MAKING WAR AGAINST THE WRONG PEOPLE

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The Most Reverend David Foley, Bishop of Birmingham, Alabama, has issued what he calls a "particular law" for his diocese which forbids the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with the priest and the people all facing East, in the direction of Jerusalem, the city of our Lord's Resurrection. This ancient practice of the Church's Latin Rite (which is still used in most Eastern rite Divine Liturgies) fostered reverence and devotion. It focused our attention on the action of the Holy Spirit working through an alter Christus, a priest, whose individual personality was subordinated to the unbloody perpetuation of the Sacrifice our Lord offered to the Father once in time on the Holy Cross on Good Friday. How sad it is that a Successor of the Apostles finds it necessary to condemn as an "innovation and a sacrilege" that which characterized the Latin liturgy for the better part of two millennia, and that which is still found in the Easter rites.

There have been a number of scholarly, dispassionate studies of the effects of Mass said facing the people. Even Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a few years ago that one of the possible "reforms of the reform" would be to turn the priest around "ad orientem" once more. The faithful are not there to look at the priest. The priest is not there to look at us. Everyone who attends Mass is supposed to be uniting himself to our Lord's immolation on the wood of the Cross to effect our redemption. It is Mass facing the people that has led to a great deal of sacrilege, irreverence, familiarity, and profanation, not the tradition of offering the sacred mysteries facing the tabernacle. There is quite a difference between the atmosphere in St. Agnes Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota--where the Novus Ordo is celebrated in Latin facing the tabernacle--and, say, Bishop Howard Hubbard's Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Albany, New York.

Yes, Bishop Foley has the authority to promulgate his "particular law," which is clearly aimed at preventing priests from offering Mass ad orientem at Mother Angelica's new chapel in his diocese. The fact that he has the authority to do so does not mean that he is right to what he is doing. He is not. For while the Novus Ordo is offered in most places here and around the world with the priest facing the people, there are places where this is not the case (including the Holy Father's own chapel).

Whatever happened to the spirit of liturgical pluralism? Isn't it the case that there are folk Masses, rock Masses, "senior" Masses, "gay and lesbian" Masses? Aren't there "liturgical committees" in many parishes around the country, most of which leave such a parochial stamp on the liturgy that it is not unfair to say that we have become a congregational church. Every parish has its own way of "doing liturgy." What about the priests who do not celebrate obligatory memorials or even universal feasts of the Church? What about the priests who don't wear proper vestments, who preach outright heresy from the pulpit? Nothing ever happens to those who use the Mass to further theological relativism and open abuses of the liturgy. The only people who ever get sanctioned are those devoted to the Traditional Latin Mass and/or those who want to incorporate elements of liturgical tradition (Latin, Gregorian chant, Mass with everyone facing the tabernacle) into the Novus Ordo.

What's next? Prohibiting the ancient practice of kneeling to receive Holy Communion in the parishes where this act of reverence is still permitted? Telling people they must receive Holy Communion in the hand (it is the case already that most children are not taught that they have an option to receive Holy Communion on the tongue)? Forbidding people to genuflect before receiving Holy Communion (which is happening in a lot of places)? Requiring everyone in a church to stand during the consecration (which is a new trend)? Really, what's next?

Revolutionaries desire to flush the past down the memory hole. This is true of political revolutionaries. It is also true of the ecclesiastical revolutionaries who have sought to so water down the Mass that it has become little more than a means of community self-congratulations, a "banquet meal," not the august sacrifice of Calvary offered in an unbloody manner. If anything is divisive, it is not the movement to restore the Traditional Latin Mass or the isolated efforts to incorporate tradition into the Novus Ordo. It is the congregational interpretation and application of the Novus Ordo which has led to a loss of belief in the Real Presence, outright irreverence by the clergy and the faithful during the Mass, an unprecedented decline in Mass attendance on Sundays, and the invention of new liturgical "rubrics" on an almost annual basis (from the likes of ICEL and the Bishops Committee on the Liturgy).

Enough of the hypocrisy and double-standards. There are many different liturgical rites within the Catholic Church. It is my prayer, which I realize has little chance of being answered in my lifetime, that this Holy Father--or one of his successors—will erect the Traditional Latin Mass as a personal prelature, giving it a canonical protection it does not enjoy at present under the Ecclesia Dei motu proprio. The faithful are entitled to reverence in the liturgy, and they are entitled to have access to the glorious liturgical tradition which produced so many martyrs for the faith, indeed, which helped to spawn Christendom itself!

Don't talk to me about how "divisive" this would be. We have almost as many "rites" with the Latin Rite today as we have parishes. And there are only one or two bishops in this country I can think of who actually try to discipline priests and liturgists who make the Mass their own personal toy. The rest either lack the guts to confront the modernists (largely out of fear of "bad press") or are actually committed to pressing the liturgical revolution with all the power at their disposal.

Let those who say they want liturgical pluralism within the Church put their money where their big mouths are. Pluralism? Why not a personal prelature for the Traditional Mass? Let the faithful have a choice. Then there would be no need to try to undo the harm of the last thirty years by attempting to incorporate small elements of liturgical tradition back into the Mass. The fullest expression of that tradition would be available for anyone and for everyone who desired to experience it.

We know the revolutionaries want to stamp out the past. How sad it is that Bishop Foley has seen fit to do their work by sanctioning the people who desire to restore some sense of the sacred in the celebration of the sacred mysteries. As a son of the Church who will never leave the Ship of Peter, all I can do is to pray and work for the day when bishops will embrace our liturgical tradition, not make war against it.