The communion in Christ has nothing of the self-assertion found in natural communities. It breathes of the Redemption. It liberates men from all self-centeredness. Yet such a communion emphatically does not depersonalize the individual; far from dissolving the person into the cosmic, pantheistic swoon so often commended to us these days, it actualizes the person’s true self in a unique way. In the community of Christ the conflict between person and community that is present in all natural communities cannot exist. So this sacred community experience is really at war with the depersonalizing ‘we-experience” found in mass assemblies and popular gatherings which tend to absorb and evaporate the individual. This communion in Christ that was so fully alive in the early Christian centuries, that all the saints entered into, that found a matchless expression in the liturgy now under attack-this communion has never regarded the individual person as a mere segment of the community, or as an instrument to serve it. (Dietrich Von Hildebrand: The Case for the Latin Mass)
Mass of St. Gregory the Great
Mass in the Church of the Nativity (1955)
Saint Johns Cathedral in Valletta Malta
Cologne Germany (1950’s)
Bishop at Pontifical Vespers
Ken,
That last one’s a Novus Ordo or I’m a monkey’s uncle. How’d that one slip in? ;^)
Yeah, it is the new rite, but I like the picture.
And where it is possible to find old large photos from divine services in Cologne?