For the past few months, and especially since Pope Benedict issued his Motu Proprio freeing up the Latin Mass, those who hate the Traditional Faith have been doing the linguistic cartwheels about how nobody will attend, nobody wants it, and how the Novus Ordo is so much better.
My most recent New Oxford Review (www.newoxfordreview.org) has an article in the New Oxford Notes titled "The New Mass Just Can't Be Fixed". In it, the NOR points to the Publisher of Our Sunday Visitor, one Greg Erlandson, who did the usual ragging job on the Latin Mass, and states that "many of the problems we face - lower Mass attendance, declining awareness of the teaching of the Real Presence, even the reluctance to invite others to share our faith - can be linked to a lack of appreciation for the [New] Mass itself" (emphasis mine)
The New Oxford Review states that all of these indicators that have been on the decline are "part and parcel of the New Mass, which in the end, just can't be fixed."
To which I'd say "Right on, brother."
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8 comments:
Well, there are an awful lot of anti-Tridentine-Mass priests who must also not appreciate the Novus Ordo, since they can't seem to ever say it the way it's supposed to be said, but are forever fiddling with it, adding to it, taking away from it, and otherwise adding their own personal frills and dressings.
And since that's one of the big reasons the Pope has freed up the usus antiquior (along with the stinginess of bishops in allowing it to be offered), these guys brought this on themselves.
My suspicion is that Mammon captured the interest of US (and Western) Catholics in the mid-1950's and really got the hooks into them in the mid-1970's.
Maybe the N O Mass helped, but it was by no means the prime mover.
My suspicion is that Mammon captured the interest of US (and Western) Catholics in the mid-1950's and really got the hooks into them in the mid-1970's.
You mean as far as churches filled with precious metals and marble and expensive art? I hope not, because whereas poor immigrants at the turn of the last century built utterly beautiful churches on shoestring budgets, it's the crappy, cognitive-dissonance, sensory-deprivation-tank churches that run into the hundreds of millions to build. Just look at the website to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, which is about a quarter brag about how rare and sumptuous and costly are the materials that went into building it.
Like Dolly Parton said: It costs a lot of money to look this cheap!
Excellent point, Anita.
great post and I wholehartedly agree.
Paul, I need to find a way to send you something that's too drop dead funny not to put on your blog. Contact me via email at zachk1983 at yahoo dot com.
good cartoon!
I don't know; if the "New Mass" can't be fixed, wouldn't that be becasue people are incapable of appreciating the fixing of it? And if they were incapable of appreciating the fixing of it, I don't see how the older form would ever be appreciated. In other words, as far as I can see, if the older form is going to work, the newer form is fixable, unless there's some factor somebody hasn't told me about.
Mind you, I totally think it's stupid to say that the trouble is people just don't "appreciate" the nonsense that often gets put in the Novus Ordo. The Traditiophobes are awfully blind to... a lot of things.
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