>>> Christopher Crockett <[log in to unmask]> 07/27
1:37 PM >>>
RubTn Peret= Rivas wrote:

>
As an Outsider, I'm curious to know, what, precisely, is the
rationale behind
actively trying to supress the use of the old liturgy?

Since it seemed to be valid enough to be used for more than a few
years, 
I assume that it can hardly be thought of as "heretical"?

Obviously a certain percentage--perhaps a substantial minority--of
the
(decreasing in number, btw) faithful--lay and clergy--feel strongly 
enough about it to defy their shepards and attend/support/long for
such
services.

********
Actually the numbers of priests and laity enthused about the Latin
Mass (both the revised post-Vatican II version and the Tridentine
rite) is growing and growing quite rapidly.  The Priestly Fraternity
of St. Peter and several other new religious orders devoted to the
Tridentine rite have seminaries bulging at the seams.  They are being
invited by more and more bishops to take parishes within their
dioceses.  And I must underscore that the enthusiasm is strongest
among those below the age of 35, precisely the group that never
experienced the Mass in Latin. 
******

Surely the reason doesn't have anything to do with certain tendancies
toward
the arbitrary and self-serving abuse of patriarchal power in the
hierarcy of
the Church which occasionally reared its ugly head during the Bad Old
Days?

There must be at least a fig-leaf's worth of theological cover for
supression(?).

******
I don't think it had much to do with theology at all.  I disagree
another assessment, posted recently, which assertedthat those who
rejected the new Mass also rejected the rest of Vatican II.  This was
and is true for some but by no means all and certainly not the
leaders.  At issue is how Vatican II should be interpreted.  It took
several generations to implement the decisions of Trent; the
implementation of Vatican II in some ways only really got underway
with John Paul II--who as archbishop of Cracow was probably the most
energetic implementer of Vatican II among the world's bishops.  He
wrote an entire book on the importance and approach to that
implementation and all his encyclicals are essentially running
commentaries on Vatican II documents.

The actual reform of the liturgy was carried out by a commision after
the Council, so the commission itself was an implementation of the
Council's call for a reform of the liturgy. Those who had doubts about
the results of the commision's work should not be accused of rejecting
the Council's call for reform.

Some proponents of the Latin Mass believe that the Latin text that
emerged from the commission (the Novus Ordo Missae) was flawed, that
it had weakened some aspects of the theology of the Mass.  The changes
to the Roman Canon are relatively minor, though one could quibble
about the way the "Mysterium Fidei" was handled.  More significant
changes were made in the offertory, notably by substituting prayers
derived from the 1st-2nd century Didache and dropping some beautiful
medieval prayers that had been added.  This sort of historical
primitivism, in my view, was ill-advised, but not theologically
flawed.  But, by adding three alternative Eucharistic prayers, the
commission made it possible to avoid regular recitation of the Roman
Canon, the Eucharistic prayer that goes back to the late
patristic/early medieval period and in its core, probably back much
farther.  In fact, that is what has happened.  Some priests tell me
the reason they seldom recite the Roman Canon is that it lacks an
epiclesis, a formal invocation of the Holy Spirit, the absence of
which is a bone of contention between Eastern Orthodoxy and western
Catholicism. So, in practice, the way Mass came to be offered, even in
Latin (even in my Novus Ordo celebrating parish), involved some really
new elements.  One of the alternative prayers, of course, is based on
Hippolytus's _Apostolic Tradition_ and the 2nd Eucharistic prayer is
basically a simplified version of the Roman Canon.

However, these changes are relatively minor compared to what happened
when the Mass was vernacularized.  The council's decree on the liturgy
says nothing about complete vernacularization.  The best
interpretation of the council's intent that I can come up with is that
they intended something like the dialogue Masses that were becoming
popular in the 1950s: the congregation sings/chants along with the
Sanctus, Credo, Pater Noster, Gloria etc.--in the vernacular, f that
seemed appropriate.   Other portions of the Mass might be translated
and done in the vernacular, but the council decree itself did not
mandate or even suggest complete vernacularization.  And this, I
believe, was for a good reason: vernacularization has done more than
anything else to create a federation of national Catholic
Churches--exactly what Cranmer and Luther did in England and Germany
in the 1500s and which the Tridentine rite was designed to counter, by
establishing strict international uniformity, down the each individual
gesture of the priest, in the Latin Catholic rite.  Today, when a
Catholic travels to another country, he or she _cannot_ participate in
the vernacular Mass very well.  In the "bad old days," anyone who put
any real effort into familiarizing himself with the Mass in Latin
would feel at least to some degree at home internationally.

But the more important problem with the vernacularization was the
implementation of that decision by national conferences of bishops. 
The International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL)
translations used in most English-speaking countries often bear little
resemblance to the Latin texts they purportedly translate.  The theory
of translation used was dyanmic equivalence and it was applied very
loosely.  All the supplicatory language was simply dropped, the
subjunctives are inconsistently maintained--the upshot is that pure
imperatives are left in English, with the worshipers ordering God
around, telling God what to do.  In the Latin text, a straight
imperative is always accompanied by _quaesumus_ to make clear the
relationship, crucial to Judaism and Christianity, of humans as
creatures of God.  Sometimes entire phrases not present in the Latin
are inserted; in other cases entire clauses of the Latin are simply
dropped.  The upshot is a liturgy that is crypto-Pelagian and terribly
banal.  Cranmer, who also made some key theological changes, was at
least upfront about it and he had beautiful English style.  The ICEL
translators,whether intentionally or incompetently, I do not know,
changed the theology and they had no sense of style, or rather, they
thought they were creating a style that would suit "modern" tastes. 
In fact it left people cold,though it took some people ten years or
more to realize it.  That the ICEL translations were approved by the
bishops' conferences is a testimony to how much the bishops (who at
that time still had the Latin competence to do the comparisons and
make theological assessments) deferred to their liturgical
consultants.  My only explanation for Rome's approval of the ICEl
translations is that they trusted the national conferences of bishops
and didn't really check over the translations carefully.  They've
learned their lesson and are much more careful now.

So there were real differences between what was happening with the
vernacular Mass and both the old (Tridentine) and new (Novus Ordo)
Latin texts.

Now, for the original question--why the attempted suppression of the
old rite?  What little reading I've done on this suggests that Paul VI
hesitated but was convinced by the liturgical experts of the
commission that the Novus Ordo would never be accepted unless the old
rite was suppressed.  This was never tested, because the Novus Ordo in
Latin soon became as rare or rarer than the Tridentine rite, so the
real comparison for most people was between the vernacular versions
and the Tridentine Latin rite.  Given that comparison, those familiar
with the Latin and possessing some theological and literary acumen
might be expected to raise questions.

Underlying this, I think, sociologically, was the fact that what was
attempted by the commission had never been attempted before: writing a
liturgy by committee.  The liturgy had always grown organically and
revisions, even at Trent, were miniscule compared to the overall
continuity.  The commission seems to have taken as its approach a much
more complete revision than had ever been attempted and one could
understand that its members were unsure about how their work would be
received.  For them, convincing Paul VI to suppress the rival to their
infant was an insurance measure that indicates how uncertain they were
about their mandate and procedures.  They were operating with
historicist principles (that the earliest is always the best)
characteristic of modern scholarship and at best in uneasy tension
with the Catholic understanding of Tradition.  Both historicist
reconstruction and organic tradition have proper roles to play in a
religious faith like Catholicism (and have always been at work), but
the commission, in my view, failed to grasp the intricate interplay
between these two--at least in the revision of the offertory and the
entrance rites.  But that might well have been absorbed and massaged
into an organic growth of the liturgy had vernacularization not
occurred at the same time.  Vernacularization is what blew the ship
out of the water, confused people in the pews unnecessarily and
contributed to the precipitous drop in Mass attendance over the past
thirty years.  Again, had the vernacularization proceeded in stages,
it might well have become a process of organic growth, but as it was
done, it was bound to be a source of dislocation psychologically for
people.  It was part of an advocacy for a whole series of radical
changes in questions of moral theology and interaction with culture,
most of which were not intended by the documents of Vatican II
themselves.  In recent years, what the media often call a
"conservative reaction" is not so much a rejection of Vatican II as a
claim that the council decisions themselves admit of a quite different
interpretation and implementation.  The two journals _Concilium_ and
_Communio_ illustrate this bifurcating interpretation of Vatican II
well.

In Catholic circles today the Society for Catholic Liturgy (in the
US) represents a group of liturgical scholars who accept the
vernacularization in its ICEL form but think that the way the
vernacularization and accompanying architectural and musical forms 
were carried out on the parish level was banal, sloppy, in bad taste
and can be much improved.  The organization known as Adoremus believes
that the commission's work is not above criticism and ought to be
revisited--that the Novus Ordo Latin texts need some more revision and
that the vernacular texts need complete redoing, from scratch. 
Adoremus is not interested in returning to the Tridentine rite, though
most of its leaders probably welcome the coexistence of the two rites
for the foreseeable future.  Various Tridentine rite groups (Coalition
in Support of Ecclesia Dei, Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter) fully
accept Vatican II but wish to see the Tridentine rite free to flourish
alongside the Novus Ordo.  The Society of St. Pius X is the schismatic
group (Lefebvrist) that, depend who you talk to, thinks the Novus Ordo
is heretical and rejects some or all of Vatican II, though it's hard
to pin down just what the SSPX really thinks.  There is also a Latin
Liturgy Association that supports the celebration of liturgy in Latin
both in Novus Ordo and Tridentine rites.

Similar societies and organizations exist in most countries in
western Europe, in Australia etc.  The Latin Liturgy Association keeps
its members informed of international developments and also includes
in its newsletter reviews of new books aimed at teaching Latin,
teaching how to celebrate or hear Mass in Latin and Latin culture,
music, archtecture etc.  in general.   The secretary is Scott Calta,
who can be contacted at [log in to unmask] or at P.O. Box 831150,
Miami, FL 33283.

There is also a considerable, growing movement to return to classic
forms of church architecture.  It is headquartered, perhaps, at the
school of architecture at Notre Dame University (South Bend), where
Duncan Stroick and others teach.

In some parishes, the Mass was never celebrated in the
vernacular--St. Agnes in St. Paul, Minnesota, is one.  The priests
simply continued to celebrate in Latin.  Vernacularization was never
mandated!  The only thing that was suppressed was the Tridentine Latin
rite (which had informal vernacular translations in hand
missals--which the ICEL translators would have done well to have paid
more attention to--but no official vernacular text for celebration). 
And it was suppressed not because it was in Latin but because its text
differed from the Latin Novus Ordo text.


Dennis Martin










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