Fracture since the Second Vatican Council. Are we creating a New Tower of Babel?

Fracture since the Second Vatican Council. Are we creating a New Tower of Babel?

The Tower of Babel signifying the hubris of doing it yourself!

Over at A Reluctant Sinner there is a wide ranging and thoughtful post which gives some sad insights into the state of the Church in these times: "Fragmented Liturgy - There are far too many different ways of celebrating the Mass within the Roman Rite. For the sake of its mission, it's time to restore unity in the Church."

Dylan draws our attention to the dis-unity there now is in the Church; spiritual, moral and liturgical. The constant adaption to groups and individuals summed up by what has happened in the Mass. "One of the hall-marks of the novus Ordo is that the priest, as an individual man, has become far too important a figure during Mass, whilst, conversely, the priesthood of Jesus Christ - the one who is actually offering himself - seems to have diminished."

The immediate context for this is the introduction - or not - of the new translation. Letters to the Tablet (from what I notice are nearly all elderly priests) raging against the new translation's words. But they miss the point, the new translation is to be accompanied by catechesis on re-sacralising the liturgy - reverence and paying attention to the rubrics is something we are supposed to have been doing with the old missal but many people didn't bother. I've heard ofpriests here in my own diocese saying they will refuse to use it but I suspect that eventually they will but with the same lack of care to the rubrics and church law, freely changing words and gestures, in complete contradiction to the fact that the Church tells them not to.

I'm sure there was always dissent in the Church but the structure held and called us together. If we dissented, we knew we were dissenting and from what. Now, all those dissenting believe they have a better handle on the "real" meaning of the Faith. Reluctant Sinner refers to the seemingly endless innovation in the Mass but actually in very many places it's not so much new innovation as some strange aberration that crept in years ago (often a "nice" thing to do for the children or to make people feel "included" - usually thereby excluding someone else!) In fact, these things have become dull, boring and meaningless, like the offertory processions that bring up things that are not in fact offered to anyone but taken back by the person who carried them up. Or the sign of peace that has lost all spiritual content and become merely a secular exchange.

I'm preparing for a (EF) Solemn Mass here next week. What I notice on such occasions is that there is no committee that gets together to decide what "our" theme will be or what new activities can be incorporated into the Mass to keep people interested and occupied, or how we can include as many people as possible "doing" things. Rather, those who are involved (musicians, cantors, servers, sacred ministers) study the Missal, the rubrics, the given text and feast of the day and go to Fortescue, O'Connell and Reid to try to make sure they can carry out the actions and words of the Mass in the received way. In other words, the whole animus is to be obedient to something outside ourselves. While that may help the liturgy to proceed with dignity, it also points to a different attitude. The Mass is not mine or my group's but the Church's, Christ's. Our Christian life is not to be lived as I want but as Our Lord teaches in the Scriptures and through the Church he founded. Or in the words of Bishop Malcolm McMahon in an earlier post:

"The Mass is a mystery whose depths we can never plumb, whose treasures we can never exhaust, all the while drawing more riches and grace for us.

Pope Benedict reminds us that it is God’s gift and God’s work, or it is nothing at all.”