Philadelphia Chapter

By Gregory DiPippo of NLM

We recently received this information about the new location of the FSSP Apostolate in South Bend, Indiana, from the parish priest, Msgr. John C. Fritz. NLM joins the Fraternity in thanking His Excellency Kevin Rhoades, bishop of Fort Wayne – South Bend, for this generous pastoral provision for the faithful in his diocese attached to the traditional Mass.

The Mother Theodore Guerin Latin Mass Community had been celebrating the Traditional Latin Mass as guests at St. Patrick’s Parish in South Bend. As the small community continued to thrive and grow, its chaplain, Msgr. John C. Fritz, FSSP began to think that perhaps the group was ready to find a home of its own. As often happens, Divine Providence stepped in, and the opportunity came through a phone call from the local bishop. Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of the Diocese of Fort Wayne South Bend called to ask Msgr. Fritz how he would feel about relocating his community to St. Stanislaus Parish in South Bend, thereby placing the parish under the care of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. Msgr. Fritz called a ‘town hall’ meeting of his community where the proposal was unanimously and joyfully accepted! Msgr. Fritz went home to pack his bags in order to prepare to move from Fort Wayne to South Bend, in order to take up residence in the rectory of St. Stanislaus Parish as its new pastor.

The Traditional Latin Mass was resumed at St. Stanislaus on September 8, 2015, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and will continue regularly on Sunday mornings at 10:00 am. Msgr. Fritz warmly welcomes everyone in South Bend and the nearby areas to come and experience this beautiful ancient liturgy. We will celebrate a Solemn High Mass on Sunday, September 27, 2015 at 10:00 a.m. with guests Fr. Gerard Saguto, FSSP and Fr. Simon Harkins, FSSP. All are welcome to attend.

The Fort Wayne – South Bend Diocesan Newspaper, Today’s Catholic, recently did a feature story on the changes taking place at St. Stanislaus, and the South Bend Tribune also published an informational piece explaining what people can expect when they attend the Latin Mass. Check out either of these great articles or the parish website (http://ststanparish.com/) to learn more!

By Gregory DiPippo of NLM

We received the following report … from Fr Kyle Doustou, parochial vicar of the Parish of the Precious Blood, in Caribou, Maine, about the institution of a regular EF in his parish, and some thoughts about the Mass by one of his parishioners, which we are glad to share with our readers.

I am the parochial vicar of an extremely large, rural parish comprised of 10 churches in a geographical area of 834 sq. miles in northern Maine. On September 3rd of this year – the feast of St. Pius X – we celebrated a Missa Cantata in the Extraordinary Form with the participation of over 120 of the faithful. This Mass was held at one of our churches – St. Denis in Fort Fairfield – a small, farming community where you’re more likely to see moose or Amish buggies than anything. Since my arrival in July 2014, the people here have been requesting the celebration of the Usus Antiquior, and after obtaining the permission of our pastor, we have been able to begin doing so. As it stands, we will be celebrating the Extraordinary Form on a monthly basis.

There is enormous support for the celebration of Mass according to the Extraordinary Form even in this rural, north-eastern most part of the United States. Since September 3rd, I have had numerous phone calls and e-mails from people expressing their excitement over this and who plan to frequent our monthly Masses. I’d like to share with you the testimony of one of my parishioners, a wife and mother of 7, who has fallen in love with this form of the Mass.

“I had never been to a Latin Mass and I didn’t know what to think. As a convert, my family certainly didn’t talk about the ‘old days’ before Vatican II. Surprisingly, no one in my new church ‘family’ did either. So, when our young, full of the Spirit priest suggested a monthly Latin Mass being held in our parish, I thought ‘there’s no way anyone will come!’ You see, to my mind, it seemed that most people had forgotten everything the Church had been prior to 1968.

The weeks leading up were a bit anxious. Would anyone come? I approached my fellow Daughters of Isabella about refreshments after the Mass. The response was overwhelming. “Of course!” they said and the room erupted in questions and ladies saying they couldn’t wait! But, of course, I still doubted.
My six youngest children are homeschooled. Due to this flexibility in our schooling, our 9-year-old twin boys are learning the Latin Mass. You can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been, right? Due to this, they were asked to be altar boys. I never imagined that I would see them on the altar, serving a Latin Mass. Never in a million years.

Finally, the evening was upon us. When I arrived an hour early to bring the boys, there were many people already in the pews. Would that be all? I stood in the back to hand out missals as parishioners came in. One missal for every two people and the stack of 100 dwindled to less than twenty-five. They had come!! A few faces were unfamiliar, but most were friends. Some I knew would come, but others surprised me with their attendance.

I knew very little about the Mass we were about to attend. What I did know is that I wanted to know more. More about why things were changed, why it was all thrown out and more about why it wasn’t permitted regularly for all those years since Vatican II. I was about to find out.

The Missa Cantata was like nothing I had ever experienced in the Church. The smells and the chants made it a heavenly experience. I wondered how I would feel about the priest standing ‘ad orientem’. Would I be able to see? The answer is, no, I couldn’t really, but it only brought home that the priest is offering the sacrifice FOR us, not TO us. The focus was on God. I have and do know several pious, holy priests, but nothing they have ever done spoke to me as this position of the priest during the Latin Mass. All eyes were on God, and it wasn’t something you saw, but you could almost hear the beat of angel’s wings. Yes, it is that profound of an experience.

As to my questions prior to the mass, I felt they were answered. I understood why some things were changed, like to the native tongue. Latin is very hard to understand, however with the Latin/English missal available with small illustrations along the borders, it was quite simple to catch up if you had gotten lost. I also understood why it wasn’t permitted regularly – I believe you would have more Latin Masses being said every Sunday than Novus Ordo. It is truly that spectacular. Not spectacular like a show or performance, but spectacular in its reverence and focus on God. There are no distractions.

However, the sudden change and acceptance`of the Novus Ordo after Vatican II shows, to me, the dedication of the faithful to our Church and to the Mass. After only attending NO Mass in my 15 years as a Catholic, I am grateful to Pope Emeritus Benedict for recognizing there is room for both forms of the Mass. As I was surrounded by over 120 people at this Mass, I realized how wrong I was to feel that others wouldn’t want to experience it as well. Sometimes where you’re going isn’t as good as where you’ve been.

As a mother, I would be remiss to not mention my boys, the altar boys at their first Latin Mass. The ease at which they did their jobs was astonishing. I would love to tell you I focused on their every move, but I didn’t. They performed their duties I observed with grace and all the reverence the occasion called for-pure, innocent love of Our Lord and His Mass. I am very proud, but I am more grateful for the experience and the opportunity to continue. May God bless our priests may they continue to bring us all to Christ through the Traditional Latin Mass.”

Priest: Rev. Fr. James Bartoloma
Mass Intention: Michael, Lisa, Flora, Haly Brill (Living) req. by John A. Laurito
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Don’t forget that the World Meeting of Families is this week followed by the Papal Visit. Please join our fellow Catholics in celebrating the family as God has designed it and in welcoming our Holy Father, Pope Francis to Catholic Philadelphia.

Upcoming Masses:
Sunday, September 20 Missa Cantata @ Noon at St. Edmond Church

Monday, September 21 through Friday, September 25 Low Mass @ 9am at Holy Redeemer Chinese Catholic Church (1/2 mile away from the Convention Center)

Thursday, September 24 Missa Cantata @ 7pm at Holy Redeemer in honor of Our Lady of Ransom: Quartet a cappella (No organ) – Missa Aeterna Christi Munera Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Saturday – No TLM scheduled
Sunday, September 27 – No TLM scheduled

Assistance Needed: We are blest at St. Edmond to have space for socials. Anyone who would be willing to assist with organizing after Mass social, please contact Theresa Herr @ vocemagna@gmail.com .

Music Schedule:

Sunday, October 4 Feast of the Holy Rosary: Missa Quarti Toni Tomás Luis de Victoria
Sunday, October 11 XX Post Pentecost + Maternity of BVM : Missa for 4 voices Antonio Lotti
Sunday, October 18 XXI Post Pentecost + St. Luke + Prop of the Faith: Missa for 4 voices William Byrd with Organist, Steven Ball
Sunday, October 25 In Festo Domino Nostro Jesu Christi: Missa “O Rex Gloriae” Giovanni Pierluigi da with Organist, Steven Ball

E-Giving: A few people have asked me about E-giving. Please know that on www.latinmassphila.org there is a PayPal button on the right side of the home page. You can make one-time donations or you can set up a monthly donation through a credit card. If you prefer, you can always mail a check to my rectory in Doylestown.
Website: www.latinmassphila.org
International Institute for Culture: Check out upcoming events at http://www.iiculture.org/aboutus.asp
Relics on Tour: The relics of St. Maria Goretti are on tour. For more information, please see http://mariagoretti.com/tour-schedule-3/ for location dates and times. They are presently scheduled to be in our area in September 2015.
Events: If anyone has pertinent information that would be appropriate for our bulletin, please e-mail it to Fr. McKale @ tlmcommunityofphila@gmail.com.
Mass Intentions: If anyone still has unfulfilled Mass intentions, Fr. McKale can pass them on to a priest that will satisfy the intention by offering a TLM or Divine Liturgy (Byzantine). Please specify if you have a preference. The donation is $10. If you would like a Mass card, please include an extra $5 for the card.
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By Peter Kwasniewski of NLM

On Friday, October 26, 2007, only six weeks after Summorum Pontificum had become the law of the Church, the founder of this blog, Shawn Tribe, made some perceptive comments about the meaning of the terms ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ as found in the motu proprio.[1] I remember thinking at the time that he was getting too worried about the possible misunderstanding of this pair of terms, but eight years of experience have convinced me that he was right. I’ve had first-hand experiences with people who argue along these lines: “Benedict XVI was saying that this liturgy is out of the ordinary and should remain that way.”

While “extraordinary form” has become a common way to refer to the traditional Latin Mass (and one can understand why: it has the advantage of brevity and an easy symmetry with “ordinary form,” particularly when one abbreviates them as EF and OF), nevertheless, the phrase can be misleading, because it is an extrinsic description, based on the current liturgical situation, in which one form has de facto prominence over the other: the ordinary is that which is more commonplace, and the extra-ordinary that which is relatively uncommon. But if we put ourselves in mind of a parish run by the Fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of Christ the King, or another such society of apostolic life, the opposite situation obtains: the “extraordinary form” is the ordinary liturgy for the people, indeed the only one, for all intents and purposes.

Shawn drew our attention to a point of vital importance that deserves to be brought forward as soon as a conversation starts hinging or fixating on the OF/EF terminology — namely, that Pope Benedict XVI in Summorum Pontificum and its explanatory letter to the worlds’ bishops makes use of other expressions as well: the Missal of St. Pius V[2], “the Missal of Blessed John XXIII” (in fact, he uses this phrase more often than any other[3]), “the old Missal,” “the ancient Latin liturgical tradition,” and the “usus antiquior.” The clarifying instruction Universae Ecclesiae of 2011 speaks of “the older liturgical tradition” and frequently calls it the “usus antiquior” or “older use.”[4] There is no evidence that Pope Benedict was legally and officially giving a single or a privileged name to the traditional Latin Mass any more than he was doing so for the modern Roman Rite. The official documents of the Church use multiple names for them, and for good reason: each name conveys something important that the other names do not convey. The unofficial names also add to the portrait: Gregorian rite, Tridentine rite, classical Roman rite, etc.

A failure to recognize the diversity and purpose of Pope Benedict’s nomenclature can lead to a situation where the “extraordinary” of “EF” is used to fend off ordinary Catholics who desire, or desire more regularly, that which Benedict XVI asked the clergy generously to offer. “No,” responds the nay-sayer, “the Church says this Mass is out of the ordinary — rare, marginal, exceptional, not the norm for us.” If the nay-sayer went on to suggest that the “E” in “extraordinary form” meant somewhat the same as in the “E” in “extraordinary minister of holy communion,” one could disprove the claim by pointing to the fact that there are whole communities and even an entire diocese (Campos, Brazil) that are permitted to celebrate exclusively the extraordinary form, while there is not a single church in the world where EMHCs are legally allowed to be the ordinary ministers of holy communion — for the simple reason that it is metaphysically impossible for them to become so without first changing their state in life (or, for many, their sex, quod absit). But such an argument would be specious and disingenuous; after all, when’s the last time you saw EF’s multiplied the way that EMHC’s are multiplied? In reality, the “E” of EMHC means one thing and the “E” of EF means another; we call this an analogous use of language. It happens a lot in poetry, and, by the way, in theology, too. Just ask St. Thomas Aquinas.

I knew a priest who took the “E” of “EF” in a restrictive sense, as if it meant “that which should remain marginal or rare,” but the logic of Summorum Pontificum and the wide range of permissions the Vatican has granted since approximately 1988 shows that the “E” has a descriptive rather than a prescriptive force; it is factual, not restrictive. In contrast, the restrictive sense is employed in the phrase “EMHCs,” which are supposed to be for emergency situations and rare.[5] But since there are whole parishes, religious orders, and even a diocese that exclusively employ the “extraordinary form” of the Roman Rite, the “E” here must not mean for emergency situations or rarely permitted, but simply that, socially and institutionally speaking, it is out of the ordinary. Put differently, OF and EF are sociological or demographic terms: they state what the global pastoral situation is, but do not prescribe how it should be, or imply a judgment on which form should be more normal in a particular community.[6]

The comparison I like to use is this: driving the wrong way down a one-way street is certainly extraordinary and can be justified only by an emergency, but driving to work taking the scenic country road rather than the speedy interstate is also extra-ordinary in that most people don’t do it, but it is completely legal and, in fact, more beautiful. And some people may choose to drive exclusively on the country roads. Perhaps, like Mary of Bethany, they have chosen the better part.

Summorum Pontificum is a fine example of papal diplomacy. It assumes that the OF is the norm for the vast majority of Catholic communities, and that, for now at least, it must remain in currency, while the EF is gradually added back to the life of the Church. Thus, it seems to me that, given standing liturgical law, a pastor of a parish could not, on his own authority, declare that his parish will be exclusively EF from a certain point onwards. On the other hand, it seems equally clear from the motu proprio that if there is a stable coetus fidelium capable of supporting an EF parish (particularly if there is an empty church or a church in danger of closure), the local bishop could not reasonably say: “Sorry, this is not the normal liturgy of our diocese and you can’t have it.” The fact that the OF is, so to speak, the default setting does not mean it must be the default for every Roman Catholic believer or community of believers. We know this cannot be so because of parishes and religious houses that exclusively celebrate the EF, with the Church’s permission.

Let us consider some of the implications of postconciliar Church policy. Under Pope Paul VI, it was thought by most Catholics that the whole liturgical life of the Church had been overhauled, in such a way that the old was definitively retired and the new authoritatively imposed. Gone, defunct, inoperative, impermissible, was anything for which a new equivalent had been created. But this strong line had already started to wane under the Polish pope, and it was permanently retired by the Bavarian. Today, the traditional Roman calendar (as of 1962), the old Martyrology, the old Divine Office (including the Office of Prime), the rite of tonsure, the minor orders, the subdiaconate, all of the sacramental rites and blessings of the Rituale Romanum, the Pontificale—all of this is back in use, deemed fully legitimate[7]; according to Pope Benedict XVI, none of it was ever abrogated or abolished.

Consequently, all of this heritage can be taken up again by a community and become normative for that community. For Catholics who belong to an FSSP parish, Epiphany is not the Sunday after New Year’s, but January 6 (as it had always been, prior to recent decades); Ascension Thursday is not bumped to the Sunday after Ascension, but takes place forty days after the Resurrection (as had always been the case)—and this, regardless of the OF Ordo; the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas is March 7, not January 28; and so forth. The real calendar for these EF-attending Catholics is the 1962 calendar; they are not, as it were, pretending or playacting. There is, at this time in the Church’s life, a unique coexistence of two forms of the Roman Rite, each with its own structure of Mass and Office, feasts and ferials, sacraments and sacramentals—and therefore it cannot be said that one of these forms is normative in an unqualified sense for all Roman Catholics. The OF may be the norm for most Catholics, but it is not obligatory and it is certainly not in itself superior, as if it dictates the conditions under which the EF is to be allowed, or as if it is always to be preferred whenever there is a choice of forms. Such views would contradict the equality of the forms and the now-widespread existence of exclusively EF communities, both parochial and religious, permitted by the Apostolic See.

When Pope Benedict in his Letter to Bishops of July 7, 2007, speaks about “the actual situation of the communities of the faithful” and their “degree of liturgical formation,” he is admitting that the nature of a given community has to be taken into account when determining the proportion of the OF to the EF. There isn’t a “one-size fits all” blueprint that could be superimposed on every group of Catholics. Some will not enjoy the presence of the EF; others may have the EF exclusively. The Church permits both extremes and every permutation in between—although Universae Ecclesiae does imply that every Catholic should be exposed to the EF when it says, apropos Summorum Pontificum, that “the Letter has the aim of bestowing[8] on all of the faithful the Roman Liturgy in the usus antiquior, considered as a precious treasure to be preserved” (8a).

On this eighth anniversary of the going into effect of Summorum Pontificum, we can perform a simple thought experiment. The number of traditionalist priests ordained each year in France is steadily rising and the number of diocesan clergy is falling precipitously. Years down the line, it is almost certain that the former will outnumber the latter.[9] What will the bishops do? Close more and more churches, or bite the bullet and entrust them to priests who celebrate only the EF? If country parishes over time went in the EF direction simply out of necessity, would there not eventually be a tipping point when the OF and the EF were, say, 50/50 in their representation? And if that were possible, why not a century in which the EF becomes the norm and the OF a permitted alternative? Whatever shift takes place, we can be sure that a day will come when the terminology of OF and EF will seem quaintly old-fashioned.

Back on that fateful day of March 7, 1965, when Pope Paul VI celebrated the first mostly-Italian Mass at the parish of Ognissanti in Rome, he said in his homily: “Today’s new way of prayer, of celebrating the Holy Mass, is extraordinary.” Less than five years later, the “extraordinary” vernacular Mass had become altogether ordinary, in spite of centuries of tradition and the clear teaching of Pius XII’s Mediator Dei and the Second Vatican Council. Now, fifty years later, we see a striking reversal happening at the grassroots level: for an increasing number of Catholics, the “extraordinary” Latin Mass is becoming altogether ordinary once again, in a development that can only be called natural, normal, and healthy, with plenty of youthful momentum.

NOTES

[1] Shawn Tribe, “’Ordinary’ and ‘Extraordinary’: A Discussion about Interpretive Keys to Their Meaning.”

[2] In Art. 1: “the Roman Missal promulgated by St. Pius V and reissued by Bl. John XXIII.”

[3] Pope Benedict XVI defines the older form of the Mass in reference to John XXIII eight times in the motu proprio and once in the accompanying letter. In contrast, he uses the expression “extraordinary form” only three times in the motu proprio and twice in the accompanying letter.

[4] See Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, Universae Ecclesiae, nn. 5, 8a, and 15.

[5] See my article at EWTN, with all the pertinent statements on EMHCs from 1969 to 1997.

[6] When Benedict XVI cites “juridical norms” as indicative of the status of the OF (“Already from these concrete presuppositions, it is clearly seen that the new Missal will certainly remain the ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, not only on account of the juridical norms, but also because of the actual situation of the communities of the faithful,” Letter to Bishops, July 7, 2007), he is referring to the fact that Paul VI instituted the new Roman Missal for the universal church, and it has been given in such a way that it is understood to be the default. If a new church is built and a priest is assigned to it, the default is that he will celebrate the OF. However, this is a far cry from saying that the OF is “what believers ought to be following,” and they may follow the EF “by way of exception.”

[7] Albeit with some restrictions, most notably this one: “Only [or At least] in Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life subject to the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, and in these where the use of the liturgical books of the forma extraordinaria is maintained, is it allowed to use the Pontificale Romanum of the year 1962 for conferring major and minor Orders” (Universae Ecclesiae 31).

[8] The Latin original says: omnibus largire fidelibus—the usus antiquior should be “bestowed on all the faithful,” not merely “offered” to them, as the official translation at the Vatican website has it. The difference is significant. The official translation is misleading at times, as is the case with many Vatican documents. The Latin Mass Society has prepared a more literal translation.

[9] See the data and projections here.

By Peter Kwasniewski, from NLM

(Today New Liturgical Movement is happy to share with our readers an article submitted to us by Juventutem DC in commemoration of this anniversary.–PAK)

Here we are, eight years after Pope Benedict XVI’s motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum, came into effect. This is an extraordinary day, both for those who endured long years without the clarity that Summorum provides, as well as for younger Catholics (like those in Juventutem DC) who grew up after Vatican II and were — to the surprise of many — drawn to tradition. So where are we eight years after Summorum took effect?

For context, let’s reflect on some typical comments Juventutem DC has heard.

1. “At our parish, we have had an Indult for nearly 20 years!”

2. “Summorum Pontificum has been around for years, but my bishop/diocese/pastor won’t implement it.”

3. “If only the FSSP would be given a parish here, everything would be better.”

As far as Juventutem DC is concerned, Summorum is the biggest thing since the responsorial psalm in E-flat major. A total game changer, it is classic Pope Benedict — pragmatic, intelligent, well reasoned, and has the force of law. Moreover, it presupposes that lay Catholics possess a certain competence, energy, and endurance. It does not, however, promote an “Indult-mentality.”

The Indult was the mechanism to get the traditional Mass before Summorum was issued. The general consensus is that those who didn’t like the traditional Mass used the Indult to limit its celebration. It was a flawed licensing system — completely at the discretion of the bishop. Pope Benedict XVI called out its weaknesses in his letter introducing Summorum. In fact, the very first article of Summorum explains that the documents that created the Indult system are replaced by Summorum. That’s a big deal: eight years ago on this day, the 1984 Indult became a legal nullity.

Yet, to this day, some diocesan authorities have been slow or unwilling to move beyond Indult-style restrictions. It’s wrong. It’s not healthy or helpful, but it’s not really all that surprising.

But what’s with all the laity who still have an Indult-mentality? The three comments above are emblematic and probably, there are a number of reasons for this mentality. Many laity and clergy simply assume that Church law prescribes this state of affairs. Even the focus on obtaining clergy from an Ecclesia Dei priestly society to run local parishes is understandable: they do amazing work and even Juventutem International’s chaplain is an FSSP priest! But the assumption that the Extraordinary Form begins and ends with these societies and orders is a false one. Summorum is meant for everyone, for all parishes and dioceses.

Above all, we think that this mentality is the result of a vague familiarity with certain concepts, but not an in-depth knowledge of Summorum and the 2011 explanatory Instruction of the Ecclesia Dei Commission. Mastery of these two documents will equip laity and priests with the confidence to cease being treated as second-class Catholics as they seek to discover or promote traditional Catholic life in the Church. Summorum is the law, and the Instruction confirms that Summorum is to be given a liberal construction and generous application. In effect, these two documents are the current tools for the restoration of liturgical tradition.

So let’s take a step back, gain our bearings, and once and for all, master Summorum.

Summorum lays out a simple timeline for anyone in a parish to restore the traditional Mass to its altars. Reading the provisions that pertain to parishes in the order in which they appear in the document reveals a robust framework that empowers priests and the laity alike.

Step 1: the lonely priest in a parish. Under Art. 2, any priest can privately (i.e., “without a congregation”) say the traditional Mass. He doesn’t need any permission from the Holy See or his bishop or pastor to do so. Imagine a priest, probably with a server, saying Mass at an unscheduled time in his parish church occasionally. Arguably, this is a low Mass.

Step 2: the not-so lonely priest. Lay faithful see that the priest is saying an Art. 2 Mass in the parish. They say, “Father, thank you! May we assist at this Mass?” Under Art. 4, those lay faithful may assist at the priest’s Art. 2 Mass, and no matter how many people there are, it remains a private Mass and does not require anyone’s permission (neither the pastor nor the bishop may forbid it). Very pragmatic!

Step 3: the popular priest. It turns out that, after steps 1 and 2, a group of faithful stably exists in that parish and wants to assist at the traditional Mass. Under Art. 5, the pastor should “willingly accede to their requests to celebrate Holy Mass according to the rite of the 1962 Roman Missal.” A few points:

● That, of course, presupposes that the faithful are requesting it! Have you asked your priest to implement Summorum? Have you told him you’d help him do so?

● There’s no minimum number of people required to be a group and it doesn’t matter how long it’s been around as a group – the people don’t even have to be from the same parish. Just go for it!

● The careful reader will note a shift from Art. 2 that only mentions Masses “without a congregation” (arguably, a low Mass) to Art. 5 where now we can choose from all the various forms of “Holy Mass according to the rite of the 1962 Roman Missal.” That’s a lot of options beyond a low Mass—pick a Mass, any Mass—Missa cantata? Solemn Mass? Go for it!

● These Art. 5 Masses can be said on any feria, Sunday, or feast day. Again, when requested, they are permitted for marriages, funerals, or other reasons, including pilgrimages. In each case, Summorum says that the pastor should grant the request of the faithful.

Step 4: if the pastor doesn’t grant the request. Let’s say things go poorly. If the pastor doesn’t grant the group’s request, then under Art. 7, the group “should inform the diocesan bishop [and] [t]he bishop is earnestly requested to satisfy their desire.” If the bishop doesn’t do so, then the group can petition the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei in Rome to help find a solution. The laity does not need any permission from an unsympathetic chancery to do so—Summorum has a check where the Indult system was lacking.

So you see, there is a real framework and there are real protections, at least for the laity. But someone has to ask a priest for the Mass—ask for it! Keep asking for it! Invite your friends, even those who go to Mass in the Ordinary Form. Share your faith with them; help them discover tradition. Buy your priest a 1962 Roman Missal—you’d be surprised how effective that is. If you can’t afford a Missal, find someone who can. Amass a talent pool of singers and servers, even if you have to train people. And if an aging hold-out in the diocese doesn’t like what your priest is doing, be ready to defend him. Zealously advocate for him and for your spiritual needs, keeping charity in your hearts while you do so.

Just as the logic of Summorum is incompatible with the crummy Indult system, it is completely inconsistent with lay inertia, slactivism, and complacency with the status quo ante.

We recommend using the tools of Summorum to your full advantage, with contagious joy and unwavering enthusiasm. Have courage, have guts, and be prepared to talk to a lot of people who have no idea what Summorum says. Help them understand it—both friend and foe. And, lest we forget, birotā vehimini!

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Juventutem DC is the local chapter in Washington, DC of the Foederatio Internationalis Juventutem, a Catholic network fostering the sanctification of the young adults and youth worldwide according to the Roman traditions of the Church. If you are interested in starting a Juventutem chapter, please visit www.juventutem.org for more details. (It’s easier than you think.)

Priest: Rev. Fr. James Bartoloma

Mass Intention: Mrs. Margaret Brill req. by John A. Laurito

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THANK YOU to those who assisted with the organ on Friday. It is greatly appreciated.

Assistance Needed: We are blest at St. Edmond to have space for socials. Anyone who would be willing to assist with organizing after Mass social, please contact Theresa Herr at vocemagna@gmail.com.

August Finances:

Income: $3,459 [Aug. 2 $1,115; Aug. 9 $588; Aug. 16 $738; Aug. 23 $677 & Aug. 30 $341]

Expenses: $2750 [Rent $500; Clergy $650; Music $1500 + direct sponsorship; Supplies $100]

Balance $709

Thank you for your continued support of the Traditional Latin Mass.

Upcoming Masses:

Sunday, September 20 Missa Cantata @ Noon at St. Edmond Church

Monday, September 21 through Friday, September 25 Low Mass @ 9am at Holy Redeemer Chinese Catholic Church (1/2 mile away from the Convention Center)

Thursday, September 24 Missa Cantata @ 7pm at Holy Redeemer in honor of Our Lady of Ransom

Saturday – No TLM scheduled

Sunday, September 27 – No TLM scheduled

Music Schedule:

September 13: Quartet a cappella (No organ) – Missa Octavii Toni by Orlando Di Lasso Domine memorabor by Nobuaki Izawa

September 20: Quartet a cappella (No organ) – Missa Quaturor Vocem by Domenico Scarlatti

September 24: Quartet a cappella (No organ) – Missa Aeterna Christi Munera Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

E-Giving: A few people have asked me about E-giving. Please know that on www.latinmassphila.org there is a PayPal button on the right side of the home page. You can make one-time donations or you can set up a monthly donation through a credit card. If you prefer, you can always mail a check to my rectory in Doylestown.

Website: www.latinmassphila.org

International Institute for Culture: Check out upcoming events at http://www.iiculture.org/aboutus.asp

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From Rorate Caeli Blog

The Old Mass and the New Evangelization:
Beyond the Long Winter of Rationalism
Peter A. Kwasniewski [*]
Gentile Gallery of the J. C. Williams Center
The Franciscan University of Steubenville
September 7, 2015

It is an honor and a joy for me to be here this evening. I am grateful to Dr. Michael Sirilla for the invitation to speak at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, which, for so many years, has maintained the reputation of a school where Our Lord Jesus Christ is “the king and center of all hearts” and where the Catholic Faith is taught, practiced, and loved. On a more personal note, I have the feeling of “coming full circle,” since I taught for the Austrian Program at the Kartause in Gaming, and at that time mingled with many wonderful people from the university—but never had a chance to visit the home campus.

As I was working on this talk, I came to see that my title, “The Old Mass and the New Evangelization,” really deserves to be a book, not a lecture. I decided to limit myself to an aspect that seemed especially fruitful—“Beyond the Long Winter of Rationalism”—even though one could approach the topic from so many angles.[1]

Rediscovering the Ancient Mass

Allow me to begin with some facts. The attendance of Catholics at Mass has been in steady decline, one might even say freefall, since about 1965—the year when huge changes began to be made to the way in which the Mass had been celebrated for centuries.[2] On the other hand, since the year 1984, when Pope John Paul II first asked bishops to permit priests to celebrate the usus antiquior or older use of the Roman Rite, and particularly since Pope Benedict XVI’s motu proprio Summorum Pontificum in 2007, which dispensed with the need for episcopal permission, the number of traditional Latin Masses available to the faithful, the number of clergy offering them, and the number of Catholics attending them have steadily increased. As of 2013, over 1,000 clergy in North America had completed a formal training program for celebrating the Extraordinary Form. In 1988, there were only about 20 places in the United States where you could find a traditional Latin Mass on Sundays; today, that number has risen to almost 500.[3] In response to an obvious demand on the part of students, faculty, and staff, Catholic colleges and universities are including the Extraordinary Form in their chaplaincy schedules. Religious orders have incorporated the usus antiquior into their way of life or even adopted it exclusively, with the result of a surge in vocations. The average age of Catholics attending traditional Latin Mass parishes or chaplaincies is lower than the national average, while the average family size is higher.[4] It is a vibrantly youthful, flourishing, and expanding movement. As Pope Benedict XVI observed in 2007:

Immediately after the Second Vatican Council it was presumed that requests for the use of the 1962 Missal would be limited to the older generation which had grown up with it, but in the meantime it has clearly been demonstrated that young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist, particularly suited to them.[5]

Why is all this happening? Why has the liturgical reform of the 1960s and 1970s failed to produce a new springtime in the Church?[6] What, in contrast, is the secret of the old Latin Mass’s appeal—the reason or reasons for its suprising resurgence in our day, when most of the people who celebrate or attend it were born after 1970? And how is this development good for the Church and for the New Evangelization?

In order to begin answering these questions, we need to orient ourselves correctly with respect to what the New Evangelization means and how the liturgy fits into it. One could give a number of valid formulations, but I find Bishop Dominique Rey’s the most succinct:

The New Evangelization is not an idea or a program: it is a demand that each of us comes to know the person of Christ more profoundly and, by doing so, become more able to lead others to Him. The only way to begin to do this is through the sacred liturgy, and if the liturgy is somehow not as it should be, or I am not properly prepared, this encounter with Christ will be impeded, the New Evangelization will suffer. … The history of evangelization throughout the centuries shows how the great missionaries were great men of prayer, and more specifically of authentic devotion. It also shows the correlation between the quality and depth of liturgical life and apostolic dynamism. … The New Evangelization needs to anchor itself in profound Eucharistic and liturgical renewal.[7]

Taking what Bishop Rey says, we can formulate a thesis. If the old Mass helps people to “come to know the person of Christ more profoundly,” if it helps us become “great men of prayer and authentic devotion,” if it provides superior “quality and depth,” then it is, and will continue to be, one of the most important elements of the New Evangelization.

I’d like to take an experiential or inductive approach, by looking at what Catholics themselves say when asked what struck them about the traditional Latin Mass the first time they attended it. Personal testimonies are abundantly available.[8] Let us begin with several from young adults.

I took more notice of what the priest was doing, which surprised me. His facing away from us was refreshing, because I liked the fact that he is one of us, looking towards God, representing us. . . . The smell of the incense, kneeling for Communion, wearing of the mantilla, quiet prayer . . . all focused on God with reverence and humility, and I was not distracted by the priest or altar servers.[9]

Here’s another report:

It was a Missa Cantata, a sung Mass. All I had known [before] was folk Masses, people singing ‘Kumbaya,’ and the first thing that struck me was the seriousness of it. … I was just amazed at the solemnity of the people and the priest. … I felt really focused for the first time in a Mass. … The main thing I like is the silence. … It is an opportunity to meditate and contemplate. I like to think of myself at the foot of the Cross.[10]

And a third reaction:

It was here [in Oxford] where I first experienced the Mass in Latin. It was a solemn high Mass, and it was perhaps the most beautiful experience I have ever had. Though now I know the liturgy, understand what is happening upon the altar, and am familiar with the replies in Latin, in my ignorance on that happy day in Oxford I was able to experience that Mass as a blind child, imagining the angels singing from on high, as I was too embarrassed in this foreign place to turn my head back to get a glimpse of the choir loft. … There is an unsurpassed solemnity that the “old” rite carries.[11]

And this, from one of your own students, Mary Bonadies, as told in the Summer 2015 issue of Franciscan Way. Mary is talking about her experience of singing in the choir at the first Extraordinary Form Mass she attended:

It opened up a whole new world to me. At the end of the liturgy, I broke down and cried because I had never experienced such beauty.[12]

A young couple due to be married this October at St. Walburge’s in Preston, Lancaster, had this to say about their journey:

Coming from an atheist background, my fiancé and I have been attracted to the Catholic faith this year through the beauty of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. We were taken in by the liturgical music, tradition, and reverence of everyone that attended. It sparked a curiosity in the faith that led to us being received into the Catholic Church.[13]

To show that such reactions are not limited to the young, here are two testimonies from elderly people:

I was focused during the whole of the service. It felt more spiritual and I felt much more connected to the service because it wasn’t in English. It seemed a lot more profound… there was no shaking of hands or anything. We were all focused on the Mass rather than the priest. Often, at Mass it’s all about the character of the priest and this wasn’t like that. … I felt myself listening intently. … It felt really special in a way I hadn’t thought about Mass being special in 40 years.[14]

I came by chance to discover the [ICKSP] Shrine Church in New Brighton and the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. I was immediately transported to another realm. The obvious spirituality, respect, and devotion that I saw amongst the people and clergy moved me to such a degree that I was transfixed and knew immediately that I had found what I never knew I was looking for. . . . Being given this wonderful chance to draw close to God for the first time in many years, and to engage with him at a far deeper level than I ever believed possible, is something that I could only have found in the Traditional Mass.[15]

As these first-person reports bear witness, people find something special in the traditional Latin Mass, something they may never have experienced or encountered elsewhere. Allowing for differences of emphasis or vocabulary, all of the writers seem to be expressing a threefold perception. First, the old Mass is theocentric, focused on God, “vertical,” evocative of the transcendent. Second, it is Christocentric, bringing out the priesthood of Christ and His supreme sacrifice on Calvary, and throwing into high relief the ministerial priest’s acting in persona Christi, while downplaying his idiosyncratic self. Third, it is hagiocentric, emphasizing the holiness of the ritual, the piety and reverence that should characterize our approach to God, the peculiar modes of addressing the tremendous and fascinating mystery that God is, with hushed awe and holy fear, and a heightened awareness of one’s own interiority—one’s capacity for recollection, meditation, and contemplation.[16]

In other words, the usus antiquior Mass follows the great sacramental principle of doing what it looks like, and looking like what it is.[17] If the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is indeed a tremendous mystery, a reality so awesome and divine that we cannot possibly wrap our finite minds around it but can only yield ourselves to it and be carried away by it, then it should come across that way to us. A sacred encounter with the transcendent God should look and feel both sacred and transcendent. It should signify what it is, and be what it signifies. If the liturgy does its work well, we will be humbled in its midst, provoked to prayer, stirred by singing, brought to silence, caught up in things invisible, turned inward to the depths of our soul, turned outward to the absolute primacy of God. The usus antiquior does all these things exceedingly well. The question may then be asked: Why is it so efficacious? How does it work?

A Common Objection—and Fallacy

We can answer this question by considering one of the most common objections to the revival of the traditional Latin Mass: “This Mass is in an ancient language that no one speaks any more. It’s often very quiet, so we can’t hear what the priest is saying. The ceremonies are complex and hard to follow. The chants are in a strange style that has no connection with today’s popular culture. All of these things make the old Mass hard for modern people to relate to or enter into. By the time of the Second Vatican Council, the Mass had become inaccessible, and so it needed to be put into the vernacular, simplified, and adapted to modern ways of thinking and acting.”

That’s the objection you’ll often hear, and the justification for most of the changes. Under the influence of rationalism, the architects of the modern Roman rite did their utmost to make the liturgy more (as they saw it) intelligible, transparent, and accessible—and this, ironically, has meant a tremendous decrease in the liturgy’s power to convey and communicate the mystery of the Eternal and Infinite God and the sacred mysteries of Christ in His divine humanity. As just about everyone has noted at one point or another in the past fifty years, the mysteriousness of the Mass has evaporated. This is not merely an incidental problem; it is a problem that strikes at the very essence and purpose of liturgy as divine worship.[18]

The most basic fact of our existence is that we are in need of God—not a god of our own making, who fits into our mental categories, but a God who transcends all we can ever think and imagine.[19] The liturgy has to introduce us to this God, the real one, in order to satisfy our neediness of Him. “Thou didst touch me,” says St. Augustine, “and I have burned for Thy peace.”[20] If the liturgy is to bring us into the real presence of the sovereign mystery of God, it will have to make serious demands on us, in God’s name; in keeping with the logic of the Cross, it will try us as gold in the fire, to see whether we are worthy and to render us less and less unworthy. The believer, for his own good, needs the liturgy to be dense, elusive, and fascinating. The “thickness” of the old liturgy[21] better expresses and inculcates the mysteries of the Faith; its layers of prayer, symbolism, ceremony, and chant, even in their apparent foreignness, have the power to speak more directly to the soul and to call forth an interior response.[22]

Transparency and Opacity

Traditional liturgies, Eastern and Western, have a certain inherent density of content and meaning that demands a response from us, yet our response is never fully adequate, satisfactory, or exhaustive: we can always have prayed better, we are always being outstripped by the reality. We never get to the bottom of it, shrug our shoulders, and say: “Well, that was nice, what’s next?” In contrast, a liturgy that attempts to be totally “intelligible,” in the sense of having no opacity, impenetrability, or beyondness, is ill-suited and off-putting to man as an intellectual being. It gives him nothing to sink his teeth into; it leaves his highest faculties in the lurch; it gives precious little exercise even to his lower faculties.[23]

The truth of the matter is quite different from what the liturgical reformers thought. To them, the liturgy had to be transparent so that we could see through it. But total transparency equals total invisibility. A window that is perfectly clean and clear is one that birds kill themselves flying into, because it has ceased to appear as a window, as a paradoxical barrier that lets the light through. In this life, we do not have full possession of the divine light, but this purifying, illuminating, and unifying light flows to us through the liturgy’s prayers, ceremonies, and symbols. If we wish to compare the liturgy to a window, it would be a stained glass window, where the colors and shapes of the glass, the stories it tells or the mysteries it evokes, are both what is seen and that through which the light is seen.

Christ appears in our midst through the liturgy, and it is vitally important that we come up against the liturgy to experience, in a palpable way, His physicality, His resistance to our pressure, His otherness, precisely as the condition of our union with Him. You cannot marry an idea or a concept, you can only marry a person of flesh and blood who is different from you: the precondition for oneness is otherness. This is why it is extremely dangerous for human beings to think of themselves as the creators or modifiers of the liturgy and to act accordingly—whether before or after the coming of Christ.

Speaking of the golden calf, which is the nation of Israel’s collective fall, parallel to the fall of Adam, Joseph Ratzinger writes:

The people cannot cope with the invisible, remote, and mysterious God. They want to bring him down into their own world, into what they can see and understand. Worship is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one’s own world. He must be there when he is needed, and he must be the kind of God that is needed. Man is using God, and in reality, even if it is not outwardly discernible, he is placing himself above God. This gives us a clue to the second point. The worship of the golden calf is a self-generated cult. When Moses stays away for too long, and God himself becomes inaccessible, the people just fetch him back. Worship becomes a feast that the community gives itself, a festival of self-affirmation. Instead of being worship of God, it becomes a circle closed in on itself: eating, drinking, and making merry. . . . Then liturgy really does become pointless, just fooling around. Or still worse it becomes an apostasy from the living God, an apostasy in sacral disguise.[24]

To the extent that we think and act that way, we are in serious danger of hugging ourselves rather than encountering Christ, of gazing into a pool like Narcissus and falling in love with our own reflection. One cannot truly be obedient to something he himself has instituted, since it emanated from his will and remains ultimately within his power.[25] The teacher is not docile to himself, the king is not submissive to his own will. As Ratzinger often says in his writings, the true liturgy is one that comes down to us along the stream of tradition, dictates to us our (relative) place, impresses us with its own form and shapes us according to its mind—the mind of the Church collectively, not of any particular committee or even any particular pope.[26]

Doorway to the Sacred

Let me suggest a different example.[27] A door is a useful thing: it enables us to pass from one space into another, while keeping the outside out and the inside in. As such, a door can be ignored apart from its functionality; we typically don’t think about commonplace doors, the ones we use every day at home or at work. You might say we give them our peripheral attention, enough not to walk into them like one of the Three Stooges.

But there are at least two situations in which our experience of a door is quite different. First, if we are going to an important place for the first time—the office of a prominent person such as a bishop or a president, or the family home of my boyfriend or girlfriend. This door can be rather intimidating, because it represents something to us: it is a barrier, a threshold, a test, a point of no return. Such a door seems to have a personality: it challenges you, dares you to go in, perhaps whispers that you are not ready to go in and had better turn around. This door becomes more than a door; it is a symbol of the unknown, a sign of an unknown person. The second experience is when we see a massive, elaborate, richly-decorated door, as one finds on the great cathedrals and even in many humbler churches from ages past. Notice what has happened. The door, in its origin a purely utilitarian thing, has now become a reality in its own right: it is Christ, who is the door, the gate, the entrance. This door is something more than a door, something meaningful and beautiful in itself. With wonderful strangeness, it is not merely something we go through, but something we take into ourselves as we pass through it, something we give ourselves over to as it receives us. If, as in the great entrances of the medieval churches, the image of Christ is integrated into the doorway, He embraces us and we embrace Him. Here it is no longer possible to say that the door is just a door. It is a sign and a reality that transcends its usefulness, just as a true friend is not only useful but also pleasant and virtuous.

How does all this relate to the liturgy? The liturgy is not merely a means to an end, but an end in its own right: a sign and a reality, like the door, that demands and deserves our devout attention and our surrender to its own language, as we pass through it to the heavenly Jerusalem. When we pass through the liturgy, we do not leave it behind or forget about it, much less denigrate it; we take it into ourselves and it takes us into itself. It may be fanciful to say it, but we could think of the entire church as one great door to heaven, and in that sense, we never finish passing through the door; we are always passing through it. The liturgy is the same way. That is why, like those magnificent old church doors, the liturgy, too, should be massive, elaborate, and richly-decorated. It is not trying to get out of the way, but to get in the way, because it is the way. We speak, eloquently in my opinion, of “going to Mass,” as if the goal of our going were the Mass. This is quite true: we should be going to the Mass, and once we are within it, then we are joined to the mysteries it carries and conveys. It has to be not transparent in order to serve as a connection to God. In this way, a church door is like the stained glass window, and the liturgy is like both—not like a modern minimalist door of industrial manufacture or a plate glass window with no differentiation.

The English language has the poignant idiom “seeing through something,” meaning, exposing its emptiness or uncovering its imposture. If we can “see through” the liturgy, if it does not interpose signs and symbols like the stained glass window or the grand doorway, we cease to see it; we take it for granted, and soon enough, we are the ones who take center stage, as in Ratzinger’s analysis of the golden calf. In the ensuing vacuum, we need to invent something creative to occupy ourselves and our audience, or we need to play heavily on the emotions, since we are not wrapped up in the fullness and thickness of traditional theocentric liturgy.[28] As surely as night follows day, this filling in the gaps or filling up of dead space fails to entertain the people, and they go away, sometimes forever. Such is the tragic result of failing to respect the grandeur, strangeness, and singularity of the liturgy and attempting to shift it into more familiar categories that are, nevertheless, foreign to it.

Accessibility and Elusiveness

Next, let us consider the phenomenon of boredom. It is not difficult to see that total accessibility equals boredom. One of the reasons modern Western man is so unhappy is that he has too much of everything too easily available to him. We are awash in food and drink, laden with clothes, living in comfort; sexual titillation is suffocatingly omnipresent; we can get where we are going quickly and easily, but we don’t really know where we are going or why we should go there. What do we have to strive for, to hope for, to suffer for, to sacrifice ourselves for? The value of our goals decreases in proportion to their triviality and ease of acquisition. Does modern man have a transcendent Other to whom he can surrender himself, an elusive quarry that fascinates him, beckons him onwards, and is always just around the corner but never in his grasp? No, modern man is trapped in immanence, the quotidian, the pedestrian (or should we say, the automotive), the predictable, the endless bestirring and satisfaction of finite needs. It all gets rather wearisome. No wonder chronic boredom has become a psychological epidemic. We are seeing what happens when a creature, created from an eternal idea and destined for eternity, created by the Infinite for the infinite, has bound itself by chains to the finite and the temporary.

What are the liturgical implications of this point? Quite simply that a liturgy, to be true to God and true to man made in God’s image, cannot be totally “accessible”—and the attempt to make it so will only result in its degradation. To make the liturgy obvious, easy, simple, is to make it cease to be the liturgy. If it becomes proportionate to man in his temporality and finitude, it becomes, to that same extent, disproportionate to God and to man’s immortal intellectual soul, created in God’s image. This principle affects every aspect of liturgy.

For example, sacred music should not be a music that emphasizes temporality by a heavy regular beat, and finitude by catchy and simplistic melodic phrases. Gregorian chant is supremely fitting for the liturgy and serves as the supreme model of sacred music because its lack of the straightjacket of accentuated metricality, its free-floating rhythm and graceful, sinuous melodies, intimately wedded with the words in a one-flesh union, leave behind the predictable patterns of this world and carry us into the heavenly realm, the world of supernal beauty. The vestments worn by the ministers must not look like polyester drapes that could be hung on a curtain rod in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. In their rich colors and embroidered symbols, their splendor and set-apartness, liturgical vestments should be pushing at the limits of what clothing can be—signs of the invisible clothing of the beauty of sanctifying grace.[29] The sacred vessels placed on the altar of sacrifice should be resplendent precious metals, and the chalice ornamented with gems, engravings, filigree, whatever can set it apart as “this glorious chalice” that our Lord will take into His holy and venerable hands, to fill with His most precious Blood, “whereof a single drop has power to win / All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.”[30] Everything in the liturgy must bespeak the sacred, the transcendent, the holy, the beautiful, the noblest offerings of love and thanksgiving.

Let me summarize my argument against liturgical rationalism. Liturgy that is totally intelligible is irrelevant, because it no longer summons forth from us the leisurely labor of the deepest and fullest response we can give, with our senses, imagination, memory, intellect, will. Liturgy that is totally transparent is invisible and thus ignored, because it does not catch our attention at the very point where the invisible God becomes visible in otherworldly signs and symbols, like light becoming narrative in the stained glass window. Liturgy that is totally accessible is boring, because it is too easy. As the mystics tell us, God is our sovereign Lover, and He woos mankind with a lengthy and perilous courtship. We, in return, chase after Him with sighs, groans, and tears, ever on the trail, catching now and again a glimpse that sets our hearts ablaze. If we have any clue about what we are doing, there is nothing quick, easy, or boring about it: the liturgy is a lifelong courtship, an exhilarating chase, the exploration of a new world in which we are not the conquerors but the captives; the liturgy is our wedding feast, anticipated and somehow already present. Such metaphors fall so far short of the reality that they strain the bounds of language, they clash and meld. This, too, should be our experience of liturgy: it is a mystery that strains the bounds of our language, our thoughts, our feelings, beckoning us to go “further up and further in.”

It is precisely the traditional liturgies of the Church, Eastern and Western, that most perfectly express and fulfill these inherent requirements and human needs. They are not readily intelligible but opaque, multi-layered, cosmic in scope, rich in paradox, proclaiming the ineffable divine sacrifice; they are not transparent but, like a rood screen or an iconostasis, stand before and between us, mediating the unapproachable Light; they are not easily accessible, but exacting, requiring self-discipline,[31] demanding our conversion to something objective, outside of us, prior to us, higher than us, and normative of us. A traditional liturgy dictates the terms of our engagement with it; we are not in the position of telling it what to be or what to do. In all these ways, the great liturgies of the Christian tradition—the Mass of St. Gregory the Great as codified by St. Pius V, the Ambrosian rite, the Mozarabic rite, the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom or of St. Basil the Great—are supreme gifts given by God to His Church on earth, by which our profound neediness of God is stirred up and quenched, and God’s mysterious “longing” for man reaches down and calls forth from us the response He desires, one that is as simple as Himself and as complex as ourselves.

Simplicity and Complexity, Revisited

Earlier I spoke of the danger of simplicity and the attraction of complexity. But we need to be more precise, because there is good simplicity and bad, good complexity and bad. If, because of the way things are being done, you can see at a glance that the Mass is a sacrificial action in which our Lord and God is present for our adoration, that is a good simplicity—something the tiniest child can perceive and the oldest person still relish as the awe-inspiring wonder it is. If, on the other hand, you think the Mass is a Protestant Bible study with a communion service tacked on, that is because you have been exposed to a bad simplification of it. Similarly, if you get immersed and a bit dizzy in the richness of the Mass as it invades all your senses and thoughts, that’s a good complexity; no analysis could ever do justice to it. But if there’s a lot of disjointed and distracting stuff going on at Mass and you can hardly pray and can’t wait to get out, that’s a bad complexity.

Again, the key to making such distinctions is to ponder the difference between rationalism, which brings everything down to our level, and mysticism, which elevates us to the divine. Rationalism seeks the linguistification of reality in order to control it, seeks to capture transcendent mystery in handy formulas, speaks on and on as though one could create an image of eternity if one only talks long enough. The old liturgy knows better[32]: the priest praying at the altar, primarily addressing God on behalf of all; the schola chanting antiphons and psalms; the incense rising and bells ringing; the people following their missals or praying rosaries, singing the Creed or just watching, letting their souls be led by images, sounds, motions—everyone is glued together by the complex simplicity and simple complexity of the divine mysteries, which are always far beyond us and yet right there before us and inside us, at once transcendent and immanent.

Many Catholics today, however, are harassed with a simplistic simplicity (the banality of all-too-human activity, unskilled and redolent of the marketplace) combined with a complex complexity (since language, especially when it attempts to be “self-explanatory,” is often a distraction, a barrier, to the apprehension of inward meaning). Thus modern liturgical praxis re-instates unintelligibility by insisting overmuch on intelligibility. Verbosity cancels out the ineffable Verbum; “undisciplined squads of emotion” cloud over the deifying light.[33] Contrary to the stated intentions of the reformers (“simplify, simplify”), the complexity is never actually reduced to an aesthetic and spiritual simplicity. Ratzinger puts his finger on this very problem:

More and more clearly we can discern the frightening impoverishment which takes place when people show beauty the door and devote themselves exclusively to “utility.” Experience has shown that the retreat to “intelligibility for all,” taken as the sole criterion, does not really make liturgies more intelligible and more open but only poorer. “Simple” liturgy does not mean poor or cheap liturgy: there is the simplicity of the banal and the simplicity that comes from spiritual, cultural, and historical wealth.[34]

Or, as Dom Mark Kirby, Prior of the Benedictine monastery of Our Lady of the Cenacle in Ireland, observes:

There is a cold, reasonable, and altogether too “grown-up” form of religion that fails to address the needs of the heart. Chilly and cerebral, it is foreign to the spirit of the Gospel because it is so far removed from things that children need and understand. In many places, the past fifty years saw the imposition of a new iconoclasm, an elitist religion without warmth, a religion for the brain with precious little for the heart, a religion stripped of images and devoid of the sacred signs that penetrate deeply those places in the human person where mere discourse cannot go.[35]

The classical liturgy is already simple in a profound way that comprises complexity of word, image, gesture, song, silence; it is simple in the way that a living animal is simple, in spite of an inconceivable multitude of parts, because it is a single holistic, articulated, organic whole, a unified center of action and suffering.

The New Evangelization

All this may sound rather speculative, but it has decisive practical consequences for the everyday life and mission of the Church in the modern world. “The way the liturgy is treated determines the fate of the faith and the Church,” said Cardinal Ratzinger.[36] The humanism, rationalism, archaeologism, utilitarianism, modernism, and other -isms on the basis of which the reformers worked in the sixties and seventies have yielded a liturgy inadequate to its own theological essence, unequal to its ascetical-mystical vocation, and estranged from its cultural inheritance. This modern liturgy, in the manner in which it is commonly celebrated and experienced today, reflects and inculcates an anthropocentric view of worship that is spiritually damaging, since it deviates from the evidently theocentric, Christocentric, and hagiocentric worship bequeathed by tradition. This, in turn, will continue to weaken the Church’s internal coherence, mar the external beauty of her face, deplete her doctrinal fidelity, limit the extension and intensity of her holiness, and diminish the efficacy of her missionary efforts. As Cardinal Burke laments:

If the Sacred Liturgy is celebrated in an anthropocentric way, in a horizontal way in which it is no longer evident that it is a divine action, it simply becomes a social activity that can be relativized along with everything else—it doesn’t have any lasting impact on one’s life.[37]

Conversely, as the traditional liturgical rites and their spirituality are recovered and come to occupy an ever-greater place in the lives of the faithful, to that extent the damage of the past fifty years will be able to be reversed, staunch fortitude can be developed for the coming persecutions, and tremendous energies of evangelization can be nurtured and released.[38]

Bishop Athanasius Schneider has given eloquent expression to the real priorities that face the Church today:

Only on the basis of adoring and glorifying God can the Church adequately proclaim the word of truth, that is, evangelize. … Everything about the liturgy of the Holy Mass must therefore serve to express clearly the reality of Christ’s sacrifice, namely the prayers of adoration, of thanks, of expiation, and of impetration that the eternal High Priest presented to His Father. … How can we call others to convert while, among those doing the calling, no convincing conversion towards God has yet occurred, internally or externally?[39]

Bishop Dominique Rey, whom I quoted at the start of this talk, puts it well: “I wish to say very clearly that the New Evangelization must be founded on the faithful and fruitful celebration of the sacred liturgy as given to us by the Church in her tradition—Western and Eastern.”[40]

This, brothers and sisters, is good news: God, having loved us first, has given us, in various traditions, optimal ways to make our response to Him in love—a work that we can do, but only through Him, with Him, and in Him. That is the great gift of the sacred liturgy. That is why the rediscovery of the traditional Latin Mass, with all of its special qualities, is vital both for the re-evangelization of Catholics and the sharing of the Gospel with non-believers: it is at the very heart of the good news that we seek to share, it is itself a powerful agent of conversion, and without it, we are in danger of talking about the good news rather than initiating people into it, as a living communion with Christ.

Think of it this way: an atheist, out of curiosity, goes to church. What will he find there? Will he be shattered out of complacency by the “shock of the beautiful”[41]? Or a Protestant wonders what the Catholic Mass is all about, and she decides to attend one Sunday. Will she be overwhelmed by her confrontation with the majesty and mystery of Christ in his holy sanctuary, an existential contact with undiluted sacredness? It is sad to have to say that, if our atheist and our Protestant happen to pick a Catholic church at random, they face a great risk of being turned off by the banality or puzzled as to how such a religion can survive its moribundity. Or let us say that we have shared the word of truth with our neighbor; with God’s help, we have rekindled the spark of faith in a fallen-away Catholic, or started a promising exchange with an unbeliever. What is it, ultimately, that we are inviting them to share? Our faith is far more than belief in a book or a set of propositions, far more than a plan of life or a social network. We want them to come fully alive in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh; we want them to behold the glory of the only-begotten Son of God, full of grace and truth; we want them to experience “the divine, holy, most pure, immortal, heavenly, life-creating, and awesome mysteries of Christ.”[42] Where and how is that going to happen? Do we have something truly wonderful, truly satisfying, to invite them to? Something that can make their hearts burn within them and their minds rise up to heaven, as it does for us? If our liturgy isn’t as it should be, evangelization has no real end in view.[43]

Where Does This Leave Us?

Msgr. Ignacio Barreiro writes these sobering words:

Only the man who has roots has a future. Part and parcel of the problems of modern man are that because he has cut his roots with his own past, he can no longer project himself to the future. Man, without an inherited and objective frame of reference, cannot even make sense of the present in which he lives. To attempt to achieve freedom by escaping from the burdens of tradition tends to result in a new enslavement to a chaotic present.[44]

Yet there is hopefulness in this observation, too, if we take it to heart. “Only the man who has roots has a future”: we must regain our roots, get reconnected with them, in order to bear much fruit.

It is, of course, extremely disturbing that leaders in the Church have created or permitted such a disastrous situation. But we would be guilty of great naiveté if we did not recognize how much confusion has afflicted the Church at certain times in her 2,000-year pilgrimage: the treason of bishops during the Arian crisis, the moral degradation of the papacy in the Dark Ages, the worldliness of Renaissance Rome with its princely pontiffs, the colossal mistakes made at the time of the Protestant revolt, and the surrender to Enlightenment seductions. All of these are prominent episodes in Church history that teach us just how much ignorance, error, and sin God in His inscrutable Providence may allow, for the testing of the saints.[45]

Serious confusion is possible among believers, as we see in the famous scene in the Acts of the Apostles when St. Paul asks a band of disciples at Ephesus: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” They replied: “No, we have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”[46] Obviously, whoever had preached the Good News to them not done a thorough job of catechizing. The same can be true today: “Did you receive the Holy Tradition when you believed?” “No, we have never even heard that there is a Catholic tradition—no one ever told us about it. We didn’t know there was a great, rich, solemn, prayerful form of the Mass prior to the Second Vatican Council—no one ever showed it to us.” It is the role of apostles today to bring to men, believers and unbelievers alike, all the riches of Christ and of the Church’s long and fruitful life in Christ. We do not need to judge the erring or the ignorant; we need to have mercy on them by loving them enough to care that they hear, touch, taste, smell, and see the beautiful. Indeed, as St. Augustine says, we need to start the works of mercy by showing mercy to ourselves.[47] We are the poor and hungry, the lame, blind, and deaf, for whose benefit Christ has lavished upon His Church vast stores of spiritual nourishment. It is therefore our duty to immerse ourselves in those stores and, once we have become strengthened by the food of kings, to lead others to the same banquet.

If you already attend the traditional Latin Mass, get to know the liturgy better. Follow along (at least sometimes) with a hand-held missal: when it comes to vocal and mental prayer, you will never find anything richer or more worthy of meditation than the very prayers of the Mass, including the ones the priest says silently and privately. If your main or exclusive exposure has been to the Low Mass, make an effort to find a High Mass or a Solemn High Mass. We need both the Low Mass for its peacefulness and the High Mass for its glory—they capture both aspects of the song of the angels: “Glory to God in the highest” (that’s the High Mass), “and peace on earth to men of good will” (that’s the Low Mass)—but it cannot be denied that the Roman liturgy is fully itself only when clothed in its full ceremonial and musical splendor. Read good books about the Mass. There are such wonderful, gripping, illuminating authors you can read—Ratzinger, Guardini, Fortescue, Davies, Mosebach, Dobszay, Mahrt, Lang, Reid. As some of you may know, I’ve written a book, Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church, which discusses more in depth the sort of things I’ve touched on tonight. Don’t be bashful about inviting friends and family to the usus antiquior to introduce them to this treasure of our faith. Tell them not to worry if they can’t follow it at first and that it will grow on them over time. If, on the other hand, you have not yet attended the old Mass, or go only rarely, do yourself a favor and plunge in.

The New Evangelization begins with my conversion and your conversion. As Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland says: “If we are transformed by the sacred liturgy, then we, as believers, can help transform the culture.”[48] Let us place ourselves in the school of the old Mass, the school of countless saints, so that it can shape our minds and hearts, nourish us, and equip us for the work God is calling us to do. It is my hope, my prayer, and my conviction that you will come to see how the traditional Latin Mass is one of the best ways for us to make Christ our king and to make the Faith blossom again in the midst of our modern wilderness.

NOTES

[*] I would like to thank Dr. Joseph Shaw, Christopher Owens, Fr. Thomas Kocik, and Fr. Samuel Weber, O.S.B., for their comments on an earlier draft of this lecture.

[1] An excellent essay on this topic has already been written by Dr. Tracey Rowland, “The Usus Antiquior and the New Evangelisation,” in The Sacred Liturgy: Source and Summit of the Life and Mission of the Church, ed. Alcuin Reid (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 115–37. This volume contains a number of papers relevant to our topic. See also Bishop Athanasius Schneider, “The Extraordinary Form and the New Evangelization,” in The Latin Mass, vol. 21, n. 2 (Summer 2012): 6–10; also available at http://pblosser.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-extraordinary-form-and-new.html. Those who wish to pursue the matter in some detail may consult my book, Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2014).

[2] See Susan Benofy, “The Day the Mass Changed,” Part 1: http://www.adoremus.org/0210Benofy.html; Part 2: http://www.adoremus.org/0310Benofy.html. To me it seems irrelevant to object that the huge changes (e.g., Mass versus populum, the de facto abolition of Latin and Gregorian chant) were not mandated by the Second Vatican Council and are not required by the Novus Ordo Missae as such, which, in its rubrics, permits an ars celebrandi in continuity with tradition. The simple fact is that, from 1965 onwards, a self-consciously modern way of celebrating the liturgy was introduced from the highest levels of authority and, for all intents and purposes, was imposed upon the body of the faithful, with no serious attempt made to practice what Pope Benedict XVI would later call “the hermeneutic of continuity” (Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, note 6). Pope Paul VI stated, in his general audience of November 26, 1969, that the “divine” Latin and the “incomparable” Gregorian chant were going to have to be sacrificed for the sake of reaching modern man. As a result, the number of churches in each country that retained, in the Novus Ordo, a Latin liturgy with Gregorian chant could be counted on one’s fingers. It is understandable that defenders of the modern Roman Rite wish to compare the Ordinary Form “as it might be” with the Extraordinary Form “as it actually is,” but such a comparison is unreal, even fantastical, given the strength of custom built up by decades of impoverished, discontinuous, and abusive ars celebrand. The Novus Ordo “High Masses” of the Oratories in London, Oxford, Toronto, or Vienna are beautiful exceptions that prove the rule. This, unfortunately, has been our existential situation for a long time, and it will continue to be so until the traditional movement gains ascendency through numerical superiority (which, demographically, is not improbable in the long haul) or a reforming pope comes to the throne of Peter, or both.

[3] For the status quo in 2013, see http://reginamag.com/update-latin-mass-america-today (accessed August 19, 2015).

[4] Moreover, anecdotal evidence as well as actual research strongly suggests that the ratio of men and women in traditional Latin Mass communities is more balanced than in Ordinary Form communities, where women outnumber men by a sizeable margin; but further speculation on this point would take us too far afield in the present talk. For more on this subject, see the FIUV Position Paper 26, “The Extraordinary Form and the Evangelisation of Men,” and resources available at the weblog of Dr. Joseph Shaw, President of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales.

[5] Letter to Bishops, July 7, 2007. Antonio Cardinal Cañizares Llovera, when still Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, wrote in a similar vein in 2013: “[T]he motu proprio also produced a phenomenon that is for many astonishing and is a true ‘sign of the times’: the interest that the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite elicits, in particular among the young who never lived it as an ordinary form and that manifests a thirst for ‘languages’ that are not ‘more of the same’ and that call us towards new and, for many pastors, unforeseen horizons. The opening-up of the liturgical wealth of the Church to all the faithful has made possible the discovery of all the treasures of this patrimony for those who had not known them—among whom this liturgical form is stirring up, more than ever, numerous priestly and religious vocations throughout the world, willing to give their lives to the service of evangelization” (see full text here).

[6] For my response to the familiar objection that Pope Paul VI’s liturgical reform would have produced a new springtime if only it had been “correctly implemented,” see note 2.

[7] Bishop Dominique Rey, “Introduction,” in Reid, Sacred Liturgy: Source and Summit, 15–16. Canon Francis Altiere offers this elegant single-sentence definition of evangelization: “Evangelisation concretely means helping practicing Catholics to grow in holiness and become apostles; helping lapsed or non-practicing Catholics to return to the sacraments; and helping non-Catholics to become Catholics” (Mass of the Ages, issue 185 [Autumn 2015], 10).

[8] For more examples of this burgeoning genre, see Carl Wolk, “The Flight to Eternal Rome and the Mass of the Revolution,” OnePeterFive, June 11, 2015; James Kalb, “What the Traditional Mass Means to Me,” Crisis Magazine, December 4, 2014; “Finding What Should Never Have Been Lost: Priests and the Extraordinary Form,” The Catholic World Report, August 19, 2014; Anne M. Larson, ed., Love in the Ruins: Modern Catholics in Search of the Ancient Faith (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2009). It is a fertile field for research if someone is looking to identify subjective or experiential factors in the resurgence of the traditional Latin Mass.

[9] Mass of the Ages, issue 185, 9. The writer’s name is Maile Hanson. In the magazine of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, Mass of Ages, there is a regular feature in which Catholics are asked to attend the Extraordinary Form and then give their honest-to-goodness reactions. Some are attending for the very first time, while others are older Catholics who haven’t been in decades or may not even be practicing any more.

[10] Mass of the Ages, issue 182 (Winter 2014), 8. The writer’s name is Philip Dillon.

[11] “An Atheist’s Conversion to Catholicism, the Traditional Liturgy, and Young Adults” (accessed August 20, 2015), written under the pen name Zita Mirzakhani.

[12] Emily Stimpson, “Singing for God,” Franciscan Way, Summer 2015, p. 5.

[13] Mass of Ages, issue 185 (Autumn 2015), p. 11.

[14] Mass of the Ages, issue 180 (Summer 2014), p. 8. The writer’s name is Timothy Whitebloom.

[15] Mass of the Ages, issue 183 (Spring 2015), 7. The writer’s name is J. Mackenzie, who describes himself as a convert from Anglicanism.

[16] Note how these features line up with what is most needed, most neglected, and even most derided in our times.

[17] What I mean is this: water cleanses dirt from the body; therefore baptism, which is for cleansing sin from the soul, is done with water, and that water, together with the words, really cleanses the soul. Similarly, bread and wine nourish the body; therefore the Eucharist, which is for nourishing the soul, is given to us under the forms of bread and wine. In scholastic language, we say a sacrament effects what it signifies.

[18] For an excellent treatment of this problem, see Aidan Nichols, O.P., Looking at the Liturgy: A Critical View of Its Contemporary Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), esp. ch. 2, “The Importance of Ritual,” 49–86.

[19] As St. Augustine famously said: “Si comprehendis, non est deus” (Sermon 117, PL 38:663)—“If you can grasp it with your mind, it’s not God.”

[20] Confessions, trans. Frank Sheed, ed. Michael P. Foley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), Bk. 10, ch. 27, p. 210.

[21] The language of “thickness” is borrowed from C. S. Lewis, who contrasted “thick” and “clear” religions, and argued that the true religion has to be thoroughly both: see “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Religion, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1970), 101–3. For further discussion, see Thomas Storck, “Catholicism: The Perfection of Religion,” in Homiletic & Pastoral Review, 99.11–12 (August/September 1999): 7–12, available here.

[22] Needless to say, this interior response is the primary element of active participation. If the interior response is present, it does not require an external expression, although it will often benefit from one; if it is lacking, all the external actions in the world cannot substitute for it.

[23] It may give plenty of exercise to them quantitatively, but it is not well-structured and ordered to a definite goal; it is exercise for the sake of exercise, rather than for the sake of producing a certain physique.

[24] Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 22–23.

[25] I am reminded of a conversation in which Fr. Louis Bouyer said he would never pray the second Eucharistic Prayer, and when asked why, responded: “Because I wrote it!”

[26] The old Mass is certainly not “the Mass of” St. Gregory the Great, St. Pius V, or St. John XXIII in the same way that the new Mass is the Mass of Paul VI. Moreover, there was never a time in the Church’s history prior to the invention of the Consilium when the Roman liturgy was sliced into discrete portions that were farmed out to subcommittees (the many Coetus) for redactions and spliced back together, with the ragged joints still showing.

[27] I gladly acknowledge my debt to Romano Guardini’s masterful treatment of the metaphysical-psychological language of signs: see his Sacred Signs, trans. Grace Branham (St. Louis: Pio Decimo Press, 1956; available in reprinted form here).

[28] As Joseph Ratzinger has remarked: “If the Liturgy appears first of all as the workshop for our activity, then what is essential is being forgotten: God. For the Liturgy is not about us, but about God. Forgetting about God is the most imminent danger of our age. As against this, the Liturgy should be setting up a sign of God’s presence” (Preface to Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy, 2nd ed. [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005], 13). One-dimensional texts and ceremonies convey what seems like a superficial message (sometimes it is superficial, sometimes it is not, but the manner of its communication is what counts: “the medium is the message”). The natural human reaction to superficiality on a serious occasion is to make an attempt to elicit or inject more content, more meaning, more feeling, more earnestness. It is precisely in such hostile environs that we find the invasion of foreign practices like chronic ad libbing, secular readings, liturgical dancing, rock or pop music, special lights, video screens, and pseudo-symbols (e.g., the unity sand ceremony at weddings), interwoven with methods of cajoling active participation. None of this “enhancement” would be necessary if the liturgy was doing its own work well, so that worshipers could be brought into the presence of God and abide in it.

[29] I am aware, of course, that vestments, like other elements used in the liturgy, had fairly humble and utilitarian origins in the ancient Church, and that the point of view I have expressed is definitely a medieval one, even Baroque. However, since I accept without demur the principle of organic development, by which the liturgy is enriched over the centuries as the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, internalizes ever more deeply the theological and spiritual meaning of the sacred mysteries, it is, to my mind, a fundamental error, even a heresy, to suggest that we ought to take the foggy records of ancient Christianity during its time as a persecuted underground movement and make them (such as they are) into a normative blueprint for the contemporary Church. This error was rightly castigated as “archaeologism” by Pope Pius XII, and yet the architects of the liturgical reform routinely appealed to this principle as well as the ill-defined expectations of ecumenism to justify some of their most outrageous acts of vandalism.

[30] From Gerard Manley Hopkins’ translation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Adoro te devote.

[31] Historically, of course, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was not for outsiders, nor even for catechumens, but for the fully initiated: it was the culminating thing Christians did, not the first thing they did—a holy rite guarded with strictest secrecy. With the gradual Christianization of the European world, it was inevitable that the liturgy came to be celebrated more and more publicly, without such restrictions—and that, in subsequent ages, from the time of the Protestant revolt onwards, it has been able to function as a major incentive to conversion, as Pope Benedict XVI reminds us in his Address to Schola Cantorum Pilgrims in November 2012, invoking the example of Paul Claudel.

[32] Indeed Pope Paul VI seems to have known better: he writes in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi: “We are well aware that modern man is sated by talk; he is obviously often tired of listening and, what is worse, impervious to words. We are also aware that many psychologists and sociologists express the view that modern man has passed beyond the civilization of the word, which is now ineffective and useless, and that today he lives in the civilization of the image.” This he said in 1975—five years after the introduction of a rite whose verbose didacticism and elimination of much non-verbal symbolism is by now as painfully out of date as the architecture of the same period.

[33] The phrase in quotation marks is from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘East Coker,’ V (accessed at http://oedipa.tripod.com/eliot-2.html, September 2, 2015); for “deifying light,” see the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue: “Let us open our eyes to the deifying light.”

[34] The Ratzinger Report, trans. Salvator Attansio and Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), 128.

[35] Dom Mark Daniel Kirby, O.S.B., Vultus Christi weblog, May 21, 2008 (http://vultus.stblogs.org/2008/05/evviva-santa-rita.html, accessed August 24, 2015).

[36] Joseph Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord, trans. Martha M. Matesich (New York: Crossroad, 1997), ix; my translation, which is from Bp. Athanasius Schneider’s talk “The Extraordinary Form and the New Evangelization,” differs slightly from Matesich’s.

[37] “The Wanderer Interviews His Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke,” Don Fier, February 2, 2015 (accessed August 20, 2015).

[38] I would not say that the modern Roman Rite, or some kind of “reform of the reform,” has no part whatsoever to play in this process of repentance and restoration, but I am convinced it will not have the leading role. While it is true that anything short of the beatific vision can admit of improvements, the tradition was not broken and did not need fixing; the reform needs all the help it can get.

[39] Schneider, “The Extraordinary Form and the New Evangelization.”

[40] “Introduction,” in Reid, Sacred Liturgy: Source and Summit, 15–16.

[41] See Pope Benedict XVI’s Address to Artists, November 21, 2009.

[42] As the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom chants.

[43] This is well summarized in Proposition 35 of the Final List of Propositions from the XIII Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, which reads, in part: “The worthy celebration of the Sacred Liturgy, God’s most treasured gift to us, is the source of the highest expression of our life in Christ (cf. Sacrosanctum concilium, 10). It is, therefore, the primary and most powerful expression of the new evangelization. God desires to manifest the incomparable beauty of his immeasurable and unceasing love for us through the Sacred Liturgy, and we, for our part, desire to employ what is most beautiful in our worship of God in response to his gift” (accessed August 19, 2015).

[44] Msgr. Ignacio Barreiro Carámbula, “Sacred Liturgy and the Defense of Human Life,” in Reid, Sacred Liturgy: Source and Summit, 384.

[45] The best overall account I have seen of the crisis moments in the history of the Catholic Church, with particular attention to the crisis of the past sixty years, is H. J. A. Sire, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Making, Unmaking, and Restoration of Catholic Tradition (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2015).

[46] See Acts 19:1–7.

[47] See City of God, Bk. 10, ch. 6; Sermon 106 on Luke 11:39, n. 4.

[48] “Bishop Sample: ‘Transformed by the Liturgy, Transforming the Culture,’” Anna Abbott, National Catholic Register, March 8, 2013 (accessed August 24, 2015).

N.B. FORMAT UNEDITED AND POSTED AS RECEIVED.

Priest: Rev. Fr. Harold B. McKale

Mass Intention: Mary Grace Pagano req. by Anthony Corvaia, Jr.

*****************

We presently have three volunteers; can I have one or two more?????

Thanks to Steven Ball we have been given a pipe organ on loan for our use, which Fr.

Kelley has given us permission to have placed in the church. Pertaining to the small

Italian organ: It will be packed at the Cathedral and moved to St. Edmond’s on the

We need help loading & unloading the truck on Friday, September 11. I would like to

request the assistance of at least 4 volunteers to meet at the Cathedral at

approximately 9 AM to help load the organ there, and proceed to help unload the

organ at St. Edmond’s. My GUESS is that the total time commitment would be 4

hours. All other arrangements have been made, and there should be no further

All volunteers are asked to email Fr. McKale at tlmcommunityofphila@gmail.com

Thank you in advance for your help.

Mass Sponsorship: In response to an inquiry: Anyone who wishes to sponsor a

Mass at St. Edmond Church should contact Fr. McKale directly. To sponsor one of

our regular Sunday Masses, Missa Cantata with organ & quartet, the donation is

$1,000 – Solemn High $1,500. It would need to be far in advance so that

arrangements may be made. All monies would need to be given in one envelope with

Sunday, September 20 Missa Cantata @ Noon at St. Edmond Church

Monday, September 21 through Friday, September 25 Low Mass @ 9am at Holy Redeemer

Chinese Catholic Church (1/2 mile away from the Convention Center)

Thursday, September 24 Missa Cantata @ 7pm at Holy Redeemer in honor of Our Lady of

Saturday – No TLM scheduled

Sunday, September 27 – No TLM scheduled

September 13: Quartet a cappella (No organ) – Missa Octavii Toni by Orlando Di Lasso

Domine memorabor by Nobuaki Izawa

September 20: Quartet a cappella (No organ) – Missa Quaturor Vocem by Domenico Scarlatti

September 24: Quartet a cappella (No organ) – Missa Aeterna Christi Munera Giovanni Pierluigi da

E-Giving: A few people have asked me about E-giving. Please know that on

www.latinmassphila.org there is a PayPal button on the right side of the home page. You

can make one-time donations or you can set up a monthly donation through a credit

card. If you prefer, you can always mail a check to my rectory in Doylestown.

Website: www.latinmassphila.org

International Institute for Culture: Check out upcoming events at

http://www.iiculture.org/aboutus.asp

Relics on Tour: The relics of St. Maria Goretti are on tour. For more information,

please see http://mariagoretti.com/tour-schedule-3/ for location dates and times. They are

presently scheduled to be in our area in September 2015.

Events: If anyone has pertinent information that would be appropriate for our bulletin,

please e-mail it to Fr. McKale @ tlmcommunityofphila@gmail.com.

Mass Intentions: If anyone still has unfulfilled Mass intentions, Fr. McKale can pass

them on to a priest that will satisfy the intention by offering a TLM or Divine Liturgy

(Byzantine). Please specify if you have a preference. The donation is $10. If you would

like a Mass card, please include an extra $5 for the card. We are presently out of Mass

cards; they should be at St. Edmond’s by Labor Day weekend.

********************************************

First Friday, September 4, A.D. 2015, Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) will be offered by Fr. Harold B. Mc Kale, Parish Vicar of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Roman Catholic Church, at the Rectory Chapel of St. Albert The Great Parish, 212 Welsh Road, Huntingdon Valley, PA 19006, (T) 215-947-3500, at 7:00 p.m. preceded by Confessions at 6:30 p.m. This TLM will be a Votive Mass of the Sacred Heart, offered in Reparation to The Sacred Heart of Jesus. WHITE vestments.

First Saturday, 5th of September, A.D. 2015 Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) will also be offered by Fr. Harold B. Mc Kale, Parish Vicar of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Roman Catholic Church, at the Rectory Chapel of St. Albert The Great Parish, at 9 a.m., preceded by Confessions at 8:30 a.m. This TLM will be a Votive Mass (V) of the Blessed Virgin, with a Commemoration of St. Lawrence Justinian, offered in Reparation to The Immaculate Heart of Mary. WHITE vestments.

The St. Albert The Great Rectory, also known as the Parish Center, is behind the Church, which fronts on Welsh Road.

Mark Matthews
2617 Huntingdon Pike
Huntingdon Valley, PA
19006-5109
(T) 215-947-6555
(F) 215-947-4949

By Dr. Peter Kwasniewski

Why was the tabernacle removed from the high altar or kept away from the center of so many churches during the past fifty years? There are many reasons for this disgraceful pushing away of our Lord Jesus Christ in the miracle of His abiding Eucharistic presence among us, including the specious academic rationales that have been refuted so often by better scholars than their purveyors. But it may be that a subtler dynamic was also at work (and, sadly, sometimes still is).

The ancient rite enshrines and expresses in the most perfect way the sacrificial nature of the Mass, the fact that what is of infinite importance and centrality is the Sacrifice of Calvary, the immolation of Our Lord Jesus Christ which wrought and continues to work our salvation and that of the whole world. Speaking frankly, the expression of this sacrificial dimension is not simply muted in the Novus Ordo, it is largely absent. In a vernacular Mass said versus populum in the usual manner, with the zippy Eucharistic Prayer II as a default, how much is there in text or ceremony that strongly and unambiguously conveys the Sacrifice of the Cross? In the traditional Roman Rite, the Offertory is a luminous foreshadowing of this very sacrifice, clearly establishing the priestly intention; the Roman Canon is permeated with the language of oblation and sacrifice; the consecrations for which the offertory prepares, with their double genuflections and glorious elevations in the midst of an ocean of silence, is a piercing evocation and making-present of Calvary. In contrast, one might say that the Novus Ordo emphasizes the presence of Christ in our midst, but not His sacrifice.[1]

A difference in catechesis follows upon this difference in phenomenology.

When teaching children what happens at Mass, one says something like the following. “Jesus dying on the Cross offered His life to God, so that our sins could be washed away in His precious Blood. Jesus wanted to make it possible for us to be right there, so that our sins could be washed away, too, and we could be one with Him. So He gave us the Mass. The priest at the altar takes bread and wine, as Jesus did at the Last Supper, and, by God’s power, changes these things into the body and blood of Jesus and raises them up on high, as Jesus was raised up high on the Cross. God rejoices in this perfect gift of His Son and, in His overflowing love for Him and for us who belong to Him, He lets us receive the body and blood of Jesus in communion. This makes us as completely one with Jesus as we can be in this life; the Father is pleased with us as He is pleased with His Son; and we are prepared for heaven, when it is our turn to be just like Jesus and offer up our own life to God at the moment of our death.”

I’m not saying that one couldn’t find a better way of putting it, but something along those lines will get the thing going. What really struck me in working with my own children, however, was how little catechesis, relatively speaking, was required to make sense out of the gestures of the priest at the traditional Mass, and how powerfully those gestures remind one of the meaning learned and continually reinforce it, burning it into the memory. Once you know a little about what Jesus did at the Last Supper and on Good Friday, the actions and prayers practically hit you over the head with a chain of mysteries — mediation, redemption, atonement, satisfaction, adoration. It doesn’t take a lot to be equipped to perceive the traditional Mass as an awesome sacrifice joining earth to heaven, the sinner to the Savior, the altar to the cross.

Conversely, I found that my children and other children routinely did not see the same connections at the Ordinary Form Masses we attended. The connections were not nearly so obvious. This manner of Mass seemed like a loosely related but rather different ritual, one that was more focused on the people, with a lot of talking, and the reception of communion tacked on at the end. What was most of all hidden to the senses was that this liturgy is a sacrifice. It looks like a manipulation of bread and wine over a table, a meal in imitation of the Last Supper. What I realized, to my chagrin, is that I had to assert, without much in the way of supporting evidence, that the Novus Ordo Missae was the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, even though it didn’t look like one and didn’t have the marvelous panoply of texts and ceremonies that underlined the sacrificial nature of the action.

That bothered me then, and it still bothers me now. It’s as if the rite was designed by someone who wanted it not to be easy to perceive, by the combined strength of a simple catechism and a complex liturgy, that the Mass is the unbloody re-presentation of the bloody sacrifice of our Lord on Calvary. In the sphere of the Ordinary Form, in contrast, we need a complex catechism to go with a simple liturgy, because otherwise the truth won’t be known. The liturgy doesn’t embody and proclaim it the same way, so we have to spend more time explaining, asserting, and keeping our fingers crossed that the brittle fideism won’t give way to the ravages of forgetfulness, boredom, or heresy.

Now for my theory about the moving of the tabernacle. The overwhelming miracle of Our Lord’s Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament reserved in the Tabernacle sets a challenge to the Mass. To speak in halting human terms, the only way the Mass could be or do something greater than that miracle, the only way there could be no confusion of orders, is if the liturgy had the wherewithal to monstrate the very Sacrifice that allows for the abiding presence of the divine victim in the tabernacle. The Mass in a certain sense must be seen and felt to outweigh the Tabernacle so that there can be no confusion between the two orders — Sacrifice and Presence. That this is the case with the traditional Mass vis-à-vis the Tabernacle I have no doubt; even in European churches with enormous gilded tabernacles bedecked with extravagant decoration, the old Mass holds its own, draws all eyes and hearts to itself, and remains the total master of the building, the altar, and the furnishings. It is clearly the reason for everything else and its earnest spirit of prayer, with invisible arms spread out and raised aloft, gathers all into a single offering of praise.

In contrast, the Tabernacle has the wherewithal to overwhelm the liturgy of the Novus Ordo, which is, in many respects, weak, consumptive, and thin, barely able to hold its own in a magnificent church or at a splendid high altar. The Sacrifice is, so to speak, phenomenologically suppressed by the Presence (both as it resides in the Tabernacle and as it will reside upon the Cranmer table, which is nothing but an artistic denial of sacrifice). Therefore, by a kind of malevolent instinct for compensation, “the Tabernacle has to go!,” it must be removed, decentralized, hidden, so that a weak liturgy can muster some communicative force of its own. It is like removing the smartest pupil from a class because the teacher is not smart enough to deal with him. The liturgy has to be unobstructed, with no competition and no context, or it will vanish into the background. It has to claim as much space for itself as it can and push out all vestiges of a world of greater mass and gravity. Doesn’t this make more sense out of the postconciliar rage for ecclesiastical wreckovations and monstrosities? Not only must the tabernacle go, but so must the high altar, and maybe the crucifix or stained-glass windows or elevated pulpit or communion rail, etc. Maybe we need to tear it all down and replace it with an empty gray box that has no symmetrical curves and no ornamentation. Against that stage, the clean, efficient, succinct lines of the Novus Ordo will ring out with metallic clarity. And the people who still care for such “devotions” might find the reserved Sacrament somewhere behind or over to the side, as if placed in an Ordinary Time-out.

* * *
Question: Why has there been so much of a need for the Church’s pastors since the liturgical reform to emphasize the truth — never disputed since the Council of Trent — that the Mass is really and truly a sacrifice? Why such a stream of papal and curial documents, most of them ignored?

The answer is quite simple. If what we do at the Novus Ordo Mass looked like a sacrifice, if it expressed the sacrificial reality in a sensible and intelligible way, there would be no need for endless reassertions and clarifications. The doctrine was taught de fide by the Council of Trent, and the Mass of St. Pius V embodies that doctrine perfectly. As long as the Mass remains faithful to the fundamental principle of sacramentality — namely, that something ought to signify what it does and do what it signifies — it will be known to do what it really does by a manifest and unambiguous signification. This, clearly, is not the case with the Mass of Paul VI.

We have seen many polls over the years that prove the loss of faith among Catholics in the real, substantial presence of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. What I would love to see is a poll that, having identified mainstream Catholics and traditional Catholics by means of a couple of deft questions (perhaps even as simple as “Have you heard of Summorum Pontificum?”), proceeded to ask each group: “Do you believe that the Mass is the true and proper sacrifice of Christ on the Cross?” It is not hard to imagine the results: the former group would mostly say no (as a matter of fact, more than a few would register surprise at the question, which might be found to introduce a claim they have never even heard), and the latter group would unanimously say yes. Their answers would mirror perfectly their experience of the liturgy.

Although its work is the glorification of God and the sanctification of man, the liturgy has always been a great catechizer, almost in spite of itself; and now, with the Novus Ordo, there is a vacuum of catechism at the very heart of Catholic life. We now need to keep repeating that “the Mass IS a sacrifice” because it has so little that is obviously sacrificial about it. It is frighteningly close to the way that democratic governments keep saying “This is the Will of the People,” precisely because it isn’t. Trying to convince people of something they cannot in any way gather with their own senses is an uphill battle.

NOTE

[1] Nor should this be surprising to those who know the history of the liturgical reform, whose architects were enamored of ecumenism to such an extent that they admitted they were trying to recast the Roman Rite in a manner that would be acceptable to Protestant advisers. The conservative Protestants were only too happy to concede a “presence” of Christ in the Mass, but talk of sacrifice was anathema to them (if one might so speak). Joseph Ratzinger’s magnificent essay “The Theology of the Liturgy” goes a great deal into this rejection of sacrifice.