At Blackfen this evening, we had a Low Mass in the Classical Roman Rite to celebrate the feast of the Ascension. (I'll also be celebrating the Novus Ordo on Sunday for the same feast.) For two young lads in my parish, this was their first chance to serve the Mass after lots of practice with me - they did a great job. They need a little more practice with the responses at the foot of the altar but they managed to get through them and serve the whole Mass with great reverence and enthusiasm.We had a good congregation of families and individuals from the parish, people from the Deanery Pastoral Council, and the Latin Mass Society. I reflected on the beauty of being able to celebrate the traditional Mass as something for the parish and the deanery together with those who have stuck to it through difficult times.
The Curt Jester amusingly refers to today as the Feast of the Rant that today is not Ascension Thursday
Joanna Bogle points up the disunity that has been brought about by the decision to move the Ascension to Sunday.
Lacrymarum Valle has a report with photos on the High Mass today at the Birmingham Oratory. (Alleluia! Ascendit Deus in Iubilatione
Man with Black Hat has a good post Hail which festival day? proposing a fictitious "biblical scholarship" argument that Our Lord ascended to heaven 43 days after Easter and then saying
And if you believe all that, moving a Feast Day to a Sunday because we're all too damned lazy to go to Mass on a weekday (or a weeknight) makes about as much sense.I'm sure there are many more posts around the blogosphere exhibiting similar disaffection with this decision.
Here's a competition. Does anyone have a link to anything on the internet (excluding official Bishops' Conference websites) that actually welcomes moving the Ascension to Sunday?
23 comments:
Do you admit women serving the Mass? It is not a very traditional practice... And it is discussed as well... I am surprised.
We also had a Low Mass of yesterday's feast. One 13 year old who had never seen the Traditional Mass before commented afterwards:
"Well, I can understand entirely why the Pope wants to bring back this Mass - it's beautiful!". Out of the mouths of babes...
Fr Andrew Wadsworth,
Chaplain to Harrow School.
I was happy to be in Scotland, the Scottish Bishops haven't moved Ascension day to Sunday.
It is such a folly, by moving Holy days of Obligation to a Sunday they are merely reducing the number of Holy days. Really they should find and treat the root course of the poor attendance.
I had the priviledge of attending the Latin Mass yesterday evening with my wife and three of my children. I applaud the two young lads who served Mass, they really did very well indeed. It was wonderful to celebrate the Ascension of Our Blessed Lord specifically. My kids including my seventeen year old son were perfectly happy to attend an evening weekday Mass. Why the Bishops had to move ..... oh oh I can feel a rant brewing ..... take a deep breath.
Anyway, despite there being 'blue leaflets' available as one walked through the doors, explaining quite clearly that the responses are to be said by the servers only, a number in the congregation (too close to my left ear unfortunately) were adamant to show off their abilities with spoken Latin (not!) and would respond with the servers in what I can only describe as an 'incoherent babbling ramble'. Maybe they were 'speaking in tongues' who knows.
These were mostly elderly people, which surprised me, because I would have thought they should have known otherwise being familiar with the Latin Mass in their younger days.
Just goes to show I think how some forty years or so of Novus Ordo and having to participate verbally in the Mass is going to be difficult to shake off. More blue leaflets in LARGE TYPE please Fr Tim and perhaps just a few brief words on the subject in a future homily.
What on earth is a Low Mass Classical Rite? How does it differ from our Tridentine Mass last night? Sadly it's all very confusing. One parishioner this morning was at pains to explain to the Head of RE that it's not any different to the normal high Mass??
Oh it's good to be a Scot. I'm still amazed our bishops haven't moved it yet!
I feel really lucky--here it is Thursday. Full stop.
I don't get the reason ever for shifting weekday Feasts to the Weekend. It is a wonderful reason to, yes I dare say it, be forced to go to Church. It's all good for us... I mean, are the Bishops trying to make it easy for us? Oh, let's just stop going on Sundays then. Roll back from appeasement! ;-)
I said my piece on this four years ago.
I have not changed my views. In my personal prayer, Ascension is still on Thursday.
I have just spent 2 weeks in Ontario with the opportunity of attending the Traditional Latin Mass at the FSSP parish church in St Catherine's. It has been such a joy to assist at the Mass that I have been getting up at 6am every morning to drive 20km for the 7am Mass, which is attended by 25-30 people most mornings.
Last night was a Sung Mass for the Feast of the Ascension. It was just beautiful. It's actually quite heart-wrenching to leave and not have the opportunity to attend Mass in the old rite every day. Sigh...
Some time in the early 60s, as I recall – certainly not after Vatican II, - the Irish bishops dropped the Epiphany as a holyday of obligation and moved it to Sunday. I remember one of our priests, the late Fr Fergus O’Higgins, known to his fellow priests in Dublin as ‘Father Zealous’, expressing his bafflement during a homily at this change. However, the feast was changed back to its proper date a couple of years later.
In the early 90s a teacher at Dublin City University told me that there was a daily Mass there. Usually very few attended but on holydays he told me the large university chapel was packed. Nobody was forcing these young people to go to Mass. A few years later the Irish bishops dropped both Ascension Thursday and Corpus Christi as holydays.
Whit Monday used to be a bank holiday in Ireland but when the public holiday was changed to the first Monday in June there wasn’t, as far as I know, a murmur from the Irish bishops about this break from the great feast of Pentecost. (I was in the Philippines then and I may be doing the bishops an injustice). Some years later the weekly Sunday holiday was abolished for a huge section of the work force in Ireland. Now the Labour Party is promising that if they’re part of the next Irish government – there’s a general election on 24 May - they will introduce an extra holiday so that families, including grandparents, can get together on holiday weekends. But they’re not promising to restore Sunday, that used to be a family day for most, as a weekly holiday for the ordinary worker.
We started our Penteost Novena tonight. Now we have a problem. If the bishops were into the Pentecost Novenas they would have realised that this is probably why we had Ascension Thursday. We are supposed to be imitating the Apostles with Mary spending their time in prayer awaiting the coming of the Spirit. So with Ascension day still to come and only six days after before Pentecost the symbolism has gone. I think I will write to Rome pointing out this irregularity.
Anon - in my parish I inherited the custom of having girls serving at Mass. I have discussed before the difficulty involved in changing this but will perhaps do another post on the difficulties of restoring tradition in the average parish.
We only have boys or men serving when it is the traditional Roman rite.
oh my life i didn't know you had girls serving! With 8 daughters i'm permanently explaining how it's best left to the boys. i did a post on male altar servers a while back.
I have always been aware of girls serving in our church, I did not realise it was a problem. Maybe there were only boys when I was younger and I didn't notice? Could you just run past me why girls serveing is a bad thing? Please excuse my ignorance - I don't suppose youth is any excuse for it :-)
Originally, the servers at Mass were clerics, those who were preparing for Holy Orders. The boys who served in parishes were like mini clerics who wore a cassock and cotta to serve Mass. Serving Mass was often a help in a boy's vocation to the priesthood.
In 1994, the Congregation for Divine Worship said that girls were allowed to serve at the altar. This is a permission, not obligatory and parishes are allowed to restrict serving to the boys.
In practice that would be difficult in a parish where girls have been serving for some years because what tends to happen is that far more girls serve than boys and that itself tends to put boys off even more. Added to that, a priest does not want to hurt children who have been serving well and devoutly.
I would prefer if we could just have boys serving and if girls were able to take on other roles in the parish. In our parish it would be great if someone could set up a choir for the girls at 9am Mass, for example. In the meantime, I try to encourage more boys to serve. Having the Latin Mass helps in this because I can get boys to serve that.
Stung by last year's disgraceful decision I wrote to the bishops' conference and here is the response I got
Dear Mr xxxxxx
Thanks you for your recent correspondence regarding holydays of obligation.
The circumstances in England and Wales are such that increasing numbers of people cannot participate in the celebration of Mass on holydays of obligation that fall during the week, and are not public holidays. Others can participate only with great difficulty. Yet the importance of the holydays is such that it is most desirable that they be celebrated by the whole of the local Church.
It is the view of the bishops, and of the majority of those clergy and laity whom they have consulted, that this desire can only be realistically achieved when they are celebrated on Sunday.
Consequently with regard to the Solemnities of the Lord the bishops have availed of the option envisaged in Canon Law, and already adopted in many other lands, of celebrating on Sundays the feasts of the Epiphany, Ascension and Corpus Christi.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has noted that the decision to transfer these feasts provides “an opportunity for Catholics to deepen, through catechesis and celebration, their faith and understanding of these mysteries of the life of Christ.”
Do please pray that the clergy and lay faithful will take full advantage of this opportunity.
Yours sincerely
Fr Allen Morris
Secretary to the Department for Christian Life and Worship
Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales
39 Eccleston Square, London SW1V 1PL
i agree entirely with Fr Tim. i did a post on my blog on male altar servers a while back. Thankfully only boys serve at The Oratory. Even when i had 7 daughters i still didn't think it was acceptable for girls to serve. i think they look plain ridiculous. Also if my girls were on the altar i don't think a lot of young men would be concentrating on the Mass!
Fr. Tim,
Jackie has hit the nail on the head, or at least raised an “elephant in the living room” point which one rarely hears in relation to female altar servers.
Let’s be honest – teenage altar girls (how can I put this) “distract” the male contingent in the congregation, and I would humbly submit that they “distract” the men much more than a debonair male altar server “distracts” the women. What is more restful on the eye for the average man? An attractive teenage girl, or a middle-aged, balding priest with an expanding waistline? Oh – sorry, Fr. Tim, present company excepted, of course! :–)
There are many good reasons not to have altar girls (adherence to tradition, fostering of priestly vocations among boys, counteracting the female ordinationist agenda). But let’s not forget fallen human nature either.
For what it's worth, the Ascension was kept in Ireland on Sunday too. As a visitor, I don't know for how long.
In Poland the Ascension is not kept as a Holy Day of obligation either.
Here in Gibraltar we still celebrate the Ascension on Thursday AND the kids get the day off school!
Again, I'm getting contradictory inputs about the role of 'females' in the Catholic church. On the one hand it's not OK to serve at the alter, for a variety of reasons. On the other, it is OK to aspire to attain individual educational potential - e.g. train to be a Dr rather than a nurse. Isn't the latter a bit 'femenist'?
Anon - it's only "contradictory" if you work from the feminist categories that often shape this discussion. Catholics do not actually deny women the opportunity to become professionally qualified in a variety of fields.
Contrary to the feminist depiction of the question, the matter of altar servers has nothing to do with whether women can be doctors.
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