After the ban on the celebration of the traditional Mass for the pilgrimage of Our Lady of Christendom, and after the information provided by the newspaper The Pillar on the attitude of certain members of the Curia, here is a new testimony given by Cardinal Gerhard Müller on the occasion of ordinations.
The Cardinal confided what he heard from a senior representative of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments during a recent exchange, after the feast of Pentecost.
Cardinal Müller explained how moved he was to have been able to celebrate Mass in the Chartres cathedral in front of a crowd of young people, on Pentecost Monday (Whit Monday).
The response he received is truly astounding. This “senior representative” - who could have been the Cardinal Prefect - responded that, for his part, he thought that this could in no case be a reason for joy, since the Mass had been celebrated in the ancient Rite or the “Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite,” according to the popular terminology.
And he went on to explain that some see in the ancient Rite of the Mass - the Tridentine Rite sanctioned by St. Pius V - a great danger for the unity of the Church. It is a danger that they consider greater than the falsification of the Creed or even the absence of the celebration of the Mass.
In other words: an empty church is better than a church filled with 20,000 people assisting at the traditional Rite of the Mass. Certainly, the churches in most European countries - but also elsewhere - are achieving unity: they are all empty.
But a unity through emptiness is nothingness.
The “senior prelate” continued his explanation: the preference for the ancient Rite is understood and interpreted as the expression of a sterile traditionalism, more interested in the theatricality of the liturgy than in the living communion with God that it conveys.
The preconceptions of this “senior prelate” are quite astonishing. The Mass which has sanctified generations and generations of faithful, which has been the Mass of so many saints, which has invigorated the members of the Church for centuries, this Mass, today, can no longer transmit grace and would only serve those nostalgic for the past.
And what is there to say of its fruits?
In particular, vocations.
While the new Mass and the new religion of Vatican II show their sterility, one only has to look at the numbers of vocations and priestly ordinations, in Europe especially, to see the difference.
Such blindness can only be a divine punishment: in wanting to follow the conciliar and post-conciliar reforms at all costs, the men of the Church have ended up no longer seeing the truth, and reality escapes them, but in their stubbornness, it seems that they prefer to see the Church run aground rather than admit their error: perseverare, diabolicum.
But their folly will not prevent the traditional Mass from continuing to invigorate the faithful who are nourished by it.