www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Ideas to Achieve Vatican - Orthodox Reconciliation

The Kyrie is part of the Tridentine mass, existed in pre-Tridentine masses. In the Gelasian Sacramentary it was actually an "Eastern" style ektenia known as the Gelasian deprecation. That was shortened to be the Kyrie. Shortened already prior to the Schism. Before the Aachen liturgists of the late eighth century, the Roman mass had ektenias like the Byzantine, Milanese, Gallican, British and Mozarabic rites.

So, yes, Trent preserved the historical text of what some call "The Mass of St. Gregory the Great".

I don't think so. For example, the "Kyrie" in the Paul V Missal is a remnant of the time when the liturgy was served in Greek--prior to Pope Damasus--and a remnant of the time when the full Litany of the Saints was chanted at that part of the liturgy. This little tidbit comes from the Catholic encyclopedia I cited earlier.

We then go to parish practice and wonder if people would tolerate anything beyond an hour. Even Roman cardinals at the time of the Council thought not.

Bob[/quote]

Actually, Father, the Litany of Saints comes later. Litanies were devotions much like Orthodox Catholic Akathists/Salutations. They weren't part of the mass. The Litany of Saints is probably post Schism. What the Kyrie originated as in the early history of the "Mass of Saint Gregory" was the Gelasian Deprecation. Essentially an ektenia. The earlier Roman masses just had ektenias as we know them. The Gelasian Deprecation was later shortened to the Kyrie.

Now in Anglican practice, sometimes what they term "The Great Litany" is recited prior to the Eucharist.

The early Roman masses and then the Roman Canon did all have diptyches within the Canon commemorating lists of Saints and the Saint(s) commemorated on that day.

I don't want to argue this point any more. Let me give you something else to consider.

Pope Francis, for one, would probably argue against it and he's doing his best to make sure it doesn't happen. He has sidelined most of the conservative, traditionalist cardinals and bishops and promoted only those with his very relaxed, liberal viewpoint and praxis: including those in positions at the doctrinal congregation and those in charge of liturgical matters. He is indifferent to the Eastern Churches, willing to let them go their own way--which may be good if that means the Oriental Congregation goes away. He has recently stated that the liturgical reforms will not be reversed. He is indifferent, if not hostile, to the traditionalists and to the motu proprio of Pope Benedict XVI that allowed for greater use of the Pope St John XXIII liturgical books. He has indicated that the Church needs to be less rule oriented and more pastoral. He has the time to put his stamp on the Catholic Church moving forward and this stamp will not be in the direction you hope for or that "traditionalists" hope for.

I just don't see it.

I think that the current pope has serious challenges to his papacy and that he has a better than even chance of not leaving a legacy behind him. The appointments he has made can just as easily be unmade. He doesn't have a sustainable, liberal base: it dwindles away with each funeral, with each passing decade of post Christianity in the West.

The single most influential RC organ in North America is EWTN. It also owns the National Catholic Register. It is Broad Church - Traditionalist in orientation. Then there are also people like Scott Hahn and his work at Steunbenville University. Radio networks like Ave Maria. The lists goes on. They will outlive the current papacy and the liberals. Because the RC traditionalists are actually growing while the liberals are either apostatizing or marginalizing themselves and losing followers by attrition.

So I respectfully disagree with your position.

I don't see it either. Some scholar wrote a book on the future of the Catholic Church being Developing World. Much of the issues discussed in this thread are Developed World problems and perhaps the remedies suggested are appropriate to that section of the globe...I would draw the line where solutions to ecclesiastical problems are taken from the playbook of party politics.
To focus on Christ is the most important thing and the only way to be led out of this postmodern morass.

Pope Francis' indifference to liturgy (and to English in it, since he doesn't really speak English) have been good for traditional (Tridentine Mass) and conservative (high-church reform of the reform) Roman Catholics, and I'll add Eastern Catholics, because he's left us alone, leaving Pope Benedict XVI's reforms to the Roman Rite in place. I much prefer life in American Catholicism now to the 1980s or even the early 2000s.

Regarding the developing world and considering high churchmanship a First World luxury, Archbishop Lefebvre probably knew more about the developing world than most of us ever will, having been a missionary in western Africa for many years (he was the Archbishop of Dakar in Senegal); official churchmen still credit him with building the Catholic Church there.

Ritualism appeals to the developing world much more than mainline Protestant secularized worship and moral relativism: the growth of the Orthodox Catholic Church in Africa over the last 50+ years testifies to that. Liberalism is in retreat everywhere, except in the Western press and academia, places which have made idols of the late 1960s and 1970s. Believers in the world want authenticity, spirituality, piety, fidelity, not guitar masses, female priests, LGBTQ marriage, social crusader "saints" and legal abortions understood "as matters of personal conscience".

On Roman Catholic Traditionalism And Pope Francis

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/catholic-traditionalism-old-new

...Francis’s concrete perception of Catholicism today. He’s dealing with the SSPX in this way because he knows the degree to which traditionalism perhaps even more pronounced than that of the SSPX exists. ...

...Less than fifteen years separate the publication of two important books on Catholic traditionalism—Michael Cuneo’s The Smoke of Satan (1997) and Giovanni Miccoli’s La Chiesa dell’anticoncilio (published in Italian in 2011, in French in 2014), yet they each paint a different picture. Cuneo saw traditionalism in a limited number of well-identified streams: conservatism-traditionalism, anti-abortion culture, marianism, and apocalypticism. Miccoli portrays a widespread support of traditionalist causes in the hierarchy of Catholicism. ...

...It’s clear that the traditionalism that’s developed since the 1990s has arisen outside any organized, mass movement of conversion of schismatics. Francis knows that dealing with traditionalism now is less a matter of outreach to the SSPX than it is an issue to be handled internally. Ironically, the new, “home-grown” traditionalism has made the schism with the SSPX a less urgent issue. Today the SSPX of Bishop Bernard Fellay is not much more traditionalist than, for example, some Dominicans, Benedictines, Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, some diocesan seminaries or even Cardinal Burke—all of whom are in communion with the pope even if their view of Vatican II theology is not so different from Lefebvre’s in 1970. ...

...So what’s happened during these last two decades, and what are the differences between the old 1970s traditionalism of the SSPX and the new traditionalism? One of the big changes is that traditionalism is no longer confined to a small and well-identified ecclesial group that put itself outside the Catholic Church of Rome, but rather is spread through the Church and its structures (clergy, religious orders, media outlets, universities). Nor is the new traditionalism an expression of a 19th-century, anti-Enlightenment, French Catholic culture, but rather of a piece with (what remains of) the “culture wars” in the English-speaking world. In some cases it is now also associated with high-profile conversions to Catholicism in the West. ...

...Another difference is how this new traditionalism was able to find a home in the Catholic Church of Benedict XVI. John Paul II opened the door by creating some practical conditions for its return in the early 1980s (the 1984 indult to celebrate the pre-conciliar Mass, for example), though without conceding much in terms of theological reassessment of Vatican II in a traditionalist sense. But Benedict XVI went further. Just a few examples:

His December 2005 programmatic speech for a hermeneutic of Vatican II as “continuity and reform vs. discontinuity and rupture.” Originally, the speech had an anti-traditionalist intent (since the SSPX sees Vatican II as rupture), but it became a tool in the hands of Benedict-appointed bishops and curia officials pushing the traditionalist agenda.
His liberalization of the pre-Vatican II liturgy in July 2007, which invigorated—if not created—a neo-traditionalist liturgical movement that did not exist before with the strength it has today.
His decision to lift the excommunication of four bishops of the SSPX in January 2009, which signaled the unilateral willingness of the papacy to readmit the schismatic group that hosted the disturbing anti-Semitic views of one of Bishop Richard Williamson (who was expelled from SSPX in 2012).
These were not just accommodations made for the SSPX. They were also changes in the Church’s stance on the latest fifty years of Church history, changes that in the eyes of the traditionalists vindicated what they had been saying all along since the beginning of the post-Vatican II period. ...

...There were clearly also other factors. The rise of Catholic conservatism and traditionalism was also a reaction against globalization, and most of all a reaction to 9/11 and to the rise of radical and political Islam. Finally, there was the rise of digital communications: if you consider the impact of the printing press in cementing the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation in early modern Europe, you cannot overlook the impact of the blogosphere and internet for cementing and mainstreaming old and new Catholic traditionalism. ...

...in the United States, where during these last few decades an institutional “Vatican II revisionism,” pushed especially by the bishops, has been a subset of the culture wars.

Yes; your use of the word "ritualism" jogged my born-Episcopal memory. A reason Anglo-Catholic Anglican priests adopted the ceremonial and devotions of the Roman Catholic Church in their time, the 1800s, was not just that they had a parallel theology very close to us and even a true-church claim to rival ours, but because this appealed to the working classes in the neighborhoods in which they worked: "slum priests" in the East End (Cockney country) of London, for example.

Pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism is still a living tradition like the Byzantine Rite; the people from before the council had the chance to pass it down to younger people interested in it, showing them how to do right and not go off on crazy tangents.

It is true Anglo Catholicism was a working class movement in the UK, whose politics were definitely Labour oriented. There wasn't such a divide over social issues on the Left at the time - social conservatism was defended by Labour in opposition to the moral decadence of the exploitative upper classes. During this time in the US, the Democrat party was a very socially conservative party and that is why so many RCs today are registered Democrats. By legacy. In the developing world today, especially Africa, a similar phenomenon is witnessed: traditional morality, endorsement of doctrinal orthodoxy, respect for authentic ritual with a cold reception given to ad hoc, make it up as you go along liberal gimmickry. That is why Christianity in Africa has a more traditionalist character, be it of the Orthodox Catholic, Roman Catholic or Anglican variety.

In other words, Christian social democracy is concerned with authenticity in worship and put off by faux elitist, liberal, relativized contrivance specifically because working and struggling people are neither debased enough by liberalism nor do secularism and moral relativism offer them any other answer other than the hard life they have is all there is and will be. They don't have the luxury to complain about the mass eating up their free time or it being too old fashioned.

Liberals urge you to vote for a paternalist government to take care of you: corrupt liberals who end up exploiting you and keeping you in generational poverty. This paternalism holds poor people down who come to resent it, to reject its degenerate lack of morality. So struggling people end up wanting something more, something more authentic, which offers a spirituality of human liberation and achievement, whose worship creates a nexus between heaven and Earth and offers a transfigured and sanctified reality. A better life. That is true in a peasant hut in Africa or a tenement in Belfast or a working class home in Warsaw. As it was true for the British working class in London and immigrant auto workers in Detroit.

If anything, liberal decadence and whining along with all of the ridiculous gimmickries are First World problems while traditionalism is the natural outlook of traditional societies.

To 99% of RC, BC UC etc or Orthodox SITTING IN THE PEWS, the only difference between the Catholics and Orthodox is the issue with the ROMAN POPE being the HEAD (whatever that means to them) of a REUNIFIED CHURCH!
None of US know much about the THEOLOGICAL ISSUES that seem to separate our Churches.
Ask any RC or Orthodox what the FILIOQUE is and they won't even know what you are talking about!
As a layman I think that it was and is mostly a POLITICAL separation!
WHOSE GOING TO BE THE BOSS!

I can guarantee you that more Orthodox Catholics than not on the grassroots level are interested in reunion only when oneness of Faith and conciliarity can win out. Not a papal run Church: that's why talk of papal primacy is a waste of time and so overly premature as to be suspect. Not ecumenical gimmickry and/or a new form of unia.

Moreover, RC traditionalists have an idea of what they don't want liturgically, theologically, morally and where the Roman Catholic church needs to be fixed - they're 20 - 30% of the faithful, depending on the diocese.

Honestly, RussoRuthenian, the more I read your erudite rantings the more you sound like an ecclesiastical Steve Bannon. Besides being an Orthodox Catholic perhaps you could tell us just who you are.

I'll leave the ad hominem for liberals who are not confident or competent enough in their views to defend and present them: bigotry and invective is something I have no time for. I am thankfully not a liberal. I have substantiated my indictment of liberalism without going after persons: Obama, Clinton, Soros or otherwise. And my context here is ecclesiastical orientations in the Roman Catholic church and in the Orthodox Catholic Church. Let's stick to that or perhaps start another discussion about it?

So my personal life is not the issue here - although I appreciate the liberals' first response in being on the losing side of a discussion is to try to find personal information in the attempt to discredit their partners in dialogue. Frankly, that is a further indictment of liberalism, underscoring it can't make it in the marketplace of ideas without personal attacks. Its ideas are simply that indefensible. My only advice when such things come up is to emphasize respect for dialogue (And, moreover, the democratic, American, electoral process).

I am much more at home being associated with Steve Bannon than being associated with NARAL/PP, Human Rights Campaign, Antifa or BLM. I am a working class American. Working people with traditional values keep the USA strong and pay the bills. No one, liberal or conservative, gives us anything. Limousine liberals and establishment conservatives have made Americans poorer and leveraged the futures of American working families for agendas which don't represent the American middle class. Agendas which are hateful to it.

So I am with the American electoral and ecclesiastical majority who does not want a future of a morally bankrupt, liberal America, politically, socially and spiritually epitomized as the apogee of liberal policy, Detroit - with transexual priests, clown masses, gay marriage and third trimester abortions on demand.