(www.RemnantNewspaper.com) No more than three days after I penned the article on today's liturgical innovation becoming tomorrow's Mass, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (CDW) issued this response to a dubium on "liturgical dance and drama ministry":

"The liturgical law of the Roman Rite does not foresee the use of dance or drama within the Sacred Liturgy, unless particular legislation has been enacted by the Bishops' Conference and confirmed by the Holy See. Any other practice is to be considered an abuse."

Thus, liturgical dance in the Mass is currently, for the moment, an "abuse." However, if enough liturgical dancers in your nation can convince your Bishops' Conference (which has zero ecclesiastical authority under Canon Law) to enact "legislation" (as if they were congress) confirmed by the Holy See (i.e. the CDW) then dancing is no longer an abuse, but magically becomes an officially sanctioned part of the Mass!

The response by the CDW also went on to state, "These activities could, however, be useful outside the sacred liturgy in the work of catechesis and evangelization, if appropriately directed by the Bishop and his clergy."

Translation? "To tide you innovators over, until you can ram dancing legislation through your Bishop's Conference and we can confirm it, feel free to dance until your heart's content outside the liturgy as long as your Bishop is ok with it."

Once again the premise is confirmed by the CDW that previously unheard of and deleterious liturgical innovations are only to be considered "abuses" and therefore "bad" if an administrative organ of the Vatican says so. However, if said administrative organ, at some time in the future, says such "abuses" are good, they become good!

After forty years of opposing and mocking liturgical dance as a ridiculous "abuse" and distancing the practice from the New Mass, it will be interesting to see the inevitable about-face on this issue from the Neo-Catholic media.  Having joined in the liberals' flawed premise of legal positivism in the Church, the self-styled "conservative" Neo-Catholics have unwittingly become nothing more than the useful idiots of the Catholic left.  Each liturgical victory for the innovators is eventually accepted by the Neo-Catholics as legitimate and then defended as conservative as compared to the liberals' next liturgical move towards Modernism.  As we have seen for the last 40 years, this strategy only keeps leading us in one direction.

http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2012/10/for-record-cdw-response-to-dubium-on.html