It was 1969, and the rain pelted the little car as it sped through the Brazilian countryside. It was night, black as it only gets out in the country on a rainy night. In the little car there was a bishop, driving erratically. He was weeping with great sobs hacking at his chest, and with that and the rain and the dark, he was having trouble finding his way to the seminary. Finally the headlamps caught the edge of a simple stone building, and the weeping bishop tried to wipe his face fruitlessly in the rain as he parked the car and hurried into the foyer of the building. There, in the gaze of astonished professors and seminarians, he sank into a chair. They had never seen him like this, and they rushed to him in one movement. "Senor- Padre- Que-"
Bishop Castro del Mayer, a true and firm, loving Shepherd of the Brazilian diocese of Campos, raised his wet cheeks to them and asked for a glass of water. In the ensuing busy fluttering of cassocks, the head of the seminary sat down next to the Bishop. "Que ha pasado?" he asked softly. The Bishop, who for years now since the Council, had tried to maintain stability and faith in his poor diocese, who had endured ridicule and contempt at the Brazilian Bishops Council for his cautions on the new developments coming out of the documents of Vatican II, looked back sadly at his old friend. "The Holy Father has promulgated a New Order of Mass. How could this be done to the Holy Sacrifice?"
The Second Vatican Council, ecumenical and pastoral, had produced many documents relating to the directive of Pope John XXIII, the directive of "aggiornomento". It is this which I think is now called "The Spirit of Vatican II". What is it? An opening to the world: the Catholic Church had, especially since the days of Martin Luther's 99 theses, been seen as a fortress, a Mother with her arms crossed tightly to her breast, in defense of doctrine and Tradition alike. But the modern world, in the 1950's, had drifted away from a frontal attack and in the West was complacently buying everything it could get its hands on, and in the East, constructing its own fortresses, satanic ones. Perhaps one could say that Catholics in that era might have been a bit institutionalized- perhaps not. There are differing opinions.
At any rate, Pope John XXIII was an optimistic man and he wanted the Church to reach out to the world. There are, though, two senses of aggiornomento- one is to come out of your fortress and invite people in, to show the joy of Christ as it flows within what is peculiarly Catholic- the other way is to begin to tear down the walls of the fortress in hopes that the world will welcome you as "leaven".
How can I, a sort-of educated laywoman, judge which is the better? So I take the example of another layman, Mr. Davies and I look at the Spirit of Vatican II in light of Tradition. What we see then, is that no council was ever called for pastoral reasons in a time where there was no crisis to be attended to; and that the manner of rejecting the schemata and then writing creatively in committees was also never done before. It seems that although the Council was a true Council, it was an occasion perhaps, for devilry.
Mr. Davies calls this devilry "time bombs"- and as I understand him, he meant that the documents, although containing no heresy in terms of Faith and Morals, contained loose ends- or ambiguities which could later be exploited. By whom? Those who, although within the fortress, were bent on rebuilding the Church in their own images. Thus, although the Council may have been called with much hope and potential for mission work to a secularized West, the type of "aggiornomento" which was adopted was the tearing down of the walls, obstensibly to help Catholics become leaven and open the inner rooms of God's Church to those who did not understand Her. The danger of course, which has come to pass, is that Her identity would become actually hidden, that She would begin to appear like everything else around Her.
Thus began a process of making all the aspects of the Church more palpatable to the world- and most importantly, the centerpiece of Catholic life, the Mass. Protestant advisors were brought in to make suggestions on how the liturgy of the Holy Sacrifice could be edited to be more agreeable to ecumenical services with Protestants, and so the ensuing directive from the Council for the Novus Ordo Missae was in effect, a banishing of the Traditional Latin rite. Within the document, therefore, was a rather ambiguous directive that the Novus Ordo should itself contain options which would make the rite more specific to the culture and to the occasional Protestant who might stop in.
Pope Paul VI was following the ambiguously stated directives buried in the official documents of the Vatican II when he promulgated the Novus Ordo Missae. It contained no error, or heresy: Mr. Davies makes it abundantly clear that the Novus Ordo is indeed a valid Mass, and legally promulgated by a Pope. Even further, if one goes to a Novus Ordo Mass done as Pope Paul VI promulgated it, it is hard for the casual observer to see the difference between this and the Traditional Latin Rite. But there are some tragic differences, like the loss of the Last Gospel and the prayers at the foot of the altar, and it is the novelty and the sweeping away of the divinely-crafted Traditional rite, this novelty introduced into the very fabric of the Novus Ordo through the instructions and 'options', that is the fundamental problem. Also, there have been many, many abuses and heretical practices that have been illicitly introduced into the liturgies: Altar girls, communion in the hand, changes of the prayers, and worse-much worse: most of which have gone without reform and disciplinary action from the proper hierarchy.
Why did Bishop Castro del Mayer weep?
It was the reasons for the Novus Ordo, it was the Spirit of Vatican II mentality that had begun to take hold everywhere in the Church by 1969; and the intelligent Bishop saw the handwriting on the wall when he saw the options and the open doors contained within the instructions for the Mass. He saw, in the future, priests and liturgists crafting the clothes of Christ to fit their liking.
In 1969, the promulgation of the New Mass was like a lit match dropped on dry tinder, and the education of future Catholics of the true nature of their faith was the wood. This fire signaled a fracturing within the Church, and now we have a landscape of different kinds of Catholics, each not sure whether the other is still Catholic; there are many who've fallen off Peter's barque altogether for various reasons, mostly grounded in confusion and bitterness, in a sense of abandonment akin to despair. And of course, there are those who have simply become indistnguishable from the secular culture around them. They think they are Catholic, but they are not in form or essence. This seems to me to be the greater tragedy.
It is a tragic landscape; and yet Pope John Paul II used to talk about a new springtime in the Church. But I think that there was more to what he was saying than what appears to be a statement totally out of touch: once again, we look at both his statement and at the landscape of the Church in the light of Tradition. In Christian history, in the Tradition of the Church, God brings a new springtime out of hardship and loss. The new flowers of spring, the uncountable blades of new and sweet grass grow from a soil watered by the blood of martyrs. It has always been thus. Resurrection is born out of Crucifixion.
I have read somewhere, perhaps in the writings of St. John Bosco, that the Church has a life in the world as did Christ. It had its infancy and childhood, it's flowering of teaching and spreading- and perhaps now, we are witnissing the Crucifixion. The Church was left open to enemies by Her own, is now not known by Her own. Her apostles are fleeing, the devastation and ignomy is too great to bear: but Mary is there, still, and the Apostle of Love. A Catholic has to see the Blood of Our Lord poured out from a pitcher into cups; and another Catholic has to wonder if his chapel is really part of the Church; priests have to suffer the loss of their rightful place, their sacrificial role which defines them: and Our Lord has to wait patiently in a Tabernacle that no one can find, in a Eucharist in which eighty percent of His children have no faith or real understanding- mainly because the liturgies tell them nothing about Him there, Body and Blood.
But Resurrection comes out of Crucifixion, in the Right-side up Kingdom of Christ, hope is ever born anew even in the wreckage. St. Joseph is there, Guardian of the Church, Guardian of the Faithful. Our Lady is there, in the surety of the Triumph of Her Immaculate Heart. "But those days will be shortened, lest even the elect be deceived, if that were possible." And what, Traditionally, marks the elect(they are called saints, too)? Look back in the Tradition to learn from the saints: Dependence on Our Lord, the intercession of His Mother, and above all: humility. Never to presume to pass judgment on Christ's Vicar, but to have the courage to speak out humbly to defend and to protect the vulnerable. To reach out to the people in the world, indeed, but with the "aggiornomento" of the peculiarly Catholic. To love the Tradition and to suffer for even the smallest thing which is Our Lord's.
