JUST WHAT DOES MUTUAL ENRICHMENT OF THE EF AND OF MEAN? IS IT MODELED AT THE VATICAN OR ANYWHERE ELSE?

Prayers at the Foot of the altar, one from the Latin Rite during Passiontide another from the Episcopal Church during Clowntide:

An anonymous writter opines the following about mutual enrichment of both forms of the one Latin Rite Mass:

In his letter, Pope Benedict gives some example of mutual enrichment. The OF enrich the EF by offering new Saints. The EF can enrich the OF by what he calls “the sacrality which attracts many people to the former usage”. I think he is talking about the sense of the sacred and I suspect this is what many people are referring to when they speak of the reverence of the EF. The Pope is concerned widely occurring “arbitrary deformations of the liturgy” in the OF and I think he is saying that the influence of the EF will help to fix this problem.

Pope Benedict is, of course, talking about mutual enrichment of the two Forms in terms of the Church as a whole. I was thinking that I could apply it at an individual level too. Here is an example. The words of Consecration are silent in the EF. This enriches my experience of the OF because, when I hear the words of Our Lord spoken aloud at the Consecration, rather than taking it for granted, I have a sense of it being a great privilege. The difference also works in reverse. When I am at the EF the silence at the Consecration draws my attention to the holiness and power of God even more because it is in contrast with the spoken option. 

Cardinal Burke who is a member of the Congregation for Divine Worship had the following sentiments in 2011:


Cardinal Burke is also responsible for overseeing the Church's liturgy as a member of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship. 

He is grateful to Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for giving the Church "a font of solid direction" regarding worship, based on the Second Vatican Council's vision of a "God-centered liturgy and not a man-centered liturgy." 

That intention was not always realized, he said, since the council's call for liturgical reform coincided with a "cultural revolution." 

Many congregations lost their "fundamental sense that the liturgy is Jesus Christ himself acting, God himself acting in our midst to sanctify us." 

Cardinal Burke said greater access to the traditional Latin Mass, now know (sic) as the "extraordinary form" of the Roman rite, has helped correct the problem. 

"The celebration of the Mass in the extraordinary form is now less and less contested," he noted, "and people are seeing the great beauty of the rite as it was celebrated practically since the time if Pope Gregory the Great" in the sixth century.

Many Catholics now see that the Church's "ordinary form" of Mass, celebrated in modern languages, "could be enriched by elements of that long tradition." 

In time, Cardinal Burke expects the Western Church's ancient and modern forms of Mass to be combined in one normative rite, a move he suggests the Pope also favors. 

"It seems to me that is what he has in mind is that this mutual enrichment would seem to naturally produce a new form of the Roman rite – the 'reform of the reform,' if we may – all of which I would welcome and look forward to its advent."

My musings about Cardinal Burke's intuition that we will one day have a new form of the Roman Rite that is more like the EF Mass but maintains the tradition of the OF Mass, without radically changing the OF Missal.

To that end, I think we see it already in the revised "Anglican Use Mass." It was revised last year and was a collaborative work between the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for Divine Worship. While the work took place primarily under the reign of Pope Benedict, it was Pope Francis who signed off on it and ultimately approved of it. 

These are the options for the Anglican Use Mass which basically uses the 2013 revised Roman Missal except for one option that has Elizabethan English. But the areas of enrichment of the EF Mass on the OF Mass which could come easily to the Ordinary Form Roman Missal immediately if allowed are the following options in the Anglican Use Missal found in its appendix:

1. Prayers at the Foot of the Altar!

2. The EF Offertory Prayers!

3. Revised rubrics for the Roman Canon that adapt many of the EF's rubrics for it!

4. The Last Gospel!

5. The Ordinariate Revised calendar has many EF elements restored too , like Septuagesima and ember days but still remaining true to the Ordinary Form Calendar and Lectionary!

6. Ad orientem is clearly the preferred option and kneeling for Holy Communion all the while still allowing the distribution of the Precious Blood of Christ from the Chalice! 

Of course the Ordinary Form Mass has more flexibility than the EF Mass. The six options from the EF Mass for the Anglican Use Mass would allow the Ordinary Form Mass to resemble an EF Mass with OF enrichment.

How?

If the Ordinary Form Mass with the six optioins from the EF Mass were included in it and completely said or sung in Latin, maintaining the modern lectionary (which still has the option of the Gradual in place of the Responsorial Psalm, even today) and let's say that the canon is prayed in a low voice during this Ordinary Form Mass, would it not then be the case in reality that the OF Mass has enriched the EF Mass and the two are very similar? 

So in my above scenario, in an all Latin Ordinary Form Mass with the EF elements included, the only difference between it and a traditional EF Mass would be the following:

1. The propers and Collect, Prayer over the Gifts (Secret) and Post Communion Prayer would be from the Ordinary Form Missal but in Latin (many of these were revised and others were borrowed from older Missals predating the Tridentine Missal and some are new. The same would be true of the Prefaces. All these would be from the current Ordinary Form Mass.

2. The revised Lectionary would be used and presumably in the vernacular not in Latin and in the manner of the OF Mass, from the Ambo but not to exclude the chanting of the Gospel in the position of the EF's Solemn Sung Mass. 

3. The Rite of Holy Communion would be the revised one of the Ordinary Form, meaning that there would not be a double Communion Rite, one for the priest and the other for the laity. Therefore the priest would receive his Holy Communion after the Ecce Agnus Dei which he proclaims facing the congregation and then turns back to the altar to receive himself first and then the laity.  

Would this not be the perfect new missal to supplant the older version of the Ordinary Form and the Extraordinary Form?  

This is Pentecost Sunday Solemn Mass at Saint Peter's with Pope Francis. What elements of the Extraordinary Form Mass are present in the Ordinary Form Mass?

Let me point out the first. The Penitential Act is omitted in favor of the Rite of Sprinkling Holy Water. After the water is blessed and sprinkled and the choir has sung "Vidi Aqaum" in Latin, the free standing Kyrie is not omitted as is done in so many American parishes. Of course Saint Joseph Church in Macon has chanted the free-standing Kyrie following the "absolution" for the Rite of Sprinking as is done at the Vatican.

The free standing Kyrie should not be viewed as a Penitential Act. It should always be included when the Penitential Act is omitted, for example at Requiem Masses and Nuptial Masses in the Ordinary Form as well as when the Rite of Sprinkling is chosen! This is very EF indeed!
  




Does the Holy Father look gaunt or he is trying to lose some extra pounds? He looks quite papal though, very nice miter and vestments for this morning's Pentecost Mass: