Okay guys hear me out before you jump on me:
I feel a bit of my personal background is needed so you can understand where I’m coming from. I’m an Early Church Historian by training and trade, I’ve gone to the “Traditional” Mass before, the “New” Mass and more Protestant Services than you could count. My Latin, grasp of Church History and Theology are great. This is not as a means to say “I’m better than you are” but rather as a means to say “I know what I’m talking about”.
I love the Mass that came out of the Council of Trent; I love it because I can understand the Latin; I love it because I think its beautiful; I Love it because I can understand the time and place it came out of. Thats my point however, the Mass of Trent did not come out of thin air, it is NOT the Mass of Jesus or the Early Saints (Even the later Saints). It came about as a response to the Protestants and because the Church had a need to define itself. Thats all great, and its beautiful but it is not the “Traditional” Mass.
I am a Traditional Catholic. I follow the Mass that best represents the Traditions of the Church. What does that mean? The early Writters, Christian and otherwise spoke that the earliest and best traditions of the Church are corporate Prayer, the Sharing of “Meal” and coming together as Bothers and Sisters in Christ. Nowhere are pretty clothes, gold and Latin required.
Pliny tells us that Christians came together and shared a meal and prayed together. Paul tells us that Christians came together and shared the meal and prayed together and remembered the saving act on the Cross. Latin did not come into the Mass until late in the game, even in Rome.
The “New” Mass is an effort to get back to these things, it is an effort to get back to what the Early Chuch and the Early Saints knew and loved. The Mass has changed many times. The Mass of Paul is different then the Mass of Saint Thomas, which is different than the Mass of Saint Catherine which is different then the Mass of Trent and all of those changes were good and okay. Trent was not the first Mass and it is clearly not the last. All are beautiful and holy and all show that Mass, like every other Work of God is meant to speak to people at their own time and place, the time and place of Trent is over
Thank you for letting me rant a bit, have a peachy day.
I’m not a liturgist, nor a theologian, but a medievalist, so I hope you will let me say a few words here, even though I’m not particularly competent as far as rubrics go.
There is something implied in your argument that’s very damaging not only to the Church, but to the very existence of Western Civilization. It’s not your fault or anything. It’s a bias against the medieval that began in the Renaissance, gained strength with Gibbon and the Enlightenment, and reached full bloom in the 20th Century.
When we adopt this archeaologism, in liturgy but especially in philosophy, we create a dangerous current that can only undermine Christianity in the West,.
The new Liturgy is in one sense more ancient than the Tridentine Mass. Certainly this is true. It seems to me to have been pieced together from various prayers dating from the first millenium. As such, it is certainly stripped down from the “accretions” that developed from the so-called Middle Ages all the way to the 20th Century.
In one sense, I can admire your desire to “return” to the early Church. The desire for that supposed authenticity is certainly a good thing. And regardless of what’s said on this forum, the new Liturgy
is “bearing fruit,” so to speak, in Africa and Asia. It is not, however, bearing fruit in any kind of demonstrable way in the West. This is not, in my opinion, specifically due to the new liturgy, but to certain philosophical tenets developed during the enlightenment and further refined in the 19th and 20th centuries, that just happen to find their expressions in how we view the liturgy. With all of that said, “auto-demolition” of the Church is certainly occurring in the West.
Why the difference between the two geographic regions? Well, the newer Liturgy is certainly more stripped down. The new Liturgy is the Mass at its bare essentials. As such, specifically “European” elements have been partially removed. From an African point of view, this could be a great blessing, in that it provides a foundation for authentic incorporation of the liturgy into African culture. The genuflection, a specifically Western gesture, could eventually be dropped in favor of native gestures that invoke a sense of reverence and submission. For example, the kow-tow of many Asian cultures doesn’t really resemble the one-knee, European knightly genuflection, but it certainly does invoke a sense of submission and reverence. The new liturgy is sparse enough for this kind of proper inculturation. As a matter of fact, we ought to hope that one day, an African “Tridentine” Mass will develop, as African civilization becomes more and more refined due to the presence of the Truth on that continent.
But what about the West? It is evident that Westerners have approached the new Liturgy from a completely different, almost entirely erroneous, perspective. Westerners don’t see a seed Liturgy that can sprout into a new Rite or Rites. To the contrary, most of us belong to the timeless Latin Rite, and as such, have witnessed what has in the American Church amounted to a complete refutation of the Catholic faith. It has been expressed materially in the destruction of statues, of altar rails, etc. It has been expressed doctrinally in the giant, seemingly unassailable heterodox movements of the 20th Century. Most people in the pews don’t really recognize it, but among scholars, especially secular scholars, this “New Springtime” is seen as the end of the Church.
The Tridentine Mass was codified as European civilization was reemerging globally. The Church created a fixed Liturgy that best expressed the Catholic faith. However, that faith was expressed in a European way. Symbols and ritual developed that augmented a sense of mystery, of moral submission, and of timelessness. In the European mind, the Tridentine Mass came to resemble a religion that could not fundamentally change, despite the constant state of flux that succeeded the Reformation and French Revolution.
As a result, the average Western Christian of the latter 20th Century saw its vanishing as a refutation of the Middle Ages, which was ironically, the most Christianized era in Western history. They saw in the removal of the traditional Mass the end of Christ’s kingship, of absolutism in regards to faith and morals, of some kind of “updated” understanding of God, who has, unfortunately for us in the West, still remained a scientifically unreachable mystery.
This attempt at recreating the early Church has enabled some of this damage in the West. The Middle Ages, despite the opinions of the early Protestants, does not represent a corruption of the Early Church. The scholar knows that the Medieval Church is not a warped version of supposedly authentic Christianity, but is actually is its
triumph.
If we refute the medieval, we are essentially refuting the Western Christianity, since the medieval is essentially the implementation of Christianity on a civilization-wide level. This past era has seen some positive developments, especially in regards to shepherding in the faithful remnants of Protestant sects that have almost totally veered from the straight and narrow, but it has unfortunately created a sense that the Catholic religion can contradict its past, when it cannot without compromising its own integrity. The heterodox publication, the National Catholic Reporter, is evidence of these sour grapes.
Continued on next post…
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