Motu Madness Merry Go-Round
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Yesterday was Ascension Thursday. Or was it? Well, it was Ascension Thursday in every chapel served by true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its false shepherds. It was Ascension Thursday in the chapels administered by the priests of the Society of Saint Pius X and the priests, some validly ordained and some not, who run "independent" chapels without the permission of the conciliar authorities while "recognizing" the esteemer of false religions as the validly reigning "pontiff." It was Ascension Thursday even in many dioceses in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. However, it was not Ascension Thursday in all of the dioceses that are in the control currently of the revolutionaries of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. Let me explain.
Several national "episcopal" conferences in the counterfeit church of conciliarism petitioned the conciliar Vatican about twenty years ago for "permission" to transfer the celebration of the Ascension of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ into Heaven forty days after His Resurrection on Easter Sunday to the Sunday before Pentecost Sunday. Otherwise, you see, that particular Sunday is called the "Seventh Sunday of Easter" in those dioceses in the conciliar structures that observe the Feast of the Ascension on the day of the week on which Our Lord actually Ascended into Heaven to take with Him the Sacred Humanity that He had assumed in His Most Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation and with Which He redeemed us on the wood of the Holy Cross by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood. Among the places in the conciliar world where yesterday was observed as either the Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker (an "optional memorial") or that of "Thursday in the Sixth Week of Easter."
Mind you, this confusion exists under the official aegis of what is called the Roman Rite of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. There is perhaps no better way to point out the insanity of this confusion by describing what I experienced in Rome in 1993.
It was on Wednesday, May 26, 1993, that I was given the "privilege" (or so I thought at the time) of assisting at the service offered by Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II in his private chapel in the Apostolic Palace. I was one of thirty or so invitees. The then Monsignor Stanislaus Dziwisz, Wojtyla/John Paul II's longtime secretary and now the conciliar "cardinal archbishop" of Krakow, Poland, tapped me on the shoulder to ask me I spoke English, whereupon I was asked to serve as the "lector guy" for the Novus Ordo service. Heady stuff for a forty-one and one-half year old Catholic man who was still projecting Catholicism into the mind and heart of the man who had presided over the Assisi travesty just seven years before.
The next day, Thursday, May 27, 1993, was Ascension Thursday--or so I thought. I tried to assist at what I thought was Holy Mass that day at Santa Maria in Transpotina on the Via della Concilazione, which is located near the Tiber River about half a mile, if that, from the Basilica of Saint Peter. There was a little problem, however. It was not Ascension Thursday in the Diocese of Rome, the "pope's" own diocese! It was "Thursday in the Sixth Week of Easter." I walked out. What did I do? Simple. I walked up the Via della Concilazione to go to what I thought was Holy Mass in the Basilica of Saint Peter in Vatican City, where it was Ascension Thursday! Yes, you see, the Italian "bishops'" conference in the counterfeit church of conciliarism had gotten permission to transfer the observance of the Ascension of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ into Heaven to the following Sunday, otherwise known as the "Seventh Sunday of Easter" in the Novus Ordo world, while the "pope" observed the feast on its proper day.
Several dioceses in the western part of the United States of America, including those in the provinces of Los Angeles and San Francisco, had secured "permission" from the conciliar Vatican to transfer the Feast of the Ascension to the "Seventh Sunday of Easter" at around that same time. The conciliar "episcopal" conference of England and Wales secured such permission in 2007. There thus exists a veritable hodgepodge of liturgical celebrations in one "rite" of what alleges itself to be the Catholic Church on the same day. And it is now thanks to Summorum Pontificum and its interpretation and enforcement by "Pontifical" Commission" Ecclesia Dei that those Motu communities which find themselves working with dioceses where the Feast of the Ascension has been transferred to the following Sunday must adhere to the dictates of the Novus Ordo calendar within those dioceses, not to the calendar observed by the Catholic Church from time immemorial.
Those Motu communities working in dioceses under conciliar captivity where the Feast of the Ascension is observed on the following Sunday thus observed the Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker yesterday. Other priests in those same communities working elsewhere observed Ascension Thursday. Ah, there is yet another wrinkle here. There were some places where Ascension Thursday was Ascension Wednesday evening:
A Vigil Mass will be offered on Wednesday, April 30, at 6:00 pm in the Extraordinary Use of Blessed John XXIII (Latin). The Mass will be sung with a special choral setting by Franz Liszt. This will be a rare opportunity to celebrate the great feast with such extraordinary music.( http://www.oursaviournyc.org Look under "Schedules" once on the site.)
Welcome to the Motu Madness Merry-Go-Round, a conciliar carousel that takes one round and round and around and up and down and up and down. One enters the merry-go-round by the gate marked "1962." One exits the merry-go-round by the gate marked "1969." One will not leave by the same gate by which he had entered. One will leave only by the gate marked "1969," try as one might to exit by the entrance gate marked "1962." Y YouTube - Frog singalong "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" (You will never know in this passing, mortal vale of tears the efforts that are made to provide you readers with a bit of free, emphasis on the "free" part for you freeloaders out there, amusement for you all!)
Oh, I am sure that there are some in the Motu world who will point out that the American bishops received permission from Rome in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century to observe the Feast of Corpus Christi on the Sunday after Trinity Sunday in order to provide workers with an opportunity to participate in the Corpus Christi processions. What's so wrong with moving the Feast of the Ascension to a Sunday for the same reason (which was the ostensible rationale of the conciliar "bishops" in seeking permission some twenty years ago now for the transfer of the observance of the Feast of the Ascension)? What's so wrong with moving the Feast of the Epiphany?
What's wrong with this is that it makes the liturgical calendar of what purports to be the Catholic Church the prisoner of temporal considerations when it is the temporal world that should be organizing itself around the liturgical life of the Catholic Church. There are still countries in formerly Catholic Europe and in South America where the Feast of the Ascension and the Feast of Corpus Christi are public holidays. Not so in the United States of America, the pluralistic land of "religious freedom" that is the "model" of Church-State relations for the rest of the world, according to Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. Here we have an example yet again of the influence of Americanism on the efforts of conciliarists to subject the life of the Church according to the life of the world when it must be the other way around.
The effort to move those in what used to be the "indult" world closer and closer to the Novus Ordo service has long been something near and dear to the hearts of the apparatchiks in "Pontifical" Commission Ecclesia Dei. This is why the corrupt Society of Saint John, which has now reinvented itself in Paraguay under the protection of
Rogelio Ricardo Livieres Plano, the conciliar "bishop" of the Diocese of Ciudad del Este, was viewed so favorably by some within the Ecclesia Dei commission. Father Carlos Urrutigoity told me personally in November of 1999 that it was the goal of the Society of Saint John to "move" the liturgy "organically" without the "polemics" of the 1960s. Father Urrutigoity wanted to "see" where the liturgy "would have gone" had there not been the fireworks caused by the way in which the Novus Ordo was constructed synthetically. In other words, Father Urrutigoity, whose personal charisma had convinced at least twelve priests in the Society of Saint Pius X of his theory in this regard, although only one other priest followed him, Father Daniel Fullerton, followed him out of the Society of Saint Pius X (along with several seminarians), believed that some kind of "liturgical renewal" was necessary and that he had been chosen by God the Holy Ghost to lead such a reform.
Even though the Society of Saint John finds itself in the relative obscurity of Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, Father Urrutigoity's "vision" of "moving" the Mass of the ages along the path of "renewal" is indeed very much the mind of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. As has been noted before on this site, Ratzinger/Benedict's official spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, S.J., and Sandro Magister of the Chiesa website both have judged the mind of the current antipope quite well concerning the eventual merger of the Missal of Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII with that of Giovanni Montini/Paul VI:
"Neither the Missal of Pius V and John XXIII -- used by a small minority -- nor that of Paul VI -- used today with much spiritual fruit by the greatest majority -- will be the final 'law of prayer' of the Catholic Church." (Father Federico Lombardi, Zenit, July 15, 2007.)
From this point of view, then, the new prayer for the Jews in the liturgy in the ancient rite does not weaken, but postulates an enrichment of the meaning of the prayer in use in the modern rite. Exactly like in other cases, it is the modern rite that postulates an enriching evolution of the ancient rite. In a liturgy that is perennially alive, as the Catholic liturgy is, this is the meaning of the coexistence between the two rites, ancient and modern, as intended by Benedict XVI with the motu proprio "Summorum Pontificum."
This is a coexistence that is not destined to endure, but to fuse in the future "in a single Roman rite once again," taking the best from both of these. This is what then-cardinal Ratzinger wrote in 2003 – revealing a deeply held conviction – in a letter to an erudite representative of Lefebvrist traditionalism, the German philologist Heinz-Lothar Barth. (Sandro Magister, A Bishop and a Rabbi Defend the Prayer for the Salvation of the Jews.)
It is the case already that there has been the "revision" of the Good Friday prayer for the adherents of the Talmud, a "revision" made at the behest of angry Talmudic rabbis. The Novus Ordo prefaces already are being incorporated into some of the offerings/simulations of the modernized version of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, something that is in absolutely perfect accord with the expressed desires of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI as found in the accompanying letter that he wrote to the conciliar "bishops" on the occasion of the release of Summorum Pontificum, July 7, 2007:
It is true that there have been exaggerations and at times social aspects unduly linked to the attitude of the faithful attached to the ancient Latin liturgical tradition. Your charity and pastoral prudence will be an incentive and guide for improving these. For that matter, the two Forms of the usage of the Roman Rite can be mutually enriching: new Saints and some of the new Prefaces can and should be inserted in the old Missal. The "Ecclesia Dei" Commission, in contact with various bodies devoted to the usus antiquior, will study the practical possibilities in this regard. (Explanatory Letter - English.)
The Motu Madness Merry-Go-Round comes replete with its own carousel music of giddiness and joy at having the "high church" celebrations as more and more efforts are made to get those being taken for quite a rite to exit only by the gate marked "1969." So what if a little silence about such matters as blaspheming and dishonor the majesty of God and the propagation of condemned propositions as being consonant with the Catholic Faith must be maintained? It's all for a "good end," right? Things will "work out," right?
Well, go tell that to the saint who is commemorated today, Saint Athanasius. Go tell that to the English martyrs, whose courage in the face of silence from most genuine bishops and priests of their day is the model that should inspire us, not the false "prudence" of those who believed then that things"would work out all right in the end" if only they kept quiet and kept their skins and their property and their respectability in the eyes of others in the process. They kept their skins all right. Some of them also may have lost their immortal souls by preferring to remain silent in the wake of the Anglican effort to "reform" the liturgy and the Faith in incremental ways that are almost identical to what has been happening in the counterfeit church of conciliarism and what is taking place before our very eyes as the Motu Madness Merry Go-Round forces its riders to leave by the gate marked "1969."
Obviously, this did not all happen overnight. Giovanni Montini/Paul VI himself noted that the changes of the 1950s that were engineered by Fathers Ferdinando Antonelli, O.F.M., and Annibale Bugnini, C.M., were meant to lead to the Novus Ordo service, something that Pope Pius XII could not have imagined possible would be the result of the changes that he had authorized at the behest of these revolutionaries:
Since the beginning of this liturgical renewal, it has also become clear that the formularies of the Roman Missal had to be revised and enriched. A beginning was made by Pius XII in the restoration of the Easter Vigil and Holy Week services; he thus took the first step toward adapting the Roman Missal to the contemporary mentality.” (Promulgation of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo Service, April 3, 1969.) (For a wonderful explication of the differences between the Missal of Pope Sandro Pius X and that of Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII, please see His Excellency Bishop Daniel Dolan's The Pius X and John XXIII Missals Compared.)
As was noted on this site a few days ago, Pope Gregory XVI, writing in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832, warned against those seeking to impose novelties upon the Catholic Church:
Indeed you will accomplish this perfectly if, as the duty of your office demands, you attend to yourselves and to doctrine and meditate on these words: "the universal Church is affected by any and every novelty" and the admonition of Pope Agatho: "nothing of the things appointed ought to be diminished; nothing changed; nothing added; but they must be preserved both as regards expression and meaning."
Saint Teresa of Avila put the matter this way:
"I would give up my life a thousand times, not only for each of the truths of Sacred Scripture, but even more for the least of the ceremonies of the Catholic Church." (Saint Teresa of Avila, Life, Thirty-three, 3.)
"Know this: it is by very little breaches of regularity that the devil succeeds in introducing the greatest abuses. May you never end up saying: 'This is nothing, this is an exaggeration.'" (Saint Teresa of Avila, Foundations, Chapter Twenty-nine)
We are in the month of Our Lady, the month of May. Statues of Our Lady will be crowned by schoolchildren across the world. Shrines in her honor will be erected in homes, including at least one motor home with which we are familiar. We must honor Our Lady most especially, however, by praying Rosaries of reparation for our own sins and those of the whole world, especially those being committed by the scions of Modernism who stop at nothing as they blaspheme God and propagate falsehoods as a synthetic religion having nothing to do with the true Faith is advanced in the name of the Catholic Church.
Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart will triumph in the end. May our commitment to fulfilling our obligations as the consecrated slaves of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through her own Immaculate Heart help to plant a few seeds for the triumph of a heart that beats as one with that of the Most Sacred Heart of her Divine Son, which Sacred Heart will honor solemnly in but four weeks from this very day.
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
