Masses at St. Peter's

I have some catching up to do, but I'll start with this strangely particular exercise of power, of totally regularizing Masses at St. Peter's in a way that has no purpose and amounts to suppression.

I want to just pull this out from Christopher Altieri's article:

One friend, whose feathers were not ruffled in the least, said she thought it sounded like a move akin to a pastor calling everyone sprinkled all over the church to move down front. 

Let's be clear: even that minimal and almost unremarkable exercise of power would be, not to put too fine a point on it, wrong.

A pastor has no right to tell people to move to be closer together. He has a job, and that is to offer the Mass (I wonder how many know that the Mass is literally "Opus Dei" -- the work of God: in Romano Guardini's words: "The liturgy is the Church's public and lawful act of worship, and it is performed and conducted by the officials whom the Church herself has designated for the post--her priests.")

Where the faithful sit is of no concern to the clergy (or even if they sit at all or are there at all -- there are in fact no rubrics for the faithful, only for those serving at the altar). The desire to boss them around is of no pure origin.

It is this misunderstanding of when and how to meddle that fuels the engine of what certainly looks like a sudden urge to control the organized lack of order that is Mass-saying at St. Peter's at the side altars.

 Nothing lights a fire under a bureaucrat like the thought that responsible people are taking care of business without their intervention. I disagree with Altieri on one thing -- it's not silly. Silly implies harmlessness; the current regime is not harmless.