www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Pope's shift of emphasis to that of a local bishop?

Why not simply do as Taft suggested, and celebrate the Novus Ordo faithfully, according to its normative text and rubrics?

Becuase there's a multitude of things lacking in the new rite? (It waters down the theology of our prayers, it abolishes feasts, it destroys our ancient lectionary, it abolishes our pre-Lenten season, it minimizes the bodily actions by which we show reverence to God, one could go on) Why not just celebrate the Revised Divine Liturgy and get on with it?

I'll wager a week's pay you've never even seen it celebrated properly

How much do you make in a week? It'll be nice to have a boost to my budget.

They were completely absorbed by the experience, but obviously had no idea what was really happening, because the woman whispered to her husband, "It's so good to see the old Mass being celebrated again".

They do that at our parish too after he Novus Ordo. But we also have the 1962 rite.

So, stop bitching, stop wishing for the return of what is gone, and go forth to make better that which is.

Except that it's not gone. It's been around as long as I've been a Catholic. Franjkly, it's a bit insulting for you to assume that people aren't working hard to make better what is.

Taft's comment, "The Catholic West does not need to turn East" is ironic given the Byzantinization found in the Novus Ordo.

Apotheoun,
Could you please explain what kind of liturgical abuses you are referring to. I was trying to find it on the net but with little success: only something on a dramatized liturgy at a Eucharistic Conference celebrated by him (though that is not an abuse for certain).
Thanks!

You seem to have a lot invested when it comes to what type of worship prevails in the Roman Church. I really don't care whether Rome returns to the older rite or keeps its new one, but I do care about the fact that Cardinal Hummes has influence with the new pope, and that during the time he was head of the Church in São Paulo he allowed very strange liturgies to develop.

The answer to your query, Stuart, is simply that I am not a priest. Didn't you know?

Your second paragraph is both terrifying and delicious in the scope of it's arrogance and uselessness. Just for fun, let's examine it.

This thing (the Mythic "Novus Ordo celebrated properly") that you have managed to find in all of two locations on just as many continents, and suggest I have almost certainly never even seen, this is what you recommend to me? Slightly more common than unicorns, this is your solution?

I picture you, Stuart, getting off a plane in famine-stricken Ethiopia and saying "What the heck is wrong with you people? Eat! Eat!" and the jubilant Ethiopians carry you off in a sedan chair to your enthronement chanting "Gee, why didn't we think of that!?"

But Great Falls, Virginia can't be more than a few days drive from me, so, heck, if I leave Thursday evening, I can probably get a little sight seeing in before Mass on Sunday and still make it to work on Tuesday.

The trouble for humble laymen like me, limited by education and financial resources, not to mention time and space, is that we must choose from what we have to choose from. Even if some of us are not so sophisticated as you, to recognize the new Mass in Latin from the old, we are quite clever enough to know when we are starving, and what it is to be fed.

Your story of ignorant American tourists (told here at least once before) actually demonstrates the opposite of what you think it does, exceptions proving rules. That the Mass celebrated properly wasn't even recognizable to them speaks to the incredible difficulty experienced by ordinary Roman Catholics who only mean to cling to their faith in the face of clergy and hierarchy who, at best, refuse to help.

Oh Stuart! At the Oratory in Toronto, where I have been, they also celebrate the new Mass properly. I will send you a private message including the address where you can send me your week's wages.

I am glad to see one of our number come into some good fortune! (But sad to see another lose out on a week's earnings.)

I have to say that I basically agree with Stuart. The most compelling argument for the Tridentine Mass has basically always been the prevailingly sad misuse of the reformed liturgy in the RC church. (I think both of you seem to agree on that.) I don't really think that that is really all that much to have going for it.

Nothing substantive. I don't like the new Eucharistic prayer, nor do I care that much for the lectionary, but the rest is quite acceptable.


This is unrealistic hyperbole, and a misappreciation of what the Novus Ordo was meant to do--peeling back a host of medieval accretions and innovations in favor of the older and more authentic Latin Tradition. Of course, to appreciate that, one would have to know that Tradition, and not merely that selected 400 year period between the Council of Trent and Vatican II. In fact, the new calendar restores ancient liturgical cycles that were either superseded or submerged under a plethora of new feasts. Suppression of medieval Marian feasts in favor of the authentic Marian aspects of the Nativity-Epiphany Cycle. I don't particularly like the new Latin lectionary (too didactic), but that's just small beer, in my book. So, too are complaints about liturgical posture. Latin Churches have pews, for crying out loud. Your liturgical posture is conditioned by an innovation of the Protestant reformers?


The answer, therefore, is not to ask for the Tridentine rite, whose problems you seem unwilling to acknowledge, but insistence from the top-down and the bottom-up that the Novus Ordo be celebrated properly. The problem is, whether it's the Novus Ordo or the Tridentine, neither the laity nor the clergy of the Latin Church have, in general, a well developed liturgical consciousness. They don't see liturgy as something integral--indeed, central--to what the Church is and does, but mainly as a means of receiving grace through the Eucharist. It undoubtedly would have been better to spend a decade on reshaping the Latin liturgical consciousness rather than promulgating a new rite, but the toothpaste is out of the tube, and you can't put it back. So, the answer is to celebrate the Novus Ordo properly, so that it will reshape the liturgical consciousness of the people, and the people, having come to understand liturgy for what it is, will insist on its proper celebration.


I'm so lucky then that you caught me in the midst of a week off, instead of a month ago, when I was actually putting in something like 60 hours a week. As a self-employed consultant, no worked, no payee.

In that case, I'll settle for an Easter card, but not if you're planning on sending it according to the Gregorian calendar. I can't abide that kind of thing.

I'm enormously disappointed that you breezed over the Ethiopians. That was my favourite part.

It is not only the new Eucharistic prayers or the lectionary that are the problems. The new Offertory, among other elements, is also bad. The deepest problem, and the idea that won't seem to die until the last hippy has, is that liturgy itself is and should be made for the people of a place and time. Contemporary RC's don't see the Mass as a means of receiving grace. They see it as a means of building community, which is why it doesn't.

I'm surprised you wrote the "toothpaste is out" part. That is a poor justification for pursuing what is obviously a suicidal path. The worthwhile liturgical reforms you enumerate are not incompatible with the growing Latin Mass movement or the still-dropping attendance of the new Mass. In fact, there was only ever any interest in them when the old Mass was the norm.

JDC, I think there is a great deal more momentum behind the movement to reform the Norvus Ordo than you seem to credit. For my part, I find this far more hopeful than the movement to 'repristinate' the Church through the Latin Mass. Perhaps not all of its proponents think this way, but I don't think it's an unfair generalization.

Sadly I have seen absolutely no indication of a reform of the Novus Ordo going on - or that there is any momentum to even try and improve the celebration of the liturgy - in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Alas, because the Byzantine liturgy is offered only once a month in my area, I am stuck attending the most banal forms of the Roman Church's liturgy for 3/4 of the month.

I believe this reform is of the type that you wouldn't see without a new, younger priest, Apotheoun.

If the same priests have been staffing the RC churches near you for a decade or more, they may be of the old guard. They're never going to change, not really. Sure, they'll say the new translation, more or less. But as they age out and younger priests replace them, things generally do change, for the better, even if incrementally in some parishes.

Alexis

I've seen a well celebrated Novus Ordo, at St. James, in Vancouver, WA. They use a different book, too: Adoremus Hymnal

The efforts to improve the Novus Ordo; Adoremus, and the whole reform of the reform movement, are basically aimed at eliminating abuses, getting the whole exercise to look less goofy and more like the older form of Mass. This movement lacks the principles or intellectual thrust of the Liturgical Movement of the last century, and is basically a defensive movement doing damage control. In fact, the liturgical situation since Vatican II is an unmitigated disaster, but because that's a terribly uncomfortable thing to admit, and collides with popular conservative RC myths about the papacy always being occupied by super heroes (with the Holy Spirit as faithful sidekick) this effort has developed to pretend that there's a baby in that liturgical bathwater somewhere. It's a Stockholm syndrome thing. It's not that I object to putting lipstick on a pig, but I wonder why we would start with a pig if we haven't got to.

I do not believe we are starting with a pig. I prefer the Novus Ordo mass to the Latin Mass.

I think I understand what you are trying to say, but honestly, I don't think you really provide a good argument for calling it a pig in the first place. I can say that my own preference has very little to do with saving face for a 'super-hero' myth of the magisterium. I suppose I would say that in my case it comes from the same place as my sympathies for the Christian East--a sort of 'preference for' or 'deference to' or 'privileging of' the ancient church over the church's more recent history. I admit it is a generalization, but it is (so-far) true to my experience that the Latin Mass's greatest enthusiasts do not share this same priority and often exhibit an opposite one.

I am always a little baffled by the invocation of the baby-bathwater metaphor in this connection. We are talking about Christ after all. I will say from experience that he has shown up as promised to feed me in a great number of liturgies I would freely admit fit a pattern you are right to describe as banal, uninspiring, and even goofy. Like you, I wish my personal experience of the church's public prayer were more inspiring than it usually is. But unlike you (?), I suppose I see a simpler answer in a more inspiring mass, rather than in changing forms.