Participatio actuosa Pope Francis Style

A Creole Operatic Mass, all in Spanish, for an international congregation at Saint Peter's today by order of the Holy Father himself.

Question.

Where is the full and active participation of the faithful given the virtuosity and cacophony of the choir's performance and in a language which is not the language of the Church nor presumably that of most of the congregants?

In every other Parish Church in the world the people would run you out of town for that!

That the people might "understand" and "participate" was the excuse for jettisoning the Latin, the Gregorian Chant and the Polyphony; contrary to the express dictates of Sacrosanctum Concilium.

Apparently the Holy Father thinks there are principles in the Liturgy which are higher than the need for the people to participate and understand: namely promotion of the vernacular, folk tradition and sundry confusion. If you like the Missa Criolla you should love Palestrina!

The more I consider the Holy Father's pastoral style the more he looks to me like the myriad dysfunctional pastors we have seen over the past fifty years: generators of widespread confusion, angering and alienating of the faithful parishioners.

Beware of people who talk too much about the poor and the people outside while they are inconsiderate of the Christ inside! Faithful and traditional Catholics are people too.

A Pope who will not tolerate princes of the Church with their long red capes while promoting phony indigenous in the most bizarre costumes and performances. Shall we call it self-hating Europeans! The Holy Father is not doing anything novel, he actually represents the last hurrah of a dead age of liturgical innovation and rejection of tradition in the name of openness and concern for the poor while neglecting the flock of Christ and their legitimate culture and sensibilities. Anything goes except the European tradition!

The good news is that operatic Masses are OK! We don't have to be obsessed about the "participation" of the people. Based on this precedent there is no reason every Cathedral of the world should not have a solemn high Pontifical traditional Mass every Sunday celebrated by the Ordinary.

There is also another worthy benefit of such a stunt: accenting the great importance of Spanish for the Catholic world today, even in Rome.