Changes to the Mass

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Hey Y’all,

I’m writing a research paper, and I wanted to know if anyone knew of any good resources.

I want to know if there have been any attempts to change the Mass which were heretical, and how they were stopped.

Any help would be great!

God Love You!!
 
Hey Y’all,

I’m writing a research paper, and I wanted to know if anyone knew of any good resources.

I want to know if there have been any attempts to change the Mass which were heretical, and how they were stopped.

Any help would be great!

God Love You!!
Heresy only applies to doctrine, or teachings, of the Church. No part of the Mass has ever been heretical.

Now where you can get into debates with more traditionalists is whether some of the changes to the Mass over the years (like what that changes that occurred after Vatican II) have been sacrilegious. A sacrilege is a discipline that is seen as disrespectful or goes against church teaching. There are traditionalist who see receiving the Eucharist in the hand as sacrilegious, others just see it as less reverent.
 
Hey Y’all,

I’m writing a research paper, and I wanted to know if anyone knew of any good resources.

I want to know if there have been any attempts to change the Mass which were heretical, and how they were stopped.

Any help would be great!

God Love You!!
Hi,

Can you provide some examples?

Best,
Ed
 
Hey Y’all,

I’m writing a research paper, and I wanted to know if anyone knew of any good resources.

I want to know if there have been any attempts to change the Mass which were heretical, and how they were stopped.

Any help would be great!

God Love You!!
Hi,

Can you provide some examples?

Best,
Ed
 
I’m writing a research paper …
On? For?
… and I wanted to know if anyone knew of any good resources.
Which ones have you already found?
I want to know if there have been any attempts to change the Mass which were heretical, and how they were stopped.
As explained in Post #2 no parts of Mass have been heretical. Have you chosen a research topic for which you have sufficient knowledge?
 
Sorry for the confusion.

At my school, we are required to write a research paper (just to become seniors, not for a particular class)

I wanted to write on the subject that the Mass has not changed since it’s origination, but my superintendent said it might be better to write on the changes that were attempted but were fought against.

As for resources, my most informative on is “The Mass of the Early Christions” by Mike Aquilina.

Are there any recordings of Church Fathers or other leaders “reforming” or writing on how in particular the Mass should be said?

Sorry again for the confusion!
 
At my school, we are required to write a research paper (just to become seniors, not for a particular class)
I don’t know US education system. From its name I’d guess seniors are in final year at school and by school I presume you mean high school. What age range is that? My apologies: when you said “research paper” I imagined you as an undergraduate student.
 
We are juniors in highschool (typically 17).

Guess I should have put that at the beginning of my question! :o

Thanks!
 
Hey Y’all,

I’m writing a research paper, and I wanted to know if anyone knew of any good resources.

I want to know if there have been any attempts to change the Mass which were heretical, and how they were stopped.

Any help would be great!

God Love You!!
The form of the Mass is a discipline and not a doctrine. The words of consecration and the priest receiving are the only things which cannot change (and have not changed). Everything else in the Mass can be changed.
 
The form of the Mass is a discipline and not a doctrine. The words of consecration and the priest receiving are the only things which cannot change (and have not changed). Everything else in the Mass can be changed.
So COULD a Mass be said where only the Consecration takes place (with the proper permission)?
 
And I suppose a better subject for the paper would be on the development of the Mass to its current form?

If this is the case, what’s the best book/site on this history?

Thanks!
 
So COULD a Mass be said where only the Consecration takes place (with the proper permission)?
I don’t absolutely know. However, if I were to make an informed guess I would say no. My answer is no for two reasons. The Consecration alone is not the Mass in any of its current approved forms, so the Consecration on its own is not Mass. However, I think that’s more of an academic exercise than anything that’s really likely to happen. More pragmatically, I’d say no because it’s totally and absolutely prohibited to consecrate the sacred species outside Mass.
 
I disagree with some posters above who have said no change to the mass could be heretical. Let’s start with the case in Australia where new Catholics were baptized in the name of the Creator, the Sanctifier, and the Redeemer. This is not strictly speaking heretical, as God is all of these things, and each person of the Trinity could be matched most closely with one of the labels. But it was questionable enough that the Church ruled it no longer constituted valid form, and therefore all those baptized during that period were invalidly baptized.

My point is that heretical statements and prayers could be introduced into the Order of the Mass in a similar way. One place where this was probably done was in a community in Canada where the belief was that God was not three persons, but five - the other two being the Blessed Virgin and some woman who I think was still alive and part of that group. If we look back at the history of the Church, we have recent knowledge of changes and experimentation that took place especially in the 1970s but in later decades as well. But we also have at least three other indications of great diversity in liturgy in the past:

  1. *]Many local rites or uses were suppressed in favor of the Roman rite. Only those which could prove a certain age were exempted, and even fewer are still practiced today, such as the Ambrosian rite. Most major cities in Europe had their own rites, although these probably didn’t vary a great deal.
    *]The long list of heresies is a list of Catholics who thought they were worshipping God correctly. For these heresies to come to prominence, they needed educated leaders to formulate and spread them. In most cases, this included priests. Some priests may have limited their heresies to the homily, but back in an era before the entire mass was as rigidly codified as it is today, it’s likely that some of these priests standardized certain heretical prayers or practices as part of the mass in that local Church.
    *]If we look at the separated (mainly Orthodox) Churches whose origins date to the apostolic era, we can see a great diversity of practices and prayers that have survived. One has to assume that some changes veered into heresy, although most were reined in or corrected in time by contact with other Christians. Can we say that the 81 books of the Ethiopian canon are heresy-free?
    So I think there are strong reasons to suppose that the mass has at times been changed to include heresy, but we have little direct evidence because such deviations have usually been suppressed.
 
I disagree with some posters above who have said no change to the mass could be heretical. Let’s start with the case in Australia where new Catholics were baptized in the name of the Creator, the Sanctifier, and the Redeemer. This is not strictly speaking heretical, as God is all of these things, and each person of the Trinity could be matched most closely with one of the labels. But it was questionable enough that the Church ruled it no longer constituted valid form, and therefore all those baptized during that period were invalidly baptized.

My point is that heretical statements and prayers could be introduced into the Order of the Mass in a similar way. One place where this was probably done was in a community in Canada where the belief was that God was not three persons, but five - the other two being the Blessed Virgin and some woman who I think was still alive and part of that group. If we look back at the history of the Church, we have recent knowledge of changes and experimentation that took place especially in the 1970s but in later decades as well. But we also have at least three other indications of great diversity in liturgy in the past:

  1. *]Many local rites or uses were suppressed in favor of the Roman rite. Only those which could prove a certain age were exempted, and even fewer are still practiced today, such as the Ambrosian rite. Most major cities in Europe had their own rites, although these probably didn’t vary a great deal.
    *]The long list of heresies is a list of Catholics who thought they were worshipping God correctly. For these heresies to come to prominence, they needed educated leaders to formulate and spread them. In most cases, this included priests. Some priests may have limited their heresies to the homily, but back in an era before the entire mass was as rigidly codified as it is today, it’s likely that some of these priests standardized certain heretical prayers or practices as part of the mass in that local Church.
    *]If we look at the separated (mainly Orthodox) Churches whose origins date to the apostolic era, we can see a great diversity of practices and prayers that have survived. One has to assume that some changes veered into heresy, although most were reined in or corrected in time by contact with other Christians. Can we say that the 81 books of the Ethiopian canon are heresy-free?
    So I think there are strong reasons to suppose that the mass has at times been changed to include heresy, but we have little direct evidence because such deviations have usually been suppressed.

  1. I don’t believe the Holy See would introduce anything heretical into the Mass. It’s the Holy See which regulates the Mass.

    The example of the baptisms in Australia was a case of those with no authority to change the liturgy attempting to change it.
 
I don’t believe the Holy See would introduce anything heretical into the Mass. It’s the Holy See which regulates the Mass.
Well it depends on how you interpret the OP’s question. If he is only wondering whether large-scale, approved changes throughout the universal Church have attempted to introduce heresy, there isn’t really much to find.

The Holy See has appropriated to itself the regulation of the mass in recent centuries, which is fitting when there is a single Roman Missal used nearly universally throughout the Church. Historically, however, the other apostles weren’t constantly sending couriers to ask Peter to add this or that prayer, or to get approval for the translation into Malayam. Regulation of the liturgy was much more in the hands of the local bishop, and changes happened more locally. That is what much of my answer above was developing.
 
There is ample evidence of the establishment of a sequence of liturgical/ritual actions that were generally followed by the turn into the 2nd century AD. And of course there is the evidence in Acts of the Apostles of St. Paul’s correction of one community’s (Corinth?) errant praxis circa 50AD. But the sequence always included what we now call formally the Liturgy of the Word. So, consecration of the elements alone would have been aberrant.
As an HS Junior I’m sure you could obtain many topic threads on Wikipedia, but don’t count on redigesting those into a paper.
And I agree about looking into the Council of Trent as the serious watermark affecting the elements of Mass for the next 500 years or so.
Great book to check: The Christian West and its Singers-Page.
 
Books on the development and history of the Mass:
  1. The Mass of the Roman Rite (2 vols) - Rev. Josef Jungmann (this has a fair amount of Latin and Greek in it that you probably won’t understand)
  2. The Mass - Rev. Josef Jungmann (updated after Vatican II)
  3. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass - Rev. Nicholas Gihr
 
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