Some find themselves offered not bread but a stone:

One Catholic, who did not want to trash his parish, says he finds more sustenance these days sneaking off to the old Latin Mass. This isn’t because he’s a traditionalist, but because of its quiet and almost mystical aesthetic: lots of bells, lots of incense, no “awful” hymns badly sung but gorgeous Latin chants instead.

Something not of the everyday variety. Exactly the opposite. It’s a pastoral consideration that escaped post-Vatican 2 liturgy change agents.

Bad music – and bad singers leading the singing – was a frequent young Catholic complaint. One complainer, understanding how superficial that sounds, told me that bad music for him turns what’s supposed to be a sacred time into a [cringe-producing] endurance test.

It’s downright embarrassing [for him] when the cringeworthiness takes place at a Catholic funeral and he’s surrounded by non-Catholic friends.

Sacramentalism used to be the thing, but in contemporary Catholicism it’s the person. Or so it seems.

We have taken our cue from Evangelical Protestantism, where grace (divine help) comes from praying with partners after service, for example, as at Calvary Memorial in Oak Park, and not from the sacrament.

Potential partners wait at the end of each service, usually couples. It’s ministry up close and personal, to use last year’s hot phrase. And a good thing.

Ritual was the prime medium in Catholicism, not one’s fellow worshipers. This was a major sticking point of the Reformation, contained in the question whether the sinfulness of the minister affected a sacrament’s grace-giving effect.

Ex opere operato was a key term, from or because of the thing done, vs. ex opere operantis, from or because of the one doing it.

It’s a 500-year-old divide. In bald terms, for the sake…

. . . where the worship is peaceful, quiet, and fruitful:

My mother, a musician, struggled to endure the off-key singers who led hymns, unfortunately for us all, at Sunday Mass in my hometown parish.

So sometimes she’d sneak out of Mass early Sunday and during the week, take me to daily Mass instead. No off-key singing there. No singing at all, actually. There was quiet, peacefulness, intimacy among the 20 or 30 communicants.

The lights were dim, the sermons short and to the point. “The apostle picked up his cross and followed Him,” the priest began one sermon I remember, then paused, then ended it: “Would that we would do the same.”

More, at Crux, by margeryeagan:

Barely a half-hour long, daily Mass felt to me mysterious and holy and sacred in a way a very busy Sunday Mass, with its ups and downs and all arounds, could…

Strictly speaking he’s the new Prefect of Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, and if you really want to be correct and solidify your credentials in the matter, of this dicastery (!).

Where the die is cast? At least where decisions are made about how mass is said, presumably binding on all ecclesiastical underlings, including cardinals, priests, bishops, and deacons.

Posted on 24 November 2014 by the inimitable Fr. John Zuhlsdorf:

Pope Francis has appointed Robert Card. Sarah, 69, as the new Prefect . . . Hitherto, Card. Sarah, from Guinea, has been the head of the Pontifical Council “Cor Unum.”

At Cor Unum, which oversees Caritas International, Sarah had got iffy about supplying poor people with condoms and the like, the better to not clutter the already crowded earth with their babies, Cor Unum being a disaster-relief organization (another dicastery, by the way) established…