Reason 6 On Why The Revised Rites of Vatican II Are Superior To The Preconciliar Rites

Let’s go back to our series on why I maintain that the current Roman Rite of the Mass is superior to the unreformed rites used previous to the Council.  I had enumerated 10 reasons—in response to a rather supercilious article by the ever supercilious Professor Peter Kwasniewski of Wyoming Catholic College making the counter-claim—that I believe make it clear why the current Rites, though still in need of much work, are a vast improvement over the Traditional Liturgy.  We had looked at the first five claims.   Now let’s go to the sixth.

The liturgy walks us through the cycle of Christ’s birth, life, teaching, suffering, death, resurrection and sending the Holy Spirit. 

Now, remember I am not giving a set of abstract reflections here. I am talking from experience.   I grew up under the Tridentine Liturgy.   I was an altar boy with that Rite.  I went to Mass daily under that Rite.  I am not some armchair pontificator still in my 40’s or 50’s (or late 20’s) that whines about some supposed loss of reverence or why women don’t invest more in mantillas when a lace shawl makes them look so much more sexily piously subservient to male fantasies authority. When it comes to the Traditional Latin Mass, I’ve been there; done that; and got the cotta.  (A cotta is a sort of ecclesiastical T-shirt, a type of surplice that ends at about the line of the pubis.)

One of the things I remember most of being an altar boy in the old days of the TLM was the constancy of the Black Mass.  No, I am not referring to Satanic Worship.  We didn’t know about such things in those days before Stephen King.  I mean that weekdays, despite a rich and deep calendar of saints that kept being ignored were given to Requiem Masses.  Day after day, week after week, Mass was invariably the same.  The same introit.  The same epistle.  The same gradual. The same gospel. The same cradling voice of the aged Mrs. Steffans coming from the choir loft as she pedaled the harmonium.    Everything was Requiem Aeternam dona eis Domine. Mass after Mass, day after day, week after week.   And of course once one got into the “Mass of the Faithful” (more or less equivalent to today’s Liturgy of the Eucharist) nothing ever changed. Nothing.  Ever.  One didn’t get to hear the gospels unfold the cycle of Jesus’s Incarnation, birth, teaching, miracles, suffering, death, and Resurrection.  O sure, there were Advent Sundays and Lent Sundays and Easter Sundays where you got a somewhat bare-bones account, a sketchy outline of the gospel story, Gospel Highlights as it were, but it was all so abstract and far-away because it just wasn’t tied together through the week.  All in all, we heard less than 15% of the Gospels read to us during the liturgy—and that presumes, of course, that we knew our Latin well enough to comprehend the readings that were being mumbled by the priest at the altar without a vernacular repetition.  Yes, we had missals, but who used them.  Mass was good for two, maybe three trips around the beads.  I mean, really???  It just removed by mystery of Christ’s Life, Death, and Resurrection to a sort of mental tableau for us to contemplate through the veil of the centuries, sucking life and color from it to reduce it to nothing more than a spiritual representation of the same cheap plaster tableaux with which our churches were over-decorated. 

These many years later I am all but a daily communicant.  There are days, relatively few, when I am not at Mass. There is always a reason if I am not.  I want to go to morning Mass.  I find that the systematic reading of the scriptures and especially the Gospels nourishes me and makes the reality of Christ’s life something very tangible.  My Latin is more than sufficient that were the Mass in Latin I would still find great value in it—but it is infinitely richer for me when I can pick up the nuances of the prayers without doing the mental gymnastics of interfacing two languages.  (I have studied the Latin texts, and especially those of the Eucharistic Prayers, carefully in order to better understand the precise theology they contain and I must say, Liturgiam Authenicam be damned, Vox Clara has done a huge screw-up of those translations in which they have sacrificed sound theology for their own political purposes.)  I find that the role of the Holy Spirit in consecrating the Eucharist and in uniting us in Eucharistic Unity is so much more developed in the new Eucharistic Prayers over the faint epiclesis of the Roman Canon.  The Mass is the highlight of my day, not simply in the way of some pious reverie, but in what integrates my day, what gives it shape and depth.  I have come to not just understand but in some way appropriate the cycle of Christ’s life, from the appearance of the Baptist in the desert until the rush of the Holy Spirit upon those in the Upper Room, into my life.  Part of this is that it has been long journey through sixty-some years, but it is the collapse of the TLM in favor of the Novus Ordo that let it be a journey and not be stuck in that short-circuited cycle of an infinity of Black Masses which marked my youth.  It is, to cite Jaroslav Pelikan, the difference between living faith and dead faith.  

Reason 3 For Why the "New Mass" Is Superior to the Old Rite.

Reason 3: True prayer comes out of the depth of our graced experience and thus is rooted in the particulars of our own culture.

One of my favorite historical quotes is from the Emperor, Charles V (1519-1556) who said

I speak Spanish to God

French to my soldiers

Italian to my women

And German to my horse.

(In those days, unlike today, the French had the reputation for being the bravest of soldiers.)  Charles prayed in Spanish because it was his primary language—his everyday language which he knew best and in which he was most comfortable.  I am always amused, wryly amused, when people claim that the Latin Mass was “universal” because Latin is a “universal language.”  A universal language that (almost) no one speaks and few know.  I am not sure that that qualifies Latin as “universal.”  It certainly doesn’t qualify as a language of prayer except for those few who have not only a rudimentary education in it (4 years secondary or 2 years college minimum) but some genuine facility with the language.  (I am a former Latin teacher and can pretty much tell how much exposure to the language it takes for one to have a sufficient level of comfort to more than read it.  I remember being at morning Mass one day some years back at a little parish church in Clifton, Virginia where I was staying with friends.  The priest—a somewhat young man—came out and began Mass in Latin.  It was painful.  I mentioned to him afterwards that no one present, including himself, other than God and I, knew what he was saying.  He took his breathes and pauses at times that made no sense, his pronunciation was way off, accents falling on syllables they didn’t belong, no awareness of the idiosyncrasies of the pronunciation of Latin letter combinations or consonants.   It was absolutely dreadful.  It was worse than dreadful.  And I wish it were the exception—but it is far from so among these junior clergy who think a year or two of seminary Latin has made them ready for their attempts to simulate a Pontifical High Mass.  But I have digressed too far.) 

Prayer is not some mindless repetition of words, much less nonsense syllables.  A recent comment addressed to this site, in an attempt to justify the Latin Mass as a normal rite, said “Latin is not mumbo-jumbo.”  I beg to disagree.  Unless one knows the language, Latin—or any other language we attempt to use whether at Church or ordering in a restaurant or watching an Art Film—is mumbo jumbo.  The nuances of Shakespeare are lost on a person who does not have a pretty deep knowledge of English.  The Divine Comedy is best read in translation if you do not know 14^th century Italian pretty well.  And so too with the Liturgy. 

Ann and Barry Ulanov wrote about prayer:

In prayer we speak to and of ourselves, of what lies heavy on our minds, of what rumbles in fear at the pit of our stomachs, of the grudges and resentments we hold behind our eyes below the surfaces of our outward being.  We speak what we have to say, whatever that is, and however we are moved to say it.  

This is not limited to liturgical prayer but extends to all prayer.  In prayer we must come truthfully and honestly into the Divine Presence.  It is precisely why the Church ordinarily begins the Liturgy with a “penitential rite” that makes us look deep inside and acknowledge the disorder into which we have fallen.  We can’t pray, truly pray, until we do so.  And then the Church confronts us with the Word of God which is meant to pierce our hearts like a two-edged sword:

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.  And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.  (Hebrews 4: 12-13). 

And we proceed on to make an intelligible affirmation of our adherence to the key doctrines of the faith in the Creed—an intelligible affirmation of what we believe and ponder in our hearts.  The gifts that represent our lives are then presented on the altar and the Great Mystery of Faith unfolds.  While in contemporary English “mystery” means something not-understood, in Latin and in the Tradition of the Church it means something that transcends understanding: something we know in our being without having to intellectualize it.  It is not meant to be something veiled by human confusion but something that in clarity reveals the Divine Essence being made manifest in it.  That is the splendor of the Eucharistic Prayer.  (Well, not the so called Roman Canon that delights in that sheer multiplicity of words that Jesus warns us against in Matthew 6:7).  The oldest of the Eucharistic Prayers, so-called Prayer II on which III and the Eucharistic Prayer for Special Needs are each modeled, has a very austere outline: epiclesis (consecratory invocation of the Holy Spirit), consecratory Last Supper narrative, anamnesis, oblatio, communio of the Church and its hierarchs,  communio of the departed,  communio of the Mother of God and the Saints, and the Doxology.  The simplicity of the prayer reveals the complexity of the Eucharist and at the same time keeps our focus on the Mysterium.  The prayer reveals the action of the Holy Spirit as the one who transforms the Bread and Wine—and by extension we who offer it and whom it represents—into the Body and Blood of Christ.  The Prayer centers in the Sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross and establishes the identity of the Bread and Wine (and us whom the bread and wine represent) with the Body sacrificially broken on the Cross and the Blood sacrificially there shed for the forgiveness of our sins.) The Prayer draws us there gathered into unity with the Church spread through the world.  The Prayer keeps us in union with those whom we have loved and cherished and who have gone before us.  The Prayer celebrates our identity in communion with the Mother of God and all the saints.  And finally the Prayer leads us to the great Doxology in which we, in gratitude for all God does for us in the Eucharist and indeed in life, sing the Praise of God.  This prayer, to which we are given access when it is in a comprehendible language, gives us direct and immediate participation in the Eucharistic Sacrifice without diminishing the unique ministry of the ordained priest celebrating the Mass.  We are not passive spectators but can join our entire person—heart and mind—into the great act of Worship.

What makes the Mass “universal” is not its language, or even its Rite.  The joke was always told that Mass should not be in a language that only some understood—the vernacular, but a language, Latin, in which no one understood.  In my travels I have often been faced with attending Mass in a language I don’t understand—Polish, Czech, Arabic, even Irish on one occasion.  It wasn’t a problem because my familiarity with the Mass in my own language keeps me very much aware where I can pray in my own language with those whose language is different.  But I am familiar with it, know it by heart at this point, only because day after day I pray it, and can pray it deeply, in my own language.   I am familiar enough with the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom that it isn’t a huge problem when I have been at the Liturgy in Greek or Old Slavonic but I must admit that I not only miss the nuances of the prayers, but much of the particularities.  While I enjoy the experience—especially the music—I can’t say that I have the same direct and conscious access to the Mysterium as when I am praying in my own language regardless of rite. 

And then there are times when I am in an unfamiliar rite and language—the Syro Malabar Rite when I was in India or the Chaldean in Iraq.  They are lovely rites—well, I found the music to the Syro-Malabar rite non-conducive to prayer but that is my subjective experience—but it does push me out of the community into private prayer while those around me are immersing themselves in the common experience.  I like private prayer.  I spend a considerable amount of time each day in silent prayer.  But that is not the Liturgy or the essence of Liturgical Prayer. 

I am not saying there is no room for Latin in our worship.  There is a treasury of great Latin Music and like the wise steward we need to bring forth both the old and the new from our storeroom.  A Pie Jesu, or an Ave Verum Corpus, can offer a respite from the vernacular in which we can give ourselves over to a moment or two of prayerful reverie, but the Mass is not meant to be prayerful reverie but our participation in the salvific Death and Resurrection of Christ.  

Reason 2 For Why the "New Mass" Is Superior To The Old Rite

The most valuable experience in our process of being catechized in the faith is our participation in Liturgical Prayer and thus the prayer must reflect fully the authentic Catholic Faith.  

I attended the Divine Liturgy today in the Byzantine Rite—something I like to do—and I noticed that in the Byzantine/Orthodox calendars July 20 is the feast of the Prophet Elijah.  In the First and Second Book of Kings, Elijah was the great defender of True Faith against those Israelites who had fallen into superstitious practices.  The wealthy and secure of Israel had fallen into the worship of the Baals—the local deities, mostly fertility cults—that promised them prosperity.  Elijah was an especial defender of the poor as the Protected of Yahweh, against those of the great and powerful who tried to exploit them for their own gain. 

History shows us that this often happens with religion, even Christianity, when religious leaders for their own greed or power become too close to the politically and economically powerful interests.  Religion, for its own power, will often forget the interests of the poor.  In the history of the Catholic Church we see how this happened in the Ancien Regime, the alliance of Throne and Altar that came tumbling down with the French Revolution.  In the late Middle Agnes and in the Age of Absolutism in the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th century, the Church too often was part of the problem and not part of the solution—the Gospel Message of Good News for the poor. 

This wasn’t just a Catholic problem.  I remember writing a paper for a course in graduate school in which I explored how the Anglican Prayer Books of 1549, 1552, 1559 and 1662 incorporated a political ideology into the Liturgy that reinforced the absolute authority of the King as well as instructing people to be happy with their subordinate places in society. 

One of the reasons that I am committed to the liturgical changes of the Second Vatican Council is that the Church’s worship embodies and teaches the faith of the Church and the current rites most accurately reflect the faith of the Church as it stands today.  People’s belief is shaped by the way in which we worship.  Liturgy is highly symbolic and the symbols impress on our hearts and our minds the Truth in which we put our faith.  Indeed, not the catechism or the documents of the magisterium, but the liturgy itself is the primary agent of catechesis: faith formation. 

The liturgy in the pre-conciliar rites expressed a theological worldview which was appropriate to the time but to which the Church no longer adheres.  In 1570, when Pius V issued the Missal that incorporated the liturgical changes and direction ordered by the Council of Trent, the Church still held that the earth, not the sun, was the center of the solar system, indeed the center around which the entire universe revolved.  This, in turn, reflected a cosmology which presumed that man was the main point in creation and that all else in creation was subordinate to the relationship of Creator and his human creation.  Stars were not known to be suns and the universe itself was seen to be much smaller than we have come to know it to be.  God was in a heaven only an angel-laden ladder away and the devil was in a hell that occasionally belched fire and brimstone into our atmosphere in Vesuvius and Etna.  In 1570 the Catholic Church still held that absolute monarchy was the best form of government because the (supposed) Divine Authority of Kings modeled in an earthly fashion the Divine Authority of God himself and thus kings were to be obeyed and reverenced.  In the 16^th century the Church still held that European culture was inherently superior to the other cultures of the human family and the Church produced a Liturgy that in language and symbol system was exclusively European with a disregard for the newly discovered worlds of the Americas, Africa, and the Far East.  In the sixteenth century the Church still held to the idea of the Great Chain of Being in which each person occupied the position: King, rich person, woman, leper, bishop, mental defective, widow, etc. to which the Divine Plan had ordained them and in which they must remain.  The Mass reflected these and other ideas which over the subsequent centuries faded.   The Liturgy was designed to mimic the ceremonial of a royal court.  Women, because of their menses, were excluded from entrance into the altar area and were not permitted to exercise certain functions.  The Liturgy was designed to emphasize the mediatorial role of the priest between God and the mere faithful.  The priest offered the sacrifice on behalf of the assembled faithful whose role was to watch and to listen.  They were separated from the sacrifice by railings that divided the church into the section for those ordained and those assisting the ordained, and where the ordinary people could gather. The use of an arcane language which only a few of the faithful understood (and not all priests really understood) was another separation keeping the ordinary faithful at a distance from the sacred action.

Over the intervening centuries the Church’s understanding of the world—both this world and the Eternal—evolved.  The French Revolution swept royal absolutism into the dustbin of history.  The rise of the Middle Class due to the Industrial Revolution made the common person an agent of history, no longer a bystander to history.   The Church accommodated to this.  Through the course of the nineteenth century bishops increasingly came from the Middle Class and no longer from the aristocracy.  As more and more people became educated, class and social status played less and less a role as the Church itself democratized.  While for centuries Popes had come from the nobility, with Pius X the son of a peasant sat on the Throne of Peter.  But the liturgy was fixed and frozen and reflected a world of hierarchy resting on the base of a people who were mere sheep to be guided by their betters.  Baptism no longer conferred dignity and the royal priestly and prophetic character of the baptized was totally obscured.

Moves to unfreeze the liturgy began over a century ago.  Pius X wanted to increase the active role of the faithful in the Liturgy and wrote the motu proprio Tra la Sollectitudine relegating polyphony to the concert hall and restoring the primacy of chant to the Mass precisely to break the monopoly of choirs and encourage congregational singing.   It was, of course, highly ignored.  Pius also permitted the ordinary Catholic to receive communion daily without permission of his or her pastor or confessor and he restored the communion of the faithful to a place within the Mass and not a private ceremony for the few communicants after Mass was over.  Such changes may seem rather minimal to us, but it heralded a different approach to the Liturgy than had been taken for four centuries. 

Even before Pius’ legislation to increase the participation of the faithful in the Liturgy, he and his predecessor Leo XIII had taken the Church for an interesting turn towards recapturing its own historical character.  Both Leo and Pius—and even Leo’s predecessor the arch-conservative Pius IX—were big on restoring the ancient churches of Rome.  They went into many of the older churches—San Giorgio in Velabro, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Santa Maria in Dominica, San Stefano Rotondo, Santa Costanza, Santa Sabina and others—and stripped away the baroque ornamentations that had been added in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  They recovered the ancient Roman basilica form.  Their work showed that Rome had never oriented its churches—they did not all face east but the churches of Rome faced every direction of the compass.  Moreover, their historical restorations revealed that the custom in Rome had always been for the priest to face the people across the altar.  Stripped of the baroque decorations, the churches stood in their ancient simplicity devoid of statues though often decorated with ancient mosaics and icons.  Suddenly the baroque liturgy of 1570 was startlingly out of place in these ancient temples. It triggered historians and patristic scholars to research the development of the rites and suggest modifications to the Roman Rite to restore its ancient character.  Those modifications began to take shape with the restoration of the Holy Week rites in 1955 and then more and more appeared in the years during and after the Council until the Missal of 1970 gave shape to the current official rite. 

Pius XII who reigned as pope from 1939-1958 encouraged these studies and wrote two encyclicals that reflected the developing theology of the Church and understanding of its liturgy: Mystici Corporis (1943) and Mediator Dei (1947).  The first—appropriately—returned to a patristic theology of the Church (as opposed to the scholastic approach of Trent and the post-Tridentine theologians such as Bellarmine) and the second gave a vision of the Liturgy that reflected this patristic ecclesiology.  These documents—among other writings of Pius XII—provided the theological basis for the Second Vatican Council. 

The Council itself marked significant developments in Catholic doctrine.  The priestly role of the laity was clearly restored in the Dogmatic (repeat Dogmatic) Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium.  (Some people dismiss Vatican II as not being a dogmatic Council: they need to read the documents that are dogmatic constitutions to see their error.)  The Church abandoned its proclaimed right to be established by law in civil society and affirmed the right of the individual conscience to believe according to whatever lights were given it.  It was acknowledged that the Church is the community of the baptized and not only those in full communion with the Roman Pontiff—though, the fullness of Christ’s Church subsists in the Roman Communion.  There were dramatic changes.

And the Liturgy issued by Pope Paul VI to implement the changes mandated by the Council has been designed to express more fully the theological realities as proclaimed by the Church today.  Safeguarding the unique graces and responsibilities conferred upon the ordained, all the baptized share in the priestly, royal, and prophetic office.   All the faithful, with each according to his or her proper order, join Christ the High Priest in offering the Eucharistic Sacrifice with full active conscious participation.  New church buildings reflect this ecclesiology with the faithful gathered around the altar.  Railings have been removed so as to unite priest and people around the Lord’s Table.  The Eucharist is more clearly both meal and sacrifice.  The Chalice has been restored to the faithful to fulfill Christ’s command: “take and drink…”  While the properly vertical nature of the Mass has been maintained, the communal nature of worship has been emphasized over the private by restoring an appropriate horizontal awareness among the community of worshippers.  The baptized are recognized by being given ministries proper to them as lectors, cantors, and even “extraordinary” ministers of the Eucharist.  Indeed the artificial distinction (see Galatians 3:28) of male and female has been—to an extent—removed as women join men in the various ministries open to the Order of the faithful.  There remains more work yet to be done for a fuller expression of our ecclesiology to be reflected in our Liturgical celebrations. 

The cultural variations of the Church as it finds itself around the globe—and even as it finds itself in certain societies such as our multi-cultural America—gives varied expression to the Mass and indeed to all our prayer.  Gospel Music in one place, Mariachi in another, and the Fauré Requiem have all found their place.  In Africa you need dancers if you are to consecrate a church; in America only if you want to give the bishop a coronary.  A priest in India might be seated at a low table-altar for Mass while a priest in Nigeria dances around it holding a bowl of incense.   

The 1970 and the 1570 rites each express the faith of the Church as it was defined at that particular period in history.  I always enjoy a trip to colonial Williamsburg, but that is not the America of today.  I don’t particularly enjoy the usus antiquior of the Mass and I am troubled by it because, unlike Colonial Williamsburg, the Mass is something far to sacred to relegate to historical re-enactment. The Mass embodies and enshrines the faith of the Church, not the Church that was in God’s yesterday but the Church that is in the grace of God’s Present moment.  Of course, if your faith is static and removed from this world in which the Divine Word incarnated himself, that is another matter—one for Elijah who stood against the false gods of his day.  

Ten Reasons to Embrace the Liturgical Changes of the Second Vatican Council

Yes, I admit it.  I troll the katholik krazy sites for fun—and just to see what sort of mischief up to which they are.  (How do you like that, Sister Mary Tarcisius who taught us never to end a sentence with a preposition.  Honeychile, I’m no canon lawyer, but some rules are made to be broken—and, as much as I enjoy reading Edwardian prose, some things are just obsolete.  And that pertains to Church too.)  Most of the sights are semi-literate trash—my old friend Janet at Restore DC Catholicism, her evil twin in Boston at the artist blog formerly known as Throw the Bums Out in 2010 (when the Bums got reelected in 2010 and the Bum-in-Chief got reelected in 2012, she changed it to The Tenth Crusade and then it briefly became something like What the Pope Really Means but now it seems to be nameless.  And then there is Rorate Caeli which used to be fairly intelligent reading but now has just devolved into a semi-sedevacantist anti-Francis rave.  But when I want to read something on the extreme right wing that is usually intelligent and always (well, almost always) well researched, I go to New Liturgical Movement.  For the most part they don’t qualify as krazies, though I would still consider them among the effete savants I referred to in my previous post. 

I found New Liturgical Movement somewhat by accident.  A reader tipped me off to it’s having cited me.  I felt deeply honored, even after I read the diatribe.  It seems that Dom Antony Ruff OSB, a  monk of Saint John’s Collegeville and manager of the PrayTell blog, initially referred to What Sister Never Knew and Father Never Told You.  The particular reference had to do with my declaiming about one of my favorite bugaboos—the questionable “offertory rite” in the Missal of Pius V, the rite on which the current usus antiquior (aka Traditonal Latin Mass) is based.  My problem with the rite in question is that it teaches the (false) doctrine that the Mass consists of two sacrifices: the Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross at Calvary and a secondary and lesser sacrifice in which the priest offers in sacrifice the bread and the wine which will be used for the Eucharistic Sacrifice.  Now I have no quibble that in the Sacrifice of the Mass the One Eternal Sacrifice of Christ, offered once and for all becomes mystically (i.e. sacramentally) present on the altar.  In the Mass we participate in the One Eternal Sacrifice which Christ offered for the forgiveness of sins.  Agree.  100%   Sorry Martin Luther, sorry John Calvin, sorry Thomas Cranmer but you guys were wrong—but I don’t have to tell you that, you know it, now.  Too bad you didn’t know it back in the day, but frankly too many of your Catholic contemporaries were making such outlandish claims about Christ being sacrificed over and over again each time Mass was offered that I can’t blame you for over-reacting.  But the dust has settled—or in poor Archbishop Cranmer’s case, the ashes have settled, somewhere, and we all need to move on.  But, no there is no sacrifice of bread and wine.  Call it an oblatio all you want, or a hostia, or even refer to the gifts as a sacrificium—but they aren’t, and we shouldn’t say that they are.  That is not the faith of the Church!  Pius V’s faulty rite notwithstanding. 

In any event, this comment on the faux offertory rite of the 1570 rite sent Gregory DiPippo who is the managing editor of New Liturgical Movement into a bustle of research and writing in which he produced an entire series of articles on the various late medieval offertory rites.  (Of course, my objection is precisely this: that this exaggerated rite with its double sacrifice is a late medieval rite and varies from the ancient and patristic sources which would never have obscured the True Sacrifice with the imaginary devotionalisms of some medieval priests, more pious than orthodox, who thrilled at the thought that they were making a sacrifice of their very own with which to gild the solitary True Sacrifice of Christ by which we are redeemed.)   In the event Mr. DiPippo has produced a remarkable study of the various offertory rites of the Mendicant and Monastic Religious Orders as well as of the variant English and French Rites.  I understand that he has yet to finish this magnum opus by looking at the various Iberian Rites and I presume German, Scandinavian, and Western Slavic rites.  And this only covers the usages of the Western Church—which is appropriate as there is little or actually no influence of the Eastern Rites on the Western Liturgy from probably the eighth century until the twentieth.  But I am wandering from my objectives.  As I said, I have great respect—as well as frequent disagreement—with the work of the New Liturgical Movement blog.  My fundamental objection is their agenda of furthering the restoration of the pre-conciliar liturgy, an agenda to which I personally am totally opposed for a variety of historical, theological, and pastoral reasons.   New Liturgical Movement recently published an article by Peter Kwasniewski entitled “Ten Reasons to Attend the Traditional Latin Mass.”  It has led me to articulate my opposition to the revival of the pre-conciliar rite and so I will be doing a series of postings on Ten Reasons Why One Should Embrace the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite.  Like Mr. Kwasniewski’s article, my series will be not so much a thoroughly thought out manifesto but more a work in process that at times will fall into redundancy and probably even circular argument but it will give me a chance—for my own sake—to investigate why I think the liturgical Reforms of the Second Vatican Council provide the spiritual foundation for the Church in our time to be faithful to its mission.    Here are my ten reasons for embracing the liturgical changes of the Second Vatican Council.   Any similarity to the reasons posed by Mr. Kwasniewski are co-incidental. 

1.    saints are formed by prayer that draws them into deep participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

2.    The most valuable experience in our process of being catechized in the faith is our participation in Liturgical Prayer and thus the prayer must reflect fully the authentic Catholic Faith.  

3.    True prayer comes out of the depth of our graced experience and thus is rooted in the particulars of our own culture.

4.    True and authentic prayer is intelligible

5.    Because of its centrality in conforming us to Christ, the Liturgy must be a clear and unambiguous witness of our Trinitarian and Incarnational faith

6.    The liturgy walks us through the cycle of Christ’s birth, life, teaching, suffering, death, resurrection and sending the Holy Spirit. 

7.    The Liturgy introduces us to the life of discipleship as we follow the saints through the Church year. 

8.    The Liturgy immerses us in the Word of God which is the nourishment of our life of discipleship

9.    The Liturgy reveals to us the Full Mystery of the Body of Christ

10.                  The Liturgy is the means by which we are transformed into Christ and come to share in His Divine Nature.