Pope's Solution to the Spiritual Decay in the Church: Fewer Masses

 This comes via way of Fr. Z, among various other places.  This morning the Vatican released an unsigned decree banning private masses at St. Peter's Basillica.  If you want to celebrate Mass there, it has to be concelebrated, has to have singing, etc.  There isn't really a rationale given for this kind of change, which we will get to.  To mitigate the impending pastoral disaster (as the Extraordinary Form and pilgrim/tourist groups celebrate loads of these masses every week) they are funneling all of these into one room, with no explanation for how that works logistically.

The decree is almost certainly real, but left unsigned so it can be withdrawn once it either generates significant opposition or flops.  The truth is the liturgical reformers have always hated private masses.  While some of your more high minded critics (often in bad faith) will point out that these are nearly non-existent in most Eastern Catholic settings, the reality is that private masses are a fact of life in the Latin Rite, even today in the Novus Ordo, where celebrations occur on side altars in cathedrals or in small group settings in major basilicas.  

The objection to this practice is not new.  The liturgical reform tried to eliminate it entirely originally, but faced pushback from the likes of Cardinal Ottaviani.  The liturgical reformers did not reject the Mass being about the worship of God, they just placed a far higher priority on the primary purpose of Mass being the instruction and edification of the faithful.  The original definition, changed because it was certainly heretical, said as follows about the Mass:

The Lord's Supper or Mass is a sacred meeting or assembly of the People of God, met together under the presidency of the priest, to celebrate the memorial of the Lord. Thus the promise of Christ, "where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them"

As noted, this definition was struck, and in its place Paul VI promulgated a definition of the Mass that explicitly referenced the Mass being the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ on the cross, made present to us in an unbloody matter. Yet its ethos lived on in the spirit of the liturgical reformers, who Ottaviani described as such in his now famous Intervention:

1. Ultimate End. This is that of the Sacrifice of praise to the Most Holy Trinity according to the explicit declaration of Christ in the primary purpose of His very Incarnation: "Coming into the world he saith: 'sacrifice and oblation thou wouldst not but a body thou hast fitted me' ". (Ps. XXXIX, 7-9 in Heb. X, 5).

This end has disappeared: from the Offertory, with the disappearance of the prayer "Suscipe, Sancta Trinitas", from the end of the Mass with the omission of the "Placet tibi Sancta Trinitas", and from the Preface, which on Sunday will no longer be that of the Most Holy Trinity, as this Preface will be reserved only to the Feast of the Trinity, and so in future will be heard but once a year.

2. Ordinary End. This is the propitiatory Sacrifice. It too has been deviated from; for instead of putting the stress on the remission of sins of the living and the dead, it lays emphasis on the nourishment and sanctification of those present (No. 54). Christ certainly instituted the Sacrament of the Last Supper putting Himself in the state of Victim in order that we might be united to Him in this state but his self- immolation precedes the eating of the Victim, and has an antecedent and full redemptive value (the application of the bloody immolation). This is borne out by the fact that the faithful present are not bound to communicate, sacramentally.

To the reformer, Mass without a congregation is pointless.  If the Mass is about feeding the congregation, why have a Mass?  A Mass limited to a small group only would be an abomination, as the primary purpose of the Mass for them is "feeding the flock" via the Eucharist and the proclamation of the Word.  Outside of Benedict XVI, this has been the attitude of every pope who has presided over the liturgical reform since the Council.  Pope Francis is no different.  He has repeatedly said both that the liturgical reform was a smashing success in the Church, and yet that its work remains unfinished.  While he may not put liturgical matters front and center, he still very clearly believes more of the reform needs to be carried out.  The suppression of private Masses should be read in that light.

If such a decision sounds absurd..... it is.  The solution to spiritual decay is not fewer Masses.  It is more Masses, better Masses, and a faithful more engaged in Masses.  This is even more the case in Rome, where tourists, visiting St. Peters, had a chance to hear the Mass in their own language.  If one wants to say every Catholic should be proficient in the Mass in Latin, welcome to traditionalism, beer is in the fridge.  Yet we are not there now, nor will we be in 40-50 years.  This kind of move is rotten theology, and even worse pastoral application.

The icing on the cake is the obvious contempt this decree has for the Extraordinary Form.  Now, contra some others, I don't think this was a deliberate snubbing and spiting of traditionalists by the Pope.  I think he's genuinely understood spending the first few years trolling and edgelording .1% of the Church for kicks and favorable media headlines was a really bad strategy, and its one he has mostly abandoned the past few years.  I'm just guessing he really wanted to ban private masses because he can't comprehend why anyone would like them.  When it was pointed out this would functionally ban the Latin Mass in St. Peters, he decided to give them a Mass in a crypt, because that's a pastoral thing to do, and he is a pastoral pope. So he repeats a thousand times.

Yet it is pretty clear traditionalists would not take being relegated to a private crypt at restricted times of day, by "authorized priests", in only 3 times before 9am, in a space they now have to fight for with tourist groups, as a "win."  There's also the whole institutional memory of forcing traditionalists into small crypts via the Indult so their liturgical tradition would not trouble the Church at large.  Yet this is honestly par for the course in this pontificate with his "pastoral" initiatives, they are "pastoral" in the sense that people who craft headlines say they are pastoral, and because people tell the pope he's being pastoral, not because he's actually meeting any spiritual need of the faithful with his decisions.

In the grand scheme of things, is this among the worst things he's done?  Probably not.  (That would go to attacking abuse victims as needy and greedy,  also covering for McCarrick.)  Yet it is instructive of a mindset this Pope has, which people will try to tell you he doesn't:  he is a son of the Revolution in the Church, and it is the goal of the sons of the revolution to make perpetual war upon the traditions and identity of the Catholic Church.  That he might go years without such attacks, and that he does good things elsewhere, does not mean he has changed his ways.