St Joseph and St Helena

This year, the feast of the Finding of the Cross is followed immediately by the Solemnity of St Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church. Although they often come close to each other, this is the first time in thirty years that these two feasts have concurred at Vespers, as the rubrics traditionally describe it. This got me to thinking about some profound reflections on the figure of St Helena by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, and how they also apply to Our Lord’s foster father.

In 1950, Waugh published his only historical novel, Helena, a fictionalized account of the empress’ life, and her discovery of the Cross. His introduction begins with a funny story based on the Latin version of the feast’s title, “Inventio Crucis”, which, in his classic fashion, foreshadows the greater point of the story.

“It is reported (and I, for one, believe it) that some few years ago a lady prominent for her hostility to the Church returned from a visit to Palestine in a state of exultation. ‘I got the real low-down at last,’ she told her friends. ‘The whole story of the crucifixion was made up by a British woman named Ellen. Why, the guide showed me the very place where it happened. Even the priests admit it. They call their chapel “the Invention of the Cross.” ’ ”

The chapel of the Finding of the Cross in the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem; photo by Nicola dei Grandi, from an article published in April of 2019.

“a British woman named Ellen” refers to a medieval tradition that Helena was the daughter of a local chieftain in Roman Britain, a tradition which Waugh incorporates into the story. He always regarded it as his best work, a fact which may well surprise those who know him for much more famous books like The Loved One or Brideshead Revisited. The latter was made into a critically acclaimed mini-series, and several of his other works have likewise been brought to film, although none as well or successfully. Helena, on the other, has not only never been filmed, but is the only one of his novels that ever fell out of print.

Two years after its publication, Waugh was invited by Claire Booth Luce, who like him, was a prominent convert to Catholicism, to contribute to a collection of essays called Saints for Now, alongside a number of other Catholic writers. He chose St Helena as his subject, and his essay, essentially a summary of the novel’s theological ideas, is deeply insightful; all the more so, when one considers that he had no pretense of any sort to be a theologian.

Evelyn Waugh in 1940. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

What Waugh correctly understood was that in the 4th century, once Christianity had been legalized, it was in danger of being assimilated to (if not into) the numerous other religions that existed in the ancient Roman world. Many things about it were already very congenial to the Roman religious mind: “(a)nother phase of existence which select souls enjoyed when the body was shed; a priesthood; a sacramental system, even in certain details of eating, anointing and washing – all these had already a shadowy place in fashionable thought. Everything about the new religion (i.e. Christianity) was capable of interpretation, could be refined and diminished…”

The novel is set shortly after the Council of Nicea, the first major defeat of the Arian heresy, but far from the last battle fought over it. This newly fashionable version of the Creed, which most of the emperors for 50 years after Constantine adopted, was just such an interpretation, refinement and diminution: the translation of Christianity into Platonism, with God the Father as Plato’s One, and God the Son as the demiurge of the Timaeus.

But Waugh goes on to clarify that everything about Christianity was capable of being interpreted in such a fashion “except the unreasonable assertion that God became man and died on the Cross; not a myth or an allegory; true God, truly incarnate, tortured to death at a particular moment in time, at a particular geographical place, as a matter of plain historical fact.” And thus, in the novel, St Helena herself (a classically British self-assured older woman, who could well be played by Maggie Smith if it were ever filmed), says to the Pope, St Sylvester I, “Just at this moment when everyone is forgetting it… there’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against. I’m going off to find it.”

St Helena, 1495, by Cima da Conegliano. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

And of course, find it she does, a fact whose importance Waugh underscores by saying in Saints for Now, “It is not fantastic to claim that her discovery entitles her to a place in the Doctorate of the Church, for she was not merely adding one more stupendous trophy to (its) hoard of relics … She was asserting in sensational form a dogma that was in danger of neglect.”

Now it must be stated that the Church’s defense of that dogma was not the argument over abstruse and useless theology that bad historians have long presented it as. It was motivated rather by the gravest possible pastoral concerns, and for this reason, it is very appropriate that the Finding of the Cross should be preceded by the feast of St Athanasius, the great champion of Nicene orthodoxy.

The assertion of Christ’s full divinity is the assertion that it is God Himself who takes such great interest in the salvation of the human race that He joins it, uniting each baptized person to Himself in His mystical body. And since it is God Himself, not a lesser creature, who freely offers redemption and salvation to “every man that cometh into this world”, the Church can truly say to every man, regardless of his status in this world, “God is your salvation.” In this sense, the only sense that ultimately matters, all men are equal before God. From this derives the very concept of personhood, which did not exist in the ancient world before Christianity, and the dignity of the human person.

Waugh beautifully connects this essential point, the unique importance of each individual before God, to the career of St Helena. When Constantine came to power in 306, she had been divorced from his father, Constantius Chlorus, for over 15 years, and was no more than a wealthy but obscure retiree, far from power and the centers of power. Indeed, it was for the sake of consolidating power through political alliances that Constantius had put her aside. But as Waugh writes in Saints for Now, “God had His own use for her. Others faced the lions in the circus; others lived in the caves in the desert. She was to be St Helena Empress, not St Helena Martyr or St Helena Anchorite. She accepted a state of life (i.e. that of dowager empress, after her son’s ascent to power) full of dangers to the soul in which many foundered, and she remained fixed in her purpose … Then came her call to a single peculiar act of service, something unattempted before and unrepeatable – the finding of the True Cross. … What we can learn from Helena is something about the workings of God; that He wants a different thing from each of us, laborious or easy, conspicuous or quite private, but something which only we can do and for which we were each created.”

A catacomb stone of the 3rd century, with the Magi approaching the child Jesus as he sits in the His Mother’s lap; note that St Joseph is standing behind the throne.

This also applies in an especially fitting way to St Joseph. Like St Helena, very little is known about him, although many traditions, some of them very ancient, but historically very uncertain, have sprung up around him. In recent centuries, he has largely taken over St Barbara’s role as patron Saint of a good death, but the canonical Gospels, our only genuinely reliable source of information about him, do not even mention his death. In many early depictions of the Nativity, he is either absent or relegated to a visibly inferior position, standing where the servants stand, behind the throne of the Virgin and Child. His feast day was slow to catch on, not admitted at Rome until the later 15th century.

But like St Helena, he too was chosen for “a single peculiar act of service”, the guardianship of the two holiest persons who have ever lived in this world. And the Church, having long and duly considered his role as Jesus’ earthly foster father and the true spouse of the Virgin Mary, has thus entrusted itself to him as its own guardian under the title “Patron of the Universal Church”, with which he is honored in today’s feast.

Apart from their specific roles in the history of salvation, these two Saints therefore each remind us in their own way of the broader truth stated by Waugh above, also beautifully expressed by one of the more recent Popes who was given Joseph’s name in baptism. “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in the homily of his inaugural Mass, April 24, 2005.)

St Joseph as Patron of the Catholic Church. This image was used as the header of his feast under that title in liturgical books printed by the German company Frideric Pustet, from the later 19th to mid 20th century. The crests of Popes Bl. Pius IX, who placed the feast of the Patronage of St Joseph on the universal calendar, and Leo XIII are seen to either side of St Peter’s Basilica.

Evelyn Waugh on the Liturgical Reform: An Article in The American Conservative

The American Conservative published an interesting article yesterday by Casey Chalk, a student at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology at Christendom College, on Catholic author Evelyn Waugh’s assessment of the post-Conciliar liturgical reform. It must be remembered that Waugh died in April of 1966, over three-and-a-half years before the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, but like many others his period, saw very clearly to what pass the process was already bringing the Church. Many of our readers will be familiar with the exchange of letters on the subject between him and John Cardinal Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster, which was edited by Dom Alcuin Reid and published in 2011. The title of that book, “A Bitter Trial”, comes from one of Waugh’s letters, in which he writes of those early changes, far less radical than those still to come, “Church-going is now a bitter trial.” But it was not only for himself and his own preferences that he said and wrote such things; as Mr Chalk writes,

One of Waugh’s most persistent criticisms of the liturgical changes is that progressive, elitist-driven experimentation hurts ordinary people the most, undermining their confidence in important institutions. Vatican II represented, in Waugh’s mind, a rejection of the needs and opinions of local people. “A vociferous minority has imposed itself on the hierarchy and made them believe that a popular demand existed where there was in fact not even a preference,” he warned.

Likewise Cardinal Heenan, who “observed that the reform was driven by self-described ‘intellectuals’ whose ‘constant nagging’ and ‘tiresome letters to the press and articles in the Catholic papers may eventually disturb the faithful.’ ... ‘the voice of the laity’ was largely ignored by the media, as were conservative leaders in the Church, whom intellectuals painted as ‘mitred peasants.’ Waugh argued, ‘the function of the Church in every age has been conservative—to transmit undiminished and uncontaminated the creed inherited from its predecessors.”

Read the whole thing over there. I make bold to add only one observation. The title of the article is “Evelyn Waugh Predicted the Collapse of Catholic England”, and Mr Chalk goes on to note the dramatic decline in church attendance in England, which is similar to that in most historical Catholic countries or regions since the post-Conciliar reforms. It has been fashionable for a long time to deny that the liturgical reform has been the cause of this decline and fall by citing the famous dictum that “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” is a logical fallacy. It must never been forgotten that “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” is indeed a fallacy in logic, but does not change the fact that causality moves forward in time.

The future of the Church, ca. 1965.

Can We Love Tradition Too Much?

NLM received permission to republish this article by Dr. Kwasniewski, which first appeared at OnePeterFive on March 18, 2019.

Can We Love Tradition Too Much?

by Peter Kwasniewski

The indefatigable blogger Fr. Dwight Longenecker is at it again. In a new article from March 15, 2019, entitled “Tradition is the Democracy of the Dead,” he writes to assure us that he is a lover of tradition — but not excessively.

He rightly says one should be or become Catholic for the sake of its 2,000-year-old tradition — or, more accurately, its 4,000-year-old tradition, since the law, prophecies, and worship of Israel are fulfilled in the Church. But he also says that, since tradition is not static or unchangeable, we need to be willing to change with the times, according to the judgment calls emanating from Rome, and not make an “idol” of the past.

Well, one can certainly live free of fear that today’s Rome is in danger of making an idol of the past. One might rather fear its making an idol of the present or of the future.

This all too easy reduction of one’s opponents to idolaters, which is one of the characteristic rhetorical moves used by Pope Francis and other progressives who are impatient of analysis and argument and wish to get on with modern pastoring, reminds me of what I like to call “A Corollary of Godwin’s Law”: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison of a defender of Catholic tradition to a Pharisee approaches 1.” Perhaps we could expand this to say “a Pharisee or an idolater.” This slight adjustment makes it more interreligious too — surely an important consideration in this age of joint statements from popes and imams.

Moreover, this brings the corollary more into harmony with “Bergoglio’s Hypothesis.” That is surely a welcome step in building the new paradigm. In my formulation, this hypothesis reads:

If there is a discrepancy between Catholic doctrine and European liberalism, then the former needs further “development” until it harmonizes with the latter. If Catholics resist modernity or modern ecclesiastical reforms, they are guilty of nostalgic insecurity, temperamental rigidity, pharisaical neo-Pelagianism, and lack of fraternal charity. [1]

In his article, Fr. Longenecker makes the classic move of the Anglican Newman: wanting to be in the sweet spot of the via media. Unlike the revolutionaries, I love tradition; unlike the traditionalists, I don’t idolize tradition as an unchanging thing.

The first problem here is the caricature. Traditionalists fully recognize that liturgy develops over time. However, as with the development of doctrine, they see the development as tending, in broad lines, toward greater amplitude and perfection. So just as we don’t decide to cancel out at some point the Nicene Creed for the sake of going back to the more ancient and pristine Apostles’ Creed, in like manner, we don’t cancel out the medieval and Baroque developments of the liturgy in our search for a more ancient and pristine Christian worship. Pius XII warned against “antiquarianism,” but that became one of the two battle cries of the liturgical reformers — that and their aggiornamentalism, by which everything had to be adjusted and proportioned to the mentality of Modern Man (whoever he is).

The second and bigger problem is that the Catholic Newman came to reject the via media approach when he realized that, on some questions, the right answer was found in the “extreme” position, not in the middle position. For example, at the time of the Arian crisis, there were (to simplify things) the Arians, the Semi-Arians, and the Nicaeans. In all the political battles and regional councils, the Semi-Arians were able to position themselves as the reasonable middle between the extremists who denied the divinity of the Son and the other extremists who conflated the Son and the Father by identifying them both as God. In this, needless to say, they showed that they did not grasp, or did not wish to grasp, the position of St. Athanasius and other orthodox fathers, who, though a beleaguered minority, nevertheless held the truth and ultimately prevailed. [2]

So too in our present situation. The traditionalists maintain that there is nothing “traditional” about the Novus Ordo and the rest of the papally imposed liturgical rites from the ’60s and ’70s. Even when the reformers claimed to be “recovering” elements lost in antiquity, the way they went about it was distinctively modern: they took what chimed in with their fancy and filtered out difficult bits that could have been disturbing or distressing to modern audiences. And these men say outright in their articles and books that this is what they are doing; no conspiracy theories need apply. Moreover, they freely amputated and suppressed many extremely ancient features of the liturgy, such as the Pentecost octave and season, Septuagesima, the Ember Days, and the lectionary on which St. Gregory the Great preached in the late sixth century (how’s that for ancient?), replacing them with innovative and hybridized material fashioned by scholarly brains. Constructivism on this magnitude and with this method is unprecedented in the Church’s history. It is impossible to see what could be “traditional” about this approach or the results.

Thus, when Fr. Longenecker says: “I do what I can to pray the tradition, live the tradition, and worship in the tradition,” it is a perfect study in the art of equivocation. To “pray the tradition” and “worship in the tradition” is to pray and worship in union with all the centuries of Catholicism as they are glued together in the one Roman liturgical tradition that was ours until 1969, not to hit the ecclesial reset button as the conciliar enthusiasts did. One may admire conservatives’ efforts to bring traditional elements in through the back door — when the local bishop’s not looking too attentively, and the neighborhood climate is favorable — but one should have the candor to admit that this is a desperate and somewhat pathetic attempt to put old Humpty-Dumpty back together again. Fortunately, the real McCoy is still there, waiting to be rediscovered, and until a man has rediscovered it, he cannot quite say he has “done what he can.”

It is telling when Fr. Longenecker implies that the only things unchangeable in the Church are her dogmas and proceeds to identify the essence of the Mass as the miracle of transubstantiation. Neoscholastic reductionism [3] has been a problem for some time, but it is galling to see it in the context of an article that is supposed to be about Catholic tradition. Traditional liturgies are categorized into their ritual families and subfamilies (Latin or Byzantine, Slavic or Greek, Roman or Ambrosian or Mozarabic, etc.) based not on whether transubstantiation occurs, which is something they all have in common, but on exactly what their content is. Imagine saying to a Byzantine Catholic: “You know, at the end of the day, your Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and our Novus Ordo are pretty much the same, because they both do the one essential, immutable thing: convert the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ.”

I’m afraid what we are seeing is the result of speaking about such grave matters without the requisite knowledge of details. It is all too easy to say “the Roman rite remains intact” when the only thing one is looking at is an outline of the order of Mass from 30,000 feet in the sky. But the devil’s in the details — and the angels, too, whose role was greatly reduced in the Novus Ordo. Liturgical rites exist not as outlines or abstractions, but as concrete codifications of text, music, rubric, ceremonial, and cast of supporting artefacts. The more one drills into what the classic Roman rite actually is — its ancient ad orientem stance, its particular calendar and lectionary, its more than a thousand orations, its set of Prefaces, its monolithic Roman Canon, the early medieval offertory rite, and so forth — the more one can see how abruptly and comprehensively the Novus Ordo severs itself from that venerable rite. They are, in truth, two different liturgies that share some common elements, somewhat as the Eiffel Tower might be said to share in the verticality of the Gothic cathedral.

Gargoyles atop Notre Dame discussing verticality and modernism

It is thus more than ironic when Fr. Longenecker cites G.K. Chesterton’s famous words — “Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead” — when the postconciliar liturgical reform was, in fact, the most autocratic imaginable in its contempt for the collective voice of our ancestors, and democratic only in the sense that it proceeded by way of the voting of “experts” on a panoply of committees that sliced up the parts of liturgy into study groups, like teams of computer programmers testing new operating system modules. [4]

In the finest, most lyrical passage of his article, Fr. Longenecker compares Catholic tradition to a giant old mansion with extensive gardens:

I sometimes think that being a Catholic is like living in a grand old house like the one in Brideshead Revisited. It is an ornate, ancient and venerable structure, full of corridors of memories and alleyways of tradition. The walls are lined with the banners from ancient battles and the ancestors of grand reputation. The attic is full of curious and precious antiques and the kitchens and cellars are full of fine wine, casks of provisions and bundles of equipment for battle and for housework. The gardens are lush and expansive — some formal and fruitful, some still wild and untamed. The modernist would demolish such a house and send the contents to auction. But a Catholic should decide to live there, dust and shine the antiques, clean the carpets, polish the silver, restore the paintings, sharpen the halberds and shine the armor … and then he should draw back the drapes to open the windows and let in the fresh air and the morning light.

The last phrase, a deliberate echo of John XXIII’s famous remark about how the Church needs to open her windows and let in the air from the world (how’s that workin’ out for ya, postconciliar Church?), could be refurbished as a reminder that without the Holy Spirit, without the grace of God, we cannot produce good fruits, regardless of how handsome the tree may be. Fr. Longenecker would be the first to agree, I’m sure, that this interior necessity by no means suggests there is something wrong with the old house and its contents, which the First Cause of all things — the architect and first interior decorator, so to speak — intended to put there by His Providence.

It is ironic, again, that our author should choose just this metaphor of the old house and its rambling grounds, since it has always been the traditionalists’ favorite comparison when they wish to describe the result of twenty centuries of gradual development in the liturgy, gently tended by gardeners and janitors. There is no question whatsoever that Archbishop Bugnini and his fellow experts had no patience for this old mansion. They wanted to raze it to the ground and build rational modern flats in its place. In his own words, Bugnini sought to “rejuvenate the liturgy, ‘ridding’ it of the superstructures that weighed it down over the centuries.” This is why the new missal is so “rationally” ordered, using simple blueprints over and over again instead of the wonderfully unpredictable variety in the old missal. [5]

Archbishop Bugnini was not the only liturgist who thought in terms of architectural images of demolition and reconstruction. Consider this passage from Demain la liturgie (1976) by Fr. Joseph Gelineau, S.J., who played a prominent role on the Consilium:

If the formulae change, the rite is changed. If a single element is changed, the signification of the whole is modified. Let those who like myself have known and sung a Latin-Gregorian High Mass remember it if they can. Let them compare it with the Mass that we now have. Not only the words, the melodies, and some of the gestures are different. To tell the truth, it is a different liturgy of the Mass [c’est une autre liturgie de la messe]. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists [le rite romaine tel que nous l’avons connu n’existe plus]. It has been destroyed. [Il est détruit.] Some walls of the former edifice have fallen while others have changed their appearance, to the extent that it appears today either as a ruin or the partial substructure of a different building.

Could Fr. Longenecker’s mention of Brideshead Revisited be a subtle hint to the cognoscenti that he does not, in fact, see eye-to-eye with the liturgical reform? It is well known that the author of this splendid novel, Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), was fiercely opposed to the dismantling of the Catholic liturgy, conducting a regular correspondence with Cardinal Heenan to see if anything could be done to halt the madness that was beginning to bleed the churches of their congregations, and publishing anguished articles on the subject in periodicals (readers will find all of this in the book A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes). Though he was spared the ultimate indignity of witnessing the Novus Ordo, as he died more than 3½ years before it was rolled off the assembly line, Waugh was utterly horrified by the changes that had been made to the liturgy, which at that point were not insignifcant, but had certainly not become the great tsunami of 1969.

Among Catholics who care deeply about the sacred liturgy (and why should they not, when Vatican II calls the “Eucharistic sacrifice” the “font and apex of the entire Christian life”?), one finds several camps: those who believe that the changes after the Council went too far; those who believe that the changes were not comprehensive and radical enough; those who think that whatever happened happened, and we might as well make the best of it we can today; and those who think that approaching the liturgy with the mentality of progress and relevancy is the wrong way to let it be itself and do what it alone can do and, moreover, a path doomed to self-parody and implosion the more one goes down it.

The traditionalist takes the last view. It is based, first of all, on real and repeated experiences of the beauty and riches of the classic Roman rite, against which the impoverished text and ceremonial of the new rite stand out glaringly. There can be no substitute for familiarity. No one who is not intimately familiar with the old Roman rite is in a position to make any global commentary about how it compares with its intended replacement. It is time for those who make out their fellow Catholics attached to the usus antiquior to be actual or potential idolaters to step down from their high horses and walk a few miles in the same shoes, out of charity if for no other reason. Get to know the old rite — not just the Mass, but all the sacramental rites and blessings. See its qualities firsthand, and not from a distance.

Such people might be surprised at how different the view is from the ground. They might, indeed, come to see that the danger of idolatry — in the form of an unquestioned, perhaps even unrecognized, adulation of aggiornamento — is more real for those who endorse the Consilium’s modern construction. It was, after all, the attitudes and antics of liturgical progressives that Joseph Ratzinger compared to the episode of the golden calf.

Unbeknownst to himself, Fr. Longenecker is ready to become a traditionalist if he merely discovers the applicability of his words to the entire liturgical reform:

One of the disastrous results of the Second Vatican Council is that liturgists, clergy, and religious who were so zealous to make the faith contemporary and relevant, felt that they could best do this not by valuing and re-invigorating the traditions of the Church, but by demolishing them in revolutionary zeal.

Amen. Now just use your editing pen to excise some of the other misleading bits of the sermon.

NOTES

[1] This hypothesis is based on a more fundamental assumption that I call “Maritain’s Axiom”: “Given the leavening of Greek philosophy, Roman law, Hebrew prophecy, and the Christian Gospel, Europe will develop the finest conscience, most ample respect for human rights, and most consistent rule of law that the world has ever known.” This axiom is true descriptively, in the context of Catholic civilization. It fails prescriptively, in the sense that the outcome is not guaranteed simply from the availability of the ingredients. Yet it is assumed as the basis of, e.g., Pope Francis’s stance on the death penalty.

[2] I’ve written elsewhere about “the use and abuse of the via media.”

[3] This phenomenon is defined and critiqued in two articles: “The Long Shadow of Neoscholastic Reductionism” and “Against Reducing the Mass to a Sacramental Delivery System.”

[4] This comparison, incidentally, was made by Fr. Thomas Reese in an article called “Reforming Catholic liturgy should be like updating software,” in which he compared the old liturgy to DOS and the reform to Windows — with the 1965 interim missal being 1.0, the 1969 missal 2.0, etc.

[5] See here for several examples.

Prophets of Truth in a Decadent Age

We are so accustomed to hearing praise heaped upon the liturgical reform that we can too quickly forget the many clear-sighted men and women — and not just Ratzinger, even if he came to be the most famous — who spoke out against the Church’s marginalization and destruction of her own heritage at the very moment it was happening. What follows is but a beginning, a sampling; readers should feel free to add their favorite quotations in the comments below.

Monsignor Celada wrote in Lo Specchio of July 29, 1969:

I regret having voted in favor of the Council constitution in whose name (but in what a manner!) this heretical pseudo-reform has been carried out, a triumph of arrogance and ignorance. If it were possible, I would take back my vote, and attest before a magistrate that my assent had been obtained through trickery.[1]

Archbishop Dwyer (1908-1976)

Perhaps my favorite prophet from the Church’s hierarchy is Archbishop R. J. Dwyer, who very early on spoke with a Jeremiah-like fierceness. For example, in the newspaper Catholic Twin Circle, he wrote on July 9, 1971:

The great mistake of the Council Fathers was to allow the implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy to fall into the hands of men who were either unscrupulous or incompetent. This is the so-called “Liturgical Establishment,” a Sacred Cow which acts more like a White Elephant as it tramples the shards of a shattered liturgy with ponderous abandon.

Again, in the issue of October 26, 1973:

Who dreamed on that day [when we voted for Sacrosanctum Concilium] that within a few years, far less than a decade, the Latin past of the Church would be all but expunged . . . ? The thought would have horrified us, but it seemed so far beyond the realm of the possible as to be ridiculous.

Council Father Ignatius Doggett, an Australian-born Friar Minor and bishop emeritus of Aitape, New Guinea, opined in 1996 that the conciliar debate on the liturgy was

horrible, if we judge the debate on the liturgy as we have it today. Very few bishops would be proud to say they had a hand in it. Communion in the hand was never mentioned in the debate, neither was the word table (mensa) to take the place of altar, the place of sacrifice… In my opinion the debate on the liturgy has been hijacked. The Council was to reform, not to change completely.[2]

Bishop Paschang (1895-1999)

Bishop John L. Paschang, the veteran emeritus of Grand Island, Nebraska, observed:

In my opinion the innovations were a mistake. We should have retained the substance of the former Mass. “By their fruits you shall know them.” Church attendance has declined. Few people … go to the sacrament of Reconciliation. People are losing their faith. Almost 50 percent of the faithful no longer believe in the Real Presence, etc. etc.[3]

The Divine Word Missionary and emeritus of the Indian diocese of Indore, Bishop Frans Simons, noted, in a similar vein:

Progressives expected a great deal for the effect and attractiveness of the Church from the use of the vernacular and the simplification and what they considered the adaptation of the liturgy. Nothing of the kind has happened. Since the introduction of these features, within 30 years, church attendance dropped to 10-20% of what it was before in several western countries.[4]

John Senior (1923-1999)

Some of the sharpest observations outside the hierarchy came from John Senior, the great teacher and founder of the Integrated Humanities Program at Kansas University, who saw the 1970s without rose-colored glasses and criticized, without sentimentality, the ecclesiastical anti-culture: “Anyone can see the Church is steering straight into the looming ice of unbelief.”[5]

Once embarked safe and sound on the boat of the Church, I was desolated to see it go straight towards the shipwreck from which I had just escaped. A worldly Church and a world without the Church were on the edges of the abyss.

There is little comfort in the visible Church now. The liturgy, set upon by thieves, is lying in the ditch; contemplatives are mouthing political slogans in the streets; nuns have lost their habits along with their virtues, virgins their virginity, confessors their consciences, theologians their minds.

A well instructed man can shut his eyes and ears at a Novus Ordo mass and teach himself from memory that this action is the selfsame sacrifice at Calvary offered under the unbloody appearances of bread and wine, but it is not possible for ordinary people and especially children who have no memory of such things to keep the faith in the face of an assault on the senses, emotions and intelligence.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)

And, of course, there are the famous letters of Evelyn Waugh and John Cardinal Heenan, collected by Dom Alcuin Reid under the title A Bitter Trial, and well worth reading for their mordant commentary on the unraveling of the liturgy during the 1960s, a time when it still retained some kind of organic connection with the past. Waugh was spared the trial of seeing the new Missal—a shock that might have killed him if he had still been alive.

I have often said that the countless Catholics who either fell away from the faith due to the liturgical reform or who drifted into schism are the “unremembered dead,” the nameless casualties of a triumphal march of progress that did not care about its victims, who were deemed (if we may borrow Benedict XVI’s words in another context) a necessary if unfortunate sacrifice to the Moloch of the Future.[6] These people deserve our sympathetic remembrance and prayers, and our hard work today to reverse something of the damage that traumatized and alienated them. In particular, we should be assiduous in collecting and publishing whatever prophetic judgments and critical recollections survive from that conciliar generation, so that the whitewashing official propaganda can be challenged every step of the way.

Fittingly, let us give the final word to Jeremiah:

     And they healed the breach of the daughter of my people disgracefully, saying: Peace, peace: and there was no peace.
     They were confounded, because they committed abomination: yea, rather they were not confounded with confusion, and they knew not how to blush: wherefore they shall fall among them that fall: in the time of their visitation they shall fall down, saith the Lord.
     Thus saith the Lord: Stand ye on the ways, and see and ask for the old paths which is the good way, and walk ye in it: and you shall find refreshment for your souls. And they said: we will not walk.
     And I appointed watchmen over you, saying: Hearken ye to the sound of the trumpet. And they said: We will not hearken.
     Therefore hear, ye nations, and know, O congregation, what great things I will do to them.
     Hear, O earth: Behold I will bring evils upon this people, the fruits of their own thoughts: because they have not heard my words, and they have cast away my law. (Jer 6:14-19)

NOTES

[1] I am grateful to Hannah Graves for this and the two subsequent quotations.

[2] From Alcuin Reid, “The Fathers of Vatican II and the Revised Mass: Results of a Survey,” Antiphon 10 (2006): 170–90, at 175. 

[3] Ibid., 183. 

[4] Ibid., 185. 

[5] This and the following quotations drawn from Dom Francis Bethel, O.S.B., “A Dark Night: John Senior and the Society of Pius X,” available here.

[6] In the original context, Pope Benedict XVI was writing about Marxism's demand for social revolution: "What we have here, though, is really an inhuman philosophy. People of the present are sacrificed to the moloch of the future—a future whose effective realization is at best doubtful. One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here and now" (Deus Caritas Est, 31b).

Why Do We Care About Beautiful Things?

It has long struck me as strange that so many people in the Catholic world seem to consider the love and longing for beauty in the liturgy to be a matter of reproach. The traditional Catholic is written off as, at best, a hopeless romantic, a foppish aesthete, a poorly-adjusted introvert yearning for past glories, and at worst, someone who probably doesn’t care much about the poor or the modern world but who does care a great deal about the ornamentation of the monstrance, the cut and hue of the chasuble, and the precise amount of incense heaped on the coals. The way the term “nostalgia” is used as a pejorative term is quite revealing in this regard.

Yet those who find it easy to dismiss the traditionalists rarely pose the question: Might there be a good reason, even a compelling one, to care passionately about beautiful signs and symbols, beautiful cultural artifacts, customs, and practices, the “smells and bells” that were once so prevalent in Catholic worship that they seemed, to outsiders, to be nearly synonymous with it?

Our Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote eloquently on this subject in section 35 of his Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, in a passage that deserves to be read and re-read:

This relationship between creed and worship is evidenced in a particular way by the rich theological and liturgical category of beauty. Like the rest of Christian Revelation, the liturgy is inherently linked to beauty: it is veritatis splendor. The liturgy is a radiant expression of the paschal mystery, in which Christ draws us to himself and calls us to communion. As Saint Bonaventure would say, in Jesus we contemplate beauty and splendour at their source. This is no mere aestheticism, but the concrete way in which the truth of God’s love in Christ encounters us, attracts us and delights us, enabling us to emerge from ourselves and drawing us towards our true vocation, which is love.  

God allows himself to be glimpsed first in creation, in the beauty and harmony of the cosmos (cf. Wis 13:5; Rom 1:19-20). In the Old Testament we see many signs of the grandeur of God’s power as he manifests his glory in his wondrous deeds among the Chosen People (cf. Ex 14; 16:10; 24:12-18; Num 14:20- 23). In the New Testament this epiphany of beauty reaches definitive fulfilment in God’s revelation in Jesus Christ: Christ is the full manifestation of the glory of God. In the glorification of the Son, the Father’s glory shines forth and is communicated (cf. Jn 1:14; 8:54; 12:28; 17:1). Yet this beauty is not simply a harmony of proportion and form; “the fairest of the sons of men” (Ps 45:3) is also, mysteriously, the one “who had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Is 53:2). Jesus Christ shows us how the truth of love can transform even the dark mystery of death into the radiant light of the resurrection. Here the splendour of God’s glory surpasses all worldly beauty. The truest beauty is the love of God, who definitively revealed himself to us in the paschal mystery.

The beauty of the liturgy is part of this mystery; it is a sublime expression of God’s glory and, in a certain sense, a glimpse of heaven on earth. The memorial of Jesus’ redemptive sacrifice contains something of that beauty which Peter, James, and John beheld when the Master, making his way to Jerusalem, was transfigured before their eyes (cf. Mk 9:2). Beauty, then, is no mere decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action, since it is an attribute of God himself and his revelation. These considerations should make us realize the care which is needed, if the liturgical action is to reflect its innate splendor.

This is the same man who had said, many years earlier in The Ratzinger Report: “A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music, and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology” (p. 130).

What did Ratzinger mean? A person who is not “in tune with the world,” as Josef Pieper would say—one who is not vibrating sympathetically, as it were, with the splendor of God’s artistry in nature, one who feels little or no affinity with the manifestations of His beauty in the works of fine art His grace has inspired across the Christian centuries—will be a person whose theology is monotonous, mechanical, and one-dimensional, the shell of reasoning without the marrow of insight or the burning embers of eros. It will be a blind and deaf theology suited for the deaf and the blind. We know what Our Lord said about unseeing leaders and their sightless followers: they end up in a ditch, that is, in a dark hole where beauty cannot flourish (cf. Lk 6:39).

That is how such a theologian is, in Ratzinger’s surprising phrase, dangerous. His defect can become an impediment to the salvation of men, an encouragement of the philistinism that narrows and distorts reality, a discouragement to those who see or feel more than he. Where Ratzinger says “theologian,” moreover, we may also say “liturgist” or “celebrant,” because it is impossible to think about, talk about, or celebrate the liturgy without drawing upon some theological account of what one is referring to or carrying out. Whether the account is full and harmonious or fragmentary and inconsistent, there must be an operational basis that could be put into words if need be.

How dangerous is this lack of appreciation for the beautiful in the liturgy? Towards the end of his life, Evelyn Waugh wrote in a letter: “Easter used to mean so much to me. Before Pope John and his Council—they destroyed the beauty of the liturgy. I have not yet soaked myself in petrol and gone up in flames, but I now cling to the Faith doggedly without joy.”

“They destroyed the beauty of the liturgy.” We might quibble with Waugh about whether this destruction can be attributed to the Pope who called the Council or to the Council itself (given that the same Pope promulgated the last edition of the usus antiquior Missal and that the same Council celebrated Mass according to that missal from start to finish), but there can be no doubt that Waugh was permitted to see, towards the end of his life, the beginnings of a systematic dismantling and discarding of many beautiful things in the Mass and in Catholic life that had nourished him just as they had nourished countless others over the centuries. Waugh grasped the bitter cost of all the rationalism, didacticism, experimentation, and thirst for novelty: the beauty that had been lovingly built up over so many generations of believers. This was the outstanding casualty of the reform in the manner in which it was executed almost everywhere. And then we hear that heart-breaking phrase: “I now cling to the Faith doggedly without joy.” Thus did the melancholy author of Brideshead Revisited tersely identify the aftermath of the campaign against beauty: the waning of spiritual joy in the profession of the true Faith.

It has taken over forty years to realize the full magnitude of the sickness unto death, which, as with Lazarus, has ended not in the stark silence of the tomb but in an astonishing resurrection from the dead: the ever-growing restoration of the traditional Roman Rite across the world (in spite of temporary setbacks), accompanied by a slow rediscovery and renewal of its cultural “supports,” the countless beautiful things, great and small, that always accompany Catholic liturgy when lived to the full. If Waugh were alive today, he would see that there is, thanks be to God, matter to rejoice about once more—although we may sincerely hope that he now enjoys unveiled the changeless Beauty, ever ancient, ever new, and no longer has need of such comfort.