REFORM IN CONTINUITY: IS IT STILL HAPPENING IN NOVUS ORDO PARISHES?

As you know, as a senior priest, I reside on Hilton Head Island and assist in three parishes, two in the Beaufort County area of the Diocese of Charleston and once a month in Savannah for the TLM. 

Holy Family Church, parish to gators who are greeters, caters primarily to the tourist population on the Island, as we residents call it. There is a strong parish community too but the tourists out number the parishioners quite significantly during the summer. 

Novus Ordo parishes throughout the country have done a great job with tourists that come to the Island and not only make sure they attend Sunday Mass, but many also attend Holy Family’s daily Mass. 

There are a significant number of young tourists at Sunday and daily Mass, especially college age young people.

What I have noticed is that a great number of the late teen and early 20’s Catholic tourists normally kneel to receive Holy Communion. That tells me that they are doing so in their Novus Ordo parishes. They also take advantage of going to Confession during the weekdays as well, when they are here. 

Renewal of the Novus Ordo Mass in continuity with the TLM is happening still and after TC. This is great news and the Catholics, especially the young ones, formed by the so-called “reform of the reform” parishes are producing wonderful, zealous and strong Catholics. 

My prayer is that bishops will be as zealous at implementing Pope Francis’ document on the liturgy which came out after TC as they are in rigorously implementing TC! This is one thing that the pope wrote in his liturgy document DESIDERIO DESIDERAVI which you can read HERE:

23. Let us be clear here: every aspect of the celebration must be carefully tended to (space, time, gestures, words, objects, vestments, song, music…) and every rubric must be observed. Such attention would be enough to prevent robbing from the assembly what is owed to it; namely, the paschal mystery celebrated according to the ritual that the Church sets down. But even if the quality and the proper action of the celebration were guaranteed, that would not be enough to make our participation full.

54. If it is true that the ars celebrandi is required of the entire assembly that celebrates, it is likewise true that ordained ministers must have a very particular concern for it. In visiting Christian communities, I have noticed that their way of living the liturgical celebration is conditioned — for better or, unfortunately, for worse — by the way in which their pastor presides in the assembly. We could say that there are different “models” of presiding. Here is a possible list of approaches, which even though opposed to each other, characterize a way of presiding that is certainly inadequate: rigid austerity or an exasperating creativity, a spiritualizing mysticism or a practical functionalism, a rushed briskness or an overemphasized slowness, a sloppy carelessness or an excessive finickiness, a superabundant friendliness or priestly impassibility. Granted the wide range of these examples, I think that the inadequacy of these models of presiding have a common root: a heightened personalism of the celebrating style which at times expresses a poorly concealed mania to be the centre of attention. Often this becomes more evident when our celebrations are transmitted over the air or online, something not always opportune and that needs further reflection. Be sure you understand me: these are not the most widespread behaviours, but still, not infrequently assemblies suffer from being thus abused.