The Novus Ordo Mass and Watching the Priest's Face

The perils of the ad populum Mass

I have occasion to go to a N.O. from time to time, and it is amazing, when one attends an N.O. only rarely, how "face-centered" it all is. Even with me, myself, and I, all three of us, constantly thinking, "No, I'm going to focus of the liturgy and Our Lord, focus, focus, focus...", helplessly find myself contemplating the priest's face, his every blink, angle of head, raised eyebrow.
It's just incredible. And then, of course, POW! I've got to shake hands! Er, wait...what? It is incredibly disconcerting experience, and one that is -- shall we say -- "not conducive to prayer."

It's just best to sit in the back, or look out a window, if by God's grace, there's a nice one to look out of.

None of that makes the rite invalid, I hasten to add, because God is always faithful (Romans 3:3), and we have entered into the New Covenant with Him (and thus into all the old ones), and He is always faithful, whether we are or not. But wow, I thank the Lord I only experience an N.O. rarely now.

Closely related to this: there's no way to attend a Traditional Latin Mass for the first time and not be surprised at the ornateness of the priest's chasuble. (A chasuble is the outer most garment of a priest who is vestured to say Mass.)

The ornate chasuble a TLM priest wears, of which we mainly see the back, prevents all that "face-watching" endemic to the New Mass. The chasuble symbolizes the royal robe the Roman soldiers threw over Our Lord, and when the priest vests, he prays of the chasuble as the "yoke of Christ". And on top of all that beautiful symbolism, it acts as a mobile iconostasis, an icon screen. separating us from the Mysteries at the altar as the iconostasis does in an Eastern Liturgy.

An Préachán

The Importance of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an article by David Solway, and a book by Carrie Gress titled "The Anti=Mary Exposed...."

An excellent article by David Solway at PJ Media reviewing the danger Feminism present to our civilization, focusing on a book by Carrie Gress, The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity, about demonic influence on women today, has prompted a lot of comments, with one Commentator wondering why so many Christians have such a negative attitude toward the Blessed Virgin Mary. I wrote the following in response.

Dear...,

As with "Mother_of_4_Original's response below, Protestants (the vast majority) "just don't get Mary."


The basic problem is they don't get the Covenants. Mary is integral to the establishment of the New Covenant while at the same time the fulfillment of all the old ones. When we partake of the Holy Eucharist, we take into ourselves the Real Presence of God, and that is necessary for Salvation (as in St. John, Chapter 6) – yet Protestants reject that dogma. At the Reformation, all the founding documents of the Reformed Churches rejected it. They may have kept some form of a "Lord's Supper" but denied Transubstantiation. But the central teaching of the Historical Church, East and West, is that the New Testament, the New Covenant, is the Holy Eucharist, and it is truly the Body and Blood of God. (1 Corinthians, 11:17 and following)


So therefore when we partake of the Holy Eucharist, we take on God's nature to a small extent, but it begins our transformation in Christ; the Greeks call it Theosis. It incorporates us into the great Covenants God made with the Patriarchs. We also take in some of His human nature, as well, which he received from His Mother –thus we become full biological heirs of the Covenants. (And thus one can see why the Jews and the Christians fell out early on -- the Jews obviously rejected the idea that just anybody could become a full heir of Abraham by baptism and then Holy Communion! But that's what the Christians asserted, hence the falling out. Protestants, on the other hand, miss out of all of this because of their strict rejection of the core idea of the entire Faith – Old and New Covenants.)


Anyway, Mary is thus the most important person to have ever lived: She's our Mother in Salvation, and literally our Mother, for we have the Salvation inheritance from Her through Her Son. She's the most important fully human person in herself; Jesus is both God and Man, with two Natures, fully both; but as one is a mother of a person and not merely a nature, so Mary is the Mother of God.


"Mother of God." Non-Catholic, non-Orthodox Christians don't get that, or they don't get the significance of what it means, that the Creator of All That Exists has a human Mother, God Himself nursed at her breast, took His very humanity from her. Learned to walk and talk from her. She was at His birth and at His death, the whole way. All they can say is "She's a human being and no different from any other human being."


That's a profound statement, incredible, really.


It's jaw-dropping. It's like missing half of the whole story! But there it is, the sad fruit of the Reformation. Ironically, Luther himself was quite devoted to Her. Protestant anti-Marianism didn't develop till a bit latter.

_An Préachán 

Christ the King: A Catholic Essay on Christianity, Judaism, and Protestantism, and How Salvation Works, Part I

Here's a take on Original Sin and Christianity/Judaism that many of you are probably not familiar with. But today, on the Traditional and proper Feast of Christ the King, it is good to recall just how He is Lord of History and our True King -- not only of Heaven, but our Earth, our present, miserable, confused, and lost (even in so many persons in the Church itself, even Christ's Vicar!) as it seems to be. 

God, the Lord of Hosts, Creator and Sustainer of all that is, is following a program He's put in place that is still running. It's the same program from Adam and Eve down to today. This is crucially important. The Lord doesn't run about changing things to fit the circumstances of the day. He's Christ the King, the Lord of History and He is in control. That's important to remember -- and believe -- after a horror such as the purely evil, vile, and obscene Pittsburgh Massacre.

So:

The first Covenant the Lord made with all Creation when He "rested" on the Seventh Day. The next Covenant He made with Adam and Eve, that through Eve's seed He would raise up a Savior who would crush the serpent's head, even though the serpent (Satan) would bit the heel of the seed -- Christians of all stripes take that to be a prophecy of the Passion and Crucifixion. The second Covenant He made with Noah, and so on. Seven Covenants in all, the last being the New Covenant (here Christians deviate from Judaism, obviously).

To be "saved" one needs to have this inheritance, to be in the inheritance of blessing, THE blessing God gave to Abraham (the red-haired "Great Father", to whom God granted this via a close series of three special Abrahamic covenants), and as was then passed down through Isaac ("Laughter") to Isaac's second son, Jacob ("Heel") whom the Lord renamed "Israel" ("He who struggles with El", or God). To be "saved", this long-running program has it, one indeed has to be of the People Israel, through whom salvation is solely available.


What Jesus, (Yeshu'a, Joshua, meaning: "Yahweh is salvation") did was to arrange for the adoption into the divine Sonship of non-Jews, into this Abrahamic Covenant. Through His Incarnation, and then Crucifixion and Resurrection, Our Lord Christ made this adoption into the Abrahamic Covenant possible through changing our nature. This is the belief of the Christian Orthodoxies (Western Orthodoxy/Roman Catholicism, the various Eastern Orthodoxies, and then the "Oriental" Orthodox -- Armenian, Coptic), all of whom have the same system of Apostolic Succession and the Seven Sacraments. (Ahem, some of the Churches get along with each other better than with others, but their actual theological differences are minor compared with Protestantism.)


What they have in common is that they're the Churches of the Real Presence, i.e., that God is truly present in the consecrated bread and wine. Being baptized allows one to partake of the other Sacraments, esp that of the Holy Eucharist. It is the Most Holy Eucharist that is the New Covenant, the New Testament (and not the 27 books of the Christian Bible -- they only contain the story of the New Testament. And when we have taken the Holy Eucharist, we are changed in our nature because we receive the Incarnate God. And we not only have the Body and Blood of God in our arteries, but His Human Nature too. Jesus got His Human Nature from his Mother, as all Jews inherit the blessings Israel received from his father Isaac, through their mothers, from Sarah on down.


Thus, the Blessed Virgin Mary is truly our Mother, literally, because Our Lord is Incarnate through her and via the Holy Eucharist, we take on His Nature. We're "new creations in Christ" as St. Paul says so often, and in so many ways. In other words, all Christians who are "Orthodox" and participate in the Holy Eucharist are adopted into Israel, and all thus receive the Covenant blessing and salvation inherent in that. It's the same program it has always been, in other words.


Now, traditionally, Catholicism has taught that the fourth Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant (fourth from Adam and Eve, fifth from the Seventh Day Covenant with Creation), was cancelled, or abrogated, or made defunct, and that it was replaced by the New Covenant. That would change the number of the Seven Covenants, of course, and also it is not necessary, because each Covenant is transformed by the Covenant made after it. Expanded, uplifted, transfigured. We understand Noah's Covenant in a new light via the Abrahamic Covenant, and we see the Mosaic Covenant transformed and heightened by the Davidic Covenant (that the Kingship of Israel would never pass from David's House). Just as Our Lord was Transfigured on the Mount, and for the first time, Peter, James, and John -- who thought they knew him -- beheld Him as He is, so the Mosaic Covenant was transfigured from eating a lamb without blemish or broken bones into the Lamb of God Himself.


Now, as these transformations and uplifts in Covenants occur, one does have to keep up. Think of all of Noah's descendants who weren't descended from Abraham through Sarah. Or think of all those Israelites who rejected the Davidic kings and started their own "Kingdom of Israel" in Samaria and Galilee -- the famous "Lost Tribes of Israel". All cut off from the Covenants after inheriting them directly. Similarly, those Jews who didn't come to believe in Jesus of Nazareth cut themselves off from the fulfilled Covenants. I personally think "God will sort it" in His own way, because so many Jews have been faithful to Him (as they understood it) throughout the millennia, and I think so because God is always faithful -- always -- and because the Lord God is the Reader of Hearts. He is Judge, too, the Absolute Judge, an essential part of His Divine Kingship. But the true and certain road of Salvation comes through the Church He set up, which is the New Israel, the Synagogue of God.

 N.B. When looked at this way, one can immediately see the cause for conflict between Jews and Christians. Jews resented the idea that non-Jews could suddenly be incorporated into the Jewish people, while not "going all the way" with Temple Worship and Kosher laws, and so on -- not to mention all these non-Jews being, well, not descended from Abraham! Christians resented the Jews saying, "Whoa! You're not part of the ancient Covenant!" So the fight began. In contrast to the Churches of the Real Presence, Protestantism, is the "Churches of the Real Absence" (i.e., all Protestant Churches deny -- in their founding documents -- the ancient Real Presence teaching), have a very different understanding of how Salvation works, and 500 years of that have driven this teaching I've just outlined out of the popular imagination, knowledge, etc,.

An Préachán