Pope set to bring back Latin Mass that divided the Church Pope Benedict XVI is understood to have signed a permission for priests to again celebrate the Mass used throughout the Church for nearly 1,500 years

I note:

It never was forbidden by Vat 2, which permitted English.  Very big deal, this.

More:

The new indult would permit any priest to introduce the Tridentine Mass to his church, anywhere in the world, unless his bishop has explicitly forbidden it in writing.

Which puts ball in bishop’s court.  Cardinal Joseph Zen, of Hong Kong, is said to be the source.  (He does not have a book on motorcycle maintenance, by the way.)

“There have been false alarms before, not least because within the Curia there are those genuinely well-disposed to the Latin Mass, those who are against and those who like to move groups within the Church like pieces on a chessboard,” a source told The Times. “But hopes have been raised with the new pope. It would fit with what he has said and done on the subject. He celebrated in the old rite, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.”

This saves the 1962 missal from gathering dust:

In a lecture in 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger said that it would be “fatal” for the Missal to be “placed in a deep-freeze, left like a national park, a park protected for the sake of a certain kind of people, for whom one leaves available these relics of the past”.

The old mass has the priest with his back to the people  (I missed this earlier.)  Finally, a very important point:

The advantages of the Mass, according to [its supporters], are in its uniformity and the fact that movements and gestures are prescribed, so that there is no room for “personalisation.”

Yes!  Like personalization by the deacon who used to say at the end, “Go, the mass never ends” — his version of “Ite, missa est,” commonly translated, “Go, the mass is ended.”

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Later: The Tridentine Mass-sayers who reject the Pope and Vatican 2 smell a rat in this indult business. 

1. Any such “Indult” Mass would not be the Traditional Latin Mass, but the Modernized Mass of 1962, which implements four waves of Freemason Hannibal Bugnini’s Modernism (1951, 1956, 1960, 1962) into the Traditional Latin Mass.
2. Any such “Indult” Mass would continue to mix in elements of the invalid Novus Ordo service, as is the case with most “Indult” Masses today.
3. The “Indult” Mass would continue to be infected with Novus Ordo service practices, such as using the Novus Ordo lectionary, giving the communion/cookie in the hand, using lay “ministers” and “ministresses,” using “altar girls,” eliminating the traditional Collect prayers and the Leonine prayers, transferring or eliminating traditional holydays, substituting Saturday “anticipated” Masses for Mass on the Lord’s Day, virtually abolishing the traditional Eucharistic fast and traditional days of fast and abstinence.
4. Any such “indult” would implicity deny the canonization of the apostolic Traditional Latin Mass in perpetuum by Pope St. Pius V acting for a Dogmatic Council.

Do not expect wholesale return to current Roman authority by these traditionalists.

#4 Daughter keeps me up on NY Times, sends me this about 7–11 shenanigans in the coming championship season:

It is not easy to conjure $500,000 out of the ether, but the Chicago White Sox have discovered a way. Their financial trick was really quite simple.

They changed their evening game times at U.S. Cellular Field.

No more 7:05 p.m. or 7:35 p.m. games, of which there are about 50. They will all begin, for the next three seasons, at 7:11 p.m., courtesy of 7-Eleven, the convenience store giant, which will pay the team an average of a half-million dollars a year to be the name behind the time.

Regarding which #4 says:

I wonder if Slurpees will now be sold at the park.
Hey, they have the guy with the margarita back pack,
so how far off can it be?

Then Daddy:

Slip gin into a Slurpee and you have an instant winner in the left field
bleachers, for sure.

The wit coruscates sometimes, does it not?

Rev. Donald McGuire SJ need not undergo rehab as sex offender for now, a Wis. judge decided.  It would involve discussing his past, which could be used against him in court, his lawyers argued.  They are not admissible, countered the prosecutor.  His lawyers want probation suspended pending appeal of his conviction, but prosecutors are mulling revoking of it and thus keeping him in jail.  He is currently in jail for violating it.

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Meanwhile, busy, cluttered, unstable new website notwithstanding, Sun-Times continues to ignore the McGuire story, as it ignored the seminary fatal crash on St. Mary of Lake grounds some months back.  As if priests’ issues are out of bounds.

Here’s an amazing piece from San Francisco, of all places in the Chronicle, in which Debra J. Saunders makes precisely the point to be made about Fox News:

AS FOX NEWS celebrates its 10-year anniversary, media watchers should appreciate how Fox, which tilts right, has provided balance to major new operations such as CNN and the New York Times, which tilt left.

Many tilt without knowing it.

Go to most newsrooms and you’ll find a staff that overwhelmingly voted for John Kerry in 2004, while the rest keep their politics to themselves lest they be considered biased. A survey of the Washington press corps found that 89 percent voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. It’s true, most reporters do their level best to tell a story straight and present both sides. To use Fox-speak, most reporters I know strive to be “fair and balanced.”

But they can’t escape the presumptions that underlie their stories, and they are likely not to notice the presumptions when all the newsroom management thinks alike. That’s how illegal immigrants became “undocumented workers” and global warming became a certainty. (Italics added)

It’s the old one about what one fish said to the other: “What water?”

The worst of it is: They have no idea that they’re biased. They think their positions are neutral.

And they say Fox is the biased one.

Do I like everything on Fox? No. I hit the remote when feuding talking heads are spouting prefab talking points and I can get a real news story on CNN. (Other times, I turn to Fox to escape the same on CNN.) I also turn to Fox because its coverage on the war in Iraq takes the longer view, and its coverage on intelligence eavesdropping does not read like an ACLU press release.

As for the Chris Wallace-Bill Clinton dustup:

Bill Clinton berated . . . Wallace for a “nice conservative little hit job” — just because Wallace asked Clinton a question. In a respectful tone, Wallace told Clinton that Fox viewers wanted him to ask why the former president had not done more to stop Osama bin Laden.

A Bubba tirade followed, when an answer would have worked fine.

As Wallace told the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, the surprising thing was that he (Wallace) was the only TV interviewer among many to ask Clinton that question, even though Clinton had been complaining about an ABC miniseries that faulted his handling of bin Laden. It is amazing no one else asked. It goes to show that Fox News keeps American media fair and balanced.

It was as if Wallace broke the rules and Clinton had to hit back (even threatening jobs as he left the studio).

A fool and his money are soon parted, you say?  Bosh, in view of the Ted Turner experience.  He still has his money.

“I am absolutely convinced that the North Koreans are absolutely sincere,” Turner said [in a Sept. 19, 2005, interview on CNN after meeting N. Korean officials]. “There’s really no reason for them to cheat” and use nuclear power for weapons instead of generating electricity and other civilian uses.

“I looked them right in the eyes, and they looked like they meant the truth,” he added. “I mean, you know, just because somebody’s done something wrong in the past doesn’t mean they can’t do right in the future or the present. That happens all the, all the time.” [Italics added]

On the other hand, he proves Barnum was right about suckers.

If you are tempted to resent Com Ed’s wanting to raise electricity prices, read Dennis Byrne in Chi Trib and Dan Miller in Sun-Times.  Between the two of them, you will be moved to resent the politicians who want to stop the world so we can all get off.

Byrne on “Playing politics with electricity rates” in part:

Nothing says more about the pandering, spineless nature of our current knot of politicians than their call for a special session of the Illinois General Assembly to zap one of the best deals that electricity consumers in Illinois have ever had.

The deal was made 10 years ago when ComEd, consumer groups, businesses and the politicians agreed to roll back electric rates more than 20 percent and freeze them there. ComEd customers have saved billions.

So what?  It’s close to election time, with the votes meat a-cooking.

Miller, with “New freeze would pull rug out under ComEd”:

Illinois’ electricity market for the last 10 years has been based on a complex infrastructure of laws and regulations negotiated and agreed to by all players, from the General Assembly and the Illinois Commerce Commission to the Citizens Utility Board and the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, and dozens of other special interest groups in between. Tampering with that infrastructure now threatens the reliability of Illinois’ electricity supply, the stability of every business enterprise in the state, and — make no mistake about it — the financial survival of the state’s biggest utility, Commonwealth Edison.

Look at this week-old story about Dems in pursuit of election victories and compare it with the weakness of a Chi Trib-Tackett or Sun-Times-Sweet column or so-called analysis. Nobody faults Wall St. Journal coverage, just its editorial page, as far as I know. This account of Dem strategy and strategists Schumer and Emanuel is enlightening and balanced. I can rarely say that for our local analyses.

Take on the NY Times?  Can Chi Trib do that, as this provocateur suggests? 

“Civic concerns, the long-term health of the paper and journalistic values” are losing out to shareholders’ interests, complains ex-publisher of the LA Times John Carroll. 

It’s a shame they are not more altruistic, like the Chandler family who sold the paper off for $8 billion of those shareholders’ money.