I don't blame the Council; there is nothing, as far as I am aware, in any of its documents to justify all the antisemitism which followed in the trail of the Council, and has received new emphasis in this corrupt pontificate..
The Council did not mandate the dreadful reduction in the amount of psalmody in the Divine Office. It did nothing to encourage the untraditional, unorganic revolution of inserting "New Testament Canticles" into the Vespers psalmody, thereby reducing its psalms from five to two! And the Council encouraged the community celebration of the Office ... yet how many Catholic Churches have Vespers on Saturday or Sunday evening? (God bless the Oratorians!) How many even of regularly practising Catholics have ever attended Vespers, with that moving offering of Incense in memory of ... no; I should have written in continuation of ... the Evening Offering in God's Temple? Sicut incensum in conspectu tuo ... It is as if there has been a concerted plot to rob Christian clergy and laity of our consciousness of our essentially and gloriously Judaic identity.
The Council ordered that the Faithful should be given a richer diet of Scripture; and it is true that, in years following, an Old Testament reading was tacked on to the Sunday Epistle and Gospel. But the price that had to be paid for this somewhat external and artificial alteration was the eviction of the more integrated and ancient structural elements which were lost during the process of 'reform'. The ecumenical twelve readings of the Easter Vigil had been reduced to a pitiful four (or fewer); the Pentecost Vigil, the Ember Days, the Lenten 'stational' weekday series of lections from the Hebrew Bible, all needed to disappear. The quiet, daily insistence of the Eucharistic celebrant, as he stood at the foot of the Altar, that he would, in a few moments, be going up to God's holy Hill of Sacrifice, treading in the footsteps of Abraham and Isaac and the Family from Nazareth and entering God's tabernacula ... was ruthlessly expunged.
The Council did not abolish the Roman Canon ... indeed, if the Conciliar movers and shakers had even hinted that this was the direction they were moving in, I bet enough of the Fathers would have risen in rebellion to prevent their plans. So, sixty years ago, every devout presbyter of the Latin Church, every morning, explicitly remembered and renewed and fulfilled the sacrifices of God's Righteous Boy Abel, and our Patriarch Abraham, and the High Priest Melchisedek; he offered the tamid lamb for God's People and looked for the Salvation which was to come from ... the East. Nowadays, only an eccentric minority of clergy ... left in no doubt that they are out of favour with the current spiteful regime ... take such words upon their lips. How many, indeed, of the clergy and laity out there in the 'Mainstream Church' are even aware that Holy Mass is a Sacrifice? How often does anyone remind them of it? How much awareness is there that the very heart of Man's commerce with the Divine, even before and outside the Mosaic dispensation, was and is and ever must be sacrificial?
Our great Anglican Benedictine mystagogue Dom Gregory Dix, who daily prayed the Canon of the Mass, memorably wrote of "that mighty and most necessary truth, the majestic tradition of the worshipping Church, the rich tradition of the liturgy unbroken since the Apostles, and beyond - beyond even Calvary and Sion and the Synagogues of Capernaum and Nazareth, back to the heights of Moriah and Sinai and the shadowy altar on Ararat - and beyond that again".
And now we are condescendingly informed that the Council is 'finally' being implemented ... by a pope who attacks the Torah, God's Holy Law! Who has spoken so insultingly about "the Torah with its quibbles [cavilli]". Indeed! Quibbles!! I will not repeat what I have written about such naive and offensive antisemitisms in my paper included in Luther and his Progeny, Angelico Press; I situated them in the context of the unbroken and deplorable tradition of Lutheran and Protestant antisemitism since the sixteenth century; which found its climax and full ritual expression in Nazism.
Traddiland is in many ways a strange country; persecution may indeed have driven us into eccentricity! Even me! But, at least, we have preserved, against all the odds, the basic DNA, the fundamentally Hebrew grammar, of the Christian Faith. Nobody, not even PF, will be able ever to take that boast from us.
Beautifully written, Father
ReplyDeleteI do not think Pope Francis in all his diabolical Pachamamian splendor would be able to grasp the truth you've written. He learned to be"hip to the now" in the eternally splendid 1960s. For him, it's always 1967. No ancient Hebrew worship, no ancient Catholic worship would ever suffice.
ReplyDeleteAbusus non tollit usum. As I recall, the Council (Vat II) in its constitution on the liturgy did ask for fewer psalms. I feel certain this was intended to reduce the psalmody of Matins rather than of Lauds and Vespers, although, of course, the rot had set in under Pius X, who removed pss 148-149-150 from Lauds. I would agree (if you are suggesting this) or suggest that the psalms of Lauds and Vespers should be on a weekly course.
ReplyDeleteWhether these changes are intended as antisemitic is perhaps stretching it a bit, especially since in other places you have spoken out in favour of the Septuagint and Vulgate textual traditions rather than the Hebrew.
However, the main drift of your criticism needs to be addressed. As with the reform of Mass in the wake of the Council, so too with the Prayer of the Church, the whole rationale needs to be re-examined.
That changes were desirable, and needed, was clear to the Council Fathers. Equally clear to us of today is that they have not been achieved yet.
Of course, a retreat into the various citadels of denial will not help.
However dire and ghastly the current situation is, one must engage.
Dear Father. It is a measure of the low level of faith that resulted in a non-protest against the revolutionaries destroying the Real Mass and substituting in its place the Lil' Licit Liturgy.
ReplyDeleteIf the ecumenical revolutionaries had changed The Muffin Man to this:
Do you know the Muffin Man
The Muffin Man
The Muffin Man
O, Do you know the Muffin Man who lives in Cabrini-Green
There would have been protests.
That's not how my Father and his Father and His Father sang that song; why are you changing the words?
But the Mass?
Pffffft, whatever, just so long as we fulfill our Sunday obligation.
I was born into a YUGE Irish-Algonquin family in Vermont and the members of my family who have nominally kept the faith always go to the Lil' Licit Liturgy Saturdays, To get it out of the way
To Unknown:
ReplyDeleteWhile I’m sure Fr. H can answer more ably than I can, I do know that the reason why Fr. H has counseled that the Septuagint is superior to the Masoretic (?) Jewish sources used in the Vulgate is that the Septuagent is the fuller and more faithful Jewish source from the late BCs and early ADs, and that the Masoretic texts were edited by the synagogue Pharisees in the early AD centuries, to eliminate references that point to Jesus as Messiah.
Thus, Fr. H was being “pro-Semitic,” not anti.
“How many even of regularly practising Catholics have ever attended Vespers…?”
ReplyDeleteGrowing up in Ireland in the 1940s and 50s I cannot recall ever hearing of Vespers in a parish church. We did have ‘devotions’ on Sunday evenings consisting of Rosary and Benediction, Adoration or the occasional Holy Hour. If we heard about Vespers, it would have been “something monks did…”
In Holland, and many other lands in Europe, before 1970, sung Mass with sung Vespers in parish churches on Sundays was the rule. All folkmissals from before 1970 have Sunday Vespers and Completorium.
ReplyDeleteTo the illuminating comments of GOR and Albertus above---these interesting remarks confirm what I have long observed from reading and extensive travel: in countries where Catholics have historically been a majority (Latin America, Italy, Ireland, and Spain especially), the Faith has long been taken for granted (hence, the anemic presence of the traditional movement in them and the more grotesque manifestations of Modernism, both theological and liturgical) and, concurrently, the liturgical life of the people has been scandalously neglected, outside devotional practices such as processions or novenas. France, Austria, and the Catholic areas of Germany being joyous exceptions (until recently). In countries where Catholicism had to struggle to survive the Protestant Revolt, both Faith and liturgy always seemed stronger, more orderly, and more fervent. Behold Holland: in the first half of the 20th century it was the European country that gave the Church the greatest number of foreign missionaries. Of course, all that has changed as the conciliar "aggiornamiento" has taken care that ALL the Catholic world (with the possible exception of Africa, and with the inculturation mania I am not even sure of that) is more or less equally gray, bland, fearful, lifeless, clownish, and ultimately ashamed of the Faith---all according to plan, no?
ReplyDelete