A PERFECT STORM — The Catholic Mass after Vatican II

then what's your question my question is what went so awry after the vatican ii [Music] so we have these things called councils it's when all the people in the funny hats get together and they make decisions about the faith and about the way that the faith will be practiced vatican ii was a major shift some might say a major break and it was a shift to accommodate the church to the modern world people often refer to vatican ii as the council well this is very strange because there have been other councils presumably there was vatican one or vatican ii you know they didn't start with number two and there have been many other councils too so why is that the council here we have to distinguish between what vatican ii really taught and encouraged versus what happened vatican ii opened the doors and the windows of the church the purpose of doing that wasn't to let the world in to secularize the church the purpose was to let the church out to christify the world among regular churchgoers who attend mass weekly or more only 63 percent believe that this is actually the body and blood of jesus in the consecrated host if the mass that we've been saying over the past 50 60 years has coincided with a tremendous loss of faith in the church there comes a point where you have to say maybe it's not just coinciding with it the real question is what did vatican ii demand of the liturgy what did the council have in mind archbishop bhunini was the principal architect of the new mass i think that it just got out of control [Music] the road to union with our separated brethren the protestants is to remove every stone from the liturgy every prayer from the mass that could even remotely be an obstacle or a difficulty [Music] [Music] i think the the good will of the reformers was probably very genuine but it was probably also terribly terribly culturally naive and it was a time where everything was changing the worst possible time 65 to 70. in the culture it was just a time of revolution so in a way it's not too surprising that the mass was also kind of caught up into that when we say that modern man is the starting point and ending point of liturgical reform we may well create something which a 1960s teenager or university student will find appealing but that student will grow up and future generations will arrive and of course if we're using the language of of appealing if we're trying to market something to a particular generation or time we've lost the plot we're on the wrong train we're no longer living in the you know high-flying days of the age of aquarius where everyone thinks that we're on the brink of some wonderful utopia in the 1960s people like going to theaters and they like going to casinos but they don't like coming to church why because it's a drag but we could change all that see we could we could pack this joint is it a concert or a catholic mass the difference with the traditional catholic church is striking this is obviously a warehouse on the periphery of the city and these people are just having a great time i'm reminded of a line from that great political philosopher and religious theologian hank hill from king of the hill who points out that christian rock makes neither christianity nor rock and roll any better it makes them both worse and i i think people know that now we we probably always do it but we certainly know it now day by day day by day i remember i was a boy scout and going camping and we'd sing songs around the campfire those made you feel great you know you're sitting around the fire you're having the s'mores and some you know scoutmaster has the guitar that's fantastic should we repeat that at mass no go go have another cookout go to the campfire again [Music] every night in my [Music] now close your eyes [Music] [Applause] [Music] come with me and you'll be in a world of pure imagination the lord is my light and my salvation everywhere you glory go god glory to god glory to god in the highest and on earth [Music] father anabali bonini was a young ascension priest who was a liturgical enthusiast he wasn't a mover and shaker his first really important role was as a coordinator for the drafting of soccer sanctum concilium the the psycho vatican council's document on the liturgy curiously enough that was the only one of the documents written before the council that wasn't thrown out at the beginning of the council all the other documents that had been pre-written were thrown out and they said let's start over but they kept the one that that bunini had shepherded through it would be most inconvenient for the articles of our constitution to be rejected by the council that is why we must tread carefully and discreetly proposals must be formulated in such a way that much is said without seeming to say anything let many things be said in embryo and in this way let the door remain open to legitimate and possible post-conciliar deductions and applications so something in embryo we're going to say it obliquely not totally we're not going to reveal our whole plans we're going to say just a little bit so that it'll get approved and then we can do what we want so bhunini from the very beginning had designed this document to be used the way he wanted to be used although it did have some striking language in it it mostly comes across as a conservative document or at least a document that would reassure people we're not talking about a radical overhaul of the catholic church's worship we're talking about adding a little bit of vernacular here and there we're talking about you know modifying the calendar a little bit and then the council of course reaffirmed latin as the language of the liturgy gregorian chant it should have pride of place the mass is described as a solemn act of worship of the blessed trinity the the council fathers reading this document they might have thought well okay you know moderate reform sounds like a good idea i'll sign off on that [Music] immediately after the promulgation of sacrosanctum concilium pope paul vi called him in and gave him the opportunity of being the secretary of the concilium the concilium was the organism that was set up to put into practice the constitution on the liturgy and this was bonini's great moment of opportunity it's very important for people to understand that the role of secretary in a body like this is much more important than it might sound you might think oh secretary he's just keeping minutes and he's filing documents and stuff no the secretary in this case was the one who coordinated all of the meetings of the different scholars and and he's the one who was the kind of central clearinghouse for communications so when people wrote in with their ideas or their criticisms or something it all went through the secretary and and then he ran the meetings as well so he established the agendas for the meetings so that the secretary was the one who really had the bird's eye view of the entire project instead of a group of of scholars working together on say the whole mass it was many different subcommittees working on many different parts of the mass at the same time but one of the few people who had the a picture of the whole desired outcome was bounini cardinal le carro was named the nominal head of this concilium but he um lecaro was old and dottering and i don't even know how cognitive the alert he was bounini kind of took over and was the dynamic person he was a very good organizer he worked long hours and for the next five years really he worked assiduously on every element of the reform pope paul vi himself and i quote no predisposition to change everything without reason must govern this investigation the investigation into the liturgy nor a hastiness to amend and revise everything the guides must be a devout prudence and a reverence combined with wisdom with the best will in the world i struggle to see in the nuts and bolts of the reform in the way in which it was carried out that the concilium paid much heed to the pope they were hasty almost the entire roman liturgy was overhauled within the space of a decade a revision of almost everything good morning good morning so let's begin in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit the grace of god [Music] lord have mercy christ have mercy [Music] as a choir director and as a singer your your default if you will or your starting point is gregorian chant which the church says is the greatest treasure that that we have in the arts um greater than any other art unfortunately now there was just kind of a rupture where things stopped and there was no need for composers to be trained to write for the church there's a there's a there's a real tension there's a real tension between liturgical prayer as it's always been understood and the way the nose order tries to grab your attention in order to keep you awake keep you engaged giving you new ideas having a theme for the mass that you know keeps coming back to something or other that's what you do in a lecture you know the great saints of the past some of them were very simple some of them were very complicated some of them were great theologians some of them were unlettered how did they engage with the mass it wasn't about understanding everything that happens it's about devotion so what does increased devotion well like thomas aquinas said singing having it in latin because it's a sacred language you can see the care that's being taken this is a sacred language it's appropriate to these sacred rights having it um in silence is a way of emphasizing its holiness as a way of exciting devotion now all these things people say what the their barriers to comprehension well how important is that compared with the effect it has on devotion and actually how much of a barrier is it if the liturgy is is an uninterrupted flow of vernacular words then unfortunately even if those words are about religious things it it makes it much closer to what we're surrounded with in the world all the time which is this unending stream of noise and voices journalism and television and you know youtube and whatever if you never have any silence you could go through a whole mass and just and just walk out and never have prayed once [Music] the new offertory prayers in the novus order which are substantially prayers for a meal for a banquet a protestant style prayers taken from a jewish supper prayer come that is happening and he was never in the church and the offer trolley must express the goal of the mass which is a sacrifice and not a meal messed up our lord our god king the world blessed are you lord god of all creation bring us to us bread from here the bread we offer you fruit of the earth and work of human hands it will become for us the bread of life blessed be god forever the priest facing utter orientem in the traditional latin mass he's not in a sense he's facing away from you but it's not all about you buddy he's actually facing toward the altar toward what we are all doing leading us like an airplane pilot you don't want your airplane pilot to be facing the cabin things aren't going to turn out very well i'm conscious of that that the one who brings us together isn't invited into the conversation so it's like you and i talking to each other right now and the topic of our conversation is god and he's behind us they're like oh kyle i want to get in the conversation like no you can't you know you're blocking me i said well then it seems to me that if i'm moving back and forth in front of the tabernacle the blessed sacrament that i should genuflect but even things like that where you know don't really acknowledge that our lord is there because the focus is on what's happening on the altar but what's happening on the all and again there it is this wasn't an issue when the altar is up against the wall and the tabernacle was there and the crucifix was up here so the whole tableau and everyone facing in the same direction there was no competition between the presider's chair and the ambo and the altar and the cross how do i say that what's happening at the altar is more important than our lord in the tabernacle when our lord on the altar is our lord in the tabernacle and it's our lord and the tabernacle who made it impossible for us to come together and celebrate our lord who's going to be on the altar mean think about all this cognitive dissonance that creates for people [Music] saint francis de sales has an entire meditation how the prayers of the foot of the altar is jesus in the garden and the collect at the beginning is jesus before pilate the triple curie is peter denying jesus three times when you turn around and say dominus phobias come to the people that is jesus looking at peter at the moment that he denied him when the chalice veil comes off you're actually meditating on the scourging when jesus was stripped when you lift up the body of christ you're supposed to be thinking of jesus being nailed to the cross when you lift up the chalice you're supposed to be thinking of the blood flowing as the cross falls into the hole so every single part of the mass has a connection to the passion of jesus christ in the latin mass and so if you talk to a conservative nova sort of person they'll frequently say i go to mass for the eucharist i go because jesus is truly present but if you talk to jerusalem mass priest he really has the sense he's at the full sacrifice of calvary [Music] so that they may become for us the body and blood of our lord jesus christ at the time he was betrayed and entered willingly into in a similar way when supper was ended he took the chalice and once more we do want people to understand but what about the zero to ten year olds they're only learning by what they see and what they hear that's how they are learning about the real presence there are so many catholics who don't seem to believe the catholic faith and it's not entirely their fault if you're told that this you know host is the literal body and blood of your lord and savior but you are given it disrespectfully on your hand and you can walk away and a crumb falls and that's not who cares it's not that big a deal we are incarnational beings we are incarnate beings we have an incarnational faith and what we do is going to affect what we believe i mean it's it's like this principle of cognitive dissonance you know sometimes when people's behaviors and their beliefs seem to disagree they will change their beliefs they will change their beliefs because it's easier to change your abstract ideas floating around pie in the sky than it is to change the tangible i imagine after vatican ii you thought everyone thought we just have to move on to this new mass so why did you start searching for the old math because we had a love for it that couldn't be extinguished uh if i hadn't found it i wouldn't be practicing catholic today i would i kept drifting drifting drifting and drifting until i drifted right out of the church it was necessary for the for me to find it i've been doing this for 40 years but this is one i'm currently working on if you go look behind you there you'll see i've got the back of it over there and this is what i intend to use on the back of the vestment and this is us we were we were pretty much hippies and then this is one of my favorite pictures too we were messing around in a restaurant having a food fight so we had lots of fun i made it so i could put it in my purse so that i could take it out and show people because i if you haven't noticed i talk about john a lot so i was able to show people what you know our life we were invited to the first mass of our lady of mount carmel latin mass community it was about 16 people we were in the basement and we were sitting on bar stools i sat in the library for three solid months looking through the phone books to see if there's any place that listed the traditional latin mass i wanted so badly labor day 1980 was the first time we went back to the traditional mass every month i would take all of this stuff the portable older and everything that all the accruments pile them in the back of my station wagon and then we went and set up for mass and then we moved to a holiday inn meeting room and that's where we had the mass for a number of years why couldn't you just go to a church you couldn't go nobody would not not back then you couldn't do that at the beginning no one wanted us in the diocese they called all the churches in the diocese of denver and nobody invited us in to have our masses there there was a lot of prejudice oh yes a definite prejudice uh you were considered a heretic if you dare go to the latin mass our priest here gave us sermon that did not agree with somebody and they snuck into the church and smashed a statue of our lady on the metal lectern and the secretary handed it to me in a box and said you have a garden at your home and it needs to be buried in the ground there was about two or three hundred pieces to it and i looked at john and i said hey you plaster and i paint what do you think he pieced the entire thing together and then i painted it and we gave it back to our priest and he thanked us so much for buying another statue exactly like his mother would and we flipped it over in the inscription on the bottom told him that that was his and word got out and pretty soon we became a statue hospital and everybody's statue arrived here come on back i'd like to introduce you to three priests wonderful wonderful priests and he wore his red beretta this is cardinal george this is bishop george and this is father george they have a very special duty their duty is to introduce children from 6 to 60 to the latin mass travel ultra cards i sent one to pope benedict he sent me a thank you letter but i also sent one to cardinal orenzi he wrote me a handwritten note thanking me cardinal burke has been one of her best customers absolutely and i've made berettas until my hands are ready to fall off she's better at that beretta stuff than i am our neighbors would always laugh because they would look over and we would have a large sacred heart statue in our garage or pews or they were always wondering what in the world we were going to be up to next the attitude that you see in the catholic church for many many centuries in fact for the whole of church history is a deep reverence and respect for the inherited tradition the analogy which is most often used is the literally developed organically very much like an organism like a like a plant like a tree you have the same tree it grows it becomes bigger it becomes more beautiful but sometimes you know leaves fall off and and you know parts of the tree uh can disappear but the organism stays alive what christ our lord gave to the apostles was a kind of acorn right here's the new covenant in my blood um here is is my body and blood here's the sacrifice of the cross made present for you in mystery and the apostles took that and they began celebrating that and they added and their successors added to it they they surrounded it with the most fitting ceremonies the rate of of change in the liturgy slows down over time so you have a lot of development in the first 500 years you have a fairly significant amount in the next 500 years but less quite a bit than the first 500. then the 500 after that we're talking now from say 1000 to 1500 is certainly an embellishment and adornment and enrichment and expansion of what's there but nothing fundamentally new enters in um that you could say oh we've never seen that before in any form and then finally from 1 500 to the present there's a period of great stability constancy then the church can do reform of the liturgy but it's a repeat slowly like a plant is growing slowly and there is no moment when you can discover a rupture in the growth of a plant it can make so repeat some small light changes in the ritual but only for the sake for the aim of more preciseness of more clarity of more sacredness bishops and cardinals in procession at st peter's basilica where pope paul presides at a special mass for both the synod of bishops and the world after the concilium had worked on the mass for three years it was time to get the bishop's approval so at the 1967 synod of bishops they unveiled the new mass for the first time and this is what happened these are the bishops actual responses the beginning of the mass seems empty people need to realize that if they want to approach god they must free themselves from evil why are the names of our lady saint michael the archangel saint john the baptist removed it needs to be enriched with signs of the cross geno and vows the overture is impoverished i call for an end to liturgical changes [Music] it is not easy to cut one's ties with age-old practices open oneself to new horizons and force oneself to accept the demands expressed in the signs of the times it is difficult to appraise the value of the revised order of mass a liturgical text reveals its value only after lengthy experience of it we will have to see therefore whether the young will find a spiritual food that their ancestors found in the old mass like all bishops i offer my sincere thanks to the concilium after studying the new mass it was clear to me that few of the members of the concilian have ever been parish priests the new mass would reduce parish congregations to mostly women and children the road to union with our separated brethren the protestants is to remove every stone from the liturgy every prayer from the mass that could even remotely be an obstacle or difficulty all these changes of but one justification a senseless ecumenism that will not attract a single protestant to the faith but will cause countless catholics to lose it and will instill total confusion in the minds of many more who will no longer know what is true and what is false the law of prayer is the law of belief if there is to be more emphasis in the mass on bible readings than on eucharistic prayer the faith of both clergy and people will be weakened there is more need than ever today to stress the real presence of our lord in the blessed sacrament no change in the mass should be made which might seem to throw doubt on this doctrine it is always unpleasant to revise holy prayers which have nourished the church for centuries but no one should find reason for spiritual discomfort in the prayer of the church i assure you that we will examine with the greatest care each and every one of your observations since these are the fruit of long and diligent pastoral experience [Music] three years ago 99 of these bishops had signed the vatican ii document on the sacred liturgy but now after seeing what revisions actually took place many lost confidence in the reforms and the bishops were split in half so paul vi removed the president of the consilium cardinal le carro and called bhunini into his office now you alone are left i urge you to be very patient and very prudent i assure you once again of my complete confidence holy father the reform will continue as long as your holiness retains this confidence as soon as he lessens it will come to a halt this is what vatican ii said this is what the bishop signed sacred music must be preserved but in 64 the sung parts of the mass were replaced by new vernacular songs the vernacular may be added to some of the mass in 67 this became the entire mass that more scripture be added to the readings but the concilium removed over 40 scripture verses from the prayers of the mass latin must be retained and gregorian chant has pride of place but in 69 paul vi said no longer latin but the spoken language will be the principal language of the mass we will lose a great part of the incomparable gregorian chant finally vatican 2 said there must be no innovations unless the good of the church genuinely and certainly requires them but in 69 the concilium wrote that the altar should be built apart from the wall so that mask be celebrated facing the people this is not just for new churches but for the adapting of old ones individual parishes did not raise or get thousands of dollars to rip out their altars and make massive architectural changes because there was a spontaneous movement across the world it was actually promoted from the highest levels of the bishops in the vatican and paul vi believed in this he was hoping that this mass would really spark a revival in the faith because people would be able to participate more he really hoped that it would do that do you find him saying oh the the great beauty of the traditional issue the great beauty of the latin language but we must sacrifice all of this because this new liturgy is better for modern man [Music] we don't know exactly how the early church used the scriptures during its liturgy what we do know is that as all of the liturgical rites matured the roman the ambrosian the byzantine the armenian the coptic they all went with a one-year cycle i don't know a great deal about the history of the decision to move to a three-year lectionary but i do know that it was motivated by an admirable goal which is to expose the faithful to as much scripture as possible and that is the advantage with a three year cycle you get a lot more quantity but i do miss the quality of the one year cycle lots of scholars have lots of very very complimentary things to say about the new lectionary in that it's so it's so obviously better than the old primarily because we read more of the bible and that well self-explanatory you read more scripture equals more better without really much of a consideration of well precisely what is read and i i struggled in vain for a few weeks to try and find any sort of detailed comparison of the the older new lecturers and it eventually occurred to me that well nobody's ever really bothered to kind of line them up and an oration is basically one of the in in this context it's a prayer 669 of them go missing about 52 there's only 165 uh were unchanged there's only about 13 of the prayers of the older missile that make it unchanged into the new missile as i say more than half of the of the older missile just kind of goes missing the reality of divine judgment our need for grace our need to repent these are theological themes and they've been removed almost all of them so even references to grace vastly reduced we need to be confronted with these things precisely because we've forgotten them we're in danger for getting them the very conspicuous one is saint nicholas so the collect for saint nicholas in the old mass besieged saint nicholas by his prayers to save us from the fires of hell and he's jolly old saint nicholas helping us and saving us from the fires of hell what a great helper but the reformers didn't want to talk about the fires of hell and so they put a new prayer in there which took away the fires of hell the most terrifying and horrible example of this is the omission of of saint paul's injunction that if we receive the blessed eucharist unworthily we eat and drink our own condemnation that appears nowhere in the modern lectionary the passage in the new mass stops before you get to that point a profound teaching of the church but which is excised from her worship and if we remember the importance of the alexa randy lex credenti well if that doesn't appear in our worship how on earth are we supposed to believe it a lot of it was had a certain mindless aspect to it that i don't understand someone just took an axe to do it every single line of the liturgy of the church whether it was the divine office the mass the other sacramental rights the blessings every line was debated analyzed dissected and reconstructed by the by the the concilium i mean this is unprecedented there's not even anything remotely like that in the history of the church there's always been a clear understanding of that which has come before needs to remain intact there is at times a manner in which we speak about the ordinary form as if it were something created of whole cloth and new which in to a certain degree that is true and that has severed itself from the history of basically you know almost 2000 years it existed before see pope is not an absolute monarch whose will is law rather he is the guardian of the authentic tradition that is why with respect to the liturgy he has the task of a gardener not that of a technician who builds new machines and throws the old ones on the junk pile how difficult it is to take an ancient building in hand and make it functional and habitable without changing the structure peripheral changes are not enough there has to be a radical restoration [Music] [Music] so it is simply a fact that the council was pushed aside for instance it had said that the language of the latin right was to remain latin although suitable scope was to be given to the vernacular today we might ask is there a latin right at all anymore these forms of liturgical renewal are not simply identical with the council someone who does not think that everything in this reform turned out well is therefore not an opponent of city council [Music] i think over time more and more people recognize this that yeah a lot of mistakes were made uh things were done hastily we didn't really recognize that by changing the architecture changing the orientation of the altar changing the language changing the mode of communion in fact they rewrote the liturgy for seven sacraments change change change change change and what did we see happen we were supposed to have a new springtime in the life of the church the new liturgy was supposed to attract people to the church and sustain people in the practice of their faith well that's five decades ago now and if we look at the statistics you know the churches are emptying not filling up the new liturgy hasn't stopped the hemorrhage it isn't filling up the churches a collapse in attendance a collapse in belief in the eucharist even a decrease in infant baptisms a decrease in adult baptisms are there cultural elements that led to these things of course we had a sexual revolution television film radio social media all these things have happened but what should have been a bulwark and something consistent also began to change [Music] the recent pew study said 6.5 people leave for every one catholic who enters the catholic church so i often said to that well the reason why there's so many people leaving the church is because of the sexual revolution the problem with that is if you look at the pew study of 6.5 catholics leaving for everyone entering many of them are going to evangelical mega churches did the sexual revolution not affect the evangelical megachurches of course it did so something changed not from without the church but from within the church that has tanked the numbers we see these pew studies that say most catholics don't believe in the eucharist the typical response we hear from the hierarchy is more catechesis we need more catechesis we need more catechesis and the evidence is all around us because we've had catechetical programs we've we have a catechism now that's it's a fine book but it has no effect on ordinary catholics if they're worshiping incorrectly so the very first thing we need to do is reform the liturgy if you take the cumulative effect of all of these reductions in rubrics and relaxations and discipline right it it actually sends a message there's a message in that which is what you're doing there isn't as awesome and solemn and you know fearful as we thought it was well this is a recipe for disaster because the the final effect of that is going to be a watering down of faith and eventually a loss of faith right not again not directly caused by any one of those changes but the but the environment for the loss of faith is very much created by the sum total of these decisions was chaos chaos ensued we lost we lost so much we lost so much it sounds kind of selfish but i'll say it anyway the grade school i went to no longer exists the high school i attended no longer exists catholic schools no longer exist they're finished the religious sisters who taught in grade school the christian brothers who taught they left schools closed hospitals are close it's this is this is a this is a good fruit this is the result this is a wonderful result of something marvelous no something went wrong something went wrong through some crack the smoke of satan has entered the temple of god there is doubt uncertainty disquiet dissatisfaction confrontation doubt has entered our consciences and it entered by windows that should have been opened to the light there was belief that after the council there would be a day of sunshine for the history of the church instead it is the arrival of a day of clouds of tempest of darkness of uncertainty i interviewed canon georges martimore once about the reform of the bravery for which he was the the secretary the relator of the study group and he prepared two position papers very detailed with his working group and submitted them to the bishops of the concilium cannon martin were told me with the shrug of the shoulders that position paper that that uh project never got to paul the sixth bernini put it in the bin he said and took his own this revelation dovetails with the reminiscences of louis boye who calls him nothing less than a lying scoundrel because boudini manipulated the flow of information to paul vi and louis boyer as it were found him out because he was a personal friend of paul vi and he was also on the concilium at the time and the two things didn't match bernini ran into opposition that was not only massive but close to unanimous in such cases he didn't hesitate to say but the pope will sit after that of course there was no question of discussing the matter any further yet one day after he made use of that argument i was having lunch right above the paypal apartments as i was coming down i came out of the lift and brienne person emerged from the staircase on his way in at the sight of me he didn't just turn pale he was visibly horrified i could not guess why he would be so terrorized at the idea that i had an interview with the pope regarding our affairs i would be given the answer weeks later by pope paul the sixth himself why did the concilium make these changes why simply because bouini had assured us that you absolutely wished it how can this be he told me himself that you were unanimous so he played the one off of the other he played the concilium off of the pope and the pope off of the concilium and that's how he he got through some of the extraordinary changes that took place there were rumors already about bounini being a freemason in the early 1970s freemasonry has always had as its object the subversion of the church from the inside there's no doubt it's happening today as well they really are a religion it's uh they have rituals they have their their their own ceremonies they they have their own belief system uh they're not christian they don't believe in the divinity of christ and also it has to be said because it's it's true they're espoused enemies of of especially the catholic church the free masonic ideas ultimately are a denial of original sin that's their central dogma is that there is no original sin there is no need for the redeeming sacrifice of jesus christ man himself can simply create a perfect world just by throwing away the superstitions of catholicism there has emerged more evidence in recent years cardinal gagnon was the man appointed by paul vi to investigate and report on corruption at the vatican including freemasonic complicity and and charles moore was his secretary every step of the way all of a sudden they were seeing problems and he as pope everything was brought to his attention he was a sharp man good mind and he paid attention to those things and he saw that things were going wrong there were two cardinals cardinal staffa and cardinal odie they went to go see the pope with some very upsetting documents that they had and accused two very important people in the roman curia of being freemasons those allegations were investigated seriously it was decided that there was reason to believe that they were true it seems as if paul vi took it quite seriously either that or paul vi had become disillusioned with benini because paul vi sent him off packing to tehran to to iran as a papal diplomat which is a line of work that bonini had no experience with and no expertise in and no particular reason why he should do that but just to get him as far away as possible they got rid of him by sending him to iran as nuncio iran had a catholic population that would almost constitute a parish the entire country where he could do very little harm that was the idea the pope decided to do an investigation of the entire roman courier and gagnon agreed to it and he began his investigation a lot of things that he was going through they were very difficult times for him to because to do that investigation his life was threatened his rooms were broken into ransacked his office was broken into then he came to live with us gagnon brought the evidence to paul vi i know because i drove him had an audience with the pope and presented him with the with the results the results of of that three-year visit the pope simply put it to one side and said it would be for his successor he didn't say i'm about to die leave me alone he didn't say that but he didn't have to cardinal ganoner he was archbishop gagnon at the time understood very well what he meant he died several months later august 6 1978. [Music] saint paul the sixth uh montini uh he was a wonderful and a great and saintly pope but his interests were you know geopolitical and so on he didn't really the liturgy was just he confided it unfortunately to archbishop bunini what i would say about brunini is he was a product of his age of his time and he's not the only one he's the catalyst let's say he convinced paul vi to do what he did with the liturgy and but there are there's a whole movement behind him it's just the spirit of the age of spirit of the world that he crystallized and gained enough power to overcome the liturgy of the church in many significant ways many people like to talk about dance bishop uni as as as a freemason perhaps he was perhaps he wasn't my own opinion is that really we need to judge his work on their fruits that is to say the liturgical reforms should be judged on liturgical criteria not on personal criteria or ad hominem criteria in terms of who made them i think pope paul or saint paul vi says he is was again a very very very sincere pope i don't think he set out to destroy the liturgy or to destroy the church that would be almost unthinkable but he seems [Music] not to have foreseen the effects of the reforms particularly the detergent reforms he signed off i think it needs to be said very clearly that the second vatican council didn't want what we know today as eucharistic prayer two or any of the other particular modern liturgical forms they wanted a renewal of people praying the liturgy of connecting with it of it being the source and summit of their christian lives we don't have to cling to the modern forms if they're no longer working the whole point of the new mass was that we were going to get the youths back to the church you're going to fill it up with the utes right and i look around the novus ordo mass the more new massey the parish was the older the the median age of the congregation the the the fewer children there were you know and the more traditional the more latin mass you'd f you'd say the median age was something like 24 and they all had a dozen kids and biologically i don't even know how that's possible but they did it and i thought oh pardon my i don't mean to be disrespectful but you boomers are telling me a millennial how you're going to get the youths back to church perhaps you ought to listen to us because what we are doing is is going to the traditional liturgy it's not just the lesson it's the whole atmosphere and many things contribute to that and it cannot be reproduced in the nervous order because the nose order is the product of an entire way of thinking about the liturgy which puts the emphasis in a completely different place so it's about understanding it's about hearing it's about participating vocally it's about participating with your gestures you know whether you're standing up or kneeing down shaking hands making acclimations all those sorts of things now there's nothing necessarily wrong with all that i i can understand what they were trying to do and i did it myself for the first 30 years of my life but i experienced something different which was it deeply exciting i think it was part of the culture of the 1960s there was this idea that everything old had to be thrown aside had to be jettisoned and everything new had to be tried and for whatever reason the church decided to do the same thing but i think we're far enough into the experiment to realize it failed i do not want to put myself forward as some expert of the documents of some some canon lawyer as a theologian i am not i am but a lay catholic looking at the effect of the second vatican council and it has been a disaster the things that they set out to do increase participation bring the youths back into the church it just didn't happen the opposite happened and so now it would seem if we have let these very radical people lead lead things for a while perhaps we ought to now listen to the people who had urged caution who have been vindicated every single step of the way i was reading a letter today from a young man and he wrote a lovely piece in his prayer journal thanking my husband who didn't live long enough to see the fruits of his labors but he was so grateful to him and he called my husband his spiritual grandfather and he said that many many generations now will continue to have this beautiful mass because of the hard work that john and i and many many others did just to keep this tradition going so that's where my hope lies in the young people we had 150 people there just four maybe four years ago and we're now up to over 400. my gosh so many young families my median age is 16. i'm the old guy in my congregation i'm 55. there are some who are older but really we're few and far between truly it's 40 year olds 30 year olds 20 year olds and i'm amazed the number of high school boys coming on their own when it comes down to it the latin mass is not going away [Music] young people young families young adults find here uh the source and summit of their christian life and mission they find here what the second vatican council wanted them to find in the liturgy this is slightly ironic in one sense those of us who live the traditional liturgy or who participate regularly in celebrations of it see the true conscious active and fruitful participation of people just as the council desired the right hasn't changed but the level of participation and engagement the empowerment that these people find for christian life and mission the the heroic witness of so many young catholic families attached to the traditional liturgy in having many children and bringing them up in a secular world according to catholic doctrine and and life you know these people are not fomenting division in the church they're not creating a sect they're getting on with with the business of of bringing christ into their families and into the world and they're a powerful witness [Music] uh [Music] [Music] is [Music] there [Music] foreign [Music] oh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] yes [Music] boys [Music] [Music] these oh [Music] oh [Music] r [Music] pope francis is cracking down on what he says is a divide within the catholic church a bombshell of a law titled guardians of the tradition bishops will also no longer be allowed to form any new pro-latin mass groups within their diocese it limits and restricts the celebration of the traditional latin mass and will francis's decree bring about the unity that he seeks throughout the church [Music] is [Music] [Applause] is [Music] see is [Music] is [Music] yes [Music] so [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] jesus [Music] is [Music] foreign [Music] is [Music] is [Music] is is [Music] is [Music] one [Music] is [Music] foreign [Music] you

Channel: Mass of the Ages: The Latin Mass Trilogy

Views: 271,810

Keywords: mass of the ages episode 2, mass of the ages, mass of the ages part 2, mass of the ages documentary, second vatican council, holy mass, daily mass today, lex orandi lex credendi, traditional latin mass vs novus ordo, annibale bugnini, archbishop lefebvre, vatican ii, catholic mass, latin mass vs novus ordo, mass today, sensus fidelium, sspx, michael knowles, taylor marshall, pope francis, Dom Alcuin Reid, Desiderio Desideravi, novus ordo, sunday mass today, fsspx

Id: 8y1cABhLc2o

Length: 71min 50sec (4310 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2022