Bugnini, Roche, Grillo, and Inculturation Overdrive

Not the Zaire usage?

The term “inculturation” is certainly one of the favorite buzzwords of progressives. We have heard it mentioned for decades. It was the original rationale for updating or modernizing the liturgy: the old liturgical rites (so it was said) are excessively beholden to and redolent of past ages, and modern people clearly need a recognizably modern set of rites, sleek, direct, patent, simple, comprehensible, action-oriented, etc. The fact that they did not ask for such rites is only a sign of their habitual modesty and passivity, but the scholars were capable of divining hidden intentions that a grateful laity subsequently recognized and welcomed as if these had proceeded forth from their own breasts. It was also claimed, although the impression of hocus-pocus was a little too strong to ignore, that remarkably these modern qualities were the very same as those that early Christians prized in their rites, about which we have almost no records but of which German scholarly reconstructions could achieve the highest verisimilitude.

For a time, such futuristic fantasies took a back seat as the Church under Benedict XVI hunkered down to restore a modicum of dignity to the new rites and began to restore the old ones, at first only here and there, and over time nearly everywhere. The pulsing drumbeat of inculturation died down for a time, and one might have thought it had gone extinct. But, like a rare species of poisonous frog sighted in the remotest part of a rainforest, it has returned with a vengeance in the form of soon-to-be Cardinal Arthur Roche, a most unlikely proponent of flexibility and exoticism.

In an interview with the Spanish Catholic magazine Omnes, he said the following:

On this subject, I have often said to the bishops that we have spent the last fifty years preparing the translation of the liturgical texts; and now we must move on to the second phase, which is already foreseen by Sacrosanctum Concilium, and that is the inculturation or adaptation of the Liturgy to the other different cultures, while maintaining unity. I think that we should start this work now. But I would like to point out that today there is only one [other Novus Ordo] liturgical “use,” not a “rite,” and that is in Zaire, in Africa.
          It is important to understand what it means that Jesus has shared our nature, and in a historical moment. We have to consider the importance of the Incarnation and, if we can say so, of the action of grace being incarnated in other cultures, with various expressions that are completely different from what we have seen and appreciated in Europe for so many years.

Are we surprised, then, to hear similar language, yet less diplomatic and more aggressive, in the self-appointed czar of the reformists, Andrea Grillo? In a reflection he posted for the one-year anniversary of Traditionis Custodes, Grillo writes (as quoted by Luke Coppen of The Pillar):

It is about releasing the true energies of ritual language (verbal and non-verbal) as the culmen et fons [summit and source] of all the action of the Church. Today this happens no longer primarily in Latin and in a rite of priests and not of the assembly, but in many languages whose cultures have entered, for 60 years, into the common patrimony of the great ecclesial tradition. A Church that wants to ‘guard the tradition’ must not be afraid of the different cultures with which we can experience faith and express our creed today. This ‘communal table’ will be able to make it possible to assess the limits of what has been done so far and boldly take the way forward on the level of verbal and non-verbal languages. A great construction site can open up: for the tradition of guarding by walking forward, not backward. 

When I read such things, my mind wanders back a few years to an intriguing conversation I once held with an older priest who had done his liturgical studies at Sant’Anselmo in Rome in the 1970s. He had the rare good luck to be able to go out to lunch one day with Annibale Bugnini shortly before the latter’s fall from grace. My friend told me that Bugnini, a regular raconteur at the table, finally came around to the topic of the liturgical reform.

The mastermind of the Consilium said to him essentially this:

What you need to see is that the new liturgy involves three stages. First, we had to eliminate the old way of doing things. This was mainly the work of the 1960s, and in thirty years’ time, everyone will have forgotten what came before. Second, we had to create something new for the time being: this is what people are calling the ‘Novus Ordo’. But even this must disappear, giving way to… complete inculturation: every liturgy should be made by the community, for its own immediate needs. No liturgical books, just like it was in the ancient church! Even my Mass will disappear, by the year 2000.

Readers familiar with the immediate postconciliar literature will recognize, in this vision, the viewpoint given eloquent expression by Joseph Gelineau, SJ: that the liturgy is a “permanent workshop” (Grillo's “great construction site”). Not deceived by the siren song of inculturation, Dom Hugh Somerville Knapman puts his finger on the inevitable result:

The progressive element among the reforming liturgists saw the 1969 missal as but a stage — a significant one, mind you — in the new project of reconstituting the liturgy as something that contin­ually adapts to the age in which it is celebrated. As we have seen, the result is that the liturgy generally degenerates into reflecting the age rather than speaking to it and sanctifying it. Or more to the point, radical deformations of the liturgy reflect not the face of Christ but the face of the dominant person or clique that imposes them, and so become vehicles not of worship but of narcissism, the cult of self which is the de facto creed of postmodern western soci­ety…. We are rootless and thus heartless, replacing self-sacrifice with self-service, with self as the only moral absolute, its inescap­able subjectivity and impermanence denying the absolutism it demands for itself. Its secondary absolute, novelty, suffers the same inherent flaw.

Here we can see that Bugnini was no prophet. By the year 2000, the Novus Ordo was still plodding along in its thousand vernaculars, subject to widespread abuse and feeble attempts at community customization that never amounted to much more than a presider’s or a committee’s vague and often silly ideas about what a celebration “for us” should look like. In short, one might call it creative mediocrity or mediocre creativity, but it was a far cry from the lunchtime prognostication.

In Roger Buck’s entertaining romp The Gentle Traditionalist Returns, there is a point in the imaginary conversation where a thoroughly modern person objects that GT (i.e., the Gentle Traditionalist) is nothing other than a medievalist, an escapist, a nostalgic. In reply, GT explains why he loves tradition in its totality—from every stage, every place, every period, every culture through which the Catholic religion has passed, not limiting himself to the medieval age but not willing to limit himself to modernity either, particularly because it seems to operate under an oddly reactionary mentality that traps it in a little box marked “Now”:

Well, the medieval era is an important stage in Catholic tradition. But it’s just one stage. Catholic tradition covers 3,000 years—not just modern media culture! It begins with the Old Testament, becomes infinitely enriched by the Gospel, takes in Greek thinking with the Patristic era, develops through the so-called “Dark Ages.” Then comes the medieval era. Finally, the tradition significantly develops in modern times, as well. That, my dear fellow, is the whole point to Tradition—respecting three thousand years of Divine Revelation and dedicated human effort to engage that Revelation. Three thousand years of prayer, thought, study, sacrifice—indeed blood, sweat and tears. But all that, I know, is just three thousand years of encrusted patriarchal baggage to you. (p. 126)
          You see why the destruction of tradition troubles me. One so easily gets enslaved to the present moment. All this “Power of Now” stuff is dangerous, if you ask me. It’s also arrogant. Thousands of years of human insight, human enquiry, human intellectual and spiritual endeavour—not to mention Divine Revelation—thrown to the winds. And why? Because it didn’t jive with the Baby Boomers after the “Summer of Love”? (pp. 129–30)

The liturgy so prized by Roche & Co. is — contrary to their mindlessly-repeated claims about breadth of inclusivity and depth of sources — staggeringly provincial in time and space, reflecting the preoccupations of mid-twentieth-century liturgists of postwar “enlightened” Europe, through whose filtration devices every item of ritual and rubric had to pass.

To the future cardinal, we express our modest and humble opinion: we do not want this Bugninian futuristic indigenous/cosmopolitan self-inculturated workshop. Its first iteration failed, and the current geriatric fad for attempting to revive the mimeographed agenda of the reformers not only fails to enthuse, it positively nauseates most of us who still frequent the pews, study in seminaries, or go in unto the altar of God — unto God who giveth joy to our youth.

(Since this article was first drafted, there have appeared several articles of great relevance to the question of inculturation: see here, here, and here.) 

Worship Aids from the 1960s

Our friend Fr Hugh Somerville-Knapman, a monk of Douai Abbey in England and author of the blog Dominus mihi adjutor, has been doing some research in the abbey’s archives, and has come across a series of interesting items which he very graciously agreed to share with us. Most of these are advertisements printed in liturgical publications from the 1960s, which give some ominous hints of where things are going; there are a couple from a little earlier than that, and some other items which will be explained below. Normally, I would post these in strictly chronological order, but this first one... just had to be first.

From the August-September 1963 issue of “Worship”, an advertisement for a chausble in the “more meaningful conical pattern.” It’s all those extra wrinkles, they’re like special pockets for meaningfulness.

An insert in “Liturgy: The Quarterly of the Society of St Gregory”, from January of 1962. Sixty years of propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, the idea of the “active participation” of the faithful was not invented at Vatican II; the purpose of this recording, as explained on the reverse side of the flyer, was to show that it was perfectly possible to teach the ordinary faithful to sing the Mass in Gregorian chant. The corollary of this is, of course, that it would simply be unthinkable to lower the music of the Sacred Liturgy to the (presumed) level of the faithful.

By January of 1968, however, “Liturgy” is advertising “songs of our day, in the folk-music of our times.” Yes, it sounds exactly like you would expect a song called “Joy is like the Rain” to sound...

Speaking of the presumed level of the faithful ... by the later ’60s, we are also learning how to discuss the liturgy with Young People™. “Highly illustrated in the latest catechetical styles! Brings the thinking of Vatican II to young people’s level!” (From the July 1967 issue of “Liturgy”. Not condescending at all...)

Continue Reading this Article. . .

“Irreversible” Round-Up

For a variety of reasons, I thought it best to wait a while before saying anything about the now famous (or infamous) “irreversible” speech which the Holy Father recently gave to the participants in the 68th Italian National Liturgical Week. A number of good articles have come out in the week following its publication.

- Canonist Dr Edward Peters, on his blog In the Light of the Law, addresses the proper object of the magisterial authority which the Pope invoked in declaring that the post-Conciliar liturgical reform is “irreversible.” The sum of it is “… I think it can be confusing to the faithful for any prelate to ‘affirm with certainty’ and/or with ‘magisterial authority’ that liturgical reform is ‘irreversible’ precisely because such language connotes in Catholic minds the exercise of a charism given not to underscore the importance of what is being asserted, but rather, to identify certainly and without error either what is divinely revealed and thus to be believed or what is required to safeguard reverently the deposit of faith and thus to be definitely held.”

- Fr Zuhlsdorf begins his very useful commentary by stating “Given what I have seen and heard in Italy, my mind reels in dread at the very notion of a room full of Italian liturgists.” This is a completely reasonable reaction; the state of the liturgy in Italy is appalling, with a particular emphasis on very bad music. (For example, it is not an exaggeration to say that most churches sing the sixth mode triple Alleluia at every single Mass outside of Lent.) I especially enjoyed his comments on these words from the Pope’s discourse: “Just as there is no human life without a heartbeat, so too without the beating Heart of Christ there is no liturgical action.

“Our heart rates speed up and slow down according to activity, etc. The resting heartbeat is a baseline which is consistent, even, continuous. When our heartbeat is erratic there are problems. An arrhythmia can result in cardiac death. This is probably what happened with the artificial imposition of many liturgical changes after the Council (not actually called for by the Council Fathers in SC): liturgical arrhythmias. … Screw around with the Church’s liturgical heartbeat, and you wind up with what we have seen in the Church for the last 50 years, as virtually every aspect of Catholic life has become enervated, weak, lethargic and even necrotic.”

- We can always rely on Fr Hunwicke for intelligent commentary on any matter, and particularly on the true scope of Papal authority. (The dashes here are in the original, and do not represent omissions.)

“...But the liturgical texts and practices established after the Council are themselves not immutable. If a papal instruction, such as that of S Pius V in Quo primum, was in itself subject to change ... and Bergoglio seems to assume that it was changeable ... then clearly what Blessed Paul VI did, and what the current occupant of the Roman See now says ... are themselves changeable; they cannot be set in stone for ever.

Pope Francis has exactly as much papal authority as S Pius V. He does not have a milligram less.

And he does not have a milligram more.

And if it was acceptable (the Holy Father seems to assume that it was) for ‘experts’, in the decades before the Council, to explain at great length what (in their view) was wrong with the Liturgy as it then existed ... ... then it acceptable now for us to explain, at any length we like, what (in our view) is wrong with the Liturgy as it is done now in so many places.”

- Geoffrey Kirk, who writes a very funny blog called Ignatius His Conclave, gives an excellent example of how liturgical reform was reversed within the Anglican church.

- I particularly commend to our readers’ attention an article by Fr Hugh Somerville-Knapman OSB, on his blog Dominus mihi adjutor. Fr Hugh rightly, in my view, says that the speech itself is really not all that interesting, and in any case, much of what it does say is at best unclear. (The Pope speaks, for example, of “practices that disfigure the liturgy.” It would take no time at all to come up a list of perfectly licit practices of the reformed liturgy which one may reasonably regard as disfigurements; leaving the celebrant to choose the Eucharistic prayer comes immediately to mind.)

“What is remarkable is the nostalgia that lies so close to the surface in so many commentators in the mainline reform movement. Seeing in the eyes of traditionalists the mote of a nostalgia for a golden age that never was, they fail to see the beam of the same in their own eyes. …

If ever there was a group stuck in a rut of nostalgia it is the mainline liturgical reformers. They have not seen that the world, and the Church, have moved on from the heady days of hippies, free love, the brotherhood of man and revolution in everything that marked, indeed scarred, the 60s. The mainline liturgical reformers have failed in their express intention of producing a liturgy that engages modern people actively, a failure proved by the precipitous decline in Mass attendance since the reform was introduced.

Blaming social change and militant secularism is just passing of the buck and does not stand much scrutiny. It was precisely such a changed and more secular society that the reformers sought to accommodate liturgically. … ”

- Matthew Schmitz published an article yesterday on the Catholic Herald about the continually growing interest in the traditional Rite on the part of the young, with the one title I most wish I had thought of myself, “The Kids Are Old Rite.”

“Who are these terrifying young traditionalists? Step into a quiet chapel in New York and you will find an answer. There, early each Saturday morning, young worshippers gather in secret. They are divided by sex: women on the left, men on the right. Dressed in denim and Birkenstocks, with the occasional nose piercing, they could be a group of loiterers on any downtown sidewalk. But they have come here with a purpose. As a bell rings, they rise in unison. A hooded priest approaches the altar and begins to say Mass in Latin. During Communion, they kneel on the bare floor where an altar rail should be.

In a city where discretion is mocked and vice goes on parade, the atmosphere of reverence is startling. ...”

- Just a few thoughts of my own then, to wrap up.

The post-Conciliar liturgical reform has been in every way a complete success. The Fathers of Vatican II knew ahead of time that the letter of Sacrosanctum Concilium would be repeatedly disobeyed in the actual execution of the reform, and approved of this, knowing that the same Spirit which inspired such holy foreknowledge within them would lead to greater and better achievements than they themselves could ever have envisioned. The committees that produced the reform acted from only the very highest and purest motives; their liturgical scholarship was impeccable in every way, nor has any part of it subsequently been proved wrong or outdated.

Shortly after the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, an article in the Osservatore Romano proclaimed that the Council had officially embraced and approved of the goals of the first Liturgical Movement. And indeed, the wildest hopes of Dom Gueranger, the Blessed Schuster, Fr Fortescue and Dom Beauduin have been fulfilled in our times. Liturgical piety now flourishes as never before among the Catholic faithful, who have almost all joyfully embraced the reformed rites.

Of course, every movement within the Church, be it ever so obviously led and driven by the Spirit, encounters some resistance from reactionaries. “Reactionary” is a word to conjure with, as are the many abstract nouns which are helpfully employed to categorize the unhealthy motives lurking in the dark corners of the reactionary mind. The –isms take the lead here, with “clericalism” as the perennial favorite, alongside “triumphalism” and “formalism”; beyond them wait “rigidity”, “nostalgia”, and a panoply of others. In this most blessed age, however, the reactionaries are so few, their complaints so unreasonable, their challenge so baseless, that there is no need to respond to them at all.

Indeed, given the perfect triumph of the reform, it is difficult to see why any need was felt at all to assert (whether directly or obliquely) that it cannot be undone. We may even question whether such an assertion is altogether prudent, since it might suggest to some a degree of insecurity about its future, which is of course wholly unwarranted.