We had a father from another parrish come and give a very nice lecture on the changes in the mass comeing soon. No holding hands during the lords prayer, no running aroung shaking hands during the offering of peace. When we enter the church we are entering a time of "Kyros" (sp) meaning we are at one with heaven in the same time No dunking of the host in the wine. We should cross our selves,bow or genuflex at the offering of the host. The time for experiments during the mass are over. Music is to be reverent.Oh, and Father Newnam has been to mass with the Pope :-) Claims in the question on wether or not the host should be chewed?? He said the pope bites it in half and that no one chews it louder or with more zest! Please excuse all my spelling errors....

-- Debbie Stith (RMMastiffs@aol.com), January 16, 2002

Answers

Response to New Litugery

Jmj

Thanks for the excellent and hope-filled post, Debbie!

Actually the "time for experiments" was announced as being finished in the 1970s, but the word has not filtered down to some parts of the Church yet. Maybe at last this will change.
What your good priest said about a sign of reverence being required at time of reception of Communion was actually in a 1980 papal document (Inaestimabile donum). Was the average Catholic told then? No. Now he/she will be told, I hope.

The word with the uncertain spelling is "kairos" -- a Greek word for "time." Here is what Fr. William Saunders (in an article called "Is the Mass Really a Sacrifice") writes about this:
"One must distinguish chronological time from kairotic time, as found in sacred Scripture. In the Bible, chronos refers to chronological time —- past, present and future —- specific deeds which have an end point. Kairos, or kairotic time, refers to God's eternal time, time of the present moment which recapitulates the entire past as well as contains the entire future. Therefore, while our Lord's saving event occurred chronologically around the year AD 30-33, in the kairotic sense of time it is an ever-present reality which touches our lives here and now. In the same sense, this is why through baptism we share now in the mystery of Christ's passion, death and resurrection, a chronological event that happened [about 1,970] years ago, but is still efficacious for us today."

God bless you.
John

-- (jfgecik@hotmail.com), January 16, 2002.

Response to New Litugery

What? Their going to fix the Mass again?

It can't happen soon enough for me. It's been so long since I genuinely felt able to worship at Mass. The chowder heads who reduced our Latin ritual to this current amateur hootenanny would have been fired by any other religion on this planet.

Just shoveling away the current Hymnal would be a huge improvement - unfamiliar crud that's tried each week, crudy songs impossible for most men to hit the high notes. Maybe somebody got the pope to look out at the congregation finally, and he saw that very, very few people actually sung.

But ya' know, the hand shaking isn't so bad if they'd just do it at the reasonable point in time - at the end of the Mass. Then, instead of an awkward interruption after the Lord's Prayer, it would be an invitation to socialize after the service.

God, how I'd welcome the return of a Mass wherein I could worship instead of be made to sing and read and greet and hold hands, etc., etc.

-- Billy Pilgrim (madhack@mail.md), January 17, 2002.

Response to New Litugery

Jmj

"Billy," you should not be so melancholy (or even disgusted).

Please do one of two things:
(1) Find a licit celebration of the old-rite Latin Mass to attend. Call the bishop's office for information. There's a pretty good chance that it is available in your diocese, since the Pope gave bishops permission to authorize its celebration several years ago. OR ...
(2) Pray for the grace (that you should have prayed for 30 years ago) to accept the new-rite Mass, celebrated in Latin or in the vernacular or in a combination of both languages.

The reason I offer only those choices is that the changes that will soon be made will not be as dramatic as you have just jumped to the conclusion that they will be.

If you have not "genuinely felt able to worship at Mass," you should have gone (and may still have to go) in search of a properly celebrated Mass with beautiful music. But you are very wrong to say that singing and reading are not part of true worship. Total silence and passivity are not what your Church and mine have told us is genuine worship at Mass -- but rather active participation of body, mind, voice, and soul. [Hand-holding has never been approved.]

There is one thing on which you and I agree -- the need for a new positioning of the Sign of Peace (which can be a hand-shake, and which is actually optional for the priest to introduce). Very many orthodox Catholics would prefer that it be moved -- usually to a point just after the prayer of the faithful, since that is in keeping with a certain scriptural reference.

God bless you.
John

-- (jfgecik@hotmail.com), January 17, 2002.

Response to New Litugery

The offering of the sign of peace is what I had the most trouble with when I returned to the church. Well, this past weekend at mass, after the lecture with Father Newman, At the offering of peace we, the choir were instructed to immediately start singing Lamb of God. This discouraged people from leaving their pew and my husband who was in the congagation said that there was only time for shaking the hand of the people on either side of you.

-- Debbie Stith (RMMastiffs@aol.com), January 21, 2002.