{"id":769,"date":"2007-07-06T02:13:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-06T02:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/voxnova2.wordpress.com\/2007\/07\/06\/in-praise-of-the-novus-ordowhen-its-prayed-correctly\/"},"modified":"2007-07-06T02:13:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-06T02:13:00","slug":"in-praise-of-the-novus-ordowhen-its-prayed-correctly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2007\/07\/06\/in-praise-of-the-novus-ordowhen-its-prayed-correctly\/","title":{"rendered":"In Praise of the Novus Ordo…when it’s prayed correctly!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

As the late, great Dietrich von<\/span> Hildebrand, one of my favorite Catholic thinkers of all time, reminds us in his Liturgy and Personality<\/em>, the Liturgy is not some private devotion that Catholics hold in common but is rather the transformative<\/span> formal prayer of the Church that illumines and enhances true personhood<\/span>, which in turn transforms society. The Liturgy, precisely because of the center of its activity, the Eucharist, is the source of emanating grace in the world. Thus, the Liturgy, without being conceptually reduced to a mere social phenomenon, possess profound implication for the culture in which it is prayed.<\/p>\n

For all the criticism that is levelled against the Second Vatican Council\u2019s liturgical reform of the Roman Rite within the Catholic blogosphere<\/span>, there is little praise to balance out the picture. Without focusing on how particular parishes have or have not implemented<\/span> these reforms accurately or on the proliferating abuses that inevitably follow an ecumenical council of such a grand scope as that of Vatican II (think of how it took almost 200 years to implement the reforms of the Council of Trent), I\u2019d like to point to a few reforms that have made our Liturgy richer and more in conformity with the early Christians forms of worship.<\/p>\n

1. Vatican II\u2019s<\/span> reforms aimed at the Roman Rite.<\/strong> You would be amazed at how few self-appointed liturgical police offficers have read Sacrosanctum<\/span> Concilium<\/span><\/em><\/a>, the great liturgical document from the Second Vatican Council. It\u2019s important to realize that Vatican II did not change the entire liturgical life of the Church. It reformed one particular rite of the Catholic Church, the Roman Rite. Very often critics of Vatican II fabricate an historical image of the \u201cpre<\/span>-Vatican II\u201d Church as one uniform body with a homogeneous Liturgy. This is simply not accurate. While the the so-called Tridentine<\/span> Mass (I don\u2019t call it the \u201cLatin Mass\u201d since the Novus<\/span> Ordo<\/span><\/em> Mass can be, and has been, said entirely in Latin) was the official Liturgy of the Roman Rite, there were and still are a number of Eastern rite Liturgies. It\u2019s easy for so-called \u201ctraditionalist\u201d Catholics to forget that Eastern Catholicism has a long and celebrated history of tradition of the vernacular with a plurality of eucharistic<\/span> prayers.<\/p>\n

2. Vatican II drew from ancient liturgies and from the Eastern rites for its reforms.<\/strong>
\nVatican II helped the Roman Rite to recover many traditions that were lost during the Carolingian era of the Western Church. Looking to ancient liturgical texts as well as to current practices in the Eastern rites, which helped preserve some of the most ancient traditions of the Church, the Roman Rite incorporated a number of important practices, not restricted to:<\/p>\n