Have you been to a local novus ordo mass lately?
Have you been to a traditional Latin Mass lately, the most beautiful experience this side of Heaven?
Can you tell any difference between the two?
I know this is a very stupid question, but it has to be asked...
If you have attended the traditional Latin Mass, then why go back to the novus ordo, a concoction created by a Freemason "archbishop" by the name of Bugnini?
The following article from crisismagazine.com and written by Dr. Peter A. Kwasniewski, explains the responsibility parents have to raise in, and expose their precious children to the liturgy of the ages, the TL Mass that created uncountable saints and martyrs.
Indicating that the way we pray (worship) is the way we believe...
Sometimes We Should Not Try to “Fix” the Local Parish - Crisis Magazine
"Auguste Meyrat’s article “How to Save the Music at Mass” rightly sounds a clarion call for restoring better music at Mass through taking the entire question of music seriously to begin with (which includes paying at least some of the musicians what their knowledge, training, and ability justly deserve). As one who has been singing in and directing choirs for decades, I can only say, “Hear, hear!”
I take issue, however, with a significant component of Meyrat’s argument. He noted that he once attended the traditional Latin Mass and reveled in the “exquisite music [that] lifted the souls in the congregation.” Yet, he later judged it better to go back to his local parish, to the “Mass of the Boomers” with “frequently cheesy” music, because “there’s something to be said about going to Mass with one’s actual neighbors.” And, with a lot of work, one might eventually achieve “suitable music at Mass.”
In a spirit of fraternal conversation, I’d like to suggest that this path may, in fact, be not only difficult but dangerous and that families should think twice before pursuing it.
Children change everything. This is a truth we ponder many times in our lives. First, Christians celebrate each year the coming of a child—the Child, Emmanuel, God with us, the Word made flesh—the infant, the boy, the youth, the man, on Whom all of reality hinges, who is our head, our cornerstone, our deliverer, our life. The annunciation, conception, and birth of this child certainly changed everything in the world; and, in spite of the constant battering of unbelief against the walls of the Church, His advent among us will never cease to purify and polarize mankind until the end of time.
Closer to home, whenever a man and a woman unite in marriage, God intends to change their lives by the advent of their child. By welcoming the child from His hands, they begin a long journey of maturing into their calling as husband and wife, mother and father, and, eventually, grandmother and grandfather.
Parents face difficult decisions as the children grow up. Before, the man and the woman may not have thought much about what movies they were watching, what music they were listening to, what influences they allowed into their lives; but now they might start questioning their habits and trying to improve them.
As much as newborns turn their parents’ lives upside down, new challenges arise when children are expected to begin their education. Is homeschooling the way to go? Is the local Catholic school an option? What about online curricula? As the surrounding society becomes more demented and even parochial schools turn out to be lukewarm or heterodox, Catholic parents who want their children to know and love the Lord and practice the Faith usually reach the conclusion that education must be done in the home, in keeping with the divine right and duty parents have not only to beget children but also to educate them. And keeping children at home for their education definitely changes everything.
Likewise, once children are part of our lives, we need to think more carefully about the liturgy we attend week in, week out. We know how important Sunday is: it is the Dies Domini, the Day of the Lord. We also know how important is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, where we give perfect worship to God through Christ and receive His most holy Body as the divinizing food for our journey. Faithful Catholics intuitively know just how important it is that Sundays and Holy Days be properly set apart, solemnized with reverent, mystical, nourishing, and edifying liturgy. We have a duty to seek this out for ourselves. But, more to the point, we have a duty to seek it out for our children.
Up to a point, one can “out-catechize” the misunderstandings arrived at by children who are judging simply on the basis of sights and sounds. But it is an uphill battle every step of the way when the mainstream form of worship transmits a message contrary to that of any traditional catechism published in the past 500 years. In fact, it’s worse: the liturgy cannot even harmonize with the models of worship given by God Himself to His people, which all Christian liturgies deliberately echoed—until the Novus Ordo. A friend once shared an experience of his, teaching CCD at a local parish:
Today we looked at a model of the Israelites’ Tabernacle in the wilderness and drew parallels to the Church and the Mass; it was a neat exercise and they seemed to be getting into it. But then we went to the CCD Mass and the parallels were messed up by the versus populum celebration, clericalization of the laity, and verbose profanation of sacred time. It seemed to have barely anything to do with the Tabernacle—and yet this is the model that informs the Temple, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Book of Revelation. With this level of disconnect, how are Catholics supposed to grasp anything Scripture says about worship?The phrase “cognitive dissonance” comes to mind—in reference to so many levels. No parent needs the headache of having to address, in a sort of liturgical postmortem, the errors, ugliness, or irreverence of a Mass one has just attended. It’s uncomfortable at best and discouraging at worst.
Another friend shared with me these insights:
When our oldest started noticing things and asking questions, and knowing that when we face our personal judgment we will be judged on how well we performed our duties of state, we had to leave the diocesan parishes. Not only were the kids getting malnourished; we were getting small doses of poison. My wife and I had the capacity to filter most of it out, but the kids do not. The only option was to correct the priests’ actions and words, but that puts us in the awkward position of possibly disrespecting the one who has spiritual authority over us. And I have a very high view of the priesthood and did not want to be in a position of regularly criticizing priests.
After we started assisting at the TLM, I noticed, as if in retrospect, that I had built up all sorts of defenses to filter out the not-so-good stuff that goes on in your average Novus Ordo Mass. We should not have to filter out stuff as we actively participate (in the proper sense) in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass; I’d say that those filters actually prevent proper participation. At this point, I find it pretty near impossible to pray at a Novus Ordo Mass, and my kids do not want to go to “the English Mass,” as they call it.My correspondent points out that children are naturally absorptive and inquisitive. We could add to this that they are naïve, innocent, and trusting. So, their experiences are teaching them something about the nature of what they are seeing and hearing far more intensely than do the experiences of older people, who have seen and heard a lot more and had time to process it and learn about things from other sources. We, perhaps, can “shut it out,” close our eyes, meditate on something beautiful we once saw or heard, or “offer it up” as a penance, but their eyes are wide open, taking it all in—and it shapes them. What they see is what they are going to believe, and if we have to keep correcting erroneous inferences from what they see, it will fracture the fundamental axiom lex orandi, lex credendi. After all, how we worship should dictate what we believe, and what we believe should be spotlessly reflected in how we worship. Children, therefore, need to be protected from imbibing contradictions.
Michael Fiedrowicz points out the huge advantage we have in assisting at the old Mass:
The exterior forms of veneration and adoration that belong to the classical rite of the Mass are the best way of guaranteeing the corresponding interior attitudes. Prayers of preparation, genuflections, and bows are not trifles that could be omitted without diminishing the faithful completion of the holy action. The interior encounter with the sacred must manifest itself outwardly, involving and being supported by an exterior form. The traditional liturgy insists that interior sentiments are plausible only if at the same time they appear in an outwardly appropriate manner. In the same way, the liturgy is aware of the formative power that the sensible can exercise on the spiritual condition.
With the number of its sacred signs, the beauty of its altars, the preciousness of its chalices and vestments, and its ceaseless expressions of reverence, the classical rite guarantees this correspondence of interior belief and exterior form. This rite is, so to speak, safeguarded against a possible discord between that which one believes and that which one sees. Here is found the perfected unity and harmony between that which is to be performed and the way in which it is performed. The classical rite does not require anything to be believed that one does not—symbolically—see. (The Traditional Mass, 214–15)We parents are responsible for the spiritual formation of our children. This is not something that can be outsourced to clergy, CCD volunteers, or parochial teachers. No matter how much formation they are getting from the outside, it is not likely to be enough, and it may not even be correct (by which I mean: in conformity with traditional Catholic doctrine). We need to ensure that the faith of children is fed from pure, uncontaminated sources; that their hope is directed primarily to heavenly realities, with worldly projects in second place; that their charity is enkindled by the sight of loving homage being paid to the Divine Lover and by the sight of other devout believers observing the proper order of charity, which puts God first.
The liturgy is for the purpose of honoring and glorifying God; but precisely by doing this well, it also nourishes us. Ironically, when liturgy is done “for the people,” it ends up not benefiting them because it does not order them rightly to God, who is our Creator and sovereign Lord. Take ad orientem worship: when the priest and the people together face the same direction, toward the East—the symbol of Christ, Sun of Justice, who will return to judge the world from the East, as He tells us in Scripture (Matthew 24:27)—we all immediately experience that the sacred liturgy is something being offered to God, without the need for any tedious explanation. It is quite intuitive. To experience ad orientem negatively, as “being ignored by the priest,” one must actually be brainwashed to some extent.
Such examples could be multiplied. Every traditional practice of the Catholic Church is catechetically powerful in this way, without the need for words. The reformed liturgy jettisons or inverts many of these symbols so that, again without the need for words, they catechize us in the opposite way, prompting us to draw false conclusions. Only those who are well catechized can intellectually resist the performative and habituating pressure of the new rites—what my correspondent referred to as “small doses of poison.”
Occasionally, one will hear Catholics say: “My family has gone to this parish for generations; I can’t abandon it, even though the liturgy is pretty bad. I will stay and work as hard as I can to improve things.” They fail to realize that in maintaining this attitude they are holding their children hostage to the hope that things will, in fact, improve—which may or may not be realistic and, given the scope of episcopal corruption and incompetence and the ubiquity of liturgical abuse in the Church, is far more likely to be unrealistic; meanwhile, the children are being malformed at this parish right now and for as many years as it may take to achieve the better conditions about which their parents dream.
Acting this way is arguably a violation of the parents’ moral duty to give children the best faith formation they can, here and now, which necessarily centers on rightful divine worship. If anything, parents should act decisively with the good of their children foremost in mind, which takes precedence over the vaguer and more remote good of their territorial parish. Again, it has to do with the order of charity: the good of my children takes precedence over the good of fellow parishioners who are not dependent on me in the same way.
We need to be on our guard against the subtle pride of activism. Talented and energetic people can easily fall into the trap of believing that they are the special “agents” God has raised up to “save” the local Novus Ordo. They need to realize that they will, in fact, do more good for the Church by developing a deeper interior life with the aid of the traditional Latin Mass than by exhausting themselves trying to repair the irreparable.
There is only one way to find healing. A Mass that we know will be sound, prayerful, formal, orthodox, and beautiful (or at least silent)—because it is utterly traditional and totally stable in content and manner of execution—is a liturgy to which we can gladly surrender ourselves, with no filters. We can let ourselves go; we can rest in the prayer of the Church, enjoy a poison-free banquet. We will then be achieving, perhaps for the first time in our lives, that “full, conscious, and active participation” in the name of which the Catholic universe was carpet-bombed in the 1960s.
One of the longest-lasting ways children change everything is that they make you think—regularly—about their future. How will they respond to the grace of God? What will their vocations be? As difficult as it is on the human level to give away a child to the Lord as a priest, friar, monk, or nun, all Catholic parents should be praying that one or more of their children receive such an immense grace, if the Lord wills it. Nothing could be better for your children to choose, for their own sanctification and eternal happiness; nothing is more important in the life of the Church than holy clergy and religious, who represent the “head” and “heart” of the Mystical Body of Christ. There will never be a renewed and healthy Church without an enormous number of good priests and religious.
Where are these vocations coming from today? To a surprising extent, they are fostered in communities centered on the traditional Mass. It is precisely those young men and women who fall in love with prayer and the worship of God who are most likely to respond generously to an invitation to give their lives completely to Him; after all, the liturgy is the basic “work” all priests and religious do “for a living.” Parents who sincerely desire to foster openness to priestly and religious vocations will find no better way of doing it than by frequenting the same ancient Latin liturgy within which vocations flourished for so many centuries.
Two things are necessary, then: begging the Lord for vocations, and bringing up young people in an environment well suited to responding to His call. A parish that I once attended, run by the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, shows both elements. Whenever Benediction is held, everyone prays together: “Lord, send us priests. Lord, send us holy priests. Lord, send us many holy priests and religious vocations.” Thanks be to God, this parish, in the past sixteen years, has given to the Church eight young ladies as nuns.
Children need many things from their parents. They need our time and loving attention; our guidance and encouragement; our teaching and sharing of what we have learned; and our good, consistent example. They need us to do them the favor of establishing clear boundaries and enforcing a reasonable discipline. But within this complex role of parenting, nothing we do for our children will be more important than bringing them up in the Catholic Faith. And within the Catholic Faith, nothing is more important than the greatest act of prayer ever given to man: the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, in its grace and truth. Parents cannot give a greater gift to their children than a formative exposure to and a lifelong love for the Mass of the Ages.
Ultimately, the only satisfying, reliable, and long-term answer to the question implicit in Meyrat’s title, “How to Save the Music at Mass,” is simple, but too few want to hear it: we save the music by saving the traditional Latin Mass, for which the greatest music was composed, in which it is totally and naturally at home, and by which God is glorified and, yes, our souls (including the children’s souls) are lifted up to God—His glory and our edification being the twin purpose of having any music at Mass at all, as St. Pius X taught in Tra le Sollecitudini."
Author
End of article...
Pray for strength and honor!
Viva Cristo Rey! Bl. Fr. Miguel Pro, Fr. Emil Kapaun and Fr. Vincent Capodanno, pray for us...
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle...
St. Joseph pray for us!!
Gene DeLalla
