Diane Montagna

Sub tuum praesidium confugimus, Sancta Dei Genetrix.

JUST IN: Newly Published Letters Refute Vatican Claim That TLM Pilgrimage Failed to Specify Its Request — dianemontagna.substack.com/p… New letters have emerged concerning the Vatican’s refusal to let the fifteenth annual Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage Ad Petri Sedem enter St. Peter’s Basilica in procession to pray for the Pope and adore the Most Blessed Sacrament. They confirm reports on the organizers’ Sept. 8 request and directly refute the Vatican’s claim that the request was not specific enough. Today the Italian blog @messainlatino published three letters documenting the exchanges: Archbishop Paolo Rudelli’s Aug. 7 refusal of a request to celebrate Mass, Fr. Claude Barthe’s Sept. 8 request to enter the Basilica for prayer and Eucharistic adoration, and Archbishop Rudelli’s Sept. 30 reply. MiL also published the text of a June 12 letter to Pope Leo XIV requesting permission to celebrate Mass. Original letters with English translation here: dianemontagna.substack.com/p…

JUST IN: Bishop Athanasius Schneider Offers Mass for Pope Francis’s Soul at St. Mary Major, Calls for Liturgical Peace Read the official English text of Bishop Schneider’s Oct. 24 homily at the Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage here: dianemontagna.substack.com/p…

NEW: As reported earlier today, the Vatican Secretariat of State’s letter to Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage organizers, denying their request to enter St. Peter's Basilica to pray for the Holy Father and adore the Most Blessed Sacrament at the Altar of the Chair, was dated Sept. 30. However, sources indicate the letter took roughly 10-12 days to arrive by post, and so organizers did not receive it until closer to mid-October.

LATEST: As the Vatican Secretariat of State did not specify in their Sept. 30 letter what precise request was being denied, some have asked what pilgrimage organizers had requested in their letter of Sept. 8. I had included the content of their request in my article earlier today, but have now further specified it, writing: In his letter of 8 September, Abbé Barthe had acknowledged the Secretariat of State’s refusal to authorize a Mass in the usus antiquior, the older form of the Roman Rite, in St. Peter’s Basilica this year. He then asked: “May we nevertheless, this coming 24 October, enter the Basilica in procession, pray for the Pope at the Confession, and adore the Blessed Sacrament at the Altar of the Chair? The Basilica’s sacristy indicates to us that this would be possible at 1 p.m., should you grant us permission.” Article here: dianemontagna.substack.com/p…

LATEST: A few photos from today’s ‘Summorum Pontificum’ pilgrimage. Vatican and Italian security allowed pilgrims to enter the square as far as the obelisk, but as reported yesterday, the Vatican Secretariat of State barred the procession from entering St. Peter’s Basilica to pray at the tomb of St. Peter. I asked a Vatican security official what he thought of the group. He said: “Very beautiful and peaceful.”

JUST IN: The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith today released a new document titled “VENITE AD ME [COME TO ME]: Considerations on the Transmission of the Faith in an Epochal Change” — vatican.va/roman_curia/congr… Signed by DDF Prefect Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the section on Liturgy (n. 90-94) states: 90. The second consideration linked to the rediscovery of the centrality of the proclamation of the kerygma concerns the liturgy. If the heart of the Christian proclamation is the encounter with God’s saving love in Christ, the liturgy constitutes the privileged place in which this mystery is celebrated and communicated sacramentally. For this reason, it plays a central role in handing on the faith, serving as the beating heart of ecclesial life, where the community is nourished by the Word of God and the Bread of eternal life. In this regard, we must move beyond a reductive view that regards the liturgy as merely a ritual framework for ecclesial life. The liturgy, in fact, is first and foremost an experience of faith, even before it is a teaching, in that it allows the faithful to participate in gestures, words, silences, and symbols, thereby experiencing the mystery of Christ in a living way. As stated in Evangelii Gaudium, “the Church evangelizes and is herself evangelized through the beauty of the liturgy”[94]; precisely through its symbolic power and its ability to engage the whole person fully, the liturgy becomes an authentic place of proclamation and encounter with the Lord. In the liturgical action, and particularly in the Eucharist, we are drawn ever more deeply into the Paschal Mystery, while the sacramental character of the Church—called to be a sign of God’s love for humanity—is made visible. In this sacramental event, the encounter with the Risen One becomes a shared and vital act that educates believers not only by “informing” them, but by shaping them from within so that they may become participants in the mystery being celebrated. For this reason, in the liturgy, faith is transmitted in a performative way: we do not merely speak of God but enter into a relationship with him. The liturgy is living memory and tradition, generating and shaping Christians capable of bearing witness to the salvation they have encountered: by participating in liturgical prayer, one enters, in fact, into a history, into a shared memory that spans the centuries. Therefore, to celebrate means first and foremost to receive a faith that has been believed, lived, and prayed by others before us. 91. Furthermore, this dynamic highlights the eminently communal dimension of the liturgy. Faith, in fact, is not transmitted solely through individual proclamation or teaching, but within a people who celebrate together. In the liturgy, the believer is never isolated but is part of a “we” that precedes, accompanies, and transcends him or her. This communal dimension serves as a powerful antidote to the allure of a selfish and individualistic lifestyle, which, as we have already seen, is so widespread today in many contexts. Precisely because it is an ecclesial and communal experience, the celebration of the faith is closely linked to processes of inculturation—that is, to the effort “to communicate more effectively the truth of the Gospel in a specific context, without renouncing the truth, the goodness and the light which it can bring whenever perfection is not possible.”[95] Applied to the liturgy, this perspective requires preserving the richness of the Church’s symbolic tradition, while at the same time making it accessible and meaningful to the men and women of our time, within a healthy and fruitful tension between fidelity to tradition and the comprehensibility of the message being celebrated. 92. From the perspective of the transmission of the faith, therefore, the liturgy is of crucial importance, in accordance with the ancient adage lex orandi, lex credendi. [96] It follows that the liturgical celebration cannot be reduced to a mere formal performance, but must be an action in which the signs truly speak to the minds and hearts of the faithful, expressing in a vivid and concrete way the one faith of the Church and strengthening in each believer the awareness of being a member of the Body of Christ. Only through fully conscious participation, which presupposes an adequate education in liturgical language, can faith be transmitted not as an abstract doctrine, but as a new life that is communicated by attraction in daily life. The young Augustine also bore witness to this power of the liturgy; years after that experience, he was able to write: “How greatly I wept at your hymns and canticles, how deeply was I moved by the sounds of your Church sweetly singing! Those voices flowed into my ears, and your truth melted into my heart until the feeling of devotion surged up from within; my tears ran down, and I was the better for them.”[97] Through the beauty of the signs and the power of the Word, the liturgical action thus becomes the generative source of the Church’s mission, enabling the community to give an account of the hope that dwells within it, through the credibility of a life transfigured by grace. For this reason, special care must be taken in the celebrations, and a mystagogical accompaniment of the younger generations is necessary, so that they may fully understand and live out what they celebrate in the liturgy. 93. In addition, the liturgy can be experienced in different ways. Indeed, popular piety also has its own way of expressing a liturgical sensibility, which takes different forms according to the various cultures. To understand this, we can cite a beautiful account by Romano Guardini, in which he recounts his visit to Sicily: “Today I saw something magnificent: Monreale. […] When we arrived—it was Holy Thursday—the solemn Mass had proceeded beyond the consecration. […] What should I say about the splendor of this place? […] The crowd sat and watched. […] Almost no one was reading. All were living in the gaze; all were intent on contemplation. Then it became clear to me what the foundation of true liturgical piety is: the ability to perceive the ‘sacred’ within the image and its dynamism. Monreale, Holy Saturday. […] Every now and then a ray of sunlight pierced through the vault, and then a golden smile spread through the space above. […] Yet the most beautiful thing was the people. […] The sacred ceremony lasted more than four hours, but there was a lively participation throughout. There are different ways of prayerful participation. One takes place through listening, speaking and gesture, and the other through seeing. The first way is a good one, and in Northern Europe it is the only way we know. But we have lost something that was still present in Monreale: the capacity for living-in-the-gaze, for dwelling in the act of seeing, for welcoming the sacred in the form and event, by contemplating them.” [98] 94. Particular care should also be taken to enable the faithful in every diocese, as well as those who are approaching or returning to the community of believers, to encounter the various liturgical sensibilities present within the tradition of the Catholic Church. With due respect for the liturgical norms currently in force, pastors are called to highlight the richness of the Catholic liturgical heritage—consider, for example the variety of musical styles that characterize it—in such a way as to enter into contact with the different sensibilities of their contemporaries. Specific attention should also be given to accompanying the significant stages of human life with the Church’s blessing. Especially in the West, there is a progressive loss of the collective memory of rites and ritual practices in favor of a highly radical form of individualism; yet this does not eliminate the anthropological need for rituality, to which human beings have always responded in different ways. The Christian community grows and is built up through ritual practices, and in this regard, the Church’s rich spiritual heritage represents a precious and inexhaustible resource.

JUST IN: Pope Leo XIV’s Doctors say “no further treatment is necessary.” @HolySeePress has just announced that Dr Luigi Carbone and Professor Stefano Margaritora have issued the following statement regarding the Pope’s postoperative recovery: “Today, the final histopathological findings and molecular biology analyses of the tissue removed during the surgical procedure performed on the Holy Father were reported. The results confirmed that the disease was a pulmonary adenocarcinoma and that it was localized. A subsequent oncological assessment confirmed that no further treatment is necessary.”