Amici,
Bergoglio
and his merry band of Teddy McCarrick's slimey "sons" (some of the worst are now cardinals) are ratcheting up
their antics, as reported by LifeSiteNews, and others. As John Henry
Weston says, they certainly seem intent on creating a false Church on
myriad levels. See John Henry here for details, with Liz Yore.
I
think it is time to pause and consider just what Bergoglio's antics are
clearly intended to destroy. What is he out to kill? Today, I'll focus on the liturgy.
"The liturgy of the Mass is more than the proclamation of the teaching Christ. It is a great "Ecce homo": it exhibits and points to the silent Christ. It is infinitely more than the prayer of the faithful. It gives us a glimpse of something absolutely unthinkable: God at prayer."
So writes Martin Mosebach in his The Heresy of Formlessness; the Roman Liturgy and It's Enemy, page 74, in the chapter 'Liturgy is Art'.
I'm
pretty sure none of you have thought of the Traditional Latin Mass as
"God at prayer", yet it is a genius insight. Mosebach, throughout this
collection of essays, explains how one doesn't "understand"
the Mass, how one is not supposed to. The whole central point of the
Novus Ordo Mass, i.e. something that could be understood by everyone, is
utterly non-Catholic, and non-worshiping.
Our Lord Christ Himeslf set the
Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as our earthly experience of the Incarnate
God, made Present to us on the Altar of Sacrifice. I would dare to
tender the hope that most Christians understand Heaven to be the
Beatific Vision, one's eternal contemplation of God in His Presence. The
Mass is our foretaste of that, our first step into Eternity. So of
course it cannot be flat, mediocre, prosaic, humdrum, banal – by definition it cannot be a liturgy designed to be "understood" anymore than one can "understand" God.
The
Mass of the Ages does something more than teach: it allows one to contemplate God's Incarnate Presence
under the form of bread and wine, understanding as an act of faith the
miracle of the Mass, personally experiencing within it the Real
Presence of God consecrated at the altar of sacrifice, Himself, Christ,
offered perpetually in sacrifice unto God, the eternal sacrifice we read
of in Revelation, the slain Lamb coming forward. (Rev 5:6ff; Revelation describes the Heavenly Liturgy, and so of course most modern people have no clue about its mysteries. Martin Luther wanted to excise it entirely from the New Testament.)
We'll
be eternally contemplating the Incarnation and the Sacrifice the
Incarnation consummated on earth 2,000 years ago, always filled with
more comprehension in ever more Beatific Vision – and our own roles in that Incarnation – for by His Incarnation into the human race, God enabled the human race to be incarnated into God. Theosis,
the Greeks call it. Scott Hahn somewhere described it as the "nuclear
pile" of the Faith. This eternal Mystery will never be completely within
our understanding.
And
as one just does not "understand" this most Divine Mystery, one doesn't
"understand" the Divine Mysteries in general. The one book in the New
Testament (or the Old) that carries the title "Revelation", the
Apocalypse, is the single most mysterious of all the holy library, after
all, is it not? And mystery stands at the heart of all learning, and
certainly all love. A young couple in love want to find out all there is
to know and experience about each other, but if that wish ever seems to
encompass them, should no mystery of one another remain, what happens
to them? And a work of art, painting, sculpture, or literature piece we
completely "understand" becomes a work of art we're not likely to keep
thinking about, pondering, or want to see again. "Familiarity breeds
contempt." In fact, it is an axiom that art is different from pornography in
that pornography "leaves nothing to the imagination". And the same is
true of propaganda. Nothing is more boring than either porn or
propaganda (unless you become addicted to them, as many are addicted to
Covid-19 "fear porn").
Mosebach returns to pondering art as that which intrigues us, moves us in
ways we don't fully grasp. Great art has a soul, he says, and the Mass
is the greatest art, begun when the Divine Master, after the Passover
meal had been eaten, picked up a piece of bread and said, "Take this, this is my body which will be given for you."
"When he utters the words 'This is my body,' should he not take a piece of the Paschal Lamb from the table (considering his impending sacrificial death as the Lamb of God), rather than a piece of bread? No, because the bread that has become the body of Christ fits in perfectly with what Jesus says, by way of preparation for Holy Thursday, about the grain of wheat; it also recalls the prayer in the Our Father concerning our daily bread and the warning that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from God. Here, then, we have the bread that, at the same time, 'was the Word of God.' ... Is there not, however something of the Greek artists' ability to transform and elevate nature in the way Jesus chooses to elevate a piece of bread to the level of the real sacrificial flesh of the God-man? At the same time, of course, there is a crucial different between him and the Greek artist: the artist created his work 'after nature,' through contemplation and study, whereas Christ created the unbloody Sacrifice of the Mass in anticipation of his very real execution, with all its attendant horrors. We could say that with his intuition and foreknowledge – for the meal of Holy Thursday is permeated with premonitions – he was painting a picture of his death, giving an artistic form to the pains of his execution, a form that perfectly and unmistakably manifested its profoundest core, that is, the love sacrifice that nourishes and redeems. (Page 71)
(See why I say you should read Mosebach?)
In
all the squabbles over the Roman Catholic Church's liturgy since
Vatican II, I think Moseback gets to the heart of the matter best, and
with the fewest yet best-chosen words. A successful novelist, Mosebach's
writing is superb.
But
then, who will listen? The Second Vatican Council, in fact, called for
some liturgical changes to be made only after great deliberation, and
actually mandated Latin to be largely retained, along with Gregorian
Chant being encouraged. Has the mainstream Church obeyed those
strictures? Almost none of the things one pictures in one's mind about
the Novus Ordo pastiche was actually requested at the Second Vatican
Council. The Council "Fathers" did not vote for the total
destruction-remake of the Mass that the Concilium committee on the
Liturgy wrought. They did not vote for a Mass in the vernacular,
especially a vernacular than everyone, from children to theologians to
blue-collar working men to matronly ladies, all "understood" to the
point of boredom. I always wondered why, what with the rich history of English, its means of expression, massive vocabulary – not to mention the literary variety between national English languages –
the Church reduced whole of the Anglophone world to one single English
vernacular, and a pathetic, flat, mumbling one at that. The reason was
they did so by design. Their goal surely had been to turn off, alienate,
cold-shoulder as great a number as possible.
Now, while it might be charitable to not try to think Bugnini and his crew were actually
working against the Catholic Church by attacking and crashing the most
Catholic thing in existence, the Mass, to view them as misguided
idealists with "good intentions", it is much easier and I believe much
closer to the truth to see all the disastrous changes after the actual
Council to be the results of an anti-Catholic "war of position", a "long
march" through Catholic institutions to bring them down.
If
there is truth in such an assertion, it is easy to see how it started
in the later 19th century via the Modernists, those clergy and
theologians who rejected as passé the Church's traditional teaching. But
then later, by the mid-20th century, Communists got involved, as Bella
Dodd famously revealed after her conversion to the Church. Bergoglio and
his henchmen are the last, desperate stand of an old guard, literally
old men who either are wholly on board with anti-Christian Communism and
Modernism, or are aged dupes who have never understood their
"fellow-traveler" status.
And
certainly their desperate endeavors to kill off the Traditional Latin
Mass seems insane. Bergoglio has publicly stated he thinks Latin Mass
devotees are either all old people themselves (the opposite is true) or
they're mentally ill. (Yes, he's said that.) The one part of the
Church that's actually Catholic, they want to drive out of the Church. That CANNOT be an accident. How could Bergoglio and his McCarrick deviants possibly go all Herman
Melville on the young faith-filled families of the TLM? To go, as
Melville had it, "...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I
stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee." The Mass
of the Ages is Bergoglio's Moby Dick.
It is just bizarre. And it is crazed obsession like that which is truly not understandable.
Read
Martin Mosebach. You'll apprehend a great deal more about the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass than by reading even the best intentioned
theologians.
An Préachán
Notes:
This Novus Ordo
new order Mass was created by the Concilium, a bureaucratic body
inaugurated to implement ideas in the Vatican II document on the Mass called Sacrosanctum Concilium. The Concilium worked from the Council's end to the 1970 unveiling of the Novus Ordo Mass.
But in truth, the huge committee that the Concilium consisted of was
merely window dressing. Hannibal ("Grace of Ba'al") Bugnini, the
Concilium's secretary, and his closest associates, did almost all the new liturgy's creation, and they got Pope Paul VI approve most of what they
recommended. (Bugnini would tell Paul VI that the Concilium wanted X,
and when the pope said, "Surely they can't want that!" Bugnini would
say, "Oh, yes, they all agree." Then he would tell the larger Concilium
that the pope wanted X, and when they said "He can't possibly want that!" Bugnini would say, "Oh, he's adamant on it!" See Psalm 101:7 for judgement on liars. ) Thus,
via such deceits, "The Bug" created a new liturgy altogether. It is
only connected to the old Mass, the Traditional Latin Mass, the Mass of
the Ages (best title for it) by their own fevered fiats – by their saying it was connected. In reality, it was a new rite entirely.
AnP
Psalm 146 of the Douay-Rheims: verse 9:
Who giveth to beasts their food: and to the young ravens that call upon Him.
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