Why Monsignor Bambera?

There is some good news coming out of Washington: On April 24, at our National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception there will be a Pontifical Mass in the EXTRAORDINARY FORM celebrated by his Eminence Dario Cardinal Castrillion Hoyos, former President of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei.

While you wouldn't catch anyone at the Scranton chancery office actually celebrating the Extraordinary Form at our OWN Cathedral, here we see the Cardinal coming to America's Cathedral to help celebrate His Holiness' 5th year as the Successor to Peter.

They are looking for donations to help EWTN broadcast this Mass, which I'm sure the Diocese would rather pre-empt in favor of some riveting Dan Gallagher commentary, but anyway, please donate here to help defray some costs.

In other news, Edward Cardinal Egan will also celebrate a Pontifical Mass in the Extraordinary Form (see a pattern here?) on March 25 at the Church of the Holy Innocents in Manhattan. This same church is where our retired Bishop with a love of Tradition, James Timlin, also celebrated a Pontifical Mass at the request of the Society of St. Hugh of Cluny.

He just can't celebrate one when asked by a similar local society in his own Diocese, it would seem. Right, Monsignor Bambera?

Andrea Tornielli ran a post where he states that worldwide since Pope Benedict's Summorum Pontificum took effect roughly 138 Bishops or Cardinals have celebrated Masses according to the liturgical books of 1962. We can't even get the Scranton Diocese to recognize the authority of the priest to say the Old Mass without Monsignor Bambera coming down with a case of apoplexy.

Just about two years ago there were several locations where the Extraordinary Form was available in this Diocese namely Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Plains, Nanticoke, and Hazleton.

Now only Scranton and Hazleton is left. What about Tioga county? Bradford? Wayne or Pike? Susquehanna? Monroe?

Guessing the agenda of the chancery office is not a difficult task. While the Extraordinary Form is on the rise throughout the Church, here in the backwards Diocese of Scranton it is the opposite. The Old Mass is disappearing, and those few priests who dare to offer it get harassed and eventually are sent away. Punished. For doing what it is their right to do.

Because, as Pope Benedict clearly wrote in his Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum "...each Catholic priest of the Latin rite, whether secular or regular, may use the Roman Missal published by Bl. Pope John XXIII in 1962, or the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970, and may do so on any day with the exception of the Easter Triduum. For such celebrations, with either one Missal or the other, the priest has no need for permission from the Apostolic See or from his Ordinary."

You read that correctly Monsignor Bambera. A priest doesn't need permission from his Ordinary. So says the Pope. And you aren't the Ordinary, (in case you didn't know). So where does that power come from that you wield so mercilessly over the cowering priests of this Diocese?

"But Traddy!" you say. "Didn't the chancery just start a new Latin Mass?"

Well, if you meant to say "didn't the chancery just wipe some crumbs off their table for the traditionalists?" Then yeah. I would agree.

Plans were afoot as I reported here to get a priest trained so say the Old Mass, and to have a Mass said regularly in Wilkes-Barre to replace the one we lost last year. But when Bambera and his gang got wind of the news they did everything they could to obstruct our plans, they bullied the priests involved and inserted themselves fully into the plans and disrupted everything.

But I am quite convinced that if some priest wanted to have an ecumenical love-in with the local Protestants at his parish where they would be performing some pseudo catholic-like mass thingy complete with guitars, tambourines, and grape juice, that would have been greeted with joyful weeping and confetti strewn into the air from those at the chancery.

Oh wait! That's called the "Neocatechumenal Way" and they've already been welcomed into the Diocese. If I'm not mistaken, they've actually held their little "revival meeting" type clown masses at the Cathedral.

But when Tradition is touted it is a thing to be regulated. Watched closely. Discouraged. Stopped.

Why is that Monsignor Bambera? Why do you bully priests with a sense of Tradition for veiling the chalice? For wearing black vestments? For wearing traditional roman vestments? For doing things that the Church has always done? Why is tradition scorned and innovation praised?

I almost forgot to mention the other place to attend the Extraordinary Form in the Anti-Diocese of Scranton.

The Society of Saint Pius X has a chapel in Pittston. Many may start to go there if chancery officials don't get a sense of the shifting wind, get with the program, and allow priests to use the Extraordinary Form without intimidation and threats.

But Monsignor Bambera wouldn't know anything about that, right?