Just a few notes on the mass

 Anthony Esolen notes the problem about the Latin mass ignores the reality of the way the mass has been distorted /trivialized post vatican II:

The love of order, the sense of the beauty of a thing wherein nothing is extraneous or exaggerated or misplaced or tending to corrupt or obliterate the whole, is universal to mankind. It has the power to unite.

 

Imagine a band of Zulu warriors chanting a war song in polyphonic power, while Japanese samurai listen in proper silence. Imagine Onondaga chieftains traveling from far away to hear Jenny Lind sing Swedish folk songs just for them, and then departing with honor both given and received. That actually happened, in Rochester, in 1850.

 

Pope Francis wants the Mass to unite Catholics, rather than to be the site of division. It is right to want that. But can the means deliver? The question is not ecclesiological. I am not asking about what God can do. I am on the near side of the matter, asking about what does in fact raise the mind of man.

 

Now, the Novus Ordo Mass can be celebrated in a beautiful and reverent way. The reverence may be easier to secure than the beauty. Most priests are reverent. Most of the faithful who attend Mass want to be reverent. But beauty is another thing. That, for the Novus Ordo, takes work. You must first know what you’re doing. And the Novus Ordo gives plenty of room for people who do not know what they’re doing: bad songwriters, treacherous translators, peacocks in the choir, Miss Hospitality interrupting your prayer by welcoming you from the pulpit and advertising the hosts for today, the lounge pianist who plays like Billy Joel while you are coming back from Communion, tempting you to say, “Man, what are you doing here?” This disorder, sometimes a casual and breezy negligence, sometimes a showy display of tastes and talents or quasi-talents, sometimes both at once, and always a failure to conceive of the Mass as an artistic whole, is anti-evangelistic. If you want bad art, you can get a much higher quality of it – worse, with more talent for the bad – by staying home and listening to Beyoncé or somebody.

I don’t go to Mass for the art. I go to receive the Lord in the sacrament, and to hear the word of God, grit my teeth as I may when I hear it strangled in translation. The Mass is valid. I receive the Lord. When the priest and the people seem well-disposed, I remember to thank God for them and to pray for them, regardless of the clumsiness, and I ask God to remind me that taste doesn’t save or damn. Still, when I go to an ordinary Mass and I find no choir, I thank God. I shouldn’t have to do so. Were I a Byzantine Catholic, I’d never have occasion for it. When no one bugs me at the door with false welcomes, I am relieved. I shouldn’t have to look for the side door when I enter a strange church. I shouldn’t have to avoid the near occasion of toothache. Silence – another thing that the modern world flees – is a stream of living water. In silence I pray. Only then do I really notice people, they and I with our social guards down.

Sounds about right.

I sometimes use an older Latin link to the Divine office, and they have the words of the older mass every day on their site. And those words are beautiful and let me calm my restless mind to pray the office.

so why not let people attend a mass said in the mode of the older, silent mass, except using their own language? But if I read it correctly, that "rite"would be also forbidden (but what about the Anglican ordinate mass? or the Byzantine rite mass in the local language? Ah, but outsiders aren't supposed to attend them either).

For me, it is not an issue; Churches are full but demand distancing, and elders are not supposed to go into church, etc. and it has been impossible for me to attend mass for almost two years.  

Joy is busy with her penteocstal cult, and Kuya is mad at God, so it sort of leaves me to attend, as I did in the pre covid days, at 530 am with the busy cook.

now that covid restrictions have been partially dropped, I suppose I could go again, but alas, now I am simply too weak to stand for the service and even traveling to the nearby church would be difficult.

Sigh. 

Well, anyway, Ann Barnhardt has been quoted saying that like a cockroach infested restaurant, sometimes the only way to clean up the place is to destroy it, treat it, and then rebuild it.

Uh, Ann, Jesus said a bit differently: Don't pull out the weeds because you will also pull out the wheat. Wait til the harvest and the angels will sort it out.

A warning against the ones who want to schism the church and see themselves as the elect.

On the other hand, one wonders if the destruction of the church under this pope is God's way to purify the church.

again this reminds me of a vision of Katherine Emmerich:

a fake church, but a few who prayed allowed Mary to rebuild it.

In The Vision, pastor Wilkerson said the PC European and some American bishops will join the liberal protestants to make a NWO church that winks at sexual sin, and makes the church a social organization, not one about salvation.. As a pentecostal protestant, he saw the believing catholics would join with their protestant brothers.... something we see in South America and even here in the Philippines. That was prophecized 50 years ago. 

Our Lady at Akita said the same thing, that believing priests will be torn between the church and the truth, but the remedy is the rosary. Don Bosco also saw the church riding out the storm with the 2 pillers of the rosary and the Eucharist.

Well, I do pray the rosary, but after vatican II this was discouraged, along with other popular forms of piety that ordinary folks loved. 

Sigh.

So what do we do?

The theological types love CS Lewis as popular theologian, but ignore that Tolkien's influence is more pervasive: Because he posits beauty and gentleness as something good, and defends our search for beauty in art, writing, including fantasy, is not a flee from the world, but as a prisoner escaping the jail of ugliness of our surroundings.

His quote on the mass reminds us that the mass is not just about how it feeds our soul with beauty (a fact ignored by Vatican II) but about worshipping God, even in times of trouble, where we hold onto the truth even when the evil seems to be winning, and that this endurance is a better prayer than feeling happy, i.e. the fuzyyiness of spirituality of the religion of me me me  in contrast to standing beneath the cross.

from a letter to his son Michael:

 

You speak of ‘sagging faith’, however, that is quite another matter. In the last resort faith is an act of will, inspired by love. Our love may be chilled and our will eroded by the spectacle of the shortcomings, folly, and even sins of the Church and its ministers, but I do not think that one who has once had faith goes back over the line for these reasons (least of all anyone with any historical knowledge).

‘Scandal’ at most is an occasion of temptation – as indecency is to lust, which it does not make but arouses. It is convenient because it tends to turn our eyes away from ourselves and our own faults to find a scapegoat.

But the act of will of faith is not a single moment of final decision: it is a permanent indefinitely repeated act – a state which must go on – so we pray for ‘final perseverance’.

The temptation to ‘unbelief’ (which really means rejection of Our Lord and His claims) is always there within us. Part of us longs to find an excuse for it outside us. The stronger the inner temptation the more readily and severely shall we be ‘scandalized’ by others.

I think I am as sensitive as you (or any other Christian) to the scandals, both of clergy and laity. I have suffered grievously in my life from stupid, tired, dimmed, and even bad priests; but I now know enough about myself to be aware that I should not leave the church (which for me would mean leaving the allegiance of Our Lord) for any such reasons: I should leave because I did not believe, and should not believe anymore, even if I had never met anyone in orders who was not both wise and saintly. I should deny the Blessed Sacrament, that is: call our Lord a fraud to His face. If He is a fraud and the Gospels fraudulent – that is: garbled accounts of a demented megalomaniac (which is the only alternative), then of course the spectacle exhibited by the Church (in the sense of clergy) in history and today is simply evidence of a gigantic fraud. If not, however, then this spectacle is alas! only what was to be expected: it began before the first Easter, and it does not affect faith at all – except that we may and should be deeply grieved. But we should grieve on our Lord’s behalf and for Him, associating ourselves with the scandalized heirs not with the saints, not crying out that we cannot ‘take’ Judas Iscariot, or even the absurd & cowardly Simon Peter, or the silly women like James’ mother, trying to push her sons.

It takes a fantastic will to unbelief to suppose that Jesus never really ‘happened’, and more to suppose that he did not say the things recorded all of him – so incapable of being ‘invented’ by anyone in the world at that time: such as ‘before Abraham came to be I am’ (John viii). ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John ix); or the promulgation of the Blessed Sacrament in John v: ‘He that he eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life.’

We must therefore either believe in Him and in what he said and take the consequences; or reject him and take the consequences. I find it for myself difficult to believe that anyone who has ever been to Communion, even once, with at least a right intention, can ever again reject Him without grave blame. (However, He alone knows each unique soul and its circumstances.)

but what about the superfical masses we attend (luckily here there is a lot of prayer going on: and no, people don't sing here either, meaning I suspect the quiet mass would be popular here too).

Again a quote from Tolkien:

 

Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your Communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children—from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn—open-necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to Communion with them (and pray for them). “It will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. “It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand—after which our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.”