Every time I attend the Latin Mass (once a month), and every time I attend the Novus Ordo (daily) it's borne in on me again with greater force: the Latin Mass is a rich banquet of real food for the soul while the New Mass is a subsistence diet, barely enough to keep us in the land of the spiritually living.
In fact, as we all know from Mass counts, countless souls have starved to death on the paltry helping of food dished up over the past 50+ years, ever since the Second Vatican Council whipped away the sustaining, delicious menu offered by the Immemorial Mass and wheeled in the porridge that's now called (with unconscious irony) the Ordinary Form. Because the Extraordinary Form is truly extraordinary, offering a menu a la carte in that each individual soul attending, in the silence and absorption of priest and people in God rather than anyone around them, hears Him speak to them intimately, in their own language.
(I'm speaking here, of course, of the texts and Scriptures of the Mass, not of the very Bread of Heaven, which so consolingly is given us by the Lord in the bread and wine every time the words of consecration have been pronounced by a validly ordained priest who intends to confect the sacrament.)
I didn't intend, in this post, to embarrass myself, my congregation or Father by rehashing the homily at the parish Sunday Mass yesterday.
But on reflection I realise how in the evening, at the SSPX Mass in Napier - at a funeral parlour instead of any of the three city churches, because the SSPX is still being stood in the ecclesiastical corner, the naughty boy of the post-Vat II Church - a stunning sermon by Father Francois Laisney fortuitously laid bare the pop psychology peddled in so many homilies at the New Mass, flatly contradicting what I'd heard in the morning. He preached erudite, orthodox Church doctrine with a verve and vigour I haven't seen, except from SSPX priests at St Anthony's Whanganui, for as long as I can remember.
The comparison served to illustrate the fact that it's not just the Mass texts that have been dumbed-down; Scripture verses warning of the end-of-life experience awaiting every single one of us (Particular Judgment) were thrown out of the liturgy like bathwater with such enthusiasm that the Baby was very nearly thrown out too, meaning that bishops and priests fed on the porridge of the New Mass for fifty years - to say nothing of what remains of their flock - are consequently showing signs of severe malnutrition.
Yesterday's Gospel in the New Mass was the parable of the wheat and the darnel (Mt 13: 30). Ah, thought I, how will Father get around the fate of the darnel, which will be bound "into bundles to burn but the wheat gather ye into my barn"?
He never mentioned it. Turns out the darnel grows inside us. Father called the darnel "our shadow side". That's what I'd call sin, but 'shadow side' is a nicer, unthreatening, Marriage Encounterish of putting it. And what should we do about the darnel (sin) in our hearts? "Leave it!" said Father.
He'd already talked about hearing Confessions (really? How long ago?) and hearing over and over again penitents saying, "It's the same old thing, Father." This was to emphasise that we should just put up with our 'shadow side' until the day we die, and our friends and relations have to put up with it too.
But at the same time we have to love those friends and relations! Loving our friends and relations and everyone else is the most important thing!
Father, how do we love our friends and relations without loving God first? Doesn't the First Commandment come before the Second? Don't we love others truly only because they are made by God, and loved by Him?
If I'd been under any illusions about the prudence of letting the darnel (my 'shadow side', aka sin) flourish in my soul until the day I face my God in judgment, they were dispelled at the other end of the day by Fr Laisney at Dunstall's Funeral Services chapel in Napier (Mass is supposed to start at 5 pm but Father occasionally is held up driving from Whanganui, and there's always a queue waiting for confession before Mass; if he doesn't hear everyone before Mass he does it after).
On the subject of how we deal with the darnel (even though the Latin Mass, following the pre-Vat II calendar, had a different Gospel), preaching on the Epistle (St Paul to the Romans, 6:19-23) Father Laisney was explicit on "the infirmity of your flesh; for as you have yielded your members to serve uncleanness and iniquity"(i.e. darnel/sin) "unto iniquity, so now yield your members to serve justice unto sanctification ... For the wages of sin" (i.e. darnel) "is death. "
As Dr Peter Kwasniewski puts it:
"Our Lord through His Church has given the liturgy to us for our benefit, for our growth in holiness, not for His (He is already infinitely good and cannot be improved by anything we do), and He becomes present in our midst in order to accomplish this transformation in us wayfarers, since it is already accomplished in the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem.
"The external form of the liturgy in all its details must prepare the souls of the faithful for the working of the Holy Spirit" (in uprooting the 'darnel' from our souls).
"... If we cannot get past the opening bars of guitar music or the Hallmark greetings" (songs with texts straight out of Paper Plus) "without a groan of weariness or a quick surge of anger, how well disposed can we possibly be to receive the Lord when He comes?"Two of my brothers say they left the Church not long after the imposition of the New Mass, more because being musical they couldn't stomach what have by now quite frankly graduated from the status of hymns to 'songs'. They haven't returned. Yet.
"It is a thoroughly false asceticism to pretend that one should buck up and suffer everything — including the distortion or demeaning of the worship owed to God!"It's for this reason that the SSPX advises the faithful who find the New Mass and its accoutrements too distressing that they should stay away and attend the Traditional Latin Mass just as often as they can.
For family reasons and having received Communion daily now for years - and being given Communion again now after such a protracted period of being denied the sacrament on the tongue I am newly conscious of the graces the Eucharist bestows - I compromise and make things bearable by following the New Mass (OF) with my Latin Mass missal. It's not easy; fortunately, as the OF texts skip heedlessly past so many beautiful EF prayers marked especially by their humility in acknowledging our unworthiness of the Sacrifice of Calvary and invoking the aid of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, and the saints, I can be a speed reader when I have to be.
"The Church has the duty of leading souls to perfection," (Father's been known to ask when sermonising on a Sunday, "Who says we have to be perfect?" It was of course a rhetorical question but I was sorely tempted to call loudly, "Jesus Christ!") "not of setting up obstacles to it; her priests have mighty powers, but inflicting harm on their own flocks is not numbered among them.
"A parish does not serve a lofty penitential calling by punishing its members with a combination of bad taste and ignored rubrics. However much God is present in all places, including dens of Babylonian lions, we are not required to throw ourselves into them each and every Sunday."Dr Kwasniewski comments that the last allusion will escape many Novus Ordo Massgoers who've forgotten the story of Daniel in the lions' den - if they old enough to have heard it - because the Mason Annibale Bugnini took to it with his savage scissors and snipped it right out of the new Lectionary. Along with so many other jewels of our Catholic faith.
Dr Kwasniewski offers this quote from the then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger:
"We ought to get back the dimension of the sacred in the liturgy. The liturgy is not a festivity; it is not a meeting for the purpose of having a good time. It is of no importance that the parish priest has cudgeled his brains to come up with suggestive ideas or imaginative novelties.
"The liturgy is what makes the Thrice-Holy God present amongst us; it is the burning bush; it is the Alliance of God with man in Jesus Christ, who has died and risen again. The grandeur of the liturgy does not rest upon the fact that it offers an interesting entertainment, but in rendering tangible the Totally Other, whom we are not capable of summoning. He comes because He wills.
"In other words, the essential in the liturgy is the mystery, which is realized in the common ritual of the Church; all the rest diminishes it. Men experiment with it in lively fashion, and find themselves deceived, when the mystery is transformed into distraction, when the chief actor in the liturgy is not the Living God but the priest or the liturgical director."
Dr Kwasniewski goes on to tell us to leave our "substandard parish for the sake of a better one". In country districts that's an impossible luxury. But Kwasniewski makes no secret, in "Ten Reasons to Attend the Latin Mass" https://onepeterfive.com/ten-reasons-to-attend-the-traditional-latin-mass/
of his preference for the usus antiquior (yet another name for the Latin Mass).
"Why should we deprive ourselves of the light and peace and joy of what is more beautiful, more transcendent, more sacred, more sanctifying, and more obviously Catholic? Innumerable blessings await us when, in the midst of an unprecedented crisis of identity in the Church today, we live out our Catholic faith in total fidelity and with the ardent dedication of the Elizabethan martyrs who were willing to do and to suffer anything rather than be parted from the Mass they had grown to cherish more than life itself.
Yes, we will be called upon to make sacrifices—accepting an inconvenient time or a less-than-satisfactory venue, humbly bearing with misunderstanding and even rejection from our loved ones—but we know that sacrifices for the sake of a greater good are the very pith and marrow of charity.
https://onepeterfive.com/vigano-vatican-ii-marked-the-beginning-of-a-false-parallel-church/
Now that valiant mover and shaker and whistleblower of the Church, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, has declared - more or less - that he's fed up to the back teeth with the Second Vatican Council and believes that a future Magisterium does need to reject the Second Vatican Council in its entirety because of the “the errors against the Faith scattered throughout the documents.”
Let us pray that the 'New Mass' will eventually be declared one of those errors and discarded.
In Archbishop Vigano's words:
"It is undeniable that from Vatican II onwards a parallel church was built, superimposed over and diametrically opposed to the true Church of Christ."
Great analogy Julia. You get a full diet at the SSPX that’s for sure. It’s not until you experience it that you realise you’ve been fed crumbs at the Novus Disordo all these years.
ReplyDeleteRichard Welsh says:
ReplyDeleteHow the New Mass Came About.
..There was a Dutchman , and one evening at Mass in 1964, at Eketahuna, he stood up and confronted the Bishop, saying, "Your Grace, what are you going to do about all the young ones not coming to Mass? Because of the Beatles?"
Bishop Sneddon had no answer, only to say, "Al right Mr Buys .. we’ll see what we can do."
So he went off and reported it to the VII Council.
Thus ... was this the catalyst? Henk is still alive and I remind him that it’s all his fault we got the New Mass.
Ah yes...those Dutch Catholics!
ReplyDelete