The one tradition that can never be regained!

[Deacon_Ed_B]

I think that is exactly the point, Deacon Ed–how can we accept the Mass for what it is when we no longer have, judging from the sad state of the Liturgy in many places, a clear understanding anymore of what the Mass is.

I answer this in no way trying to be judgmental. We each get out of the mass exactly what we put into it. If we go in expecting to be disappointed, we will be. If we go in anticipating the banquet of the Eucharist, and concentrate on that, regardless of the language or faux pas of the priest or deacon, we we will come away spiritually fed and renewed. What we get out of the mass, regardless of the form, depends over 90% on ourselves. If we realize just that and concentrate on that, we will be surprised on how we will be spiritually renewed after mass.
Prayers & blessings
Deacon Ed B

 

[maurin]

I answer this in no way trying to be judgmental. We each get out of the mass exactly what we put into it. If we go in expecting to be disappointed, we will be. If we go in anticipating the banquet of the Eucharist, and concentrate on that, regardless of the language or faux pas of the priest or deacon, we we will come away spiritually fed and renewed. What we get out of the mass, regardless of the form, depends over 90% on ourselves. If we realize just that and concentrate on that, we will be surprised on how we will be spiritually renewed after mass.
Prayers & blessings
Deacon Ed B

And I respond to this in a similar vein. If the faithful are not taught what to expect from the Mass, or if they are taught incorrectly, then they will not get from the Mass what the Mass is meant to give.

Have you read Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Deacon?

 

[elts1956]

I have a big screen tv, comuter, blu-ray, went to a private school…and I go to Latin Mass.

I like my technology, and I like my tradition too. I firmly believe that there are somethings that are eternal in beauty and truth (ie Mass), and somethings that are meant to change frequently (technology, fashion, etc). Life should have a good mix of things that change (to make things interesting) and those that don’t (to keep us grounded).

As far as the OP is concerned, I do think its sad that not everyone in the western rite experences the same Mass. 60 years ago, the Mass I attend in California would have very few differences vs the Mass my family in Italy attends. Today, there is a massive difference even within my parish (youth mass, family mass, noon mass, etc).

Hi I was raised at the time when the only Mass available was the Latin Mass. It is beautiful. But I have a question about something I either don’t understand, or am misinterpreting.

Those folks who claim the NO Mass is not as “pure” as the Latin Mass are leaving me with the impression that rectifying this by having everyone attend the TLM Mass instead of having the choice of the NO would rectify the wrongs I see within the Church these days. Is this what you mean?

Isn’t there more to it than just the form of the Mass? Please note, I am NOT saying the NO is not legitimate, just trying to get some clarification.

Thanks.

 

[Deacon_Ed_B]

** Have you read Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Deacon?**

I have read several of his books, years ago, and loaned them out. As usual I did not keep a record of whom I loaned them out to and they are history. I do have several of his cassettes a; A truly gifted speaker and writer.
Prayers & blessings
Deacon Ed B

 

[Deacon_Ed_B]

If the faithful are not taught what to expect from the Mass, or if they are taught incorrectly, then they will not get from the Mass what the Mass is meant to give.

This is true. Once taught, we should never forget. That is what helps us concentrate of the fruits of the mass, not the foibles of the priest.
Prayers & blessings
Deacon Ed B

 

[SacredHeartFan]

To the OP

Yes you are correct. That will never be re-gained. People will try to tell you that the early church did it but also the early church only allowed one confession in a lifetime, they carried the Eucharist on their persons wherever they went, and lets face it we would do none of that today. The mass needs to move forward not back. It was devloping during the latin period. It would have been better had VII not done anything, but they did. Just my :twocents:

 

[Deacon_Ed_B]

Thank God that today we can have more than one confession in our lifetime.
Prayers & blessings
deacon Ed B

 

[maurin]

I have read several of his books, years ago, and loaned them out. As usual I did not keep a record of whom I loaned them out to and they are history. I do have several of his cassettes a; A truly gifted speaker and writer.
Prayers & blessings
Deacon Ed B

I would love to make a gift of “Calvary and the Mass” to you. pm me if you would accept such a gift.

 

[a_cermak]

Thank God that today we can have more than one confession in our lifetime.
Prayers & blessings
deacon Ed B

Not only that but originally confession had to be PUBLIC! You can thank the Irish monks for the benefit of private confessions!

 

[Freshman88]

I know all about that. I knew that as a Protestant. I’ve always known that God is a God of ORDER and CEREMONY. It is one of the reasons that I started questiong my evangelical Protestant church, because order and ceremony were being eliminated in favor of a free-for-all open mike session.

I am getting just a tad irritated here.

Mass = Liturgy. Yes, when you are talking about the theology.

But in the common use of the term, the way common people like silly ol’ me uses it, Liturgy refers to the “Order of Show.” Sorry to use such a blatently secular and possibly offensive term, but THAT is what I’m talking about when I say that Jesus did NOT establish the ORDER of the Catholic Mass.

Yes, various prayers and of course, the Words of Consecration are straight from Jesus and the BIble, and the idea of a liturgical ceremony surrounding the Consecration of the Host is from the Passover ceremony.

But Jesus did NOT give the apostles a specific ORDER OF MASS that must be followed from the 1st century all the way to the end of time. You are playing with words and trying to imply that Jesus did give out an exact order of Mass. He didn’t. He left those details up to the CHURCH and gave them the authority to establish the “order of show.”

Right?
Jesus did NOT make up the order of the Catholic Mass.

I’m going to repeat myself one more time, and that will be all.

I was commenting on your misuse of the terms. I have never heard liturgy used the way you use it, even in common use. The misuse of the terms gave rise to several incorrect statements which I felt obliged to correct. This whole time I have been agreeing with you, many of the particulars of the mass can be subjected to organic development.

 

[EasterJoy]

It doesn’t matter how well we study the rubrics, how careful the priests are in following the norms, how ‘traditional’ the congregation, how much attention is given to historical detail, there is one thing about the Extraordinary Form of the mass that will NEVER be like a pre-Vatican II mass.

That one thing is its’ universality. In 1950, people didn’t go to Latin mass because they were ‘Traditional’, they went to Latin mass because they were Catholic! It was just the mass, the one parish mass that everyone goes to.

I’ve recently been reading Catherine Pickstock (an Anglican, but very close to Catholicism in her liturgical understanding) on the liturgy. Pickstock’s view is that liturgy doesn’t just bring the community together in an ordinary event, liturgy CREATES the community. Without liturgy, there is no Church, no congregation. This is key, the people of God comes from the Body of Christ, which is imparted to us through the liturgy.

This community is, after the Eucharistic consecration itself, the most important aspect of the mass. Looking at it this way has really made me think again about the whole Latin mass movement. Like it or not, the only place we will find this universality in worship today is in the Ordinary Form, celebrated in the ordinary parish church.

Pickstock is especially critical of the ‘polity of death’ which she sees in the increasing reliance on the ‘dead letter’ rather than the living Word. Our need to tie everything down, bring it out of a book, pick up an old book (a 1962 missal?), reprint it, reproduce it, ‘pretend’ it’s still the way things are, is a disconnect from a fundamental aspect of our embodied humanity. In this context, I can understand why defunct rites, like the Sarum Use for example, no matter how beautiful they might be as a spectacle, are not properly ‘liturgical’ for us today, they are historical artefacts, learned from a book not from a human person. Learning the mass from an old book or an old film reel, no matter how authentic a reproduction, will always be reproduction, not the ongoing production of the living community.

OK, I’m guessing this is going to be a controversial post on here. Tell me why I’m wrong? I honestly want to know.

There are plenty of living people who are alive to hand on the living tradition of the Latin Mass. It didn’t die, and I don’t think it will. If anything, it is the NO that was introduced to the Church from a book, not the current incarnation of the TLM. It seems very much alive to me! The TLM is no more defunct than the NO was imaginary.

One could also make the point that if the texts had not been preserved, the Bible would have been gone a long time ago. It was written for other people and for another time. Does that make it an artifact? Hardly! And how many peoples have been evangelized by the example of one priest or perhaps just a few missionaries who knew the Mass, whom they imitated? It seems to have worked.

It is necessary to have norms and carefully considered boundaries for liturgy, but the universality of the Church does not and probably never has depended on every Catholic on the planet experiencing an identical liturgy. That is nonsense.

The only thing required for those who attend the TLM and those who attend the NO to become the Body of Christ is charity. If you don’t have that, you’re sunk anyway. The liturgical choices you make are moot.

 

[Brian777]

I am curious as to why you believe this. Do you honestly think that the mainstream practicing Catholics of America with their minivans, two and a half kids, dog, soccer practice, xbox 360 , text messages, big-screen tvs, computers, blu-ray dvds , private schools and guitar hero have a knowledge, much less a desire to go to Mass in latin?

Why do their materialist heresies matter? The Mass is the Mass, and whatever GOD wants will be done! not what liberal American Catholics want done.

In response to the original post, I will say that in the Roman Catholic tradition yea there was an element of universality, but we must remember that outside the Roman church were other Churches in communion with rome who had mass in greek, aramaic, even a hebrew mass was said in the middle east at one point i believe. Also, during the Midlle Ages, the Roman Rite was not the only mass celebrated. In France you had the Gallican Rite, in England, the Sarum, in Spain the Mozarabic, and among Domincans the Dominican Rite, etc. So the Mass has always been subject to culture, histroy and tradition of the people celebrating it. The one thing that held the different rites together was the eucharist and its central role. So why can’t that be the situation today? why cant we have 2 different rites, when it used to work with over 50?

 

[ASD]

This is an excellent thread.

IMHO, DL82 has pointed out an aching irony: When we choose TLM, don’t we seem like all the other lifestyle consumers in our society?

I think it’s a very general problem: Can a tradition that one chooses be authentic or genuine at all? Similarly, can our choice between competing traditions be legitimate?

In fact, I claim that in our multicultural world this strange position is not peculiar to traditional Catholics. It is our general condition. We’re all like Zarathustra, who would overcome the contingency & thrown-ness of his own existence: Thus I willed it.

E.g., it seems to me that people who attend OF (NO), including so-called cradle Catholics, have more or less deliberately “chosen” a particular form of Christianity, a tradition, over others. That is, given their absolute freedom to worship elsewhere, they have at least tacitly “chosen” it. In fact, they have more or less deliberately chosen Christianity over, say, Mohammedanism or Hinduism or Buddhism or atheism.

But how can such a choice be legitimate? (I think this multicultural condition of ours is a much more difficult challenge to faith than, say, science or other forms of self-sufficient rationality.)

It’s easy enough to say, “Well, my choice is legitimate because our Church has the Truth.” But many people will notice that the other guys are saying the same thing, and find themselves right back where they started: How do I make a legitimate choice?

Notice that the easy answer tries to establish legitimacy in terms of knowledge and truth. I wonder if that’s the right approach at all.

Instead, what I have been thinking lately is that our choice of a particular tradition is more like our love for our own particular families than like our response to a particular line of reasoning involving facts and logic, or like a choice between competing scientific theories.

Similarly, maybe a “chosen tradition” can be genuine in the same way a conscious commitment to our own families is genuine.

Compare our embrace of a particular tradition to our embrace of our own particular families: We don’t choose our children any more than we choose to be born Catholic. (And even our spouses are chosen from among the people with whom we happen to find ourselves thrown together.) But if we were called upon to positively affirm our commitment to these particular children, rather than the bunch next door, perfectly nice though they be, who would find our choice of our own illegitimate or inauthentic?

In sum, the legitimacy of our embrace of a particular tradition, our strange, oxymoronic “choice of a tradition,” is not really like the legitimacy of our embrace of an intellectual position into which facts and logic have forced us, to be defended with evidence and syllogisms. (If such a thing were even possible with religion, it would only be legitimate as long as the evidence and logic hold up. The history of science and philosophy show how tenuous those supports are.)

Rather, it’s like love, a freely embraced commitment. Like love, it’s self-legitimating and, in a sense, impervious to facts and logic.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for your patience. I will be glad to have my muddled thinking clarified for me by others.

TIA, ASD​

Traditional Latin Mass: Translation and Grammar

 

[LeroyCRHP]

As a convert I cannot imagine how the church changed from latin mass in 1969. What was so bad that they did this massive change and almost univerally everyone was happier with it afterwards. I’ve read and still isn’t clear what was actually going on in the church. So many things we take for granted happened then.

 

[Brennan_Doherty]

This is an excellent thread.

IMHO, DL82 has pointed out an aching irony: When we choose TLM, don’t we seem like all the other lifestyle consumers in our society?

I think it’s a very general problem: Can a tradition that one chooses be authentic or genuine at all? Similarly, can our choice between competing traditions be legitimate?

In fact, I claim that in our multicultural world this strange position is not peculiar to traditional Catholics. It is our general condition. We’re all like Zarathustra, who would overcome the contingency & thrown-ness of his own existence: Thus I willed it.

E.g., it seems to me that people who attend OF (NO), including so-called cradle Catholics, have more or less deliberately “chosen” a particular form of Christianity, a tradition, over others. That is, given their absolute freedom to worship elsewhere, they have at least tacitly “chosen” it. In fact, they have more or less deliberately chosen Christianity over, say, Mohammedanism or Hinduism or Buddhism or atheism.

But how can such a choice be legitimate? (I think this multicultural condition of ours is a much more difficult challenge to faith than, say, science or other forms of self-sufficient rationality.)

It’s easy enough to say, “Well, my choice is legitimate because our Church has the Truth.” But many people will notice that the other guys are saying the same thing, and find themselves right back where they started: How do I make a legitimate choice?

Notice that the easy answer tries to establish legitimacy in terms of knowledge and truth. I wonder if that’s the right approach at all.

Instead, what I have been thinking lately is that our choice of a particular tradition is more like our love for our own particular families than like our response to a particular line of reasoning involving facts and logic, or like a choice between competing scientific theories.

Similarly, maybe a “chosen tradition” can be genuine in the same way a conscious commitment to our own families is genuine.

Compare our embrace of a particular tradition to our embrace of our own particular families: We don’t choose our children any more than we choose to be born Catholic. (And even our spouses are chosen from among the people with whom we happen to find ourselves thrown together.) But if we were called upon to positively affirm our commitment to these particular children, rather than the bunch next door, perfectly nice though they be, who would find our choice of our own illegitimate or inauthentic?

In sum, the legitimacy of our embrace of a particular tradition, our strange, oxymoronic “choice of a tradition,” is not really like the legitimacy of our embrace of an intellectual position into which facts and logic have forced us, to be defended with evidence and syllogisms. (If such a thing were even possible with religion, it would only be legitimate as long as the evidence and logic hold up. The history of science and philosophy show how tenuous those supports are.)

Rather, it’s like love, a freely embraced commitment. Like love, it’s self-legitimating and, in a sense, impervious to facts and logic.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for your patience. I will be glad to have my muddled thinking clarified for me by others.

TIA, ASD​

Traditional Latin Mass: Translation and Grammar

Hi ASD,

Without going into too many particulars, I can say as a former Protestant that it was precisely the facts, logic, and evidence which converted me to the Catholic faith. I simply looked at the evidence and arguments on both sides and found the Protestant side wanting, to say the least.

Nor do I think the Church or her teachings are going to become tenuous because of philosophy or science. If anything it is the lack of solid philosophical teaching which has helped us into the cultural and religious muddle we are in today.

 

[Andreas_Hofer]

As a convert I cannot imagine how the church changed from latin mass in 1969. What was so bad that they did this massive change and almost univerally everyone was happier with it afterwards. I’ve read and still isn’t clear what was actually going on in the church. So many things we take for granted happened then.

The historical fact is actually far from your rosy (though conventional picture). Whatever problems did need to be fixed, we were subjected to a massive change that was not followed by near-universal happiness. Rather, thousands, perhaps milliions of Catholics left the faith, millions more ceased to believe it in full, four decadeds later barely one in four self-described Catholics actually practices the faith, some (if not many) of those who continued practicing simply put up with changes rather than happily welcoming them, etc. No one should read that as a simple post hoc ergo propter hoc, but any notion of unversal happiness has been resoundingly and empirically falsified.

 

[michaeldaniels]

I am one of those mainstream practicing Catholics that understand the Latin Mass completely and I have a strong desire to attend it…that is why I drive from Zachary, dowtown to St. Agnes to do it…since you are in BR, you should try going sometime…it is at St. Agnes at 9:30 AM every Sunday. It is the Tridentine (Pre-Conciliar) Latin Mass. God Bless

I am curious as to why you believe this. Do you honestly think that the mainstream practicing Catholics of America with their minivans, two and a half kids, dog, soccer practice, xbox 360 , text messages, big-screen tvs, computers, blu-ray dvds , private schools and guitar hero have a knowledge, much less a desire to go to Mass in latin?

 

[totustuus2345]

I am curious as to why you believe this. Do you honestly think that the mainstream practicing Catholics of America with their minivans, two and a half kids, dog, soccer practice, xbox 360 , text messages, big-screen tvs, computers, blu-ray dvds , private schools and guitar hero have a knowledge, much less a desire to go to Mass in latin?

I would be MORE than willing to go to a Mass in Latin (be it EF or OF), and I do most of these things, there is something about the Mass, (in Latin or vernacular) that manifests its reality of being not of this world, and the Latin and ornateness of the Mass is a truly Catholic thing, it sets us apart from the protestant Mass imitations, it also increases the Divine origin of the Mass

 

[mmtpender]

Without liturgy, there is no Church, no congregation. This is key, the people of God comes from the Body of Christ, which is imparted to us through the liturgy. <<<

This is not Catholic thinking. The Church has always held that a priest saying Mass with only one server (or even alone, as those did who were in prison camp isolation cells) is as valid as a Mass celebrated in presence of however many faithful.

The idea of “we are church” is fuzzy protestant nonsense.

 

[Julianna]

I was reading about the rosary one day and one thing that struck me was the statement that said one should never say the rosary during Mass. I was confused when I read this because I wondered why someone would say the rosary DURING Mass instead of participating in the Mass. Then I realized that in the “olden” days, because of the silent Canon of the latin Mass, many people simply sat there and said the rosary or other private devotions because they had no idea what was going on. Contrary to popular opinion, not everyone had latin to english missals, and even if the did, it didn’t insure an ability to follow along with the priest. My dad told me of how men used to stand at the back of church during Mass so that they could pop outside to have a smoke!

I’ve also read that Pope Pius XII was in favor of Mass in the vernacular. Why? To put an end to the private devotions during Mass. And as others have mentioned, there are many other rites who would disagree with notion that Mass should only be said in latin.

One can no more go back to the “traditionalism” of the 1950s than culture and fashion can go back to the 1920s.

The 1950’s …no way. I don’t own an apron or shirt-waist dress.