Hagan lio

The Herald lays it out clearly:

Pope Francis’s two apostolic letters on the liturgy in 2021 and 2022 restrict the use of the pre-conciliar missal while calling for an enhanced liturgical formation of the laity. What the Vatican seems to miss is that adherents of the older missal are generally younger, largely better-informed than their elders, and thoroughly imbued with the democratic forthrightness of expression that the Holy Father has strongly advocated under the banner of parrhesia. Many of them have read the decrees of Vatican II themselves and discovered a marked difference from what has subsequently been done in its name.

Perhaps the intention was that only certain subsets within the Church should employ parrhesia. One assumes, in the context of other strands to Pope Francis’s teaching, that this frankness was encouraged for those on the peripheries. However, the recent swingeing restrictions on the older liturgy, so generously lifted under Benedict XVI in the name of ecclesial communion, have forced a significant proportion of practising Catholics (proportionally far younger than in most parishes) onto a very real periphery. Perhaps this is not what that the Holy Father intended when he encouraged young people to make “mess” in July 2015. Having restricted the older liturgy for the sake of “the concord and unity of the Church,” the result has been the opposite, with many Catholics now experiencing new divisions and hurts. Wounds that had been healing have been reopened.

Ostensibly, the new restrictions were occasioned by those traditionalists who were apparently too outspoken and doctrinaire in their advocacy of the pre-conciliar missal. No doubt some were guilty of this. Yet to punish the many for the misdeeds of a few seems remarkably intolerant, if not totalitarian. This is especially so given that so many of the committed young, with whom the Church desperately seeks to engage, seem to prefer the traditional liturgy. Moreover, the media-savvy young see online, or experience first-hand, grievous liturgical abuses of the new liturgy and ask why there are no restrictions focused on these. The young have an especial sensitivity to inconsistency and injustice.

That the restrictions are explicitly aimed at addressing “non-acceptance of the liturgical reform” serves only to highlight the issue of whether the reform as enacted corresponds to the decrees of Vatican II. In a recent interview with The Tablet Cardinal Arthur Roche said the new restrictions derive from liturgical dicastery’s mission to promote “the renewal undertaken by the Second Vatican Council.” It is not mere pedantry to point out that no liturgical reform was “undertaken” by the Council. The reforms were undertaken by a body called the Consilium, erected on papal not conciliar authority to implement the reforms decreed by the Council.

The reformed liturgy devised by the Consilium often departs markedly from, and exceeds, the decrees of the Council…The liturgical reforms were expressly pastoral, intended to increase congregational participation. The severe decline in the numbers in congregations since the promulgation of the reformed liturgy over 50 years ago suggests that the reforms have not achieved their purpose. Equating the reformed liturgy—which I celebrate, but which for all its virtues has failed in its purpose—with the will of Vatican II leads logically to the conclusion that the failure is the Council’s when in fact it is the Consilium’s.

The current policy of suppressing dissatisfaction by the restriction and marginalisation of anyone who points out imperial nakedness aligns disturbingly with that of a totalitarian regime desperate to shore up its legitimacy in the face of dissent and dissatisfaction at the failure of its policies. It shocks those who try to hold the middle ground of fidelity to the Church and to reason, but it need not be so.  The Vatican could simply continue to allow the old and new liturgical forms to coexist and so allow the people to choose which nourishes their faith and Christian living. 

I have said from the beginning that this seems an awful lot like the Emperor's New Clothes.