Why are the Italian bishops set to attack the Traditional Mass?

 Someone wrote recently in a friend's email: "I don’t understand why the Bishops In Italy want to reduce opportunities to hear the traditional Latin Mass. Why are they opposed to it? ... I really don't get it."

The questioner is referring to this article at One Peter Five. I wrote the following in answer.

One could flippantly answer that the reason is they've "gone over to the dark side". Less flippantly, Francis has appointed his special cronies in key positions -- both in Italy and here, too -- to put a stop, once and for all, to the Traditional Mass (among other things). And it is Francis who is doing this, forcing this to happen. Make no mistake about that.

Why?

Where you see no downside to offering the Traditional Mass, they see a massive one: people actually in the presence of God and at the fount of Catholic spirituality as it has been since the days of St. Gregory the Great (and before back to the beginning). In comparison, the new Mass, the Novus Ordo of Paul VI, fails miserably. (After 60 years, I can say this most solemnly.) As the old saying has it, a camel is a horse designed by a committee, so the New Mass lacks the innate spiritual grace and power of the old, which, like the horse, evolved over a very long period of time, and under the influence of both saints, the pious, and 2,000 years worth of laity. The Novus Ordo just compares poorly, even when done at its best. After all, the old Mass was the Mass of the great saints, and the "nuclear" pile, the spiritual core at the center of everything Catholic -- as Catholicism existed in the centuries before the Vatican II Reformation.

And Bergoglio & Co. DO NOT want a return to "the Faith of Our Fathers". They all have too much emotionally and self-consciously invested in the Vat 2 Reformation. But rejecting that iconoclastic reformation is exactly what will be demanded by more and more people who discover the Traditional Mass. (My personal experience is that about half the people who experience a Missa cantata, or sung High Mass, reject it as weird, alien, incomprehensible, or a "museum piece" while the other half are dumbfounded with wonder, awe, and spiritual uplift. There seems to be no middle ground.)

Why is the Rite of St. Gregory the Great so powerful?

The Catholic/Orthodox idea is that no more important a thing (in this world) exists than Liturgy, as there's no more important a thing for a Christian than meeting and interacting with God, for Mass is how we come into the Presence of God before Judgment Day. It's how we prepare for eternity, by entering into and lingering in the Timelessness of the Eternal Presence. We partake of the Divine Nature in Mass, in many ways, especially prayer and simple wonder and contemplation, but primarily through reception of the Most Holy Eucharist.

The old Mass -- I refer to the High Mass forms -- organically developed over a millennium to express all that, and it does so most excellently.

The new Mass is a committee-concocted horizontal group therapy session, or a group pep rally, a sort of parade ground drill: a crowded, relentless one-thing-after-another performance led by a relentless conductor with whom we never break eye contact. (That's an amazingly important difference between the two rites.)* And it is all done to affirm our selves. Affirm our self-awareness and self-consciousness. Reinforce our identity. It's about us. Ultimately, it's all about "Belief", rather than "Dwelling With". The Traditional Mass and the Eastern Liturgies are a Dwelling With: a listening, praying, wandering in the antechambers of Heaven's timelessness.

The very first thing I noticed when I started attending the Eastern Liturgies, and then the Traditional Latin Mass, was how "roomy" they were compared to the Novus Ordo, how uncrowded, peaceful, and filled with time for silence and eternal, internal space -- especially prayer space. Prayer comes naturally in the old liturgies, and at our own speed. One's spirit can simply wander in a sacred citadel. But most of all, it is about lingering in the very Presence of the Lord of Hosts. Catholicism (and Orthodoxy) are all about the Presence of God, His presence on Earth and our presence to and in Him.

In comparison, the modern Mass is like a brass band marching in some sort of "pride" parade.

These devotees of Bergoglio, however, want none of the Old Faith. Please understand. This is crucial. To the extent they have any faith in Christ, it is Protestant faith, meaning in worship that the worship service is about one expressing one's belief rather than dwelling in the Presence. The Novus Ordo is about us, and it reaffirms us. This is why so many observers insist that Vatican II and its fallout was a Protestantization of Catholicism. It was that on various levels, especially both on the ecumenical level and the liturgical one, the latter enacted to make the former all the easier. (And Papa Bergoglio has demonstrated, many times in many comments, sermons, observations and off-the-cuff remarks, that he has a Lutheran understanding of how salvation works, not a Catholic one. He's thus the "perfect Progressive" of "Manifest Modernist.")

However. this Vat 2 ecumenical goal was a "chasing after wind." Protestants, as a collective, aren't interested in Catholicism. Individuals do convert, obviously, from both directions, but no Protestant Church has any interest in "Communion" with Catholicism. (And Catholicism has always rejected the core Protestant ideas.) In 500 years, not a single Protestant denomination ever "evolved" back toward Catholicism. Not even a little.

The reason: Catholicism and Orthodoxy are the Churches of the Real Presence and Protestantism is the Church of the Real Absence. And I mean that literally: in their various founding documents, the Protestant Churches insist Our Lord is really NOT present in the Holy Eucharist. And that's why they all insisted miracles came to an end at the conclusion of the New Testament, for the Holy Eucharist is a miracle and they wanted none of it. (Pentecostalism came into existence primarily driven by a thirst to experience some sort of miracle, actually, and thus it runs counter to the foundational ideas of classical Protestantism.)

So, therefore, everything about the Rite of St. Gregory the Great -- by its very nature -- invalidates everything Vatican II types believe -- or perhaps one should say, everything they don't believe.

They can thus hardly be expected to tolerate it!

Pope Francis intentionally, as an act of pure spite, destroyed the thriving Traditionalist order of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate. According to Benedict's Summorum Pontificum, the FFI had every right to embrace the Traditional Mass. Bergoglio showed his colors then as he has now by smacking down the U.S. bishops in their attempt to do something about the sex abuse crisis. Read this article, or one of the many others on this latest Bergoglian outrage. The pope is making himself odious. Something like old-time gangster films, they're holed up in a hideout surrounded by police, and they're in effect shouting, "Come in a get us, Coppers!" Because of the pope's actions, the American Church will be helpless when the prosecutors come to liquidate its assets.

In Francis, the Modernist / Progressive faction has total control of the Church, and they won't let it go. They intend to keep it and drive the rest of us out.

But they'll only lose it, and drive everyone else out.

That's a fuller, non-flippant answer to your question.

We are in dire, very dire times.

An Préachán

* Note I write "two rites" when it is a strict rule in the Modernist Church that all the Latin rites are really only one rite. That's nonsense. The Novus Ordo is more different from a High Mass than any two separate Eastern Liturgies are from each other. A High Mass has more in common with any Eastern Liturgy than it does with the Novus Ordo. It is true that the Novus Ordo is a bowdlerized version of the Low Mass, which itself is a "short form" or Reader's Digest Condensed version of the High Mass, developed for specific monastic purposes in the High Middle Ages, but it had ended up being almost the only form of the Mass pre-Vatican II Catholics experienced. A 1950's Catholic parish had two or three Sunday Masses, all Low. But the Eastern Liturgy Churches only have the one Sunday Liturgy. It was the heavy use of the Low Mass that gave fuel to the liturgical iconoclasts' fire when they rampaged "in the spirit of Vatican II".