Bloggen Pray&Tell (som for det aller meste forfekter moderne liturgiske synspunkter) meldte for noen dager siden at Msgr. Andrew R Wadsworth, som er leder for arbeidet med den engelske oversettelsen av messen, hadde anmeldt en bok (en kritikk av den nye messen) skrevet av en sedevakantist (som mener at Kirken nå ikke har noen pave), Fr. Anthony Cekada.
Msgr. Wadsworth skrev tydelig hvem forfatteren var, men mente likevel at det var mye å lære fra denne boka. Likevel var det mange som mente at en slik sentral person i Den katolske Kirke ikke burde anmelde bøker av personer som slik står i opposisjon til Kirken – og i alle fall ikke skrive mange positive ting i anmeldelsen!
Blogginnlegget har vakt stor interesse, og har så langt fått over 300 kommentarer, bl.a. én fra Msgr. Wadsworth og flere fra Fr. Cekada. Under tar jeg med noe av tre (ganske moderate) kommentarer:
# 196
As another 20-something, … I attend the Ordinary Form exclusively, but I’ve been to an EF about 3 times, and I really like it. I see pros and cons with both. But I am not openly hostile to the EF as most who lived through VII are. The tides are changing, as more and more young people are looking for something different than their everyday experiences. The older generation thinks they know exactly how the liturgy can speak to us, and it can be found exclusively in the OF the way it was celebrated in the 70s and 80s. The truth is, most of us wish for a liturgy that takes the best of both worlds and marries them together so we have a relevant and reverent liturgy in 2011. We don’t see ad orientem as the priest turning his back to us, but facing God. We have no problem kneeling to receive Jesus, because we don’t think it diminishes our dignity as human beings. Of course, I am only speaking for myself and those around me, but it truly seems to be a different way of thinking among younger Catholics. …# 280
Many people, including self-identified traditionalists today and their sympathizers, concede that the pre-conciliar liturgy was in need of reform or revitalization. That doesn’t mean the reform was done correctly. Increasingly, many feel the New Rite itself is in need of reform or augmentation.My most consistent experience of the New Rite is of a ritual created seemingly in a vacuum a decade or two before Non-Denominationals really learned how to make Christianity cool. I understand it’s a synthetic piece crafted in light of largely abstract theological, pastoral and liturgical “principles”. A rite that does very little to give a person the sense they are the recipient of an ancient testimony of God’s actions, receiving, by a long standing process of historical mediation, something of the life of God as He passed through our ancestors then and enters us now.
Churches are filled with neglect and affected by a dark amnesia. We’ve forgotten our own time-honored symbols and praxis, neglect our high altars (if they were not torn out), have no musical tradition to speak of, and, where ever the piety that once made up the basic “shell” of our spirituality and interiority still flourishes, it is really a relic of a half refuted past.
# 291
The OF is rich in many ways. The EF is rich in other ways. I think Jordan’s point, though perhaps obscured a bit by his passionate rhetoric, is that the process of reforming the EF into the OF ended up significantly obscuring the historical connection between the two — which is a serious problem.Summorum Pontificum is a bold beginning to a solution to this problem, using the lovely and age-old Catholic approach of ‘both/and’. It’s impossible for the strictest partisans of either form of the liturgy to be happy with SP, but in the end it’s hard to imagine a more prudent and pastoral answer to the real problem identified above.