Posted on 07/08/2007 8:38:21 AM PDT by doesnt suffer fools gladly
Pope Angers Jews, Liberals With Rite
Conservatives Rejoice as Pontiff Revives Old Latin Mass By NICOLE WINFIELD,AP
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.
Reciting passages without understanding them is a practice of Islam. I would encourage you to do some simple research into the meaning of the word 'Catholic'. It is not a denomination or and administrative organization, quite the contrary.
Catholic - derived, through Latin, from the Greek adjective καθολικός, meaning "general", "universal". Most Reformation and post-Reformation Churches use the term Catholic (sometimes with a lower-case c) to refer to the belief that all Christians are part of one Church, regardless of denominational divisions. It is in line with this interpretation, which applies the word "catholic"/"universal" to no one denomination, that they understand the phrase "One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church" in the Nicene Creed, the phrase "the catholic faith" in the Athanasian Creed, and the phrase "holy catholic church" in the Apostles' Creed.
If we are to accept your words and deeds as reflective of Judaism, can we then interpret them as a peek into the origins if Islam?
The Latin Mass causes no body’s death. If someone is concerned the prayers call for conversions that tells me they have no faith in their religious belief.
The Latin Mass doesn’t call for someone’s beheading if they don’t believe what we believe. Nor is it forcable.
So, before you jump all over me for my statement, you might want to think before you speak.
Amen. No need to post the response I was formulating.
Actually, the Inquisition only affected baptized Christians. One of the problems is that many of the Jews actually had converted (voluntarily) but had received very poor instruction and had a sort of syncretist version of Christianity. Remember, much of Spain had been under the Muslims for hundreds of years, and there had been dioceses without bishops and hence religious instruction that had kept functioning secretly but where the religion had gotten very confused.
The initial focus of the Inquisition were heretical movements, such as that of Luther, that had crept into various parts of the Catholic world. Jews were, in a sense, incidental, although they were more important in Spain because Spain had always had a large Jewish population, dating back to the Fall of the Temple. But even then, it was conversos that were the subject of the Inquisition, and the Inquisition was not seen as a missionary activity or an attempt to “convert” masses of anybody, Jews or otherwise.
The Court of Ferdinand and Isabella had many Jewish members, not even conversos, but Jews who were practicing Jews. Jews lived in their own separate areas of town, which they governed with their own law, but some of them also participated in city affairs and there were parts of Castilla where Jews were very influential.
Partly because of the clash of the nascent middle class with the hereditary nobility, Jews became the object of insane jealousy and were pawns, to some extent, in the fight between the merchant class, the nobility and the Crown. Being perceived as foreigners, they were a good target; in addition, the Visigothic (Germanic) kings who had invaded Spain after the fall of Rome had been extremely anti-Semitic and had placed many anti-Semitic laws on the books. These laws had rarely been enforced since the time of the Visigoths, but all of a sudden, they were “rediscovered.”
Isabella expelled the Jews (that is, not just conversos, but practicing Jews) quite unwillingly, but after a few truly hideous riots in some parts of Spain, she finally acknowledged that she was unable to protect them. She lost many valuable members of her court in the process, and she was well aware of this at the time.
As for the Inquisition, it essentially became nothing but a way of persecuting one’s political enemies. The Pope sent several bulls to Spain trying to stop it, but because of some powerful Inquisitors and their support by the royals (not Isabella, but subsequent Spanish rulers) he was simply ignored. It eventually ran out of steam, being reduced to things like burning somebody’s hat as a symbolic way of “executing” him and engaging in symbolic posthumous punishments as an attempt to tarnish political enemies who might have been that person’s descendants.
Don’t forget that Franco took in more refugee Jews than almost any other European country, and more than the US. He did so because he was very pious and regarded Jews as the people of Jesus Christ, and hence felt that it was his duty to offer them protection.
My aren't we the sensitive one. Nobody jumped all over you. You make a broad proclamation it's nobodys business about something in the news, open forums and common knowledge and I called you on it. There are things people will talk about other than death and beheadings. The news is just full of such stuff. Better go back into the monastery and avoid all of this talk that is nobodys business.
And there IS no Mass on Good Friday.
You know, I’m a catholic and I have always known there was an undercurrent of anti-catholic bigotry in society what with articles like this where newspapers feel it necessary to go find anyone who they can to say that internal church doctrine or dogma is offensive. But I havent experienced the vitriol in person, not until I was on a recent business trip with a colleague and he felt it necessary to spout a lot of anti-catholic nonsense about how the church required the use of the latin mass, lined up jews to be killed in the holocaust, etc. He stopped short of saying we sacrifice babies on the alter, but if someone told him we did it, he’d believe it. I’m sure this news will send him into a tirade about our secret magical incantations in latin.
You are the one with the problem NOT ME.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center urged Benedict to publicly point out that such phrases "are now entirely contrary to the teaching of the church."
Jeez!!! Get over it! How dare you demand that the leader of a religion conform their prayers to your demands! Why aren't you doing that when it comes to islam? A "body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations?" These people, like Abe Foxman, are nothing more than professional race and religion baiters, who drum up outrage in order to drum up dollars for themselves. They're no more than self appointed "spokesman" for Jews, and no different than the other shake-down artists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Get over it... And for those who don't know, I'm NOT Catholic. I'm Jewish.
Mark
I agree with you 100%. I happen to know that my cousin prays for my conversion weekly. It "ain't happenen," but I don't begrudge her, since I know that she's doing it out of love. She doesn't want me to spend all of eternity in hell. And I was thankful when all of my Christian friends and co-workers prayed for my mother, ending each prayer with "in Jesus' name," as she was dying of cancer.
These people are simply looking for something to get outraged over. Sort of like the muslims...
Mark
Funny, I haven't gotten a return trip from any Jehova's Witnesses since I invited them in, and told them that I'd be happy to hear about the "Good news about Jesus," if I could share the good news about satan with them.
They didn't even leave a "Watchtower."
Mark
“Funny, I haven’t gotten a return trip from any Jehova’s Witnesses since I invited them in, and told them that I’d be happy to hear about the “Good news about Jesus,” if I could share the good news about satan with them”
hee hee!
Any details on what their immediate response was to your question? :)
The mormons were in the middle of telling me how there was a “great Apostasy” where the apostles died out and there was no christianity until Constantine invented it.
When I said there was vast documentation of early christian writings and proof of Church activities during those first centuries they weren’t very chatty.
I don’t think those boys are allowed to surf the internet much.
“They didn’t even leave a “Watchtower.””
What a shame.
I like the illustrations.
hee hee!
Any details on what their immediate response was to your question? :)
It was shortly after I bought my house, more than 15 years ago, so it's hard to recall clearly, however I seem to recall that they didn't seem to hear me correctly, and asked me to repeat what I had said 2 or 3 times. Then they seemed to be in a bit of a hurry to leave.
Mark
too funny!
“The document upset Jews, since the Tridentine rite contains a prayer on Good Friday of Easter Week calling for their conversion.”
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. Why that’s causing some people to lose conscious contact with reality is beyond me.
As for the rest of it, I couldn’t care less what French liberals or anyone else thinks about the Pope’s decisions. Why should I? Others don’t ask him how they should run their faiths. This whole thing is ridiculous.
The real problem is that Pope Benedict has made it patently clear that he is NOT a PC pope. He’s not Clinton, for pity sake. He doesn’t make his decisions based upon poll numbers or public opinion and I’m glad.
I also welcome the return of at least a few Latin masses. They’re beautiful, and I always loved the sound of the text in ancient Latin.
Boy you really missed this by a mile... How about convert to 'Christianity'.
Catholic means original - the Orthodox christian churches might disagree that Catholic maintains the original teachings but it is fair to say that the Church of Rome and the several Orthodox churches are Christ’s original church.
You’re really going to get the anti-semite/Mel Gibson crowd stirred up with this one.
If these knuckleheads considered that Jesus never viewed himself as anything but a Jew, they would be appalled...
Muslims and catholics both deny their history too, like the rest of us are fooled by this.
I guess all the catholics who murdered and tortured Jews and Christians got it worked out in 'purgatory'. Another evil they follow instead of Christ.
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