April 2007
Sacrificial "Smoke"-Extractor
THE EDITOR
'It is a useless Mass and the whole mentality is stupid. The idea of it is that things were better in the old days. It makes the Vatican look medieval.' |
It sounds like a send-up: the sort of bilious diatribe one associates with ranting Protestant heresiarchs like Luther, Calvin, Cranmer and the rest. Yet this moronic, indeed blasphemous description of the traditional Roman Rite was spouted last January by no less a personnage than Father Reginald Foster, the Papal Latinist.
Appointed by Paul VI, Fr Foster is one of the world's foremost Latin scholars who for 38 years has translated the encyclicals and speeches of four popes. He made the above comment in his Vatican office down the corridor from Pope Benedict, in the process of speculating that the anticipated motu proprio from the Holy Father freeing up the Old Mass would not eventuate: "He is not going to do it. He had trouble with Regensburg, and then trouble in Warsaw, and if he does this, all hell will break loose." [Sunday Telegraph, 28/1/07]
Now, many were staggered that a priest of Jesus Christ who has spent his life striving to preserve Latin would rubbish the primary liturgical guardian of that language. Even more shocking, however, is Fr Foster's culpable ignorance of the postconciliar fallout. The 68-year-old Carmelite seems oblivious to the fact that all hell actually broke loose forty years ago, when the clearly sacrificial, God-centred Latin Mass was rudely discarded and the "smoke of Satan," according to his old boss Paul VI, "entered the Church."
Largely diffused by a new vernacular Mass tailored for a Modernist clergy, that diabolic "smoke" has disoriented and blinded Catholics ever since, destroying belief in fundamental Easter doctrines about the Mass as sacrifice, the Real Presence et. al..
'If the Pope does unleash the Old Mass, all hell will break loose,' says Fr Foster. We counter: 'If he does not free up the Old Mass to extract the "smoke" from our sanctuaries, the infernal fog will only thicken and the hellish Protestantising continue unabated.'