Two weeks ago dear faithful I addressed you with the words: "The Pope is dead, Long live the Pope !" and suggested to you that these words implied for us a "double duty" - a duty to pray for the repose of the soul of the leader who has left us, and especially to pray for the one whom, in God’s providence, will now be called to lead Christ’s Church.

Over the last two weeks we have celebrated Holy Mass together, first of all for the repose of the soul of John Paul II in the days of the week that followed the Pope’s death, and then last week we offered Holy Mass daily using the formularies of the Mass for the election of a Pope. Beginning tomorrow we will say daily the Mass of the Holy Ghost which is to be said during a conclave for the direction of the Spirit of God to enlighten the Cardinal electors.

I believe we stand at the crossroads once again as a Church. As I said on Divine Mercy Sunday (the first Sunday after Easter) what one Pope took away (the Divine Mercy devotion under John XXIII and the Tridentine Mass under Paul VI) another Pope can restore. Already under the pontificate of John Paul II the Divine Mercy devotion was fully restored to us and a limited restoration of the Mass was allowed with the permission of the so called "Indult Mass". Unfortunately, as is the case with many things Rome has said in the last three decades, the permission was not widely granted by local bishops especially where the local bishop was none too favorable towards the Old Mass.

A great mistake our Jewish forebears made in regards to the first coming of our Divine Savior was to expect him to be an earthly King of Glory with a terrestrial reign. His "Kingdom", he told Pilate was "not of this world". His triumph was one of life over death and through the shameful sign of a condemned "criminal’s" Cross - the usual Divine reversal of the human expected; the Divine Paradox ! Today’s traditionalists by and large have already set their criteria for accepting that Tradition has returned when they see the restoration of the externals of the Papacy, tiara and sede gestatoria (the portable throne upon which the Pope used to be carried into St. Peter’s Basilica.) I think a true Traditionalist is looking for much more than this !

Just days before the death of John Paul II, Cardinal Ratizinger had this to say concerning the crisis in the Church (and on Good Friday of all days):

"Lord, often your Church seems to be about to sink, and to be a boat full of holes… The face and clothing of your Church shock us. But it is we who are sullying it."

Tough talk indeed ! It takes a man to recognize a mess before he can clean it up. Indeed Cardinal Ratzinger is a man of tough talk about the New Mass as well. In the preface to a book about the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council he wrote as follows:

"What happened at the Council was something else entirely: in the place of the liturgy as the fruit of development came fabricated liturgy. We abandoned the organic, living, process of growth and development over centuries, and replaced it - as in a manufacturing process - with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product."

"The second great event at the beginning of my years in Regensburg was the publication of the Missal of Paul VI, which was accompanied by the almost total prohibition, after a transitional phase of only half a year, of using the missal we had had until then. I welcomed the fact that now we had a binding liturgical text after a period of experimentation that had often deformed the liturgy. But I was dismayed by the prohibition of the old missal, since nothing of the sort had ever happened in the entire history of the liturgy. The impression was even given that what was happening was quite normal. The previous missal had been created by Pius V in 1570 in connection with the Council of Trent; and so it was quite normal that, after four hundred years a new council, a new pope would present us with a new missal. But the historical truth of the matter is different. Pius V had simply ordered a reworking of the Missale Romanum being used, which is the normal thing as history develops over the course of centuries. Many of his successors had likewise reworked this missal again, but without ever setting one missal against another. It was a continual process of growth and purification in which continuity was never destroyed. There is no such thing as a "Missal of Pius V", created by Pius V himself. There is only the reworking done by Pius V as one phase in a long history of growth. (…) The prohibition of the missal that was now decreed, a missal that had known continuous growth over the centuries, starting with the sacramentaries of the ancient Church, introduced a breach of the liturgy whose consequences could only be tragic."

As we said above, the crisis of faith that all admit is within the Church is essentially one of liturgy. Cardinal Ratzinger, again, has also made this same point:

"When liturgy is self-made, however, then it can no longer give us what its proper gift should be: the encounter with the mystery that is not our own product but rather our origin and the source of our life. (…) I am convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing today is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy."

What might only be just around the corner ! All is, of course, mere speculation, but one thing is certain: for all of us, this is a time of great prayer!

Most Reverend Terence R. Fulham