At his Wednesday audience this week, the Holy Father Pope Leo XIV delivered the last in a series of eight discourses on Sacrosanctum Concilium, the most recent ecumenical council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. This is part of an ongoing program which began in January, and intends to cover all the documents of Vatican II; His Holiness has previously spoken at length about Dei Verbum and Lumen gentium.
Until now, the series has been fairly anodyne, as such things are wont to be. This week’s discourse, however, contains a statement that has raised perhaps more than a few eyebrows. “The liturgical reform promoted by the Second Vatican Council is thus firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church.” The Italian word “dunque”, translated here as “thus” in English (from the Vatican’s website) could also be rendered “therefore.”Now one should always be cautious about making too much of such discourses. Popes say a great many things which turn out not to be very meaningful in the long run, or even in the short run. For example, speaking on this very topic in 1964, Paul VI assured a group of teachers of plain chant that there would be no general eclipse of Gregorian chant, precisely because Vatican II had specifically stated that it was to retain pride of place in the Roman liturgy. Only five-and-a-half years later, he admitted that the arrival of the new liturgy would indeed bring about the very eclipse that he had previously declared would not take place. “We (i.e. the Church) will lose a great part of that stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant.”
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| From the Catholic Transcript, an official publication of the Archdiocese of Hartford, Connecticut, printed on April 6, 1964; originally brought to my attention by Sharon Kabel. |
Nevertheless, prima facie, the pope has formally endorsed the view that the liturgical reform that came after Vatican II was promoted by Vatican II, and stands “firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church.” And of course, this view cannot be squared with the single most basic and obvious fact about the liturgical reform which came after Vatican II; namely, that its very essence is the rejection of what the Council Fathers asked for, and what they thought they were going to get, when they put their signatures to Sacrosanctum Concilium.
Fortunately, we can always turn for some wise and reassuring words on matters liturgical to Dom Alcuin Reid OSB. On the same day, he published a commentary on the text via the Substack of the Rome-based journalist Diane Montagna. Dom Alcuin is right to note that the text was almost certainly prepared for the pope by members of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, and that on a variety of scores, His Holiness has not been well-served by their work. E.g., it refers to “the need … to streamline (“rendere più lineare”, lit. “make more linear”) the order of the celebration” of the Mass, which is, of course, not stated anywhere in Sacrosanctum Concilium. As I have noted before more than once, someday, the Church will simply have to have an honest reckoning with the fact that most of its current liturgical practice derives from things which are not stated anywhere in Sacrosanctum Concilium.
As always, I encourage our readers to read the whole article; in the meantime, I make bold to note this statement from the pope’s discourse which follows the one cited above: “A correct understanding of (the reform) also enables us to reject the abuses that occurred in certain sectors of the Church (a polite circumlocution for ‘everywhere’) during the post-Conciliar period, and which, unfortunately, still occur from time to time (a polite circumlocution for ‘constantly’) today, where some of the principles underlying the reform itself have been taken to extremes or misunderstood.”
Enter Claudio Maniago, archbishop of Catanzaro and Squillace in the southern Italian region of Calabria, and president of the Centro Azione Liturgica (“Center for Liturgical Action”), an entity of the Italian Bishops’ Conference. The CAL’s annual “Liturgy Week” ended on Thursday, and in his closing discourse, delivered one day after the pope’s audience cited above, His Excellency informed his listeners that “we still do not know how to celebrate in such a way as to bring forth the splendor of the liturgy.”
This is what is known in law as an “admission against interest”, a statement which is accepted as true because the party who makes it has nothing to gain, and possibly something to lose, by making it. And His Excellency is right, as anyone who has suffered through the post-Conciliar Mass as it is practiced almost everywhere in Italy knows full well. With almost no exceptions, the peninsula is the liturgical equivalent of the surface of Mars: lots of dust, but very little light or air. The closing Mass of the conference itself is absolutely typical of what the liturgy has become there. And remember as you watch (if you can bear to) that this is a national conference which has been recurring annually since 1950, an event that by definition should showcase the liturgy at its best.
“We” also still do not know how to manage a live-stream on YouTube, so this video begins with nearly 48 minutes of dead air. The Mass finally begins with a hymn, the singing of which is almost totally dominated by one man’s voice. When the camera pans around to the pews, we see a thin and aging congregation, clearly rather smaller than the crowd of concelebrants. The introductory rites are spoken, not sung, and followed by an exchange of pleasantries between Abp Maniago and the celebrant, an official of the above-mentioned dicastery, “as is necessary on such occasions.” The celebrant then makes some introductory remarks on the Saint of the day, Monica, as a lead-in to the penitential rite, after which the soloist leads the assembly in doing something very… unusual to the Kyrie. And so on.
Does it need to be said that none of this is “firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church”? And can we ask if this is why “we” don’t know how to celebrate it, or care?
