NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT

It looks like the Vatican itself has decided to answer back systematically all the sniping and sometimes frontal attacks against Benedict XVI because of Summorum Pontificum.

In Mons. Ranjith's long interview with the FIDES news agency last week, translated in full earlier on this page, he not only goes over all the reasons for the Pope's decision to grant full validity to the traditional Mass. He also enumerates the liturgical abuses connected with the new Mass that the Church hopes to curb and correct.

Yesterday's issue of Osservatore Romano (Sunday, Nov. 18) carried a long article by Vatican theologian Fr. Nicola Bux writing about Pope Pius XII's 1967 encyclical Mediator Dei (MD) on liturgical reform.

This encyclical led to much preliminary work that enabled Vatican-II 16 years later to come out with the liturgical constitution Sacrosanctum concilium as the first document of the Council, issued at the end of its first session. (A full translation of the Bux article has been posted in READINGS).

Mediator Dei re-states all the principles and logic that define what liturgy is and should be, and how liturgical reforms should grow organically from what exists.

The same principles were reiterated in Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) but those responsible for implementing liturgical reform after Vatican-II chose mostly to ignore specific provisions of SC itself, let alone the principles of liturgy as defined by MD! (And as Mons. Ranjith states in this interview, even specific instructions issued by John Paul II. In a previous interview with PETRUS, he referred to documents which were either 'simply filed away, or worse, thrown into the wastebasket.']

Now comes a front-page article in tomorrow's Osservatore Romano with yet another interview with Mons. Ranjith. Before I proceed to translate the full interview, here is a translation of what Apcom reports about it:


VATICAN CITY, Nov. 19 (Apcom) - 'Faithfulness to the Council' is the title chosen by L'Osservatore Romano to summarize a long interview with Archbishop Albert Malcolm Ranjith, secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship. The interview appears in tomorrow's issue of the Vatican newspaper.

"We are called on to be faithful to something which is not ours but which has been given to us," Mons. Ranjith says. "We should be faithful to the seriousness with which sacraments ought to be celebrated. Why do we need to issue page upon page of instructions if everyone feels free to do as he pleases?"

The prelate says that a confrontation between 'traditionalists' and 'innovators' makes 'no sense'. [The OR article yesterday by Fr. Bux starts out by saying the same thing.] "There was not and there isn't any break between a 'before' and 'after' in the Church, but a continuous line."

"With respect to the traditional Mass," he went on, "there had been a growing demand over time, which also became more organized little by little. At the same time, faithfulness to the standards of celebrating the sacraments was falling. The more such faithfulness diminished, along with the beauty and wonder of liturgy, the more some Catholics looked back to the tradtional Mass."

"For years, the liturgy has undergone so many abuses, and so many bishops have simply ignored them. Pope John Paul II made a heartfelt appeal in Ecclesia Dei afflicta, which called on the Church to be more serious about the liturgy. And he did it again in the Instruction Redemptoris sacramentum. But many liturgists and diocesan offices of liturgy criticized the Papal documents. [And obviously did mostly nothing about it.]

"The problem then is not so much about the traditional Mass, but an almost unlimited abuse of the nobility and dignity of the Eucharistic celebration. And this was something about which Pope Benedict could not be silent, as we saw in his explanatory letter to the bishops and in his many speeches. He feels a great sense of pastoral responsibility.

"Therefore, this document [Sunmmorum Pontificum], beyond being an attempt to bring back the Society of St. Pius X into the Church, is also a gesture, a strong call from the universal Pastor to a sense of seriousness about the liturgy."


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I have posted the translation of the full interview in READINGS.