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The church is finding its balance again
By Michael Coren
September 8, 2009
Michael Coren
It’s been more than two years since Pope Benedict allowed the Mass to be said more freely in Latin. Fears allegedly abounded. One was that Catholics would start robotically praying for the conversion of “the perfidious Jews.” All the papal statement actually said was that “In parishes where there is a stable group of faithful who adhere to the earlier liturgical tradition, the pastor should willingly accept their request to celebrate the Mass according to the rite of the Roman Missal published in 1962.”
In fact the announcement stressed that there were certain areas where the public liturgy had to follow the more modern form, including when it speaks of the Jews. The Good Friday service did once use the word perfidious, an ugly translation from “perfideles” or half-believer. In earlier times the congregation prayed first for the “fideles,” meaning believers or church, then for the Jewish people and then for the “infidels” or unbelievers. The deeply troubling word was expunged more than 40 years ago.
In fact the announcement stressed that there were certain areas where the public liturgy had to follow the more modern form, including when it speaks of the Jews. The Good Friday service did once use the word perfidious, an ugly translation from “perfideles” or half-believer. In earlier times the congregation prayed first for the “fideles,” meaning believers or church, then for the Jewish people and then for the “infidels” or unbelievers. The deeply troubling word was expunged more than 40 years ago.
Roman Catholics do, however, still pray for the Jews at Easter. “Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God that they may continue to grow in the love of His name and in faithfulness to His covenant. Almighty and eternal God, long ago you gave your promise to Abraham and his posterity. Listen to your church as we pray that the people you first made your own may arrive at the fullness of redemption.”
None of this changed. Some critics, naturally, will always be offended by any sense of a hierarchy of belief and any call for conversion. Yet an exclusive truth cannot, obviously, co-exist with another exclusive truth. Otherwise that truth would not be exclusive. If there is a God, there is not an absence of God. If water is wet, it is not dry.
Serious Catholics believe that happiness and eternal life are to be found within the Catholic Church and, as such, to refuse to pray that other people will find their way into such a place would be positively cruel. The problem is that in this intellectually dumb and morally numb age we like our truths, well, less truthful. “Might be” or “could be” or, usually, “anything you want it to be.” Never “you should be.”
So what have we seen since 2007? Not burning heretics but, with delicious irony, more freedom of worship. For some time individual priests had only been allowed to say the Latin Mass if they had special permission from their bishop but now they are allowed to use Latin or the vernacular, leaving the decision up to them.
In the paradoxical mindset of the contemporary liberal, of course, any act that fails to impose what is perceived as being radical is by its nature reactionary. As perverse as the argument that the truly tolerant must refuse to tolerate the intolerant. Oppression in the name of freedom.
The Vatican also hoped that this move would bring back some of the hundreds of thousands of conservative Catholics who had joined quasi-Catholic groups outside of the church. Some of them left for obscure or sinister reasons but certainly not all. Many have returned and just this summer English Anglo-Catholics still inside the Church of England met en masse with Catholic leaders with a view to joining the church. They and numerous other converts have named the new orthodoxy and the return of the Latin Mass and traditional liturgy as the final reason for their decision.
Nor must we forget that the Pope’s reform was also a recapturing of Vatican II, which was intended to be an organic progression of 2,000 years of church tradition and teaching. Windows were supposed to be opened but an assortment of 1960s academics and left-wing priests preferred to smash them. Continuation became breach and a legion of abuses were allowed and even encouraged.
That time of fear, confusion, denial and spiritual banality is, thank God, over. It caused enormous damage and in some parts of the church and the world it still drains away the lifeblood of salvation. But the tide has turned. The church is finding her balance once again, which she always does.
(Coren’s new book, As I See It, is now on sale. His web site is michaelcoren.com .)
None of this changed. Some critics, naturally, will always be offended by any sense of a hierarchy of belief and any call for conversion. Yet an exclusive truth cannot, obviously, co-exist with another exclusive truth. Otherwise that truth would not be exclusive. If there is a God, there is not an absence of God. If water is wet, it is not dry.
Serious Catholics believe that happiness and eternal life are to be found within the Catholic Church and, as such, to refuse to pray that other people will find their way into such a place would be positively cruel. The problem is that in this intellectually dumb and morally numb age we like our truths, well, less truthful. “Might be” or “could be” or, usually, “anything you want it to be.” Never “you should be.”
So what have we seen since 2007? Not burning heretics but, with delicious irony, more freedom of worship. For some time individual priests had only been allowed to say the Latin Mass if they had special permission from their bishop but now they are allowed to use Latin or the vernacular, leaving the decision up to them.
In the paradoxical mindset of the contemporary liberal, of course, any act that fails to impose what is perceived as being radical is by its nature reactionary. As perverse as the argument that the truly tolerant must refuse to tolerate the intolerant. Oppression in the name of freedom.
The Vatican also hoped that this move would bring back some of the hundreds of thousands of conservative Catholics who had joined quasi-Catholic groups outside of the church. Some of them left for obscure or sinister reasons but certainly not all. Many have returned and just this summer English Anglo-Catholics still inside the Church of England met en masse with Catholic leaders with a view to joining the church. They and numerous other converts have named the new orthodoxy and the return of the Latin Mass and traditional liturgy as the final reason for their decision.
Nor must we forget that the Pope’s reform was also a recapturing of Vatican II, which was intended to be an organic progression of 2,000 years of church tradition and teaching. Windows were supposed to be opened but an assortment of 1960s academics and left-wing priests preferred to smash them. Continuation became breach and a legion of abuses were allowed and even encouraged.
That time of fear, confusion, denial and spiritual banality is, thank God, over. It caused enormous damage and in some parts of the church and the world it still drains away the lifeblood of salvation. But the tide has turned. The church is finding her balance once again, which she always does.
(Coren’s new book, As I See It, is now on sale. His web site is michaelcoren.com .)
Michael Coren