There's a survey being taken of all bishops regarding the Latin Mass that Pope Benedict made 'legal' a few years back. (Read about it here: https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/pope-francis-surveys-bishops-worldwide-on-traditional-latin-mass) This survey may mean that the bishops who don't like the use of the Latin Mass may prefer that it be taken away. Many of the present cardinals (and some of the older bishops) were the ones who created the reforms of Vatican II, and they see the new espousal of the Latin Tridentine Mass as a slap in the face of those reforms they worked so hard to create. It is not widely known that those Vatican II Mass reforms were the result of an ecumenical effort that included the input of Protestant clergy in the creation of the new Mass. It was supposed to bring the Catholic Church forward into the future and modernity, and it was also supposed to bridge the Protestant-Catholic gap by bringing us closer to our Protestant brethren. The results of this survey may not be good news for the new remnant. More about the new remnant toward the end of this post.
It amazes me that it is the younger generation that is now espousing the old traditions of the church. It's ironic because my parents' and my generation lived and worshipped the post-Vatical II "new mass." We craved modernism and were glad when the church would inch toward new freedoms and modernity. "The Catholic Church needs to catch up to the 20th century!" was the battle cry, and so we applauded when old traditions went out the window. I distinctly remember thinking how cool it was that the teachers that chose the music for our weekly class masses chose songs like Kumbaya and the songs of John Denver, Carol King, and James Taylor for the children to sing in place of the 'old-fashioned, archaic' hymns at the back of the church missalettes. We just thought it was so cool and modern to add top 40 pop music to the Mass.
Something has changed in the past two decades though, and it's not the change everyone thought it would be. It is a good thing for my generation and my parents' generation to see that what they thought was good for them and for all future generations is not cutting it for the new generation of Catholics. I speak of the new remnant. It is my children's generation of Catholics that make up the new remnant. They have grown up witnesses to a shrinking Catholic church. They grew up watching my generation and my parents' generation of Catholics grow weaker in faith and turning their backs on the sacredness of traditional worship. They have witnessed fellow Catholics leave the church for brighter, happier, upbeat forms of worship in the Evangelical church where obedience is not a word heard much and where the focus is the preaching at the pulpit and modern music played by full bands.
I was once a worshipper at Evangelical churches, and as I look back I realize I left the Mass behind in favor of a better show, better entertainment. More vibrant preaching and music that awakened the soul was the order of the day. If the preaching dwindled and the music became lackluster, there was always another church to try that would fill that void. I realized that if I was not swept up in the excitement of the preaching and the music, I could always find another church that did a better job. The truth sounds mean, but it is a truth I have lived. I left the church of my youth because I was not being entertained. Surely my relationship with Jesus Christ could only be improved by better preaching and better music. This is what I raised my children on. This is what my children's generation of Catholics lived through. Church hoppers like me. My own kids now tell me how much they disliked our church hopping in their younger years. I thought attendance at Evangelical children's church services was good for them, that they would learn about Jesus and Christianity at their own level. They tell me otherwise now.
Now back to the new remnant. Let me tell you something about them. They are members of my children's generation of Catholics. They feel they got a raw deal when modernism reigned and traditions were thrown out the window. They are better educated about their church and faith history than my generation and my parents' generation. They seek truth at all costs. They are turning back to ancient writings and learning church history dating all the way back to the first century. They are learning the names and the writings of Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, and other men who sat and learned at the feet of the apostles and heard the apostles' witness of Jesus and what he did and said first hand. They are discovering and learning what the Novus Ordo generation of the clergy was hoping had been forgotten. It is this new remnant that is the generation of Catholics who are looking back to the ancient traditions of our church and re-embracing it all, and not in the cafeteria-style belief system that their parents and grandparents adopted. They are also looking for the freedom to worship in the old, more sacred ways enshrined in reverence for the Eucharist. God bless them. They are young, not afraid of the past, and, in fact, believe the past to be a treasure and salvation. They don't consider obedience to be a detriment or a weakness but see it as a necessity to nurturing a lifelong deepening relationship with Jesus Christ and authentic, biblically-based salvation. They are brave enough to seek truth wherever it leads them, and it is the truth that they want to live, even if it means that the old must be made new again.
The Mass is the most important worship element of the Roman Catholic Church. It is the sole source and summit of the Roman Catholic Church. I'll tell you what the Catholic Mass is NOT. It is not a fellowship. It is not meant to entertain and keep us engaged with musical elements and the content of sermons preached. Most of all, the Catholic Mass is a sacrament. That is what so many Catholics don't understand because they were not taught nor are they interested in their own church's history. They don't understand the word sacrament, don't know how to identify it in the Mass, and so they leave for better entertainment. The word 'sacrament' is also what so many non-Catholics who visit a Mass don't understand. Sacrament, sacramentalism, sacramental theology. These are dirty words in the modern world. They conjure up the dark ages, clerical abuses, selling of indulgences for gold as a means of salvation. They conjure up all the mistakes that caused Martin Luther to nail his 95 theses on the door of that old German church.
Sacrament. What is it? it comes from the Latin word 'sacramentum' which means 'vow.' As I wrote earlier, the words 'sacrament' and 'sacramental theology' are necessary to know and understand clearly because they are the key to opening the way to understanding the true beauty and sacredness of the Holy Roman Catholic Mass, a sacredness that is not found anymore and that so many young Catholics may never know. The Sacraments were instituted by Jesus Christ himself and shown to His apostles. He established the sacraments the very first time when he manifested His true real presence in the bread and wine, and he did this in the presence of his disciples in a most personal and immediate way. One cannot claim Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and reject the sacraments He established. The sacraments are the reality of Jesus Christ and all that he established for his people. In the sacraments today, our own present time, Jesus reveals to us that we must do in the Church what He did in the gospels. He regenerated his people, healed the sick and the lame, broke bread and wine and said verbatum that they are His Body and Blood. He created His Church when he said 'He who eats my body and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day.' (John 6:54). I never understand when Christians say we must take the bible literally, but then we are told that this particular verse and others like it in scripture are meant only symbolically. No, Jesus is not a symbol in the bread and the wine, the Holy Eucharist. It is really Jesus, and we are not recrucifying Him. We are taking part in his last supper, his passion, death, and resurrection in REAL-TIME. It's not a replay of an old film. It is happening now as it happened then. The problem is that we get so hung up on the concept of time, something Jesus did not establish because time is a manmade concept. So how can He have been crucified and resurrected over 2000 years ago and again now in the Roman Catholic Mass? It is impossible because that all happened a long time ago, so we must be re-crucifying Christ. Sure. If you think The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit keep time by clocks and calendars but they don't.
I've heard it said that the Catholic Church is on the way out, that the Catholic Church is dying. The Catholic Church is not dying, will never die. It is through the Sacraments that the church of Jesus Christ is sustained and will remain to the end of the age. The gates of hell will not prevail. The Catholic Church may shrink. It will go through worse scandals than those that have already happened, but it will not die. Do you want to know what it is that our Creator and Father in Heaven deems most precious, most sacred? Take a look at all the things that the devil profanes and attacks. Children, sex, marriage, family, our Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Church will survive to the end of time and it is because of the sacraments that he established and by which the Catholic Church is sustained. This is what the new remnant knows. It is this new remnant that embraces the sacraments. This blessed, new remnant who embrace truth and sacramentalism. They are the remnant Pope Benedict wrote about. They are young, not afraid of the past, brave enough to seek truth wherever it leads them, and they are finding it in the past and passing on to their own children. I've decided I want to be part of this remnant and I pray for my Christian brethren to be a part of this remnant too.
NOTE: The new remnant of the future church that Pope Emeritus Benedict the XVI speaks of in his writing on the future of the Catholic church, words and ideas that some see as a prophecy and others see as one possible future for the Catholic Church. Most modern Catholics aren't buying it. Here's what then-Cardinal Bernard Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) wrote:
“The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods; nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves. To put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality. Unselfishness, which makes men free, is attained only through the patience of small daily acts of self-denial. By this daily passion, which alone reveals to a man in how many ways he is enslaved by his own ego, by this daily passion and by it alone, a man’s eyes are slowly opened. He sees only to the extent that he has lived and suffered. If today we are scarcely able any longer to become aware of God, that is because we find it so easy to evade ourselves, to flee from the depths of our being by means of the narcotic of some pleasure or other. Thus our own interior depths remain closed to us. If it is true that a man can see only with his heart, then how blind we are!
“How does all this affect the problem we are examining? It means that the big talk of those who prophesy a Church without God and without faith is all empty chatter. We have no need of a Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the priest who is no specialist, who does not stand on the [sidelines], watching the game, giving official advice, but in the name of God places himself at the disposal of man, who is beside them in their sorrows, in their joys, in their hope, and in their fear, such a priest will certainly be needed in the future.
“Let us go a step farther. From the crisis of today, the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly it will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Along-side this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer, she will again recognize the sacraments as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.
“The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century. But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
“And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death. — Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (future Pope Benedict XVI), “A smaller Church”; Faith and Future
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Articles referred to in this post:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/pope-francis-surveys-bishops-worldwide-on-traditional-latin-mass
https://catholiccitizens.org/news/88584/latin-mass-church-traditions-bring-boom-in-vocations-for-us-order-of-nuns/
https://wherepeteris.com/the-remnant-it-is-not-what-youve-been-told/
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