Oct
28
Quadraginta Annis: A meaningless liturgical calendar, a “novus ordo”
October 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Dom Prosper Gueranger wrote as if to somehow foreshadow the conditions of our own infelicitous age when he penned his entry for the Feast of Christ The King:
Today we sadly behold “a world undone,” largely paganized in principles and outlook, and sometimes even glorying in the name “pagan.” At the best, governments mostly ignore God; and at the worst, openly fight against Him. Even the statesmen’s well-meant efforts to find a remedy for present ills and, above all, to secure world peace, prove futile because, whereas peace is from Christ, and possible only in the Kingdom of Christ, His Name is never mentioned throughout their deliberations or their documents. Christ is kept out of the State schools and seats of higher education; and the rising generations seem to be taught anything and everything save to know, love and serve Him. Art and literature all too frequently reflect the same tendencies.
And since the spirit of evil reigns inevitably wherever the spirit of Christ has ceased to reign, in public and in private men are flouting the moral laws of God, and most, if not all, of the worst abominations of ancient paganism are becoming matters of everyday life. Moreover, be it remembered, modern paganism is worse than that of the ancient world, in that the former knows what it does as the latter did not. There is now an intense, positive hatred of Jesus Christ in the militant atheist, which differs in kind from the attitude of the fiercest Roman or Eastern persecutor: “If I had not come and spoken to them… if I had not done among them the works that no other man hath done, they would not have sin: but now they have both seen and hated both Me and My Father” (John 15: 22, 24).
Alas, even the liturgical calendar has been distorted with familiar landmarks displaced – the feast of Christ the King is no longer the last Sunday of October but now marks the end of that ill-defined period of “ordinary time”.
Ordinary Time – no reference to a period in the Life of Christ exists there, it is Christless, Godless, “Ordinary” in its title plain, without savor, a mark of iconoclasm absent the image of the Holy One of Israel or His Holy Spirit - no reference to Pentecost, no reference to Epiphany, merely ordinariness of time, as if in a lobby awaiting one’s dentist’s appointment.
No longer does Pentecost mark the liturgical season until Advent and the time after Epiphany is too likewise confused by the term “ordinary” when in fact nothing about the Liturgical Year is “ordinary”. Yet the great minds inspired by that sprite, that will ‘o the wisp, “The Spirit of Vatican II” have removed as many logical points of reference in the Liturgical Year as could be done and have replaced them with meaningless and disorienting spans which mean nothing – it is as if those evil genii who inspired the use of metrics to supplant formerly logical measures have succeeded in making the Church calendar as sterile as the centimeter and the kilogram: long for the days of Pounds and Yards, and Sundays after Pentecost and the Sundays of Epiphany – as Dom Gueranger has said; “Today we sadly behold “a world undone…””
