Commentary on "Summorum Pontificum"

The Exorcism Begins in Earnest

+Our readers may be familiar with the claim of the late Father Malachi Martin regarding certain mysterious events that took place during the evening of June 29, 1963.

+Father Martin describes, in “Windswept House,” a satanic enthronement ritual -performed by members of the Church’s own hierarchy - that took place that evening in the Vatican and in Charleston, South Carolina, simultaneously and coordinated by telephone. He then indicates that this enthronement of Satan within the Church was the true cause and sustenance of the revolution that swept through Her in the years that followed.

+If Martin’s story is true (and he claimed it was), then The Flying Buttress views this motu propriu as the first serious public step toward undoing this enthronement ritual, and therefore at healing all the far-reaching confusion which followed. Confusion is, after all, the first trademark of the presence of the Church’s ancient enemy.

+We predict the eventual effect of Summorum Pontificum on all the heterodox, “progressives,” dissenters, heretics, and the proud and sinless homosexuals who infest the Church will be quite similar to the reaction of a possessed person when a Crucifix or a Rosary is brought near to them, or touches them.

+That being said, however, we offer some critical commentary on several phrases in this document and the accompanying letter which, to a layman attempting to employ both faith and reason, sadly indicate a Rome who still appears to be weak and compromised. Is Benedict XVI that Knight in Shining Armor who will restore the Church Militant and Triumphant? No, but he is laying the groundwork for that Knight:

“Up to our own times, it has been the constant concern of Supreme Pontiffs to ensure that the Church of Christ offers a worthy ritual to the Divine Majesty, ‘to the praise and glory of His name,’ and ‘to the benefit of all His Holy Church.’"

+Paul VI, however, in promulgating his Missal, seemed more concerned with offering a worthy ritual comprehensible and acceptable to mankind than in offering a worthy ritual to the Divine Majesty. In fact, in the all-too-common usage of his Missal, mankind has replaced the Divine Majesty as the object of worship.

“In more recent times, the Second Vatican Council expressed a desire that the respectful reverence due to divine worship should be renewed and adapted to the needs of our time.”

+One wonders, first of all, how “respectful reverence” can be adapted to anything, let alone to the needs of our time. Is this therefore a relativistic reverence? And how are the spiritual needs of mankind in our time – the Church’s primary concern - different from man’s needs in any other time? Be that as it may, we all know how “reverently” the Missal of Paul VI has been used in practice.

+While many have attempted to defend this Missal based on the fact that it can be celebrated “reverently,” that is not the issue. Pagans can slaughter chickens “reverently.” The issue is the omission of the sacred mystery, the omission or merely oblique focus on the Holy Sacrifice, and the replacement of the alter christus priest with the Amiable Lecturer, Congenial Social Worker, Psychologist, Team Leader, and All-Around Swell Guy.

+While sacred mystery evokes reverence, reverence does not in and of itself invoke sacred mystery.

“These [Paul VI’s liturgical books of 1970], translated into the various languages of the world, were willingly accepted by bishops, priests and faithful.”

+...except for those tens of millions of faithful and many thousands of clergy and religious who left the Church rather than accept the “reforms” of 1970.

“Thus Roman Pontiffs have operated to ensure that ‘this kind of liturgical edifice ... should again appear resplendent for its dignity and harmony.’”

+More recently, however, Roman Pontiffs have operated to ensure something quite different, namely, that a Missal based on a Calvinist communion service (as Paul VI himself admitted) – in other words, a rite which is in its essence not Catholic - should appear to be Catholic. They have also operated to perpetuate the myth that the “reforms” of Vatican II have been good for the Church, rather than devastating.

Articles 7 and 8: legal and procedural disputes.

+Though these articles intend the very opposite, they in practice will be nothing more than the loopholes which disobedient bishops have always managed to find, bogging down urgent questions in years of canonical proceedings.

And, from the accompanying letter:

“In the first place, there is the fear that the document detracts from the authority of the Second Vatican Council, one of whose essential decisions -- the liturgical reform -- is being called into question.”

+What should be called into question is the work of Bugnini’s Consilium: whether it fulfilled the liturgical decree of the Council, or whether it embarked upon its own prefabricated and premeditated revolution which it then attempted to disguise as the work of the Council. How do we know that the Missal of Paul VI was not what the Council Fathers had in mind on the question of liturgical reform? They voted it down soundly when it was presented to them!

+If the Missal of Paul VI violates both the letter and the spirit of the liturgical decree of the Council, does it not therefore also violate its authority? Is not this “fear,” therefore, just a smokescreen?

+In order to better understand how the vague and internally inconsistent language of the Vatican II documents laid the foundation for Bugnini’s Revolution, the student of history would do well to compare the procedural technique of the Freemasons as applied to the French Revolution/Reign of Terror, the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the Bolshevik Revolution, and Vatican II. They are one and the same technique.

“…a good number of people remained strongly attached to this usage of the Roman Rite, which had been familiar to them from childhood.”

+Yet it is among those who never knew the Missal of 1962 in their childhood that this Rite attracts the most devotion (as the Holy Father acknowledges elsewhere).

“The celebration of the Mass according to the Missal of Paul VI will be able to demonstrate, more powerfully than has been the case hitherto, the sacrality which attracts many people to the former usage” [as a result of mutual enriching of the two Rites].

+How this will occur remains to be seen: it will require the priest to turn around and once again face the altar; it will require the faithful to receive Holy Eucharist kneeling and on the tongue; it will require the use of an altar instead of a communal table; it will require the restoration of the Tabernacle on the altar; it will require prayers and rubrics which restore the priest’s role as alter christus, it will require…

“There is no contradiction between the two editions of the Roman Missal. In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church's faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place. Needless to say, in order to experience full communion, the priests of the communities adhering to the former usage cannot, as a matter of principle, exclude celebrating according to the new books.

+ Is there really no contradiction between the sterile, secularized and philistine Protestant parodies of worship upon which the Missal of Paul VI is based, and the Catholic Mass lovingly and carefully developed over centuries based on Apostolic Tradition? Is there really no rupture evident in the revolution of Bugnini’s Consilium, which took an officially sanctioned Sherman’s March through our Tradition?

+Does the Holy Father mean that there has been no rupture in the history of the development of the “Tridentine” Mass? That would be correct. Or does he mean that the promulgation of the Missal of Paul VI does not constitute a terrible rupture in the liturgy? That would be a ludicrous statement, a slap in the face to any Catholic who takes his faith seriously, and a contradiction of his previous statement as Prefect:

“After the Council… in place of the liturgy as the fruit of organic development came fabricated liturgy. We abandoned the organic, living process of growth and development over centuries, and replaced it, as in a manufacturing process, with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product.” (Quoted by Philip Goddard in “The Latin Mass Society Newsletter,” May 2004)

+The Pope’s prior remarks on this lack of continuity and unity should be enough in and of themselves, but Goddard adds: “In order to justify their desire to deprive traditionalists of access to their preferred rite, therefore, the modernists are compelled to argue that they are not two different rites, but an older and a newer version of the same.”

+Does the last sentence of this paragraph (“Needless to say…”) also now force the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, as well as all the other orders and societies “adhering to the former usage,” to celebrate the Novus Ordo?

“The total exclusion of the new rite would not in fact be consistent with the recognition of its value and holiness.”

+Just as the attempted total exclusion of the old Rite was not consistent with the recognition of its value and holiness (note the reference to the “new rite,” a slip of the tongue which all by itself destroys the previous attempt to make these two Missals one unified rite). Moreover, any value and holiness present in the new rite is not inherent, since it did not come from within Tradition but from something utterly inimical to it. If it has any value, it would be only that holiness added by those priests who have refused to surrender the alter christus to modernism.

+We conclude our perspective on the Missal of Paul VI with some thoughts recently posed by one of our readers to several members of Cincinnati’s Catholic intelligentsia. To our knowledge, he has never received the courtesy of a reply:

“Regarding the approaching universal indult for the Missal of 1962, I am at a loss to explain the utterly schizophrenic behavior of the Church. The Church bemoans the scarcity of vocations to the priesthood, yet Her default liturgy, the Missal of Paul VI, is one that demeans priests and the sacrificial nature of the priesthood, reducing them to “presiders” over the “assembly.” The Church affirms that the Holy Eucharist is the “source and summit of Christian life,” yet Her default liturgy degrades the Eucharist by having laity receive standing, in the hand, and from other laity. The Church bemoans the loss of faith in the Real Presence, yet Her default liturgy is one that emphasizes a communal meal at the expense of transubstantiation. And worst of all, the Church twice dismisses the architect of Her default liturgy, Annibale Bugnini, under suspicion of being a Freemason, yet She promulgates the very liturgy he created! Can anyone explain this to me?”

+Let the exorcism begin…