O’Malley warned that traditionalists would perceive the order as an insult and expects conflicts to crop up when bishops do remove the Latin Mass. “It’s the logic of suppression, which I don’t think is a very Christian approach to dealing with adversaries.” “I think it’s difficult to figure out what the end game is,” he said. Traditionalists have already begun to describe themselves as a persecuted group, akin to practitioners in China. Hillis, along with many other experts, believes that instead of undercutting dissent, the order will fuel it. The Queen’s Corgis May Not Be Dead, but There’s a New Royal Dog on the Scene I Guess I Should Explain Why Taylor Swift Fans Want to Kill One Another Over Her New Boyfriend What Really Happened With Meghan and Harry’s ‘Near Catastrophic Car Chase”? The Details Are Revealing. I Became a Mother When Somebody Suddenly Handed Me a Baby “It does seem to go against what he’s been about in so many ways.” “This appears to be sort of a nuclear option,” Hillis said. So when Francis suddenly announced, after only relatively light consultation with some bishops, that he was making a unilateral decision, many observers were baffled by what they saw as a very different style from the pope they knew. His supporters may find the conservatives in the Vatican frustrating, but they also laud the pope for not squashing all dissent. His legacy has been one of decentralization and simplification. But inside the church, the more hotly discussed topics have to do with bureaucracy, hierarchy, and leadership style. To those outside the church, Francis’ papacy is known for his views on divorce, homosexuality, climate change, and capitalism. Even some who described themselves as more progressive expressed discomfort with the autocratic way he went about it. He called the situation “something uncomfortably close to open revolt against Rome” and described Francis’ decision as “overdue.” O’Malley also attributed Francis’ actions to a realization that traditionalism had become “a crisis” and that the church was in danger of “fracturing.”īut it’s not only traditionalists who balked at Francis’ order. And it was inevitable that this problem was going to need to be confronted.” “We know there are people who have not said that they separated themselves from the pope and the church, but they have. “This problem has been festering,” said Steven Millies, a theology professor at the Catholic Theological Union. In 2007, the more conservative Pope Benedict XVI officially lifted the restrictions on the Latin Mass, allowing priests to use the traditional mass in private or whenever “a group of the faithful attached to the previous liturgical tradition stably exists.” In the 1970s, a traditionalist group angered by the recent reforms broke away from the Catholic church, and the Vatican slowly began to allow the Latin Mass in some circumstances in an attempt to bring the traditionalists back into the fold. The Latin Mass had been pretty much the only way of saying the mass until the 1960s, when Pope John XXIII and Vatican II modernized the church. The aesthetics are different-priests face the altar rather than the congregants, and they recite prayers in Latin rather than the common language-but Catholic experts are quick to point out that one form of worship is as valid as the other. Theologically, there is nothing different about the “extraordinary form” of the mass, known colloquially as the Latin Mass. Why? It has to do with the history of the Latin Mass and how one set of rituals came to stand for an entire worldview. But for those who deal with church politics, the matter was extraordinarily serious: in a document that accompanied the order, Francis wrote that he was reversing the Vatican’s stance on the Latin Mass because it was being used as a tool to sow division in the church. The vast majority of Catholics have never attended a traditional Latin Mass, so Francis’ declaration will have virtually no effect on their lives. To many Catholics, such an anguished response is hard to understand.
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