Newsletter 0901



FSSP Finland Pyhän Pietarin pappisveljeskunnan Suomen apostolaatti Isä Benjamin Durham FSSP

[email protected]

Newsletter 2009/01

January 28th, 2009

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Dear Faithful Reader, This past year has been eventful for the Finnish apostolate, although if one had to provide statistics for our ‘mission’, things would perhaps seem less impressive: two Baptisms, no receptions of converts, no Confirmations, no First Communions. Undoubtedly, there remains much work to be done. However, those of you who receive this newsletter, and who have been participating in many of the events organized, know that it has been possible to attend beautiful Sung Masses in the Cathedral, attend conferences and participate in discussions on theological or liturgical matters, and to receive the Sacraments. The success of the Church is not measured by statistics but in souls, who come to know and love God in the hope of eternal Salvation. It is important that all of us, both clergy and laypersons, participate in this reality through our prayers and our sacrifices. Motivated by true Charity, we must be willing to ‘go that extra step’ to gain even one soul for Christ, and this can only come about by a fruitful cooperation among all of Christ’s faithful. I would ask you to please continue to pray for our apostolate so that it may continue to grow, rooted firmly in Faith, which is the necessary foundation for any true Catholic mission. May this New Year be filled with many blessings for you and your family! Fr. Benjamin Durham, FSSP

What has been happening in Finland and elsewhere… Shortly before Christmas, young Maximilian Hermann Olavi Mäkinen was baptized in Saint Henry’s Cathedral in Helsinki during Fr. Durham’s visit to Finland, which took place from the 19th to the 23rd December. Our congratulations to the Mäkinen family and many heartfelt thanks to Fr. Marino for allowing the Masses and Baptism in the Cathedral. We would also like to thank Fr. Antoine and the Dominican Friars for providing accommodation for Fr. Durham at Studium Catholicum. Fr. Durham also had the chance to discover their many theological and liturgical volumes – a true literary treasure in Finland. A reminder that Holy Mass is celebrated for the intentions of our Friends and Benefactors every First Friday of the month. The next Mass will be on the 6th of February, which is the Feast of St. Titus – a close collaborator of Saint Paul. One of Saint Paul’s Epistles is addressed to Titus, who died in the year 101.

 On the 7th of February, there will be ordinations to the minor orders and the subdiaconate at St Peter’s Seminary in Wigratzbad, Bavaria. This is the international seminary of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (FSSP), which is located near the shores of Lake Constance and the Bavarian Alps. It is a beautiful setting in which young men from many nations prepare, during seven years of spiritual and intellectual formation, to serve in our missions throughout the world. Please keep those to be ordained in your prayers.

On October 3, 1899, the eve of the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the Rev. Lewis Thomas Wattson, an Episcopal clergyman later known as the Very Rev. Paul James Francis, S.A., arrived at Graymoor, N.Y. to establish a community of Episcopal Franciscans called the Friars of the Atonement. A year previously, Miss Lurana White, a devout young woman, had founded in the same place a community of Episcopal nuns known as the Sisters of the Atonement. For ten years the two communities were jointly known as the Society of the Atonement and lived the monastic life as members of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Looking about him on a largely irreligious world, Father Paul grieved most because Christians seemed divided into warring sects and factions. He began to preach corporate reunion of the Episcopal Church with the Roman Catholic Church. Because of this he was banned from the pulpits of the Episcopal Church. In his brown robe and sandals, Father Paul took his message to the streets and parks of New York. He caused quite a sensation. Father Paul James Francis was determined to carry on a vigorous apostolate for the return of all separated Christians to communion with the Holy See. To further this aim, he inaugurated in 1908 the Chair of Unity Octave (Jan. 18-25). One year later, the members of the Society themselves received the grace of conversion, and on October 30, 1909, they entered the Catholic Church in a body. It astonished no one when he took his own advice and brought his community with him into the Catholic Church. With the blessing of Pope St. Pius X, they were permitted to continue as a religious society in the Catholic Church and were

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The Chair of Unity Octave (18th-25th January)

 commissioned to carry on the apostolate of Christian unity as their community aim. The Chair of Unity Octave was also approved as a Catholic devotion by Pope Benedict XV in an Apostolic Brief in 1916. In 1921, at their annual meeting in Washington, the Catholic hierarchy of the United States unanimously adopted the Octave for all the dioceses in the country. Under the patronage of St. Peter, the first Vicar of Christ, Bishop of Rome, and St. Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, the Chair of Unity Octave has flourished and grown. It is now observed in many parts of the world.

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The Liturgical Movement in Germany – Development and Criticism One notes that liturgy had the most extraordinary and most visible rise in the first half of the 20th century. It developed from a peripheral theological science to that of a necessary and important principal subject, and one that is certainly of great interest to many faithful throughout the world, even outside of an academic context. In Germany, the liturgical movement (liturgische Bewegung) was, at first, confined to academic circles. In 1918, the abbey of Maria Laach introduced the first ‘community Mass’ (Gemeinschaftsmesse) that was, in fact, a dialogued Mass. The Catholic youth enthusiastically adopted the new manner of celebrating the liturgy. (In the 1920s, a dialogued Mass was celebrated by Italian youth in the presence of Pius XI, with all singing the Pater.) The spontaneously growing new liturgical practice was from the start accompanied and clarified by a theology which united strictly scientific, even historicoarechaeological investigation with proclamation and piety. Especially effective in the area of liturgical formation was Romano Guardini (1885-1961) with his Vom Geist der Liturgie (1918), Liturgische Bildung (1923), Von heiligen Zeichen (1927), and his scriptural-theological introduction, Der Herr (1937). He led to reading and reflection on Holy Scripture, but also encouraged that the world should be taken seriously and interpreted with the eyes of faith. The texts of the Ordinary of the Mass, published by three communities noted for common prayer in the ’Community Mass’, give a picture of the growing liturgical and religious and pedagogical experience: The Gemeinschaftliche Andacht zur Feier der heiligen Messe, published by Guardini in 1920, provided the text of the Mass only with paraphrasing interpretive additions. The Missa composed in 1924 by Fr. Joseph Kramp (1886-1940) for the ’Union of New Germany’ led to the praying aloud of the entire Mass from the prayers at the foot of the altar to the Last Gospel except for the canon, without making any distinction between he public prayers of the priest and congregation and the private prayers of the priest. This booklet was an expression of the first excess of zeal in which people felt that the community nature of the Mass was expressed by the fact that all prayed everything, which threatened to lead to an empty, loud operation and supplied welcome material to critics. The Kirchengebet published in 1928 by Ludwig Wolker made the newer knowledge its own, especially in the later issues, and, in accord with the ’High Mass Rule’, asked which prayers belonged to the priest, the reader, and the congregation. Respectively, and which were to be prayed quietly.



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The translations of the Kirchengebet, which had a circulation of several million, were transformed into new editions of diocesan prayerbooks. Exaggerations, narrow-mindedness, and willfullness of overzealous circles from the liturgical movement led to anxious and passionate criticism. The conflicts led to the German bishops’ taking up of the liturgical efforts, and so the liturgical movement became the liturgical renewal directed by the Church’s authority. In 1940 the Episcopal Conference formed the Liturgical Section under Bishops Albert Stohr and Simon Konrad Landersdorfer and a Liturgical commission of experts in theory and practice. Their work led to the 1942 ’Guidelines for the liturgical structure of the parochial liturgy’. A memorandum of Archbishop Conrad Groeber of Freiburg, which he submitted on 18 January 1943 to the Curia and his fellow bishops, threatened to lead to a new crisis. The seventeen points ’giving occasion to uneasiness’ were, among others: the immanent schism in the clergy, an ’alarming flourishing mysticism of Christ’ as a consequence of an exaggerated interpretation of the doctrine of the Corpus Christi mysticum, the overstressing of the doctrine of the general priesthood, the ’thesis of Meal-Sacrifice and Sacrificial Meal’, the ’overemphasis of the liturgical’, the effort to make the congregational Mass obligatory, and the use of German in the Mass. “Can we German bishops,” thus concluded Groeber, “and can Rome keep silent?” This memorandum crossed a letter of Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione, which the chairman of the Episcopal Conference, Cardinal Bertram, received on 11 January 1943. On 10 April 1943 Cardinal Bertram gave to Rome a comprehensive report on the origin of the liturgical movement, on the forms of congregational participation in Mass, including the German High Mass as a ’sung Mass, joined with popular singing in German’, and on the ’defects and mistakes of the liturgical movement’. An indirect position on the controverted questions was indicated as early as Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici corporis, because in it the Pope acknowledged the understanding of the Church by the liturgical movement and termed the new understanding of the sacred liturgy the cause of a deeper consideration of the riches of Christ in the Church. On 24 December 1943 Maglione made known the Roman decision to Cardinal Bertram. In it the religious and pastoral fruits of the liturgical movement were praised but a warning was lodged against arbitrary innovations. The final point of the Roman examination and the point of departure for the liturgical reform pursued by the Curia came in the encyclical on the sacred liturgy, Mediator Dei, of 20 November 1947. In it Pius XII made use of the keyword of ’active and personal participation’. The liturgy is ’the public worship which our Redeemer, the Head of the Church, gives to the heavenly Father and which the community of believers offers to its Founder and through him to the eternal Father... It displays the total public worship of the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, namely, the Head and his members’. As stated above, Archbishop Groeber details his objections in a 21-page memorandum to the German episcopate, in which he describes his ’uneasiness’ over certain excesses of the liturgical movement:

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 The eighth and ninth points deal with the growing ecumenical movement and Groeber criticises the doctrine emanating from this movement; theories stemming, in part, from the branch theory in vogue in the Nordic churches. In simple terms, the protestant churches ’together with the Catholic Church’ (zusammen mit der Kath. Kirche) do not form ’die Kirche Christi’ – a sort of invisible gathering of believers. The Catholic Church is not the invisible Church of the Protestants nor is the Church merely defined as ’Volk Gottes’ (the People of God). Groeber rightly insists, reading from the definition of the Church given by St. Robert Bellarmine, that the Church is a visible structure united in a same profession of faith, gathered in the communion of the sacraments and under the authority of the legitimate pastors, most notably, the Roman pontiff. Point number thirteen is a defence of the sacramental priesthood, against the overemphasis on the general priesthood. Here Groeber points out that the divine cult (worship) is exercised through hierarchical acts. Recall his famous definition of liturgy: Liturgie bedeutet den kirchlich autoritativ geregelten Gottesdienst. Groeber frequently makes mention of the Amt (office) of the priest, in contrast to Karl Borgmann’s work on the inner structure of Christian worship. Borgmann posits, in part, that the Church as the People of God is visible in the world as the community of faithful under the guidance (Fuehrung) of the office holder (presider). Borgmann adds: ’the faithful community is a priestly community’. Such a belief in a false mysticism regarding the ’inner structure’ of the Church leads to ’priestly acts of the community’, according to Borgmann. The responses of the faithful in Mass, particularly the Amen of the people at the conclusion of several notable prayers of the Mass, according to Groeber’s criticism, are introduced in the light of the theory that it is the community of believers, the priestly community that ratify the prayers offered by the priest. We cannot hold that the active participation of the faithful, in giving the responses, is a ratification of the Offering of the Mass (Messopfer). The excesses of the liturgical movement falsely introduced this notion based on the belief that this was the practice of the early Church (Urkirche). In the end, Groeber remarks that the sacramental priesthood is left ’in actu secundo’, giving way to the excesses of the Mass offered by the priestly community. In the sixteenth point, Archbishop Groeber criticises the Gemeinschaftsmesse, which he considered to be ’a temporary and peripheral phenomenon’. Again, Groeber condemns the statement of Borgmann, in which the celebrating priest utters the prayers of the Mass ’nur als Sprecher der Gemeinde’, in like fashion to the Protestant conception of the Diener am Wort. Groeber’s justification is found in the words of Saint Augustine: Nos (the priests) offerimus sacrificium, vobis (the people) non licet, and in the law of the Church: Potestatem offerendi Missae sacrificium habent soli sacerdotes. (CIC 1917, can. 802) The mission of the priest is an apostolic mission: he is sent to the community by the bishop, just as the Apostles were sent out into the world by Christ, to preach His Gospel and not their own doctrine: “Der Priester wird in der Gemeinde gesandt von seinem Bischof und nicht gerufen und bestellt von der Gemeinde... Er liest die Hl. Messe zwar fuer und mit der Gemeinde, aber nicht als der Beamte der Gemeinde.” Groeber carefully points out that a conception of the Holy Mass as dependent on the ratification of the people is not Catholic (…nicht Katholisch ist).



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The seventeenth and last point of Groeber’s memorandum deals with the use of German in the Mass, despite the non expedire of the Council of Trent (Sessio XXII, can IX). This point follows from, once again, from a false idea of the general priesthood. Groeber insists on the ’Verbindung mit der Kirche und Rom’, against various nationalistic movements, in vogue throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Groeber gives the 19th century example of a vicar general of his Archdiocese -- Freiherr von Wessenberg (1774-1860) who had reformed the Ritual of Constance: “in the entire Ritual of Constance, no longer could a single Latin word be found.” The Archbishop exposes how the rise in ’German Catholicism’ found many sympathies among the clergy and people, but how in their root, such nationalistic movements often seek a certain independence from Rome. The liturgical movement will continue its excesses throughout the 20th century, introducing its false ecclesiological and theological conceptions, conceptions denounced by Archbishop Groeber in his famous memorandum. At the time of the second Vatican Council, one finds that the first document to be discussed is that on the sacred liturgy. Much preparatory work had been done and changes introduced before the Council, paving the way to consider a reform of the liturgy. Even after the announcement of an ecumenical Council, Pope John XXIII will introduce in 1960 a reform of the rubrics of the Missal and Breviary, even though such discussion on reforms of the liturgy had been reserved for consideration by the Council fathers. The principles of the liturgical movement will be the basis for the ’novus ordo missae’, prepared by the appointed experts of the Consilium. In a new definition, found in the Institutio Generalis (no.7) under the title De Structura Missae, the Mass is there defined as ’The Lord’s Supper or Mass is a sacred meeting or assembly of the People of God, met together under the presidency of the priest, to celebrate the memorial of the Lord. Thus the promise of Christ, “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them”, is eminently true of the local community in the Church.’ Here we find expressed, almost word for word, the possible antithesis to Groeber’s memorandum. Pope Paul VI will insist that this definition should be corrected to include the notion of sacrifice but Groeber’s ‘uneasiness’ clearly finds an echo when one reads this definition of the Mass. One finds there expressed an overemphasis of the Sacrificial meal and the clear expression of the Mass as the assembly of the People of God under the presidency of the priest, recalling the excesses criticised by Groeber concerning the role of the faithful and the overemphasis of the general priesthood. Groeber himself concludes that a deep break in the earlier life of faith and religious tradition has followed with the splitting wide-open between ’old’ and ’new’ in such a manner that can no longer be bridged. One may see Groeber’s memorandum as pessimistic, and outdated in our time; nevertheless, it is a real attempt to examine the principles and theories behind the liturgical changes. Often, one remains fixed on what is external, especially in liturgical matters; without seeing the foundation on which it is built or the contemplation of God, to Whom the Church’s liturgy must lead. More than sixty years after Groeber’s famous memorandum, there is perhaps a greater emphasis on liturgy than ever before, and yet so much of what is written stops short of a real examination of liturgical principles. Whether one disagrees with Archbishop

 Groeber or rather sees him as somewhat of a prophetic figure, one cannot deny that his letter inspires one to look beyond what is visible, in order to contemplate that which remains unseen and which forms the object of our Faith.

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St Anthony, Abbot. Feast Day: 17th January (Lesson taken from Matins of the Breviarium Romanum) Anthony was an Egyptian, the child of noble and Christian parents, whom he lost while yet very young. On one occasion he entered a Church, and heard these words of the Gospel, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor. He took these words as if they were addressed to himself personally, for this was the obedience which he thought every word of the Lord Christ should meet with. He therefore sold his whole possessions, and gave the price to the poor. Being thus delivered from worldly entanglements, he set himself to lead on earth the life of an angel. Finding himself, as it were, about to enter the field of battle against Satan, he thought it wisest to add to the shield of faith, which he already possessed, all the rest of the armour of God, wherefore he observed all those who were eminent for any grace, and strove to copy them.■

Press release of the FSSP following upon the Decree of the Congregation for Bishops Fribourg (Switzerland), Saturday, January 24th, 2009 - www.fssp.org The Congregation for Bishops, having made public today the decree lifting the excommunication declared in 1988 regarding the four bishops ordained without pontifical mandate by Archbishop Lefebvre, The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter wishes to express its joy at the news of this step forward towards unity. Since its foundation, the Fraternity of Saint Peter has not ceased to witness to its double attachment to the Seat of Peter and to the Tradition of the Church, praying constantly that a reconciliation could be achieved between the Holy See and the Society of Saint Pius X. Today the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter unites itself completely to the hope of the Holy See, desiring “that this step be followed by the prompt accomplishment of full communion with the Church of the entire Fraternity of Saint Pius X, thus testifying true fidelity and true recognition of the Magisterium and of the authority of the Pope with the proof of visible unity”. (Decree of the Congregation for Bishops, 21 January 2009) The Fraternity of Saint Peter would like to express its profound gratitude to the Sovereign Pontiff. It sees in this magnanimous gesture a call to unity for all Catholics in order to spread in the world, faced with all the contradictions of our day, the Reign of Christ.