One would assume Bergoglio ordered it. Wait, that might be redundant. But, of course, like everything that communists and other modernists do, the act is cloaked in a mist of plausible deniability, to provide cover should anyone push back. The letter was not signed by Bergoglio, but consists of an unsigned directive from the Office of the Vatican Secretary of State. Not even signed by him, though it is reasonable to wonder what liturgical authority he has over the celebration of Masses in St. Peter’s Basilica. My working theory is that he has as much as I do. The question no one will answer is whether he has as much as the current occupant of the Casa Santa Marta, and whether his power is universal and immediate, or whether he, too, has the same authority as I do. But I digress. In Rome, in Washington, in Brussels, in Beijing– power is the rule of the day.
Fr. Hunwicke posted on this shocking turn of events. Well, perhaps it is shocking only for those five Catholics left in the world who are still Catholic and don’t know that the Church lives under active tyranny. No private Masses, only “concelebrations”.
I recall one of my favorite early memories after my “tradversion”. Perhaps “reversion to the Faith” may be a better way to say it. At my local Church, a conference of clergy was taking place that week. As I entered the Church for morning Mass, I saw a glorious sight. At several of our side altars, of which thank God we have many, priests were offering their private Masses. There they were, offering up that one and eternal Sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins, pleading the Blood of Christ, appeasing the Father. I could easily understand the multitude of angels and saints gathered in that space. It made me weep with joy. Such a miracle, taking place right before my eyes. Not only could I see the multiplicity of each Mass in space, but the mind could see by easy extrapolation the Mass through the ages, all the way to Calvary.
It was a breakthrough moment; the ancient Mass is not designed to emphasize the didactic perhaps, but it teaches by its very existence. That moment was more didactic that a year’s worth of sermons on the timelessness and universality of the Mass. A lifetime of catechism in that little weekday Mass setting.
So, of course, Bergoglio must suppress it.
Fr. quotes an Anglican scholar, and even he knows the truth about the timelessness and corporate nature of the many– yet just one– Sacrifice(s) of the Mass taking place all over the world. But for how much longer?:
[If] you want to make ‘anybody understand wherein the corporateness of the mass really consists’ the best thing you can do is to take him into a church with lots of simultaneous private masses going on, and tell him that “the different priests saying their different masses at their different altars are doing not different things but the same thing, that they are all taking part in the one eternal Liturgy whose celebrant is Christ and that their priesthood is only a participation in his … the multiplication of masses emphasises the real unity of the mass and the true nature of the Church’s corporate character as nothing else can … what makes the mass one and corporate is not the fact that a lot of people are together at the same service, but the fact that it is the act of Christ in his body (corpus) the Church … ‘Look at those men at their various altars all around the church, each of them apparently muttering away on his own and having nothing to do with the others. In fact, they are all of them doing the same thing – the same essentially, the same numerically – not just a lot of different things of the same kind, but the very same identical thing; each of them is taking his part as a priest in the one redemptive act which Christ, who died for our sins and rose again for our justification, perpetuates in the Church which is his Body through the sacrament of his body and blood’.
Saint Louis Catholic 