Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, the Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship, has written the foreword to a book to be published in September by Roman Catholic Books, "True Development of the Liturgy" by Msgr. Nicola Giampietro.Catholic World news has a feature on the foreword and NLM has its own piece by Gregor Kollmorgen.
The Archbishop, who is second in charge of the Holy Father's curial dicastery for the Liturgy says:
Some practices which Sacrosanctum Concilium had never even contemplated were allowed into the Liturgy, like Mass versus populum, Holy Communion in the hand, altogether giving up on the Latin and Gregorian Chant in favor of the vernacular and songs and hymns without much space for God, and extension beyond any reasonable limits of the faculty to concelebrate at Holy Mass. There was also the gross misinterpretation of the principle of "active participation".He also encourages us to be
courageous in improving or changing that which was erroneously introduced and which appears to be incompatible with the true dignity of the Liturgy.Sometimes I am taken to task for saying too much on this blog about the Extraordinary Form and not enough about the newer form of the Mass and how it should be affected by the hermeneutic of continuity. Archbishop Ranjith shows us that the celebration of the newer form needs to be reassessed in the light of tradition, something that I try in a small way to further in my parish.
3 comments:
Frankly, I very rarely attend the novus ordo Mass. There are very few churches where it is celebrated in what I would call a Catholic manner.
All too often, in the novus ordo, the theology of the Sacrifice of the Mass seems totally to have been abandoned. The New Mass is served up in a form more closely resembling the Protestant service of Holy Communion than the Catholic Mass.
Many Catholics seem happy with this. I presume this is because they have no real knowledge of the meaning of the Mass, but think of it merely as a memorial of the Last Supper.
Their behaviour in church suggests to me a profound ignorance, or misunderstanding of, the Real Presence.
I have spoken at length with modern Catholics, and listened to what they had to say.
They seem to me to have little or no real knowledge of the Catholic faith, sin, redemption, the sacraments, and much,
much more.
There is a massive rupture between what they believe and what I believe.
We can't both be right.
One of us is wrong.
If it is me, then my parents,and grandparents,and great grandparents, reaching back through the generations into history, were wrong too. And so were their priests and bishops, and, yes, the Church itself, mired in medieval obscurantism and oblivious to the truth.
Unless, that is, Archbishop Ranjith is right, and there has indeed been a massive, disastrous, unCatholic interpretation which has produced not reform but revolution.
In that case, I would agree there is a very great deal which needs to be reassessed in the light of tradition.
Then people can once again learn the Truth.
Well, I hope Elena Curti is reading this! And all those who objected to you saying the EO in your parish, Fr.
The guiding hand of Pope Benedict can be seen behind all this and I'm sure the Liberals are aghast and thinking up some new assault.
I realise that I will sound unpopular for this but:
The reform of the reform is becoming like a movement to rearrange deckchairs on a titanic. The reason why the traditional rite has survived through the desert years of the 70s, 80s and up to now is because it is the mass of the future. The Novus Ordo was literally created out of thin air with no foundations, with a false ecumenical agenda on the part of Bugnini. How can you reform something that is inherently meant to be dumbed down Catholicism?
Granted that many people of good will have reservations about the old rite, prejudices will have to be abandoned as more and more priests begin to celebrate the old mass and realise what was taken away from them... and why saints were prepared to die than to celebrate something else.
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