(www.Remnantnewspaper.com)
In a general audience on October 3, Benedict XVI spoke
on the liturgy. He first discussed the nature of
prayer in general before moving on to address liturgical
prayer specifically. One sentence of note has raised
more than one Traditional eyebrow. The Pope states:
It is not the individual - priest or layman - or the
group that celebrates the liturgy, but it is primarily
God's action through the Church,
which has its own history, its rich tradition and
creativity. This universality and fundamental openness,
which is characteristic of the entire liturgy is one of
the reasons why it cannot be created or amended by the
individual community or by experts, but must be faithful
to the forms of the universal Church.
The key thought here is that the liturgy cannot be
created or amended by the individual community or by
experts. Here the Pope seems to be speaking of local
liturgical experts who deviate from the liturgical laws
of the Novus Ordo. Otherwise, it is not clear how the
Holy Father can, on the one hand, state the
impossibility of a liturgy created by experts, yet on
the other celebrate and defend the Novus Ordo Mass,
which was itself created by a committee of experts.
What the Pope seems to be saying is that any liturgies
created by local experts are not “universal” in nature
and thus not “open” to the entire Church. However, the
irony here is that the Novus Ordo Mass, created entirely
by experts in contradiction to 2,000 years of liturgical
tradition, is considered open and universal in nature
only because it was approved and imposed upon all
Catholics by the administrative powers of Paul VI.
Therefore, the only difference between the liturgical
innovations of local communities and experts and the
Novus Ordo Mass is that the Novus Ordo was concocted by
experts on a grander scale and was imposed on the entire
Latin Church by the Pope. Thus, what is considered
impossible on the local level is treated as not only
possible, but desired on a universal level. We are then
put in a position where we are obligated to accept the
arbitrary Mass of experts the current Vatican approves
of, but at the same time we are forbidden to accept the
arbitrary Masses of local experts or individual
communities not in line with the “approved” arbitrary
Mass.
The liberal Catholics of our day speak much about the
liturgy of the “people.” However, the great irony of
the Novus Ordo is that it has always been a top down
bureaucratic social experiment imposed upon the people
by experts and a radical “individual community” of
liturgical innovators. Even the later innovations of
Communion in the hand and altar girls were imposed upon
the people by the machinations of a small minority of
liberal bishops. Indeed these practices began as
illegitimate “amendments” of the Novus Ordo Mass by
individual communities and experts.
Thus, according to the Pope’s words, these amendments
are expressly impossible. However, what if those illicit
amendments are later accepted by the Church bureaucracy?
Well then, they must be, ipso facto, “in
union with the Pope, the Bishops, with believers of all
times and all places.”
The lesson here is that local innovators should not lose
heart, as if they press their innovations long and hard
enough, they just may become the new universal
liturgical norm of the Church! Then these innovators can
demand that other local liturgical innovators not
deviate from what they themselves have created. After
all, once “approved” their previous illicit amendments
are now open and universal practices of Holy Mother
Church.
The ironic fact sadly lost on Catholics today is that
the true Mass of the people is the Traditional Mass
which developed from the very customs and Traditions of
early Christians guided over the years by the Holy Ghost
and memorialized by St. Pius V. Indeed the great
repeated error of the Vatican II mindset is that any
contrived rite or ceremony, with the approval of the
pope or bishops, can become an authentically Catholic
liturgy.
Link:http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-pope-on-sacred-liturgy-liturgy.html#more
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