A commentary by Phil Lawler notes that Pope Francis refers to the liturgical reform that began with Pope St. Pius X and continued with the encyclical Mediator Dei:

http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otn.cfm?id=1237

well, let's see in the end who became an anathema after all...

Yep. Put too much power in any office and sooner or later you will get a crazy occupant.

whether it is heresey, errancy or anathema is certainly in God's purview, not ours, nonetheless, here is the beef:

http://www.fatimaperspectives.com/fe/perspective1072.asp

and

http://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/732-how-catholic-resistance-saved-the-church-and-how-it-can-do-it-again-part-ii.

I wonder that you are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ, unto another gospel.

Which is not another: only there are some that trouble you and would pervert the gospel of Christ.

But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema.

As we said before, so now I say again: If any one preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema.

For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.

For I give you to understand, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man.

For neither did I receive it of man: nor did I learn it but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Galatians

Just because he proclaims it is magisterial teaching from his own mouth does not make it so. The church has been in this position before as the two articles above clearly explain.

Can you please explain to me what this "God of surprises" is?

tomjaw

love this...

The unworthy little table on wheels, which had stood in the middle of the Sanctuary of his Cathedral Church, was wheeled right away, and the original, central, noble High Altar, symbol of Christ, was restored to use. Apparently Archbishop Nichols did not regard the 1970s 'coffee table' fad as "irreversible".

Fr. Hunwicke is brilliant... In another London church we removed a similar unworthy coffee table and burnt it in a skip that was providentially placed outside the church one Holy Week. I believe that the N.O. happy clappy crowd were quite disappointed when they turned up on Easter day...

>> From the above trends we can predict that the N.O. [...] will continue to decline possibly to extinction...

:-)

Liam

Previous figures showed a straight line increase for EF clergy in France, I suspect that this straight line will eventually more closely match an exponential curve. The exponential curve is what we are seeing with Marriages and Baptisms in London over the last 20 years, which would be expected.

As for the decline of N.O. vocations, we don't have a straight line either... A gradual climb until 1970, a swift decline, moving to a slow decline, a slight rise and now another slow decline... Parish closures could make this a steep decline, which would be difficult to recover from.

Anyway what is and will happen in other parts of the world will be of far greater consequence.

Tomjaw - I am a direct descendant of King Canute!

As I once told my dear mother when she asked why I didn't trust her, "mom, trust ONLY in GOD and you'll never truly be disappointed." At first she was taken aback, but then she quickly learned the wisdom in what I said and smiled.

Looking from the east, I see the current problems beginning with the initial tampering with the liturgy centuries ago. Liturgy has to be something too sacred for human revision.

I suspect it wasn't tampered with until the fall of Rome when the culture and civilization collapsed. Over time, fingers have messed with it from invaders, "scholars," popes, and so on. It seems that once you mess with the sacred for any reason, it is easier to tamper with it again and again.

I would say that the problem really started with the Council of Trent and the promulgation of the Roman Missal and Breviary for the entire Catholic world.

The Tridentine reforms were themselves not creative, but rather, they tended to be destructive in nature. The end result of the Council of Trent and its subsequent centuries of implementation (at times very coercive) was the rapid disappearance of thousands of sacred chants from the Latin repertory. Nothing new (like new chant propers for feasts) ever really took their place. They just disappeared. They vanished, never to be heard from again except in secular academic and concert settings. But never again would these sacred chants be heard in the temple, in the context of the Church's sacred rites.

This is especially true of the various proper offices of Saints, where unique poetical compositions of an explicitly narrative and laudatory form were once chanted on the feast days of these saints (much like Byzantine stichera, troparia, kontakia, and canons for my Eastern readers), but in the Roman Missal and Breviary after Trent, they were either omitted entirely (i.e. not celebrated or commemorated) or the propers provided for that feast were so generic and common that they were really just vague and un-specific to the person or thing being celebrated on that day.

If you look at the age before the Council of Trent, beginning 800 years or so before it, you will see a massive and steady growth of liturgical composition and development. There was an enlargement and embellishment of the liturgy in ways that today would blow most Catholics' minds away. Really, when you think about all the creative energy that went into the divine services of the Church, it is truly awe-inspiring. These were all the exuberant outpouring of faith from devout Christians, some of them even canonized saints. And yet most of these wonderful liturgical compositions will probably never be heard in Catholic churches ever again.

In the East, no such large-scale curtailment of hymnody and poetry was ever implemented, which is why the Byzantine Rite seems so foreign to Latin Rite Catholics today. It is not that the Greeks (and others) have a fundamentally different character, or somehow their language and history are such that they needs be so different than Latins. No, the soul of a Greek is the same as the soul of a Latin.

But what distinguishes these two liturgical families is a historical rupture that happened in the West that has no real equivalent in the East. This is why I say that what distinguishes the Tridentine reforms, and all of its subsequent reformist movements like Vatican II, is their inherent spirit of destructiveness, rather than their creativeness. Some might call the post-Vatican II "spirit" one of creativity, but this would only be an indication of having a strange idea of what creativity actually means.

Example:

St Notker was creative when he composed and then popularized Sequence hymns, which were once commonly sung at Mass. Bugnini, however, was actually quite destructive when he was being "creative" with the liturgy of Holy Saturday or with the content of the Liturgy of the Hours (among many other things). There's a huge difference there in how one defines "creative."

St Notker, in his creative impulse, added beauty and piety to the liturgy. Bugnini, however, added nothing. Rather, he threw beautiful and pious things away.

But in comparing the Latin liturgy to the Greek, we must compare apples to apples, and not spend our time walking around in an orange grove. Most of the Greek liturgical character was actually formed in the late Middle Ages, from the 10th to the 15th centuries. It just so happens that in the West, that was also the period of liturgical formation, when there was a tremendous level of new sacred composition. Many of the things going on in the East at that time actually had direct equivalents in the West (and vice versa), like embellishing the chants and the prayers of the liturgy. Example: Byzantine chant, for all of its exotic "foreignness" to Western ears today, is actually pretty similar to medieval organum that was once commonly sung in Western Europe.

Nobody who has ever studied the liturgical books of the Franks, the English, or the various Medieval Uses of the Roman Rite throughout Europe would come to the conclusion that the Latin Rite was "austere" in comparison to the Greek. Yet, today this dichotomy is still commonly drawn between a supposed Roman "austerity" and a Greek "floridness." This is only because the points of reference are now so very different between the two. In the Middle Ages, the differences were actually fewer and farther between. The stark differences we see now are mostly the result of the Latin liturgy being progressively cut down in both quantity and quality from its previously rich medieval splendor.

So while it may be true that no living liturgy is ever truly static, it is also true that the Latin liturgy has undergone much, much more alteration in the last few centuries than any others have. And therein lies the rub.

I have said that those liturgies across the Roman world in the 4th and 5th centuries were more alike than different. I have read the interview with Fr. Gabriel Bunge who said,


—Just as an aside, last spring there was a delegation from Russia present at a celebration in Sicily commemorating the aid given by Russian soldiers to victims of the great Messina earthquake in 1908. The Russian clergy present were invited to serve the Liturgy for the local Orthodox congregation in the Capella Palatina in Palermo.

—Ah, beautiful. The Russians continually celebrate solemn Liturgies in the St. Nicholas Cathedral in Bari. I have seen one Liturgy there celebrated by a Russian Metropolitan, about 20 priests, with a large choir. And I thought, “That is the Liturgy required by this beautiful cathedral. But when it was over, the Latin mass started… and you want to cry. You want to ask, “What are you doing here?”

He noted that those historic and beautiful churches were not created for what the Latin Rite liturgy has become. If interested, the interview is here http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/65138.htm

Fr. Bunge wrote the book," Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer According to the Patristic Tradition." He advocates turning to east when praying.

To the original point, our souls are not different from east to west. Our views on the liturgy differ, to be sure.

For what it is worth, I have been accused by some of having a stodgy, pre-Vatican II view of the liturgy in the Latin parish where I work. Not true. I have an eastern view that carries over. I don't consider the liturgy a social occasion for the enjoyment of the congregation - or should I say, assembly, since that is the word in fashion at the moment. I don't get out of bed and go play for mass so I can have an "Oprah" moment.

I would say that the problem really started with the Council of Trent and the promulgation of the Roman Missal and Breviary for the entire Catholic world.

Not true, this did not effect Dominicans, Benedictines, the Use of Sarum etc. The Missal and Breviary was optional for many. It was made quite clear that usages more than a couple century old could continue.

The Tridentine reforms were themselves not creative, but rather, they tended to be destructive in nature.

I understand that the Trent Missal was almost entirely based on an earlier Missal sadly they chose one that had a rather limited selection of chants. I suspect that this was deliberate, with all the changes in the secular world and the many attacks on the Church with state sanctioned murder of priests and religious, a simple selection of Propers was a good idea. The failure was really with the local churches that over the next 100 years gave up their Rites and usages, e.g. Sarum and the other English usages. and those that failed to bring from older Missals Proper Masses and Offices.

The older local usages did have a problem as it would have always been easier to use the universal Missal rather than a local, the rise of the printing press would have also hindered the continuation of the local uses. Although a handful survived, Ambrosian, Toledo, etc.

it is also true that the Latin liturgy has undergone much, much more alteration

This is applies to the Proper rather than the Ordinary... I wonder how sustainable it would have been to continue having many different sets of Propers in use across Europe.

It is true that the 1962 Missal is rather austere, but much has been lost in the last century... For instance, in my researches I think a least 20 Sequences are still nominally in use in the Trent Missal, mainly in local or Monastic Propers

https://canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2017/08/25/some-notes-on-terminology-usually-associated-with-the-churchs-teaching-office/

@MJO

https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/isbn/0836207068/

http://www.fatimaperspectives.com/fe/perspective1074.asp

http://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius05/p5quopri.htm

Chris -

I said that Congar and Chirico were 'seminal in my crossing the Tiber'.
Is there a problem here?
I have heard that Congar was a questionable mind, at least to some.
I am not knowledgeable about the reasons for this.
I did, though, find the mentioned book highly illuminating and ideally fecund.

Please do enlighten me as to your apparent reservation about him.
Or, am I misunderstanding you?

Chris -

I've heard von Balthasar dismissed as 'speculative theology'. I have his The Office of Peter, which, to me, is very dense but interesting, even fascinating. The small amount of Chardin that I've read I thought was basically Pelagian. As for Congar, I don't know wherein he is unorthodox, but would like to know.

Can you elaborate on their unorthodoxy?

For what, precisely, was he censured and silenced?
Why then rehabilitated?
Details?

Censured for œcumenical activities, I understand, and then he published a book True and False Reform in the Church which was condemned by the Vatican. However Angelo Roncalli's own copy (he was nuncio in France so would be obliged to read it!) is heavily annotated and it appears that it inspired him to call a Council when he became pope John XXIII.
>>> "maybe not just like St Thomas Aquinas". I concede that.

I am reading Congars book. I am only fifteen pages in, but it looks like the manifesto of modernism to me. However, I am going to read the whole thing and then give comment.