Fr. Brian Austin, ordained on the vigil of Pentecost, came to Long Island to offer Mass at the parish of St. Matthew's, the home parish of some of his relatives, assisted by a deacon and sub-deacon from the Fraternity of St. Peter's Seminary in Nebraska with the pastor, Fr. John McCartney, and a few priests and seminarians from the diocese in attendance.
The St. Matthew's Latin Mass Schola, directed by Mr. Aristotle Esguerra, did a masterful job of singing the propers and the Orbis Factor Mass, and the Our Lady of the Angels girls' choir contributed fine renditions of Ave Maria and Ave Verum Corpus, closing with Holy God, We Praise Thy Name, with descant---a rare treat.
Some photos (taken by my son Peter) of this historic and extremely moving occasion:
St. Matthew's redoubtable music master at the helm.
Last-minute preparations for the illustrious event.
Close-up of the credence table and the covered chalice and burse.
Father's chasuble and stole in which he will vest after the Asperges.
A fine example of how a modern sanctuary, with a little care and imagination, may be easily transformed for the Extraordinary Form.
The procession gathers near the front entrance.
A moving sight for Long Island Catholics, unaccustomed to the solemnity and grandeur of the traditional Roman Rite.
The procession continues with seminarians and priests from Rockville Centre and Brooklyn, each with biretta and stole----a sign of the dignity of the priesthood.
The newly ordained Fr. Austin, attended by the deacon and sub-deacon.
The congregation is sprinkled with holy water during the Asperges.
Preparing to say the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar.
The deacon and sub-deacon bow to the priest.
Blessing the sub-deacon who sang the Epistle.
The Gospel is sung beautifullly by the deacon.
The pastor, Fr. McCartney, during his sermon which was a fine exposition on the mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of the priesthood.
A solemn moment before the Consecration of the Host.
The Consecration.
The deacon and sub-deacon sing the Confiteor just before Communion.
A family kneels for Fr. Austin's first blessing after Mass.
12 comments:
"A moving sight for Long Island Catholics, unaccustomed to the solemnity and grandeur of the traditional Roman Rite."
Thousands of Long Island Catholics have spent our lives accustomed to the solemnity and grandeur of our traditional liturgy instituted by Jesus and developed by our Church.
The Pope's generous gesture in allowing Catholics who wish to experience the EF form of the liturgy is to be welcomed but is not a "restoration". To treat the huge majority of us who prefer the OF form dishonors that gesture and is downright un-Christian.
Dear AnPiobaire:
There is nothing wrong with preferring the OF. But I would encourage you to avail yourself of a Sung High mass once in a while so that you can begin to understand the "continuity" that Benedict intends for us.
If you read Cardinal Ratzinger's many, many writings about the liturgy then you will realize that RESTORATION is a word HE used when he was prefect for the CDF.
It was often stated that there needed to be a "reform of the reform". If you read the introductory letter to the July 2007 Motu Proprio by Pope Benedict and the motu proprio itself... you will see that using the word "restoration" is an accurate use of the word when reintroducing the EF Mass.
Yes! Restoration was what the Holy Father Benedict intended... and restoration is what these young folks are giving us.
There is nothing "un christian" about being historically accurate when reading the words of a past prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
I would suggest this to you: Never assist at the OF Mass without thinking about the EF Mass... and visa versa.
I would also acknowledge that there is a certain "culture shock" that one experiences if one is used to the OF. The very strong emphasis on the theologically vertical is not something we are used to.
I sing an a Gregorian schola at an EF Mass... and I am speaking as someone who came back to the Catholic Church through the Charismatic Renewal. It took me a while to adjust. The silence which one encounters at the EF is not something most in my generation are used to. We are used to entertainment and quick gratification in most things.
The EF requires a bit of work... but I have found that it is very much worth the effort.
God bless.
I agree totally with PASCENDI.
Thank you for your thoughts on my comments, Pascendi.
"Continuity" is a big part of the point I'd like to make. I have no problem with people availing themselves of the renewed availablity of the Tridentine Mass; I think it was a wise and generous decision the Pope made. I had often since the Novo Ordo was introduced expressed the opinion that the Tridentine form should continue to be available to people who are edified in their faith by particpating in it, and am glad that the Holy Father saw fit to take my advice, LOL!!
The problem I have is the tendancy of many who are aficionados of the EF to treat the OF liturgy as deficient and some sort of malignant anomoly which for forty years has afflicted our Church, which now must be "restored".
The Pope is not the one who coined that pharase, "reform of the reform", and if he uttered the word "restore" it was in the context of restoring the availability of the EF, not in supplanting the new form with the Tridentine.
I do plan on taking your adice to and attending an EF liturgy, although I ask you to forgive my temerity in asking: how old are you? I did, in my younger years, along with everyone else, attend, serve and sing at the Mass in the Tridentine form. Part of my desire to attend one now is nostaglia. I don't think this is an unworthy motive, but I must confess to a tendancy to silently accuse Tridentine Mass fans born after Vatcian II of "false nostalgia".
I also possess a related but usually unvoiced suspision that those younger people are sort of "sold a bill of goods" by older folk, clerical and lay, who never accepted VII but couldn't convince their contemporaries and later saw their chance with younger people who are always open to rebelling against the old fogies, even to the extent of becoming "young fogies" with a hopeless longing for a return to a past romanticized to a point of hisotric innaccuracy, if not fantasy.
Fantastic!!! What a miracle at Rockville Centre. I am not a parishioner but have family that are and have been there many times in the past.
Hope that this will happen again so I can attend the EF there! Posting as anonymous in deference to my family.
AnPiobaire,
I'm not sure what exactly your point is. Is it not true that we've haven't had a Solemn High Mass in over forty years in this diocese?
Does it not follow that everyone under 40 is "not accustomed to the solemnity and grandeur of the traditional Roman Rite?"
As for the ordinary form, here are some thoughts for your consideration:
In 1965, Archbishop Bugnini, the chief architect of the liturgical reform, warned the world that he intended to excise from the liturgy anything offensive to protestants:
"We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren that is for the Protestants." (Annibale Bugnini, L'Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965.)
In 1993, Jean Guitton, a close friend of Pope Paul VI confirmed that this is indeed what the Pope wanted, as he thought it would serve a good ecumenical purpose.
"[T]he intention of Pope Paul VI with regard to what is commonly called the Mass, was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should coincide with the Protestant liturgy.... [T]here was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to correct, or at least to relax, what was too Catholic in the traditional sense, in the Mass, and I, repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist mass" (Dec. 19, 1993), Apropos, #17, pp. 8f; quoted in Christian Order, October, 1994. (Jean Guitton, a close friend of Giovanni Montini/Paul VI. The quotation and citations are found in Christopher A. Ferrara and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Great Facade, The Remnant Publishing Company, 2002, p. 317.)
Four years later, Cardinal Ratzinger, who had previously described the reformed liturgy as "...a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product..."(Preface to the French edition of Msgr. Klaus Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Liturgy.), stated unambiguously that "I am convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing today is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy..." Jozef Cardinal Ratzinger, Milestones, p.72, 1997
Now what this ecumenical 'stripping away' consists of is documentation for another day, but it does seem that the above three statements are abundantly clear...and true. ;)
All the best,
Rob
Sincerely,
Rob
At the risk of being repetitious, my main point was to protest that what many fans of the EF seem to really want to do is not to just enjoy the freedom to celebrate in that form which our Pope has so wisely granted them, but to use it as some kind of stepping stone to nullify Vatican II, bashing the huge majority of Catholics who have no interest in a doomed attempt to turn back the clock at the same time.
It's great that you may celebrate the EF if you wish, and I would like to join you on occasion. Advocating for a wholesale return to pre-Vatican II is harmful to the church and not what Benedict wanted to do. He wanted to preserve unity.
I ask the same question I asked the other correspondent, is there any chance that you had even a little firsthand experience of the pre-Vatican II church?
I had some, and its no mere happenstance that my contemporaries and those a bit older and a bit younger have no interest in returning to a romanticized vision of something that never existed.
The Church is not some exclusive club for a small remnant of nerdy insiders overly impressed with their own limited knowledge of the arcane trappings of bygone eras.
I'm the parent of young adults, and believe me, there's no chance of effectively passing along the faith that way. I would despair it I thought that our Church could be limited to that, but I rejoice in the fact thank God has sent us Her Spirit and will guide us through.
Dear AnPiobaire: When it comes to actions of the liturgy (and most other things) it is probably not a good idea for us to attribute personal motives to another (unless the other declares their motives publicly at least). As we discus, please know that you are speaking with someone who returned to the Church through the Charismatic Renewal, has strummed his guitar and led many a Novus Ordo Mass in song and done all the things charismatic Catholics do at Mass and elsewhere. I will ALWAYS be "charismatic in my heart". King David danced... and so do I! Yet I have come to a place where I now recognize the connection between the language (and iconography) of the liturgy and what Catholics eventually come to believe and actually DO. "Lex orandi, lex credendi" as the saying goes! This (among several other things) is what has drawn me to the Tridentine rite.
As a 50 year old man and father of three, I can tell you that it is my children who pine for the old Mass. I have been told that the silence, reverence, beauty of the Gregorian propers are what attracts them. I can say more about chant and the propers in a separate comment. We have no illusions about the past... only a vision of the present and what is to be done for the future.
By the logic of your suspicions it would be difficult to explain the myriad of growing traditional men’s and women’s religous orders in the US & abroad. These now have so many young vocations that they are unable to keep up with building living space for these young and very orthodox men & women... many of whom celebrate the old rite either exclusively or along side the new... and all with curial approval from Rome. If these kids were sold a bill of goods... they sure are willing to lay their lives down... and their entire future for that "bill of goods".
Clearly the way we celebrate the Mass (EF and OF) must be restored. There are a handful of good men in curial positions who have the ecclesial competency to say this and they have often used the word "continuity" to say it. Now let’s examine what the word continuity means. When something is broken and requires mending we say it lacks continuity and thus continuity must be restored. It does not matter if it is a broken wire or a broken thought. To strive for and write about continuity is to say that there is not always continuity. There is nothing lexically mind boggling or "unchristian" about this. The way the Mass today is celebrated (or the way minimalist low Tridentine Masses were celebrated by the Irish in America 100 years ago [I'm Irish], for that matter) is broken. It takes courage, honesty and self examination to face that
A good question to ask ourselves is: What of the verticality of the Tridentine rite might be missing from the Novus Ordo? How can that be reintroduced into the Novus Ordo? One could ask onself "Am I missing something in the discussion"? or "What bothers me about the New Mass?" or finally "What bothers me a Tridentine Mass?".
To summarie, AnPiobaire... we can ask ourselves: If the Mass is the center of our universe (as it should be), then how can I integrate the invisible spiritual realities of the Mass into my own life so that I can become a saint (notice the SMALL "s" in saint). This is not delusional... it's practical and it is for all men for all time. It is why we were created.
If you are having this discussion (which you are), then you already care about what the Mass is. I would say go on to the deep. Be prepared for pleasant suprises where you least expect them.
Ave Maria!
Incidentally AnPiobaire... My parents described much of their young lives in terms of the Church. They fully accepted V-II, as I do.
My mother's description of attending Queen of the Most Holy Rosary was one I will always remember. She loved the nuns (the tough ones and the gentle ones).
Nobody is expecting perfectionism in my family... just a means of making things a little better.
Have you ever visited any of these very traditional religious orders that are all over the place now. It's like the best kept secret in the Catholic church.
No... there are no unrealistic expectations about a "romantic past that never existed"... but there is the Joyful anticipation which comes with being "Surprised by Orthodoxy" as Chesterton once said.
vty Pascendi
Anbiopaire,
Nobody is interested in the old divisive "pre-" and "post-" Vatican II labels.
We just love the 'Usus Antiquior,' as is our privilege as Catholics.
We also love the Pope, our Bishop, our priests, and we think Vatican II---interpreted according to the "hermeneutic of continuity"---as our Holy Father has stated, was a valuable grace to the Church.
So, whomever you may have had bad experiences with, it ain't us. We've got alot of work to do in the re-evangelization of Long Island, and the Latin Mass is one of many excellent tools to accomplish that end.
All the best,
Rob
AnPiobaire I would like to invite to actualy read the documents of Vatican II before you make such assertions.
The NO as we have it today is NOT, I repeat is NOT a mandate of VII. But rather the interpretation that is was given by following what many called and still call "the spirit of Vatican II." this is not the intent of the council.
The following effects:
The disaperience of Latin
The disaperience of Chant
The disaperience of Polyphony
The praying of the Mass towards the people
The so called "renovations" of our churches (The lack of beauty in our churches)
The moving of the tabernacle out of sight of the people
Not kneeling when receiving the Eucharist.
The abuses of the use of extraordinary ministers.
I was 3 --- THREE IN 1966 AND A MEMBER OF THE OUR LADY OF LOURDES PARISH when we rid ourselves of this.
The Mass said in English never hurt me FROM BEING REVERENT. I have always knelt during the Eucharistic Rite. I now live in Florida. I am an EM and have even MORE REVERENCE THAN those who do not have a serious personal relationship with the Blessed Triune God.
We are still called to be saints no matter what language we speak.
Pope John XXIII is now Blessed John XXIII FOR A REASON = Vatican II
Jeanne Stark http://findmeinfloridaagain.blogspot.com
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