The “New Mass”

Elizabeth Scalia (aka The Anchoress at First Things) is someone who is always worth reading even if you sometimes come at things Catholic from a different angle than she does.  Her she is over at Inside Catholic on the “New” Mass(es). 

The Novus Ordo isn’t going anywhere, but many Catholics who appreciate its music, relaxed standards, and the dicey creativity of parish liturgists are wary of Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum. They worry that the “traditionalists” who have longed for greater availability of the Tridentine Rite and more traditional worship will try to inflict what they perceive to be dead forms onto the newer Mass.

In truth, their worries, while probably excessive, are not baseless. Many Catholics perceive over-corrections within post-conciliar liturgies and devotions, and the pendulum is, predictably, swinging back. The weaknesses of the vernacular translations of the Mass, particularly from Latin to English, have been recognized and are being addressed. Bishops are gently discouraging the liturgical excesses that a decade ago affected a great deal of Catholic worship and often led to eye-rolling in the pews and angry letters to the Vatican. Most notably, there is an increasing trend among Catholics — particularly young Catholics, who got a taste of a fuller, more solemn liturgy with the funeral mass of Pope John Paul II — to seek out the so-called Old Latin Rite. Summorum Pontificum is Pope Benedict’s happy recommendation that their bishops oblige them in their desires, but whether the promotion of the 1962 Missal and a greater availability of that Mass has any discernable effect on the primacy of the Novus Ordo remains to be seen. For those of us raised in a religious environment that was half Tridentine and half free-for-all, I suspect we will continue to straddle the chasm.

Read the rest here.