“The right to celebrate the perennial Mass of the Roman Church is based on immemorial tradition and not on legal positivism” — Homily by Traditional Catholic Priest

A recently-ordained priest's first Mass

Rorate Caeli has been given a copy of a homily preached this past Sunday, the Seventh after Pentecost, by a traditional priest serving in a major metropolitan parish, with whose permission we publish it for the benefit of our readers as we prepare to return to the bunkers and trenches of the 1970s.

Everyone knows that the centrepiece of the Catholic religion is the holy Mass. The Mass is a proper sacrifice in which the true Body and Blood of the Lord are offered to God under the outward appearances of bread and wine through the ministry of an ordained priest. The holy Mass renews—you could say it prolongs and perpetuates—the sacrifice Our Lord offered once and for all on the cross. In fact, it is the self-same sacrifice; only the outward manner of the offering differs.

 

This holy sacrifice, moreover, does not exist in a void but it is encased in a sublime sequence of prayers and ceremonies called the rite or the liturgy of the Mass. The ancient axiom of the Church Fathers lex orandi, lex credendi—“the law of praying is the law of believing”—reminds us that our liturgical prayers must be an accurate expression of our faith and must inculcate true reverence for God. That is why, especially at the time of the Protestant Reformation, the faith of the people was changed precisely by disrupting the ancient forms of Catholic worship. For example, John Calvin, a radical reformer who denied the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Eucharist, once wrote, “God has given us a table at which to feast, not an altar on which to offer sacrifice” (Institutes; IV, xviii, 12, col. 1059), and so by removing the old high altars and replacing them with a common table, the faith of the people in the sacrifice of the Mass was undermined and soon destroyed.

 

I mention these things because today [July 11] falls right between two important anniversaries related to the sacred liturgy: the papal letter Summorum pontificum from Pope Benedict XVI on July 7, 2007 and the papal bull Quo primum from Pope Saint Pius V on July 14, 1570. The Council of Trent had met from 1545 to 1563 to address the challenges of the Protestant Reformation, above all by clearly defining the Catholic dogmas denied by the heretics [1] and by promoting sound reforms in the life of the Church to root out the abuses which had first sparked the Reformation—things like the poor training and immorality of some of the clergy and the shoddy manner of celebrating Mass in many places.

 

Will the real Pope Pius V please come forward?

It was Professor Lauren Pristas, a careful scholar of the orations of the Mass (especially collects, secrets, postcommunions), who first drew my attention and that of many others to the enormous differences in the lex orandi between the old and new missals—a difference that bears very obviously on the lex credendi of the Church.

Rorate Exclusive: Letter Exchange between Msgr. Eugene Clark and Neil McCaffrey in 1977 on the Old Mass

[Rorate thanks Roger McCaffrey for sharing with us these letters from his father's archives from January 1977 and for providing the following introduction.]

The letters below are part of an epistolary exchange between Neil McCaffrey, Jr. and one of his oldest friends from minor-seminary days in New York, Msgr. Eugene Clark, both protégés of Msgr. Florence Cohalan, noted New York archdiocesan historian and pastor. Both men rather quickly succeeded in their chosen paths, Neil as an executive at Doubleday and Macmillan publishers before founding his own companies; Gene Clark as secretary to Cardinal Spellman and then communications director and aide de camp for Cardinal Cooke. Vatican II liturgical changes were embraced by neither man at first, but Clark eventually took up the party line, and the two old friends quarreled, eventually committing their thoughts to a letter exchange that had several back-and-forths, of which we publish below a pair. The reference to The Wanderer was to the way that newspaper leveled criticism at traditional Mass partisans like Michael Davies while not, McCaffrey complained, giving equal time for responses. The full exchange between Neil and Msgr. Clark will be published in the next print edition of The Traditionalist magazine, in Spring 2017. For the current edition of The Traditionalist, visit BooksForCatholics.com. -- Roger McCaffrey

January 19, 1977

Dear Neil:

Back to the question of Pope Pius V and the Tridentine Mass.