Spirit Daily
**Move To Revive Latin Mass Reflects Deep **Vatican Concerns On Liturgical Abuse
By Michael H. Brown
The move by the Vatican toward permitting wider use of the Latin Mass can be seen as a reflection of views long held by officials like Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, widely thought to be the Pope’s closest official adviser. As such, they also may be viewed as a reflection of the pontiff’s own thinking and an indication of his serious questions about abuses with the new or *Novus Ordo *Mass in the wake of Vatican II.
Earlier this month the Vatican allowed the first celebration of the Latin or “Tridentine Rite” Mass at St. Peter’s in twenty years and is widely expected to issue a document (with an “indult”) before Christmas permitting priests around the world to celebrate the old rite without the express permission of bishops. In that rite, which dates back to the Council of Trent in 1570, the priest says high Mass facing east with his back to the congregation, intoning the Latin liturgy. Up to now, such Masses have been few and far between, with many bishops frowning upon or outright quashing them.
The Vatican still views the new Mass as possessing significant advantages but has been concerned by the way many priests have taken liberties with it – in many instances stripping the liturgy of its mystery. Cardinal Ratzinger, who meets privately with the Pope for several hours each Friday, has long expressed discontent with the way Masses are now handled. In a book called
The Ratzinger Report, the Cardinal – prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – said that he “shudders at the lackluster face of the post-conciliar liturgy as it has become, or one is simply bored with its hankering after banality and its lackluster artistic standards.” He lamented that “many treasures that were intact have been squandered away.”
“The liturgy is not a show, a spectacle, requiring brilliant producers and talented actors,” he said in interviews with Italian journalist Vittorio Messori. “The life of the liturgy does not consist in ‘pleasant’ surprises and attractive ‘ideas’ but in solemn repetitions.”
As for the need for active participation on the part of those in the pews, Ratzinger has remarked that “the concept is no doubt correct. But the way it has been applied following the Council has exhibited a fatal narrowing of perspective. The impression arose that there was only ‘active participation’ when there was discernible external activity – speaking, singing, preaching, reading, shaking hands. It was forgotten that the Council also included silence under
actuosa participatio, for silence facilitates a really deep, personal participation, allowing us to listen inwardly to the Lord’s word.”
While the new Mass allows for more contact between priest and congregants, and presents the liturgy in native language (the removal of which would be opposed by many Catholics), the rite has been abused by clerics who have relaxed reverence toward the Eucharist, introduced clanging music, stripped altars of their statues, and relocated or even removed the tabernacle. Those who sought to attend the Latin Rite, noted Ratzinger, have been treated as “lepers.”
“The most important thing today is that we should regain respect for the liturgy and for the fact that it is not to be manipulated,” he wrote in a second book,
God and the World, adding that “unauthorized fabrication” should “vanish.” He said that priests should perform their ministries as a service to the mystery of the liturgy “and not want to invent and manufacture something better, like experts who are almighty in and of themselves.”
While on at least one occasion Cardinal Ratzinger has virtually expressed his wish the the liturgy had never been so radically changed, he cites advantages to the
Novus Ordo. When Messori asked him if Masses should be said in Latin again, the prefect replied, “That is no longer going to be possible as a general practice, and perhaps it is not desirable as such. At least it is clear, I would say, that the Liturgy of the Word should be in people’s mother tongue. But otherwise I would be in favor of a new openness toward the use of Latin.” That openness will now be expressed in the expected indult, which may in its turn reverse the Church’s course and bring elements of the older rite back into the liturgy.
Resources: Secrets of the Eucharist]
Ratzinger’s book, God and the World, will be available soon in the Spiritdaily bookstore
spiritdaily.org/MHB%20editorials/ratzingermass.htm
). If we had more people being judgmental about priests who sexually molest teenage boys, we could have avoided the whole abuse problem in the Church.
