Fake Resistance Watch

[Stone]

Excerpt from an article written by an English priest and published in August 1982 issue of The Angelus ... as you read these words below, reflect on how they contrast sharply with Bishop Williamson's 'The New Religion can build your faith' or 'Attending the New Mass can build your faith.':

The existing lex orandi was an obstacle to their new religion, so it had to be destroyed. The Council text was defied, and the Holy Mass of all the Catholic ages, the Church's most sacred treasure and the most beautiful thing this side of heaven, was cunningly demolished by installments and replaced by a completely different rite, entirely vernacular and frequently vulgar, celebrated back to front, and shorn of the traditional gestures of reverence and the verbal safeguards of Catholic Eucharistic doctrine—just the things that Cranmer himself had suppressed. The sacrificial element was consigned to oblivion, and all the emphasis transferred to the "memorial" and "meal" elements, just as in the Protestant "Lord's Supper." The obvious purpose was to make the Eucharist so "ecumenical" that it could be shared by those who had no belief in either the Sacrifice or the Real Presence. Can one imagine anything more dastardly than this betrayal of the Holy of Holies for the beaux yeux of unbelievers? Yet the Modernists were allowed—and are still allowed—to get away with it and to impose it on the whole Church of the West. No such subversion has ever before been known in the Catholic Church.

And what a vernacular!—the shabby, ephemeral speech of the streets and the pubs brought into the sanctuary! The whole concept of a vernacular liturgy is indeed a monstrosity, only to be excused by total illiteracy of the worshippers. Are the Catholics of the West so illiterate that they cannot read even the simplest prayer book? Liturgy is an essentially sacred thing, eternal truths clad in an unchanging form: in a word, it must be hieratic, not demotic. The Church had been telling us this for centuries, and had repeated it emphatically as recently as 1962 (the Apostolic Constitution of John XXIII, Veterum Sapientia); but the Church was now made to eat her own words and swing over to the Protestant slogan of "a language understanded of the people"—as if Latin had been a mere mumbo-jumbo to our people for all these centuries!

Since the Novus Ordo Missae was designed as an "ecumenical" liturgy, ambivalence was essential to it. Hence the many alternative formulas (Confiteors, Canons, etc.) left to the option of the celebrant, together with the studied ambiguity of the wording where any definite Catholic doctrine (such as transubstantiation or sacrifice) is involved. Hence the abolition of the Offertory prayers, and the reduction of the Consecration to what can be taken as a mere narrative. The result of it all has been to stir up controversy among the faithful as to whether the new liturgy can be regarded as sacramentally valid. To take the negative view would amount to questioning the God-given authority of the Church which has sanctioned the changes. But a careful study of such works as Michael Davies' masterly trilogy on the Liturgical Revolution1 will show that the bare essentials of validity have been preserved, but in so thoroughly Protestantized a setting and mentality that lapses from validity are much more likely to occur, and the Catholic faith cannot be expected to survive or flourish in such an environment. All that used to protect and nourish this faith has been ruthlessly cut away in the interests of "ecumenism," and the effect of the revolution can be plainly seen in the vast exodus from the Church which has followed it.