By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
We are living through a tragic chapter of life in the Church, in which legitimate Catholic freedom is being violated for specious and even perhaps malign motives.
A cascade of documents has been launched in the wake of July’s Traditiones custodes (TC), the first move to limit the free and generous use of the traditional Mass. That motu proprio by Francis aims to toss Pope Benedict’s honest emancipation of the source and summit of sacred tradition, which can never be abrogated, into the dustbin of Church history.
Summorum Pontificum was a reasoned, theologically sound and wise intervention on the part of Benedict to acknowledge a wound in the life of the Church. It was necessary for unity to teach that what was sacred and prayed by everyone in the Latin rite before Vatican II “remains sacred for us too.”
All Catholics found peace as they worshipped freely under either option, the traditional Mass or the Novus Ordo as the post-Vatican II Mass is also known. A new peace was won as our bishops were freed to put their time and efforts into many other more important tasks, the energy formerly drained by the plague of futile liturgy wars now conserved.
The fathers of the Second Vatican Council offered the traditional Latin Mass every day before, during and, for a period, after the conclusion of the Council. Some of them continued to offer the usus antiquior after the new Mass was created following the conclusion of the Council by Bugnini’s committee and after the bishops had returned to their home dioceses all over the world.
The vision of those bishops has been betrayed by the implementation of what was a simplification and reinvention of the traditional Mass in response to Council deliberations but which was never intended by them to be a mutilation of the Church’s sacred prayer handed down by the Apostles and their successors for nearly two millennia.
Today the liturgical vision of the Council Fathers is in many places yet unrealized, with gratuitous talking, irreverence, and even sacrilege occurring regularly in the name of sacred worship, using the new Mass as an excuse.
The Latin, Gregorian chant, and organ specifically mandated in the documents of the Council by the Fathers is in many places neglected and even rejected in preference for innovation and worldly and horizontal compromises.
For many observers with experience of both the new and traditional liturgies, the latter appears to conform more with the Council’s vision. Many Catholics, because they accept Vatican II and its teaching as set down in writing, precisely for that reason gravitate toward the security and dependability of the traditional liturgy which is not a plaything subject to the whims and caprices of priests or committees.
Each new document further implementing TC is more restrictive than the last. We’ve moved from restricting the offering of the Mass to certain locations to further limitations forbidding its celebration on certain days.
Laity have in Catholic freedom the right to say and do something about the fact that a liturgy cobbled together by committee after Vatican II and in the name of Vatican II has not solved the problems noted by or fulfilled the promises of the idealistic dream with which it was launched a little over 50 years ago.
The two liturgies are not the same. If they were you would have silence before and after Mass with faithful remaining to give Thanksgiving afterward instead of chattering. The faithful would wear suits and ties and Sunday best instead of jeans and shorts and bathing suit type clothing. And the list goes on.
The traditional Mass inculcates a culture of faith and life. It fosters relationships that go beyond worship and communal lunch at the hall together on the Lord’s Day. It’s a web or network of relationships and friendships between individuals and families that sustain us. It is not an artificial and stilted association limited primarily to physical proximity in the pews on Sunday. Or Saturday night.
One could mention further the collapse of the incidence of confessions among Vatican II Novus Ordo Catholics and the complete opposite among traditional Catholics, many of whom go to Confession more than once a week.
Collapse of belief in the real Presence of Christ on the part of those who have been formed primarily by means of the new Mass is the most damning indictment.
We pray as we believe. When we believe in God and in His truth, our way of prayer infallibly reflects what is to be believed and is then, for that reasoned, lived.
Truth, the sacred and reverence are infallible signs of the Catholic. The true, the good and the beautiful must all have a place in our official prayer as Catholics if we are to assent with intellect and will to the Lord and all that is necessary for salvation.
It’s certainly above the pay grade of this writer to determine, but the fault for this erosion of belief is either with the liturgy itself, which seems to invite manipulation away from Catholic sacredness, or with those unfamiliar with the Church’s sacred liturgical tradition and thus unable to properly interpret the ambiguous ars practica of the new Mass.
Whatever the reasons for this implosion of belief, it is now necessary that all Catholics have unfettered access to the traditional liturgy in order to make the needed ecclesial course correction away from the lack of unity threatening the vitality of the Church resulting from dissent and disbelief.
The Bishop of Portland has found a way forward by declaring the truth that traditional Catholics are not a source of disunity and so he will not restrict the traditional Mass there.
But the Church at large is now experiencing a harsh and futile mandate akin to the vaccine mandates disrupting work and families, shortening careers and even lives. Reckless and dangerous, experimental vaccines are a crime against humanity and a source of destabilizing and disruptive division.
The Vatican II mandate, robbing good and humble Catholics of the traditional Mass and legitimate spiritual sustenance, now propounded by Archbishop Roche and Cardinal Cupich among others, will only cause further division and heartbreak.
Cupich is taking the punishment for imagined offenses against unity much further than what is required by Pope Francis, in banning the traditional Mass on the first Sunday of every month, the Triduum, Easter, Christmas and Pentecost in the Archdiocese of Chicago.
The cruel and draconian strictures may result in great division, hardly the unity claimed as the goal of this new and rash project. The proponents of this illegitimate and violent vandalism speciously claim that unity is only possible if everyone is forced into total physical compliance with the new liturgy.
The immemorial Mass was supported by popes before and after the Council, and even “allowed” in the vision of Bugnini, the architect of the new Mass, to coexist with the old. It will not disappear from the earth, though it may for a time disappear from view in our churches.
And great disunity will result the more this legitimate and venerable means of worship is attacked by men who, as spiritual fathers should feed, not this starve, the flock so loyal and loving toward them and their sacred office.
Please pray for the pope and all of our bishops.
Praised be Jesus Christ now and forever.
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