Notre Dame 2.0 and Missale Romanum 2.0

Notre Dame Cathedral has once again been in the news quite a bit. (I promise my readers that this article will come around to the subject on all of our minds, namely, the attack on the Roman Rite that was intensified by the CDW document released this past Saturday.) On the side of good news, Sharon Kabel at OnePeterFive takes us through the wondrous things happening in the course of Notre Dame’s painstaking structural restoration, in the categories of wood, acoustics, metal, glass, stone, structure, digital, and emotion. What a building and what a project! The artisans, art historians, and craftsmen obviously love the medieval masterpiece that they are privileged to study and repair. On the side of bad news, Auguste Meyrat at Crisis tells us that (surprise, surprise) Catholic churchmen are in cahoots with liturgical and artistic modernists to produce an interior of hair-raising horror. Jeanne Smits, the Paris correspondent of LifeSiteNews, furnishes details about the plan, which apparently has received preliminary approval, in spite of the impassioned protest of over a hundred major French cultural figures. One can only hope and pray that better counsels will prevail, as they did for the replacement of the spire and the outside renovation.

In an interesting article published last April at PrayTell, James Hadley made a brilliant case for architectural traditionalism and against artistic modernism. He quotes Jorge Otero-Pailos, Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, who said that “heritage is a social process of making and remaking culture by interacting in and with sites and objects inherited with previous generations.” Hadley comments:

While this in part is true, it also wrongly gives the impression that both heritage and culture are things we create based upon what we value or dis-value at any given moment. It implies that heritage has no inherent force or stability by which we “should” value it. As a result, contemporary society is left unfettered to destroy or remake past monuments as we see fit. We are simply playing at making new transient meanings and values based upon our shifting priorities and allegiances at the moment.

He then turns to the Vatican’s Pontificia Commissione per i Beni Culturali della Chiesa for guidance. The commission’s body of directives on how old ecclesiastical buildings should be treated

understands ecclesiastical heritage not firstly as high artistic achievement, but as material witness to Christian belief. The object itself (be it a sculpture or building) expresses Christian belief, but more importantly, it records and projects the faith of the community which created it – it is the witness of the witnesses. Christian heritage is theologically rooted therefore in those who have seen and confessed Christ as Lord, and is theologically oriented to continuing that witness in the present. In this way, the pertinent question for church heritage is not how may we act upon it to our own ends, but how may we become present to its inner world of meaning, what in Italian is known as valorizzazione. In this paradigm there is a very real sense of communio with and between the present church, the object, and the Christian community of the past. To tamper with the material object, is to change the record of witness. A communion suggests respect, listening, and investigation. Not hubris, hegemony, and alteration. Oddly, no one would contend that in order to understand the past and make it relevant one should enter an archive and rewrite, erase or destroy documents. But this is exactly what we continuously do in the built environment (our church buildings bearing the brunt), and in so doing we falsify and destroy the underlying witness. In this process of alteration we ultimately erase ourselves since we are constantly born out of our pasts.

Hadley notes that most of the proponents of super-modern renovations to Notre Dame (thankfully all rejected) believe that moderns are inescapably stuck in modernity and cannot relate any more to past styles as if they were present languages. Citing Catholics who believe that the right approach is to “innovate for God,” to show that the community has something “new” to say, he remarks:

In a post-Christian West the necessary reflection called for by the Notre-Dame tragedy is not a question of “innovation” but of reclamation and witness. Reclaiming and fortifying our witness by understanding our past. When the fire broke out at the cathedral, the nearby monastic Fraternité de Jérusalem began signing the Litany of Saints in their church invoking the aid of French Christians of old whose faith had built Notre-Dame. They continued the litany until the flames were extinguished…. What I see at stake now is the preservation of the very possibility of religious imagination. It seems to me that what Christianity should be proposing at this time is not “innovation” but deep engagement with our past, by calling upon the people, faith, and wisdom, that created that which we postmodernists are now playing at. After all, the term innovate in its earlier Latin form meant more to “renew” than to “change.” One is hard pressed to innovate with empty hands. We need our architectural and artistic past and we need to relearn it urgently.

The end of Hadley’s article is an eloquent appeal to abandon modern hubris and to sit at the feet of our ancestors in the Faith, who have something to teach us, who have indeed much to tell us that we have forgotten, to our impoverishment. Perhaps most of all, we need to be broken out of our temporal snobbery and the hidden heresy of perpetual progress. Every age is an age of progress, regress, and stasis, in different respects; and yet the most important truths, the truths by which we live and die, remain the same.

It now must be said again explicitly; Our ancestors, histories, material cultures, and built environments, have the right to be what they are. To not be re-interpreted, or reinvented. To exist today in their integrity without our pushy or hubristic updates, additions, and re-contextualization meant to sooth, temporarily mesmerize, or aggrandize ourselves… What this demands of us is humility, recognition that we are not inherently progressive in any positive way, that modernity is not innately better, that the junk we flood the earth with today, is not more enduring and meaningful than the artistry and faith of our past. We like the Russian Orthodox reformer of the 19th century, Ivan Kireevsky, cannot insist that the way forward is to change a past because we have forgotten it (Kireevsky, Fragments, 248-43). We must instead go to that place our ancestors built and learn to see it as they did, and thus bear testimony to it as eyewitnesses. And such is the case of Notre-Dame in Paris. Its restoration lies not in our changes to it, but in our submission to its form, wisdom, and witness.

 

Could anyone read this impassioned plea for preserving the architectural integrity of Notre Dame cathedral and not think immediately of the even greater claim made on us by the greatest work of art known to the Western world—the Roman Rite of the Mass, and its panoply of attendant rites—whose integrity was so violently assaulted after the Second Vatican Council? Just go back and re-read the quotations from Hadley, but having in mind the liturgy instead of Notre Dame. There is a nearly one-for-one equivalency of concept and praxis.

This, in turn, reminds me of one of the most splendid passages in the writings of John Senior:

Whatever we do in the political or social order, the indispensable foundation is prayer, the heart of which is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the perfect prayer of Christ Himself, Priest and Victim, recreating in an unbloody manner the bloody, selfsame Sacrifice of Calvary. What is Christian culture? It is essentially the Mass.
       That is not my or anyone’s opinion or theory or wish but the central fact of 2,000 years of history. Christendom, what secularists call Western Civilization, is the Mass and the paraphernalia which protect and facilitate it. All architecture, art, political and social forms, economics, the way people live and feel and think, music, literature―all these things, when they are right, are ways of fostering and protecting the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
       To enact a sacrifice, there must be an altar, an altar has to have a roof over it in case it rains; to reserve the Blessed Sacrament, we build a little House of Gold and over it a Tower of Ivory with a bell and a garden round it with the roses and lilies of purity, emblems of the Virgin Mary ―Rosa Mystica, Turris Davidica, Turris Eburnea, Domus Aurea, who carried His Body and His Blood in her womb, Body of her body, Blood of her blood.
       And around the church and garden, where we bury the faithful dead, the caretakers live, the priests and religious whose work is prayer, who keep the Mystery of Faith in its tabernacle of music and words in the Office of the Church; and around them, the faithful who gather to worship and divide the other work that must be done in order to make the perpetuation of the Sacrifice possible—to raise the food and make the clothes and build and keep the peace so that generations to come may live for Him, so that the Sacrifice goes on even until the consummation of the world.

The raging flames that burned up the spire and roof of the great medieval masterpiece of Notre-Dame in Paris, the fire that gutted its harmonious additions and renovations, provided us with a palpable image of what was done to that even greater masterpiece of medieval art (so to speak), the traditional Roman Rite, in the decade from about 1963 to 1973. The cathedral, after all, was created to house the Host and to provide a worthy space for the sacred liturgy. There would be no Notre Dame, no Chartres, not a single one of the great cathedrals, without the usus antiquior, as Marcel Proust recognized (see his important 1904 essay Death Comes for the Cathedrals, recently published by Wiseblood Books with commentary by John Pepino and me, tying it in to the traditionalist movement today).

It is therefore the very same instinct to wish to see Notre Dame restored to her glory and to wish to see the Roman liturgy restored to its glory; the same intuition that tells us there is something radically wrong with deconstructing and reconstructing our central act of prayer according to modernist or post-modernist proclivities.

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).