On The Novus Ordo Mass Again
I have received a comment asking me whether I had changed my position about the Novus Ordo. The author of the comment mentioned a post dated January 2022. I think he meant this one.
The most comprehensive blog post I have written about the Novus Ordo (written after a lot of prayer and reflection) is a long 2013 post, here.
I have honestly re-read both posts and, reading them back to back, I understand why someone might think that I have changed my stance. I didn’t. The fact is that it is quite likely that a post in 2022 would have a different “cut” than a post in 2013, because the occasion for the writing of the post is different.
Therefore, let me explain in short how I see it, and why both posts are in no contradiction.
Firstly, I have no doubt (and never had one) that the NO has to go. I also had no doubt that the NO is the work of the devil, as in: it was the devil who attacked the Mass and caused, with God’s permission, the NO to be born. It is the work of the devil that Coca Cola is now served instead of Barolo. It is true that we want the return to Barolo. It is, likewise, true that the Coca Cola also quenches the thirst, that it is still the beverage God allows you to have, and that it is, in most cases (but I am not your confessor), preferable to no beverage at all.
What has not changed since 2013? The absurdity of thinking that the Church serves poison to 99% of Her faithful, and a true faithful should actually stay away from the Mass because… the Church serves (literal) poison.
What has changed since 2013? One thing has changed: my anger for bad masses has greatly increased, and my rage at what is done to the people who attend there, too. In 2013 I had started to go back to Mass only since a handful of years, and a reverent NO, to me, was still enough to make me be ashamed of having been away for so long. In 2023 the memory of the years away from the Church has reduced, and the anger for the football teams on the altar has increased. However, then as now this statement applies:
“I love the Church even when she slaps me in the face. Already once I stopped attending because I thought I knew better, and was better. Already once I thought I do not need to go and listen to a stupid priest talking stupid waffle (obviously, no clue about the real reason why I went to Mass). Never again.“
It’s a slippery slope. You start by deciding that the NO is not good enough for you, you end up thinking that you decide who is the Pope. At times, we are required to be submissive, and to exercise in humility. The hamburger of the NO is vastly inferior to the filet of the TLM, but if it is the only fare Christ puts on my plate, I will accept it in obedience (obviously, by still never ceasing to call for the return of the filet!).
Others will react in different ways. They will have, possibly, a different personal trajectory than myself. But I was proud, and I think that *it did my spiritual life no good at all*. Thankfully, God is patient, and merciful.
For many years now, for me, whenever I attend a NO Mass (I do not want to say how often or rarely) attendance at a NO mass has been a suffering and a penance, a punishment for my sins I accept in humility. I wish I had been born in a different age, but God in His Wisdom has made me be born in this age. When I get angry, I pray more, and I also pray that Francis may die soon. I assure you I have prayed for his painless death a lot.
Some people (particularly Anglo-Saxons) always seem to think in black and white. If it’s bad, then I don’t go. No. It’s bad, and I still go, because it’s still valid, and therefore still the bringer of sacramental graces, and therefore still founding a mass obligation.
Is the Novus Ordo offensive to Christ? Of course it is!! Does this mean that I should not go there? If you ask me: NO! Why? Because it is still an offense that God Himself has mysteriously and providentially allowed. It is part of the punishment that we, sinners, have attracted on ourselves.
Believe me, because I have been there and done that: if you are like me, the decision not to attend Mass at all – say: because a NO is not in reasonable reach and this NO is vastly inferior to the TLM – is a decision where pride is already mixing in, and preparing to make damage, perhaps a lot of damage, in the years to come.
Where do I draw the line? I draw the line when the Mass becomes a betrayal of Christ in the ideology, in the spirit with which it is celebrated. When the priest celebrates an LGBT mass. When the consecration words are changed. When the disobedience is willed and proclaimed, rather than in the structure of a mass that is still reverently celebrated. I honestly doubt that I will find such a situation in my lifetime. I see around me a lot of, so to speak, “innocently dumb” NO masses. You all know what I mean. In this case, I could not see in the offence of Christ (every NO is, as we know, offensive to Christ) the offence that comes from a mediocre liturgy in which – to put it shortly – the aspect of sacrifice is downplayed and many parts are clearly protestantised. In this case I would see an actual rebellion, in that actual parish, by that actual priest. Then I would look for a different parish and a different priest.
This is the way I see it. It’s the best I can do with the lights at my disposal. I will, also, not go to sleep thinking that I might, with my words, have caused the one or other to stop attending and then, as it can easily happen, see his faith drift apart.
Don’t ask a simple blogger, and a wretched sinner at that, to give you advice whether you should, or should not, obey the Church. We should obey the Church in all that we reasonably can.
I can never know: when I die, the many hamburgers eaten in a mixture of anger and prayer might be just the difference that, by God’s grace, actually saves my soul.
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Posted on June 19, 2023, in Traditional Catholicism and tagged Novus ordo Mass, TLM, Traditional Latin Mass, Tridentine Mass. Bookmark the permalink. 13 Comments.
Mundabor's Blog 
Beautiful post. Thank you.
Let me begin by saying our Sunday Mass obligation ends only after the priest has drunk the dregs of the Sacred Blood (I hope I have that right), wiped out the holy vessels and put them away. If you leave Mass sooner, you have not met your Sunday obligation
Mea culpa, I left early yesterday and will have to confess. Lord have mercy on me. At the NO I attended, the smarmy ultra-liberal deacon, in the prayers of the Faithful, spoke thusly: “that we joyfully accept reparations for institutionalized racism as we celebrate this week’s Juneteenth, let us pray…”
Politicizing the Mass. Promoting a lie and fostering polarization of the citizenry. So evil.
How long, Lord?
I think this will be a very fast absolution. By the by, I never heard anything of the sort in England.
Juneteenth, I suppose, has always been a boutique observance by a very small black minority to celebrate the slaves of Texas getting word that they were emancipated via a Union Army missive.
In the wake of Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd incident, Biden made it yet another federal holiday.
Talk of reparations for slavery fill the American press. There is a movement afoot in California to grant descendants of slaves hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
Your great Country is really going down the drain. Sad. So sad.
Very well said, Mr. M. This is where I land. Providentially, there is a TLM parish approved by our local Ordinary and staffed by the FSSP less than 20 minutes from my home. My son and I go there whenever we can. When there are special events at our territorial parish, I attend out of love for Catholics in my neighborhood. When travelling it is rare that a TLM is reasonably available, and I attend the local parish. Usually, these “travel Sundays” are the most penitential, since tourist destinations in the US seem to attract the religious orders (Jesuits, Fransciscans, Salesians et. al.) with all their Stalinist iconoclastic “church architecture” and their semi- heretical homilies. The Third Commandment is not optional; and I am deserving of much greater suffering in honoring My Lord.
It’s a complicated issue. If I have my Archbishop Lefebvre right (and I am subject to being proved wrong), he said he did not think the faithful have an obligation to attend the Novus Ordo. The SSPX says the Novus Ordo is a danger to the faith, and I can’t argue with that since I can see the deleterious effects it has had on my own faith. The late Fr. Gregory Hesse held that there is an affirmative duty NOT to attend, and that the faithful cannot be responsible for the failure of the hierarchy to proved them with an authentic Catholic rite. One can take the position that these men of the Church and those who follow them are outliers. Even Bishop Williamson has a softer stance on attending the Novus Ordo. But on top of this disagreement among priests and bishops, we have scandals within the mainstream Church concerning verifiably invalid Sacraments. There is the scandal three years ago of two men in two different American archdioceses who thought they were priests, but turned out to have been invalidly baptized, followed this month by the discovery of countless invalid Masses in the Archdiocese of Kansas City due to the use of improper matter. Priests have been encouraged to play fast and loose with the Sacraments for so many years that it is hard not to suspect that this sort of thing is going on a lot more than we might think.
I don’t agree that the cobbling up of an inferior liturgy and inferior forms of the Sacraments, and the forcing of these new forms on the faithful, are authentic acts of the Church. They are the acts of men in the hierarchy abusing their authority and acting ultra vires. Our Catholic instinct for authority is pitted against our Catholic instinct for truth, and it must have taken a preternatural intellect to come up with that strategy. But I do agree that God has indeed permitted these abnormalities, and we’d be fools not to see it as His punishment for our sins. We are still left with the dilemma of what to do in these straits. More prayer, fasting and almsgiving are needed.
I don’t think both can be true. If the bastardisation of the Mass has been allowed, it follows that this bastard Mass is, in principle, still binding. Of course, there are degrees of evil. But I am fully against a blanket rejection.
“If the bastardisation of the Mass has been allowed, it follows that this bastard Mass is, in principle, still binding.”
Well, no, because doesn’t the binding character of an act depend upon whether it is based on legitimate authority, and done within the law? The imposition of the bastard Mass (+Lefebvre’s words) was done extralegally, which is how most things seem to be done in the Church of the New Advent. It was done, not by a legal act of abrogation of the old Mass, as Pope Benedict XVI confirmed in Summorum Pontificum, but by force and coercion and chicanery. Here, I think, is our clue to whether it is binding. Why, we have to ask, was the de facto abrogation of the old Mass not done de jure? The obvious conclusion is that it could not have been accomplished legally, because it is beyond the authority of the hierarchy to do it; and the fact that they have resorted to underhanded measures shows that they KNOW they are exceeding their authority. So instead they took a non-order and gave it the appearance of an order, using their prestige to fool people into obeying it, and brute force where people are not fooled. They have done the same thing with all the novelties of Vatican II, which is explicitly non-infallible, but treated as infallible and sought to be imposed by force by its partisans.
That is why I question the proposition that the new Mass and new Sacraments are truly acts of the indefectible Church. My own (obviously non-binding) opinion is that these are acts by the highly defectible men in the hierarchy, acting under color of authority but outside the scope of that authority. The Church will have to rule on these issues once she has been delivered from this present crisis. Meanwhile, we are still left with the question of what we are to do in our present circumstances, and I trust that, if we do the best we can with what we have, God will judge us mercifully.
You are conflating two issues: the fact that the New Mass has been introduced via duplicity and deception (which nobody questions) does not make the new Mass extraneous to the Church. To say this would mean to say that the Church is not the Church anymore. This leads, in turn, to sedevacantism; sedevacantism, in turn, leads to a ban.
Brutally said: if the Church shits the NO, it is still shit, and it is still the Church’s shit.
On this one, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. I don’t think my opinion (and it’s ONLY my opinion) exposes me to the risk of sedevacantism. Rather, it helps me hold on to the indefectibility of the Church that is nevertheless populated and run by sinners.
For the record, I reject sedevacantism, and hold that Francis is the true Pope, however little I like it. I don’t attend the Novus Ordo anymore, which is universally awful where I live, because I have the ability to attend an SSPX chapel; however, I don’t reject the Novus Ordo as per se invalid.
I think the last point is very important.
Very good article regarding the novus ordo mass. I would only add that, in my opinion, the majority of novus ordo attendees are fine with the it, and wouldn’t want to attend a TLM. Perhaps the TLM was taken away, with God’s permission, because few would appreciate it. I’ve recently moved to an area with no TLM, and am forced to attend the novus ordo. It does require strength and humilty to deal with it, and a greater dependence on Our Lord to get through it.
My impression is that most of those who attend a NO mass have *no idea* of what revolution the TLM would be in their religious life. The others are people who don’t have a TLM reasonably available to them.