Commentary on Traditionis Custodes

ON THE MOTU PROPRIO "TRADITIONIS CUSTODES"

by Pietro De Marco

A collection of essays from the mid-1960s (Groot, van Hess, Poeisz and others, "Inquiry into Dutch Catholics") already contained all of the Catholic drama. “One of the first things - wrote A. van der Weyer - is the exclusion of all that is not essential to expose the fundamental structure of the liturgical event”. The new prayers were conceived according to these premises: “It is no longer the transcendent God but the Father who is close to us in Christ; no longer the God who appears in his glory but the hidden God of the Gospel; no longer the objective sacral relationship with God, but the human love in which we share ourselves with the man Jesus Christ ”. No mystery objectivity, no sacrament, in all this, of course, only an irrational "event".

I think I have to interpret that it is humanity as such that “fulfills itself” in the sacraments, according to the mystical evolutionism widespread in the 1960s, to which the fortune of Teilhard de Chardin contributed. Almost sixty years later, this seems to be the basic theology (humanistic without transcendence and without supernatural life), much more than liturgical, in the majority of Catholic clergy and theologians, also by virtue of the astute equivocaction of those formulas. Equivocation so suitable to justify any subjectivism in beliefs and practices that it has been artfully cultivated by theological dissemination, to spread today in unconscious clergy and laity.

A moment of resistance (aware of the ongoing degradation) on the part of the living liturgical tradition was the pontificate of Benedict XVI. An act, timid for many for others deplorable, not of magnanimity but of right governance and shrewd theological balance was in 2007 the letter motu proprio " Summorum pontificum ". Pope Joseph Ratzinger entrusted a dialectic between "vetus" and "novus ordo" in the Church to the protection of the Spirit, so that the presence of the secular canon would be valid as experience and as a corrective theology of the universe of small and large abuses, and of dominant, shameful, superficiality produced not by the Council but by the liturgical reform of the late 1960s (a true betrayal of the liturgical movement, on which I wrote extensively, in 2017).

It is against this holy balance that the threatened and feared repeal of the "Summorum pontificum" is now being published on 16 July. It will need to be carefully reexamined, but at a first reading this appears: as a rule in the current pontificate, a covering letter with a bland and at times heartfelt appearance corresponds to a normative act entitled " Traditionis custodes " whose partisan and destructive motivation (which perhaps escapes the pope) cannot deceive anyone. There is naturally room for a juridical defense of the rights of the faithful and this must be used.

The two documents, in addition to broadening the legitimate power (and burden) of the bishops to control the methods and contents of the celebrations according to the 1962 Missal, speak, in symptomatic and aberrant terms, of "groups" to be monitored and prevented from multiplying. . Why is the term "group" aberrant? Because it suggests that fidelity to the "vetus ordo" is a fact of organized minorities, tendentially schismatic: a hypothesis far from reality and devoid of any discernment. A criminal offense is being acted out unfairly which would accompany people and practices: the "groups" cultivate hostility to the Council and present themselves as "the true Church". When this is not the case, people and groups are referred to as "minus habentes", who delay or struggle to accept the conciliar novelty. Two observations,

The first. The rhetoric and liturgical practice that proclaims itself as "conciliar" have great responsibility for the widespread, growing and reasoned resistance, and for their progressive stiffening. The theological fragility, as we know, and the primary objective - the "participation" to which everything has been sacrificed - of the liturgical reform, very distant from the "Sacrosanctum concilium", are stubbornly traced back to the will of the Council Fathers. This has been happening in the same way, for decades and today even more blindly (who reads the conciliar texts?), Also for the different and chaotic theological, pastoral, missionary dynamics, which all and always claim to implement the Council. How could the Council not consequently appear to the most vigilant believers as the source of all evil? In this framework also operates, in theologians who have become intelligencija, a certain dishonesty typical of every intelligencija: it is well known that the Council (its texts, its "intentio") justifies almost nothing of current practices, except as an "event", or rather as an alleged "caesura" that can be interpreted at will . We know but we are silent.

The second. Feeling “true Church” or catacomb or monastic Church is certainly an error, at least an ingenuity that circulates in the widespread ecclesial resistance; it surprises me in some friends, of which I still appreciate sincerity and suffering. But what spectacle of failure or uncertain or betrayed preaching of the Christian mystery (that is, of Christ truly the Son of God) do many parishes in the world, not a small hierarchy, in short, a lot of the Church "in capite et in membris"? In what humiliating disaster are the remains of the national Churches protagonists of the Council not prowling? What flood of presidential chat overwhelms the essence of faith?

With what authority, then, will a "quidam" - as prescribed in the motu proprio - present itself to control the practices and beliefs of a community, which I would call "Summorum pontificum"? Latin will not be enough for him, for what to do with it, then? To verify the orthodoxy of the "Nobis quoque peccatoribus"? Wouldn't it rather be the case that, before letting him in, the parish priest or rector of that church asked this conciliar commissioner (to be assumed with too many powers and little understanding of the facts) if he believes in something? For example in the divinity of Jesus, in the supernatural action of the sacraments, in grace, in the saving sacrifice, in the Trinitarian mystery? Who will answer the investigator of the faith of others, since on this center of faith, he concentrated on life and love, haven't you been used to thinking for a long time? But of course the commissioners are not asked questions.

The point is important: the common layman who applauds the pope or his sympathetic pastor or the latest writer of theological things does not know how many deformations and rubble of Catholic truth clutter the heads of priests and laymen and saturate documents and articles. It is therefore to add to the damage (consequent to the incomprehension that Rome shows for the total Catholic reality) the insult that the motu proprio is entitled "Traditionis custodes". Since Pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio wants to be “traditionis custos” Without a doubt, we expect our bishops, bishops from all over the world, to be. But if they are (and I add with sorrow: if currently many of them had been in recent decades) they will only be able to notice where "traditio" is and where it is ignored or explicitly mocked: isn't everything new and different in the Church after the Council? Isn't everything in faith and in the Church entrusted to the future so that past and present do not clutter up? Isn't the liturgy a happy and creative performance? In short: who if not this class, this "société de pensée" of reckless and overly influential people has the primary responsibility in "increasing distances, hardening differences, building contrasts that injure the Church and hinder its progress?". It is not long since I read the calembour (from an abyss of Catholic self-destruction) according to which the time of Lent is not a time of "mortification" but of "vivification". Does this "société de pensée" of reckless and overly influential have the primary responsibility in "increasing distances, hardening differences, building contrasts that hurt the Church and hinder its progress?". It is not long since I read the calembour (from an abyss of Catholic self-destruction) according to which the time of Lent is not a time of "mortification" but of "vivification". Does this "société de pensée" of reckless and overly influential have the primary responsibility in "increasing distances, hardening differences, building contrasts that hurt the Church and hinder its progress?". It is not long since I read the calembour (from an abyss of Catholic self-destruction) according to which the time of Lent is not a time of "mortification" but of "vivification".

The writer does not belong to any ecclesial group. Remote memberships were, if anything, to progressive groups. I have long been a simple Catholic believer, a "civis" of the "civitas Dei", theologically equipped, I presume, but (what matters) from my early years led to firm beliefs as my lips said: "lex orandi lex credendi" . Not out of a right, a "constitutional" perspective on the Church that doesn't excite me, but out of duty, the impulse of a believer, I evaluate what happens in the Church, which is truly my Mother. That is why I agreed with those who dared to warn His Holiness of the risk of serious errors in his positions and statements. For this reason I will be closer than ever to priests and lay "christifideles" who grasp and live in the mass of the "vetus ordo" (according to the "typica" of 1962) the fullness of the confession of faith and the apex of sacramental life in the Eucharistic Christ . Under the millennial guidance of the saints, not of educators and animators. Nor of liturgists. I fear that the Holy Father will have to regret having succumbed, still ill, to the pressure of anti-Ratzinger groups, to extremists of dubious doctrine and with no discernment of the damage they (for their part) have been causing for decades.

Google translation of Italian original at Settimo Cielo