3 April 2023

Rejoice, Rejoice! And would you prefer to be accompanied or to be escorted?

D'ye know, there are things to celebrate on April 3?

Today is the Anniversary of the Day when S Paul VI, in promulgating the Novus Ordo, forgot to abrogate the Authentic Form of the Roman Rite. An extremely important inaction of the Roman Pontiff; after all, this was the canonical basis of the canonical decision that the 1962 Missal was "Never abrogated". (Nor, indeed, was the even more authentic 1939 Use. Or Sarum ...)

O felix Immemoria, as we liturgical pedants tend to say.

Happy Day! Frabjous Day!! 3 April, 1969, when the Roman Pontiff forgot to Cancel two millennia of worship!!! If it weren't Holy Week, I'd advise readers to fetch up a bottle of Cava!

Strange, incidentally, that Arthur Roche is unaware that the 1962 Missal was "Never Abrogated" by Papa Montini. When those Liturgical Catechists, who have been promised to visit us to "accompany" us, start going on their rounds, perhaps the lacunose state of his Eminence's memory could be one of the subjects that they can spend some time on. It's the sort of topic that particularly interests very many of us.

Another little detail these erudite ladies will be able to explain concerns the Penitential Rite. Y'see, the 1969 Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum, by which the Holy Pontiff authorised the Forma Nimis Mutila et Valde Deterior, included the 'information' that the 'Penitential Rite' was among those elements which needed to be restored to the ancient norm of the Holy Fathers. Strange that Jungmann in his two heavy volumes provides no information about the existence of a ritus paenitentialis in the Patristic Period. Is it hiding in the deep dark archives of the DDW?

And I most especially long to be brought up to speed on the progress of the implementation of the Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia (of Good Pope John XXIII, in 1962) mandating the compulsory sacking of all seminary professors who can't teach in Latin. Is an Interim Report about this incredibly important matter perhaps now at last imminent?

Will it be valid and licit for us to pre-book a time-slot in which to be "accompanied" by a Liturgical Catechist? Will they have big expense accounts?

Would "Escorts" be a briefer and handier and more vernacularly accessible slang term for them?

6 comments:

Richard Ashton said...

The move to suppress the old Mass is heavy with legalistic jiggery pokery. That's how we know they are in the wrong. If their cause was just they would have no need for subterfuge.

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

Dear Father. I have posted in here reference to Wholly Water and for those interested I have reposted an examination of the topic by an expert.

The essence of the reason for the change is this -

The very “conceptual model” of sacramentality therefore shifts according to the way God’s relationship to the world is understood – in Rahner’s terms, from one “based on the implicit assumption that grace can be an unmerited gift of God only if it becomes present in a secular and sinful world to which it is mostly denied,” to one which “starts out from the assumption that the secular world from the outset is always encompassed and permeated with the grace of the divine self-communication”: “The
sacraments accordingly are not really to be understood as successive individual incursions of God into a secular world, but as ‘outbursts’ . . . of the innermost, ever present gracious endowment of the world with God himself into history. The material things of creation, as necessary components of the “liturgy of the world,” are by that very fact valuable. The value of material creation is in turn understood and acknowledged in sacramental celebrations, where these things are utilized for the purpose
of symbolizing this “primordial” liturgy.

This notion of the “liturgy of the world,” whether rightly or wrongly attributed to Rahner, could go a long way towards explaining why the current Order for Blessing Water Outside of Mass does not explicitly bless or exorcize the water, and moreover, why things (rather than people) generally are not blessed or exorcized in De benedictionibus. Although the notion is specifically invoked rather infrequently, the “liturgy of the world” could shed light on the general consensus articulated by many theologians writing on blessings in the post- Conciliar period: God’s creatures are blessed from their creation; liturgical blessings are opportunities to praise and thank God for this, and, from the pastoral
perspective, to edify those present by recalling it.


Good Lord, this is insane and changes based upon this type of revolutionary theology were justified by the 60s Synod.

Talk about a revolution.

This information used to be easily accessible online but it is a bit more difficult to get to now so I just copied and pasted the entirety of the original post.

http://nesceinet.blogspot.com/2023/04/wholly-water-thanks-60s-synod.html

OreamnosAmericanus said...

From a man in the pew viewpoint, the Penitential Rite was the part of the Novus Ordo that I disliked the most. Even more than all the silly handshaking.

It reminded me of what it's like to sail along in the airport on a moving sidewalk and sudden land back on ordinary ground. Lurch.

"Let us call to mind our sins." That is, "Let us stop what we are doing and each become faux-introspective for 12 seconds, or just wind up staring at someone's shoes."

It is useless and counter-directional, messing up the ritual flow.

Bill Murphy said...

I heard a story that at least one British seminary took Veterum Sapientia seriously and made heroic attempts to teach the sacred sciences using Latin. After a year or so they abandoned the effort (The first vernacular Mass was introduced at Advent 1964). Can anyone confirm this story? Specialists in Rome went so far as to draw up a detailed syllabus designed to get students from novice learners to fluent Latin readers in seven years.

Father K said...

I know that the seminaries in Sydney, Australia (St Columba's at Springwood and St Patrick's at Manly) taught philosophy and theology in Latin. I have the philosophy text books that were used then. A funny and true story: one of the lecturers at Manly, Fr Thomas Muldoon, (who was consecrated bishop in May 1960 by Pope John XXIII; and one of the co-consecrators was none other than Fulton J Sheen)) was nicknamed 'Bull Muldoon'. In one lecture he said 'Sanctus Augustinus...nescit, Sanctus Thomas de Aquino...nescit...' to which a student called out, 'sed Bull scit.' Famous anecdote. Nice.

Fr PJM said...



Dear Father, Blogmaster and Moderator,
Speaking of legal jiggery and pokery, maybe you could explore the *false*, fabricated
English translations of Missale romanum, that made a sentence about concluding
the argument into an attempt to make the whole thing legally binding, when the
Latin said *no such thing*.

Fr Paul McDonald