Monday, April 27, 2020

Michael Fiedrowicz, The Traditional Mass: History, Form, and Theology of the Classical Roman Rite


Angelico Press

From the publisher's description:
In contrast to conventional explanations of the Mass that offer practical or allegorical explanations of particular moments in the rite, the present work attends to the organic process by which the Roman rite was built up from its foundations into a magnificent structure, marked by the accumulated riches of each age through which it passed, and characterized by order, beauty, and piety in its texts, gestures, rubrics, chants, and calendar—ranging from the major elements to the most minute details. Treated as well are the reality of the sacred and how it is encountered, the irreducible role of ritual action, the eastward direction of prayer, the formation and value of a specialized sacred language, and liturgical participation correctly understood.

via Fr. Z, who includes this excerpt:

Only in the orations of the classical rite are contained and preserved numerous ideas that, although they belong irrevocably to the Catholic Faith, are understated or entirely lost in later modified versions: detachment from the temporal and desire for the eternal; the Kingship of Christ over the world and society; the battle against heresy and schism, the conversion of non-believers, the necessity of the return to the Catholic Church and genuine truth; merits, miracles, and apparitions of the saints; God’s wrath for sin and the possibility of eternal damnation.
"The necessity of the return to the Catholic Church and genuine truth" -- in reference to whom? Protestants? Non-Latin apostolic Christians?

Is a Latin traditionalist mindset necessarily tied to Latin triumphalism? Or is Latin triumphalism just the consequence of Roman Catholicism of the latter half of the second millenium taking precedence over charity?

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