"Has it worked?" -
the question we dare not ask about
the Vatican-II liturgical reform
November 13, 2017
In this centenary year of the Soviet Revolution, it is worth reflecting that after 70 years, the Russian people actually asked the question, "Has it worked?" It is the question an efficient business asks regularly. I suspect parents in a healthy family ask that question. It should be the fundamental question of the spiritual life.
Fifty years after the implementation of the liturgical changes [Novus Ordo], it is the question the Church should be asking itself. Any business would have market-tested before a change of brand.
[But this was not done at all. The Novus Ordo was simply imposed on the universal Church overnight. I do not recall that there was even a brief transitional period allowed]. I suppose that
Summorum Pontificum was Benedict's way of doing this retrospectively.
[Not really. SP simply said that the Traditional Mass was never abrogated or outlawed, and that it remains a fully legitimate rite in the Roman Church. After all, it had been 'market-tested' for centuries, even if we only start from the Council of Trent - which recognized all Roman rite liturgies that had been in use for at least 200 years at the time of the Council.
Before the Roman Missal of 1570 resulting from the standardization of the liturgy by the Council of Trent, the Order of Mass in the Roman rite was less uniform, but by 1000 AD many sections of the Tridentine Mass were already established as part of the Mass, probably since the time of Pope Gregory I (590-604) who made a general revision of the Mass liturgy.]
Vatican II's liturgical reforms were introduced en masse everywhere and within a few years of the Council, unlike the gradually introduced liturgical reforms of Pius V that percolated gradually as old books were slowly replaced but even then, only where the Roman Rite was used, the Milanese, Lyonese, Bragans, Dominican, Carthusian, for example, continued using their own Rites, and
acted as a kind of quality control or reference point for the reformed Roman Rite. [How exactly? How many priests are even aware that there are other forms of the Roman Rite validated by the Council of Trent and mostly unaffected by the Novus Ordo?]
There are two areas where, 'Has it worked?' should be asked - the first is liturgical reform; the second is the modern use of the papal fiat (by Paul VI) that introduced them - it was an unprecedented use of papal power.
On the second question, Pope Francis is forcing most conservatives to ask about the modern use of papal power, "Has it worked?".
[More pertinently, "Does it work?", in the case of this pope's all-out exercise of it beyond the boundaries defined for the papacy by the First Vatican Council, as articulated most recently in a 1998 document from the CDF on 'The Primacy of the Successor of Peter':
"The Roman Pontiff - like all the faithful - is subject to the Word of God, to the Catholic faith, and is the guarantor of the Church's obedience; in this sense he is servus servorum Dei.
He does not make arbitrary decisions, but is spokesman for the will of the Lord, who speaks to man in the Scriptures lived and interpreted by Tradition; in other words, the episkope of the primacy has limits set by divine law and by the Church's divine, inviolable constitution found in Revelation.
The Successor of Peter is the rock which guarantees a rigorous fidelity to the Word of God against arbitrariness and conformism: hence the martyrological nature of his primacy."
[One doubts, of course, that Jorge Bergoglio ever bothered to read documents from the CDF when he was a bishop! Nor that he has taken seriously the entire existing body of literature since the 19th century about the limitations to the power and authority of a pope.]
I half think that it is a deliberate policy, a
reductio ad absurdum, that the Pope is raising with allies like Fr Spadaro and Dr Ivereigh and other cheerleaders. Are they cooperators who will heroically sacrifice their careers in a successive papacy?
Dare one suggest that Magnum Principium might actually be a return of the Church to local Rites and Usages that are mutually enriching? I suspect not but it is a possibility. [As MP is specifically concerned only with the translation of liturgical books, it is quite a leap to imagine that it would necessarily lead to 'a return to local Rites and Usages' which was exactly what the Tridentine liturgical standardization intended to avoid, except for those rites and usages that had been in use for at least 200 years by the time of the Tridentine reform.
First, let us ask whether in the 10 years since SP, there has been any mutual enrichment between the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms of the Roman Rite, as Benedict XVI envisioned. Any evidence to this effect is anecdotal and it is mostly one-sided - how some priests (perhaps many) have taken to celebrate the Novus Ordo by re-instilling in it the sense of the sacredness and mystery that infuses the traditional Mass (in other words, by celebrating it the way John Paul II and Benedict XVI did).]
The Ordinariate Rite after all seems to have this effect where it is celebrated. [But the Ordinariate Rite falls into the same category as other current but historical Roman rites such as the Ambrosian, the Dominican, the Mozarabic, etc. It is the Vatican-approved Catholic adaptation of the High Anglican Sunday liturgy (that most resembles the traditional Catholic Mass), and was approved for the ex-Anglicans who became Catholic under Anglicanorum coetibus. Since the Ordinariate Rite has much more in common with the EF than with the Novus Ordo, one wonders in what way it is affecting the Novus Ordo at all, other than the effect of the EF to help instill a sense of sacredness and mystery into the Novus Ordo.]
Apparently a large number of French Seminaries are closing, as are a whole lot of ancient monasteries, and practically every convent has become a retirement home. I am not sure what the number is this year, but last year, in our diocese we had only 3 seminarians. Whilst I was at the seminary we had in this city of Brighton and Hove almost 30 priests; in 17 years time by the year 2030 we will be lucky to have 2 under 65, they will age prematurely out of exhaustion.
The thing is that there isn't an absence of vocations. From my little parish we have three men, two preparing for the priesthood and one in a rather rigorous contemplative monastery but they were very much involved in the Old Rite and have gone to communities outside of the diocese.
It isn't even that there is an absence of contemplative religious - there are new convents opening in the Channel Islands and in the Diocese of Lancaster, but again the sisters will worship according to Old Rite. The only monastery flourishing, without scandal, in Italy (despite episcopal opposition) is Old Rite, at Norcia [the Benedictine monastery]. The same in France, where a quarter of this year's ordinations were of priests attached to the Old Rite, and where monastic life is generally declining, retracting but Old Rite monasteries like Fontgombault are actually making new foundations.
I am quite willing to accept that it is not necessarily the Rite itself responsible for this, but if it is not, then it is the theology that goes with the Rite, or the 'ecclesiological experience' that goes with it. On a practical level the Old Rite seems to work.
Why are we incapable of asking, "Has it worked?" about the Novus Ordo? Presumably because of the ideological attachment, rather like the politburo of the Soviet Union that did not allow itself to question any 'givens'.
What then is the answer to "Has it worked?" regarding the Novus Ordo? It certainly has worked in that it is by far the liturgy most celebrated in the universal Church. Alas! But if we consider the continuing decline in Sunday Massgoing since it was introduced, it certainly has not brought in more Catholics to Sunday Mass - for all its convenience, brevity, informality and openness to all kinds of 'creative' abuses of the liturgy in the futile attempt to make the Mass more 'entertaining' or having the congregation more 'involved'. Sunday Mass is hardly the place to go for anyone looking to be entertained, and for whom the idea of worshiping God is a no-starter to begin with.[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/11/2017 23:59]