New CDF Document on Lumen Gentium Today

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith today published a short explication of several articles of the Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium. The document deals with several questions about the nature of the Church, especially pertaining to the statement made in Lumen Gentium that the true Church of Christ "subsists" in the Catholic Church. The document is brief (I hope this becomes a standard aspect of documents issued under Benedict XVI in contrast to John Paul II's 95 page encyclicals) and is layed out in a simple question and answer format. Some of the pertinent points of the document:

Summorum Pontificum

Praise and thanks be to God for the document Summorum Pontificum released this Saturday. I think I speak for many when I say that this document exceeded many of our expectations. The Mass of 1962 has been completely freed and any priest who wishes to may use it without the permission of his Ordinary. Furthermore, the old usages for all of the sacraments have been allowed as well. Perhaps the most rewarding thing about this document is the vindication it gives to those who claimed that the Mass of 1962 was never abrogated and that it has always been allowed (the actions of local bishops in surpressing it notwithstanding).

The Holy Father has explicitly declared that the Mass of Bl. John XXIII was in point of fact never abrogated. This is just another step towards what has been rightfully called "the reform of the reform." Perhaps now we can move away from the kind of horrendous liturgical abuses that we have all been subject to for so long.

Liturgical Abuse: Just say No

While there is much to do from here on out, I cannot help but pondering the next step. This is a long and slow process, and one marked by many small steppingstones. The Indult of 1984 and its expansion in 1988 are two previous steps, and this is another one. What should come next? When will it be enough? I will tell you what I would like to see next:

(1) The old usage be declared the "normative" form of the Latin rite instead of the extraordinary form.

(2) The gradual phasing out of the Novus Ordo.

(3) Some kind of official acknowledgement that the hoped for "riches" envisioned by Sacrosanctum Concilium have not materialized and that the implementation of the Novus Ordo has been an abject failure.

The end we ought to be aiming at should be, in the words of Msgr. Klaus Gamber: "In the final analysis, in the future the traditional rite of the Mass must be retained in the Roman Catholic Church...as the primary liturgical form for the celebration of Mass. It must become once more the norm of our faith and the symbol of Catholic unity throughout the world, a rock of stability in a period of upheaval and neverending change" (from : "Reform of the Roman Liturgy, pg. 114).

Is this too much? I don't think so. I do not want the Mass of 1962 just to satisfy my own private aesthetic or spiritual "taste." I honestly think this usage is better for the Church Universal, and therefore I think we ought to, as a final goal, will that it be used by the Universal Church, as it had been for 1500 years. Well, the next several months should be exciting to say the least!

Motu Proprio Tomorrow

With it virtually certain that the MP will be out tomorrow, I thought it prudent to simply restate here what was posted by Shawn Tribe today on The New Liturgical Movement regarding our expectations concerning this document and how we ought to react to it. Here is the post from TNLM:

Benedict's motu proprio on the Traditional Latin Mass is due for release tomorrow. Here are some suggestions to keep in mind when reading this document, from Shawn Tribe at New Liturgical Movement:

1. Think about Pope Benedict's liturgical teaching. It would be good if people really stop and think about Pope Benedict's vision for the liturgy and the Church, which sees liturgical co-existence, but one which attempts to address the Council and might eventually lead to synthesis. Get your mind into that mode and read Summorum Pontificum in that light, understanding it from that perspective as the seeds of a 'corrective' of the hermeneutic of rupture.

2. Forget about what you've heard about the document and simply read it for what it is. Consider this as well: if this document came as a complete and total surprise with no lead up to it these past months, how would you respond to it then? Respond to it accordingly as such.

3. In the same vein, think not about what you personally would like to see happen, but rather think about the present state of things and ask, regardless of my own opinion of what would be for the best, how does this motu proprio change the landscape for the better (for both the ordinary and extraordinary forms of the Roman rite)? How does it help in the process of reclaiming our tradition from the margins of ecclesial life? How does it build for the future?

4. Realize as well that Benedict may also have had to make a prudential decision about precisely what he thought he could promulgate with a reasonable chance of being successful in the here and now, building for the future. Think of this as another step in a process rather than the "end game". Think about what was released in 1984, which was very restrictive; then the loosening of 1988 with Ecclesia Dei, and now this next step in the process.

5. Be aware, now, before you read it tomorrow, that you probably won't get everything you hope for in one document. Don't expect magical juridical solutions, nor one's that implement all of your own desires.

6. Presume that there no document can absolutely safeguard against those who determined to foil it, but, again, how does it make it that much harder to do so, or that much freer where such a situation doesn't exist, and how does the document build for a better future by redefining attitudes?

7. At the end of the day, your wish-list aside, take real note of the proverbial "new toys" that this motu proprio provides and that you didn't have as of today and be thankful for yet another step back toward our tradition, toward a hermeneutic of continuity, and toward a sensible implementation of the Council.

8. Finally, before you even read the document tomorrow, might I recommend you place it before yourself, and then go through this list of considerations one more time.

Scott Hahn's Holy Spirit Thesis

Much controversy has come of late regarding the assertion Dr. Scott Hahn (Professor of Scripture and Theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville) of the so-called "maternal role" of the Holy Spirit. This teaching is formulated in Chapter 10 of Hahn's book First Comes Love (Doubelday Books, 2002) and Hahn has developed and spoken more on the idea since then. Opponents suggest that the teaching of Hahn introduces a femininty into God that will sanction such practices as calling God "Mother" and giving more ground to the radical feminist sect within the Church. Hahn says that his assertion is backed up by the Fathers, Scripture, and the Popes and that, if understood rightly, is completely in line with Tradition and orthodoxy. Having been profoundly influenced by the teachings of Dr. Scott Hahn in my own spiritual life, I decided this issue merited looking into and got the book for myself.

"Numchuck skills, liturgical skills..."

I have recently come to realize that while it is so enormously important to conform to proper liturgical rubrics, it is also very important that the execution of the rubrics be done with skill and grace. What good is it to have a choir chanting Gregorian chant if they cannot sing in key? Or a priest using the universal language of the Church if he stumbles over any Latin word with more than two syllables? How about sloppily dressed altar boys, priests with their albs on crooked and wristwatches showing while they are holding up the Sacred Host at the elevation?  How about sound systems that continually malfunction causing the priest to have to dash away into the sacristy in the middle of the liturgy to try to fix the problem?

Fortunately, these things seldom happen at my parish, but I see them happen all of the time in other places. Even if we do get the liturgy right, let's make sure we do it good! The Church's liturgy deserves our efforts at executing it with excellence and beauty. Of course, the Mass has an intrinsic value apart from how well it is executed. But from a pastoral standpoint (and everybody wants to be "pastoral" these days), whether or not a liturgy is done with excellence is of tremendous importance. It is the beauty of the Tridentine rite that so many say they miss when comparing it with the Novus Ordo, and it is that same beauty that will attract people back to the traditional rite. As Dostoevsky once said, "Beauty will save the world." So, to all of us who may in one way or another be involved in liturgical matters, or may be offering the Holy Sacrifice, let's bone up on our liturgical skills and do this thing right if we are going to do it at all.

Motu Proprio: Practical Considerations

With the Vatican saying that the Motu Proprio liberalizing the use of the Tridentine Mass of St. Pius V will be out any day now (or I should say, the Tridentine Mass as codified in the liturgical books issued by Blessed Pope John XXIII in 1962), many parishes are getting ready to implement the anticipated changes. There has been much written on the merits of the old Mass versus the Novus Ordo, with much especially insightful commentary on the three blogs listed on our links (Athanasius Contra Mundum, Fr. Zuhlsdorf and New Liturgical Movement).

However, I decided to write here on the practical aspects of the switch to the old rite. As a DRE, part of my job is helping my priest to prepare for the transition and he has asked me to help compile a list of practical things that will need to be done for the old Mass to be celebrated in our parish. Thank God I don't have to tackle the pastoral end! Here is the list myself and my colleague Anselm came up with:

1) The first thing that comes to mind is the 1962 Missale Romanum. I've seen these going on the net for $150 at the cheapest and $350 at the most. We were fortunate enough to have a donation.

2) In the Church itself,the reinstallation (or new installation)of the communion rails comes to mind. My parish is fortunate enough to still have its old ones, though they are not installed. Father estimates it may cost $1000 to have them properly reinstalled and brought up to snuff. This price would obviously be higher in a parish that did not still have the originals.

3) As far as vestments go, he will need a dignified chasuble and maniples (about $600).

4) Altar cards, as well, and booklets with the translations for the congregation to follow ($75 for the cards and about $250 for the booklets).

That comes to at least $2000 for just the hardware. That does not even take into account the intense training that will need to be implemented:

5) For the choir, who will need to learn Gregorian Chant.

6) For the altar boys, who will need to learn the Latin responses. We found an excellent little book called "Learning to Serve" that was used to train altar boys in the pre-Vatican II days.

Buying the hardware is simple [by the way, you can get all this stuff from the Coalition Ecclesia Dei]; but it will take hours of training to get the choir and altar boys ready, not to mention the weeks of catechesis on the liturgy that the parishioners will need. We also must take into consideration the training your priest will need. Deo gratias to the FSSP for their Tridentine "Boot Camps" they have been hosting (click here for an excellent write up of one of these boot camps from The New Liturgical Movement. It's about half way down the blog).

Let's not imagine that come Saturday, everything will be right with the world. To pull this off correctly, it is going to take months of training, probably years of catechesis and decades of faithful adherence to the liturgy to undue the harm that has been done. But when all is said and done, this whole sorry period of the past forty years will be but a little blip, a historical footnote, in the glorious history of the Church.

Cur Deus Homo

Bishop, Confessor, and Doctor of the Church

St. Anselm, the famous Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Benedictine monk, who fought intrepidly for the faith and liberty of the Church. He is one of the greatest philosophers and mystics of the eleventh century. He died on 21 April in 1109.

As Dr Ludwig Ott summarises it in his Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma:

"St. Anselm of Canterbury in his dialogue: 'Cur Deus Homo' has speculatively penetrated and built up to a systematic theory of Redemption the idea of the vicarious atonement of Christ which is based in Scripture and tradition. While the Fathers, in the explanation of Christ's work of sanctification, proceed more from the contemplation of the consequences of the Redemption, and therefore stress the negative side of the Redemption, namely, the ransoming from the slavery of sin and of the devil, St. Anselm proceeds from the contemplation of the guilt of sin. This, as an insult offered to God, is infinite, and therefore demands an infinite expiation. Such expiation, however, can be achieved by a Divine Person only. To be capable of thus representing mankind, this person must be, at the same time, man and God."

The Catechism of the Council of Trent (The Roman Catechism) has this to say on the doctrine of the atonement:

"The pastor should teach that all these inestimable and divine blessings flow to us from the Passion of Christ. First, indeed, because the satisfaction which Jesus Christ has in an admirable manner made to God the Father for our sins is full and complete. The price which he paid for our ransom was not only adequate and equal to our debts, but far exceeded them. Again, it (the Passion of Christ) was a sacrifice most acceptable to God, for when offered by His Son on the altar of the cross, it entirely appeased the wrath and indignation of the Father."

I have chosen St. Anselm as my patron and (pseudonym) here as it my conviction that a renewed understanding of the Catholic doctrine of the atonement, so admirably ennunciated by St. Anselm, is imperative to regaining a proper understanding of the sacrificial and propitiatory nature of the Mass, which is indeed nothing other than the re-presentation of that self-same atoning sacrifice. I am further convinced, with then-Cardinal Ratzinger, "that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing today is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy." In short, understanding the atonement will help us to understand the sacrificial nature of the Mass, which will lead us back to the traditional rite of Mass which so well expressed that sacrificial nature, which in turn will bolster the faith and hence the morals of the Catholic people. Of course there is much more to be said here, especially as regards the assertion that the Traditional Latin Mass will bolster the faith and morals of the Catholic people. But I have gone on long enough for now. Perhaps another post. Sancte Anselme, ora pro nobis!

Democratization of the Church

It is not hard to point out many of the changes in the past forty years that have contributed to the current state of doctrinal apathy and moral confusion in the Church. One could cite the liturgical reforms forced on the Church in the name of the spirit of Vatican II (which find no justification in the documents of Vatican II), or one could point to the abandonment of traditional ecclesiology that emphasized the subsistence of truth within the Catholic faith for a newer, more ecumenical ecclesiology which waters down the distinctive nature of the Church and adopts an "I'm okay, you're okay" attitude towards Protestantism. One could point to the tragic decline in biblical scholarship in the past century, characterized by the general acceptance by scholars of anti-supernatural bias, as well as the heretical Documentary Hypothesis and the "Q" Theory (also called the "Two Source" Theory). In this vein, I could point to the ambiguitites created by such documents as Sacrosanctum Concilium and Dei Verbum (chapter 11 in particular). Couple all of these factors with the strange phenomenon of the Popes since John XXIII renouncing much of their authority and adopting a more "pastoral" in place of an authoritative position, and we have a recipe for the present chaos in the Church.

I am not the first one by far to point this out, and volumes have been written on these issues. However, I think they are but instrumental causes of the Church's present state. I notice that they all presuppose another, more foundational tenet which is not discussed or debated so much as it is taken for granted: this is the tend towards democratization in the Church. To be sure, the Church is not a democracy, nor has it ever proclaimed itself to be; but these days it acts more and more like one. Popes no longer wear the triple tiara. Rather, they delegate their authority to commissions and congregations; bishops make no move without the advice of committees of lay advisors, and even parish priests work hand in hand with "worship teams" and other useless bodies of individuals who contribute very little to the common good but do foster much confusion and disillusionment.

One reason why the Middle Ages is considered by many to be a Golden Age of the Church is that the Church and State both followed the same model in their structure. Everybody knows that God's kingdom is not a democracy; Christ is the King of Kings and rules absolutely. It is a divine monarchy. In the temporal sphere, the Church functioned as a monarchy as well, with the Pope ruling as the physical head of the Church Militant and the bishops acting as the princes or prelates of the ecclesiastical kingdom. Likewise, civil society was ordered on the monarchic model, with the king reigning in the name of God and exercising the authority vested in his person by divine order.

Following the social changes of the past two centuries, we now have a different situation: Christ, of course, who is unchanging, is still the same and is still King and His kingdom is still a divine monarchy. But civil society has cast off monarchy in favor of democracy and liberal government. Now, the Church is in the middle. As part of Christ's kingdom, she must conform to His order; but more often than not she finds herself instead influenced by the existing socio-political framework. Thus, democracy is seen by the Church as something inherently meritorious, an attitude that is novel to the Church's tradition. The Church had frequently been pressured to submit to a popular will of the people before (as the 17th century French bishops clamored for their so-called "Gallican liberties" and the 19th century liberal Biblical scholars asserted that the papacy had to assent to their heretical views on the Sacred Scriptures, whose views were condemned in Lamenatbili Sane in 1907); the difference is that in ages past, the Popes vigorously asserted their unique prerogatives against those who insisted on the Popes bending to the will of the people. Now, the popes and bishops cave in or go soft when they are confronted with a "majority opinion" (by the way, check out Numbers 16:1-50 and I Samuel 8:1-22 to see what God thinks of majority opinion).

It is clear that to fix anything in the Church it will take authority. And no authority can be exercized until the Popes and Bishops rise up and take the authority that is rightfully theirs and reject this devastating trend of "democratization."

Can We Legislate Morality?

It is not even election year yet and already the presidential candidates are gearing up for the primaries. As with every election year, the so-called dilemma of "legislating morality" comes up. How far can and ought a state go in implementing its laws to fight not only crime, but vice, which is always accompanies crime and often leads to it?