Clearly, 'Catholic' Liturgy is currently in the most truly terrible hands.

Oxford scholar Fr. John Hunwicke has picked up a huge mistake from Papal Preacher Raniero Cardinal Cantalamessa's Lenten preaching. Fr Hunwicke laments that during Lent or Easter, Cantalamessa should pursue polemical attacks on the Authentic Form of the Roman Rite. He states: "Clearly, for him and his like, there is no truce or surcease in their attacks on their fellow Catholics and upon Holy Tradition, even at the holiest times. But so be it.]"

Fr Hunwicke continues:

Cantalamessa, soon after the start of his 'Forth [sic] Lenten Sermon 2023', refers "the Traditio Apostolica of St Hippolytus". "We obtain a vision of the Mass that is certainly closer to the reformed one of today than to that of the centuries behind us. What happened? The answer is an awkward one which, however, we cannot avoid: clericalisation! In no other sphere was it more conspicuous than in the Liturgy."

(1) Readers of this blog ... or even just of my last Friday's post ... will have spotted the Giant Historical Howler. The document which was so influential in the period 1930-1970, and was then thought to be the Apostolic Tradition of S Hippolytus of Rome, is now regarded, in the scholarly consensus, as having nothing to do with Rome and nothing to do with Hippolytus.

(2) Readers of this blog will also have learned last Saturday, if they did not already know this, that a rigid definition of clerical liturgical roles is insisted upon in the First Epistle to Corinth of S Clement, commonly dated to the ... apparently already heavily clericalised ... nineties of the First Century.

Cantalamessa goes on to say this about the Patristic Form (i.e. the form we traddies know today) of the Roman Mass: "There is an evident return to to what was going on in the worship of the First Covenant. The High Priest entered the Sancta sanctorum, with incense and the blood of the victims, and the people stood outside trembling, overwhelmed by the sense of God's tremendous holiness and majesty."

In conclusion:

"Cantalamessa speaks like a man who has read little in his last half century. He chatters on in glib ignorance about the "Apostolic Tradition of St Hippolytus". He runs off chasing a "missing epiclesis". He praises "the linearity and simplicity" of the Novus Ordo, unaware of the writings of Catherine Pickstock and of other Anglicans, and of (e.g.) Fr Aidan Nichols, who recognise 'linearity' and 'simplicity' as "Enlightenment" superstitions which deface the "oral" structures of the Roman Mass, with its 'stutterings' and its 'recommencements' [Pickstock After Writing 1998; Nichols Looking at the Liturgy 1996.].

Clearly, 'Catholic' Liturgy is currently in the most truly terrible hands. There is the horrible, unCatholic view of PF and Roche, that Liturgy is not a great received and given Holy Tradition, but a matter of daily legal positivism. 'Authorities' intrude, prescribe, impose, forbid, tinker, reclarify, and, perhaps, graciously permit it, otherwise it is not "licit"; and those who use it will need to have their ignorances corrected in a Maoist-style 're-education' programme. If they ... we ... persist in recalcitrance, they ... we ... will need to be thoroughly whacked with a great big stick.

That is appalling enough. May God forgive them.

But what is even worse than that, is the picture I now have in my mind after reading Cantalamessa: two octogenarian clergymen, both profoundly allergic to the scholarship of the last three decades, who sit nodding their agreement at each other, antiphonally reinforcing the rigid adherence they share to the moth-eaten certainties of circa 1950."

You can read Fr Hunwickes blog here.