Post by Deleted on Jul 24, 2023 8:15:35 GMT
A short article I wrote for my blog on the topic of liturgical abuse.
Liturgical Abuse: a Wound on the Body of Christ
Consecration as it should be done during the Holy Mass.
“In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, a minister of the holies and of the true tabernacle. We sing a hymn to the Lord’s glory with all the warriors of the heavenly army. Venerating the memory of the saints, we hope for some part and fellowship with them. We eagerly await the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ, until He, our life, shall appear and we too will appear with Him in glory”.
Sacrosanctum concilium, Article 8.
In the life of the Christian faithful, and in the life of the Church, the sacred liturgy occupies a central role. I speak primarily of my experience as a Latin rite Catholic, but the same could be said about Catholics of the Byzantine, Armenian, Coptic, and other rites that are in use in the Catholic Church with the solemn approval of the Apostolic See.
We see in the liturgy of the Holy Mass – which in the Roman rite is celebrated primarily according to the 1970 recension of the Roman Missal approved by Pope St Paul VI – the re-presentation to the Father of the once and for all sacrifice of Our Lord at Calvary. We also understand that in the Mass, heaven and earth come together and unite in that great moment when the priest, in the person of Jesus Christ, consecrates the bread and the wine, so that they truly become the body, blood, soul, and divinity, of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Roman Mass was heavily reformed in the 1960s. Still, when celebrated in Latin, ad Orientem, according to the ancient tradition of the Church, and with the ancient chants of St Gregory, we see that this is substantially the same liturgy that the Church has used for 1000 years. This is even more so the case when we speak of the Traditional Latin Mass.
However, although the promulgation of the new Mass in 1970 promised a liturgical renewal in the Church – and indeed there is nothing wrong ipso facto with the Roman Missal of 1970 – in fact it ushered in a new phenomenon previously at the margins of the Church. I am speaking about widespread liturgical abuse. Before the 1970s, liturgical abuse on the scale we see in some parts of the Church today, was completely incomprehensible.
Firstly, we must define what is meant by liturgical abuse. This article focuses on liturgical abuse in the Mass celebrated according to the 1970 recension of the Roman Missal, because such abuse does not exist or is rather marginal in communities which use the Tridentine Missal or various of the Eastern Catholic liturgical rites.
In the Roman rite, the primary liturgical book is the Roman Missal. The current edition of the Roman Missal, published in 1970 and re-published with alterations in 2002, is entitled The Roman Missal renewed by decree of the Most Holy Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican promulgated by the authority of Pope Paul VI and revised at the direction of Pope John Paul II.
The Roman Missal prescribes almost down to each movement and certainly each word what the priest, deacon, servers, and lay faithful are to do during Mass. There are very many options – I believe one priest has calculated that if you multiply all the possibilities together you reach around 600,000 options per Sunday Mass. The Roman Missal of 1970 is very generous in terms of the options it provides. There are four Eucharistic prayers, including the ancient Roman Canon, and many additional ones for different occasions. Need I even mention the priest may celebrate in Latin or the vernacular, facing towards or away from the people.
Compared to the 1962 Missal, which is substantially the same as that promulgated by the Council of Trent in 1570, and remained in force until 1970, there are far fewer options. Indeed liturgical abuse in the Tridentine Mass was largely confined to mumbling the Latin incoherently and speeding through the rituals without regard to piety or observing the precise nature of the rubrics.
However, due to the preponderance of options and I believe the possibility of celebrating Mass in the vernacular, the 1970 Roman Missal has unintentionally opened up the possibility of widespread liturgical abuse.
Hence to answer the question I posed, namely, what is liturgical abuse, it is necessary to state that liturgical abuse is any deviation from the prescribed rubrics of the Roman Missal, or, where something is not prescribed, an act that is not appropriate given said rubrics and the spirit of piety that must necessarily prevail amongst both priest and faithful during the celebration of the Mass.
In the 1970s, when the new Missal was implemented, liturgical abuse began to proliferate in certain parts of the Church. In particular, in West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and to a lesser extent the English-speaking countries, unbearable distortions of the liturgy were introduced. One such abuse gradually became legalised across much of the Catholic world. I am speaking of the practice of receiving communion on the hand. The official position of the Church is that communion is to be received on the tongue. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, it became common for communion to be received in the hand in various German and Dutch-speaking countries. This was an abuse, but wishing not to unnecessarily divide the Church, Pope Paul VI reluctantly gave permission for communion in the hand (whilst still encouraging communion on the tongue as the norm) as a canonical exception in those countries which desired it. Initially, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany, and other countries received the permission. Many countries did not and still to this day, communion on the tongue is the norm there as it technically should still be in the mostly Western countries that received permission for communion in the hand.
Common liturgical abuses in the Latin Church include, most common of all, the times when the priest alters – even slightly – the prescribed words of the Mass. Also: when any of the scripture readings are omitted; when lay people are invited to give a homily at Mass; when the incorrect vestments are worn; when unnecessary numbers of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion are used; when the Mass is celebrated in a sloppy or lazy manner; and playing secular music during Mass.
More extreme examples of liturgical abuse include: using gender-neutral terms to describe God, allowing lay men and women to read parts of the Eucharistic prayer, and covering the sanctuary of the church in gaudy, cheap decorations. I would hazard to say the first two of these extreme examples are so abhorrent that when and where they occur the ruling bishop of the diocese must be asked to intervene immediately, and if he declines, then the Apostolic See and Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments must be notified. Thankfully, these extreme examples are very uncommon and almost unheard of in the Catholic Church. However, particularly in the most liberal parishes in German-speaking countries, these incidents are not unheard of. One such incident where a woman was reading the Eucharistic prayer occurred a number of months ago in Switzerland. Thankfully the bishop condemned this and intervened.
One example of an extreme liturgical abuse would be the Youth Mass celebrated in 1970 in the Diocese of Limburg, in a city near Frankfurt. The priest celebrated the Mass in a suit and tie, on an altar surrounded by Coca-Cola boxes, with scantily dressed young people surrounding him. A sausage sizzle took place during Mass in front of the altar.
In my own diocese, there are some parishes where lay people appointed by decree of the Archbishop are allowed by virtue of their non-canonical post to process into the church behind or even (!) – alongside the priest – during the procession with the cross into the sanctuary and the recession at the end of Mass.
There are of course other issues, such as moving the tabernacle to the side of the church, tearing down altar rails, and using inappropriate musical instruments during the Mass. These are not technically abuses, although I do not know why these things were or are done in the first place. This post shall not deal with these undoubtedly unfortunate protestantising changes in the liturgical life of the Church. We are speaking strictly of that which is clearly liturgical abuse, that is, a deviation from the rubrics of the Mass as written in the Roman Missal and the General Instruction on the Roman Missal.
The greatest problem with liturgical abuse is that it diminishes our respect for God. If we affirm, as every orthodox Christian who holds to the Catholic and Apostolic Faith must affirm, that during the Holy Mass the priest re-presents to God the Father the sacrifice of God the Son at Calvary, then we cannot in good conscience permit deviations from the rubrics which our Holy Mother the Church has in her wisdom prescribed. And if we affirm – as every Christian must – that during the Mass, the bread and wine becomes truly the Body and Blood of Christ – then how could we permit ourselves to disrespect Our Lord, who comes to us so humbly, under the appearance of bread and wine, by treating the Mass as being at the whim and fancy of the priest who happens to be celebrating it?
The answer is that if we affirm this, then liturgical abuse can only happen intentionally if we try to rationalise this or perhaps combine this theological understanding with the passing ideologies of the age, the ideologies that have always been the enemies of the true Christian faith and the Church of Christ. We can therefore link liturgical abuse to the neo-Kantist, personalist, neo-Protestant view of ecclesiology based on the flawed post-Enlightenment understanding of man’s relationship with God that has already wreaked so much havoc in liberal Protestant communities. A Christ-centred liturgy is one in which the priest-celebrant understands that it is not he who is at the centre of the liturgy, but rather Christ acting through him. This is basic Catholic theology. He who denies it consciously and with full knowledge of the true faith – well, we leave him to God’s judgement. But such a man would certainly be in error.
Priests can unintentionally, in good faith and without any ill will, deviate from the rubrics. This is surely not a sin. It used to be common for priests to be ordained at 22, 23, or 24 years of age. Can one imagine that during his first Mass the priest would get everything right? Of course not. Nor could one blame him for accidentally getting something wrong. But when a priest intentionally commits an act of liturgical abuse in violation of the rubrics, then he is simultaneously affirming by this very act that he lacks the shared system of beliefs of the universal Church. Of course, it does not mean he denies transubstantiation, and in fact only rarely does it mean that (hence why the vast majority of Masses containing liturgical abuse are illicit but valid). What it is a sign of is that he believes the liturgy is not important enough to warrant his own assenting to the rubrics that the Church has prescribed.
We need only look to the so-called “separated brethren” to see what happens when the liturgy is allowed to fall to pieces. For example, a Lutheran priestess in Minnesota recently replaced the ancient creed of the Church with the blasphemous “Sparkle Creed” which claimed Jesus had “two dads”, that God is “non-binary”, and has “plural pronouns”. Are the people who would recite such a creed Christian? Are they believers? They certainly believe in a different God than the one Catholics worship. They may claim to be Lutheran, but I shall say that even Martin Luther, whose heretical ideas are condemned by the Church, would turn in his grave to hear that blasphemy recited at a church bearing his name.
This is one example of the rational end of the proliferation of liturgical abuse.
Now, I have said before that it is better that a false ideology in its most radical and demonic form is barking outside the gates of the Church than for a watered-down, less radical, milder version of the same ideology to have infiltrated inside the Church. When heretical ideologies have infiltrated inside the Church, the devil more easily sows weeds amongst the wheat. For those who are impressionable or do not know the faith well enough, they are easy prey when these ideals are promoted in the Church.
Thus when liturgical abuse – which may seem like nothing in comparison to the blasphemy of the Sparkle Creed – occurs inside the Catholic Church, it is a cause for grave concern. It shows that some priests do not care about the rubrics enough even to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with dignity, honour, care, and piety.
In the words of Fr John Hardon, S.J. (1914-2000):
“Abuses in the Eucharistic Liturgy are no mere abuses in external worship. In other words, they are both in ignorance in not understanding the true faith and laziness in not exerting oneself to keep the faith by knowing the Church’s teachings and laws on the Eucharistic Liturgy.”
With some exceptions – the law of prayer is the law of belief. How we pray symbolises what we believe. If a priest celebrates Mass carelessly, it is possible his faith is built on shallow ground. Pope Francis, in his motu proprio Traditiones custodes, lamented the “unbearable distortions” that have entered the Roman Mass in many quarters of the Church.
The main consequence of liturgical abuse is therefore that it erodes many people’s faith. For if the Mass is the most solemn expression of the praise and honour that the Christian people accord to God, then it represents in a very real sense what we believe and how we believe it.
Let us pray to the Holy Virgin, that she may help provide for all the Christian faithful Holy Masses worthily celebrated as a fitting offering of sacrifice and praise to her Divine Son.
Liturgical Abuse: a Wound on the Body of Christ
Consecration as it should be done during the Holy Mass.
“In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, a minister of the holies and of the true tabernacle. We sing a hymn to the Lord’s glory with all the warriors of the heavenly army. Venerating the memory of the saints, we hope for some part and fellowship with them. We eagerly await the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ, until He, our life, shall appear and we too will appear with Him in glory”.
Sacrosanctum concilium, Article 8.
In the life of the Christian faithful, and in the life of the Church, the sacred liturgy occupies a central role. I speak primarily of my experience as a Latin rite Catholic, but the same could be said about Catholics of the Byzantine, Armenian, Coptic, and other rites that are in use in the Catholic Church with the solemn approval of the Apostolic See.
We see in the liturgy of the Holy Mass – which in the Roman rite is celebrated primarily according to the 1970 recension of the Roman Missal approved by Pope St Paul VI – the re-presentation to the Father of the once and for all sacrifice of Our Lord at Calvary. We also understand that in the Mass, heaven and earth come together and unite in that great moment when the priest, in the person of Jesus Christ, consecrates the bread and the wine, so that they truly become the body, blood, soul, and divinity, of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Roman Mass was heavily reformed in the 1960s. Still, when celebrated in Latin, ad Orientem, according to the ancient tradition of the Church, and with the ancient chants of St Gregory, we see that this is substantially the same liturgy that the Church has used for 1000 years. This is even more so the case when we speak of the Traditional Latin Mass.
However, although the promulgation of the new Mass in 1970 promised a liturgical renewal in the Church – and indeed there is nothing wrong ipso facto with the Roman Missal of 1970 – in fact it ushered in a new phenomenon previously at the margins of the Church. I am speaking about widespread liturgical abuse. Before the 1970s, liturgical abuse on the scale we see in some parts of the Church today, was completely incomprehensible.
Firstly, we must define what is meant by liturgical abuse. This article focuses on liturgical abuse in the Mass celebrated according to the 1970 recension of the Roman Missal, because such abuse does not exist or is rather marginal in communities which use the Tridentine Missal or various of the Eastern Catholic liturgical rites.
In the Roman rite, the primary liturgical book is the Roman Missal. The current edition of the Roman Missal, published in 1970 and re-published with alterations in 2002, is entitled The Roman Missal renewed by decree of the Most Holy Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican promulgated by the authority of Pope Paul VI and revised at the direction of Pope John Paul II.
The Roman Missal prescribes almost down to each movement and certainly each word what the priest, deacon, servers, and lay faithful are to do during Mass. There are very many options – I believe one priest has calculated that if you multiply all the possibilities together you reach around 600,000 options per Sunday Mass. The Roman Missal of 1970 is very generous in terms of the options it provides. There are four Eucharistic prayers, including the ancient Roman Canon, and many additional ones for different occasions. Need I even mention the priest may celebrate in Latin or the vernacular, facing towards or away from the people.
Compared to the 1962 Missal, which is substantially the same as that promulgated by the Council of Trent in 1570, and remained in force until 1970, there are far fewer options. Indeed liturgical abuse in the Tridentine Mass was largely confined to mumbling the Latin incoherently and speeding through the rituals without regard to piety or observing the precise nature of the rubrics.
However, due to the preponderance of options and I believe the possibility of celebrating Mass in the vernacular, the 1970 Roman Missal has unintentionally opened up the possibility of widespread liturgical abuse.
Hence to answer the question I posed, namely, what is liturgical abuse, it is necessary to state that liturgical abuse is any deviation from the prescribed rubrics of the Roman Missal, or, where something is not prescribed, an act that is not appropriate given said rubrics and the spirit of piety that must necessarily prevail amongst both priest and faithful during the celebration of the Mass.
In the 1970s, when the new Missal was implemented, liturgical abuse began to proliferate in certain parts of the Church. In particular, in West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and to a lesser extent the English-speaking countries, unbearable distortions of the liturgy were introduced. One such abuse gradually became legalised across much of the Catholic world. I am speaking of the practice of receiving communion on the hand. The official position of the Church is that communion is to be received on the tongue. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, it became common for communion to be received in the hand in various German and Dutch-speaking countries. This was an abuse, but wishing not to unnecessarily divide the Church, Pope Paul VI reluctantly gave permission for communion in the hand (whilst still encouraging communion on the tongue as the norm) as a canonical exception in those countries which desired it. Initially, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany, and other countries received the permission. Many countries did not and still to this day, communion on the tongue is the norm there as it technically should still be in the mostly Western countries that received permission for communion in the hand.
Common liturgical abuses in the Latin Church include, most common of all, the times when the priest alters – even slightly – the prescribed words of the Mass. Also: when any of the scripture readings are omitted; when lay people are invited to give a homily at Mass; when the incorrect vestments are worn; when unnecessary numbers of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion are used; when the Mass is celebrated in a sloppy or lazy manner; and playing secular music during Mass.
More extreme examples of liturgical abuse include: using gender-neutral terms to describe God, allowing lay men and women to read parts of the Eucharistic prayer, and covering the sanctuary of the church in gaudy, cheap decorations. I would hazard to say the first two of these extreme examples are so abhorrent that when and where they occur the ruling bishop of the diocese must be asked to intervene immediately, and if he declines, then the Apostolic See and Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments must be notified. Thankfully, these extreme examples are very uncommon and almost unheard of in the Catholic Church. However, particularly in the most liberal parishes in German-speaking countries, these incidents are not unheard of. One such incident where a woman was reading the Eucharistic prayer occurred a number of months ago in Switzerland. Thankfully the bishop condemned this and intervened.
One example of an extreme liturgical abuse would be the Youth Mass celebrated in 1970 in the Diocese of Limburg, in a city near Frankfurt. The priest celebrated the Mass in a suit and tie, on an altar surrounded by Coca-Cola boxes, with scantily dressed young people surrounding him. A sausage sizzle took place during Mass in front of the altar.
In my own diocese, there are some parishes where lay people appointed by decree of the Archbishop are allowed by virtue of their non-canonical post to process into the church behind or even (!) – alongside the priest – during the procession with the cross into the sanctuary and the recession at the end of Mass.
There are of course other issues, such as moving the tabernacle to the side of the church, tearing down altar rails, and using inappropriate musical instruments during the Mass. These are not technically abuses, although I do not know why these things were or are done in the first place. This post shall not deal with these undoubtedly unfortunate protestantising changes in the liturgical life of the Church. We are speaking strictly of that which is clearly liturgical abuse, that is, a deviation from the rubrics of the Mass as written in the Roman Missal and the General Instruction on the Roman Missal.
The greatest problem with liturgical abuse is that it diminishes our respect for God. If we affirm, as every orthodox Christian who holds to the Catholic and Apostolic Faith must affirm, that during the Holy Mass the priest re-presents to God the Father the sacrifice of God the Son at Calvary, then we cannot in good conscience permit deviations from the rubrics which our Holy Mother the Church has in her wisdom prescribed. And if we affirm – as every Christian must – that during the Mass, the bread and wine becomes truly the Body and Blood of Christ – then how could we permit ourselves to disrespect Our Lord, who comes to us so humbly, under the appearance of bread and wine, by treating the Mass as being at the whim and fancy of the priest who happens to be celebrating it?
The answer is that if we affirm this, then liturgical abuse can only happen intentionally if we try to rationalise this or perhaps combine this theological understanding with the passing ideologies of the age, the ideologies that have always been the enemies of the true Christian faith and the Church of Christ. We can therefore link liturgical abuse to the neo-Kantist, personalist, neo-Protestant view of ecclesiology based on the flawed post-Enlightenment understanding of man’s relationship with God that has already wreaked so much havoc in liberal Protestant communities. A Christ-centred liturgy is one in which the priest-celebrant understands that it is not he who is at the centre of the liturgy, but rather Christ acting through him. This is basic Catholic theology. He who denies it consciously and with full knowledge of the true faith – well, we leave him to God’s judgement. But such a man would certainly be in error.
Priests can unintentionally, in good faith and without any ill will, deviate from the rubrics. This is surely not a sin. It used to be common for priests to be ordained at 22, 23, or 24 years of age. Can one imagine that during his first Mass the priest would get everything right? Of course not. Nor could one blame him for accidentally getting something wrong. But when a priest intentionally commits an act of liturgical abuse in violation of the rubrics, then he is simultaneously affirming by this very act that he lacks the shared system of beliefs of the universal Church. Of course, it does not mean he denies transubstantiation, and in fact only rarely does it mean that (hence why the vast majority of Masses containing liturgical abuse are illicit but valid). What it is a sign of is that he believes the liturgy is not important enough to warrant his own assenting to the rubrics that the Church has prescribed.
We need only look to the so-called “separated brethren” to see what happens when the liturgy is allowed to fall to pieces. For example, a Lutheran priestess in Minnesota recently replaced the ancient creed of the Church with the blasphemous “Sparkle Creed” which claimed Jesus had “two dads”, that God is “non-binary”, and has “plural pronouns”. Are the people who would recite such a creed Christian? Are they believers? They certainly believe in a different God than the one Catholics worship. They may claim to be Lutheran, but I shall say that even Martin Luther, whose heretical ideas are condemned by the Church, would turn in his grave to hear that blasphemy recited at a church bearing his name.
This is one example of the rational end of the proliferation of liturgical abuse.
Now, I have said before that it is better that a false ideology in its most radical and demonic form is barking outside the gates of the Church than for a watered-down, less radical, milder version of the same ideology to have infiltrated inside the Church. When heretical ideologies have infiltrated inside the Church, the devil more easily sows weeds amongst the wheat. For those who are impressionable or do not know the faith well enough, they are easy prey when these ideals are promoted in the Church.
Thus when liturgical abuse – which may seem like nothing in comparison to the blasphemy of the Sparkle Creed – occurs inside the Catholic Church, it is a cause for grave concern. It shows that some priests do not care about the rubrics enough even to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with dignity, honour, care, and piety.
In the words of Fr John Hardon, S.J. (1914-2000):
“Abuses in the Eucharistic Liturgy are no mere abuses in external worship. In other words, they are both in ignorance in not understanding the true faith and laziness in not exerting oneself to keep the faith by knowing the Church’s teachings and laws on the Eucharistic Liturgy.”
With some exceptions – the law of prayer is the law of belief. How we pray symbolises what we believe. If a priest celebrates Mass carelessly, it is possible his faith is built on shallow ground. Pope Francis, in his motu proprio Traditiones custodes, lamented the “unbearable distortions” that have entered the Roman Mass in many quarters of the Church.
The main consequence of liturgical abuse is therefore that it erodes many people’s faith. For if the Mass is the most solemn expression of the praise and honour that the Christian people accord to God, then it represents in a very real sense what we believe and how we believe it.
Let us pray to the Holy Virgin, that she may help provide for all the Christian faithful Holy Masses worthily celebrated as a fitting offering of sacrifice and praise to her Divine Son.