"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Mark Cameron, weighing in on the topic of missal revisions, eloquently argues that the '69, rather than the '62, ought to be brought more in line with the '65. Of the '65, which he describes as "a sort of halfway house between the traditional liturgy and Paul VI's radical revision of 1969," he writes:
Now actually, I think some of the proposed 1965 reforms were quite good. I have no problem, for example, with the Epistle and Gospel being read from the pulpit in the vernacular (as long as a decent translation is used - Douay-Rheims, Confraternity, or Catholic RSV - not the NRSV, please). Adding the "prayers of the people" was, I think, an appropriate change, and a restoration of medieval practice (although, again, in many Novus Ordo parishes this descends into weekly prayers for the advent of socialism or an exercise in group therapy -- some carefully written prayers for the Church, the dead, the sick, and civil society should be composed as models, leaving only one or two prayers to local discretion.)
But some of the other proposals seem misguided -- for example, the omission of the prayers at the foot of the altar (beginning with the "introibo at altare Dei", which people have known for centuries as the first words of the Mass), or of the Last Gospel (the prologue of the Gospel of John, perhaps the most profound text in the entire Bible) and the Leonine prayers at Low Mass (including the Prayer to St. Michael for protection from the devil, which is I think a salutary reminder of the powers of darkness in our age). These may be "extras" added to the rite over the course of the centuries, but they are good extras that only enhance and enrich the liturgy.
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