Here's Another Puzzle For Traditionalists
Pelosi was given the honor of meeting with the Pope on Saturday.
Pelosi was also invited to do a reading during Mass at St Patrick’s Catholic American Parish in Rome. But there was some form of a “security incident” according to Paulist Fr. Steven Petroff, rector of St. Patrick’s, who was saying the Mass. The Rome correspondent for The Epoch Times described it as Pelosi being “heckled.”
We know little else about the incident, except that according to Fr Petroff, there was some type of disruption that caused her security detail to take her out of the mass before she could do the second reading, which would be Hebrews 4: 12-13:12 For the word of God is living and effectual, and more piercing than any two edged sword; and reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit, of the joints also and the marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
13 Neither is there any creature invisible in his sight: but all things are naked and open to his eyes, to whom our speech is.
If I were she, I might take the circumstances as a caution of some sort, but I doubt if she even gave the passage any thought or study before she was going to read it. It may as well have been in Latin.Which brings me to yet another puzzle: Pelosi, born in 1940, would have been confirmed in the early 1950s, well before any innovations in the Church. She would have been 30 by the time the novus ordo was promulgated, in other words a cradle Catholic fully formed by adulthood, all of that time hearing the mass in Latin under the old calendar and lectionary. According to traditionalists, this is just the thing that will restore the Church, right?
So how come Pelosi is at odds with the very wing of the Church that's most sympathetic to traditionalists? I suspect her own Abp Cordileone would have problems with her serving as a lector within his archdiocese (I don't know if she ever does -- if anyone knows, I'll be interested to hear). And I think this goes to the question of how the Church has changed since Vatican II.
All visibly attended mass, but I very much doubt if any ever went to confession, or if they did, it never had much effect. None seems ever to have had a problem with the public scandal he created, but they were all happy to campaign on the Catholic brand.
It's plain that the US bishops are less and less comfortable with that sort of arrangement, and Abp Cordileone has been increasingly vocal in his warnings to Pelosi that Catholic politicians shouldn't campaign on the brand if they don't support Catholic teaching.
This is a post-Conciliar development and a good one. It's reflected in a YouTube presentation by Bp Barron prior to the Catholic Paul Ryan's retirement as Speaker suggesting that Republican views like Ryan's were incresingly acceptable to Catholics and, by extension, the Catholic hierarchy. Ryan, born in 1970, was also formed entirely under novus ordo.
One clear intent of the Vatican II constitutions that produced novus ordo was to increae lay involvement in the mass and, by implication, the overall life of the Church. It's significant that somehow a vetus ordo machine politician like Speaker Pelosi should find herself in difficulties trying to participate in a novus ordo mass, in Rome, so soon after meeting with the pope.
But the changes go beyond that. There was nothing new in the clergy abuse scandal. Cardinal McCarrick, born in 1930, was convicted of abuse committed in the 1990s but was almost certainly part of a pattern over a much longer period, and which wasn't unique in the pre-Conciliar, Latin mass hierarchy. It was only in a post-Conciliar environment that laity could play a major role in addressing this problem.
I don't see how a return to the bad old days helps anything.
