I don't even know what to say to this beyond expressing disappointment. Am I allowed as someone who is wanting to become Catholic as not seeing Eastern Orthdoxy as one of two lungs?
"As we said earlier, the tone and content of Orientale Lumen, and of all magisterial documents and practically all Catholic writing about Easterners, is very respectful. In the opinion of some, it is even deferential. Yet Easterners as a whole are famous (dare one say “notorious”?) for their candor in telling us what is wrong with the Catholic Church. The time has come for equally candid (though always charitable) talk by Catholics.
I get it. But the reality is they will not be whole without us and we are not whole without them. Whole in the sense that we can survive, but not whole in the sense that we would do better with them.
I'm having a really tough time with the two lungs comparison.
I would rather have that than what we have today, where everyone is separated by 6 feet.
If done reverently both can be good. If done sloppily or as a showboat both can be disasters. It's easier to lose valuable things in the novus ordo, but they can also be preserved. Monsignor Schuler did the novus ordo mass in Latin, with classical music by folks like Mozart, with all the bells and incense. He was a close follower of Vatican II and actually knew what the Council wanted to have implemented liturgically. And so he did. But other people had other ideas and let loose the liturgical wrecking balls.
I think you are right. If we defer to the Orthodox by bending over backwards they will not respect us. But then the Orthodox have long been rather sure that they don't need us. They do, but don't know it, and there really isn't much of a way to prompt them to figure it out.
You would be allowed to not see the Orthodox as the other lung. Such thinking is in no way required. It's just a way of thinking about the separation and what to do about it. We do have to be respectful of the Orthodox, however the best way of doing that is.
one thing that is different,
Thank you for sharing Mgr. Schuler's story. It makes the point that the Novus Ordo has a lot of potential. I appreciate his emphasis on the Mass' music.
Novus ordo does not mean clown mass. Having a clown makes it a clown mass. God forbid.
I definitely wouldn't be into a clown Mass. Do the rules for Novus Ordo Mass allow that much flexibility? Or did somebody just get too freewheeling?
I would walk out of such a thing. I would send a note to the bishop too. But then there are clownish things that are abuses of the liturgy all the time. Not that I want to go back to any parish where they occur. The mass has rubrics but within those rubrics there is also flexibility. And we want that. We want to 'say the black, do the red' kind of priests, doing so interiorly and prayerfully. And that does have options. What we don't want is people who don't say the black and/or don't do the red. Some of those priests are just poorly educated in liturgy. Some of them are alien to the faith and should be avoided like the plague. Freewheeling is not a gospel virtue.
