The Mass at the Shrine

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The Mass at the Shrine

[2010-04-29]

[Engleză]

The largest Catholic church in America was filled to standing room only with nearly 4,000 people on Saturday afternoon for the first 'old Latin Mass' in the church in 40 years. The Mass was to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the day Pope Benedict XVI was installed as Pope

By Robert Moynihan, reporting from America

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Special Initial Note: I will speak at Georgetown University this Wednesday, April 28, 2010. All are invited. For more information, see: http://events.georgetown.edu/events/index.cfm?Action=View&EventID=76242)

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Benedict Honored

WASHINGTON, DC, April 25, 2020 -- Embattled Pope Benedict XVI, who turned 83 ten days ago on April 16, was honored in the United States on April 24, the 5th anniversary of his election in 2005 at the age of 78, by thousands of American Catholics who attended a Mass commemorating his installation.

(Photo, Mass in the packed Basilica at the moment of the homily. Bishop Slattery is seated to the left at the base of the column, and near him in red is seated Cardinal William Baum. There was standing-room only in the Basilica for this extraordinary Saturday afternoon Mass.)

The Mass was also the first celebration of the 'old Latin liturgy' in the nation's largest Catholic church in 40 years, since the reform of the liturgy by Paul VI in 1970, and the large crowd in attendance is striking evidence that, despite the passage of four decades, there remains a considerable reservoir of devotion to the old form of the Mass among Catholics in America.

Despite some controversy associated with the choice of the celebrant, between 3,000 and 4,000 people filled the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC on Saturday afternoon for this double purpose: (1) to commemorate the installation of Pope Benedict XVI as Pope five years ago, and (2) to celebrate the return, after a 40-year absence, of the 'old Mass' to this shrine dedicated to the Mother of God.

The pews in the basilica was completely filled, and there were several hundred people standing in the aisles. One of the basilica ushers told me that 'though officially we seat 3,500, actually the capacity is 2,800 to 3,000.' With the number of people standing, he added, it would not be exaggerated to say there were 'more than 3,000' present in the basilica.

Paul King, a leading Washington business executive who also heads the Paulus Institute, a group dedicated to the renewal of the traditional liturgy of the Church, was the chief organizer of the Mass. He told me he thought the number of people who were standing, as well as considerable squishing together in the pews, meant that the number present must have approached 4,000.

(Photo, Paul King with his brother after the Mass. For more on King, see: http://www.thepaulusinstitute.org/directors/paul%20king.htm)

In the absence of an official count, it seems fair to say that there were between 3,000 and 4,000 people at the Mass.

The Controversy Before the Mass

The Mass, a High Pontifical Mass sung in Latin and accompanied by an organ and choir, was offered by His Excellency Bishop Edward Slattery of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

But Slattery was not the first choice as celebrant.

'We are pleased and honored to have His Excellency, Edward Slattery, come to Washington to celebrate what will be a historic event and a major step toward the restoration of sacred tradition,' Paulus Institute President King, wrote in a mid-April press release. 'The richness of our Catholic tradition will be visible to all the world on Pope Benedict's fifth anniversary.'

But Slattery was a last-minute replacement for the originally scheduled celebrant, the Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, 81 (photo), famous for standing up at the risk of his own life to drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, the greatest Colombian drug lord, whose Medellín cartel once controlled 80% of the cocaine shipped illegally into the United States.

So Castrillon is regarded as a man with courage, who will not back down when faced with a challenge.

But Castrillon became too controversial for this event.

Several weeks ago, a letter he wrote almost 10 years ago concerning a case of priestly pedophilia in France was made public. In his letter, Castrillon praised a French bishop for not telling police about a French priest who had sexually assaulted children.

In mid-April, advocates for sexual abuse victims voiced outrage that Castrillon was planning to come to Washington to celebrate the Mass.

The 'Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests' (SNAP) sent letters to Pope Benedict XVI and to Washington Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl, calling on them to condemn Castrillon's remarks and to replace him in the Mass.

The Pope did not intervene. He didn't have to.

Instead, there was a dramatic conference phone call between Paul King and another organizer of the Mass and Castrillon in which the decision was made not to have Castrillon be the celebrant.

'A lot of things have been written about how the decision was taken,' King said. 'Some say I asked him not to come, others, that he took the decision not to come. But it was not as clear-cut as that. During a 40-minute-long phone conversation, a deep and profound conversation filled with much sorrow and pain, it became clear what the decision had to be. It was decided that, in order to maintain the solemnity, reverence and beauty of the Mass, we needed to have another celebrant.'

A Homily about Obedience and Suffering

Bishop Slattery (photo) gave a thoughtful, moving homily which focused on how our sufferings in this world can be made meaningful, and so bearable, if we unite them with the sufferings of Christ.

Here is the complete text of the homily:

Solemn Pontifical Mass, Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, D.C.

Celebrating the fifth anniversary of the ascension of Benedict XVI to the throne of Peter -- ad multos annos!

We have much to discuss -- you and I …

… much to speak of on this glorious occasion when we gather together in the glare of the world’s scrutiny to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the ascension of Joseph Ratzinger to the throne of Peter.

We must come to understand how it is that suffering can reveal the mercy of God and make manifest among us the consoling presence of Jesus Christ, crucified and now risen from the dead.

We must speak of this mystery today, first of all because it is one of the great mysteries of revelation, spoken of in the New Testament and attested to by every saint in the Church’s long history, by the martyrs with their blood, by the confessors with their constancy, by the virgins with their purity and by the lay faithful of Christ’s body by their resolute courage under fire.

But we must also speak clearly of this mystery because of the enormous suffering which is all around us and which does so much to determine the culture of our modern age.

From the enormous suffering of His Holiness these past months to the suffering of the Church’s most recent martyrs in India and Africa, welling up from the suffering of the poor and the dispossessed and the undocumented, and gathering tears from the victims of abuse and neglect, from women who have been deceived into believing that abortion was a simple medical procedure and thus have lost part of their soul to the greed of the abortionist, and now flowing with the heartache of those who suffer from cancer, diabetes, AIDS, or the emotional diseases of our age, it is the sufferings of our people that defines the culture of our modern secular age.

This enormous suffering which can take on so many varied physical, mental, and emotional forms will reduce us to fear and trembling -- if we do not remember that Christ -- our Pasch -- has been raised from the dead. Our pain and anguish could dehumanize us, for it has the power to close us in upon ourselves such that we would live always in chaos and confusion -- if we do not remember that Christ -- our hope -- has been raised for our sakes. Jesus is our Pasch, our hope and our light.

He makes himself most present in the suffering of his people and this is the mystery of which we must speak today, for when we speak of His saving presence and proclaim His infinite love in the midst of our suffering, when we seek His light and refuse to surrender to the darkness, we receive that light which is the life of men; that light which, as Saint John reminds us in the prologue to his Gospel, can never be overcome by the darkness, no matter how thick, no matter how choking.

Our suffering is thus transformed by His presence. It no longer has the power to alienate or isolate us. Neither can it dehumanize us nor destroy us. Suffering, however long and terrible it may be, has only the power to reveal Christ among us, and He is the mercy and the forgiveness of God.

The mystery then, of which we speak, is the light that shines in the darkness, Christ Our Lord, Who reveals Himself most wondrously to those who suffer so that suffering and death can do nothing more than bring us to the mercy of the Father.

(Photo, Slattery while delivering his homily Saturday)

But the point which we must clarify is that Christ reveals Himself to those who suffer in Christ, to those who humbly accept their pain as a personal sharing in His Passion and who are thus obedient to Christ’s command that we take up our cross and follow Him. Suffering by itself is simply the promise that death will claim these mortal bodies of ours, but suffering in Christ is the promise that we will be raised with Christ, when our mortality will be remade in his immortality and all that in our lives which is broken because it is perishable and finite will be made imperishable and incorrupt.

This is the meaning of Peter’s claim that he is a witness to the sufferings of Christ and thus one who has a share in the glory yet to be revealed. Once?Peter grasped the overwhelming truth of this mystery, his life was changed. The world held nothing for Peter. For him, there was only Christ.

This is, as you know, quite a dramatic shift for the man who three times denied Our Lord, the man to whom Jesus said, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Christ’s declaration to Peter that he would be the rock, the impregnable foundation, the mountain of Zion upon which the new Jerusalem would be constructed, follows in Matthew’s Gospel Saint Peter’s dramatic profession of faith, when the Lord asks the Twelve, “Who do people say that I am?” and Peter, impulsive as always, responds “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

Only later -- much later -- would Peter come to understand the full implication of this first Profession of Faith. Peter would still have to learn that to follow Christ, to truly be His disciple, one must let go of everything which the world considers valuable and necessary, and become powerless. This is the mystery which confounds independent Peter. It is the mystery which still confounds us: to follow Christ, one must surrender everything and become obedient with the obedience of Christ, for no one gains access to the Kingdom of the Father, unless he enter through the humility and the obedience of Jesus.

Peter had no idea that eventually he would find himself fully accepting this obedience, joyfully accepting his share in the Passion and Death of Christ. But Peter loved Our Lord and love was the way by which Peter learned how to obey. “Lord, you know that I love thee,”?Peter affirms three times with tears; and three times Christ commands him to tend to the flock that gathers at the foot of Calvary - and that is where we are now.

Peter knew that Jesus was the true Shepherd, the one Master and the only teacher; the rest of us are learners and the lesson we must learn is obedience, obedience unto death. Nothing less than this, for only when we are willing to be obedient with the very obedience of Christ will we come to recognize Christ’s presence among us.

Obedience is thus the heart of the life of the disciple and the key to suffering in Christ and with Christ. This obedience, is must be said, is quite different from obedience the way it is spoken of and dismissed in the world.

For those in the world, obedience is a burden and an imposition. It is the way by which the powerful force the powerless to do obeisance. Simply juridical and always external, obedience is the bending that breaks, but a breaking which is still less painful than the punishment meted out for disobedience. Thus for those in the world obedience is a punishment which must be avoided; but for Christians, obedience is always personal, because it is centered on Christ. It is a surrender to Jesus Whom we love.

For those whose lives are centered in Christ, obedience is that movement which the heart makes when it leaps in joy having once discovered the truth.

Let us consider, then, that Christ has given us both the image of his obedience and the action by which we are made obedient.

The image of Christ’s obedience is His Sacred Heart. That Heart, exposed and wounded must give us pause, for man’s heart it generally hidden and secret. In the silence of his own heart, each of us discovers the truth of who we are, the truth of why we are silent when we should speak, or bothersome and quarrelsome when we should be silent. In our hidden recesses of the heart, we come to know the impulses behind our deeds and the reasons why we act so often as cowards and fools.

But while man’s heart is generally silent and secret, the Heart of the God-Man is fully visible and accessible. It too reveals the motives behind our Lord’s self-surrender. It was obedience to the Father’s will that mankind be reconciled and our many sins forgiven us. “Son though he was,” the Apostle reminds us, “Jesus learned obedience through what He suffered.” Obedient unto death, death on a cross, Jesus asks his Father to forgive us that God might reveal the full depth of his mercy and love. “Father, forgive them,” he prayed, “for they know not what they do.”

Christ’s Sacred Heart is the image of the obedience which Christ showed by his sacrificial love on Calvary. The Sacrifice of Calvary is also for us the means by which we are made obedient and this is a point which you must never forget: at Mass, we offer ourselves to the Father in union with Christ, who offers Himself in perfect obedience to the Father. We make this offering in obedience to Christ who commanded us to “Do this in memory of me” and our obediential offering is perfected in the love with which the Father receives the gift of His Son.

Do not be surprised then that here at Mass, our bloodless offering of the bloody sacrifice of Calvary is a triple act of obedience. First, Christ is obedient to the Father, and offers Himself as a sacrifice of reconciliation. Secondly, we are obedient to Christ and offer ourselves to the Father with Jesus the Son; and thirdly, in sharing Christ’s obedience to the Father, we are made obedient to a new order of reality, in which love is supreme and life reigns eternal, in which suffering and death have been defeated by becoming for us the means by which Christ’s final victory, his future coming, is made manifest and real today.

Suffering then, yours, mine, the Pontiffs, is at the heart of personal holiness, because it is our sharing in the obedience of Jesus which reveals his glory. It is the means by which we are made witnesses of his suffering and sharers in the glory to come.

Do not be dismayed that there many in the Church have not yet grasped this point, and fewer still in the world will even consider it. You know this to be true and ten men who whisper the truth speak louder than a hundred million who lie.

If then someone asks of what we spoke today, tell them we spoke of the truth. If someone asks why it is you came to this Mass, say that it was so that you could be obedient with Christ. If someone asks about the homily, tell them it was about a mystery and if someone asks what I said of the present situation, tell them only that we must -- all of us -- become saints.

(Here is an audio version of the homily; simply click on the icon to play the audio: http://wdtprs.com/blog/2010/04/bp-slatterys-sermon-in-washington-dc/)

A Passing Phase?

It is right that the controversy over the celebrant, Cardinal Castrillon vs. Bishop Slattery, did not 'up-stage' what was happening at this Mass.

For, in addition to the sacred mystery of the Mass itself (which was the most important thing of all, of course), something else was occurring on April 24 in Washington of considerable importance -- of importance for the future of the Church, and so also of importance for the future of the West.

That 'something' is this: the interest in this Mass -- which was televised nationwide by EWTN (photo) -- reveals that, in the West, in the United States, and precisely in Washington DC, the capital of the US, despite a generation or more of 'post-Christian' cultural pressure, there remains a desire, a hunger, to be connected with the Christian past, and to hand on to posterity what was handed down over the centuries, often in the face of much suffering.

In short, the celebration of this Mass, after 40 years, and in the midst of an admittedly profound crisis in the Church, suggests that American Catholics, like their counterparts in Europe and around the world, may yet turn to the riches and treasures of their tradition to find a way forward.

And this will not be pure archaism.

It will not reflect a flight from present reality.

Nor will it be a rejection tout court of everything that came with the Second Vatican Council.

Rather, it will be an attempt to pick up the threads of our past, and see if they may still be woven into the fabric of our present, in order to create the tapestry of our future.

It is our future that it looks toward -- not just our past.

Having just been in Rome, having been present three weeks ago at the papal liturgies during Holy Week, having talked recently with a number of Vatican officials about liturgical matters, and about the Second Vatican Council and its legacy, for me this liturgy reflected what Pope Benedict is trying ceaselessly to teach: that the Catholic tradition has not been lost, that it remains to be discovered, and lived.

How this will all work out, of course, is yet to be seen.

At least one Vatican official I talked to recently told me he believes the future of the Church's liturgical life will be a type of fusion between the old Mass and the new Mass of Paul VI.

This is the view of many.

But at least one Vatican official I talked to, also in the past month, told me he believes the future is solely and exclusively in a return to the old rite.

'The old rite is our past, and it will be our future,' he told me. 'The new Mass is a passing phase. In 50 years, that will be entirely clear.'

'Lex orandi, lex credendi'

In this context, we must recall the words 'lex orandi, lex credendi.'

That is, literally, 'the law of praying is the law of believing.'

To put it less literally: the way one prays, the way the Church prays, shapes and determines and establishes what a person, what the Church, believes.

Praying 'becomes' believing.

And this is the fundamental reason that liturgy matters.

Some readers may feel the liturgy is a superficial matter, that time spent discussing or arguing or debating about the liturgy is wasted time, time that could be better spent in study, or prayer, or works of mercy and charity.

But the liturgy is not a superficial matter.

It is a fundamental matter.

It is fundamental because it determines and establishes the faith itself: lex orandi, lex credendi.

And this means that, for those who wish to change faith, or alter it, or destroy it, changing the liturgy is the first, essential step.

Likewise, for those who wish to keep the faith, and hand it on, and preserve it, preserving the liturgy is the first and fundamental aim of all their efforts.

Pope Benedict has written: 'The Church stands and falls with the Liturgy. When the adoration of the divine Trinity declines, when the faith no longer appears in its fullness in the Liturgy of the Church, when man’s words, his thoughts, his intentions are suffocating him, then faith will have lost the place where it is expressed and where it dwells. For that reason, the true celebration of the Sacred Liturgy is the center of any renewal of the Church whatsoever.”

And so Pope Benedict has been a Pope of liturgical reform, or of liturgical preservation, because he believes that only through the liturgy, through the prayer of the Church, can the Church's faith, that depositum fidei which was entrusted to him, be protected and handed on to his successor.

Lex orandi, lex credendi. In the Early Church there were about 70 years of liturgical tradition before there was any creed -- any formulated statement of what the Church believed -- and about 350 years before there was an accepted biblical canon.

The Church's prayer, her liturgy, provided the basis for establishing the other bases of the faith, the creeds and the canon.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: 'When the Church celebrates the sacraments, she confesses the faith received from the apostles -- whence the ancient saying: lex orandi, lex credendi.'

Now, this is not to say that the new rite of the Roman Mass, promulgated by Paul VI after the Council, does not draw on very early Christian traditions and prayers.

Sursa: www.InSideTheVatican.com

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