Shambolic state of post-Conciliar Catholicism. No point in the spirituality of the present, we are all indietrists now!
Could it be that we are indietrists?
*Indietrist: from the Italian "in dietro" (backwards). The term refers to the rigid and nostalgic Catholic, obsessed with the past, especially with the traditional liturgy.
Years before I entered religious life, I attended daily 8am Mass in my village parish. It was the highlight of my day. Priest in the confessional, 30 minute celebration in the Blessed Sacrament chapel, entrance hymn, short homily and final hymn to Our Lady. Good. Beautiful.
I knew nothing more about the rite than the fact that it had been modified after Vatican II because previously, in Latin, "people didn't understand anything", and I had read Summorum Pontificum; Benedict XVI was "my pope", so I read everything he wrote. That's all.
"Mass was the source and summit of the Christian life"; that's what the Church says and that's how it was lived - or that's how I lived it - every day in the celebration.
It was when I entered religious life that my attention to the liturgy began to change. I began to notice the priest's way of celebrating, the homilies, and to notice details that until then had gone unnoticed. Priests who omitted parts of the Mass; others who celebrated without a chasuble; others who did not recite the Creed on Sunday; and so on and so forth. But the liturgical shock was even greater after the "transfer" to rural Catalonia (so that no one is scandalised by the spelling, we will henceforth write it like this, with a ñ). We had imagined that rural life is more traditional than urban life and, therefore, there would be "life" in the Church. The surprise was to see that only the very few older people attended Mass, including on Sundays, and that in this environment the figure of the priest present among the faithful on a daily basis was not only a luxury, but a species on the verge of extinction.
A vast territory, where each church is kilometres away from another, with very few priests if we consider the ratio of population to priests. It is usual here for a priest to be responsible for between five and eighteen villages. Thus: "the parish priest of X has 18 villages". At first, it is striking. It seems that these priests are very busy with their work: so many villages, so many masses, and funerals! Always at the disposal of the funeral parlour, which dictates the timetable and, of course, with such an ageing population, there are about two funerals a week. Being new to the place, one assumes that no priest can come daily to celebrate Mass in the sanctuary because there are too few of them, they are too busy, etc. No matter. Sunday and holy days Mass here, and the rest of the days we go to Mass in the parish. We are fortunate: in our parish Mass is celebrated daily. Sorry, "daily" except on Saturdays, when it is possible that only one Saturday Mass is celebrated in the whole diocese, in a cloistered monastery; the other "Saturday" Masses are actually Sunday Masses. Idiosyncrasies of each place... In many villages they do not have the good fortune of daily Mass, but find themselves with a church closed all week and an absent parish priest. The church opens for weekly Mass, where there is one, or monthly, or yearly... because this is what one discovers with time, and that is that the eighteen villages of the parish priest of X are not the same and he does not celebrate Mass in them every day, every week or every month; in quite a few, in fact, he only celebrates the annual Mass of the patron saint. And in some of these there is no Mass at all, but a permanent deacon who celebrates liturgies of the Word.
Are we writing all this to criticise priests? Of course we are not. It hurts, and it hurts a lot. In the first place, it must hurt the Lord. Closed temples, populations orphaned of spiritual leaders, few confessions. It is a kind of vicious circle in which priests and faithful blame each other for the poor attendance at celebrations. It is true that there is in many celebrations a sense of lukewarm custom, and that the demography of the place is what it is, but it is also true that there are a good number of priests who are civil servants ("mercenaries", "hirelings" Jesus Christ himself calls them in Jn 10:11-18) who only work at weekends. Thank God, since our arrival in this diocese and until 2021, we have had a magnificent spiritual director and confessor; a very well trained priest - and banned from the Faculty of Theology of Catalonia for having refuted in his Doctoral thesis at the Gregorian the Christology of a sj -, with a very deep faith and a great love for the Church. A parish priest in a county capital with some 6000 inhabitants, an impeccable church, open many hours a day, with confessions, daily Mass. And what a beautiful Mass. With him we understood why there were so many people who travelled many kilometres to attend the Mass of the holy Curé of Ars. Because, even if the sacrament is valid, it benefits the faithful according to their disposition and the way it is celebrated. What unction, what delicacy, what love. And what homilies... He told us that all priests should pay attention to how Benedict XVI celebrated Mass, and he suffered a lot during the pandemic, when so many priests closed - even more - the churches and left the villages (to other places, with their families). He wondered bitterly how a priest could live without celebrating the daily sacrifice of the altar. The Lord must have had an important mission in store for him, because he took him away suddenly in the summer of 2021, at the age of fifty-nine. As well as missing him greatly, we remember the important life lessons of faith that we learned from him.
There was one particular issue we returned to often: ritual. Fed up with the creativity and haste of some priests, we had begun to read a lot about liturgy; about the Novus Ordo and the extraordinary rite. It seemed that the only solution to so many excesses was the Vetus Ordo. Thanks to our spiritual director we were able to celebrate Mass in this beautiful rite on several occasions, as well as the Novus Ordo ad orientem. I was part of a very small ecclesial group that is convinced that the Novus Ordo can be celebrated in continuity with the long liturgical tradition of the Church if it is done solemnly, without haste, with silences, bells, Kyrie, Sanctus, Roman canon, Agnus Dei.... What one usually finds is either people who are very convinced of attending Mass by the extraordinary rite (I know that it can be called by other names and that none of them is the most accurate) or people who are convinced of the opposite. Coincidentally or causally, it is in the second group that the excesses can be seen....
Reading about how the new ritual was elaborated, the shenanigans of Bugnini and company, the incomprehensible swallowing of the Holy Father; when compared to the beauty of the Vetus Ordo, even in its more sober versions, and the priest's lack of capacity to be creative, it is clear to me. But I also see Benedict XVI, our spiritual director and a very few others sharing that view of continuity, and celebrating with all solemnity and unction the novus ordo who, being much more educated and much wiser than I am, make me think of the need to pray much more about it and, of course, to love and give thanks for every Mass I can attend, which is no small thing in these times. A parish priest in a county capital with some 6000 inhabitants, an impeccable church, open many hours a day, with confessions, daily Mass. And what a beautiful Mass. With him we understood why there were so many people who travelled many kilometres to attend the Mass of the holy Curé of Ars. Because, even if the sacrament is valid, it benefits the faithful according to their disposition and the way it is celebrated. What unction, what delicacy, what love. And what homilies... He told us that all priests should pay attention to how Benedict XVI celebrated Mass, and he suffered a lot during the pandemic, when so many priests closed - even more - the churches and left the villages (to other places, with their families). He wondered bitterly how a priest could live without celebrating the daily sacrifice of the altar. The Lord must have had an important mission in store for him, because he took him away suddenly in the summer of 2021, at the age of fifty-nine. As well as missing him greatly, we remember the important life lessons of faith that we learned from him.
There was one particular issue we returned to often: ritual. Fed up with the creativity and haste of some priests, we had begun to read a lot about liturgy; about the Novus Ordo and the extraordinary rite. It seemed that the only solution to so many excesses was the Vetus Ordo. Thanks to our spiritual director we were able to celebrate Mass in this beautiful rite on several occasions, as well as the Novus Ordo ad orientem. I was part of a very small ecclesial group that is convinced that the Novus Ordo can be celebrated in continuity with the long liturgical tradition of the Church if it is done solemnly, without haste, with silences, bells, Kyrie, Sanctus, Roman canon, Agnus Dei.... What one usually finds is either people who are very convinced of attending Mass by the extraordinary rite (I know that it can be called by other names and that none of them is the most accurate) or people who are convinced of the opposite. Coincidentally or causally, it is in the second group that the excesses can be seen....
Reading about how the new ritual was elaborated, the shenanigans of Bugnini and company, the incomprehensible delight of the Holy Father; when compared to the beauty of the Vetus Ordo, even in its more sober versions, and the priest's lack of capacity to be creative, it is clear to me. But I also see Benedict XVI, our spiritual director and a very few others sharing that view of continuity, and celebrating with all solemnity and unction the novus ordo who, being much more educated and much wiser than I am, make me think of the need to pray much more about it and, of course, to love and give thanks for every Mass I can attend, which is no small thing in these times.
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