Pitting the Mass

I'm also watching it through the Internet as I type this post. :)

Lets have both forms of the Mass in the Latin rite celebrated properly and work to those ends.

Amen. In saecula saeculorum.

On a side note, I do find the implementation date of September 14 to be quite interesting, since it is also the day wherein the third and the fourth (and final) periods of Vatican II started.

Isn't that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing in the background there?

Matbe its selective memory on my part, but I remember some reverent and wonderful masses in the newer form from my childhood in Iowa back in the '70s. Organs, processions and the priest sang most of the Mass.

I remember great Novus Ordo Masses from childhood, too, back in the 80's. They gradually faded away. I remember latin, bells, patens, incense, and chant. One by one those beautiful things dissolved out of the local liturgies replaced by hand-holding, re-worded hymns, and "flash-kneeling". I'd never seen a TLM until EWTN yesterday morning, and all it did was stir up a longing for my "old" Novus Ordo. Why in the world would anyone do away with those beautiful bells? I would prefer a TLM to today's Masses any Sunday, but I'd be just as overjoyed to reserve the High Mass for special occasions and return the Novus Ordo to it's original glory.

I agree that it is unfair to compare the worst of one thing with the best of another -- much like when liberals advocate married clergy by comparing the worst clergy to the best married couples. It's not a true comparison at all. However, where I'm from, you would be very hard pressed to find a NO mass celebrated properly. Were I to make a video of this type here in Saskatchewan using local examples, it would not be as extreme but it would show the NO as irreformably banal.

Seeing all those clips of minimalist, modern chapels and churches with their sterile, barren feel makes me hanker for the splendor of the old churches where art truly honored God. Even the bare but rustic and charming chapels of cloistered orders is miles better.

It's rare for me to attend a NO Mass with the pomp and glory that the Eucharist deserves—though when I do attend one it is so much more uplifting.

I agree with Mr. Miller on most of what he said.
However I would certainly say that the TLM is still superior to the Novus Ordo and that the NO should just slowly die out altogether. The NO is a break from the organic development of the Mass; it throws away many beautiful prayers, waters others down and inserts banal forms as options just like what was inserted in the Tradition Missal in the mid-1960s.

As Mr. Candido sums it up:

“More than 80% of the prayers, antiphons, collects, post communion prayers, are not found in the New Mass, some of them going back to the 2nd century. The lectionary, in use since the 4th century (though some organic development had occurred within it) was eliminated and a new one made from scratch, with a novel system of a three year cycle which purports to give us more scripture while at the same time cutting out essential teachings or translating it in a way antithetical to the text and the Greek.

The whole calendar of saints was changed, and the feast days of the saints were changed, the ember days were eliminated, the octaves of every saint and feast, even of the Holy Spirit which is as old as the liturgical calendar were suppressed, and the entire ordinary was either suppressed or reworked.

All of the rites, symbolism and ritual present in the ancient liturgy has been suppressed. For example the numerous signs of the Crosses, all with theological meaning, were reduced to 3. All the rites governing the use of incense were suppressed. Ritual symbolism such as the altar boy moving the missal from the epistle side to the gospel side which symbolizes the old law passing from the Jews to the gentiles was removed, as well as the actions of the priest, outstretching his hands as Christ on the cross, or how he bows down at the confiteor to symbolize Christ weighed down by the world's sin. These things were all completely excised from the Novus Ordo.”

This plus the obvious inferiority of the prayers in the NO compared to the TLM merit its death.

I'm not a devote of the Missel of Bl. John XXIII, but I surely understand the hankering.

I bacame a Catholic on Holy thursday 1975. I have lived in several States in the US, The Republic of Panama, the Carribean, Germany, Isreal, and Egypt, as well as visiting several other countries. Other than the Chapel where I was recieved into the Church, reverent Masses according to the Missel of Pope Paul VI have been in very short supply.

Most documents issued by the Vatican concerning the Liturgy are ignored.

In fact, I normally travel outside of my home Archdiocese (Indianapolis) to go to sunday mass. I regularly attend at St. Martin of Tours in Louisville KY, for their high standard of Ars Celebrandi, in the Pauline Missel.

The local churches here reach a highpoint when they reach OCP banality. One parish here makes a point of useing wine glasses for Holy Communion. (Hint, it's a Franciscan Parish in Jeff.) When you ask why they arn't following the practices layed out in Redemptionis Sacramentam and other documents, they deny they evenexist, get made and call you names (but oh so politly, to correct your error!)

I've seen more masses like the ones in the video than I care to remember--the Pauline Missel has been corrupted by a spirit of foolishness and disrespect to the Eucharist. I think the video is justified.

Here's a link you should check out
Stunning intro video.... it brought
tears to my eyes

http://www.acmrcia.org/

I don't know about the claim that the 1962 Missal never would have had any "Clown Masses". There is a view that before VII, "the rot had already set in", and to some extent, it is true. In America, particularly, there was a strange low-Church approach to the old Mass, and a kind of Pharasitism common among some Catholics. Modernism had already started to infiltrate, and there were philosophical problems present in many Catholic thinkers (though claims that Catholic thought before the Council was a "wasteland" are horribly false).

We could have fixed it without the major changes that took place. They were problems that needed addressing, but the way they were addressed just opened the doors for all the rottenness to escape into every corner of the Church. The 1970 Missal was a radical break where mild reform would have sufficed, as were many of the "reforms" introduced after VII.

You're so right. It is unfair to compare the best of one use with the worst of the other. Whenever I see these things, I ask people which they would rather have--an extraordinary use Mass celebrated by a priest so badly trained that he messes up the Latin and has to be prodded into the right position by an altar server, with no music and a congregation that acts completely divorced from what's happening in the sanctuary, or an ordinary use Mass sung by a well-trained priest with a good schola and a congregation who make their proper responses. Some people will say this comparison is unfair, or protest that it's obviously not as extreme as High Mass vs. clown Mass.

Still, I've seen a lot more badly-celebrated extraordinary use Masses out there than gorgeous High Masses, and I think it's highly unfair of folks to represent a beautiful High Mass as the norm--if my parents and grandparents are to be believed, it wasn't what happened in most parishes in 1962, and it isn't what happens in most places with the 1962 Missal now either, any more than the clown Mass is the norm with the 1970 Missal. I've seen pictures of them, but I don't know a single person who's ever attended one, nor has one ever been advertised in a parish near me.

A more realistic comparison would be low Mass 1962-style with slightly soppy vernacular hymns vs. low Mass 1970-style with a couple of extemporised prayers and soppy vernacular hymns. The line from point A to point B becomes clearer when you think of it that way.