Card. Dulles on the Old Mass

Avery Robert Cardinal Dulles, S.J. †

Function: Priest of the Society of Jesus

Title: Cardinal Deacon of Santissimi Nomi di Gesù e Maria in Via Lata

Birthdate: Aug 24, 1918	Country: USA

Elevated: Feb 21, 2001	More information: www.catholic-hierarchy.org

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Card. Dulles on the Old Mass
Sept 12, 2004
“If there be anyone who contends that in order to be converted to the Catholic faith one must be first attracted by the beauty of the liturgy, he will have me to explain away."

(The Tablet, 5 July 2003) The American convert Cardinal Avery Dulles SJ writes of the pre-Vatican II Mass: “If there be anyone who contends that in order to be converted to the Catholic faith one must be first attracted by the beauty of the liturgy, he will have me to explain away.

Filled as I was with a Puritan antipathy toward splendour in religious ritual, I found myself actually repulsed by the elaborate symbolism in which the Holy Sacrifice is clothed.” Accustomed to Presbyterian worship, Dulles says that in the Masses he attended as an undergraduate “there was little external unity to be discerned. The priest, so far from telling the congregation when to sit or stand or kneel, carried out his tasks almost as though he were alone.

The congregation, for their part, were not watching with scrupulous exactitude the movements of the celebrant. Some, on the contrary, were reciting prayers on mysterious strings of beads which Catholics call rosaries. Others were thumbing through pages of prayer-books and missals, which, for all I knew, might have been totally unrelated to the Mass. Not even a hymn was sung to bring unity into this apparently dull and unconnected service.”

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