This is a post that is long overdue because confirmation of the 'rumor' about it came in late June as Prof. Di Mattei discloses in his post at the time.
I shall append to his post a series of items by Father Hunwicke in which he comments more expansively on the implications of yet another stealth move
by which the Bergoglio Vatican - or more properly, Bergoglio himself - is seeking to undermine Summorum Pontificum and the traditional Mass in general
without, as yet, a direct assault...
This pope seeks to impose concelebration of daily Mass
in the priestly colleges and seminaries of Rome
Which means depriving the priest of his right to celebrate his own private Mass
by Roberto de Mattei
Corrispondenza Romana
Translated by Francesca Romana for
June 28, 2017
There is this rumour going around in the Vatican. One of Pope Francis’S collaborators asked him if it were true that a commission had been set up “to re-interpret” Humanae Vitae and he responded “It is not a commission, it’s a study group”. This is not only a linguistic ploy to hide the truth, but a play on words which reveal how
the cult of contradiction is the essence of this pontificate.
Monsignor Gilfredo Marengo, coordinator of the 'study group' on HV, sums up this philosophy well when he says we need to avoid the “polemical game ' the pill - yes - the pill, - no', just like today’s 'Communion to the divorced - yes - Communion to the divorced – no'"
(Vatican Insider, March 23rd 2017).
We need this premise to present a new confidential document, also,the product of another 'study group'. It is the 'working paper' of the Congregation for the Clergy “On Concelebration in the Colleges and Seminaries of Rome”, which is circulating in an unofficial way in the Roman colleges and seminaries.
What emerges clearly from this text is that Pope Francis wants to impose Eucharistic Concelebration in the colleges and seminaries of Rome, de facto, if not in principle, affirming that: “the celebration in community must always be preferred to individual celebration".
The motive for this decision emerges from the document. Rome is not only the See of the Chair of Peter and the heart of Christendom, but it is also the place where priests and seminarians from all over the world meet to acquire that veneration towards the faith, the rites and traditions of the Church, which was once called “the Roman spirit”.
The sojourn in Rome, which helped to develop love for the Tradition of the Church, today offers the opportunity for a liturgical and doctrinal “re-education”, to those who want to “reform” the Church according to the directives of Pope Bergoglio. Life in the Roman colleges – affirms the “working paper” in fact: offers the occasion “of experiencing, at the same time, an intense period of permanent, integral formation”.
The document refers explicitly to a recent speech given to priests studying in Rome, wherein Pope Francis expressed the ecclesial importance of concelebration in the context of the communities of priest-students:
“It is an unending challenge to overcome individualism and experience diversity as a gift, seeking the unity of the priest, which is a sign of God’s presence in community life. The priest who doesn’t maintain unity, de facto, drives God away from the life of the community. He doesn’t give witness to the presence of God. He drives Him out. Thus, gathered in the Name of the Lord, especially when the Eucharist is celebrated, you manifest also sacramentally that He is the love of your heart.” (Discourse, April 1, 2017).
In the light of this Bergoglian teaching, the working paper by the Congregation for the Clergy, repeats that
“the concelebrated Mass is preferable to individual celebration” (the bold is in the original and also in the following citations).
“Therefore, Superiors are heartily recommended to encourage Concelebration, even several times a day, in the large priestly communities. Hence, several concelebrations can be anticipated in the various Colleges, so that the resident priests can participate according to their personal needs, carefully establishing [Masses] two or three times a day.”...
“In effect, everyday relations, shared on a daily basis for years in the same Roman College are an important experience in every priest’s vocational trajectory. By way of this mediation, in fact, fraternal bonds and communion are established among priests of different dioceses and nations which find a sacramental expression in Eucharistic concelebration.”...
“Certainly, leaving one’s own diocese and pastoral mission for quite a long time guarantees not only intellectual preparation, but above all, offers the opportunity, at the same time, to experience an intense period of enduring, integral formation. With this in mind, the community life in the priestly Colleges offers this modality of presbyterial fraternity, probably new in respect to that of the past.
“The College experience is an opportunity for fruitful celebration of the Eucharist on the part of the priests. Thus, the practice of daily Eucharistic Concelebration in Colleges can become an occasion for deepening the spiritual life of priests, with important fruits such as: the expression of communion among priests from different particular Churches, which is manifest especially when Bishops of different dioceses preside over the concelebration on their visits to Rome; the chance to listen to the homilies of other confreres; the carefully prepared celebration, even solemn, of the daily Eucharist, the deepening of Eucharistic devotion which every priest needs to cultivate, outside the celebration itself.”...
Among the practical norms indicated, we can read:
“It is to be recommended that priests can participate ordinarily in the Eucharistic Concelebration in the hours established by the College, always preferring community celebration to the individual one. In this sense, the Colleges with a large group of priests could establish the Eucharistic Concelebration in 2 or 3 different hours of the day, so that everyone may be allowed to participate according to their personal, academic or pastoral needs.”...
“If the resident priests in the College for particular circumstances cannot participate in the Concelebration during the hours established, they must always prefer to celebrate together in another more convenient hour.”
The violation of Canon 902, according to which priests
“may concelebrate the Eucharist; they are however, fully entitled to celebrate the Eucharist individually”, is obvious and repeated in two passages of the text, with the result that
The colleges that apply the working paper to the letter, will violate the current universal law. But beyond the juridical considerations, there are others of a theological and spiritual nature.
On March 5th 2012, on occasion of the presentation of Monsignor Guillaume Derville’s book,
Eucharistic Concelebration. From Symbol to Reality (Wilson & Lafleur, Montréal 2012), Cardinal Antonio Cañizares, the then Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, underlined the need for “moderating” concelebration, making the words of Benedict XVI his own:
“I join... in recommending the daily celebration of Mass, even when the faithful are not present. This recommendation is consistent with the objectively infinite value of every celebration of the Eucharist, and is motivated by the Mass's unique spiritual fruitfulness. If celebrated in a faith-filled and attentive way, Mass is formative in the deepest sense of the word, since it fosters the priest's configuration to Christ and strengthens him in his vocation.” (Apostolic Exhortation,Sacramentum caritatis, n. 80).
Catholic doctrine in fact, sees in Holy Mass the unbloody reenactment of the Sacrifice of the Cross. The multiplication of Masses renders greater glory to God and is an immense good for souls. Fr. Joseph de Sainte-Marie
[1931–1985, a professor and specialist in Carmelite spirituality at the Pontifical Theological Faculty ‘Teresianum’ in Rome, who published a 600-page volume entitled "The Holy Eucharist - The World's Salvation" in 1982, with the English edition translated from the French only in 2015] wrote:
“If every Mass has in itself the same infinite value, the dispositions of men to receive its fruits are always imperfect and, in this sense, limited. From here [comes] the importance of the number of celebrations of Masses in order to multiply the fruits of salvation.
Sustained by this elementary but sufficient theological reasoning, the redeeming fecundity of the multiplication of Masses is moreover proved by the liturgical practice of the Church and of the stance of the Magisterium. Of this fecundity, the Church – history teaches – has become progressively more aware over the course of the centuries, has promoted the practice of the multiplication of Masses and subsequently has encouraged it officially more and more.” (L’Eucharistie, salut du monde, Dominique Martin Morin, Paris 1982, pp. 457-458)).
For the neo-modernists, the Mass is reduced to an assembly: the more priests and faithful present, the more significant it is. Concelebration is a means for the Priest to lose slowly the awareness of who he is and what his mission is, which is exclusively the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice and the salvation of souls. The diminution of Masses, however -- as well as the right conception of the Mass -- is one of the main causes for today’s religious crisis.
Now even the Congregation for the Clergy, at the request of Pope Francis, is making its contribution to the demolition of the Catholic Faith.
Here are Father Hunwicke's reflections on this matter published on his blog between July 17-24.
On concelebration in the Roman colleges
17 July 2017
Readers will be familiar with the document described recently by Professor Roberto de Mattei on the Rorate Blog, designed to intimidate those who work in the Roman Colleges into concelebrating, rather than celebrating 'private' Masses.
Many, including of course the admirable and indefatigable
Archibloggopoios Fr Zed, have pointed out that this represents a direct and shameless attack on a right embodied in the direct enactment of an Ecumenical Council, in
Sacrosanctum Concilium of Vatican II.
This is a particularly unscrupulous example of the practice of citing Vatican II, or its Spirit, when it suits a writer; and of ignoring or misrepresenting its explicit mandates when they are inconvenient. But more about this in a later section of this series.
However, I do urge readers to take courage from
this offensive, intolerant, and thoroughly nasty draft Working Paper, because it proves that
They are worried. Indeed,
They have every reason to be anxious. Young priests, and Seminarians, are overwhelmingly either in favour of Tradition, or are at least tolerant of it. Increasingly, one hears those cheerful gusts of laughter as the younger clergy reflect on the certainty that
Age and our Beloved Sister Death will solve the problem of the bigotted generation currently in the ascendancy.
As our Holy Father Pope Emeritus Benedict enigmatically pointed out to Bergoglio's new cardinals, God wins in the end. Indeed he does. We may have another decade or two to work and suffer through, until the Cupich generation is itself called to its reward, but it can prudently be predicted that the End is now in sight, that the light can finally be discerned, even if only dimly, at the end of the tunnel.
We should also take heart from the sense of panic manifested in that other recent repressive proposal, that
Transitional Deacons, having worked in a parish, should need a positive votum from "the laity" before they proceed to the priesthood. This actually constitutes an attack upon the Sacrament of Holy Orders, because it implies that men who felt a call to priestood might be marooned in a diaconate to which they had never felt permanently called. Would their oath of Celibacy be dispensed?
Whoever dreamed up this piece of discrimination evidently believes that the Grace of the Holy Spirit for the Order of Deacon in the Church of God is a piece of rubbish that can easily and conveniently be dumped. Of course, saying this does not mean that one mistrusts the Laity.
It means that one has the sense to realise that, under the current ascendancy, a faction of the Laity will be used ... abused ... as a manipulative tool for keeping out of the priesthood many young men who believe in priesthood.
"My dear boy, I'm terribly sorry ... if it were just left to me ... but the Laity have spoken ... What did you say? How many of them? What percentage? Now really! Be reasonable! You can't expect us to conduct an actual vote, can you ...". Remember what happened at Maynooth [Ireland] last year when the 'formators' tried to chuck out almost an entire year because they didn't like their attitudes.
The last occasion on which I concelebrated a Novus Ordo Mass was a couple of years ago. A keen and hardworking young priest - not an Extraordinary Form type but what I think of as 'Wojtyla loyalist' - was hounded out of his parish by a lay faction. Blame me if you will, but I felt compelled, out of priestly solidarity, to go along and concelebrate with him his last Mass in his parish.
It does not take much imagination to guess what such factions would do if given the power currently being discussed. Remember the Irish diocese in which, four or five years ago, even the diocesan Bishop was himself bullied by such people into abandoning his proposal to introduce Permanent Deacons. It was felt that this would reinforce the Patriarchy of the clerical state. The ultimate ambition, of course, is to introduce women priests or, failing that, to ensure that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is replaced by lay-led communion services ... or worse ...
18 July
I do not know whence this proposal ultimately arises, but it seems to me to bear all the hallmarks of the current regime. We have come to recognise
the methodology of Bergoglian realpolitik: "Doctrine is not changed", and so a document like Amoris laetitia may even contain an explicit assertion of the indissolubilty of Marriage - several hundred pages apart from the deft little footnote, or the crafty ambiguity, by which this doctrine may in practice be set aside. Episcopal Conferences may not have been formally given the right to attack the Sacrament of Marriage, but nods, winks, and private letters single out those Conferences which Have Got the Message.
This is a culture in which Cardinal Sarah has not been sacked, but he is publicly humiliated and neutered by having his colleagues and staff sacked and replaced by Bergoglians ](I except from this generalisation Bishop Alan Hopes who, being a former Anglican, has sound and orthodox liturgical instincts).
So it is with the proposal that priests in the Roman Colleges should be bullied into forgoing their canonical right to celebrate individually the Holy Eucharist.
Summorum Pontificum is not set aside, but it is circumvented. Not that this document explicitly mentions
Summorum Pontificum, or indeed the Extraordinary Form. It is far too cunning to do that. But this is what it is all about.
Consider:
- Since Concelebration is permitted in the Novus Ordo, but (except at Ordinations) forbidden in the Classical Roman Mass, and since the readers are repeatedly told that the young men must be intimidated into prefering Concelebration,
what we have in this draft document is, in practical, political terms, a major initiative to prevent the use of the Extraordinary Form by "student priests".
Doubtless it is hoped that the provisions of this illiberal document will spread, particularly in places under the watchful eye of rigidly Bergoglianist bishops.
20 July 2017
Today: a couple of dogs that failed to bark in the night.
(1) Dog A is the CDW, still nominally under the direction of the disgraced not-sufficiently-Bergoglian Cardinal Sarah.
There is no evidence in the Working Paper which we are considering that the CDW was consulted. Yet the Working Paper is exclusively about a liturgical matter! Here we have
another example of Bergoglian method: the dodge of not entrusting something to an actually relevant dicastery.
There would, you see, be the terrible risk that they might not come up with the right answer. After all, the Holy Father told Sarah to change the rules concerning the Maundy Thursday pedilavium and Sarah did nothing until, a year later, Bergoglio kicked him. Sarah then did as he was told but made it public that he was acting under duress. Just so, Amoris laetitia was presented to the Press by the Graf von Schoenborn and not by the (then) Cardinal Prefect of the CDF. Far, far safer! Gerhard is so, so off message!
(2) Dog B is the Divine Office. True, the Working Paper we are currently considering is, according to its explicit heading, concerned with Concelebration.
But the closely connected question of the common recitation of the Divine Office cannot be irrelevant here. The Institutio Generalis de Liturgia Horarum makes clear (paragraphs 9 and 20) the great desirability of the common recitation of the Office. And it draws upon the same advice of Sacrosanctum Concilium which the Working Paper on Concelebration mentions. Why does the Congregatio pro clericis not allude to this?
I think the reasons for this deafening silence are practical and obvious. [n]Any attempt to force student clergy in Roman Colleges to celebrate (ex. gr.) Lauds, Vespers, and the Office of Readings and Compline in common would probably lead to a general insurrection. The Offices in the Liturgy of the Hours are short and the daily pensum could probably be got through by an individual, moving his lips silently, in less than a total of twenty minutes.
The Office need cause very little interruption to the working life of a priest or student. But if one had to stop what one was doing, go to chapel, and sing the texts, they would take up very much more time. I'm not denying that this might be a good thing ... I haven't forgotten the view of S Benedict that the the opus Dei should take priority over everything... I'm simply saying that the students, being only human, might not all embrace it with equal enthusiasm ... I mean, they would cut up rough.
So ... the drafters of the Working Paper decided to let that potentially irritable Sleeping Dog lie. After all, Who Cares?
Our priority, they mused, is to put a stop to this pernicious practice of all these disgraceful young priests getting out of bed early and slipping off before breakfast to access an altar on which to celebrate that Extraordinary Form which the current pope so dislikes; which encapsulates an entire attitude to Priesthood and to life which he fears and loaths.
21 July 2017
You will have been asking: does this Working Paper forget to mention the explicit words of
Sacrosanctum Concilium, of the liturgical books, and of the Code of Canon Law, which secure to a presbyter his right (
facultas) of celebrating a private (
singularis) Mass?
Not a bit of it. To be fair, it grasps that problem very firmly and with both hands. It quotes it, gives the references, and then this is what it says (the highlighting is in the original draft):
Il criterio fondamentale che giustifica la celebrazione individuale nello stesso giorno nel quale la Chiesa o la comunita propone la concelebrazione e quando il beneficio dei fedeli lo richieda o lo consigli. ((The fundamental criterion which justifies individual celebration on the same day on which the Church or the community proposes concelebration is when the benefit of the faithful requests or advises it.)
` Yes. I thought that would take your breath away. I really do not think it necessary for me to labour the nastiness of this ... and its cleverness in seeking to prevent young priests from saying their daily Mass. It completely perverts the plain and contextual meaning of the Council, the rubrics, and Canon Law.
Another anxiety: papal and curial documents like to build up a 'position' by citing previous documents, regarded as precedents. If the Congregation for Clergy gets away with this cheap dodge, there is every risk that their enactment will be littered around in the footnotes of future repressive documents until we are told that it has become the Church's settled position.
I will merely add that the Working Paper does
not deal with another right canonically secured to every presbyter of the Roman Rite: that of celebrating a private mass daily in the Extraordinary Form (vide the opening sections of
Summorum Pontificum). If the Working Paper had taken up this question, doubtless its conclusion would have been just as clever and equally nasty.
I have one more piece about this a nasty document put together by a nasty group in pursuance of a nasty plot. After that, my final piece on this subject will throw the windows wide open to the clean fresh air of the wholesome paradosis of our wonderful Western and Latin Christendom. It will contain extensive quotations from somebody whom I consider one of the great theologians of the last century, whom I knew and whose teachings greatly influenced my own vocation to the Sacred Priesthood. So hang on there: something good is on the way
23 July
A little more about Paragraph 57 (2) of Sacrosanctum Concilium.
"Salva tamen sit semper sit cuique sacerdoti facultas Missam singularem celebrandi ..." [ "Nevertheless, each priest shall always retain his right to celebrate Mass individually ..."]
I dealt last time with the Hermeneutical Miracle, the Circaean Touch in the iniquitousdraft Working Paper, whereby this Conciliar mandate is metamorphosed into meaning
"A priest may only withdraw from concelebrating in order to serve the needs of the Laity". I want to emphasise this morning that
the suppressio veri and suggestio falsi involved here are so shameless as, in effect, to constitute barefaced lies.
Vatican II is clearly preserving here a right which the clergy had before the Council. While permitting Concelebration, with the limitations made clear in Paragraph 57 (Maundy Thursday, Councils, Ordinations and abbatial Blessings, other occasions to which the Ordinary has explicitly consented), it is also preserving an existing right. As Canon 902 in turn puts it,
" ... integra tamen pro singulis libertate manente Eucharistiam individuali modo celebrandi ..." (... for each and every priest, the freedom remains intact of celebrating the Eucharist in the individual way ...")
Notice manente. The liberty remains. Notice integra. It remains intact. In other words, the pre-Conciliar freedom is not abrogated. It is preserved, it is set in stone.
Not even the dodgy group which put together this disgraceful Working Paper could go so far as to rewrite History and to claim that, before the Council, 'private Masses' were forbidden or discouraged. They were an integral part of universal priestly culture in the Latin Church. They were vigorously defended by Pius XII (
Mediator Dei) in 1947, who explicitly condemned the very errors now resurrected by the draft Working Paper (I will quote him in my final piece).
And, less than two decades after the teaching of Pius XII,
the Council, followed by the Novus Ordo Missal, and, a few years after that, the Conciliar Code of Canon Law, all carefully and unambiguously preserved his right to every priest of the Latin Churches. How decisive and repeated does the Magisterium of the Church have to be before the wayward and the heterodox take notice of it? Why are curial departments so cluttered up with the wayward and the heterodox?
But what the H**l:
If one is part of a Vatican culture engaged on the exciting and far-reaching project of subverting the Sacrament (and Natural Institution) of Holy Matrimony, one is hardly going to draw the line at telling a few lies in order to put a stop to private masses and the Extraordinary Form.
24 July 2017
The great Catholic Anglican theologian, Dr Eric Mascall, writing at the time when Concelebration was the new sexy –ation among trendy Western liturgists, put in a spirited defence of the practice of the Private Mass. I particularly commend to you its Catholic understanding of "Corporate", so very much more Pauline than the naively infantile understanding of the term which we find in the Roman draft Working Paper we have been considering.
Mascall, in truth, is simply unfolding the teaching of Pius XII in Mediator Dei
" ... this Sacrifice , always and everywhere, necessarily and of its very nature, has a public and social character. For he who offers it acts in the name both of Christ and of the faithful, of whom the divine Redeemer is the Head ...".
Macall wrote that "if you want to make anybody understand wherein the corporateness of the mass really consists", the best thing you can do is to take him into a church with lots of simultaneous private masses going on, and tell him that
"..the different priests saying their different masses at their different altars are doing not different things but the same thing, that they are all taking part in the one eternal Liturgy whose celebrant is Christ and that their priesthood is only a participation in his ...
The multiplication of masses emphasises the real unity of the mass and the true nature of the Church's corporate character as nothing else can ... what makes the mass one and corporate is not the fact that a lot of people are together at the same service, but the fact that it is the act of Christ in his body (corpus) the Church ...
Look at those men at their various altars all around the church, each of them apparently muttering away on his own and having nothing to do with the others. In fact, they are all of them doing the same thing - the same essentially, the same numerically - not just a lot of different things of the same kind, but the very same identical thing; each of them is taking his part as a priest in the one redemptive act which Christ, who died for our sins and rose again for our justification, perpetuates in the Church which is his Body through the sacrament of his body and blood'.
Professor Mascall's description fits the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Oxford, then a busy Anglican Catholic center but now sadly lapsed. It was there that, except when he was on the rota to celebrate in Christ Church Cathedral, he said his daily Mass, old style,
Introibo ad Altare Dei through to
Et Verbum caro factum est. Not infrequently, every altar in that church was occupied by a priest offering that same eternal sacrifice.
One thinks also of the Anglican Shrine Church at Walsingham, its twenty or so altars all abuzz with Sacrifice at the height of the pilgrimage season.
Come to think of it, that's probably why the lower basilica at Lourdes has an altar to each of the fifteen mysteries of the Holy Rosary. One can imagine palmy days when priests were queuing up on rotas to say their masses and (if there were a shortage of trained servers) making, each of them, the then customary arrangement with the priest just before him or the one just after, to serve his Mass in return for him serving yours.
This was the time of my adolescence
before the Council when churches which are now empty or even closed or demolished were full of busy-ness - alive and electric with sacramental and devotional life.
And, after the contempt into which the Private Mass fell in the decades after Vatican II, we should welcome with unconfined joy its increasing return to the main-stream repertoire of every-day Western Catholicism.
When there are laypeople needing a Mass, it is obviously the first duty of a priest to serve that need (and a desire to say an additional Mass solo would not be a sufficient reason for binating).
But we should remember that Vatican II did preserve inviolate the right of every priest to celebrate a Private Mass, with a couple of caveats (not during a concelebration within the same church; not on Maundy Thursday). And subsequent magisterial documents, including the Code of Canon Law, have repeated this right. And successive editions even of the Novus Ordo Missal have provided (and, most recently, substantially revised) the rite for celebrating the 'New Mass' privately.
According to one prominent Vaticanologist,
the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for Clergy [Beniamino Stella], from which emerged the draft Working Paper we have been considering, is the current pope's closest friend in the Curia. It seems strange that such an important and well-connected man, apparently, knows (or wishes to know) so little about the teaching and praxis of the Catholic Church.
God will, in Pope Benedict's words, win in the end, even if the boat, full of water, seems about to capsise!
2 August
It was because of rumours that the current papal regime might reverse
Summorum pontificum that I wrote my recent series on Concelebration in the Roman Colleges. I suppose I must learn that people don't read all one writes and commonly fail to grasp what one is really getting at.
I will put my opinions as simply as I can.
I do not think it is the Holy Father's style to do things in an unnecessarily and publicly confrontational way.
There are certainly gruesome individuals around like Andrea Grillo who do hope for SP to be eviscerated. This, they hope, would be achieved by eliminating the Subsidiarity according to which all presbyters can celebrate the EF without needing permissions.
But I do not think that the HF would just reverse SP, certainly not during the lifetime of his predecessor.
I think the current pope prefers to achieve his ends by more subtle and round-about means.
I suspect the draft Working Paper which I discussed at such length, of being an attempt by Pope Bergoglio or, more likely, his intimates such as the Prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, to destroy the priestly culture that SP fed into. That's much more his style.
Anyway, Benedict XVI, not the stupidest of men, got in first by making clear that it would be
ultra vires [beyond the authority] for any pope to attempt to extinguish the classical Roman Rite.
Remember also that it is historically the position of the SSPX that they did not ask for permission to celebrate the older Rite themselves in a private ghetto, but insisted, absolutely rightly, on this fundamental liberty, never lawfully abrogated, being confirmed to every presbyter of the Latin Churches.
Pace Bishop Williamson's mistrust of his former colleagues, I do not think the Society would renege upon such a highly important principle.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/08/2017 17:11]