I think you are on both sides of legal positivism here. If we should keep the old rule merely because it was a rule for many years, even if we see no good reason for it, why should we reject the current rule now merely because we don’t see a reason to change? If the old rule was important just because it was the rule, why is the same not true for the new rule?
Well, actually one of the properties of good law in general is stability - too much change erodes the power of law so from that standpoint we shouldn’t change it unless we think it is necessary to achieve some good. This is why Benedict did not immediately change liturgical laws he doesn’t like, etc. and also why I wouldn’t changing our current (lack of) law on sacristans if we could achieve a reasonable situation without doing so.
But I’m not arguing that we should adhere to the traditional norms merely because they were the norms. I actually tried to articulate two
principles within those older norms which suggest to me that we should continue to try to approximate them as closely as possible. The first principle is that contact with the sacred should be restricted. That which is most sacred (the Eucharist) should continue to be restricted to the hands of the ordained, and that most closely associated with the Eucharist (primarily the vessels in which it is contained) should be restricted to those who have somehow been dedicated to sacred service (in our present legal reality, this would probably extend to acolytes). Here as well, I don’t simply recognize that this is the older principle but I think it remains key for Catholicism today, when a misunderstanding or total lack of the concept of the sacred leads to many deformations of practice and even of the faith.
The second principle, then, was that in the absence of those who are allowed to perform a clerical function (in this case handling the sacred vessels), we try to fill the job with someone who
could be a cleric. I think I gave sufficient historical examples of this above. When a principle is a old as this one we owe it deference because we need to give it the benefit of the doubt that there is some good reasoning behind it. Here I think the reasoning is that we don’t want the exercise of the ministry by someone not actually instituted in it to confuse ourselves or others about the nature of that ministry. So if we think service at the altar, for instance, is an essentially clerical function, aren’t we sending a confusing message by letting someone serve who could never possibly be a cleric? Or if we think the office of sanctifying is entrusted primarily to the bishop, then the pastor, etc., what kind of message would be saying by having a deacon confer a blessing while the bishop is standing right beside him? (canonically, those in lower orders are supposed to defer to those in higher orders - this conveys our belief about the fullness of the priesthood in the episcopacy)
So the argument runs: If we continue to value our sense of the sacred (which I think we should) and we also think our non-ideal practice should try not to obscure the principles behind ideal practice (which I also think remains valid), and both these principles were in fact the operating principles of the Church for many centuries until
very recently, shouldn’t we demand compelling positive reasons to depart from the principles?
Sacrosanctum Concilium itself said that there should be no change unless truly necessary (not just possibly beneficial), yet no one has presented any evidence as to why it might have been *necessary *to alter our restrictions on contact with the sacred. Why then should we not ask to see these reasons and, while waiting, seek to continue obeying the operative principles we have received through tradition?
