When I was growing up in the years after the Council, I was taught that the New Rite had completely superseded the Old. The only people who attended the Tridentine Mass were hatchet-faced old men wearing berets and gabardine raincoats, who muttered darkly about Satan’s capture of the papacy. I had never been to the Old Mass and knew only two things about it: that it was said by the priest ‘with his back to the people’ — how rude! — and that most priests who celebrated it were followers of the rebel French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. These people were unaccountably ‘attached’ to the Tridentine Rite and its ‘fussy’ accretions — the prayers at the foot of the altar; the intricately choreographed bows, crossings and genuflections of the celebrant; the ‘blessed mutter’ of the Canon in a voice inaudible to the congregation. The New Mass, in contrast, was said by the priest facing the people, nearly always in English. It was for everyone. Including people who didn’t like it.
He concludes on a very serious note:
‘In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek,’ said St Paul. ‘Nor traditionalist nor liberal,’ adds Benedict. The Pope knows that the vast majority of Catholics wish to worship God in their own language — but he also knows that the communities that use the Missal of John XXIII are among the most dynamic in the universal Church. Summorum Pontificum tore down the liturgical veil separating the old from the new; now the social barriers must be removed. For that to happen, former traditionalists will have to stop thinking of themselves as a spiritual elite; and former liberals must turn their eyes towards the astonishing treasures that this greatest of modern Popes has reclaimed from the rubbish heap. As I said, this is an exciting time to be a Catholic.
True that.
Have you been to a trid-mass yet?
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah, man. I attended the Latin mass at St. Boniface in Pittsburgh for about 3 years. Then when I moved to Cleveland's west side I went to the now-defunct Latin Mass at St. Rose for 7,8 years. I sang in both choirs for a bit. We've occasionally gone over to Immaculate Conception for the Latin Mass on Cleveland's East Side. I've been to the big one in Chicago, St. John Cantius. I attended 2 in Rome for the 10th anniversary of EDA in 1998.
ReplyDeleteSuffice to say I'm pretty familiar with the agony and the ecstasy or the Latin Mass, as well as the good, the bad and the ugly of the traditional movement. What the Pope has done with the ordinary/extraordinary paradigm shift is absolutely brilliant. A lot of the trads wanted to see the TLM "split off" as another rite of the church and he did the opposite. So he spanked both "fringes" -- and I'm loving that, baby.