Will the show go on? And this time, with Vatican 'approval'?
Sandro Magister's latest column ("'Placet' or 'Non placet?' The wager of Carmen and Kiko") has the following regarding the links between this group and Annibale Bugnini:
In the liturgical field, more than Kiko, it has been the co-founder Carmen Hernández who has shaped the Neocatechumenal "rite."
During the years of Vatican Council II and immediately afterward, when he (sic) still wore the religious habit of the Misioneras de Cristo Jesús and was studying to obtain his (sic) degree in theology, Carmen became an enthusiast of liturgical renewal. His (sic) teachers and inspiration were the liturgist Pedro Farnés Scherer in Spain and Fr. Luigi della Torre in Rome, also a prominent liturgist, pastor of the Church of the Nativity on Via Gallia, which was one of the movement's first locations in Rome, and Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, at the time the powerful secretary of the Vatican congregation for divine worship and the main architect of the postconciliar liturgical reform.
It was precisely Bugnini, at the beginning of the 1970's, who congratulated himself over the way in which the first communities founded by Kiko and Carmen celebrated the Mass. He wrote about it in "Notitiæ," the official magazine of the congregation for divine worship. And it was again him, together with the co-founders, who decided to call the newborn movement "Neocatechumenal Way."
From visiting with these liturgists and from loosely reworking their ideas, Kiko and Carmen drew their own personal conception of the Catholic liturgy, which they put into practice in the Masses of their communities.
Let us pray.
[New Catholic: See our last post on the date of approval. It is considered certain that it will take place when the Pope meets the Way on Jan. 20.]
