31 August 2015

A Miserable Reformer

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We have entered the last quarter of the Church's year and I am beginning to pull together my conclusions about the effects of the calendar reforms of Pius X.  I have found one of the fruits of that change in Fr Bouyer's memoirs, which I mentioned here last week.

He mentions the major onslaught on the Roman Calendar of the post-Vatican II reformers, and quotes the principal author of that onslaught, Fr Jounel, as saying:

"The feasts of the Saints must be rare, since rarity is one of the conditions of festive joy."

It is hard to imagine anything less Catholic! (It is hard to imagine that Fr Jounel was much of a Chestertonian: he sounds like a caricature of a Calvinistic Methodist.)

But the more Sundays become Ordinary, the more the Mass becomes an act of catechesis, and therefore the less the need for catechesis of adults separate from Mass.

Still, I've found an encouraging quote from Pope Francis to counter Fr Jounel:

"Finally an evangelizing community is filled with joy; it knows how to rejoice always. It celebrates every small victory, every step forward in the work of evangelization. Evangelization with joy becomes beauty in the liturgy, as part of our daily concern to spread goodness. The Church evangelizes and is herself evangelized through the beauty of the liturgy, which is both a celebration of the task of evangelization and the source of her renewed self-giving." (Evangelii Gaudium 24)

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