I am not going to excerpt this piece but rather encourage reading it in its entirety
here. The implications of the pope's recent decree that comes dangerously close to the outright suppression of the Latin Church's 1500 year old liturgical patrimony, are breathtaking. Setting aside the obvious lack of prudence in Francis' decree, the suggestion that it is even within the legitimate powers of his office to do such a thing, should bring any talk of restoration of communion with Rome to a screeching halt.
HT: Blog reader John L.
P.S. This comment received via email...
I'm
surprised that Geoffrey Hull, the author of "The Banished
Heart," hadn't gone full Byzantine - his entire thesis is that
Rome had destroyed or mutilated every one of the liturgies of its
non-Latin "sui iuris" churches long before Vatican II and
the 1970 "reforms".
All the shock and dismay, it's like it's the 1970s all over again! What did everyone expect? Honestly...
ReplyDeleteWell, this happened in the 1970s to the Maronites (on their own initiative) and to the Malabaris (who have been fighting about "liturgical reform" ever since). I am told that a similar "reform" is under way among the Syriac Catholics (although I know nothing about it) and among the Ethiopian Catholics. And here is an old article about the situation among the Chaldean Catholics:
ReplyDeletehttps://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2015/09/infusing-spirit-of-novus-ordo-into.html
As I've said on occasion, I don't know if I would have done what Pope Francis did with respect to use of the Mass of John XXIII. If, in fact, it was being used as a redoubt to attack the legitimacy of the Mass of Paul VI, I'm not surprised that he thought it best to return to the status quo of the 1970's, just as I can't imagine the Eastern rites being suppressed unless their use had somehow become a serious effort at undermining the Roman Rite.
ReplyDeleteBut what caught my attention was this phrase: "dangerously close to the outright suppression of the Latin Church's 1500 year old liturgical patrimony." Now I suppose to someone combatively defensive of every jot and tittle of the older rite, the Roman rite of 1970 looks like a departure. But, honestly, when I put the Latin text of the two rites side by side (using the Roman Canon for the later), their content is just about identical--fewer lists of saints, no more second gospel, some re-arranging. Yeah, people go crazy about the smallest changes, but the idea that those changes constitute in any way "suppression of the Latin Church's 1500 year old liturgical patrimony" seems like a great exaggeration.
Understand that there are other issues: overwhelming use of the vernacular, use of the other three Eucharist Prayers, allowance of frankly Protestant-derived liturgies like the English Ordinariate, congregational responses rather than those of the server. I think there are also legitimate aesthetic considerations, but there's no way we'll ever get consensus on those I'm afraid.