Loftus: reverence to Our Lord is totalitarian

'On a general level a priest naturally, and supernaturally, will want to smile into the eyes of those to whom he gives Holy Communion. [So this is for the priest's benefit, right?] It's a lot easier to do so if they are all joyfully singing the Communion song together with their heads thrown back [ie, without looking at a hymn book], in accordance with liturgical law [yes, a chant or song is allowed at Communion, well done Basil], rather than looking at the ground as they first of all bow, and then try to avoid being swiped by a redundant communion plate, as prescribed by rubrical nit-pickers [surely, 'liturgical law', which says that the 'Communion Plate is to be retained' (Redemptionis Sacramentum para 93) and the recommendation to make an 'act of reverence' before communion (Redemptionis Sacramentum 90)].

'Look at North Korea. Is there in that blighted and over-regulated dictatorship any of the joy and freedom which is needed if human dignity is to be protected? Was there any joy or freedom in Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, or East Germany? Would anyone in the free world want to live there? In all of this there are lessons about freedom and joy for the Church.'

Lost: if found, please send to the Catholic Times

Mgr Basil Loftus, Catholic Times 19th May 2013.

I kid you not. Is he finally losing his marbles? Does he really want to suggest that Bl Pope John Paul II, under whom those rubrical prescriptions were made in Redemptionem Sacramentum in 2004, was a joyless dictator to rival Erich Honecker, Kim Jong-Il, Stalin and Mao? Where are the gulags where dissidents were locked up to maintain this reign of terror? Oh, how silly of me! They were condemned to the ultimate torture: of writing perpetual articles in the Catholic Times.

Actually, Basil, reading this stuff is the real torture, not writing it.

I sometimes complain that it is not really my brief to defend the Novus Ordo; I mean I'm happy to do it, but why is it left to me? Why aren't all those 'conservative' Catholic bloggers defending these rubrics against Loftus and his ilk? I fancy they have given up. But you can't just give up: he's spewing this stuff out every week.

Yet again this week - I think for the third time at least - he recounts the story of Pope Francis saying 'the carnival is over' to the Papal MC Mgr Marini, despite it long since being debunked as a malicious smear, above all a calumny against the Holy Father, who doesn't share Loftus' habit of unthinking rudeness.

When is the madness of these articles going to end?

Holy Communion at the Family Retreat, with Fr John Hunwicke

Since I'm not a neo-conservative with the task of defending every detail of the Novus Ordo Missae ('Ordinary Form') and its associated legislation, I should add that Loftus is given an easier target by the awkwardness of the current liturgical settlement, if I may call it that. It is perfectly true that there is something a little unnatural and contrived about asking people to bow before receiving Holy Communion. Why not just have them kneel down? And it is also true that the is something a little unnatural and contrived about having a communion plate where practically everyone receives in the hand.

These rubrics were ways of trying to claw something back from the disaster of the spread of, and then the permission for, the abuse of receiving Communion in the hand, and the novelty of receiving standing up. Those things didn't work, and trying to ameliorate them with these rubrics hasn't worked either.

But then, the Novus Ordo manner of receiving on the tongue is awkward too: having to say 'Amen'. You can't make it clear that you are ready to receive - people tend to stick their tongues out, pull them in to say 'Amen', and then stick them out again. At least, this is what I seem to end up doing at the OF.

Say what you like about the Traditional Mass, it works. It works because it has developed to work, over many centuries, instead of being some kind of bureaucratic compromise in the midst of an endless liturgical war.

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