Liturgical Shipwreck 25 Years of the New Mass 1969-1994 - Part X

By Michael Davies

Fine words indeed, but words that were ignored by the liberal priests who were breaking the law, words that were ignored by the very bishops who had voted to uphold the traditional practice. In country after country, the hierarchy surrendered abjectly to the liturgical rebels, and in every case the Holy See surrendered in an equally abject manner and gave legal sanction to the rebellion. The message of this capitulation was clear, defy the Pope and the Pope will surrender, and surrender he did on the practice of Communion under both kinds on Sundays-----which was specifically prohibited, and then later legalized. In 1994, with cruel irony and within a few days of the precise anniversary of the imposition of the New Mass, the Pope surrendered on altar girls, the one instance on which many conservative Catholics were confident that he would not back down. There could hardly have been a more appropriate commemoration of a quarter of a century of liturgical anarchy than this humiliating capitulation by the Holy See to the strident harridans of the feminist movement.

While on the subject of institutionalized abuses, one might add that almost every occasion that a woman reads a lesson in Church constitutes an abuse, as this is permitted only if male lectors cannot be found; and almost every use of an extraordinary minister of Communion constitutes an abuse, as the strict conditions for their use are rarely if ever met in the Western World. The sight of an extraordinary minister in a Catholic sanctuary should be a truly extraordinary event, but it is now extraordinary to find a sanctuary that is not infested by them. The official liturgical norm has become the abnormal, and the abnormal has become the norm.