When issuing Traditionis custodes, PF mumbled again his aged and spiteful mantras about Fulfilling the Mandates of Vatican II.
Having counted it on my fingers three times, I think I am right in saying that it is now 53 years since that tragic Advent Sunday when millions of Latin Catholics were robbed of their Rite.
PF now accuses traddies of being Indietrists ["Advance Backwards, chaps"].
Liturgical studies, and Liturgical enactments, have not been exactly non-existent during these 53 years. In particular, the formal revelation of a Roman Pontiff that the Old Rite has never been canonically abrogated is, surely, very significant.
Even if Arthur Roche, an enormously clever man, disagrees with poor old Ratzinger on this.
FIFTY THREE Years.
In calling on us (with menaces) to advance back to Vatican II, who exactly is the Indietrist?
FIFTY THREE YEARS!
16 comments:
On the Sundays I cannot get to a TLM I wind up in my former parish often at either a Folk Mass or Mass with Contemporary Choir. These are the fruits of the spirit of Vatican II. They are painful. The Folk Choir music is vintage 1974. I keep hoping 1000 years of Catholic music and all we ever get is Be Not Afraid and Eagles Wings.
1969 was indeed the year the earthquake happened.My Father sang in the choir for years before this.Palestrina Mass to guitars and rubbish songs in the space of two months or so.Steadily down hill since to Bergoglio now.God Help us.
It is 53 years since the NO was promulgated, but it was not immediately brought in to effect. That awaited an approved (as it turned out, pathetically inadequate) translation. In England&Wales the indult obtained by Cardinal Heenan meant that we were never totally deprived of that "Old Rite".
Query - did Mgr Gilbey always celebrate alone?
I would be remiss if I did not wish you a happy feast of the glorious Martyred Priests today. It is appropriate to remember that while the allegation is that Good Queen Mary is supposed to have killed under three hundred ‘protestants’ (in fact the number of conscientious biblicists who so identified can be counted on the fingers of one hand, the others were just those whom the good bishop Bonner could not persuade personally) the protestant regime killed in excess of 600 Catholic Christians.
One of the things that has disappointed about Vatican treatment of this country was the lack of canonizations before 1970 and then the failure, I would say abject failure, to place the English Martyrs in the universal calendar; I consider four feasts are required, 4 May, 9 July, today to remember all the martyred priests of England, and another day for the Religious Martyrs. These were Christians martyred for the faith by evil men.
I assume some kind of geopolitical considerations were in play.
Oh and I have just given up on Bergoglio, as I have on the house of Sleswick Holstein's London branch, I do not consume media that mentions these individuals. Life is enriched without them. Perhaps not everyone has that luxury.
Father,
Today, from an OP priest:
"One of our brothers, conversing with a bishop said that the scuttlebutt from on high is that there will be further, more general restrictions on the EF in all its forms next year."
Any other whispers heard on the foul wind? Anyone?
How my mind wanders…
In Indonesian the word Mantra usually means a Magic Spell. So talk of mumbling spells combined with mention of Going Backwards reminded me irresistibly of Milton's Comus:
Spirit: What, have you let the false enchanter scape?
O ye mistook, ye should have snatcht his wand
And bound him fast; without his rod revers't,
And backward mutters of dissevering power,
We cannot free the Lady that sits here
In stony fetters fixt and motionless.
And that in turn brought me to CS Lewis in The Great Divorce:
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, ‘with backwards mutterings of dissevering power’ – or else not.
-while we are discussing the topic "Is it ever right to Go Backwards?"
If I am to be an indietrist, as it appears I am to be, how would that be pronounced? It looks English but I suppose it's Italian. Or is it Argentinian Italian, if there is such a thing?
"Backward, turn backward, O time in your flight . . . ." Yup. That would be me.
Jon: I think it's possible. Consider this extract from the letter sent to the bishops along with TC.
Indications about how to proceed in your dioceses are chiefly dictated by two principles: on the one hand, to provide for the good of those who are rooted in the previous form of celebration and need to return in due time [Italian: e hanno bisogno di tempo: ‘need time to return’] to the Roman Rite promulgated by Saints Paul VI and John Paul II, and, on the other hand, to discontinue the erection of new personal parishes tied more to the desire and wishes of individual priests than to the real need of the “holy People of God.” (From the LMS website.)
It could be that the Holy Father has determined that two years is more than enough time for trads to learn to appreciate the depths and riches of the NO. I'll know by July next year if my theory is correct.
Get those priest-holes ready...
Oremus.
As for receiving the teachings of the Council, consider the following.
(1) In the preparations for the Synod on Synodality (which is laughably supposed to stop us from becoming self-referential), the powers that be in Rome have instructed the bishops to abdicate their role as teachers of the Faith (which, according to Lumen Gentium and a long tradition before it, they hold jure divino and not merely as delegates of the pope) and act merely as stenographers who will pass on uncritically whatever rubbish the process produces. One man, and one man alone, will then make the decisions. This is unexceptionable ultramontanism and Jesuit authoritarianism of a certain type, but it is most certainly not the ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium.
(2) In defending the appointment of lay people as heads of Vatican dicasteries, PF has adopted the pet theories of his favourite canonist and Jesuit authoritarian (albeit 'progressive' authoritarian) Cardinal Ghirlandaio. Ghirlandaio maintains that the power of government in the Church derives not from ordination but from canonical mission. Whatever else might be said about that, it is most definitely not the teaching of Lumen Gentium, in which the threefold munus comes from Holy Orders. According to Lumen Gentium, the bishops must exercise that munus in communion with the Roman pontiff, but they hold it jure divino and directly from Christ by virtue of their episcopal consecration.
The point of all that is this: who is now rejecting the teachings of the Council?
Note, by the way, that in Lumen Gentium and Dei Verbum the Council really did teach and was not merely 'pastoral'.
Psalm 37 BCP (36 Vulgate): "Fret not thyself because of the ungodly : neither be thou envious against the evil-doers. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass : and be withered even as the green herb."
This papacy will pass. B16's statement that the Vetus Ordo was never formally abrogated and can never be abrogated because a Bishop of Rome lacks the authority to abrogate it will be remembered, asserted and widely known. Destroy the Tridentine Use of the Latin Rite? Might as well throw stones at the Rock of Gibraltar in an effort to reduce it to sand!
Cardinal Roche and Bishop Bergoglio will be gone one day. We shall endure. We shall survive. Holy Mass will become holy again and the aberration and horror story of the last 53 years will become a footnote in the history of the Church. Perhaps PF will be condemned as an antipope.
PF may prove to be a crucial stimulus for the SSPX's congregations. Their impressive ordained numbers will need to rise further to cope with the post-TC inflow, so they they will need more chapel buildings and schools. Donations will not be wanting.
If PF (or his possibly like-minded successor) then tries to claim the SSPX are schismatic or even heretical, this time round I doubt the TLM-committed will be so easily brainwashed as so many were fifty years ago.
One can only wonder at Pope Benedict XVI's astonishing and still inexplicable resignation that has left the Church in this perilous condition.
pace E Sapelion, TLM Masses of the Heenan 1971 indult were few, widely scattered, scantily advertised, and generally scheduled so early in the day as to make attendance possible only for local residents.* When Cardinal Heenan died four years later, of his two successors Hume was uninterested and Murphy O'Connor actively hostile. Nobody should underestimate the courage a priest needs to counter the 'wishes' of his ordinary.
*I note that at least one large centrally situated London church in a thinly populated area has timorously reverted to this practice, cancelling a later TLM; another refuses to advertise its weekday TLM Masses.
@E Sapelion,
No, Mgr Gilbey did not celebrate always alone. Most weekdays, with the usual exception of Thursdays, he celebrated in St Wilfrid's Chapel at the London Oratory. On First Fridays, and the Thursday preceding them, he celebrated in the Sodality Chapel of the Jesuits and on the Sunday following a first Friday at his exquisite chapel near Henley on Thames. Memorable for having two sanctus candles and only one altar card. He, gently, reprimanded me when I queried the card and told me to read the rubrics and improve my Latin.
Isn't this post a tad like a Daily Mail headline?
If a hypothetical worshiper had attended an 'old' Mass on the Saturday before Advent Sunday 53 years ago in an avant garde parish, e.g. Mgr Crichton in Pershore, the Mass would have been facing the people (for over a decade in that particular parish), no Psalm 42 at the beginning, an experimental ferial lectionary, the vernacular throughout, one of the new Eucharistic prayers, the blessing ending the Mass and no last Gospel.
If the next day the hypothetical worshiper had attended Mass at Brompton it would have been facing the right way and all in Latin. Which was the more traditional?
The excellent thing about the present Modernist savagery (the precise term, in my opinion) is that at last the masks have come off: behind the cultish smile (often a smirk) of the "open-minded" and humanity-embracing prattle, there is and there has always been the iron-fisted, cruel, and fanatical totalitarian. Some of us have always known them for what they truly are.
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