"To work for the eternal benefit of every area of life"

Here is a quick translation of an interesting article I read today in Messa in Latino .  It is in fact an editorial published by Radicati nella Fede (Rooted in the Faith). The translation may contain a few mistakes, but it was done in some haste.  I ought to be getting on with other things, such as the ironing.

“Summorum Pontificum: A double-edged sword

Don’t worry, we do not want to criticise the Holy Father’s document, we only want to say that it can be used in different ways, depending on people’s intentions.

Indeed, we have witnessed a strange phenomenon, these past five years: everyone, or nearly everyone, has appealed to Summorum Pontificum, whether those who wanted the return of the tradition of Catholicity to the churches, or those who wanted to obstruct it, to prevent it from disturbing the new process of violent modernisation which had been introduced nearly half a century ago.

We had already stated this in July 2007. Enthusiasts began to celebrate in the Vetus Ordo (the traditional Mass), rejoicing in the liberalisation miraculously wrought by Benedict XVI, and the curias intervened to say that what they were doing was not the real intention of the Holy Father. Let us all spare ourselves the shilly-shallying of that time, with the bitter disputes as to what was a “private Mass” and what wasn’t: it reached the point of claiming that priests were free to celebrate the “old” Mass alone, behind closed doors, with, at the most, one well-trained server … the more private, the more likely to die out, it has to be said! … it reached the point of requiring the details of everyone who requested and attended the traditional Mass, contrary to “privacy”; they tried to forbid catechesis and preaching. All this was done by referring to various juridical quibbles in the papal document: to juridical quibbles, not to the substance.

Then they decided to discredit the traditional faithful behind the scenes, with the magic words … “They are disobedient”, without providing any further details.

In a Church where chaos reigns over everything, where very few now accept all the truths of the Creed without exclusion, where the Commandments are accepted or rejected as one pleases, where parish priests can hardly ask anything of the faithful any more, for fear of being subjected to public judgment, where the Pope is criticised according to personal taste (sympathetic/antipathetic), where even in the confessionals the moral law is often made up by the priest on duty at the time, who is more or less “open” to the new and urgent needs of human life, it is very strange that the only ones who are “disobedient” are the priests and faithful who love Tradition!

Is it not that the question of obedience is brought up only to stop the return to Tradition? How many faithful have been scared off like this, by hissing in their ears, “Watch out! They are disobedient”? But have those who have hissed in this way subsequently taken care of their listeners’ souls? We fear not; their only desire was that of detaching them from Tradition.

It is a thing that remains the central point of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, the substance of it: “The traditional Mass was never abolished”. This is the clear point. It is necessary to start from this in order to understand one another. The traditional Mass is not a concession, it is a reality, it forms part of the life of the Church. Hence it is a matter of justice not to stop it, this Mass of all time, not to impede its fruits, either by the explicit means of prohibitions, or by those crafty methods of instilling doubts.

It was never abolished. So leave it free to work for the eternal benefit of every area of life. It was never abolished, it has been the Mass of centuries and centuries of Christianity, it has made the saints of the Church … and so, what are you afraid of? Yes, what are you afraid of? If the faith of the Church is the faith of all time, why be afraid of the Mass of all time? Unless someone thinks that the faith changes in accordance with the particular era; but this is another story; it is called “modernism”; it is a beautiful, good heresy – or, on the contrary, it is the same as all the heresies.

And so, the person who thinks it is necessary to modernise the faith is the disobedient one: and this is disobedience, the unique and most serious disobedience: the disobedience not only against human laws, but against the faith.”





Picture from blog.adw.org (The Archdiocese of Washington) via Google Images