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| A Trappist offering the old rite of Mass |
I once received a letter from a religious superior who explained that his community had been quietly integrating the traditional Latin Mass into its life, with several younger members learning the Mass and beginning to delve into the breviary. They all felt they had so much to learn. He asked me for advice and reading recommendations. He also noted that while some prelates had encouraged them to learn the TLM, others had strongly discouraged them, and asked me why I thought there was such a sharp division among prelates over this issue. Here’s what I replied.
Dear Father,
Thank you for your very kind and encouraging letter.
The questions you are raising are enormous ones, and very delicate, too. The problem is, to speak quite frankly, when one starts to enter into the great liturgical tradition, one can’t help noticing all kinds of ways in which it is obviously superior, from the point of view of offering worthy adoration and praise to God, cultivating the right interior and exterior dispositions, and edifying all who participate in it. The old liturgy was slowly built up as a great hymn of glory to the omnipotent God, to the humanity of the Savior, and to the invisible working of the Holy Spirit. It is supple, generous, meditative, profound, and poetic. (I speak now of both the Mass and the Office, and indeed of all the sacramental rites and the blessings.)
As one discovers these things, one also feels pained by the loss of so much beauty and reverence in the reformed rites, which will increasingly look and feel like committee-made rational constructions—which, of course, they are, even if there is no heresy or intentional sacrilege in them as such. The reformers exhibited an almost pathological aversion to symbolism, ceremonial, repetition, silence, chant, and the self-surrender of a fixed order of worship with detailed rubrics.
When Catholics, whether lay or clerical, rediscover the old rites today, they are often struck, on the contrary, by how utterly appropriate all these things are to a mysterious action in which God is the primacy agent and we are His collaborators and cultivators, privileged to step for a moment into the celestial worship of the Eternal High Priest.
Moreover, it cannot be accidental that religious communities around the world began to crumble apart and bleed their members as the liturgical axis around which their entire lives had once revolved collapsed into a shameful chaos. The Second Vatican Council taught in Perfectae Caritatis that “the religious life bears witness to the fruitfulness of the sacraments.” If that is true, what does the catastrophic decline of religious life tell us about the Church’s “updated” sacramental regime?
For these reasons (and others that I go into in this article), I am convinced that the long-term health and even viability of the religious life and of the priesthood will depend on reintegrating—and, for some communities, simply being completely dedicated to—the traditional rites of the Latin Church (and here I include Roman, Dominican, Norbertine, Carthusian, Ambrosian, and other such rites and uses), which have been powerhouses of holiness and touchstones of theology for so many centuries.
Moreover, as we briefly discussed in person, it is remarkable how well the laity respond to traditional expressions of the Faith. Wherever the old Mass has taken root, the congregation suddenly “juventates,” if I may coin an expression: young families pop out of the woodwork, while older folk feel comforted by the calmness and prayerfulness of the rite.
Here is where a difficulty begins to arise. Once a person gets a really good taste, a deep draught, of these rites, he wants to use them more. Eventually, he may want to use them exclusively, because he can so easily rest in their stability, flow along with their naturalness and rightness. Basically, the old liturgy is “built for praying.” No one feels this more viscerally than priests and religious do. As with a taste of freshly baked bread or the finest wine, so in matters liturgical: sensitive souls hesitate to go back to that which is less satisfying to the spiritual palate.
After a time, one who has entered deeply into the old Mass notices that the old Office is perfectly coordinated with it: there is a continual back-and-forth between the lections at Mass and the chapters in the Office, and the calendar, of course, is richer and more coherent. So the Mass leads to the Office, and soon it becomes challenging, if not frustrating, to be switching back and forth between the new calendar and the old, or the new Liturgy of the Hours and the old Mass, etc. Put simply, the two worlds are different, very different, and they do not readily lend themselves to coexistence.
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| Benedictines chanting Tenebrae in Australia |
Now, I will qualify that last statement this way. In a community like the Oratorians, where there are many priests and where congregations of the faithful show up on a regular basis for worship, one can have a fairly dense schedule of Masses, confessions, and devotions, with priests taking turns doing various things, and most of the time praying their office privately; so they get to choose whether to use the 1960 Roman breviary or the 1970 Liturgy of the Hours (and most will choose the former). So you get a sort of rough-and-ready coexistence that works well enough on a pastoral level.
In a religious house, on the other hand, the ideal is a daily conventual Mass and at least some common recitation or chanting of the Office. This, therefore, requires a certain uniformity of practice so that everyone can be at peace and not feel “jerked around” by a shifting schedule or by the shifting expectations of different liturgical forms. It isn’t so easy in this environment to “punt” on liturgical questions, as they affect communal exercises.
If religious priests learn the TLM, they will have the freedom to offer their “private” morning Masses in the usus antiquior—regardless of whether or not the conventual Mass is the TLM. Since the daily Mass is so formative of priestly spirituality, this step will already be a great enrichment that does not directly impinge on the communal horarium. It goes without saying that no priest ever needs permission to offer the old rite.
I am happy that you asked me for reading recommendations. I know that time is limited, so I’ll recommend just a few works that I think will be particularly helpful: Joseph Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy, if you haven’t already read it (this can be an excellent community read for ongoing intellectual formation); two of mine, Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness: Why the Modern Age Needs the Mass of Ages and The Once and Future Roman Rite: Returning to the Traditional Latin Liturgy after Seventy Years of Exile; Martin Mosebach’s The Heresy of Formlessness: The Roman Liturgy and Its Enemy. That being said, frequent experience of the rite will be more beneficial, for most, than reading and arguments—at least for a while. The intellectual component is important but can follow subsequently.
The old liturgy carries the force of conviction in its very practice. Explanations can and will be helpful, but there is a point at which liturgists might seem to be simply flinging opposite opinions at each other: “he says... she says...” Whereas when a Christian, especially a priest, experiences that he can more fervently adore, supplicate, and immolate himself, or that meditation on and assimilation of the Word of God is deepened in the traditional rite, no argument can contradict it, even as no argument can substitute for it.
Along these lines, a genre of reading that I find especially moving and effective in melting resistance or misconceptions is that of priests writing about their own journey. Some fine examples may be found here, here, and here, but many more exist.
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| Card. Burke celebrating Pontifical Mass for the Franciscans of the Immaculate, ca. 2010 |
As for why some prelates would be opposed to the recovery of liturgical tradition, there is much that can be said, but this much is clear: there was a mighty epidemic of identity confusion and tradition-bashing that took place overtly between 1965 and 1975, but which had roots in the 1940s, and of course, going back to the late 19th century with the Modernist controversy to which Pope Pius X responded. Once Catholics begin to study these matters in depth, they usually realize they’ve been “had,” to a greater or lesser extent. They have been lied to; their birthright has been stolen from them. Older generations do not take kindly to criticism of the novel and enthusiasm for the traditional. (I wrote about this in an article, “Can We Explain the Anti-Tridentine Phobia or Rage?”)
Some anti-traditionalists say that having the old rite in the Church “causes division.” How can they ignore the fact that the Novus Ordo has produced more division than has ever been seen in the history of Western liturgy? Don’t be put off the right path by those who discourage you from pursuing what is clearly your right and indeed your birthright. [1] It seems to me that most of the opponents of the old rite have never celebrated the usus antiquior themselves. In my experience, this is the “Rubicon”: when you know in your heart and your bones that this rite was “made to be prayed”—that it is Christ’s holocaust of love, offered in and through His alter Christus—it becomes impossible to walk away from it, much less to suppress it, without sinning against the light.
I am aware of many communities—most of them obscure, but including various Carmels, and fairly new Oratories in the process of starting up—that are experiencing a mighty tension between the “reform of the reform” and a return to the traditional rite. Their members know that the traditional liturgy is a vessel “full of grace and truth,” like the Incarnate Word who inspired its development in the Church over the millennia; but they are no less acutely aware of the ecclesiastical politics that make a simple switchover, or even a significant accommodation, difficult to achieve.
Every step taken should be gradual, gentle, and understood by all ahead of time, so that all may walk arm-in-arm. However we look at it, the incorporation of the TLM and the breviary and other sacramental rites is an immense enrichment. How could we think otherwise about a liturgy celebrated by countless saints and endorsed by centuries of Roman Pontiffs? It is truly a kind of schizophrenia when people get tied up in knots about it. As Ratzinger asked, what does this say about how we view our own tradition, our own history? When a well-meaning person says “Yes, tradition is good, but don’t get carried away…,” that is the voice of worldly prudence, not the passion of divine love that seeks to give the best and greatest to Our Lord.
Dear Father, the elephant in the room is this: many Catholics are ignorant of or malformed in theology, ignorant of or malformed in liturgy; they are not deeply rooted in the history and tradition of Catholicism. It sounds harsh to say it, but it’s clearly true. Vatican II was like a nuclear bomb. Millions of books (including liturgical books) were thrown into dumpsters in the 1960s and 1970s. The self-styled reformers attempted to make a clean break with the past. Of course, they could never have succeeded completely, and a reaction was inevitable; but the extreme makeover has succeeded well enough to leave us a vast swath of Catholics unacquainted with basic monuments and elements of the Faith, such as the liturgy prayed by the Church from well before St. Gregory the Great down to Pope John XXIII, or the decrees and canons of the Council of Trent.
After the imposition of the Novus Ordo, it was believed that the use of the old Roman rite would gradually vanish. Its endurance was written off as a fetish, a fashion, a niche interest, a bit of nostalgia. Today, decades later, we can see very clearly that it is a magnet for young people, for families, for vocations.
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| Padre Pio celebrating a Solemn High Mass |
The question then becomes: How do we integrate our new knowledge of old tradition, with all its truth, beauty, and goodness, into our lives as Catholics, as religious, as priests? It is no easy task, since we are very much still living in the age of rupture, discontinuity, confusion, ignorance, and, I’m afraid to say, bad will.
This much is clear: there is no “stuffing” of the old back into a box; once it comes out, it is too powerful to push down. The priests in your community need to learn the old rite and to offer it, since it is the most perfect, most fruitful, and most formative exercise of the ministerial priesthood, the key to a richer interior life. It should be a standard feature that is accepted as a normal part of day-to-day life, and not fussed over.
Whatever else one may say, it is a time for being “wise as serpents, innocent as doves” (Matt 10, 16).
Yours in Christ our Lord,
Dr. Kwasniewski
[1] Traditionis Custodes changes none of this because it claims to revoke a faculty that was never granted. Benedict XVI did not grant a faculty in Summorum Pontificum, but precisely the contrary: he acknowledged that the old rite had never been abrogated and was always in principle available to priests, and simply proclaimed their freedom to use the older form of the Roman rite, basing his decision ultimately on a dogmatic fact that what was sacred remains sacred and great for us today.
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