Today, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, is also the anniversary of the 2007 Summorum Pontificum going into effect. This Motu Proprio – the Emancipation Proclamation for the faithful who desire the Vetus Ordo – was a keystone in Pope Benedict XVI’s program – I think it was a meditated program – for the renewal of Catholic identity and the life of the Church.
We are our rites.
Ratzinger knew and Benedict knows that the artificially cobbled up and brutally imposed post-Conciliar Novus Ordo interrupted the sacred worship of the Church without which we cannot fulfill the virtue of Religion. If the virtue of Religion is absent, disorders in the Church will result. Change the way we pray and the way we believe and live will, over time, change.
Since the Eucharist – that is, the Sacrament Itself and its celebration which is Holy Mass – is the “source and summit” of our Catholic identity and life, change the Mass and you cause massive waves in the Church. Do it in a discordant way and with an artificial replacement, and the results will follow suit, as we have seen for some 50 years.
The imposition of the Novus Ordo did not only interrupt the Church’s life, it interrupted the organic development of liturgical worship, the kind that is necessary and prudent for a Church still in this vale of tears.
Correctives were and are – now more than ever before – necessary.
Hence, Summorum Pontificum was and is still of monumental importance for the life of the Church today.
This is because, from 2007 until the attempts to crush the faithful who want the Vetus Ordo began in earnest, many thousands of committed Catholics learned of this way of prayer from our forebears. Also, the internet and entrepreneurial ventures put all the tools people needed into their hands swiftly and economically.
In the 80’s and 90’s it was near impossible to find a Missale Romanum or information about what to do. Now… this is no longer a problem. It’s a wholly new landscape, and not one entirely controlled by modernists.
There will be more acts of persecution wrapped in weasel words and the faux-pastoral clucking and lisping about unity.
We must get through them with charity and our jaws set against the next pastoral uppercut.
So to honor and to exalt the Cross.
Thank you, Benedict XVI, for that great gift to the Church.
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I happen to catch a couple of minutes of the Pope’s outdoor Mass today in Kazakhstan. It threw me for a minute as I watched priests give out communion. Then I realized they were singing the Agnus Dei! After a long pause the commentator explains that due to crowd size they started communion before the Agnus Dei.
I don’t know maybe it’s me. But I wondered how much time are you really saving? And why when you are at Mass with the Pope is there a thought of saving a few minutes?
Though I noted Pope Francis was not the celebrant. He was sitting and not at the altar. Perhaps he’s not feeling well but he did give the homily according to the news I read.
Well, technically… I think that if the priest finishes all the eucharistic prayers before the choir stops singing, the priest could get all the way to Communion before the Agnus Dei was done being sung.
But… that sounds like an EF principle, not an OF one.
Heh.