Fraction in the New Rite


To handle the Host was the priviledge of the ordained, as it says.

Dietrich von Hildebrand had noticed the direction the innovations were taking as early as 1966. Writing in the October issue of Triumph in that year, he noted:

"The basic error of most of the innovations is to imagine that the new liturgy brings the holy sacrifice of the Mass nearer to the faithful, that shorn of its rituals the Mass now enters the substance of our lives. For the question is whether we better meet Christ in the Mass by soaring up to Him, or by dragging Him down into our workaday world. The innovators would replace holy intimacy with Christ by an unbecoming familiarity. The new liturgy actually threatens to frustrate the confrontation with Christ. It discourages reverence in the face of mystery, precludes awe, and all but extinguishes a sense of sacredness."

Comments

In fairness to the rite, though it doesn't say anything good about the people involved in this case, we should note that this practice of laity assisting in the fraction is forbidden (was it ever not, I can't track down a refernence right now.)