the choir was excellent and the music was classic and beautiful. One could overlook the fact that the proper antiphons were omitted.The 20 something year old cathedral like church was also classic in design and well executed. And then the fly in the ointment that so many priests like honey attract that defiles the Mass. After the first prayer of the Mass, the Entrance Chant, after the praise to the Most Holy Trinity and the religious greeting, there was three minutes of secular greetings, welcoming visitors and asking where they were from as people shouted out Florida, Georgia, Brazil, Chile, and on and on. Then two cheer leading groups were acknowledged to happy applause. Then after this intermission from the prayerful beginning of Mass all were invited to recall their sins and the Mass was fine until...
The wonderful professional stipended choir concluded their wonderful post communion song and someone began applause!
Then after the Prayer after Communion there were more announcements, advertisements, and acknowledgements of the various actors of the Mass. And more applause was invited for the deserving paid choir.
This is what is wrong with the OF Mass and needs reform and the recovery of the unified approach to a prayerful experience of Mass starting with the prayerful gathering prior to Mass as is the case with the EF Mass. There should be continuity in this regard between the two forms of the Mass.
And now the sad fact that we know is the disease of my generation of 1970's prepared priests deformed by the liturgical theology of Fr. Eugene Walsh and the like, the priest celebrant who high jacked an otherwise lovely OF Mass with his theology of welcome was slightly older than me. How is it that I was cured of this same disease?
24 comments:
Father, you forgot to mention did the priest wish everyone a good lunch while still vested but before the recessional? I hear that phrase is the latest liturgical innovation coming from Rome these days.
The Holy Father only does that when the Angelus is after the Prayer after Holy Communion. The Holy Father does not ad lib at any other time of the Mass .
The vaccine for this disease is simple. Keep the OF Roman Missal as it is, but Rome must mandate that Bugnini's Order of the Mass be suppressed, and replace it with the 1965 vernacular revision of the 1962 Order.
The big quesiton is, will the Holy Father give us this vaccine, even it it may be painful to some, or will he not in order to spare hurt feelings of some?
It is not so much a question of reform as of clear directives banning such practices - but wait - such directives would be ignored. Redemptionis Sacramentum made it clear that EMHC are only to be used if absolutely necessary, and should not be used as a way of enhancing lay participation; yet Westminster Cathedral, which has the best cathedral choir in England, which actually means in the world, and has formidable competition from the Anglicans, violates this on a daily basis. The English hierarchy gaily ignored any instruction from the CDWDS which in their Lordships' opinion "doesn't apply to us" which resulted in a monumental rebuke from Benedict XVI. Which, of course, they ignored.
It's hardly surprising that an increasing number of liturgical scholars are coming to the conclusion that the OF has been so corrupted as to be immune to reform, and the only solution is to return to 1962 and start again. It is not as far-fetched as it sounds, since the Roman Rite has now been recognized as having at least the same status as the Pauline Missal; which in effect means a higher status, since it is obvious that the former represents an organic development whereas the latter (as Benedict XVI admitted) can be, and often is, perceived as a rupture.
What would make you think my comment about "lunch" referred to the Holy Father? I mean it is so obvious that he respects the liturgy as given to us by the Church that he would never impose his own personal wishes upon it. Except for the inauguration Mass when every cardinal was supposed to give him a promise of obedience, and the time he crawled on the floor at the feet of a female Muslim, or in Brazil when the bishops were doing disco dancing while vested and Holy Communion was reserved in plastic cups. What made you think I was thinking of Francis? I don't understand.
Agreed but simply allowing what the Anglican Ordinariate allows would go a long way!
Anonymous @ 9:33 am,
Maybe I'm totally out of it--thought you simply were illustrating rhetorically the difference between chief legislator and chief violator of the Church.
If the Sacrifice of the Cross is not focus of the Mass, then something has gone horribly wrong.
JBS, clearly it is, as John Paul II re-affirmed in Ecclesia de Eucharistia 11 that the Mass "is not only a reminder but the sacramental re-presentation. It is the sacrifice of the Cross perpetuated down the ages." The question is whether the people recognize it as such, and perhaps whether the priest celebrating a particular Mass defiles it by not making it plainly recognizable as primarily a sacrifice.
FrAJM, you may not have been cured as much as burdened. The leper went forth proclaiming the miracle and glorifying God. You are doing that with you parish and blog. But as the song says, there is work in that mule, yet. What more do you think you could do?
Anonymous:
When Pope Francis washed the feet of two girls as well as ten boys in a juvenile detention center on Holy Thursday, one a Muslim and the other a Catholic, some may have seen Pope Francis “crawling on the floor” at the feet of a female Muslim. Others, however, may have seen him washing the feet of another child of God, equally precious in the eyes of our heavenly Father because of her immeasurable worth and dignity, even if her vision may still be clouded more than yours. Do you believe differently? Or is your objection rather that what Pope Francis did was contrary to tradition or canon law and may have confused the faithful and others over the matter of women’s ordination?
FWIIW here is the communication of the USCCB recognizing the legitimacy of including women in the foot washing ceremony:
http://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/liturgical-resources/triduum/holy-thursday-mandatum.cfm
P.S. I apologize in advance that this comment is not sufficiently original, to spare you the trouble of having to point it out.
Anon 2, Muslims are the enemies of Christ and the Church. It is both bad theology and stupid behavior to kiss up to them. Some things must be rejected outright. People like you are the very reason the Church and the country are failing.
Gene, if you had learnt later that the Muslim girl as a result of the experience had become a Catholic, would that have caused you to modify your view? I'm reminded of the elder Crouchback's rebuke to his son in Waugh's "Sword of Honour" trilogy: "The Mystical Body [the Church] doesn't strike attitudes or stand on its own dignity. Quantitative judgements don't apply. If only one soul was saved, that is full compensation for any amount of loss of face".
Thank you, John. You make an excellent point. And to reinforce it, I would only add a plea to Gene that instead of making ad hominem attacks on me, he try to let God out of the little box in which he has confined Him.
Thank you, John. You make an excellent point. And to reinforce it, I would only add a plea to Gene that instead of making ad hominem attacks on me, he try to let God out of the little box in which he has confined Him.
John, No, it would not modify my view that Muslims are the enemies of Christ and the Church. Such sentimentalistic and anecdotal examples don't mean much. Some alligators won't bite if you rub their snout. So, if one Muslim soul is saved while Western Judaeo-Christian culture and the Church burn you call that a victory?
Anon 2, No God is not confined in a box. Libs want God to be the variable in their indeterminate equation.
Which is worse?
John Nolan,
Thank you for making a reference to Waugh. It gives me hope whenever I see such literary reference.
Evelyn Waugh was by far the best novelist of the 20th century and the trilogy "Men at Arms", "Officers and Gentlemen" and "Unconditional Surrender" is his greatest achievement (they need to be read separately; the 1965 recension doesn't do them justice). When I first read them I was in my early twenties and revelled in the accurate portrayal of life in that peculiar institution, the British Army, and saw them as one man's journey from idealism to disillusionment.
Re-reading them over the last forty years has uncovered more and more layers. Waugh has a far greater understanding of Catholic theology (from an Augustinian standpoint) than does Graham Greene, and the work cannot be really understood unless one takes this into account. Charles Ryder's pilgrimage in "Brideshead Revisited" is from atheism to Catholicism, and most readers can understand this, but Guy Crouchback's pilgrimage is no less significant, and he begins it as a Catholic and a practising one at that.
The last book of the trilogy appeared in 1961, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council. Already Waugh sensed the approaching disaster and by 1965 could remark that he had unwittingly written the obituary of the Catholic Church in England - "All the rites and most of the opinions are now obsolete".
He died suddenly on Easter Sunday 1966 having heard Mass in the Traditional Rite celebrated by his friend Philip Caraman SJ. His Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral was also in the old Rite, despite considerable opposition from the cathedral authorities. Requiescat in Pace.
Gene: Because you tend to see the world in “Manichean” terms (judging from your many comments on the Blog), you cannot or will not see the third way that transcends and redeems both, in this case the little box and the indeterminate equation as you put it), even though that third way is at the heart of our faith and persuaded Augustine from his previous error. It must be comforting to know with such certainty who belongs to the City of God and who belongs to the City of Man and thus who is friend and who is enemy. But how ironic to transform the third way back into the dualism from which it offered an escape; thus, Christians (or Catholics) friend, all others enemy; or, if you prefer, Christians (or Catholics) good, all others evil.
That is certainly not the teaching of our Church, which is more along the lines of: other beliefs, or many other beliefs, good, Christianity (especially Catholicism) better. That way we avoid the Scylla of an arrogant, absolutist universalism, and the Charybdis of a timid, nihilist relativism. If I have him right, it wasn’t even the understanding of Augustine, who distinguished between erroneous beliefs and the person holding them.
Ultimately, of course, we cannot avoid putting God in a box because we puny humans are seeking to understand the infinite and ineffable when our tools of understanding are finite and inadequate. So, for us humans the only question is how big and supple the box will be.
Where do you get the idea that I see there world in Manichean terms?
Gene is not a Manichean. However he is a controversialist who likes to draw people out of a comfortable, but intellectually lazy way of thinking. Chesterton and Belloc did the same; and they were writing at a time when independent thought was not stifled by "political correctness" which actually worked both ways - HG Wells could say what he wanted and so could Chesterton. They were not confined by a culture which in principle allows free speech but in practice is squeamish about anything that might offend anyone else. Even the word 'offend', from the Latin ob+fendere, "to strike against" is used in modern slack English as a synonym for "to hurt someone's feelings".
If I have read Gene wrongly, I am sure that he would have no compunction about correcting me.
It's "better" to believe that God incarnated, suffered, died, ans resurrected for the salvation of the world. But, it's still "good" to believe this same God was merely a prophet who lied to his people and placed an imposter in his place to die.
John Nolan, Thank you.
Anonymous, what in the Hell are you talking about?
Sorry, I'm a bit late in on this, but Anon is making an ironic reference to the Mahometan heresy regarding the crucifixion. If Islam is indeed a heresy, rather than a different religion; I remember that Peter the Venerable hedged his bets on this in the 12th century.
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