We have been told countless times by liturgists, that the Council Fathers felt the liturgy was in need of reform and thus they suggested some conservative reforms that blossomed into what we have today in the Liturgy. If the pre-Vatican II liturgy needed reforming and renewal, what would the Council Fathers say about the reformed Mass.
What is it about the reformed mentality that this would be seen as pastorally advantageous? Why would a bishop not intervene and say to his priests this is unacceptable? Why do bishop and many priests refuse the laity their liturgical right to the older rites of the Church, not just the Mass, but the other sacraments?
These are all good questions during these absurd times.
This will not make your last Friday of the month happy or maybe it will:
27 comments:
No he did not.....😵. There aren't words strong enough to condemn this kind of BS...
And just to add........the altar looks like a birthday cake without a candle.....
People have, and will continue, to vote with their feet. A loon like this will likely be playing to an empty house at some point. Priests really need to consider the staggering losses over the last 50 years, reflect on them maturely, and study how to reverse the tide. In my parish the numbers of people (mostly young) attending the monthly EF, converted it to a weekly EF.
From what I have read one of the original reasons for the reforms of Vatican 2 had to do with Europe transitioning from monarchies to states. The thought was that people would no longer be familiar with the ritual procedures in the Mass that were associated with a subject’s behavior in front of royalty. The feast of Christ the King follows a similar theme. The other influence in the reform was missionary work in countries that also would be unfamiliar with the nuances of a kings court. The liturgical absurdity that resulted, imho, was an opportunistic assault by individuals that did not like Catholicism. They used the reform to create a mockery of the Mass to demoralize those in attendance. It was done in a very friendly way, a common political tactic.
When Benedict gave us Summorum Pontificum, it was "DOA" in most parishes. Everyone who posts here has at least one story of a parish priest telling them (or someone they know) "I'm NOT doing THAT Mass!"
Instead of giving the faithful a choice, the company men decided to try to keep them in the dark. They're not stupid. They KNOW that TLM parishes have solid attendance. Many are fully aware that the Traditionalists are the ONLY reliably growing sector of the Church in the non-missionary west. These priests KNOW that if they start offering a choice, many people are going to vote with their feet and embrace what they have either tried to suppress or have been taught to suppress. Most of them can't even TELL you why they have such a rabid hatred for this Mass, but it's there.
But now we have the internet and the cat's out of the bag. More and more voices are asking the right questions. Too bad it took 50 years.
Lame dancing. Lame singing. Goulash of sacred/liturgical and social justice. Some, perhaps many will conclude "nothing to see here" and will keep moving.
There is a fine recent op-ed about the perverted goings on in the Church today by Fr Cipolla:
"...the root problems of the Catholic Church today lie in the deliberate ambiguities of the documents of the Second Vatican Council and the post-Conciliar radical assault, in the name of aggiornamento, on the heart of the Catholic worship that is the Mass. The Catholic Church decided in the 1960s to become “modern” at the same time that Western culture turned its back on Modernism and embraced, with all of its ambiguities, Post-modernism. The obvious increasingly irrelevant state of the Catholic Church in the West is not due mainly to secularism but rather to the failure of the Church to be true to herself and her founder, Jesus Christ, and instead trying to become relevant to a society that was already then and is even more now post-Christian."
https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2020/07/turn-to-tradition-response-to-george.html
The responsibility is squarely on the Pope nd the Bishops. The question has been raised already: is the Pope still Catholic (and the Bishops under him ditto)? The evidence is aboundant that the leadership in charge no longer believes the gospel of the New Testament. The office holders resemble the Soviet apparatchik class 5-10 years before Gorbachev. A prominent Catholic priest- blogger often says "We are our rites!" The clergyman above in his liturgy is making fun of the One who died on the cross. I want nothing to do with that person or any one else who tolarates his kind.
I did not watch the entire video, but rather skipped through.
I'll work backwards to the beginning...
- Father is rather talented; later in the video he plays two flute devices at once; and by that I mean, he actually registered a coherent tune.
- Father has good presence when he speaks, and that's worthwhile.
- He seemed suitably sober during the intervening segment featuring the Stations of the Cross. I don't know what he or the others said, however.
- And now, we come to the trainwreck at the beginning; that is, both the dancing and the singing of "Hallelujah." What immediately hit me was that Father seems quite familiar with this sort of dancing. Things that make you go hmmmm....
As an extrovertive person myself, I think I can sympathize somewhat with this priest, in this way: there is an incredible temptation to perform, to win laughs and plaudits; and as the ordinary form of the Mass is routinely allowed to be celebrated, it presents almost unbearable temptation to folks such as this priest, and me, to put on a show. You can see it happen at almost any stage of the Mass:
- At the entrance, especially if someone decides to have either dancers, or choir members doing a "rhythmic" procession.
- In the introductory rites, which frequently turn into a mini-homily, or a "let's welcome our special guests" bit. The mini-homily here often focuses on our sins in a way that seems anything but truly convicting. I.e., I never hear any really uncomfortable references here, such as to unchastity or drunkenness, but always on "selfishness" and "uncaring," that sort of thing.
- The sprinkling rite easily becomes a real show-stopper, especially when the priest (and maybe the deacon too) are armed with real plant branches, and gleefully drench people. (Confession: I walk the length of the nave during the sprinkling rite, and I do try to spread the water around. Am I being seduced?)
- The responsorial psalms sometimes are impressive performances, and can easily overwhelm the other readings.
- The Gospel procession is a new opportunity for gyrations and novel means of providing smoke.
- The homily can, of course, feature show-and-tell, and the petitions can be full of nonsense.
- Oh, the fun that can be had with the offertory! Dressing the altar (totally uncalled for), and parading around it.
- The Eucharistic Prayer can be performed a la Broadway, with Haugen's setting of Eucharistic Prayer III.
- Skipping ahead to the post-communion "announcements": this, too, can easily become a mini-homily, and a comedic moment. Again, confession-time; I have made some jokes with the announcements myself; in the hope of making them memorable, but of course, this is also another temptation to put on a show.
It is possible to offer the ordinary form of the Mass without all this, but it takes a great deal of discipline and consistency. One thing that helps is to avoid constant use of various options, even legitimate ones, because it just perpetuates the notion that the Mass is something the celebrant gets to "curate." So in my parish (following my predecessor's lead), I always use the confiteor, I only do a sprinkling rite about three times a year, and I use the Roman Canon at least 90% of the time; when I don't use that, I use number II, and all the rest, never at all.
In short, one way to wring the ordinary form of the Mass of this narcissism and performance approach is to bring an extraordinary form mindset and approach. Note well: I'm not saying extraordinary form rubrics; only that the celebrant carry over the ethos of self-effacement and self-denial that is so deeply woven into the traditional form of Mass. It is easy if you try.
Bee here:
I wonder what the people who contributed to the building of that church in Omaha, who sacrificed their hard earned wages for the founding of that parish would think if they saw this "liturgy" or listened to that "Stations of the Cross." For that matter, I wonder what the Council Fathers would have voted had they had a time machine, and could have watched this very video. I expect many would have thought it could never happen, or that it was an anomaly. Unfortunately, they would have been wrong.
Given what I understand about the way the "reforms" were presented to make them acceptable to the majority of cardinals and bishops, and that the Ottaviani Intervention had little to no effect in mitigating the "reforms," I wonder if even if they had seen this video, or how the Novus Ordo Mass is actually celebrated in most parishes around the world today, whether they would have voted differently.
Unleashing this sort of man as a priest on a Catholic parish is tantamount to spiritual abuse.
God bless.
Bee
My stock investment in a company specializing in manufacture of air-sick bags just tripled. Same with cloying perfume stocks and molotov cocktail start-ups.
Father Fox,
Excellent analysis and advice
Personally, as for his obvious "dance" practice, noted also he thlipped with hith lithp a few times, including the flute demo.
Them identifying Matthew as gay, likely means that privately they hold that Matthew is not the only one.
What Bee said.👍
If Steve Martin had become a priest.......
Bee’s judgment is superior to much of the hierarchy
Father Fox, your analysis is great! Did you by chance stop by my parish? Our Introductory Rite "mini homily" is so long, they skip the Penitential Act and go right into singing the Kyrie. The homily often starts out with a long discussion on yesterday's football game and then goes into childhood memories. At the end of Mass we have to sit down and clap for how well the choir did; clap for how well the altar servers did; clap for those having birthdays that month (and of course sing the "Happy Birthday" song...why can't the priest give them the blessing from the Book of Blessings, instead?); clap for the visitors. At one Mass I counted the number of times we were supposed to clap....eight!!! Then the priest reads the bulletin which is handed to us ten minutes later by the ushers on the way out. Our parish has the Sunday Mass online, but I can't bear to watch it. There are very many online where it is done with reverence and not a la rainbows and unicorns. I am taking full advantage of online Mass since our dispensation has been extended to August 30.
And the Novus Ordonarians wonder why we just get sick and utterly disgusted by this nonsense, and yes I know I know we will hear well this is not what our Mass looks like. He is acting like a complete fool and a child, I mean really folks what is he supposed to be doing? This has NOTHING to do with Roman Catholicism in any way shape or form. I have been to an Anglican-Catholic Mass with Latin, Gregorian chant, altar boys, kneeling at the communion rail, Mozart, Palestrina, incense, priest wearing Fiddle back chasuble, organ music, women wearing Mantillas, you would have thought you were in a Roman Catholic Church prior to the disaster called Vatican II but it was an Anglican-Catholic Church amazing how far the man made Novus Ordo has come.
Bee
Cardinal Heenan claimed that had the bishops thought they were voting for the replacement of the Roman Rite by 'an ad-hoc vernacular liturgy' they would not have done so. But Sacrosanctum Concilium we now know to have been be a cleverly ambiguous document.
He seems very excited about his "dinner date" with 17 yr old JoJo Siwa......he gave her a "shout out" from the ambo.....this guy is a sick puppy...
What a fruitcake - it's all about him.
I think the Marines should try adding dance to their next recruitment video. This sort of thing happens so often in the Roman Church, one can only conclude that it works well and fills the pews.
I really should have better qualified my last comment. To me, this is cringe worthy, awkward, childish and uncomfortable for many. With that said, here we go (addressed to some, by no means all):
Fathers: Take your craft seriously! You have nothing better to do than to celebrate the rites of the Church as prescribed and well. Be prepared. Most people cannot speak well off-the-cuff. So, stop trying as your lack of effort is obvious (and, no, 20 - 30 minutes to prepare something thoughtful isn't asking too much). Stop trying to entertain. We all know why you are there and what you are expected to do. Vaudeville isn't one of those things. Look the part. When celebrating, wear albs that fit, noble vestments if affordable and if able, big boy shoes as well. Tone set at the top. Your audience will take things as seriously as you do. A military field drill would not be stopped to break into dance in hopes of better relating to those watching or, to make it more "meaningful". Rule of thumb: If you wouldn't expect to see it at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, fight the urge to do whatever it is that you might be tempted to do. "Oh, light up! Don't compare us to the Orthodox" will be the response of some. I say B.S. as to me, it's getting to the point where such comparisons are becoming unavoidable.
Bee here:
Anonymous said...
If Steve Martin had become a priest.......
July 31, 2020 at 8:05 PM
LOL!!!! Really. I literally laughed out loud. Thanks for the smile!
God bless
Bee
Wasn't one of Steve Martin's movies called " The Jerk"??
I'm embarrassed for the Priest,I feel sorry for the congregation of his church, and I am both saddened and angry at the flippancy of the priest's ministry. It's a Protestant talent show?
Oh yeah, so "with it", so trendy I want to vomit.
Where is this Priest's Bishop?
Unknown,
The priest's bishop is probably ferreting out faithful catholic priests, they are the real danger!
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