dts:
If a universal indult for the Tridentine Mass (1962 rite) was granted do you think it would diffuse much of the contention over the liturgy within the church?
I do think that those who favor the 1962 missal are justified in being angry over the manner in which it has been suppressed.
The whole latin church worshipped a certain way over long periods of time and then everything was just adruptly changed. The rug was essentially pulled out from under folks who loved the 1962 rite. In many instances, the changes were coupled with a deliberate effort to destroy long held traditions of the church (e.g., abandonment of Gregorian chant, Latin, male altar boys etc. . . ).
The trouble is, people had grown up in in a style of Catholicism which made obedience the supreme virtue. It was a very authoritarian style. So there was an unspoken assumption that people would obey orders, & change their liturgical & devotional habits, when and as commanded.
That sort of attitude is a great part of the problem, ISTM - attention shifts from whether a course of action is prudent and good, to whether it is commanded; and if so, what the grounds for the validity of the command may be. It didn’t help that there was a spirituality of obedience which treated any command of a superior as valid, simply because it was an order. People weren’t taught to ask “Does this seem as if it is a good thing for the Church ?” - they were taught to do what “Father”, the bishop, the Cardinal, and the Pope said.
So whether people loved the old Mass or not, was simply not relevant. As people point out here, “The CC is not a democracy” - & the bishops at Vatican II didn’t think it was. They and the Pope were acting within their rights by denying the Old Mass to people: so what if people wanted it ? Tough - this is the CC,
not a democracy. In the CC, the bishops rule -
not the laity. So if the bishop says, “No more Mass as in 1962” - then it disobedient and rebellious and wicked, in 1969 or so, to insist on it. This idea is not yet dead - the disobiedience of some Catholics in this matter is astonishing. IOW if the laity are Catholics, they will do what they are told.
We are still stuck in that rut, when there are more important things to consider.
The point is, people have not been deprived of anything. The way they are encouraged to sneak to Rome about their rulers in the Church is utterly disgraceful, and would not have been tolerated in the 1950s, not for ten seconds.
So the present situation, in which traditionalist groups are free to form, would have been unthinkable if the ethos of 50s Catholicism still survived intact - the chaos of the late 60s and the 70s is probably a major cause of how it is possible for such groups to form; that, and the declaration of Pius XII that it belonged to the Pope, and no lesser authority, to change the liturgy. If the Pope can do that - then the Pope is free to reject the Old Mass. And did.
From one POV, the rejection of the Old Mass is a long-range by-product of Vatican I, which gave the Pope total control over the whole Church as a matter of divine right. No one one can tell an infallible and omnicompetent authority what not to do. So Pius IX or Pius XII is the man to blame for the New Mass.
As for your question: not if one equates having the Old Mass with rejecting the Pauline Missal: an indult is unlikely to satisfy the SSPX and others. ##
