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By Joseph O'Brien
A Vatican cardinal recently said that Pope Benedict XVI would like to see a traditional Latin Mass in every parish. Even if that's meant metaphorically, it's a very long way from realization.
A year ago this month, Pope Benedict introduced new rules to make it easier for priests around the world to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass. Most significantly, he removed the requirement that priests get permission from their bishop.
His purpose was to underscore the continuity in the Church's liturgical tradition between what existed before the Second Vatican Council and what came after.
Celebration of the Mass according to the Missal of 1962 still represents a tiny percentage of liturgies, at least according to widespread anecdotal evidence. Hard data simply doesn't exist. Because of the pope's rules that priests don't have to get permission from their bishops, there's no reporting mechanism available, according to Father Richard B. Hilgartner, associate director of the U.S. bishop's liturgy office.
Even assuming a demand, expanding use of the older liturgical form poses a host of challenges: few priests trained in it, priests already stretched thin in parishes, and sometimes tension in parishes where the older liturgical form has been introduced.
Several groups have leapt to the task of paving the way for wider implementation of the older Mass -- sometimes by drawing on the newest technologies.
One of the best known is the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP), founded in 1988 by priests and seminarians who re-established full union with Rome after a traditionalist archbishop split away by ordaining four bishops without papal permission.
The fraternity trains priests in the older form of the Mass at its Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Denton, Neb., in the Diocese of Lincoln. According to the director of priest training at the seminary, Father Calvin Goodwin, with 36 apostolates in North America -- 31 in the United States and five in Canada -- the FSSP is a crucial element in the motu proprio's North American implementation.
The fraternity defines its mission as forming and sanctifying priests in the extraordinary liturgy of the Roman rite and to serve the Church by providing the extraordinary form wherever the faithful desire it. Before the motu proprio, the first of these goals was already being accomplished through Our Lady of Guadalupe in Denton and St. Peter Seminary in Wigratzbad, Germany.
The second goal was being accomplished as well, Father Goodwin pointed out, but only under the limits of the 1984 indult granted by Pope John Paul II, which required that bishops approve the celebration of each Mass in the extraordinary form. The FSSP has a combined 200 priests around the world and 110 seminarians shared between their two seminaries.
The FSSP are currently training non-Fraternity priests who desire to celebrate the extraordinary form of the Mass. Since the FSSP Priest Training Program launched last year, it has trained more than 100 priests from 60 different dioceses in North America. The FSSP says that 80 percent of those trained are celebrating the extraordinary form on "a regular basis."
According to one of the workshop trainers, Father Joseph Lee, the five-day program begins with a general introduction to the spirituality and history of the Mass, followed by sessions dealing with different parts of the Mass. The goal is not proficiency, Father Lee added, but familiarity.
"We tell them that at the end of these five days, you're not going to be able to say the low Mass perfectly, but you're going to have the liturgical principles necessary to go home and continue practicing the Mass on your own," Father Lee said.
"A lot of these guys are a lot older than me," he added. "They're much more experienced. And yet, they're so completely humble. They want to learn the Mass. And we'll tell them, you know, we're going to grill you on the forms."
Despite their willingness, though, Father Goodwin said, many priests who attend the workshop are initially put off by the strange style of the extraordinary form.
"So much of the traditional form of the Mass is predetermined -- what you say and how you move," he explained. "Whereas in the ordinary form there is a lot more scope for individual priests to do things in a way that is more comfortable. A number of priests who come here for training tell us that when they began to practice saying Mass in their deacon years at seminary, they would ask their professors how they should hold their hands, for example. Very often they would get the answer, 'Whatever feels comfortable for you.'"
In the extraordinary form, though, Father Goodwin pointed out, comfort is not a first principle of liturgy.
"It doesn't matter what might be comfortable for us or what we think might be meaningful, we're held to a list of standards for movement, gesture and language," he explained, adding that learning the standards are less difficult than they might first appear. "The way I explain it to the priests, it's like learning to drive. When you first got in the car, your first driving lesson, you had to think where is my foot supposed to go, which mirror am I supposed to look out, and what is this shifting thing? 'I'll never be able to do all these things -- it's too many details.' But like anything else, practice simply makes those things quite easy."
The primary workshop instructor, Father Justin Nolan, was ordained last June by a Vatican curial cardinal. His youth, though, belies his unique qualification for training priests -- especially older priests -- in the extraordinary form: Before entering the seminary, Father Nolan was a technical support director for a major software support company.
Father Nolan's tasks as corporate techie included training executive level employees who were often twice his age and possessed little understanding of technology.
"So my job was to write technical manuals and take large complex pieces of software and break them down into easy-to-understand pieces for people with no computer experience," he said.
It is a similar, and humbling, experience to break down the components of the extraordinary form for older priests Father Nolan said.
"I've been a priest for three weeks and here comes Father Joe who was ordained in 1959. He gets down on his knees and says the prayers at the foot of the altar, reads the little book of prayers, and starts asking me questions," he said.
Technology is also behind another training resource. The FSSP has enlisted the help of the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) to produce a liturgical training DVD that will be available by the end of summer. Donations have made it possible to be able to give the DVD for free to priests and seminarians in the United States who request it, Father Nolan said. So far there are more than 1,000 preorders.
Implementing the motu proprio has presented challenges, especially in integration in parishes. Father Goodwin said the order has learned to avoid situations where it is "sharing" a parish. Best is either a dedicated FSSP parish, or a parish where the pastor celebrates both forms of the Mass, he said.
"We found out by a lot of experience," Father Goodwin said, "that the shared parish experience -- the extraordinary and ordinary forms side by side in the same parish -- is confusing for the faithful and difficult for local clergy."
The different sanctuary arrangements for the two forms of the Mass, Father Goodwin pointed out, led to tensions between the two parties involved. Because of these tensions, the fraternity now seeks different arrangements with diocesan bishops.
"We found out by trial and error that the best way to go into a diocese is to sit down with a bishop and make a contractual agreement," he explained. "However the apostolate begins, if over a period of a year or so it's setting down roots and going well we expect to have a church of our own within a reasonable time."
On the other hand, Father Nolan added, it would be preferable for a pastor to serve as sole celebrant of both forms for his parishioners.
"When it's the parish priest who is the common denominator, there's an organic harmony working throughout the parish," he explained. "This way, the pastor can lay out the sanctuary in such a way that you don't have to be moving things around constantly."
The more the motu proprio continues to be implemented, Father Goodwin said, the closer he sees the FSSP living to its founders' intent.
"Before the motu proprio, the fraternity tended to be islands of traditional life within the life of a diocese," he said. "But now we're able to live more as a fraternity in the way our constitutions envisioned -- mainly as a community, but also as a resource within a diocese so people can come and find the traditional form of the liturgy in its full form."
"That's one of the things that the Holy Father has made possible with Summorum Pontificum," he added. "We're no longer seen as a liturgical ghetto, but as a resource in the life of the Church."
Joseph O'Brien writes from Wisconsin.
There was some prior understanding there that somehow the missal was unlawful, and now [Pope] Benedict is saying it is lawful. That's monumental indeed.
"There are a lot of young families with lots of children attending," he said. "The Fraternity is able to enlist the services of young men at the altar, too. I try to get a few vocations from them. The servers are very well prepared and devout."
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