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

I tip my biretta to the Cafeteria o{]:¬)  for linking to a posting on the site of one Joseph S. O’Leary: a very interesting 2003 letter of Joseph Card. Ratzinger on the issue of the older form of Mass, the "Tridentine" Mass, being more widely available.

The letter was written in German by Card. Ratzinger and O’Leary provided a translation.  However, Gerald of the Cafeteria also did a translation.  After a rapid check, I will give you O’Leary’s, because the English is smoother.

NB: O’Leary calls this letter "frightening", which gives you an idea of his take on the Joseph Ratzinger and the use of the older form of Mass.

Here is the O’Leary translation with my emphases and comments:

To Dr. Heinz-Lothar Barth, 23 June 2003

Dear Dr. Barth,

I thank you cordially for your letter of April 6 to which I find the time to answer only now. You are asking me to act for a broader availability of the old Roman rite. Actually, you know yourself that I have no deaf ears towards such a request. My work on behalf of this cause is meanwhile generally known.

Whether the Holy See will “admit the old rite again for every place and without restrictions” as you desire and have heard it rumoured cannot be simply answered or confirmed without further ado. [We know more about this now, of course.] Still too great is the aversion of many Catholics, instilled in them over many years, against the traditional liturgy which they scornfully call “preconciliar”. Also one would have to reckon with considerable resistance on the part of many bishops against a general readmission.  [This is pretty dense and needs to be pulled apart.  1) Immediately Card. Ratzinger wants to dispel the fiction that the use of the older Mass is somehow out of step with the Second Vatican Council.  He knows that "pre-conciliar" is code for "opposed to the Council".  Ratzinger sees continuity between the older Mass and Council, not rupture.  2) The aversion which was instilled in people was purposely instilled: people in power positions tried to make others hate the older form of Mass.  They weren’t content to make people love the newer form, they wanted people to feel aversion to the older.  3) Bishops, who should know better, are the real obstacles.]

Things look different, however, if one thinks about a limited readmission. The demand for the old liturgy is limited, too. [Ratzinger is talking about a measured response to the demand for the older Mass.  Also, he is a shrewed strategist: he knows that to over-reach would do great harm to future possibilties.  This is the "brick by brick" element of his Marshall Plan I keep talking about.] I know that its worth, of course, does not depend upon the demand for it, but the question of the number of interested priests and laypeople, nevertheless, plays a certain role. Besides, such a measure can now, only some 30 years after the liturgy reform of Paul VI, be implemented only stepwise. Any new hurry would surely not be a good thing.  [See?  It would be worse to tye to implement something that has little chance of success.]

I believe, though, that in the long term the Roman Church must have again a single Roman rite. The existence of two official rites is for bishops and priests difficult to “manage” in practice. [This is why Summorum Pontificum is so clever!  Papa Ratzinger does not resolve on a scholarly lever the debate about whether or not there are two rites.  Frankly, I doubt serious if Papa Ratzinger thinks that the Novus Ordo and the older form are really the same Roman Rite.  What we got in Summorum Pontificum was a juridical solution to the issue.  By saying there is, juridically, one Roman Rite, he eliminated the need for a priest to have additional faculties to use the older form.  That was a masterstroke.] The Roman rite of the future should be a single rite, celebrated in Latin or in the vernacular, but standing completely in the tradition of the rite that has been handed down. It could take up some new elements which have proven themselves, like new feasts, some new prefaces in the Mass, an expanded lectionary – more choice than earlier, but not too much, – an “oratio fidelium”, i.e., a fixed litany of intercessions following the Oremus before the offertory where it had its place earlier. [This is huge and it needs more explanation below.]

Dear Dr. Barth, if you commit yourself to work for the cause of the liturgy in this way, you will surely not stand alone, and you will prepare "public opinion in the Church" for eventual measures in favor of an expanded use of the earlier liturgical books. One should be cautious, however, about awakening too high or maximum expectations among the traditional faithful.  [See my comments above.]

I am using the opportunity to thank you for your appreciated commitment to the liturgy of the Roman Church in your books and lectures, even if here and there I would wish still more charity and understanding towards the magisterium of the pope and bishops. [Many of our liturgical problems remain battles over ecclesiology!] May the seed you are sowing germinate and bring much fruit for the renewed life of the Church the “source and summit” of which, indeed its true heart, is and must remain the liturgy.

With delight I give you the blessing you have asked and remain sincerely yours

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

This is an interesting read.  I have seen this before, but it is nice to get it back out there again.

I said there was more to say about that central paragraph.

Joseph Ratzinger had the idea that side by side celebrations of the older form of Mass with the newer would eventually jump-start the organic growth of liturgy that was so artificially interrupted by the cut-paste job of experts at desks when the Novus Ordo was stitched together.  Never had liturgy been impose in that manner and harm has resulted.

Neverthless, we must be practical.  At the Council there was perceived a need for some reform.  Though we didn’t get the reform the Council Fathers though they were mandating, and the Consilium under Bugnini and Lercaro (with Piero Marini already a disciple in the cause) went way beyond its mandate in order to push a new ecclesiology on the whole Church, there are some elements that in retrospect we can reflect on as a Church as being positive.  We can also learn from the problems we created.

So, what is envisioned here is a kind of tertium quid that slowly but surely there would emerge over time from the "dialogue" between the older form and the newer form.  Ratzinger is saying that the older, traditional form must be the basis, the starting point, for any eventual single Roman Rite, not the Novus Ordo.  The Novus Ordo is perceived as a kind of bump in the road, perhaps, in the long route of the liturgy’s development.  But there are points in the Novus Ordo which might be useful… perhaps we be useful… over time.  Not right away…. eventually, as a matter of organic growth, not artificial imposition.  The elements he suggests as useful are also in part ancient.

Pope Benedict has a clear vision, thought though long and well.  I used to pick his brains about this years ago when I had the chance to talk with him, fairly often, when I worked in the PC Ecclesia Dei, in the same building as the CDF.  I wrote an article about this very point in the early ‘90s in Catholic World Report, (I would love a copy of that issue or article now!) and was taken to task about it by no less than Michael Davies and Eric de Saventhem, both of whom I esteem. 

Papa Ratzinger, not they, will be proven right about this, however.  Wait and see.

This is why I make so bold as to talk Benedict’s vision and work in terms of a Marshall Plan.  This is why I repeat "brick by brick", to describe the slow process we need and the patience.  This is why I say that the "liturgy is the tip of the spear", for it is truly the key to a long engaged thelogical war being waged.  This is why I use the image of "gravitational pull" when I describe the way the older form will influence the newer form, and vice versa.  Frankly, even the smaller moon exerts some pull on the larger earth.  So too, the older Mass will influence the newer form much more than the other way around and eventually it will be the older form that prevails, in this vision.

But that doesn’t mean that the effects will be either immediate or only in one direction.