15 May 2021

Archbishop Vigano

 Readers will remember that I recently commended a collection of Archbishop Vigano's articles and interviews ... and so I will not, I hope, be criticised as being hostile to His Grace. The truth is quite the opposite. So I will dare to suggest that a passage in hs most recent interview is either not quite right; or is liable to misinterpretation.

"It is at least difficult to maintain that the Mystical Body can raise up liturgical prayer -- whicvh is an official, solemn, and public action -- with a double voice: this two-fold nature can signify duplicity ..."

If this means that two rites should not coexist, then it appears contrary to the millennia-old insistence of the Roman Church that a plurality of rites is in itself good. In my mail this morning I had a letter from an enthusiastic friend who had experienced an old Carmelite Triduum. And I have Dominican friends. And friends who are Catholics of Eastern Rites. And ... I won't need to remind His Grace of the Ambrosian Rite.

We need the spirit and the Methodology of S Pius V in his Quo primum. He insisted ... No! he mandated ... the retention of Latin Rites more than two centuries old. His edition was compulsory only for churches which had not preserved a form of the Roman Rite from before that time.

Why two centuries? Because that took S Pius back to well before the invention of printing: which had facilitated in the Western Church liturgical innovation, fiddling, and Clever Ideas (when every missal had to be handwritten, this was a powerful remora against liturgical jiggery pokery).

When the time is ripe, we shall need an edition of the Roman Rite which is traditional ... and which excludes the innovations which followed the election of Eugenio Pacelli.

What do I mean by 'traditional'? Let me reply by practical examples. The first printed edition of the Roman Missal (1474) is something that I could use today. I might have to gum in newer propers (or content myself with using the Communia) but the book would be usable. I have myself used a missal which belonged to to Bishop Challoner, VA. True, I was saying a requiem and I needed to use the Common Preface, since the (Neo-Gallican) Preface for the Departed was not inserted until Benedict XV did so. But the book was usable.

But nobody could say the Novus Ordo from a Missal of 1962. Nobody could celebrate the Old, Authentic Mass from a Novus Ordo Missal.

That is what 'rupture' means!

And so that's my rule of thumb. And I would claim that it is a practical expression of what 90% of the Fathers of Vatican II thought they were expressing when they talked about 'organic evolution'. 

Rites do develop and do respond to new cultures. They are not unchanging. In fact, the immediate successors of S Pius V did make modifications in his missal. 

What is wrong with the Novus Ordo is not that the Catholic Church (to plagiarise Archbishop Thomas Cranmer)  'now from hencefurth  ... shall haue but one use', but that the NO is a corrupted rite.

2 comments:

Ignatius, Cornwall said...

You say, Father, that the Novus Ordo Missae is a corrupted rite.
I maintain that it is a corrupt-ING rite.
Since it was forced on us it has proved to be a Protestantising and apostatising influence upon the Faithful, even taking into account the inestimably anti-Christian influence of the societies in which we live.
The first half of the twentieth century saw conversions at a "high", but right from its promulgation fifty years ago, the NO has contributed vastly to the ruin of conversions to the Holy Faith.
Previous European Catholic countries have become post-Catholic countries – some, even rather anti-Catholic. The Church in the US is in tatters it seems. The German Church is effectively already approaching schism!
Yes, there have been other major factors, some going way back before the NO Modernists. There were the "modernisers" and atheists in our western societies who obviously changed the educational influence away from Christianity, BUT why on earth did Paul VI and the other "Catholic" Modernists seek to replace the Tridentine Mass which was, as it were, working extremely well at the very time the Church was subject to growing attacks, to a trivialised form of the Mass? It was a serious rupture from Tradition, twisting the emphasis towards Communion rather than the Sacrifice of the Altar along with all those other unprayerful liturgical abuses, (Priests facing the people over table-altars, Communion standing and in the hand, et alia), AND in such UN-sacral, often inelegant, often mistranslated vernacular texts.
One must doubt the educational backgrounds of those responsible for them!!

John Patrick said...

"It is at least difficult to maintain that the Mystical Body can raise up liturgical prayer -- which is an official, solemn, and public action -- with a double voice: this two-fold nature can signify duplicity ..."

Perhaps he meant priests shouldn't concelebrate?