[Question:]{.underline} Should I attend the New Mass when I cannot travel to attend the traditional Mass?
[Answer:]{.underline} The answer to this question is fundamental to our understanding of the crisis in the Church. The answer that will be given by the priests who celebrate under the 2007 Motu proprio of Pope Benedict XVI, Summorum pontificum, is quite clear. The New Mass is the “ordinary” form of the Roman rite, and the traditional Mass is the “extraordinary form”. While a person might have a personal preference for one or the other, such a personal preference does not exempt him from the general law of the Church, making the assistance at Mass on Sundays an obligation in conscience. Such can be the only logical answer of those priests and communities approved by the bishops and post-conciliar Rome, but who celebrate the traditional Mass.
However, the answer to this question will be quite different from a priest who celebrates the traditional Mass in virtue of the perpetual right guaranteed by the Papal Bull Quo primum of Saint Pius V (1570). Such a priest will clearly be free to answer the truth, namely that the New Mass of Paul VI is a compromise on the principles of Faith, in particular undermining belief in the divinity of Christ, in the Real Presence, and in the propitiatory value of the sacrifice of the Mass; that it is a compromise that attempts to fuse together some (not all) Catholic externals with a neo-protestant and neo-modernist way of thinking and acting..
If you, a traditional Catholic, assist at the traditional Mass, it is not because of personal preference for an old-fashioned “extraordinary” form. It is because you want to keep the Faith, live the Faith, sanctify your soul and go to Heaven, and because you know that the traditional Mass hallowed by seventeen continuous centuries of use by saints, is the most powerful means to do this that God has given to His Church. If you were to go to the New Mass when unable to travel to the traditional Mass, you would risk losing your Faith, you would be scandalized by the disrespect for God made man in the Blessed Sacrament, and you would not only fail to grow in the Faith and in the love of God, but would be in grave danger of bitterness and cynicism about a Church that has become so lukewarm as to allow such an abuse on such a widespread basis.
Consequently, for the love of Jesus who died for our sins, who lives in the Blessed Sacrament, always interceding for our behalf, do not participate in the New Mass. All the moral theologians say that the positive laws of the Church (such as attendance at Sunday Mass) do not oblige under grave inconvenience. That is why a person is not obliged to travel more than one hour to get to Sunday Mass. One hour travel time is considered a grave inconvenience. In this case, the grave inconvenience is the participation in a liturgy that is offensive to God, and quite simply evil, deliberately deprived of the beauty, goodness, truth, integrity and holiness that chacterize all the prayers and ceremonies of the true Catholic Mass.
Answered by Father Peter Scott, SSPX.