Announcing the New Congregation for Monitoring Church Bulletins

As we all know, in recent days and months, the sacred dicasteries have taken some important steps to preserve the legacy of the Second Vatican Council. For explanation of how this is so, you can hardly do better than this article from The Pillar (https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/roches-rules-does-the-new-extraordinary). It explains how, in the spirit of collegiality, the CDW has pretended to arrogate to itself all kinds of prerogatives that would normally belong to the local bishop, in fulfillment of Vatican II’s dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium, and specifically, of its declaration that “The pastoral office, or the habitual and daily care of their sheep, is entrusted to [the local bishops] completely, nor are they to be regarded as vicars of the Roman Pontiffs, for they exercise an authority that is proper to them. … In virtue of this power, bishops have the sacred right and the duty before the Lord to make laws for their subjects, to pass judgment on them and to moderate everything pertaining to the ordering of worship and the apostolate.” (LG 27)

One of the most notable ways in which the new responsa fulfill this is that they take from the bishops jurisdiction over what may be printed in local church bulletins. As a wise young priest noted on Twitter, “At some point we went from ‘We have to modernize the liturgy so that young people will show up.’ to ‘If we don’t publish Latin Mass times, we will keep young people from showing up.’ ” However, this represents an obvious logistic problem: how to monitor the world’s church bulletins to make sure no one is advertising a Mass that young people want to go to.