I came here with the naïve idea that Pope Benedict's motu had set the world straight (or at least firmly upon the right path). I definitely no longer believe that.
Nor do I.
Another good book - particularly one for reading
Summorum PontificuŠ¼ in a very illuminating context - would be
The Reform of the Roman Liturgy by Msgr. Klaus Gamber. Cardinal Ratzinger wrote the introduction to the French version of the book. That introduction is the source of Ratzinger / Benedict's famous quote describing the Novus Ordo as a "banal, on-the-spot fabrication." The future (now former) pope also went on in that introduction to call Msgr Gamber (I'm paraphrasing) the best representative of the "center" of the Church's liturgical thinking, and he more or less openly endorsed the solution to the liturgical crisis laid out in that book.
That solution, briefly put, was to restore the TLM, and establish it as the official Roman Liturgical Rite. The Novus Ordo would be re-branded as an "Ad Experimentum" Rite; it would be permitted to exist for a limited timeframe (soemthing like 10 years) and would be offered no more than once a day in any given parish, and never offered instead of the TLM. If, at the end of that timeframe, the "experimental" rite had not brought forth good fruits (which, of course, it has not and would not), it would be abrogated and the TLM would remain what St. Pius V declared it to be in perpetuity - the one and only official Roman Rite of Mass. Most importantly, the two Rites would be established as two separate, distinct and totally different Rites (which they objectively are).
Well, despite endorsing that plan in word, Benedict XVI brought about something far different in deed. Summorum PontificuŠ¼, in yet another postconciliar violation of the Law of Non-Contradiction, declared that the TLM and the NO are not separate and distinct rites, but merely different "forms" of the same Roman Rite (by which logic, we'd have to declare all other Rites - Mozarabic, Byzantine, Coptic, Syriac, all of which are far more similar to the TLM than the NO is - to merely be various "forms" of the one Rite - utter absdurdity). Worse, it establishes the NO as the "Ordinary Form" and the TLM as the "Extraordinary Form." Worse still, it actually relegates the Traditional Latin Mass - the Mass of Ages - to the ignominious position of being merely "
an" (not "the") "extraordinary form" of the Roman Rite (one wonders - what are the other "extraordinary forms" of the Rite?). It also goes out of its way to insist that the TLM should be provided merely as a "pastoral" favor to those weak souls "attached" to, or who "prefer" that Mass that Quo Primum defined as the one and only Rite of Mass for the Roman Church, in perpetuity, under pain of sin and the Wrath of Almighty God and Saints Peter and Paul - and
not because the Novus Ordo is an objectively inferior, "banal, on-the-spot fabrication" (to quote the pope who promulgated Summorum PontificuŠ¼), and therefore an abomination that can never replace the TLM.
But the era of Benedict XVI's weak, milquetoast, compromised overtures to Tradition is now over, replaced by the current infelicitous reign of Bergoglio, who has opted for a campaign of open hostility and antipathy for the Traditional Latin Mass, and even the Catholic Faith and Morality itself. In an era when Catholics who merely wish to pray and live as Catholics always have are openly derided and slandered by the Occupant of the Papal Throne as "Rosary Counters" and "Promethean neo-Pelagians," and when the very Natural Law itself is being put up for debate at two putative "Synods" called by the pope and engineered by his Modernist cronies, one would have to be looking at the world through some seriously vision-imparing rose-colored glasses to think that the great Restoration of Catholic Tradition lies anywhere at all in the near future.
Topic: New Guy, Old Trads (Read 7765 times)