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Denunciations of the liturgical practices of the post-VII Church decades, centuries before the fact August 20, 2012

This month in Germany, courtesy Eponymous Flower

So I’m finally done with the painful experience of reading The Banished Heart by Dr. Geoffrey Hull.  Uff da, I plan to write a review of that book sometime soon, but not yet.  Now I’m on to another book on the liturgical changes that have afflicted the Latin Rite in the past several decades, Work of Human Hands: A Theological Critique of the Mass of Paul VI by Fr. Anthony Cekada.  This book, it’s like a breath of fresh air. Clean, crisp, engaging prose, and no orientalist promotion of Eastern Orthodox propaganda – and bad propaganda at that.   I’ve only just begun reading it, but already I can pull out two excerpts that help provide some historical background/analysis on the changes that were made to the Mass in 1965~70.

The first quote comes from the great author of the liturgical movement of the 19th century, Dom Prosper Gueranger.  He wrote in his Liturgical Institutions (1840) regarding what he called the “anti-liturgical heresy,” or the hostility that all heresies tend to show towards the traditional Catholic liturgy.

The anti-liturgical heresy, Gueranger says, promotes hatred for tradition, the selective use of Scripture, the invention of new formulas, contradictory principles, false appeals to antiquity, hatred for the mystical, replacing the altar with a table , use of the vernacular, reducing the length of services and undermining the priesthood [by reducing the priest from a persona Christi offering a Sacrifice on behalf of all the people, to a “presider” of a “remembrance” meal offered by the community].

Another quote from Gueranger’s 1840 work:

Every sectarian who wishes to introduce a new doctrine finds himself, unfailingly, face to face with the Liturgy, which is Tradition at its strongest and best, and he cannot rest until he has silenced this voice, until he has torn up these pages which recall the faith of past centuries.

Ahem, well, yes.  I can see how they would want to do that.

Fr. Cekada also quotes a 17-point memorandum circulated by Archbishop Conrad Groeber of Freiburg, Germany, penned in 1942 in response to the then-burgeoning and heterodox/modernist liturgical “reforms” first gaining wide circulation in that country with such a checkered history with regard to the Faith.  To quote Cekada, “Those of Groeber’s criticisms pertaining specifically to liturgical practices that the movement advocated in the 1940s will ring a bell for post-Vatican II traditionalists:

Advocating the vernacular, which “has often served the forces of error as a weapon in the arsenal of heresy.”

Insistence on vocal participation by the laity at Mass

Disparagement of private Masses and devotional prayers (the Rosary, Stations, etc)

Arbitrary changes to the rubrics

Advocating Communion under both species

Promoting the notion that “it is the community which celebrates,” and reducing the role of the priest to one “delegated by the parish to ‘celebrate’ Mass” [This is a key fount of error, and something that had already been defined as an error by the Council of Trent…..d’oh!]

Exaggeration of the priesthood of the laity [Another key]

Growing influence of protestant dogma on the way the faith is presented […..]

Extending the limits of the “Church” to include protestants, considering heretical churches part of The Church [….]

Giving a new definition to “faith;” it is no longer belief in revealed truths, but an experience, an emotion. [A simple, straightforward definition of modernism]

Neglect of dogmatic and systematic theology

Neglect of scholastic philosophy and theology, preference for modernist systems of thought

Placing undue emphasis on [ostensible] forms of religious life in the primitive Church [pseudo-antiquarianism]

Unfortunately, the Church prior to Vatican II, going back many decades or even centuries, tended to…….not focus too much on the liturgy.  Popes and Cardinals and other defenders of the Faith looked on the liturgy as something fixed and untouchable, so when modernists were driven from theological circles by the actions of Pope St. Pius X, they found a rather comfortable, unnoticed area in which to operate.  And one thing the liturgical “reformers” realized quite early is that, if you want to radically change the belief of the Church, there is no better vehicle for doing so than changing the liturgy, the Mass.

Hardcore stuff, I know.  But if you are a faithful Catholic who laments the present state of the liturgy in the vast majority of parishes and the collapse in fidelity to Church Doctrine, it seems incumbent to at least recognize that the changes foisted on the liturgy in the 1960s were already denounced decades and centuries before they took place.  That’s extremely revealing in and of itself.  For those who sought to change the unchangeable, and since the direct attacks on Dogma had been totally blocked by a great, saintly Pope, why not make an end run and achieve the same thing by attacking the bedrock practice of the Faith, the Mass?  By changing the Mass and thus the theologically underpinnings of virtually all of the Faith AND the prime source of catechesis/orthopraxis for the vast majority of Catholics, the “reformers” could accomplish all their ends in one fell swoop.  It was a brilliant tactical move, but I think its success in deconstructing the Faith has been beyond the “reformer’s” wildest dreams.

I expect to get pelted for my quotations from this book.