Coincidence?

On March 22, 1970, Palm Sunday, the Novus Ordo Missae was first permitted to be used in these United States.  (It did not become mandatory until the First Sunday of Advent, 1971.)

On March 22, 2020, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, the public celebration of the Novus Ordo Missae is effectively almost entirely suppressed in these U.S.A., and in much of the rest of the world, as we labor under what one priest has aptly described as God’s Interdict.

It appears that the only public Masses now being offered are the traditional Latin Masses offered by the Society of St. Pius X (at least where they are not prevented by the civil authorities).  Although the Society has less than 700 priests worldwide, it has actually increased the number of Masses in order to have fewer people attend each one.

Notice also that the Fourth Sunday of Lent is Laetare Sunday, the midpoint of Lent, when special signs of joy are permitted in the liturgy to encourage the faithful in their Lenten penance.

So, on Palm Sunday, when the Church commemorates Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem in order to undergo His Passion, she entered into the eclipse of the traditional Mass and the rise of the New Mass, in which she would become all but unrecognizable.  Exactly 50 years later, the public celebration of the new Mass is all but completely shut down, leaving only the public celebration of the traditional Mass.

Coincidence?

According to St. Padre Pio, with Divine Providence there is no coincidence.

What Does It Mean?

Masses all over the world are becoming scarce.  Dozens of dioceses all over these United States are suspending public Masses.  Just yesterday afternoon came the announcement that public Masses in the Diocese of Boise are suspended, at least through Palm Sunday (though the Cathedral parish is vastly increasing the availability of confession and Eucharistic adoration).  A few dioceses are taking the intermediate approach of carrying on with public Masses but dispensing the faithful from the Sunday obligation, or at least dispensing certain categories of people from the obligation.  The Society of St. Pius X is more or less following this middle course, though they intend to add Masses in places where their chapels are full, so that fewer people will attend each Mass.

I can only give my own, non-authoritative opinion as to what this all means.  I think it means there is an immense lack of faith and a failure to see this crisis in a supernatural light.  Some bishops in Italy, where hundreds are dying every day, have actually come out and denied even the possibility that this plague is a scourge of divine chastisement calling for repentance, conversion and propitiation.  Even some good priests say they think this is not a chastisement, despite obviously recognizing the many reasons why we so richly deserve a chastisement.  A time like this calls for an increase, not a decrease, in reception of the Sacraments and in offerings of the Propitiating Sacrifice.

Yet God, without Whose consent nothing happens, is permitting the shutting down of the Sacrifice and the restricting of access to the Sacraments even during a pandemic.  This, frankly, is a chastisement in itself, and one that I think is even more frightening than the coronavirus itself and rightly described as apocalyptic.  We should ask ourselves why God would strip us of the Mass and in some cases the Sacraments in a time of contagion.  I fear that one answer may be that, so far from propitiating God, we have actually been making the occasion of our worship a means of aggravating our guilt.

Are our hearts far away from Him, even while we honor Him with our lips?  There seems little enough to distinguish us from non-Catholics.  The Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research arm, says that, according to a 2011 study, 98% of Catholic women have used contraceptives at some point; 87% were currently using contraceptives; and 89% of Catholic women who have never married have had sex.  The Church has never changed her teaching on contraceptives or sex outside of marriage.  According to a 2015 Pew Research Center report, a quarter of Catholics have been divorced; 44% have lived in concubinage; 62% favor Communion for those who have divorced and remarried without an annulment.  Even our own clergy, up to the highest levels of the Church, have been outspoken proponents of Communion for the divorced and remarried, which the Church has never endorsed and cannot endorse.  A 2019 Pew study found that only 31% of Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  Most of these do not know the Church’s doctrine of transubstantiation; but 22% of Catholics do know it but reject it.  Is God putting the kibosh on countless multitudes of unworthy and sacrilegious Communions?

What about general irreverence in church?  The noise levels inside a Catholic church surpass anything that went on even during the crazy seventies, when all sorts of excesses ran riot in the liturgy.  The last time I was present at a priestly ordination in my diocese, several years ago, people were literally whooping and yelling inside the cathedral, during the Mass, as if they were at a football game.  No one corrected them.  (Now I come to think of it, we have had very, very few priestly ordinations in this diocese since then.)  Many of us, who do not have the excuse of having just come in from hard and unavoidable labor, appear at Mass dirty and smelly, dressed like slobs, or dressed immodestly.  Maybe God got tired of looking at tramp stamps and butt cracks and cleavage and flip flops inside His house, and smelling B.O. and listening to inane sports conversations in front of the tabernacle, and tossed us out until we have straightened up.  Wouldn’t we throw people out of our houses who came over only to behave disrespectfully and ignore us?

Also on ice are bound to be a great many Masses offered by perverted and corrupt priests and bishops, such as those who, to our shame, have been exposed in recent years, and by priests who preach errors and heresies from the pulpit.  Yes, as St. Thomas More explains in his Dialogue Concerning Heresies, a bad priest does not make for an invalid Mass; but nevertheless, he also argues that it would be better to have fewer Masses than more Masses offered by bad priests.  “For though God of His goodness, however bad the priest may be, well accepts the oblation of Christ’s holy Body for the sake of other folk,” says Thomas, “He yet is highly displeased with that priest’s presumption.  And we ought never to seek our own well-being with our neighbor’s harm.  And we should, as a duty to God, rather forgo the profit that we ourselves might attain by a Mass than see His Majesty disreverenced by the bold presumption of such an odious minister as He has forbidden to come around Him.”  It is worth reflecting on what the effect is in the diocese when an evil priest is uncovered and brought to light.  Do we collectively, as a local church, put on sackcloth and ashes and try to make reparation and do justice?  Or is it business as usual?

And then there is the Mass itself, as celebrated in so many places.  We quite fail, on a constant and ongoing basis, to offer to God the best that we have.  We replace Latin with the vernacular; we replace chant with guitars and tambourines, badly played; we replace polyphony with Broadway show tunes and campfire ditties.  Consider the following from a paean to ourselves, often trotted out during Lent, in which God only gets a couple of passing mentions:

We reach out to those who are homeless/To those who live without warmth/In the coolness of evening we’ll shelter their dreams/We will clothe them in mercy and peace.

What does this morass even mean?  And then there is the gender ideology injected into the Palm Sunday Gospel reading of the Passion, where the liberal liturgists assign all the male lines to female readers, while a multitude of able-bodied men stand around mute.  Whom do we seek to please by this gender-bending?  Is God pleased?

I am among those who think depriving us of the Mass and shrinking the visibility of the Church in a time of pestilence is a failure on the part of the bishops, and the result of our experiment in bringing the Church into line with the modern world.  But whatever guilt bishops may or may not incur in this is swallowed up by the realization that none of this could have happened without the permission of Almighty God.  God has allowed this to happen for a reason.

God loves us infinitely, as though each of us were the only person who ever existed, and He sent His Son to die to unlock the gates of heaven that were closed against us on account of sin.  But He is not required to put up with our crap.

We would have no chance of making it to heaven if He did.

Disorientation

Some Catholics, in common with the Protestant revolutionaries of the 16th century, hate Mass celebrated ad orientem.  Some bishops have gone as far as to forbid their priests to celebrate the New Mass ad orientem.  But I submit that that orientation in the Mass whereby the priest faces the people not only goes against century upon century of tradition, but is inherently disordered.

First, versus populum makes the priest the center of attention, instead of God.  That makes no sense, when we are there to worship God.

Second, the prayers of the Mass are addressed to God, not to the people in the pews.  How do you like having somebody turn his back on you and face someone else while he talks to you?

Third, it gets even worse.  Since the Tabernacle behind the altar contains Jesus in the Eucharist, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, every time the priest bends over at the altar, while facing the people, such as to kiss the altar, he is raising his rear end to  Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

Ever think of that?  Let this sink in.

Every time the priest bends over at the altar while facing the people, he is brandishing his butt at God.  He is directing his derrière at the Divine.  He is mooning the Messiah.  He is flashing the vertical smile at the Almighty.  (Don’t talk to me about the layers of vestments: God knows and sees what all is underneath those, right down to the racing stripes.)

Has this ever, in the two-thousand-year history of the Church, or during the millennia of the Old Covenant, ever been an accepted method of paying God the respect He is due?  How does it make you feel to be suddenly confronted with someone’s great big ass, whether they intended to point it at you or not?  And, since God made us in His image and likeness, why should we think He likes that any more than we do?

There are those who might think the solution to this problem would be to remove the Tabernacle to some other location, and continue to have the priest celebrate Mass facing the people.  But the removal of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament from His place of honor inside His own house is only a further progression of this whole disorder.

If Jesus cannot have the place of honor inside His own house, with nobody sticking their butt in His Face, it is that much harder for us to give Him the place of honor in our hearts, in our lives, and in society.  And when Jesus is denied His rightful place, the inevitable result is strange times like the ones we are now living in.

When Superman Refuses to Fly

So what are our shepherds doing about the coronavirus?  Among other things:

- No Communion from the chalice. (GOOD, should cut down on the use of lay Communion ministers, though certain exceptions are needed)
- Thorough washing of Communion vessels (Rome has previously ruled that this must be done by clerics)
- No hand-holding during Our Father and sign of peace (YAY!)
- Empty out holy water fonts (FAIL)
- No Communion on the tongue (ILLEGAL)

Some of these measures are prudent.  Some are welcome as purges of inane ‘70s accretions in the liturgy.  Some have nothing to do with stopping the spread of disease and are exercises of raw power, with the coronavirus as an obvious pretext for trying to quash traditional devotions and set modernist abuses in concrete.

This set of responses to the coronavirus is a bad sign.  Do our bishops really think these worldly precautions are sufficient?  Some of them don’t address the problem at all; none of them come close to bringing to bear all the powers at a bishop’s disposal.  Why aren’t bishops:

- Organizing processions?
- Using the Rituale Romanum to mass-produce holy water and exorcised salt and get them into the hands of as many people as possible?
- Imposing deprecatory blessings against plagues?
- Offering votive Masses against plagues?

Surely, the worst thing to do in a time of plague is to get rid of holy water!  Since a lot of priests use the Book of Blessings to make holy water, or even just make up their own blessings, maybe the absence of that water isn’t much of a loss; but real holy water, in which some exorcised salt is mixed, is meant to drive away disease!  Look at these passages from the blessings of salt and water out of the Rituale Romanum:

God’s creature, salt, I cast out the demon from you by the living God, by the true God, by the holy God, by God Who ordered you to be thrown into the water-spring by Eliseus to heal it of its barrenness.  May you be a purified salt, a means of health for those who believe, a medicine for body and soul for all who make use of you. 

O God, Who for man’s welfare established the most wonderful mysteries in the substance of water, hearten to our prayer, and pour forth Your blessing on this element now being prepared with various purifying rites.  May this creature of Yours, when used in Your mysteries and endowed with Your grace, serve to cast out demons and to banish disease.  May everything that this water sprinkles in the homes and gatherings of the faithful be delivered from all that is unclean and hurtful; let no breath of contagion hover there, no taint of corruption; let all the wiles of the lurking enemy come to nothing.  By the sprinkling of this water may everything opposed to the safety and peace of the occupants of these homes be banished, so that in calling on Your Holy Name they may know the well-being they desire, and be protected from every peril; through Christ our Lord.

These sacramentals are immensely powerful!  Or don’t we believe that anymore?

In the traditional Mass, there is a votive Mass for Deliverance from Death in Time of Pestilence.  It is founded on the belief, naively abandoned in our time, that plagues and pestilence are the scourges of God’s wrath for our sins.  For some reason, in the middle of the bloodiest century in human history, we came up with the idea that there is no need to appease God’s wrath.  We even got the zany idea that we can treat with God as equals.  How is that working out for us?  Why don’t we go back to praying like we used to in the Introit and the Collect and the Postcommunion for this votive Mass:

Be mindful, O Lord, of Thy covenant and say to the destroying Angel: Now hold thy hand, and let not the land be made desolate, and destroy not every living soul. 

O God, Who willest not the death of the sinner but that he should repent: welcome with pardon Thy people’s return to Thee: and so long as they are faithful in Thy service, do Thou in Thy clemency withdraw the scourge of Thy wrath. 

Graciously hear us, O God our Savior: deliver Thy people from the terrors of Thy wrath, and assure them of that safety which is the gift of Thy mercy.

These are extremely powerful spiritual weapons that only our priests and bishops can give us.  Why don’t they?  Is it because they don’t believe?

It is as if Superman is refusing to fly.

Bring Back the Communion Rail

Thou shalt not take nor remove thy neighbor's landmark, which thy predecessors have set in thy possession, which the Lord thy God will give thee in the land that thou shalt receive to possess.

Deuteronomy 19:14

Pass not beyond the ancient bounds which thy fathers have set. 

Proverbs 22:28

Cursed be he that removeth his neighbor’s landmarks: and all the people shall say: Amen.  

Deuteronomy 27:17

One of the worst moves pastors and bishops made in the wake of Vatican II was to tear the Communion rails out of existing churches, and to build new churches without them.  Egalitarianism, don’t you know, dictated that there be no boundaries between the sanctuary and the rabble in the pews.  We ought not even to have to climb steps to the altar!  God should be on our level.  Everything must be flattened and horizontalized.  After all, there ought to be no barriers between us and our pal, the Man Upstairs.

But there are barriers between us and God, starting with the fact that He is the Infinite God and we are dust and ashes.  There is an infinite abyss between us and God, and only God can bridge it -- which He in fact does.  But we still have to acknowledge that we are nothing compared to Him.  Another barrier between us and God is sin.  Christ died to destroy that barrier, and Baptism removes from us the stain of original sin; but we still suffer from the effects of original sin, and we still commit personal sins.  It takes a colossal pride for us to decide to act as if we are not in fact beggars at God's doorstep, and to dictate the terms upon which we are to approach God.  

Yet that's exactly what we did after the Second Vatican Council.  We decided we were too grown-up to abase ourselves anymore before God.  Can you credit that?  After a century and a half of atheistic revolutions, two world wars, atomic bombs, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the Cultural Revolution, millions of people across the world still being murdered by their own governments,  and millions of Catholics suffering under communist persecution, the need for humility and penance totally escaped us.  There we were, thinking we were Too Good to Be Lower than the Sanctuary and Kneel before God to receive Him in Holy Communion!  And Nothing is going to Keep Us Out of the Sanctuary if We Want to Go There!

But the irony is that, since most of the lay faithful do not in fact want to tramp gratuitously through the sanctuary, removing the Communion rail actually had the effect of distancing us from it.  The Communion rail is not a "barrier," but a boundary marker that shows us the point at which heaven meets earth.  The sanctuary represents heaven.  The Communion rail shows us where God comes to meet us.  How do we know where to go to meet the invisible, hidden God without a boundary marker?  The laity used to be accustomed to kneeling at the Communion rail to pray outside of Mass, so as to be as close as possible to Jesus in the tabernacle.  Now that the rails are gone, not only can we no longer kneel for Communion (with the hope of being able to get up off the floor again), we can no longer pray close to the tabernacle while keeping our proper place in the church.  Removing the Communion rail needlessly violates the sensibilities of faithful Catholics, and is thus an offense against charity.

Attacking people's faith is also an offense against charity.  It is practically impossible to view the changes to the reception of Holy Communion, including removing the rail, as anything but an attack on people's faith, especially in view of the boldness of many members of the hierarchy in our time who now openly display their lack of faith.  If the prelates responsible for these changes truly believed in the Real Presence, why would they want people to disrespect our Lord by approaching Holy Communion in a less reverent manner?  And let us not deconstruct the difference between kneeling and standing by pointing to the practice of Eastern Catholics.  We in the Latin Rite are not Eastern, and we do not receive Holy Communion in the same manner.  In the Latin Rite, kneeling is clearly more reverential than standing; and when you purport to abolish a more reverent posture in favor of a less reverent one, you are sending a message.  The message has clearly been received: now a majority of Catholics disbelieve in the Real Presence.  Incidentally, you also encourage non-Catholics to get into the Communion line, thus exposing the Sacrament to a heightened risk of profanation by people who simply do not know what to do with It.

Holy Scripture clearly anathematizes the removal of boundary markers.  We have now spent the last half-century learning the reasons.  Take away boundary markers, and you have to learn the hard way why they were there in the first place.  You also get to find out how hard, and how costly, it is to put them back.  It is high time we faced up to the difficulties of doing the right thing and accept them as a penance.

And all the people shall say: Amen.

Rumor

There is a rumor going around to the effect that priest of the Boise diocese, or some group of them, have had A Meeting to declare Their Resolution that there shall be No Latin Used Whatsoever in Any Novus Ordo Mass.  This is only a rumor; but, sadly, it is believable.  There is at least one local parish where this rule is apparently in effect.

And it is believable because so much of the Catholic hierarchy has spent the last half-century or so proving that they do not (a) believe in the content of the Catholic Faith, or (b) care about the flock, except insofar as the flock serves their purposes for the moment.  

Jesus asked, which of our fathers, if we asked him for bread, would give us a stone, or a serpent if we asked for a fish, or a scorpion if we asked for an egg?  Sadly, the answer, in our time, is, the Catholic hierarchy.  To so many of our priests and bishops, we are nothing more than sources of money, for which their demands are endless, or raw material for their liturgical or social engineering experiments.  They have no respect for our sensibilities, and double down on the things that hurt or offend us.  They excoriate us, not for our sins, but for wanting to receive Holy Communion on the tongue, or kneeling, or only from the consecrated hands of a priest.  We have to repeatedly beg many of them for the legitimate goods we seek, that lie only within their power to give us (such as the traditional Mass), and they either ignore us, deny us outright or grudgingly dole us out crumbs.  Many bishops are remote, quasi-mythical figures who don’t even answer letters from their subjects or grant them audiences.  Instead, they spend millions of our dollars on vain pursuits, like the just-concluded USCCB general assembly, behind a tight wall of armed security, at the $300.00-a-night Inner Harbor Marriott in Baltimore.  And they spend a lot of time not turfing out the sexual predators from among their own ranks. 

Jesus said: “If you, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father from heaven give the good Spirit to them that ask Him?”  How far must one have fallen not to even know how to give good gifts to the children?

Therefore, ye shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: As I live, saith the Lord God, forasmuch as my flocks have been made a spoil, and my sheep are become a prey to all the beasts of the field, because there was no shepherd: for my shepherds did not seek after my flock, but the shepherds fed themselves, and fed not my flocks: Therefore, ye shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: Thus saith the Lord God: Behold I Myself come upon the shepherds, I will require my flock at their hand, and I will cause them to cease from feeding the flock any more, neither shall the shepherds feed themselves any more: and I will deliver my flock from their mouth, and it shall no more be meat for them.

Ezekiel 34:7-10.

There Are Reasons People Hate Clowns

I don't know how many of the three or four people who read this blog are priests; but if you are a priest or bishop, and you think you are there to entertain your congregation at Mass, this post is addressed to you.

Some of you priest celebrants at Mass cannot resist doing a clown act on the altar.  Some of you confine this nonsense to your sermons, which is bad enough.  Others of you pepper the liturgy with stupid jokes; or you constantly halt the liturgy in order to try to warm up the crowd with "humorous" asides.  The nervous, raised-eyebrow tittering of your congregation suggests nothing to you.

You need to cut this crap out right now.

First of all, you are living, breathing proof of what a rotten idea it was (a) to turn the priest around to face the people during Mass; (b) to give him a microphone; and (c) to cobble up a liturgy where every part of the Mass has numerous different options for how it can be done, all entirely at the discretion of the priest-celebrant.  (The new Mass has so many options to it, in fact, it is next to impossible for us in the pews to follow in the missal and know whether you are using a legitimate option or just making up your own.)  No wonder you think it's all about you.  No wonder that after decades of this kind of stuff, you are now convinced that you are supposed to be the center of everything.  And having had your ego thus stoked all these years, no wonder you fight tooth and nail to resist the traditional Mass at your parishes, no matter how much your people might want it.  You have weakened and fattened your flock up for the wolves on a steady diet of liturgical junk food, until the ones who still actually believe in the content of the Catholic faith are reduced to gritting their teeth and telling themselves that at least they are getting the Eucharist.

Somewhere along the line, you clown priests convinced yourselves that you need to spice up the Mass with your own peculiar (and I do mean peculiar) brand of humor in order to be "pastoral."  Well, let me give you the perspective from the receiving end.

You have no idea who all in your congregation is dealing with what -- not even those of you who bother to find out who your parishioners are (and not all of you do).  That man sitting way in the back, in a corner, behind a pillar, has been away from the Church and the Sacraments for years and years, and is in shock over his realization that he has been leading a bad life.  That miserable-looking, unfriendly woman who doesn't want to engage in pre-Mass ice-breakers or the sign of peace has just suffered a major bereavement.  That couple off to the side with haunted expressions on their faces have no idea where their child is or whether they will ever see her again.  Those teenagers who aren't singing along with the offertory hymn have just been told that their mother has terminal cancer.  That stony-faced father with three little kids has just lost his job.

And here you come, administering blows on top of bruises with your "pastoral" method.

In the first place, you are not cheering these people up.  You are trivializing and adding to their pain.  Proverbs 25:20: He who sings songs to a heavy heart is like one who takes off a garment on a cold day, and like vinegar on a wound.

In the second place, what these people most need, in the midst of these awful changes in their lives, is something that does not change.  At one time, and until very recently, that was the liturgy, which opened up a window onto the supernatural.  But your people can't see through that window, because you are in their face, dancing around in front of them while they are trying to look at something greater and more important than yourself.  You have no idea how jarring your "improvements" to the Mass are.  You have no idea, because you never listen.  After all, you are the priest, and therefore, you know better.  Nobody can tell you anything, so they eventually give up trying.

Since so many of the changes in the liturgy over the last 60 years or so have purported to be about going back to the "purity" of the early Church, maybe we should bring back the ancient practice of the laity rioting anytime they heard changes in the wording of the Gospel.  The time has not yet passed out of living memory when it was considered a mortal sin for a priest to make changes to the liturgy sua sponte; that's another idea whose time has come again.  It has not been considered so during this extended period of experimentation; but it's time we seriously asked ourselves whether it is possible that the objective sinful character of such acts can really have changed.  The answer surely lies in the rotten fruits of experimentation, and the real pain it has caused us in the pews.

Priests, you have got to stop playing the fool at Mass.  You are driving your flocks, and yourselves, away from the True Shepherd, and you are going to have to answer for every one.  The Bread of Life is Jesus Christ, not you.  Stop giving us stones when we come to you for the Bread.

Taking Even Bitter for Sweet

It is said to be an abuse to neglect to give a homily at Sunday Mass.  Apparently, there are places where this abuse is widespread.  I want to know where to go to sign up to have the neglect of homilies enshrined in canon law as it applies to my parish, where I have been given to understand, among other things, that the hierarchy of the Church was not divinely instituted; that the Eucharist was established by the Christian community as a memorial to Christ; that you don't need to believe in God to be a good person; and that the darkness the people walked in before they saw the great light was not sin, but the oppression of the priestly classes.

Today, instead of a homily, we got a really lame joke from the priest, followed by a layman ascending the pulpit and dunning us for donations to the diocese.  Not quite what I had in mind, but at least I didn't have to listen to the Gospel According to Karl Marx.

Still, it's a mark of how bad things are when you find yourself rejoicing that this time you only got slapped in the face instead of getting beaten with a baseball bat.

A soul that is full shall tread upon the honeycomb: and a soul that is hungry shall take even bitter for sweet.  Proverbs 27:7.

Notes and Images from the Mary Magdalene Retreat

Our chapter's annual Mary Magdalene retreat on July 17-19 was a success.  A big thank you to all those who made it possible, from the cleanup crew to the cooks to Maria Turner and the chant schola to the newly-ordained Fr. Gabriel Mosher, O.P. who stepped in for Fr. Vincent Kelber, O.P. as our retreat master.  He offered a Dominican Rite Mass every day of our retreat, culminating in sung High Mass on Sunday.  We were glad to see a fair number of folks from outside the chapter join us for Mass in the main room of our chapter house, where we have set up a temporary chapel with a real battlefield altar.  Herewith some images (hopefully discreetly shot) from the retreat:

Adoration on Friday night.  Father leads us in the Holy Hour of Reparation to the Sacred Heart.

The Dominican Rite, which belongs particularly to the Order of Preachers and which predates the Council of Trent, is similar in many, but not all respects, to the traditional Roman Rite.  Here the altar is set up for High Mass in the Dominican Rite.  Notice that the chalice is not set up as it would be for the Latin Rite.  In the Dominican Rite the chalice is set up at the beginning of Mass.  Also notice the extra, unlit candles at either end of the altar.  These are the Sanctus candles.  They are lit during the Sanctus.

Vesting for Mass.  Father has the amice over his head and is putting on his maniple.

The sprinkling rite, done sans chasuble.

Altar servers are much more integral in the Dominican Rite than in the Roman Rite.  There were three servers at this High Mass, and they had a lot of complicated maneuvers to perform.  There is a constant orbiting around the altar, like a solar system.  In fact, it is a kind of solar system, with Christ -- represented by the altar -- as the center around which all of creation revolves.  This makes the liturgy a sort of dance, proving that there is a legitimate form of liturgical dance, with no gauze involved.

Preparing the incense.  Notice that there are a lot of candles in the Dominican Rite.

Elevation of the Host, with incensing.

After Mass, Father blessed candles, rosaries, salt and water for us according to the traditional Dominican rites of blessing and the Rituale Romanum.  If you have access to a Dominican friar who is willing to use the traditional formulas, there is a special Dominican blessing on rosaries that allows one to gain a plenary indulgence with each use of the beads.  We have now a tsunami of holy water, and enough exorcised salt to carpet-bomb every level of hell. 

There are many places where the old guard from the '70s and '80s still has the upper hand; but, as we saw this weekend, many of our new young priests and friars love the treasures of our Catholic patrimony and have very little use for the "wonderful" "new" ideas that so captivated their elders. 

More Random Thoughts

-- The secular lay members of the Mystical Body of Christ have their own role to play in the history of salvation and a special dignity all our own that is different from that of priests and religious.  It is crass clericalism of a major order to think that the secular lay faithful are not fully participating in the life of the Church unless we are engaged in a flurry of activity at Mass or otherwise doing things that priests ought to be doing.

-- When we go chasing after imaginary "rights," we forfeit our authentic ones, both for ourselves and for others.  When we start chasing after the "right" to pursue our unbridled passions, even at the price of putting to death unwanted babies in the womb, we forfeit our right to a well-ordered society.  When we start chasing after the "right" of two people of the same sex to enter into "marriage," we forfeit the free exercise of religion.  When we start chasing after the "right" of one spouse to put away the other spouse when he gets tired of her and trade her in for a new model, we forfeit the right of the innocent spouse to a common life and consortium; we forfeit the right of the children to live in an intact family with both mother and father; and we forfeit the property rights of the spouses.

-- That last point bears a little closer examination.  Has anybody besides innocent spouses noticed that no-fault divorce is just a great, big redistribution scheme?  File for divorce, and suddenly, your property isn't your property anymore: the marital estate -- not to mention the separate income of the spouse who makes the most money, even if he is not the one who filed -- gets turned over to the legislature and the courts to distribute as they see fit.  This kind of power in the hands of government perverts the mission of government, which should be to protect society's building-block institutions.  That is why the law favors those who set out to torpedo their families, and leaves those who want to stay together without any recourse.

-- Think you know all about the "Red Scare" and the Hollywood blacklist?  Did you know, for instance, that every single one of the Hollywood Ten was in fact an active member of the Communist Party and had pledged his allegiance to the Soviet Union?  Did you know that, in an effort to gain control over the movie industry, the Communists instigated two bitter, violent and ultimately fruitless strikes of behind-the-scenes studio employees in 1945 and 1946?  Did you know that the blacklist was actually instituted by the studios themselves -- not by the government -- in response to the defiant performance of the Hollywood Ten in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947?  If not, then you need to read Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters: Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler by Allan H. Ryskind.

-- It is always the priests who have to add their little ad-libs to the Mass, or take out parts of the Mass they don't like, who can't faithfully say the black and do the red, who have the greatest reputations for humility and pastoral-mindedness.  This proves that we no longer have a clue in what humility consists.

-- I am happy to be able to report that it has been some years now since I have seen sand or twigs or nothing at all in local holy water fonts during Lent.  But if you are unfortunate enough to live in a place where that foolishness still goes on, don't just take it.  Carry holy water around (REAL holy water, blessed according to the Rituale Romanum -- find a priest willing to do this and create a big supply) and fill the empty fonts, dumping the debris when necessary.

-- Fr. Chad Ripperger is a big proponent of spiritual contracts.  A spiritual contract is when you ask God that, every time you say a particular prayer or do a particular good work, He understand you to be offering that prayer or work for some intention.  That way, you can always pray for the intention even when you are not consciously thinking about it at the time of the prayer or work.  Here is an example of some of my own spiritual contracts.  I like to say the Litany of the Sacred Heart after every Holy Communion.  I have marked particular lines in the Litany with the names of people for whose intention I want to pray every time I say that line.  Sometimes, I just say that line as an aspiration; and every time I do, I am praying for that person.  I also have spiritual contracts tied to some of my daily prayers.  The thought that I am praying for the intentions of people I love every time I say some part of those prayers helps me to persevere in prayer even when I don't feel like it.

-- In these days of institutional rottenness both in the Church and in the secular world, we are told that those who speak out against this rottenness and who try to restore what has been destroyed are "divisive" and "uncharitable."  Bl. Clemens Graf von Galen, the Lion of Münster, teaches us how to respond to this accusation:

My Christians! It will perhaps be held against me that by this frank statement I am weakening the home front of the German people during this war. I, on the contrary, say this: It is not I who am responsible for a possible weakening of the home front, but those who regardless of the war, regardless of this fearful week of terrible air-raids, impose heavy punishments on innocent people without the judgment of a court or any possibility of defence, who evict our religious orders, our brothers and sisters, from their property, throw them on to the street, drive them out of their own country. They destroy men's security under the law, they undermine trust in law, they destroy men's confidence in our government. And therefore I raise my voice in the name of the upright German people, in the name of the majesty of Justice, in the interests of peace and the solidarity of the home front; therefore as a German, an honourable citizen, a representative of the Christian religion, a Catholic bishop, I exclaim: we demand justice! If this call remains unheard and unanswered, if the reign of Justice is not restored, then our German people and our country, in spite of the heroism of our soldiers and the glorious victories they have won, will perish through an inner rottenness and decay.

-- Things in the Church have been so bad for so long that we are ready to leap on any little crumb of comfort -- any tiny sign, for instance, that in fact we have been mistaken all these years about our pastor or our bishop being a doctrinaire leftist, or that reverence will soon be restored in our local parishes -- in the frantic hope that it portends a change for the better.  But once we have devoured that crumb, we see that nothing has really changed, and we feel emptier than ever.  We may  have to endure even worse times before authentic reform comes.  But when it does come, we will not need to wonder whether it is here.  It will be unmistakable.  

Holy Week and "Gender" Politics

With liberals, everything is always about politics, which means the rest of us must constantly be indoctrinated, lest we fail to see the light.  We can't just have music: we have to have some message set to a tune.  We can't just have a novel: we have to have an attitude adjustment.  We can't just have plays or movies: we have to have leftist sermons disguised as entertainment.  Even religion isn't safe from this busybody interference.  We can't just have Holy Mass, or Vespers, or the Rosary, or Stations of the Cross: our once Catholic worship and devotions have to be salted down with a heavy seasoning of philistinism, narcissism, secular humanism and even downright Marxism.  It is always during this, the holiest week of the year, that the top is off the salt-shaker and the spoons and castor oil are out, and we are lined up to take our medicine.  It is time for us once again to be force-fed our annual lessons in "gender" theory, beginning with the reading of the Passion on Palm Sunday and culminating in Holy Thursday with the washing of the feet.

These days, during the reading of the Passion, and while a multitude of men stands around, we have women reading the parts of St. Peter and Pontius Pilate, and men reading the part of the maidservant who confronts St. Peter.  Why is this a big deal?  Because, apart from the fact that it is jarring to hear a woman reading St. Peter's lines, it is obvious that this is not being done out of necessity, since there are plenty of men around; it is clearly being done to make a point, even if those who orchestrate it vehemently deny it.  One grows weary of being peppered by these little points during Mass.  It is hoped that eventually we will grow so used to them that we start ignoring them -- and therein lies the danger.  To ignore them is to be anesthetized, and therefore compliant.  This sort of thing prepares us, gradually, to accept the lie that there is no difference between men and women. Each time one of these little stunts is pulled, that is one more degree added to the temperature of the pot of water that we frogs are sitting in. And the lie has broad and deep implications. If it is true that there is no difference between men and women, and men and women do not each have their proper roles and inclinations ordained by God in virtue of their different endowments, then there is no reason why marriage should only be between one man and one woman; there is no reason why children need both their mothers and their fathers; and ultimately, the union of Christ, the divine Bridegroom, and His spotless Bride, the Church, is a joke.

The gender-bending and general confusion in secular society about the nature of maleness and femaleness is being harnessed by the women's ordination crowd within the Church.  We need to get it through our thick skulls that there is no real difference between the sexes, you see, so that we will realize what an injustice it is that women cannot be ordained to the priesthood.  The inherent dignity of women demands that they have a role at the table too, and not just as sacristans or preparers of meals or on cleaning crews, the argument runs; therefore, women must swarm the sanctuary, must read the male lines in the reading of the Passion, and must have their feet washed -- even though the rubrics of the Mass specify that only men are to have their feet washed, as they symbolize the all-male college of Apostles.  

But this line of thinking betrays a worldly mindset as well as a total lack of understanding of the self-immolation that is the ordained priesthood.  If the inherent dignity of women demands that they have a role "at the table" -- which seems to be how we now think of the Altar of Sacrifice -- why wasn't the Mother of God there at the Last Supper; or, if she was there, why wasn't she mentioned in Scripture? If any woman deserved a place "at the table," surely it was she.  Perhaps the answer is that the Mother of God, rather than standing on her dignity, took her (unglamorous) place at the blood-soaked foot of the Cross, which is identical to the Mass.  Besides: is there something undignified about being a sacristan or preparer of meals or on a cleaning crew?  Generations of saints, including the Mother of God herself, might disagree with such a proposition.   

The Mass is the August Sacrifice of Calvary, where our redemption was won and the powers of hell were decisively defeated; it is not a forum for politicking, and the faithful are not there to serve as a captive audience for liberal propaganda.  For years, the world has been telling us that the sexes are fungible and that sexual identity is purely a societal construct that has nothing to do with nature. This is patently false. Why, then, are we Catholics buying into the gender-bending ideology, and why are we applying it to the Mass?

Terrible Is This Place

Bernini's baldocchino at St. Peter's Basilica.
Photo by Ricardo Andre Frantz.

Last Sunday, before Mass, I happened to open my 1962 Missal up to the Common of Saints, and my eye fell on these lines: 

Terribilis est locus iste: hic domus Dei est et porta coeli: et vocabitur aula Dei.

Terrible is this place: it is the House of God, and the gate of Heaven; and it shall be called the Court of God.

That is the antiphon from the Introit of the Mass for the Dedication of a Church in the Extraordinary Form.  "Terrible" here is used in its older sense of "awe-inspiring."  I looked around the cathedral and thought of those words ringing inside that space at its dedication 92 Easter Sundays ago.  I must confess that it increased my anger and sorrow at the thought of the mutilation of that beautiful cathedral in 1979, and indeed the similar desecration of many other old churches, brutally inflicted against the will of the laity who built them, and in accordance with notions falsely attributed to the Second Vatican Council.

The Collect of this Mass:

Deus, qui invisibiliter omnia contines, et tamen pro salute generis humani signa tuae potentiae visibiliter ostendis: templum hoc potentia tuae inhabitationis illustra, et concede; ut omnes, qui huc deprecaturi conveniunt, ex quacumque tribulatione ad te clamaverint, consolationis tuae beneficia consequantur.  

O God, Who, though unseen, upholdest all things, and yet for the salvation of mankind dost visibly show signs of Thy power: give glory to this temple by the might of Thy indwelling, and grant that all who in their deep distress shall come and call upon Thee here, may receive Thy goodly comfort.

Imagine a bishop chanting this stirring prayer in a tiny church in a poor, humble town -- a tiny church that is no less the House of God and Gate of Heaven than a cathedral.  Indeed, how much more the Mighty Indwelling must uphold it in its littleness.  The Gradual:

Locus iste a Deo factus est, inaestimabile sacramentum, irreprehensibilis est.  Deus, cui adstat Angelorum chorus, exaudi preces servorum tuorum.

This place was made by God, a priceless mystery, it is without reproof.  O God, before Whom stands the choir of angels, give ear to the prayers of Thy servants.

The Lesson of the Mass for the Dedication of a Church is from Chapter 21 of the Apocalypse, the vision of the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven; and the Gospel is the story of Zacheus from the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus declares that "this day is salvation come to this house."

I don't know how the dedication of a church goes according to the Mass of Paul VI, but I can see here one of the many reasons Pope Benedict XVI took the Traditional Mass out of mothballs.  We have gotten so casual and careless anymore about where we are when we are in church: we talk, we laugh, we dress like slobs, we let kids roughhouse in front of the tabernacle.  Priests and deacons behave in church as though they are merely at work and not inside a sacred space.  Of course, it doesn't help that many new churches are sterile and ugly, and do not appear to be in any way connected with religion.

Every new Latin Rite church should be dedicated according to the Extraordinary Form, and every Catholic should meditate on these propers, so that we can be reminded of just where we really are every Sunday, and how we ought to act there.

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi

Once again, Sunday Mass featured a visiting priest who evidently thinks it's All About Him. Today's narcissism took the form of constantly interrupting the Mass -- even the Canon -- in order to insert commentaries.  Can somebody point out where in the Missal it says to do that?  Must the priest's private views, which I did not come to church to hear, constantly intrude on the Mass, which I did come to hear?  Why can't we just have -- the Mass?  

The incessant attention-seeking from today's celebrant put me in mind of a religious sister I heard speaking once, a high-ranking official in the diocese at the time, who was publicly lamenting the fact that the Church contumaciously refuses to ordain women (read: her) as priests.  It pained her so much, she said, that she could only do so much before people had to turn away from her and seek out a priest.  In other words, she wanted to be a priestess because she wanted (a) power, and (b) to be the center of attention.  This distorted view of the priesthood is wholly foreign to the mindset of a man with a legitimate vocation, who understand himself to be called to a life of service and self-sacrifice.

Then I thought: after decades of attending Holy Mass under the guise of a fourth-rate vaudeville act, can the wymynpriest crowd really be blamed for thinking the priesthood is the key to satisfying their cravings for the spotlight?  Have not priests themselves fostered this gross misconception; and is this not due in large part to what has been done to the liturgy?  Turn the priest toward the congregation and hook him up to a microphone, and of course he will think he's supposed to play to the crowd, and begin acting accordingly.  Next thing you know, Holy Mass is transformed from the highest act of worship to a show that the priest feels the need constantly to try to steal.  And just to make sure of an adoring crowd, the people in the pews are strictly regimented, while he gets away with doing whatever he wants, whatever the Missal may say -- a phenomenon we have reflected on in this space before.  Was the women's ordination movement as noisy and pestiferous before the changes to the Mass and the ensuing abuses as it is now?

The abuses in the liturgy that are now so widespread are themselves a symptom of deeper problems in the Church; but they are the proximate cause of doctrinal derailments, which foster chaos and moral impotence that ripple out into the world at large.  No wonder it is said that to save the liturgy is to save the world.

The Still, Small Voice

Weekend before last, I went down to Ogden to visit the grandparents.  Among other things, Sunday the 8th was (a) my birthday, and (b) the date set for Missa Cantata at St. James the Just, the inimitable Fr. Erik Richstieg celebrating, and Michael Wooden directing the schola cantorum.  It was a great treat to be able to attend Mass in the Extraordinary Form on my special day.

Meditating on this beautiful Mass gave rise to some reflections.   My attention was drawn to the professionalism of Michael, the altar server, in all his movements.  He did not look stiff and rigid, but on the other hand, there was nothing lazy or sloppy in how he carried out his duties.  I particularly noticed how, whenever he passed in front of the tabernacle, instead of just walking across the front of the altar, he descended to the bottom of the steps, stopped directly in front of the tabernacle, genuflected, then re-ascended the steps and continued on his way.  He was clearly committed to striving for excellence at the altar and doing everything exactly right.  There is an almost military precision to the traditional Mass, and the ministers in the sanctuary who love it, like Michael and Fr. Erik, work hard to be faithful to it.  There is a rubric to govern everything they do at the altar, and it must be done in a particular way.  Part of the purpose of all this strict ritual is to shield the people from the distraction of having the priest's personality intrude on the Mass; to safeguard the priest from feelings of self-importance; and to remind us all that the Mass is the work of God and not of mere men.  So crucial was -- is -- fidelity to the ritual that it was once considered a mortal sin for a priest deliberately to deviate from it.

Things are more relaxed for the people in the pews in the traditional Mass.  Except for genuflecting during the Credo and the Last Gospel, standing for the Gospels and kneeling for the consecration --  instinctive for believing Catholics -- there seem to be no set rules to what the people are supposed to be doing.  My 1962 Missal has a loose-leaf cheat sheet with a table that tells you generally when to sit, stand and kneel, but in practice, one just does whatever is done in a particular place.  You can never go wrong by kneeling through the whole Mass if you want to, but you don't have to; and if you want to sit after Communion, there's nobody to tell you you can't.  Nor are you required to sing, or say any responses, or make gestures.  You can just listen, and watch, and be, and quiet your soul, and leave all the heavy lifting to the alter Christus in the sanctuary.  That is what he is there for.

One can't help contrasting this order of business with the way things are done in most places with the Mass of Paul VI.  The New Mass is supposed to be an expression of the New Spirit of Freedom and Openness...and yet have you ever noticed how strictly regimented we in the pews are?  We are expected to say our parts, and sing the songs, and generally busy ourselves with doing a bunch of stuff.  We have ushers to keep us in line, and priests and deacons to lecture us sternly on our failures of "active participation" if we do not keep up with our many appointed tasks.  We are essentially driven like cattle through a noisy, fast-paced proceeding that leaves us no time to pray or recollect ourselves or remember that we are at the foot of the Cross.  Meanwhile, many priests do pretty much whatever they want at the altar, whatever the books may say.  

And this is what is known as the "golden age of the laity."

Personally, I envision the Golden Age of the Laity as something more along the lines of what I got on September the 8th.  I would much rather let the priest be the priest, and have him let me be me, and shut out the din of everyday life and listen in silence for the still, small voice.

The Cruise Ship of Peter

The modern world, which denies personal guilt and admits only social crimes, which has no place for personal repentance but only public reforms, has divorced Christ from His Cross; the Bridegroom and Bride have been pulled apart. What God hath joined together, men have torn asunder. As a result, to the left is the Cross; to the right is the Christ...The Western post-Christian civilization has picked up the Christ without His Cross. But a Christ without a sacrifice that reconciles the world to God is a cheap, feminized, colorless, itinerant preacher who deserves to be popular for His great Sermon on the Mount, but also merits unpopularity for what He said about His Divinity on the one hand, and divorce, judgment, and hell on the other. This sentimental Christ is patched together with a thousand commonplaces....Without His Cross, He becomes nothing more than a sultry precursor of democracy or a humanitarian who taught brotherhood without tears.  

Ven. Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

This weekend, I had the joy of attending Low Mass in the Dominican Rite, for the feast of St. Vincent de Paul; then a Novus Ordo Vigil Mass for Sunday celebrated ad orientem.  But it all had to be paid for this morning, when I found myself at a Mass with muzak-like campfire ditties played on piano and bass guitar and bongos and cymbals and tinkly chimes; girl altar servers with loose hair and flip-flops; people encouraged to socialize with each other instead of getting recollected for Mass; a priest improvising Mass parts; the canon gone through hastily and almost carelessly; and applause at the end for Murph and the Magictones, followed by raucous yakking inside the church.

Such is the Cruise Ship of Peter, the favorite fantasy of so many Catholics, even in the hierarchy.

Unlike the Barque of Peter, constantly under assault and in danger of sinking, yet manfully plowing forward through rough seas, the Cruise Ship of Peter is nice.  Its worship is uncontroversial.  It is bland.  It is insipid.  It is jejune.  It is decadent.  It is effeminate.  It kindles no fires, stirs no ardor, pricks no consciences.  Its lifeblood is mediocrity.  It docks at any old port, and will strike any old compromise to do so.  It insulates man from the uncomfortable mystery of the supernatural, and protects him from transports of zeal.  There is little enough to distinguish it from any other organization calling itself a church, or even from secular society: its very furnishings are precisely those of a posh country club.  That is why it always has smooth sailing, at least for as long as this serves the purposes of the prince of this world.  Even when sailing is not smooth, the ship is so grand and luxurious that nobody on board notices.  One leaves the liturgy on the cruise ship feeling as though one has just been to a really nice wine and cheese reception.  With its affluence and its amphitheater layout and its cushioned pews and its polished wood and its orchestra pit next to the sanctuary and its soothing, tranquilizing liturgy, the Cruise Ship of Peter is all ordered, down to the smallest detail, with a view to sealing up Catholics in a soft, warm cocoon of niceness and upper-class comfort, making them forget, or even filling them with friendly feelings toward, the pirates and cutthroats that smile back from their little boats that nevertheless daily increase and close in.

All are welcome aboard the Cruise Ship of Peter -- they even have a song about it that they sing at the beginning of Mass! -- all, that is, except anyone who might rock the boat.  What might the Cruise Ship do, one is tempted to wonder, with a Francis of Assisi, or a Dominic de Guzman, or a Catherine of Siena, or an Alphonsus Liguori, or a Fulton Sheen?  Would they have to walk the plank?  How much has the Cruise Ship liturgy to do with immemorial tradition?  Does it inspire missionaries and fortify martyrs?  Does it remotely resemble the Masses of Aquinas, wrapped in awe; or those of the Recusants in Elizabethan England, where it was death to be a priest; or of Father Willie Doyle on makeshift altars in the muddy trenches of the First World War; or of the Cristeros in their secret refuges from the Masonic Mexican regime; or of the first and only Mass celebrated by Bl. Karl Leisner, secretly ordained in Dachau on Gaudete Sunday, 1944, desperately ill yet on fire for souls?  Can one picture Father Augustine Tolton on board, his soul blazing like a beacon from the crumbling lighthouse of his overworked body, his trembling hands raised amid the mellow strains of "On Eagle's Wings"?

Is it worth it to try to trade the Barque of Peter in for this new luxury model?  Does the Cruise Ship of Peter connect Catholics to their illustrious past?  Does it prepare Catholics to meet their adversaries in battle in these increasingly stern times?  Is it counter-cultural?  Does it provide Catholics with a distinctive identity apart from the secular society?  Does it actively promote unity, rather than Balkanization, of Catholics of differing ethnic and linguistic backgrounds?  Does it make Catholics know that we are not of the world, though we are in it?

Or does it merely fatten and soften up the sheep for the slaughter?

You decide.

December 25th: Christmas

Though coming in the form of man, yet not in every thing is He subject to the laws of man's nature; for while His being born of a woman tells of human nature; virginity becoming capable of childbirth betokens something above man.  Of Him then His mother's burden was light, the birth immaculate, the delivery without pain, the nativity without defilement, neither beginning from wanton desire, nor brought to pass with sorrow.  For as she who by her guilt engrafted death into our nature, was condemned to bring forth in trouble, it was meet that she who brought life into the world should accomplish her delivery with joy.  But through a virgin's purity He makes His passage into mortal life at a time in which the darkness was beginning to fail, and the vast expanse of night to fade away before the exceeding brightness of the light.  For the death of sin had brought an end of wickedness which from henceforth tends to nothing by reason of the presence of the true light which has illuminated the whole world with the rays of the Gospel.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Benedicta et venerabilis es, Virgo Maria: Quae sine tactu pudoris inventa es mater Salvatoris.  virgo Dei Genitrix, quem totus non capit orbis, in tua se clausit viscera factus homo.

Alleluia, alleluia.  Post partum Virgo inviolata permansisti: Dei Genitrix, intercede pro nobis.  Alleluia.

Blessed and venerable art thou, O Virgin Mary: who without loss of purity wert found to be the Mother of our Savior.  Virgin Mother of God, He whom the whole world cannot hold enclosed Himself in thy womb, and became man.

Alleluia, alleluia.  After His birth a Virgin entire thou didst remain: O Mother of God, intercede for us. Alleluia.

The Gradual of the Mass: Salve, Sancta Parens, from the Common of Feasts of the Blessed Virgin in the 1962 Missal

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Yesterday, I found myself at a Mass caught in the clutches of a sort of pop music "choir." The guitars, tambourines, mics, and bee-boppy quality of the repertoire destroyed all meditation and recollection.  I couldn't look at the priest through most of the Mass, because he was on the verge of dancing to the beat.  Despite the presence of a perfectly good choir loft, the oversized group and their many accoutrements were parked next to the altar.  The sight of even the best-behaved musicians next to the altar is a major distraction; even more so when they are dancing around and/or dressed outlandishly or immodestly.

Yet, for some reason, this circus is still considered by many to be preferable to sacred chant, in Latin (I don't think chant and English are a good fit), sung from the choir loft, or at least from the back of the church.  I never cease to be amazed at the visceral hatred of and prejudice against sacred chant -- all of a piece with the irrational hatred of the Extraordinary Form Mass, often on the part of people who have either never attended one or only remember it as a distant childhood memory. I guess the problem with chant is (a) it takes effort, talent and discipline to master; (b) it suffers no mediocrity; (c) one cannot imprint one's own idiosynchratic stamp on it. 

But the reality is that there is true freedom in chant. Once I have mastered a piece of chant, singing it makes me feel as though I am soaring. Not being metrical, it is free of time, which is a prison; it is thus, in its own way, a little taste of eternity, which is beyond time.  Which, maybe, come to think of it, is part of the problem with chant: (d) it embodies too much freedom, the unbearable lightness of being.  That's a threat to our taskmasters, the liberals in both the religious and political spheres, who live in dread lest we develop a taste for true freedom, as in the freedom of the sons of God.  

So now would be a good time to dig through our old trunks and pull out the much ballyhooed non-conformity of our youth.  Remember that?  Now we can press it into the service of something really worthwhile.  Try chant.  Get used to singing it, or at least listening to it, and you find that it quite puts the lie to the idea that it and other aspects of traditional worship represent repression and hide-bound uptightness.  On the contrary, it opens our eyes to the difference between the banal and the transcendent.  The discipline of chant is itself freeing: one is only free to create or convey beauty with discipline, because true beauty must be orderly, as Truth is orderly.  Freedom without order is really chaos, and chaos is another prison, the prison of ugliness and insecurity.  That is what we have had in our worship for far too long, and our faith has suffered on account of it.  We no longer recognize chaos for what it is, and we fail to embrace Truth and Beauty, which, as Keats said, are the same.

We need to break out of this prison.  But when we've grown up not knowing anything else, it's hard.  Freedom is dangerous and frightening in our increasingly regimented, collectivist, atheistic age.  Yet we have the tools we need to make our escape, if we just use them.  Consistent exposure to sacred chant and traditional worship are the files that Pope Benedict has baked into the cakes of Summorum Pontificum and Universae Ecclesiae and smuggled to us in our cells.

The Devil Wants the Church to Be "Relevant"

The last time I found myself in the unfortunate situation of attending a LifeTeen Mass, it made me so damn mad I felt I couldn't receive Holy Communion.  The music (average age of the band: well over 30) was as sophomoric as it was objectively sacrilegious, and a football stadium atmosphere prevailed inside the Church.  And as if all that weren't bad enough, (a) the celebrant was the bishop, and (b) he was singing along with the tunes.

I can already hear the howls of protest.  It's no use trying to inform me that rock music at Mass "can be reverent," and "brings the kids into church" and "draws them closer to Christ."     Secular music is not fit for worship, period.  There was a time, still within living memory, when the consensus on drums and steel guitars inside a Catholic church would have been that they're simply sacrilegious.  And before you start getting on my case about "rash-judging" the souls of those who like and participate in rock concert Masses, go back and notice that I called the music at the Mass I got stuck at "objectively sacrilegious," thereby giving the band and the organizers the benefit of the doubt.  Persons who are poorly formed in their faith cannot be expected to know any better, especially when they have priests and bishops setting a bad example.

As to what it is exactly that kids are being "drawn to" by rock bands in church, surely that calls for closer examination.  Authentic Christianity has never been about manipulating people's emotions: quite the opposite.  We read over and over again in the great spiritual works that good feelings during prayer and worship are gifts that God gives to beginners for their encouragement; but sooner or later He withdraws them, to test whether we love Him for Himself or because He gives us candy.  We know from the saints that prayer is often arduous work, devoid of sensible consolations; otherwise, how could we gain any merit by persevering?

But this rock band stuff makes the candy an end in itself.  Mass becomes all about what we are getting out of it, with little or no serious thought for whether we are giving God the worship that is His due.  (Question: if the band isn't even good enough for a garage -- let alone a recording contract -- why is it good enough for the Creator of the Universe?)  Rock band Masses are in direct opposition to the Gospel injunction to seek first the kingdom of God and His justice, and then all these other things will be added unto us.  It sends the message that we're not really engaged in authentic prayer and worship unless it makes us feel good, and that if God's not giving us candy, then we must not be right with Him.  So, then, when the non-stop gratification of the senses ceases, so does Mass attendance.    

Finally, the Church is not supposed to be "relevant" in the sense the world means "relevant."  The world defines "relevance" as going along with the Zeitgeist.  But the Church is decidedly and emphatically counter-cultural.  Her Founder, after all, commands us to love our enemies, turn the other cheek and not lay up to ourselves treasures on earth.  And Christ warned us that the world will hate us because it hated Him first.  Yet the same people who prattle on and on about how Jesus was a "revolutionary" and "shook up the Establishment" have striven might and main for decades to bring the Church into lockstep with this same world.

The Catholic Church has the Truth in its fullness.  Truth is always relevant.  Truth needs neither frill nor dressing: people hunger for it on their own without the artificial stimulants.  People hunger for something higher, and beautiful, because that is what we were made for: we're not supposed to be satisfied with lying in our own personal gutter.  The devil, on the other hand, wants the Church and her worship to be "relevant" in the worldly sense, because "relevance" distracts us from Truth.  And the devil is all about lowering expectations to the point they're already met, because that keeps us from striving for the perfection we're called to.  When are we going to figure this out?