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YoungTradCath
Guest
Well, I’m sure if the Pope wanted to, he could have people step in for them for the mass. And I don’t see why, for example, the Swiss Guard couldn’t dress like the Palatine Guard to step in for them.
Many of the “offices” necessary for the celebration were just that, offices. Many of them were cardinalate offices. So why couldn’t some other cardinal of some other now-extant office perform the same role? It’s not like the cardinals doing specific functions in a Papal High Mass actually did anything that really correlated with whatever office they held in the curia. It just so happened that whatever office he held became the traditional office to go to to get the cardinal to perform a specific task in the mass. Specific mass tasks had a cardinal of a specific office performing them always, but the role of the cardinal in the mass in most cases had nothing to do with his role in whatever office he held. Nowadays, it would be a different office that he holds, but his role during the mass would be exactly the same, hence the mass would be exactly the same as before, with the added benefit of nobody having to “fake” for the old position, because as I said, the office never really correlated with the position performed by the cardinal holing that office in the mass in the first place. For example, the Pope used to wear a thing called a falda, basically a very long alb that required train bearers in the front and back of him. There never was, for example, a cardinalate office called “Papal Clothing Wrangler.” They just got some cardinals, who happened to always come from the same offices, to do this function.
There are a few cardinals whose offices did correlate with the task they performed in the mass. For example, the popes’ deacon was always the Cardinal Protodeacon, but we still have a Cardinal Protodeacon. But most of the tasks in Papal High Masses performed by cardinals never correlated with the office of the cardinal who performed them, as I said.
We don’t have a Papal Court anymore, but we do have a Papal Household, the same thing with a different name. I don’t understand the point of a Papal Household at all if they don’t ever perform any actions together like they used to in the Papal High Masses. That was the point of having a Papal Household. What role, for example, do the Numerary Protonotaries Apostolic (type of monsignor living at the Vatican) have in Papal Masses nowadays? None. They used to.
