Abp Cordileone’s Review of Dr Michael Foley’s Lost in Translation

We are very honored to share this review by His Excellency Salvatore Cordileone, the Archbishop of San Francisco, of our contributor Dr Michael Foley’s book Lost in Translation; the essays which form the largest part of the book were originally published here on NLM. A shorter version of this review was published on Sunday at The Catholic Thing.

Rooted in the conviction that the Sacred Liturgy, as “an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ,” is “the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed” and “the font from which all her power flows,” the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council asserted the supremacy of liturgical prayer in the life of the Church and called for the entire people of God – clergy, religious and laity alike – to form themselves in a spiritual life centered on the Church’s Liturgy. In so doing, they gave voice in authoritative manner to the Liturgical Movement that had been blossoming in the Church for some 100 years, the central aim of that Liturgical Movement being the reawakening of the Christian faithful to a liturgically-centered spiritual life.

Among the contemporary Catholic writers answering this call of Vatican II and the Liturgical Movement, Michael P. Foley has distinguished himself both in a popular key with his best-selling Drinking with the Saints (and related volumes) and in the academic world with his well-researched and learned explorations of “liturgical recapitulation” and of “Ordinary Time” in the Church’s liturgical calendar. Now, however, Foley has produced a hybrid of the popular and the scholarly in Lost in Translation: Meditating on the Orations of the Traditional Roman Rite (Angelico Press, 2023), a work of spiritually rich theological reflection composed in approachable prose.

The purpose of Lost in Translation is at once simple and profound: to meditate fruitfully on the liturgical prayers – principally, the Collect, Secret and Postcommunion – of the classical texts of the Roman Rite by paying careful attention to the various shades of meaning and context in the poetry and rhetoric of the Latin prayers themselves. An expert Latinist as well as a liturgical scholar, Foley demonstrates throughout his work that the meaning of the liturgical prayers can sometimes be “lost in translation” because of the various subtleties and nuances in the original text of the prayers. To help the reader pray the Liturgy, then, Foley provides accurate English translations of the orations, and in so doing, he shows how the prayers of the Roman Liturgy are a sort of “eructation” (literally, a belching!) of the Sacred Scriptures, chewed over diligently by Mother Church, who brings forth her Scriptural treasures in order to form us as her children in her “school of love.”

Lost in Translation begins with a brief and lucid introduction to the essential elements in the composition of the orations of the Roman Rite, with the author providing a kind of roadmap for understanding the content of these prayers of the Roman Church. Armed with this initiation, the reader is equipped with adequate understanding to meditate on the liturgical prayers of the Church year. The rest of Foley’s volume is divided into nine parts, the first seven of which take the reader through the “temporal cycle” of the liturgical year – the commemoration of the mysteries of Christ, renewed in the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, through the seven traditional liturgical seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Pre-Lent, Lent, Easter, and Time after Pentecost. The eighth part of the book includes the major celebrations of what is known as the “sanctoral cycle” of the liturgical year – the various feast days of Our Lord, Our Lady, and the saints, assigned to certain dates and days on the calendar. Finally, the ninth part provides a theological analysis of the structure of the orations themselves, particularly focusing on their “adjuration” or ending. In total, then, Lost in Translation unpacks the theological and spiritual meaning of the orations of 77 distinct liturgical celebrations. Two appendices even provide bonus material, analyzing the sequences sung on the feasts of Easter and Pentecost.

The brilliance of Foley’s achievement is evident in manifold ways throughout his work, even beyond that of which he speaks explicitly. For example, one can read into his writing a certain beautiful coherence with the liturgical teaching of Dom Prosper Guéranger, the founder of the Abbey of Solesmes and the man who, according to Pope St. Paul VI, inaugurated the Liturgical Movement in the life of the Church. Dom Guéranger taught that the liturgical year, as a true school of spiritual growth, was structured in such a way as to bring the Christian through the three ages of the interior life – the purgative, illuminative and unitive. I would like to reflect on that coherence here.

Advent, for Guéranger, is the season of the purgative life, and Foley’s meditations for Advent help us understand how the Christian is always in need of deeper purgation even as he lives the liturgical year fruitfully again and again. Indeed, the often-vexing question of the shape of the liturgical year itself is elucidated brilliantly in Foley’s analysis of the Collects for the First, Second and Fourth Sundays of Advent, all of which ask God to “stir up” His People or His power. Foley notes that the Collect for the Last Sunday after Pentecost also contains this “stir up” petition to God, and Foley takes this as a linguistic cue that the Roman Church intends us to understand that the end and beginning of the liturgical year overlap, especially when one considers that the gospel readings for the last and first Sundays both focus on the Second Coming of the Lord. Thus, these “stir up” Sundays, occurring at the year’s end and beginning, function, in Foley’s words, “as two interlocking clasps that connect the dazzling necklace of the year’s feasts and seasons.” Such an insight provides a satisfying sense of unity and wholeness to the liturgical year itself. It also allows us to see that the circularity of the liturgical year functions more like a spiral, pushing us ever higher towards Heaven. Thus, the purgative life of Advent, renewed each year, is not redundant but “stirs up” in us an ever-greater detachment from affection for sin and the things of this world.

The illuminative life commences, says Dom Guéranger, at the feast of Christmas, and Foley’s analysis of the Collect for the Vigil Mass of Christmas Eve deepens our understanding of this illumination afforded by the Sacred Liturgy. On Christmas Eve, the Roman Church prays in her Collect that “we who now joyfully receive” Jesus “as our Redeemer, may also confidently behold Him coming as our judge.” Here is, as Foley explains by connecting the traditional “three Comings” of Christ for which Advent prepares us, the key to Christmas peace and joy: to be in such a state of union with Christ in His Coming to us by the grace He pours into our souls (the “intermediate” or “middle” Coming, corresponding to the illuminative life) that we will receive His Final Coming at the end of time with the same gladness with which we greet His First Coming in the stable of Bethlehem. Such an interpretation of the liturgical year harmonizes beautifully with Dom Guéranger’s connection of the progress of the liturgical year with the progress of the soul in the spiritual life: the peace of the Christ Child’s illumination of our souls – casting away from us all serious sin, which is what, practically speaking, it means to be in the illuminative way; indeed, it brings us the ability to expect His Last Day with tranquil hearts.

For Dom Guéranger, the seasons of Pre-Lent and Lent are invitations to deeper purgation within the illuminative life of Christ’s mysteries, moving us from the joyful sweetness of Christmas and Epiphany to the awesome glory of Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension. Thus, Foley notes that the Collect for Ash Wednesday (which inaugurates our Lenten fast of forty days) speaks of our Lenten penance as the “solemnities of fasting which should be venerated.” In this way, far from grumpiness over the deprivations that come with a strict diet, the Liturgy forms in us an illuminated love for the precious sobriety of Christ’s Fasting, Passion and Death, to which we are conformed in the commemoration of Christ’s sorrowful mysteries.

Our more deeply purifying conformation to Christ’s mysteries leads us then, according to Dom Guéranger, to the fullest brightness of the illuminative life, with the arrival of Easter Sunday and Ascension Thursday. In harmony with this movement of the liturgical year, Foley notes that the Collect for Easter Sunday forms our hearts to relish that Christ “has conquered death and opened for us the gate of eternity.” Perfecting our paschal joy, the Collect for Ascension Thursday, Foley teaches us, elevates us even now through that gate of eternity, as the Church prays that we the faithful “may ourselves dwell in mind amidst heavenly things.”

Noting that the mysteries of Easter time bring us to the climax of the illuminative life, Dom Guéranger connects the Easter-consummating feast of Pentecost and the Time after Pentecost with the “unitive way” of spiritual progress, and Foley’s meditation on the Collect for the feast of Pentecost highlights the mystery of this unitive life even as it reveals the need for a book like Lost in Translation. Indeed, precious gems can very much get lost in translation if we are not careful to appreciate the Latin of the orations, and our author explains that the “recta sapere” of the Collect for Pentecost can be translated in no fewer than five different ways! Foley rightly privileges the intellectual meaning of sapere, and so renders the phrase as “to understand what is right,” but he explains that the verb can also mean “to taste”, “to savor”, “to resemble”, or “to be well acquainted with the value of.” All of these alternate renderings shed light on the dynamism of the unitive life of the Christian who lives predominantly under the influence of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit: here the Christian experiences a practical connaturality with the Spirit, even in the sense of a kind of tasting and experiencing of the Spirit Himself.

Foley’s linguistic work here, then, unpacks for the reader multiple levels of rich material for meditation, bringing the light and heat of the fire of Pentecost down into the everyday life of the reader in the pursuit of real progress in the spiritual life.

The unitive life enjoyed by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit during the Time after Pentecost comes to its fruition in the context of the Feast of All Saints on November 1. Foley points out that the Collect for that feast boldly claims that “God…hast given” us the celebration of the whole heavenly court. This insistence on the primary causality of God in the giving of the feast day highlights the divine mode of Christian life in the unitive way, as the soul lives primarily under the direct action of God, according to the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Doubling down on the soul’s rejoicing in the Celestial City, the Heavenward focus of the unitive life in the Time after Pentecost is reinforced also in the Collect for the Last Sunday after Pentecost (always reserved for the last Sunday of the liturgical year), in which the Church states as a matter of fact that, as Foley highlights, God has given her “to rejoice in divine participation,” an apt description of the unitive life. Thus, in Lost in Translation, we witness the achievement of a truly liturgical spirituality.

In addition to providing these (and many more) multi-faceted insights fit for Liturgy- centered personal prayer, Foley’s analysis of the content of the orations of the traditional Roman Missal allows him to provide the reader with an initiation into the spirit of the liturgical year, an endeavor valuable in itself. Foley manages then to capture the joy of liturgical living, even as he provides serious content for the reader’s meditation. In so doing, he continues the legacy of Dom Guéranger, and many others after him, who have re-introduced the Catholic faithful to the transforming power of the Sacred Liturgy. In terms of how the book should be used, Foley’s reflections are versatile in that they provide what could be a ten-minute period of spiritual reading in preparation for Holy Mass or a more extended time of mental prayer centered on the liturgical texts. Beneath the erudite analysis of the Latin, however, what is offered in this work is quite remarkable: the reader, week after week, feast after feast, whether using the text for spiritual reading or mental prayer, will learn to pray with the actual text of the Sacred Liturgy. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council envisioned exactly such a spiritual exercise as the soul of the Catholic spiritual life.

In Defense of Cluttered Calendars

A few weeks ago, on July 12th to be precise, I mentioned on Facebook that it was the feast, on the traditional Roman calendar, of St. John Gualbert, Abbot, with a commemoration of Saints Felix and Nabor, martyrs who were praised by St Ambrose and enshrined by him in Milan. I noted that the Collect for the commemoration of the latter is very interesting:

Praesta, quæsumus, Domine: ut, sicut nos sanctorum Martyrum tuorum Naboris et Felicis natalitia celebranda non deserunt; ita jugiter suffragiis comitentur. Per Dominum... [Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that just as the celebration of the birth of Thy holy Martyrs Nabor and Felix never abandons us, so may they always accompany us by their prayers. Through our Lord…]

Nearly every time I post a comment in praise of a “lesser” saint’s feast on the traditional Roman calendar for the Mass, or publish a blog article along those lines, inevitably several comments arise: “We should get rid of a lot of these obscure or territorial saints and leave more room for more local or modern saints.” The ones who make these comments love the traditional liturgy, but they seem to agree with the rationale that led to the removal of over 300 saints from the general calendar in 1969.

I would like to suggest, in all kindness, that this gigantic overhaul was excessive, disproportionate, harmful, and uncharacteristic of liturgical history, which tends to prune rather than to purge, and which prefers to add more than to cut away. Yes, I’m quite aware that St. Pius V removed quite a few saints from the Roman calendar, but even his cuts could not compare with Paul VI’s — and besides, his successors pretty quickly began adding back ones that Pius had removed.

A university student once wrote the following note to me:

In my liturgy class, we discussed the calendar. What you wrote at Rorate about St. Felix of Valois — “Who is this obscure saint, and why is he cluttering our calendar?” — was the exact mindset the professor strove to pound into students’ minds that day. He described how over the centuries, “certain elements crept into the calendar” (his words), and these elements had clouded over the meaning of Sunday, plus many saints and feasts days held no meaning for us anymore and sometimes were mythological. But, he said, as if to clinch his point, “other popes have cleaned out the calendar before.”
         Thank you for being willing to defend the old calendar and its rich sanctoral cycle and prayers. Any time I’ve tried to defend the beauty of the traditional rites in class, the things I’ve pointed to have been declared “unnecessary for modern man.” Well, to that I respond, the Mass should not have changed for modern man; modern man should have changed for the Mass.

That’s what all the modern liturgists said and still say: “The calendar was too cluttered, it needed a lot of pruning.” I used to think so, too — until I got to know the traditional missal well, over years of daily Massgoing, and came to love the richly-encrusted cycle of saints, famous and obscure, ancient and modern, and how they crowd into certain clusters, sometimes even forming “octaves” of a sort.

My appreciation of the density of the old calendar grew still more when I began attending Mass with the Institute of Christ the King, whose clergy follow (somewhat inconsistently, but with growing conviction) a sanctoral calendar of circa 1948. In this calendar there are even more saints, and frequently double commemorations. I have to say: so far from seeming cluttered, it’s like a big Catholic family with kids all over the place, and everyone happy. The multiple orations enrich the liturgy’s prayerfulness and power, rather than detracting from a “simplicity” or “focus” conceived in rationalist terms. Anyone who knows great works of art knows that they achieve their cumulative effect through multiple simultaneous means, and that unity and coherence are not foreign to but actually reliant upon a carefully balanced harmony of many parts, including tiny and seemingly insignificant details. Multiplicity and complexity are not the problem; pointless multiplication and a random or confused complexity are the problem.

I am reminded of the insight of Martin Mosebach:

It was the new Western way of perceiving the “real” sacred act as narrowed down to the consecration that handed over the Mass to the planners’ clutches. But liturgy has this in common with art: within its sphere there is no distinction between the important and the unimportant. All parts of a painting by a master are of equal significance, none can be dispensed with. Just imagine, in regard to Raphael’s painting of St. Cecilia, wanting only to recognize the value of the face and hands, because they are “important,” while cutting off the musical instruments at her feet because they are “unimportant.” (Heresy of Formlessness, rev. ed., p. 185)

Doubtless, we cannot say of the details of the sanctoral cycle that all are of equal importance; this claim would be easier to sustain of the fixed Order of Mass. Nevertheless, we love our saints — especially that somewhat “arbitrary” group that our tradition, in its slow meandering, has put right in front of us in the missal. The combination of famous and obscure saints, and the concentration of martyrs and confessors of antiquity, is itself a resounding lesson: we do not pick and choose our saints at Mass to reflect our preoccupations or favoritisms; the saints pick us, as it were, by coming to us down through centuries of devotion. It is another expression of the “scandal of the particular” in which the very essence of Christianity consists. No matter how wonderful a more recent or more local saint may be, this quality, in and of itself, does not justify the suppression of another saint who has been liturgically venerated by countless Christians for many centuries.

The solution we should favor is to let saints pile up on a given day, but decide which one gets the Mass (so to speak) and which one gets the Commemoration. The main cause of the purge in 1969 was a positive dread of having more than one set of orations per Mass, since evidently Modern Man™ is too stupid to follow more than one thread at a time. How differently we think in the era of emails, texting, and social media.

And even if, as the liturgists say, calendric simplification has happened before in the history of the Roman Rite, was it necessary to do so between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s? Who was clamoring for it? The People of God? The parochial clergy? Truth be told, it was no one but the professional liturgists, lovers of “clear and distinct” Cartesian modernity, with its glassy, steely mien, as of hygienic instruments, silver aeroplanes, and whirring time-saving appliances. The resulting empty-headedness of Catholics regarding their own heroes is, needless to say, not caused exclusively or even primarily by the loss of a rich sanctoral cycle, but surely we cannot avoid seeing a connection.

Consider the following exchange between two art historians, Martin Gayford and Philippe de Montebello, in a book called Rendez-vous with Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014):

MG: Some would say that putting a religious work in a museum removes its most crucial meaning. It wasn’t intended — or at least only intended — to be appreciated as a painting; it was made to be prayed before, to stand on an altar while a priest performed Mass.
         PdM: Well, the meanings are in danger of disappearing anyway. The modern public by and large no longer reads the Bible, no longer knows the stories represented in the pictures. The role of museums in re-educating people in sacred stories and doctrines is very large. One could almost make the case that museums fill a gap that the churches are increasingly leaving in teaching the lives of the saints, Christ, and the Virgin, plus the stories of the Old Testament. All of the pictures and sculptures in most museums carry a label briefly telling the story, something that you do not find in church. 

“The pictures and sculptures . . . carry a label briefly telling the story, something that you do not find in church.” Yet this is exactly what my St. Andrew’s Daily Missal (reprint of the 1948 edition) and countless other hand missals did and still do for the laity: they tell us something about every saint, and make them beloved companions of the journey.
 

Note that this banishment of the cultus of saints goes hand in hand with the ecumenical downplaying of all that is distinctive, the pseudo-purity of “focusing on Christ” when even He is pushed away from the closed circle, and the utter ineffectiveness of the verbal didacticism of reading so much Scripture. The people in the old days knew more about the saints and the stories of the Bible than modern believers, who are so much more “literate” and “educated.” However many causes there are of the stygian vacuity of the modern Catholic mind, we can say without hesitation that the traditional Roman liturgy emphasizes the saints vastly more than the modern liturgy does, and was capable, accordingly, of serving as a crucial pillar in a culture that saturated with the cultus of the Virgin and the saints. As Dom Guéranger writes in the general preface to The Liturgical Year:

In order that the divine type may the more easily be stamped upon us, we need examples; we want to see how our fellow-men have realized that type in themselves: and the liturgy fulfils this need for us, by offering us the practical teaching and the encouragement of our dear saints, who shine like stars in the firmament of the ecclesiastical year. By looking upon them we come to learn the way which leads to Jesus, just as Jesus is our Way which leads to the Father. But above all the saints, and brighter than them all, we have Mary, showing us, in her single person, the Mirror of Justice, in which is reflected all the sanctity possible in a pure creature.

I have to say, in passing, that the older Roman calendar reminds me much more of the Byzantine calendar, which expressly names saints in the liturgy practically  every day. Of course, it works differently because their daily liturgy is not nearly as shaped and “governed” by the saint as the Roman one is — there is no concept of a “Mass of a Virgin” or a “Mass of a Confessor” in the Divine Liturgy: it has a few special antiphons sprinkled throughout for the saint, and then the rest is generic. Still, the Eastern and Western traditions bear witness to the norm throughout Christian history until the Protestant revolt: “the more saints, the merrier.” The presence of saints on the calendar augmented the glory of Christ rather than detracting from Him, as indeed the original placement of the feast of Christ the King, right before the feast of All Saints, emphasized.

Twenty-five years of working under both Roman calendars, old and new, gave me a vivid experience of the truth of Louis Bouyer’s acerbic estimation of the reform:

I prefer to say nothing, or little, about the new calendar, the handiwork of a trio of maniacs who suppressed, with no good reason, Septuagesima and the Octave of Pentecost, and who scattered three-quarters of the Saints higgledy-piggledy, all based on notions of their own devising! Because these three hotheads obstinately refused to change anything in their work and because the pope wanted to finish up quickly to avoid letting the chaos get out of hand, their project, however insane, was accepted! (The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer, trans. John Pepino [Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2015], 222–23) 

To return, then, to our starting point, Saints Nabor and Felix. For many centuries the Church at prayer told her Lord that the birthday of these martyrs “never abandons us” and saw this recurring date as a promise that their intercession, too, would always be ours. Every time I encounter these “obscure” saints, I thank God for making them part of my life, for connecting me to the memory of their triumph and the power of their living intercession. Nor will this grand old calendar of saints ever cease to be followed within the Catholic Church, notwithstanding the feeble fulminations of faded flower-children.

A page from my 1838 Ordo from Baltimore

The One and Only Pentecost: Against the Neo-Joachimite Heresy

(The continuation of the argument of “Divergent Political Models in the Two ‘Forms’ of the Roman Rite” will be published next week. Today’s post honors the Solemnity and Octave of Pentecost.)

The Second Vatican Council was billed as a “new Pentecost.” But a new or second Pentecost is impossible. Pentecost is the mystery of the Church’s identity and vitality down through all ages until Christ returns in glory; Pentecost is not a simple event like a Fourth of July fireworks display, repeatable at will, but a permanent dynamism, expressed in the perennial freshness of the liturgy over which “the Holy Ghost … broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings” (1), warmly remembered in all those “Sundays after Pentecost” that fill the authentic Roman calendar with bright green.

There can be a new Pentecost only if the old one has failed; and in like manner, there can be a new Mass only if the old one has failed. (2) If there can be a new Pentecost, there can be a new form of Catholicism, with new doctrines, new morality, a new liturgy, for a new humanity in a new creation — all of which can be openly in conflict with their old counterparts.

Martin Mosebach eloquently diagnoses the problem:

The “spirit of the Council” began to be played off against the literal text of the conciliar decisions. Disastrously, the implementation of the conciliar decrees was caught up in the cultural revolution of 1968, which had broken out all over the world. That was certainly the work of a spirit — if only of a very impure one. The political subversion of every kind of authority, the aesthetic vulgarity, the philosophical demolition of tradition not only laid waste universities and schools and poisoned the public atmosphere but at the same time took possession of broad circles within the Church. Distrust of tradition, elimination of tradition began to spread in, of all places, an entity whose essence consists totally of tradition — so much so that one has to say the Church is nothing without tradition. So the post-conciliar battle that had broken out in so many places against tradition was nothing else but the attempted suicide of the Church — a literally absurd, nihilistic process. We all can recall how bishops and theology professors, pastors and the functionaries of Catholic organizations proclaimed with a confident victorious tone that with the Second Vatican Council a new Pentecost had come upon the Church — which none of those famous Councils of history which had so decisively shaped the development of the Faith had ever claimed. A “new Pentecost” means nothing less than a new illumination, possibly one that would surpass that received two thousand years ago; why not advance immediately to the “Third Testament” from the Education of the Human Race of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing? In the view of these people, Vatican II meant a break with the Tradition as it existed up till then, and this breach was salutary. Whoever listened to this could have believed that the Catholic religion had found itself really only after Vatican II. All previous generations — to which we who sit here owe our faith — are supposed to have remained in an outer courtyard of immaturity. (3)

What we have seen in the past half-century is a clumsy revival of the medieval Joachimite heresy by which the Church would have entered the third and final age, a new age of the Spirit, which leaves behind the Old Covenant of the Father, represented by the tables of the decalogue and the animal sacrifices, and the New Covenant of the Son, represented by the Constantinian conjunction of Church and State and the holy sacrifice of the Mass. The new age ecumenically and interreligiously “moves beyond” commandments and Christendom and traditional divine worship. With Paul VI’s liturgical reform, we move beyond the inherited liturgical tradition; with John Paul II’s Assisi meetings, we move beyond the absolute difference between the true religion and false religions; with Francis’s Amoris Laetitia, we move beyond the rigid confines of the Decalogue and the Gospels.

Now, obviously, all this novelty would be nothing but a new religion, and a new religion is a false religion. In this way, the most distinctive features of the so-called “new Pentecost” or “new springtime” are manifestations of a neo-Joachimite heresy that is incompatible with confessional Catholicism. The collapse of the Church in our times has been the divine stamp of disapproval on the deliberate departure and the passive drifting away from Scripture, Tradition, and (yes) Magisterium, in these decades when amnesia has replaced anamnesis and sacrilege has supplanted sacredness. As a writer at Rorate Caeli noted on May 2, 2014:

It is the general untrustworthiness of much of the official Catholic media and printing houses that has made blogs so popular. This is especially true regarding the obvious cognitive dissonance any serious Catholic feels between the placidity and jolliness of the official media, and the reality seen on the ground, from the abuse of children to the abuse of sacraments, from the abuse of liturgy to the abuse of confidence, from the promotion of dissidents to the hiding of the statistics of the general collapse of Catholic demographics and practice in most of the world since this wintriest of springtimes began.

The Church today suffers from heart disease: she is lethargic from fatty tissue and clogged arteries. She needs a heart transplant — but rather than getting a different heart, she needs to get rid of the artificial mechanical heart installed by her ill-informed doctors and take back the heart of flesh that her tradition grew within her. When this occurs, we shall witness, not a new Pentecost, but a renewal of the worship of God in spirit and in truth, even as Our Lord prophesied and has already provided for us. Dom Paul Delatte (abbot of Solesmes from 1890 to 1921) wrote, concerning the traditional sacred liturgy:

In it the Holy Spirit has achieved the concentration, eternalization, and diffusion throughout the whole Body of Christ of the unchangeable fullness of the act of redemption, all the spiritual riches of the Church in the past, in the present, and in eternity. (4)

It is no wonder that Dom Guéranger, in a line I love to quote, said: “The Holy Spirit has made the liturgy the center of his working in men’s souls.” This is where our Pentecost is to be found; this is where the Church is perpetually reborn in her youth, finding ready to hand the one common language with which to praise, bless, glorify, and adore her heavenly King, until He returns from the east in glory. “I will go up to the altar of God, to God, who giveth joy to my youth.”

NOTES

(1) Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur.”

(2) A “new Mass” is a contradiction in terms; the Church has no mandate to do such a thing.

(3) “On the Occasion of the 90th Birthday of Benedict XVI,” Foreword to P. Kwasniewski, Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness: Why the Modern Age Needs the Mass of Ages (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2017), xii–xiii.

(4) Commentary on the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, 133.

Angelico Press Brings Out New Edition of Guéranger’s Explanation of the Prayers and Ceremonies of Holy Mass

Dom Prosper Guéranger holds a lofty place in the history of the revival of the vita liturgica, the Roman Rite, and monasticism after the ravages of the anticlerical Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution. Many have found insight and inspiration in the pages of his multi-volume The Liturgical Year, which has never been out of print. Another work by Guéranger beloved to many is his compact yet penetrating commentary on the Mass, which has seen a number of English editions in recent decades.

Angelico Press has now brought out a newly typeset edition of this gem of a work, under a title that is less stuffy and more appealing to readers in the post-Summorum world.

On the left, the hardcover edition; on the right, the paperback.

It was an honor and pleasure for me to contribute a Foreword to this book, as it gave me a welcome opportunity to discharge a small part of the debt of gratitude I owe to this great Benedictine of the nineteenth century who opened the riches of the liturgy to countless millions of souls, and who can still guide us capably today as we dig up the hidden treasure that the crypto-Protestant reformers of the 1960s did their best to bury forever. Guéranger saw more clearly than anyone in his day, and certainly far more clearly than anyone in the period from ca. 1950 to 1970, the danger of what he called "the anti-liturgical heresy."

This new edition from Angelico is very handsome and would make not only a nice addition to one's personal library but also a thoughtful little gift for someone for Easter, Christmas, a nameday, a birthday, etc.

Available at Amazon.com in paperback ($14.95), hardcover ($20), Kindle ($5.99), and international affiliates.

The Church and World War I - “Echoes of the Great War” by Catholic News Service

As I watched this excellent documentary from Catholic News Service, I was reminded particularly by the second half (from 9:00, discussing the aftermath of “The War to End All Wars”, and its impact on culture and society) of a very interesting paper given by Dr Alcuin Reid at the CIEL Conference in Rome several years ago. Dom Reid’s topic was the change that took place in the Liturgical Movement in the period between the World Wars. Before World War I, the major figures in the Liturgical Movement believed that instilling true devotion to the liturgy, and curing the neglect thereof, was principally a matter of education. The liturgy was seen as an inexhaustible treasure-trove for the spiritual life, and the goal of men such as Dom Guéranger and Fr Romano Guardini was to raise both the clergy and the laity up to a greater appreciation of it. In the period between the wars, the attitude shifted towards the idea that if the run of the clergy and faithful were disinterested in the liturgy, the problem lay not with them, but with the liturgy. The cure for this neglect would then become, not to educate the faithful up to the level of the liturgy, but to alter the liturgy to suit the needs of “modern” man. (This paper has not been published, so I am citing it from notes and memory, trusting to Dom Alcuin’s indulgence if I have misstated anything.)

It is a question for Church historians and social historians whether this shift in attitude was actually created by what the persons here interviewed describe as the aftermath of World War I, “a sense of brooding nihilism, (the belief that) nothing was effective”, (Dr David Berlinski), a “shak(ing of) the faith that many Europeans had in their own elites ... (including) religious elites.” (Dr Margaret MacMillan) The emergence of Modernism in the Church well before World War I suggests perhaps that it was already present, but strongly reinforced by the great catastrophe which Pope Benedict XV called “the suicide of Europe.” The shift itself, however, is unmistakable. It may best be seen, I think, in the difference between the writings of Dom Guéranger in the 19th century, and those of the Bl. Cardinal Schuster in the 20th. Every page of the former’s The Liturgical Year breathes a profound reverence for the texts and rites of the liturgy, be they those of great feast day, or an obscure sequence not used since the 14th century. Describing the liturgy of Palm Sunday, Dom Guéranger writes this of the Epistle which is sung before the blessing of palms in the Missal of St Pius V, Exodus 15, 27 - 16, 7.

After this prayer, the subdeacon chants a passage from the Book of Exodus, which relates how the people of God, after they had gone forth from Egypt, pitched their tents at Elim, beneath the shade of seventy palm-trees, where also were twelve fountains. While here, they were told by Moses that God was about to send them manna from heaven, and that, on the very next morning, their hunger would be appeased. These were figures of what is now given to the Christian people. The faithful, by a sincere conversion, have separated themselves from the Egypt of a sinful world. They are offering the palms of their loyalty and love to Jesus, their King. The fountains typify the Baptism, which, a few days hence, is to be administered to our catechumens. These fountains are twelve in number; the twelve articles of the symbol of our faith were preached to the world by the twelve apostles. And finally, on the morning of Easter day, Jesus, the Bread of life, the heavenly Manna, will arise from the tomb, and manifest His glory to us. (The Liturgical Year, vol. 6)

Writing of the same Epistle in 1919 in “The Sacramentary”, Cardinal Schuster says:

The lesson from Exodus… does not appear to be in keeping with today’s mystery. It was introduced by the Gallican liturgists of the Middle Ages, on account of the reference to the fountains of water and the seventy palm-trees… The two alternative Graduals which follow have no bearing whatever on the ceremony of the blessing of the palms, and have been inserted here merely to fill in the gaps and to separate the two Scriptural lessons. It is easy to see that the whole arrangement of today’s function, in spite of its apparent antiquity, is somewhat artificial; consisting, as it does, of various parts differing great both in inspiration and in origin, which have been joined together anyhow, without any real unity of design. (The Sacramentary, vol. 2) 

I write this not as an attack on Schuster, whose devotion to the liturgy was noted even by communist newspapers, and whose holiness has been officially recognized by the Church Herself. Nevertheless, there is a notable difference in his approach from that of Dom Guéranger; an air of judgment and skepticism has crept into what he himself describes in his preface as “whatever sentiments of faith and reverence Our Lord may have deigned to grant me, his unworthy servant, in the course of my daily meditation on the Roman Missal.” Does this perhaps result from a real sense permeating his era that the ancient ways of life, ancient customs and traditions, are losing or have indeed permanently lost their value, as Dr de Mattei notes in the CNS piece? And since all of the architects of the post-Conciliar reforms were formed as churchmen in the aftermath of the two World Wars, the question should also be asked: how much of their era’s way of looking at the world, how many of their attitudes and ideas, are as perennially valuable as those of, say, Saints Augustine, Benedict, and Gregory the Great? If they could ask the question “how much longer must we live according to the ideas of the preceding centuries?”, and answer “no longer, starting from today”; can we not also ask “how much longer must we live according to the ideas of the preceding century?” (These questions are pertinent not only to the liturgy, of course, but to all of the aspects in which the Church struggles through the aftermath of the post-Conciliar reforms.)

I would highly recommend to those who find the CNS piece of interest that they also watch this interview with Dr David Berlinski. Personally, I find everything that he says fascinating; after watching an earlier interview on the same program, I read his previous book, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, and enjoyed it immensely. Starting at 26:14, he discusses with Peter Robinson the 19th-century’s highly optimistic notions of the inevitable improvement and perfection of society, and the dashing of that optimism in the 20th.

Monday, July 28th, marks the 100th anniversary of Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia, the official beginning of the First World War. Let us all take some time on that day to pray for peace in the world, and to remember the wisdom of the ancient Collect of the Mass for Peace, that “holy desires, right counsels and just works” come from God, and from Him alone, and that the true peace is one “which the world cannot give.”

Deus, a quo sancta desideria, recta consilia, et justa sunt opera: da servis tuis illam, quam mundus dare non potest, pacem; ut et corda nostra mandatis tuis dedita, et, hostium sublata formidine, tempora sint tua protectione tranquilla.

God, from whom are holy desires, right counsels and just works, give to thy servants that peace which the world cannot give; that our hearts may be given over to Thy commandments, and, the fear of our enemies being taken away, our times be peaceful under Thy protection.