Pope Angers Jews, Liberals With Rite

VATICAN CITY (July 7) - Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday removed restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass, reviving a rite that was all but swept away by the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

The decision, a victory for traditional, conservative Roman Catholics, came over the objections of liberal-minded Catholics and angered Jews because the Tridentine Mass contains a prayer for their conversion.

Benedict, who stressed that he was not negating Vatican II, issued a document authorizing parish priests to celebrate the Tridentine rite if a "stable group of faithful" requests it. Currently, the local bishop must approve such requests - an obstacle that supporters of the rite say has greatly limited its availability.

"What earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us, too," Benedict wrote.

The document upset Jews, since the Tridentine rite contains a prayer on Good Friday of Easter Week calling for their conversion. The Anti-Defamation League called the move a "body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations," the Jewish news agency JTA reported.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center urged Benedict to publicly point out that such phrases "are now entirely contrary to the teaching of the church."

In reviving the rite, Benedict was reaching out to the followers of an excommunicated ultratraditionalist, the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who split with the Vatican over Vatican II, particularly the introduction of the New Mass celebrated in the vernacular.

The Vatican excommunicated Lefebvre in 1988 after he consecrated four bishops without Rome's consent. The bishops were excommunicated as well.

Benedict has been eager to reconcile with Lefebvre's group, the Society of St. Pius X, which has demanded freer use of the old Mass as a precondition for normalizing relations. The other precondition is the removal of the excommunication decrees. The Vatican did not address the excommunication issue Saturday and there was no indication if or when it would.

The current head of the society, Bishop Bernard Fellay, welcomed Benedict's document in a statement. He said he hoped "that the favorable climate established by the new dispositions of the Holy See" would eventually allow other doctrinal disputes that emerged from Vatican II to be discussed, including ecumenism, religious liberty and the sharing of power with bishops.

The old rite differs significantly from the New Mass. In addition to the Latin, the prayers and readings are different, and the priest faces the altar, to be seen as leading the faithful in prayer.

Benedict, a conservative theologian, has made no secret of his affinity for the Tridentine rite and has long said the faithful should have greater access to it. But more liberal Catholics have suggested that in liberalizing the use of the rite, Benedict was sending a strong message that Vatican II was not the "break from the past" that some view it as being.

In addition to Jewish concerns, bishops in France and liberal-minded clergy and faithful elsewhere expressed concerns that allowing freer use of the Tridentine liturgy would imply a negation of Vatican II and create divisions in parishes since two different liturgies would be celebrated.

Benedict said those fears were "unfounded" in a letter to bishops accompanying the Latin text.

He said the New Mass remained the "normal" form of Mass while the Tridentine version was an "extraordinary" one that would probably only be sought by a few Catholics.

The document "doesn't impose any return to the past, it doesn't mean any weakening of the authority of the council nor the authority and responsibility of bishops," Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said.

However, Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, the head of the French bishops' conference, warned that the move will create divisions. "There will be resistance from both sides," he told Le Monde.

The liberal lay church group We Are Church said that the move represented a step back from Vatican II and could set an even more conservative direction for the church. It warned of a "new split within many parishes, diocese and finally the entire Roman Catholic Church."

"It is to be feared that while it appears to only be about the old Mass, in reality it is an attempt to set the Catholic Church on a new old course," the group said.

Ricard, speaking on France-Info radio Saturday, said the move does not mean the entire church is becoming more fundamentalist. "Just because you have in a family a cousin who is a bit different, whom you tolerate and accept, doesn't mean that the whole family adopts his positions or his way of life," he said.

The document was welcomed by traditional Catholics who remained in good standing with Rome but simply preferred the Tridentine liturgy and have long complained that bishops had been stingy in allowing it, said Michael Dunnigan, chairman of Una Voce America, the largest lay organization in the United States dedicated to promoting wider access to the traditional Mass.

"The traditional Mass is a true a gem of the church's heritage, and the Holy Father has taken the most important step toward making it available to many more of the faithful," he said.

Furthermore, Rome was not the actual ruler of most of the Christians even in the Empire. It was no accident that nearly all the bishops who attended the First Council, the one called by Constantine, were from Eastern cities. Christians were a decided minority in the Western Empire. The same was true of the Jews. Despite the age and prestige of th Roman Church, the pope of Rome played a modest role in the course of events following Constantine’s decision to make Christianity the official religion.

What an interesting bit of analysis. Do you have any sources you care to share? I mean the facts are clear, and this is the history I know, but I never got this bit.. like this.

The thing that seems to be always left out of the history of this time is the War between Rome and Persia (Parthia). The 114 Revolt and perhaps the Bar Kochba revolt seem to have to been amongst other things, skirmishes that stopped the Romans from their goal of conquering and holding all of Parthia and thus enslaving the Greater Jewish community that this and prior Persian and Babylonian Empires had sheltered ever since the fall of the First Temple.

I think, when you talk about 1 year to convert to a mainline denomination, you are talking about eligibility for Membership more than about acceptance of the conversion. I bet that a one day converso can pretty much access all of the rites and benefits of even the most stodgy Christian community. Burial, Communion and even after a short period (longer than a day but less than a year) marriage in the Church all seem to be front loaded. Perhaps I am wrong.

As for Converting to Judiasm, well good luck. There seems to always be someone who will claim you aren't Jewish enough if you weren't born Jewish.

Recently there has been a squabble between the Orthodox that effectively invalidated all of the conversions performed by American Orthodox Rabbi's. And, of course this causes convulsions. But, some think this is appropriate. Personally, I see this as a sign of folks who have lost their way and they I am sure, believe I have lost mine. Yet, we still keep plugging away at it.

Good grief. Everyone sit down, take a deep breath and relax. Unless I misread the article, the so-called “conversion prayer” is only said on Good Friday and/or at one (1) Mass per year.

You would think freepers would know better than to trust the news media. You are correct we all need to relax about this issue. First the Litany of Prayers is not in a Mass per say as there are no Masses on Good Friday. The Litany for the conversion of all of those outside the Roman Catholic Church is still a part of the Novus Ordo Liturgy and may be prayed on Good Friday as a part of the Tre Ore services, Communion may also be distributed but no Mass is Celebrated. There may also be veneration of the Cross and a recitation of or sung Passion.

The complaint seems to have either transformed in the past few weeks or taken on another form. The first complain I heard was the use of the word perfidious in from of Jew, well that word was removed from the Litany in 1960 as several Freepers have already posted. The Second complaint seems to center around the audacity of Catholics to pray for the conversion of Jews. Well, too bad for those who fear this prayer.

I'll bet you have specific fantasies to back up your general libel of my Church. Do not ascribe individual anti-Semitism to some general Church policy unless you can back it up with specifics.

For my bona fides in regard to Jews, Judaism, Israel, I refer you to Nachum, Chicago Hebrew and S. Jackson for starters. More references available on request.

When you post what you have posted, you cause the less sophisticated Catholics and some schismatics to return your serve with their volley.

If your point is that some who were baptized Catholic unjustly sinned against Jews, fine. No Catholic ever denied that each and every human, including each and every Catholic, is a fallen human being, tainted by original sin and attainted by a tendency to actual sins.

BTW, Christ was crucified at some time between 29 and 33 AD (or CE if you prefer). We've not been around as a Church for two millenia. If we had been, you would be accusing the Roman Catholic Church of being devoted to exterminating the Jewish people throughout its history. Can you understand that such an accusation is as offensive was the old blood libel that has caused such suffering among Jews.

Just as reasonable Catholics refuse to blame all Jews for Christ's death and would limit that accusation to Annas and Caiphas and the little mob demanding His death, just as them innocent Jewish families preparing for Passover Seder all over Jerusalem that day had no guilt whatsoever for His death much less do other Jews of other time and places. No one in that mob is still alive. No Jew of our times can possibly be morally responsible for the crucifixion in any way not shared with every sinful Catholic (which is to say every Catholic).

Either Annas or Caiphas, told by Pontius Pilate that he found no guilt in Christ, replied: "Let His blood be upon us and upon our children." So, who authorized Annas or Caiphas to shift a share of the blame to the innocent? No one. If the reference on Good Friday services to "perfidious Jews" meant all Jews, it would be redundant. In the same way, there are perfidious Christians of all sorts including perfidious Catholics.

In any event, the Simon Wiesenthal Center for pushing liberal agendas in the name of Holocaust victims has time to attack the pope for his decisions as to Catholic worship practices, it has too much time on its hands.

To sum up: Catholics have certainly sinned against Jews but the extermination of the Jewish people is not a Catholic agenda. When Jews accuse the Roman Catholic Church of such an agenda, they sin against us.

We regard Jews as our elder brothers and sisters in faith. Our faiths are not identical. God did make a covenant with Abraham that was not limited in time. Although we Catholics believe in a new covenant, Jesus Himself said: I come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. To me at least, that suggests that the old covenant of Abraham is still in force and that there is a new covenant available to Gentles. If you do not believe in that new covenant, that is understandable but it is a monstrous distortion to suggest that Catholicism promoter genocide against Jews.

Hitler, BTW, may have been baptized and may have been an altar boy in his youth but, in adulthood (if that is the right term) he was no more Catholic by belief or practice than was Margaret Sanger (who was baptized at White Plains), or any number of other monsters. Are there not Jews who have persecuted their own? We have analogous types whom we excommunicate by canon law or more publicly.

Finally, we Catholics would have to be completely schizophrenic to be antiSemitic since we worship Jesus of Nazareth (certainly a Jew by descent from his mother) as God and venerate his Jewish mother as the only other sinless human in the history of the human race to reach the age of reason. That does not mean that there have not been such schizophrenics. All too shamefully, there have been all too many. Anti-Semitism is NOT an article of the Catholic faith. If we pray for Jews to be converted, that is NOT an insult but rather a desire to share our faith, our Mass and our sacraments with Jews who have converted. We aren't drafting them into Catholicism. To love is to want what is best for the loved one. Christian faiths tend to be evangelical in ways that Judaism is not. To pray for conversion is to love and not to hate.

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