Oops! That will have to wait until Easter! Just like the new Vatican Document on liturgical abuse!
The document has been unusually controversial.
…
Among other things, the draft insisted on limiting the role of lay ministers, forbade liturgical dance, warned against use of nonapproved texts, cautioned against pseudo-liturgical rites by and for women, and said distribution of Communion under the forms of bread and wine is not always a good idea.
That sounds reasonable, not controversial.
At the end of the session, Servite Father Silvano Maggiani, president of the Association of Professors of Liturgy, read a message expressing the liturgists’ fear that the liturgical reform movement opened by Vatican II was being closed down.
The reform needs to be reformed! The reform “movement” isn’t a movement any more – it simply perserves liturgical practices that are supposed to give more meaning to things many lay people don’t even understand. Take the glass chalice, for instance. “We want people to see the red of wine – it looks like blood.” Is is blood, Christ’s blood, after the Consecration, but focusing on the accidents of wine doesn’t help anyone to come to belief and reverance for the Blessed Sacrament.
What we need is orthodoxy and stability in the litgury, and a renewed focus on faithfulness to the Magisterium and Catechesis. The yahoos who want to re-form the liturgy every Sunday need to realize there are a multitude of souls at stake.
Father Maggiani told Catholic News Service that the association later sent personal letters to Pope John Paul II and other high officials at the Vatican, expressing “bewilderment, unease, fear and concern” at the apparent direction of the liturgical abuse document.
Father Maggiani, a consultor to the office that prepares papal liturgies, wrote that it was not right to “define as abuse things that are not.” Any real abuses should be corrected not with a “repressive” spirit but through formation, he said.
He also wrote that it would go against Vatican II to try and return to a “schism … between lay faithful and ordained ministers.”
What a load! Reading things like this make me want to grate cheese.
“To grate cheese”?
Not that there’s anything whatsoever wrong with that (hey, I’m from Wisconsin – the more cheese being sliced or grated or whatever, the better), but, I don’t get the connection.
Kevin,
I think it’s another way of saying, “Reading that guy makes me want to grind my teeth.”
“consultor to the office that prepares papal liturgies”? What does this mean? What office — is this a Roman dicastery? If so, how is it that he is so at odds with the Holy Father?
Or does “consult” mean “They called me once to get my advice but for some reason haven’t called me since”?
The prelate in charge of arranging papal liturgies, Bp. Piero Marini, is profiled here by John Allen. Bp. Marini seems to be the fellow responsible for the Holy Father witnessing or submitting to various odd-looking cultural rituals in Masses during his travels, so there’s some dispute about how wise these adoptions are. He is famous or notorious (take your pick) for having said “the Mass is also a show”, a sentiment disturbing to people concerned about the influence of entertainment values on liturgical praxis.