– Aurelio Porfiri
Part of the most precious heritage of our Catholic tradition, a living heritage, is the Tridentine Mass, which, after the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, is now called the extraordinary form of the Roman rite. There are some misconceptions around this venerable liturgical rite. In the above-mentioned Motu Proprio Pope Benedict XVI has said:
“Eminent among the Popes who showed such proper concern was Saint Gregory the Great, who sought to hand on to the new peoples of Europe both the Catholic faith and the treasures of worship and culture amassed by the Romans in preceding centuries. He ordered that the form of the sacred liturgy, both of the sacrifice of the Mass and the Divine Office, as celebrated in Rome, should be defined and preserved. He greatly encouraged those monks and nuns who, following the Rule of Saint Benedict, everywhere proclaimed the Gospel and illustrated by their lives the salutary provision of the Rule that ‘nothing is to be preferred to the work of God.’ In this way the sacred liturgy, celebrated according to the Roman usage, enriched the faith and piety, as well as the culture, of numerous peoples. It is well known that in every century of the Christian era the Church’s Latin liturgy in its various forms has inspired countless saints in their spiritual life, confirmed many peoples in the virtue of religion and enriched their devotion.
“In the course of the centuries, many other Roman Pontiffs took particular care that the sacred liturgy should accomplish this task more effectively. Outstanding among them was Saint Pius V, who in response to the desire expressed by the Council of Trent, renewed with great pastoral zeal the Church’s entire worship, saw to the publication of liturgical books corrected and ‘restored in accordance with the norm of the Fathers,’ and provided them for the use of the Latin Church.”
This rite, in its basic form, has to be ascribed also to the work of Pope Gregory, as is witnessed in a medieval book of rules for liturgical ceremonies, called Ordo Romanus I. We know well that after Vatican II there were many changes in the liturgy. Changes that not always, I may say quite often indeed, respect what the Council documents were asking for. So we spoke with with a real expert on this very topic, Father James Jackson, an American priest of the Fraternity of Saint Peter, a congregation that is among the congregations of the Ecclesia Dei commission (now we should say office, because the commission was disbanded and transformed into one of the offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith).
These congregations, in communion with the Holy See, are allowed to celebrate the Mass regularly in the Extraordinary Form of Roman rite (the Ordinary Form being the Mass coming from the reforms promoted by Vatican II). Those who have little knowledge about “the other Mass” would find it helpful to read what Father Jackson has said to be able to understand a little more about this venerable form of the liturgy, a form that today is fully allowed in our Roman Catholic Church.
Let us talk about some misconception surrounding the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. Why do the priests say some prayers at the foot of the altar and don’t start directly with the Introit?
The prayers at the foot are a solemn preparation for Mass. All rites of Mass have some preparation, be it an entrance procession or music of some kind, but the Rite of St Gregory does far more than sing a song or just process up to the altar. St Augustine puts it this way: “There is an invisible and heavenly altar, which the unjust can never approach. No one comes to that heavenly altar but he who comes to this altar with care. He will find his life there, if at this altar, he distinguishes his cause.”
The prayers at the foot recognize this heavenly altar, and the necessity of approaching it with great care. The 42nd Psalm is used for this preparation, with the antiphon “I will go unto the altar of God, to God Who giveth joy to my youth.” “Unto God”: this is God’s altar. Men can spend their whole lives searching for love and acceptance, but only God can fulfill this; not even a beloved spouse can do it. “Who giveth joy to my youth.” Youth here refers not to a man’s age, but to the soul. God is the one who scrapes off the barnacles, the detritus of life’s sins and mistakes, and the garbage collected in the soul. His grace makes the soul young again; young in the sense of a restored innocence. Besides referring to restored innocence, the term youth in Psalm 42 is to be understood as the supernatural and spiritual new life obtained by regeneration in the grace of the Holy Ghost. By grace, the old man of sin (Rom 6:6) is destroyed in us and the newness of life in the Holy Ghost is given in its place (Col 3:9). So whoever approaches the altar as a spiritually newborn child—that is, full of holy simplicity, innocence, and purity of mind—will find that his youthfulness of spirit (that is, his fervor and cheerfulness in the service of God) or his young (that is, his still tender and weak) life of grace daily grows and waxes strong under the blessed influence of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. There is much more to the Psalm and the preparation than this, but hopefully I’ve whetted the appetite of your readers for more about the Prayers at the Foot.
Why are the readings in Latin?
Unity, beauty, coherence. Take unity. Cardinal Cajetan once said to Martin Luther, “You know, a time will come when a man will no longer be able to say, ‘I speak Latin and am a Christian’ and go his way in peace. There will come frontiers, frontiers of all kinds – between men – and there will be no end to them.” The Cardinal was right, the loss of unity (and language is not a small component of unity) in the Church had an enormous effect upon the loss of unity in Christendom.
The great Benedictine Abbot Dom Prosper Gueranger wrote this: “Hatred for the Latin language is inborn in the hearts of all the enemies of Rome. They recognize it as the bond among Catholics throughout the universe, as the arsenal of orthodoxy against all the subtleties of the sectarian spirit. The spirit of rebellion which drives them to confide the universal prayer to the idiom of each people, of each province, of each century, has for the rest produced its fruits, and the reformed themselves constantly perceive that the Catholic people, in spite of their Latin prayers, relish better and accomplish with more zeal the duties of the cult than most do the Protestant people. At every hour of the day, divine worship takes place in Catholic churches. The faithful Catholic, who assists, leaves his mother tongue at the door. Apart from the sermons, he hears nothing but mysterious words which, even so, are not heard in the most solemn moment of the Canon of the Mass. Nevertheless, this mystery charms him in such a way that he is not jealous of the lot of the Protestant, even though the ear of the latter doesn’t hear a single sound without perceiving its meaning. We must admit it is a master blow of Protestantism to have declared war on the sacred language. If it should ever succeed in ever destroying it, it would be well on the way to victory. Exposed to profane gaze, like a virgin who has been violated, from that moment on the Liturgy has lost much of its sacred character, and very soon people find that it is not worthwhile putting aside one’s work or pleasure in order to go and listen to what is being said in the way one speaks on the marketplace.”
Why can the readings not be proclaimed by a layperson?
Actually they can under certain circumstances – by what is called a straw subdeacon – but normally one should be ordained to do this. It’s similar to why a layperson normally does not touch the Holy Eucharist. His hands are not consecrated to do so, and a layman is not consecrated to read the Scriptures at Mass. I should point out that in the Ordinary Form of the Roman rite only an installed Lector can do the readings. I don’t know why this is ignored largely; I suspect it is because only a man can be installed as a Lector, and so Catholic feminists would recoil from such a notion.
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