'Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.' My lifelong motto. This was my life from the year of my birth 1943 into the Catholic church. I thank the dear Lord for this gift. Now I am brought to holy tears during the Latin Mass and oh when I watch the children, their whole demeanour, patience, reverence is nothing short of wonderful and beautiful. The Latin Mass is the real Mass. How dare they even think of taking our Mass from us?
Obedience is the only pathway towards the universal Church. As a cradle to grave Catholic, I read obedience throughout the scriptures and have since the bishop handed me my Bible in 11th grade, back in the early 90s. If you go into Christianity from a perspective of obedience you will find your way.
Obedience must always be at the service of the Faith. Blind obedience, or obedience for its own sake, is never the answer. Indeed, it is spiritual suicide.
@christopherbates1428 obedience and faith must both be in the service of Grace. But if we talk in that way, every single sentence must include a Grace clause, which of course is true but linguistically inefficient. Faith in the Golden Calf gets you nowhere, so it's not the root, where Grace is. But I repeat if you go into Christianity with a spirit of disobedience, it doesn't work.
Obedience sometimes means blind obedience--with blinders on. We are not peasants harvesting a Medieval field, when illiteracy and lack of formal education among the masses flourished, except for the clergy. If obedience means following what Jesus said and did out of love and devotion, it is another thing. When we do it collectively, it is the Church acting together.
This an enlightening conversation. Many good insights. One important point regarding what happens if Francis bans the TLM for good: this completely removes the security of the Eastern rites as well as the Ordinariate. If a rite can be simply jettisoned at the will of the pontiff, all rites become de facto his property. But they simply aren't his: they belong to the Church as a whole.
Oh my! I find the attitude of both of you towards what you call the Novus Ordo, or properly the Roman Missal, and those that cherish it to be remarkably patronising. Without doubt, it has been abused. But is beautiful when celebrated with reverence and dignity. And your attitude to Pope Francis........................!!!!
Larry Chapp hit upon a point, i.e. the affinity of some Traditionalists for the Ordinariate or the relationship between the two. I observed, when the Ordinariate was just beginning as the "Anglican Use," the fondness of Traditionalists for the Anglican liturgy. Why would Traditionalists, who lean toward the Latin Mass, be drawn to the Anglican liturgy? The Anglicans had been using a Mass in English for four hundred years. I surmised that it was the Anglican ritual, especially in Solemn High Mass.
Essentially, the question at issue is this. Should a Pope, on his own authority alone, possibly with the consent of a majority of the Bishops, possibly not, have full authority over the form of the Liturgy? Surely something so important should be decided by an Ecumenical Council? In fact, of course, it has been decided by an Ecumenical Council. The Second Vatican Council decided that all existing forms of the Liturgy were to be reverenced, respected and preserved. The use of the vernacular was permitted, with the intention of having the congregation more directly involved. However, apart from these general principles, the Council made no decision to have the form of the Liturgy completely rewritten. If the decision of an Ecumenical Council can simply be ignored, or over written, by the Pope, just what is the point of having an Ecumenical Council in the first place? The Pope can simply make all decisions himself, with or without advice and with or without the consent of the Bishops, as he sees fit. The Catholic Church was never intended to be governed in this way. What if a Pope goes off his rocker (for example starts to use swear words and to make insulting comments about minorities in the Church) and is clearly no longer capable of exercising the Petrine Ministry? Should he retain this ministry and also retain absolute authority to do exactly what he wants in the Church? Whether or not it is authorised by the Sacred Scriptures, the continuous Tradition of the Church and Ecumenical Councils? If this really is the new model of the Church, where one man sets himself up above every other authority in Heaven or on Earth, is this really still the Catholic Church?
You touch upon a deeper issue, i.e. the administrative organization of the Church, which has borrowed organizational structure around it through time. Reminder: pope is an administrative title, as is cardinal, patriarch, metropolitan, archbishop. There are three holy orders: deacon, priest, and bishop. A pope is not ordained a pope. It seems the Church should be open to adopt organizational features that are effective and, too, respectful of historical position since the Apostolic Era.
@@royquick-s5n You are right - for example, when Pope Paul VI formally confirmed the documents of the Second Vatican Council, he signed “Paul, Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God”. Holy Father, Papa, or Pope are simply terms of endearment.
I find these final comments on the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo Mass very condescending. Especially the mocking of those who made liturgical decisions. JP II and Benedict said this Mass. Granted, there are corrections needed so they can get back to its original purpose. Helping that becoming a reality works better than condescension.!!!
No need to “dumb down” RC faith for the Orthodox! It’s at the level of theological nuance & sophistication that the divide occurs: filioque, primacy, grace & essence-energies. These subjects are not for the faint of heart, seeking easy-peasy me-and-Jesus devotionalism. I should add that I’ve read the entire doc. I’m EO, and I’ve yet to hear anyone address it for what it is: a summation, a response, and a means of offering non-RCs a means of connection to the pope appropriate to where they are now, now doubt in hopes that in years (generations) to come, a gradual as l return to the Roman obedience will/might occur. It’s not offering a compromise. It’s not offering a “just do this and you’ll be ok.” It’s offering a means for all Christians to be connected to the pope so he can exercise a ministry of unity, even before communion is reached. It actually says this, twice. And its assignment from a dicastery to further a conversation opened by a RC saint, JPII. Is it that difficult comprehend? Finally, Eastern synodality (RC synodality stiffening to my eye) is championed as Apostolic & of Tradition, not worldly efficiency of workability.
I'm a big fan of Gavin Ashenden, but he gets some things fundamentally wrong here. First, his denigration of the Novus Ordo is a misstep. There is nothing wrong with the Novus Ordo. Many people find it vastly more inspiring than the Latin Mass. The Novus Ordo can be done just as beautifully and just as holiness - inspiring as the TLM. Just watch the St. John Cantius Novus Ordo 2002 missal on youtube. It is basically the same as the TLM. So the Novus Ordo is usually done wrong - but that can be easily remedied with the new priests who understand the beauty of the TLM, and are incorporating aspects of the TLM into the way the NO is done.(I prefer the TLM and go whenever I can. But to denigrate Novus Ordo goers as virtual simpletons is haughty and incorrect) Second, his take on Vatican II illustrates that he has been influenced by Taylor Marshall and similar critics. Vatican II was not an "accomodation" to secularism. Far from it. It was a call to get the church out of defensive crouch that it had been in for hundreds of years. It was a clarion call to EVANGELIZE the whole world. It prepared us for the final triumph of Catholicism throughout the world, and its explosive growth in Africa and Asia is essentially Vatican II inspired growth. Vatican II issued an universal call to HOLINESS for everyone, not just priests and religious. To make those calls was not "accommodating the beast". No, it appears that Gavin is now in his "Say, these rad trads have some points to make" phase. We all go through that. I went through that, that is why I had to reject that stance. There was no document of Vatican II that called for us to accommodate the world and bend to its will. Far from that - it was a call for EVERYONE to spread Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth. Catholics were not even thinking about doing that before Vatican II. True - overly left wing bishops twisted the call to evangelize into a call to submit to worldly ways. But that was a mistake. Both JP II and Benedict kept saying that Vatican II was not yet implemented. So what is needed is a proper understanding of what it really called for - and Gavin has not yet figured out Vatican II in its whole. He is simply being sucked up into the tempting Siren Song of the Vatican II critics. As i said, we have all been there. It's hard to get a proper understanding of Vatican II through all the noise, and Gavin is in the midst of what is probably a five year project to understand it correctly.
Vatican 2 must be renounced and jettisoned, in toto. It is opposed to the perineal magisterium of the Church. Once this has been done, the crisis the Church has been undergoing will begin to abate.
The Novus Ordo is hopelessly and intrinsically invalid. It, like Vatican 2, must be unequivocally rejected and fine away with. The terms beauty and reverence when describing the NO are naive and utopian, and certainly oxymoronic.
You claim that VII has not yet been fully implemented and that 'what is needed is a proper understanding'. Almost six decades have now passed since VII - when would you propose that we reach this moment of cultural enrichment?
I agree with you about V2 and the problems with its strong critics. On the liturgy, however, I think it is a mistake to frame it in terms of 'the Novus Ordo can be beautiful'. It certainly can, particularly when celebrated by those with a knowledge of the traditional ritual (John Cantius or, in my country, the Oratorians). More power to them. The problem is that the liturgy as 'theologia prima' is almost lost when it is essentially composed by a committee. The Catholic Church's three-fold notion of authority - scripture, tradition, magisterium - loses its balance, as the primary 'tradition' is the liturgy! This means the weight of authority is placed much more heavily on the shoulders of magisterium (scripture is v. limited without the other two to interpret it), hence the modern problem of everything being about what the Pope says. The Orthodox, for instance, wouldn't dream of doing to their (equally authoritative) liturgy what was done to the Latin, because that liturgy - developed gradually over centuries but with a continuous thread back to the Apostles, just like the so-called 'Latin Mass' (really, Gregorian liturgy), is their primary means of transmitting the faith, a faith to which faithful and hierarchy are all bound, not a faith which the hierarchy gives to the faithful (which is what as happened in the West post-V1). The reform should have been much more conservative (that includes Pius X's reforms to the Office and Pius XII's Holy Week, so has nothing to do with being 'anti-Vatican 2'). 3-year lectionary? Yes, of course, but keep the traditional one as Year A! Vernacular? Sure, but the Institution formula didn't need to be rewritten and a new Offertory composed. Why were the majority of Collects, which are a crucial source of the Church's 'theologia prima' either chucked out of rewritten to give them a different emphasis (I refer to the rewriting of the Latin, not the issue of vernacular translation)? How can they be a source of the Church's theology when they were rewritten by 'experts' in the 1960s? So, I do think we have two separate issues of 1) Vatican 2 and 2) the disastrous liturgical deforms of 20th century popes (none prior to that century would have dared). You can defend 1) whilst being critical of 2).
The fact that you reach for a video of a special instance of the Novus Ordo from 2002 - instead of any video from any parish today - to demonstrate what it *could* be, says everything. The churches will continue to empty, unless they are re-filled by Latinos who culturally have more solid spiritual inclinations - although on that note, they too seem to be heading more towards parishes celebrating the TLM should they exist nearby.
'Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.' My lifelong motto. This was my life from the year of my birth 1943 into the Catholic church. I thank the dear Lord for this gift. Now I am brought to holy tears during the Latin Mass and oh when I watch the children, their whole demeanour, patience, reverence is nothing short of wonderful and beautiful. The Latin Mass is the real Mass. How dare they even think of taking our Mass from us?
Obedience is the only pathway towards the universal Church. As a cradle to grave Catholic, I read obedience throughout the scriptures and have since the bishop handed me my Bible in 11th grade, back in the early 90s. If you go into Christianity from a perspective of obedience you will find your way.
Obedience must always be at the service of the Faith. Blind obedience, or obedience for its own sake, is never the answer. Indeed, it is spiritual suicide.
@christopherbates1428 obedience and faith must both be in the service of Grace. But if we talk in that way, every single sentence must include a Grace clause, which of course is true but linguistically inefficient. Faith in the Golden Calf gets you nowhere, so it's not the root, where Grace is. But I repeat if you go into Christianity with a spirit of disobedience, it doesn't work.
Obedience sometimes means blind obedience--with blinders on. We are not peasants harvesting a Medieval field, when illiteracy and lack of formal education among the masses flourished, except for the clergy. If obedience means following what Jesus said and did out of love and devotion, it is another thing. When we do it collectively, it is the Church acting together.
Marvelous discussion. Hope the Vatican Curia, USCCB and Pope Francis are watching.
This an enlightening conversation. Many good insights. One important point regarding what happens if Francis bans the TLM for good: this completely removes the security of the Eastern rites as well as the Ordinariate. If a rite can be simply jettisoned at the will of the pontiff, all rites become de facto his property. But they simply aren't his: they belong to the Church as a whole.
Oh my! I find the attitude of both of you towards what you call the Novus Ordo, or properly the Roman Missal, and those that cherish it to be remarkably patronising.
Without doubt, it has been abused. But is beautiful when celebrated with reverence and dignity.
And your attitude to Pope Francis........................!!!!
Larry Chapp hit upon a point, i.e. the affinity of some Traditionalists for the Ordinariate or the relationship between the two. I observed, when the Ordinariate was just beginning as the "Anglican Use," the fondness of Traditionalists for the Anglican liturgy. Why would Traditionalists, who lean toward the Latin Mass, be drawn to the Anglican liturgy? The Anglicans had been using a Mass in English for four hundred years. I surmised that it was the Anglican ritual, especially in Solemn High Mass.
Essentially, the question at issue is this. Should a Pope, on his own authority alone, possibly with the consent of a majority of the Bishops, possibly not, have full authority over the form of the Liturgy? Surely something so important should be decided by an Ecumenical Council? In fact, of course, it has been decided by an Ecumenical Council. The Second Vatican Council decided that all existing forms of the Liturgy were to be reverenced, respected and preserved. The use of the vernacular was permitted, with the intention of having the congregation more directly involved. However, apart from these general principles, the Council made no decision to have the form of the Liturgy completely rewritten. If the decision of an Ecumenical Council can simply be ignored, or over written, by the Pope, just what is the point of having an Ecumenical Council in the first place? The Pope can simply make all decisions himself, with or without advice and with or without the consent of the Bishops, as he sees fit. The Catholic Church was never intended to be governed in this way. What if a Pope goes off his rocker (for example starts to use swear words and to make insulting comments about minorities in the Church) and is clearly no longer capable of exercising the Petrine Ministry? Should he retain this ministry and also retain absolute authority to do exactly what he wants in the Church? Whether or not it is authorised by the Sacred Scriptures, the continuous Tradition of the Church and Ecumenical Councils? If this really is the new model of the Church, where one man sets himself up above every other authority in Heaven or on Earth, is this really still the Catholic Church?
You touch upon a deeper issue, i.e. the administrative organization of the Church, which has borrowed organizational structure around it through time. Reminder: pope is an administrative title, as is cardinal, patriarch, metropolitan, archbishop. There are three holy orders: deacon, priest, and bishop. A pope is not ordained a pope. It seems the Church should be open to adopt organizational features that are effective and, too, respectful of historical position since the Apostolic Era.
@@royquick-s5n You are right - for example, when Pope Paul VI formally confirmed the documents of the Second Vatican Council, he signed “Paul, Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God”. Holy Father, Papa, or Pope are simply terms of endearment.
Loved this discussion.
I find these final comments on the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo Mass very condescending. Especially the mocking of those who made liturgical decisions. JP II and Benedict said this Mass. Granted, there are corrections needed so they can get back to its original purpose. Helping that becoming a reality works better than condescension.!!!
No need to “dumb down” RC faith for the Orthodox! It’s at the level of theological nuance & sophistication that the divide occurs: filioque, primacy, grace & essence-energies. These subjects are not for the faint of heart, seeking easy-peasy me-and-Jesus devotionalism.
I should add that I’ve read the entire doc. I’m EO, and I’ve yet to hear anyone address it for what it is: a summation, a response, and a means of offering non-RCs a means of connection to the pope appropriate to where they are now, now doubt in hopes that in years (generations) to come, a gradual as l return to the Roman obedience will/might occur. It’s not offering a compromise. It’s not offering a “just do this and you’ll be ok.” It’s offering a means for all Christians to be connected to the pope so he can exercise a ministry of unity, even before communion is reached. It actually says this, twice. And its assignment from a dicastery to further a conversation opened by a RC saint, JPII. Is it that difficult comprehend? Finally, Eastern synodality (RC synodality stiffening to my eye) is championed as Apostolic & of Tradition, not worldly efficiency of workability.
I'm a big fan of Gavin Ashenden, but he gets some things fundamentally wrong here. First, his denigration of the Novus Ordo is a misstep. There is nothing wrong with the Novus Ordo. Many people find it vastly more inspiring than the Latin Mass. The Novus Ordo can be done just as beautifully and just as holiness - inspiring as the TLM. Just watch the St. John Cantius Novus Ordo 2002 missal on youtube. It is basically the same as the TLM. So the Novus Ordo is usually done wrong - but that can be easily remedied with the new priests who understand the beauty of the TLM, and are incorporating aspects of the TLM into the way the NO is done.(I prefer the TLM and go whenever I can. But to denigrate Novus Ordo goers as virtual simpletons is haughty and incorrect) Second, his take on Vatican II illustrates that he has been influenced by Taylor Marshall and similar critics. Vatican II was not an "accomodation" to secularism. Far from it. It was a call to get the church out of defensive crouch that it had been in for hundreds of years. It was a clarion call to EVANGELIZE the whole world. It prepared us for the final triumph of Catholicism throughout the world, and its explosive growth in Africa and Asia is essentially Vatican II inspired growth. Vatican II issued an universal call to HOLINESS for everyone, not just priests and religious. To make those calls was not "accommodating the beast". No, it appears that Gavin is now in his "Say, these rad trads have some points to make" phase. We all go through that. I went through that, that is why I had to reject that stance. There was no document of Vatican II that called for us to accommodate the world and bend to its will. Far from that - it was a call for EVERYONE to spread Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth. Catholics were not even thinking about doing that before Vatican II. True - overly left wing bishops twisted the call to evangelize into a call to submit to worldly ways. But that was a mistake. Both JP II and Benedict kept saying that Vatican II was not yet implemented. So what is needed is a proper understanding of what it really called for - and Gavin has not yet figured out Vatican II in its whole. He is simply being sucked up into the tempting Siren Song of the Vatican II critics. As i said, we have all been there. It's hard to get a proper understanding of Vatican II through all the noise, and Gavin is in the midst of what is probably a five year project to understand it correctly.
Vatican 2 must be renounced and jettisoned, in toto. It is opposed to the perineal magisterium of the Church. Once this has been done, the crisis the Church has been undergoing will begin to abate.
The Novus Ordo is hopelessly and intrinsically invalid. It, like Vatican 2, must be unequivocally rejected and fine away with. The terms beauty and reverence when describing the NO are naive and utopian, and certainly oxymoronic.
You claim that VII has not yet been fully implemented and that 'what is needed is a proper understanding'. Almost six decades have now passed since VII - when would you propose that we reach this moment of cultural enrichment?
I agree with you about V2 and the problems with its strong critics. On the liturgy, however, I think it is a mistake to frame it in terms of 'the Novus Ordo can be beautiful'. It certainly can, particularly when celebrated by those with a knowledge of the traditional ritual (John Cantius or, in my country, the Oratorians). More power to them. The problem is that the liturgy as 'theologia prima' is almost lost when it is essentially composed by a committee. The Catholic Church's three-fold notion of authority - scripture, tradition, magisterium - loses its balance, as the primary 'tradition' is the liturgy! This means the weight of authority is placed much more heavily on the shoulders of magisterium (scripture is v. limited without the other two to interpret it), hence the modern problem of everything being about what the Pope says. The Orthodox, for instance, wouldn't dream of doing to their (equally authoritative) liturgy what was done to the Latin, because that liturgy - developed gradually over centuries but with a continuous thread back to the Apostles, just like the so-called 'Latin Mass' (really, Gregorian liturgy), is their primary means of transmitting the faith, a faith to which faithful and hierarchy are all bound, not a faith which the hierarchy gives to the faithful (which is what as happened in the West post-V1). The reform should have been much more conservative (that includes Pius X's reforms to the Office and Pius XII's Holy Week, so has nothing to do with being 'anti-Vatican 2'). 3-year lectionary? Yes, of course, but keep the traditional one as Year A! Vernacular? Sure, but the Institution formula didn't need to be rewritten and a new Offertory composed. Why were the majority of Collects, which are a crucial source of the Church's 'theologia prima' either chucked out of rewritten to give them a different emphasis (I refer to the rewriting of the Latin, not the issue of vernacular translation)? How can they be a source of the Church's theology when they were rewritten by 'experts' in the 1960s? So, I do think we have two separate issues of 1) Vatican 2 and 2) the disastrous liturgical deforms of 20th century popes (none prior to that century would have dared). You can defend 1) whilst being critical of 2).
The fact that you reach for a video of a special instance of the Novus Ordo from 2002 - instead of any video from any parish today - to demonstrate what it *could* be, says everything. The churches will continue to empty, unless they are re-filled by Latinos who culturally have more solid spiritual inclinations - although on that note, they too seem to be heading more towards parishes celebrating the TLM should they exist nearby.