The reformed Roman Missal that is Divine Worship, the Missal of the Latin Rite’s Ordinariate community:
Given the fact that Pope Benedict’s successor has put the toothpaste back into the tube (but not entirely) yes, Pope Benedict made a mistake. Has Pope Francis made a mistake in trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube? We’ll have to wait and see what his successor will do. What is clear now, we are subject to the whims of popes, not a consistency in faith and praxis.
Let’s say that Pope Benedict had not issued Summorum Pontificum, but rather began a revision of the latest reformed issue of the Roman Missal at that time. Let’s say that he abrogated all previous issues of the revised/reformed Mass of Vatican II and said the new Roman Missal was the new lex orandi of the Latin Rite Church but in continuity with the Ancient Latin Mass.
I doubt that his successor, Pope Francis, would have turned the clock back as he has done to the time before Summorum Pontificum.
We would have a Roman Missal very similar to the Ordinariate’s Roman Missal, Divine Worship.
We would have a Roman Missal that more than likely would have required the Eucharistic Prayers to be exclusively in Latin, with the Roman Canon holding a place of pride.
We’d have a Roman Calendar more in continuity with the more Ancient and traditional Roman Calendar, as the Ordinariate now has.
Maybe one day, the next pope will do what I recommend and His Holiness, the future pope, will make sure no future pope returns to the 1970 Roman Missal and Calendar.
God willing!
2 comments:
Obviously Pope Benedict did not make a mistake. He laid the foundation for the rebirth of Catholicism. The tragedy in the reforms is they were unnecessary for people of my generation properly trained in the Faith. As I have mentioned before, I could chant, thanks to the good sisters, 5 Latin ordinaries by the time I was 10. I found the “reforms” disturbing. By liberating the EF Pope Benedict was exposing how vapid the OF is by comparison. Maybe some folks who refused to buy a Latin/English missal benefited from the vernacular, but I think these folks had a fairly tenuous grasp of their Faith and the richness of our Latin liturgical heritage. We have reduced the Mass for the benefit of the lowest common denominator ( I am including bishops and priests) and still millions have walked away. I recall the youngest priest in my parish, around 30 years of age, was the most vocal in criticizing the “reforms” maybe because he hit the seminary at its zenith, in the late 1950s, when Catholicism was flourishing, at least in the US.
Even if the Canon is not in Latin, it would be good to have part of the Canon said silently. Before the first schema was written, the Consilium reportedly considered having the Canon audible only from the prayers Hanc Igitur to Supplices inclusive (which may be why the 1965 rite of concelebration allowed these prayers to be sung).
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