i still say it's been down hill after the Church dropped Latin
Posted on 11/29/2009 2:55:43 PM PST by Steelfish
Latin Mass Appeal
By KENNETH J. WOLFE Published: November 28, 2009
WALKING into church 40 years ago on this first Sunday of Advent, many Roman Catholics might have wondered where they were. The priest not only spoke English rather than Latin, but he faced the congregation instead of the tabernacle; laymen took on duties previously reserved for priests; folk music filled the air. The great changes of Vatican II had hit home.
All this was a radical break from the traditional Latin Mass, codified in the 16th century at the Council of Trent. For centuries, that Mass served as a structured sacrifice with directives, called “rubrics,” that were not optional. This is how it is done, said the book. As recently as 1947, Pope Pius XII had issued an encyclical on liturgy that scoffed at modernization; he said that the idea of changes to the traditional Latin Mass “pained” him “grievously.”
Paradoxically, however, it was Pius himself who was largely responsible for the momentous changes of 1969. It was he who appointed the chief architect of the new Mass, Annibale Bugnini, to the Vatican’s liturgical commission in 1948.
Bugnini was born in 1912 and ordained a Vincentian priest in 1936. Though Bugnini had barely a decade of parish work, Pius XII made him secretary to the Commission for Liturgical Reform. In the 1950s, Bugnini led a major revision of the liturgies of Holy Week. As a result, on Good Friday of 1955, congregations for the first time joined the priest in reciting the Pater Noster, and the priest faced the congregation for some of the liturgy.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
i still say it's been down hill after the Church dropped Latin
Great post, that’s the best article I can remember reading the the NY Times for a very long time. Like so many other destructive people that priest ended his life in obscurity, but the damage was already done.
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Agreed, I love the Latin Mass
You are right! Last week a young woman with a child brought in a “big gulp” and was sipping on it throughout Mass while her little girl was whining and laying flat on the kneeler. Why do these people bother?
The New York Times? Am I reading right? The New York Times deserves the stopped-clock award today!
A couple of years ago I attended Mass for the first time in decades. I chose to go to the church where I had served as an altar boy, which is in a building that my father and I actually helped build in the early ‘60’s.
I’m not sure what I had hoped to find, perhaps a connection with the faith that so powerfully sustained me in my youth. I was not prepared for the Hippy-Dippy-Touchy-Feely Folk-Fest that I found. I haven’t been back.
We took the kids to Midnight Mass about ten years ago. It was very embarrassing. Haven't been back.
Deo gratias.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
30 yrs ago, my wife & I had to go thru a lengthy petition to get a Latin Mass at our wedding. We could only get a Latin translation of the fashionable Mass.
Neither have I.
I grew up serving as an altar boy. I learned Latin. I was in awe of the choir and the mighty pipe organ. I could go to any Catholic Church in the world and speak that Latin and aside from the sermon, I knew everything that was going on and understood it. There was a common bond that held us together. In unity, there was strength
Then came... DIVERSITY. There is no strength in diversity. There is no awe in a hootenanny. Vatican II was the beginning of a long, bad dream caused by liberals in the Church hierachy.
DAMN THE LIBERALS!
I grew up in the Catholic church, and remember as a child in grade school attending Mass every morning,and it was all in Latin. But so what? None of us kids understood Latin, we recited it all. "Et cum spritu tuo". We didn't understand what we were saying and singing.
I just don't believe God is impressed by a bunch of people chanting things they don't even understand. As scripture says, God is not the author of confusion, and confusion is saying things you don't even understand.
There are a lot of evil forces, a.k.a the Prince of This Word, at work against any Christian church regardless of what language they use.
“This World”, not “This Word”, I meant to say. Hate it when I do that.
Not only does modernity not offer spiritual satisfaction, but in its quest for utilitarianism, it suffers for want of both joy and beauty.
A person can visit the most glorious church in Boston, but they won’t find the joy and beauty of a small Indian village in Mexico, with a procession of happy, young barefoot girls wearing their white Sunday dresses, each with flowers in her hair, going to an old, adobe church.
The difference here is not wealth and poverty, as one might expect, but the choice of the people. In Boston, a church service is an orderly and efficient affair, closely timed so that busy people can get back to their busy lives. In Mexico, the church service lasts as long as needs be to both perform the ritual well, and to see to the needs of the congregation, including the well attended blessing of a burro and two chickens, after the regular service and other duties.
But that joy and beauty need not be forgotten in America, and if that sense is brought to America, it will again be loved and cherished.
I will long remember the return of the Latin Mass to Phoenix, the church needing extra fans for the heat, because it was so full, and many congregants invalid and shut-ins, who demanded to be taken to church so that they could once again see what had been so precious in their youth.
Both poor and wealthy, they came for the joy and the beauty.
that’s why there now is more of a choice .....
I must say, I have always wondered whether Bugnini was a servant of the Devil. He never went far enough to destroy the Mass, but he certainly went out of his way to do as much damage as he could get away with without getting caught until it was too late.
And then Donald Trautman and the ICEL took what he gave them and made it even worse in the English translation.
However, I attend Mass every Sunday, in a Catholic Church. It’s not what I would like, and I am in great sorrow at how much damage it has done and how many people it—and other abuses such as catechetical failures—have driven out of the Church.
Nevertheless, the Church is the Church, and the Mass is still valid. The Church still gives us the Sacraments.
This is not the first time that the Church has suffered from abuses and painful difficulties. During the Arian heresy, all but a few bishops fell away from orthodoxy, and it must have been painful and confusing for their flocks. But the answer is not to drop out. That is what Satan wants.
I agree that there are and have been many more negative forces at work in the Catholic church over the past 40 years, as there have been in every aspect of American society. That being said, I think that ritual and familiarity were important parts of what I experienced in the church. I was also caused to learn the meaning of the Latin which made up the Mass, my part as well as what the priest was saying.
I didn’t expect God to be impressed by what I said, but I felt that I was offering Him my best efforts.
Find a Church near you...http://www.fssp.org/en/presentation.htm
http://www.fssp.org/en/index.htm
http://www.fssp.org/en/coordonnees.htm (scroll down)
it's not hard, you simply follow it on the English side of the Ordinary... and it was more of aesthetic loss to the mass than the downfall of the Church. highmass sung in Latin was wonderful.
King David "Believed God,and it was accounted to him for righteousness", even though he was a dirtbag who sent his officer to the front lines to be killed, so that he could steal and boink his wife.
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