When we talk about the active participation of the laity in Mass, are we talking about the institution of extraordinary ministers of the sacraments or are we talking about the way we pray during Mass? Are we praying as a collective group of Catholics, in a mass act of public worship, or are we talking about having equal rights to serve the sacraments? It seems with the Novus Ordo, we have become all about "equal rights". But when has the Church ever supported "equal rights"? I have seen the Church become progressively more and more democratic and progressively more and more about equality to the extent that it has become less of a Church and more of a political party that bears the name "Catholic Church". I have seen deacons, priests, and bishops become sell-outs to the spirit of liberal democracy and abandon any other political system that has been favorable to the Church throughout the centuries. What I see when I look at the politicization of our Church is not a "de-politicized" Eucharist but a rather heavily politicized Eucharist that equates democratic values in human society with official Church doctrine. This is the "active participation" that has become of the Novus Ordo. It is lousy and inept and spiritually damaging to the Church. It's not that the Church needs reform. I did not enter the Church to reform it, after all. I entered into the Church to be a churchmen. What I will say is that this spirit of democratic ideology has no place in the Church, it is not the Church. To state, as I did in my last entry, that our clergy need to seek to abolish the Novus Ordo, is not my pinning up of the 95 Theses as the heretic Martin Luther did. It is my observation that the Novus Ordo has become an obstacle in the prayer life of the Church. Frankly, if we're going to make all of Pope Francis the Heretic's encyclicals dogmatic, even as they change Church teaching, we need to embrace the fact that Quod Primum is also explicit dogma and remember that any one among us who even sets foot in a Novus Ordo parish is frankly not even a Catholic, they've been automatically excommunicated.
What we need is consistency and the Neo-Catholics have become inconsistent vermin that occupy the Church like rats do a hotel. What we do to rats is exterminate them. Like rats, there is no other group that needs more systematic extermination from the Church than Neo-Catholics. They are probably worse than the more obvious heretics like Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, Tim Kaine, Nancy Pelosi, or Joe Biden. These are the kind of heretics that still insist they possess a formal communion with the more obvious heretics by the mere fact that "authority" hasn't properly pronounced them excommunicated nor declared them excommunicated so we must "obediently submit" to authority even though authority is scandalizing us by allowing us to believe we are in a "true communion" with false Catholics. Neo-Catholics, as I have said before, seem more intent on conserving the problems that the liberals have created in the name of authority which they see as rooted in piety but is rooted in a fervent rejection of tradition and a fervent repudiation of Catholic theology throughout the centuries. Neo-Catholics have gone along with this democratic spirit and have greatly done aid in conserving the democratic spirit that has crept into the Novus Ordo liturgy.
Kwasniewski addresses the issue of active participation. What is meant by the issue of active participation as he understands it, is not the implementation of more lay ministers of the sacraments but the participation of prayer. We see in the traditional rites, there is a greater call for the spirit to engage in prayer as the body is taken through the motions of prayer. In the East, we practice bows, we cross ourselves, we stand, we raise our arms. Any one who has been to a more ancient traditional liturgy also knows that in the West, they kneel, they stand, they cross themselves, they go through these motions because the body is inherently connected to the spirit. Unlike the Platonic philosophy where the soul is a slave to the body in a dualistic combat between soul and body, the body is an earthen vessel for the soul and its service is to assist the soul in attaining to heavenly things. Hence, the body is put through these ascetical disciplines.
Further, the laity become engaged in a communal form of worship that exceeds the spirit of individualism in the Novus Ordo. In the Novus Ordo, the laity have the option of receiving Eucharist on the tongue or in the hand. In the traditional rites, that is not an option. The Novus Ordo stresses option and choice as has been talked about. This entails not active participation but individual participation. The traditional rites stress the communal form of worship that when we see one brother kneeling, that is because either he is not as familiar with the rite, or we're all supposed to kneel in reverence at that moment with him. In the Byzantine rite, we all fall face to the ground during our Presanctified Liturgy. This is how we participate in the Liturgy. Active participation is not about having more laity serve the sacraments nor about having more laity go their own way in the liturgy. The Divine Liturgy is not a democracy. The Catholic Church has no place in either its liturgy or in its theology for the democratic ideology that the Novus Ordo heretics are attempting to fuse into its worship and tradition. That we even consider this a discussion when Church teaching has been unambiguous and instead defend a Pope who has been anything but unambiguous at best is an appalling circumstance that the Church has been placed in.
I suppose critics of Kwasniewski could state here that "active participation" does not entail the communal worship and I would contend with them stating that the worship in the liturgy is public, therefore the active participation must be a public service to the Church, ergo, not about individuality. The public worship of the Church calls us to abandon our individuality and enter into communion with God. That is active participation. We cannot come into communion with God if we are looking at our own selves and only concerned with our own wishes in the participation. Participation in holy worship is about deification. We are not divine in our own right but made divine by God. If we are going to allow him to accomplish this act of deification, we need to abandon ourselves and embrace a more active participation in public worship. The Novus Ordo centers the worship on man and away from God.
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