{"id":8684,"date":"2013-06-26T16:14:19","date_gmt":"2013-06-26T16:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/06\/26\/the-devirilization-of-priest-and-liturgy-in-the-novus-ordo-mass\/"},"modified":"2013-06-26T16:14:19","modified_gmt":"2013-06-26T16:14:19","slug":"the-devirilization-of-priest-and-liturgy-in-the-novus-ordo-mass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/06\/26\/the-devirilization-of-priest-and-liturgy-in-the-novus-ordo-mass\/","title":{"rendered":"The Devirilization of Priest and Liturgy in the Novus Ordo<\/i> Mass"},"content":{"rendered":"

I  would like to return to the practice of the religion of my youth, I really would.  Nothing of the usual sort holds me back: not the sex monkey, not illicit loves or addictions, not worldly ambition or the demands of career,  not the thoughtlessness of the worldling mesmerized by the play of transient phenomena, not the Luciferian pride of a Russell or a Sartre or a Hitchens, not the opposition of a wife: mine is a good old-fashioned Catholic girl who attends mass on Sundays, ministers to the sick, and embodies the old-time virtues.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Philosophical and theological questions and doubts are the main impediments to my return.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the trashy Vatican II 'reforms' run a close second.  These are well-documented in Fr. Cipolla's erudite The Devirilization of the Liturgy in the Novus Ordo Mass<\/a>.  Excerpt:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

. . . in the Novus Ordo rite of Mass the Liturgy has been effeminized.  There is a famous passage in Caesar\u2019s De bello Gallico<\/em> where he explains why the Belgae <\/em>tribe were such good soldiers.  He attributes this to their lack of contact with the centers of culture like the cities. Caesar believed that such contact contributes ad effeminandos animos<\/em>, to the effeminizing of their spirits.<\/span><\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n

In its Novus Ordo form . . . the Liturgy has been devirilized.  One must recall the meaning of the word, vir, in Latin. Both vir <\/em>and homo <\/em>mean \u201cman\u201d, but it is vir <\/em>alone that has the connotation of the man-hero and is the word that is often used for \u201chusband\u201d.  The Aeneid begins with the famous words:  arma virumque cano<\/em>. (\u201c I sing of arms and the man-hero.\u201d)  What Cardinal Heenan presciently and correctly saw in 1967 was the virtual elimination of the virile nature of the Liturgy, the replacement of masculine objectivity, necessary for the public worship of the Church, with softness, sentimentality and personalization centered on the motherly person of the priest.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But not only the Liturgy has been devirilized; the priests have been too.  The priests of my youth were manly men.  But this soon changed in ways that are well known.<\/span><\/p>\n

There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate  human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction  kept going by human needs and desires noble and base.  Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order.  Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons<\/em> (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents.  Suppose all that.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, religion has its immanent life-enhancing  role to play, whether true or false, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it will ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning.  Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering.  Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent.  Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk.  Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'<\/span><\/p>\n

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians.  The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clienetele, the conservatives and traditionalists.  The church should be a liberal-free zone.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now go read Cipolla's outstanding article.<\/span><\/p>\n

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I  would like to return to the practice of the religion of my youth, I really would.  Nothing of the usual sort holds me back: not the sex monkey, not illicit loves or addictions, not worldly ambition or the demands of career,  not the thoughtlessness of the worldling mesmerized by the play of transient phenomena, … Continue reading “The Devirilization of Priest and Liturgy in the Novus Ordo<\/i> Mass”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,58,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-christian-doctrine","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}