From The Back of the World Blog<\/p>\n
Hi, my name is Ryan. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m 27-years-old, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m new to this diocese. And for the love of all that is holy, can someone please do something about all of the tambourine playing going on around here?!<\/p>\n
I apologize in advance if this post comes off as too much of a rant. And I should say this from the start: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not a Traditionalist Catholic. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never found the criticisms of Vatican II to be very convincing, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a big fan of some theologians that Trads usually aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fond of (e.g., von Balthasar), I think that Pope Francis\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 simpler style is (for the most part) pretty awesome, etc. I guess you can say I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153JP2 conservative\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6faithful to the Magisterium, adherent to the hermeneutic of continuity, etc. All that to say, I was never interested in picking on the Novus Ordo liturgy\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n
But we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve made a decision as a family to start attending the Traditional Latin Mass regularly. And here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why:<\/p>\n
When we were received into the Catholic Church, we lived in Boston. There, it was never hard to find a beautiful, reverent, Novus Ordo Mass. Life was good, and when I was on the right side of town, I even enjoyed the occasional Anglican Use Mass or Maronite Divine Liturgy.<\/p>\n
Last year, I read Pope Benedict\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Spirit of the Liturgy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (a must-read, by the way), and began to re-think a lot of the views I held on the liturgy. I began to agree with the need for kneeling to receive Communion, having the priest celebrate ad orientem, etc. [Ed. note: many thanks to Fr. Z for catching the Latin typo in the original!] But, I have to admit, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see these things as really pressing issues, mostly because what I saw in and around the city of Boston was (for the most part) in keeping with the solemn nature of what we as Catholics believe to be taking place at the Mass.<\/p>\n
Now, though, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve moved to the Diocese of ______________, Florida. And, if I may be blunt, the state of the liturgy around here is utterly atrocious.<\/p>\n
Imagine seashell-shaped parishes filled with Baby Boomers dressed in Bermuda shirts and khaki shorts. Imagine complete strangers holding hands with each other during the Our Father. Imagine jamming out to contemporary Christian songs that were popular 15-20 years ago. Imagine all sorts of improvisations on the part of priests. Heck, imagine everyone getting called up to stand around the altar together during the Eucharistic prayers, rather than kneeling back in the pews\u00e2\u20ac\u201cyeah, that happened! I was there!<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s enough to make me want to scream: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153People! We are attending the re-presentation of the once-for-all-sacrifice made for us on Calvary, and simultaneously realizing the eschatological Wedding Supper of the Lamb made present in the Eucharist! PUT DOWN THE TAMBOURINES!<\/p>\n
And so we attended the Latin Mass this past Sunday. And it was breathtakingly beautiful. And you know, it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that hard to follow along in the missal. And, in what is no doubt a bitter irony to the kind of people that like contemporary Christian music, at a Latin Mass of about 100 people, there were probably triple the number of young people than at any other Mass I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been to since we moved here\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n
And maybe this will sound extreme to some of my readers, but I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really want my kids exposed to what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going on in the Novus Ordo in this diocese. I think liturgy has a huge pedagogical component to it, and I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like what those liturgies teach my children. I think they take away from the utter seriousness of what the Mass is, I think it says \u00e2\u20ac\u0153this is just a Sunday get-together\u00e2\u20ac\u009d rather than \u00e2\u20ac\u0153this is a Holy Sacrifice\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, I think it teaches that liturgy is about your musical preferences rather than worshiping God\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6Besides which, my two-year-old was way better-behaved than he has been at the Novus Ordo, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because he picked up on the reverent and serious silence, rather than looking at a guy his grandfather\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s age rocking out on a guitar and thinking \u00e2\u20ac\u0153aw man, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s party time up in here!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
If this is where we are at, if this is what the Novus Ordo has become in some dioceses, then maybe the best thing to do is to hit the reset button and start from the beginning. Maybe we need to all go home, re-learn the 1962 missal, then calmly re-read Sacrosanctum Concilium in about 5 years to learn what the Council actually said, and we can have this discussion again.<\/p>\n
Until then, you can find me and mine down the street at the TLM on Sundays, reclaiming my heritage and birth-right as a Roman Catholic\u00e2\u20ac\u201ci.e., good liturgy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From The Back of the World Blog Hi, my name is Ryan. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m 27-years-old, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m new to this diocese. And for the love of all that is holy, can someone please do something about all of the tambourine playing going on around here?! I apologize in advance if this post comes off as too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}