Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Msgr. Pozzo: Summorum Pontificum intended to spread EF
In response to questions in an interview in Italy about the "widespread restrictive interpretation" of the Motu Proprio, Summorum Pontificum -- the interpretation of those who suggest that "the papal provision is primarily, if not exclusively, aimed at those groups and institutes that were already attached to the traditional form" -- Msgr. Guido Pozzo, secretary of the Pontifical Commission, Ecclesia Dei, responded that the Motu Proprio is addressed not only "to all Catholic faithful who desire the extraordinary form of the Roman liturgy." Rather, he replied: "The purpose of the document is also to allow the spreading of the extraordinary form." (Michael J. Miller, "A Progress Report: News from the Ecclesia Dei Commission," Catholic World Report, January, 2010, p. 40, my emphasis)
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6 comments:
The author of tlm-md.blogspot.com has written an excellent article. You have made your point and there is not much to argue about. It is like the following universal truth that you can not argue with: You cannot teach someone unless you are willing to learn from them. Thanks for the info.
Don't stop posting such articles. I love to read stories like that. BTW add more pics :)
If you are a pope who truly wants to spread the so called "extraordinary form," you have to deal with the fact that the vast majority of bishops in the world don't want it. They want to keep the old Mass in its indult ghetto. So you bump up against the sacred V2 totem of collegiality. Governance has already largely been sacrificed to this totemic metaphor of ecclesial brotherhood. I live in a diocese where the pope's promotion of the ridiculously titled "extraordinary form" has had absolutely no effect. The only "extraordinary form" masses we have are those which were formerly "indult" masses -- and in reality still are, whatever Benedict may have said or intended. We have a bishop who poses shoving pierogies in his mouth and begging for support of Catholic Charities, and gets rankled in the extreme when anyone brings up the subject of the "extraordinary form". He offers his defacto indult masses, recruiting priests to celebrate them simply because they know Latin already, don't require any additional training, and -- most of all -- have absolutely no enthusiasm for spreading the old mass -- just doing their jobs, ma'am. It is a disgusting situation in a blighted diocese, and I am convinced it is absolutely typical of the situation in the diocese of Europe and the Americas. A predator without teeth is a dead predator; a motu proprio without teeth isn't particularly lively either
Just curious, Ralph. What would you reasonably expect a pope to do, given the circumstances you describe?
What would you call "reasonable"? Is loyalty to tradition and dogma more or less "reasonable" than loyalty to one's colleagues?
I believe that this pope -- unlike his predecessors, who were modernists, pure and simple -- is deeply conflicted, and pathetically divided between Ratzinger, the V2 peritus and liberal firebrand of the sixties, and Benedict, the pope who has come to value the tradition his mirror image did so much to squander. Even now, after all these years, Benedict stands with one foot on the bus and one foot off. He wants both, and all his rhetoric, in all the wafer thin volumes Ignatius Press can pry out of him, will not enable him to have it.
Despite the best intentions of the pope who wrote the motu proprio giving lie to the myth of the old mass's "abrogation", Benedict's reign is destined to be little more than a brief slowing in the Church's fifty year decline. It will take a less conflicted, less compromised man to renew the Roman Catholic Church
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