What happened to the Mass after Vatican II? —with Fr. Dwight Longenecker

one i'm cameron o'hearn director of the mass of the aegis trilogy and uh what we do is about once a month we will just have a casual show where we bring on a priest an expert someone who can kind of unpack something to do with the latin mass we like to go deep and uh you know deep and wide with topics to do with the latin mass and uh we do this once a month so if you want to you know get notified when we're doing these things you can subscribe do all the stuff on youtube and instagram you can find us at mass of the ages and then twitter and facebook at liturgyfilm i hope you guys enjoyed episode one of mass of the ages uh we will be announcing you know release dates for episodes two and three um in the future and thanks for joining us uh please leave your comments and questions below and we'll get to as many as we can today i'm joined by father dwight longnecker and we're going to talk today about what happened to the mass after vatican 2. neither of us are experts but i think what we know is we at least know that the misconceptions are not true which is vatican ii created the new mass it didn't the new mass didn't roll off the shelf of vatican ii there was an important period of time about five years of assembling the new mass by the concilium that was commissioned by paul vi and a lot of catholics just think vatican ii and then new mass but they forget this this middle step which was this concilium so we're going to get into what changed and get his opinions on why and then also what does mass look like at father dwight long and equals parish so father would you mind introducing yourself and letting us know what parish life looks like at your parish yeah um i think everything is all these kind of discussions are really valuable within context because it's so easy to take things out of context and therefore misunderstand um really what they're rooted in and where they came from and my own background is that of evangelical fundamentalism i was brought up in a very fundamentalist bible church i went to um the rabidly anti-catholic bob jones university um victor college and while i was there i became an anglican and um felt the cult of england uh and loved c.s lewis and j.r tolkien and tsla and all those english writers um and the opportunity came up for me to go to england to study for the anglican priesthood so off i went um in my early twenties um to study theology in oxford and train as an anglican priest during this time i became much more catholic in my understanding of the sacraments and understanding of the church and understanding of church history so i ended up as an anglican priest very much on the um sort of catholic side of anglicanism for those of you who know anglicanism you know that it's possible to be almost presbyterian anglican and also to be an almost uh catholic anglican within the anglican church it's a big tent and i was one more and more on the catholic end and by the time i had my own parish in the anglican church some 15 years later um i consider myself to be a catholic but in the anglican church and um my spiritual director who was the abbot of the local benedictine monastery catholic benedictine monastery said well i he said very kindly he says i i appreciate that you want to be a catholic in the anglican church he said but we catholics did define catholic a bit differently than you do so he sort of very gently and kindly in an english way put me in my place and then when the anglican church was in the midst of debating the um issue of women's ordination to the priesthood in the late 1980s and early 1990s i and about seven or eight hundred other anglican pre-church of england priests decided to leave the anglican church and become catholic so my my family by this time i was married with four young children sorry two young children and um we i resigned from the anglican ministry and became a catholic in 1995. i was then a catholic layman for ten years in the in the in england before the door opened for me to come back to america to be um ordained as a catholic priest here so my approach to liturgy therefore my approach to parish life is conditioned by my evangelical upbringing which had lots of strength which i still try to affirm um even though i don't deny what they deny and also a lot of good things from the anglican tradition which again i seek to affirm and but not deny what they deny which has always been my approach to my spiritual journey to affirm more and more of the historic faith um but not to deny what the protestant reformers denied as they moved away from the catholic faith so this has been my journey and therefore explains a lot of my approach to uh liturgy to pastoral life to my life as a catholic pastor um to my understanding of the catholic church um and its hierarchy and its um bureaucracy and so forth and if that's the case i have to plead guilty to also bringing from my protestant background a certain amount of i think proper um critique or attitude towards the hierarchy as such you know because in the protestant background we were trained to think that uh all the popes were like the borgia pokes and all the if you wore um the red robes of a cardinal you were epitomizing the scarlet woman in in the book of revelation you know and all that kind of stuff so um while i turn away from that and turn towards um loyalty to the catholic church as a catholic priest of course um i also retain i think a certain amount of um healthy skepticism from those other days towards towards the catholic hierarchy and some of the worst the negative aspects of our of our tradition in our history so i hope that puts it into context a little bit for you yeah i think that um you know vatican one talked about the authority of the pope but you know left some questions unanswered uh vatican ii obviously dealt with many different things mainly teaching the faith to modern man and revised liturgy i think we just need a vatican three to help us understand and get past this ultra montanism that um everything the pope says or does is uh catholic and should be followed um there's a lot of confusion out there and uh i heard a priest say recently that uh he thinks ultramountainism is going to die with his next generation um so is that what you mean when you say like healthy um skepticism of the church hierarchy like what does church authority say about this or that how do you define you know church teaching that kind of thing i i don't go into specifics too much i'm just admitting that i'm guilty probably from my also my background before my own family's background and evangelical fundamentalism was seven generations of mennonites and amish okay now these are um protestants who were so extreme they were persecuted by calvin right and we're familiar with the um amish mennonite mentality which is very sort of some uh ant antics anti-establishment you know and so no that's that's kind of in my bloodstream uh i don't specify it too much and try to pin it down into this is infallible and that's not and that's not infallible and so forth but just a general kind of um resistance to any kind of bureaucracy and authority structure which ever tends to impose things on the little guy um whether it's the federal government or whether it's the vatican or whether it's the diocese or whether it's the state or whatever it is um i have that kind of natural resistance um you know that don't tread on me um and i think that is is not unhealthy i think it can move in unhealthy directions but i think it's not unhealthy to have that kind of sense of you know that squinty-eyed clint eastwood look like yeah what are you really about buddy and i think that's okay what does mass look like at your parish father well considering that i'm coming from an evangelical and then an anglican background this has influenced the way i celebrate mass and the way i'm a pastor so i am very concerned for our people to understand for instance the scriptures and to love the scriptures and to have parish bible studies and have in our parish school a very um thoroughgoing understanding of the sacred scriptures and and the study of the sacred scriptures which would come from my evangelical background of course but also um the liturgy is celebrated um i won't say in a high anglican style although that has influenced me and um if anybody's been to the masses according to the anglican use in the ordinary parishes they will see an anglo-catholic form of worship which is very ritualized and has beautiful vestments and wonderful musical and choral tradition um one of the things that i did after coming here 11 years ago was to actually build we actually actually had to build a new church and so i made sure that it was built in a beautiful traditional style so our lady of the rosary church in greenville now is a beautiful romanesque church just built five years ago and if any viewers are interested then go to our website our lady rose olr greenville there's a an online tour they can take there um and so the architecture and the arts there is a wonderful contribution to our liturgy i'm just uh looking that up maybe we can put on the screen um do you now getting really nitty gritty do you celebrate audrientum do you um incorporate chant uh what what are the nerdy little details yeah we we do celebrate the masses uh odd orientem and a good number of our people um would prefer to receive communion kneeling and on the tongue i'm uh i don't impose things on on my folks and when i came to the parish it was very much a mainstream what i call am church you know they had a sort of christian rock band up front and they were singing um folk songs and all that sort of stuff that was their tradition for maybe 15 or 20 years tradition it's so funny i get what you're saying that has become a tradition you know um it's not traditionalists but it's become their tradition um and they're they were as some of them were as attached to that as traditionalists are attached to the to the um extraordinary for the mass so anyway that was their tradition so we um gradually moved now to a much more traditional form of worship although we don't celebrate the latin mass um we do celebrate the uh novus ordo in a very traditional form without oriental celebration the covet has kind of devastated our musical program because um choir practices were forbidden and so forth so we're building that absolutely we have a beautiful girls scola um and we encourage the girls to sing in the choir and the boys to serve the altar so we have ultra boys um and then we encourage the girls and the young women to sing in the choir and they sing a beautiful classical repertoire of hymns and um sacred polyphony and gregorian chant to um for our high mass on sundays so this is what you know intrigued me to you uh a year ago i remember watching you on different shows and you were talking about how masses conducted at your parish and uh up to that point i had been to one in my life that was authorientem one novus ordo mass it was authorientum and i just went to one more yesterday so i've been to a grand total of two nova sort of masses that were authorientum that were careful with the rubrics um that had an altar rail where you could kneel and receive on the tongue and uh that's really bizarre to me because it sounds like what you're doing is is trying to do the nova sort of mass in the most traditional way you can and it seems like your mass would map on with what the document on the liturgy of the second vatican council sacra sanctum concilium actually says that's what i like to think and in all the liturgy wars i i would defend what we're doing and say well folks i've just read sacrosanct and concilium i've come into the church as a convert um i never i never i've never knew the um pre-vatican to mass although of course i've been to latin masses but it's never part of my heritage and part of my tradition or part of my personal spirituality i'm not against it i'm all for it if people that's if people want to do that but my approach was to read sacrosanct and concilium as part of my training as a catholic priest and i had to sort of do some retraining after becoming an anglican priest and to say well this is very close to what i'm doing in the anglican church and this is very close to the to what the catholic church is recommending and therefore this is what has um influenced and shed light on the way we try to celebrate the mass in our parish what would you say to priests out there i i get i get frustrated that i can't when i'm traveling and you know there's no sort of masses i can go to three i can choose between three and all of them all of them seem to be patterned after the priest's personality and it's different depending on where you go but then i i see priests like you i see priests like a close priest friend of mine who celebrates novus ordo very reverently audrientum high altar all that um what would you say to priests the 99.9 percent of priests out there who just are i don't know they're just they're not they don't seem to be in the spirit of vatican 2 that's a weird way to say it there are a lot of problems here and uh i asked um an older priest one time who was trained in i guess the 1970s and 80s i said father and he shares my views on liturgy i said what is going on i said why do catholic priests not seem to understand what liturgy is about okay because i'm coming from an anglican background correct he said let me tell you what my training was like in seminary he said and the liturgy professor got us together in his living room and sat around the coffee table he put on a kind of ethnic stall and brought out some some pottery vessels with some wonder bread from from the supermarket and a bottle of you know supermarket wine and he said and he was making up prayers and then he had the roman cat the roman you know the the prayer of consecration which was valid but the rest of it he sort of made up and it was impromptu prayer time a pre-impromptu prayer meeting basically and he said gentlemen he said by the time you ordained priest this is what the mass will consist of home masses with little old ladies who are the only ones left okay and so he said this priest said to me so me and my buddies went to the library and we trained ourselves in liturgy okay so this was the the turn the era of um the the end of i guess the middle to the end of john paul's pontificate um and and independent benedict so the training has been terrible and i like i liken it to um for instance uh let's say you were training to be a dentist you know and then you go to the dentist and he said open your mouth uh what's that hard white thing in there you know he would take it out i don't know what it is i don't know what it is but it hurts okay right so so in other words the training that some of these men have received has been so lamentable um and when it comes to art and architecture i know we were able to build a beautiful church because i lived in europe for 25 years and so i visited these places i was an art student for a couple of years i have family members who are sacred artists so i kind of knew a little bit more about what to do i've asked some of our recent seminarians hey guys do you ever do any training in art in seminary no nothing like that okay so what are you doing philosophy philosophy philosophy philosophy theology theology theology wonderful great that's i'm not against that but do you ever do any art do you ever study the history of sacred architecture do you ever study the history of sacred iconography no some one of them said a woman comes in who's an abstract art modern artist and she talks to us about art for a bit okay so these are guys going to be building churches and renovating churches and they're not given the proper training okay they don't understand our sacred tradition um sorry i'm getting a little bit heated about it but that's that's the root of a lot of the problem that our priests themselves have not been trained in liturgy i don't know whether you know but i've actually written a book called letters on liturgy in which i try to express my um some of my views and one of the things i've said in there is that although i celebrate the novus ordo in in my opinion every seminarian inc in in seminary should learn how to celebrate the latin mass why because even if he's not going to be celebrating it in his parish it's part of his his history it's part of the tradition it's part of the rootedness of his of his priesthood so i mean this this should be a no-brainer you know this should be something that um anybody does who's actually trying to train um for uh for any profession to be able to know the history and the background and the roots of what you're actually trying to do that's right yeah um i think you know after vatican ii there's you know two extremes people fall into one is um to throw out vatican ii entirely to throw out any kind of future reform of the latin mass entirely full stop um as if you know benedict xvi says that would make the mass kind of a museum where you just it never changes no matter a thousand years from now now i would i would caution that by saying i think the liturgy should change less over time and becomes more solid you know like cardinal newman's idea of a of an acorn and an oak tree but uh the other extreme is to say that there was a church before vatican ii that was had this certain liturgy and now there's this church after vatican ii which is now the correct way to view the church and they they forget the traditions we have and they're not reading what to do in their churches with their church architecture what to do in the mass uh uh what to um you know counsel their parishioners to do well one of the things about this is the is this catch phrase the um hermeneutic hermeneutic of continuity um i actually and this is where i will probably disagree with some hardcore um latin mass aficionados i actually believe that the new liturgy it does does have continuity with the old and that it's a proper continuity which has been established by the authority of the catholic church which if we were if we're not if we're catholics we must recognize um however i do have a lot of disagreements with the way that the the nervous order is celebrated in norfolk churches around the world which as you said is open to many different abuses and many different sort of crazy stuff going on um and believe that if we were to celebrate mass according to read sacrosanct and concilium and celebrate mass informed by the la and celebrate the novice order informed by the latin mass we would have and of course every priest will say that we would have more people doing what i'm doing but i don't pretend to be the expert in it but i do believe that what we've done has been a humble and a simple way for an ordinary parish to to be able to um be consistent with the church and loyal to the church but also loyal to the tradition i need to make a t-shirt for myself that says uh extreme latin mass aficionado and wear that proudly i like that um it's a good t-shirt yeah yeah put it in your ball cap that's right uh yeah my my my opinion would be that if you read sacred sanctuarium with tradition and with history um this is why 2 000 plus bishops voted for it was because yes we we can have some conservative adjustments to the the mass of the ages for example like offering some of the prayers in english like the prayers directed to the people um the readings that kind of thing um but it's written in very conservative language like for example let me read this this paragraph sticks out to me whenever i think about what happened after it's paragraph 23 of sacrosanct unconcilium and it says there must be no innovations unless the good the church genuinely and certainly requires them and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing so i think these kinds of paragraphs are why you had over 2000 bishops saying yes i sign off on this it's it's good it's traditional and only like six dissenting from it but then my frustration is what happened after vatican ii and i'd be interested to hear your opinions on you know you're an obedient priest from everything i hear and you're celebrating the mass according to the rubrics um you can't change the rubrics but if the if you could change the rubrics is there anything in the novus ordo miss a from paul the sixth from the concilium that you wish was different in significant ways or do you think that that that's what you mean by the reform is in continuity well i i think that um from talking to priests to older priests who did celebrate the latin mass before vatican ii um they felt very restricted very often by the extremely precise rubrics um over you know numbers of crossings and genuflections and hand gestures and all the rest of it um when i was leading the retreat for the monks at clear creek monastery which was a wonderful experience um one of the guys i said tell me more about the latin mess i'd like to learn more about it he gave me one of the um booklets which priests use for the preparation for investing okay and i have to admit i mean i'm a big picture guy not another not dots a crosses into a darning eye and crossing t's kind of guy but this this thing was so restrictive it was saying things like as the cassock is um put on the right arm must be put in first therefore signifying jesus at the right hand of god the father almighty and then the left arm and it was kind of like you must say a prayer for every button you button up and it was like the cassock needs to be one and a half inches um from the floor but not more than that and the priest's socks should not be showing or something you know i mean the detail and this was not dogmatic rules it was just guidelines set up for celebrating the latin mess i'm thinking i could never do this this is and i think a lot of the older priests said these things these rubrics and these rules became too restrictive and they actually restricted um what while they enforced a kind of uniformity it also was very restrictive on the priests and on the celebration of the mass in ways which um in the worst instances made the mass into a kind of um [Music] automatic sacrament machine i'm not i'm looking glass was here but you know people were and people would come into mass and you've heard the stories stood in the back of mass and say the rosary because they didn't know what was going on up there because priests would the priest was going through all the actions and it became this kind of legalistic thing for a lot of people which did not have the life and the spirit and the love and the reverence in it which i find when i see the latin mass celebrated today so i think there's all kinds of abuses okay there can abuses be abuses in that direction too yeah it reminds me i read a read a line from saint john of the cross and when he made his final vows as a carmelite he said he his will felt like a corpse because um he realized that to be a saint um his will needed to die and he was called to perfect obedience i think a lot of priests would say with the traditional latin mass you had all these rubrics but it's it seems like the holier a priest is yeah there was priests who did whatever and probably there's abuses in that direction but i think uh it it seems to me like an opportunity for obedience that you don't and this this is what was so lost after vatican 2 the priest does not create the liturgy and so when you have everything written down it it guides him to offer the sacrifice whereas in the new mass even as it's written even if you're following the rubrics it gives a lot of uh there's like odd libido i don't think i said that correctly like say this or in similar words and it there's so many options that it gives a priest he's almost like a and benedict the 16th lamented this it makes him like a programmer of the liturgy and you can if you just calculate how many different kinds of novus ordo masses there could be on any given day even with following the rubrics it against it into astronomical numbers because of all the options so i would almost think perhaps you're correct but have we gone too far in the other direction oh yeah and i can remember reading spirit of the liturgy when i was still an anglican priest and ratzinger says the liturgy is not the place for creativity and i was going what because i in the anglican church there was an awful lot of creativity and innovation that's as you say um which i was moving away from but still i understood and thought that one was meant to be creative in the liturgy in order to make it relevant for people and to make it real for people to make people understand it and all this kind of good stuff um so when i read bouncing or saying that the um the liturgy is not the place for creativity i it shocked me and i had to think it through and then i came back and actually agreed with him and said actually yeah creativity in the liturgy is kind of like putting up getting a a a um you know a sharpie and putting a mustache on the mona lisa you know it's like this is this is something a heritage that's been handed down to us it's not a time for us to be creative and to be doing fun stuff and i think with that that sense of innovation the other thing is um i've found since since celebrating mass at orientum and there are three parishes in greenville where the masters are now celebrated at orientum uh hourly to the rosary where i'm pastor st mary's in greenville uh where father j scott newman is a pastor and across town at prince of peace where father chris smith is also very devoted to the um traditional latin mass um so that might be the same father chris smith i know personally interesting yeah where is he where is he located he's here in greenville as well on just on the other side of town in taylor's one of the suburbs of greenville um and um he does a wonderful job with the traditional latin mass and i mean it is it's a diocesan parish it's not fssp or something like that but they celebrate the traditional nut mess but they also celebrate the nova's zordo so he does both it is not the chris smith i know there's so many there's a lot of chris smith's and there's probably a lot of father christmas i think there are a lot of christmas i've got a handful of them for my twitter followers i think but anyway um this sense of innovation i've also found in celebrating the uh at orientum is wonderful because it's i'm praying with my people i feel that they're behind me praying with me and i'm leading them in prayer to the altar of the of the almighty the other thing is um my my first degree in college so many years ago was in speech and english and i had to do a lot of standing up and giving public doing public speaking and stuff and um i don't can't speak for everybody else but when i'm standing facing the people behind the altar and versus popular celebration i automatically go into performance mode okay it's about them looking at me and i have to make i go to my public speaking mode in which i feel that even though i try to focus on the mass and the sacrifice of the mass i still have this instinct in this field that i have to make it meaningful and get eye contact and communicate and you can do attention getting devices and all this stuff and i think that instinct i feel is probably felt by a lot of priests and why uh so often the celebration of the nervous order moves over into a kind of performance mode um and that that has been i think that's part of the instinctive problem with a lot of the innovations that have come along that the priest feels even if he's not consciously doing this he feels he has to make mass interesting for everybody or they're going to leave yeah and benedict said the same thing in spirit of the liturgy that when you have the priest facing the people you have this closed circle where the priest feels like the entire celebration rests on his shoulders as if he he needs to make like you said make sure everyone is having this spiritual experience and it becomes very exactly and all of this all of this goes back of course to what we believe and um i think it's not an exaggeration to say that the major problem with the spirit or the attitude of vatican ii about the liturgy is that the mass was transformed from being uh the emphasis was transformed from from it being the sacrifice of our lord on the cross being represented um before heaven to being a family meal and this is why if it's a family meal then everybody needs to gather around the table that's why the churches were built in the round that's why the altars were put in the middle because that was the whole emphasis this is about fellowship now this is about a family meal and underneath all of that and i'm sorry to get again get on the soapbox here but underneath all of that is a deep distrust and a deep disbelief in the actual events of the incarnation and the res the death and resurrection of our lord and what happened and i've talked about this in my book immortal combat what happened was in the modern age a lot of modernist theologians began to have trouble with um this language about sacrifice and blood sacrifice and a blood atonement for your sins and in the 19th and 20th centuries they were saying learning more about ancient religions and so forth and they were saying look this is bronze age religion when people used to sacrifice do human sacrifice and and slaughter lambs and so forth in order to please the sky god we don't do that anymore we're modern people let's just quietly get rid of all that stuff put it in grandma's ecclesiastical attic as an interesting curiosity and realize that the true message of the gospel is being kind and loving to one another and making the world a better place and therefore the the sacrifice of the mass suddenly became uh shoved on one side to make way for the fellowship meal because we're all gonna be loved one another and have the fellowship of jesus which is of course is an aspect of the mass we mustn't forget that the catechism says this is a one of the aspects of of the eucharist the sacrificial meal that it is it is the it is the fellowship of the church okay it is the last supper it all is all those but the primary meaning of it being the sacrifice of our lord for our sins being offered again on the altar has been forgotten and been brushed aside to make way for the emphasis on the family meal and this emphasis is because there is a deep distrust and disbelief in the efficacy of our lord's death on the cross so theology is driving it all it's not it's not just trying to be relevant and being cool it's actually a very modernistic dismissal of the cornerstone and the kernel of our faith which is the incarnation the death resurrection ascension of our lord jesus christ one of the examples that comes to mind of um this uh d emphasis on sacrifice and this emphasis on a communal meal is actually so again we're talking about not what vatican ii said but what the church did shortly thereafter and uh after two thousand bishops voted for sanctum concilium and resounding you know support of it then there was these what i would consider uh innovations yes valid yes approved by the pope but one example would be the um the freestanding altars so that's the kindest way you can say it without saying table or this or that but so again we have in our minds no innovation must be done unless it's certainly for the good of the faithful and then the first instruction written by the concilium the committee implementing the vatican ii uh said that it is preferable that altars be freestanding and then it quotes vatican twos documents sacrosanct and chilean but sacrosanct and concilium says in the construction of new churches we should consider you know active participation it didn't say anything about removing altars then when you had the um the actual misali romanum like here's how to do the new mass it quotes that first instruction but it doesn't just mention in um in constructing churches it says also in adapting churches so then there was we've all heard stories of high altars being torn down stone masons being called and weeping because they have to tear down this priceless treasure to make room for this thing that looks like a table it's it's still an altar it's a freestanding altar but again 99 of the churches around the world seem to be built in this style and this is not a vatican ii thing as much as it's a concilium thing so would that be an example of how you think the the reforms went too far yeah there's all sorts of examples you know um of of a kind of iconoclasm that came in after the second vatican council now but i think i think also you know at the beginning of our interview i said i want to get into the context and understand the bigger picture i think we also have to try if we can to understand the mindset of a lot of catholic pastors bishops and the religious in the 1950s and the 1960s okay a lot of them and they've spoken to me personally about this a lot of them would say the 1950s was a time when the church seemed to be booming they said but as clergy we were aware that the people were locked into a kind of legalistic mindset about their faith which was do this don't do that do this don't do that make sure that you do this don't think that you get to heaven okay um and it was legalistic they did not have a real living faith which was vital in their lives they were going through the motions the priests were going through the motions that's what they felt whether it was true or not that's what they felt and that's what they saw how they saw the church and they were saying good pastors were saying we are longing for our people our priests our people our religious our nuns our brothers to actually have a living vital um relationship with the lord jesus and to live their faith in a dynamic and a new and a fresh way um and so when vatican ii came along they saw this as a great opening up like you know what's what's the phrase for opening the windows a great opening up in which they would be able to suddenly help their people to have a real relationship with the lord jesus and this brought about all of what i call puppies puppy dogs and kittens catechesis as well you know in which it was all the catechesis consisted of drawing pictures of jesus who loves you okay that's fine jesus does love you don't get me wrong it's the sacred heart of jesus it's part of catholic tradition but it all merged over therefore into this touchy-feely happy clappy type of stuff because for a good sincere reason they really didn't want their people to have a living vital relationship with the lord jesus but they saw it in the protestant churches and tried to copy the protestant churches rather than revitalizing their own tradition and saying at the heart of these traditions which have gone a bit stale and gone a bit legalistic is this relationship with lord jesus you know so in other words i'm just trying to be a little bit sympathetic and try to understand what they were trying to do they were well-meaning they were sincere they wanted good things unfortunately they had so far such poor catechesis they went off beam into you know i'm okay you're okay and psychology and all the nuns left and all the other crazy stuff that happened okay but um they they were sincere and what when well meaning and what they were trying to do but they just went about it the wrong way in my life yeah if i go back in a time machine and i'm there at vatican 2 i would be i'm not a bishop so i'd be like outside waving through the window or something but i i would be applauding what what sacrosanct and concealment is trying to do um but it's difficult like it's difficult talking about this is a it's good to change the traditional net mass when change is also associated to such a large degree with the new mass that it's been changed so drastically and when i think about changing the traditional lap mass i think we have to we have to get the new mass the nova sort of miss a in order first of all we need priests to celebrate according to the rubrics we need priests to offer it in in a sacred profound way according to the traditions of the church and then we need to pray that the church church reconsiders some of these innovations that went far beyond vatican ii and then i think we can talk about uh changes to the traditional eye masks because we need stability i i agree that's a an idealistic way of looking at it um i i actually wrote a blog post after the pope's recent moto proprio about you know restricting the latin mass and i said look folks i said we're catholics the pope has said this we need to be obedient we need to understand what the motivations for and try to understand in in and be sympathetic to what his aims and ideals are but i said the problem with the novus ordo mass is all of its ambiguity and all of its open-endedness that it can be adapted to have clowns and and and communism and whatever other freaky stuff people want to throw into the communism that's another t-shirt yep but i said the advantage of the of the flexibility and the ambiguity is that it can also be taken in a conservative direction i said for good sake you can say the whole thing in latin if you want you can celebrate out oriented have alter boys instead of multiple in unisex you know alter alter servers bring in beautiful music bring in the latin bring in for goodness sake if you want to at our parish we've added the prayer of saint michael at the end of mass you can bring in the prayers before the altar if you want to in other words because it's because it's open-ended and because there's so many alternatives traditionally minded priests can actually bring in these things and i would always advise them to do so in their parish with proper catechesis and training for their people so that they can actually not just go through legalistic routines but also actually make it part of their life of faith and make it vital for them i think so i just want to say clearly that i think priests like you and priests like holy priests i know who are um not going with the flow and not just doing the easy thing but are striving to make the liturgy more sacred i think that's really honorable um and i'd like to ask a question about if you felt uh you know like you've got arrows shot at you if you feel like a martyr in different ways for doing that but i also want to say that the difficulty with having a mass that's so adaptable is that you have a priest like you in a parish for you can do 10 years in a parish and make all these changes that can be overthrown when the next pastor comes in and there's i've hear so many stories of that where yes it's all well and good but what about i'm i'm a dad father uh we buy a house we want to settle down here's a great parish father long and ecker is doing some great stuff and then the next priest comes in father clowns and communism and uh and then it's all just and then our foundation's lost we need a solid foundation of faith on sundays and i think that's the fundamental problem now we can talk about it you gave some great advice for priests but i i speak to um families and i'd say hey a traditional latin mass is is a solid foundation because it's not going to be changed by father father clowns and communism we are um blessed in charleston diocese of south carolina in the park we don't have terms for priests so once a man is a pastor um the bishop does not move him sort of willy-nilly oh wow that's good and and so um i've been here for 11 years and um i don't see the pre the bishop at least president bishop you know yanking me up and plunking me someplace else so that's a blessing we have in the diocese of charleston that we can have some continuity of course the downside of that is if it's if it's a lousy priest you might be stuck with him for a long time so you know these things always go both ways you know so i don't know what to advise in that situation i'm not a bishop and i i sympathize with people in the pew um and i do not recommend that people continue to go church shopping and church hopping from one priest to another that that will only lead to disappointment because they'll then find out that that priest is a human too um but you know we all have to have um some patience and some loyalty within all of this and if people do find that their new priest is changing things completely um in let's say you know in a modernist direction then they might may need to find their spiritual nourishment elsewhere it might be for instance that one of the traditionalist orders like fssp or something is running a family retreat or a family um you know youth camp or something and they go off there once a year to be able to support that and be able to worship in a more traditional manner i don't have the answer and i'm i'm as a catholic i must a catholic as a convert i must admit um i'm just as distressed by some of the things i i find when i travel around the country and because i go and do parish missions and stuff and so when i see some of the abuses that are going on i can remember going to one parish for instance also i think a lot of priests who have a who want to do the right thing are kind of they're scared to implement more traditional um things because they're scared there's gonna be kickback from from their parishioners but i can remember being asked to go to one parish and and the people actually organized the parish mission and they said father will you please come and help us to worship more traditionally i said does your priest in favor of this they said yes he is but he doesn't know what to do and does not know okay and then once there are some help as well so again i'm not an expert but all i did was i said allow me to celebrate the daily mass for you every day okay and so all i did was i set up some kneelers so they could receive kneeling and on the tongue they had one of the men was an altar server for daily mass so i put him in a cassock and a surplus and i gave him some simple instruction on serving the mess and i didn't do anything radically sort of traditional i just celebrated mass in a reverent solemn traditional manner and it was the nervous order at orient and i instructed the people step by step as he went through they were ecstatic after the parish mission oh thank you father this has been such a big help i didn't even do that much but just step by step these things can be implemented and changed um if good kind of pieces is given and people are people they share with people what you're doing and why you're doing it did you experience pushback right away when you became a catholic priest and started to do mass art orientem and alter radio and all that when i was first ordered as a catholic greece i did not celebrate my salary i was working as a school chaplain and we said and wherever i went i adapted to where i was who was i had to say what to do and i was there working in a parish and the masses were first as popular there but then we switched over to that oriented and i was sympathetic to that what do you think about um so a priest could tomorrow or next sunday um certainly he could celebrate art orientum get some people mad at him uh he could incorporate more latin um what do you think about adding the prayers at the foot of the altar before the mass because that's really where the tradition came from and let's have a preparation before mass it's like a devotion but you could very easily incorporate that so you have this this gradual entry into into mass what do you think of that it could be done also um it means the the people remember an awful lot of our ordinary catholics in parishes have um they have experienced catholicism in america for the last 50 years with um you know banal music and and and all of the abuses of vatican do so to suddenly drop them in the deep end of a traditional latin mass is is unfair to them even though even though the changes of vatican do were imposed on the catholics overnight it's still not fair to do that now to those who have lived with this for 50 years so yes introducing things step by step for people if there's latin put it in the worship aid and always have a translation there so people know that they're what what it actually means um if at orientum is introduced make sure that there's a good six weeks of catechesis before you build up to it to explain what's going on there's father newman at st mary's greenville has an excellent um explanation of catechesis for at orient worship on his website and if pastors want to start doing this they can go there to learn what the reasons for how to orient them are and how to share with the people and in our experience most of most of our people except everybody has accepted it um and and thanked us for it this comment just came in our bishop ordered it a decree that all masses shall be odd orientem indirectly banning versus popular that is if that is true that is legit it's it might sound harsh to some people but i just think if you you could solve so many so i i think that the latin mass is a solid foundation i think that even when the novus ordo mass is celebrating celebrated to its highest end you're still you're still missing significant parts of the catholic faith but i also think like i said earlier i think priests like you are doing a great work and we would solve so many problems if the priest stopped facing the people like an emcee if there was mystery around the mass if communion was given on the tongue there would be so many problems that are are solved now here here's another kind of nerdy little thing um i've been thinking of recently is the the silent canon so as you know um cardinal ratzinger benedict xvi said this would be a a reform of the reform thing that could happen very soon priests could start doing this and to say the the eucharistic prayer the canon of the mass in silence and that is something i think a lot of people go to the latin mass love about the traditional at mass is the silence and mystery and it's like well you encounter god in silence that's his language so stop talking let's enter into meditation let's encounter god but in the i think i think in the rubrics as it says now that it's to be done in in an audible tone so what's your opinions on a silent canon do you agree with benedict in that regard well i haven't really thought it through that much but what strike strikes me immediately is that it's kind of weird to uh legislate to have something said in silence if it's silence it's silence um so why do you want to say what do you want to sort of say something in silence make sure that you say it secretly so that's kind of in secret silence but it's not really silence because it's saying something well i would i would be much more inclined to make sure that we integrate um significant periods of silence within the liturgy at appropriate times for the priests and for the people so that before he says the consecratory prayer which is what i try to do he actually stops and takes um some real time for silence before the um announcement of agnes day behold the lamb of god the priest in the rubrics the priest is told to kneel at that point and to genuflect at that point i tried to not only genuflect but to kneel before the altar in silent prayer before i stand to say behold the lamb of god to the people and all of our people kneel at that point so there are particular points in the liturgy which lend themselves naturally to silence and contemplation and i would be inclined to emphasize those and emphasize those aspects of silence which are natural to the liturgy at those points anyway so for instance the priest says before the confetti or on brothers and sisters um let us pause and and for to prepare to prepare to celebrate these sacred mysteries there's a time to actually allow for an extended period of silence so these times of silence are very important also before mass begins before the prayers before the altar for instance there's this time for silence in the lord's presence as well as after mass so i guess what i'm saying is i'm not that in favor of these the silent canon but for what i'm looking for silence if i uh i bet there's a lot of parishioners that would love it i'm just gonna put it out there i think a silent cannon is i hear it all the time i think a lot of a lot of people i mean it's because the thing about um a mass that yes you have moments of silence kind of put in but benedict xvi who we keep referencing says it feels artificial when it's just put in the mass and doesn't kind of grow out of the mass um organically and uh the the silent cannon be it's how we can encounter god and if the entire mass is uninterrupted loud resuscitation of prayers it's hard to go from vocal prayer to meditative prayer it's hard to have the mass really sink its roots into you because there's just noise it ends up being a lot of talking and it it seems like a flat road we often walk down like the priest is saying a prayer and we have to be tracking with him but silence allows the holy spirit i think to work in in the person at mass in a much more dynamic way what do you think about that i agree but um eucharistic adoration is different from the celebration of the sacred liturgy and eucharistic adoration is important um and silence is important in the liturgy um i think we're just quibbling a little bit about where it ought to go that's all uh say that last part again i i we agree that silence is important contemplation is important i think maybe maybe we're quibbling a little bit about exactly where the silence ought to go sure yeah and it's okay to disagree that's fine i like conversations like this where we can get a little nerdy and talk about the latin mass so a father we're coming up against our time um i did see some questions come in but uh i think some of the questions are a little bit uh uh just asked just to say something they're not really uh somebody could start a conversation so uh thank you all for joining us if you have more questions um and things that you wish i covered i like to do also weekly shows so if you if you want me to dig into one of these topics more i can certainly do that can i just before we close out um recommend my book littered letters on liturgy if people want to update to obtain it i talk about um not just not just the liturgy but also about sacred art sacred architecture and so forth um and it might um be a good read for some of the folks who are interested in all of this awesome sounds looks like he has good reviews good job good um thank you thank you so much father would you mind closing us in a prayer thanks for the invitation in the name of the father son of holy spirit amen may the lord bless you and keep you the lord make his face to shine upon you and give you his peace and may your holy guardian angels watch over you and all whom you love and be blessed in the name of the father son and holy spirit amen god bless you thank you thank you thank you for all you're doing and thanks to all the listeners god bless thank you god bless you i'll just all right peace until next

Channel: Mass of the Ages

Views: 57,678

Keywords: traditional latin mass, latin mass vs novus ordo, tridentine mass, tlm, catholic, latin mass, catholic church, mass of the ages, rad trads, vatican ii, novus ordo, holy mass, traditional catholic, lex orandi lex credendi, catholic mass, second vatican council, traditional latin mass vs novus ordo, daily mass, the daily mass, daily mass today, traditional catholicism, novus ordo mass, cameron o'hearn, pope francis, pope paul vi, fr longnecker, gregorian chant

Id: wcf5mktzbeA

Length: 54min 31sec (3271 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021