A Case Study of Rupture in the Lex Orandi: The Epistles of Lenten Sundays

One of the most striking areas of rupture and discontinuity between the traditional Latin Mass and the Mass of Paul VI is to be found in the passages of Scripture read on Sundays. The annual cycle of the old Missal, embodying the practice of well over a millennium, puts before the Christian people year after year essential truths of the spiritual life and fundamentals of morality to which we must always return. The three-year cycle of the new Mass, an unprecedented novelty against the backdrop of all historic liturgical rites, brings in a greater quantity and variety of texts but, as a result, diffuses the impact and substance of the message.

It is as if the canvas on which the painting is being executed is so large and the subjects so numerous that one cannot quite make out what the painting is of. There is not enough “useful repetition” to allow the words to sink in deeply and remain in the heart, rather than passing in one ear and out the other. As a friend of mine likes to say, education involves cutting the groove many times until a lasting mark is left. The enormous contrast between the two is appreciated perhaps only by those who have regularly attended both forms of the Roman Rite over a long stretch of time.

Chastity is Impossible: The Kernel of the Kasperite Position

Regarding the debate over marriage and divorce, serial polygamy, and admission to communion, Cardinal Kasper does not dismiss the need for the sacrament of Penance prior to reception of the Eucharist when one is conscious of grave sin. Nevertheless, he does not seem to affirm the necessity of a firm purpose of amendment for Penance, since in the case at hand such a purpose would demand the renunciation of the use of marriage—the repudiation of an adulterous union. Or, if he does admit the necessity of amendment, then he must not affirm the objective gravity of divorce itself (a mere fiction of civil law, no more real, in the spiritual order, than a pink elephant) and especially of attempted “re-marriage” or of sexual relations with someone other than one’s legitimate spouse. Kasper’s error seems to be simultaneously an error about the indissolubility of marriage, the preconditions of absolution, and the sanctity of the Holy Eucharist.