Chapter 3. “The ROMANtic Liturgy”

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J.M.J.

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Why  ROMAnce?

Only the common man is equipped to perceive the immense pleasure of orthodoxy.

Chapter  3

“The   ROMANtic  Liturgy”

Still hazy on how Catholics should view Mass celebrated versus populum? Drift no longer.

by J. P. F. McGuire

    a|   Persons who get a kick out of feeling disingenuously superior get a kick out of telling us life is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. Sure. As if percentages and long words had anything to do with life or love. In Chapter 1 we saw that just behind Scott Hahn’s hermaphroditic theology lurks Gnosticism, that God really is love, that love[1] makes fools of us all but, boy, especially of our theologians. In Chapter 2 we saw that just behind “Bible Alone” lurk Templaresque patterns we’ve seen throughout the Enlightenment. We looked at the many cults this has spawned. I won’t deny taking some relish in how these Protesters squirm, trying to backpedal but incapable of just saying clearly, “ ‘Bible Alone’ and ‘Faith Alone’ were little more than stark, raving lunacies” or “Rome had it right on this one.” Instead you hear: “Well it’s more like ‘Bible First’ ” and “Well faith is really never alone” and “Well it doesn’t matter that we’re dead wrong as long as we stay true to our real fundamental, neurosis.” In Chapter 3 we are going to get more into the liturgy as we tackle an issue—just behind which lurks a key spiritual battle—much newer and much more allegedly “Catholic” and that issue is the Mass being celebrated “facing the people” or versus populum. We are going to see who engineered this novelty and whence its underpinning ideas probably ultimately came. We are going to explore what the Mass of Paul VI[2] is, how it differs from the 1960 Missal[3] and how they both differ from what I’m going to call “the United States Catholic Mass.”

    b|   Disclaimer #1: Where Peter is there is the Church and where the Church, eternal life. I am a Catholic who has attended the Mass of Paul VI every[4] Sunday of his life.

    c|   Disclaimer #2: Faith and reason. This notwithstanding I never cease to reflect critically upon the quaint, at times chilling innovations that have been visited upon my local fellow-parishioners and me, many of whom make the heroic and redemptive sacrifice[5] of remaining in communion with Rome but without treating the Second Vatican Council as something it is not. I am not about to fall into the pathology of traditionalist[6] Catholics who complain endlessly of the Church’s countless post-conciliar monkeyshines nor of the ultratraditionalists/sedevacantists[7] who simply reject the idea that Josef Ratzinger is the Pope. That is why this installment is only about so-called versus populum and will not touch on the vernacular or percussion instruments or the ordinary use of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion whose outrages, though painful to one who loves the Church, must be seen as lesser, subordinate or diversionary tactics compared with the global orchestration of versus populum.

   d|   The Second Vatican Council never called for versus populum.[8] So who did?

    e|   We are not going to rest the case, however, on the resistance-free-because-it’s-too-insane-to-refute “Tradition Alone” tenet[9]. That would be an implicit denial of sanity, of orthodoxy, of the three-pronged wisdom of Catholicism that upholds Scripture, Tradition and Magisterium. Taken in their universal[10] richness there is nothing in Scripture, Tradition or Magisterium to support celebrating Mass versus populum and much to indicate its stunning inappropriateness. What I want to do is not split hairs by engaging the bird-brained arguments so-called “liberal Catholics” use to try and overwhelm the vanguard of piety. What I want to do is start a conversation about how, to the common man, liturgically vapid versus populum is from root to leaf.

     f|   Bishop Edward J. Slattery of Tulsa, Okla., who on 9 August 2009 broke flank with the unauthoritative United States Conference of Catholic Bishops[11] by celebrating Mass facing eastward (ad orientem), was obliged promptly to explain to his “fellow-Catholics” that “[t]he critical element in these conversations is an understanding that we Catholics worship the way we do because of what the Mass is: Christ’s sacrifice, offered under the sacramental signs of bread and wine.” This statement actually sums up why versus populum is, at least today, a thoroughly mad/anti-Catholic proposition. But before Bishop Slattery Pope Benedict XVI celebrated ad orientem on 13 January 2008 in the Sistine Chapel! Pope Benedict was silent on the significance of this groundbreaking gesture, a first since A.D. 1965, but “[a] statement by the Vatican’s office for liturgical celebrations said it had been decided to use the old altar, where ballots are placed during papal elections, to respect ‘the beauty and the harmony of this architectonic jewel.’ ” Okay, whatever gets ’er done, I guess.

    g|   The thing I want to highlight is that God’s children deserve better. We’re worth it. Jesus speaks of a sort of holy greed, a divine ambition—of a spiritual order. “ ‘Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right: they shall be satisfied’ ”[12]. With all deference for authority we question, we challenge, we reject all liturgical abortions[13] because they simply don’t aid us in worshipping God in the way Our Lord Jesus Christ wishes us to. If you believe God is your sole Benefactor[14] and not your saboteur[15] the Latin Mass is the mode of prayer you spontaneously[16] opt for. The worship Our Loving God fairly begs of us begins with—revisiting Jesus and the Samaritan Woman—spirit and truth. All other “worship” may be trite and quaint—the Mass of Paul VI may indeed represent the supremely trite and quaint in liturgy—but it certainly has no appeal to the fonder desires of the devout soul possessed of divine fire by reason that it falls short of the truth about God and our earthly pilgrimage toward Him. So you see how the Latin Mass is not merely a product of two millennia of Scripture or Tradition or Magisterium but all these harmonized and brought to bear in each age by the Spirit of the Living God alive and burning in his Church!

    h|   Reverent Catholic liturgy appeals to him who desires to worship God. Other liturgies quench other fetishes, culminating in self-esteem, self-help, self-love. God works for those who work for Him, but ever since Eden there has been this splinter of mistrust. We often speak of how mysterious God is, as if we were speaking of the Wizard of Oz who is “very good but very mysterious,” an architect, a watch-maker, the way Muslims do. To Catholics God is Father, Friend and Consoler! To Masons God is old, rigidly authoritarian “Maker.” Maybe this latter theology says more about men’s souls than God. Or it’s all a function of taking Jesus seriously or not. Catholics seek to return to the Father who begot them; Masons strive to come to terms with their existence alienated and cold.

      i|   Versus populum can claim no established precedent and no positive track record. At this point it seems better associated with power tripping, incompetence, horizontalism and mistrust than piety, worship or self-offering. Versus populum predominately seems to celebrate a buzz, a vibe, an “energy,” a fuzzy Zen that borrows from religions that do not confess God. It all rings quite secular.

      j|   I take my share of flack[17], even from Catholics I love and respect, for having the gall to implicate Masonic infiltration in these “Mass evils.” I’ve heard it all from Mason sympathizers/defenders/friends. When it isn’t shallow ridicule or blank query it’s a lecture on how this low-level United States Mason so-and-so knows just doesn’t seem the type to perpetrate globally coordinated chaos to facilitate the rise of totalitarian secularist governance. But when I see the versus populum rite I am seeing literally a change in orientation, an outright affront to God that parallels China’s schismatic official church. There is a very real state religion on the rise, and it is based on the nationalist worship of political parties, the mechanical antidox Masonry and antidox Calvinism as preferred to the more human orthodox Catholicism and, to be honest, Judaism too.

    k|   Masonry is a festival of distortions. He who does not oppose Masonry with every fiber of his being is no Catholic, and I will tell him as much to his face. I can see how this is difficult for men who aren’t men, men of today who lie to themselves and others, who basically had no credible role models[18], who do not live for love but only frivolity. I can see that. But I cannot pretend this Anglo-American Establishment Neopaganism is somehow “inconsequential” or “irrelevant” or “secondary.” Being Catholic literally requires being anti-Masonic because anti-Masonry is the instinct of God’s children, sensus ecclesiæ, apart from the automatic excommunication Masonic membership carries for those who join while aware of its evil. Masonry is the Church’s enemy number one. No lover of God can abide even the thought of Masonry without a shudder. Selling out is the same as betraying Christ. He who dwells in denial is no friend and less a disciple to Jesus Who Is the Truth. But the Church currently is infested by such self-deluded men who, even if they aren’t officially Masons, are cheap and fake, “modern” men, “metropolitan” men, effeminate[19], disjointed, disincarnational, fragmented, flaky, seedy, shifty, eyes glazed over, constructed from spare parts of demons, believing themselves sophisticated, enlightened, refined, élite.

      l|   Disclaimer #3. My name is not Buzzkilljoy. I’ve watched my share of raunchy entertainment none of which I endorse[20]. And similarly I’m no stranger to the fluorescent glow of antidox Sunday evening “youth Masses” done all wrong, the lightless heat of Neopaganism, the intrigue of metaphysics, the flat-out fascination of mystical geometry, the buzz of overdone percussion, the nice numbness that comes with the absence of moral framework that reduces all things to engineering. We all get a buzz from the unstructured but then we soon miss the beauty. As Pope Benedict XVI described the experience, “ ‘Rock’…is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals [read youth Masses] it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship.” What antidoxy builds on is the principle that something can be so wrong it congeals in a seeming “rightness” all its own, transporting its followers to the unreal domain in which it reigns as exclusive autocrat. It leaps to a “magic island”[21] beyond where the peninsula sinks into the sea. In chemistry, geometry and engineering it is well for man to push the limits of what sound[22] science can construct. Indeed these may be the only disciplines to which modern academia, which exacts constant novelties in exchange for doctorates, is really suited. But novelty in anthropology, theology and liturgy is nearly always disastrous to the common man serving only would-be gurus who are only too rehearsed and too giddy to pluck those sheep who stray a bit from the faithful herd for use in their Frankensteinesque experiments.

  m|   Disclaimer #4. Sanity clause?[23] Nor am I unacquainted with the neurotic traditionalist whose oft-psychotic religionism drives some youth to the scenario I above delineate. Religion minus romance equals an evil not much better than shamanism, which is what largely prompted me to create Why ROMAnce? Catholicism is uniquely accommodating of all that is not sin, to bring souls to true divine love. Notwithstanding this cognizant Catholics today may need to do more to speak out about the evil that comes of stunting one’s spiritual growth in the name of “pious sensations.” The comfortable are, as a rule, spiritually dwarfed. Jesus said, “…[A]las for you who are rich: you are having your consolation now. Alas for you who have your fill now: you shall go hungry. Alas for you who laugh now: you shall mourn and weep.” In Chapter 2 I spoke of one way—circumcision—in which “modern Catholics” evidence their propensity for straddling two lanes, of being just those Judaizers[24] St. Paul shot down, of participating in the Calvinist charade of a Puritan Empire with its con artist’s Zionism. Besides circumcision one could well cite such filthy superstitions as Yoga and positive thinking. Catholicism is a whole[25] life, not merely a theory, a flea market of random trinkets or a magic show because Jesus is Truth, not an ideal, not one Buddha-guru among many and certainly not a parlor trickster. No amount of shallow and apathetic may amount to humble. No amount of ignorant and materialist may amount to innocent. Amoral “tolerance” is not a virtue to a Catholic, only to a Mason. Those who sacrifice health for control over others, whatever they tell themselves, are not virtuous in the Catholic sense, in the universal sense, in the life-giving sense. And I don’t necessarily want to hear whether so-and-so is a Democrat or a Republican precisely because I have no use for buzzwords. Pretending to have ideals is no kind of defense at the judgment throne: it’s an even lousier cop-out than saying “Lord, Lord”: it is saying “vibe, vibe.” Delusion! Neurosis! Narcissism! Vanity! Hypocrisy! Shame! Shame! Shame eternal to the self-justified! Down with Masonry! Down and never up! But “ ‘[a]ll who call on the name of the Lord will be saved’ ”[26].

    n|   So intellectually we are left with the lone proposition that versus populum is the Mason manifesto in the key of Catholic liturgy. It is one of the very best signs a commentator could hope for that indeed Masonic pluralism, globalism and modernism had stakes in making the “reform” of the liturgy exactly the type of fiasco it has been in the United States and globally. Forget about the vernacular or the percussion or the people facing not only the priest but one another and holding hands or other brazen scandals I won’t go into. Just think about versus populum and you’ll know in your heart that the rest just spilled over from that. The devil is bold. Why aren’t the orthodox? You know what all these laicist liturgists are shooting for: the opposite of godliness.

    o|   Disclaimer #5. Disagreeing without being disagreeable. Pope Paul VI said, “The altar should be built apart from the wall, in such a way that it is possible to walk around it easily and that Mass can be celebrated at it facing the people, which is desirable wherever possible.” Awkward! In most churches this meant the priest facing westward. I am not trying to lambast anyone or play “good popes bad pope”[27], but the goal of such an almost heroically outlandish suggestion is simply lost on me. In Christian charity we may grant that it was in the “tradition” of this genre we’ll call “the Second Vatican Council’s post-game commentary,” and therefore it had to be something controversial and antagonistic[28] to the limit just to be “faithful” to the fad. I’m going to be vulgar once more just so everybody gets it: couples who love each other face each other to become intimate. Jesus advised his followers to constantly keep watch for his coming rather than worry about things of this world. Making the priest the star of the show is like a nasty mixture of secularism on the one hand and clericalism on the other, a sacrilege waiting to happen, the near occasion of priestly abuse of all varieties, and if you haven’t seen all varieties you’ve been asleep for the past forty years. No, really, the priest is to be heard not seen. The priest is an intermediary between God and man, so yes it makes sense that he occasionally, briefly face men. But the priest has all day to face men! just as the people have all day to hold hands and listen to God knows what kind of mentally ill music. But let’s just not pretend that being bizarre is pleasing God, fair enough? Mass is for the priest to speak to God on behalf of the consenting laity, not wasting time speaking[29] to us outside the sermon[30]. Mass is a prayer, even the prayer. What prayer is ever helped by folks facing each other? Well?

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A.M.D.G.

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[1] G. K. Chesterton points out that divine love is just as real as human love.

[2] Sometimes called “novus ordo missæ” and habitually celebrated versus populum.

[3] The 1960 Missal (and preceding ones) choreographed the “Latin Mass” (“Indult,” “Extraordinary Form,” “Tridentine Mass,” “Gregorian Rite”), also known to more pedantic traditionalists as the “Traditional Mass.”

[4] Excepting the extremely rare “Latin Mass” and Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom (“Byzantine Rite”).

[5] I was about to call this a balance beam, but it is far better likened to a high wire.

[6] I laud traditionalists for keeping alive awareness of the St. Michael the Archangel prayer for after Holy Mass, celebrating Mass ad orientem, Our Lady of Fatima’s predictions and the correct disposition regarding the Jews, a thing with most of the post-conciliar Church has had a sort of amnesia about.

[7] The term sedevacantism is derived from the Latin phrase sede vacante, which literally means “empty chair,” the chair in question being that of a pope.

[8] Discussed on “Fr. Z’s Blog”: http://wdtprs.com/blog/2010/08/quaeritur-where-did-mass-facing-the-people-come-from/

[9] It isn’t too hard to see how the insanity of “Tradition Alone” rivals that of “Bible Alone” or “Faith Alone.” I often muse on how the United States borrowed its three-pronged governance (legislative, executive and judicial) from the Catholic Church’s (Scripture, Tradition and Magisterium) but also how the Catholic Church in the United States borrowed from the United States Government the error of bipartisan governance (right/left paradigm) which hearkens back to the Pharisee and Sadducee parties Jesus refused to recognize or acquiesce to. But in reality there are no conservative or liberal Catholics; there are only orthodox Catholics and antidox Masons.

[10] Catholic means universal.

[11] Flippantly acronymized U.S.C.C.B.

[12] Matthew 5:6 (Jerusalem Bible).

[13] This reminds me of a scene from a certain television show: “Death (takes a sip from mug and spits it out): Geeze, what did you make this hot cocoa with, crap? / Lois (sighs): Well if you want me to make it again— / Death: No, no. I’m sorry: it’s just that I assumed that you were going to make it with milk…not crap.” Can we please talk this way to our priests before there’s no liturgy left to celebrate?

[14] Catholic teaching.

[15] Masonic teaching.

[16] Not necessarily by force of tradition, note.

[17] Grief would be a better word for it…if indeed not crap.

[18] Heard of Alex Jones?

[19] I do not refer exactly to sodomites or homosexuals nor much less to the biattracted. Misogyny wears many masks. One is or male chauvinism. Another is sexual ambiguity, itself a hallmark of Neopaganism/Satanism.

[20] No, really, burn it all!

[21] “Pleasure Island”? No. The term “magic island” referent to chemistry is the theoretical mass several protons beyond the Periodic Table’s 112 “ununbium” and 114 “ununquadium.”

[22] A.k.a. sane.

[23] “Fiorello: Eh, you no fool me: there ain’t no ‘Santy Claus’ ” (Chico, A Night at the Opera).

[24] Judaizers advocated for all Christians to become Jews before being considered for Christian Communion. The chief Judaizer-Antijudaizer debates therefore revolved around circumcision, clean foods and Sabbath. St. Paul, himself a Jewish Pharisee Scribe and an unusually learned and zealous one at that, made minced meat of all notions of returning to the Old (Talmudic) Law as somehow a requisite to belonging to Christ. Protestants (Evangelical Quietists being the most notorious Judaizers and hypochondriacs in modern times), in order to make this seem to resonate with their agenda, had to twist this argument into meaning “Faith Alone” by divorcing it from its context and thus managed to give it the opposite meaning from what it had when St. Paul published it. Just to be clear, the debate around the “Works of the Law” had no impact on the “Works of Mercy” or the “Work of the People” (a.k.a. Liturgy). But this debate is so commonly marinated in ignorance, anger and predestinational presumption I wouldn’t tend to touch it with a nine foot pole in any forum less than academia.

[25] Holy and holistic mean whole.

[26] Pope St. Peter, Apostle, Acts 2:21 (Jerusalem Bible).

[27] Pope Benedict, who is now actively reinstituting ad orientem, was seemingly on board with versus populum back then.

[28] Did somebody say “Masonic”? It figures. Unable to make any case against orthodoxy and orthopraxy Masons are forever setting out to pervert and corrupt. Why did they remove the St. Michael prayer from churches? Why did they de-emphasize Fatima? What the Mason is going on? We want answers!

[29] This aptly covers the vernacular question as well.

[30] The post-conciliar trend is one of terming things with Greek rather than Latin nomenclature (homily instead of sermon; ambo instead of pulpit; etc.). Whether this is in a spirit of ecumenism and getting back to our true Catholic roots or modernist Enlightenment (which also spurns Latin in favor of Greek) I cannot yet determine.