An excellent article from Dec 2015 from One Peter Five on the top 10 reasons to attend a Traditional Catholic Mass. H/t to Peter Kwasniewski and Michael Foley, they state:-
"Given that it can often be less convenient for a
person or a family to attend the traditional Latin Mass (and I am
thinking not only of obvious issues like the place and the time, but
also of the lack of a parish infrastructure and the hostile reactions
one can get from friends, family, and even clergy), it is definitely
worthwhile to remind ourselves of
why we are doing this in the first place. If something is worth doing, then it’s worth persevering in—even at the cost of sacrifices.
This article will set forth a number of reasons why, in spite of
all the inconveniences (and even minor persecutions) we have experienced
over the years, we and our families
love to attend the
traditional Latin Mass. Sharing these reasons will, we hope, encourage
readers everywhere either to begin attending the
usus antiquior or
to continue attending if they might be wavering. Indeed, it is our
conviction that the sacred liturgy handed down to us by tradition has
never been more important in the life of Catholics, as we behold the
“pilgrim Church on earth” continue to forget her theology, dilute her
message, lose her identity, and bleed her members. By preserving,
knowing, following, and loving her ancient liturgy, we do our part to
bolster authentic doctrine, proclaim heavenly salvation, regain a full
stature, and attract new believers who are searching for unadulterated
truth and manifest beauty. By handing down this immense gift in turn,
and by inviting to the Mass as many of our friends and our families as
we can, we are fulfilling our vocation as followers of the Apostles.
Without further ado, ten reasons:
1. You will be formed in the same way that most of the Saints were formed. If
we take a conservative estimate and consider the Roman Mass to have
been codified by the reign of Pope St. Gregory the Great (ca. 600) and
to have lasted intact until 1970, we are talking about close to 1,400
years of the life of the Church—and that’s most of her history of
saints. The prayers, readings, and chants that they heard and pondered
will be the ones you hear and ponder.
For
this is the Mass that St. Gregory the Great
inherited, developed, and solidified. This is the Mass that St. Thomas
Aquinas celebrated, lovingly wrote about, and contributed to (he
composed the Mass Propers and Office for the Feast of Corpus Christi).
This is the Mass that St. Louis IX, the crusader king of France,
attended three times a day. This is the Mass that St. Philip Neri had to
distract himself
from before he celebrated it because it so
easily sent him into ecstasies that lasted for hours. This is the Mass
that was first celebrated on the shores of America by Spanish and French
missionaries, such as the North American Martyrs. This is the Mass that
priests said secretly in England and Ireland during the dark days of
persecution, and this is the Mass that Blessed Miguel Pro risked his
life to celebrate before being captured and martyred by the Mexican
government. This is the Mass that Blessed John Henry Newman said he
would celebrate every waking moment of his life if he could. This is the
Mass that the Fr. Frederick Faber called “the most beautiful thing this
side of heaven.” This is the Mass that Fr. Damien of Molokai celebrated
with leprous hands in the church he had built and painted himself. This
is the Mass during which St. Edith Stein, who was later to die in the
gas chambers of Auschwitz, became completely enraptured. This is the
Mass that great artists such as Evelyn Waugh, David Jones, and Graham
Greene loved so much that they lamented its loss with sorrow and alarm.
This is the Mass so widely respected that even non-Catholics such as
Agatha Christie and Iris Murdoch came to its defense in the 1970s. This
is the Mass that St. Padre Pio insisted on celebrating until his death
in 1968,
after the liturgical apparatchiks had begun to mess
with the missal (and this was a man who knew a thing or two about the
secrets of sanctity). This is the Mass that St. Josemaría Escrivá, the
founder of Opus Dei, received permission to continue celebrating in
private at the end of his life.
What a glorious cloud of witnesses surrounds the traditional
Latin Mass! Their holiness was forged like gold and silver in the
furnace of this Mass, and it is an undeserved blessing that we, too, can
seek and obtain the same formation. Yes, I can go to the new Mass and
know that I am in the presence of God and His saints (and for that I am
profoundly grateful), but a concrete historical link to these saints has
been severed, as well as a historical link to my own heritage as a
Catholic in the Roman rite.
2. What is true for me is even more true for my children.
This way of celebrating most deeply forms the minds and hearts of our
children in reverence for Almighty God, in the virtues of humility,
obedience, and adoring silence. It fills their senses and imaginations
with sacred signs and symbols, “mystic ceremonies” (as the Council of
Trent puts it). Maria Montessori herself frequently pointed out that
small children are very receptive to the language of symbols, often more
than adults are, and that they will learn more easily from watching
people
do a solemn liturgy than from hearing a lot of words
with little action. All of this is extremely impressive and gripping for
children who are learning their faith, and especially boys who become
altar servers.
[1]
3. Its universality. The traditional Latin Mass
not only provides a visible and unbroken link from the present day to
the distant past, it also constitutes an inspiring bond of unity across
the globe. Older Catholics often recall how moving it was for them to
assist at Mass in a foreign country for the first time and to discover
that “the Mass was the same” wherever they went. The experience was, for
them, a confirmation of the catholicity of their Catholicism. By
contrast, today one is sometimes hard pressed to find “the same Mass” at
the
same parish on the
same weekend. The universality
of the traditional Latin Mass, with its umbrella of Latin as a sacred
language and its insistence that the priest put aside his own
idiosyncratic and cultural preferences and put on the person of Christ,
acts as a true Pentecost in which many tongues and tribes come together
as one in the Spirit—rather than a new Babel that privileges unshareable
identities such as ethnicity or age group and threatens to occlude the
“neither Greek nor Jew” principle of the Gospel.
4. You always know what you are getting. The
Mass will be focused on the Holy Sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ on
the Cross. There will be respectful and prayerful silence before,
during, and after Mass. There will be only males serving in the
sanctuary and only priests and deacons handling the Body of Christ, in
accord with nearly 2,000 years of tradition. People will usually be
dressed modestly. Music may not always be present (and when present, may
not always be perfectly executed), but you will never hear pseudo-pop
songs with narcissistic or heretical lyrics.
Put differently,
the traditional form of the Roman rite can never be completely co-opted.
Like almost every other good thing this side of the grave, the Latin
Mass can be botched, but it can never be abused to the extent that it no
longer points to the true God. Chesterton once said that “there is only
one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with
oppression—and that is orthodoxy. I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so
as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German
philosophy to justify him entirely.”
[2]
The same is true for the traditional Latin Mass. Father Jonathan
Robinson, who at the time of writing his book was not a friend of the
usus antiquior,
nevertheless admitted that “the perennial attraction of the Old Rite is
that it provided a transcendental reference, and it did this even when
it was misused in various ways.”
[3] By contrast, Robinson observes, while the new Mass
can
be celebrated in a reverent way that directs us to the transcendent,
“there is nothing in the rule governing the way the Novus Ordo is to be
said that
ensures the centrality of the celebration of the Paschal mystery.”
[4]
In other words, the new Mass can be celebrated validly but in a way
that puts such an emphasis on community or sharing a meal that it can
amount to “the virtual denial of a Catholic understanding of the Mass.”
[5]
On the other hand, the indestructibility of the traditional Mass’s
inherent meaning is what inspired one commentator to compare it to the
old line about the U.S. Navy: “It’s a machine built by geniuses so it
can be operated safely by idiots.”
[6]
5. It’s the real McCoy. The classical Roman rite has an obvious theocentric and Christocentric orientation, found both in the
ad orientem stance
of the priest and in the rich texts of the classical Roman Missal
itself, which give far greater emphasis to the Mystery of the Most Holy
Trinity, the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the sacrifice of Our
Lord upon the Cross.
[7]
As Dr. Lauren Pristas has shown, the prayers of the new Missal are
often watered-down in their expression of dogma and ascetical doctrine,
whereas the prayers of the old Missal are unambiguously and
uncompromisingly Catholic.
[8]
It is the real McCoy, the pure font, not something cobbled together by
“experts” for “modern man” and adjusted to his preferences. More and
more Catholic pastors and scholars are acknowledging how badly rushed
and botched were the liturgical reforms of the 1960s. This has left us
with a confusingly messy situation for which the reformed liturgy itself
is totally ill-equipped to provide a solution, with its plethora of
options, its minimalist rubrics, its vulnerability to manipulative
“presiders,” and its manifest discontinuity with at least fourteen
centuries of Roman Catholic worship—a discontinuity powerfully displayed
in the matter of language, since the old Mass whispers and sings in the
Western Church’s holy mother tongue, Latin, while the new Mass has
awkwardly mingled itself with the ever-changing vernaculars of the
world.
6. A superior calendar for the saints. In
liturgical discussions, most ammunition is spent on defending or
attacking changes to the Ordinary of the Mass—and understandably so. But
one of the most significant differences between the 1962 and 1970
Missals is the calendar. Let’s start with the Sanctoral Cycle, the feast
days of the saints. The 1962 calendar is an amazing primer in Church
history, especially the history of the early Church, which often gets
overlooked today. It is providentially arranged in such a way that
certain saints form different “clusters” that accent a particular facet
of holiness. The creators of the 1969/1970 general calendar, on the
other hand, eliminated or demoted 200 saints, including St. Valentine
from St. Valentine’s Day and St. Christopher, the patron saint of
travelers, claiming that he never existed. They also eliminated St.
Catherine of Alexandria for the same reason, even though she was one of
the saints that St. Joan of Arc saw when God commissioned her to fight
the English.
[9]
The architects of the new calendar often made their decisions on the
basis of modern historical scholarship rather than the oral traditions
of the Church. Their scholarly criteria call to mind Chesterton’s
rejoinder that he would rather trust old wives’ tales than old maids’
facts. “It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be
treated, more respectfully than a book of history,” G. K. writes. “The
legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who
are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village
who is mad.”
[10]
7. A superior calendar for the seasons. Similarly,
the “Temporal Cycle”—Christmastide, Epiphanytide, Septuagesimatide,
Eastertide, Time after Pentecost, etc.—is far richer in the 1962
calendar. Thanks to its annual cycle of propers, each Sunday has a
distinct flavor to it, and this annual recurrence creates a marker or
yardstick that allows the faithful to measure their spiritual progress
or decline over the course of their lives. The traditional calendar has
ancient observances like
Ember Days and
Rogation Days
that heighten not only our gratitude to God but our appreciation of the
goodness of the natural seasons and of the agricultural cycles of the
land. The traditional calendar has no such thing as “Ordinary Time” (a
most unfortunate phrase, seeing that there cannot be such a thing as
“ordinary time” after the Incarnation
[11])
but instead has a Time after Epiphany and a Time after Pentecost,
thereby extending the meaning of these great feasts like a long
afterglow or echo. In company with Christmas and Easter, Pentecost, a
feast of no lesser status than they, is celebrated for a full eight
days, so that the Church may bask in the warmth and light of the
heavenly fire. And the traditional calendar has the pre-Lenten season of
Septuagesima
or “Carnevale,” which begins three weeks before Ash Wednesday and
deftly aids in the psychological transition from the joy of
Christmastide to the sorrow of Lent. Like most other features of the
usus antiquior, the
aforementioned aspects of the calendar are extremely ancient and
connect us vividly with the Church of the first millennium and even the
earliest centuries.
8. A Better Way to the Bible. Many think that
the Novus Ordo has a natural advantage over the old Mass because it has a
three-year cycle of Sunday readings and a two-year cycle of weekday
readings, and longer and more numerous readings at Mass, instead of the
ancient one-year cycle, usually consisting of two readings per Mass
(Epistle and Gospel). What they overlook is the fact that the architects
of the Novus Ordo simultaneously took out most of the biblical
allusions that formed the warp and woof of the Ordinary of the Mass, and
then parachuted in a plethora of readings with little regard to their
congruency with each other. When it comes to biblical readings, the old
rite operates on two admirable principles: first, that passages are
chosen not for their own sake (to “get through” as much of Scripture as
possible) but to illuminate the meaning of the occasion of worship;
second, that the emphasis is not on a mere increase of biblical literacy
or didactic instruction but on “mystagogy.” In other words, the
readings at Mass are not meant to be a glorified Sunday school but an
ongoing initiation into the mysteries of the Faith. Their more limited
number, brevity, liturgical suitability, and repetition over the course
of every year makes them a powerful agent of spiritual formation and
preparation for the Eucharistic sacrifice.
9. Reverence for the Most Holy Eucharist. The
Ordinary Form of the Mass can, of course, be celebrated with reverence
and with only ordained ministers distributing Holy Communion. But let’s
be honest: the vast majority of Catholic parishes deploy “extraordinary”
lay ministers of Holy Communion, and the vast majority of the faithful
will receive Holy Communion in the hand. These two arrangements alone
constitute a significant breach in reverence for the Blessed Sacrament.
Unlike the priest, lay ministers do not purify their hands or fingers
after handling God, thus accumulating and scattering particles of the
Real Presence. The same is true of the faithful who receive Communion in
the hand; even brief contact with the Host on the palm of one’s hand
can leave tiny particles of the consecrated Victim.
[12]
Think about it: every day, thousands upon thousands of these
unintentional acts of desecration of the Blessed Sacrament occur around
the world. How patient is the Eucharistic Heart of our Lord! But do we
really want to contribute to this desecration? And even if we ourselves
receive communion on the tongue at a Novus Ordo Mass, chances are we
will still be surrounded by these careless habits—an environment that
will either fill us with outrage and sorrow or lead to a settled
indifference. These reactions are not helpful in experiencing the peace
of Christ’s Real Presence, nor are they an optimal way to raise one’s
children in the Faith!
Similar points could be made about the distracting “
Sign of Peace”
[13];
or female lectors and EMHCs, who, apart from constituting an utter
break with tradition, can be clad in clothing of questionable modesty;
or the almost universal custom of loud chitchat before
and after Mass; or the ad-libbing and optionizing of the priest. These and so many other characteristics of the Novus Ordo
as it is all too often celebrated are
all, singly and collectively, signs of a lack of faith in the Real
Presence, signs of an anthropocentric, horizontal self-celebration of
the community.
This point should be emphasized:
it is especially harmful for children
to witness, again and again, the shocking lack of reverence with which
Our Lord and God is treated in the awesome Sacrament of His Love, as pew
after pew of Catholics automatically go up to receive a gift they
generally treat with casual and even bored indifference. We believe the
Eucharist is really
our Savior, our King, our Judge—but then
promptly act in a way that says we are handling regular (though
symbolic) food and drink, which explains why so many Catholics seem to
have a Protestant view of what is going on at Mass. This unfortunate
situation will not end until the pre-Vatican II norms regarding the
sacred Host are made
mandatory for all liturgical ministers,
which is not likely anytime soon. The safe haven of refuge is, once
again, the traditional Latin Mass, where sanity and sanctity prevail.
10. When all is said and done, it’s the Mystery of Faith.
Many of the reasons for persevering in and supporting the traditional
Latin Mass, in spite of all the trouble the devil manages to stir up for
us, can be summarized in one word: MYSTERY. What St. Paul calls
musterion and what the Latin liturgical tradition designates by the names
mysterium and
sacramentum
are far from being marginal concepts in Christianity. God’s dramatic
self-disclosure to us, throughout history and most of all in the Person
of Jesus Christ, is a mystery in the highest sense of the term: it is
the revelation of a Reality that is utterly intelligible yet always
ineluctable, ever luminous yet blinding in its luminosity. It is fitting
that the liturgical celebrations that bring us into contact with our
very God should bear the stamp of His eternal and infinite
mysteriousness, His marvelous transcendence, His overwhelming holiness,
His disarming intimacy, His gentle yet penetrating silence. The
traditional form of the Roman rite surely bears this stamp. Its
ceremonies, its language, its
ad orientem posture, and its
ethereal music are not obscurantist but perfectly intelligible while at
the same time instilling a sense of the unknown, even the fearful and
thrilling. By fostering a sense of the sacred, the old Mass preserves
intact the mystery of Faith.
[14]
In sum, the classical Roman Rite is an ambassador of tradition, a
midwife for the interior man, a lifelong tutor in the faith, a school
of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication, an absolutely
reliable rock of stability on which we can confidently build our
spiritual lives.
As the movement for the restoration of the Church’s sacred
liturgy is growing and gaining momentum, now is not a time for
discouragement or second thoughts; it is a time for a joyful and serene
embrace of all the treasures our Church has in store for us, in spite of
the shortsightedness of some of her current pastors and the ignorance
(usually not their own fault) of many of the faithful. This is a renewal
that
must happen if the Church is to survive the coming perils. Would that the Lord could
count on us
to be ready to lead the way, to hold up the “catholic and orthodox
faith”! Would that we might respond to His graces as He leads us back to
the immense riches of the Tradition that He, in His loving-kindness,
gave to the Church, His Bride!
It is no time to flag or grow weary, but to put our shoulders to
the wheel, our hand to the plough. Why should we deprive ourselves of
the light and peace and joy of what is more beautiful, more
transcendent, more sacred, more sanctifying, and more obviously
Catholic? Innumerable blessings await us when, in the midst of an
unprecedented crisis of identity in the Church today, we live out our
Catholic faith in total fidelity and with the ardent dedication of the
Elizabethan martyrs who were willing to do and to suffer anything rather
than be parted from the Mass they had grown to cherish more than life
itself. Yes, we will be called upon to make sacrifices—accepting an
inconvenient time or a less-than-satisfactory venue, humbly bearing with
misunderstanding and even rejection from our loved ones—but we know
that sacrifices for the sake of a greater good are the very pith and
marrow of charity.
We have given ten reasons for attending the traditional Latin
Mass. There are many more that could be given, and each person will have
his or her own. What we know for sure is that the Church needs her
Mass,
we need this Mass, and, in a strange sort of way that bestows on us an unmerited privilege, the Mass needs
us. Let us hold fast to it, that we may cleave all the more to Christ our King, our Savior, our All."
NOTES
[1] See “Helping Children Enter into the Traditional Latin Mass” (
Part 1,
Part 2); “Ex ore infantium: Children and the Traditional Latin Mass” (
here).
[2] Chesterton,
Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 132.
[3] Jonathan Robinson,
The Mass and Modernity (Ignatius Press, 2005), 307.
[4] Ibid., 311, italics added.
[5] Ibid., 311.
[6]
The same author, John Zmirak (who is sound on this issue), continues:
“The old liturgy was crafted by saints, and can be said by schlubs
without risk of sacrilege. The new rite was patched together by
bureaucrats, and should only be safely celebrated by the saintly.” John
Zmirak, “
All Your Church Are Belong to Us.”
[7] As documented in Peter Kwasniewski,
Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2014), ch. 6, “Offspring of Arius in the Holy of Holies.”
[8] See, among Lauren Pristas’s many fine studies, her book
Collects of the Roman Missal: A Comparative Study of the Sundays in Proper Seasons Before and After the Second Vatican Council (London: T&T Clark, 2013).
[9]
Fortunately, acknowledging that this was a mistake, Pope John Paul II
restored St. Catherine to the Novus Ordo calendar twenty years later,
but what about all the other saints who got axed?
[10] Chesterton,
Orthodoxy, 53.
[11] See, among the many who argue for this point, Fr. Richard Cipolla, “
Epiphany and the Unordinariness of Liturgical Time.”
[12] See Father X, “
Losing Fragments with Communion in the Hand,”
The Latin Mass Magazine (Fall 2009), 27-29.
[13]
The Novus Ordo “Sign of Peace” has almost nothing to do with the
dignified manner in which the “Pax” is given at a Solemn High Mass,
where it is abundantly clear that the peace in question is a spiritual
endowment emanating from the Lamb of God slain upon the altar and gently
spreading out through the sacred ministers until it rests on the
lowliest ministers who represent the people
[14]
For centuries, going all the way back to the early Church (and even,
says St. Thomas Aquinas, to the Apostles), the priest has always said
“Mysterium Fidei” in the midst of the consecration of the chalice. He
was referring specifically to the irruption or inbreaking of God into
our midst in this unfathomable Sacrament.
