John Lamont argues that the Novus Ordo (NO) is illicit. I’ve enjoyed Lamont’s work in the past, so it was disconcerting to find him arguing that the continuation of my spiritual life would be habitual mortal sin. From his conclusion:
We can therefore conclude that the promulgation of the Novus Ordo by Missale Romanumhas no legal force, and that the Novus Ordo is illicit. It is not permitted for any Catholic priest to say it, and it is not permitted for any Catholic to attend it, except perhaps under the most exceptional circumstances (as perhaps at a funeral, where it is clear that attendance at it is not intended to be an act of worship but is simply an act of respect for the dead). Nor, according to the current Code of Canon Law, can attendance at the Novus Ordo satisfy the Sunday obligation; that obligation requires attendance at a mass of a Catholic rite, and the Novus Ordo does not belong to a Catholic rite.
[The Novus Ordo] could only be claimed to be a form of the Roman Rite if it is assumed that the Roman Rite is simply anything that the pope chooses to call the Roman Rite, and that the content of what is given this name by the pope is irrelevant to its identity.
The question is about the extent of the power of a pope’s fiat. While I agree with Lamont that there are limits, I disagree with him about how to understand the extent of those limits given that the pope himself has said the Mass reforms fall within them. Normally our opinion about whether something is permitted can be answered apart from considering whether it has been done, and we are certainly able to address the question of whether the NO falls within papal power in abstraction from whether the it exists or not. But the NO does exist, has saints, and has been the norm of worship for half a century. Nowhere in his argument does one detect a docility or presumption in favor of the NO as a clear exercise of the chair of Peter in the area of discipline. True, I agree with him that the normal avenues of defending liturgical reforms as organic developments do not defend the NO, and for me this means one has to move considerably beyond Newman’s conservative and balanced approach to defend the new rite. So what might that approach look like?
All agree that the NO is a move toward re-unification of Western Christianity divided in the Reformation. Leaving aside the tridentine response, Vatican II is intentionally a move toward integrating the whole of Western Christianity. Catholics cannot view Protestantism as a mere heresy, as though it were nothing but a historical label for a single erroneous theological claim, but it has to be taken as a melange of wrong ideas and worthwhile reforms. Good grief, we all still live among Protestants, and it’s silly to think that all there is to them is all heresy in every way. The NO reforms are indeed very suggestive of the Reformation (their radical nature, speed, vernacularization, popularization, humanism, etc.) so a defense of the NO will require a properly Catholic sympathy for the Reformation.
Just Thomism 