Seven Year Anniversary of Summorum Pontificum

Father Alexander Lucie-Smith writes about the seventh anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI's motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, in The Catholic Herald:

My father was a huge admirer of the Latin Mass of his youth: he used to say that its great advantage was that wherever you went in the world, the Mass was the same, in Latin, in the universal language, and thus accessible to all. That is a point of view I have not heard expressed for many a year. But there is something in it. The EF, I discovered as I learned it, is very formal: every gesture and every word has its place, and there is no room for variation, which is a good thing. Every Mass, in theory, is exactly like every other Mass. Why is this good? It is good because it reminds us that the Church is Catholic, universal. Of course we all have our particularities, but we need to remember that the universal aspect ought to take precedence. Why? Because the revelation of Jesus Christ is something that makes sense across space and time. It is valid for all times and places. Therefore it seems to me that the Mass ought to be celebrated in a way that emphasises the unicity of revelation and the unity of the human family. We should not be celebrating diversity, but identity; not celebrating difference, but the common heritage we all share.

I think this is one thing that has changed in the last seven years, and this is one of the looked for fruits of Summorum Pontificum: the EF has ‘reminded’ the OF of the ‘catholicity’ of the Church.

If the horizontal aspect is important, so is the vertical. The EF is clearly old, indeed very old. Codified at Trent, it is much older than Trent, going back to the time of Gregory the Great; in his time it was already old. Moreover, the OF is not ‘new’, in the sense that it is clearly in continuity with the ‘old’ Mass; the ‘new’ Mass is not ex nihilo. So, whether you celebrate one Mass or the other, or both from time to time, you are standing in a millennial tradition, going right back to the time before Pope Gregory. The ancient nature of the Church’s tradition is not something you heard much about when I was growing up, when all the talk was of the importance of ‘relevance’. So it is good that we should feel the worth and weight of tradition, and antiquity. These are useful counter-cultural correctives in this culture of ours, a culture which will one day be in the dustbin of history while the Mass, ever old, ever new, will continue.

So this is the main thing that we owe to Benedict’s motu proprio: it has put us more in touch with our history and with our universality.

As you may know from reading this blog, my husband and I have grown devoted to the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Liturgy of the Roman Rite, attending Sunday Mass at St. Anthony of Padua (my husband took the picture above on Palm Sunday this year) here in Wichita and seeking it out when we travel--especially at St. Eugene-Ste. Cecile in Paris. I echo Father Lucie-Smith's statement about being in touch with "our history", our Catholic past. To me, the historical connection has been to the English Catholic martyrs, since the missionary priests who had studied on the Continent came back to England, celebrating the Mass according to the Missal of Pope St. Pius V. They knew the glories of the rite in Rome, Paris, and throughout Europe--in their native land they celebrated Low Mass secretly, furtively, and faithfully. It's the form of Latin Liturgy of the Roman Rite that Blessed John Henry Newman learned to celebrate when he studied for the Catholic priesthood in Rome and then celebrated at the Oratory.

We are very thankful to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, to our local Ordinary, Bishop Carl Kemme, and the priests of our diocese who offer the Mass in the Extraordinary Form at St. Anthony and throughout the diocese--and to the master of ceremonies and the servers he's trained and the choir director and the choir members he directs to sing the parts of the Mass and the beautiful hymns.

The St. John Fisher Missale for the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite

From the Catholic community of the University of Cambridge comes this on-line, .pdf Missal for the faithful to use in celebrating sung Masses of the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite:

The name ‘Saint John Fisher Missale’ for this website was chosen because most of its contents were originally made for the use of the faithful at Fisher House, the Catholic Chaplaincy of the University of Cambridge, which a few months after the promulgation of the Motu proprio Summorum Pontificum established a weekly Mass according to the Extraordinary Form.

The University Chaplaincy, founded in 1895, is fittingly named after St John Fisher, who was not only a Saint and a Martyr, but also one of the most important figures in the history of the University of Cambridge.

John Fisher, the son of a merchant, came up to Michaelhouse (later suppressed and taken over by Trinity College) in 1484 and eventually became head of several colleges, Proctor, Vice-Chancellor and Chancellor of the University. He was instrumental in transforming the late-medieval University into a centre of the modern, humanist scholarship, and persuaded his friend Erasmus of Rotterdam to work for a while at Queens’ College. Fisher became confessor to Lady Margaret Beaufort (+ 1509), the mother of Henry VII, and through her patronage he was able to found two colleges (Christ’s College and St John’s College) and to endow academic positions that could support a true Catholic reform of the Church, including a chair in Biblical studies and a preachership. In 1504 he was appointed Bishop of the small and impoverished diocese of Rochester, and in the following years he worked there as a zealous pastor, several times refusing to exchange it for a better-endowed see.

When King Henry VIII moved with increasing aggressiveness against the Church — both to use her endowments for his wars and to divorce Queen Catherine of Aragon — John Fisher was the only bishop in England who remained loyal to the Holy Father and opposed the King’s plans. Having been imprisoned several times in the early 1530s, Fisher was eventually arrested as a traitor because he refused to acknowledge the King’s supposed marriage to Ann Boleyn. In 1535 he was created Cardinal Priest of S. Vitale by Pope Paul III, and this fact enraged the king so much that he had him sentenced to death for refusing to acknowledge him as Supreme Head of the ‘Church of England’. St John Fisher was beheaded on June 22, 1535, dying as a martyr for the freedom of the Church and the sanctity of marriage. He was beatified in 1886 and canonised in 1935.

It's an interesting project, because it's all on-line and the materials are designed for individuals to print on an as needed basis:

The digital version of the St John Fisher Missale is a work in progress. In its complete form it will consist of a number of PDF-files with the following elements:

~The Ordo Missæ (available with and without a short Kyriale)
~The Order of Requiem Mass with some Propers of Masses for the Dead
~A selection of the Kyriale containing music for several Mass Ordinaries, Creeds and some other chants
~Proper texts for all Sundays, all feasts of First and Second Class, and some other occasions (like Ember Saturdays or Rogations)

For instance, here are links to the Propers for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14) and the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary (September 15).