Fr H starts this brief post with a droll suggestion about role reversal, then proceeds to his main point, obviously a sore one with him, as it is for many orthodox liturgists...
Will the Bishop of Rome once again be
the only able-bodied bishop who will not
celebrate the Mass of the Lord's Supper
with his priests and the diocesan faithful
at his cathedral (in this case, St. John's Lateran)???
27 February 2015
Why don't people swap roles occasionally?
Fr Lombardi could go riding around in airliners making remarks to journalists; then the Holy Father could do the News Conferences explaining what the remarks had really meant.
This year's Vatican Liturgical Schedule doesn't include the Holy Father presiding at the Mass of the Last Supper. Is Cardinal Burke,
il Cardinale volante, still free to step into this breach? If, by then, the Swiss Guard has been abolished, he could bring his Knights of Malta to the Lateran to provide Security. Juventutem could waggle flabella [ostrich-plume fans] over the sedia gestatoria.
Except Burke can't because he is not the Bishop of Rome. But if the Bishop of Rome chooses to be elsewhere, could his Vicar-General in Rome not celebrate the Cathedral Mass instead?]
I wonder if the Bishop of Rome will be the only able-bodied Latin Rite diocesan bishop in the world not to celebrate the Mass of the Last Supper openly with his priests, deacons, and people?
There will of course be sound precedents galore from the much more flexible age of the Renaissance papacy ... it's praxis within the rather more rigid post-Vatican II dispensation that I'm curious about.
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[Fr. H is, of course, ironizing, as usual. I am sure he is well aware that as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio decided unilaterally, with regard to the Mass of the Lord's Supper - which commemorates both the institution of the Eucharist and of the priesthood - to reduce it, in effect, to focus on the footwashing ritual, imbuing it with a distorted symbolism. In which he ignores the rules set down in the post-Vatican II manual of rituals for the Paschal Triduum - the rites celebrated by the Church in the three days preceding Easter, starting on the eve of Good Friday - precisely with the Mass of the Lord's Supper - and ends with the Vespers of Resurrection Sunday). [One gets an idea of the considerable 'autonomy' this Pope would allow local bishops from all the liberties he took unilaterally as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. most notably, 'communion for everyone'. How anyone could have thought of him as fundamentally 'conservative and orthodox' considering his record in Buenos Aires would make an excellent study on the psychology of reality-denying perception !][colore]
I must hunt up Fr. Giovanni Scalese's very informative post in 2013 about the Triduum and why the liturgical manual specifies that
the diocesan bishop must hold the Mass of the Lord's Supper at his cathedral, in the presence of his priests and the diocesan faithful.
Maundy Thursday is not about Jesus demonstrating his humility to his apostles - they already knew that. The footwashing was a reminder that they must be 'clean' in carrying out their ministry, and yes, that their ministry is service above all. These are prerequisites/ corollaries to the priesthood which Jesus instituted that night and to the even greater institution that the Mass of the Lord's Supper commemorates - the Eucharist. henceforth to be celebrated by the priest in persona Christi.
Why then has Jorge Bergoglio chosen to 'downgrade' the Mass of the Lord's Supper to manifest his personal humility and his symbolic service to 'outcasts' and 'the least' in society? Why can he not celebrate this signally-important Mass in his Cathedral, washing the feet of priests as traditionally done, in keeping with Jesus's original gesture, then afterwards, hold a separate foot-washing ritual at the venue of his choice - a hospital, a jail, a hospice for terminal AIDS patients, a leprosarium, even in places where there is no consecrated chapel, a beggar's hovel in some shantytown - instead of co-opting the hardly unimportant Mass of the Lord's Supper for his own agenda?
Since he first did this as Pope in 2013, how many bishops around the world have thought it 'wise' to emulate his example?
The Mass of the Lord's Supper - or any Mass, for that matter - is not about the priest celebrating it, but one would not think that to observe how much store JMB has put into his footwashing 'fetish'. It is not, after all, called the Mass of the Footwashing.
And, in this Pontificate, is the Lateran Cathedral, seat of the Bishop of Rome, destined to be empty and dark on the evening of Maundy Thursday when its bishop chooses to celebrate the Mass of the Lord's Supper elsewhere? (Personally, I have very vivid memories of attending, from a sixth-row seat, the Mass of the Lord's Supper celebrated at the Lateran by St. John Paul II in 1984.)
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/03/2015 04:00]