Clarity on Genuflections Around Communion in the Usus Antiquior

I received the following question from a reader, and given that others might find themselves with a similar question, or might simply wish to doublecheck that they are doing the right thing, I share my response today at NLM.

The Query: I am seeking instruction on the rubric in the Missal of 1962 which directs the priest to genuflect prior to retrieving the Blessed Sacrament from the tabernacle in the ciborium, and again after reposing it. I know Novus Ordo instructions do not point to this gesture. Would you be so kind as to indicate where such an instruction may be found, should it exist? And the rationale behind it.”

The Response: The instructions can be found in the 1962 Ritus Servandus which read as follows in translation:

X. The Lord’s Prayer and everything else up to the end of Communion…

6. If there are some to communicate during the Mass, the minister [read “server”] warns them a little beforehand with a ring of the bell. The Priest, after drinking the Blood, places the Chalice a little toward the Gospel side, but still within the Corporal, and covers it with the Pall.

• Then, if there are consecrated Hosts upon the Corporal, having made a genuflection, he places Them upon the Paten.
• If They have been consecrated in the same Mass within a Pyx/Ciborium, he places the Pyx/Ciborium in the middle of the Altar, uncovers It, and genuflects.
• If the Hosts to be administered have been consecrated beforehand, having opened the Tabernacle, he genuflects, extracts the Pyx/Ciborium and uncovers It.

He takes the Pyx/Ciborium or Paten with the Sacrament in his left hand, and takes one Host in his right, which he holds somewhat elevated over the Pyx/Ciborium or Paten with his thumb and index finger, and standing at the center of the Altar, facing the communicants, says: Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi. Then he says: Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum, sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea. After repeating this the third time, he goes to their right, that is, to the Epistle side, and facing each one, holding the Sacrament, he makes the sign of the cross with It over the Pyx or Paten, saying at the same time: Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam. Amen.

7. After the Faithful have communicated, the Celebrant returns to the Altar. Then, if there have been any Hosts upon the Corporal, he wipes it with the Paten, and if there are Fragments upon it, places them in the Chalice. If Hosts remain in the Pyx/Ciborium, he places It upon the Corporal, covers It, replaces It in the Tabernacle, genuflects, and closes the door.

Afterward he places in the Chalice any Fragments, which he happens to find upon the Paten, which was placed under the mouths of the communicants. Then he says secretly Quod ore sumpsimus, etc., and purifies himself, saying Corpus tuum, Domine, quod sumpsi, etc., and does everything as above. If there is a Tabernacle upon the Altar, and a Pyx/Ciborium with consecrated Hosts remains upon the Altar until the end of Mass, They are saved, which is prescribed at the end of Mass on Holy Thursday.

Thus, for the actual rubrics in the missal. The general principle is that any time the Priest and ministers interact with the Blessed Sacrament, a reverence is shown. This is also the case when the proximity between the ministers and the Blessed Sacrament changes, such as when the Tabernacle opens or shuts.

As to why this is done, it should be self-explanatory: under the signs of bread and wine, Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself is present, in person, and so we should reverence the Person as we would do when entering the presence of a King, or leaving it. The lack of such a gesture would be nothing better than negligence or contempt, if not a sign of a merely notional assent to the Real Presence rather than the real assent of supernatural faith.

It is worth pointing out, in addition, that the number of genuflections in connection with the Sacrament were reduced in 1962. If one takes a look at Matters Liturgical of 1956 (n. 238), the genuflections were:

• When the tabernacle is opened
• When the Priest uncovers the ciborium and turns for the Misereatur…
  
• When the Priest turns from back the Misereatur…
• After returning to the altar after Communion and placing down the ciborium (if hosts remain) 
• After placing the ciborium in the Tabernacle, before closing the door (if hosts remain)

Even not considering the Confiteor before Communion, there would have been two additional genuflections pre-62, one when the ciborium is uncovered and one at returning from the distribution (presumably connected with the immediate or somewhat immediate covering). Yet another indication of the involvement, in the code of rubrics for the 1962 missal, of the same reductionistic and horizontalizing reformers who would later, as part of the Consilium, take advantage of a wide permission to deconstruct and destroy.

In practice, as would be expected, the strict following of the ’62 Ritus is not universal, with the older practice still finding a place, even as occurs with the repetition of the Confiteor and other carryovers from the past.

Back to the point at hand, I would recommend that every celebrant of the TLM obtain a copy of a translation of the Ritus (it is in the Missal itself in Latin), which the FSSP sells here (along with other items).  It is important to be familiar with the Ritus along with the rubrics to get a full picture of how Mass is to be celebrated.

Photos by Allison Girone.

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Why 1962 Must Eventually Perish: The Case of St. John

Each year after Christmas comes the wonderful sequence of companion feasts. This week at NLM, I should like to make a brief reflection on St. John the Divine.

December 27th is the feast of the virgin disciple who rested his head on the breast of Jesus and who alone remained faithful in the hour of His Passion; the one who merited to receive the Mother of God as his mother, with whom he dwelt in Patmos; the author of the loftiest of the four Gospels, the Epistles of Agape, and the Apocalypse; the Theologian par excellence, model and measure of all mystics; the last living Apostle with the cessation of whose breath public revelation ceased.

St. John’s feast on December 27th is older than the octave of Christmas. In every missal known to Christendom, his feast would have been celebrated on this date, no matter what. Dignum et justum.

But in the 1960 code of rubrics that governs the 1962 Missale Romanum, whenever December 27th falls on a Sunday, the beloved disciple simply vanishes from Mass and receives a measly commemoration at Lauds and Vespers, as if we were suddenly catapulted into the middle of Lent.

The same thing happens, believe it or not, to St. Stephen and the Holy Innocents: all of them can be bumped off, liturgically speaking.

To make it even sillier, there’s always at least one universal feria, the 30th, to which the Sunday gets bumped when the Comites Christi or even St. Thomas of Canterbury takes precedence. Indeed, apostolic devaluation is infectious: all of the Apostles other than Saints Peter and Paul get shabby treatment in the 1960 rubrics. Needless to say, Peter and Paul were shorn of their octave some years earlier.

Such topsy-turvy rubrics and grave omissions point up the feebleness of the editio typica of 1962, the “missal of Bd. John XXIII” in the short-lived nomenclature of Summorum Pontificum, as well as the importance of restoring the Tridentine rite to its own proper principles. 1962 is a half-dismantled building waiting for the demolition crew called the Consilium. Such is the burden of the argument of chapter 12 in my book The Once and Future Roman Rite.

I should note that by the time the Novus Ordo Ambrosianus was designed, the folly of these feasts being impeded had been recognized, and the neo-Ambrosian rite does not allow it to occur. So, even though the Ambrosian rite normally does not allow any feast to impede a Sunday, even things like All Saints, Assumption, St Charles Borromeo, yet there is an exception during the octave of Christmas, when Stephen, John, the Holy Innocents, and even Thomas of Canterbury do take precedence over the Sunday after Christmas. Meanwhile, neither the 1962 and 1969 missals has rectified this egregious defect.

Pope Francis has made it clear that the Tradition is unwelcome and unwanted. If there is a place for the Tradition, it cannot rest on the shifting grounds of papal approval; it must be a matter of inherent worth and dignity. 1920 is the safe editio typica from which to begin the restoration; any editio post typicam until about 1948 will present no great difficulties.

The most urgent practical need right now in the new liturgical movement is the republication of all of the liturgical books before their post-War deformations.

 

Don't let the rigged rubrics of this John take away the homage owed to that John

The images below are taken from my 1951 Monastic Diurnal, reflecting preconciliar Benedictine usage (which is virtually identical to the pre-Pacellian Roman use):

The images of St. John and John XXIII are from Fr. Lawrence Lew's Flickr account.

On the Insertion of St Joseph’s Name into the Roman Canon

Traditional Catholics place a strong emphasis on the Roman Canon as an essential quality of the Roman Rite, something that enters into its very definition. Where you have the Roman Canon as the singular and necessary anaphora, you are dealing for sure with one of the Western or Latin Rites of the Church; certainly where you have the Roman Rite, you always have the Roman Canon. If this Canon is not present or if it is merely optional, you may have a valid Mass (provided all conditions are met), but you do not have the Roman Rite in any but a 30,000-foot sense of the term.

Given this premise, people like to ask about John XXIII’s insertion, in 1962, of the name of St Joseph into the first list of saints in the Roman Canon. The background story is told well enough by Fr Joseph Komonchak in this article at Commonweal, in which a quotation from Yves Congar’s diary certainly clues one in to the mentality of the progressives. In his Council daybook, Xavier Rynne relates more about the behind-the-scenes cause of Pope John’s unexpected and unilateral decision. A picture of the Latin decree may be found here. The insertion into the text is highlighted in bold:

Communicantes, et memoriam venerantes, in primis gloriosæ semper Virginis Mariæ, Genetricis Dei et Domini nostri Iesu Christi: sed et beati Ioseph, eiusdem Virginis Sponsi, et beatorum Apostolorum ac Martyrum tuorum, Petri et Pauli, Andreæ, Iacobi, Ioannis, Thomæ, Iacobi, Philippi, Bartholomæi, Matthæi, Simonis et Thaddæi: Lini, Cleti, Clementis, Xysti, Cornelii, Cypriani, Laurentii, Chrysogoni, Ioannis et Pauli, Cosmæ et Damiani et omnium Sanctorum tuorum; quorum meritis precibusque concedas, ut in omnibus protectionis tuæ muniamur auxilio. Per eundem Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

It is hard, at this point, to dispute that Joseph’s name should not have been inserted into the Canon. It was seen at the time by liturgical progressives as a mighty breach with the fabric of tradition and a sign that “hey, anything can be changed, as long as the pope says so!” In short: it played into the same growing hyperpapalism that enabled Pius X, Pius XII, and Paul VI to make deep and radical changes to inherited liturgical forms of 500, 1,000, or even 1,500 years’ duration, and encouraged the future members of the Consilium to stop at nothing in the magnitude and detail of their reformatory projects. [1]

Let no one misunderstand what I am claiming. I love St Joseph and pray to him daily. Not only is there nothing wrong with venerating him publicly, there would be something wrong if we did not venerate him publicly. The problem consists, rather, in making the Canon conform to momentary enthusiasms. Joseph had never been mentioned in this most solemn of prayers for 1,400 years, and we can’t say that the Holy Spirit, by willing or at least permitting this “lacuna,” intended him any disrespect, or caused any lack of the honor due to him as the foster-father of Jesus. If anything, it seems more in keeping with Joseph’s hidden sanctity that he be a light that shines out gradually from behind the constellation of the more famous saints. When we parachute him into the Canon, we are letting our devotional preferences shape the core prayers of the inherited liturgy. (John XXIII was well-known for his strong personal devotion to Joseph, which was his middle name, and is still one of the most popular names in Italy. [2])

Consider these incisive words of liturgist Bernard Botte in the 1950s:

We should be grateful to the people of the Middle Ages for having preserved the Canon in its purity and for not having allowed their personal effusions or theological ideas to pass into it. One can imagine the complete mess we would have today if each generation had been permitted to remake the canon to the measure of their theological controversies or novel forms of piety. We can only hope for a continuing imitation of the good sense of these people, who had their own theological ideas but who understood that the Canon was not their playground. In their eyes, it was the expression of a venerable tradition, and they felt that it could not be touched without opening the door to every sort of abuse. [3]

For those who wish to read more about this subject, I recommend (although without a blanket endorsement) Carol Byrne’s article “St Joseph in the Canon: An Innovation to Break Tradition.” [4] The late Fr. Carota observed:

Although different readings and saints feasts were added in the Roman Missal, the exact words of the Roman Canon were never changed since the slight change Pope St. Gregory the Great made in 600 AD, when he added a few words to it. The Roman Canon was unchanged for 1362 years. It was not altered at all until 1962 when Pope John XXIII permitted the name of St. Joseph to be inserted. Although St. Joseph is such a wonderful powerful saint for the Catholic Church, the Church carefully guarded the integrity of the Roman Canon from any alteration. In 1815, hundreds of thousands of signatures of clergy and laity were gathered to have his name inserted in the Canon. But the Church would not dare change it.

Fr Carota here steps beyond what is strictly true historically. We do not know with certainty that the final redaction of the Canon was the work of St Gregory, although a good case can be made for that view; we do know that minor variants were introduced here and there after his time, e.g., variable Hanc igiturs. Particular local saints were occasionally introduced into the lists of saints. [5] But a local devotional practice is one thing, a universal imposition from the pope is another.

From a strictly liturgical point of view, moreover, one may ask where in the Canon the name St Joseph best belongs, if his name is to be included in it. The Communicantes is not an ideal place to put him, seeing as the 24 names (12 Apostles and 12 Martyrs) were obviously chosen in reminiscence of the 24 elders in chapter 4 of the Book of Revelation. On the other hand, the Nobis quoque has 15 names (8 men and 7 women), which has no obvious symbolic value. If Joseph had been added after John the Baptist, nothing important would be disturbed, and the last Patriarch of the old covenant would be put next to the last Prophet, which is a very sensible arrangement.

When Fr. Carota says “the Church would not dare change it [the Canon],” he is alluding to a popular legend, the source of which I have not yet been able to track down (I would not be surprised if, as is often the case with legend, it rests on a true story). When Pope Pius IX was presented with support for inserting the name of Joseph, he is said to have responded: “I cannot do that; I am only the Pope.” Would that all of the successors of St Gregory the Great, even to our time, had maintained this attitude of sober humility and religious veneration!

Today, with the ongoing reevaluation of so many foolish changes in the 20th century, some raise the question of whether or not it may be worthwhile to seek the omission of Joseph’s name, so that the Canon may be restored to its perfect form (since, as just mentioned, the introduction of the extra name throws off the Canon’s careful design). Given the magnitude of other decisions facing the traditional movement, such as the restoration of the pre-1955 Holy Week, and given the ecclesiastical climate, it would seem that now is not the time to revisit this question. The addition of St Joseph’s name is a fait accompli we may regret, but we are not obliged to attribute to it the sinister meaning that the progressives of the 1960s and certain rad trads today are wont to do; we may simply accept it as one of those things we cannot change at the moment. It would be an ideal candidate to add to the raft of restorative changes yet to be made under a future pontificate, with a view to purifying the Roman Rite of the damage caused by post-World War II tinkeritis.

We can learn a lesson in this regard from the PCED’s flip-flop on the Confiteor before Communion. At first, they said: “No, this is not in the rubrics of the 1962 missal, so it shouldn’t be done.” Then later, they winked at it and said: “Well, wherever this is a custom, it can be preserved.” Rapidly, the somewhat Jesuitical argument spread: “This Confiteor had been a universal custom everywhere, and now that we are starting up the Latin Mass again in continuity with how it was being celebrated before the silly season of the 1960s, we will also retain this longstanding custom. Besides, only the legalistic sticklers at this point care about whether there’s a second Confiteor. We’ve moved past that phase for the most part.”

There we are — and I like to think that the intercession of St. Joseph, a wonderworking carpenter, might have something to do with this healthy spirit of rebuilding.

NOTES

[1] The Roman psalter supplanted by Pius X was about 1,500 years old; some of the aspects of Holy Week modified by Pius XII were 1,000 years old; the prayers at the foot of the altar were in the Roman Missal for about 500 years when Paul VI removed them. Of course many other examples can be given.

[2] There is another story, possibly apocryphal, that Roncalli wanted to call himself Pope Joseph, but was dissuaded from doing so by the cardinals, since the name was not a traditional one. It seems that cardinals of such mettle were not on hand in March 2013.

[3] “Histoire des prières de l’ordinaire de la messe,” in B. Botte/C. Mohrmann, eds., L’ordinaire de la messe. Texte critique, traduction et études (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf/Louvain: Éditions de Abbaye du Mont César, 1953), 27.

[4] In contrast, Fr David Friel takes a relaxed, irenic approach in his article “Adding Joseph to the Eucharistic Prayers.”

[5] Here, for example, is folio 144r of the Gellone Sacramentary, a sacramentary of the Gelasian type, and one of the oldest in existence (later 8th century). The names of Ss Hilary, Martin, Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, and Benedict are added to the Communicantes. You can also see that the words pro quibus tibi offerimus, which are a later addition, are missing from the Memento; Pope Benedict XIV already noted in the 18th century that these words were missing from all of the oldest manuscripts of the Canon that they had at the time.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website for articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press, his SoundCloud page for lectures, interviews, and readings, and YouTube for lectures and sacred music.

Why the Confiteor Before Communion Should Be Retained (or Reintroduced)

The Confiteor at the start of Mass

In this article, I will defend the fittingness of the repetition of the Confiteor by the ministers immediately before their communion — sung by the deacon and subdeacon at Solemn Mass, said by the acolytes at the Missa Cantata and Low Mass. I shall argue that it not only deserves to be retained, but that it should be used everywhere in the usus antiquior, and not omitted.

Before moving to this question, let us consider for a moment why there ought to be a double Confiteor at the start of the Mass, in the penitential section at the foot of the altar, prior to the ministers’ ascending the mountain of the Lord to offer the twofold sacrifice: first, the verbal sacrifice of the readings, followed by the unbloody sacrifice of the Lamb of God.

At first glance, it might appear that there should be only a single Confiteor of priest and people together, and indeed, this is what the Novus Ordo Missae provides, having relied on scholars to purge it of “useless repetitions.”

Nevertheless, the double Confiteor is far from useless. It strongly brings out the dialogical nature of liturgical worship, where the celebrant acts as a mediator for the people, and where each member of the body is praying for the other. The doubling formalizes the mediation as well as the mutual assistance. It reinforces the humility needed in the celebrant, who confesses his sins alone coram omnibus, and also exhibits the dignity of the servant who says to the master: “May almighty God have mercy on thee, and having forgiven thy sins, lead thee to eternal life.” It reflects the truth of cosmic and ecclesiastical hierarchy and pushes against one of the dominant errors of our time, that of democratic egalitarianism, which lumps everyone together into an undifferentiated mass (or Mass).

Bishop Athanasius Schneider once told of a Low Mass he was offering in Africa at a large traditional Catholic school for girls. When he had confessed his sins, he heard all these little girls say to him, in perfect Latin, “Misereatur tui omnipotens Deus, et dimissis peccatis tuis, perducat te ad vitam aeternam.” He was overcome with feelings of humility, littleness, and joy. This experience of the priest confessing his own sins in front of the people—or, for that matter, the bishop, or the pope—is something we could use a great deal more of in the Church today, together (of course) with the confession of the people. And all of this in the humbling and strengthening presence of the saints invoked by name, twice: “Blessed Mary ever-virgin, St. Michael the Archangel, St. John the Baptist, the holy apostles Peter and Paul, and all the saints” — not (as we were just saying) lumped together in an undifferentiated mass of “all the angels and saints,” mentioned only once, for efficiency’s sake. There are no shortcuts in penance and forgiveness.

Now, moving to our main topic — the Confiteor before communion — it was not only the repetition at this moment of something that had “already been done” earlier in the Mass that the liturgical reformers objected to; it was rather the impression that the communion rite for the faithful is “tacked on to” the Mass as an extrinsic piece rather than something intrinsic to it. Eliding the communion rite(s) was a way of underlining the unity of liturgical action.

Yet the old practice makes theological sense, at least from the vantage of the dogmatic teaching of the Council of Trent. The communion of the offering priest is essential to the completion of the sacrifice in a way that the communion of no one else is. In fact, the obscuring of this point by having a single communion rite in which the priest announces “Ecce Agnus Dei” prior to receiving Christ and distributing Him to the faithful is among the many factors that have contributed to the obscuring of the difference in kind between the ministerial priesthood and the priesthood of the faithful.

Moreover, one should not evaluate this practice only from a low Mass standpoint, but also from the Solemn High Mass, the normative Mass of the Roman Rite. Seeing the priest flanked by his close companions, the deacon and the subdeacon, with the deacon chanting the Confiteor, throws into sharp relief how the sacrifice is essentially complete with the communion of the priest, who stands in for Christ the High Priest, and that the further communions are an extension of this sacrifice to the ministers and the faithful, a sacramental “rippling out” comparable to the rippling out of the Pax, the gesture of peace, passed down from on high — much as the higher angels communicate illuminations to lower angels.

The one offering brings the sacrifice to completion by himself partaking of the sacrificial Victim. No other communion is necessary for this completion, although obviously the Church rejoices in the participation of as many faithful as are in a state of grace and prepared to receive Our Lord. The scholastic distinction between intensity and extension is helpful here. For example, the separated soul in heaven fully possesses beatitude intensively, but when the body is reunited to it in the resurrection, that happiness will overflow into the flesh and so the beatitude will be greater extensively, i.e., it will have a greater extension.

The separate communions of priest and people, with the Confiteor as a visible and audible caesura, is the liturgy’s way of representing the dogmatic truth spoken of by Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis Christi when he distinguishes between the “objective redemption” that Christ accomplished in full on the Cross and the “subjective redemption” of Christians, which occurs through the application of the merits of His Passion to our souls in the sacraments of the Church. St. Thomas speaks of this point often, as when he explains why the faithful need not receive the chalice: “The perfection of this sacrament does not lie in the use of the faithful, but in the consecration of the matter. And hence there is nothing derogatory to the perfection of this sacrament, if the people receive the body without the blood, provided that the priest who consecrates receive both” (Summa theologiae III, q. 80, a. 12, ad 2). “Our Lord’s Passion is represented in the very consecration of this sacrament, in which the body ought not to be consecrated without the blood. But the body can be received by the people without the blood: nor is this detrimental to the sacrament, because the priest both offers and consumes the blood on behalf of all; and Christ is fully contained under either species, as was shown above (q. 76, a. 2)” (ibid., ad 3).

This aspect of the usus antiquior points unambiguously to the essence of the Mass as the re-presentation of the Sacrifice of the Cross at the hands of the ordained minister, and forcefully sets aside the Protestant conflation of the Mass and the Last Supper, i.e., the simple identification of the Eucharist with communion — an error so ubiquitous in our day that Catholics not only take it for granted but are unaware that there is any other way of thinking about the matter.

Again, at a high Mass, the faithful are usually not able to hear the Confiteor of the priest and the servers at the beginning, as these preparatory prayers in the sanctuary are muffled under the soaring sound of the Introit. Thus, when the deacon sings or the servers say the Confiteor right before communion, everyone is able to hear it and make it their own, since there is nothing else “covering over” this action.[1] Holy Mother Church offers all the faithful one final opportunity to bow low before the altar, express contrition for sins, call upon saints and angels as intercessors, and receive a minor absolution prior to approaching the Sanctissimum, the Most Holy One, before whom even the Cherubim and Seraphim veil their faces. Thus we see that this Confiteor is both theologically appropriate and spiritually profitable.

To my mind (and probably, I’ll admit, for quite incidental reasons), the suppression of this Confiteor before communion in the missal promulgated by Pope John XXIII serves as the “poster child” of all that went wrong during that strange no-man’s-land between Mediator Dei (1947) and the imposition of the Novus Ordo (1969). In this period of two decades, official papal language still paid lip service to the binding force of tradition and the non-negotiable good of continuity, while at the same time three Popes in succession permitted changes to the liturgy — at first tentatively and in smaller ways, but subsequently growing in audacity to embrace whole sacramental rituals from top to bottom — that led with a kind of inevitability to the jettisoning of the historic Roman Rite and its replacement by the “modern papal rite” (as Gamber calls the Novus Ordo).

Let there be no mistake about it: the incremental changes of Pius XII and John XXIII to the Mass and its rubrics — the abolition of most octaves and vigils, multiple collects, doubled lections, the “Benedicamus Domino,” folded chasubles, etc. — are also corruptions, even if lesser corruptions than Montini’s, and deserve to be rejected by those who care for the Roman Rite in its integrity and plenitude just as readily and easily as the more egregious novelties of the late sixties.

A last consideration, since we are on the subject of the Confiteor and the role of penitence in the rite of Mass: I read in an article at PrayTell about the proposal, fashionable among today’s “with-it” liturgists, to move the penitential rite to after the “Liturgy of the Word.” Their theory (fine on paper, as always) is that we should first hear the Word of God summoning us to faith and repentance, and then express our acceptance of the message in the Creed and a penitential rite immediately prior to the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Probably the sign of peace would be moved into this intermediate section as well, so that we can take care of all the Eucharistic preliminaries at once.

Now, I have two reactions to this idea.

First, this proposal and any other like it would make sense only if liturgy is just something we make up according to our own brilliant ideas, rather than a form of prayer we receive from those who came before us and whom we revere as our fathers in Christ, from whom we receive the faith together with its enactment in rites. And surely this is a tempting view, since modern people are seen consistently to have better ideas and to produce greater art than their predecessors. Just think of primitives like Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Shakespeare, Bach and Mozart, and compare them with Rorty and Derrida, Cummings and Kerouac, the Beach Boys and Eminem. We are clearly in a better position to design liturgy than the men who built Hagia Sophia or Notre Dame Cathedral.

What is astonishing to me is that such proposals can be made, let alone taken seriously. Do we know better than the millennia of Latin Catholics who started off the liturgy with penitential preparation—or for that matter, Eastern Christians who can’t help chanting “Lord, have mercy” from the get-go? But we can forgive them and, well, ignore them; after all, among professional liturgists, Byzantines get a pass for everything, no matter how outlandish; the more litanies, processions, blessings, and chants, the better. The East is the exotic “other” whose presence allows us to loathe ourselves in a perpetual inferiority complex, which prompts us to “act out” irrationally from time to time by lopping off another ancient feature that connects us with the East.

Second, in an irony that repeats itself on a regular basis, what the fashionable liturgists say they want is already present in the unreformed (I mean, pre-1962) traditional Mass. They say they want a moment, after the Word and before the Eucharist, in which to express our repentance. The old Mass gives us the Confiteor before communion and the threefold “Domine, non sum dignus...” with the minor absolution from the priest. The old rite, embodying a deep instinct for symmetry, has in that sense two penitential rites: the one prior to receiving the Word, and the one prior to receiving the Word-made-flesh.

The more we ponder the inherited liturgy, the more riches we find in it, and the less we are inclined to tinker with it or accept the tinkering of others, bereft of the fear of God the Father, the love of Christ the High Priest, and the unction of the Holy Spirit. We give thanks to the Most Holy Trinity for beginning to deliver His people from the seventy-year Babylonian captivity of liturgical reform (ca. 1948–2018), stretching from Pius XII’s creation of the committee that would produce the neo-Tridentine Holy Week to the year when Ecclesia Dei granted permission to the ICKSP and FSSP to return to the unreformed Holy Week. We are coming full circle at last, and there is no turning back.

(Portions of this article are excerpted from my lecture at St. Mary’s in Norwalk, “Poets, Lovers, Children, Madmen — and Worshipers: Why We Repeat Ourselves in the Liturgy.”)

Note

[1] Needless to say, if it is to serve a corporate purpose, the Confiteor needs to be heard at this point rather than mumbled or muttered into the acolyte's sleeve. No need for loudness; an articulate voice and a reasonable pacing will suffice to make the prayer audible even in a large church. For more thoughts along these lines, see my article "Two Modest Proposals for Improving the Prayerfulness of Low Mass."

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for events, articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).