Eyewitness Accounts of Liturgical Life Before and After the Council

In his second memoir, Traddy Daddy: Memories and Thoughts of the Father of a Catholic Family, Joseph Bevan regales us again, as he did before in Two Families, with story after story of English life before, during, and after the Second Vatican Council. I think personal testimonies like these are worth their weight in gold, particularly as fewer and fewer people are left who can pass on the tales of what things were like back then.

Indeed, I have noticed a disconcerting tendency among younger generations nowadays to deny or downplay how good things were in the 1950s in many places, and how bad things really were in the 1960s and thereafter. The partial restorations of tradition under John Paul II and Benedict XVI have, to some extent, been projected backwards so as to create the illusion of a mild squall rather than a tempestuous storm. Memoirs are a partial but crucial way to overcome such biases. (See “Not ‘the Silly Season’ but ‘the Satanic Season’” for more on this point.)

There’s also a lot of rich detail in this book about the history of the Society of St. Pius X, obviously of considerable interest given this summer’s events.

(The remainder of this post is direct quotation from Bevan’s Traddy Daddy.)

Solemn Pontifical Mass in Westminster Cathedral, ca. 1950

1966: Westminster Cathedral Choir School

The priest mutters his way through the Latin prayers during early morning Mass as we boys kneel in adoration in the dusty half-light of the crypt under Westminster Cathedral. The celebrant stands at the altar with his back to us as he performs the work of a master craftsman, and he whispers the prayers. I look up during the elevation of the host and watch the fishes in the mosaic depicted on the arch above the altar, as I have done hundreds of times before. There is Our Lord walking on the water and there’s the ship containing the apostles who are scared by the storm. Fish abound in the picture, and I try to count them. Having had nothing to eat I often feel faint at the priest’s recitation of the Agnus Dei, during which he bends slightly and taps his chest three times. Why I do so at that particular time of the Mass I have no idea and today I pass out momentarily.

Sister Immaculata frogmarches me out of the crypt and sends me on a trot around the car park outside. I find that attending Mass on a completely empty stomach is a bit of a trial, but, as it is Sunday, we do get a decent breakfast afterwards. Nevertheless, I am struck by the dual simplicity and dignity of the ceremony, with the priest in sparkling gold vestments on Saints’ days. To my young brain, the whole ceremony is rich with deep meaning which is beyond my comprehension, and represents the magnificence of the supreme orderliness which is the Catholic Church. Everything is in its place and the whole organisation reminds me of an ancient clock which ticks away over the centuries and never loses a beat. During the hush of the consecration of the host, I hear the low mumbling and tinkling bells of other Masses which are going on in the various crypt chapels. There is also the distant rumble of traffic in Victoria Street….

Every Sunday we wear our smartest uniforms as we file into the cathedral for High Mass and take our places in the front two rows facing the grand altar. The interior of the church is constructed out of miniature red bricks, reminding me of Legos and, for a little boy of my size, it’s vast. I cannot see the roof as it soars up above my head shrouded in darkness. Above the high altar is a decorative baldacchino which, to me, is as big as a railway bridge, and hanging over the sanctuary a massive crucifix keeps sentinel over the proceedings. The organ is growling in the background as the church begins to fill up.

Some people kneel whilst reciting their rosaries and knots of people cluster around the votive candle stations as they light candles and kneel in prayer. No one is talking and all I can hear is the shuffling of many feet and the creaking of chairs as they quietly take their places with the organ playing in the background. Sister Immaculata fusses over us like a mother hen and ensures that we have our missals open at the correct page. My own Mass book contains a section at the end of the service called “post communion” and I have concluded that it is for when the priest posts off holy communion to people who have been unable to attend. (1-3)

My favourite service in the cathedral is Sunday Vespers. Again, we probationers occupy the front two rows and follow the service in our missals. The psalms at Vespers move me to tears sometimes; even as a boy of eight my sensitivity is acute, and I am transported by the sight of five priests in gold copes among the clouds of incense. During the incensing, while the altar is prepared for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the organist plays thunderously and it is this part of the ceremony that I look forward to most of all, for the organist is Nicholas Kynaston who, we are told, is internationally famous. (6)

Quite often Sister Immaculata takes us to the cathedral during the week to visit the Blessed Sacrament in a special chapel set aside for devotions. We follow the nun quietly through the echoing cathedral where we see people praying, strolling around, or lighting votive candles. The Blessed Sacrament chapel is off a side aisle to the left of the high altar and when we enter, we see many people kneeling down. Some are holding rosaries and whispering the prayers. The centre of devotional attention is the gold tabernacle on the altar, surrounded by lighted candles and flowers. I smell the sweet odour of the incense of past ceremonies, and the attendant hush is in striking contrast to the noisiness of the London traffic outside in Victoria Street. I have no difficulty in saying prayers as I am transported by the beauty of the chapel and the fervour of the people around me. My childlike approach to prayer, which has never left me, was formed during those wonderful visits to the cathedral.

One Wednesday afternoon we are milling around in the playground and Father Veal is walking around the perimeter of the lawn in the distance, buried in his breviary. All the priests I meet at the choir school, and there are lots of them, seem to have their daily lives dominated by this mysterious black prayer book which they always carry around with them. (7-8)

We have religious instruction lessons with Father Veal, and he first distributes to each of us a little red booklet called the Penny Catechism. Over the next few terms, he makes us learn the whole thing parrot fashion and we recite sections of it back to him together in a singsong chorus. There is a lot of discussion, which Father leads and encourages, and in doing so he displays his own deep love of the Catholic Faith, which is infectious. (10)
 

How things were before: Bevan's father as director of the Downside Abbey choir

Changes in the liturgy

Our parish church in Shepton Mallet is a converted hall and every Sunday it is full. There is a choir gallery which our family inhabits so as to sing the Mass, and Pa plays the organ for us. We sing Gregorian chant and a few simple motets.

I detect trouble ahead as something Pa calls “Vatican Two” is casting a shadow over everything religious. Attending Mass, after the experience of Westminster in term time, comes as a surprise but I am thoroughly entertained by the upheavals.

Father Ryan is now facing us, having put in place a table which he uses as an altar. He is given to interrupting the service every so often to emit what Pa calls “sermonettes.” Worst of all, we are forced to join in with the server in a rather wordy and tedious translation of the Latin Mass. Jokes abound with the cack-handed words, such as, “mindful of our Saviour’s bidding, and for the prairie tortoise” (prayer he taught us).

Pa and my elder brothers, especially, are often angry after Mass. This is a massive alteration in our religious observance as respect for the parish priest, who is agitating for change, diminishes. I hear them mutter in annoyance when the priest gives an extra-long sermon about the “presidential chair,” whatever that is. The whole of Mass is, for me at least, an orgy of experimentation and I look forward to each Sunday in anticipation of new outrages.

Rather than being a servant of the liturgy, Father Ryan is behaving like a compère at a village dance, not resisting the odd joke or two either. Yet I am struck by the “do this or else” attitude of the priest, meaning that by taking our part in the changes we are being loyal subjects of the Holy Father. Nobody dares to object publicly, but privately people are either angry or mystified. Ma is convinced that the Pope has been kidnapped and is trussed up in a cellar in the Vatican. “Don’t worry,” she says, “he’ll restore things to what they were after he escapes.” This is how many people cling to hope.

St Michael's, Shepton Mallet

Changing church buildings

At about this time we abandon the old chapel of St Nicholas and take possession of our new gleaming concrete and glass building which is St Michael’s Church. As we enter the new building for the first time, I am immediately aware of that smell common to new buildings, it is the slightly sweet odour of floor polish. The altar is a slab of white bare stone and, unlike its predecessor at our last chapel, has no coverings. Also gone are the statues and the stations of the cross. The servers at Mass have abandoned their black cassocks and white cottas in favour of what look, to me at least, like long dresses which are coloured dark green.

With the new church comes a new parish priest, called Father Gerald Carrol, who has a string of drinkdriving convictions, so we are told. I am under the impression that Father Carrol is a “conservative” (the Catholic Church nowadays is reduced to political name-calling) and is resisting pressure from some of the more enlightened members of his congregation to get rid of our family choir which sings for him every Sunday. I can only describe the goings-on at the altar during Mass as chaotic. Father Carrol is often not particularly sober and keeps on breaking out into Latin. The servers bustle around like headless chickens and constantly trip up over their green dresses which are far too long for some or far too short for others. The master of ceremonies pushes and shoves to restore some kind of order. As I am at a delicate age, I find all this tremendous fun, but I catch the sighs, the groans and sharp intakes of breath from those around me.

During Mass of Low Sunday, we look up to see Father Carrol’s little white dog entering the church through the open vestry door and, neglecting to genuflect, waddling past the front row of pews, and then settling down in the corner by the little organ. Mass continues normally but during the hymn at the offertory the dog starts to howl, so a parishioner picks it up and returns it to the vestry. (11-13)
 

Chaos in 1969

1969 finds the Church in a maelstrom of chaos, upheaval, and experimentation. All Hallows, an unknown prep school in the middle of nowhere, is not immune to these revolutionary forces and Alistair Mortimer, our Headmaster, willingly carries the banner of progress. The school chapel, for example, a beautiful cruciform and ancient room with a remarkable reredos, is the first place to receive unwelcome attention from the reforming Headmaster. The altar is torn from its mountings and dragged out, leaving a space behind it from which the priest can face the congregation. The delicately carved wooden reredos is sold off, and a yellow curtain replaces it. The stations of the cross are removed along with the many statues of Our Lady, Saint Joseph, and the saints. A public address system is installed which often either breaks down or emits loud crackles which are extremely offensive to the ear.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Rich Historical and Religious Reflections in New Memoir of Modern English Catholicism

A new book, Two Families: A Memoir of English Life During and After the Council, contains many narratives and reminiscences that will be of great interest to readers of NLM for their liturgical and musical insights.

In running through his eventful life, Joseph Bevan describes the practice of English Catholicism before, during, and after the Council: he shows the strengths and weaknesses of the preconciliar routine, the confusion unleashed in the 1960s, the collapse of the liturgy and especially of sacred music “in real time,” as it was unfolding.

Eyewitness accounts are important for the history of the traditionalist movement, as they flesh out our more abstract claims with concrete examples, and help fend off accusations that we are inventing or exaggerating the problems.

Those who are interested in Benedictine monasticism will learn a lot of intriguing (and sometimes disturbing) things about Downside Abbey in this book, including the time when some students got themselves involved with demons, and one of them died on account of it.

Downside Abbey, where many events in Two Families took place.

Two Families takes the form of contrasting the family into which Bevan was born with the family that he himself established later on. His family of origin was largely swept along with the tide of the times. Joseph Bevan and his wife decided to pursue the opposite course as they rediscovered tradition in the Society of St. Pius X and turned their lives upside-down to ensure a proper upbringing for their own large family of ten children.

At a time when it was not fashionable to homeschool, they homeschooled, and later on moved to a town from which their older children could more easily get to traditional schools in France; at a time when priests were being persecuted for fidelity to tradition, they welcomed into their home an old and faithful priest. God has blessed them with two priest-sons and a daughter who is a nun (and, in fact, just made her solemn vows).

The memoir is filled with honest self-assessment of failings and opportunities, falls taken and graces received; it contains some excellent, hard-won advice for parents. Kennedy Hall contributes a fine Foreword. The book has received glowing endorsements from The Right Reverend Dom Cuthbert Brogan, OSB, Abbot of St. Michael’s Abbey, Farnborough; Dom Alcuin Reid, OSB, Prior of Monastère Saint-Benoît, Fréjus-Toulon; Edward Pentin, Senior Contributor, National Catholic Register; James Bogle, barrister, retired army officer, former President of the Una Voce Federation; and Anthony P. Stine of the Return to Tradition Podcast.

Now for some excerpts of particular liturgical and musical interest.

A view of Somerset, the county where the Bevans lived for much of their lives

Wise words, to which we can all relate:

Although this book contains some stern criticisms of monks and priests who have crossed my path, I still regard them as belonging to my Church, and the wholesale collapse of the clergy is something I mourn. I have no idea how God is going to put things right, but I am sure that, sooner or later, he will, and it might take 100 years. In the meantime, I just carry on in my own quiet way, trying to save my soul and the souls of my nearest and dearest. (xix)

Speaking at one point of Westminster Choir School where he attended for a short time, Bevan describes the daily routine of the choristers. This is a great passage for giving the lie to the idea that the artistic standards were not high prior to the Council. In fact, they were much, much higher than they would ever be afterwards. Even now, we have not quite caught up to “the way things were,” and I doubt we ever shall until there is a complete restoration of tradition.

The choir school supplied the sopranos and altos for the cathedral choir. Even in the 1960s it was being proclaimed as one of the best choirs in Europe, and its schedule was punishing. There was a Sung Mass every morning, and new music had to be prepared to a professional standard. We would rise early and have a school Low Mass in the crypt of the cathedral. After breakfast there would be lessons followed by sung Mass but, as a probationer, I was too young to sing in the choir, so we juniors sat in the front two rows in the nave….
          The cathedral choir sound was utterly unique and a total contrast to the politeness of its Anglican cathedral rivals. We had daily High Mass in the cathedral. Even with my disturbed brain, I could see how beautiful and solemn was the drama being played out before my eyes— all accompanied by music which was often sublime. My musical tastes were maturing rapidly, and I was transported by Victoria and Palestrina….
          It was a rare privilege as a youngster to witness daily the dignity and the beauty of the liturgy at the cathedral, which managed to cling to the traditional rite of Mass well into the 1970s, until the death of Cardinal Heenan. Once the glories of Catholic worship have been seen at first hand, one cannot fail to be unimpressed by the sterile and turgid offerings of the reformed liturgies in the Catholic Church following on from the Second Vatican Council, known as Vatican II. I happen to know that anyone who sang in that choir was probably marked for life, as I was, and many ex-choristers still keep in touch with each other and often meet up to sing. The old cathedral is affectionately referred to as “the drome,” but nowadays the previously grand liturgy has degenerated into a patchy concert of words and music. My three elder brothers, who attended the school at Westminster, spent their lives campaigning for proper music to be incorporated into the New Mass and have found the going extremely bumpy in the face of reluctant clergy up and down the country….
          The lasting benefits of the choir school on my life were a love of the liturgy and a love of prayer. I learned to pray, and this stayed with me even during my non-churchgoing period. I never completely lost touch with Our Lady and the Saints, and this saved me from disaster, I think. (24–27)

There was a lot of confusion, silliness, and Pelagianism in the shift from the old rite to the new rite: 

We [the Bevans] were the official choir at St Michael’s Church in Shepton Mallet, and every Sunday in the holidays we sang the Mass. My father was the conductor and organist, and he laid out treats for the congregation in the form of plainchant and polyphony. With the closing of the old Catholic church in Shepton we moved to a spick-and-span affair of concrete and glass, which had been built by the diocese to accommodate the new springtime in the Church anticipated by the recent Second Vatican Council. With the new building came the New Mass. I was first made aware that something wasn’t right when, during the Canon, I received a dig in the back from Neville Dyke, who was sitting just behind me. I turned round in surprise and said, “Hello, Neville!” I received the reply, “Peace be with you!” I answered, “Talk to you later.” I can still see the Catholic families of Shepton Mallet sitting in their habitual pews: the Tullys, the Dykes, the Quins, the Dampiers, the Todds, and many others with lots of young children. With the advent of the New Mass in December 1969, the services became chaotic. The parish priest, Father Carol, wrestled with the new liturgy; he would suddenly break into Latin and correct himself.
          The music we sang as a family in church was becoming irrelevant to the goings-on at the altar, and the congregation became restless for more change. Mrs Todd, the wife of the owner of Darton, Longman & Todd, which was a leading Catholic publisher, became an agitator for change in the music. One Sunday, as we struck up with some William Byrd, she simply marched out of Mass in full view of the whole congregation.
          Pa, like the Elizabethan composers before him, adapted to the demand for change and started writing “congregational Masses” to be sung by everybody at Mass. I have to say that these compositions were so trite and turgid that we got thoroughly bored with them. In actual fact, Mass on Sunday became a frightful bore with its “sweet nothings” prayers, “hello children everywhere” readings, and faulty microphones. It took a great personal effort to rise on Sunday morning and go to church. As it dawned on our new parish priest, Father Meehan, that the reformed liturgy was turning out to be a bit of a flop, he decided upon a more “energetic” approach to the liturgy. As a result, we were made to endure all kinds of humiliating displays, such as parading the children in the sanctuary and the priest quizzing them over the microphone.
          We all hated it, but Pa said, “If you live at home you go to church!” I think Pa liked the changes. In fact, he did say in an unguarded moment— following a session with the gin and martini bottles— that it was like coming home to his Church of England past. Ma endured the revolution patiently and, much later, embraced Catholic Tradition again.
          In those days we were witnessing the changes in the Mass, which were bad enough. Little did we know that there was a wholesale offensive against the Catholic faith going on at the highest levels, and the New Mass was just a symptom of this attack. My mother has testified to the gradual meltdown in Catholic moral theology amongst her own teenage daughters, who were only following the example of their friends. (33–35) 

This next passage reminds me strikingly of my own experience in a private Benedictine high school, when by my senior year I was acting the role of conservative in the midst of almost exclusively liberal teachers and largely indifferent, if not contemptuous, fellow students:

There were various Benedictine monks at the school who occupied the senior positions such as headmaster and housemasters. My instincts informed me that most of these gentlemen lived a fairly soft life and seemed to wear expressions of self-doubt, evidenced by furrowed brows and the inability to look one in the face. This was the period after the Second Vatican Council and, as I mentioned before, the whole Church seemed to be indulging in an orgy of self-doubt. Religious Instruction (RI) classes were pure comedy, where the boys would come up with bizarre theories and discuss them in a free-for-all. The monk running the class almost seemed to be more avant-garde than his charges.
          Needless to say, I had conservative leanings and was by nature abrasive. Accordingly, I became an obvious target for the whole class, which regularly produced the situation of “Bevan contra mundum.” That was the trouble with knowing things but not knowing why. Everything was subject to scornful ridicule without limit. Apart from RI classes at Westminster Cathedral Choir School, where we studied the Penny Catechism, I had received no further formal training in religion. Hence, I knew nothing whatever about the faith apart from the odd phrase which had stuck. My classmates at Downside, however, knew absolutely nothing about their religion and used the RI classes as an opportunity to let off steam about how boring the school Mass was (indeed it was). Time-worn words were bandied about such as “irrelevant” and “participation.”
          I found myself—although I had no idea at the time— defending the Novus Ordo Mass, which all 500 boys had to endure in the abbey church every Sunday. I became identified with it alongside my father, who was organising the music, and this inflamed further antipathy towards my family. I do not believe that anyone in the school or the monastery next door liked the New Mass. There were many plots afoot to undermine it, and grievances were aired during RI classes all over the school.
          There was a very sharp and outspoken member of the class by the name of Grace, ironically, and his opinions were deferred to by everyone except me, of course. During one session in the RI class of Dom Ambrose Lambert, Grace pointed out that we should dispense with incense at Mass because, “after all, it was only introduced in the Middle Ages to keep off the smell of the plebs!” Everyone nodded, and I could see the furrowed brow of the monk also nodding in thoughtful sympathy. I instinctively made a fuss simply because this did not sound right at all, but as my knowledge of these things was non-existent, I was quickly shouted down.
          I have alluded to the school Mass in the abbey church. The abbey had been closed for two years to allow the bulldozers in to reorder the interior, in accordance with the liturgical movement’s slogan “out with the old, in with the new!” In the meantime, the school theatre was used for the Sunday Masses. I was not present at these events, as they were just before my time. However, I am assured by people who were present— my father among them— that the Masses degenerated into a riot, as the boys would constantly bang the sprung theatre seats up and down in the auditorium.
          My arrival at Downside coincided with the grand reopening of the abbey church for school Masses. Although the sanctuary had been rearranged with an altar placed in the middle (as opposed to at the far end), the congregation area was untouched, which led to wholesale discontent and open rebellion by the boys. The point of the New Mass, as it is called, is to encourage outward participation by the 500-odd boys, which they would do by joining in the prayers and singing the hymns. In spite of the hugely expensive loudspeaker system recently installed, the boys were really isolated from what was going on in the distance at the altar and responded to the energetic blandishments booming over the loudspeakers with a stony silence. I was present when, during an evening benediction, the lights failed. As we were plunged into darkness, a huge cheer went up from the whole school.
          The whole experiment with the New Mass was— and still is— an unmitigated disaster because the whole point of Mass is to achieve union with Christ, which is essentially an interior union necessitating silent prayer and adoration. (55–57)

Long-time musicians will recognize, with a groan, the truth in Bevan's discussion of the problems with transferring the treasury of great sacred music that grew up organically in the old rite to a new rite that was not designed with it in mind, and in fact works at cross-purposes to it:

I joined the Schola Cantorum, which provided the music for the New Mass in the abbey church, and Pa was the conductor. Because Pa thought we should sing music from the treasures of the Renaissance as though there had been no liturgical revolution at all, noses were put out of joint amongst the innovators in the monastery. The boys also complained (and who can blame them?), so an attempt was made to curtail Pa’s counter-revolutionary activities by the organising of a folk Mass in the abbey. That, too, was a flop and the last we heard of the guitars.
          I have to say that my father was mistaken in his belief that the boys would in any way profit from listening to William Byrd and plainchant in the context of the New Mass. Effectively, his critics were correct. He was turning the Mass into a concert, and a rather dull one at that. Renaissance church music was written for the Tridentine Rite of Mass, the “Old Mass.” It was strictly liturgical and as much a part of the Mass as the priest was. In the New Mass, the proceedings at the altar are interrupted and the irritable priest sits down with a thump while “Bevan and his choir strikes up!”
          Writing about these matters now, nearly sixty years on, all arguments in favour of the Old Mass are as relevant now as they were in the 1970s, but nothing gets done. This is why I now believe, in retrospect, that the attack on the traditional Mass was on ideological grounds and had nothing to do with getting the best out of the liturgy. The Old Mass had to be completely destroyed to clear the decks for what was to follow, and that was not the Catholic faith. In fact, it hardly mattered what replaced it. The liturgical anarchy that has been prevalent in the Catholic Church for sixty years is preferable, in the eyes of the reformers, to the pre-Vatican II Mass. At worst, the new liturgy is irreverent, blasphemous, and chaotic. At best, it is turgid, vacuous, and boring. It is almost as though the Catholic Church was deliberately trying to put people off religion, which it succeeded in doing, deliberately or not. (63–64)

Although Hamish Fraser played no role in my coming to tradition, Michael Davies certainly did, as he has done for countless people. The seeds planted by good reading bear fruit in due season:

By the time I had left school, my religious feelings were at a very low ebb. I was what could be described as a semi-lapsed Catholic, and this was the same for my brothers and sisters, so far as I could see. My mother, I think, had a prayer life and shared it with my father. We offspring were not interested. It was one afternoon in the spring of 1976 that we received a visit from Martin Blake, a retired French master who taught at Worth monastic school in Sussex. He was a frequent visitor, as he was Jeremy’s godfather. Whereas normal godparents would donate money and presents, as mine did, Martin would give Jeremy holy books. On this visit, he dumped a pile of tatty magazines entitled Approaches, which were edited by a certain Hamish Fraser. As nobody else was interested, I scooped up the pile and took them to my bedroom.
          Much later, for want of anything else to read, I sat up in bed and flipped through the pile of literature, which was badly reproduced on a home printer. I began to read about a certain archbishop in Switzerland who was being persecuted by the Catholic authorities for running a seminary that was out of step with the modern direction of the Catholic Church. My reaction was one of outrage for everything which annoyed me about the Church, such as the palsy-walsy clergy, the boring Mass, the warfare between the Downside monks and my father, the attacks on the faith in RI classes at school and the complete lack of religious education. It was all explained by Hamish Fraser. What I had dismissed until now as simply an emotional attachment to a vague conservatism was clarified by the rebellion of Archbishop Lefebvre. In all my time at Downside, the Second Vatican Council was hardly mentioned by the monks, who tried to give the impression that the Church was always like this.
          It would be stretching things to say that I now became more virtuous or religious, as I was happy in my state of semi-lapsation. However, the thoughts of returning to the true faith of the Church were never far away, and I had privately resolved to do something about it— but what? I knew that I would have to change my life and pull up my socks, so any thought of a real conversion was put on the back-burner, as they say… In the end, I forgot all about Archbishop Lefebvre as soon as I entered into my legal studies, because my whole position was built on sand. I still knew nothing about my religion and was easily disposed of by my intellectual superiors. I was glad, though, that Hamish Fraser, and later Michael Davies, were both planted in my sub-conscious and never left me. (73–74)

I could keep quoting all day long, but that would spoil the pleasure of discovering the work for yourself! So I’ll stop here, but do consider reading this meaty but still compact (under 200 pages) memoir of a Catholic caught between a false modernization that failed to fulfill its promises and a return to tradition that actually delivers the goods—the interesting story of a man, typical of his era in many ways, who was led by grace from lazy lapsation to burning zeal for the Faith.

The author (far left) with his family

Two Families is available directly from the publisher in paperback, hardcover, or ebook, as well as from Amazon.

The Power of Catholic Customs: A Candlemas Procession in the Life of Dom Hubert van Zeller

In his extremely entertaining and somewhat melancholy autobiography One Foot in the Cradle, well-known spiritual writer Dom Hubert van Zeller (1905–1984) describes a particularly memorable February 2nd in his life as a Benedictine novice at Downside Abbey, in the school of which he had been enrolled for a decade as a student. (Since there appear to be no archival photos of any Candlemas at Downside, I found a photo that perhaps suggests a similar spirit: Candlemas at Westminster Cathedral in 1938, with plenty of schoolboys in attendance.)

Dom Hubert had entered religion one year after graduation, in 1924, and so still had friends among the older boys. At this point in his life he is struggling with his vocation — whether to remain in the monastery, or to go back to the world, to which he was drawn by many affections. The account deserves to be shared on this eve of Candlemas. Afterwards I will share four points of reflection.

*       *       *

“It was a little later, when the school reassembled after the Christmas holidays, that the proximity of the boys and of all that went with them began to trouble me. Up till now I had been so busy learning what to do as a novice, and finding satisfaction in the fulfilment of what had been so long awaited, that I had not found the presence of the school within hailing distance any great distraction. But now the whole question of my place in Benedictine education became more acute. The immediacy was brought home to me on February 2, the feast of the Purification.

“At Downside the Candlemas procession, everyone holding a lighted candle, moves round the cloisters. Following the cross and acolytes come first of all the boys, then the monks, then the celebrant and ministers. So it was that together with my fellow junior novice (Brother Maurice, né Reggie) I came close upon the heels of the two most senior boys in the school. These were Maurice Turnbull and Robert Arbuthnot — Robert as well as Maurice being a very particular friend of mine. By stretching out my candle I could have singed the hair of either of them. I was as close as I had been to the Field Marshal’s ears in Egypt.

“While the Purification antiphons were going on and we wound our way from one cloister to another I was conscious of a dualism at work inside me which so boiled up as to make me wonder for a moment which part of the procession I was in. I felt that there was a significant difference between belonging to those who walked in front of me and belonging to those who walked behind me. I was caught in the middle between two environments. Spiritually I was in one, emotionally in another. It was like a bad dream, because I could not tell where the one ended and the other began. I knew only that for me there were two quite separate worlds, and that one or other must win in the end. Must, indeed, be winning now. I knew in which world I willed to be — namely among the monks who were just behind me in the procession — but was the will strong enough to override the pull of the emotions which drew me towards those in front?

“This Candlemas procession came to be, during the months which followed, something of a symbol to me. It was one which carried particular urgency as the time for taking vows drew near: I must know in good time where I was in the procession, and where it was leading me.

“Things were not made any easier by such glimpses and echoes of school life as inevitably came my way. The roar of laughter from a classroom well beyond novitiate bounds, light music played on gramophones in rooms whose doors had been open to me eighteen months ago, the sound of a band-practice, the cheering at a rugger match, the sight of teams on their way up to the field, the crowding in to Mass and Benediction, the group of rather cheeky boys whom I had known as fags [i.e., boys who acted as servants to older schoolmates] who would bump into me on purpose in the church and then laugh and look away: all this made for matter of further self-searching.

“It is commonplace to observe that the human mind can want two opposite things at once. I wanted very much to be under the rule which forbad novices to speak to anyone not in the novitiate, and at the same time wanted to talk to people. Everything all round me told me that the school was an essential part of the life, that it was an extension of the community, that the boys belonged to the procession as much as the monks did. It was not even a question of one world impinging on another: they coincided. But until I could myself feel this, and not merely see it as an identification which others could feel, I knew I would never be at peace. Without the experience of such a harmony, I would always be a misfit.

“While in America not long ago I was saying Mass at a convent where the community runs a large high-school for girls. Some few of the students are boarders, but the majority are day-girls. These, the ‘day-hops,’ arrive noisily in cars and school buses just in time for the first class of the day which begins at a quarter to nine. I had said Mass at eight and was about to leave at a quarter to nine when I noticed a young nun rinsing out the cruets at the sacristy sink. Cars were still racing through the campus and skidding to a gritty stop at the school entrance. I could hear the car doors being closed with a rich plunk, the loud cries and shrill laughter, the hurrying of feet and the dropping of books. The young nun was hearing it too, and I watched her face as she looked out of the window. She was too preoccupied to know that I was there, that the tap was running, that the cruet needed no more drying. My guess was that she had been in the school a year or two before. I felt like telling her to keep her wits about her at the next Candlemas procession.” (One Foot in the Cradle: An Autobiography [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966], 134–36.)
 

Downside boys ice-skating in the 1930s

Several things about this account are striking to me.

First, it was precisely by having such a Candlemas procession that the young novice was able to have a sort of “peg” on which to hang his thoughts, a palpable “axis” around which he could arrange his thoughts of discernment. It’s a brilliant example of how the so-called “externals” of Catholicism in fact constitute something like a spiritual gravitational field that gathers our scattered selves into coherent entities. The procession became a symbol of the new monk’s life, and helped him to sort out where he belonged. If we diminish or abolish such symbols — as the postconciliar liturgical reform did, both on paper and especially in its iconoclastic implementation — we are eliminating solid walls, ceilings, windows, and doors for the interior castle in which we are capable of living. We take away the centripetal power of rituals and leave the field open to the centrifugal force of fallen mindlessness and worldly distraction. As conservatives never seem to realize, it is not enough, most of the time, to “desire to be a good Catholic”; the desire has to be suggested, shaped, nourished, solidly built up by the structures of ecclesial life.

Second, only traditional Catholic communities today could actually understand and relate to the liturgical experience van Zeller is describing, since they alone (with a tiny number of exceptions) have retained the candle procession with the Latin Gregorian antiphons Dom Hubert is talking about. Such communities are continuing to do nearly the same thing he was doing (with perhaps some unfortunate modifications from the 1960 code of rubrics).

Third, monastic life at this time was exuberantly flourishing. As van Zeller describes it in the book, every religious community in England was pretty well packed with vocations. This is the kind of record that gives the lie to the myth — propagandistically repeated so often that it is now practically assumed as self-evident — that the Church before the Second Vatican Council was in desperate straits and needed radical reform. In fact, it was precisely the sudden explosion of radical ideas in the 1960s that precipitated the crisis of faith that undermined the consensus and common life of Catholics, leading to a decline from which the Church in the Western world has never recovered (except, incipiently, in those traditional communities against which Pope Francis and his nostalgic advisers have aligned themselves). As Martin Mosebach says somewhere, it was inevitable that there would be some crashing challenges to the Church in the post-War era, but the very best thing churchmen could have done is to meet those shocks with an adamant refusal to budge, rather than with a slippery willingness to move wherever the world moved.

Fourth, the genres of autobiography and detailed historical accounts of individuals and particular places are extremely valuable in achieving an accurate Catholic sense of the past and of what a Catholic culture looks like. Monasteries that still practice refectory reading have long shown a preference for these genres, and one can understand why: a robust awareness of belonging to a tradition is best achieved by learning about those who belonged to it before, and how they faced and either surmounted or failed to surmount the anti-traditional forces that opposed their way of life. General history, fiction, and theology obviously have their honorable places, but let’s not forget about books like One Foot in the Cradle, which have a lot to teach us.

The Dedication of the Downside Abbey Church in 1935