What Does The Prayer Really Say?
W D T P R S

An official letter, or instruction, I am not sure what to call it, has been issued by the Office of Divine Worship of the Diocese of Peoria, headed I am guessing by Fr. Stanely Deptula, whose name appears at the top. 

I want to emphasize that this is not over the signature of the Bishop, Most Reverend Daniel Robert Jenky.  

My emphases and comments. 

Office of Divine Worship

607 NE Madison Avenue
Peoria, Illinois 61603
Telephone: 309-671-1561
Fax: 309-671-5079

To:         Priests of the Diocese of Peoria
From:      Fr. Stanley Deptula
Date:      September 10, 2007
Re:          Celebrations of the "tridentine" Mass

On September 14, 2007, the Motu Proprio of the Holy Father regarding the celebration of the Mass according to the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite will take effect. While Bishop Jenky expects ["Theoden King has decided that Eomer should be banished."] that the vast majority of our parishes and parishioners will not experience any changes [hmmm… that "expects" in what sense of the word?] in their celebration of Mass, after discussions at the recent Presbyteral Council some concerns remain among the priests and faithful of our diocese.

For Lay Faithful desiring to participate in Mass celebrated according the Missal of 1962 (the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite or the so-called "Tridentine" Mass):

Currently, two parishes in our diocese offer the Traditional Mass every Sunday. By the end of the calendar year, we expect [there it is again] that five parishes throughout our diocese will offer this Mass regularly and at a variety of times for the convenience of the faithful. A full listing of these parishes will be available soon.

For Lay Faithful desiring to participate in Mass celebrated according to the Missal of 2000 (the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite or the so-called "Novus Ordo" Mass):

[Now pay attention to the vocabulary here…] The "Novus Ordo" Mass is the ordinary way [So… what does "ordinary" mean here compared to "extraordinary".  This is something that needs more consideration.] of celebrating Mass. Parishioners need not fear that the Traditional Mass will be imposed on them or that they will be "surprised" by a pastor arbitrarily choosing to change the way that Mass is celebrated in a parish. [I wonder if this, by the dichotomy set up by paragraphs consciously dividing the faithful into these two groups that, as a consequence, the faithful who want the 1962 form of Mass "need not hope" that their needs will be met in their parishes, even if there is a group who desires it.] Most Catholics in our Diocese will not experience any change in they way they experience Sunday Mass because of this Motu Proprio.  [Will abuses be corrected if their are any?]

For Pastors desiring to celebrate Mass according to the Missal of 1962:

While [Notice… another interesting choice of words, no?  It sets us up for a contrast, just watch…] the Motu Proprio gives permission for the Private Celebration of Masses according to the Traditional Rite, [without further permission of the Holy See or local bishop] it also states repeatedly the Bishop’s obligation to safeguard the celebration [cf. "the Party Line"] of the Sacraments in his diocese. In coming statements, Bishop Jenky will provide means for priests who wish to learn the linguistic and ritual requirements of the 1962 Missal.  [Okay… that is positive.]

As the "chief moderator" of the liturgy [cf. "the Party Line"]  in this Diocese, and in accord with Motu Proprio, the Bishop will not allow [] any priest to celebrate the extraordinary form without his first demonstrating a working understanding of Latin [in other words, a test.  Remember, everyone, this goes beyond the provisions of the Motu Proprio.  The MP says a priest must be idoneus, "capable… qualified".  This refers to a minimum qualification, not expertise.  As Cardinal Egan pointed out, the priest must be able to pronounce the words properly.  He does NOT have to have a "working understanding" of the Latin language.  Just what does that mean, "working understanding"?  A priest who does what I do, who is a writer and theologian, focused on the Fathers of the Church, has to have a working knowledge of Latin.  But for me a working knowledge is different from, say, a parish priest who needs Latin for entirely different reasons.  Of course it is better if the all priests know Latin well.  However, what the statement in this worship office memo implies goes far beyond the provisions of the Motu Proprio.] and a knowledge of the rubrics of the 1962 Missal. Pastoral sense and theological principal make it clear [...] that priests ought not to celebrate a Mass, even privately, if they are unable to ofter the Mass properly and reverently. No priest may impose his personal ritual preference on his parish.  [And no one but the Roman Pontiff could have issued Summorum Pontificum.  Note that we have a reference to "pastoral sense" and "theological principle".  Pastoral sense should also include the spiritual well-being of priests, too.  I think tests and a measure of intimidation might be inconsistent with that.  "Theological principal" is invoked.  I guess this means that the priest must understand what he is saying?  Okay, tests begin immediately also for non-hispanic priests pretending to understand what they are saying when they say Mass in Spanish, or other languages.  Let’s start the tests for the foreign born priests serving in a parish so we can ascertain if they really grasp the English of the Mass, colloquial language used in the confessional and the harder to understand language of children, what people say in counseling or marriage prep.  Let’s test the parishioners to see if they understand the foreign born priest’s accented English.  And if we want to talk about "pastoral sense" and "theological principle", let’s talk also about the interpretive principles of canon law, whereby laws which favor people (e.g., a priest) are to be interpreted as generosly as possible (odiosa restringenda).  I must say even the way this memo is written is simply dire.]

For Pastors who are unable to offer Mass according to the 1962 Missal when approached by parishioners: The Holy Father asks pastors to offer Mass according to the Traditional Rite when a stable group of parishioners request. A number of Cardinals [Oh yes?!?  Who would they be precisely?  I hope readers here will try to dig up their names and send them to me.  And when are they to listened to if the distinguished canonist and Latinist Card. Egan has pretty clearly explained the MP in very different terms?] have commented that a "group" of parishioners could mean anywhere from 40 – 300 parishioners. [Oh my oh my oh my… does this stumble badly.  The MP does not apply a minimum number in any way.  The word coetus is probaly as small as three, and the priest himself can be one of them.] All of the requests that have come to the attention of the Office of Divine Worship or the Bishop’s Office have been from individuals or very small groups. Pastors should refer these small groups [Actually, I think the MP says pretty explicitly that the pastor is to receive the petitions of groups favorably.  Does it not?]or individuals to the various, regular celebrations of the Traditional Mass that are offered around our diocese.

If any priests do not have a copy of the actual document released by the Holy See and would like one, please contact Laurie at the Chancery—309-671-1561.

Folks… this is … well… not one of the best pieces I have seen on the Motu Proprio.

Please note that this was not issued over the signature of the Bishop.

You might recall that the Bishop of Raleigh, NC, His Excellency Most Reverend Michael F. Burbidge had issued one of the best statements about Summorum Pontificum I have seen by any bishop anywhere.

Bishop Burbidge steps up to the plate as well.

There was a Mass cantata celebrated in thanksgiving for the Motu Proprio in Raleigh, and Bishop Burbidge attended.

Here is the happy crew of clergy in attendance.

Notice the friendly wave from St. Michael the Archangel, who seems quite pleased with His Excellency’s proper choir dress.

I was the homilist for the thanksgiving celebration at Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Blackfen, where the great Fr. Finigan is parish priest.  There was a very nice solemn Mass for 14 September when the provision of Summorum Pontificum went into effect.

I set up my digital recorder to capture the sermon, but found afterward that there must have been a bad sector on the disk.  I cannot recover the audio, alas, though I am trying what I know to try.  There is still a program I can purchase to work on the file I managed to xcopy from the mp3 player/recorder’s hard drive. 

In any event, here is the copy of notes I adhered to fairly closely.  I added a few things I remember saying in pretty much the way I said them.   Also, I did a digital recording after the fact and incorporated it into a PODCAzT so you can listen to it.

For what it may be worth:

Our Lady of the Rosary, Blackfen – 14 September 2007: Exaltation of the Cross

Today’s feast commemorates the discovery of the Holy Cross by Emperor Constantine’s mother St. Helena in A.D. 325 in Jerusalem, through a series of archaeological digs in search of relics of the Passion, as well as and the Dedication of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher in 335 built on site where the Holy Cross found. A portion of the Cross was placed there at the Basilica.  The Basilica was consecrated on a 13 September, and on 14 September the fragment of the Cross was shown to the people so that the clergy and faithful could pray before it.  In 614 invading Persians and King Chosroes absconded with it and held it until it was recaptured by the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in 628 and returned to the Basilica.

Today’s Mass places before us the image of the Holy Cross.  But just as we don’t celebrate feasts in honor of dogmas, neither do we have feasts for archaeological digs.

The feast brings together the historical reality of the Cross – it really existed – with its symbolic function – it invites us to explore the central mystery of the life of Christ and of our life, namely, death.

The Cross as a symbol both allures us and it repels because it points to the mystery of Christ’s death, the mysterium tremendens et fascinans (Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy). 

Christ’s death is a mystery, because mysteries reveal something hidden, they show us something unknown, something outside our experience.  The mystery’s allure and its repellence come from the fact that the Cross reminds us that we all must die.  We instinctively flee from this reality.  And thus we so arranged our worlds as to avoid the fact of death and distract ourselves from it.  We look for way to occupy out time, shuttling from activity to activity.  We surround ourselves with noise.  We kill time with television, or the internet, or sports or endless forms of play, or even our work, noble though it may be.  Silence and solitude are shoved aside so that we are less likely to confront the terror.  That terror is death.  What terrifies us about the mystery of Christ’s death is not just that He died, but rather that we still have to die even though He died and rose for us.  We can’t avoid death.  We cannot control death.  We don’t understand death and we fear what we don’t understand.  Fear, at its root, is a result of the Fall.  Death and fear are inseparable, as cause to its effect.  The Cross forces us to confront death’s mystery and it does so supremely in Holy Mass.

Mass must be celebrated in such a way that it leads us into the mystery of Christ’s death, and our death.  Mass is therefore like the Cross.  It is a mystery.  It thus will allure and repel, reveal that things are hidden and demand faith in what is unseen, or rather seen only darkly as if through a glass.

We remove the Cross from Mass at our peril.  By removing or diminishing the Cross at Mass we dodge, once again, our fear of death.   We get through another hour or so without having confronted anything either frightening or meaningful.  We avert our gaze from what Christ did for us and from what must yet experience.   Take the Cross from its central role in Holy Mass and we reduce Mass to yet another worldly distraction.  It becomes a show.  But Mass is a sacrament, in the sense of its being a mystery.  It prepares us for death, Christ’s and our own.  What other reason is there to go to Mass?

Pope Benedict chose the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross as the precise moment when the Motu Proprio would come into force.  This cannot be an accident.  The older form of Mass is itself an exaltation of the Cross.  The Holy Father is teaching by this gesture that the Holy Cross is central to the Roman Rite.  We thank God for the gift of a wider use of the older, traditional form of the Roman Rite for it will build up the faith of the Catholic community with the correct orientation, toward the Cross of the Lord, the Lord who passed through death and will come again to rescue us from a death that would otherwise never end.  The older form of Mass will give more Catholics the opportunity to experience a Mass that places starkly before them the symbol of the Cross.  That symbol, never lacking in the older form of Mass, does not fail to draw us into the central mystery of the life of Christ and of our own life.

In this media age, this immediate age, when television allows us to see in slow motion even the laces of a baseball as it leaves the pitcher’s hand, we expect – rather – we demand to be able to see and hear everything with easy apprehension.  So, for many who experience the older form of Mass for the first time, or the first time in many decades, some of its characteristic elements leave them disoriented.  The Latin language, for example, or the position of the priest in relation to the altar, or the silence, especially the silent Canon, leaves them confused.  And so these elements are thought to be defects, defects which liturgical experts couldn’t wait to correct. 

But we know that these characteristics which so challenge 21st century man, are actually advantages.  They are precisely what we need to train the soul for an encounter with mystery.  They purify us of our over-attachment to the immediate, to the easily and instantly comprehensible.  The soul grows in faith, hope and charity only in contact with a reality so far beyond itself, so transcendent, that it cannot be grasped or controlled.  The soul stands back in awe, in fear and wonder at what it cannot understand and yet knows somehow to be deeply true and necessary.  The older form of Mass explicitly asks for surrender to the supernatural and strips us of our power to control.  It defies reduction to sound bites.  It places the modern believer suddenly in the cave with Moses when he was permitted his passing glimpse of God.  Moses demanded of God that He show Himself.  So God told Moses to peer through a cleft in the rock to see Him as He passed by, for a glance of the divine majesty but only at his back, from behind, in a fleeting way.  So too Christ’s humanity both reveals and leaves hidden His Godhead.  The difficult elements of the traditional form of Mass create in the soul the very tensions which are in the warp and weft of an experience of mystery.

Holy Mass necessitates our own sacrifice, deprivation, self-emptying, even unto death.  One way this is made clear in truly sacramental liturgy is through the denial of sensory perception.  For example, in the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Churches people can hear every text being sung but are denied visual participation because of the wall-like iconostasis with its closed doors.  Here in the Western, Latin Church, at least in the extraordinary use of the Roman Rite, we are denied at times not only to see various gestures but also to hear the mystery-laden central prayers.  The extraordinary form of Mass wants a deeper participation because it wants a greater deprivation and dying to self.  It asks for a deeper active participation, an active receptivity to what Christ is doing.  In a way, our participation at the older form of Mass reflects clearly our human condition, how in this earthly life we are waiting for the Lord, watching for Him to come to fulfill His promises in us.  We are waiting for Him to save us from our incessant fear of death, which St. Augustine called “our daily winter” (ep. 38).  Only by detachment from the merely worldly and through an interior movement of the soul upward, can the seeker come to “awe at transcendence” (William James), the experience of mystery.  Awe at transcendence, which is the very object of religion, cannot induced by empty spectacle or too much manipulation of those very elements which draw us to mystery, or, above all, the removal of those elements.  It must instead be promoted by a purification from distractions, from a measure of deprivation, of hunger, of longing for that which we glimpse only through the cleft in the rock, through the dark glass, through the mystery of the Cross.

Just as the today’s feast isn’t really about a relic, as such, so too the Motu Proprio is not just about a venerable liturgical artifact.  We actually do the older form of Mass a disservice by saying that its value derives from its antiquity.  That would be like saying we found a really curious old relic: “O look!  They move the book from one side to the other.  Isn’t that interesting?”  From that point of view, Holy Mass, no matter how solemn or beautiful is merely another spectacle which distracts us from the central mystery, which is the sacrificial death of the Lord.

Our attachment to the extraordinary form of Mass is therefore grounded not in nostalgia, or curiosity, or a fear of modernity, or suspicion of Vatican II, or downright stubbornness, but rather in the conviction that this form of Holy Mass draws us into a participation in the mystery of Christ, the incarnate Word, who saves us from eternal death.

Liturgy has no higher goal than to promote holiness.  And so we are thankful for the gift of Summorum Pontificum.  We accept the challenge the Holy Father has given us to extend this older form of the Roman Rite to all those who seek it and to celebrate the Roman Rite with devotion.  May it promote in us the holiness which is Christ’s gift to the Church.

Folks, remember that with 14 September not only the provisions of Summorum Pontificum are in force.

The Rules are now in force too.

Fr. Z’s 5 Rules of Engagement now that the Motu Proprio is in force:

1) Rejoice because our liturgical life has been enriched, not because "we win".  Everyone wins when the Church’s life is enriched.  This is not a "zero sum game".

2) Do not strut.  Let us be gracious to those who have in the past not been gracious in regard to our "legitimate aspirations".

3) Show genuine Christian joy.  If you want to attract people to what gives you so much consolation and happiness, be inviting and be joyful.  Avoid the sourness some of the more traditional stamp have sadly worn for so long.

4) Be engaged in the whole life of your parishes, especially in works of mercy organized by the same.  If you want the whole Church to benefit from the use of the older liturgy, then you who are shaped by the older form of Mass should be of benefit to the whole Church in concrete terms.

5) If the document doesn’t say everything we might hope for, don’t bitch about it like a whiner.  Speak less of our rights and what we deserve, or what it ought to have been, as if we were our own little popes, and more about our gratitude, gratitude, gratitude for what God gives us.

The French paper Le Croix has an article speculating that the Pontifical Commission "Ecclesia Dei" will undergo a change of status.

What are the main points of the article?  Keep in mind that this is the article, and not my predictions, though I agree with some of them.

• The Pont. Comm. (PCED) has competence in the implementation of the provisions of Summorum Pontificum.
• The PCED will probably be given a stronger set of statutes.  [In years past the Secretariate of State had somewhat limited what the PCED could really do in contrast to what it could do on paper.]
• The PCED will act as a kind of court of appeal.
• The PCED will respond to questions.
• The PCED will still handle the cases of groups of religious.
• The PCED will perhaps become a Pontifical Council.

Furthermore, I personally think that the Council will be renamed.  I can’t imagine that they would retain this name of "Ecclesia Dei", after the 1988 Motu Proprio of John Paul II Ecclesia Dei adflicta provoked by the illicit episcopal consecration.  That name itself harks to the very issue that Summorum Pontificum seeks to heal.  So, a change of name is in order.

My flight from the USA to the UK went without a hitch, until I put my feet on terra firma at Gatwick.  The line for passport control took 1.5 hours, which was both unusual and pretty annoying.

I am presently with Fr. Finigan of The Hermeneutic of Continuity in Blackfen.

Yesterday, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, we celebrated here a very nice solemn Mass with two priest friends, of the Diocese of Southwark, as deacon and subdeacon.  Fr. Finigan was celebrant.  I was asked to preach. 

There was a fairly sound small schola cantorum for the proper chants for the day.  Some of the chant was accompanied by organ, which I am not convinced is always necessary.  The Mass itself was well executed, and the sacred ministers obviously knew what they were about.  It was well-attended given its time at midday.  Afterwards there was a pleasant reception in the parish hall.

I attempted to record my sermon, but I can’t now get it off my digital recorder.  There is some sort of file error.  So… I may not be able to give you the audio, alas.  I will try to post the text in a separate entry later, if I can resolve my technical problems of getting my own notebook connected to the parish’s router.  Grrrr.  I also has some photos to share, but I will need to get my own computer connected before I can upload them.  Double Grrrr.

In the evening Fr. Finigan and I took the tube into central London and attended, in choir, the solemn Mass at the Brompton Oratory.  The music was splendid polyphony by a mixed choir. I am not sure what the Mass setting was.  The ceremonies were very well coordinated.  Afterwards there was a well-attended reception.  I had the great good fortune to meet quite a few people who read this blog.

So far, this trip – aside from the jet lag and connectivity problems – can be characterized by beautiful traditional liturgy, vigorous Catholic faith on the part of all whom I am meeting, wonderful hospitality and sunny weather.

You know about the horrid vestments the Holy Father wore at Mariazell in Austria. I have a bit of news. Apparently, the Austrians wanted the Holy Father to wear Baroque vestments. They were overidden by His Excellency the current Master of Pontifical Ceremonies, Most Rev. Piero Marini.

UPDATE: Someone sent me the following, which I duly pass along.

Because you are clearly someone interested in factual<br />accuracy, I am presuming to send you this email.&nbsp; Please note that according<br />to a story published on September 7 in Der Standard/Panorama, the Mariazell<br />vestments were commissioned by the Austrian bishops.&nbsp; Subject to the<br />approval of the Vatican to be sure, but the initial choice does not seem to<br />have been made by Archbishop Marini.