Liturgy as the Primary Embodiment of Tradition

Walter Cardinal Brandmüller kisses the Gospel during Solemn Mass

In the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council teaches us about the relationship between Scripture and Tradition:

There exists a close connection and communication between Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end. For Sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit, while Sacred Tradition takes the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the Apostles, and hands it on to their successors in its full purity, so that led by the light of the Spirit of truth, they may in proclaiming it preserve this word of God faithfully, explain it, and make it more widely known. Consequently, it is not from Sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed. Therefore both Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence. Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church.[1]

When we speak of Scripture, it’s clear (or clear enough) what we are referring to: the contents of the Bible, the canon of writings established by the Church. But when we speak of Tradition, what exactly are we referring to? Where, to put it more concretely, do we meet up with or run into Tradition? When do we find ourselves in its presence? How do we know we’re dealing with “Sacred Tradition”—which the Council says is part of the very word of God!—and not with mere “traditions of men” that may or may not be from Christ the Lord?

Dom Mark Kirby, Prior of Our Lady of the Cenacle Monastery in Ireland, speaks of “the age-old law that grounds and shapes both Catholic doctrine and the Catholic moral life: Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi.”[2] This is a pithy way of saying that “the law of praying” (how we pray) shapes “the law of believing” (what we believe), which in turn informs “the law of living” (how we actually lead our lives).

LEX ORANDI

Dom Mark comments on the first of these components:

The lex orandi is the enactment of the sacred liturgy; it is composed not only of texts, but also of the whole complexus of sacred signs, gestures, and rites by which, through the mediating priesthood of Jesus Christ, men are sanctified and God is glorified. The sacred liturgy itself—being the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the other sacraments, the Divine Office, and the various rites and sacramentals found in the Church’s official liturgical books—is the Church’s theologia prima. ... The Church’s primary theology is not something invented by learned men; it is found in the givenness of the liturgy, the primary organ of the Church’s authentic tradition.

This conclusion is echoed in the eloquent statement of Fr. Louis Bouyer:

It is in the celebration of the liturgy’s mysteries, and in all of the new, mystical, and communal life flowing from it, that the Church maintains in unity the perpetual and perpetually living consciousness of the immutable deposit of faith entrusted to her.

More succinctly still, Pope Pius XI declares: “The liturgy is the principal organ of the Church’s ordinary Magisterium.”[3] A contemporary anonymous writer draws out the implications of this special status:

The liturgy is the primary font or source of our knowledge of revelation. … [I]t is the ordinary, normal context wherein Christian worshipers encounter the divine realities in such a way as to participate in them contemplatively and prayerfully. Encyclicals and councils serve the primarily didactic purpose of informing the intellect of the individual truths of faith—a necessary thing in the Christian life. But the liturgy does this and more. The liturgy is where this formation of the intellect bears its fruit in the living out of faith. The liturgy is faith in practice. It is where Christians receive revelation, believe in it, and act upon that belief by directly worshiping their Creator. … The liturgy, too, is a medium through which revelation is communicated. Indeed, as stated before, it is the definitive and primary context wherein this communication and reception of revelation occurs for Christians, precisely because it is the central act of Christian worship. Worship is the principal act of religion; all other acts are vain unless directed to the act of worship.[4]

Because of this intimate connection between how we pray, what we believe, and how we lead our lives, the saints have always shown a burning love for the liturgy and everything connected with it. Its phrases and gestures fill their imaginations. They feel a sense of awe, reverence, and humility before this holy inheritance and they counsel caution in tampering with it. A learned Benedictine of our time, Dom Bernard Capelle (1884–1961), when asked by a Vatican commission to share his opinion about liturgical reform, wrote in 1949:

Nothing is to be changed unless it is a case of indispensable necessity. This rule is most wise, for the Liturgy is truly a sacred testament and monument—not so much written but living—of Tradition, to be reckoned with as a locus of theology and a most pure font of piety and of the Christian spirit.[5]

Here, too, we can start to see connections between what I argued concerning the Book of Revelation (the cosmic centrality of worship and the heavenly liturgy of the Church Triumphant as paradigmatic for the Church Militant on earth) and what one learns from Romano Guardini’s Sacred Signs on the language of symbols, through which we come to understand and relate with God, and by which we express what is most inward and most exalted in ourselves.

Tying together the preceding points, Dom Daniel Augustine Oppenheimer shows the ethical and spiritual demands placed on the believer by the sacred liturgy:

Before all else … the primary antecedent is humility before the source itself. Already the ascetic principle of faith is operative, understanding that the liturgical traditio is not “some old piece of cloth,” to use a famous phrase of Cardinal Ottaviani, open to free flight or arbitrary incisions and repiecing. The texts, gestures, signs, symbols, music, the full panoply of the liturgical culture, all have together an internal cohesion, sense, depth, and character. The thing itself deserves reverence because it is holy and the principal font of revelation.[6]

LEX CREDENDI & LEX VIVENDI

Coming now to the second and third members of our “age-old law,” Dom Mark writes:

The lex credendi is the articulation of what is already given, contemplated, and celebrated in the lex orandi. The Church’s doctrine emerges in all its shining purity—in the veritatis splendor—from the wellspring of her liturgy. Catholic doctrine, the Church’s theologia secunda, is the fruit of her liturgical experience. … The lex vivendi is the Catholic moral life, a life quickened by the theological virtues, a life in obedience to the divine commandments, characterized by the cardinal virtues, illumined by the Beatitudes, enriched by the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and displayed in the Holy Spirit’s Twelve Fruits. The lex vivendi pertains to all that teaches men to live rightly, to every ethical and social question, and to the pursuit of that holiness that already we contemplate in the saints set before us by the Church.

The order of the three elements is by no means accidental: as we have seen, the liturgy delivers to us the faith we profess, or put differently, we profess our faith in and through the liturgy. Divine worship, as handed down from the apostles and their successors, comes first, fills our minds and hearts, and shows us the way; the theological articulation and explication of the faith comes second, as an internalization of and reflection upon what we are doing when we celebrate the sacred mysteries. Once we have turned in prayer to the living God, who is Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, giving Him the primacy that is His due (the lex orandi)—and once we have received the truth from His lips and His hands, giving truth the primacy in our souls (the lex credendi)—then we will have our “marching orders” for life in the world, the fulfillment of righteousness in virtuous love of ourselves and of our neighbor (the lex vivendi). Dom Mark captures this order nicely:

The restoration of Catholic doctrine in all its beauty and richness, and the consequent reclaiming of Catholic discipline as something both healing and life-giving, will begin with the restoration of the sacred liturgy.

Another pseudonymous author offers us a powerful meditation on the super-realism of the liturgy, which, by really containing what it represents, puts us in direct, immediate contact with the ultimate realities:

Liturgy does not merely teach belief and transmit grace. It revives and renews the sacred mysteries of Christ in time for the faithful. In doing so, one encounters Christ, the angels and saints, and glimpses the greater spiritual reality of the Lord while remaining on earth, blurring the lines which separate the eternal and the temporal. One leaves the liturgy and the “mystical supper” of Christ not only having learned what to believe, but also how to believe when he returns to the world outside the temple. … How does one orient one’s self to God and away from sin? How does one see the world and God as He wishes? The liturgy shows us this, in conjunction with being the setting for the Sacraments, wherein the Holy Spirit acts and makes the work of Christ immediately accessible to the believer. … The purpose of the liturgy, especially during the great periods of the year, is to unite the faithful to God so that they might know Him and save their souls. He gathers them to Himself and to His new Jerusalem, the Church, and to His Body, again, the Church.[7]

NOTES

[1] Dei Verbum, n. 9.

[2] All the quotations of Dom Mark are from his article “Liturgy, Doctrine, and Discipline: The Right Order." See also Joyce Little's article "Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi: Many Young Catholics Find Liturgy Incomprehensible and Irrelevant. Is It?"

[3] Cited in George Cardinal Pell's "The Translation of Liturgical Texts" (and by many other authors).

[4] The Maestro, "Liturgy, Revelation, and Tradition."

[5] Cited in Paweł Milcarek's excellent article “Balance Instead of Harmony."

[6] Dom Daniel Augustine Oppenheimer, "Asceticism and Tradition."

[7] The Rad Trad, "Liturgy & Tradition: Sensus Fidelium."

Lectio Divina: Liturgical Proclamation and Personal Reading

Citing the words of St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Ambrose, the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum reminds all members of the Church of our responsibility to cling to the Word of God:

25. Therefore, all the clergy must hold fast to the Sacred Scriptures through diligent sacred reading and careful study, especially the priests of Christ and others, such as deacons and catechists who are legitimately active in the ministry of the word. This is to be done so that none of them will become “an empty preacher of the word of God outwardly, who is not a listener to it inwardly” [St. Augustine], since they must share the abundant wealth of the divine word with the faithful committed to them, especially in the sacred liturgy. The sacred synod also earnestly and particularly urges all the Christian faithful, especially religious, to learn by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures the “excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ” (Phil 3:8). “For ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ” [St. Jerome]. Therefore, they should gladly put themselves in touch with the sacred text itself, whether it be through the liturgy, rich in the divine word, or through devotional reading, or through instructions suitable for the purpose and other aids which, in our time, with approval and active support of the shepherds of the Church, are commendably spread everywhere. And let them remember that prayer should accompany the reading of Sacred Scripture, so that God and man may talk together; for “we speak to Him when we pray; we hear Him when we read the divine saying” [St. Ambrose]. 

This exhortation is something we all need to ponder—including those of us who love and cherish the usus antiquior. We, too, need to pay close attention to the readings read or chanted at Mass; it’s not as if taking Scripture seriously is some kind of Protestant or modernist innovation! In fact, Scripture’s “home” is most of all the liturgy, the Divine Office and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It will not do to react against charismatic excesses or the flaws of the Ordinary Form Lectionary by swinging to an extreme that fails to give to the Word of God the profound reverence it deserves—the homage of our minds and hearts, the deliberate attentiveness and personal application that causes the seed to take root.

I have noticed a strange phenomenon, namely, that traditionalists tend to swing to the opposite extreme on a lot of things, as if overreacting to the abuses around them. "The congregation singing at Mass? Oh, that's a Novus Ordo thing"—forgetting that St. Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII, to name just the most outstanding, repeatedly urged the faithful to chant the Ordinary of the Mass, as indeed is completely fitting and easily done through regular exposure to the chant. "Read Scripture devotionally? Oh, that's a Protestant thing"—forgetting that the Bible is a Catholic book and that the saints of the Church were doing lectio divina for fifteen centuries before the Protestants ever showed up. "Follow along with the readings and prayers at Mass in a Missal? I can't be bothered, I'd rather just pray individually, and be in a pleasant holy haze for an hour." I'm not denying that the old Mass wonderfully promotes interior prayer, and certainly I would never say we should always be reading or singing, but it's no less true that we ought to put on the mind of Christ by joining in the public worship offered by the Mystical Body—and this involves at least some effort at getting acquainted with the content of that worship!

To get back to our main point: Scripture is most of all at home in the Mass, where it is like a jewel placed in a setting of precious metal, and it is our privilege as Catholics to attend to the voice of Almighty God when His very words are being offered up before Him as a sweet-smelling incense. Like everything else in the liturgy, the proclamation of the biblical readings is both for God's glory and for man's sanctification.

A contemporary author has spoken eloquently of these connections:

“Liturgical proclamation is obviously the place and privileged means of contact with the sacred text. There the living and active Word is returned to me in all its fullness. . . ‘It is he himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in church’ (Sacrosanctum Concilium 7).”[1]

This is because the Church’s worship is the activity of the Risen Christ, Head of the Church, together with all the members of His Mystical Body. The liturgy is His personal action for, and with, His people: He saves and sanctifies them, He gives them the grace to respond to Him in adoration, praise, blessing, contrition, supplication, thanksgiving. However, “the Church does not actualize its mystery or carry out its activity only in liturgical acts. It follows from this that, in the liturgy, the Word is living and active maximally though not exclusively”[2].

Of course the book itself is not the Word of God, only the means by which it is transmitted to me. But the reader of the book is a member of the Church. That reading takes place in the context of the ecclesial mystery, where the same Spirit who inspired the prophets and sacred writers is present and active. Therefore the text can be read in the light of the same Spirit by whom it was written.

Because we are members of Christ’s Body, we can continue to hear God’s Word outside of the liturgy—and in fact that continuation is what makes the public proclamation bear fruit within us as well as prepares us for the next reception of the Word. “All personal reading of the sacred text finds its center in liturgical hearing—as preparation for it, or as its continuation.”

Let me give some examples about how we might prepare ourselves for, or derive further fruit from, the liturgical hearing of the Bible.

• On Sundays or Holy Days, we might look at the day’s readings ahead of time, either the evening before or in the morning, and/or look at them again later that day, to impress the word more firmly on our souls. I have been amazed, personally, at how much more I get out of the reading or chanting of the Scriptures at Mass when I have already gone through the text, even if only cursorily, beforehand. It’s as if the ground had been plowed, and now there are furrows where the seeds can fall and find moisture.
• During Lent, where both the traditional and the modern Roman Rites offer us daily readings at Mass, we might take as our lectio divina the very Epistle and Gospel of the day.
• I have seen Dom Mark Kirby of Silverstream recommend doing lectio divina with the entirety of the Mass, from the Introit through the readings to the Communion, and this has indeed been very fruitful for me on the occasions when I’ve done it.
• If one is fortunate enough to be able to attend a public Divine Office at a monastery or parish, one may do the same thing: look over the psalms and other parts of the liturgy ahead of time and/or afterwards.

In such ways, we are nourishing our souls from the feast of the liturgy, preparing better for its celebration, returning to it in memory and love. Archbishop Magrassi comments:

A kind of spiritual exchange will take place. The soul, in its moments of prayer, will easily remain influenced by what moved it during the liturgy; it will relive it, probe it more deeply, personalize it in one-to-one dialogue with the divine speaker. On the other hand, what the soul experiences in these moments of prayer will, as it were, flow back to it as it listens during the liturgy. It will be totally present to the reading; it will listen more receptively and be more fully open. The two moments become complementary aspects of a single act.[3]

Lectio divina is an essential instrument in the life of the traditional Catholic. It has been a fundamental element (or better yet, foundation) of monastic life since the very beginning. It has been the recurrent life-giving devotion of countless saints. It has shaped the great theologians and mystics. It is recommended to us again and again by the popes and enriched with indulgences. It is a spiritual bread that feeds our hunger and yet causes us to hunger more and more for the Bread of Life, our Lord Jesus Christ, in His Eucharistic Presence and in His heavenly glory. “It is your face, O Lord, that I seek; hide not your face from me.”

NOTES
[1] Archbishop Mariano Magrassi, O.S.B., Praying the Bible: An Introduction to Lectio Divina, 3.
[2] Ibid., 4. The next two quotations are from the same page.
[3] Ibid., 9-10.

(Part V of a multi-part series.  Links to the other articles: Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.)

Where Have All the Good Preachers Gone?

January 27 is the feast of St. John Chrysostom,
Patron of preachers,
in the traditional Roman calendar

It’s no secret that preaching in the Catholic Church today is of a generally abysmal quality. There are shining exceptions, no doubt, and if you are fortunate to be part of a community with one or several competent preachers, count your blessings.

Most Catholics have to endure superficial, long-winded, random, vague, and social-justicy homilies week after week—sometimes even heretical ones. Something has gone wrong. Pope Benedict XVI knew it, and offered the world a stunning example (and corpus) of beautiful, profound, clear, concise, nourishing, orthodox preaching. While it is doubtful that any pope will equal Benedict’s preaching for many a decade or century, Pope Francis, for his part, has a vigorous homiletic style that gets his points across loud and clear, often by means of the Jesuit tactic of “three words.” 

What we need, evidently, is for the internal memo to make the rounds: Priests and deacons everywhere, work hard on your preaching! It seems to me, on the basis of conversations with many priests, listening to a lot of preaching in my lifetime, and studying classic homilies as a theologian, that there are a few key principles to success. I offer a summary of these principles in a spirit of genuine appreciation for the demanding work of preachers everywhere and with a hope that something in these reflections may be found helpful.

I

First, preachers should follow St. Augustine’s rule that we need to interpret Scripture by Scripture, and so they should be using concordances to deepen their understanding and enrich their preaching. (A software program like BibleWorks is an amazing tool.) The most powerful homilies I’ve heard are not the ones sprinkled with cartoons, newspaper stories, personal reminiscences, self-help lingo, and so forth, but rather, the ones shot through with the Word of God, which “is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12)

St. Paul tells us: “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17). Why don’t we get genuine teaching? And reproof and correction? As for training in righteousness, when’s the last time you heard a strong call to holiness, righteousness, integrity of faith and purity of conscience? And yet that is the persistent message of Scripture to us.

Wouldn’t it be galvanizing to hear, during the Christmas season, a homily preached on these two verses: “Your all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed, a stern warrior carrying the sharp sword of your authentic command, and stood and filled all things with death, and touched heaven while standing on the earth” (Wis 18:15-16). The Church has always applied this text to the coming of Jesus—and yet there is such a paradox: the helpless child lying in a manger...a stern warrior? How does he fills things with death—didn’t he come to bring life? Right away, one begins to see all the wonderful things that could flow out of this theme.

The virtual abandonment of seriously Scripture-based preaching is the single greatest defect in Catholic homiletics today. Look at any Father or Doctor of the Church, or the greatest teaching popes, and you will see that their homilies are literally woven out of strands of Scripture. St. Augustine and St. Bernard of Clairvaux furnish some of the best examples of this.

II

Which leads into a second key principle. In order to understand the Word of God they are to expound, preachers should be leaning heavily on the greatest theological sources after Scripture: the Fathers of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas (e.g., the Catena aurea on the four Gospels [online or book form], or the Commentaries on Matthew and John, the Commentaries on the Letters of Paul—what a treasure-trove!), and the writings of the mystics, like the Carmelite doctors. I was so delighted when I saw, some time ago, an American bishop take Blessed Columba Marmion, a sublime spiritual writer, as a basis for his Lenten preaching. That’s what we need to see: rich fare for the minds and hearts of the People of God.

As Catholics, we believe that Divine Providence has raised up for us twenty centuries of holy men and women who illuminate for us the wisdom of Scripture. We do not try to do it all on our own—and when we do, the results are usually bad. Look at the preacher who speaks “off the cuff” about the day’s Gospel. Such homilies, as we all know, are some of the worst, very often straying into confusion, randomness, and false doctrine, all for lack of suitable guidance. It is an act of humility and a spiritual work of mercy towards the faithful to seek such guidance and to rely upon it. In Book IV of On Christian Doctrine, St. Augustine even says: If you don’t know how to preach, start by adapting stuff from the Fathers. Don’t be worried about “copying”; you could hardly do better than to copy them!

Clergy and religious are bound to the Liturgy of the Hours, part of which is the daily Office of Readings. Why, then, do we so rarely hear the Office of Readings enter into preaching? Are the clergy actually reading it? So often there are perfect passages that illuminate the readings from the lectionary, and you would think that universally we would be hearing constant use being made of this Office. But it struck me recently, when our chaplain made several references to the Office of Readings, that he’s the first one I’ve ever noticed who’s done that. Is this Office some great secret that only the clergy are supposed to know about, that they are not allowed to share with the faithful for some reason? Clergy out there: Can someone enlighten me as to why this is not a much more common influence on preaching than it appears to be?

III

Above I spoke of finding and leaning on reliable authorities. But who is reliable? And can we ever be certain of the truth of what we are preaching? For Catholics, there is always a third key principle: the Magisterium of the Church. Preachers should be taking in a steady diet of magisterial wisdom, for instance the Catechism and papal encyclicals, and making use of them. If a priest needs to preach on married love, where better to look than Pius XI’s Casti Connubii? If on the duties of Christian citizens towards their country and its government, Leo XIII’s Sapientiae Christianae? If on the nature of the sacred liturgy and the holy sacrifice of the Mass, Pius XII’s Mediator Dei? The list could go on. With such a wealth of profound and eloquent teaching given to us by the Church, it seems incongruous that it is so rarely shared with the people.

Pope Benedict XVI comes to mind once again. His papal preaching is exemplary in every respect: in its lucid doctrinal content, in its eloquent and concise style, in its reliance on the best sources, in its pulsing spiritual vitality and conviction. If we are looking for a model to learn our preaching from, we will not find a better one.

The three principles of this article can be summed up in a formula that will be familiar to students of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum: (I) Scripture, (II) Tradition, and (III) Magisterium. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Joseph Ratzinger who assisted in the drafting of Dei Verbum during the Council should have given us, as Pope Benedict, a touchstone of what one might call “Dei Verbum preaching”—preaching of the Word of God, permeated with Sacred Scripture, richly endowed with Tradition, and informed throughout by the Magisterium.

A closing thought, again from St. Paul’s second epistle to Timothy:

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching. (2 Tim 4:1-2)

That’s a mighty and momentous charge; it is a charge given to every bishop, priest, and deacon. It is time that the clergy renew their dedication to preparing and delivering homilies that meet the desperate needs of the Church of our time, and so, become the evangelizers God has called them to be.