Online Article in the Wall Street Journal….

…on the Latin Mass. And quite favorable to it! The article is unusually well informed and feautures a photograph of the congegation of St. Josaphat’s. Queens! Our author also relies on the witness of a number of people who have been involved in the Traditional Mass in our (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut) region in various capacities: not just in the congregation but also in the schola. Indeed, these individuals have partcipated in and to a great extent made possible many events sponsored by the Society of St. Hugh of Cluny.

The Power of the Latin Mass

My one critique would be that the article tends to focus on externals, the subjective experiences of individuals and nonessential customs (like the use of veils by women) and not the real reasons all this is happpening in the first place – at the cost of such great efforts by the Traditionalist Catholics over the years. Illustrating this problem, the article concludes with the opinions of a “liturgical expert,” Timothy O’Malley :

Some of the distinctive features of the Latin Mass can be applied to the new Mass, according to Timothy O’Malley, an expert on liturgy who teaches at the University of Notre Dame. He says that elements such as Gregorian chant have become more common since they were encouraged by Pope Benedict XVI. Whatever the fate of the Latin Mass, Mr. O’Malley predicts, celebrants of the new Mass will give renewed attention to “the material or aesthetic dimension of liturgical worship…symbols, images, materiality, processions, all the things that are integral to liturgy.”

This will be easier, he says, with the rise of a generation of priests for whom questions such as the use of Latin are no longer linked to ideological battles. The fight over the Latin Mass “is the last of the liturgy war fights that we’re going to have,” Mr. O’Malley said.

So elements of the Traditonal Mass can be “tacked on” to the Novus Ordo. But this has been happening since the beginnings of the New Mass without any gaining any traction. And hasn’t Pope Francis also expressly condemned the “reform of the reform” of the Novus Ordo? Indeed, the very word (“ROTR”) cannot be used! As Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston decreed on September 1:

“The rubrics of the Roman Missal of 1962 are not to be added to the celebration of Mass according to the current edition of the Roman Missal of 1970.” 1)

Pope Francis has recently launched a super-ideological struggle against the Latin Mass – in such a context, it’s hard to see how “the use of Latin (will) no longer (be) linked to ideological battles.” And, as a matter of principle, how will celebrants of the New Mass give renewed attention to “the material or aesthetic dimension of liturgical worship…symbols, images, materiality, processions, all the things that are integral to liturgy” when the entire sense of the New Mass is a denial of this dimension, its symbols and images? As was so eloquently described in Alfred Lorenzer’s Das Konzil der Buchhalter – already in 1981.

1. Traditional Latin Masses to end in some Houston parishes but continue in others, Cardinal DiNardo says