When Cardinal Roche was working for Pope Benedict XVI, His Eminence was very supportive of the two usages of the one Roman Rite, the Ancient and the Modern. Then His Eminence became the Prefect under Pope Francis who hates the pre-Conciliar Church, wants the current post-Conciliar Church to become even more of a "different Church" than what has been experienced since Vatican II.
Now that Pope Francis is entering his last days as pope, it appears that Cardinal Roche is moderating his rigid opposition to the Tridentine Mass and becoming a bit more conciliatory and pastoral toward those who want it, unlike Pope Francis. It appears to me, your most humble blogger, that Roche is throwing TC under the bus!
Does Cardinal Roche see the "handwriting on the wall" as it concerns the liturgical direction the next pope, whoever he may be, will take which will be more traditional and pastoral? Time will tell.
This is the liturgical part of an interview that Cardinal Roche gave to England's "Catholic Herald". My astute commentary on what His Eminence says is in bold red!
CH Herald]: One of the phenomena that has become apparent in the modern Church is the devotion that young people have to the Traditional Latin Mass, the 1962 Roman Missal promulgated by Pope John XXIII. What advice would you give to those who want to remain faithful members of the Church and love the Latin Mass but find themselves restricted in attending?
CR [Roche]: Of course, it is good that people want to be part of the Church, and there is no reason why they cannot. There is nothing wrong with attending the Mass celebrated with the 1962 missal. That has been accepted since the time of Pope St John Paul II, Pope Benedict and now Pope Francis. (It was completely immoral and unpastoral for TC to push young Catholics who embrace the Ancient Mass to the periphery of Catholicism, mock them, scold them and berate them. It was and is ridiculous! And it also did the same thing to the late, great Pope Benedict XVI!)
What Pope Francis said in Traditionis Custodes is that it is not the norm. For very good reasons, the Church, through conciliar legislation, decided to move away from what had become an overly elaborate form of celebrating the Mass. (Pope Benedict made clear by using the word "extraordinary, meaning out of the norm" for the Ancient Mass and "Ordinary, meaning regular/usual" for the Modern Mass, that the Ancient Mass would not be as widespread as the Modern but allowed to be celebrated where there were enough who desired to have it and that each parish with multiple Sunday Masses should designate one of those for the Extraordinary Form.)
When I was at school, I used to serve Mass, and the priest would say to me: “Remember, boy, it’s 20 minutes, amice to amice.” What he meant was that as soon as he put the amice [liturgical vestment] around his neck, I was to start counting the minutes until he took it off at the end of Mass. If, by chance, he reached the last Gospel by 15 minutes, I had to pull the back of his chasuble. It was a sort of scruple, I suppose, but something very different from what people experience in the Extraordinary Form today. (Cardinal Roche uses a completely immature argument based on a childhood experience as to why the Ancient Mass needed reform. Yet he turns a blind eye to what young people today experience in the Modern Rite which is in no way what Vatican II envisioned for the modification of the Ancient Mass! Do we really want to name all of the abuses that are experienced worldwide by priests and congregations with the modern Mass? It's the speck in the Ancient Mass that prevents Roche from seeing the blank in the Modern Mass!)
One of the things that has been very interesting to me is observing this situation worldwide. The numbers devoted to the Traditional Latin Mass are, in reality, quite small, but some of the groups are quite clamorous. They are more noticeable because they make their voices heard. (Catholic clergy and laity have a right to be heard, and yes, some of what so-called "rad trads" promote and want are undisciplined, vulgar and prideful. Thinking that the Extraordinary Form should be the exclusive form of the Church and repudiating Vatican II completely should be condemned!)
Another important point is that one of the major reforms of the Second Vatican Council was in Dei Verbum, which recognised that the scriptures needed to become more and more part of the daily diet of every Catholic Christian.
In
the lectionary from the Novus Ordo, there is a three-year cycle for
Sundays and a two-year cycle for weekday readings. There is a much lower
percentage of scriptural readings in the 1962 missal than there are in
the newer missal. (This ignores the reality that the Modern Mass is far too wordy and pedantic, which includes too made readings for the Liturgy of the Word. All that is needed is the First Reading, Old or New Testament, Gradual, not a lengthy, endless Responsorial Psalm, the Alleluia, Tract and Gospel. The Old lectionary should have been maintained as "Year A" and two newer cycles based on the model of the Ancient Lectionary devised to add more Scriptures not heard in the one year cycle. Catholic's attention span even for a 10 minute homily is very short, not to mention all the Bible Readings thrown at them at a single Mass!)
What
interests me is why people get hot under the collar about others
celebrating the Tridentine Mass. I think this has been a mistake. Bishop
Wheeler, of the Diocese of Leeds, insisted that a Holy Mass be
celebrated in Latin according to the Novus Ordo at least once every
Sunday in every deanery. That showed considerable wisdom.
From
my perspective, the celebration of the Eucharist, in whichever missal
you are using, should be very noble and marked by noble simplicity. (No Cardinal Roche, what needs to be done is for the priest to read the black and do the red, no matter what Missal is used as well as the General Instructions for the Roman Mass in either Missal! But it was Pope Francis and you who were so hot under the collar that the Ancient Mass, due to Pope Benedict's explicit permission, was spreading like wildfire especially among the young to include young priests and bishop!. Physician heal thyself!)
I often hear people say, “Cardinal Roche is against the Latin Mass.” Well, if they only knew that most days I celebrate Mass in Latin because it is the common language for all of us here. It is the Novus Ordo Mass in Latin. I was trained as an altar boy until the age of 20, serving the Tridentine Form. (Cardinal Roche, if you also celebrate the Tridentine Mass today, that would be something. Nice try at changing the subject!)
Here are interesting facts about the experience of the two major forms of the One Roman Rite back in 2019. There is an update from Pew Research for the USA today that truly paints a dismal picture of what Vatican II has done to the Church, with more Catholics leaving the Church than ever. Vatican II's spirit and non dogmatic intuitions, many of which were wrong then as now, has made the Church toothless to deal with secularism and its allurements:
8 comments:
Roche is a political animal and not to be trusted. His lies about the TLM prior to the Council are just ridiculous. If you were a server for Mass without a congregation, the TLM could be celebrated fairly quickly, but I would point out that the Novus Ordo without a congregation, can be celebrated even more quickly if the priest uses a Eucharistic prayer other than the Roman Canon. I went to a Catholic grade school and our daily Mass was a Missa Cantata which I have fond memories of. So was our primary Mass on Sunday. I guess Roche must have served exclusively at private Masses.
As an Easterner, I do not feel that the ancient form of mass, fundamentally, was overly elaborate. Embellishments that crept in over time made it so. When you compare images of mass in a friary to those of a pontifical high mass, clearly there's a degree of pageantry in one that is not present in the other.
The reformers WANTED something that better aligned with their views. How easy it would have been to keep the rite, remove certain embellishments that perhaps had become archaic while introducing the vernacular to enhance accessibility. There likely would have been peace in the proverbial valley had this occurred as opposed to the triumph of ideology that actually happened.
We will N-E-V-E-R all agree here, that has been crystal clear within the combox of this blog. Perhaps we can agree that scorched earth and the force feeding that followed was not necessary or compassionate. To some extent, I feel it was self-serving, ideological and political to the relative few that desired the path that became forced. The vast majority of practicing Catholics might not have given a tinker's damn about buskins and would not have noticed or cared if they disappeared. In all likelihood, the average pewsitter was not actively seeking change on the scale that followed.
TJM - In addition to my culture vs countercultural argument, the single greatest, and perhaps most destructive change, was versus populem. Here, we went from symbolically facing the New Jerusalem and verticality to the horizontal and "I see you. You see me". In many ways, and despite its validity, the execution of the NO feels like that nursery rhyme (look at all the goofy videos that circulate of a priest acting foolishly, the music ministry sounding childish or serving oddly and the art and environment committee putting up childish/tasteless banners and piling hay, corn, potatoes and carrots in front of the altar at Thanksgiving). This was the most glaring thing to teach your average pew sitter with some warning and preparation. Overnight, that which was cherished tradition for generations became wrong, bad and old thinking. It's like Jesus, in part, stopped being the star of his own show being made to compete with "Gather Us In" and up with people. A "closed self-centered circle" is how I believe it was referred to by Benedict XVI. For whatever value my opinion might have, I believe he was right.
ByzRus,
I totally agree with you about the pernicious change to "versus populum" celebration. I actually attended a totally vernacular, Novus Ordo Mass, where the priest celebrated the Mass ad orientem. There was a totally different look and feel. So reverent, so dignified. No focus on the "Big I Am Priest."
The liturgical reform was a top-down movement. The laity did not ask for any of this. I assume it was bored clerics and academics with massive egos engaging in the most extraordinary hubris, who were behind all of this. I hope they are happy with their "accomplishment." If you were trying to destroy the Catholic Church this liturgical revolution was just want you would pursue. Once these old double-knit dinosaurs are gone, the Church may have a fighting chance.
Taking a very brief break from my Lenten Internet hiatus, the pastor at my (Novus Ordo) parish recently refused to be the only minister of the Host at Communion time, even though we have a newly-installed altar rail and things would not be slowed down if we stopped using an EMHC to assist with administering the Host (we max out at the priest and one EMHC for the Host at any given Mass anyway).
His reason? He didn't want people to be too focused on him as administering Holy Communion, even though he stands in the person of Christ countless times as sacramental minister. The great irony is that, when we had Masses in the parish hall during church renovations, he commented that he enjoyed the layout, as we were closer to him during Mass and it was more like a "cooking show."
This is a man I doubt I could ever convince of even the intellectual basis for ad orientem, much less of putting it into practice. Don't get me wrong, he's no hippy-dippy/silly-season priest, but the Council has put a mental block against certain practice in many peoples' heads that cannot be fully reasoned with.
Nick
More evidence of the "Francis Effect!"
https://catholicreview.org/pew-u-s-christianity-downturn-leveling-but-catholics-suffer-greatest-net-losses/
If this was your business, you are owner/operator, CEO, partner, whatever, wouldn't you reasonably consider a pivot to save your business?
Here, so wed is the hierarchy to "we're not going back" they'll run the ship aground and start salvaging what's still useful rather than compromise their views. It's so strange.
So, where does that leave the faithful? Not in the best set of circumstances. Where does that leave the clergy - the boots on the ground? In an even worse set of evaporating circumstances.
I'm not wishing my life away, but I'm glad I won't likely still be around to watch the unraveling truly accelerate - unless it has and I'm too desensitized to even notice.
ByzRus,
Well, many in the Vatican and the USCCB live in an alternate world of reality. Many of them cannot admit error. If the hierarchy had a brain, they would have seen the warning signs in the late 1960s and done a course correction then when it might have salvaged much of what was being lost. But they would have had to admit they were mistaken but instead they doubled down on stupid. Look at how long it took to deal with the clerical sexual scandals. They came around only because they were being sued. Unfortunately, the laity could not sue them for ruining the Sacred Liturgy.
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