Blog to discuss the book "The Apocalypse - Letter by Letter: A Literary Analysis of the Book of Revelation" and current events that point to the events described therein.
Note: Emphasis in bold mine. "A devastating and catastrophic mistake"
Priests praise return of traditional Latin Mass; say discouraging its use for so long was an error
Priests in the Bay Area are speaking out in favor of the traditional Latin Mass, telling a secular newspaper the old rite has several virtues nearly lost by the Church.
"For a long time, I have felt that the Mass we're doing today is not as reverent," Fr. Lawrence Goode told the March 13 Oakland Tribune. Fr. Goode offers the traditional Latin Mass at 7 p.m. every first Friday of the month at St. Francis of Assisi Church in East Palo Alto.
Goode has been celebrating the Mass according to Pope John XXIII's 1963 Roman Missal for six months at St. Francis. He told the Tribune that he wants eventually to celebrate the old rite on more occasions. "It helps in my devotion," Goode said. "It makes me conscious of the meaning of what I'm doing. (But) I'm just beginning to get the hang of it." More than 40 people assisted at the Mass on March 7.
The Second Vatican Council, noted the Tribune, never banned the old rite of the Mass outright, "but it was gradually phased out."
"We felt it was wrong to suppress it (the old Latin Mass)," Fr. William Young, who resides at Most Holy Redeemer parish in San Francisco's Castro district, told the Tribune. Fr. Young says the traditional Latin Mass at the Chapel of the Most Holy Rosary in San Rafael. The chapel is located on the grounds of the St. Vincent School for Boys, a residential treatment center for emotionally troubled young men. Fr. Young told the newspaper that suppressing the rite "was a devastating and catastrophic mistake."
"We were determined to do all we could to keep it from becoming something for antiquarians to study," said Fr. Young.
The San Rafael Mass is, currently, the only regular Sunday celebration of the traditional Mass in the archdiocese, which includes San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties, with an estimated 425,000 Catholics.
Fr. Young, who was ordained in 1976, said that before Pope Benedict XVI's motu proprio last July freeing up the celebration of the old rite, "to celebrate it would constitute disobedience and disloyalty. Rome allowed the impression that the Mass was forbidden to continue."
"The old Mass attempts to create a sense of the transcendent and the sacred," Fr. Young told the newspaper. "It attempts to create an experience that is totally discontinuous of ordinary experience."
Another priest interviewed by the Tribune, Msgr. Bruno Peschiera, celebrated the traditional Mass in Rome for ten years. "There is a great devotion," he said. "You see the respect for the Eucharist and for the things that happen at the altar."
Sixty-four-year-old Joan Favero of Santa Cruz told the Tribune the Mass is "just part of life. I don't think it's important to actually be part of the Mass as far as answering in English. Worshipping God is why we are there. Any other type of community or social activity can be after Mass."
I apologize to my frequent visitors for not posting or writing much the last few days. I've had a bit of writer's block. Or rather, the ideas and news articles have come so fast and furious lately that I haven't had time to thoroughly read them all and pick the ones most relevant to the Apocalypse.
But what has really been on my mind is the complete collapse of the Catholic way of life as seen through the prism of the local parish. I was contemplating that during the Triduum when we are at our supposedly most solemn. On Holy Thursday, a cell phone was vibrating in someones pocket behind me. It belonged to someone in the choir. On Good Friday, the Missal says to leave Church silently. But instead, I heard the usual chatter about every meaningless topic people could think of.
As a child, both before and shortly after the "reforms" a Church was a holy place, a sacred place. When you entered, even as a child, you knew to be quiet and respectful. You wore decent clothes there, especially on holy days. And you reverenced the priest, never questioning his holiness.
Now, the priest is treated like one of the gang. The building is almost constantly abuzz with chatter. The genuflect is hardly ever seen. The altar service is almost completely female now. Once reserved for young men who could later hear a call to the priesthood, now it's a social club for girls and boys have no interest. The same holds true for the foot washing on Holy Thursday, the initiation to the priesthood that Christ performed for his apostles. Now it's some sort of social status, missing the whole point of "the greatest among you must serve the least".
The pews are emptier now. So are the seminaries. Birth control is no longer enumerated as a sin in public. It has taken its toll. Homosexuality has compromised the priesthood even though only a small minority of priests practice it.
I went to confession on a Saturday in Lent at a fairly large parish. My wife and two of my seven children went with me. We were the only people there at first. As we left a very elderly couple arrived. That was it. As a child I remember long lines for confession on almost any Saturday. I remember a missal with words in Latin on one page and in English on the next so you could follow along. I remember an altar rail that we knelt at as an altar boy held a patten under our chins and the priest placed the host on out tongues.
I feel like I switched to a strange religion somewhere along the way, a protestant one. I long for the one from my childhood, the one where everything was sacred. Will I ever see it again?
I have to believe with all my heart that we are in a time when "the Sun is darkened and the moon does not give its light". Divine truth is no longer being taught. Strange doctrines have replaced it - radical feminism, environmentalism and relativism. Man has become his own God.
I also remember how full the churches were right after September 11, 2001. Catholic churches. People know the truth deep down. It is written on our nature. But we are being mislead and deceived. The time is drawing near when a false prophet, The False Prophet, will lead many away from the Church of Peter. And a leader will unite most of the world in a kingdom opposed to all the Church has taught for two millenia. And the only obstacle left will be the pope. And he will be assassinated shortly after his difficult election.
It's all in the book. And it seems more true today than when it was given to me a few years ago.
Note: To me, the prayer for the Jews, no matter how worded, is a sign of deep love. It fits within similar prayers for atheists and non-Catholic Christians. It simply reflects an acknowledgement that we believe our religion is the sole basis for salvation. All religions have similar teachings. In the case of the Jews, we have specific affinity and common heritage. It is an article of our faith that the conversion of the Jews precedes the final judgment. The Latin form of the prayer doesn't really depart much from the form we've been using since Vatican II in terms of intent and meaning. In Apocalypse - Letter by Letter: A Literary Analysis of the Book of Revelation, this is made even more clear. It is spelled out in the Bible.
Jews and the Vatican: A New Clash
Bringing back an ancient rite risked reopening ancient wounds. And so after Pope Benedict XVI introduced wider use of the old Latin rite last year, top Vatican officials promised to adjust a Good Friday prayer from the ancient liturgy that had called for the conversion of the Jews. The text of the updated version - released this week in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano - deletes offensive language referring to Jews' "blindness" and the need to "remove the veil from their hearts." But the substance is left in place: "Let us pray for the Jews," the prayer says, according to an unofficial translation from Latin. "May the Lord our God illuminate their hearts so that they may recognize Jesus Christ savior of all men."
The wounds, according to top Jewish leaders and rabbis, have been reopened. They say the prayer, which in reality had never been scrapped completely, recalls past centuries of forced conversions and a lingering incomprehension of their faith. And while several well-known Jewish voices in New York and Jerusalem spoke of their "disappointment," the loudest - and indeed angriest - response to the revised text came from those closest to home. Late Wednesday, having had 24 hours to absorb the news and study the text, the Italian Rabbinical Assembly announced they were suspending the decades-long Jewish-Catholic dialogue for a "pause of reflection" in light of the Good Friday prayer.
Rome's chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni told reporters that the prayer brings Catholic-Jewish relations "back 43 years," noting that the 1960s Second Vatican Council had spoken of an "alliance" between the two faiths. Di Segni spoke indignantly about reassurances he said he'd received from Church leaders that his concerns about the conversion language would have been addressed. It raises questions about just what is the "image of the Jewish people for the Church," said Di Segni. "It's an old question: What are the Jews doing here on earth? If this [prayer] is the requirement for dialogue, it is intolerable. Evidently, the Church is having problems rediscovering the foundations of its orthodoxy." Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican's pointman on Catholic-Jewish relations, responded to the criticism in a Thursday morning interview on Vatican radio. He said great progress has been made in interfaith dialogue with Jews, but it requires that "we respect each other's diversity." "We have much in common, but there's a specific difference. Jesus is the Christ, that means the Messiah, the son of God, and you cannot hide this difference. The Holy Father wanted to say: Yes, Jesus Christ is the Savior of all men, including the Jews. This is said in the prayer," Kasper said. "But this does not mean we have the intention of evangelizing [Jews]. We must give witness to our faith. But in the past the language was with disrespect. Now there is respect." Huge steps forward have in fact been made since the days that Catholics blamed Jews for Jesus' death, and when the original Good Friday conversion prayer spoke of the "perfidious Jews." Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI began to rewrite Catholic teachings, paving the way for John Paul II's historic outreach to Jews, including visits to the central synagogue in Rome and the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and his characterization of the People of Israel as "older brothers" to Christians.
Reached in his office in Jerusalem, Rabbi David Rosen of the American Jewish Committee, a veteran of Catholic-Jewish dialogue, said that he too had his "hopes raised" that an explicit reference to conversion would have been excised. Rosen noted that the expansion of the Latin rite "had nothing to do with this prayer, and nothing to do with the Jews," but was rather an attempt by the Pope to mend fences with Catholic arch-traditionalists. Still, the language of the Good Friday prayer sounds to Jews to be "exclusivist and triumphalist," said the rabbi.
Rosen, who has worked with Benedict since he was a Vatican cardinal, said he worries that the Pope seems to "insulate" himself from top advisers who might alert him to potential fallout. Still, Rosen called his Italian rabbinical colleagues' break in dialogue with Catholics a "rash" decision. "There's so much at stake for Jews and Catholics and Benedict himself that we must ensure that this difficulty will not torpedo the commitment to advancing Jewish-Catholic relations," Rosen said. "Yes, we must speak up. But there is nothing to be gained from making this a casus belli."
Note: It seems strange to me that the way we show our love for our brothers, the Jews, is to remove the language we use to indicate our prayers that they reach the fullfilment of faith in Jesus Christ that our religion says is the path to salvation. Stranger still is that we did it due to objections by Abe Foxman, who neither speaks for the entire Jewish people nor respects Roman Catholicism as can be easily seen from his previous public statements. It seems dangerous to me to revise a liturgical formula at the insistence of someone outside our faith. It is a precedent not likely to be repeated by other faiths. Pope Benedict to reformulate Good Friday prayers for Tridentine Mass
Rabbi David Rosen
London, Feb 3, 2008 / 08:26 pm (CNA).- Pope Benedict XVI will modify the Good Friday prayers used in the Tridentine Mass that generated protests from Jewish leaders who found the prayers offensive, the Jerusalem Post reports.
In July Pope Benedict widened the use of the 1962 Latin Tridentine missal in a "Motu Proprio" edict. This missal included Latin prayers for Good Friday that asked Catholics to "pray also for the Jews that the Lord our God may take the veil from their hearts and that they also may acknowledge Our Lord Jesus Christ," asking God not to "refuse your mercy even to the Jews; hear the prayers which we offer for the blindness of that people so that they may acknowledge the light of your truth, which is Christ, and be delivered from their darkness."
After the Pope permitted the wide use of the Tridentine Missal, Abraham H. Foxman, United States director of the Anti-Defamation League, criticized the prayers. In July he said he was "extremely disappointed and deeply offended" by the use of what he called "insulting anti-Jewish language" that would "now permit Catholics to utter such hurtful and insulting words." According to the Jerusalem Post, Foxman said the reintroduction of the Latin prayers was a "theological setback in the religious life of Catholics and a body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations."
The Chief Rabbinate of Israel also wrote the Pope expressing concern.
In a July interview with the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire, Archbishop Angelo Amato denied the Good Friday prayers were anti-Jewish. The archbishop said Catholics pray first for their own conversion "And then we pray for the conversion of all Christians and of all non-Christians. The Gospel is for all."
On January 18 the Milan newspaper Il Giornale reported that the new text of the prayers would drop all references to the "blindness" of the Jews. The Pope has reportedly drafted a new prayer that will be released in time for Holy Week in March.
Rabbi David Rosen, chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, told the Jerusalem Post that the removal of references to the "darkness" and the "blindness" of the Jews for refusing to recognize Jesus as the messiah was a sign Pope Benedict was "deeply committed to advancing the relationship with the Jewish Community."
Rabbi Rosen said the July Motu Proprio had nothing to do with Jews, saying there was confusion about the concept of conversion. "Used in the sense that Archbishop Amato uses it, it does not mean the acceptance of the Christian Faith by a non-Christian," he said, according to the Jerusalem Post. Rosen said that his Vatican sources indicated that the new text does not call for Jews to accept the Christian faith. Like a common 1970 prayer used by the Church, he said it "prays for the physical and spiritual well being of the Jews."
The Vatican would not confirm the Il Giornale report.
