The British LMS chairman has some interesting posts on his blog about the relationship between the EF Mass and faith/orthodoxy, and why it is that most self-described liberals who praise diversity and pluralism want the Old Rite suppressed even when congregations want it. (See the ACP website passim.) There are of course honourable exceptions.
Note also that Mr Shaw uses the problematic shorthand "neo-cons" to describe orthodox Catholics not attached to the EF.
Use the links. The whole thing is well worth reading
www.lmschairman.org/2014/03/orthodoxy-and-traditional-mass-part-1.htmlEXTRACT
There are people who like the Extraordinary Form, but have heterodox theological views. There are, of course, many people who are orthodox in faith who don't even know about the Traditional Mass, or know about it but don't particularly seek it out. It is nevertheless an observable phenomenon that Traditional Catholics tend to very orthodox, and, conversely, that heterodox thinkers within the Church tend to dislike the Traditional Mass. Indeed, Cardinal Ratzinger commented on the latter fact, linking hatred of the Vetus Ordo to dissent specifically about the sacrificial nature of the Mass.
I want to mention two reasons for this linkage, and one important consequence of it.
The first reason is, as with Cardinal Ratzinger's example, the texts of the Extraordinary Form emphasise a lot of the teachings which the most popular heresies of our day reject. This has now been set out at scholarly length by Lauren Pristas: if you don't want to believe this, buy her book about the reform of the Collects. The old collects, many of them being very old indeed, make repeated and very clear points about our need for grace, for example. The Holy Father is absolutely right to worry about Pelagianism in the Church - Cardinal Ratzinger, again, remarked that the texts of the Novus Ordo were open to Pelagian intepretation. But there are many such issues, the Real Presence, the reality of the Devil (another favourite topic of Pope Francis), even the theology of marriage (in the Nuptial Blessing), and the importance of penance and the intercession of the Saints.
The second reason is that the Traditional Mass represents continuity. It is is logically possible to accept the validity of the ancient Mass and reject the validity of the ancient teaching of the Church, or to reject the Mass and accept the teaching, but unless you have some strange and complicated reason to do either thing it is incongruous.
So here's the consequence. Liberals tend not only to dislike the Traditional Mass personally, but oppose anyone having access to it. This is something which is puzzling, but there is an explanation. They find the texts about grace and penance and the intercession of the saints embarrassing, not only for themselves but for the whole Church. They want them wiped from the Church's collective memory. But more deeply, they want to deny the continuity of the Church. They are opposed to the idea that anything worthwhile can be found in the Church's past. If they do look at the past, they prefer to look at isolated bits and pieces from the distant past, with which there is no lived continuity.
The reason is that in order to deny the Church's teaching you have to stop people appealing to the teaching and also to the lived experience of Catholics over recent centuries up to Vatican II. The recent centuries are the most useful, often, because they were struggling with the same problems as us: 'natural' theories of education, the theory of evolution, critical methods of interpreting the Bible, contraception, divorce, secularism. The liberals want to cut us off most of all from those parts of the Magisterium which are most useful. They want to destroy the prestige and authority of this teaching by ridiculing the Mass which went with it.
END OF EXTRACT
www.lmschairman.org/2014/03/orthodoxy-and-traditional-mass-2.htmlEXTRACT
Anne Roche Muggeridge, in her book The Desolate City, explains the way that the 'revolutionary' party in the Church gained dominance in a short space of time in the 1960s, in light of a parallel with revolutions in the secular sphere. Borrowing a phrase from a secular historian (Peter Shaw, no relation!), she talks about 'the rituals of the revolution':
'These rituals are designed to diminish the power of existing authority by destroying its mystique during a process in which the symbols that inspire awe are mocked and degraded in "reversed ceremonies of legitimacy". The mocking reversal of sacred symbols serves as a psychological preparation for a transference of allegiance.'
She goes on to discuss the shocking liturgical abuses, and parodies of the liturgy, which took place in the 1960s, particularly in the context of get-togethers of dissenting priests, but in many parishes too. In order to destroy the allegiance of the Faithful to the old doctrines, the liberals subjected them to the ritualised mockery of the most holy and important symbols of the old order. Of course, this did not stop in the 1960s, but it had a special importance in that decade because almost the whole Catholic population had to be brought round from a strong habitual attachment to the old ways to an attitude at least of non-resistance to the revolution the liberals wanted to push forward, of which the keynote issue was the rejection of the Church's teaching on contraception.
The end result was less, of course, than the 1960s radicals wanted. The interesting point for us now is the connection this reveals between the liturgy and orthodoxy. For practical purposes there are no references to the Church's teaching on contraception in the Traditional Mass. That wasn't the liberals' problem with it. They wanted to destroy the prestige of the ancient Mass because they wanted to destroy the prestige of the Church, since the Mass is the holiest thing the Church possesses. To express this in another way, they, like all revolutionaries, wanted to destroy the prestige of the past.
The ancient Mass is not simply a well put-together liturgy, cleverly combining this element with that one. It is something which has developed over many centuries, slowly enough to enable us to participate in a meaningful way in the spiritual atmosphere of the preceding generation of Catholics, and the one before that, and so on for many centuries. It is the product of the Church in a very deep way: not of a committee, even at some distant time in the past, but of the prayer and practice of innumerable Popes, Doctors and Saints, and ordinary priests and lay people as well. We all know instinctively that, despite identifiable changes made in the decades up to 1962, it is essentially very, very, old, and that this age is not the age of a pot-shard dug out from an ancient rubbish-tip where it has lain forgotten, but of a great public building or city square walked over and worked and lived in every day since its construction until today. And this lived-in age makes it venerable, worthy of respect.
The liberals of the 1960s needed to destroy this connection with the past, because they wanted to establish a new theology. The promulgation of the Novus Ordo Missae at the end of the decade restored a degree of stability to the liturgical scene, but of course a lot of damage had already been done, and even at its best the new liturgical settlement was a striking break with the past.
What I want to draw from this is the usefulness of the Traditional Mass for Catholics who want to promote orthodoxy, and the disaster a rejection of the Traditional Mass is for them. The polemic against the Traditional Mass, which is still heard today, is that it was 'all wrong': it 'excluded the people', it made them 'dumb spectators', the theology, even, was misguided. If we allow that polemic to stand we are saying that the Church was wrong about her most intimate inner life, the shared liturgical life of the Christian community. It may be logically possible to say that she was wrong about that and right about all the doctrines, but, as I said in the last post in the series, it is incongruous. I can now go a little further and say, from the point of view of psychology, it is incredible: it is, almost, impossible to believe.
It is not that people are incapable of distinguishing doctrine from liturgy, or are ignorant that the liturgy of the mid 20th century was not identical to that celebrated by the Apostles. It will amaze many neo-conservatives to hear this, but Catholics are not that stupid. It is, rather, that the institution they want us to believe in doctrinally also brought us this ancient liturgy. If the liturgy is rubbished, then the Church is rubbished. The Church loses her credibility. If you lose your credibility, you don't lose it selectively: people say, 'if he was deluded or a liar about that, I won't believe anything he says any more.' That's what the liberals wanted people to say about the Church, and to a tragically large extent they succeeded.
The conclusion for practical purposes is a simple one. If we want to promote orthodoxy in doctrine in the Church, we have to reverse the process the liberals undertook in the 1960s: we have to reconnect people with the ancient liturgy, restore the prestige of this liturgy, convince people again of its value. Only by doing this will we get them to accept the authority of the succession of Councils and the ancient Creeds and the Scriptures: the authority, in short, of the Church's continuous life over many centuries, or, even more briefly, of the past.
END OF EXTRACT
www.lmschairman.org/2014/03/orthodoxy-and-traditional-mass-3-making.htmlEXTRACT
In this final post in the series I want to point out another aspect of the connection between the Extraordinary Form and orthodoxy. This is that the ancient Mass not only attracts people who are orthodox, but it creates and sustains communities which are orthodox, and it helps people become orthodox. I have seen on numerous occasions people who discover the Traditional Mass, becoming attached to it, learning more about it, and going on to learn more about their Faith, gradually freeing themselves from the attitudes and beliefs of the wider society, and of Catholic liberalism, which are opposed to the Faith.
No doubt this happens with 'conservative Novus Ordo' Masses, but my own experience is that this is more marked with the Traditional Mass, and it is not hard to explain why this should be so. As I explained in the last post, if you want to get Catholics to take seriously the teaching of the Church over the centuries, it is essential to free them from the contemptuous polemic against the liturgical practices which the Church had over the centuries. Furthermore, learning about the Traditional Mass puts you in touch with Catholic authors, of all periods of history, who are passionately committed to the teaching of the Church and to the apostolate.
But there is something else as well. The ancient liturgy itself, to use a favourite phrase of Pope Francis, 'makes the heart burn'. He is paraphrasing the account in Acts of the disciples who met Jesus after the Resurrection on the road to Emmaeus. Afterwards they said to each other: 'Did not our hearts burn within us?' One of the interesting things about the story is its liturgical character: the disciples recognised Jesus 'in the breaking of bread'.
There are many things which can give people a sense of euphoria, and if you want to feel a bit giddy and superb alcohol and drugs are probably what you are after. What we are talking about is something different. It is not a sense of human community, or the impression made by human achievements, even if these have real value (for example, artistic value). It is the sense of God's presence in the liturgy. This may be accompanied by spiritual consolation, but it is also compatible with a feeling of spiritual aridity, just as some of the great mystics had visions during times of great dryness. You may be able to see God is there even if you don't have a warm and fuzzy feeling.
This is especially important because we need the liturgy to sustain us most of all during periods of dryness. If our experience of God in the Mass depends on the generation of a certain mood, then it won't happen if we are feeling a bit tired, depressed, or are suffering grief. It can and does happen in the Traditional Mass because of the objective nature of what is happening: precisely because it does not depend on us, because the ceremonies and prayers are about making something happen on the Altar, something which makes Jesus Christ present in our midst whether we feeling pious or not.
The combination of this objective, ritual efficacy with beauty of the furnishings, music, and of the texts, or with a moment of personal spiritual breakthrough, can have an electrifying effect, and it is a striking feature of many conversion stories from before the reform, many of those discussed, for example, in Joseph Pearce's Literary Converts. Converts today tend not to talk so much about the liturgy, unless it is to admit (as former Anglicans often do) that bad liturgy kept them out of the Catholic Church for a time. Perusing this book about a pilgrimage to Compostella, which was clearly a deeply significant spiritual experience for the young Catholic author, I was astonished to read that when he finally arrived and went to Mass in the great Basilica, it was an anti-climax. You just don't hear that in parallel accounts from before the liturgical reform
END OF EXTRACT