Praying in the Same Words with which the Saints Prayed

A few of the many altar missals I had the chance to peruse in a monastery library...

The first level in being converted to taking Catholic liturgy seriously is what might be called the “smells and bells.” As rational animals who learn through our senses, we notice and appreciate beautiful vestments, furnishings, bells, incense, and music. These things are important: not only do their subtly instruct us as to what is going on and how we should respond to it, they also inoculate us against the errors of minimalism and spiritualism. We might call this “extrinsic maximalism.” It is sad to think that many, perhaps most, Catholics have never experienced it.

But, at times, the smells and bells can be largely absent without fatal results, as in a devout Low Mass. This helps us to see the second level of being converted to Catholic liturgy, namely, the integral, substantive, expressively adequate or even superabundant prayers and ceremonies contained in the traditional missal and required to be used. We might call this an “intrinsic maximalism” that should never be absent from the liturgy, no matter what the circumstances of its celebration — whether pontifical, solemn, sung, or low. This level bespeaks adherence to living tradition, belonging to a community stretching back 2,000 years (or even 3,000 if we take the Jewish roots into account: a truth of which the commemoration of the Holy Maccabees today reminds us), but extending also to the Church triumphant in heaven.

It is no small matter that we have the privilege of praying in the very same words as our predecessors. St. Mechtilde of Hackeborn (1240/41–1298), whose Liber specialis gratiae (Book of Spiritual Grace, which came into medieval England as Booke of Gostlye Grace) contains frequent and detailed visions springing forth from the Latin texts of the liturgy. The liturgy came alive before her as Christ enacted the meaning of the texts. At one point, describing a liturgy she beheld (“After this our Lord sang the Mass, dressed in a red chasuble and bishop’s trappings” [1]), Mectilde hears the Lord telling her:

You shall understand that when you say any psalm or prayer which any saints prayed when they were alive on earth, then all of those saints pray to me for you. Additionally, when you are in your devotions and speak with me, then all of the saints are joyful and worship and thank me. [2]

Dom Edouard Guillou, in his 1975 work Le livre de la messe: Mysterium fidei — Le texte de la messe de saint Pie V, with a foreword by Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre (repr. Paris: Éditions Fideliter, 1992), writes concerning the Roman Canon:

This main prayer of the Canon has been meditated by so many saints, murmured by so many priests, that it can not be compared to any other prayer. Keeping its original Latin form is the dazzling testimony of the necessary unity of the Roman Church in time and space. Its abandonment in practice would be an act of impiety. [3]

Fr. Joseph Kreuter, O.S.B., in the journal Orate Fratres of October 7, 1933, wrote:

Is it not a prolific source of devotion, of spiritual joy and consolation, to know that you are privileged to call holy Mass your own Sacrifice, to share in it with Christ and His ordained priest? Happy those who say those ancient and divinely inspired words together with the priest, for they thus become intimately united with the generations of Christians who have preceded them. For centuries the faithful have prayed those words. What emotions, what joys, what sentiments of praise, adoration, thanksgiving and expiation have found their expression in these prayers of the Missal! What torrents of grace and blessings, temporal and spiritual, have they drawn down from on High upon the faithful worshipers! [4]

Since we all know now, thanks to the groundbreaking work of Fr. Anthony Cekada and the even better scholarship of Matthew Hazell, that only 13% of the orations of the old missal made their way intact into the new missal — and therefore 87% of the verbatim prayer of the Roman Church prior to 1969 has been effectively canceled out — it is worth asking what are the cosmic, heavenly, eschatological, and ecclesiological implications of such memoricide, or, to use Guillou’s word, impiety. [5]

Msgr. James Byrnes, formerly of the archdiocese of New York, whose gradual discovery of tradition obliged him to grapple with the “Novus Ordo question,” resulting in his ultimately deciding to no longer celebrate the new rite, said in a talk he gave in 2014:

It was during the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar that the thought struck me. This was the Mass offered by those priest-saints I had read biographies of when I was young, particularly St. Isaac Jogues. I could and did imagine him standing before a crude altar in the wilds of Northern New York State, uttering these very same words. It was this overwhelming sense of continuity that stayed with me, this sense that I had never experienced during my twenty-one years of offering the Novus Ordo, and made me realize what had been stolen from myself and others of my generation. We had been the victims of spiritual identity theft and we hadn’t even realized it. That was the worst part. So much was taken from us and we didn’t know it. I can say definitively that that is the reaction of most folks my age (53, almost 54) and younger who still attend the Novus Ordo but sense something isn’t quite right. After experiencing the traditional Mass and beginning to fill in all the gaps of their spiritual life with tradition, all they can do is proclaim loudly, “We. Were. Robbed.” [6]

Prodigal Son (Rembrandt), Rijksmuseum

We can probe more deeply into the moral dimensions of this problem by reflecting on the fourth commandment: “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thou mayest have long life in the land that the Lord thy God will show thee.” Robert Spaemann once remarked: When we abandon the Roman Canon and the piety of our forefathers, how are we being obedient to this commandment in its ecclesial reality? We have not only biological fathers and mothers, but spiritual ones as well. In the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire: and all our pleasant things are laid waste” (Is 64:11).

By rejecting centuries of Catholic liturgy and devotion, the clergy involved in the liturgical reform of the 1960s and 1970s were, in essence, trash-talking their Mother. They were outrageously violating the fourth commandment: “Honor thy father [God in His Providence] and thy mother [the Church in her order of worship and her customs].” It was a sin of, and against, the spiritual paternity of the priest, who is supposed to pass on the family inheritance, the social and cultural life of the people — a transmission far more imporant than that of mere biological life.

What we do to, or with, our family inheritance shows what we think of our father and of our entire family. Whatever one might say about rococo churches or fiddleback chasubles, no one can deny that such things as Latin, Gregorian chant, and the eastward orientation are central, constitutive, and characteristic treasures of our patrimony. Therefore the proponents and adherents of the liturgical reform cannot escape culpability for the grave sins of patricide, matricide, pride, ingratitude, and contempt. These are the very same sins as those of the Prodigal Son — and they can be expiated, and their bitter fruits overcome, only in the same way: “Father, I have sinned against heaven [Providence] and against you [the Latin tradition]; I no longer deserve to be called your son. Take me on as one of your hired hands.” Take me on as a servant who will punctiliously serve the family once again and devote himself to its well-being.

In its spirit, certainly, the commandment to honor our father and mother carries implications in how we treat the ways of tradition and the teachings of our parents — not only our parents individually but also our forefathers collectively. The reward of faithfulness to the commandment is obvious: a clear sense of identity, a community life that is coherent and creative and reasonable. In treating respectfully the traditions (and hence the teachings!) of our ancestors, we take our place in the continuing dialogue that God started with mankind in our first parents. Even if the central portion of it was recorded in the Sacred Scriptures, the dialogue of love within the family of faith continues past the final page of Revelation and into the history of the Church, the Body of Christ. Faithfulness to the ecclesial fourth commandment lets God continue to develop the discussion, with all of its former exchanges presupposed; whereas lack of faithfulness causes a rupture and in some sense the discussion has to be started from scratch, in random bits and pieces, like rough and difficult side paths apart from the main highway. The fruits of rejecting the commandment are visible in the unraveling of a society, the waywardness and untetheredness and confusion of the younger generations.

There is no question that this is a difficult time for Catholics who love their faith and are concerned to serve a worthy liturgy, a Eucharistic liturgy faithful to the purpose and significance of the Mass. To achieve this we must follow the commandments of God in their individual, social, and ecclesial dimensions. We must abandon the impiety of rupture from the common voice of tradition and embrace anew the status of descendents, heirs, servants, and pupils.

NOTES

[1] Christian Gregory Savage, in his dissertation “Music and the Writings of the Helfta Mystics,” thesis for the Master of Music, Florida State University, 2012, p. 47.

[2] Cum autem psalmos aut aliquam orationem tuam Sancti in terris oraverunt legis, omnes Sancti pro te orant. Cum vero meditaris, vel mecum loqueris, omnes Sanct gaudentes me benedicunt. Liber 3:11, 210; in Savage, 53.

[3] Cette prière capitale du Canon a été méditée par tant de saints, murmurée par tant de prêtres, qu’elle ne peut être équiparée à aucune autre. Son maintien dans sa forme originale latine est le témoignage éclatant de l’unité nécessaire de l’Église romaine dans le temps et dans l’espace. Son abandon pratique serait une impiété.

[4] Text here.

[5] See “‘All the Elements of the Roman Rite’? Mythbusting, Part II.”

[6] Audio here.

“What One Good Teacher Can Do: A Musical Reminiscence” by Fr Anthony Cekada†

Gregory DiPippo informed readers last Friday, September 11, of the death of Fr. Anthony Cekada. Although I never met Fr. Cekada in person, he and I would exchange emails from time to time on musical matters. Readers are no doubt aware that he was a great lover of sacred music in all its varieties. At one point, when we were discussing easy choral Masses in Latin with organ accompaniment, he offered to send me copies of a number of Masses for two- and three-voices, which I gladly accepted. He ended up sending me a considerable number of them, which I still have on my bookshelf.

On June 15, 2016, Fr. Cekada sent the following article, with illustrations, to his email list. I knew that Father was a composer of modest and useful sacred music, but I had not realized the extent of his musical training until this charming article and its illustrations. I thought it would be a fitting way to remember him, in spite of the fact that we obviously had profound disagreements in matters of ecclesiology. The article was prefaced with a note.

"Dear Fathers, Seminarians, Church Musicians, Teachers and Friends,

"During the past week or so, I’ve had a lot of correspondence with musicians, including some professionals who live by this glorious art. In one exchange, I told the unusual story of my own musical education in my early and mid-teens. It took place over two intense years, exactly a half century ago. The education took me from being an untrained but eager musical ignoramus at 14 to being the accomplished and technically adept orchestral composer of a major work at 16. The credit for my transformation belongs to one amazing man: Michael P. Hammond. The story of what he did and its final outcome is a testament to the lasting and profound change that one good teacher can make in the life of a willing student.

"Unfortunately, Mr. Hammond soon departed for another teaching post. His successors spurned the traditional principles he had taught me and insisted we composed noisy, irrational junk. I quit composition in disgust, turned to the organ, put all my works away, and, for a half century, gave little thought to my teenage composing days. But very recently, you’ll see, I went back for a look at the music I had composed. It was only with fifty years perspective that I could see in it the miracle that Michael Hammond worked on the teenage Anthony Cekada. I thank God for Michael Hammond — and all great teachers like him!"

“What One Good Teacher Can Do: A Musical Reminiscence”

Fr. Anthony Cekada†

Michael Hammond was not a composer, but he was an amazing man and musician. When I met him, he was about 30, and had just been appointed director of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and of the Milwaukee Civic Orchestra.

I studied with him for a mere two years, 1966-1968, when I was 15–17. To me, Mr. Hammond was a spectacular speeding comet, shedding bright light on all corners of the musical universe and leading me on an exhilarating, non-stop journey towards excellence in the composer’s craft.

By that time, Mr. Hammond was already the complete Renaissance man — a polymath in classics, philosophy, sociology and medicine; Rhodes scholar; student at Oriel College; expert in medieval polyphony; instructor in physiology and anatomy at the University of Wisconsin; researcher in neuroanatomy; student of Indian music and the sitar under Ravi Shankar, and, incredibly, a speaker of the Menominee American Indian language! After he left the Conservatory, he would go on to become founding dean of the music department at SUNY-Purchase; Assistant Conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Norman Dessoff Choirs; dean of music at Rice University; president of Rice University, and in 2001, be appointed by President Bush as the eighth chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

When I began studying with Mr. Hammond, my only previous musical training consisted of Catholic grade school music classes, singing the daily High Mass with the rest of the children and going to concerts, courtesy of the wealthy lady who employed my father as her chauffeur. In grade school, I desperately wanted to play the piano, but it was physically impossible to get one into our tiny apartment.

Fortunately, when I started high school in 1965 at age 14, I finally got access to pianos, and better yet, to practice organs. I found a nun to teach me organ.

I promptly composed my first piece, an organ march to be played after Mass. (Ex. 1).

At the same time, I began trying to compose sacred choral music by studying scores of the old masters and trying to imitate them. The post-Vatican II liturgical changes has just been introduced, and the new music that came with it revolted me. Everyone else might produce insipid musical junk for Mass, but not the teenage Anthony Cekada! He would learn how to be a composer and then write real sacred music!

My father’s employer, Paula Uihlein, was a great patroness of the arts in Milwaukee, and when she got wind of this, she arranged for me to meet Mr. Hammond, who had just taken up his post as the conservatory director.

I brought Mr. Hammond all my compositions, and told him what I aspired to do: compose good, traditional sacred music. He said that what I’d shown him was very promising and showed that I had a real ear for the older styles, but that I needed to learn all the correct rules of technique.

The program Mr. Hammond laid out for me was this. Two years of piano training, then organ. He would personally tutor me in counterpoint, in those those principles of composition and theory where he thought I needed the most help, and in introductory orchestration. These lessons, he said, I could immediately apply to my own compositions — a point that he probably figured would keep my interest fired up.

When I graduated from high school, Mr. Hammond added, I should then coordinate taking the formal composition curriculum at the Conservatory with my theology courses at the diocesan seminary. This would ensure that in the long run there would be no gaps in my formal training.

So each week, I spent a very intense hour or so in Michael Hammond’s office, correcting exercises, learning principles and making practical applications to my compositions-in-progress. He was an astoundingly lucid teacher and an exemplary mentor.

To begin our sessions, Mr. Hammond had me select any score from the library or his office that interested me, and pick a page or two in it. We’d then go through my selection to understand what was going on musically and why. At first, I picked Bach cantatas or Mozart symphonies, and I was amazed at his ability to do on-the-spot piano reductions of the dozen instrumental staves [stacked lines of music showing the note for each individual instrument], often in different keys. Little stinker that I was, I later started to test him by picking monster scores from Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky and Schoenberg. None of it fazed him in the least — instant reduction, then ”Here’s the musical context... Now look at this, this and this…”

After two years of this, alas, Mr. Hammond was off to Purchase and to Stokowski. But what practical effect, if any, did his tutoring have on the musical compositions of Anthony Cekada, 16-year-old aspiring composer?

Up until a few days ago, I couldn’t have given you a clear answer. Sure, Mr. Hammond’s tutoring had undoubtedly improved my composing, but I couldn’t have told you much about how or why. In 1970, I sealed up my completed scores in two envelopes, and never looked at them again.

But my discussion with a young musician on Monday piqued my curiosity, so I opened the envelopes and pulled out the scores. What I found after 45 years absolutely astounded me. I had come to Michael Hammond as a musical ignoramus with grade-school music training, but full of teenage eagerness to get things right. After just two years with him, here is some of what he got me to produce:

A homophonic Ave Maria imitating Palestrina. (Dec. 1966, age 15) With few exceptions, it followed correct voice leading and harmonization rules, but with little touches of the modern or the unexpected here and there. It showed a nice attention to subtle dynamics. A parish choir performed it. (Ex. 2)

A Renaissance-style Kyrie. (Prob Fall 1966, age 15). Scored for SSTB a cappella in mode I. The two soprano parts were an exercise in how to handle voice lines that overlap.

Motet Acclamationes Sanctae Virgini. (May 1968, age 16). A cappella with two choruses alternating (SSAA, TTBB), possibly imitating Cristobal Morales. Observes all the correct Renaissance rules. Treats successive sections of the text (Tota Pulchra es Maria) in a variety of textures. Eighty bars long! Alas, it was never performed. (Ex. 3)

A baroque pastiche on Nun Komm der Heiden Heiland (March 1969, age 17). Scored for four-part chorus, continuo and a challenging violin obliggato. (Ex. 4)

“Mass of Praise and Glory” (begun early 1967, age 15; completed January 1968, age 16) (Ex 5)

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