EVEN A CRAZY ARCHBISHOP CAN EVALUATE THE PROBLEMS OF THE MODERN ROMAN MISSAL…

 I usually don’t promote Archbishop Viganò and his various rants and raves as I believe there could be a serious pathology lurking underneath many of his rantings and ravings. But even if His Excellency is compromised in some way or the other, that doesn’t mean he can’t make a good evaluation of what has happened to the Liturgy as a result not of Vatican II but of the elite committee established by Pope Paul VI to contrive a new Mass.

Thus Consilium acted independent of Vatican II’s bishops and designed something they more than likely would not have approved. 

What is needed is a thorough revisiting of Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium with the aim of doing nothing more and nothing less than what the College of Bishops in Council asked to be done as it concerns the Mass and other Sacramental celebrations.

Thus Archbishop Vigano makes a great evaluation of the state of the Mass and the need to go back to the source of Vatican II and do what it said to do, which was the bishops of the Church in union with the pope. My comments in red to the interview republished by Lifesite News)

PL: What do you think is the main flaw of the new Mass?

Abp. Viganò: I believe that there are three critical issues that must be mentioned, attributable to the single problem of understanding the Catholic liturgy.

The first defect of the new rite is that it was drawn up with the cynical coldness of a bureaucrat, while the authentic liturgy is a harmonious corpus that has developed organically over the centuries, adapting its immune system – so to speak – in order to fight the viruses of every age. Believing that one is able to “restore original simplicity” to an adult body, forcing it to return to childhood, is an unnatural operation, revealing the willful intention of those who traveled this path with the sole intent of making the Church more vulnerable to the assaults of the enemy. And whoever plotted this fraud knew very well that he could only convey his errors by eliminating that Mass which alone condemns them and disavows them at every gesture, every ceremony, and every word. There is no good intention in whoever gave birth to this liturgical monstrum, designed to act as a sort of tent or canvas under which to give free rein to the most aberrant and sacrilegious deviations. (Look at the state of belief in the Church and even the 5% to 20% who still attend Mass don’t really believe all that the Catholic Church believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God, not the least of which is what the Church believe about the Most Holy Eucharist and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. And think about the schismatic cardinals and bishops manipulating the synodal way especially in Germany who are on the verge of an all-out schism!)

The second flaw is represented by the deception with which the Novus Ordowas presented and imposed on the Church, alleging that it was a simple translation of the ancient rite. In Sacrosanctum Concilium, the council fathers authorized the translation into the vernacular of the readings and didactic parts of the Mass, prescribing that the Roman Canon be left intact, said in Latin, and spoken in a whisper. What has been prepared for us by the Consilium ad exsequendam is something else, a rite that seems to have been slavishly copied from Cranmer’s “Book of Common Prayer” of 1549 and which corresponds perfectly to the ideological approach of its writers. (This is very important. I can remember as a 16 year old around the year 1969 that parishioners at St. Joseph Church in Augusta, my parish, were saying that the Mass and the Church were becoming Protestant. I did not understand at the time what they meant. But yes, the revision of the Mass was meant to be an ecumenical gesture to untie the Church to Protestants. I can remember visiting a Protestant who told me in the late 1970’s that the Catholic Church was finally catching up with Luther and Calvin in making the Mass a meal and using a table to celebrate “The Lord’s Supper). 

The third flaw is the deliberate substitution of the main object of worship – the Holy Trinity – who has been replaced by the assembly gathered together with the celebrant, which is now the fulcrum around which the whole liturgy revolves, the point of reference for the sacred action. The vision of the priest as “president of the assembly,” the loss of sacredness in order to encourage improvisation, the replacement of the sacrificial altar with a convivial table – these are all consequences of a doctrinal error that denies the essence of the Mass, in which Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is offered in a bloodless form to the Father. (In the late 1960’s the banal and trite song “Kumbaya” was quite popular as was holding hands during Mass. In fact liturgical theologians downplayed the Mass as a Sacrifice, adoring the consecrating Host and Precious Blood as not what Jesus wanted for this “Sign” of His Body and Blood. The role of the priest is diminished all in the name of eliminating clericalism. Vatican II said absolutely nothing about this development pushed by radical theologians who wanted to design not only a different Mass but a different Church.)