CathInfo.com

“Soon it will be 60 years of “Sacrosanctum Concilium”. This Council docuмent on the liturgy wanted the Paschal mystery to become the center of Christian life. How is this approach considered today?

Here we go again, with the interviewer wanting the Cardinal to drive home this novel Judaic notion of the Mass as mystery...

“– Sixty years is a short time in the history of the Church. After Trent, there was a great period in which there were circuмstances of difficulty for the whole Church to receive the reform -a reform is something serious-; but also now we have many difficulties.”

Every time this claim is made, the nature of the post-Tridentine difficulties which hindered that Council’s implementation is conveniently omitted:

Many of the European countries were in revolt against the Church; the difficulties encountered in implementing the Council’s decrees were therefore political, and stemmed from the active suppression and persecution of the Church and its apostolate (unlike the difficulties experienced because of the Second Vatican Council, which threw the Church into chaos because of its rupture with Tradition).

“An important difficulty in the Church is the growth of individualism. People raise their desires as individual beings, but not as a community. Now, the Church is precisely a community, and celebrates all the sacraments in a communal sense; among them, also the mass, because it is not planned to be celebrated without the presence of another person, and normally the faithful congregate in large numbers.“

Note here the implicitly heterodox conception (a la the GIRM’s ambiguous definition of the Mass) of what the Mass is:

If the Mass is primarily a propitiatory sacrifice, the absence or presence of the faithful is irrelevant, but if the Mass is conceived primarily community action, then the presence of the faithful is implicit a priori.

“At this time liberalism, individualism that exist in this society are a challenge for the Church. It is easy to think of my personal preference, of a specific type of liturgy, of a particular expression of the celebration, of this priest rather than this other priest; but this individualism is not of the character of the Church. And we must consider the effects of these influences on the spiritual life of the Church, as is clearly underlined in "Sacrosanctum Concilium", but also in "Lumen Gentium".”


Translation: Traditionalism is incompatible with Vatican II (which was already admitted by the Cardinal’s first quote above).

“Let me mention two particular aspects of "Sacrosancutm Concilium". The first is liturgical inculturation.

– It is that there are some cultures, in certain societies outside Europe, especially in mission countries, in which the Roman rite can be enriched by the genius of each place, which is not always easy.

On this subject, I have said many times to the bishops that we have spent the last fifty years preparing the translation of the liturgical texts; and now we have to move on to the second phase, which is already foreseen by "Sacrosanctum Concilium", and is the inculturation or adaptation of the liturgy to other different cultures, maintaining unity. I think that this work should be started at this time. But I want to specify that today there is only one liturgical “use”, not a “rite”, and it is in Zaire, in Africa.”

Not sure what the Cardinal is trying to accomplish, by pretending the scandalous inculturation of the “work of human hands” rite of Paul VI has yet to commence.  We’ve been treated with decades of performances demanding reparation, and outrages which have only served to bring chastisement upon ourselves: From nude female lector’s in New Guinnea, to the Abominations of Assisi. 

“It is important to understand what it means that Jesus shared our nature, and in a historical moment. We have to consider the importance of the Incarnation and, if we may say so, of the action of grace that is embodied in other cultures, with various expressions that are completely different from what we have seen and appreciated in Europe for so many years.“

The Cardinal evinces no love or knowledge of what the Incarnation meant for mankind, but instead appears to demote and profane it, by suggesting that God elevated even that portion of mankind which rejects or remains ignorant of Him, such that even cultures -not souls- embody grace. 

Here, we can see the intention is not to modestly inculturate in order to convert (as the great Jesuits of North and South America did), but rather to import paganism as paganism, while calling it Catholicism (or worse still, to pretend paganism is simply another way of worshipping the same Catholic God).