OLD MASS AND NEW
UPDATE ON OUR FORUMS
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
Tomorrow is the Feast of the Assumption, best known to Evangelicals and Fundamentalists as "the Marian dogma that isn't mentioned in Scripture." We can concede that point--it is true that Scripture nowhere mentions the Assumption--while noting the antiquity of the belief plus the fact that nothing in Scripture contradicts the Assumption.
MORE ON THE OLD MASS
The USCCB's Committee on the Liturgy, in its May/June newsletter, answers "Nine Questions on the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms of the Missale Romanum." I'd like to share some of these questions and answers with you.
Here is the first one:
"Why was the 1962 Missal of Blessed John XXIII chosen as the extraordinary form?"
Answer:
"From the time of the Council of Trent to the Second Vatican Council there were seven official editions of the Missale Romanum [Roman Missal]. They were promulgated by Popes Saint Pius V (1570) [shortly after the Council of Trent], Clement VI (1604), Urban VIII (1634), Leo XII (1994 [oops!]), Saint Pius X (1911), Benedict XV (1920), and Blessed John XXIII (1962). The 1962 edition was chosen as the last edition of the Missale Romanum promulgated before the Second Vatican Council."
I'll bet you weren't aware that there were so many prior editions. Some Traditionalist Catholics talk as though there were no modifications to the Missale Romanum between the time of Trent and 1962. Not so.
Here is the third question:
"How does participation of the faithful in the Missale Romanum of Blessed John XXIII differ from the Missale Romanum of the Servant of God, John Paul II?"
Answer:
"In both the ordinary and extraordinary forms of the Missale Romanum, full, conscious, and active participation of the faithful is to be desired above all else. In both forms, this begins with an interior participation in the sacrifice of Christ, to which the gathered assembly is joined by the prayers and rites of the Mass. The ordinary form of the rite customary accomplishes this participation through listening and responding to the prayers of the Mass in the vernacular, and by taking part in forms of exterior communal action. The extraordinary form accomplishes this participation largely through listening to the prayers in Latin and following the words and actions of the priest and joining our hearts to 'what is said by him in the Name of Christ and [what] Christ says [to] him' [quoting Pius X]."
If you think about it, these varying forms of participation are not all that different. They amount to two forms of "full, conscious, and active participation," and there is something to be said on behalf of each.
The newsletter includes a chart in which the chief differences between the ordinary and extraordinary forms of the Mass are summarized. Here are a few points:
1. The old form includes 1 percent of the Old Testament. The new form includes 14 percent.
2. The old form includes 17 percent of the New Testament. The new form includes 71 percent.
3. There is only one Eucharistic prayer in the old form. There are nine in the new form, with the first corresponding to the Eucharistic prayer in the old form.
4. The old form closes with the Last Gospel (the opening verses of the Gospel of John) and the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel. The new form closes with a prayer after Communion, a blessing, and a dismissal.
When I was young, I yearned for a greater variety of readings at Sunday Mass and wondered why, when three Synoptic Gospels recounted the same event, only one was chosen to be read at Mass. To my mind, the wider use of the New Testament, in particular, has been a blessing.
I can't say the same about the multiplicity of Eucharistic prayers, largely because in most parishes priests have defaulted to the shortest ones, rarely using the first Eucharistic prayer. Frankly, I like hearing the names of all those ancient saints.
As for the closing of the Mass, I always thought--and still think--that the historically late attachments of the Last Gospel and the prayer to St. Michael were mistakes. Yes, I understand why they were tacked on, but that's just it--they were tacked on to what otherwise was the logical end of the Mass.
I suspect the fathers of Vatican II, when envisioning a reform of the Mass, were thinking not of the wholesale changes we got but of modest changes, such as incorporating additional readings (in the vernacular) and removing those tacked-on prayers. Well, those changes certainly came, in the reform under Paul VI, but so did much else, very little of which, so far as I can gather, was intended by the Council fathers.
UPDATE ON OUR FORUMS
Have you visited the Catholic Answers discussion forums lately? Lots of people have. In fact, daily visitation is way up. At any one moment hundreds of people are online, participating in thousands of discussions daily, from deep apologetics to light humor, from family issues to spirituality.
As I write, here are the statistics: 650 simultaneous users, 151,000 threads, 2.9 million posts, and 57,000 registered members (who represent only a tenth of the total visitors).
Not long after our forums debuted a few years ago, they were ranked about 750 out of all the world's discussion forums. Now they rank 463. At the rate the forums are going, in a couple of years I think they will be within the top 100--and this means within the top 100 of hundreds of thousands of discussion forums in the world.
If you have not participated in the forums for a while--or ever--I invite you to visit. The address is:
http://forums.catholic.com
p.s., If you have a comment about anything appearing in this E-Letter, please do not hit your Reply button. Instead, go to Catholic Answers' discussion forums at
http://forums.catholic.com
where you may post your comment in the forum dedicated to the E-Letter. You will find a thread devoted to this issue of the E-Letter. Feel free to add your comment in the form of a reply to that thread.
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