This past Tuesday we began the regular celebration of the Traditional Mass (Extraordinary Form) at the daily Mass at 7:30 a.m. For me this was a moving event in so many ways. There is a straight line from when Fr. Markey introduced Solemn Mass in the parish over seven years ago to making the Traditional Mass a normal and integrated part of the parish by celebrating this Mass every day. I could not help but think that I was celebrating this Mass on our high altar just as the pastor of St. Mary’s in 1872 celebrated it. The deep continuity struck me forcefully.
I am preaching at all Masses this weekend about the special mission of St. Mary’s church. And that special mission has at its heart the renewal of the liturgical life of the Church and the heart of that renewal is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the Traditional Roman Rite. The Traditional Mass has become the driving force for our parish. From a purely practical aspect, the parish would be hard pressed to even exist without the financial support that comes from the Solemn Mass on Sunday morning. And this congregation is made up of people of all ages, of many ethnic groups, who come to this Mass from far and wide. Many have discovered something that they had never encountered in the celebration of Mass: beauty, reverence, mystery and the joy that breaks one’s heart.
It is the Traditional Mass that will be a most important, if not the very most important, element that will re-evangelize the Church and stop the slide towards a banal form of quasi-Protestantism that is a mirror of whatever contemporary society happens to be at any time, with a religious veneer. In this parish every Mass is celebrated in the light of the Traditional Mass. Every Novus Ordo Mass celebrated at St. Mary’s uses some Latin, which language is a real sign of the unity and universality of the Church that goes beyond ethnicity and common language. Every Novus Ordo Mass is celebrated in the Traditional way, where the priest and people face the Lord together and where the priest offers the Holy Sacrifice for the people and with the people who are praying for him and with him. At every Novus Ordo Mass the Roman Canon is used, that Eucharistic Prayer whose roots are in the Tradition of the Apostles and the first centuries of the Church. At the heart of the malaise afflicting the Church today is the fissure of discontinuity. Pace those who would deny this: there is a real difference between development of doctrine, which demands explicit continuity with what came before, and something made up from a particular time in human society with no roots in the Tradition.
But we cannot forget something very important. Our mission will not be successful merely by the presence of the Traditional Mass in our parish. If we do not grow in holiness and allow ourselves to be transformed by the grace of God in the Sacraments, if our lives do not reflect the truth, beauty and goodness of the Traditional Mass, then our mission will fail. We are not called to be conservative. We are not called to be traditional. We are called to be holy, and that holiness must be seen by others, and the love of Christ that is the source of holiness must be encountered by others in each one of us. And that will take sacrifice—personal sacrifice in how we live our lives, and this must include sacrificial giving to our parish to enable us to fulfill our mission. To do this we must deepen our sense of community and realize that wherever we come from, whatever language we speak, that we are one in Christ, and that He is the only basis of community that is real and lasting.
Father Richard Gennaro Cipolla
Pastor
