Fr. Z's Blog

I begin with his peroration…

Perhaps the bishops are not thinking about the liturgy at all, but about the people – whose devotion they envy, and whose moral conservatism they detest. Is that it?

Are they more to be punished because their churches are full? You might say, “Let’s learn from what they do.” You might say, “We should have real music in our parishes also.”

Why are you not pleased by their faith? They believe that you bear them a grudge. Why do you prove them right?

Thus, the concluding challenge to bishops from thoughtful Anthony Esolen at The Catholic Thing about the efficacy of the Novus Ordo as it is actually being used. His peroration is guided by the cruel treatment, inexplicable in large part, by bishops of those who desire the ancient Vetus Ordo.

I start this way because of question that came in.

From a reader…

QUAERITUR:

Should the displaced Catholics now attend the Novus Ordo ? why is is ok for priests to obey orders that are evil that are given by clergy who have no legitimate authority
to issue such orders whose clear aim is to destroy the tradition of the church?

Briefly, I am reminded of the book,  Dominus Est!, that helped to put Bp. Schneider in the spotlight.  He recounts how ancient martyrs died rather than renounce their Faith and the Eucharist because without the Eucharist they simply couldn’t go on, couldn’t live:  sine dominico non possumus.

Did Japanese Catholics, isolated from the institutional church and without clergy manage to hang on for years?  Yes.  They survived but they did not thrive.

I’ve used the “survive/thrive” binomial for decades now concerning the Novus Ordo and the Vetus Ordo, about the old ICEL translation for the Novus and the newer, for how the NO could be celebrated and how it generally is.   The idea is that a grown man can survive on the baby food of pureed carrots, but he won’t thrive.  Something more substantive is called for.   But when you are starving and can’t go on, that jar of pureed carrots looks pretty good.  At least you have that.

CAN’T go to the Vetus Ordo?   You still need the Eucharist.   All the time? Maybe not.  But you do need it.

Let’s go back to Esolen, and start at the top of the piece.

Latin and God’s Holy People

do not attend the Latin Mass.  I believe that the Novus Ordo Mass can be filled with beauty, but that the surroundings, the habits that have grown into prescriptive laws, the ancillary people and their actions, and the problems with the lectionary, especially in its English rendering, make that beauty difficult to attain.

The problem is not that the Mass, as it is in fact celebrated almost everywhere in the English world, fails to be overpowering, like a Beethoven symphony.  We cannot live on grandeur alone.  We must have ordinary bread.  But there’s a beauty to ordinary bread, too, the beauty of what is simple, wholesome, unpretentious.

The old low Mass had that simplicity.  You could say it was not grand, but it did not pretend to be.  What you could never say was that it was ugly, silly, or sentimental.  It was reliable, like a rock.

Cardinals Cupich and Gregory, Bishop Burbidge of Arlington, and others insist that we Catholics shall not be united unless we cause everyone to give up the beauty and power they find in the Latin Mass – for it is there to be found, and even at a low Mass, the quiet power is as solid and confident and firm.

[…]

There follows a series of blistering commandments from the theoretical imaginations of men like Gregory, Cupich, Francis, along the line of “We are going to strip away everything you love and find helpful and, dammit, you’re going to like it”.  Read them there and see if maybe that series doesn’t force an involuntary nod, jaw clench and perhaps a watery eye.

My emphases and comments.

[…]

I don’t question the validity of the Novus Ordo.  I certainly do question the efficacy, even the fidelity and the sanity of almost everything that has gotten tangled up with the Novus Ordo, which the despisers of the Latin Mass show no sign of wishing to reform.

Take that whole package all in all.  It doesn’t work.  It hasn’t worked.  It’s not going to work, because it runs counter to human nature, because it doesn’t acknowledge the full range of man’s needs as he stands before God, and because, in subtle but pervasive ways, it tends to make religion into a pleasant hobby and God into a hobbyhorse.

I’m referring to the whole thing there, the typical experience of Mass since 1970, and I’m speaking in general terms that do not apply to every parish or, much less, to every parishioner.

I’ve been blessed with pastors who understand beauty, and who keep in mind that God is the focus of our worship and not ourselves.  But innovations that apply generally must be evaluated for their general effect. [The Novus Ordo is exactly such an innovation.  It is, as Ratzinger aptly said, “The liturgical reform, in its concrete realization, has distanced itself even more from its origin. The result has not been a reanimation, but devastation. In place of the liturgy, fruit of a continual development, they have placed a fabricated liturgy. They have deserted a vital process of growth and becoming in order to substitute a fabrication. They did not want to continue the development, the organic maturing of something living through the centuries, and they replaced it, in the manner of technical production, by a fabrication, a banal product of the moment.” Before the pewling papalatrous peanut gallery pipes in about Novus Ordo being a derogatory term, it is exactly the term used at the time of Paul VI. And let it be known that, in Classical Latin, the very idea of something “new” is automatically to be held as suspect.]

Perhaps the bishops are not thinking about the liturgy at all, but about the people – whose devotion they envy, and whose moral conservatism they detest.  Is that it? [I’m convinced that many of the people who are trying to repress the Vetus Ordo are plagued with a particular moral problem, one that allows demons to attach, a sin that cries to heaven.  The prayers of the Novus Ordo were systematically stripped of concepts like propitiation, guilt, sin in favor of hope in eschatological fulfillment in the life to come.  Why? “Because Paschal Mystery… and shut up, you Vatican II hater!  That’s why!”  They are right in claiming that there is a difference in the theology of the Old and the New.  And, if you want to insist on “People of God” and “Paschal Mystery”, and that the Novus Ordo has – at long liberating last – got that, we respond that so does the Vetus, and it is has it better.  Why better? Because in the Novus Ordo the Resurrection aspect of the Paschal Mystery is so emphasized that the rest, Passion and Death, is eclipsed.   Problem: You can’t get to the kind of Resurrection we would prefer without Passion and Death.  Suffering, reparation, propitiation are necessary to obtain the joy of Heaven.   THAT’s what the haters of the traditional Mass don’t want to hear.  It’s like the evils of the “prosperity Gospel” and “rapture Christianity” messages: reward without suffering.  Again and again I say it here.  It’s not just that these tradition suppressors dislike the tradition – and they do – they dislike the people who want it.  Why?  Everything about the Vetus and the people who want it makes them feel guilty about something they are doing, hiding, have done and feel ashamed about.  That’s part of it, not all of it.  The true, pure ideologue is a rara avis.]

Are they more to be punished because their churches are full?  You might say, “Let’s learn from what they do.”  You might say, “We should have real music in our parishes also.”  [They’d rather close a church than have a choir that could handle Palestrina, a schola that could provide the Proper.]

Why are you not pleased by their faith?  They believe that you bear them a grudge.  Why do you prove them right?

Questions to be asked, now asked.