First Sunday of Advent, 1969: The Long Lent Begins

On November 30, 1969, the first Sunday of Advent, the Novus Ordo Missae took effect, and what is now known as the Extraordinary Rite was effectively abolished.  The floodgates of mediocrity and stupidity flew open.

Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the mediocrity and stupidity were merely unmasked.  In a fascinating interview with Latin Mass magazine in 2001, Dr. Alice von Hildebrand, the wife of the 20th-century theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand, traces the historical roots of the crisis of the last 40 years.  An extended excerpt (emphasis added):

I relate in my biography of my husband, The Soul of a Lion, that a few years after his conversion to Catholicism in the 1920s, he began teaching at the University of Munich. Munich was a Catholic city. Most Catholics at the time went to Mass, but he always said that it was there that he became aware of the loss of a sense of the supernatural among Catholics. One incident especially offered him sufficient proof, and it greatly saddened him.

When passing through a door, my husband would always give precedence to those of his students who were priests. One day, one of his colleagues (a Catholic) expressed his astonishment and disapproval: “Why do you let your students step ahead of you?” “Because they are priests,” replied my husband. “But they do not have a Ph.D.” My husband was grieved. To value a Ph.D. is a natural response; to feel awe for the sublimity of the priesthood is a supernatural response. The professor’s attitude proved that his sense for the supernatural had been eroded. That was long before Vatican II. But until the Council, the beauty and the sacredness of the Tridentine liturgy masked this phenomenon.

...

 ...[My husband] believed that after Pius X’s condemnation of the heresy of Modernism, its proponents merely went underground. He would say that they then took a much more subtle and practical approach. They spread doubt simply by raising questions about the great supernatural interventions throughout salvation history, such as the Virgin Birth and Our Lady’s perpetual virginity, as well as the Resurrection, and the Holy Eucharist. They knew that once faith – the foundation – totters, the liturgy and the moral teachings of the Church would follow suit. My husband entitled one of his books The Devastated Vineyard. After Vatican II, a tornado seemed to have hit the Church.

Modernism itself was the fruit of the calamity of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, and it took a long historical process to unfold. If you were to ask a typical Catholic in the Middle Ages to name a hero or heroine, he would answer with the name of a saint. The Renaissance began to change that. Instead of a saint, people would think of geniuses as persons to emulate, and with the oncoming of the industrial age, they would answer with the name of a great scientist. Today, they would answer with a sports figure or cinema personality. In other words, the loss of the sense of the supernatural has brought an inversion of the hierarchy of values.

Even the pagan Plato was open to a sense of the supernatural. He spoke of the weakness, frailty and cowardice often evidenced in human nature. He was asked by a critic to explain why he had such a low opinion of humanity. He replied that he was not denigrating man, only comparing him to God.

With the loss of a sense of the supernatural, there is a loss of the sense of a need for sacrifice today. The closer one comes to God, the greater should be one’s sense of sinfulness. The further one gets from God, as today, the more we hear the philosophy of the new age: “I’m OK, You’re OK.” This loss of the inclination to sacrifice has led to the obscuring of the Church’s redemptive mission. Where the Cross is downplayed, our need for redemption is given hardly a thought.

The aversion to sacrifice and redemption has assisted the secularization of the Church from within. We have been hearing for many years from priests and bishops about the need for the Church to adapt herself to the world. Great popes like St. Pius X said just the opposite: the world must adapt itself to the Church.

The interview concludes with the following summation:

The devil hates the ancient Mass. He hates it because it is the most perfect reformulation of all the teachings of the Church. It was my husband who gave me this insight about the Mass. The problem that ushered in the present crisis was not the traditional Mass. The problem was that priests who offered it had already lost the sense of the supernatural and the transcendent. They rushed through the prayers, they mumbled and didn’t enunciate them. That is a sign that they had brought to the Mass their growing secularism. The ancient Mass does not abide irreverence, and that was why so many priests were just as happy to see it go.

And so the ancient Mass went -- but only temporarily.  It is worth noting that, for all the anguish that the sudden shelving of the old rites caused, these rites have at least come down to us intact: if the Ordo Missae of 1962 was out of the reach of the faithful, it was also out of the reach of modernist tinkerers who have had a field day with the new Ordo.

Viewed in this light, the introduction of the Novus Ordo Missae and its constellation of latent follies was not the source of the crisis of the last four decades, but -- thanks to the divine Providence that works all things to our good -- its remedy.  Because God is ultimately in charge, and not Archbishop Bugnini or any other infiltrators in the Church, the Novus Ordo was always bound to be an instrument of good, for all the damage that has been wreaked on its account.  It has destroyed our illusions about our spiritual health.  It has torn the veneer of holiness off the rot and the maggots and put them in our collective face.
  
A bitter cure, to be sure, but that is often the nature of a cure.  A boil, after all, has to be lanced and drained.  The process is painful and disgusting, but necessary.

And there is healing at the end of it.

Dies Irae

November 8th is the day on which the Order of Preachers remembers and prays for its deceased members. Today at 7:00 p.m. the Bl. Margaret of Castello chapter will recite the Office of the Dead (Vespers) for deceased Dominicans in the day chapel at St. John's Cathedral in Boise. We will begin by chanting Dies Irae (though we don't expect to sound anything like the men and boys' choir in this video).

Dies Irae is the traditional sequence of the Requiem Mass. It is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Latin poetry; its beauty is apparent even to those of us who have very little Latin.

St. Thomas More teaches that meditation on the Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Hell, Heaven) is a first-class remedy against sin. Dies Irae, rich in food for such meditation, has unfortunately been squelched in the Ordinary Rite by those who (unjustly) consider it morbid; but since it survives in the 1962 Missal, the door is open for its comeback.

The Tridentine Mass Explained

For a greater appreciation of the details of the Extraordinary Rite. (It may not be strictly accurate to describe this as the Extraordinary Rite, since it predates the 1962 Missal; but my guess is, it's close enough.)

The Eternal Gift: Solemn High Mass in the traditional Roman Rite, filmed at Our Lady of Sorrows in Chicago, Easter Sunday, 1941, and narrated by the Rt. Rev. Mgr. Fulton J. Sheen. I believe this is the very place shown in this video.

This Mass appears to make a lot of physical demands on the celebrant -- certainly compared to the present Ordinary Rite. But is it possible that it only seems so now because we've become soft?

It is a long-established principle of the Catholic Church never to completely drop from her public worship any ceremony, object or prayer which once occupied a place in that worship.

Fulton J. Sheen

Sounds Like a Plan to Me!

Catholic World News reports that a senior Vatican official says the Holy Father wants the extraordinary rite to be revived in every parish. Quoth the story:

Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, the president of the Ecclesia Dei Commission, told a June 14 press conference in London that the traditional Latin Mass should be reintroduced throughout the Catholic world. Asked whether the old liturgy would eventually be used in many parishes, the Colombian prelate replied: "Not many parishes; all parishes." [Emphasis added.]

Read: the Pope is determined to rein in all the liberal bishops who are determined to continue to suppress the extraordinary rite. Shall we take a wild stab at who is bound to prevail?

By the way, in a shocking gesture of disobedience to all the liturgical "experts" out there who not only despise the extraordinary rite, but also claim it is unlawful to have anything on the altar, this is Pope Benedict celebrating Mass at an altar decorated with candles and [gasp] a crucifix.

A Hair-Raising (and Not Just on Martin Sheen's Head) Movie

It's 1999. The Fourth Vatican Council has just convened; the Church has repudiated, among other things, the Sacrament of Confession, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the good of the soul over material goods; negotiations are under way to meld Catholicism and Buddhism. This whole house of cards stands threatened by a handful of monks in an island monastery off the coast of Ireland who calmly continue to offer the Tridentine Mass, to which people from around the world flock. And young Father Kinsella (Martin Sheen) has come all the way from Rome to put the kibosh on the whole thing.

Such is the stuff of The Conflict, originally released on television as Catholics, and based on the novel of the same name by Brian Moore, a fallen-away Catholic (who, ironically, died at the beginning of the year in which the story takes place). Martin Sheen, with his big hair, intense stare, Roman-collar-less black shirt and military jacket, looks every inch the messenger of Satan that he in fact is, both objectively and to the monks of Mork Island who have preserved the Sacraments and the Mass in order not to tamper with the people's faith.

Father Kinsella, plenipotentiary of the superior general of the monks' order, cannot convince the boatman sent to ferry him to the monastery that he is a priest, and so must call in a helicopter to drop him off on the island -- the first landing of an aircraft on that island in history. He is greeted by Father Abbot (Trevor Howard), and then by Father Manus (Cyril Cusack) -- first seen offering the outlawed Tridentine Mass on windswept rocks on the mainland, with contraband vessels and vestments -- who, unable to brook dishonesty even in the name of courtesy, lays into the young know-it-all with a prophetic (in 1973) speech about everything that is wrong with a Mass in which the priest turns away from God, talks to the people, and provides an entertainment. The rest of the monks are downright hostile -- none of which matters much to Father Kinsella, who is so much more "with it" than they. Still, he misjudges Father Abbot -- though Father Abbot himself has an Achilles heel that is not without consequences.

The DVD version of this movie is somewhat spoiled by the lousy editing (some scenes that would have been helpful to understanding the plot are cut out of the beginning) and cheesy credits, and the story is limited by its author's lack of faith, particularly in the inerrancy of the Church and the primacy and infallibility of Peter (it is simply unthinkable that Rome itself would turn Protestant). Then there are the silly and completely unnecessary faux pas (e.g., no one is "ordained a monk"; and the name of the order of monks sounds most uncomfortably close to "Albigensian"). Plus, the company that wrote the copy for the disk jacket demonstrates an ignorance of and contempt for a Catholic audience by propping us up to sympathize with liberation-theology-loving Father Kinsella and his diabolical mission. Yet it provokes thought (albeit imperfectly owing to the author's lack of faith) on the reach and limits of obedience, particularly the obedience owed by religious to their superiors; and on the primacy of conscience, that much-misused doctrine upon which so much abuse has rested since Vatican II.

Most of all, in the afterlight of thirty-five years, the movie overall turns out to be astonishingly prescient. There is virtually nothing in Father Manus' predictions about the results of the new Mass that has not in fact come to pass. And Father Kinsella is a walking prophecy all on his own: the very type of the decades of priests who have given up priestly garb; sacrificed the salvation of souls on the altar of materialism; substituted political activism for the Sacraments; and dabbled in transcendental meditation. In short, he is the epitome of many worldly priests with no faith -- polite and civilized, even affable, hanging by a thread over the abyss of Hell, burdened by the weight of the many souls they are dragging down with them. Nice people can and do go to Hell.

Overall, for all its faults, I have to give this movie a thumbs-up. Hat tip to the Caveman, who first recommended it, thereby getting the Redoubtable Marcus Magnus to order it, thereby giving me a chance to see it. It's worth it.