Looking for Liturgical Love in All the Wrong Places

Who would defend the Novus Ordo, and why?

On social media some time ago, a priest posted the following tribute to the New Mass:

I love the new order of the Mass. It’s the Mass that has fed me my entire life. It’s the Mass I celebrate with joy as a priest. It’s the Mass that has brought grace for me and my people. It’s the Mass in which I have unfailingly found God. I love its rhythms. I love its simplicity. I love its focus. I love its sense of organic spirituality. I’ve found rest in it. The new order of the Mass is where I discerned my vocation. It’s where Jesus has met me on good days and bad, in sickness and in health, in my times of fidelity and infidelity.

I’ve attended the Byzantine Divine Liturgy. It was transcendent. I’ve attended the Traditional Latin Mass. It was solemn and elegant. I’ve both attended and concelebrated the Anglican Use. It was, to be as British as possible, brilliant. I loved them all. I’ve honored the men who celebrated them. I was moved by the congregations attending them. Nothing in my experience of them made me think for one instant that the ordinary form was defective. Nothing led, or could lead, me to believe that the Mass which holds the hearts of the vast majority of Catholics is in any way second-class.

I will never say a word against any legitimate form of the Eucharist. Why? Because it’s THE EUCHARIST. That’s first and foremost. But also because, as the Second Vatican Council reminds us, every legitimate rite is equal in dignity, and an expression of Tradition (SC 4).

But I think people forget that means the new rite of the Mass is ALSO equal in dignity to all the others, and a valid expression of Tradition. The Father does not give his children stones in place of bread. He would not—DID not—allow the Church to institute a second-class liturgy. I don’t know why so many people have so little trust in Providence as to be convinced He did.

There are abuses. But there have been liturgical abuses since the beginning of the Church. Liturgical abuses in the Traditional Latin Mass are why numerous popes and the Council Fathers started the liturgical renewal in the first place. Liturgical abuses are why Dom Prosper Gueranger did such heroic labors to purify the liturgy. No rite, at any point in history, has been invulnerable to abuse. No rite, at any point in history, became any less a valid rite just because sinners abused it.

Today, in all innocence, a gentleman my age told me that he’d been led to believe that when one developed spiritually, one would leave the new rite of the Mass for the older form. He was sad, because he didn’t want to go to the older form, but he’d been led to believe that’s what “spiritual” people did. I was horrified. Who had led him to doubt the Church so deeply?

But I also understood. There are soooooo many voices out there either attacking the Church’s ordinary rite or damning it with faint praise. I’ve seen absolutely no one credible coming to its passionate defense. Of course the gentleman got the impression that he had to abandon the Church’s official Mass. The only voices he ever heard said that’s what all “serious” Catholics do. I doubt he’s alone in that misapprehension.

I will never say a word against the Traditional Latin Mass, or any other legitimate rite. I wish others had the faith to also refrain from attacking the new form of the Mass. It’s approved. It’s a monument of Tradition. It’s the daily bread of countless believers. The new order of the Mass is beautiful. It makes mystics. It feeds saints. And I love it dearly.

I know I’ll be murdered in the comments for this post. So many people believe that the Church’s ordinary Mass is essentially defective. It’s like hearing nails on a chalkboard for some to hear the Novus Ordo praised. I’m not going to get into ugly fights with fellow believers. There’s no need. And I can’t let it shred my soul. I just wanted to express my appreciation for the Latin Church’s ordinary rite of the Mass.

It’s my home. It’s where I find God. It’s a liturgy approved by Him. And it need take second place to no other rite or form. Because the Church solemnly tells us that they’re all alike in dignity, and all an expression of Tradition. Don’t be afraid to love the Mass where you’ve met God your entire life. The Church loves it too. And so does God.

As soon as this gushing tribute was posted, it began accumulating comments of two sorts: the kind that patted the author on the back for a job well done, and the kind that pointed out how unsustainable his position is.

One friend of mine took him to task in comments as irrefutable as they are succinct:

A. “Nothing led, or could lead, me to believe that the Mass which holds the hearts of the vast majority of Catholics is in any way second-class.” Always the same hackneyed refusal to acknowledge the most basic fact about the post-Conciliar liturgical reform: since it was introduced, the vast majority of Catholics have stopped practicing the Faith altogether, and no form of the liturgy “holds their hearts.”

B. “The new order of the Mass is beautiful.” Well, no, it isn’t. It is usually very, very ugly, and very rarely, it is done with some sincere effort at beauty. But even at its most beautiful, it is still a gross impoverishment of the liturgy on every level. You know how we know? Because if it weren’t, the gentleman who occasioned this EXTREMELY convenient anecdote would have immediately understood what the problem was with the assertion made to him, and laughed it off. The fact that he didn’t says everything about the totality of failure of the post-Conciliar liturgy.

C. “Simplicity, focus, organic spirituality...” Even though it departs in every way from every known traditional liturgy in Christian history—except for those of the Protestant reformers?

D. “All [rites] are an expression of Tradition.” No, the Novus Ordo isn’t that, and it doesn’t take much to see that almost every supposedly “traditional source” for it was modified or corrupted.

E. “There are soooooo many voices out there either attacking the Church’s ordinary rite or damning it with faint praise. I’ve seen absolutely no one credible coming to its passionate defense.” This itself is to damn it with faint praise. If the NOM were so beautiful, traditional, nourishing, and mystic-making, surely there would be an abundant literature celebrating this in a plausible and attractive way. But there isn’t. And that’s because it can’t be done. And it can’t be done, because the thing itself is like a committee meeting one sits through.

F. “There have always been liturgical abuses.” Notice how he shifts the conversation to abuses. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about RITES, the Roman one and the Paul VI-Bugnini one.

My own response was even shorter:

There is a lot of good will in this post, but also a lot of naivete. It’s much harder to praise the new rite once you see all that was hacked away in the 1960s from the Holy Mass as it developed over centuries—and the spurious or dubious reasons why this was done, together with the immense harm caused by this rupture and loss. One can only see the loss after being immersed for a while in the tradition, where it is like moving from cartoons to the Sistine Chapel. I’m not speaking about the Eucharist, but about everything else—the entire rite or ritual, its texts, its music, its rubrics.

Having received a ton of flak for those words, I made this rejoinder to my critics:

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