The Collects of Advent: Who is Being Addressed, and What Difference Does It Make?

Some time ago, when my duties with two different choirs had me attending both the traditional and post-Conciliar rites, I noticed a striking difference in content and tone in the Advent Collects of the two rites, so I decided to look into the contrast between the totality of their Advent Collects. [1]

In the traditional rite, the Collects of the first, third, and fourth Sundays of Advent address the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity:

Stir up Thy power, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and come: that from the threatening dangers of our sins we may deserve to be rescued by Thy protection, and to be saved by Thy deliverance: Who livest and reignest with God the Father… (Collect, Sunday I, MR 1962)

Incline Thine ear, we beseech Thee, O Lord, to our petitions: and, by the grace of Thy visitation, enlighten the darkness of our minds: Who livest and reignest with God the Father… (Collect, Sunday III, MR 1962)

Stir up Thy power, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and come, and with great might succour us: that by the help of Thy grace that which is hindered by our sins may be hastened by Thy merciful forgiveness: Who livest and reignest with God the Father… (Collect, Sunday IV, MR 1962)

On the Second Sunday, the Father is addressed:

Stir up our hearts, O Lord, to prepare the ways of Thine only-begotten Son: that through His coming we may deserve to serve Thee with purified minds: Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost… (Collect, Sunday II, MR 1962)

If we look at the Ember days, the picture is more complex. Ember Wednesday’s first Collect addresses the Father (“Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God … through our Lord”) while its second Collect addresses the Son (“Hasten, we beseech Thee, O Lord, tarry not”). Ember Saturday’s six different Collects address the Father four times — namely, the second through the fifth Collects — but the first and last are to the Son:

O God, who seest that we are afflicted because of our iniquity, mercifully grant that we may be comforted by Thy visitation. Who livest and reignest with God the Father… (Ember Saturday, first Collect, MR 1962)

Mercifully hear, O Lord, we beseech Thee, the prayers of Thy people: that we who are justly afflicted for our sins may be comforted by the visitation of Thy loving kindness: Who livest and reignest with God the Father… (Ember Saturday, last [sixth] Collect, MR 1962)

The Collect on Ember Friday likewise addresses the Son:

Stir up Thy might, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and come: that they who trust in Thy loving kindness may be the more speedily freed from all adversity: Who livest and reignest with God the Father… (Ember Friday, MR 1962)

Apart from special Collects for certain feast days (e.g., the Immaculate Conception), these are the only Collects found in the traditional Roman Missal for the Advent season as such (and, importantly, they are never omitted, because even on feasts, the Advent feria is always commemorated). Therefore the missal furnishes a total of 7 distinct collects addressed to the Son, and 6 to the Father, in the following pattern:

          First Sunday – SON
          Second Sunday – FATHER
          Third Sunday – SON
          Ember Wednesday – FATHER, SON
          Ember Friday – SON
          Ember Saturday – SON, FATHER, FATHER, FATHER, FATHER, SON
          Fourth Sunday – SON

Going out on an allegorical limb with my betters, such as William Durandus, I would note that, according to the Fathers of the Church, the number 6 represents creation, because of the 6 days in Genesis, and because 6 is one of those rare numbers whose component parts, 1, 2, and 3, are equal whether they are added (1+2+3) or multipled (1x2x3), suggesting the relative integrity and solidity of the created order: “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” At the same time, six falls one short of the number seven, the number of perfection and of rest, indicating that creation, particularly the rational creature, is incomplete until it rests in God — and that, after the fall of Adam, it is groaning for redemption from sin. Jesus Christ, in other words, is the One who, “added” to creation, brings it to its perfection and ultimate rest in the beatific vision. Thus, a group of six Collects for the Father, to whom is appropriated the power of creating the universe, and a group of seven collects for the Son, to whom is appropriated the wisdom and mercy of redemption, appears beautifully fitting.

In the post-Conciliar redaction, on the other hand, many of the ancient Advent Collects were scrapped or reconfigured, and nearly all of the Collects were forced into the Patricentric mold so favored by reformers in the grip of archaeologism or antiquarianism, who removed prayers directed to the Son whenever and wherever possible. [2] We have this new series of Sunday Collects, none of which addresses the Son:

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming, so that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly Kingdom. Through our Lord Jesus Christ… (Sunday I, Collect, MR 1970/2002)

Almighty and merciful God, may no earthly undertaking hinder those who set out in haste to meet your Son, but may our learning of heavenly wisdom gain us admittance to his company. Who lives and reigns with you… (Sunday II, Collect, MR 1970/2002)

O God, who see how your people faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s Nativity, enable us, we pray, to attain the joys of so great a salvation and to celebrate them always with solemn worship and glad rejoicing. Through our Lord Jesus Christ… (Sunday III, Collect, MR 1970/2002)

Pour forth, we beseech you, O Lord, your grace into our hearts, that we, to whom the Incarnation of Christ your Son was made known by the message of an Angel, may by his Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of his Resurrection. Who lives and reigns with you… (Sunday IV, Collect, MR 1970/2002) [3]

The ferial Collects added to the new missal also follow the same subordinating pattern, with only two exceptions addressed to the Second Person: Friday of the first week uses the same prayer as the first Sunday of Advent in MR 1962, and the Collect of the morning Mass on December 24 uses a version of the second collect for Ember Wednesday in MR 1962. Because there is a different Collect every day in the MR 1970/2002, while the MR 1962 uses certain prayers again and again, a little math will give us telling results. Of all the Advent Collects in the usus recentior, 27 are addressed to the Father, and only 2 to the Son. During the same season, the usus antiquior will have prayed Collects addressed to the Son as God 21 times, and to the Father 12 times.

What do we make of this difference?

These Christocentric Collects of the usus antiquior, both in their addressee and in their repetition, emphasize the urgency of the Church’s cry during the Advent season, the cry of all mankind and of all creation longing for its very Lord to come, by an ineffable miracle, into its bosom, to heal it and elevate it from within: VENI, DOMINE — Come, Lord Jesus, do not delay. Maranatha. Rise up and save a fallen race. Come to rescue us from our misery and sin. We are calling out to the Messiah, the Christ of Israel, who has already come to earth, whom we wish to invite again into our hearts, and who will return to judge the living and the dead. Advent is the season of expecting the long-awaited Redeemer and Savior, and we, in our holy impatience, cannot resist calling out to Him. EXCITA, we boldly say, over and over: Stir up Thy power and come, do not delay, do not be silent, do not be invisible, do not leave us to our wretchedness. O Word, eternal Life, take on flesh and touch us with Thy flesh. Only Holy Mother Church, filled with the Spirit of God, could dare to pray thus, placing these words on the lips of our ancestors and of so many saints who worshiped with the traditional Roman Rite.

In short, the usus antiquior missal presents us with a spirituality of Advent that is distinctive and fitting to it, whereas the usus recentior missal conforms its prayers to a generic rule prescribed by academic liturgists. The old Collects are highly expressive, emotionally charged, as of the longing of the bride for her Bridegroom, to whom she sings and whispers directly. In her passionate love she is more caught up in beseeching Him whose face she longs to see than in politely asking His Father to send Him when the time is right (though, of course, with her gentle courtesy, she also speaks humbly to His Father, since the two are inseparable in their Godhead). It is the fervor of the Song of Songs carried over into liturgical prayer. [4]

Modern liturgists approach liturgy as if it were an a priori science: you start with principles and deduce consequences. Therefore you have to change around the Collects (for instance) if they don’t conform to your particular set of principles. In reality, liturgy is thoroughly a posteriori: it is an historical testament to which countless individuals contributed, a massive organic complexus of particulars that could have been otherwise but are the way they are, a river running down the ages into which innumerable streams have flowed. Thus, we must look to the liturgy as it is and seek to understand why it unfolded in this manner, rather than doing violence to it by forcing it to embody one’s mental presuppositions.

The change to the Advent Collects is a good example of the cold rationalism of the reformers. It would be one thing if a liturgical rite had always addressed prayers to the Father on a certain feast or in a certain season. No one, obviously, is saying there is anything wrong with doing that, for it is the customary mode of address in all historic missals. But it is quite another thing if one’s actual liturgy for many centuries, perhaps for as long as we have records (and, moreover, the liturgy that one had prayed oneself!) always prayed to the Son on certain days, marking them out as special and deserving of a special devotion to the Lamb of God. To care little or nothing about the fact that, by a series of committee decisions, one would be cutting out and ceasing to utter those hallowed prayers to Our Lord in the weeks running up to His Nativity shows the extent to which the liturgy, for these men, must have already ceased to be something deeply felt and lived. It had become, instead, the prey and sport of their theories of improvement, and in this sense, something believed to be inferior to their wills and intellects. This is perhaps the worst indictment of their entire modus operandi: that prayers for which Catholics would in former ages have been prepared to lay down their lives were treated as so many raw ingredients to be chopped and mixed in an industrial kitchen.

Indeed, it is more than a little ironic that the Epistle for the Fourth Sunday of Advent in the traditional Roman Rite is 1 Corinthians 4, 1-5, wherein St. Paul says, in words that are repeated four times in the Divine Office:

Brethren: Let a man so account us, as ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Now here it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful/trustworthy.

St. Paul is telling us that the minister of Christ, the steward of His mysteries, is required to be faithful to that which he is dispensing or administering, namely, the sacraments, the liturgy, the heritage he receives from another, in regard to which he is not a master but a servant. Of course, this reading, too, disappeared from Advent in the sack of the Roman Rite, no doubt because it was deemed seasonally inappropriate.

These final days of Advent, when we address the Son of God in the great “O Antiphons” at Vespers, let us cherish the many subtle and obvious blessings He has given to us through the traditional liturgy. Let us thank Him for the countless ways it forms and nourishes our souls in the school of the Lord’s service. And let us seek its return on the widest possible scale to churches everywhere. For this intention, too, we pray to our Sovereign King and Eternal High Priest: Excita, quaesumus, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni.

NOTES

[1] Lauren Pristas is naturally the preeminent scholar on all such questions. See chapter 3 of her The Collects of the Roman Missals.

[2] I discuss the many instances of this subordinating tendency and their implications in chapter 6 of my book Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis.

[3] I am aware that much of the language in these prayers is drawn from historical sources, but their placement and arrangement here, and the corresponding displacement of the customary prayers, is, for the Roman Rite, an innovation pure and simple.

[4] Readings and antiphons from the Song of Songs are found much more often in the traditional Missal and Divine Office than in the Novus Ordo books, but to explore the reasons behind that anti-medieval shift would require a separate article.

A Comparison of the Old and New Blessing of Candles on Candlemas

Coped priest blessing candles at the side of the altar (usus antiquior)

Of late, comparing and contrasting the prayers of the Pauline modern missal with those of the traditional Roman missal has been a passionate avocation of mine. Taking my cue from Lauren Pristas and Matthew Hazell, true masters of this labor, I find that simply placing the old and new texts beside one another and pondering their differences can be an extraordinarily enlightening exercise. It tends to confirm, time and time again, the doctrinal richness, ascetical realism, and poetic flair of the old prayers and the absense of these qualities in the new.

In this article I shall compare the prayers for the blessing of candles on February 2nd, Candlemas day, known in the old calendar as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and in the new calendar, with a Grecophilic nod, as the Presentation of the Lord.

The first and most obvious difference is that the traditional Roman rite blesses the candles by means of a sequence of five prayers, in which is expressed a well-developed theology of candles as sacramentals; of how they relate to the order of creation and the order of redemption; of the liturgical reenactment and mystical participation in Christ’s own entrance into the temple; of Jesus Christ as the light of the world and His Spirit as the internal fire/light that guides us through the “perilous darkness of this life to the never-failing light” of heaven; of Simeon as a model of one so guided, whom we should imitate as we receive Jesus in the substance of our flesh; and of the connection between the oil Moses commanded to be prepared so that lamps might burn continuously in the Lord’s presence and the blessed candles we now burn as symbols of the “lumen Spiritus” in our inward minds. The prayers are particularly outstanding for their pneumatology.

A second obvious difference is the repetition of the act of blessing the candles, which is similar to the many signs of blessing to be found in the traditional rite of Mass (think of the Roman Canon!), the rite of blessing of holy water, the rite of baptism, and so forth. Precisely seven times the priest makes the sign of the cross over the candles, using the language “bless and sanctify” in the first, second, and third prayers, and asking one last time for “the grace of Thy blessing” in the fifth prayer.

First prayer

DOMINE sancte, Pater omnipotens, æterne Deus, qui omnia ex nihilo creasti, et jussu tuo per opera apum, hunc liquorem ad perfectionem cerei venire fecisti: et qui hodierna die petitionem justi Simeonis implesti: te humiliter deprecamur; ut has candelas ad usus hominem, et sanitatem corporum et animarum, sive in terra, sive in aquis, per invocationem tui sanctissimi nominis, et per intercessionem beatæ Mariæ semper Virginis, cujus hodie festa devote celebrantur, et per preces omnium Sanctorum tuorum bene✠dicere, et sancti✠ficare digneris: et hujus plebis tuæ, quæ illas honorifice inmanibus desiderat portare, teque cantando laudare, exaudias voces de cælo sancto tuo, et de sede majestatis tuæ: et propitius sis omnibus clamantibus ad te, quos redemisti pretioso Sanguine Filii tui: Qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum. R. Amen.

(Holy Lord, Father almighty, everlasting God, who hast created all things out of nothing, and by Thy command hast caused this liquid to become perfect wax by the labour of bees: and who, on this day didst fulfil the petition of the righteous man, Simeon: we humbly entreat Thee, that by the invocation of Thy most holy Name and through the intercession of Blessed Mary ever Virgin whose feast is today devoutly observed, and by the prayers of all Thy Saints, Thou wouldst vouchsafe to bless ✠ and sancti✠fy these candles for the service of men and for the health of their bodies and souls, whether on land or on sea: and that Thou wouldst hear from Thy holy heaven, and from the throne of Thy Majesty the voices of this Thy people, who desire to carry them in their hands with honour, and to sing Your praises; and that You would look with favour on all who call upon You, whom You have redeemed with the precious Blood of Your Son, who being God, lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Ghost, world without end. R. Amen.)

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Four Qualities of Liturgy: Validity, Licitness, Fittingness, and Authenticity

Below is the full text of the lecture I gave at Queen of Peace Parish in Patton, Pennsylvania, on September 21, 2020, a video of which has also been posted at YouTube (here). Although certain ideas in this talk have been discussed in other articles of mine, the synthesis offered here represents, for me at least, an intellectual breakthrough in responding to what I have increasingly come to see as the impoverished state of liturgical discourse, which is typically limited to only two categories (validity and liceity). Although much attention is paid to fittingness in the realm of sacred art, it deserves to be considered a liturgical category alongside the aforementioned pair; and finally, joining these must be the category of authenticity or legitimacy, as an irreducibly distinct perfection. Only by considering all four qualities can we arrive at an adequate assessment. [UPDATED ON 11/12/20 with an improved version of the chart.]

The celebration of the traditional Mass of the Roman Rite is becoming more and more common; it seems that its popularity has been an unintended consequence of both the chaos of the current pontificate and the disappointment of many Catholics with their pastors and parishes during the COVID pandemic. “Enough is enough!” is a frequently heard reaction. People are looking for worship that is reverent, prayerful, God-oriented, and deeply refreshing, and for priests who are truly committed to the care of souls. This, of course, is the work of the Holy Spirit, tugging at the heartstrings of baptized and confirmed Catholics, in whom there was planted the seed of Trinitarian life, which urges us to enter into the divine mystery.

However, there are certain difficulties in our situation, too. A vast amount of information, good, bad, indifferent, and inaccurate, circulates on the internet. Lay Catholics are seldom equipped to be able to understand what they’re reading about, especially when we get “into the weeds” of liturgical history and reform. How are blogs going to equip us with the ability to navigate thorny questions about the pope’s authority, the Church’s fidelity to tradition, the duty of obedience (and the limits thereof), and so on? There is a great need for careful, thoughtful, well-informed presentations on liturgical matters, so that we can deepen our understanding of the complex issues involved, without losing the simplicity of our faith, or the spontaneity of our interior life as we strive to be the saints Our Lord is calling us to be.

After many years, I have come to the realization that a lot of the time, people are talking past one another in liturgical discussions, and that is because they are talking about different aspects or properties of the liturgy, while failing to make the necessary distinctions. There are, in fact, four properties that are always supposed to belong to any liturgy: validity; licitness; fittingness; and authenticity. All of them are important, none of them is dispensable. They are meant to work together, in harmony, to bring us the fullness of divine worship intended by Christ for His Church. The problems we have experienced in recent decades have a lot to do with an exaggerated emphasis on one or another of these qualities, at the expense of the rest. I will begin by defining each one, and then talk about how they are related.

Validity

First, validity. With validity we are looking at a fairly straightforward question: does a sacrament happen or not? At the Council of Florence, the Church officially adopted the scholastic language of “matter and form” to indicate the two parts of any sacrament — the material things it uses and the words spoken in connection with them. [1] This Council taught: “All these Sacraments are accomplished by three elements, namely, by things as the matter; by words as the form; and by the person of the minister who confers the Sacrament with the intention of doing that which the Church does. If any of these is lacking, the Sacrament is not accomplished.” [2]

So, for example, in baptism the water is poured over the person’s head, while the minister speaks the words: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” St. Augustine wrote: “Take away the words, what then is the water but water? The words are added to the element, and the Sacrament emerges.” The washing with water in the name of the Trinity then accomplishes spiritually what washing with water does physically, namely, cleanses and refreshes. That is why we say a sacrament “effects what it signifies.” And we can go through each of the seven sacraments this way, seeing what the material thing used is, and what the words are, and what effects are signified by the combination of the matter and form. This is a very rich topic but for my purposes, we are looking at validity, that is, why baptism happens, and our answer is: the correct words were said, with the correct matter, by someone capable of performing the action, who intends to do what the Catholic Church does, even if he doesn’t fully understand what that might be.

Sometimes Catholic theology strikes observers as arcane and esoteric, but in point of fact, problems with validity arise from time to time in Church history, and we need to be equipped to deal with them. The notorious recent case of Fr. Matthew Hood comes to mind. Fr. Hood, serving as a priest in the archdiocese of Detroit, discovered early last August that he had been baptized by a deacon who used the formula “We baptize you,” which was judged invalid by a decision of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published on August 6th. As a result, Hood realized he had never been baptized, and therefore had never been confirmed or ordained to the priesthood, since each subsequent sacrament rests on the foundation of the preceding ones. He had to receive all these sacraments for the first time — and then deal with the messy fallout that resulted for other people who had depended on his ministry. For example, all the confirmations he had done, all the marriages, all the absolutions, all the last rites — all of these were absolutely null and utterly void. Do we have need for any further proof that the words we say and the actions we perform make a difference?

I mentioned a moment ago that the one who performs the sacrament has to have the right intention. Some Catholics get themselves tied up in knots about what intention is necessary, and they tend to exaggerate the explicitness and orthodoxy of the required intention. All that is required is that the priest have a virtual (not even an explicit) intention to perform a ritual of the Catholic Church by following the words and actions of the rite as given in the liturgical book. He does not need to have a good theological grasp of what he is doing, and he might even have an heretical understanding of it, as, unfortunately, a lot of clergy may have nowadays, due to their poor seminary training. He might be doing the sacrament for money, or for personal vanity, or to get promoted to a better position, etc. Still, if he thinks he is doing what the Church does — though he misunderstands it, or sins because of personal unworthiness — that intention suffices for validity.

If a priest’s theological competence, subjective motivations, or personal sanctity were necessary components of a valid sacrament, we would be thrown into constant doubts about whether the sacraments are efficacious, which is clearly not what Our Lord desires, or what He instituted. He planned better than that. As the Church teaches, Christ Himself is the primary agent in every sacrament: He is the one who baptizes, who confirms, who absolves, who transubstantiates. The priest is an intelligent instrument — intelligent, yes, which is why intentionality is required; but still an instrument, like a hammer or a saw. [3]

(That, by the way, is why the Detroit deacon’s baptisms were invalid, as Matthew Hood discovered to his horror: the deacon was saying “We baptize you,” referring to the Christian community, which precisely contradicts the fundamental truth: “It is I, Jesus Christ, who am baptizing you through my visible minister, who lends his voice and hands to Me.” Interestingly, the Byzantine tradition uses a completely different formula in the passive voice: “The servant of God, N., is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Although so very different, this formula makes it clear that it is not the local community or any individual man by himself who incorporates a person into Christ; rather, this happens by God’s gracious action: “The servant of God is baptized,” with Christ implied as the one baptizing.)

To sum up this point, I will quote from theologian Roger Nutt:

[A] sacramental celebration is understood to be “valid” if it is executed by the proper minister in such a way that the sacrament is truly brought into being. Invalidity happens when the celebration is executed by an unauthorized minister or when the matter and form are so defective that the sign is not brought about. An invalid celebration indicates, precisely, that a sacrament was never brought into being and thus, absent the sacrament, none of the sacramental effects are conferred. [4]

Now, who gets to determine what counts for validity? Canon law states that “the sacraments of the New Testament were instituted by Christ the Lord and entrusted to the Church” [5] (indeed, this is a de fide dogma), and then in Canon 841 draws this conclusion: “Since the sacraments are the same for the whole Church and belong to the divine deposit, it is only for the supreme authority of the Church to approve or define the requirements for their validity.” Hence, we can say without any doubt that what counts as a valid sacramental rite, and the conditions for its performance, are solely the competence of the supreme authority of the Church, which means either the Pope by himself, or the Pope together with the college of bishops, as at an ecumenical council.

It is not possible, if we hold to the Catholic Faith, to call into question or to doubt the validity of a sacramental rite duly and correctly promulgated. This means, for example, that the Novus Ordo Missae, or the other postconciliar sacramental rites, insofar as they have been duly promulgated by the authority of the Church, are valid, no matter how much their deficiencies or their discontinuities with age-old Catholic tradition deserve to be critiqued, and no matter how much better the traditional rites may be. Validity is not about better and worse, more beautiful and less beautiful, more worthy or less worthy; it is a binary switch with two settings: on or off. Thus, either baptism happens, or it does not; either transubstantiation happens, or it does not.

But beyond saying whether something happened or not, we must also ask whether it happened rightly or correctly. That is what the other three qualities concern.

Licitness

Second, then, there is the licitness or legality of a sacrament. On this quality, I will again quote Roger Nutt, who says right after the passage I quoted a moment ago:

A licit celebration is one that is performed according to the prescribed rite of the Church, while an illicit celebration is one that directly deviates in some way from the prescribed rite. An illicit sacramental celebration does not vitiate the validity and therefore reality of the sacrament… [6]

Fr. Bernard Leeming says, more precisely:

Valid is often used as distinct from licit, which is said of a sacrament in whose administration and reception no law is broken; for unlawful administration of a sacrament does not ipso facto render it invalid. Thus a priest who is suspended or excommunicated can validly administer all sacraments except Penance, which requires jurisdiction, but he sins by so doing, if he acts contumaciously, and the faithful sin if they receive sacraments from him without some justifying reason. [7]

The term “licit” comes from the Latin verb licére, which means to allow. Licitness or liceity has to do with what is permitted, and, by extension, what is required or forbidden to Christians. In the domain of the sacraments and the liturgy, it primarily concerns the questions: Who is allowed to perform or to receive a given sacrament, and under what circumstances? If a priest or bishop in good standing, following all the conditions set forth in canon law, celebrates a liturgical rite according to the books promulgated by the supreme authority of the Church, saying the black and doing the red (in other words, reading just the texts that are printed, and following the rubrics without deviation), then he celebrates licitly. He has done, in other words, that which he had permission to do; that which he was required to do; and nothing that he is forbidden to do.

On the other hand, it is not licit for a Latin-rite priest to celebrate a Byzantine liturgy, unless he has first received canonical permission to do so; it is not licit for a laicized or degraded priest to offer Mass; it is not licit for a priest in a state of mortal sin to offer Mass; it is not licit to celebrate Mass with rice crackers and sake instead of wheat bread and wine from grapes (and that would also make it invalid); it is not licit to ad lib the opening prayer, or to play a John Lennon song in place of the psalm, or to read from a binder a Eucharistic Prayer written by liberation theologians from Nicaragua. As a matter of fact, any intentional deviation from the liturgical books, either in their texts or in their rubrics, is illicit, and makes the liturgy illicit to a greater or lesser extent. Moreover, it is not licit to receive Communion without having fasted for at least one hour beforehand; and, above all, it is not licit for anyone to receive Holy Communion in a state of mortal sin.

Two things will be immediately obvious from the foregoing list of examples.

First, some of these things are matters of mere canon law, that is, positive law created by the Church and changeable by her, while some things are matters of divine or natural law, which the Church can articulate, but does not originate and therefore can never alter. [8] The rule that we must fast for a certain period of time before Communion is a positive ecclesiastical law that can change and has changed a lot; not very long ago, the requirement was three hours (which in many ways would be much better), and not long before that, the rule was to fast from midnight onwards. But the rule that we must — so far as we can ascertain by examining our consciences — be in a state of grace in order to receive Communion is a matter of divine law, which is clear from chapter 11 of St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, where he says that someone who eats the Body of Christ unworthily eats damnation, and that a man should examine his conscience accordingly. No council or pope could ever change this rule.

Second, the Church today, at least in Western nations, is in grave trouble, since the vast majority of liturgies are illicit in one way or another; both ministers and recipients of sacraments have become habituated to illicitness. The crisis in the Church is, as Joseph Ratzinger said, in large part caused by the crisis in the liturgy.

The main point with the category of licitness (or liceity, as some prefer to call it) is that the sacred liturgy or divine worship, and with it, our sanctification by the mysteries of Christ, is a communal, ecclesial, hierarchical activity. Christ entrusted the work and the means of sanctification to His Church, and therefore, to her authorized heads. It is not something “between Jesus and me,” as our individualistic, atomistic age might think of it, a matter of convenience or personal choice, but rather, something between Christ and the Church, into which we are privileged to be inserted, as recipients and subordinates. Back in 2004, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments issued an instruction called Redemptionis Sacramentum, which addressed many of the most common liturgical problems and abuses of the Novus Ordo. In words that are of universal application, the document eloquently says:

The Mystery of the Eucharist “is too great for anyone to permit himself to treat it according to his own whim, so that its sacredness and its universal ordering would be obscured.” On the contrary, anyone who acts thus by giving free reign to his own inclinations, even if he is a Priest, injures the substantial unity of the Roman Rite, which ought to be vigorously preserved, and becomes responsible for actions that are in no way consistent with the hunger and thirst for the living God that is experienced by the people today. Nor do such actions serve authentic pastoral care or proper liturgical renewal; instead, they deprive Christ’s faithful of their patrimony and their heritage. For arbitrary actions are not conducive to true renewal, but are detrimental to the right of Christ’s faithful to a liturgical celebration that is an expression of the Church’s life in accordance with her tradition and discipline. In the end, they introduce elements of distortion and disharmony into the very celebration of the Eucharist, which is oriented in its own lofty way and by its very nature to signifying and wondrously bringing about the communion of divine life and the unity of the People of God. The result is uncertainty in matters of doctrine, perplexity and scandal on the part of the People of God, and, almost as a necessary consequence, vigorous opposition, all of which greatly confuse and sadden many of Christ’s faithful...
          On the contrary, it is the right of all of Christ’s faithful that the Liturgy, and in particular the celebration of Holy Mass, should truly be as the Church wishes, according to her stipulations as prescribed in the liturgical books and in the other laws and norms. Likewise, the Catholic people have the right that the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass should be celebrated for them in an integral manner, according to the entire doctrine of the Church’s Magisterium. [9]

The same document says later on:

In an altogether particular manner, let everyone do all that is in their power to ensure that the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist will be protected from any and every irreverence or distortion and that all abuses be thoroughly corrected. This is a most serious duty incumbent upon each and every one, and all are bound to carry it out without any favoritism. [10]

Sadly, Redemptionis Sacramentum seems to have gone to that special place in the sky, or over the seas, or under the earth, where all unwelcome Vatican documents go for their eternal rest, and where it has been forgotten like the unremembered dead. In the current COVID-19 situation, we have seen how readily bishops and priests, in their frenzy to avoid contamination with or transmission of the virus, are violating liturgical law in the most scandalous ways. In fact, Dr. Joseph Shaw makes a very important point here about clergy who are willing to experiment with or manipulate the liturgy:

The reason they feel free to play fast and loose with the liturgy is not because they feel strongly about sacramental validity and don’t care about anything else, but because they don’t care very much about sacramental validity either. They may be influenced by the idea that bishops and the Holy See feel strongly about validity, and they may allow us to comfort ourselves with the thought, when it is possible, that the sacrament was in this or that case valid. But if they really cared about validity, they would take the liturgy seriously, and that is something they are manifestly not doing.
          Liturgical abuses are an offense against God, as the abuse of something holy. They are also an offense against the faithful, whose spiritual engagement in the liturgy is impeded. Again, they are an offense against our Lord, who instituted the sacraments for our salvation, and [against] Holy Mother Church, who has surrounded them with ceremonies and texts intended to give God glory and to assist us in our participation. Finally, they are an offense against the priesthood itself, which should protect the liturgy from profanation, and whose function is to provide it to others for the good of souls.

The mention of “ceremonies and texts intended to give God glory and to assist us in our participation” is a perfect segue to the third quality, fittingness.

Fittingness

Consider the following statement: “All that matters at Mass is that Jesus is present; everything else is secondary.” Or, more succinctly, “the Mass is the Mass.” Undoubtedly it matters a great deal that Jesus is present, for otherwise we are eating no more than ordinary food. But the liturgy has a greater purpose than putting on a meal for us, and even Our Lord’s presence has a greater scope and purpose than sacramental communion. The Mass is the solemn, public, formal act of adoration, thanksgiving, and supplication offered by Christ the High Priest to the Father, and by His entire Mystical Body in union with Him. It is the foremost act of the virtue of religion, by which we offer to God a sacrifice of praise worthy of His glory. It is the chief expression of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. It is the kingdom of heaven breaking into our earthly time and space. It is the nuptial feast of the King of Kings. It is the recapitulation of the entire created universe in its Alpha and Omega.

Because it is all these things, the Church down through the ages has spared no effort and no expense to augment the beauty and elevate the solemnity of her liturgical rites. As John Paul II rightly said: “Like the woman who anointed Jesus in Bethany, the Church has feared no ‘extravagance,’ devoting the best of her resources to expressing her wonder and adoration before the unsurpassable gift of the Eucharist.” [11] So while it may be true that the only things necessary for a valid Mass in the Roman Rite are unleavened bread made from wheat and wine made from grapes, a priest, and the words of consecration, to see this as sufficient for the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass would betray a reductive, minimalist, and parsimonious view of things. Glorifying God and sanctifying our souls cannot be detached from the fittingness of the worship we offer Him. What the Council of Trent declares about the Roman Canon can be applied more generally to the whole of the Church’s liturgical life:

Since it is fitting that holy things be administered in a holy manner, and of all things this sacrifice is the most holy, the Catholic Church, to the end that it might be worthily and reverently offered and received, instituted many centuries ago the holy canon, which is so free from error that it contains nothing that does not in the highest degree savor of a certain holiness and piety and raise up to God the minds of those who offer. For it consists partly of the very words of the Lord, partly of the traditions of the Apostles, and also of pious regulations of holy pontiffs.

The essence of the Church’s liturgy is simple: it is precontained in the Heart of Christ, our Eternal High Priest, where all worthy worship perpetually exists. But the “clothing” of that worship is of decisive importance to us, who interact with Our Lord through His visible Body, the Church, and her visible rites. How these rites are structured, performed, and participated in will inevitably influence our understanding of the mysteries of the Faith and our ability to live them out. The clothing draped over the body of our prayers is, if anything, of far greater importance than any clothing a human being puts on.

When someone is attracted to the traditional Latin liturgy for its beauty to the eye and to the ear, it is not because he is stuck on these things, but because these things coalesce around the reality, the Sacrifice of the Cross, and make it stand forth with a satisfying clarity. The sensible or perceptible qualities so harmonize with the nature of the mystery that the result is the splendor of the truth. For men as body-soul composites, for Christians as disciples of the Word-made-flesh, there must be both elements: the truth and the splendor. Dom Gerard Calvet offers the perfect commentary:

One enters the Church by two doors: the door of the intelligence and the door of beauty. The narrow door...is that of intelligence; it is open to intellectuals and scholars. The wider door is that of beauty. The Church in her impenetrable mystery...has need of an earthly epiphany accessible to all: this is the majesty of her temples, the splendour of her liturgy and the sweetness of her chants.
          Take a group of Japanese tourists visiting Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. They look at the height of the stained-glass windows, the harmony of the proportions. Suppose that at that moment, sacred ministers dressed in orphried velvet copes enter in procession for solemn Vespers. The visitors watch in silence; they are entranced: beauty has opened its doors to them. Now the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas and Notre Dame in Paris are products of the same era. They say the same thing. But who among the visitors has read the Summa of St. Thomas? The same phenomenon is found at all levels. The tourists who visit the Acropolis in Athens are confronted with a civilisation of beauty. But who among them can understand Aristotle?
          And so it is with the beauty of the liturgy. More than anything else it deserves to be called the splendour of the truth. It opens to the small and the great alike the treasures of its magnificence: the beauty of psalmody, sacred chants and texts, candles, harmony of movement and dignity of bearing. With sovereign art the liturgy exercises a truly seductive influence on souls, whom it touches directly, even before the spirit perceives its influence. [12]

For this very reason — that the externals are meant to tell us something about the reality to which they are in service, and draw us towards it — we must take care that they harmonize, that the outward aspect does not openly or subtly contradict the inward. It would be unfitting to put a king’s robes on a pauper, or a gold ring in a pig’s snout: there is discordance between the decoration and the thing decorated. The same holds in the other direction: a king does not wear dirty rags nor his horse a cheap saddle. Putting the king’s robes on the king, and bedecking his mount in regal fashion: this is dignum et justum. The surface should correspond to the thing’s nature and lead us directly into it. This is not to be “caught up in” the externals, but to be caught up by the externals into the inner meaning. [13]

In other words: although it is not necessary for validity or licitness that a liturgy should look and sound as if we are entering the realm of the transcendent God and that He is accomplishing something divine and transformative among us, it is nevertheless highly fitting or suitable that it be done in this manner. And, as a matter of fact, the whole history of the liturgy cannot be understood unless we have grasped this essential fact: nearly all of its development can be attributed to the demands of fittingness.

Nor should we be surprised at the role it plays. Fittingness or suitability — convenientia in the language of theologians — is one of the central concepts of dogmatic theology, as we can see in the writings of St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas. Convenientia is a kind of necessity, a necessity based on what is appropriate for a given situation, what is decorous, proper, harmonious, corresponding to all the factors in play, or to the being about whom one is inquiring. When St. Thomas takes up the question “Must God create a world?,” he answers: “No, not by absolute necessity, for God, as infinite good, is self-sufficient and needs nothing else; but it is fitting that He share His goodness by causing finite good things to exist.” This immediately prompts another question: “Once God creates, must he create a rational or intellectual creature?” And the answer, again, is: “God is free to create any world He wishes; but it is fitting that He crown the order of creation with creatures that are as like to Him as possible, which means, beings possessed of intellect and will.” Much later on, when St. Thomas comes to the question: “Was the Incarnation necessary for the salvation of mankind?,” he again answers in this manner: “It was not simply necessary, since God could have saved man by willing it in His omnipotence. Nevertheless, it was most fitting that the Son of God become man, for many reasons: since man had sinned, it was fitting that man should make reparation; but only a sinless man of infinite merit could repair for the sin of Adam and all subsequent sins; moreover, man withdrew from spiritual goods to bodily goods, so it was right that he be restored to spiritual life by the bodily life of Christ; because the dignity of human nature consists in the image of God in the soul, it was appropriate for the Word, the perfect image of God, to restore that reflected image in man; nothing could show forth God’s extravagant love better than for His Son to lower Himself to human estate, suffer, and die in exchange for slaves; and so forth (Aquinas gives many such arguments for the fittingness of the Incarnation and the Passion). [14]

My point here is that, as the eminent Thomist Fr. Gilbert Narcisse maintains, convenientia is the central driving principle of Thomistic theology; without it, theology would be almost barren of development. So, too, the liturgy of the Church would have been barren had it not been for an ever-increasing awareness, prompted by the Holy Spirit, of the many ways in which the sacramental mysteries can be more fully expressed in words and gestures, in vestments and vessels, in music and architecture — in everything that pertains to the senses, the imagination, the memory, and the intellect’s capacity for symbolism. Fittingness is connected intimately with beauty, including moral beauty or honestas, a Latin word that refers to the condition of being reputable, honorable, upright, worthy.

Genealogy of Christ

Continue Reading this Article. . .

On Feast of Holy Name, Tradition Crushes Rupture, 27–7

In a short but pungent article at CatholicCulture.org (“Guess Whose Name Is Missing?”), Phil Lawler notes the following curious fact about the optional memorial of the Holy Name of Jesus on January 3 in the Novus Ordo calendar:

Today, January 3, the Church calendar offers us the (optional) feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. At Mass the entrance antiphon reminds us, “At the name of Jesus, every knee should bend…” And then something curious happens. Through the rest of the proper prayers crafted especially for the day’s celebration, guess what Name is never mentioned. Right.
       Take, just for example, the Collect: “O God, who founded the salvation of the human race on the Incarnation of your Word, give your peoples the mercy they implore, so that all may know there is no other name to be invoked but the Name of your Only Begotten Son. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.”
       Isn’t there an obvious place there, right before “Who lives and reigns,” for the invocation of the name of Jesus? I mean, isn’t that kinda the point?
       The Offertory prayer, similarly, speaks of “the Name that saves” — but does not mention it. The Communion prayer alludes to the sacrifice “to honor Christ’s Name,” which is honored in silence.
       Could someone please explain to me why, on the day that we celebrate the name of Jesus, we don’t celebrate the name of Jesus?

That is an excellent question, Mr Lawler. And given the fact that in many places, the “entrance antiphon” is neither sung nor recited, it is quite possible that what he is calling the “proper prayers” of the Novus Ordo Mass would not mention the Holy Name once on the putative and optional feastday in honor of it. [1]

How illuminating it is to turn, for the sake of contrast, to the traditional feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, which is obligatorily celebrated on the Sunday after the Octave of the Nativity, that is, the first Sunday of the New Year (or, if that Sunday happens to be January 1, 6, or 7, then on January 2). For comparative purposes, I would like to enlarge the definition of the Proper of the Mass to include the readings of the day. A quick glance at the old Proper shows that the Holy Name will be mentioned (no options involved) TWELVE times. Notably, the full doxology is retained after the Secret and Postcommunion in the traditional rite, whereas the new rite opts for the short form “per Christum.” The theological richness of the prayers deserves to be noted, in comparison to their easy-listening replacements. [2]

Introit. In nomine Jesu omne genuflectatur, cælestium, terrestrium, et infernorum: et omnis lingua confiteatur, quia Dominus Jesus Christus in gloria est Dei Patris. Ps. 8. 2 Domine Dominus noster: quam admirabile est nomen tuum in universa terra. V. Glória Patri. In nomine Jesu…
(In the Name of Jesus let every knee bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth; and let every tongue confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father. Ps. O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful is Thy Name in the whole earth. Glory be to the Father. In the Name of Jesus…)

Collect. Deus, qui unigenitum Filium tuum, constituisti humani generis Salvatorem, et Jesum vocari jussisti: concede propitius; ut, cujus sanctum nomen veneramur in terris, ejus quoque aspectu perfruamur in cælis. Per eumdem Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum…
(O God, Who didst appoint Thine only begotten Son the Saviour of mankind, and didst bid that He should be called Jesus: mercifully grant that we may enjoy the vision of Him in Heaven, Whose holy Name we venerate on earth. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ…)

Epistle. In diebus illis: Petrus repletus Spiritu Sancto, dixit: Principes populi et seniores, audite: Si nos hodie dijudicamur in benefacto hominis infirmi, in quo iste salvos factus est, notum sit omnibus vobis, et omni plebi Israel: quia in nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi Nazareni, quem vos crucifixistis, quem Deus suscitavit a mortuis, in hoc iste adstat coram vobis sanus. Hic est lapis, qui reprobatus est a vobis ædificantibus: qui factus est in caput anguli: et non est in alio aliquo salus. Nec enim aliud nomen est sub cælo datum hominibus, in quo oporteat nos salvos fieri.
(In those days: Peter filled with the Holy Ghost, said to them: Ye princes of the people and ancients, hear: If we this day are examined concerning the good deed done to the infirm man, by what means he hath been made whole, be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Whom you crucified, Whom God hath raised from the dead, even by Him this man standeth before you whole. This is the stone which was rejected by you the builders, which is become the head of the corner: neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved.)

Gospel. In illo tempore: Et postquam consummati sunt dies octo, ut circumcideretur puer vocatum est nomen ejus Jesus, quod vocatum est ab Angelo priusquam in utero conciperetur.
(At that time: After eight days were accomplished that the child should be circumcised; His Name was called Jesus, which was called by the Angel before He was conceived in the womb.) [3]

Secret. Benedictio tua, clementissime Deus, qua omnis viget creatura, sanctificet, quæsumus, hoc sacrificium nostrum, quod ad gloriam nominis Filii tui, Domini nostri Jesu Christi, offerimus tibi: ut majestati tuæ placere possit ad laudem, et nobis proficere ad salutem. Per eumdem Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum…
(May Thy blessing, by which all creatures live, hallow, we beseech Thee, most merciful God, this our sacrifice which we offer to Thee to the glory of the Name of Thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, that it may please Thy majesty and bring Thee praise, and avail us unto salvation. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ…)

Postcommunion. Omnipotens æterne Deus, qui creasti et redemisti nos, respice propitius vota nostra: et sacrificium salutaris hostiæ, quod in honorem nominis Filii tui, Domini nostri Jesu Christi, majestati tuæ obtulimus, placido et benigno vultu suscipere digneris; ut gratia tua nobis infusa, sub glorioso nomine Jesu, æternæ prædestinationis titulo gaudeamus nomina nostra scripta esse in cælis. Per eundem Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum…
(O almighty and everlasting God Who didst create and redeem us, look graciously upon our prayer, and with a favourable and benign countenance deign to accept the sacrifice of the saving Victim, which we have offered to Thy Majesty in honour of the Name of Thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: that through the infusion of Thy grace we may rejoice that our names are written in heaven, under the glorious Name of Jesus, the pledge of eternal predestination. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ…)

The sweet Name occurs over and over again, as if one could not speak it enough — as in the great office hymn “Jesu dulcis memoria.” One sees clearly how this feast originated with the Franciscans, one of whose greatest preachers, St. Bernardine of Siena (about whom I have written here), chose the Holy Name for his special devotion and insignia.

What if we add a consideration of the Ordinary of the Mass? In the traditional celebration of the Holy Name, the Mass (whether it falls on a Sunday or a weekday) always includes the Gloria and the Credo; the Novus Ordo celebration would not include either. The Gloria mentions the Holy Name twice; the Credo mentions it once; the prayer at the mingling of water and wine, once; the Suscipe sancta Trinitas, once; the Roman Canon, thrice; the embolism, once; the commingling, once; the priestly prayers of preparation for holy communion, thrice; the taking of communion by the priest, twice. Not including all the times the Holy Name is pronounced with each act of giving communion to the faithful (“Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi…), this adds up to FIFTEEN times, for a total of 27 (12+15).

In the Novus Ordo, the Ordinary of the Mass on this day would mention the Holy Name possibly once at the start, if the second or third greeting formula were chosen; not a single time during the Offertory; then a variable number depending on the Eucharistic Prayer chosen (for EP I, 3 times; for EP II, 2 times; for EP III, 2 times; for EP IV, once); once in the embolism; once in the post-embolism prayer; once in the priestly preparation for communion (since there is an option between two prayers). This adds up to anywhere from 4 to 7 times.

Taking the Proper and Ordinary together, this brings the total number of mentions of the Holy Name on its Novus Ordo memorial to 4 at a minimum and 13 at a maximum. If I were a betting man, I would place my bet on 7 as the most likely number, assuming the following: recitation of the entrance antiphon, the use of greeting #2, the standard lectionary readings rather than special ones, [4] and EP II.

So, in a comparison simply of texts, we would be looking at an obligatory 27 mentions of the Holy Name of Jesus in the course of the TLM, versus an optional approximately 7 mentions of the Holy Name in the Novus Ordo, give or take a few.

We know that the liturgy is so much more than the texts out of which it is composed. It is the chants to which the texts are sung (or not sung). It is the ensemble of gestures and ceremonies performed by the ministers, the collection of signs and symbols that bring to mind the mysteries of our Faith while pointing to what eludes our rational grasp. Nevertheless, the liturgy still IS a textual reality, however many other layers it has; and what we say — and how often we say it — matter profoundly. One cannot automatically assume that more is always better, since then we might as well say the Holy Name a hundred times, or a thousand. The liturgy, as such, is not the Jesus Prayer. But we can assume that a certain number of mentions is appropriate for a feast day held in honor of that very Name by which we are saved; we can assume, moreover, that a severe reduction in the number of mentions, against a fuller tradition of several centuries’ duration, is altogether inappropriate. This would not be, alas, the first or the only time the reformed liturgical books displayed such a disconnect from warm tradition and meet devotion.

It is comparisons like this — which are not difficult to come by on the internet or in books — that prompt one to ask: Where is the true patrimony of our Church, liturgical, devotional, theological, best preserved and celebrated? In the traditional rite, or in a “banal on-the-spot fabrication” that cannot even properly celebrate the personal name of the founder of Christianity?

A night that lasted fifty years is passing; a new day is at hand. As the Christmas season so often says, let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, for the honor and glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.

NOTES

[1] It is, as usual, difficult to talk about how often the Holy Name would be mentioned at a Novus Ordo Mass on January 3, because of the moving target nature of the options (something I discuss in an old article).

[2] For a comparison of the Collects, see this article.

[3] This is the totality of the Gospel! Only one verse: the shortest in the traditional calendar. The Novus Ordo also goes to this portion of Luke, but expands it to Luke 2:21-24, which does not have the same impact and focus; it becomes a mere doublet of the Presentation.

[4] There are multiple optional readings, with, accordingly, varying mentions of the Name: 3 times (1 Cor 1:1-3), 3 times (Phil 2:6-11), or once (Col 3:12-17) in the reading from Paul; and once in the reading from Luke. I have seen with my own eyes, and I imagine most who are reading this have also seen, that the regular daily lectionary readings are more frequently used than votive readings, regardless of what memorial is on offer, so there is no guarantee that any of the possibilities for the Votive Mass of the Holy Name of Jesus will be actualized on January 3.

Photos in this article are by Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P.

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.

Let Latins Be Latins, and Greeks Greeks: On Remaining Faithful to Distinctive Identities

The following is a real exchange of letters.

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

I’ve asked versions of the following questions of many excellent Latins for years, and have never gotten a satisfying reply. I’m wondering if you can shed any light.

In human terms, there is a trade-off between optimization and flexibility. The human side of liturgy is the same. Generally, systems optimize for certain conditions until they crystallize, and if all of the flexibility has been optimized out, eventually the tiniest change in conditions knocks the whole thing over. Organizations and communities prepare for this through system redundancies (e.g., back-up plans), subsidiarity, and so on.

There is a type of flexibility in the Greek Rite that I think works against “tinkeritis.” Daily commemorations pile up, and patriarchates, eparchies, and even parishes have latitude about which to celebrate. Certain canons and litanies find favor here or there, certain recensions and uses vary, even the logic of vestment colors. Decentralized and sometimes even competitive overlapping liturgical authorities have helped the Greek Rite ecosystem stay very conservative — by and large, and certainly by comparison to the Roman Rite.

When I listen to my Latin traditionalist (an honorable phrase in my mind) friends saying things like “You can’t have a solemn Mass without a subdeacon,” it just blows my mind. If the barriers of entry to progressive levels of liturgical excellence are too great at the local level, the traditioning process is given over to specialists, and, what’s worse, bishops. [1]

On the contrary, when one of my children was initiated, my parish hadn’t been using the rite of tonsure, probably ever. I asked my priest for the full ceremony, and so . . . he downloaded a perfectly excellent version from the internet. Similarly, we’ve had to have our people translate specific texts when need be from the original languages into English. I know that part of this is a de facto blessing of what you might call “the innocence of the rudeness” of the Eastern Church in the USA, and a lot of it is also the difference in how authority and tradition interplay in the Greek and Latin churches.

I can’t help but wonder, doesn’t a lot of the Roman Rite’s current liturgical crisis stem from a certain type of hyper-regulation, and then a preposterous reaction to it? Wouldn’t the Roman Rite benefit from a certain type of flexibility? Certainly not the one you got, unfortunately. Would the truly stupid ideas like versus populum have been heard of, if (for example) some dioceses could have “blown off steam” by using liturgical blue (or whatever)? I’ve never been able to penetrate the Latin Trad mindset in this regard, even though I am their biggest supporter otherwise. Small is beautiful. Big is always a temptation to mediocrity. Sameness is brittle. The strongest fabrics are cross-woven.

That is my personal and admittedly partial working theory of the human side of the Latin liturgical tragedy.

God bless,
Greek Catholic

Dear Greek Catholic,

I admire and love the Byzantine Divine Liturgy. I was blessed to be able to attend it several times a week while teaching at the International Theological Institute in Austria. I learned to cantor, which came in handy later on in Wyoming when we had weekly or monthly Divine Liturgies and I was the only one who knew how to chant the Troparion, Kontakion, Prokeimenon, etc. Even today, at every Roman Mass, I privately pray the great Byzantine prayer: “O Lord, I firmly believe and profess that you are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first…” My son and my daughter both received the “holy mystery of penance” and Holy Communion in the Byzantine rite (for circumstantial and personal reasons). As a family we are traditionally Roman to the core, but precisely for that reason, we love our Eastern brethren and their rites.

What I think is so perplexing to people is how very different the mentalities of East and West are. This difference has its roots in the contrast between the Western Roman empire (and the way it developed into Europe), and the Eastern Roman empire (and the way it developed into Byzantium, later moving into the Slavic realm). To speak in generalities, the Western mind is logical, linear, efficient, succinct, and focused; the Byzantine mind is circular, effusive, redundant, poetic, and diffuse. The strengths of each are also the source of their weaknesses, or at least their temptations. [2]

The liturgical reformers of the 1960s tore out their hair over this difference. In one sense, they wanted all liturgy to look the same, because, well, somehow there ought to be a “right liturgy” that everyone could subscribe to, like a sort of Esperanto. Ultimately, in a savage irony, the postconciliar liturgical reform created a set of rites that, so far from taking inspiration from the East or approaching more nearly to unity with it, amounted to an antithesis on almost every point of magnitude: respect for existing tradition; internal continuity in readings, prayers, antiphons, hymns; the inversion of the orientation of the priest; the dissolution of reverence in receiving the holy mysteries; the abolition of distinctions between clerical and lay, sanctuary and nave; and much else besides. [3] As many have pointed out, the only ecumenism that mattered to the liturgical reformers was accommodation to Protestantism; they could have cared less what the Eastern Orthodox or the Eastern Catholics thought.

Pope Paul VI endorsed a surrender to the Enlightenment rationalism represented by the Jansenist Synod of Pistoia, which had failed in the 18th century, but with his aid triumphed in the 20th. This reformist-constructivist mentality yielded rotten fruits at various moments in the last century, but its final and supreme fruit was the postconciliar reform, which finished stripping the Latin Church of all that was magnificent, orderly, and decorous, substituting in its place all that was industrial, modular, verbose, and hip. The East would never toy with liturgy this way, but neither would the West had it not fallen under the spell of Pistoia.

In place of the Protestantizing and rationalizing work of the Consilium, Catholics owe it to Our Lord and the providential guidance of His Spirit to respect rigorously the irreducible complexity and distinctness of the two lungs of the Church, and remain true to the originating genius, spirit, and traditions of each. The Western approach is good if, and only if, it remains true to itself. As long as we keep our inherited rituals — our concisely chiseled orations bristling with layers of meaning, our military but ravishing ceremonial, our unsurpassable Gregorian melodies, our special love of silence, our penchant for kneeling not so much as a sign of penance as a sign of humble adoration — we will be healthy. We will be decisively Roman, not making a sorry embarrassment of ourselves by second- or third-rate imitations of the secular world, of Eastern Christianity, or of evangelical Protestantism. We can be who we are, and do it brilliantly; that is all, and that is more than enough to keep us happily busy. We cannot be someone else and should not try, for failure waits at the door of rivalries and envies.

This much is obvious to me: one of the perfections of the East is the calmness, smoothness, and relaxedness (if that’s a word) with which the clergy perform the services. They know what they are supposed to do, and they do it effortlessly, without fuss, and without rubrical elaborateness. Still, it is done reverently, ceremonially, not at all casually or randomly. In the West, centuries of rubrical development brought about a situation where every motion, posture, position, and interaction was carefully orchestrated and regulated. I happen to think this is a perfection peculiar to the Latin tradition, and again, if done well, it is magnificent to behold, like a sacred dance, like Japanese Noh theatre, like Her Majesty’s guard on parade, like a flock of birds in geometric formation. It is a science and a study, a form of asceticism, an offering of the body in sacrifice. The moment one loses the meaning of it — that it is an outward expression and offering to God of a mind well-disciplined and subordinate to Him — it can become regimentation, formalism, rubricism. In other words, it becomes ripe for caricature, rejection, and replacement with a desperately bad attempt at naturalness.

The West cannot succeed except by being Western in the best possible way, just as the East cannot succeed except by being Eastern in the best possible way.

For many centuries the Latin liturgy had the deacons, subdeacons, acolytes, and other ministers it needed, at least at the cathedrals and monasteries, and in smaller places on special occasions. It was all done according to local customs and expectations, which are good things to have in play. As Roman centralization asserted itself more and more, the local customs evaporated, and the age of legalism began. This, I would agree with you, has been a scourge on doing the liturgy well, because it places the same set of ideal standards on every locality, which rather discourages than encourages solemnity. Ultimately, the root of all of our woes is Roman centralization. Once the bishop of Rome thinks he is the absolute master of the Latin liturgy, it’s all over. I would not say this of Pope Pius V, who codified an existing liturgy; but once we see Pius X radically changing the Divine Office, Pius XII radically changing Holy Week, and Paul VI radically changing everything, there is no longer any paradosis worthy of the name. It is, as Eastern Christians have rightly recognized (and as we should be humble enough to admit), the sacrifice of tradition by and for pastoral authoritarianism. I think more and more people are recognizing this deviation and seeking to do what they can about it — at least those who have an orthodox conception of what liturgy is and how it has always been handed down, not without development, of course, but never put on the chopping block of academic theory or pastoral expediency.

On the other hand, and I hope you won’t mind my saying so, it seems to me that the Eastern tradition can be so loose that it is difficult to say what “ought” to be done. What ought to be done is what’s fitting, yes; but who decides what’s fitting? The local priest? The faithful? The eparchy? Why do certain customs vanish from whole territories, while variations creep in that may over time separate national churches from each other and work against mutual recognition? Why are some Easterners so against development that they would wish to abolish devotions cherished and loved by the faithful, out of an archaic purism? Of course you are far healthier than we, in general; I am simply raising some questions.

Thank you again for writing to me. I very much enjoy this sort of dialogue.

Yours in Christ,
Peter Kwasniewski

NOTES

[1] I take it that my correspondent, by this unusual phrase, means the process by which the content of tradition is handed down, that is, inculcated in practice. He seems to be arguing that if it is too difficult for a local community to take hold of and implement the liturgical tradition, they will not be able to live it or pass it on; it will become a domain of specialists only.

[2] I go into this matter in greater depth in this article: “Byzantine Splendor and Roman Sobriety.”

[3] For more on these points, see my article: “The Byzantine Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and the Novus Ordo — Two Brothers and a Stranger,” and the related piece “For the Liturgical Progressives, Dialogue Means ‘Agreeing With.’”

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

Twelve Reasons Not to Prefer the Novus Ordo: A Reply to Fr. Longenecker

This article appeared on January 2nd at OnePeterFive. NLM is reprinting it today with permission from the original source.

Fr. Longenecker has written some fine books and articles. Years ago, I enjoyed and benefited from his book on St. Benedict and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and his recent book on the historical veracity of the Magi is interesting.

It would appear that in matters liturgical, however, Fr. Longenecker is out of his depth. Each claim he puts forward in his article “Twelve Things I Like about the Novus Ordo Mass” can be and has been refuted in the ample literature written on the subject, of which he appears to be ignorant. Indeed, the article betrays minimal knowledge of the history, process, and content of the liturgical reform (as, for instance, well documented in this biography of Annibale Bugnini) and of the contrasting richness of the traditional Mass.

Let us walk through Fr. Longenecker’s Twelve Things (printed in boldface).

1. It’s accessible. Having the liturgy in the vernacular helps it to be understood by the people. How can that be a bad thing?

It is characteristic of the rationalism of the liturgical movement (based on its Enlightenment precursors) to prioritize verbal comprehension over a more synthetic and holistic understanding of the mystery of faith, which draws on all the senses and appeals to the heart as well as the intellect. The use of Latin, in addition to being simply what the Western Church did for over 1,500 years, creates for worshipers a numinous and sacral atmosphere that invites meditation and adoration.

Moreover, seeking the goal of easy intelligibility led the reformers to dumb down much of the content of the Mass so that it might not be “too hard.” What is the heavy price we pay for the all too obvious “accessibility” of the Novus Ordo? Superficiality and boredom. It’s so accessible that it “fails to grip,” as P.G. Wodehouse would say. This is why we have a new self-help genre on getting over one’s boredom with Mass and various faddish movements like LifeTeen for pumping up the Novus Ordo. In contrast, the traditional Latin Mass is steep, craggy, and sublime, offering the worshiper the kind of challenge that befits his rational dignity and supernatural destiny, and opening up an endless vista of new discoveries in the age-old prayers and gestures.

Finally, no literate person is incapable of using a daily missal, where all the antiphons, prayers, and readings may be found in vernacular translations – but without any attempt at an “official” translation of the impossible-to-translate ancient Latin texts, thus avoiding the intractable battles over what “style” and “register” of vernacular should be used in the liturgy. The major prayers of the Mass are fixed and repeated from week to week, so it is not difficult to follow them, as one can see from wee lads and lasses who do this at the traditional Latin Mass.

2. It’s flexible. We’re supposed to honor Latin as the language of our church and it is easy enough to integrate a little or a lot of Latin into the Novus Ordo Mass. It is also flexible musically. You don’t have to use Haagan Daz, hootenany and soft rock music. Learn Gregorian chant and polyphony. It fits.

The idea that a liturgy should be a matter of “picking and choosing” among options is foreign to the historical development of Christian liturgy in East and West, which has always been toward greater definition, consistency, and stability of liturgical texts, chants, and ceremonies. A liturgy is a ritual action in which the actors lose their idiosyncratic individuality and adopt a persona that befits the mysteries enacted. The clergy should come across not as the ones steering and coloring the enterprise, but as stewards of a treasure they receive and place humbly before the people; the people, for their part, find it easier to pray when the liturgy is not a moving target, but one can enter again and again into the same sacred routine. This intrinsic quality of good liturgy is absent from the Novus Ordo by design.

Concretely, what does this flexibility end up looking like? We can choose the Roman Canon, that which defines the Roman Rite, or a Eucharistic Prayer patterned after a pseudo-anaphora written by pseudo-Hippolytus and finished on a napkin in Trastevere. We can have the chant that grew up for a thousand years with the rite, or some sentimental piano tune by an ex-Jesuit. We can have Mass facing East in accord with apostolic tradition (as St. Basil and others testify), or we can try our luck with the novel “closed circle” approach of versus populum. We can have people line up for communion in the hand like customers queuing for bus tickets, scattering fragments of the Body of Christ hither and yon, or place the Lord on the tongue of believers kneeling in a posture of adoration.  All this great flexibility! The devil delights in it, since it usually plays in his favor.

Such flexibility has also destroyed, for all intents and purposes, the distinctions among a Low Mass, a Missa cantata or High Mass, and a Solemn High Mass. In practice, one usually gets a bizarre mixture of high and low elements with no discernible order or hierarchy.

I address the spiritual dangers of this flexibility in a talk called “Liturgical Obedience, the Imitation of Christ, and the Seductions of Autonomy” (full recording here; some excerpts here).

The old Mass "traveling well"

3. It travels well. As much as we love beautiful architecture, music, vestments and pipe organs, there are times when the Mass is celebrated at camp, in prison, on the battlefield, in a tin hut or on a mission field, a mountaintop or a beach. The simplicity of the Novus Ordo means it can be celebrated more easily in such situations.

This is probably the flimsiest of the twelve reasons, given that thousands of the greatest missionaries the Church has ever known, as well as military chaplains in many wars (including both World Wars, as plenty of vintage photos online give testimony), offered exclusively the traditional Mass and carried on their backs what they needed for it.

Indeed, one of the objections raised by missionary bishops at the Second Vatican Council is that the proposed liturgical reform would greatly multiply the number of books necessary for liturgy. All a priest needs to celebrate the old Latin Mass in its integrity is a single altar missal. To celebrate the new liturgy in anything approaching completeness, on the other hand, one needs the altar missal, the lectionary, and a gradual or book of antiphons. A “sung Mass” requires a veritable library of books, as I know from firsthand experience as a choir director for many years at the Novus Ordo.

Here is a gallery of photos of priests celebrating the traditional Latin Mass outdoors, showing how well it can be done, including on backpacking trips many weeks long. Besides, as Martin Mosebach says, it’s not ultimately the architecture that makes the difference, but the Mass. The great Catholic Mass of tradition takes possession of the place where it is offered and dominates it; the Novus Ordo brings even a lofty cathedral down to its own impoverished simplism. This is why it usually feels so out of place in the great churches of the past.

It should also give us pause that prisoners would respond so positively to the Latin Mass coming into their lives. I received a letter from a prisoner in Louisiana who prays the old breviary and is requesting a weekly Latin Mass. Don’t prisoners also deserve and respond to that which is beautiful, rich, and profound? The modern world is already too much awash in abridgements, shortcuts, diet drinks, and lite snacks; we would benefit from the original version, the scenic route, the robust nourishment.

4. There is more Scripture read, and it is read in the language people can understand. How can it be a bad thing for there to be a wider range of Sacred Scripture being made available to the people?

All things being equal, familiarity with more of Scripture is better for the Christian people. But all things are not, in fact, equal.

First, the new lectionary is so cram-jammed with Scripture that it works against familiarity, whereas the old (indeed, ancient) lectionary features a more limited number of readings of optimal length and liturgical appropriateness, which encourages a deep familiarity with them. Since the Mass is not meant to be a Bible study, and no Catholic can be expected to acquire a well rounded understanding of the Bible from the liturgy (even the new lectionary features only 13.5% of the Old Testament and 54.9% of the New Testament outside of the Gospels), the claim that it is better to read more Scripture at the Mass is simply begging the question.

Second, the old lectionary, as limited as it deliberately is, demonstrably features more of the “tough sayings” of Scripture. It is not afraid to present the wrath of God, the evil of sin, or the danger of sacrilegious communions – the kind of passages that are frequently left out of the new lectionary, in spite of its much greater size. In other words, the new lectionary suppresses parts of Scripture that are “difficult” to “modern man.” Thus, it presents less of the total message of Scripture, even as the Liturgy of the Hours presents a reduced Psalter, expurgated of politically incorrect material.

Six major arguments against the appropriateness of the new lectionary may be found here; an explanation of the nature of the omissions and distortions in it may be found here; and a case study on the exclusion of 1 Corinthians 11:27-29 may be found here.

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