Leila Marie Lawler.
Short (I hope) ramblings.
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My dear friend Leila Miller posts a good reminder, as we contemplate what I called on Twitter "the desolation of abomination" -- the desolate side altars at St. Peter's:
However, in the midst of what seems to be the ongoing, orchestrated deconstruction of our Catholic patrimony, tradition, and treasures, we should neither despair nor lose our interior peace. After all, we know enough of prophesy and eschatology to realize that as we approach the final triumph, the Body of Christ has to pass through a very dark time, imitating the Passion of our Savior.
In fact, for a few years now, I have been referring everyone to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 675-677. I have memorized the numbers and much of the content, and I suggest you do the same. You’ll feel strangely better about what we are enduring, and you’ll begin to understand that this crisis in the Church, even at the highest levels, is to be expected. Now, this knowledge won’t magically remove the suffering of this cross; however, you’ll find consolation in knowing that things are not actually out of control. God is in control, and His plan is being realized...
She summarizes the passages from the Catechism this way:
The faith of many will be shaken in the final trial of the Church.
Via the persecution that comes to the faithful, the mystery of sin will be unveiled (dare we say “unmasked”?).
Something that looks and feels just like true religion will deceive many souls.
This false religion seems to offer man a solution to his earthly problems.
The cost of this “solution”? Apostasy from the truth.
Man will put himself at the center of all things, glorifying himself while displacing God.
Man will work to fix and “save” all the things of this earth (think: social justice utopia), forgetting the transcendent.
There will be no historical triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy.
The true Church will be humiliated, beaten, crushed, and crucified by the world—just like our Lord.
God will claim the victory only after the final unleashing of evil on this earth.
The Final Judgment will be fearsome. The Resurrection will come.
Get ready.
Read the whole thing. A good, supernatural shot in the arm.
George Weigel thoroughly examines and exposes the "ukase" from the First Section of the Vatican Secretariat of State regarding celebration of the Mass at side altars at St. Peter's Basilica -- "a term I use deliberately, as what was done on March 12th more resembled the diktat of an autocratic Russian czar than the carefully pondered decision of a “synodal” Church."
I urge you to read the whole thing, not only for his precise critique in terms of Canon Law and simple justice and his observant critique in terms of Christian culture, but also for his defense of a free use of the Extraordinary Form -- a defense that cannot but awaken in the minds of reasonable Novus Ordo-leaning Catholics questions about the real motives of such a suppression.
Since Weigel often inspires in Traditionalists a sort of impatient derision for his Vatican II cheerleading, I think it's only fair that he be given credit for this really spirited and honest assessment of what the restrictive "ukase" really means.
Here I would simply like again to pose to the imagination the effect -- the image and experience for the faithful trying to attend Mass at St. Peter's of a weekday morning -- of replacing organic, free worship in the heart of Roman Catholicism with regulated, tightly controlled Masses. Besides anger at the random imposition of strange rules, I can't help but picture to myself the sheer awkwardness of it all.
For awkward these Masses will be, because they will require concelebration in one language only (Italian). In ordinary circumstances (funerals, weddings, Sunday Masses in parishes with more than a few priests), concelebration is, I put to you -- be honest with yourself now -- universally felt as awkward.
The instructions for it don't seem to be clear, and the bumbling steps required to come forward and then relinquish center stage in a vague (at least to the participants) pattern is not something that comes naturally to priests, judging by how often they have to point helpfully to the sacramentary or even nudge each other to pick up their appointed place.
The faithful subjected to these Masses basically have to endure the disjointed passing along of the liturgical hot potato, hoping that it won't be dropped. The awkwardness has only been exacerbated by Covid; where before the concelebrating priest could at least hang over his confrere's shoulder to follow along, he now has to get his cues from afar.
The truth is that concelebration is not really a thing. It's quite, quite made up. Priests ought to say their own Masses, and the faithful at a basilica (or anywhere else) have a right to participate in their Masses when they come across them.
Add to the often cringe-making ordeal the insistence that it all be done in a language that after all, is not going to be common to all visitors at St. Peter's, priestly or otherwise, and a real disconnect is being introduced -- all without actual authority or canonical sanction, as Weigel amply demonstrates.
The natural supernaturalness of pilgrims and priests finding their places with great freedom at the (numerous!) side altars of St. Peter's is now to be an experience of the past. Why? The collective memory will greatly suffer. The young (if ever one is allowed to travel again) will simply not know this mysteriously organic unchoreographed choreography of morning Masses at the side altars of St. Peter's.
I hope that priests will go to other basilicas and say their Masses there. Apparently St. Peter's is meant to fall silent; so be it. Let the murmur of worship be taken up elsewhere, in freedom -- let life go on where it may.
Cardinal Raymond Burke, former prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, posted a statement on his own website, reported in the National Catholic Register by Edward Pentin, to deplore the new directives on Masses in St. Peter's.
For Cardinal Burke and other canonists and priests contacted by the Register, the most serious element of the letter concerns its imposition of concelebration upon priests who wish to offer Mass in the basilica — a change, they say, that pertains not only to the basilica but the universal Church, as St. Peter’s is the spiritual home for all Catholics and, they say, should be a model of liturgical discipline.
The letter, Cardinal Burke wrote in a statement to be published on his website, is “contrary to universal Church law” as it “unjustly conditions the primary duty of the individual priest to offer the Holy Mass daily for the salvation of the world.” More specifically, he and other canonists say it is in breach of both Canon 902 and Article 57 § 2 of Sacrosanctum Concilium.
A serious question to be raised in relation to this new directive is the appropriateness of concelebration. I think those of us who experienced only the Novus Ordo (I converted in 1979) take concelebration for granted.
Maybe it's time to resist this assumption.
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.
