Letter #18, 2025, Friday, January 31: Motu Proprio: Why the Latin Mass? Why Now? Part 6

    I want to again introduce this serial presentation of a lecture I gave almost 18 years ago, in the summer of 2007.

    On August 17, 2007, I gave a talk at a church in California, St. Cecilia Church in Tustin, near Los Angeles, on the decision of Pope Benedict XVI to issue on July 7, 2007, his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, granting wider use of the old liturgy throughout the world.

    The motu proprio had been published just 5 weeks before.

    So, at that time, in August 2007, it was entirely in keeping with the wishes of Rome, and of the Pope, to receive and to accept and to praise and to embrace that document.

    Pope Benedict had encouraged me to try to explain his intent in the pages of my magazine, Inside the Vatican, and in any talks I gave.

    So I felt “authorized” to try to give my interpretation of what he had done, and why, when I gave my first and only talk on the subject, in August 2007.

    I spoke without notes, and went on for about an hour. (It was recorded by Terry Barber of St. Joseph Radio — thank you, Terry!)

    Even as I gave the talk, I felt it was reasonably effective, but later people told me it was the best talk that I had ever given.

    I did speak from my heart, and from my memories as a child, and from my studies as a historian, and from my many conversations with Pope Benedict, in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger.

    I tried to be clear, and fair, and reasonable, and faithful, to what I had lived and learned during those decades about the Catholic Mass.

    Later, people came up to me and told me that my talk had moved them and instructed them, and they thanked me.

    I put the talk onto a CD which was entitled Motu Proprio: Why the Latin Mass? Why Now? (To order a copy, please quick here)

    Now, almost 18 years have passed by, and the attitude of Rome, and perhaps also of the Catholic faithful in general, has changed over these nearly two decades. Indeed, in Rome, the current pontiff seems intent on restricting the celebration of the old Mass, for reasons he has set forth in two documents and in several interviews. (see this link from seven months ago).

    During December, one month ago, an old friend and reader of the magazine told me that my talk had influenced him deeply, and that he had taken to listening to the talk on his car CD player (I realize that many cars no longer have CD players!) while driving on long trips. “It is a great talk,” he told me. “I may have listened to it 12 times or more by now. I always find something new in it. Why don’t you share it again, make it available again?”

    So I decided to publish that talk here, and to make the CD available again. I will also soon be posting a downloadable audio file.

    I note again that, when this talk was given, in 2007, it was given in an attempt to explain and defend the reasoning of Pope Benedict, who had acted just 5 weeks before.

    The talk was therefore intended to offer my full support to the reigning pontiff, and to explain why he had taken the decision that he took.

     —RM

    P.S. Order the Motu Proprio: Why the Latin Mass? Why Now? CD here

    P.P.S. Subscribe to Inside the Vatican magazine here. (Each subscription is quite helpful to us!)    

    Motu Proprio: Why the Latin Mass? Why Now?

    Part 6

    (Continued from previous letter)

    Pope Paul VI knew that the world was moving forward, and Christians also had this impetus to be in dialogue with the Protestants and to try to remove the impediments toward reunion with the Protestants.

    And he had asked this commission to produce this Mass that would be a little less “off- putting” to the Protestants.

    And they had done so.

    And to produce a Mass that would have more use of the vernacular, although, as many of you know, the Second Vatican Council, in the document Sacrosanctum Concilium, Holy Council, Most Holy Council, had said Latin will remain the principal language of the Roman Rite.

    So normally you would expect Latin to still be today the normal language of the Roman Rite.

    But this all occurred in a social-historical moment that many of you will remember.

    Did you ever hear of the 1960s?

    Because it occurred in the 1960s, at a time when the press and the television, and the radio, and jet travel were first reshaping the whole concept of communications and therefore of lobbying and pressure groups and making international alliances more quick and possible. The Church was being transformed from within and without in a kind of helter-skelter fashion.

    And… I could go into great detail on this, I’m not going to bother.

    But there were people who wanted radical changes who managed to have their way even against the will of the Roman Curia and the will of Pope Paul VI.

    Often Pope Paul VI would say, “Where is this moving?” And they said, “Well, the horse is already out of the barn. You can’t shut the door any longer.”

    And he would say, “Okay, for that small area, I’ll allow that.”

    And then it would spread.

    Things often happened by people taking initiative. Then it was approved as an experiment. Then it was approved in one diocese. Then it was approved in one country. And then finally it was accepted universally.

    The history of the development of what we call the reform of the Church, the conciliar reform, has never been written. Actually, there are a couple of cardinals who have said to me that I should try my hand at writing what Vatican II is, said, and then, what happened? Nobody really knows. I don’t know either.

    It’s a very complicated phenomenon. All we know is what one bishop, who just died, said to me about two years ago. He was a bishop whom I went to see because I was also talking to a very traditional man named Mel Gibson who said, “Bob, try to talk to some old bishops and say, ‘What happened to the Church?’ Try to understand how we got into this predicament.” Of course, you know Mel is very conservative.

    So I went to this old bishop in Rome who was born just a few miles from Fatima, Portugal. And I said, “Were you at the Council?”

    And he said, “Yes, I was at the Second Vatican Council.”

    He said, “I actually didn’t sign some of the documents because I myself was surprised at how far we were going inside the Council.”

    And he said, “After the Council, I observed what happened to the Church.”

    And I said, “What did you observe?”

    And he said to me — this is a bishop, now deceased — “Confusione totale.”

    And I said, “And what is your judgment of that?”

    He said, “The judgment is harsh.”

    He said, “The leadership of the Church made mistake after mistake. Moving too fast, moving things without explaining them, making explanations that were contradictory.”

    He said the Church leadership implemented the reform in a bad, in a poor, in a confusing, in a contradictory way. This was unfortunate.

    I myself experienced it, but much more important, another man experienced it, Joseph Ratzinger.

    And Ratzinger says that he experienced it in the letter that he just published on the 7th of July.

    He said, “I myself experienced the confusion of the post-conciliar reform.”

    So now we’re getting to the point, finally, after all of my perhaps-too boring-and-meandering discussion of the last 2,000 years.

    What we are at is a moment where Pope Benedict is initiating what I’m calling “the Benedictine reform” of the Roman Catholic Church.

    He’s taken two years to think about what to do.

    He didn’t do hardly a thing the first year, and that’s partly because in Bavaria — he’s from Bavaria — a new parish priest traditionally comes into a parish and replaces the old priest and doesn’t do anything different for a whole year. When he became Pope, Benedict did not make many changes the entire first year from what John Paul II had been doing.

    But starting in his second year, he initiated some things, and now the pace has actually quickened. He’s setting quite a rapid pace for an 80-year-old man.

    And by the way, he’s keeping in good shape by riding his stationary bicycle in the Apostolic Palace. He’s actually in better shape now than he was 10 or 15 years ago. I’ve met him many times and 15 years ago he was getting a little bit overweight, I’m sorry to say. He’s looking rather, in comparison, svelte, since he’s been Pope elected at the age of 78.

    And when he stepped out on the balcony at his election, he had the biggest smile on his face, no sense of angst.

    And in a way, this is quite different from Paul VI, for example, who was the anxious Pope, the indecisive Pope.

    Ratzinger stepped out on that balcony with the broadest smile I’ve ever seen on his face.

    And now what is he doing? What is the Benedictine reform?

    What is this decision to restore freedom to the old liturgy?

    What is he doing? Is it more confusion?

    What he is doing is reweaving, re-integrating, the entire post-conciliar period back into the 2,000-year tradition of the Church.

    It’s a process, and it will continue to take another generation. It’s going to take another 30 years.

    But what it means is we don’t have to “freak out.”

    [Part 7 to follow]

Facebook Comments