Michael Brendan Dougherty nails it:
Francis writes:
I am nonetheless saddened that the instrumental use of Missale Romanum of 1962 is often characterized by a rejection not only of the liturgical reform, but of the Vatican Council II itself, claiming, with unfounded and unsustainable assertions, that it betrayed the Tradition and the ‘true Church.’
As a factual matter, this is almost provably wrong. The majority of priests who say the traditional Latin Mass are now diocesan priests, serving in ordinary parishes. They almost all say the new liturgy, which is precisely the thing that Pope Francis deems proof of adherence to the Church.
Francis argues that the liturgical books of Pope Paul VI and John Paul II “constitute the unique expression of the lex orandi (law of prayer) of the Roman Rite.”
In 2007, Benedict XVI had proposed a rather legible principle for allowing the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass. “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.” Francis’s principle for abolishing it is simply a word-salad. What does “unique expression” even mean? It has no legal or theological substance or weight. It’s just a giant “because we said so.”
The bishops do have some power to at least preserve the permission that their priests already have to say this Mass. For now. But is this the Church progressives want? Constant henpecking and paranoia from Rome? There is so much more to say in the days and months ahead; for now it’s enough to say this is unseemly and ugly. This may be the most significant act of Francis’s pontificate; and it’s nothing more than bullying iconoclasm. He needs help.
Go here to read the rest. This is the ecclesiastical equivalent of a very angry old man yelling at a group of playing children: You kids get off my lawn!
It actually is the old man’s lawn. (Note, the Clint Eastwood character was scaring off some local thugs beating up one of his neighbors).
Here’s the shizz. The Holy See and local ordinaries do flat nothing about the degradation of worship in Roman-rite and it’s quite unremarkable for instructions from Rome to be ignored. I buttonholed my local priest in 2004 and asked him why a recent instruction from the Congregation for Divine Worship was ignored in his parish. He tells me that it was diocesan policy to ignore it because of the extra time in the service (a few minutes at most) it would take to implement it. (The instruction concerned the routinized use of eucharistic ministers, something absurd in a parish where the best attended Mass might have had 130 people present). A couple of years before that, we have an instruction from the bishop’s conference that we must all stand to receive communion; there was a period video of Bishop Tod Brown of Orange County yanking some parishioner’s arm to get him to stand. The echo of that (in that particular parish in the diocese of Syracuse) was that the administrator was subject to a formal reprimand from Bishop Moynihan for promoting kneeling and communion on the tongue (I think there was one irritated parishioner who complained).
Some years ago, Edwin Faust offered a description of his local ordinary and auxilliary and said at this point he wasn’t terribly interested in whether or not they approved of the Mass offered at the independent chapel he attended. We have bishops warring against piety. They’re begging to be ignored.