I have posted a few commentaries on the dissident, disobedient Catholics of the Syro-Malabar Eastern Church.
What is clear, is that Pope Francis wants a uniform way of celebrating their Eucharistic Liturgy rather than having diversity of posture for the priest-celebrant.
There is something important here. The pope wants uniformity in how the liturgy is celebrated in the various rites of the Church. This includes the Latin rite. The first shoe to fall was on traditionalists who prefer the Ancient Latin Mass. Pope Francis’ intends to do away with it altogether although he is giving time to allow the bishops to accompany the most reticent into a uniform mode in the Latin Rite.
But here is the kicker.
With the Syro-Malabar Rite, Pope Francis insists that this rite return to its ancient posture of the priest for the Mass although in a form of a compromise.
First, Pope Francis says that the ancient posture of the priest is ad orientem. Then he implicitly makes clear that after Vatican II, this eastern rite adopted for the posture of the priest-celebrant facing the congregation. What is implied here, is that facing the people is not what Vatican II taught. It was simply adopted but erroneously.
We can say the same thing for the Latin Rite’s bizarre embrace of facing the people as our tradition of ad orientem is just as ancient as any Eastern Rite’s is!
But, with that said, since the Pope wants a uniform posture for the priest in the Eastern Rite, that means he must want it too in the Latin Rite—of course that is a leap of logic on my part which we can’t always attribute to this pope.
My proposal is that Pope Francis do for the Latin Rite what he had accomplished for the Syro-Malabar Rite. Demand a uniform posture for the priest celebrant and that it be ad orientem for the Liturgy of the Eucharist.
The pope allows for the Introductory and Concluding Rites to be facing the congregation. Great!
TC angered traditionalists, although they never became violent like the progressives in the Syro-Malabar rite.
Making priests celebrate the Liturgy of the Eucharist in the Latin Rite ad orientem will certainly enrage liturgical progressives in the Latin Rite. It remains to be seen if they will become violent, but we know they have the potential to become so given what we see in India.
And while we at re-ad orienteming the Latin Rite Modern Mass, let’s also mandate that the propers not be substituted but chanted in Latin to preserve these and also Latin Gregorian Chant as Vatican II specifically states!
4 comments:
For uniformity to occur the Roman Canon should be mandatory and the other Eucharistic prayers suppressed and there should only be one introductory rite, the one containing the Confiteor. Otherwise there is no uniformity
What is interesting to me is that people think of the old rite as monolithic. Yet the priest is our small parish used to tell me stories of how the various national and ethnic churches had various ways to celebrate the same Mass. some quite humorous to a young hillbilly.
rcg,
I grew up in a town with multiple ethnic parishes and I frequented many of them before Vatican Disaster II and none of them deviated from the texts of the Mass. However, popular piety and devotions varied considerably, e.g,, processions, how major feasts were celebrated. For example, the Italian parish had a St Joseph’s board, I believe they called it, a rather sumptuous feast on St. Joseph’s Feast Day. They also had more outdoor processions. My Irish parish was pretty staid and did not have outside processions except for the annual May Crowning. St. Stephen’s Day was a big deal with the Hungarian Parish and Dyngus Day was big in the Polish parishes.
Did not PF lay the framework for both dissonance and disobedience? "Make a mess"! Is he not reaping what he has sown? How can he enforce something in one church that he's mostly leveled within his own?
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