Traditional Mass Plays A Needed Prophetic Role
By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
Prophets aren’t popular. Prophets are not liked. Prophets are sometimes put to death. The Holy Land is littered with the tombs of the prophets. The Lord Himself alluded to this when He excoriated the leaders of the Chosen People for decorating these tombs, once the voices of the prophets themselves had been stilled, while rejecting the voice of divine prophecy itself in Him.
“Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; that build the sepulchres of the prophets, and adorn the monuments of the just, And say: If we had been in the days of our Fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore you are witnesses against yourselves, that you are the sons of them that killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. You serpents, generation of vipers, how will you flee from the judgment of hell?”
Today, too, it is the leaders of God’s people who, as then, are most at risk of falling into the egregious sin of hypocrisy. To whom much is given, much is expected, as Christ taught. How much more so is it necessary that the leaders, the priests and the bishops, dedicate themselves to the charism of prophecy? Nothing offers the presence of God more than the Holy Mass and no rite of the Latin Church more effectively than the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass.
Fr. Richard G. Cipolla, a convert priest and respected authority on the Traditional liturgy and its proper celebration, recently spoke out on the most important vehicle of prophecy in the Church, the Traditional Latin Mass.
In his homily, “The Celebration of the Traditional Roman Mass is a Prophetic Statement,” delivered for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost a day after the feast of the beheading of St. John the Baptist, he addressed the perennial role of prophecy, from the Old Testament to our own day. (See roratecaeli-blogspot.com.)
“But prophets never have happy endings. For their job is to shout clearly the reality of the state of affairs: that the people have strayed from the paths of righteousness, they have strayed from the Commandments of God, that the way they worship has become corrupt and syncretistic, worshipping other gods in the name of tolerance and fitting in. It is true that there were times when the prophet’s voice was heeded and reform accepted, but those times are the great exception.”
Fr. Cipolla reminds us that prophets are needed today to confront Catholics in public life and any of us who promote the evils of abortion, transgender, the redefinition of marriage, and other assaults upon the family and human life. The prophets share the fate of all who went before them: the loneliness of unpopularity, the rejection of family and fellow believers and all of those who are close to them in this world. But prophets are heroically faithful to God and always close to Him in this world as His very voice for the highest good of others in salvation.
The words which God commanded the prophets to speak were the source of their suffering as the people rejected the messenger time and time again. It was the repeated unfaithfulness of the people, however, which made the ministry of the prophets necessary. So, too, it is the challenges of the Traditional Latin Mass that make it so prophetic and necessary in our own day.
In a world drowning in the noise of many voices, the social media and addiction to a 24-hour news cycle, many complain of a perennial malaise. Restless and sometimes sleepless as a result of too much stimulation, people are crying out for rest and peace even as they deepen their crisis by turning to dangerous drugs and stimulants in a vain attempt at escape from their quandary.
At the same time our young people, who are more steeped in, and adept at leveraging, both the benefits and burdens of social media than their elders, are turning more than anyone else in the Church for the antidote for which they are the greatest advocates: the Traditional Latin Mass.
More from Fr. Cipolla:
“But we must remember that even if there were such prophets their message would be rejected over and over again. That is the state of what the world has been, is, and always will be. That is not pessimism; it is reality. The world will ever be in opposition to the law of God, which is the law of love. May I suggest this to you: that what we do here today in the celebration of the Traditional Roman Mass is a prophetic statement. The celebration of this Mass thunders against the noise and babble of the world, the noise that fills so many of our churches as well, this Mass thunders against the noise with its silence. This Mass that is the distillation of centuries of worship prophesies against the cult of the new that drives so many of us to distraction.
“The beauty of this Mass, with its choreography that points ineffably away from itself, prophesies against a society awash in the destructive forces of pornography and sexual license and in the forgetting of the Christian and classical understanding of beauty, a society that has forgotten what beauty is. This Mass is a prophetic gesture not only to the world but to the Church, which like the Israelites of old wants to be relevant to the world by playing catch-up with a society that increasingly hates all that the Church stands for and is.
“And so it is no wonder that there is hostility within the Church among her bishops and priests to this Mass, for a prophet is never welcome in his own house.”
Thank you for reading. Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
