Photo: Fr. Paul-Joseph (left) and Fr. Vincent Ribeton (right) with Pope Francis – © Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter
Decree of Pope Francis confirming the use of the 1962 liturgical books
[Original: Latin and Spanish]
The Holy Father Francis, grants to each and every member of the Society of Apostolic Life “Fraternity of Saint Peter”, founded on July 18, 1988 and declared of “Pontifical Right” by the Holy See, the faculty to celebrate the sacrifice of the Mass, and to carry out the sacraments and other sacred rites, as well as to fulfill the Divine Office, according to the typical editions of the liturgical books, namely the Missal, the Ritual, the Pontifical and the Roman Breviary, in force in the year 1962.
They may use this faculty in their own churches or oratories; otherwise it may only be used with the consent of the Ordinary of the place, except for the celebration of private Masses.
Without prejudice to what has been said above, the Holy Father suggests that, as far as possible, the provisions of the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes be taken into account as well.
Given in Rome, near St. Peter’s, on February 11, the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, in the year 2022, the ninth year of my Pontificate.
35 comments:
I am grateful to the Holy Father and to Christ for answering my prayers. I have other thoughts, but the must take precedence.
Orders like the FSSP are the future, the Jesuits, the past. Deus Vult!
Deo Gratias! Will these exceptions apply to the Institute of Christ the King and the other exclusively EF institutes? If that is the case and the Pius X Fraternity's present circumstances prevail, then the future is not quite as bleak as it once seemed.
Beware! Bergoglio he speak with forked tongue!
@JN: or with ulterior purpose.
It is possible the FSSP could support as many as two more parishes in this diocese. Would that be pushing too far? Can we train diocesan priests to offer the VO according to the ‘62 to help when our priest is unavailable? Can we accept parishioners from the consolidating parishes in our area? That might monkey the figures of the consolidation.
So, perhaps the solution is for the FSSP to offer a kind of "third order" membership to priests who celebrate the 1970 Missal?
After all, who is served by priests -- and seminarians -- who, if forced to choose, opt for the FSSP and thereby make them entirely UNavailable to offer Mass and sacraments according to the 1970 Missal?
And if you think there aren't men contemplating the priesthood right now, and thinking, "if I want to offer Mass and sacraments in the traditional way, I must affiliate with FSSP..." After all, is there the slightest doubt that Pope Francis and his successors would gladly allow an FSSP priest to move back toward the 1970 Missal?
Conclusion: if you want to be able to have more options, join the FSSP!
We MUST be optimistic about this and try to "thrive where planted." While not much, this confirmation of the mission of the FSSP is not nothing, especially given the draconian aspects of Traditionis Custodes. Maybe the FSSP's proven record of fielty to the Pope and Church, its explicit affirmation of whatever Vatican II was or wasn't according to the current (and past) "regime" and their obvious, undeniable piety and devotion, not much meanness, score settling and virtue signaling there. Mostly, they remember that the first and most important element of Catholicism as opposed to Orthodoxy and other "proper" Churches is unity. If the Church as an institution is worth a thing, then she is what she says she is and is the Body of Christ, always and forever indivisible.
Simply can't be a "Traditonal" Catholic and be obstinate in disobedience.
I'm afraid I have to side with Mr. Nolan. Given the record, I can't help but fear this is just window-dressing to distract us for a hammer that will soon fall.
Reminds me of various non-aggression pacts that always resulted in war.
Fr. Fox may be seditious. So we sponsor priests, such as himself, who can offer the NO in a traditional fashion ala Fr McDonald, and can also provide backup the next time our calamitous priest is out of action. I bet our Bishop would go for that if the people of Miamisburg would accept it.
RCG:
I am very confident Archbishop Schnurr would be willing to have me fill in, as available, to offer the usus antiquor at, say, Holy Family. Whether the FSSP would want a non-FSSP doing so? That is not for me to say. Whether the Holy Father?
We have had guest priests several times from as far south as Kentucky. I think you would be very welcome considering your knowledge of so many of our families from up Russia way.
Archbishop Schnurr is a strong and intelligent supporter of the UA.
Fr. MARTIN Fox - I celebrate the tradional mass every time I step to the altar and use the Ordinary Form. I celebrate the traditional sacraments when I hear confessions, anoint the sick, baptize people as I did this past Sunday, or wotness wedding vows.
Using "traditional" to describe the EF liturgies creates, necessarily, the sense that the OF sacraments are not traditional. They are traditional in every way that matters. That is a false understanding and simply furthers the divisions in the Church.
True. We should us “historically accurate.” 👍😄
Fr K,
Stop with your Orwellian nonsense. There is very little that is traditional about the EF, other than if you use the Roman Canon, which I doubt you do. Priests like you are the ones fostering divisions in the Church. Pope Benedict referred to to as a banal, made up on the spot liturgy in one of his less guarded moments.
rcg - I would prefer to say theologically sound and culturally appropriate.
The Pope has an amused look on his face. The two priests look normal---not like subjects of amusement.
Father Kavanaugh, you've repeated that canard about your Novus Ordo "traditionalism" plenty of times before, and it just doesn't hold water. I've read estimates that between7 and 10 percent of the Old Mass (if you prefer a different term) is even present in the New Mass. The whole Bugnini debacle speaks for itself.
Merely repeating an opinion does not make it so. When you change the rites, you change the religion.
Jerome - Then, tell, us, how many times was the religion changed with the multiple changes in the rites over the centuries prior to Vatican Two?
Additions, accretions, changes in calendars, addition of new feasts, revisions of, say the Holy Week liturgies of Pius XII in 1955...
Jerome - And simply repeating the opinion that "changing the rites changes the religion" doesn't make it so.
Oh, Father Kavanaugh, you love the argument so much that you will nitpick EVERY detail forcing us all to be more specific than we would be in a normal conversation...somewhat suggests you are far more concerned with "winning" some ephemeral point rather than finding some point of agreement or...Oh well.
I SHOULD have specified that the organic development of rites was one thing, but drastically re-writing them with a committee filled with Protestants and calling it "traditional" is something else altogether.
No doubt some other "gotcha" is coming. Someone else can answer it when it does--I do not like discussing much of anything with you. God bless you.
Perhaps the term “traditional” is the problem. I think the Ancient Latin Mass and the Modern Vernacular Mass tells the truth about both. The order and Latin language of the 1962 liturgical books are rooted in antiquity whereas the modern books change the order, language and ethos of the liturgies of the church, are novel not ancient. Are there ancient aspects, yes! The real presence of Jesus Christ.
The Protestant reformers of Edward VI's reign (1547-1553) knew that in order to change the religion they would need to change the rites. Hence the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552. They didn't stop there; they used the resources of a centralized Tudor despotism to impose what amounted to a cultural revolution. This was accompanied by the destruction of most late medieval art, not to mention exquisite polyphonic music which was 'not needed' in the new vernacular liturgy.
Of course those who see parallels between what happened then and what happened to the Catholic Church in the years 1964 to 1970 are applying a completely false hermeneutic. We have that self-styled traditionalist Fr Kavanaugh to assure us of that.
Oh, Jerome, one day you will learn that specificity is a good thing. Remember, in the science of theology, the weights and measures that must be precise in the lab are replaced by the words and phrases that must be precise in the expression of faith. Remember, there only one iota of difference bettwen the heterodox homoiousios and the orthodox homoousios.
And in the weighty matter of faith and doctrine, there are no "ephemeral" matters.
You might also imagine the mess we might be in today had St. Jerome not been nit-picky in his translations of Sacred Scripture.
As for your "organic development" idea, I'm sure that every change in the liturgy prior to Vatican Two you would see as organic and every one after would be inorganic. Consider that one of the most INORGANIC changes to the Roman Rite came from none other than Pope Benedict XVI when he created, out of thin air, the notion that there can be/are two forms on the one rite, the Ordinary and the Extraordinary.
John, I am not a self-styled traditionalist; never have been and never will be. I am a follower of the Church's Tradition.
And as we all know, "Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition is the living faith of the dead." (Hat tip to the great historian of Christanity, Jaroslav Pelikan.)
Father K, Father McD:
I understand the objection to the use of the term "traditional" in this context, but Father K is simply being tendentious. If you go back to my prior posts, I described this particular Mass (which we cannot name at the moment due to explosions of upset over different terms) as "traditional" but also the "usus antiquor."
One reason for calling it the traditional Latin Mass is because simply saying "Latin Mass" erroneously suggests that the 1970 Mass is not, likewise, the Latin Mass. In fact it is.
Whether the 1970 Missal is "traditional" is exactly the question for many. That isn't to say it's unorthodox; only that it represents, by design, a dramatic departure from what went before. Perhaps Fr. K is one of those who wishes to maintain that the 1970 Missal is just a slight tweak on the Missals prior, but that dog will not hunt.
When he and others say the 1970 Missal is "traditional," what they can legitimately say is that it's not utterly UNtraditional; it doesn't depart ENTIRELY from Tradition (upper or lower T), and that is certainly true. But not departing ENTIRELY is far from the same thing as saying, it doesn't depart AT ALL. And it clearly does the latter. Hence, if the 1962 Missal had merely been rendered in the vernacular, circa 1970, I strongly suspect very few Catholics would have rebelled; and had there been a great outcry, then the obvious solution would have been to provide some Masses in Latin, others in the vernacular, but beyond that, it would have been the same Missal. But that's not what happened, and as a result, the 1970 Missal is vulnerable to the charge of departing in significant ways from tradition (lower-case; I am not saying it's heretical).
Meanwhile, calling the old Mass "Tridentine" is also problematic, as it goes along with the claim that this form of the Mass is only as old as Trent. But this is not true, unless you want to claim that whenever there's a revision, it's a new Mass.
We could call it the "usus antiquor," but that requires explanation to those who don't have enough Latin; the "ancient use" -- I'm okay with that. Or we could call it the Mass of Gregory the Great, but then there will be an argument that isn't helpful to most people.
So a lot of people call it the "traditional Latin Mass," and yes, it's an imperfect term, but we ALL know what we're talking about.
And really, Father K, you are making a tactical error in insisting on how "traditional" the 1970 Mass is. But in any case, I think it's just tendentious to huff and puff about it. Sometimes the terms that come into common use aren't really the right ones. I know many people who object to the term "Civil War" -- because the war from 1861-65 wasn't a contest for the same seat of government, but a war of secession, etc. Again, a legitimate but obscure point, and in certain contexts, tendentious.
Fr K is like the US media in the use of Orwellian language. Do the opposite of what they both say and you will be fine. “Mostly peaceful protests?” As folks loot, riot and burn!
Fr MJK,
"Consider that one of the most INORGANIC changes to the Roman Rite came from none other than Pope Benedict XVI when he created, out of thin air, the notion that there can be/are two forms on the one rite, the Ordinary and the Extraordinary."
Is this really inorganic? Organically, the so-called Tridentine mass amalgamated regional variations in the 1500s. Following the tenets of VII, the Ordinary Form was an organic development, and, therefore, is a valid expression of Roman patrimony. How, therefore, can one be more right than the other? Where is the fatal flaw in the predecessor making necessary its redundancy? I'd be willing to given Benedict XVI the benefit of the doubt as I cannot hold a candle to his background, or intellect around that background.
Please note, we have more than one Divine Liturgy in the Byzantine tradition, one of St. John Chrysostom, the other of St. Basil the Great, both doctors of the Church. I'm unaware that the Catholic Byzantine Churches use the Divine Liturgy of St. James as the Russian Church does, but, I'm hesitant to make an authoritative statement there. These liturgies coexist seamlessly with circumstance driving their respective usage. I cannot imagine discussing either in this context.
Benedict XVI could have referred to the Missals of 1962 and 1970 as distinct Uses of the Roman Rite - some people do in fact refer to the 'usus antiquior' and 'usus recentior'. This would be using terms which have historical precedent. But he did not do so. The most obvious reason is that he (like most reputable liturgical scholars) recognized that the Missal of Paul VI is de facto a different rite, but to draw attention to this might be seen as divisive. Hence the legal fiction of two 'forms'.
The Novus Ordo, when celebrated as a sung Latin Mass and using the Roman Canon, can on the surface pass as a Use of the Roman Rite, but a comparison with (say) the Dominican Use (which predates Trent by 300 years) shows that it contains too many innovations. This is not necessarily an adverse criticism - innovations can be seen by many as improvements - but it does affect the terminology used to designate two distinct rites.
Byz - From no less than Dr. Peter Kwasniewski in Rorate Caeli on 9/14/2020
"Thus, while Benedict asserts that there is no contradiction and no rupture, at the same time, and startlingly, he allows for the coexistence of two canonically equal forms of one and the same liturgical rite—an unprecedented and, in many ways, unintelligible situation. As we have seen, there have always been many different “uses” in the Latin Church, but that the use of Rome should be thus doubled has never been seen before. It may be likened to a case of dissociative identity disorder, or schizophrenia."
I could be wrong, but the following shared by John Nolan could help express more succinctly and cohesively what I might have been struggling to say. Additionally, it might qualify Dr. Kwasniewski's commentary provided by Fr. MJK: "The most obvious reason is that he (like most reputable liturgical scholars) recognized that the Missal of Paul VI is de facto a different rite, but to draw attention to this might be seen as divisive. Hence the legal fiction of two 'forms'".
One could perhaps conclude that Benedict did not err, he merely found a way to live with both while attempting to preserve unity.
Fr K is not the friend of the traditional latin rite liturgy but the friend of the rite which has wreaked devastation of the latin rite. He is incapable of retrospection and change. He is hopelessly stuck in the destructive ethos of the 1960s
To a certain degree, I find myself agreeing with Father Kavanaugh. Pope Benedict, creative soul that he is, invented the idea of two forms of one rite. We'll probably never know why, but it seems to many of us that he was trying to be diplomatic to allow for the New Mass to co-exist with the Old Mass, rather than say there can only be one. But it is important to note that he did NOT create a new rite out of thin air--he simply created a NAME for the New and Old rites. Personally, I think a better designation might be "artificial rite" for the Novus Ordo, or maybe "rite by committee". As for the Old Mass, I would refer to it as the "standard rite". I have NEVER bought into this whole "ordinary" and "extraordinary" form stuff. This is just a compromise made by a good pope too polite and gentle to put the hammer down when he should have.
Excuse me...when I THINK he should have. It's just my opinion. And we all know how valuable opinions are.
Fr. MARTIN Fox - I am not being tendentious. Those who use "traditional Latin Mass" clearly imply that the OF is not traditional. It is.
I have never said or suggested that the 1970 missal is "just a slight tweak to the missals prior," so you can take your lazy dogs back to the kennel.
The NO mass is traditional in the way that the the novel insertion of the the term "hommousios" into the creed in 325 was traditional. Yes, it was "novel" at the time, but understanding that Jesus and the Father are "of the same substance" is as traditonal as it gets.
The NO mass is traditional in the way that the novel declaration of the First Lateran Council that abolished the claims of secular princes to have the right of investiture of prelates. What was "novel" was traditional - part of the Church's understanding of itself even if that understanding had not been previously expressed.
My claim that the NO is traditional is not a tactical error. The coopting of the term "traditional" in order to denigrate the mass the Church has given us is the error. That is plainly and clearly the purpose.
Father K:
I will make you a proposition involving money:
Since you claim that the 1970 Missal is not in any way discontinuous with the Missal as of 1962, then I propose that for every discontinuity I can identify, you will pay me $100.
Or would you prefer to make it $10?
I might go as low as $5, but since I'm going to have work to do, I expect compensation for my time.
If you are correct in asserting very little discontinuity, it shouldn't cost you very much, right?
Is it a deal? We can work out the details, as in when payment is expected.
Of course FRMJK is doing what a virus always does, deceiving by use of language and theology. Of course every Catholic Mass no matter how nontraditional or horribly celebrated but by God grace and ex opere operato, is considered valid, could be considered traditional in terms of the doctrine of the Most Holy Eucharist and the doctrine of the Mass itself.
But the Ancient Latin Mass is traditional in this sense. It must be celebrated in Latin and the other languages traditionally associated with it. It has a completely different order. The Propers are prescribed, never substituted, the rubrics are more explicit and copious, the offertory prayers are different and some prayers are completely eliminated as well as many gestures. That is the Traditional Mass of the Roman Rite in form, words, gestures and actions.
The Modern Vernacular Mass can be in whatever language one wants, to include Latin or even Klingon. The priest can ab lib as well as the congregation and its order is changed.
I suppose Fr. MJK's ignorance about all of this and what constitutes traditional is that he is clueless about the differences having never celebrated the Ancient Latin Mass but only the Modern Vernacular Mass and I suspect with the MVM, he's never celebrated it completely in Latin, save the Liturgy of the Word.
That's the problem well diagnosed.
Fr. ALLAN McDonald - Inasmuch as you have little to no theology to speak of, stemming from the woefully inadequate formation you had at St. Mary's, Baltimore, of which you often speak, it is not surprising that the use of theology would confuse you.
The "ancient Latin Mass" is certainly different historically and, if this is a word, rubrically. But it is not different in terms of tradition. New and adapted rites have been part of the Church's history from the beginning.
What's constitutes what is "traditional" is not what we did yesterday or 1000 years ago. Those are matters of history. What constitutes tradition is what the Church teaches and believes today, basing that on what constitutes the Apostolic faith.
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