Did Pope Paul's committee which delighted in simplifying the Mass actually intend to dumb it down for dumb laity who were too dumb to notice or care because they were simpletons who had to have the Mass as simple as possible?
Yes, by 1967 Simpleton Catholics began to realize that simple reverence was being replaced by irreverence. The institutionalized irreverence could only mean one thing, what Catholics believed about Jesus and His Sacrifice and transubstantial real presence was wrong until 1967 which corrected dumb Catholics who actually believed what the pre-Vatican II Mass conveyed in all its complicated reverence.
Thus the loss of Catholic Faith leading today to 12% to 25% of Catholics actually attending Mass compared to 95% who did until about 1965 began its relentless cross generational migration to the present.
Don't get me wrong, as a 11 year old I loved seeing the priest do the 1965 Missal facing me. I loved the blend of English and Latin. With all the symbolic "sign language" facing the people with all the kissing of the altar, all the signs of the cross, all the duplications, I was in hog heaven.
Then at 12/13, 1967 came and the Mass was institutionally deformed by an academic committee telling us poor peons they had a new and improved Coke, I mean Mass. even at 12 I knew it wasn't true when I saw facing me the dumbed down version of reverence (irreverence) which in just two short years prior to 1967 I saw first hand the solemn reverence of the 1962 Roman Mass facing me.
I was sad for the loss of reverence in 1967 until this day!
I copy this from The New Liturgical Movement: ( when I read this it all came back to me!
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2017
1967: Reaching the Bottom of the Slippery Slope
Here is an interesting bit of history from the post-Conciliar period, a new set of variations to the order of Mass issued in May of 1967, following those implemented in March of 1965. The imprudence of Sacrosanctum Concilium calling for “noble simplicity” and for the rites to be “simplified”, without specifying what exactly that should entail, has by this point become impossible to deny. Less than three and a half years have passed since its promulgation, (the Council itself has been over for less than a year and a half), and the Roman Ordo Missae has already undergone more changes in that period than it had since before Trent. Altars are being turned around throughout the world, so that the faithful can see what the priest is doing at Mass; the time has now come for there to be much less for them to see.
Less reverence is the order of the day; “the altar is kissed only once”, and signs of the cross and genuflections are rapidly disappearing, most shockingly, the genuflection immediately after the Words of Consecration. As William Riccio wrote earlier this year, the faithful who were made nervous by the seemingly endless barrage of changes to that which was always held to be unchangeable “... were told that the Canon, that most untranslatable prayer, would never be in the vernacular because it is too steeped in meaning. In 1967, it was put in the vernacular.” The pretense that even the barest letter of Sacrosanctum Concilium will be respected, (“let the use of the Latin language be preserved... Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy ... should be given pride of place in liturgical services”) is now almost entirely thrown off.
We may also note that commemorations, a feature against which the reformers had a particular and wholly inexplicable animus, are now basically gone, with almost no exceptions. At the very end, there is a footnote concerning the Divine Office; in the fairly few offices of three nocturnes left at that point, one may choose to say only one. The parts of Matins specific to choir ritual (the blessings before the readings and “Tu autem, Domine...”) may now be omitted, along with the prayer called the Absolution, which is a specifically Roman feature. This presages their complete disappearance from the Liturgy of the Hours. The Ambrosian Liturgy of the Hours was not published until 1981, by which time many people were beginning to realize what a mistake some of these changes really were; it retained the blessings before the readings.
Thanks to Mr Richard Hawker for sharing these scans with us.
Less reverence is the order of the day; “the altar is kissed only once”, and signs of the cross and genuflections are rapidly disappearing, most shockingly, the genuflection immediately after the Words of Consecration. As William Riccio wrote earlier this year, the faithful who were made nervous by the seemingly endless barrage of changes to that which was always held to be unchangeable “... were told that the Canon, that most untranslatable prayer, would never be in the vernacular because it is too steeped in meaning. In 1967, it was put in the vernacular.” The pretense that even the barest letter of Sacrosanctum Concilium will be respected, (“let the use of the Latin language be preserved... Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy ... should be given pride of place in liturgical services”) is now almost entirely thrown off.
We may also note that commemorations, a feature against which the reformers had a particular and wholly inexplicable animus, are now basically gone, with almost no exceptions. At the very end, there is a footnote concerning the Divine Office; in the fairly few offices of three nocturnes left at that point, one may choose to say only one. The parts of Matins specific to choir ritual (the blessings before the readings and “Tu autem, Domine...”) may now be omitted, along with the prayer called the Absolution, which is a specifically Roman feature. This presages their complete disappearance from the Liturgy of the Hours. The Ambrosian Liturgy of the Hours was not published until 1981, by which time many people were beginning to realize what a mistake some of these changes really were; it retained the blessings before the readings.
Thanks to Mr Richard Hawker for sharing these scans with us.
17 comments:
In order to get "active participation" in the liturgy of even the dumbest of laity, you had to dumb down the liturgy. This was also true of the music.
Dear Father McDonald,
My parish recently got a new organist. For the most part, he is an improvement over our previous pianist. Although we have a pipe organ, our previous guy played the piano 90% of the time. Our new organist actually plays the pipe organ about 70% of the time. But there is one thing that bothers me, and I hope you can tell me if this is liturgical abuse or not. When we pray the Our Father at Mass, the new organist has us sing it with the protestant part tacked on directly after the Our Father, where before the celebrant would speak in between the Our Father and the protestant part. Is this is an abuse? Thank you.
It is stunning how quickly people moved to change the Mass, from putting in the table-altars to bringing in the folk music to dismantling the altar rails. I remember the sisters telling the class how the old churches didn't meet the requirements of people today (late 1960"s). It was as much a revolution as anything else of that time period, and I could only think that the Church was supposed to be a rock. It should have been something stable during a very unstable time period.
It is an abuse. The pastor, I hope, did not request the organist to do it. The pastor should correct the situation.
Number 42 of the 2002 GIRM says the gestures of the priest (etc.) should be guided not only by the post-VCII rubrics, but also by the "traditional practice of the Roman Rite". What, exactly, does this dual guidance permit?
"Repetition is reverence." If one sign of the cross over the elements of bread and wine is a good thing, multiple signs of the cross over the elements is more reverent.
Is this true? And please don't say, "We did it for centuries that way; therefore, it must be more reverent."
"...the faithful who were made nervous by the seemingly endless barrage of changes to that which was always held to be unchangeable “... were told that the Canon, that most untranslatable prayer, would never be in the vernacular because it is too steeped in meaning."
Who told the faithful this? Was it true, or is it an example of a "Because I said so!" non-answer to the question, "Can the Canon be translated?"?
I love the photograph, British (or possibly Canadian) soldiers - the censor has obscured their shoulder-flashes - in battledress, sometime after D-Day, I suspect.
No church, no altar; but the priest dressed properly for his liturgical role - his battledress.
One of the servers is an officer, the other a private soldier - both equal in their liturgical roles, which are subordinate to that of the priest; both on their knees in recognition of their equality of service and adoration.
As for 1967, I remember it well, as I was 16 at the time. On my first visit to Germany in that year I was offered Communion in the hand; I received it in that way for the first and only time in my life, naively thinking it was a local custom.
In the same year I gave up serving on the altar, after eight years (I served my first Mass in 1959). The Mass which had fascinated me since early childhood no longer existed. My role as a server was redundant.
Although I didn't know it at the time, this was the year when Gelineau, a crony of Bugnini, boasted that the Roman Rite had been destroyed. Sixteen-year-old boys are more interested in girls than liturgy. Also in my case there was the imperative of getting into university.
Once there, I didn't need much convincing of the truth proclaimed by the Catholic Church. It was intellectually compelling. Yet there was an obvious disjunct between that and what passed for liturgy in the early 1970s, when everyone over the age of twenty had been brought up with a rite that had changed little in a thousand years, but had been changed out of all recognition in half a decade.
Thank God, I was able to work through it, and am still doing so. But it has taken a lifetime of effort. Perhaps God wants us to make the effort? All the same, I feel singularly unlucky that I was born at a time when the Catholic Church, that bastion of Western civilization, decided to embark on a path of self-destruction.
Thank you, Father. I am sure the organist may be unaware it is an abuse, so I emailed my concern and the link to this blog post to both him and our incoming pastor (our current pastor will be leaving for a new assignment in a few weeks). Hopefully this liturgical abuse will be corrected by next weekend, so there will be no need to bring it to the attention of the Archbishop.
Bee here:
In the article it says, "We may also note that commemorations, a feature against which the reformers had a particular and wholly inexplicable animus, are now basically gone,.."
I was only about 8 or 9 when the changes occurred, so I don't know. Can someone tell me what a "commemoration" is? What is the author referring to?
God Bless.
Bee
I've long been convinced that people like Anonymous @ 11:14 am resent gestures of reverence so much because they don't themselves feel reverent, and therefore don't want anyone else to either.
We had a Pontifical High Mass today with Bp. Tissier. It’s hard to imagine the sort of person who acted to take away this rite from the Church and harder still to imagine how the people let them get away with it. Thankfully, they weren’t able to take it completely due, in large part, to men like Bp. Tissier himself.
Henry,
Judas, too, objected to what appeared to him to be excessive displays of reverence.
"I've long been convinced that people like Anonymous @ 11:14 am resent gestures of reverence so much because they don't themselves feel reverent, and therefore don't want anyone else to either."
Which is not an answer/response to the questions/issues raised.
Typical. And sad.
I was about 9 or 10 years old when we transitioned to the Novus Ordo. I was too young and not eloquent enough to put it into words at the time, but the bottom line is that I resented it. I knew that the Mass was being "dumbed down" and the invasion of guitars and sappy songs only made my resentment intensify. There is nothing a young person resents as much as adults treating them with condescension and the New Mass reeked of it.
Still does.
Anonymous @ 11:14 is surely Kavanaugh; it has his fingerprints all over it. Sad, since I wanted to believe that despite his erroneous views he possessed a modicum of intellectual honesty.
John Nolan,
It's also sad that a priest is sneaky
Dear Father McDonald,
Our organist has replied to my concern about liturgical abuse in the way we now say the Our Father at mass. He says it is not. You can read his reply in our parish bulletin, page 3, at http://bulletins.discovermass.com/download.php?bulletin=F6Nz%2BVI%2B2sTgl21XTmM%2Fnz%2FzfQywBkn6brh9Q8WxaR0cn6Avjbrn78%2BbzRNXKcLMkhdSveGdJsGY4ySF3W%2B0bA%3D%3D
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