Sacrosanctum Concilium [the Vatican II Decree dealing with the Liturgy], para 76, the only section which refers specifically to the rites of Ordination, mentions just two innovations which 'may' be allowed:
(1) The address by the Bishop at the beginning of each rite may be in the vernacular. My goodness! I am knocked for six, breathless and speechless! How one is swept back to the now-inconceivable realities of 1963 - quite another age! - when even such a tiny detail, such a minor permissive use of the vernacular ... just in a preliminary allocution ... was clearly considered to require a special and explicit mandate of an ecumenical council!!!!!! Little did the Council Fathers, it is apparent, realise what was in store for them once the Interferers had really got their bottoms into their saddles.
(2) At episcopal consecration, the imposition of hands may be done by all the bishops present. Again, one wonders whether the Council Fathers - remember that even Archbishop Lefebvre had no trouble at all signing this Decree - who were prepared for this careful and admirable reform of a rubrical detail to be permitted, realised that within a decade the entire ancient Roman Prayer for the Consecration of Bishops would have been consigned to the rubbish dump. (Bad Marini's book reveals nothing about the process of mangling the Pontifical except that a Bishop Guano had something to do with it. This has to be a joke. Just imagine saying the Eucharistic Prayer: " ... together with Paul our Pope and B*rdsh*t our Bishop ..." .)
If the Council Fathers had entertained the least inkling of the deluge which would in fact follow their deliberations ... Bugnini and his associates, like the Vikings of old, rampaging through the entire euchology of the Latin Church burning, raping, and murdering ... it is, surely, unlikely that so many of the bishops at Vatican II would have been prepared to vote into the hands of these self-confident pirates the following carte blanche: "Both the ceremonies and texts of the ordination rites are to be revised". Oh dear! When ever did so few pull so much wool over the eyes of so many?
Cardinal Ratzinger famously and magnificently criticised "the impression ... that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council". The tragedy is that in so many matters the 'reformers' went far, far beyond even an arguably implicit conciliar mandate. The totally unmandated provision of a shoal of alternative and committee-generated Eucharistic Prayers is, in my view, matched by the violence done to the Ordination Prayers of the Roman Church where - in the case of episcopal consecration - "to be revised" was, by a grotesque piece of lexicographical transubstantiation, treated as meaning "to be abolished and replaced"; so that the Prayer which was good enough to consecrate Gregory the Great and Hildebrand, Innocent III and Benedict XIV, Becket, Fisher, Pole, Challoner and Manning - and even Cranmer! - is deemed unfit for the purposes of the lordly 1970s.
Continues.
"Bishop Guano ... has to be a joke"
ReplyDeleteSatire is indeed impossible these days; Emiliano Guano was Bishop of Leghorn in Tuscany from 1962 to 1970.
www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bguano.html
But the odd thing is that his principal consecrator was Cardinal Siri, despite Leghorn being in the Archdiocese of Pisa, not Siri's Genua. The co-consecrators were Pietro Zuccarino of Bobbio (which later merged with Siri's Genua), and Pietro Massa of the foreign missions, then Bishop of Nanyang in China (shades of Betjeman's colonial bishops?).
Why would his consecrators be Siri, Siri's neighbour and a priest from the far overseas missions, rather than his own archbishop (the then archbishop of Pisa didn't retire for another eight years, so presumably wasn't too decrepit to do it) and other bishops of his archdiocese?
Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but to me it suggests that Guano was a Siri protege, which makes it odd that he should end up involved in liturgical vandalism.