On Sacred Art, part 2: What Governs the Style of the Traditions

How the anthropology of the Theology of the Body accounts for the iconographic, Gothic, and Baroque styles, and why the art of Leonardo and Michelangelo is not among them.

This is the second of two related articles on the three authentic liturgical traditions of the Church, as described by Benedict XVI. In the first, I asked what sacred art is for and introduced the three traditions Benedict XVI identifies: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. Here I turn to what accounts for the differences between them – the understanding of the human person that each embodies – and explain why the High Renaissance, so often considered the summit of Catholic art, is not among them.

What governs the style of these traditions?

The most important factor governing the style of figurative art is its understanding of the human person, that is, anthropology. Those familiar with John Paul II’s Theology of the Body will know that he distinguishes different states of human existence; it is helpful to draw on his categories here.

First, there is Original Man: Adam and Eve before the Fall, ‘naked without shame’, marked by innocence and complete reliance on God.

Second, there is Historical Man: mankind after the Fall, bearing the consequences of a broken relationship with God, with others, and with himself. Though corrupted by sin, Historical Man is not utterly depraved; he retains the capacity for sanctity through cooperation with grace. This is the condition we all share in this life.

Third, there is Eschatological Man: man as he will be in heaven – immortal, partaking of the divine nature, adopted as a son or daughter of God, and united to Christ in a perfect exchange of love.

These second two of these states, as I see it, correspond broadly to the three liturgical traditions in different ways. (There is no tradition directly relating to Original Man, to my knowledge).

The iconographic tradition reveals Eschatological Man. One important inspiration for this style is the account of the glorified Christ in the Transfiguration; all the saints share in that glory through baptism, as members of the Church, the mystical body of Christ. The stylistic features of icons are shaped by the desire to communicate the reality of man in heaven. The gold disc – the halo – represents the uncreated light radiating from the glorified body. There are no cast shadows, since each figure is its own light source rather than being illuminated from outside. And because heaven lies outside space and time, the icon deliberately reduces the illusion of depth through devices such as reverse perspective, ensuring that the figures inhabit the plane of the painting as much as possible. This is also why oil paint is generally avoided in iconography: it creates too strong an illusion of depth and a quality of sensory richness that works against the image’s purpose. Egg tempera, mosaic, and fresco are better suited to the iconographic style.

Christ Enthroned, in the iconographic style

The Baroque tradition reveals Historical Man, and its distinctive style follows from that different subject. Where iconographic art flattens space and eliminates shadow, Baroque painting deliberately creates an illusion of depth through perspective and portrays deep cast shadows from external light sources. Shadow has been a symbol of evil and suffering throughout Christian tradition – the ancient Office of Tenebrae (named for the Latin word for darkness or shadows) uses precisely this symbolism within the Triduum, in the final days of Holy Week. In Baroque painting, those shadowy depths are deliberately exaggerated, but the Christian message is not one of despair. Just as Easter follows Good Friday, the darkness in a Baroque painting is always contrasted with light, representing the Light that is Christ, that overcomes darkness.

The Baroque style is far more naturalistic than the iconographic, but it is not a simple reproduction of appearances. The artist varies color, edge sharpness, and tonal contrast to direct the viewer’s eye toward what matters and to ensure that the figure is depicted with dignity worthy of a creature made in God’s image. While Baroque art is always the art of fallen, Historical Man, it insists on man’s capacity for sanctity and his need for God’s grace. It is the art of suffering and hope, a Christian hope that transcends suffering.

Image: St Jerome and the Angel of Judgment, by Jose Ribera, 

Spanish/Italian, 1626, in the Baroque style

Baroque art should be clearly distinguished from the academic painting of the 19th century, with figures such as Ingres or Bouguereau in France, and from the Pre-Raphaelites in England in the same period. While there were some good examples within each grouping, in my opinion, we can detect that, as a whole, there is a subtle drift away from the Christian balance of idealization and naturalism toward one extreme or the other, becoming either cold and sterile or sentimental to the point of being saccharine. Much of what became 20th-century modernism was an overreaction to this 19th-century academic art. Although the modernists believed they were reacting against Christian tradition, they were, aesthetically at least, reacting against an inferior distortion of it.

The Gothic tradition occupies the ground between the other two, which is fitting given its historical position as a transitional form derived from the Romanesque and anticipating the Baroque. In stylistic terms, it oscillates between the visual language of Eschatological Man, characterized by a highly abstracted iconographic style, and that of Historical Man, characterized by a highly naturalistic Baroque style. It might be called the art of pilgrimage: its imagery points simultaneously toward heaven and the fallen world, reflecting that although we cannot complete the transformation into Eschatological Man in this life, we can begin it. The sacramental life of the Church is precisely the means by which that transformation starts. Like the spires of Gothic churches, Gothic art reaches upward to the heavens while remaining rooted in the earth.

Image: The tympanum of the South portal of Notre-Dame de Strasbourg , ca 1230, The Dormition of the Virgin Mary, sandstone; in the Gothic style. CC BY-SA 2.0 Frédéric Châteaux

The late-Gothic painter Fra Angelico illustrates the point well. He uses elements of the increasing naturalism developing around him, such as single-point perspective and cast shadows, alongside the iconographic visual vocabulary of uncreated light and pictorial flatness. His depictions of the Annunciation (there are several) are examples of paintings that employ perspective and cast shadow; his heavenly scenes, such as the Coronation of the Virgin, revert to the iconographic prototype of flattened space and radiant light. His works are not inconsistent with each other: they reflect a coherent theological understanding of the difference between scenes set in this world and those set in the next.

Image: The Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Angelico, painted around 1434.

A reasonable question arises here. If each tradition rests on a different understanding of man — fallen, glorified, or on pilgrimage between the two — how is it that within a single tradition we find figures in all three states? Baroque art reveals Historical Man, yet it gives us scenes set in heaven, such as the Coronation of the Virgin. The answer, I would argue, is that while a tradition may occasionally admit some slight variation – Fra Angelico is a rare and notable case – in general, once a style of representing the human figure is established within a tradition, it is applied across all situations. To ask an artist to be fluent in several styles and traditions at once, switching between them according to the subject, would be asking too much of him and would likely confuse those who see it; working consistently within one style is what gives a body of work its coherence. And in any case, there are other means of indicating heaven while remaining within the Baroque idiom – the presence of angels, the absence of any earthly setting, and so on.

Why not the High Renaissance?

Many Catholics will be surprised to find that Benedict XVI’s list of authentic liturgical artistic traditions does not include the High Renaissance – the period of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, c. 1480–1530, which is often considered the summit of Catholic artistic achievement. I follow Pope Benedict’s lead here, and it is worth explaining why.

All traditional art training involves, in varying degrees, copying the works of great masters and the direct observation of nature. The style in which an artist ultimately paints is shaped above all by the art with which he is most familiar, which in turn shapes his response to the nature he observes. Gothic artists looked to Romanesque models and to one another; for this reason, there was no sharp break between the Romanesque and the Gothic, and Gothic art can be understood as a progressively “naturalized” version of the iconographic style, the level of naturalism increasing gradually and without any clear dislocation from its roots.

The High Renaissance represents a different kind of transition: a clear break from that inherited tradition. Artists of this period no longer looked primarily to Romanesque or Gothic masters for inspiration, but to the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures that surrounded them in Italy and were being excavated at the time. The sharp change in style between the Gothic and the Italian High Renaissance is not a reflection of increased naturalism – as we have explained, that process had already been going on for centuries. Rather, it is due to the incorporation into artists’ training of copying ancient Greek and Roman statues and plaster casts of them, which radically altered the form of the art. The main impetus for this was not theological or philosophical; rather, it was simply that the period was enamored of the magnificence of this ancient form and wished to emulate it.

The implications of this shift were far-reaching. Benedict XVI described what followed:

“The Renaissance did something quite new...its art speaks of the grandeur of man almost as if it were surprised by it; it needs no other beauty to seek...The tragic burden of antiquity is forgotten; only its divine beauty is seen. A nostalgia for the gods emerges, for myth, for a world without the fear of sin...True, Christian subjects are still being depicted, but ‘religious art’ is no longer sacred in the proper sense. It does not enter into the humility of the other sacraments and their time-transcending dynamism.”

The Spirit of the Liturgy, p129

The phrase “without fear of sin” is worth dwelling on. It was the art theorist Alberti who first proposed, in his influential treatise On Painting (1435), that the observation of the nude should also form part of every artist’s training, along with the copying of ancient statues. In doing so, he was knowingly departing from the practice of Christian tradition up to that point – attaching excessive importance to direct observation of the unclothed figure without sufficient regard, in my opinion, for human dignity or for concupiscence, the natural inclination of fallen man toward sin.

The 16th century, shaped by Alberti’s ideas, is characterized less by a coherent tradition than by a series of dominant, individualistic, and brilliantly gifted figures: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. While there were undoubted individual high points, the period as a whole represented a departure from the sacred character of what preceded it, for the reasons Benedict identifies. The Baroque style was a deliberate response to this, inspired by the Council of Trent (which closed in 1563) and the spiritual energy of the Counter-Reformation. Gradually, the contributions of these and other artists were assessed and integrated, and by the end of the 16th century a coherent Christian tradition, properly grounded in theology, had developed from their work.

This, then, is why the High Renaissance, for all its brilliance, does not appear among the three authentic traditions. It is not a judgment on the gifts of its artists, but a recognition that the sacred character of an artistic tradition depends on the end it serves and the understanding of the human person it embodies. The iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque each, in their different ways, keep that end in view; and it is to a fuller account of each that I hope to turn in the articles that follow.

Michelangelo, the Creation of Adam, fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

Roman Discus Thrower, from the 1st century AD, Villa Arianna, Italy

On Sacred Art (Part 1): Revealing the Invisible through the Visible

How style communicates theological truth, and the three authentic traditions of liturgical art: iconographic, Gothic, and Baroque

This is the first of two related articles on the three authentic liturgical traditions of the Church – what makes them sacred, and how sacred art is the template for mundane or profane art. This first article asks what sacred art is for, how style communicates theological truth, and introduces the three traditions Benedict XVI identifies. The second will consider what governs the style of each, drawing on the anthropology of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, and will explain why the High Renaissance is not among them.

What should the content of sacred art be?

Every time an artist paints, he asks three fundamental questions: What do I paint? How do I paint it? And why am I painting it? All three are interconnected, but his answer to the first question: ‘What?’ governs the content; and his answer to the second: ‘How?’ governs the style. The third question, ‘Why?’, establishes the purpose that both content and style must serve.

The content and style of sacred art must accordingly serve its sacred purpose. By tradition, that purpose is to show us what we could not otherwise see, in such a way that it deepens our participation in worship and prayer. An image of Christ on the Cross is vital to our worship, for example, because it tells us something about what is happening at the Mass. Paintings of saints and angels reveal to us that there is a heavenly host of that worships God alongside us. Paintings of the feasts and Gospel narratives connect these events to specific points in the liturgical year.

In this sense, sacred art makes the invisible visible. It does so in two ways: first, as one might expect, through its subject matter; second, through the style in which it is painted. So, in the case of sacred art, how the subject is painted is just as important in communicating theological truths as what is painted. This second point is less immediately obvious and warrants careful explanation.

Image: The Theotokos, Mary the Mother of God and the Christ Child by Gregory Kroug, 20th century, in the iconographic style. Egg tempera on panel. Three stars on her outer garment, on each shoulder (one is hidden) and her forehead are symbols of perpetual virginity, i.e., before, during and after the birth of the Savior.

What governs style in art?

Most people coming out of fine art departments in the West today would assume that style is a purely personal choice, needing no stronger justification than the artist’s own preference. The Christian artist, however, should approach things differently. Every artist makes personal choices, but a Christian artist makes those choices in light of an end that aligns with his faith, and, as a result, Christian art should be as recognizably Christian by virtue of its style alone.

If an artist wants to paint Our Lady, he will not only represent her visible appearance as faithfully as he can; drawing on tradition, he will also seek to communicate truths about her that would not be visible even if she were standing before us: that she is a saint in heaven, that she is the Mother of God, that she is a virgin in perpetuity, and that, in common with all humanity, she is a person with an invisible soul as well as a visible body. These truths are abstracted – literally ‘drawn out’ – and made visible through a controlled and partial modification of natural appearances, which creates a characteristic style. It takes great skill to do this, but when done well, the resulting stylization conveys a deeper reality than a strictly naturalistic representation could and communicates many of these aspects to people who intuit these truths, even though they are often unaware of precisely how the artist uses style to communicate them.

To describe this in more detail, it is worth establishing the meanings of the terms I will use here. When I want to describe conformity to natural appearances, I use the word ‘naturalism’. Some other commentators will use the word ‘realism’ here, but I generally prefer not to, since it implies that natural appearances constitute the whole of reality, which is not true.

The tendency to deviate from natural appearances, on the other hand, is called by other commentators and me variously and interchangeably ‘abstraction’, ‘symbolism’, or ‘idealism’.

Both tendencies – that is, heightened naturalism or heightened abstraction (symbolism or idealism) – taken to their extremes, mask reality rather than reveal it. Too much abstraction risks an ugly distortion that hides the truth. The artist risks distorting appearances to the point that the viewer cannot recognize what he is supposed to be looking at. Alternatively, the artist can misapply distortion to convey the wrong message. For example, an overly erotic representation of the female figure, as seen in advertising and superhero comics. This quality of heightened eroticism is communicated as much by the style of the painting as by the pose that the figure adopts.

Too much naturalism, as we see in the style known as ‘photorealism’ (which I consider a misnomer for the reason stated above), often produces a cold sterility that fails to convey the full Christian understanding of what it means to be a person, including the presence of an immortal soul.

Christian figurative art has always navigated a course between these two poles. Because doing so is genuinely difficult, the Christian artist is wise to conform to traditional, tried-and-tested styles and to depart from established stylistic conventions only when the needs of a particular community or time clearly require it. This principle is sometimes called the ‘hermeneutic of continuity’, and can be summarized simply: don’t change things unless you have to.

Pope Pius XII addressed this balance directly in his 1947 encyclical, Mediator Dei. (In the passage below, Pius is using the word ‘realism’ to refer to what I would call naturalism, and ‘symbolism’ to refer to the degree of abstraction or idealization):

"Recent works of art which lend themselves to the materials of modern composition, should not be universally despised and rejected through prejudice. Modern art should be given free scope in the due and reverent service of the church and the sacred rites, provided that they preserve a correct balance between styles tending neither to extreme realism nor to excessive ‘symbolism,’ and that the needs of the Christian community are taken into consideration rather than the particular taste or talent of the individual artist. (Mediator Dei, 195)"

Most of the recognizable artistic styles that have developed since the beginning of the 20th century depart radically, in my opinion, from the traditional balance of naturalism and idealism — but that should not surprise us, since most modern artists had no intention of conforming to Christian tradition, actually quite the reverse; and they have a different understanding of the human person and the world around us. To consider two examples: photorealist painting, at one extreme, reflects a denial of anything beyond surface appearances. By reproducing the visible world with photographic precision and deliberate emotional flatness, it presents the human figure as a mere object among objects, stripped of any evident interior life or soul and seen as having no greater value than a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. Abstract Expressionism, at the other extreme, largely abandons the material world and the body as meaningful subjects. It instead seeks to convey pure inner states — emotions and feelings — through gesture, color, and non-representational form. For many of these artists, the essence of humanity lies in thoughts, feelings, and subjective experience rather than in the embodied person. Abstract Expressionist art, such as that of Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, although it seeks to communicate essential aspects of human nature as they see it, does not convey any sense of the human body. There is no figure shown that we would recognize as having two arms, two legs, and so on. Each approach runs contrary to the Christian understanding of the human person as a unity of body and soul.

The three authentic traditions of liturgical art

In his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy (p. 129), Pope Benedict XVI identifies three authentic traditions of liturgical art. Each in its own characteristic way strikes the balance between naturalism and abstraction that Pius XII called for. Here is an introduction to them and to what unites or distinguishes them from one another.

The first is the iconographic tradition. This style developed in the early centuries of the Church, reaching a distinctive form around the 4th century AD. It remained the dominant form of Christian sacred art, albeit in many different variations, until the 12th century, and continues to characterize the sacred art of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox churches to this day. When we speak of ‘icons’, the images of Orthodox churches naturally come to mind first – for example, the holy icons from the Monastery of St Catherine on Mt Sinai dating to the 6th century, or the works of Andrei Rublev and Theophanes the Greek in the 14th and 15th centuries. However, it is less well known that the iconographic style is also part of the Western, Roman tradition. In the West, after the style’s first development in the 4th century, all artistic styles up to and including the Romanesque remained fully consistent with the same iconographic prototype. The figurative art of the Book of Kells, made in Ireland in the 8th century, and the Celtic style, for instance, conform to the iconographic prototype. Though they may look very different from an icon, they share the same underlying principles that define iconographic art.

Image: An 8th-century illumination of St Mark in the Celtic style from the Gospel of St Gallen. It looks very different from a Russian icon, yet the two share the underlying principles of the iconographic tradition.

The second authentic tradition is the Gothic. This term is generally applied to a style that emerged in the Western Church around the 12th century, replacing the earlier Romanesque style, and died out by the 16th century. Duccio, the 13th-century Italian painter, is a representative example: his work is characterized by greater naturalism than the iconographic tradition, though it remains highly abstract in comparison with later Western styles. Over time, the degree of naturalization steadily increased, while maintaining the essential formal elements of this newly established Gothic style. I would include artists such as Fra Angelico and Flemish painters such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden in this category, considering them late-Gothic.

Image: Crucifixion Diptych by Rogier van der Weyden, 1460.

One explanation for this transition from the iconographic Romanesque style is the influence of the ideas of Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher of the 4th century BC, whose works were rediscovered and incorporated into Christian thought by the medieval scholastics beginning around the 12th century and gathering pace thereafter – among them St Bonaventure and St Thomas Aquinas, who lived in the 13th century. Through this renewed study of Aristotle, integrated into Christian thought by these great medieval figures, there was now greater confidence in the senses’ capacity to yield reliable knowledge and a deepened appreciation of the created world, which could be accurately observed and understood through the information they provide. It was not a wholesale reversal of earlier assumptions – Christians had always trusted the senses to some degree and believed in the reality of the world around us – but rather a significant shift of emphasis. As a result of this greater stress on the intelligibility of the natural world, there was a greater curiosity about it and a desire to understand the order that pervades it. An outcome of this is an increased naturalism in art. Artists studied and copied nature more rigorously than before. Many today associate high naturalism in Christian art with the Italian High Renaissance, with artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo, but the development of naturalistic art did not begin with them. Rather, it is the culmination of a process of systematic observation of nature that began much earlier, in the Gothic period. A second outcome of this movement toward a more intensive and systematic study of nature and the natural order, incidentally, was the emergence of what would eventually become modern natural science and the scientific method.

The third tradition considered authentically liturgical and sacred is the Baroque – or, as Benedict XVI puts it, the Baroque ‘at its best’. This is the strongly naturalistic style that developed in Italy as part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and characterizes the art of 17th-century Western Europe. The artists who established it include Federico Barocci and Caravaggio; other well-known Baroque painters include Velázquez, Georges de La Tour, Zurbarán, Van Dyck, Rubens, Guido Reni, and Ribera. Though strongly naturalistic, the style employs a carefully worked-out, if subtly applied, abstraction. Later commentators, drawing on Platonic terminology, would call this partial abstraction ‘idealization’ in connection with Baroque art.

Image: St James the Greater, by the Italian artist Guido Reni; an example of 17th-century Baroque sacred art.

These, then, are the three traditions: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. We have seen what unites them: each strikes, in its own way, the balance between naturalism and abstraction proper to sacred art. What we have not yet seen is what accounts for the differences between them, and why these three, and not others, are the traditions Benedict identifies. In the next of these two articles, I will turn to that question, drawing on the anthropology of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, and will explain why the High Renaissance, so often regarded as the summit of Catholic art, does not belong on the list.

A Letter Exchange on the Last Council and the Liturgical Reform

The following letter exchange took place between me and a gentleman whose personal details have been edited out.

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

I am a high school theology teacher and also lead Bible studies. The life of the Church, the Scriptures, and Holy Mass are all integral to my daily life. I find all issues related to liturgy to be terribly confusing. There are so many different narratives out there that one could lose one’s mind trying to figure out which one is correct, or if any is correct. There is the fine work done by many of you at New Liturgical Movement, among others. One could also find a different view point from rad trads, or a liberal view from people at the Pray Tell blog. So, lots of passionate views by highly educated people who feel they are interpreting Vatican II in the right way. (Unless they reject the council altogether, which is another story.)

My question, then, is: Where to begin, and whom do I trust? Having read Vatican II and Sacrosanctum Concilium on a number of occasions, as well as in class work, it seems that some reform was certainly called for. How, then, can some people completely dismiss the council and the directives that were given? I have friends who do that quite often, while referring to the council as simply “pastoral.” Yet, I am sympathetic with these people because of some of the unfortunate innovations that occurred after the council. So, for me at least, while I like the reverence and use of Latin in the TLM, I still prefer the Novus Ordo. It seems to me that there must be some place of meeting between the two, while being faithful to both the received liturgical tradition of the Church and the reforms called for by SC. What do you think?

Sincerely yours,
A Curious Catholic

***

Dear Sir:

I completely understand your predicament, as it parallels how I felt at a certain juncture. We are living in a confusing age, and a certain diversity of opinions is not only to be expected but should be tolerated, even (at times) welcomed, as we try to work things out as best we can, in the absence of strong and able leadership at the higher levels of the clergy.

This much seems beyond any doubt: the reforms to the liturgy from 1964 to 1970 went far beyond anything that the Council Fathers ever had in mind or anything that Sacrosanctum Concilium could possibly justify. This has been so thoroughly documented and demonstrated that it’s no longer an open question.

Those who defend Bugnini and the Consilium are forced, then, simply to say, “Well, that’s true, but they did the bold thing – the thing that had to be done – and the Pope recognized it and approved it.” On the other hand, those who question Bugnini’s and the Consilium’s principles will say, “We’re not surprised at the disaster that has befallen the Church, since you cannot break with the organic tradition of the liturgy and not expect to introduce massive amounts of chaos and malaise.”

None of this touches on the question of sacramental validity, which is to be presumed and can be readily defended on theological grounds; but certainly the question of the prudence of the changes and their defensibility is fair game. The attempt to shut down that conversation has failed, particularly when it became apparent that Joseph Ratzinger, one of the greatest theological luminaries of the twentieth century, and truly “the pope of the liturgical question,” was more than willing to participate in it himself.

Moreover, it really is the case that both John XXIII and Paul VI spoke of the Council as pastoral in nature and as an attempt to interpret and respond to modern man. In 1988, Cardinal Ratzinger said the following in an address to the bishops of Chile:

“The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular Council defined no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of “super-dogma” which takes away the importance of all the rest.”

Consequently, it was possible for the Council to get some things right and others not so right, since we are not dealing with unalterable dogmas that must be believed, or anathematized errors that must be shunned. The simple fact that the Council says “we should do X” doesn’t mean that, some decades later, we can’t legitimately argue that X wasn’t the best response, or that it wouldn’t make more sense to do Y or Z today. Indeed, this kind of situation has occurred many times in the history of the Church, which gives us other examples of councils (think of the Lateran councils) whose reforms didn’t always work or, in some cases, weren’t even attempted.

It seems to me that the Pray Tell perspective is generally untenable because it exalts progressivism at the expense of tradition, which is a fundamentally uncatholic way of thinking and judging. Rorate Caeli represents a consistent traditionalism that considers safe, sound, and sacred that which has always (or nearly always) been done by everyone (or nearly everyone) everywhere (or nearly everywhere). New Liturgical Movement is a meeting ground for various interests, announcements, and hypotheses, but always within a general commitment to the normativity of tradition. One will not stray far from the truth if one endeavors to remain faithful to the Magisterium while seeing tradition as a non-negotiable good that should always be privileged.

You raise an interesting question about Vatican II’s request for a reform of the liturgy. As you know, the Council insisted that no change be made unless the good of the Church certainly required it (SC 23). Far more changes were made than were ever certainly required, and the floodgates were opened for abuses. Even from a sociological-anthropological point of view, everyone knows that a gigantic and tradition-bound body can only absorb change slowly and stepwise, unless one wants to provoke rupture and confusion – which is exactly what happened. It could have been, and was, predicted ahead of time.

It seems clear that Benedict XVI’s intention was that the two “forms” would peacefully coexist for a long enough time to allow a restart of organic development, but I will admit that it’s difficult in practice to see how this would have actually taken place, and I am not aware of many traditionalists who want to see the old rite modified, for reasons explained in one of my recent books, Close the Workshop. In any case, it seems that “full, conscious, and active participation” was the primary reason given for reform, and I think it is not difficult to argue that the TLM in fact allows for a superior fulfillment of this desideratum.

Yours in Him,
Peter Kwasniewski

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

About four years ago I emailed you, out of the blue, with some questions about Vatican II, the old Mass and the new Mass. I have spent the past four years reading as much as I can while also observing and praying over my own experiences attending Mass. I have devoted considerable time reading authors that would typically be published on Pray Tell, and while I agree with some of what they argue, mainly the need of some reform, I simply cannot understand their unwillingness to see that a number of the experiments that occurred after the Council did not benefit the People of God. Examples would be the loss of chant, the abandonment of ad orientem, and the complete neglect of Latin.

When I attend the old rite, I fully appreciate the elements in it that are clearly lacking in the new rite. For me, there is a real attraction to it. However, here’s my one concern. I don’t want to be involved with any part of the Church that rejects the Second Vatican Council. While I think there is plenty of healthy dialogue that can go on concerning the implementation of Sacrosanctum Concillium, I am wary of those who reject elements of the Council. I firmly support the teachings on religious liberty, Nostra Aetate, Unitatis Redintegratio, and Lumen Gentium. My question to you is, can I embrace the pre-Conciliar Missal while also embracing the Vatican II in full?

God bless you,
A Curious Catholic

***

Dear Sir:

It’s very good to hear from you again. I no longer read Pray Tell, as I found that the perspective of Fr. Ruff in particular was exceedingly irresponsible. He speaks as if Vatican II amounted to a carte-blanche to overturn anything and everything in order to retool the Church for modern evangelization. Even if one might admire the apostolic motivation of this view, we can see that it has failed in so many ways.

Where there is flourishing new life in the Church, it has tended to align itself with so-called conservative or traditional constituencies. We can see this most obviously in the clergy, religious life, and marriages: young clergy tend, on the whole, to be interested in recovering traditions that were lost; religious orders that are growing or maintaining their numbers are the ones unembarrassed or even eager about Catholic tradition; and the marriages that are bringing new life into the Church and the world are those that are faithful to the indissoluble unitive and procreative finalities of marriage as a life-giving and life-sacrificing covenant.

You raise a difficult and challenging question – namely, about the doctrinal content and subsequent reception of the Second Vatican Council. Unavoidably, the Council is controversial, because, on the topics you mentioned (and others), it staked out positions that are not always obviously in harmony with preceding magisterial teaching. For example, there are clear tensions (which is not yet to say absolute contradictions) between Leo XIII’s encyclical Libertas Praestantissimum and Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae, or between Pius XI’s encyclical Mortalium Animos and Vatican II’s Unitatis Redintegratio, or between Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis and Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium.

Because the Council was intended as a pastoral response to modern times, as both John XXIII and Paul VI repeatedly said, it did not engage the highest level of magisterial authority – that is, it did not issue de fide pronouncements or anathemas on errors, which are considered infallible exercises of the Magisterium. At most, as the Nota praevia indicates, it intended to restate teachings already known to be true from their presence in the doctrinal heritage of the Church.

The conciliar documents were presented as a restatement of the Catholic Faith in modern language, and to that extent, they may be responsibly criticized, although the Council’s validity as an ecclesiastical gathering cannot be disputed, nor can the documents be dismissed out of hand. They must not be placed on an untouchable pedestal. Indeed, there is a great irony (as again Ratzinger pointed out) in the fact that the so-called “progressives” feel free to dispute and dismiss the more obviously authoritative canons and decrees of the Council of Trent, where we find the words de fide and anathema on practically every page, while they pillory anyone who so much as questions the prudence or adequacy of any formulation in Vatican II. Surely there is here a strange inversion and confusion.

Thus, everything depends on what is meant by “embracing Vatican II in full.” Whatever is clearly in line with the perennial Magisterium we should embrace; anything that seems in tension with it we may accept on condition that it be in harmony (which we may or may not be able to see ourselves); and we may suspend assent to false interpretations or extrapolations that have caused great harm to the Mystical Body of Christ. What I have just summarized is the view of Bishop Athanasius Schneider, such as can be found in his book Christus Vincit: Christ’s Triumph Over the Darkness of the Age, which I highly recommend for its clarity and serene common sense.

We must also be prepared to acknowledge that the state of the world today, sixty years after the close of the Council, is vastly different than it was back then, and that the burning issues that animated the prelates of the 1960s are no longer ours; moreover, that certain solutions, such as the recovery of tradition, are proving to be more effective in reaching, converting, and nourishing postmodern man than any of the programs aimed at “modern man” as conceived circa 1970. Thus, it may also simply be the case that Vatican II, whatever its status might be, has already simply ceased to be of much relevance, and therefore is no longer worth all the anguish and laborious exegesis it once occasioned.

It seems to me that the sooner bishops and cardinals recognize this dramatic shift, the sooner they can respond to the actual needs and desires of the People of God, and hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches today.

Yours in Christ,

Dr. Kwasniewski

The Third Anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI’s Death

Deus, qui inter summos sacerdótes fámulum tuum Benedictum ineffábili tua dispositióne connumerári voluisti: praesta, quáesumus; ut, qui Unigéniti Filii tui vices in terris gerébat, sanctórum tuórum Pontíficum consortio perpétuo aggregétur. Per eundem Christum, Dóminum nostrum. Amen.

God, Who in Thy ineffable providence, did will that Thy servant Benedict should be numbered among the high priests, grant, we beseech Thee, that he, who on earth held the place of Thine Only-begotten Son, may be joined forevermore to the fellowship of Thy holy pontiffs. Through the same Christ, Our Lord. Amen.

As we pray for the eternal repose of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who died three years ago today, let us also remember with gratitude the gift of his papacy, his graciousness and good humor, his many wise and well-considered writings, his paternal love especially for priests and religious, but of course above all, his restoration to the Church of the incomparable treasure of the traditional Roman Rite, an act which will continue to bear great spiritual fruit and lead the way for much-needed reform. “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”

Joseph Ratzinger serving an open-air solemn Mass in the town of Buchfelln in 1947, when he was 20. Tradition will always be for the young!

A Very Good Video from Brian Holdsworth on Liturgical Reform

I meant to share this video from the always-wise Brian Holdsworth yesterday, which was the 18th anniversary of Pope Benedict’s motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, but travel plans and an uncooperative router intervened. The title is “A Plea to Pope Leo For Reform”, and essentially, he lays out a very good case for why Summorum Pontificum needs to be restored, and likewise, some good food for thought as to what the future of liturgical reform in general should look like.

If I may be so bold as to summarize his argument, it basically runs as follows. Improvements in the human person do not happen at once; they require slow and steady work. If you are unhealthy and out of shape, you cannot simply decide to be healthy and in shape from one day to the next. You need to not just exercise and eat better, but get in the habit of exercising and eating better. Likewise, if you want to be smarter, you cannot simply decide to be smarter; you need to develop the habit of doing things that will make you smarter (read more good books, waste less time on scrolling through videos, etc.) And if you try to change your habits all at once, and go directly to he desired end-result, you will fail disastrously; he likens this to trying to get in shape by going from lifting 40 pounds in the gym one day to lifting 200 the next.

What this means (and this is the part which really made me take notice) is that even if the post-Conciliar liturgy were indeed a vast improvement on the traditional liturgy in every way, as some contend, it was nevertheless brought with it such an unprecedented amount of change, and was implemented at such an unprecedented speed, that it was never going to have the desired effect. Mr Holdsworth makes the analogy that it was like moving the pin in the weight machine from 40 to 200 from one day to the next, and the result has been a failure.

And here, by the way, he also makes a very wise cautionary note for those of us who love the traditional rite, and pray to see it restored to its rightful place in the Church, namely, that this cuts both ways. If, as we believe, it is the traditional Roman Rite that is superior, circumstances within the Church have nevertheless now changed in such a way imposing it all at once would be similarly imprudent, and lead to a similar failure.

This, in turn, is why Pope Benedict’s vision, that the liberation of the traditional Roman Rite, and his hope that it would gradually improve the general condition of the liturgy in the Church as a whole, were so wise. So I thank Mr Holdsworth for this very good observation, and urge all our readers to continue their prayers for the hastening of the day when the Summorum Pontificum regimen is restored as it should be.  

The Twentieth Anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI’s Election

On this Holy Saturday, we also mark the 20th anniversary of the election of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. Let us remember with gratitude the gift of his papacy, his graciousness and good humor, his many wise and well-considered writings, his paternal love especially for priests and religious, but of course above all, his restoration to the Church of the incomparable treasure of the traditional Roman Rite, an act which will continue to bear great spiritual fruit and lead the way for much-needed reform. “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”

Joseph Ratzinger serving an open-air solemn Mass in the town of Buchfelln in 1947, when he was 20. Tradition will always be for the young!

The Second Anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI’s Death

Deus, qui inter summos sacerdótes fámulum tuum Benedictum ineffábili tua dispositióne connumerári voluisti: praesta, quáesumus; ut, qui Unigéniti Filii tui vices in terris gerébat, sanctórum tuórum Pontíficum consortio perpétuo aggregétur. Per eundem Christum, Dóminum nostrum. Amen.

God, Who in Thy ineffable providence, did will that Thy servant Benedict should be numbered among the high priests, grant, we beseech Thee, that he, who on earth held the place of Thine Only-begotten Son, may be joined forevermore to the fellowship of Thy holy pontiffs. Through the same Christ, Our Lord. Amen.

As we pray for the eternal repose of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who died two years ago today, let us also remember with gratitude the gift of his papacy, his graciousness and good humor, his many wise and well-considered writings, his paternal love especially for priests and religious, but of course above all, his restoration to the Church of the incomparable treasure of the traditional Roman Rite, an act which will continue to bear great spiritual fruit and lead the way for much-needed reform. “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”

Joseph Ratzinger serving an open-air solemn Mass in the town of Buchfelln in 1947, when he was 20. Tradition will always be for the young!

My Interview with Dr Jan Bentz of The European Conservative

Earlier this year, on the feast of the Assumption, I had the great pleasure of giving an interview to an old friend, Dr Jan Bentz, who studied in Rome for many years. He is now teaching at Oxford University, and hosting an interview series called Reality Check on the YouTube channel of The European Conservative magazine. Our conversation ranged over a wide variety of topics related to the liturgy: a little bit about the station Masses; the current status of the traditional Roman Rite; the legacy of Pope Benedict XVI, and how it applies to the whole life of the Church; the non-reception of Vatican II; the lectionary; continuity and rupture in the post-Conciliar reform; prospects for future liturgical reform, etc. I hope you find it interesting.

The Legend of St Denis

October 9 has traditionally been kept as the feast of Ss Denis (“Dionysius” in Latin) and Companions, who were martyred at Paris in the 3rd century. St John Leonardi, the founder of a small congregation of clerks regular, died on this day in 1609; when he was added to the general calendar in 1940, his feast was placed on top of that of the martyrs, who were thus reduced to a commemoration. In the post-Conciliar reform, however, both feasts have been made optional memorials, which means that the martyrs may now be celebrated more freely in the Novus Ordo than in the Roman Rite. That they should be present at all in the modern liturgy is very surprising, since St Denis is the subject of one of the most famous hagiographical confusions, of exactly the sort that led to the suppression or downgrading of so many other feasts.

A statue of St Denis, from the treasury of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Paris. One legend tells that St Denis was beheaded on the hill of Montmartre which overlooks Paris, after which he picked up his head and walked about 4 miles to the site where he is buried, the future location of the abbey which bears his name. (Photo courtesy of the Schola Sainte-Cécile.)

In his History of the Franks (I.30), St Gregory of Tours (538-94) lists Denis as one of seven men sent to Gaul as bishops to evangelize various cities during the reign of the Emperor Decius (249-51), and says that sometime after, he was “afflicted with various sufferings for the name of Christ, and ended the present life at the blow of a sword.” In the Martyrology incorrectly attributed to St Jerome, Denis is named on October 9th together with a priest and a deacon, Rusticus and Eleutherius, who are also mentioned in the prayer of their collective feast day. Their bodies were buried at a site a few miles to the north of Paris, and a church built over it, which Gregory of Tours mentions twice, once in connection with a miracle, and again when describing its profanation. Not long after his time, King Dagobert I (603-39) established a monastery under royal patronage at the site, and completely rebuilt the church; it was rebuilt again in the days of Pepin the Short and his son Charlemagne, the latter of whom attended its consecration in 775.

According to the revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints, even before the Carolingian period, St Denis of Paris had already been confused in some quarters with the Biblical figure of the same name (i.e. Dionysius), who was converted by the preaching of St Paul in Athens (Acts 17, 22-34). This preaching took place at the “Areopagus – the hill of Ares”, a large outcropping of the Athenian acropolis which was used as a place of judgment for serious crimes like murder; St Luke calls Dionysius “the Areopagite”, i.e., one of the judges who sat on the court held there. The Church historian Eusebius reports (3.4.11), on the witness of another Dionysius (a very common name in antiquity), bishop of Corinth in the later 2nd century, that the Areopagite was the first bishop of Athens; by the turn of the seventh century, he was believed to have died as a martyr, being burnt alive by the Emperor Domitian.

The Preaching of St Paul at Athens; a preparatory cartoon made by Raphael in the 1510s as part of a series of designs intended to be woven into tapestries; now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Sometime in the later 5th or early 6th century, an unknown Greek-speaking theologian produced a series of four treatises and ten letters, purporting to be works of Dionysius the Areopagite. This is not a case like those of Ss John Chrysostom or Augustine, among many others, to whom writings were very often mistakenly ascribed in later generations; the author clearly and deliberately intended to pass himself off as the contemporary of St Paul. To this end, he claims to have been present, along with Ss Peter and James, for the Dormition of the Virgin Mary (Div. Nom. 3, 2), and addresses letters to Ss John the Evangelist, Timothy and Polycarp. Scholars generally suppose him to have been a Syrian; the dating of his works depends in part on the obvious influence upon them of the neo-Platonic philosopher Proclus, who died in 485. Further attempts to glean information about the author from his writings remain speculative.

By the first decades of the sixth century, these writings were cited by authors on both sides of the debate over the Monophysite heresy, which the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon had condemned in 451. Most notably, at a council held in Constantinople in 533, the Monophysites cited them in support of their teaching, to which the leader of the Catholic party replied that they were forgeries. Nevertheless, as the controversy continued, and as the heresy evolved into Monotheletism in the 7th century, they came to be gradually accepted as both genuine and orthodox by several important figures, the most significant being St Maximus the Confessor, who cited them at a council held in the Lateran Basilica in Rome in 649, under Pope St Martin I. They were further defended and cited to the same effect at the next two ecumenical councils, Third Constantinople in 680, and Second Nicea in 787. To this day, the Byzantine Rite’s liturgical texts for St Dionysius, “the Holy Martyr and Areopagite”, bishop of Athens, are filled with references to the writings, as for example, this hymn at Vespers: “Having made thy mind equal in honor to that of the Angels through virtue, o all-wise father Dionysius, thou didst write an account in (thy) holy books of the heavenly order of their hierarchy, and according to it, didst organize the orders of the Church’s government, likening them to the ranks of heaven.” (He is also the titular Saint of the Roman Catholic cathedral of Athens.)

An early 11th-century mosaic of St Dionysios the Areopagite, in the monastery of St Luke in Boeotia, Greece. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

In the year 827, the Byzantine Emperor Michael II (820-29) sent a copy of the writings to Charlemagne’s son, King Louis the Pious, along with several other gifts. By coincidence, they happened to reach the king on the evening of October 8th, when he was at the royal abbey of St Denis for the vigil of the titular Saint’s feast day. The abbot, Hilduin, who was very close to the king, had them translated into Latin, although this translation was not very well done, and was replaced by another about 30 years later. At the king’s behest, he also wrote a life of St Denis, which definitively conflated the bishop of Paris with the Areopagite, ascribed his mission in Gaul to Pope St Clement I towards the end of the 1st century, and acknowledged the writings as his. This conflation was henceforth accepted, and remained the common legend of St Denis in western Europe for the next 700 years. The writings became extremely influential in the High Middle Ages; Hugh of St Victor, St Albert the Great, and yet another Denis, the great Carthusian theologian, wrote commentaries on them, and they are cited well over 2000 times in the works of St Thomas Aquinas.

In the Renaissance, when many of the certainties of the medieval tradition were being called into question, the authenticity of the writings, and the identification of the two Denises as the same person, were challenged by two of the most prominent among the great humanist scholars, Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), who also unmasked the forgery known as the Donation of Constantine, and later Erasmus. The question was the subject of much controversy and debate over the following centuries, with learned men, Catholic and Protestant, offering their opinions as both defenders and detractors of the tradition. The neo-Gallican revision of the Parisian liturgical books sided with the detractors by separating Denis into two persons, one of Athens, kept on his Byzantine date, October 3rd, and the other of Paris on the traditional date, without the title “Areopagite”, a change which was later harshly condemned by Dom Prosper Guéranger.

A leaf of a 15th century Missal according to the Use of Paris, with the Epistle of the Mass of St Denis, Acts 17, 22-34. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 859A)

However, this diffidence towards the traditional legend of St Denis was not a novelty of the neo-Gallicans. The pre-Tridentine Roman Breviary devotes only a single lesson of less than 70 words to St Denis and his companions, which makes no mention of the theological treatises. It also says that he was sent to Gaul “by the Roman Pontiff”, without specifying which one, a clear sign of doubt about the legend that it was St Clement.

Much more tellingly, the pre-Tridentine Parisian Breviary also pointedly does not refer to Denis as the author of the Areopagitic corpus, although it does accept him as the Athenian disciple of St Paul and the contemporary of St Clement. The Matins lessons for the feast day and the days of its octave are taken directly from Hilduin’s life of the Saint, but omit the chapters (9-17) which describe the theological writings, nor is there any reference to them in any of the proper antiphons or responsories of the Office, or in the Sequence of the Mass. (The Epistle of the latter is the passage from Acts 17 cited above.)

In point of fact, it was only with the Tridentine revision that the Roman Breviary accepted Hilduin’s conflation of the Athenian and Parisian Denis as the same person. Furthermore, a sentence is added to the effect that “He wrote wondrous and indeed heavenly books, on the divine names, on the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, on mystical theology, and certain others.” This is perhaps the only case in the Breviary of St Pius V in which the legend of a Saint moves further away from the more skeptical view, almost certainly due to the influence of Cardinal Baronius, who defended the traditional legend in his notes on the revision of the Martyrology.

As late as 1857, when the Abbé Migne put together his great corpus of Patristic writings, the Patrologia Graeca, which is arranged in chronological order, he put the Areopagitic corpus and associated writings, including several defenses of its authenticity, between the works of St Clement I and those of St Ignatius of Antioch. However, in 1895, two Catholic scholars, Hugo Koch and Josef Stiglmayer, working quite separately from each other, demonstrated the dependence of the writings on the works of Proclus, and the question is now universally regarded as settled in the negative. This also explains what was, of course, the strongest objection to their authenticity all along, namely, the complete absence of any reference to them in the writings of earlier Church Fathers.

Part of the choir of the abbey of St Denys. Around the year 1135, the abbot Suger began the process of enlarging the Carolingian church, during which the choir was rebuilt from 1140-44. Inspired by the Areopagite’s theology of light as an expression and manifestation of God’s presence, Suger created the idea of having huge walls of windows which flood the church’s interior with light; this is the foundation of the architecture style which we now call Gothic, and this choir is the first example of it. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Guilhem Vellut, CC BY 2.0)

As with the many controversies over the authorship of the books of the Bible, the assumption behind this debate was to a large degree that if a work is not genuinely by the author to whom it is attributed, it is therefore a forgery, and hence worthless. And likewise, as with the many controversies over the authorship of the books of the Bible, this assumption has more recently been to a large degree subsumed by an understanding that authenticity is principally an historical question, and one that need not always impinge on the value of a writing as a work of theology. In his series of Wednesday audiences on the Church Fathers, Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the author of these writings (May 14, 2008), and explicitly rejected the idea that he passed himself off as the Areopagite in order to vest his work with the authority of one close to the Apostles, but rather, did so “to make an act of humility; he did not want to glorify his own name, he did not want to build a monument to himself with his work but rather truly to serve the Gospel, to create an ecclesial theology, neither individual nor based on himself.”

The Father of the Romans and Joseph Ratzinger, His German Son

Virgil’s Aeneid is one of the modern world’s many illustrious victims. The gradual abandonment of Latin has turned this epic masterpiece, one of the literary cornerstones of Western Civilization, into something that only a minuscule group of inveterate Latinists can truly enjoy in the original language. I’m sad to say that I’m not in that group—Virgil’s Latin is so rich and dense, so intricate and elegant, that reading quickly becomes laborious to the point of exhaustion, and the translations on my bookshelf appear as an oasis in the desert of my own incompetence. I take comfort in the fact that John Dryden, a Latinist of the old stripe and one of the Aeneid’s most famous English-language translators, also strained under the weight of Virgil’s genius:

Virgil called upon me in every line for some new word, and I paid so long, that I was almost bankrupt, so that the latter end must needs be more burdensome than the beginning or the middle; and, consequently, the Twelfth Aeneid cost me double the time of the First and Second. What had become of me, if Virgil had taxed me with another book?

Aeneas builds a fleet after escaping Troy. Sixteenth century, painted enamel on copper.

Written in the first century BC, the Aeneid recounts the journey of Aeneas out of defeated Troy, around Greece, over to eastern Italy, down to Sicily, across the sea to Carthage, back to Sicily, and finally up to western Italy, where he founded Lavinium, a port city in Latium and an ancestor of Roman civilization. Saint Augustine knew the story well and adopted it as an allegorical framework for his own spiritual journey from pagan Rome to Christian Rome:

I was obliged to learn the wanderings of Aeneas, and yet I was forgetful of my own wanderings. I learned to weep for the death of Dido, because she killed herself for love, while in the midst of these things I was miserable and dying, separated from Thee, my God and my Life, and I shed no tears for myself. (Confessions I, 13)

The Aeneid is the story of the founding of Rome, but the poem is more about the people than the city. A central question at stake is the Roman character—what does it mean to be Roman? Virgil’s very long poem offers a very short answer: to be a Roman is to be a child, culturally speaking, of Aeneas. And what was Aeneas? He was, above all, pius.

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Aeneas is Virgil’s epic hero, and his fundamental virtue—his renowned pietas—is an epic headache for translators. The classical Latin word pius doesn’t mean “pious,” and pietas doesn’t mean “piety.” In fact, these words have no adequate English equivalent. In his 2016 translation, the eminent classicist Barry Powell gave up and included the Latin terms in square brackets whenever they appeared, so that readers could form a better idea of what Virgil was actually saying. Powell’s attempt to convey the semantic field of classical pietas requires quite the bevy of English words: “sense of duty,” “religious behavior,” “loyalty,” “devotion,” “filial piety.” From Lewis and Short’s Latin–English dictionary we can add “affection,” “gratitude,” “love” (for one’s parents, benefactors, or homeland).

Dido weeps as Aeneas departs from Carthage.

Perhaps Virgil’s pius Aeneas is more easily understood through example than through explanation. Perhaps the best way for modern Catholics to really grasp the meaning of Roman pietas is to consider how the Roman Church treated (note the past tense) its liturgical tradition. We can reflect on the days when priests and prelates felt a sense of duty toward this tradition—the duty to preserve and reverentially enrich it as a sacred inheritance from the saints, scholars, sages, and heroes that preceded them in the great and perilous odyssey of human life. We can think of the devotion and loyalty of the faithful, who built the temples of Christendom with their labors and filled them with their prayers; who practiced and defended the Faith while humbly accepting that a layman is a layman and not a priest; who taught their children to savor the mysteries and silences and candlelit symbols of a ceremony whose object is the worship of the Triune God, not the exaltation of two-faced man with his long history of betraying himself, his friends, and his heavenly Father.

We can imagine a time when the liturgical rites of our fathers were received with gratitude and love, because they bring pleasure and beauty and divinity into the gritty, messy struggle to live as good Christians in this vale of tears. I dare say that we have our fill of utilitarian efficiency, experimental aesthetics, and prosaic banality from our earthly lives—and thus Catholics once cherished and honored a liturgy that gave them, if only for an hour or two, a vision and a foretaste of heaven.

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Seventeen years ago, Joseph Ratzinger wrote that “what earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too.” Resolved to liberate western Christendom’s ancient Mass from humiliating shackles that it did nothing to deserve, he insisted that “the Church’s Latin liturgy in its various forms has inspired countless saints in their spiritual life, confirmed many peoples in the virtue of religion, and enriched their devotion.” Though a German by birth, this priest sat on a Roman throne, and he proved himself a man of pietas—a faithful son of Aeneas.

The funeral of Joseph Ratzinger. Photo courtesy of Quirinale.it.

In Book II of the Aeneid, Troy is conquered and burning, and Aeneas rescues his elderly father in a manner that gave Western culture one of its most enduring and emblematic scenes of filial piety:

“Come then, dear father! On my shoulders I
Will bear thee, nor will think the task severe.
Whatever lot awaits us, there shall be
One danger and one safety for us both.”

Pope Benedict XVI has, Deo volente, gone to his reward, and his successor has chosen a different path. We must be patient, then, until a new hero comes to carry our paternal liturgy out of the flames.

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