When I was in major seminary from 1976-1980, we didn’t have any outdoor Masses like this, I don’t recall, but we certainly had many indoor Masses just like this, except the priest below is wearing a stole! Kudos!
When I was in major seminary, only 6 years after the Bugnini Mass had been promulgated in 1970, the new and improved Mass was celebrated with great creativity and planning.
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Mass was for the entire seminary community in our beautiful chapel (which has been spared renovations and wreckovations to this very day! God is merciful).
On Tuesdays and Thursdays we had small group Masses in the priest-faculty apartments in the seminary. These were casual affairs, as appears in the photo above, but inside. No vestments. Mass on the Floor! Everyone sitting “American Indian” style, made-up Eucharistic prayers. These were so meaningful and relevant! NOT!
One priest wore his clerical shirt but with the collar open, the plastic tab to the side and the stole laying near the floor on which the Mass was celebrated. There’s something sacred about floors, no?
One priest-faculty member would pass the bread to us as we sat in a circle on the floor as he said the words of consecration, the same with the one chalice. I think I got the flu from that, a foretaste of the Covid 19 pandemic.
More than likely that Mass was not valid in any way at all.
In fact, I wonder if any Masses in the time I was in the seminary, to include my deacon ordination Mass there, were valid.
Maybe you can help me.
We made our own homemade bread for the Eucharist as we called the Mass way back then.
That bread had whole wheat, brown sugar, leaven and honey in it. It was quite chewy. Seminarians called it “chewy Jesus”. But I don’t think so because the ingredients made it invalid, but I’m not sure—what do you think?
Oh, the nostalgia of it all, the glories of the 1970’s Church, the relevancy and meaningfulness and the glories of creativity. It was the very beginning of the new springtime for the Church, which synodality will now take over and create the best church in history.
6 comments:
These irregularities still linger when youngsters are gathered around the altar, seated on the floor, during these "children'" [sic] liturgies, etc. Oh, but, Father, it's so cute!
But remember, the TLM is the problem.
When I was in college in 1966, a friend of mine at Niagara University told me of a Sunday evening Mass where the students all gathered round the altar as the priest consecrated Parker House rolls for the Eucharist.
It seems like there is no validity to it all. They want to be the center and director of everything.
It's self-indulgent to add honey or sugar, but there are cases where the use of non-wheat breads might seem justified. I'm thinking of the 2,500 priests imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp during WW2 who only had access to black rye bread. Did using rye really make their Eucharists invalid? I wonder what Aquinas would have said.
Sound invalid. A parish near me growing up had yummy bread for their “Masses”—baked by parishioners on a rotation to be more meaningful, of course.
They hid it from the bishop, though. Every time he celebrated Mass there, they pulled out purchased, normal altar breads.
Nick
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