Editorial (04/26/08)
Panacea Trent
The patience of the Gentle Reader will allow me some space here to apologize for my very delayed essays, heretofore a feature updated weekly. Yet some of the new links on my home page (also found below, at the footer) might excuse me; the Gentle Reader will see I have not been idle.
You will find a series of talks given over an all-weekend retreat offered to the Trailblazers, to which a handful of other youth attended, youth from various parishes, youth who wanted the experience of this “mini spiritual exercises for teens and young adults.” The retreat was incredibly beautiful, and the Masses, the first warm days of spring, the outdoors way of the cross, the all-night adoration and so much more formed an atmosphere too incredible for printed text to portray.
Also this week I have been heavily occupied by some Trailblazers projects, including some World Youth Day 2008 work, and a scouting trip to Midland, Canada, at the Shrine of the North American Martyrs. This trip is in preparation for what we hope becomes the Trailblazers 2009 pilgrimage, and bears wonderful promise.
Now to some interesting new material, my humble efforts to point the Gentle Reader towards the Lord Jesus… a question I got…
Q: Why have people been leaving the Church in droves, especially since Vatican II? Would returning to the old rites of the Tridentine Mass solve the problem?
A: The assertion that people are leaving the Church "in droves" does remain to be proven, yet we can all observe some facts which are widely publicized and easily confirmed.
For example, the seminaries are empty, families are falling apart, religious houses are closing, the clergy and religious are very aged, the Church is taken ever less seriously in the popular eye, the Muslims recently were counted to outnumber Catholics worldwide, every parish shows huge discrepancies between the number of those who show up on Sunday and those who claim to be “registered” (or again, compare Mass attendance on a Sunday and on Christmas).
The list of bad news goes on and on. Oh, wait, I forgot… it’s the “new springtime” in the Church. And the Bishops love to tout hoorahs at the success of Vatican II. Whatever.
But to the point. The reason people are leaving the Church in droves is easy: mortal sin.
The solution to the problems of the Church and the world is equally
easy: it is grace. It is not the Tridentine Mass, but abolishing the Novus Ordo completely and restoring the Tridentine Mass, or a reform of that Mass which would leave it still Catholic, would be a crucial step.
Why do I assert this? Because the rites of the Tridentine Mass are infinitely superior to the Novus Ordo Mass. Catholic rites are in some sense are a means to an end; yet this “ritual means” is willed by God. God gave us a ritual Church, and obliged us to worship him ritually. Most of the sacraments (the Eucharist excluded) are similarly a means to an end, and the end is sanctifying grace in this life and heaven in the next.
Yet some means are more efficacious than others. I have no doubt that the rites of the Tridentine Mass are more powerful, beautiful, and conducive to everything Catholic than are the rites of the “Novus Ordo.” But if a means is not used, it is not used, even if it is the best of means.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I find these authors of “letters to editors” or small articles in petty journals, who decry the Tridentine Mass, pointing out how poorly the priests celebrated it. See, they say, even with the Tridentine Mass the Church had pathetic priests. Yet there are three errors in this sort of thinking.
First, the hate filled disgust such Catholics have for their priests is an equal if not worse crime than the priest’s sloppy signs of the cross over the chalice which forms the substance of their accusations. Second, it is an attack “ad hominem” which proves nothing and is a fallacy. Third, it is a petitio principii, or begging the question, because the premise is that the priest in question was a “bad” priest to begin with! Yet, what about those countless priests who celebrated the Tridentine Mass worthily and as fervently as they could? Ah, how logical thought would solve so many of the world’s problems…
Yet a grain of truth can be found in the complaint of such Disgusted-with-priests-self-righteous Authors of such letters. For not everyone before 1962 were saints. The wicked fruit of the post-conciliar years was attributable not to the Council but to the scandalous moral lives and ignorance of many clergy and bishops in the 1950’s and earlier. It is clear that they were not holy just because they were celebrating the Tridentine Mass. But I think it would be, well, overly-optimistic to say that we have more saints after 1962 than before 1962; and as we must judge trees by fruits, it is my hope that the pastors of the Church wake up and admit the catastrophic decline of the Church in the last fifty years.
But still, all of this is neither an argument for or against the old rites or the new ones. Picking old rites or new rites because of this person’s holiness or that person’s sinfulness is what Aristotle would call the fallacy “ad hominem.” This fallacy attempts to prove the truth of something or the consequence of an argument based on the virtue of one or more individual persons. All cops are bad, for example, because I met one who was a jerk. Or the Catholic Church should be abandoned because I knew a priest who gambled. Ad hominem proves nothing, and is useful only for slinging insults.
The rites have to be judged not by the sinners who used - or abused, or failed to use well - them. They have to be judged for what they are in themselves. And in that sense the ancient rites beat these new ones in every point and aspect. I don’t have the leisure now to write a doctoral dissertation, or any other 800 page book, to prove the point; but it is not necessary to prove what is evident by demonstration, right?
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Some links, referred to in the opening paragraph of this article:
Trailblazers Retreat, April 18-20, 2008
Preparation for World Youth Day 2008, Sydney, Australia
(Table of Contents)
Talk 1: Teens & Retreat
Talk 2: Sin and Conversion
Talk 3: Know the Holy Spirit
Talk 4: Pope & You