October 13, 2015
Dear Mary TV family:
Those who miss Mary TV’s streaming of the English Mass from St. James Church should know that this was due not to any restriction imposed by the parish itself but by a higher authority. If you are saddened by this development, please feel free to write to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and ask Cardinal Gerhard Muller to allow this streaming to continue (See below). What we are doing is strictly broadcasting the Holy Mass, i.e. disseminating the fundamental act of worship of the Church.
The second Vatican Council states in “Sacrosanctum Concilium”:
26. Liturgical services are not private functions, but are celebrations of the Church, which is the “sacrament of unity,” namely, the holy people united and ordered under their bishops [33]
Therefore liturgical services pertain to the whole body of the Church; they manifest it and have effects upon it; but they concern the individual members of the Church in different ways, according to their differing rank, office, and actual participation.
27. It is to be stressed that whenever rites, according to their specific nature, make provision for communal celebration involving the presence and active participation of the faithful, this way of celebrating them is to be preferred, so far as possible, to a celebration that is individual and quasi-private.
We hope and pray that the relevant ecclesiastical authorities recognize that such dissemination of the Mass is fundamental to the New Evangelization. Any obstacle to this dissemination is detrimental to the principles of Evangelization as well as the promotion of right doctrine and worship! The Church wants as many people as possible to participate in the Mass as a whole particularly by using today’s mass communications media. Imagine a situation where TV viewers are denied the opportunity to watch a papal Mass (which is the case only in countries like North Korea)! So it’s simply inexplicable that there’s a prohibition on the broadcast of a Mass being celebrated in a Catholic church in good standing and one which (as even the Zadar declaration of the Yugoslavian bishops’ conference acknowledges) attracts “numerous gatherings of the faithful from different parts of the world.” Surely the Eucharistic celebration in Medjugorje does not have any characteristics that make it off-limits to the rest of the world!
Request the CDF to clarify. Write:
His Eminence Cardinal Gerhard Muller
Prefect, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Piazza del S. Uffizio, 11, 00193
Roma, Italy
Sincerely,
Denis Nolan
MaryTV.tv
