By Father Richard G. Cipolla
It is quite remarkable to be living at a time when a
Cardinal of the Roman Church and the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine
Worship is publicly contradicted and humiliated. I do not know Cardinal Sarah personally, but
from his writings, I suspect that he is using his humiliation in a spiritually
profitable way. But one has to wonder at
the absence of any sense of fatherly concern and mercy in the Year of Mercy.
It seems that there is no limit to the nonsense that Father
Lombardi allows himself to spew forth in defense of the indefensible. We hope that once he lays aside this burden,
as he will very soon, he can return to more spiritually profitable endeavors. The ideology that lies behind that repudiation of Cardinal
Sarah’s exhortation to return to the Traditional posture of the priest at Mass
rang out quite clearly in the Clarification.
It is an ideology that has for so many years prevented the Church from
restoring the liturgical life of the Church that is necessary for the mission
of the Church to the world. It is an
ideology that has no basis in Tradition and in fact is a break with
Tradition. Anyone who still believes that
the Mass of Paul VI is continuous with the Roman Rite of Catholic Tradition
needs to get out into the fresh air more.
The heart of the ideology driving the post-Conciliar reform
of the liturgical books is the destruction of the Traditional understanding of the Mass as a
sacrifice, namely, the re-presentation of the Sacrifice of Calvary, the
offering of the Son to the Father.
Without the Roman Canon, which the reformers tried to get rid of
entirely, that the Mass is a sacrifice is not evident in the three new
Eucharistic prayers. What is at stake in
the insistence on versus populum is the very nature of the Mass. What most Catholics believe today is that the
Mass is a community meal and the priest’s job is to say the words that change
the bread and wine to the Body and Blood of Christ for the purpose of Holy
Communion. The Mass is for them. The
priest facing the people engenders this understanding quite readily and
enforces a heavily horizontal experience of the Mass. The almost universal practice of Communion in
the hand standing in a line as if waiting for ham in a deli is the result of a
deliberate repression of Communion on the tongue kneeling and telling the
people that standing in the hand is the only way to receive Holy Communion
after Vatican II. All nonsense. All ideology.
Fr. Lombardi’s defense of the celebration versus populum had
no substance except for ideology. For
him to use the General Instruction of the Roman Missal 299 as a basis for
versus populum as the necessary norm is shameless. Much has been written on the meaning of the
Latin in this section of the GIRM, quite apart from the translation into English. I speak as a Latin teacher of many years, and
I would insist that there is no way to conclude from 299 that all celebrations
of Mass must be facing the people. That
famous “quod” that introduces the relative clause cannot possibly refer to the
celebration of Mass versus populum. The
English translation has been faulty from the beginning, or rather, from when
that clause was added. In addition the
Congregation for Divine Worship in September 2000 rejected the interpretation
that 299 made a free -standing altar obligatory and therefore versum populum
obligatory.
Furthermore, the very rubrics of the Paul VI missal assume
that the priest is celebrating ad orientem.
It is distressing to have to repeat all of this at this time, but the
fact is that most of our bishops may have never read the rubrics in English let
alone Latin. At the "Orate fratres", the
rubric reads: Stans postea in medio altaris, versus
ad populum….The obvious and easy English translation is: Then, standing in the middle of the altar,
turning to the people….Why should he
turn to the people if he is already facing them? There are other examples where the rubric
calls for the priest to turn to the people.
And again, it is tiresome to have to go through these explanations once
again. But after what happened in the
slap down of Cardinal Sarah by the powers that still be, one has to rehearse
certain facts and show how it is sheer ideology that has driven and continues
to drive the intense hostility to the Traditional understanding of the Mass as
the Holy Sacrifice (despite pious talk about the Holy Sacrifice).
So much of what is happening and why it is allowed to happen
has to do with a papalatry gone wild.
The irony is that the Second Vatican Council introduced and spoke so
glowingly of collegiality vis a vis the bishops and the Pope, but the reality
after the Council is that of a highly centralized papacy whose power seems to
have no bounds. There seems to be a
never ending speculation about Benedict XVI’s resignation. Perhaps he figured out that the power of the
papacy and the authority of the papacy are two different things entirely, and
that it is entirely possible to renounce the power and keep the authority,
because, as someone has said, power comes from the office, authority is
earned. Stuff to ponder. But in this
context, to claim, as Fr. Lombardi stated, that the Extraordinary Form must
never or can never replace the Ordinary Form has no basis in Summorum Pontificum, nor in rational
thinking, nor in any magisterial document.
What can be done about this shameful episode? Nothing much except prayer. Prayer, yes. And a lot of it. But
as for me and my flock, we will go on worshiping God at the Holy Sacrifice of
the Mass not facing each other over a table but rather together facing the
Lord.
