The Treasures of the Traditional Latin Mass: Religion
We live in a generation unique among the generations of the sons of Adam: unique not only for its lack of religion, but for its contempt and hatred for it. Hence it is that not a few Catholics are wholly indifferent to the goodness, truth and beauty of the virtue of religion and its supreme and most efficacious act, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. For this reason, it behooves us, if we are to consider the treasures of the Traditional Latin Mass, that we revive a correct understanding of the virtue of religion.
The Virtue of Religion
One of the earliest definitions given for the virtue of religion by a Father of the Church, was that of Lucius Caelius Firmianus Lactantius (c. 260-340 A.D.)1, who defined it thus: “We say that the word ‘religion’ has been taken from the link of piety, because God bound man to Himself and constrained him with piety, since it is necessary that we serve Him as our Lord and follow after Him as our Father.”2
Almost a thousand years later, the Angelic Doctor, the divine St. Thomas Aquinas detailed the parts of this virtue, saying:
“Religion has two kinds of acts. Some are its proper and immediate acts, which it elicits, and by which man is directed to God alone, for instance, sacrifice, adoration and the like. But it has other acts, which it produces through the medium of the virtues which it commands, directing them to the honor of God, because the virtue which is concerned with the end, commands the virtues which are concerned with the means. Accordingly "to visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation" is an act of religion as commanding, and an act of mercy as eliciting; and "to keep oneself unspotted from this world" is an act of religion as commanding, but of temperance or of some similar virtue as eliciting.”3
And thus it is that the virtue of religion comprises many other acts: “Its principal, interior acts are devotion and prayer. Its secondary, external acts are the worship of God (latria) through acts of bodily reverence: the offering of things to God, such as sacrifices, oblations, first-fruits, tithes and vows; the taking of things from God, such as the reception of Sacraments, and the taking of His Name by adjuration, during prayer or praise, or in order to confirm an assertion.”4
The Mass as an act of the virtue of religion
The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, as an external act of the worship of God comprising acts of bodily reverence, the offering of Jesus Christ in Sacrifice, and the oblation of the prayers of the priest and faithful, the reception of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, and the use of the Divine Name in prayer and acts of praise, and to confirm the truth of the Gospel, is the supreme act of religion of the one True Faith.
From this brief review of the virtue of religion we can see at once the treasures of the Traditional Latin Mass. First, unlike the Bugninian liturgy published by Pope Paul VI, the TLM has God as its beginning and end, center and focus, foundation and goal. Mgr. Annibale Bugnini, when he set out to invent the Novus Ordo, took the erroneous liturgical theories of Dom Odo Casel, O.S.B. (who held that the theandric actions of Christ which worked our salvation really became present again during the enactment of a ritual) and formulated a “mass” in which the congregation, in enacting the rite, became the “Worker of Salvation”. Hence it is in the Novus Ordo that the priest faces the people, the tablernacle is removed and hidden away, and the Passion of Our Most High Lord and Redeemer is belittled, sanitized, and downplayed. In the Novus Ordo it is the “People of God” which saves its self: there is no more need even of the priest: and this is why many dioceses throughout the world are destroying and selling off churches, preparing as they are for the “priest-less” liturgies of the future.
Why the TLM is an authentic act of the virtue of Religion
But in the TLM the One True God is the Object of adoration, the Author of the Rite, the Priest offering, and the Victim offered, the King venerated, the Prophet teaching, and the divine Master ministering.
In the TLM the One True God is the Object of Adoration: the human priest and the congregation face the tabernacle in which resides the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of God made man. The prayers of the TLM invoke God the Father, in virtue of the merits of God the Son, through the power of God the Holy Spirit: the Sacrifice of the Mass is offered explicitly to the Father in thanksgiving, adoration, praise and propitiation.
In the TLM the One True God is the Author of the Rite: all the saints, doctors and fathers of the Church, who have written on the subject, assure us that the TLM came to us from the Apostle Peter, through the saintly Popes of Rome, many of whom were martyrs. And the Evangelists assure us that the Apostles received instruction on how to say mass from Christ’s own lips, at the Last Supper and before He ascended to the Father. This testimony is confirmed by an unbroken chain of Popes from 560 A.D. to 1960 who our of respect for this truth never sought to change the rite.
In the TLM the One True God is the Priest offering: He is present at the Altar in the Tabernacle, He acts through the human priest, who humbly and frequently confesses his unworthiness, pronouncing the awesome words of Christ in consecrating.
In the TLM the One True God is the Victim offered: it is not a question of a sacrifice constituted essentially by the offering of “praise” or of “bread and wine”, neither of which could ever propitiate the Divine Majesty. In the TLM “the Immaculate Victim” is offered to the Father to propitiate the sins of the priest and people and of all faithful Catholics, for their eternal salvation.
In the TLM the One True God is venerated as King: as Mass begins, the first thing the priest does is call to mind the presence God the Judge, saying: “Judge me, O God . . .”; during the Canon he recalls that we are all the servants and slaves of God, saying, “We beseech Thee to accept this offering not only of our servitude, but of Thy whole family . . .”.
In the TLM it is the One True God who speaks to us, teaches us, and instructs us. The Scriptures read are really and truly the Scriptures written by the Apostles, un-sanitized by the vain and sinful preoccupations of carnal men. We hear the words our Redeemer willed from all eternity for us to hear.
Finally, in the TLM it is the One True God who ministers Himself to us in the Most Blessed Sacrament: and we recognize this awesome truth by coming forward to receive him in the mouth, on bended knees, without interposing our own hands, as if it were merely a cookie.
The Clarity given by the Virtue of Religion in the TLM
The many acts of authentic religion in the TLM protect us from the many vices against religion afoot in the world today. Just as religion is an act of the virtue of justice rendering to God what we ought to give Him, so the vices of religion neglect, despise, ignore, and offend Him.
The two vices opposed to the virtue of religion are superstition and irreligion. Superstition is the vice of regarding as religiously important that which has no importance in the sight of God, and this includes the vices of idolatry, divination and vain observance. Irreligion is the vice of mistreating what is religiously important as if it were not: this includes the vices of tempting God, perjury, sacrilege and simony.5
The TLM, in being so perfectly centered on the Most Holy Trinity, protects us against the vice of superstition. It is not necessary that the priest have eye-contact: it is not necessary that his prayer be accommodating to our understanding: it is not necessary that we find Mass a pleasant or entertaining performance. We find peace of soul and time to pray focused on the Sacrifice of the Cross, meditating on the Bloody Sacrifice of Christ Crucified, and not by singing songs about ourselves. The TLM in offering its prayers to God the Father and the Most Holy Trinity ad orientem protects us from falling into the error that the priest is playing up to the crowd and trying to catch their attention, rather than God’s. In the TLM the entire spirit of the liturgy excludes preoccupation with making one’s one decisions on the character of the celebration, worrying as the Protestants do, about makings worship “a memorable experience”.
The TLM protects us from the terrible vice of irreligion. The Most Blessed Sacrament never touches anything not consecrated to God. The Precious Blood of Jesus is not chug-a-lugged from a water pitcher. No one takes “a wafer” home “as a souvenir” to sell on E-bay as a memento or to keep in a hand bag for a rainy day. The TLM does not make the priest a perjurer, when by calling “the Word of God” what is but the “words of liberal biblical scholars”; or worse, by refusing to use the words of Christ at the august moment of consecration. The TLM does not make priest and people guilty of the sacrilege of denying the Most Holy Trinity the honor and reverence, adoration and veneration due Himself and His works of redemption, by means of neglecting His Divine Presence, or making us forgetful of our own sinfulness and incomparable unworthiness, as if we somehow deserved mercy and not justice. Finally, the TLM to the one who appreciates its riches, is a preventative to the spirit of simony, inasmuch as it reminds us of the incomparable value of eternal things and of the sacred things of our Holy Religion.
The Fruit of the Riches of the TLM for our souls
And hence it is that the treasures of the TLM work to the salvation of our souls. For just as Trent taught that faith alone is not sufficient for justification, so it is that attending Mass or receiving the Most Blessed Sacrament in communion, even in the state of grace, is insufficient to profit from all the graces offered us in the Mass. For the state of grace in of itself is insufficient to obtain any grace, unless it be accompanied by meritorious acts of virtue, especially of the virtues of penance, faith, hope and charity.
These acts are elicited from us at the TLM. We are drawn in to approach the august sacrifice by humbly confessing our sins in the Confiteor, not only with word, but by beating ourselves on the chest, saying “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!”. We profess our faith in all the infallible teachings of the Faith, when we recite silently the authentic Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed with the priest. We profess our hope in the world to come, as we unite ourselves with the priest during the Canon, as he prays not for some silly inane request at the prayers of the faithful, but for the forgiveness of our sins that we and our beloved dead might attain unto eternal salvation. And finally, we are stirred to a great and tremendous love as we receive with confidence the Most Blessed Sacrament, consecrated with the same words which St. Peter heard in the Upper Room, the night Christ was betrayed by Judas Iscariot.
Oh, the riches of the goodness, the truth and the beauty of the TLM: the Bulwark of the Ages! the Rudder of the Bark of Peter! It fulfills so perfectly the precept of Our Divine Savior: hoc facite in meam commemorationem.
============
FOOTNOTES
1 “Lactantius”, The Columbia Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition, William Bridgwater et al. editors, Columbia University Press, New York, 1963, p. 1161.
2 Lactantius, Divine Institutions. Bk. I, part 4, c. 28, quoted in Dr. Nicholas Ghir’s, The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass; dogmatically, liturgically and ascetically explained, B. Herder, St. Louis, Mo., 1902, p. 17, footnote 2.
3 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II II, q. 81, a. 1, reply to obj. 1.
4 cf. op. cit., II II, introduction.
5 ibid.
The Virtue of Religion
One of the earliest definitions given for the virtue of religion by a Father of the Church, was that of Lucius Caelius Firmianus Lactantius (c. 260-340 A.D.)1, who defined it thus: “We say that the word ‘religion’ has been taken from the link of piety, because God bound man to Himself and constrained him with piety, since it is necessary that we serve Him as our Lord and follow after Him as our Father.”2
Almost a thousand years later, the Angelic Doctor, the divine St. Thomas Aquinas detailed the parts of this virtue, saying:
“Religion has two kinds of acts. Some are its proper and immediate acts, which it elicits, and by which man is directed to God alone, for instance, sacrifice, adoration and the like. But it has other acts, which it produces through the medium of the virtues which it commands, directing them to the honor of God, because the virtue which is concerned with the end, commands the virtues which are concerned with the means. Accordingly "to visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation" is an act of religion as commanding, and an act of mercy as eliciting; and "to keep oneself unspotted from this world" is an act of religion as commanding, but of temperance or of some similar virtue as eliciting.”3
And thus it is that the virtue of religion comprises many other acts: “Its principal, interior acts are devotion and prayer. Its secondary, external acts are the worship of God (latria) through acts of bodily reverence: the offering of things to God, such as sacrifices, oblations, first-fruits, tithes and vows; the taking of things from God, such as the reception of Sacraments, and the taking of His Name by adjuration, during prayer or praise, or in order to confirm an assertion.”4
The Mass as an act of the virtue of religion
The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, as an external act of the worship of God comprising acts of bodily reverence, the offering of Jesus Christ in Sacrifice, and the oblation of the prayers of the priest and faithful, the reception of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, and the use of the Divine Name in prayer and acts of praise, and to confirm the truth of the Gospel, is the supreme act of religion of the one True Faith.
From this brief review of the virtue of religion we can see at once the treasures of the Traditional Latin Mass. First, unlike the Bugninian liturgy published by Pope Paul VI, the TLM has God as its beginning and end, center and focus, foundation and goal. Mgr. Annibale Bugnini, when he set out to invent the Novus Ordo, took the erroneous liturgical theories of Dom Odo Casel, O.S.B. (who held that the theandric actions of Christ which worked our salvation really became present again during the enactment of a ritual) and formulated a “mass” in which the congregation, in enacting the rite, became the “Worker of Salvation”. Hence it is in the Novus Ordo that the priest faces the people, the tablernacle is removed and hidden away, and the Passion of Our Most High Lord and Redeemer is belittled, sanitized, and downplayed. In the Novus Ordo it is the “People of God” which saves its self: there is no more need even of the priest: and this is why many dioceses throughout the world are destroying and selling off churches, preparing as they are for the “priest-less” liturgies of the future.
Why the TLM is an authentic act of the virtue of Religion
But in the TLM the One True God is the Object of adoration, the Author of the Rite, the Priest offering, and the Victim offered, the King venerated, the Prophet teaching, and the divine Master ministering.
In the TLM the One True God is the Object of Adoration: the human priest and the congregation face the tabernacle in which resides the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of God made man. The prayers of the TLM invoke God the Father, in virtue of the merits of God the Son, through the power of God the Holy Spirit: the Sacrifice of the Mass is offered explicitly to the Father in thanksgiving, adoration, praise and propitiation.
In the TLM the One True God is the Author of the Rite: all the saints, doctors and fathers of the Church, who have written on the subject, assure us that the TLM came to us from the Apostle Peter, through the saintly Popes of Rome, many of whom were martyrs. And the Evangelists assure us that the Apostles received instruction on how to say mass from Christ’s own lips, at the Last Supper and before He ascended to the Father. This testimony is confirmed by an unbroken chain of Popes from 560 A.D. to 1960 who our of respect for this truth never sought to change the rite.
In the TLM the One True God is the Priest offering: He is present at the Altar in the Tabernacle, He acts through the human priest, who humbly and frequently confesses his unworthiness, pronouncing the awesome words of Christ in consecrating.
In the TLM the One True God is the Victim offered: it is not a question of a sacrifice constituted essentially by the offering of “praise” or of “bread and wine”, neither of which could ever propitiate the Divine Majesty. In the TLM “the Immaculate Victim” is offered to the Father to propitiate the sins of the priest and people and of all faithful Catholics, for their eternal salvation.
In the TLM the One True God is venerated as King: as Mass begins, the first thing the priest does is call to mind the presence God the Judge, saying: “Judge me, O God . . .”; during the Canon he recalls that we are all the servants and slaves of God, saying, “We beseech Thee to accept this offering not only of our servitude, but of Thy whole family . . .”.
In the TLM it is the One True God who speaks to us, teaches us, and instructs us. The Scriptures read are really and truly the Scriptures written by the Apostles, un-sanitized by the vain and sinful preoccupations of carnal men. We hear the words our Redeemer willed from all eternity for us to hear.
Finally, in the TLM it is the One True God who ministers Himself to us in the Most Blessed Sacrament: and we recognize this awesome truth by coming forward to receive him in the mouth, on bended knees, without interposing our own hands, as if it were merely a cookie.
The Clarity given by the Virtue of Religion in the TLM
The many acts of authentic religion in the TLM protect us from the many vices against religion afoot in the world today. Just as religion is an act of the virtue of justice rendering to God what we ought to give Him, so the vices of religion neglect, despise, ignore, and offend Him.
The two vices opposed to the virtue of religion are superstition and irreligion. Superstition is the vice of regarding as religiously important that which has no importance in the sight of God, and this includes the vices of idolatry, divination and vain observance. Irreligion is the vice of mistreating what is religiously important as if it were not: this includes the vices of tempting God, perjury, sacrilege and simony.5
The TLM, in being so perfectly centered on the Most Holy Trinity, protects us against the vice of superstition. It is not necessary that the priest have eye-contact: it is not necessary that his prayer be accommodating to our understanding: it is not necessary that we find Mass a pleasant or entertaining performance. We find peace of soul and time to pray focused on the Sacrifice of the Cross, meditating on the Bloody Sacrifice of Christ Crucified, and not by singing songs about ourselves. The TLM in offering its prayers to God the Father and the Most Holy Trinity ad orientem protects us from falling into the error that the priest is playing up to the crowd and trying to catch their attention, rather than God’s. In the TLM the entire spirit of the liturgy excludes preoccupation with making one’s one decisions on the character of the celebration, worrying as the Protestants do, about makings worship “a memorable experience”.
The TLM protects us from the terrible vice of irreligion. The Most Blessed Sacrament never touches anything not consecrated to God. The Precious Blood of Jesus is not chug-a-lugged from a water pitcher. No one takes “a wafer” home “as a souvenir” to sell on E-bay as a memento or to keep in a hand bag for a rainy day. The TLM does not make the priest a perjurer, when by calling “the Word of God” what is but the “words of liberal biblical scholars”; or worse, by refusing to use the words of Christ at the august moment of consecration. The TLM does not make priest and people guilty of the sacrilege of denying the Most Holy Trinity the honor and reverence, adoration and veneration due Himself and His works of redemption, by means of neglecting His Divine Presence, or making us forgetful of our own sinfulness and incomparable unworthiness, as if we somehow deserved mercy and not justice. Finally, the TLM to the one who appreciates its riches, is a preventative to the spirit of simony, inasmuch as it reminds us of the incomparable value of eternal things and of the sacred things of our Holy Religion.
The Fruit of the Riches of the TLM for our souls
And hence it is that the treasures of the TLM work to the salvation of our souls. For just as Trent taught that faith alone is not sufficient for justification, so it is that attending Mass or receiving the Most Blessed Sacrament in communion, even in the state of grace, is insufficient to profit from all the graces offered us in the Mass. For the state of grace in of itself is insufficient to obtain any grace, unless it be accompanied by meritorious acts of virtue, especially of the virtues of penance, faith, hope and charity.
These acts are elicited from us at the TLM. We are drawn in to approach the august sacrifice by humbly confessing our sins in the Confiteor, not only with word, but by beating ourselves on the chest, saying “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!”. We profess our faith in all the infallible teachings of the Faith, when we recite silently the authentic Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed with the priest. We profess our hope in the world to come, as we unite ourselves with the priest during the Canon, as he prays not for some silly inane request at the prayers of the faithful, but for the forgiveness of our sins that we and our beloved dead might attain unto eternal salvation. And finally, we are stirred to a great and tremendous love as we receive with confidence the Most Blessed Sacrament, consecrated with the same words which St. Peter heard in the Upper Room, the night Christ was betrayed by Judas Iscariot.
Oh, the riches of the goodness, the truth and the beauty of the TLM: the Bulwark of the Ages! the Rudder of the Bark of Peter! It fulfills so perfectly the precept of Our Divine Savior: hoc facite in meam commemorationem.
============
FOOTNOTES
1 “Lactantius”, The Columbia Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition, William Bridgwater et al. editors, Columbia University Press, New York, 1963, p. 1161.
2 Lactantius, Divine Institutions. Bk. I, part 4, c. 28, quoted in Dr. Nicholas Ghir’s, The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass; dogmatically, liturgically and ascetically explained, B. Herder, St. Louis, Mo., 1902, p. 17, footnote 2.
3 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II II, q. 81, a. 1, reply to obj. 1.
4 cf. op. cit., II II, introduction.
5 ibid.
posted by Br. Alexis Bugnolo at 8/13/2006 02:29:00 PM
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