Via CatholicCulture.org, I read today on the website of the Spanish Catholic magazine Omnes an interview which it published on Monday with Abp Arthur Roche, the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, which contains this rather surprising statement.
“At this moment, the liberalism, the individualism that exists in this society are a challenge for the Church. ... It is easy to think of my personal preference, of a specific type of liturgy, of a particular expression of celebration, of this priest rather than this other priest; but this individualism is not of the character of the Church.”
Obviously, this cannot refer to that Form of the Roman Rite that takes such pains to safeguard the faithful from the individual preferences of the celebrant and his chosen collaborators. We must therefore assume that it refers rather to that Form which was deliberately designed to be perpetually the creation and re-creation of the celebrant’s “personal preference, of a specific type of liturgy, of a particular expression of celebration, of this priest rather than this other priest”; in short, of, um, individualism...
This alone would be startling enough, but there is more! His Excellency goes on to say that “the point at which we are now, with the new missal of Paul VI, means that we have had the opportunity to study all the most fundamental elements, to take advantage of the sources of the liturgy, which were not known during the Tridentine Council in the years 1545-1563.” Does this signal an imminent redress of the many ways in which the creators of the post-Conciliar rite misused the sources of the Roman liturgy, either because they misunderstood them, or because they applied to them the same campaign of ruthless ideological censorship that they did not hesitate to apply to the Bible itself?
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| The Consilium ad exsequendam bringing the riches of the ancient sacramentaries to the reformed Roman Rite (artist’s conception.) |
Lastly, we note this very remarkable passage, in which His Excellency tells us that a document is in preparation “to discuss liturgical formation throughout the Church: from bishops to priests and laity. ... Possibly it will materialize in a letter to the Church on the importance of formation. What do we do when we meet every Sunday for this celebration? What is the point of that assembly? Not just an obligation to do something every week, but what do we do? What do we celebrate at that time?!”
This is an astonishing admission that more than 50 years after its promulgation, the post-Conciliar rite has, apparently, failed to impart this necessary and important information on its own, which, in turn, might well explain at least in part why Mass attendance and the frequenting of the Sacraments have cratered on a global scale.
Undoubtedly, this is no more than a foretaste of greater and even more bracing honesty yet to come...
