{"id":2361,"date":"2007-03-26T13:24:34","date_gmt":"2007-03-26T13:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/hot-and-hotter.html"},"modified":"2007-03-26T13:24:34","modified_gmt":"2007-03-26T13:24:34","slug":"hot-and-hotter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/hot-and-hotter.html","title":{"rendered":"Hot and Hotter"},"content":{"rendered":"

The rumors are heating up that the famed and legendary Motu Proprio on the "freeing" of the 1962 Missal is on its way this week or Holy Thursday at the latest. This, added to everything else, From Fr. Z.<\/a><\/p>\n

Update: <\/u>Hmm. How to say this?<\/p>\n

No, not this week or next. But soon – and that is not just a rumor "soon." I’m not being coy, but I really can’t say anything else except…relax.  Spring has sprung.<\/p>\n

I am working on the "Motu Proprio Tip Sheet" you folks gave input on a couple of months ago, and hope to have it ready in the next day or two. It will be in the form of a blog (because the template’s there, easy to do), and will have comments so folks can elaborate, explain and correct as need be.<\/p>\n

This is such a crucial moment, I think, for Benedict. Some folks scoff at my interest in the writings and words of Pope Benedict, but I do come by it honestly, I think. I was fairly unacquainted with him before his election, was brought up short, in a good way, by the homily he gave at his installation Mass, in which he went through the symbols with which he was being vested (the pallium, etc) and explained each one in this amazingly clear, pastoral and rich way. "There’s a teacher," I thought.<\/p>\n

What my husband says all the time is that the striking thing to him about Benedict is not just his understanding of theology and so one, but that he gets the problems. He understands what the core issues are, and not in any abstract way. He understands modern alienation, the temptation of secularization and relativism, as well as the very ordinary and constant problems Christians have as we attempt to live out our faith every day. <\/p>\n

And for him, the answer is Christ. A recent editorial in the NCR(egister) lays it out: The Key to Benedict<\/a> – which is not, as some would have you believe, nostalgia, a desire to "roll back" Vatican II, authoritarianism, control, or anything like that:<\/p>\n

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Pope Benedict, also, is simply and deeply devoted to the person of Christ, in all of his clarity and depth.<\/p>\n

When secular newspapers write about Pope Benedict\u2019s new post-synodal apostolic exhoratation Sacramentum Caritatis<\/em> (The Sacrament of Charity), they say things like \u201cPope Refuses to Yield\u201d or \u201cBenedict Loves Latin\u201d as if the Holy Father were merely imposing his personal preferences on the Church.<\/p>\n

But, from the very beginning, Benedict has been telling us exactly what he would do, and why he would do it. He started before the conclave that elected him, when he spoke about friendship with Christ, a concept he has returned to several times. <\/p>\n

Noting that Jesus defines friendship as \u201cthe communion of wills,\u201d he cited the old Roman definition of friendship \u2014 Idem velle idem nolle<\/em> (same desires, same dislikes) \u2014 as the model of our friendship with Christ. <\/p>\n

In his first message after becoming pope, he applied that lesson to the Eucharist. \u201cI ask everyone in the coming months to intensify love and devotion for Jesus in the Eucharist,\u201d he said, \u201cand to express courageously and clearly faith in the Real Presence of the Lord, especially by the solemnity and the correctness of the celebrations.\u201d<\/p>\n

He wanted us to show our friendship with Jesus in the Eucharist not just by good feelings, but by a communion of wills \u2014 \u201cby the solemnity and correctness\u201d of our Masses.<\/p>\n

This love for Jesus, which is both practical and passionate \u2014 we should say practical because<\/em> it is passionate \u2014 is the key to Pope Benedict\u2019s thinking. It is front and center in is private works (such as \u201cOn the Way to Christ Jesus\u201d), in his official works before becoming Pope (Dominus Iesus \u2014 <\/em>\u201cThe Lord Jesus\u201d \u2014 foremost among them), and in his first encyclical and latest document on charity and the Eucharist.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As challenging as it will be, I think it will be important to hold this up high and speak of it constantly if and when the MP appears. <\/p>\n

Speaking of the MP…<\/p>\n

Fr. Z in Rome has a few posts today, including a "Rules for Engagement" when the MP comes<\/a><\/p>\n

and Jeffrey Tucker at the New Liturgical Movement has a really fine post on various possible – and fantasy – outcomes of a MP here,<\/a>  It is not about streams of people demanding and getting the 62 Missal everywhere across the land – not going to happen. It is not about bifurcation in dioceses or parishes – let’s hope not. His best case scenario:<\/p>\n

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However you look at it, the Motu Proprio revives the classical ideal as a kind of religio-culture currency. Its status will be re-legitimated. This is hugely important because of one of the grave defects in the modern rite: it lacks rubrics that dictate a certain liturgical result. For this reason, it is too often used as a vessel in which the celebrant and the liturgy team’s agenda. Some of this is tendency results from bad intentions but lots of it is entirely innocent. People don’t have the model of the old Mass in their mind. Sometimes it takes only one attendance to create the epiphany: oh so that’s how Catholic liturgy is supposed to sound and feel! This impact here could be huge, and, I think, overshadow the bifurcation tendency mentioned above. There is also this interesting possibility: pastors will be inspired to fix up the new rite and make it more solemn and correct precisely to forestall what they consider a worse choice of actually having to learn the old rite and put it in place as a parish option. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The rumors are heating up that the famed and legendary Motu Proprio on the "freeing" of the 1962 Missal is on its way this week or Holy Thursday at the latest. This, added to everything else, From Fr. Z. Update: Hmm. How to say this? No, not this week or next. But soon – and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nHot and Hotter - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/hot-and-hotter.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hot and Hotter - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The rumors are heating up that the famed and legendary Motu Proprio on the "freeing" of the 1962 Missal is on its way this week or Holy Thursday at the latest. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}