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Modern liturgist have turned Vatican II and its so-called "spirit" into an idol. They have also turned the so-called ecclesiology of the post-Vatican II experiement into a god. Church became all about us and the revised Mass as promoted by modern, "spirit" of Vatican II liturgists is all about the human stripped of the loftiness of the sense of the sacred so evident in the Mass prior to Pope Paul's idea of what the revised Mass should be.
I will take reverence over ecclesiology and its ideology any day of the week when it comes to the Mass!The greatest complaint about the direction the revised Roman Missal of Vatican II was and is that the sense of the sacred was lost compared to the Roman Missal that immediately preceded the 1970 version--the 1962 Roman Missal. Just note the video above about that!
I am not sure that the 1970 Missal concocted by academics and theologians had an agenda intended to remove the Catholic sense of the sacred and holy reverence, but they wanted the revised Mass to be more in keeping with Protestant sensibilities to promote an unbridled ecumenism and the reunion of the Protestant sects, or at least some of them, with the Catholic Church. Thus meal was emphasized over sacrifice, casualness over reverence and flexibility over ritual which is always fixed and somewhat rigid. Rubrics were deemed robotic and unuseful for creativity.
Certainly the vernacular allowed priests for the first time to ad lib or change the words of the Mass to be to their individual tastes. Individualism and Congregationalism began to take root in the post Vatican II Church especially when priests and their liturgy committees could have fun with the Mass and make it up as they go creating new "traditions" that were meaningless, like puppet Masses and themed Masses.
The Mass facing the people allowed to priest to treat those in front of him as his audience and thus he played to his "fans" and began to read the prayers of the Mass toward them as he established eye contact and gestured to him.
Pastoral musicians tried to inculturate the music idioms of the day into the Mass, secular music with religious words. Often this took the form of folk music, polka Masses, and sounds that were more like current Broadway ditties or had Protestant devotional qualities.
Involving lay men and women in the roles of lector and extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion often was accomplished with little or no training, the encouragement of lay clothing of all types often today very casual and a very casual approach to the Mass in general.
All of this destroyed the ancient spirituality of the Mass with its devotion of reverence so evident in the video above.
Even the Revised Mass could have maintained the patrimony of the Church's sense of the sacred if radical shifts at the foundation of the revised Mass that led to irreverence had not been promoted by self-serving liturgists and clueless bishops. Ad libbing, casualness and facing the congregation by the priest are the three main culprits plus the dumbed down method of translating the Latin into the vernacular stripped the English Mass of style, reverence and beauty as well as the devotional theology of the original Latin.
The way back to the reverence in the Ordinary Form of the Mass is found in more Latin, ad orientem and attention to detail in what is worn by lay and ordained participants in the Mass and well-formed and informed clergy and laity.
1 comment:
AMEN! I recall I attended some years ago an English language Mass where the priest celebrated it ad orientem and the Ordinary was chanted in Latin. It was stunning because both visually and spiritually the Mass seemed far more in harmony with the EF and was very reverent and uplifting.
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