It's time for Pope Leo to help the entire hierarchy and lowerarchy, to include Religious men and women, to do an examination of conscience about how Vatican II was implemented which has caused so much heartache and division in the Church, both of which are still ongoing some 60 years after Vatican II and its horrible premise of "renewal" which was called reform.
It was about reforming how the Church, meaning the institutional Church, dialogues with the those outside the confines of the Church, those Christians separated from the Catholic Church and her pope and bishops, those of other religions and those of the world with no specific faith or belief in God.
The greatest error in the implementation of Vatican II is a certain spirit that wanted create a different Church than what existed prior to Vatican II for almost 2,000 years. There were those who wanted to change not just certain "changeable" disciplines but wanted to change doctrines and dogmas in order to dumb down the Church and thus make her pliable to the falsehoods of other religions and no religions, godless ideologies and thus create unity in falsehood rather than truth.
The one area that affected 100% of Catholics was the changes regarding the Mass. Let me be clear, I have not been nor am I now opposed to refining the older Mass according to the pattern that Sacrosanctum Concilium recommended or mandated.
I am opposed to using the word "REFORM!" When not applied to sinners, reforming the liturgies of the Church implied that what preceded Vatican II was flawed, corrupt and insufficient for the salvation of souls and making saints of Catholics while they traversed this world. That is a lie.
And I am old enough to remember how bishops, priests and religious derided those Catholics, in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II, for being "so pre-Vatican II" as though that was a spiritual and moral disease. What rubbish!
Pope Francis brought the Church backwards to that kind of hermeneutic which Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI tried so hard to reverse.
So my recommendation to Pope Leo is to help those who were mean spirited in implementing their spirit of Vatican II on the Church, to repent and be reformed.
Let's speak of real renewal in the liturgy, helping people to go deeper into what the Liturgical Rites reveal or are sacramental signs of. It is the Most Holy Trinity, God's mystical love for the Church and all people and how God makes us a part of His eternal Trinitarian life, here and now and in the ever after.
Today, the greatest refinement needed for the Liturgies of the Church are not the liturgies which a small minority of Catholics celebrate, the Ancient liturgical forms, but how the modern Mass and adjunct liturgies are celebrated. And here the reform doesn't necessarily refer to the liturgical books, although that might indeed be a need, but to those who have corrupted the Modern Liturgies of the Church through the abandonment of liturgical laws of prayer and rubrics and created a didactic liturgy based on the personalities of clergy and laity, and enclosed circle!
Pope Benedict XVI's vision for the Church and her liturgies needs to be recovered and implemented. Pope Leo can do it!
Refinement in Continuity is what I would suggest calling it!
4 comments:
Well said, Father McDonald!
The pre-Vatican II Mass was noble simplicity compared to the Novus Ordo - all the worshipper needed was a Missal and Kyriale!
The options need to be suppressed: the most traditional introductory Rite with the Confiteor must be mandated and only the Roman Canon may be used (get rid of the Prayers of the Faithful). Propers should supplant hymns. If these few changes were implemented Catholics would again have a unified Rite not manipulated by whom the celebrant is that day.
From: Father Fessio's (who was close to the future Pope Benedict XVI) Adoremus Bulletin:
-- Pope Benedict XVI and the Liturgical Reform
"But he also remarked that the “old liturgy” was flawed.
"In particular, he notes that 'the celebration of the old liturgy had slipped too much into the domain of the individual and the private, and that the communion between priests and faithful was insufficient' — that people privately recited prayers from their prayer books during most of the Mass.
"People had never been in contact with the liturgy itself”.
“We might say that … the liturgy was rather like a fresco [in the early 20th century].
"It had been preserved from damage, but it had been almost completely overlaid with whitewash by later generations.
"In the Missal from which the priest celebrated, the form of the liturgy that had grown from its earliest beginnings was still present, but, as far as the faithful were concerned, it was largely concealed beneath instructions for and forms of private prayer.
"The fresco was laid bare by the Liturgical Movement and, in a definitive way, by the Second Vatican Council."
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“It must be clearly stated that a real reform of the Church presupposes an unequivocal turning away from the erroneous paths whose catastrophic consequences are already incontestable”.
“Vatican II in its official promulgations, in its authentic documents, cannot be held responsible for this development which, on the contrary, radically contradicts both the letter and the spirit of the Council Fathers”;
“I am convinced that the damage that we have incurred in these twenty years is due, not to the ‘true’ Council, but to the unleashing within the Church of latent polemical and centrifugal forces; and outside the Church it is due to the confrontation with a cultural revolution in the West … with its liberal-radical ideology of individualistic, rationalistic and hedonistic stamp”.
Pax.
Mark Thomas
From: Father Fessio's Adoremus Bulletin:
1. Ratzinger’s View of the Preconciliar Liturgy
While Ratzinger is widely known for his rather sharp critiques of liturgical developments after the Council, he knew that the liturgy as celebrated before the Second Vatican Council was no “golden era” but in need of reform.
Ratzinger saw the preconciliar liturgy as in a state of fossilization or mummification when it needed to be open to development and change, but always in continuity with its own inner nature and principles.
For these reasons, Ratzinger was a supporter of the 20th-century liturgical movement...
Ratzinger does not romanticize the state of the liturgy before the Council.
Above all, as a proponent of the liturgical movement, Ratzinger stressed the need to get in greater contact with the spirit of the liturgy.
...Ratzinger viewed the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, as the culminating fruit and crowning of that movement’s efforts.
His response to the Liturgy Constitution itself is overwhelmingly positive and optimistic...Among the Council’s recommendations Ratzinger praises in his writings at the time of the Council include: the priority of Sunday over saints’ days in the liturgical year, a focus on simple liturgical structures rather than “overgrown forms” in parts of the liturgy, a greater emphasis on communal celebration, restoration of the liturgy of the word, the call for more active participation of the laity...
...overcoming the exclusive dominance of Latin through allowance of the vernacular, and a “defrosting of ritual rigidity,” opening the liturgy up to future developments.
Despite certain revisionist traditionalist narratives to the contrary, Ratzinger’s praise of these reforms testifies to the fact that they were not merely the concerns of a fringe group of “progressive” liturgists foisted upon the Church—the Liturgy Constitution was approved by the overwhelming majority of the Council Fathers (only 4 votes against vs. 2147 in favor).
The revised Missal is “nothing other than a renewed form of that same Missal to which Pius X, Urban VIII, Pius V and their predecessors have contributed, right from the Church’s earliest history.”
Pax.
Mark Thomas
No sale. Father Fessio was dismissed as a prevost of Ave Maria University!
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