Last night I taught our RCIA class on the First Commandment of God which, for coloring book Catholics, is:
I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before Me.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church goes into detail about this commandment and how a Catholic could break it.
This caught my attention:
CCC 2120 Sacrilege consists in profaning or treating unworthily the sacraments and other liturgical actions, as well as persons, things, or places consecrated to God. Sacrilege is a grave sin especially when committed against the Eucharist, for in this sacrament the true Body of Christ is made substantially present for us.52
Obviously, there are some who hold the Extraordinary Form of the Mass in contempt. Do they then not commit sacrilege when they complain about this, that or the other in order to promote what is called the reformed Mass of Vatican II?
The same is true of those who prefer the Extraordinary Form. Do they then not commit sacrilege when they complain not just about abuses of this liturgical form but denigrate the Ordinary Form's Roman Missal outright?
Do they not commit sacrilege when they profane and treat unworthily not just the sacrament itself, but liturgical actions as well?
I ask; you answer!
5 comments:
"Sacrilege consists in profaning or treating unworthily the sacraments and other liturgical actions, as well as persons, things, or places consecrated to God"
But you have to wonder, reading the first hand reports, how much of this was going on in Bugnini's Consilium, the contempt that was there for the TLM because of its perceived lack of participation of the faithful and its irrelevance for a "modern man", as if one existed. Is the Novus Ordo a result of this contempt and if so is it the result of sacrilege?
I should have added that the problem of liturgical sacrilege may go even further back to just after World War II, when liturgical changes were deemed necessary by the ivory tower crowd (Liturgical movement) and started to be realised. For example, since time immemorial no one, not even a pope would dare to make any changes to the Holy Roman Canon because of the possibility sacrilege, until John XIII started meddling with it, and thereby set the precedent for the post Counciliar liturgical deformers.
If I were to say that the new Mass is inferior in every respect to the classic Roman Rite, would I be denigrating it? Possibly, although this matters little. If I were to say that the new formulas for the administration of the sacraments, and the revised Office, were deficient in many respects, would I be committing sacrilege? If I were to say that the 1955 revision of Holy Week removed much that was ancient and valued and replaced it with elements that were so modern that they survived less than fifteen years, would I be committing sacrilege?
Of course not. Sacrilege is an act, not an opinion. A priest who introduces abuses into the Novus Ordo is guilty of sacrilege. Lay people handling the Sacred Species are certainly guilty of sacrilege as far as I am concerned (others are at liberty to disagree) but the sacrilege consists of what they do, not what they say or think.
Both forms of the Mass are valid. The manner in which every Mass is said is not always valid. It’s wrong to condemn either Mass, it’s not wrong to discuss liturgical practices. Opinion of course.
Manuals of moral theology--not studied, of course, by seminarians in the 1970s and 80s--deal with sacrilegious acts, not opinions, much less statements of fact (such as the fact that the OF of the Mass as typically celebrated today is so inferior to the classical Roman form as to be unrecognizable as the Sacrifice of the Mass by Catholics of past centuries).
So those not so much at this blog, but more at ones like PrayTell--who contemptuously denigrate the traditional Latin Mass almost daily--are not guilty of sacrilege, but perhaps of sins against the Holy Spirit, in denying the validity of His divine guidance of the development of the classical rite of Mass.
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