Some of you will find this heartening
The parish where I grew up and performed as a folk mass guitarist for four years, which is an eco-church office away from turning into a certain fictional parish, is starting Eucharistic Adoration. Considering that I had never even heard of Adoration until I was in my mid-twenties, and attended this parish regularly from 1984 to 2004….well.
Fulfilling my obligation
My license to write a Catholic blog will be yanked if I don’t write something about the upcoming motu proprio, I think.
I make no secret of the fact that I am, by orthodox Catholic standards, a political liberal. I’ve taken a harder line on some things as I get older, but I’ll always have my particular mix of liberal/libertarian beliefs.
So I enjoy Commonweal and its blog. During the countdown to the motu proprio, though, I’m coming to realize that my politics and my liturgical conservatism don’t mix very well. I should have known this all along…but a blog post about the MP turned into a rather amusing moonbat commentfest. (And I say this as someone who was somewhere between “lapsed” and “dissident” Catholic in 2005 and really disappointed at Benedict XVI’s election. At the time!) Then there was another post with much saner comments. The fear and scorn from many commenters is strange. The goal here isn’t to re-impose the Tridentine Mass on everyone, people! It’s to allow people who want to celebrate it to do so without depending on the whims of their bishops.
I haven’t been feeling well lately and haven’t the energy for any writing I’m not getting paid for. Instead, here’s a selection of comments from the dotCommonweal post. It was rather enlightening to see a more liberal perspective on this than what I’m used to reading online. It’s good for me to get out of my particular media ghetto, I guess.
I ask this seriously - can any of those favouring the older Latin Mass explain why they prefer a Mass said in a language they can’t understand.
If one needs to know Latin to be “better custodians of the mysteries ….” (whatever THAT is supposed to mean!) then one is simply interjecting an element of Gnosticism into the picture. It smacks of “secret knowledge” available only to the initiates.
Are you saying that non-Latin speakers are lesser classes when it comes to “the mysteries?” A loose parallel in your country would be saying that an Oxbridge accent is more English than all others.
I find it strange that Jesus, the gospel and epistle writers, and the early church fathers didn’t need a special language (sans secret decoder ring, of course) in order to preach, teach and sanctify.
My point about the situation at the NDC with the LC imposition of Latin into the English language Mass was that the good little sheep of yesteryear are, in the main, gone from the picture. Most contemporary Catholics no longer roll over and play dead just because Father Says So. And so it shall be once the motu proprio is fully implemented and some eager-beaver priest tries to impose a Latin mass in a parish where it is not wanted.Diversity, nonsense. Such talk is either naive or a cynical attempt to hijack the language of the reform for the purpose of defeating it. What the proponents of the use of the 1962 liturgy are after is the suppression of the Mass of Paul VI. Read their literature, and it becomes plain. I suspect the next move will be to train all priests in both rites, so the move can easily be made later to a complete change back to the so-called Tridentine rite.
As far as Bishop Elliot is concerned I am really flabbergasted. What is he talking about? Of course mystification has always served the hierarchy well in that they would have to answer to no one.
Along with Humanae Vitae, the church’s stand on divorce and annulment, and contempt of women, people will ignore Rome and attend services and hope the clergy will come out of their wilderness.
I saved the worst of the bunch for last:
What we are witnessing vis-a-vis the upcoming motu proprio is the last gasp of a fearful and pitiful old man occupying the chair of Peter. Kinda’ sad, when one thinks of it.
Mixed blessings
I forgot to mention that on Sunday at the Tridentine Mass, there were a fair number of women with uncovered heads. Bad for the rite, but good in general. Why? Well, there were so many people that I think they ran out of loaner veils!
The indult parish is part of a group of three parishes (the Tridentine community is “non-territorial,” but the other two are regular urban parishes) together under one pastor, due to the dwindling number of practicing Catholics in the city, and the priest shortage. A wonderful priest in his eighties who is otherwise retired celebrates the Tridentine Mass, but the pastor has done it in the past.
For Sunday Masses, the indult Mass’s attendance is about 120, which is delightfully high for a service around here. People travel from three different states.
I love the aesthetic of it. Attending the cathedral’s long, solemn Novus Ordo Mass occasionally was a big step, and the catalyst of my reversion. It reminds me of what is special about being Catholic, as opposed to most mainstream parishes where the only glaring difference between that and Protestant services I’ve attended is that you don’t hear any female voices reading the Gospel.
Man, I’ve gone all rad-trad lately. I promise that I’ll be back to normal soon. I just finally absorbed how wonderful the old Mass is.
I finally made it!
Last week I slept in and missed Latin Mass. Which is kind of sad, since it’s at noon. Today I slept through my alarms and somehow woke up twenty minutes before the start of mass. I hurried to wash my face and put decent clothes on, then grabbed my veil and missal but failed to bring my directions to the church. I had a vague sense of what street it was on, but I don’t know that city well at all, and I was traveling there more or less blind. And late.
Somehow I made an accurate guess as to where to get off the highway, then made a left turn, scanned the skyline for a familiar-looking steeple, and found a sign pointing to the church. Yay! There I was, with other people toting missals heading in late, too. I felt bad, but not as bad as I would have if I had been the only one heading in then.
Using missals is completely foreign to my generation of liberal Catholics. I’ve never had one before, and even with bookmarking the Pentecost pages ahead of time, I got a little lost, gave up, and just sat there absorbing the atmosphere instead of following along. I felt sort of secluded in my veil, which added to the meditative feel.
Receiving communion kneeling at a rail was a first for me, too, and like most of what went on during the hour and a half that the Low Mass took (!!), felt foreign but also somehow “right.”
The parish has a luncheon for Latin Mass folks to socialize. I grabbed lunch and ran away, not really talking to anyone. I hate being shy sometimes.
When I thought I couldn’t love Colbert any more, he came out against folk Mass.
“The point is, you should not apologize for your religion. You don’t see me apologizing for what Catholics did in the past: the Crusades, the Inquisition, guitar Mass….” - The Colbert Report, 5/14/07
Celebrate the Mass of the Ages
Zach at The Road to Reform posted a link to a short clip from a video sent from SSPX (”Letter to our brother priests”) to all of the priests in France, showing how to conduct a Tridentine Mass “on the eve of the liberalization of the Latin Mass by Pope Benedict XVI,” if I’m recalling the titles correctly. It’s interesting to note that nothing in the notes on Google about the film mentioned who produced it.
France is a strange case. If what the video claims is true, 20% of priests in France preside solely over Latin Masses. I don’t doubt this…only because of the large traditionalist population in France, and the relatively small number of French people who celebrate…well, regular modern Catholicism.
It feels strange that the priest in this video can’t be any older than I am. The music in the beginning sounds incongruously like something out of the new Battlestar Galactica series.
I’ve done a rough translation of the titles and voiceover in this video, which I hope will be helpful for Tridentine Mass fans who don’t speak French.
The Mass of ages:
Frequently banned
Never forbidden
One priest out of five ordained today in France celebrates exclusively the traditional rite of the Mass.
Numerous priests express the desire to discover the traditional Mass, and to celebrate it.
65% of French Catholics support wider use of the traditional Mass.
At a time when Pope Benedict XVI is on the verge of allowing wider use of the Tridentine rite of the Mass, the Society of St. Pius X proposes this high quality educational tool which will allow all priests to discover this rite.
CELEBRATE THE MASS OF AGES
Voiceover: He unfolds the altar cloth. The altar cloth is placed two fingers’ width from the edge of the altar. Several times during the duration fo the mass, the priest must place his joined hands on the alter, like this. His hands must not touch the altar cloth. At the words “A reading from the Gospel,” he places is left hand on the edge of the missal, and makes with his right thumb a sign of the cross over the spot on the page where the Gospel starts. Then, with his left hand on his chest, he makes the sign of the cross on himself with his right thumb, first on the forehead, then on the lips, and then on the chest. Then, he joins his hands together.
He takes the paten, and holding it in both hands at chest height, he raises his eyes for one moment to the alter crucifix. With his eyes focused on the host, he begins the prayer of consecration. To set down the host, the priest proceeds as follows. He lowers the paten, tracing with it a sign of the cross on the altar. He sets the host down on the altar cloth, taking the paten with his right hand and slides it halfway under the corporale.
He recites the [unclear] in a deep bow, joined hands placed on the altear. Then he bends down to the altar, stands back up, and then traces a sign of the cross on the host and over teh chalice. He then makes the sign over himself before joining his hands again.
This film is a production from the “Letter to our brother priests.” a means of connection between the Society of St. Pius X and the priests of France.
Oooh, a sale!
Halo Works is running a great Mother’s Day sale right now on some of their chapel veils and many other items. I took the opportunity to order two–the Junior V in white and the Spanish Essence in silver. I normally wouldn’t have bought two, but the sale made the prices very reasonable.
I have two antique chapel veils that I need to be careful with, one white and one black. I haven’t had the nerve to wear them to Mass, though. I might be able to pull it off at the cathedral, but not when I go to little churches here in the city. At those churches, everyone wears jeans (even the lectors) and I stand out for wearing skirts and dresses (aka my work clothes from my Sunday job) and my insistence on kneeling at all during any part of the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Even the church’s staff sister doesn’t wear a veil, so I think I might frighten people by wearing one.
All of this casualness turns me off.
