Summorum Pontificum Opinion

[OraLabora]

Personally as a man in his 20s I just prefer it because the Holy Mass has 1) more chanting from the priest, 2) the responses are chanted which is hard to find in my local area, 3) Gregorian chant, 4) Ad-orientem posture and greater emphasis on outward, aesthetic liturgical beauty.

Actually it doesn’t, because all of the above is exactly what happens at the OF Mass I attend twice a week at a Benedictine abbey. The entire Mass is chanted, the responses are chanted, it is in Gregorian chant (both propers and ordinary, Latin & Greek Kyrie) and it is aesthetically beautiful. The only thing it doesn’t have is ad orientem because it wouldn’t work with the configuration of the church with concelebration by 15 priests.

That it does’t happen at many OF Masses today has nothing to do with the form of the Mass. It has to do with attitude and care. Something that was not always present with the EF was the normative form of the Mass before the Council. Nor would it be if the EF were normative today.

Yes, there have been many amendments to the mass over the centuries, but none really to the extent that happened with Paul VIs Novus Ordo Missae. That’s why many trads have qualms with it.

The problem is that many of the accretions became redundant with time, instead of being removed or changed in a timely manner. A major cleaning up of them was needed. This was very well explained once by our abbot. As he said, it had become almost impossible for a priest to actually pray the Mass as he would be so caught up in getting all the minutiae right, such as exactly how many times to swing the thurible, exactly how to hold together his thumb and forefinger, etc. I have an old French ceremonial from the 1930s that goes through all the details, and how the priest could remember all of that is beyond me.