Maybe there is no perfect Mass, but that is hardly what those of us who love the Extraordinary Form complain about. The EF came to be slowly, through centuries, and always adding to the reverence. The OF in some way was too “radical” of a change, and it has been literally proven that in 40 years that change was not something anyone in their right mind would call good.
I love the Ordinary Form, don’t get me wrong. But it is simply too open to errors, customization, irreverence. You simply cannot find this in the EF. Everything took centuries to be what it is, and everything had a solid mystical meaning. In fact, we could not understand the Ordinary Form if we don’t study what the usus antiquor was!
For instance: sometimes people are puzzled at the sign of the cross when the priest says “that they may become for us the body and blood”, and they mistakenly assume that this is when the transubstantiation takes place. That’s because in the usus antiquor the priest would trace many, many crosses at different moments of the liturgy, since the cross is not a “magic sign” but an invocation (or, for a priest, a giving) of God’s blessing. The transubstantiation would actually be fulfilled (as far as my understanding goes) when the priest says: “this is my body” and, later, “this is the chalice of my blood”. Which is why they are followed by an elevation.
I expect the Extraordinary Form to become more and more popular, and more and more priests to learn how to serve it, to the extent that it will be offered much more and in more places, and the people will begin to (most naturally) prefer it to the Ordinary Form. I also expect as a result that the Ordinary Form will become increasingly more reverent and be freed from many of the small customizations and abuses that make it a sorrowful experience for many of us, while for others, blessed with a veil of non-understanding, it is perfectly fine no matter what.
Our standpoint, as faithful Catholics in union with the Holy Father and obedience to the Church, is in fact not very different from the one that then-Cardinal Ratzinger had when he wrote:
What happened after the Council was altogether different: instead of a liturgy fruit of continuous development, a fabricated liturgy was put in its place. A living growing process was abandoned and the fabrication started. There was no further wish to continue the organic evolution and maturation of the living being throughout the centuries and they were replaced – as if in a technical production – by a fabrication, a banal product of the moment. …]
Consequently, the trend is the increasingly marked retreat of those who do not look to the liturgy for a spiritual show-master but for the encounter with the living God
And how true are these words! How often in the Ordinary Form our experience depends on the priest and on the way he does things.
I invite you to read the
Study of the New Order of the Mass, which literally notified the Holy Father of the issues that were in the novus ordo of the Mass, and which - as it is factually well known - moved the Holy Father to allow extra time before the mandatory implementation, and to personally change the seventh article of the Institution Generalis Missali Romani.
In reality, what took place has been very complex, beyond anyone’s personal understanding.
I was very surprised to learn that a humble servant of God, Fr. Prosper Guéranger, O.S.B., founder of the French Benedictine Congregation, had written in 1840 a modest work called “Liturgical Institutions”, which contained a section called “
the anti-liturgical heresy” a summary of the doctrine and liturgical practice of the Protestants from the XIVth to the XVIIIth century. Quite a few of this writing confirms the worries of those who study and understand the
usus antiquor.
I was even more surprised to find that the idea of no longer facing
ad orientem as a shepherd that leads the faithful, but to instead face “the people” (forgive me, but it sounds rather populist) in fact originated from Martin Luther himself, who in the book
Deutsche Messe und Ordnung des Gottesdienstes of 1526 wrote (my translation, sorry):
We shall keep the priestly ornaments, the altar, the lights until they are exhausted or until we do not consider that we ought to change them. We will let, however, others do otherwise; but in the true Mass, among true Christians, it would be necessary that the altar did not remain as it currently is and that the priest faced the people …]. But this can wait.
And speaking someplace else against Rome, he would write: “when we will have turned their altars around, we will have destroyed their religion.”
Now I don’t want to be dramatic, and I do think that he was overly optimistic, but it is quite fascinating how some changes have deeper, ancient history and, sorry to say, simply do not arise from the Catholic spirit, or in the words of the two cardinals to the Holy Father, “a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass”.
