If you know anyone in the Montgomery Alabama area could you pass on the below notice. We need a big crowd to launch the latin mass in the capital of Alabama. ThanksAt Last! Extraordinary Form Mass To Be Celebrated In Montgomery, September 27th Una Voce Central Alabama is pleased to announce that, after 40 years, the Latin Mass (Extraordinary Form) will be celebrated at St. Peter’s Catholic Church, Montgomery, Alabama, at 5:00 p.m., Sunday, September 27th.

Father Mark Fischer, Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, will be the celebrant,
with the Mass, a Missa Cantata, sung by St. Cecilia Schola Cantorum, of Auburn.

Una Voce Central Alabama has donated to St. Peter’s the latest booklet missals for use by the faithful, and will provide a printed program for the Mass.

Special thanks to Fr. Patrick Driscoll, Pastor, St. Peter’s, Archbishop Rodi,
Archdiocese of Mobile, and to Una Voce Georgia, for all their contributions
toward making this Mass possible.

With our petition presented, as discussed in the article below, Una Voce Central Alabama continues its efforts to see the establishment of an every-Sunday Extraordinary Form Mass at St. Peter’s, and this inaugural Latin Mass will no doubt enhance these efforts.

The following are excerpts of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s Address to the Bishops of Chile in 1988

http://unavoce.org/resources/cardinal-ratzingers-address-to-bishops-of-chile/

“It will not do to attribute everything to political motives, to nostalgia, or to cultural actors of minor importance. These causes are not capable of explaining the attraction which is felt even by the young, and especially by the young, who come from many quite different nations, and who are surrounded by completely distinct political and cultural realities. Indeed they show what is from any point of view a restricted and one-sided outlook; but there is no doubt whatever that a phenomenon of this sort would be inconceivable unless there were good elements at work here, which in general do not find sufficient opportunity to live within the Church of today.”

“While there are many motives that might have led a great number of people to seek a refuge in the traditional liturgy, the chief one is that they find the dignity of the sacred preserved there. After the Council there were many priests who deliberately raised ‘desacralization’ to the level of a program, on the plea that the New Testament abolished the cult of the Temple: the veil of the Temple which was torn from top to bottom at the moment of Christ’s death on the cross is, according to certain people, the sign of the end of the sacred. The death of Jesus, outside the City walls, that is to say, in the public world, is now the true religion. Religion, if it has any being at all, must have it in the nonsacredness of daily life, in love that is lived. Inspired by such reasoning, they put aside the sacred vestments; they have despoiled the churches as much as they could of that splendor which brings to mind the sacred; and they have reduced the liturgy to the language and the gestures of ordinary life, by means of greetings, common signs of friendship, and such things.”

“…we ought to get back the dimension of the sacred in the liturgy. The liturgy is not a festivity; it is not a meeting for the purpose of having a good time. It is of no importance that the parish priest has cudgeled his brains to come up with suggestive ideas or imaginative novelties. The liturgy is what makes the Thrice-Holy God present amongst us; it is the burning bush; it is the Alliance of God with man in Jesus Christ, who has died and risen again. The grandeur of the liturgy does not rest upon the fact that it offers an interesting entertainment, but in rendering tangible the Totally Other, whom we are not capable of summoning. He comes because He wills. In other words, the essential in the liturgy is the mystery, which is realized in the common ritual of the Church; all the rest diminishes it. Men experiment with it in lively fashion, and find themselves deceived, when the mystery is transformed into distraction, when the chief actor in the liturgy is not the Living God but the priest or the liturgical director.”

“Certainly there is a mentality of narrow views that isolate Vatican II and which has provoked this opposition. There are many accounts of it which give the impression that, from Vatican II onward, everything has been changed, and that what preceded it has no value or, at best, has value only in the light of Vatican II.”

“The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular Council defined no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of superdogma which takes away the importance of all the rest.”

“I myself, when I was a professor, have seen how the very same bishop who, before the Council, had fired a teacher who was really irreproachable, for a certain rudeness of speech, was not prepared, after the Council, to dismiss a professor who openly denied certain fundamental truths of the Faith.”

“All this leads a great number of people to ask themselves if the Church of today is really the same as that of yesterday, or if they have changed it for something else without telling people. The one way in which Vatican II can be made plausible is to present it as it is; one part of the unbroken, the unique Tradition of the Church and of her faith.”

“In the spiritual movements of the post-concilar era, there is not the slightest doubt that frequently there has been an obliviousness, or even a suppression, of the issue of truth: here perhaps we confront the crucial problem for theology and for pastoral work today.”

“The ‘truth’ is thought to be a claim that is too exalted, a ‘triumphalism’ that cannot be permitted any longer. You see this attitude plainly in the crisis that troubles the missionary ideal and missionary practice. If we do not point to the truth in announcing our faith, and if this truth is no longer essential for the salvation of Man, then the missions lose their meaning. In effect the conclusion has been drawn, and it has been drawn today, that in the future we need only seek that Christians should be good Christians, Moslems good Moslems, Hindus good Hindus, and so forth. If it comes to that, how are we to know when one is a ‘good’ Christian, or a ‘good’ Moslem?”

Richard Friend and Mike Parish (the principle organizers of this Missa Cantata on August 26, 2009), with the help of the Una Voce San Bernardino President, Laurence Gonzaga (who handled promotion and filming), organized the first Mass in the Extraordinary form at St. James the Less in Perris, CA, in probably over 35 years.

Special thanks to the Pastor of St. James, Father Ed Gomez. Also, special thanks of course to the priest-celebrant, Father Carl Gismondi, FSSP, M.A., S.T.L., pastor of St. Ann Catholic Church, a personal parish for the EF Form of the Roman Rite in San Diego, CA. His assistant pastor, Father Federico Masutti, FSSP, assisted in hearing confessions before and during the Mass. Also, the FSSP seminarian assigned to their parish assisted in choir.

Laurence Gonzaga
President
Una Voce San Bernardino

Preparation for the Missa Cantata

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

An impressive ad campaign has been undertaken by Una Voce Quad Cities.

http://www.unavoceqc.com/files/POSTER-16×20-low-res.pdf

Una Voce San Bernardino may support their efforts by purchasing posters tailored to our area. Or we can design our own ads as well. We hope that the Una Voce chapters are willing to use the gifts and talents of their membership to its fullest potential to make quality work such as these. Thanks, UVQC!

Laurence Gonzaga
Una Voce San Bernardino

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA)

News release Contact: Mark Gray
August 24, 2009 202-687-0885
mmg34@georgetown.edu

Opinions about the Latin Mass have shifted over time

A Majority of adult Catholics express no opinion on return of older liturgy
Two years ago, Pope Benedict XVI gave permission for the 1962 Roman Rite
Mass to be used without a priest first acquiring a bishop’s approval.1 Using the Missal of
John XXIII, this Mass is celebrated in Latin with the priest and parishioners facing the
same direction toward the altar. It is the last version of the Latin Mass that was first
codified following the Council of Trent in the 16th century and is thus often referred to as
the Latin Tridentine Mass.2 Parish priests have been instructed by the Pope to work with
parishioners when there is a “stable group” who are interested in Latin Mass to provide
opportunities for this liturgy to be celebrated regularly under the guidance of their bishop…

Read More Here… 

Saturday, August 22, 2009

URGENT
The “Reform of the Reform” is in motion

In today’s edition of Italian daily Il Giornale, religious journalist Andrea Tornielli brings the news that several “propositiones” approved by the plenary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (reserved session held on March 12, 2009) regarding several reforms of the new Mass of Paul VI. Full translation below:

ROME The document was delivered to the hands of Benedict XVI in the morning of last April 4 by Spanish Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship. It is the result of a reserved vote, which took place on March 12, in the course of a “plenary” session of the dicastery responsible for the liturgy, and it represents the first concrete step towards that “reform of the reform” often desired by Pope Ratzinger. The Cardinals and Bishops members of the Congregation voted almost unanimously in favor of a greater sacrality of the rite, of the recovery of the sense of eucharistic worship, of the recovery of the Latin language in the celebration, and of the remaking of the introductory parts of the Missal in order to put a stop to abuses, wild experimentations, and inappropriate creativity. They have also declared themselves favorable to reaffirm that the usual way of receiving Communion according to the norms is not on the hand, but in the mouth. There is, it is true, and indult which, on request of the [local] episcopates, allows for the distribution of the host [sic] also on the palm of the hand, but this must remain an extraordinary fact. The “Liturgy Minister” of Pope Ratzinger, Cañizares, is also having studies made on the possibility to recover the orientation towards the Orient of the celebrant, at least at the moment of the eucharistic consecration, as it happened in practice before the reform, when both the faithful and the priest faced towards the Cross and the priest therefore turned his back to the assembly.

Those who know Cardinal Cañizares, nicknamed “the small Ratzinger” before his removal to Rome, know that he is disposed to move forward decisively with the project, beginning in fact from what was established by the Second Vatican Council in the liturgical constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, which was, in reality, exceeded by the post-Conciliar reform which came into forceat the end of the Sixties. The porporato, interviewed by monthly 30Days in recent months, had declared regarding this: “At times change was for the mere sake of changing from a past perceived as negative and outdated. Sometimes the reform was regarded as a break and not as an organic development of Tradition.”

For this reason, the “propositiones” voted by the Cardinals and Bishops at the March plenary foresee a return to the sense of sacredness and to adoration, but also a recovery of the celebrations in Latin in the dioceses, at least in the main solemnities, as well as the publication of bilingual Missals - a request made at his time by Paul VI - with the Latin text first.

The proposals of the Congregation, which Cañizares delivered to the Pope, obtaining his approval, are perfectly in line with the idea often expressed by Joseph Ratzinger when he was still a Cardinal, as it is made clear his unpublished words on the liturgy, revealed in advanced by Il Giornale yesterday, and which will be published in the book Davanti al Protagonista (Cantagalli [publisher]), presented beforehand at a congress at Rimini. With a significant nota bene: for the accomplishment of the “reform of the reform”, many years will be necessary. The Pope is convinced that hasty steps, as well as to simply drop directives from above, serve no good, with the risk that they may later remain a dead letter. The style of Ratzinger is that of comparison and, above all, of example. As the fact that, for more than a year, whoever approaches the Pope for Communion, have had to kneel down on the kneeler especially placed by the cerimonieri.

RORATE note: The Pope needed, for practical purposes, this first bureaucratic step by the Congregation for Divine Worship. His decisions on this matter will come in the next few months and years. May God grant him many more fruitful years of work as Successor of Peter.

posted by New Catholic at 8:24 AM

Dear Una Voce SB Supporters,

The work continues. Please continue to help us make this an informative and useful blog. Help us to improve it, if you have any suggestions. Thank you for visiting, and by all means, keep on coming back for up to date information on local news regarding orthodox and traditional events.

AMDG.
Laurence Gonzaga
President
Una Voce SB

Watch Full Mass Videos in the Extraordinary and Ordinary Forms of the Roman Rite

1. H.E. Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, then president of Ecclesia Dei Commission. (June 14, 2008).
   • “It’s a matter of common sense. In every bishop’s household there is a chapel and there are maybe three or four persons. This is a stable group… It is not possible to give two persons a Mass, but two here, two there, two elsewhere - they can have it. They are a stable group.”
   • “So many. Priests celebrating in clown’s clothing with a wig and painted lips - a travesty. A priest celebrating Sunday Mass wearing a mini skirt. Another priest who invited a Protestant minister to celebrate the Eucharist. And another who introduced his wife and sons before celebrating Mass. There is an atmosphere which makes for abuses and that must be changed. In my poor opinion the new presence of the Gregorian Rite will help us to take seriously the identity of our Faith, respecting all the other ways of thinking but keeping strongly our identity with Christ, with Christ in Calvary, with Christ in Golgotha, with Christ offering His blood for our salvation.”
     
2. Mons. Domenico Bartolucci, Maestro Perpetuo of the Sistine Chapel under five Popes. (Aug 12, 2009).
   • “I cannot deny that there some signs of restoration, but I still can see that there persists a certain blindness, almost a complacency for all that is vulgar, coarse, in bad taste and also doctrinally temerarious. Most important, do not ask me, please, to make a judgement on the guitar-players and on the tarantellas which are sung during the Offertory…..The liturgical problem is serious, do not listen to the voices of those persons who do not love the Church and who oppose the Pope and if you want to cure the sick then remember that the merciful doctor makes the wound purulent (fa la piaga purulenta).”
3. Archbishop Chaput, of Denver. (March 4, 2009).
   • “We need to be faithful to the Church’s teachings and I think a sign of being faithful to the Church’s teachings is being faithful to the liturgy as it’s given to us by the Church.”
4. Rev. Thomas M. Kocik, is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, author of The Reform of the Reform? A Liturgical Debate: Reform or Return (Ignatius Press, 2003).
   • “The Holy Father has long maintained that one of the false interpretations of Vatican II is that it marks a clean break from the past. No, says Benedict: the Council is properly understood only in light of the Church’s bi-millennial tradition, of which the liturgy is the prime expression. The distinction between reform and rupture, between continuity and discontinuity, is key to understanding Summorum Pontificum. As the pope explains in his letter to the bishops, it is not a matter of old rite versus new rite, but of “a twofold use of one and the same rite.” Traditionalists may object–correctly, I daresay–that the Missal of 1970 cannot be put on a par with the relatively modest revisions of the Roman Missal made by Bl. John XXIII and earlier popes. On this basis, I think we can safely assert, without fear of contradicting the pope, that the 1962 Missal is the last Roman Missal representing a particular stream of tradition within the family of the Roman liturgy. But to speak, as some traditionalists do speak, of the 1970 Missal as a irremediable rupture with tradition is, ironically enough, to espouse the same hermeneutic of discontinuity applied by the Catholic far left to justify all kinds of unorthodox mischief.”
   • “The only way I envision a pastor becoming more burdened is with the sudden need to add more Masses to his parish schedule. This will not happen in places where there is no considerable demand for the extraordinary form of Mass. Where the demand does exist, but where there is no priest willing or qualified to use the 1962 Missal, the bishop is to arrange for such celebration to take place, or else refer the matter to the Ecclesia Dei commission. I daresay most bishops will find many of their young priests willing to step in. A bishop might also consider inviting into his diocese priestly societies exclusively committed to the extraordinary Roman Rite and in full communion with the Church, such as the Fraternity of St. Peter or the Institute of Christ the King.”
   • “As I say, increased exposure to the extraordinary form might encourage better, more dignified celebrations of the Novus Ordo and foster a responsible way of thinking about the liturgy. The liturgical books of 1962 enshrine certain Catholic perspectives and values that are often ignored or downplayed in contemporary worship.”
   • Refers to his article on practical application of implementation of the 1962 Missal, Benedict XVI and the Tridentine Question (PDF) by Father Kocik.
5. Father Franz Schmidberger, former Superior General of the SSPX and current Superior for the District of Germany. (June 25, 2009).
   • “Well, we will have to see how things develop. There are profound differences between the two rites; for example, the direction of the celebration. The old rite is God-centered. The new is man-centered. Many of the gestures, symbols, and rituals have been fundamentally changed. Today, the old rite is like a solid rock amidst the pounding surf, that must remain unchanged. The new rite requires radical reworking so that the sacrificial nature is once again explicitly expressed.”