What Is Love? Follow up on Scott Hahn and "She's not your girlfriend".

Friends,

Following up on my earlier criticism of Professor Scott Hahn's assertion in the Mass of the Ages 3 movie that every bishop in the world should "fall in love with the Blessed Virgin Mary", I received a number of comments that make me realize "What is love?" is a question that first must be answered in order to understand how cloyingly mawkish, just plainly over-  sentimental, Hahn's comment is. 

• But first of all, please note he is speaking of bishops using their full Apostolic powers. In my original essay, I reported Hahn as saying, “All bishops and priests ought to fall hopelessly in love with the Blessed Virgin Mary.” 
• I have now watched the MOTA3 movie, and at 39 minutes in, Prof Hahn's full quote is, "I think bishops need to really stretch themselves to move from the natural to the supernatural. The bishops ought to be in persona Christi in a way that corresponds to Vatican II defined as the plenitude of holy orders. They ought to fall hopelessly in love with the Blessed Virgin Mary. That's the only safe way they can lead us."

A bit of a jump there, a bit tangled too, though now I understand his comment in context. (And for me, any reliance on anything Vatican II produces an immediate headache.)

Yet my initial observation in my original critique STILL stands: I wrote then that the majority of (at least the Western World's) bishops are chosen for their "hard-nosed" unbelief in the supernatural. All of Vatican II, especially the Novus Ordo Mass, is a desacralization of the Faith. That was exactly what the 16th century Reformation was, and Vatican II is exactly that revolution come again. In other words, the Modern Church Catholics who don't know what the Eucharist is regarding the Real Presence, they are a FEATURE of the Vatican II Church, not a BUG!

All this is because a non-Catholic "junta" or "deep state" runs the modern Church, and has done so since Pope John XXIII let his people he chose to manage the Vatican II Council be removed when the Council opened and "young Turks" took over.

This is self-evidently obvious. To deny it is to go cross-eyed with cognitive dissonance. And I mean that. The junta running the Church since the '60s has never relented in its goals. It wants no-nonsense materialist financial and "bottom-line" managers; it does not want "men of Faith". That's why Bergoglio dumped Bishop Strickland (and others): they obviously believed. That's why Benedict was deposed (and he was deposed.) That's why the Vat 2 junta remains at war with the Traditional Latin Mass: that ancient liturgy creates and inspires believers. Ergo, they want it G.O.N.E.

 

So, with that observation reinforced, I also note again how cartoonish, written in thick crayon and felt, like decorations for kindergarten, Prof Hahn's statement is. Therefore, here's a quick discussion of what love actually is.

Love

First of all: love, real love, is to "will the good of another", and it is to will their good without demanding or even wanting a return on that investment. Fr Ripperger so defines it in one of his online talks. How simple, how direct. And so of course the Vatican II Church never uses it. 

Christians use the Greek word "agápē" for this love. It was a Greek word originally employed as just a generic term, and Christians used it to denote their new love revelation: God is love. This sort of "real" love is different fundamentally from other kinds of love. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son..."; John 3:16. Translate that as "For God so willed the good of the human race and His creation that He gave Himself...". 

Love in English

In English, we can say anything from "I love you" to a spouse or a child, or "I love ice-cream" or "I love the old Twilight Zone show" or "I love baseball" to "I love God" or "I love my country". The Greeks had a different word for each of those. Many languages invest in different words precisely to avoid confusion. But English doesn't. The word "like" is no substitute: "I like ice-cream" is quite different from "I love ice-cream." But idiomatic phrases like "fall in love" specifically refer to romantic love, and that's the phrasing Scott Hahn used. Note he used "hopelessly". That's clearly used of romantic love.

But romantic love is the cheapest and silliest of all "loves". It didn't exist for most human beings for most of the human history. There's an old joke about a Greek and an Italian arguing over who had the better civilization. For every thing the Greek came up with, the Italian had something to match it. "We created democracy" said the Greek. "We had a republic" the Italian countered. "We had the Parthenon" said the Greek. "We had the Pantheon" said the Italian. Finally, the Greek boasted, "You must admit, though, that it was we Greeks who created romantic love." The Italian thought for a bit and countered, "Yeah, OK, I'll have to admit that. But you have to admit one tiny fact about it." "Oh," said the Greek, "and what is that?" The Italian said, "We Italians first gave it to women."

This is funny precisely because it is true. What we call romantic love was a homoerotic creation, first by the Ancient Greeks, and later by the Muslims of Moorish Spain, where it was transferred via the Cathar heresy to Southern France and the famous troubadours. Only later did it become a standard affectation of average people. And of course, fiction writers and playwrights like Shakespeare made it a nearly de jure icon men and women were supposed to experience.

Maybe Scott Hahn didn't intend for his comment to be read this way, but he's supposed to be a professor, a knowledgeable man. As I wrote in the original essay, "We Catholics have the problem of too few men in the Catholic world. The world itself has that problem."

And so it is. The most important types of love: i.e. married spousal love, parental love, patriotic love, can never be just strong emotion and "desire". It HAS to be rational, founded in Faith in God's Creation and in the Will, and it must be selfless, a product of the rational mind, as the soul is itself rational. We get our emotions from our bodies, rationality from our souls. It's our bodies that get all passionately "love crazy." Careless "idiomatic usage" does NOT help clarify all this. 

AnP

Comment to a Column on Cardinal Pell at OnePeterFive

Excellent column at One PeterFive, as usual. And I appreciate especially the long quote by Marco Tosatti and the info on Dr. Anna Silvas's reaction. The Apocalyptic tone is great, too, because it is so real: "Becoming a smaller, purer Church may ultimately be a good thing. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking it’ll be a painless one. A chastisement is coming indeed."

Definitely. If for nothing else, we'll face chastisement for letting the Vat 2 Church make martyrs such as Cardinal Pell definitely seems to be. Look how Archbishop Lefebvre was treated, or Vigano today -- a man literally in hiding! Or consider the "martyrdom" of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate. The pattern is clear. Very clear.

Yet something else is equally clear as this drama plays out: all this was foreordained by 'the Spirit (shouldn't I write "animus"?) of Vatican II'. Yes, we've written here ceaselessly about how the Vat II program threw the Church's windows open to the outside world just in time to let in the morally choking radioactive fallout fog of the '60s and 70s, etc.; but I mean more fundamentally this: the move into the vernacular spelled ipso facto the end of the "Roman" Catholic Church and the creation of a series of unruly, unorthodox, sex-obsessed national-language Churches.

The only thing that kept the western Catholic Church "Catholic" (i.e. 'universal') was the retention of the Latin and a papacy that supported Church life in that language. Otherwise, we'd have been like the Eastern Orthodox today, a cacophonous collection of "contemptlative" Churches who are, in theory, in Communion with one another, but in reality hold each other in profound contempt and distrust, as demonstrated by their 2016 fiasco "Council" on Crete. 

We, today, in the West, are well on our way to such a breakup ourselves. It is here, actually, in many ways, especially in how the German Church acts toward Rome, and the Spanish-language Church. The difference between the Polish Church and the German Church (and other western varieties) is profound -- already! (Had B16 not quit when he did, the German Church would soon have declared itself in Schism with him, I strongly suspect.)

Now, this is a reality that evidenced itself ages ago, long before the Greeks broke from the Latins in 1054. Centuries before that, the Syrian Church (speaking Syriac, as Christian Aramaic is called) and the Coptic-speaking Church in Egypt split. If you think all those obscure heresies about Monophysitism, the "miaphysite" position, and the orthodox dyophysitism stance were the main reasons for the splits, well, think again. They contributed to the splitting, just as the filioque in the Creed contributed to the Orthodox split from Catholics. But the real issue was linguistic. They no longer spoke the same language, they couldn't communicate. So the splits were inevitable.

We're facing that now. And even now, today, the only truly "Catholic" Church -- in the original sense of truly "universal" -- is the Latin Mass crowd. And as that recent survey reported on this website (and Liturgy Guy's) showed, those sorts of Catholic are indeed the most "orthodox" Catholics in their beliefs.

Thus all Catholics in the Vat II Church, as it capsizes with all the drama its lavender leaders can conjure, and especially in how it creates martyrs of Cardinal Pell, and Vigano, (and soon Cardinals Sarah? Burke? Müller?) will be given a clear choice between the various lifeboat Churches that float free. It was just inevitable once the vernacular took over, even had the many outrageous and terrible moral problems not manifested themselves at all.

An Préachán

The enthroned god of this age is Self, his second person is Pleasure, and his third person is Égalité

Recently, I had occasion to discuss the Church situation at One Peter Five. Below is one of my Comments.

Mr X, thanks for responding. Much appreciated. You write: My "admirable sentiment" isn't equivalent to anything like "I'm ok, you're ok".

How is it not? I’m honestly interested in how you’d explain that. The enthroned god of this age is Self, his "second person" is Pleasure, and his "holy ghost" is Égalité. You continue: My concern here is to clarify that the Novus Ordo is _the ordinary rite of mass_ in the Roman Catholic church, and that it should be treated as such.

Technically, legally, and obviously by imperial papal prescript via Summorum Pontificum, that’s true. Pope Benedict 16 specifically said so. But the article is about how the old Mass (specially the High versions thereof, of which there are three) is superior.

The unspoken conclusion is the bone of contention among the Commentators – that the N.O. Mass should be scrapped and the old one restored. Some go all the way with that, most (I would be one) say let those who want it have it but for Heaven's sake, dump the Cranmer Table and turn the priest around correctly. To be sure, I would not want it called or designated the "ordinary" form, of course; and indeed, the very phrase "ordinary form" is an insult to what the Divine Liturgy is. Anyway, all this in turn conjures the query: Well, how'd we get something defective in the first place? Not trying to be “cute” or “argumentative” but I believe there are 23 different rites in the Universal, or Catholic Church. “Roman Catholic” usually refers to the Latin Western Church, but it is no longer “Latin”. As a matter of dogmatic faith, the Universal Church consists of the bishop of Rome and all the bishops in Communion with him, whatever their liturgy. However, the current pope, Jorge Bergoglio, is acting highly irregularly and many – and I mean MANY – people are losing their faith. Perhaps it is true he's not really pope, because of the manner in which Benedict abdicated. But in the meantime, however that is eventually decided, we have an absolute, stone-cold, first-class crisis.

However, that in turn is yet merely the modern-day example of what’s been going on since Vatican II and especially the post-Conciliar “Spirit of Vatican II”.

It’s a HUGE scandal. About one-half of all Catholics simply walked away from the Faith between 1963 and 1983. (A poll down in ’63 show 2/3s, 3/4s of all U.S. Catholics attended at Mass on a Sunday morning (no Sat “vigil” masses then); a

poll done in ’83 showed exactly the reverse. So, where did they go?) You quote St. Paul to me: 10 "Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters,[d] by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose." NRSV. Admirable, once again. But who's been paying attention to that since Luther? A. B., the Catholic Church has been in de facto schism since so many theologians, clergy, and laity dissented from Humanae Vitae way back in 1968.

There's even a C: St. Paul did not mean that the Corinthian Christians had to submit to error or to be "in agreement" about error -- and the whole point of all this, of 1P5 and the Trad critique of the Vat 2 Church, is that the Vat 2 Church is in error, as we see from these doleful fruits, as noted above. See the problem?

As for the Protestants, I grew up among them, and my own father was a Methodist. I didn't have any Catholic friends till I was in my later 20s, and certainly had no Vatican II schooling in the 60s and 70s. I had to "argue Bible" since (I'd guess it was) 5th grade. There is no, none, zilch question as to the Protestant understanding of the Eucharist. It runs on a huge arc from old-fashioned Lutherans saying God is there because he's everywhere (consubstantiation) and the Calvinist God is there in a form, maybe, but it's spiritual.

In no way, no wise, no shape or form has ANY Protestant Church taught the Catholic/Orthodox Real Presence: that the Consecrated Bread and Wine are the REAL Body and Blood of Our Lord, as Body and as Blood, even though it looks, tastes as though it were still bread. The formal teaching is that NO BREAD or Wine remains, at all. NO Protestants have any teaching like that. So strict were they against it that they insisted miracles per se had come to an end in New Testament times.

So starved were average, everyday Protestant laity for miracles as reported Biblically that that is where the Pentecostal movement cam from in the latter 19th century and why the mainline Protestant Churches, and the Fundamentalist ones (as the Baptists) go out of their way to distance themselves from Pentecostals.

So I've plenty of experience in ecumenical discussion; I've always been polite, respectful, as I was of my father and so on and so forth down to today -- but that doesn't mean I have to accommodate error any more than the Corinthians did.

An Préachán

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".

The Traditional Latin Mass as Training for Heaven

Sometimes I’m asked “Why the Latin?” in regards to the Traditional Latin Mass, or more rarely, “Why all the rigmarole?” I remember a youngish nun (some thirty years ago now) asking in a very acidic tone, “What’s the point of praying in Latin?” Such questions, especially asked in that acerbic tone, remind me of a scene in one of those juvenile Austin Powers movies (I forget which one) where in Dr. Evil has concocted some bizarre method of doing away with Austin Powers, and Dr. Evil’s very American-like teenage son says in exasperation, “Just shoot him. Don’t go to all this trouble; he’ll likely escape anyway. Just shoot him.” (I’m paraphrasing from distant memory.) Dr. Evil stares in disgust at his son and says, “You just don’t get it, do you?”

I no longer remember now what I said to the nun, if anything, but perhaps, in that context and with that particular individual, this answer is as good as any: “You just don’t get it, do you?” In other words, she wasn’t disposed to hear a real reason; it was self-evidently stupid to her and she wouldn’t have been inclined to consider an explanation. It was inherently unreasonable to her. She was also a nun in the modern nun sense, no habit, no apparent religious status or affiliation at all. (I would never have guessed she was a nun if she hadn’t been introduced to me as such by an aunt.) But for everyone else in the world, for those Catholics or Protestants who might bring up why Traditional Catholics (and the Orthodox) prefer “all the rigmarole”, there is a very simple answer: the Mass is preparation for Heaven.

It’s not rocket science to figure this out, although it is spiritual science. God is a mystery; indeed, THE Mystery, and both humans and angels can easily spend all eternity in an eternal contemplation and communion with God and never remotely “know all there is to know.” (We can loosely “image” eternity with God, but we can’t really conceive it, any more than we can conceive of God.) That’s what the Old Mass – and of course the Orthodox liturgies – convey: we’re entering into the Eternal Presence and utter Mystery that is God. Yet it is essential to note that for Christians, God is in no way unknowable to us. In Islam, God is unknowable: the Islamic afterlife for men is a carnal one, and a man’s women from this life must endure forever their husband’s carnal frolicking with the legendary 72 virgins; but Allah is not there. Wherever Allah is; he’s far above the “Garden of Allah”. In the religions further Eastward, all human individuals lose their individual selves in maya, a spiritual non-existence of spiritual existence soup, with some of them perhaps to be reborn on Earth once again to do it all over.

In Christianity, however, God is a Person, indeed, Three Persons in one God, and we’ll spend forever in a most personal knowing – an eternal getting acquainted – of this Absolute Being. Angels do this already. Their minds are mirrored back to them in God, each of the nearly innumerable angels having his own presence in and with God. And they thus reflect the glory of God. The higher angels in the nine choirs shine more brightly than the lower ones because the hierarchy of Heaven gives each his unique place, closer in to or farther out from God, and of course all angels, being pure spirits, greatly reflect in their natures the received glory of the Absolute Spirit. (Even devils, according to one old tradition, can’t escape from the glory of God: the fires of Hell are nothing more than the very presence of God endured by those who have eternally rejected Him; I’ll pass on opining whether this idea is true or not, but it certainly makes sense: their rejection of God is eternal, but since God Himself is eternal, they can never escape His presence).

Human beings, those admitted to Heaven, can now participate in this Beatific Vision because of the Incarnation. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity is now a Man, both Man and God. But why was that necessary? God took on human nature in order to elevate human nature to the point where it could take on God’s divine nature, making us “new creations in Christ.” This teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament. Examples: John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation.) St. Paul states it succinctly in 2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” The chief of the Apostles puts it best in 2 Peter 1:4: “By whom He hath given us most great and precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature: flying the corruption of that concupiscence which is in the world.” “Partakers of the Divine Nature.” (BTW, St. Paul mentions the idea quite often: see Romans 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12.) And to return to St. John for a moment, he goes into great detail, not only for the necessity of the Most Holy Eucharist in the 6^th chapter of his gospel, but – with this new creation idea in mind, reread the 3^rd chapter of his gospel about being “born again”.

In the Eastern Churches, this transformation in Christ is called Theosis, and in the West, Divinization, or more likely you’ll have encountered it as the “infusion of grace” by which we are saved. As “Divinization” may seem outlandish to some Catholics, recall St. Athanasius: "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460] and of course St. Thomas Aquinas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]. The Incarnation made this infusion of grace possible, as through baptism Original Sin is removed, and then through the Holy Eucharist, we can receive into ourselves God Himself, transforming our nature to a higher form, one that can endure the Beatific Vision experienced by the Angelic Host. God’s Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist is the New Covenant, for the New Testament isn’t the 27 books of the Christian Bible but the Holy Eucharist itself. (The New Testament came to be called that because it describes God’s saving work through the Holy Eucharist.)

Of course, Orthodoxy and Catholicism have their differences, which in a mostly cultural and linguistic way existed before the split in 1054, and which has grown since, but both are “Christianity of the Real Presence”, unlike Protestantism, which although it is a direct offspring of Catholicism, is proudly the Christianity of the Real Absence. From Luther and Calvin on, the Real Presence of God in the Holy Eucharist is denied: whereas in Catholicism Christ is ontologically present, in Protestantism Christ is present only in a  mnemic sense – the memory of His life and death on Earth 2,000 years ago, so it exhibits quite a different understanding of the importance for the Incarnation. Whereas Historical Christianity teaches we are changed in our nature, Protestantism (generally) teaches our nature remains sinful and fallen, but God allows us into Heaven even so: thus Luther’s famous Simul Justus et Peccator, simultaneously justified with God and going to Heaven, but yet a sinner in our nature, as in Luther’s analogy of a manure pile covered with snow. (N.B. C.S. Lewis contested this idea in his 10^th letter in his Letters to Malcom, Chiefly on Prayer.)

Now, all this is truly a Mysterium Fidei, a Mystery of Faith, and the old Mass (and Eastern Liturgies) are our introduction to it, just as in them we receive Our Blessed Lord intimately, in Holy Communion. The old liturgy seems to the newcomer – especially a newcomer raised in the New Mass of Paul VI or the generalized Protestant worship services – to be arcane, esoteric, impenetrable, and mysterious. Latin itself is only one element of all of this profundity. Yet the Old Mass existed to introduce you to the Mystery that is God. (And the New Mass exists to remove the Mystery. But that’s a subject for another essay.) God is all these profound mysteries to us, and far more. The Old Mass is our boot camp, our basic training, for God’s eternity. And just as God is not “plain English”, not something “taken in at a glance”, so neither is the Old Mass.