This is getting to be quite nauseating, but I guess I'll do my part as a Catholic in good standing with the Church. Most Holy Father, I congratulate you on the sixth anniversary of your election as Supreme Pontiff - I remember the day well. Please keep your Summorum Pontificums and Anglicanorum Coetibuses coming, they just increase my conviction that your church is riddled with falsehood and that you yourself are perhaps worse than a kindly old heretic. I mean please, you can't even get the colour of your vestments right on Palm Sunday! Are we to take seriously anything else you say or do?
At our church we never do the Mandatum, as, correct me if i am wrong, the Mandatum was formerly done only in cathedral and monastic churches. As for the rest of the Holy Week ceremonies, we do as much of the ancient RIte as can be combined with the 1955 Pian reforms. If it were up to me, (and it is NOT), we would celebrate the whole of Holy Week strictly according to the pre-1955 Roman Rite. I can only pray, and keep on urging fellow priests to return to the true Roman Rite Holy Week ceremonies. Patrick, we do our best. We have the Novus Ordo establishment against us, we have a 1962 Missal foisted upon us, which , except for the Holy Week, is basically and substantially traditional. We would all prefer to return to a a pure pre-1955 Roman Rite liturgy. But these things take time. I donot consider it to be either disobedient of hypocritical to celebrate the old HOly Week Rites in their entirety or partially, as much as we can get away with. Like many other churches following the EF, we used the veiled procession cross with palm branch and had the Subdeacon of the Mass strike the church door thrice with the end of the Cross. The deacon of the Mass (moi) sang the old Gospel after the Passion. The present Pontiff did write that NO officially approved ancient Rites can be forbidden by ecclesiastical authority. SO, i must assume that the 1955 reforms were optional, not mandatory. I do long for the day when we shall be able to celebrate the Old Rite HOly Week ceremonies in their pristine entirety. In the meantime, we are doing our best, please understand that!
ReplyDeleteAlbertus,
ReplyDeleteThe Mandatum ceremony could have been carried out in any parish church prior to the reforms of 1956. It is a Traddieland myth to say it could only be celebrated in monastic or cathedral churches. In the 1956 rite it is not obligatory.
To be fair my understanding is that most churches didn't bother unless there were liturgically keen personnel. I suspect the idea of putting it after the Gospel was so people wouldn't clear off after an evening Mass to their dinner.
I think that we must be careful in worrying too much about the colour of vestments (Although I do agree with you on this one), but perhaps we need to just be thankful that they are still even bothering to wear vestments; what I do find disturbing is the very quick beatification of JP II. I do wonder if this might soon become a fixed "tradition" of the novus ordo papalists to supplement the personal infallibility of the Pope with a quick canonisation soon after death of all popes in the future. Thus strengthening the Pope's supposed personal infallibility with impeccability as well. A very, very dangerous precedent.
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