Another year, another Patronal Festival, another outing for the Happytudes. Useful though the Jerusalem Bible's footnotes are, the text itself is awful. I know that they are really supposed to translate the liturgical books exactly as they are. But at the very least, couldn't someone reissue the RSV Edition of the Missal? And not the NRSV, with the male pronouns taken out and to hell with the sense. If the Bible is that bad, then why use it all?
Furthermore, never mind moving All Saints Day to the day before, this once because it happens to be on a Monday. That is bad enough, of course. But following the triumphant visit of the man whose election led to our deprival of them in a fit of pique, and following the enthronement (as it is properly called) of Archbishop Vincent Nichols on the real Ascension Day, can we have it, the Epiphany and Corpus Christi on their correct days again, as observed by the Holy Father, and in at least one case as directly required by Scripture?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Um, actually, we used to translate Holidays of Obligation from Mondays and Saturdays long before Benedict was elected.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the others, though....
I know, but that doesn't mean that we should have done.
ReplyDeleteAscension Day and Corpus Christi, of course, cannot occur on any day except a Thursday.
The Happytudes is one of the best examples of the determination of the inventors of the new Mass to turn it from a spiritual occasion into a 1960s communal party where everybody is 'happy'. I would much rather be 'blessed' than 'happy'.
ReplyDeleteWith the declaration of Pope Benedict that the 'old' Mass had never been abrogated we now have the chance to attend the Mass of the feast of Christ the King on the last Sunday in October. This is much more preferable than suffering the diktats of our bishops in switching feasts to the nearest Sunday. What is the problem with going to Mass on Sunday, then All Saints on Monday, and All Souls on Tuesdays? I think the problem lies with the faith of the bishops.
You would have to live anywhere near a celebration of the Extraordinary Form, quite apart from the fact that getting involved in all of that almost always means withdrawing from ordinary parish life. And then there is the politics.
ReplyDeleteEasing the celebration of the Old Rite was welcome enough in itself, but as many people as really wanted it already had it; there was no constituency of people longing for it, as the failure of any such to materialise demonstrates, and I write as someone who is more than happy to attend it occasionally.
As for something like All Souls Day, so far as I can tell, most cradle Catholics who grew up before the Council, never mind after it, have heard of it dimly, if at all, in the way that they have never heard of Novenas, or have never heard of the Angelus other than at 12 noon, or can never recall having witnessed a High Mass, not even on the most enormously special occasions. I don't hold with the romanticisation of the Church in the Fifties.
Look at the Latin Mass Society's schedule for tomorrow and Tuesday, and they are almost all Low Masses. Who wants to travel some considerable distance for that?
ReplyDeleteNot that the Latin Mass lobby would want the Old Rite in most parishes, that would disturb their deep little subculture and they already get quite annoyed when priests outside their little gang celebrate the Extraordinary Form.
And they have a point. I admit that I have used the Ascension Day and Corpus Christi thing as an excuse to attend rather good EF celebrations.
ReplyDeleteBut if it is going to be done, then it should only ever be done well, as it cannot have been done everywhere before the Council, and as by all accounts it certainly wasn't.
The Old Rite will always have a place in the life of the Church. But it has gone from most parishes. That, moreover, is just as well.
Based on what it was like in most parishes, those who love it and are concerned for it would not want it to have to be put on everywhere every day or every week, because it mostly would not be, as it mostly was not, put on very well.
Sooner the Ordinary Form celebrated well than the Extraordinary Form celebrated badly.
You are right, if the Extraordinary Form became ordinary we would be back to the Fastest Mass in the West. You are right too about the politics of the EF subculture, the complete thought-world represented by Christian Order. Another reason to take the EF in small, but perfectly crafted, doses.
ReplyDeleteThat said, while a number of the articles in Christian Order are a number of the articles in Christian Order, there is always something in it worth reading, and about how many periodicals is it really possible to say that?
ReplyDeleteThis month sees both the conclusion of Robert Hickson's splendid paleocon three-parter on American foreign policy, and Harriet Murphy's piece in praise of Martin Mosebach.
But the latter subject rather illustrates the point about keeping the EF special, and celebrated only in the way that Mosebach sets out as the highest total work of art, the triumph of the Spirit in matter. You couldn't do that everywhere and every day, or even everywhere and every Sunday.
Dr. Geoffrey Hull's review of Fr. Anthony Cekada's Work of Human Hands is also very good this month. You wouldn't agree with all of it but it is right up your street in how frighteningly but casually learned it is. For example:
ReplyDelete"However, the Copts themselves reject this characterization, anathematize Eutyches, and teach that the Lord's divinity and His humanity were united as two natures "without separation, without confusion and without alteration" in what St Cyril of Alexandria styled 'the nature of the Incarnate Word'. This position is known as 'Miaphysite' and deemed compatible with orthodoxy by leading Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theologians who have no truck with horizontalizing Modernism."
I read that and thought of you.
You are too, too kind.
ReplyDeleteProfessor Hull's taking to task of Fr Cekada's contempt for the Eastern Rites raises important questions for Mosebach's thesis. How far can what he says about the traditional Roman Rite also be said about them, and what is implied by or consequent upon the extent to which it can or cannot be said about each of them?
Like most young people who did not live before THE council, or experience normal parish life before 1970, you have no idea of the vibrancy of parish life in those days. New churches were being built and new schools opened; it was a time of great hope and expansion. Ushaw College was packed with seminarians and the future looked exceedingly bright. Then came THE CHANGES in 1970 which has emptied our churches and our seminaries and young people are leaving school with no idea of the Catholic faith. This is a fact.
ReplyDeleteThose who have tried to hold the line have no wish to withdraw from parish life or get involved in politics (we leave that to you) but we have been cast out into the margins by people who have swallowed the new order, hook, line and sinker. The 'politics', as you describe them, are used by those in positions of authority to denigrate those who simply wish to practice their faith as their ancestors have done for the best part of 2,000 years. As an intelligent man you should arm yourself with the facts of the situation rather than express opinions that clearly expose your lack of knowledge. If you wish to express opinions about these things then you should at least be informed. Obviously, by your statements, you have no idea about what happened forty years ago and before.
Your statement that cradle Catholics had never heard of All Souls Day, or Novenas, just beggars belief. Who have you been talking to? The parish churches were packed on these days when we prayed for the saints in heaven on All Saints Day and for the souls in Purgatory on All Souls Day.
This particular thread does not do you any great honour as you have expressed opinions that are so far wide of the mark as to invite disbelief. I only hope that your political opinions are more soundly based. I think you need to to talk to someone urgently, and preferably over the age of 60.
I feel that my point is proved.
ReplyDeleteThere have always been people like you. But they were never normal. It's just that they used to be more integrated into ordinary parish life.
You are right about RE in schools, of course.
I am over the age of 60, and I can assure you that for most people liturgy before the Council meant the Low Mass and that was that. I remember people being asleep during Mass!
ReplyDeleteSome people went because they were afraid of Hell, some people went out of force of habit, some people went out of respectability, some people went to express membership of the Irish community, some people went out of profound devotion. Pre Vat II Man was presumably in the last category. Good for him, but an awful lot of people were not.
Across Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, using the OF celebrated reverently, the Church is going from strength to strength. The social and cultural trends that have led to the present collapse in Mass attendance would have happened without the Council and had already begun in the 1950s or earlier, although the parlous state of instruction in Catholic schools these days does not help. New schools and churches being built as late as that, Pre Vat II Man? Very few, if any. Before the War, yes. But everything was different before the War, was it not?
The seminaries were largely full of boys escaping from poverty, and we should be grateful that our community no longer suffers from that level of deprivation. The more cultured Catholic community of today would respond to celebrations of the EF in all its solemnity, but those could only ever be occasional in most places, and would be all the more valued for that.
All without the creationism, the Jacobite restorationism as a supposedly serious political option, the links to the French far right, the general angriness and everything else that so often accompanies the Old Rite. I remember people like that 50 years ago and they might think that they were normal Catholics in those days. But people politely crossed the road to avoid them then, just as people politely cross the road to avoid them now.
I wouldn't be so sure that that level of poverty was a thing of the past. But being ordained in order to escape it, while not the best motivation, is not the worst, either. A man who enters the seminary for that reason is likely to stick at it, before and after ordination. Nor can I see what is wrong with going to Mass out of fear of Hell. We most definitely must fear Hell.
ReplyDeleteIn 'Christendom Awake' (how sobering to think that that book is now a dozen years old), having set out the importance of the Old Rite as a permanent reference point, so long as it is celebrated in accordance with the manifest wishes of the Conciliar Fathers, Fr Aidan Nichols OP wrote:
"I hasten to add that this beneficial effect of old rite on new is only likely to be attained when the old is celebrated with that craft and care which, in the immediate past, one could find at abbeys like Ampleforth or at Westminster Cathedral, or today among the 'Catholiques de tradition' in France. Younger clerics so sunk in nostalgia as to admire even the slovenliness of Anglo-Hibernian celebration in pre-Conciliar times must be allowed to sink in what is truly a 'nostlagie de boue'!"
Quite. We are the true friends of the Extraordinary Form, who want to keep it Extraordinary in every sense.