Thick Edge of the Wedge: The Tridentine Mass Part 3

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JMJ

While there are a number of Thick Edge posts already on the blog, I have finally found the time to compose this explanation of the importance of this theme.

My theory is that organizational behavior theory (background posts can be found here and here) is applicable to understand how Catholics within the Church can be brought back to a Catholic worldview.  

In essence how to effect a cultural change.

As noted by the title of these articles, I have concluded that the Tridentine Mass is the 'Thick Edge of the Wedge' that separates the Catholics from the Protestants.  The reason being that it embodies in word, action and symbolism the core beliefs and assumptions of the Catholic religion.  I further assert that it is only within the pre-conciliar liturgical forms that a person will find the depth of breadth of this teaching in motion.


Comparing the Tridentine Mass (TLM) with the elements of Organizational culture we find that it comprises:

• Ritual
• Language
• Ceremonies
• Stories / Legends
• Physical Structure

The Tridentine Mass embodies the Catholic culture!

This is why many people who were strongly indoctrinated within the pre-counciliar culture early on had such an adverse reaction to the Novus Ordo Missae (NOM).

For others, it was a matter of time before other Beliefs, Values and Assumptions were challenged as the Church entered its identity crisis.

The difficulty is that at the time the people experiencing the cultural dissonance would have, most likely, ascribed a simple label to the NOM: Protestant.

Later, after the initial 'immune response' would they be able to describe aspects and the underpinning reasons for this reaction.

Today, after so many years, 'Modern Catholics' experience similar cultural reactions when exposed to the TLM and other Church Teachings.  In many ways, the Church is unrecognizable to them when the post conciliar trappings of ecumenism and religious liberty are stripped away.

Ultimate, there is only one Church that has True Worship - all others are both false religions and offer false worship.

For the Catholics who visit these pages, I ask you to explore  your Catholic Culture and inheritance. You will probably have a strong adversion to the cultural assumptions that are embedded in the pre-counciliar liturgy and the teachings, although always inforce, will probably be alien to you.

The question to ask yourself is: Do I believe all that the Catholic Church believes and teaches?  If so, then those teachings should inform your every waking moment as well as the way you worship God.

Think about it and pray for guidance, the first step is not the hardest, it is simply overcoming our fallen nature in order to seek God's Will and to align our wills with His.

You will find a complete list of the Wedge articles here.

P^3
Prayer
Penance
Patience

PS: Something that I had found that may be a useful seed for thoughts and actions!

The basic error of most of the innovations is to imagine that the new liturgy brings the holy sacrifice of the Mass nearer to the faithful, that shorn of its old rituals the Mass now enters into the substance of our lives. For the question is whether we better meet Christ in the Mass by soaring up to Him, or by dragging Him down into our own pedestrian, workaday world. The innovators would replace holy intimacy with Christ by an unbecoming familiarity. The new liturgy actually threatens to frustrate the confrontation with Christ, for it discourages reverence in the face of mystery, precludes awe, and all but extinguishes a sense of sacredness. What really matters, surely, is not whether the faithful feel at home at Mass, but whether they are drawn out of their ordinary lives into the world of Christ-whether their attitude is the response of ultimate reverence: whether they are imbued with the reality of Christ.
www.sanctamissa.org/en/spirituality/the-case-for-the-latin-mass.pdf