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.  

A Sad Story of a Legacy Robbed

Rev. Rich Coveny

My brother and his family live in the lovely little town of Colden NY in the ski hills of western part of the state.  I honestly don’t think you could find a nicer place to live and for years one of the factors that made the town so lovely was the Catholic Parish of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart.  For forty years Father Richard Coveny was pastor of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart and guided the parish in the years after the Council into a real Vatican II parish.

Now my brother certainly appreciates Mass in English and Communion in the hand, has never really cared for the “handshake of peace” (I use that term because that is the most you’ll get out of him and he will wipe his hand on his jeans when it is over) and in general never got the vision of Vatican II.   For years he wasn’t very fond of Father Rich, Father often being a “bridge too far” for my brother’s middle of the road Catholicism.  I would tell him, when he complained, that he was pretty lucky to have Father Rich and the sort of parish Father had built up, but my brother, a frequent communicant at the time, didn’t seem impressed any

more by my observations than by Father Rich’s calling people by name at Communion (and knowing all his parishioners on sight), or by the strong sense of community Father had built up in the parish to balance the contentious small-town politics of Colden. 

Father Rich said that he would stay at Colden as long as he could possibly serve and stayed long beyond the retirement age.  He knew in this time of diminishing vocations there would be no one to replace him.  But the day came, it always does, when Rich had to face the limitations of age and reluctantly retire.  For a few years the parish managed to run under the capable direction of Sister Margaret Donner, a Notre Dame Sister who had been Father’s Pastoral Associate.  Sister did a great job of holding things together, even building them up.  She would get a retired priest or a vacationing priest or some priest from somewhere to say the Sunday Masses or do the funerals or whatever else needed to be done sacramentally.  Father Rich had laid a sound foundation and the parish continued to flourish.

These situations can’t last forever.  Sadly, eventually the Bishop decided to close Our Lady of the Sacred Heart and absorb it in a neighboring parish.  It was a sad day but the parishioners

responded in just the way that Father Rich had prepared them.  They asked the diocese not to sell the property but to let them run it as an outreach center to serve the needs of the rural poor in southern Erie County.  There is Gabriel’s Closet, a Thrift Store that is open to the public but to which those in need are given purchase credits towards clothes and various household needs.  A food pantry, supplied by local donations, is open to all those in need.  Our Lady of the Sacred Heart parishioners contribute deeply and work hard to support this ministry—and that made Father Rich very proud in his last days.  Unfortunately, this past May, the time came for Father Rich to hear Jesus say: “I was hungry, and you gave me to eat….Now enter into the joy of your Master.“ 

Father Rich had specified that he didn’t want flowers or even Masses when he died, but donations to the Bread of Life Outreach Center.  I am sure people were very generous.  But Father also left his entire estate to Bread of Life and it was not an inconsiderable estate.  He owned a retirement home in Florida among other things.  It was a most generous bequest.

Like many generous bequests to charity it proved to be too great a temptation to those family members who felt they had been cheated out of an inheritance.  “Father Rich changed his will on his deathbed,” they came forward and alleged, “he just wasn’t able to write it down.”  Mmmhmmm,  sure. 

Their claim would never have been held up in court, of course, but the Board at Bread of Life didn’t want to dishonor Father’s memory by getting into an ugly squabble.  They accepted $10,000 for the charity and moved on.  It is sad, tragically sad, that Father Rich’s legacy of serving others and looking out for the needy, a value he had inculcated in his parishioners over 40 years, had never passed on to his nieces and nephews.  But what is really sad is that I don’t suspect that Father will be seeing his relatives at any time soon.  Just as there is a special place in heaven for those who, like Father Rich, make alleviating the sufferings of the poor a main focus of their lives, there is a special place in hell for those who take the food from the mouths of the poor.  Requiescat in pace, Father Rich.  And we will pray for those who stole your legacy.