A Reflection on the Legacy of a Steward
Francis,
Ecumenism,
and the Divisions within us
All are Welcome, Except All the Children
...
Francis
will die
— although we do not wish his death, nor the death of any man
— but it is, withal, the temporal end of every man, pontiff or layman,
commoner or king. Reflecting on this as Francis recently celebrated
his 87th birthday, we are moved to observe something
very simple about his stewardship over the House that the Lord has
entrusted to him.
For
10 years now, Francis has attempted to
“renovate”
a House that was not his, but only placed in his care as a steward.
The majestic facades, the incense-imbued silence within, dimly colored
with the stained-glass light of a late afternoon; the soaring spires
that proclaimed the great Triumph of the Cross abroad for all to
see — these were not his to depredate: they belonged to God and
to His simple servants who raised them to His glory through the
coppers they gave and through the rough, calloused, hands that engraved
every niche in stone by dint of a devotion every bit as indestructible
as the tip of the chisel the stone yielded to.
Some of these Francis and his bishops
simply tore down; others they emptied by
“consolidating”
them with other Catholic parishes who were equally bleeding parishioners
and sold them to Muslims whose adherents grew as exponentially as
ours diminished. Some were sold to Evangelical Protestants (especially
Hispanic), others to developers who gutted them and turned them
into trendy condominiums. And others are left simply abandoned and
ruined. This was part of the
“growth”
spurred by the innovations of Vatican II that was supposed to bring
the Church into the World but brought, instead, the World into
the Church.
And the faithful fled, seeing
little difference between the two.
Renovation
A far
more destructive
“renovation”
is much closer to the heart of
Francis, however, than the mere obliteration of what was
symbolically holy in the external presentation of the Church.
And it concerns the very heart of the Church: its Mass
and its Liturgy. These were the two greatest
impediments to the holy grail of Vatican II: Ecumenism.
And inextricably bound up with them were the Sacred Deposit
of Faith, and Sacred Tradition. They had been quietly
but indelibly preserved in Latin despite nearly 70 years of
experimentation in the Vernacular Mass that somehow had
promised, but could not deliver upon, an
“organic
evolution”
of worship into something ecumenically acceptable to all men in
all religions.
Perhaps the New Order of the
Mass, the
“Novus
Ordo”
constructed by Bishop
Luca Brandolini
and Anabile Bugnini,1
could still lend itself as the vehicle to a universal worship of
God under the auspices of Ecumenism: each religion to its own
god to be worshipped as the one, true god in Catholicism
— but not in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism, each of whom
keep
their respective gods without conflating them with any
other god, especially the Catholic God. To use Francis’s
dismissive term for Traditional Catholics,“indietrists”2
are much too caught up in trifles like logic to enter
emotionally into the
“spirit” of Ecumenism where, apparently, the Law of
Non-Contradiction
3
is not admissible and contradictory affirmations are compulsory.
All are Welcome ... Except All
the Children ...
Certainly,
this New Order of Mass, the Novus Ordo of Paul VI
— unlike the Latin Mass — has proven itself to be extremely
versatile and spontaneously creative, possessing nothing of that
loathsome “ridigity” so detested by Francis in the “Old Latin
Mass.” We have witnessed this spontaneity, this tossing off of
the shackles of customary ritual in nearly every Mass; so much
so, in fact, that we never quite know what to expect at a Mass
the next town over if a Catholic Church still remains there. It
could be a “Charismatic Mass” that could vie with, or even
surpass in excess, any uninhibited Protestant Revival Meeting.
It could be a “Healing Mass,” or a “Children’s Mass.” It may not
even be in your language. It could even be an “Ecumenical
Service” with your local Protestant Minister, Jewish Rabbi, or
Muslim Imam. So many Masses we now have! Except Latin Masses.
“All are welcome!” ... except Latin rite Catholics. ...
the unwelcome step-children of Vatican II ... the only children
not allowed to “walk in accompaniment” with Francis &
Friends; a “privilege” reserved to “other” Catholics,
non-Catholics, and atheists alike. Francis's own rigid
insistence on the Novus Ordo
Mass to the exclusion of any Mass preceding Vatican II is, in
fact, completely understandable in light of his determination to
fulfill the Ecumenical pledge of Vatican II: not just the
unification of all Christians in spite of doctrinal,
ecclesiological, and Confessional differences, but more
ambitiously, the unification of all believers in some form of
transcendental reality. This is a very, very, broad category
comprising nearly everything beyond sensibility, and even
sensibility is not categorically excluded. So understood, the
term becomes so broad as to become almost meaningless. It is
much like claiming to achieve an ultimate Hegelian synthesis
that claims to reconcile all contradictions but cannot explain
how, and so becomes unintelligible and therefore worthless.
This is
becoming too dense for the casual reader so I will not pursue
it. Nor should the casual reader regret the omission. Really, it
is hardly worth it.
For Francis
to scornfully dismiss those who are not persuaded that his
ecumenical agendum is the principal reason behind his
effectively abolishing and outlawing the Latin Mass (although he
disingenuously — really, quite dishonestly — states that it is
to
“preserve
unity”
in the Church) is a failure in charity to acknowledge real and
legitimate issues among the faithful concerning the very unity
he pretends to seek while actively striking discord within it.
For Francis to claim that he is trying to preserve unity through
this autocratic move is both shamefully and manifestly
untruthful. That the Latin Mass, together with the theology upon
which it has been articulated, has been so forcefully repudiated
by Francis is an indication of how desperate a measure he is
willing to resort to in order to implement, or better yet, to
force, an increasingly brittle ecumenical paradigm on clergy and
laity alike. Pieces of that ecumenical puzzle that are not of
Bergoglio's making either will not fit, or refuse to fit,
however much force he applies to them.
A Happy Failure
It will be a
happy failure that Francis could not, for all his intrigue and
ill-designs, bring to an end what faithless princes and kings,
heretics and apostates through 20 centuries had been unable to
achieve: the destruction, and the utter removal from living
memory, of the inextinguishable sanctity of the Latin Mass of
All Times and All Places. .
It will be a sad epitaph for
Francis in many ways, and history will not look kindly upon his
persecution of the faithful in the very house given them and
entrusted to him to keep them.
It is all the more sad, not that he failed to keep them,
or even that he refused to keep them, but that he sought
to drive them out. Seeking to please men, he drove out the
children. It is a tragedy of great depth. It is also one that
calls for deep, even the most profound, prayer; prayer that must
extend to the hand that strikes, as well as to the stricken, for
none of us is without sin.
Listening to Christ, let us put
aside all contention, and remember not so much what has been
done to us, but rather what remains for us to do:
Love your enemies:
do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that
persecute and calumniate you.”
(St. Matthew 5.44)