Friday, August 19, 2011

Fr. Christopher Smith on Seminarians and the Usus Antiquior

I had been meaning to share this article back when it appeared early this week on Chant Cafe, it is a refection and commentary by Fr. Christopher Smith entitled Why Are Seminaries Afraid of the Extraordinary Form?.

By now it has been linked to by a variety of other sources as well, but for the benefit of those who may not have noted it yet, here is how the piece begins:

I had just entered the seminary when Cardinal Ratzinger’s book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, came out. I had an English copy expressed to me and brought it with me into the chapel as my spiritual reading during our daily community Holy Hour. One of the older men knelt next to me as I was engrossed in Ratzinger’s chapter on Rite and whispered, “Do you want to get kicked out of the seminary? Change the book cover now.” All of my attempts to not publicise the fact that I actually knew the Old Latin Mass had apparently been blown out of the water by this defiant act of wanton schism. Suddenly seminarians began to knock on my door and counsel me how to survive the seminary, and so I exchanged Ignatius Press’ book cover for one entitled “The Pastoral Letters of Paul VI.”

Apparently it was too late. I was a marked man.

Continue reading the article here.

Fr. Smith provides some good commentary, including some pertinent words for the over-exuberant as it relates to the EF.

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