Liturgical and Moral Orthodoxy

The Catechism makes clear that there is a close link amongst the three-fold mission of the Church, leiturgia, diakonia and martyria: (cf., Deus Caritas Est, #25). That is, liturgical worship, charity, and the witness of the moral life, with a deep connection “between purity of heart, of body and of faith” (cf., CCC, #2518).

I just re-read the article from 2022, linked below, re-posted recently, by Peter Kwasnieski, on the influential theological Andrea Grillo, which is well worth perusing light of reputable rumours that the TLM is about to be outlawed, or at least as inaccessible as the current Magisterium is able to make it.

Telling, that Professor Grillo is not only anti-traditional in the liturgical sense, but also moral, with labyrinthine arguments for the justification of contraception, claiming that such an expansive, subjective and free view of sexuality was the original mind of the Church (!). As a consequence, other sexual deviancies follow, for once the indissoluble link between procreative and unitive significations of sex are sundered, nothing is disallowed.

This is not to imply that Novus Ordo = contraception. Rather, as Pope Benedict taught in Summorum Pontificum, the new form of Mass should be informed by the usus antiquior, and should look a lot like it, according to the rubrics and the mind of the conciliar fathers. To put it another way, just as there should be a hermeneutic of continuity between Pius XI’s Casti Connubii (1930) and Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae (1968), so too the same continuity should be seen between the traditional rite of Mass (last revision in 1962) and the newer one promulgated in 1969.

Admittedly, the analogy is not perfect and needs some further thought. For one thing, there is a far more seamless transition in the moral teaching than the liturgical one, to put it mildly. Only to say, for now, that we must live where and when we are in history – we were made for these times! – and any radical break with tradition is always a bad thing in the Catholic Church. For we stand with Tradition, or we stand not at all.

Pope’s Anti-TLM Theologian Shows His Pro-Contraception Cards