Concelebration in the Roman Colleges (5)

A little more about Paragraph 57 (2) of Sacrosanctum Concilium.

"Salva tamen sit semper sit cuique sacerdoti facultas Missam singularem celebrandi ..."

[Abbott: "Nevertheless, each priest shall always retain his right to celebrate Mass individually ..."] 

I dealt last time with the Hermeneutical Miracle, the Circaean Touch in the iniquitous daraft Working Paper, whereby this Conciliar mandate is metamorphosed into meaning "A priest may only withdraw from concelebrating in order to serve the needs of the Laity". I want to emphasise this morning that the Suppressio veri and Suggestio falsi involved here are so shameless as, in effect, to constitute barefaced lies.


Vatican II is clearly preserving here a right which the clergy had before the Council. While permitting Concelebration, with the limitations made clear in Paragraph 57 (Maundy Thursday, Councils, Ordinations and abbatial Blessings, other occasions to which the Ordinary has explicitly consented), it is also preserving an existing right. As Canon 902 in turn puts it,

" ... integra tamen pro singulis libertate manente Eucharistiam individuali modo celebrandi ..."

["... for each and every priest, the freedom remains intact of celebrating the Eucharist in the individual way ..."]

Notice manente. The liberty remains. Notice integra. It remains intact. In other words, the pre-Conciliar freedom is not abrogated. It is preserved, it is set in stone.

Not even the dodgy group which put together this disgraceful Working Paper could go so far as to rewrite History and to claim that, before the Council, 'private Masses' were forbidden or discouraged. They were an integral part of universal priestly culture in the Latin Church. They were vigorously defended by Pius XII (Mediator Dei) in 1947, who explicitly condemned the very errors now resurrected by the draft Working Paper (I will quote him in my final piece).

And, less than two decades after the teaching of Pius XII, the Council, followed by the Novus Ordo Missal, and, a few years after that, the Conciliar Code of Canon Law, all carefully and unambiguously preserved his right to every priest of the Latin Churches. How decisive and repeated does the Magisterium of the Church have to be before the wayward and the heterodox take notice of it? Why are curial departments so cluttered up with the wayward and the heterodox?

But what the H**l: if one is part of a Vatican culture engaged on the exciting and far-reaching project of subverting the Sacrament (and Natural Institution) of Holy Matrimony, one is hardly going to draw the line at telling a few lies in order to put a stop to private masses and the Extraordinary Form.

To be concluded.