Two Different Churches

Want a quick contrast study between the Church of the Ages and the Church of Vatican II? Here is the Collect from today’s N.O. Mass, the fourth Sunday after Epiphany (I ignore that “ordinary time” stuff anymore.)

“Grant us, Lord our God, that we may honor you with all our mind, and love everyone in truth of heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.”

Love God, love your neighbor. The two greatest commandments. Cool. As far as it goes…

Now the one used for many centuries until you-know-when:

“O God, Who knowest us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that, by reason of the frailty of our nature, we cannot always stand upright; grant to us such health of mind and body, that by thy strength and protection we may overcome all evils, whereby for our sins we are justly afflicted.”

Same Gospel reading in both the current N.O. and the 1962 (TLM) Missals, by the way. But what a difference in the Collect. Almost like, well, two different Churches. Hence, my headline for this post.

This stark contrast, which is not all that unusual if you start comparing Missal texts between the TLM and the Novus Ordo, got me thinking. It seems the more I learn about what has been done to the Liturgy over the past 75 years or so, the more I see the predominant pattern as the intentional suppression of the sense of sin. Since the old saying lex orandi, lex credendi is undoubtedly true, (the law of prayer is the law of belief), it comes as no surprise that a liturgy with minimal mention of sin leads to a sensus fidelium in which the sense of sin is also minimalized. And there you have the post-Vatican II Church. Sin? Whazzat? Confession? They still do that outside of Lent? Etc.

There are many more examples of the creeping liturgical and doctrinal destruction of the actual Catholic Church, of course, but to me, none is so pervasively destructive of the true Faith as the elimination of sin from our vocabulary. If you attend the Novus Ordo as I am constrained by circumstances to do, when was the last time you heard a homily (except on EWTN) that even mentions sin, much less any of the Four Last Things other than Heaven? Yeah, I thought so.

I am told that the newer generations of priests are as a whole much more orthodox than their V-2 Generation predecessors, and are much more willing to preach and teach the Faith without pretending that the Church was founded in 1965. That would be a very good thing. Let us pray it is true.

Laudetur Jesus Christus!