"Springtime of Vatican II" Update

It’s Time To Get Rid of Marini

by Christopher A. Ferrara

        Bishop Piero Marini was the director of papal ceremonies during the reign of John Paul II. Somehow he has clung to that position at the beginning of the reign of Benedict XVI. It is time to get rid of this man for the good of the Church.

        The former personal secretary to Anibale Bugnini, mastermind of the disastrous New Mass of Paul VI, Marini has carried on his mentor’s legacy of liturgical destruction. It was Marini who devised the bizarre, embarrassing and even sacrilegious papal liturgies through which the whole Church had to suffer during John Paul’s long reign. For example, there was the pagan "purification" ritual during the Pope’s 2002 trip to Mexico City, during which a woman with a smoking bowl rubbed down the Vicar of Christ with herbs, while the entire world watched.

        A recent article at www.chiesa.espressonline.it (April 30, 2005) quotes Marini in "La Civiltà Cattolica" (1999, III, pp. 168-180), where he expounds his liturgical "philosophy" of the liturgy as show business:

        In the old liturgy, in use before the Second Vatican Council, the role of the master of ceremonies consisted in applying a series of rigid norms which could not be changed. Today one cannot organize a celebration without first having thought: who is celebrating, what is being celebrated, where is it being celebrated. The celebration is the point toward which converge diverse and reciprocally coordinated elements under the guide of that spirit of adaptation that is the soul of post-conciliar reform…. Everything that is thought out and predisposed in view of a celebration can be considered real and proper direction. One finds oneself acting, in a certain way, upon a stage. Liturgy is also a show.

        This, of course, is a formula for the total elimination of all orthodox liturgical forms and fixed liturgical traditions, in favor of liturgical "shows" put on by directors — like Marini — according to the latest fashions and techniques. That is precisely what we saw during the pontificate of John Paul II, and the results were uniformly as clumsy and silly as they were offensive to the sensus Catholicus.

        According to www.chiesa.espressonline.it, "In the Vatican, the strongest critic of this liturgical-musical metamorphosis is [the former] Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger." Now that Cardinal Ratzinger is Benedict XVI, a pressing question comes to the fore: When will the Pope banish this liturgical vandal, this son of Bugnini, from the Vatican and simply return to the traditional liturgy of the Roman Rite? After the papal "installation" (formerly coronation) Mass, none other than Marini was riding the new version of the "popemobile" with Pope Benedict. Let us hope and pray that that was the last time we shall ever see him. Readers should pray to Our Lady of Fatima for Marini’s removal from all positions of influence over papal Masses.