A Letter Exchange on the Last Council and the Liturgical Reform

The following letter exchange took place between me and a gentleman whose personal details have been edited out.

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

I am a high school theology teacher and also lead Bible studies. The life of the Church, the Scriptures, and Holy Mass are all integral to my daily life. I find all issues related to liturgy to be terribly confusing. There are so many different narratives out there that one could lose one’s mind trying to figure out which one is correct, or if any is correct. There is the fine work done by many of you at New Liturgical Movement, among others. One could also find a different view point from rad trads, or a liberal view from people at the Pray Tell blog. So, lots of passionate views by highly educated people who feel they are interpreting Vatican II in the right way. (Unless they reject the council altogether, which is another story.)

My question, then, is: Where to begin, and whom do I trust? Having read Vatican II and Sacrosanctum Concilium on a number of occasions, as well as in class work, it seems that some reform was certainly called for. How, then, can some people completely dismiss the council and the directives that were given? I have friends who do that quite often, while referring to the council as simply “pastoral.” Yet, I am sympathetic with these people because of some of the unfortunate innovations that occurred after the council. So, for me at least, while I like the reverence and use of Latin in the TLM, I still prefer the Novus Ordo. It seems to me that there must be some place of meeting between the two, while being faithful to both the received liturgical tradition of the Church and the reforms called for by SC. What do you think?

Sincerely yours,
A Curious Catholic

***

Dear Sir:

I completely understand your predicament, as it parallels how I felt at a certain juncture. We are living in a confusing age, and a certain diversity of opinions is not only to be expected but should be tolerated, even (at times) welcomed, as we try to work things out as best we can, in the absence of strong and able leadership at the higher levels of the clergy.

This much seems beyond any doubt: the reforms to the liturgy from 1964 to 1970 went far beyond anything that the Council Fathers ever had in mind or anything that Sacrosanctum Concilium could possibly justify. This has been so thoroughly documented and demonstrated that it’s no longer an open question.

Those who defend Bugnini and the Consilium are forced, then, simply to say, “Well, that’s true, but they did the bold thing – the thing that had to be done – and the Pope recognized it and approved it.” On the other hand, those who question Bugnini’s and the Consilium’s principles will say, “We’re not surprised at the disaster that has befallen the Church, since you cannot break with the organic tradition of the liturgy and not expect to introduce massive amounts of chaos and malaise.”

None of this touches on the question of sacramental validity, which is to be presumed and can be readily defended on theological grounds; but certainly the question of the prudence of the changes and their defensibility is fair game. The attempt to shut down that conversation has failed, particularly when it became apparent that Joseph Ratzinger, one of the greatest theological luminaries of the twentieth century, and truly “the pope of the liturgical question,” was more than willing to participate in it himself.

Moreover, it really is the case that both John XXIII and Paul VI spoke of the Council as pastoral in nature and as an attempt to interpret and respond to modern man. In 1988, Cardinal Ratzinger said the following in an address to the bishops of Chile:

“The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular Council defined no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of “super-dogma” which takes away the importance of all the rest.”

Consequently, it was possible for the Council to get some things right and others not so right, since we are not dealing with unalterable dogmas that must be believed, or anathematized errors that must be shunned. The simple fact that the Council says “we should do X” doesn’t mean that, some decades later, we can’t legitimately argue that X wasn’t the best response, or that it wouldn’t make more sense to do Y or Z today. Indeed, this kind of situation has occurred many times in the history of the Church, which gives us other examples of councils (think of the Lateran councils) whose reforms didn’t always work or, in some cases, weren’t even attempted.

It seems to me that the Pray Tell perspective is generally untenable because it exalts progressivism at the expense of tradition, which is a fundamentally uncatholic way of thinking and judging. Rorate Caeli represents a consistent traditionalism that considers safe, sound, and sacred that which has always (or nearly always) been done by everyone (or nearly everyone) everywhere (or nearly everywhere). New Liturgical Movement is a meeting ground for various interests, announcements, and hypotheses, but always within a general commitment to the normativity of tradition. One will not stray far from the truth if one endeavors to remain faithful to the Magisterium while seeing tradition as a non-negotiable good that should always be privileged.

You raise an interesting question about Vatican II’s request for a reform of the liturgy. As you know, the Council insisted that no change be made unless the good of the Church certainly required it (SC 23). Far more changes were made than were ever certainly required, and the floodgates were opened for abuses. Even from a sociological-anthropological point of view, everyone knows that a gigantic and tradition-bound body can only absorb change slowly and stepwise, unless one wants to provoke rupture and confusion – which is exactly what happened. It could have been, and was, predicted ahead of time.

It seems clear that Benedict XVI’s intention was that the two “forms” would peacefully coexist for a long enough time to allow a restart of organic development, but I will admit that it’s difficult in practice to see how this would have actually taken place, and I am not aware of many traditionalists who want to see the old rite modified, for reasons explained in one of my recent books, Close the Workshop. In any case, it seems that “full, conscious, and active participation” was the primary reason given for reform, and I think it is not difficult to argue that the TLM in fact allows for a superior fulfillment of this desideratum.

Yours in Him,
Peter Kwasniewski

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

About four years ago I emailed you, out of the blue, with some questions about Vatican II, the old Mass and the new Mass. I have spent the past four years reading as much as I can while also observing and praying over my own experiences attending Mass. I have devoted considerable time reading authors that would typically be published on Pray Tell, and while I agree with some of what they argue, mainly the need of some reform, I simply cannot understand their unwillingness to see that a number of the experiments that occurred after the Council did not benefit the People of God. Examples would be the loss of chant, the abandonment of ad orientem, and the complete neglect of Latin.

When I attend the old rite, I fully appreciate the elements in it that are clearly lacking in the new rite. For me, there is a real attraction to it. However, here’s my one concern. I don’t want to be involved with any part of the Church that rejects the Second Vatican Council. While I think there is plenty of healthy dialogue that can go on concerning the implementation of Sacrosanctum Concillium, I am wary of those who reject elements of the Council. I firmly support the teachings on religious liberty, Nostra Aetate, Unitatis Redintegratio, and Lumen Gentium. My question to you is, can I embrace the pre-Conciliar Missal while also embracing the Vatican II in full?

God bless you,
A Curious Catholic

***

Dear Sir:

It’s very good to hear from you again. I no longer read Pray Tell, as I found that the perspective of Fr. Ruff in particular was exceedingly irresponsible. He speaks as if Vatican II amounted to a carte-blanche to overturn anything and everything in order to retool the Church for modern evangelization. Even if one might admire the apostolic motivation of this view, we can see that it has failed in so many ways.

Where there is flourishing new life in the Church, it has tended to align itself with so-called conservative or traditional constituencies. We can see this most obviously in the clergy, religious life, and marriages: young clergy tend, on the whole, to be interested in recovering traditions that were lost; religious orders that are growing or maintaining their numbers are the ones unembarrassed or even eager about Catholic tradition; and the marriages that are bringing new life into the Church and the world are those that are faithful to the indissoluble unitive and procreative finalities of marriage as a life-giving and life-sacrificing covenant.

You raise a difficult and challenging question – namely, about the doctrinal content and subsequent reception of the Second Vatican Council. Unavoidably, the Council is controversial, because, on the topics you mentioned (and others), it staked out positions that are not always obviously in harmony with preceding magisterial teaching. For example, there are clear tensions (which is not yet to say absolute contradictions) between Leo XIII’s encyclical Libertas Praestantissimum and Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae, or between Pius XI’s encyclical Mortalium Animos and Vatican II’s Unitatis Redintegratio, or between Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis and Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium.

Because the Council was intended as a pastoral response to modern times, as both John XXIII and Paul VI repeatedly said, it did not engage the highest level of magisterial authority – that is, it did not issue de fide pronouncements or anathemas on errors, which are considered infallible exercises of the Magisterium. At most, as the Nota praevia indicates, it intended to restate teachings already known to be true from their presence in the doctrinal heritage of the Church.

The conciliar documents were presented as a restatement of the Catholic Faith in modern language, and to that extent, they may be responsibly criticized, although the Council’s validity as an ecclesiastical gathering cannot be disputed, nor can the documents be dismissed out of hand. They must not be placed on an untouchable pedestal. Indeed, there is a great irony (as again Ratzinger pointed out) in the fact that the so-called “progressives” feel free to dispute and dismiss the more obviously authoritative canons and decrees of the Council of Trent, where we find the words de fide and anathema on practically every page, while they pillory anyone who so much as questions the prudence or adequacy of any formulation in Vatican II. Surely there is here a strange inversion and confusion.

Thus, everything depends on what is meant by “embracing Vatican II in full.” Whatever is clearly in line with the perennial Magisterium we should embrace; anything that seems in tension with it we may accept on condition that it be in harmony (which we may or may not be able to see ourselves); and we may suspend assent to false interpretations or extrapolations that have caused great harm to the Mystical Body of Christ. What I have just summarized is the view of Bishop Athanasius Schneider, such as can be found in his book Christus Vincit: Christ’s Triumph Over the Darkness of the Age, which I highly recommend for its clarity and serene common sense.

We must also be prepared to acknowledge that the state of the world today, sixty years after the close of the Council, is vastly different than it was back then, and that the burning issues that animated the prelates of the 1960s are no longer ours; moreover, that certain solutions, such as the recovery of tradition, are proving to be more effective in reaching, converting, and nourishing postmodern man than any of the programs aimed at “modern man” as conceived circa 1970. Thus, it may also simply be the case that Vatican II, whatever its status might be, has already simply ceased to be of much relevance, and therefore is no longer worth all the anguish and laborious exegesis it once occasioned.

It seems to me that the sooner bishops and cardinals recognize this dramatic shift, the sooner they can respond to the actual needs and desires of the People of God, and hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches today.

Yours in Christ,

Dr. Kwasniewski

Why Louis Bouyer Is Delightful and Frustrating to Read

One experience I think many of us have had with liturgical authors who wrote prior to the Council and/or the imposition of the Novus Ordo is that we find in their works so many wonderful insights, mingled with passages of excruciating naivete, baffling optimism about the possibilities of reform-in-continuity, strange flights of reformatory fancy, embarrassingly erroneous theories (such as “the canon of Hippolytus” and “early Christian clergy celebrated versus populum”), and the like. It can feel a bit schizophrenic to go from a glowing paragraph on the glories of tradition to another paragraph about how this and that have to be rethought and reworked. One suffers from intellectual whiplash.

This experienced plays itself out with a wide variety of authors: Romano Guardini, Pius Parsch, Ildefonso Schuster, Joseph Jungmann, Joseph Ratzinger, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, A.-M. Roguet, J.D. Chrichton, and others less famous. But the whiplash author par excellence must surely be Louis Bouyer—a theologian who, let’s say on page 35, was capable of dismissing as buffoons the squadrons of tinkering liturgists, and then on page 37 of declaring that Baroque excrescences had to be purged from the liturgy (presumably, by specialists like himself). His soaring lyricism about traditional aspects of the liturgy is matched only by his acerbic criticism of just about everything to do with the concrete liturgical life of the preconciliar era.

A good example of the mingling of true, dubious, and erroneous may be found in his important 1963 work Rite and Man, recently republished by Cluny Media. In what follows, I will first present an overview of major themes, then look at Bouyer’s take-away for the liturgical reform taking place at the very time he was writing, and lastly, discuss why Bouyer shows the fracture-lines he does.

What Is Required for Ritual Activity

Essentially, this work is an extended prelude to Guardini’s Sacred Signs that tries to explain the natural religious presuppositions of Catholic liturgy. Unless we deeply understand the roots of liturgy in human nature and Christian tradition, we are destined to misunderstand, misappropriate, and deform it even further.

Bouyer draws on recent discoveries of depth psychology and comparative religion to show how man, naturally religious, has expressed his religious experience in history. He shows empirically what we confess in faith: that the Christian religion is the fulfillment of all natural religion. He shows the origin of religious rituals, their relation to divine word, developing notions of sacred time and space, showing in each case how Christian rituals recapitulate and consummate these universal features of natural religion. Finally, he suggests how this study might inform the Liturgical Movement.

Primitive Rites and Natural Sacramentality. In its earliest stages, religious man felt himself surrounded by divine hierophanies: fire, mountains, woods, the rhythmic seasons. Each of these was a manifestation of divine power in which man participated out of reverence and fear. Thus, rites developed spontaneously as man’s attempt to participate in these divine revelations (e.g., fertility rites) and attain union with the divine powers. Each natural object had its hierophanic meaning (water, fire, earth, etc). Men understood these rites to be somehow divinely instituted—actions of the gods in which man was privileged to participate. 
 

Rite and Divine Word. These rites naturally gained expression in priestly prayers and in myths. Myths exist to justify the divine institution of primitive rites—this is a fascinating point: rites actually precede myths and give rise to them, but, at the same, thereby dangerously objectify them. Priestly prayers, too, though necessary for human participation in the ritual, can devolve into mere magic: a human arrogance that believes a set rite or prayer in a sacred language may obligate the deity. One may think of the Carmina Saliaria, the ossified antique Latin prayers used in religious rites even in the Late Republic: no one understood them anymore, but their supposed magical powers made them last.

Thus, the natural relationship between rite and divine word is essential to the survival of genuine cultus. The rite is established by divine word, because it is divine action. Only when clothed in the living divine word can the rite be what it really is: the gratuitous re-enactment for us by God of a divine action. If the divine word does not constitute the rite, then the rite devolves into magic: a collection of formulae and gestures whose validity binds the divine agent to confer certain boons. The Bible makes copious protest against such magic-making, when it insists on the radically conditional presence of God among His people. The sense of divine theophany is lost, and the rites become a mere instrument—a work of human hands.

Here is a marvelous passage that makes for painful reading when we think about the liturgical reform and the extent to which it falls afoul of the fundamental law Bouyer discerned:

This is why at all times and in all places rites are considered to be the work of the gods. The men who celebrate these rites would not celebrate them as they do if they thought that they were themselves their authors. And, in fact, the rites soon cease to be observed when men get the idea that they were instituted by other men before them…. Far from being an exception to this rule, Christianity is a transcendent realization of it…. Where this conviction fails or becomes obscured, the sacraments are emptied of their substance, just as in any case where rites come to be regarded as simple human actions, as pious means of teaching the people invented by theologians. In such a hypothesis, the theologians themselves have no need of these rites since they are supposed to have already been in substantial possession of the religion itself and to have later created the rites as a means of transmitting it to the people…. This aspect of the matter should be pointed up in more detail since it is so fundamental that if sight of it is once lost, the very possibility of a substantially religious ritual is also lost. (p. 69)

Bouyer also tarries for two chapters on the nature of sacred space and sacred time. He concludes by drawing several practical applications for the liturgical movement.

Applications to Liturgical Reform

First, he maintains that a sense of natural religion must be restored. This is where one feels the kinship with Guardini the most: we must “not attempt to rationalize [liturgy], to empty it not only of its mystery but also of its expressions that are not strictly rational. They should, on the contrary, seize again upon the chords in the heart of modern man which respond to these eternal expressions in order to restore to them their maximum efficacy. At the same time, we must do everything in our power to revive modern man’s atrophied faculties…and to bring back to our contemporaries a religious culture….,” that is, one rooted in the natural sacramentality of the world. Otherwise, there is no hope for man to live the liturgy.

A photo I took in Wyoming years ago at a ranch

This point has major implications in all kinds of spheres: family life, parish life, education. For example, ideally, schools should educate in natural religion, in two phases: first, students should be immersed in literature and poetry that fascinate with their beauty and indeed their superintelligibility, which escapes what the rational mind immediately grasps; then, they should be immersed in the wilderness, which will create a great void of silence and a sense of grandeur. (It could go in the other order, too; indeed, best of all would be some alternation between poetry and the wilderness.) With these experiences in place, the traditional liturgy is capable of capturing the soul with its beauty, transcendence, seriousness, and holiness. This is the process all students of the college should go through, because it is the true end of a liberal education: being truly free to worship God as He planned. Everything falls into line behind this supreme final goal!

Second, we should restore the primacy of the divine word. In Bouyer’s view, current liturgical practice—when the congregation stands silently by, either subjected to rationalistic commentaries on the sacred action or devoutly praying their private devotions—is a clear devolution into the sort of white magic that, according to his historical analysis, is an ever recurring danger in established rites when the ceremony is seen as a formulaic means of binding the divinity’s power. The Divine Word in the Eucharist is made present through the divine words of consecration as a consummation of the divine words of Scripture. Thus, according to Bouyer, the faithful should hear the Scripture (and much of the Canon) proclaimed in the vernacular, so that the liturgy is sufficiently manifest as divine word, rather than seeming to be a distant apotropaic relic.

Here, of course, is where red flags should be popping up. It seems like Bouyer, though he cites the dogma of ex opere operato efficacity, does not fully appreciate the objectivity of it; on his own account it might be criticized as magic (a description Sebastian Morello would take as a compliment). Bouyer is right to take a dim view of a liturgical minimalism content with validity and rubrical correctness, but surely there is quite a bit of terrain lying between magical thinking and the view that immediate verbal comprehension is the only way to see the liturgy as God speaking to us and accomplishing His salvation.

Third, purging the rites of “dramatic” substitutes for living rites clothed in the divine word. He is reticent about giving particulars in this book, but elsewhere he complains about certain elements of pomp and circumstance, the accumulation and duplication of ceremonial gestures that could seem fussy or superfluous, the importation of allegories, and other elements that seem to belong to a staged religious drama. This emphasis on “the word” as the be-all and end-all might prompt one to wonder if the old Protestant pastor in Bouyer has not quite let go of his grip.

Fourth, Bouyer approves of a certain adaptation of liturgy to modern man. At the same time, he explicitly condemns rationalizing the liturgy, turning altars around (!), etc. But he remains vague. What does he mean that the liturgy must be “adapted to modern man with his technical and rational outlook”? Is he too confident about the work specialists can do? How exactly is a technical and rational outlook compatible with the wellsprings of natural religion he so eloquently canvased? How is it compatible with spiritual perception of the divine word that brings Christian man into being? One might think, rather, that the Church needs somehow to work against the technical and rational outlook in order to prevent it from undermining liturgy altogether.
 

Modernity does not seem especially conducive to liturgy.

An Insoluble Contradiction

Bouyer was very influential in his day, yet he expressed himself in ways that were easily misconstrued and exaggerated. He regretted all this later when it was much too late; he could have made his own the words of Joseph Ratzinger:

Anyone like myself, who was moved by this perception [viz., that liturgy is a living network of tradition that cannot be torn apart] in the time of the Liturgical Movement on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, can only stand, deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were concerned for.

Case in point: Bouyer generally criticizes liturgy from the late medieval period through the Baroque as “theatrical” and “courtly,” but doesn’t seem to recall that Scripture heavily uses the language of God as a King surrounded by His court (as I discuss here). He criticizes the Tridentine liturgy for being too privatized, ritualistic, and intellectual, but does not see that it connected people consistently with the numinous, with the real presence of our Lord, and spoke to their souls—the souls of very common people, of farmers, artisans, laborers, as well as the educated and sophisticated. That is, he was overlooking strengths that are obvious to us in retrospect, now that a banal fabrication has been substituted in its place. Again, he lamented the rationalization and verbalization of the Mass, but all too late.

It seems to me that Bouyer, like Guardini, was trapped in an insoluble contradiction. For them, religion begins in something primeval, natural, essential, vital; and yet modern man is trapped in technology, subjectivism, egoism, calculative reason, and is cut off from his natural roots. So how do we build a bridge? Well, we can either try to awaken man to what is natural and primordial, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, or we can adapt and modify liturgy to his peculiar condition in an effort to educate him “as he is” and “where he is.”

The problem is that doing the latter—judging and reworking the liturgy, in other words, in contrast to submitting to a liturgy handed down from tradition—puts man in the pseudo-divine position of fabricating rites, when this is contrary to the very notion of a rite; or, one might say it implicitly makes him a god, the measure of all things, even of the sacred. Hence it compounds his alienation from the divine and makes the overall situation even worse. In contrast, the principle of tradition—namely, that one should have immense respect for what is given as a result of long centuries of organic development—has at least the merit of taking a man out of himself, out of his age and its limitations, and connecting him with, or at least confronting him to, something greater, deeper, broader, other than himself and his age.

Bouyer, it seems to me, is caught on the horns of this dilemma, which is why he will say in one chapter the sort of things traditionalists say, and then in the next chapter, the sort of things Bugnini or Lercaro say. Ultimately, I do not think his liturgical theology is altogether coherent, and yet it is extremely thought-provoking. It exercised a seductive power over the minds of men who genuinely wanted the faithful to be enthusiastic participants in the Church’s liturgy. The irony is that, in the effort to move away from “magic” to “word,” we ended up with a Protestantized “liturgy of the word”—and here I include the Canon inasmuch as it is said aloud in the vernacular—that lacks the dimension of mystery at the heart of the authentic notion of the word: the mysterion, the secret both hidden and revealed. Thus, we departed not merely from the Tridentine heritage of the preceding four centuries, but from the most ancient heritage of the Fathers, who already speak of the liturgy as something fearful, awesome, tremendous (as verified in this article).

It is true that Bouyer considered the experts of his day to be well-qualified for the work of revising the liturgical books, but as John Pepino recounts in his superb article “Cassandra’s Curse: Louis Bouyer, the Liturgical Movement, and the Post-Conciliar Reform of the Mass” (Antiphon 18.3 [2014]: 254–300), already as early as the 1950s Bouyer was complaining about would-be reformers impatient to replace the genuine liturgy of the Church with a pastoral construction of utilitarian aims. Like many churchmen, I genuinely believe Bouyer did not think it was possible or conceivable that the liturgy could or would be jettisoned in the manner in which it actually was jettisoned. He would have instinctively viewed it as monolithic, permanent, dominant, almost immovable, so that the reformers would have functioned more like men who were simply cleaning off the old mosaics or repositioning the pillars—not removing or replacing them. When things turned out differently, he was among those most surprised at the wreckage.

It is fair to say that Guardini and Bouyer would have heartily approved of what students at Wyoming Catholic College are doing: climbing mountains, memorizing poems, and learning Latin as a spoken language, among other full-immersion activities. By taking seriously the senses, the imagination, the poetic, the literary, in confrontation with God’s First Book, their souls are opened to receive the powerful divine message of the sacred liturgy. Perhaps this is the principal reform that needs to take place: a reform of our minds and hearts, so that the revelation of God will not fall on deaf ears.

“Grillo’s Tradition resembles too much the Progress of the Marxian-Pragmatist rhetoric of yore”: Pietro de Marco Responds to Grillo, and Grillo Replies

The following article appeared first in Italian at Messa in Latino and is published here for the benefit of NLM readers. Pietro De Marco (b. Genoa, 1941) taught Sociology of Religion in the Faculty of Education at the University of Florence. He has taught Comparative Religious Systems in the Faculty of Political Science in Florence. A philosopher by training, under the guidance of Eugenio Garin, he worked on the history of the European intellectual field (Renaissance and nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and on ancient Jewish and Christian thought and medieval Islamic thought. He then conducted studies in church history and theology at the Institute for Religious Sciences in Bologna. He was editor of the Encyclopedia of Religions (Vallecchi) from 1969 to 1974 and collaborator of the Chair of Church History at the Faculty of Letters in Florence.

I have been asked to convey my opinion on the arguments with which Andrea Grillo responded to his interlocutor and somewhat mistreated readers of Messa in Latino. We have had a couple of confrontations with Andrea, over time, and that makes it easy for me, even in choosing the right tone. But it also makes clear my position, which I recall for those who have never read me: I do not intervene as a “traditionalist faithful to Rome,” as MiL legitimately expresses itself. Since I have been writing, and particularly, since I have felt it my duty to show disagreement with the communicative and governing acts of the reigning pontiff—I, who have always been pro-Roman!—I have spoken as a common christifidelis, endowed with some capacity for judgment, but first and foremost filled with concern for the Church, which since childhood, by God’s gift, I have truly felt to be my Mother.

I knew and shared, in the 1960s and 1970s, the conciliar reforming “point of view” and its radicalities. But, except perhaps for a very brief period, no one could convince me that much, if not all, of the past living human-divine history of the Catholic Church had been error or relative blindness or deviation. One failed to realize, as many still do not even now, that the possibility of thinking this way had already occurred, with all its consequences: it had been at the heart of the great Protestant crisis. The hermeneutic of rupture and restart from supposedly pure origins, proper to the Reformers, is not, cannot be, the Catholic one. Despite a certain theological greatness in the Reformed churches, which I know and recognize, the Reformation constitutes a paradigm of error already worked out in Christian history, all the more seriously in its “liberal” versions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I find it incredibly naive to retrace, with the blind tâtonnement of those seeking regenerations or rebirths, the dead-end roads already imagined or traveled by others.

I will not be kicked to the “right,” therefore, either my insignificant self or the theologians, clergy, intellectuals, and churches who in the world stand firmly in the center in opposing the destructive elites, to which unfortunately Grillo also belongs, who make use of a contradictory and disorienting pontificate, endowed with fixed personal ideas as much as an individual Christian can be in difficult decades, but not a pope. This premise was appropriate as a preliminary to all the remarks and boutades that Grillo reserves for “faithful traditionalists” but which want to hit very distant and lofty targets.

Marxian-Pragmatist Rhetoric

We see this immediately in what he argues in the first response. Having said that the “ritual parallelism” instituted by Benedict XVI’s Summorum pontificum had no theological foundation, Grillo asserts, with the drasticness of reformers who renounce all dialogical masquerade, that to be “faithful” one must acquire the ritual language communally established by Rome—in other words, the one established by the recent Traditionis custodes. Indeed, Tradition incorporates “a legitimate and unsurpassable progress, which is irreversible”; this would also be the meaning of the title of the motu proprio that seemed to many to be mocking.

But Grillo’s Tradition resembles too much the Progress of the Marxian-Pragmatist rhetoric of yore (its motion is unsurpassable, irreversible) to have anything to do with Christian traditiones, and with religious traditions in general. There is, strictly speaking, no progress in the Christian traditum (what is “dogmatic progress” I will not bother to remind Andrea), and nothing new is irreversible. It is curious that I have to remind someone of this who elsewhere would deny that Trent (and perhaps Chalcedon) were unsurpassable and irreversible moments of progress.

What does not hold up—and what I am sorry to see proposed instead as obvious—is that Traditionis custodes is deemed unsurpassable and irreversible, but not Summorum Pontificum. Yet neither document has more value than that of an act of government willed by the prudentia of the head of the Church. Instead, it will be a matter of debate which of the two prudentiae is to be recognized as more solicitous of the good of Christians.

About Summorum pontificum, Grillo and I publicly debated back in 2007, in Parma Cathedral, with Luise moderating. At that time I supported the following perspective, and I remain fully convinced of it:

The new “legitimization” of the Missale romanum [of 1962] decreed by SP brings Catholic life back to its essential nature as complexio. Catholic history “preceding” the Second Vatican Council is proposed as a vital horizon for the “spirit” of the Council itself and its realization—a “realization” that many extremisms have experienced instead as incompatible with the past. Thus the goal of “internal reconciliation within the bosom of the Church” becomes part of a broad medicinal intervention for the universal church…. The recovery of the Latin rite may, contrary to objections, act as a stabilizing paradigm for the fluctuating and impoverished modern-language liturgies. As Cardinal Lehmann said, the motu proprio is good reason to promote with new attention a worthy celebration of all Masses.

The misunderstanding of many bishops has moved politically against this stabilizing paradigm of the liturgy. I cannot help but add that the sensibilities and/or theories stated by Grillo stand against the perennial, ever-acting value of mystery-sacramentary ontology in the millennial life of the Church. I firmly think, against what Grillo derisively dismisses in his answer to the fifth question, that “what was sacred for past generations cannot but be sacred for us as well”; breaking with the Christian Sacred, with the sacramentaria, was the illusory and dramatic act of Calvinist Entzauberung. Here is not the place to argue this point, but having taught and worked in the sociology of religion for decades, I distinguish between the sensory variability (but not volatility) of the sacred and its ontological status. Grillo and I both admire Odo Casel, but we may not be reading the same author, so to speak.

Christological Void

Let us therefore not be fooled: the defense of postconciliar reforms is, for the leading liturgists, only political. Hostile to the Ratzingerian correction of 2007, they aimed and have aimed for decades to proceed (as soon as possible) much further subversively and authoritatively, toward an opposite atheological polarity: abolition of liturgical books, threshold situations, effervescence, theatricalizations, and ritual primitivisms. Grillo knows just what I am talking about. It is the desperate hope of the generative negation of the new or the authentic.

The common ecclesial life, even as it is not devoid of differences of opinion and practice, and the (mostly) wise governance of the bishops, have prevented this outcome, but liturgical celebrations in general have conflicted with common sense, have been lacking strong paradigms, and have shown frequent slips toward designification. These slippages have, moreover, a worrying de fide relevance—opening up a Christological void perceptible to anyone—that catechesis is incapable of correcting.

In this recent poverty of lived meanings, of fides quae and of fides qua, the “non-ordinary” form of worship and and its language bring back the certainty of an antiquitas of the Christian rite, of its originality in Christ, into which the present may profoundly and necessarily implant itself, maintaining continuity. Nothing nostalgic, then, about this, I would say to Grillo; rather, it’s a matter of fundamentals of the Faith.

Don’t Adopt Left-Wing Strategies

I turn to the next questions and answers. Grillo opposes to MiL’s emphases on the weight of the “traditional charism” in the church—the vitality of the families of traditionalists, their “una cum Papa” response to the famine of seminarians—a sort of disqualification, or condemnation of the theological, formative, pastoral paths of “traditionalism.” They are, he thinks, the “easy” solutions: they seek refuge in the normativity of the past, finally in “contrast to tradition” (in Grillo’s sense, of course) rather than in conformity to the present Church.

I leave to Andrea the responsibility and consequences of maintaining this certainty about the inconsistency of other fellow Catholics—especially if in his head he really does believe what he is saying, for that makes all the difference. Ridiculing one’s opponent creates illusory scenarios, soothing but incapable of diagnosis and prognosis. The world that he trivializes, even just the one that self-describes and self-limits as “traditional,” has much more reason and much more substance to it that he lets on. It is the Church; moreover, it occupies Catholic spaces abandoned by “reformers” and little frequented by the average christifidelis.

I pause on the answer to the fifth question, which I would summarize as follows: “Is it possible that a ritual form that has been normative for long centuries can no longer have a place, within the admittedly pluralistic framework of the universal Church? And why be afraid of the variety of charisms?” Indeed, this formulation has the weaknesses of a defensive tactic, as well as being imitative of the opposing reformist tactics of decades ago: it makes an argument from existing pluralism, an argument from diverse charisms, etc. Such a tactic may work with a benevolent interlocutor, who might then answer, “Sure, that’s fair, but…”

Personally, I would discourage the various “right-wing” critical constellations of today from using arguments that are already “left-wing.” First of all, arguments aimed at weakening the Primacy of the Bishop of Rome. In fact, “progressive” arguments are not neutral, they are inherently instrumental. They do not care about merit; they are technically revolutionary; they are, in short, catholically unusable. Thus, when Grillo uses rhetorical indignation, exclamation, or perhaps here, precisely apostrophé (“And you cannot use from the right the great Pauline ideas so shamelessly…to nurture a ‘top-down anarchy’...”), he perfectly evokes those decades gone by, not even too long ago, when this top-down anarchy was demanded of the pontiffs “from the left,” a “free for all” for theologians and local churches. The pontiffs rightly objected. “From the right,” nothing should be done that would lead to retracing à rébours that widespread and inauspicious strategy.

Reducing Tradition to a Dispensable “Covering”

A nod to the depositum fidei and its “coverings”: here is yet another deterrent argument in Andrea’s skillful tactics, for the history of Christian doctrines, lef to liberal historicism, shows how insidious is the criterion for differentiating between the covering and the authentic body or core. Theoretically inconsistent, I consider it; consequently, an unusable concept in serious discussion.

That Grillo then thinks that it is “nostalgia” that makes us protect the authentic body of fides quae so as not to dismiss it as a mere “variable” garment shows that we have put behind us the great and decisive dogmatic debate that has accompanied Christendom since the Tridentine age, up to and including the discussions of Vatican II. The rhetoric of “coverings” [namely, that we need to remove the useless externals] remained the preserve of the external pseudo-council, the journalists, and the battle theologians, of the intelligentia of yesterday and today.

It remains to comment on what Grillo ascribes, somewhat blindly (as in a fistfight) to Pope Benedict XVI. I have already spoken about “anarchy from above.” This involves a subversive intelligentia dictating to the ruler in order to allow him to survive. Quite otherwise was Benedict XVI’s intent, considering how much his solution was intended to reduce the structural disequilibrium of recent practices. That it may have been inadequate strategy and theology is an empirical judgment, but could we agree on the parameters to be used to judge it?

When Grillo and I worked together, each in his own trench, on Universal Church or Introverted Church: A Debate on the Motu Proprio ‘Summorum Pontificum’ , the liturgical question was in the hearts of many, and in the heart of the pontiff. By the time St. Paul’s Editions published the volume in 2013, no one was interested—first and foremost in Rome. Sic transit.

But the subsistence, the bare subsistence, of the traditional liturgy—that which Andrea and other radical liturgist friends see as an unbearable stumbling block for the life of the Church (not only liturgically speaking), and which, by now, in contrast, I see as a cornerstone of a realized and lived paradigm of ancientness, placed there as an icon of the Church that cannot be renounced—is crucial as a concrete dialectic. That is, it counts as a dialectical negation of the fragile ecclesial presentism to which the Catholic Church seems reduced nowadays (and for whose gift we thank the Lord anyway), a negation that realizes a perennial ideal and reality of the Church. All in the synthesis of the Mystical Body.

Minutiae

A last thought. Concerning the “failure” of the liturgical reform, I agree with Grillo that the argument of numbers is weak. First, because correlations between church practices and numbers of practitioners are very difficult to obtain and to interpret; interpretation presupposes licit utterances of the if-then type that we lack. And then, as usual, the argument for the decline of practice has been contested by the most diverse, indeed opposing, factions for decades. Over the years I have formed my judgment rather in the experienced practice—mixed Vetus and Novus—of missalizing, listening to homilies, evaluating what is said as well as what can’t/won’t be said anymore, in observing the behaviors (within and outside the rite) of clergy and people.

I note, in closing, that Grillo’s final jab—“tradition is not past but the future”—characterizes well (I don’t know how willingly and consistently) an underlying philosophy of my liturgist friend, namely a Nietzsche-Bloch-style ontological and nihilistic utopianism, cultivated by many today, even among young philosophy undergraduates. This much can be said: it is certainly incompatible with the theology of salvation history, therefore with Christology also; and finally, with common sense.

* * *

Prof. Andrea Grillo’s Response

Dear Pietro,

Once again we are involved in a discussion. I read your article and, as always, I admire its tone and culture and always find that, even in the harshness of definitions, you never cease from being affectionate. While with Alcuin Reid we have so many times conducted a dialogue of the deaf—with the perception that, on the other side, there was a theological and liturgical simplism, nourished only by arrogance—with you I have always perceived not only the friendship that has bound us together for decades, even when we have argued most strongly, but fairness and mutual esteem. That is why we wrote together, in 2013, a book in which we constructed a small “medieval quaestio disputata,” with “videtur quod” and “sed contra.”

Even then, it seemed to me that you had, of liturgists, a vision only political and only fixed on the ’68 revolution. This, I pointed out to you even then, is not a good way to understand liturgists. For your approach has in common, with Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, the demonization of the “enemy,” which does not bear good fruit in the reconstruction of either the Liturgical Movement or the Liturgical Reform.

Those who are seriously concerned with liturgy do not instrumentalize the rites politically, but want to restore to the rites their authority, which cannot in any way be reduced to “politics,” as traditionalism and progressivism do. You are always tempted to move me to a “progressive” extreme and to confuse me with a “Marxist,” while I am simply a theologian who tries to give everything its value, and who cannot remain silent in the face of a pope’s attempt to make an ecumenical Council incidental. The fact that I take Vatican II just as seriously as I do the Council of Trent—which you know how much I appreciate for its reforming intent—cannot be read as “Marxism,” but as an opening of the Church to the future.

Connecting tradition to the future is the oldest sense of paradosis and traditio, for otherwise we make fidelity to the Lord Jesus a contradiction to the gift of the Holy Spirit. Compared to the book, today we argue in reverse: then Summorum Pontificum was in force, today Traditionis Custodes is in force. Back then, I already argued that SP had no theological foundation: the idea of two parallel “leges orandi” was and remains a true theological “monstrum.” That it was the “theologian pope” who conceived it is aggravating. In regard to the liturgy, as we know well, not only evidence, but feelings, affiliations, and attachments that are difficult to rationalize are triggered.

Today, thanks to Francis—against whom you repeatedly lash out; we have discussed this over the years—we have gained a more traditional point of view. It is curious that it was Benedict XVI who gave in to the postmodern spirit of anarchy, while it is Francis who reestablishes the conditions of an ecclesial fidelity. It would be a mistake for you to go along (not with words, but in feeling) with the idea that Benedict was a liberal pontiff, while Francis would be a Stalinist. Instead, I think that the former succumbed to the ideological reading of the Council that threatened the Council Fathers (including him), while the latter is just a “son of the Council” and enjoys this primarily biographical condition. I see more “political” conditioning in the former than in the latter and believe that an “ecclesia universa” cannot be an “ecclesia introversa.”

I am grateful for your reply and consider even this small exchange a sign of friendship.

Andrea Grillo

(source in Italian)

Cardinal Sarah on Joseph Ratzinger’s Liturgical Theology and Francis’ Departure from It

New Liturgical Movement has many times featured the name and writings of Cardinal Robert Sarah, whom Benedict XVI chose to be his close collaborator in the sacred liturgy, and who was sidelined during the early years of the present pontificate.

Cardinal Sarah has never ceased to bear clear witness to the priority of the liturgy in the life of the Church, and of the dire need for a return to sane liturgical praxis after the maelstrom of the Council. He has spoken with particular clarity since the release of Traditionis Custodes.

It is therefore of considerable interest to note that he has published a major article in the journal Communio entitled “The Inexhaustible Reality: Joseph Ratzinger and the Sacred Liturgy” (vol. 49, Winter 2022), which has been made available for free by the publication (here). Although the entire article is worth a read, I would like to draw particular attention to the following passages.

On pp. 639-40:

One of the “unnoticed” but important contributions of [Joseph Ratzinger’s] The Spirit of the Liturgy is its reflection on authority—specifically papal authority—and the sacred liturgy. Noting that the Western liturgy is something that (borrowing the words of J. A. Jungmann, SJ) “has come to be,” that is “an organic growth,” not “a specially contrived production,” “something organic that grows and whose laws of growth determine the possibilities of further development,” Cardinal Ratzinger observes that in modern times “the more vigorously the [Petrine] primacy was displayed, the more the question came up about the extent and limits of this authority, which of course had never been considered. After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an Ecumenical Council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the public consciousness of the West. In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope’s authority is bound to the Tradition of faith, and that also applies to the liturgy. It is not 'manufactured' by the authorities. Even the pope can only be a humble servant of its lawful development and abiding integrity and identity. . . . The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition.” [1]

In this assertion of the objectivity of the sacred liturgy in its developed ritual forms, and of the duty of the highest authority in the Church to respect this reality, [2] Cardinal Ratzinger laid the theological foundations for the consideration of a reform of the liturgical reform, or even for legitimately leaving aside the reformed rites in favor of their predecessors. Uncritical obedience to papal authority—already something long since abandoned in many places, but clung to by others as the guarantee of orthodoxy in turbulent times—was dealt a blow, at least with respect to the liturgical reform, by one of the highest ranking prelates in the Church (albeit writing in a private capacity).

Again, on pp. 643-45:

Pope Benedict’s most famous act of liturgical governance was, of course, his motu proprio Summorum pontificum (2007), “On the Use of the Roman Liturgy Prior to the Reform of 1970,” establishing that the older liturgical rites were “never abrogated” (1) and could therefore be freely used, and indeed that the requests of groups of the faithful for their celebration must be accepted. Bishops could no longer a priori exclude their celebration. Pope Benedict’s regulation of these principles was permissive, marking a sharp change to the parsimonious approach of too many bishops up to that point.

His accompanying “Letter to the Bishops on the Occasion of the Publication of the Apostolic Letter ‘Motu Proprio Data’ Summorum Pontificum on the Use of the Roman Liturgy Prior to the Reform of 1970” of the same date, dealt deftly with the loud opposition that this measure had attracted even before it appeared; he noted the pastoral reality that “young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the mystery of the most holy Eucharist, particularly suited to them” [3], and appealed to the bishops: “Let us generously open our hearts and make room for everything that the faith itself allows.” The pope stated clearly,

“In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.”

Again, for those who knew the liturgical thought of Joseph Ratzinger, this stance is no surprise. His openness to the realities concerned—historical, theological, and pastoral—is clear. But for those who shared neither his vision nor his openness, these were retrograde acts calling into question the Second Vatican Council and its liturgical reform.

The argument, such as it was, was won over time by what has come to be known as “the liturgical peace of Benedict XVI,” wherein the “liturgy wars” of previous decades which had established “old rite” and “new rite” factions subsided and, certainly thanks to many of the younger generation of bishops, gave way to a peaceful coexistence, tolerance, and even a degree of mutual enrichment between the liturgical forms that lasted well beyond the end of his pontificate, repairing the unity of the Church to some extent and enhancing it while respecting legitimate differences of expression within the Church of God.

It is profoundly to be regretted that the motu proprio Traditionis custodes (July 16, 2021) and the related Responsa ad dubia (December 4, 2021), perceived as acts of liturgical aggression by many, seem to have damaged this peace and may even pose a threat to the Church’s unity. If there is a revival of the postconciliar “liturgy wars,” or if people simply go elsewhere to find the older liturgy, these measures will have backfired badly. It is too early to make a thorough assessment of the motivations behind them, or of their ultimate impact, but it is nevertheless difficult to conclude that Pope Benedict XVI was wrong in asserting that the older liturgical forms “cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful,” particularly when their unfettered celebration has manifestly brought forth good fruits.

Notes (from the original Communio article)

[1] Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 165–66. As Pope Benedict XVI, he would develop this theme with respect to the wider Petrine ministry in his homily on the occasion of taking possession of the Chair of the Bishop of Rome at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, May 7, 2005.

[2] A reality taught by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1124–25.

[3] Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops on the Occasion of the Publication of the Apostolic Letter “Motu Proprio Data” Summorum Pontificum on the Use of the Roman Liturgy Prior to the Reform of 1970 (Vatican City, 7 July 2007). I also can testify to this reality from many encounters with young people―lay men and women, religious, seminarians, and priests―whose vocations in the world either to Christian marriage or to the religious or the apostolic life are grounded in and nourished by the older liturgical forms in a truly life-giving way. In this respect, I can never forget my visit to the Paris-Chartres Pentecost pilgrimage in 2018: what hope these young people give to the Church of today and of the future!
Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s Substack “Tradition & Sanity”; personal site; composer site; publishing house Os Justi Press and YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.

What Opponents of Liturgical Peace Were Saying in 2017 about “Summorum Pontificum”

I think it would be fair to say that nearly everyone was blindsided by the sweeping rupture codified in the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, and the harsh injustice of its accompanying letter. At the same time, if we comb through the literature concerned with the liturgical situation in the Church from the period of 2013 onward, we can find many indications of the kind of thinking that would eventually prevail in the papal court.

An example recently came to my attention: a piece by Romano Libero published on July 20, 2017, in the online magazine Golias (source in French). It is translated below. I believe it is helpful to see the rancor, the seething wrath against Ratzinger and his liturgical theology, and really, against the whole history and heritage of the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II, that animates his opponents, so that we will resist the temptation of assuming good will and common principles.

This being the week of the 16th anniversary of the epoch-shifting motu proprio Summorum Pontificum going into effect NLM is pleased to share a translation of a highly revealing anti-SP article. There is a hopeful message here ultimately: the author’s conclusion has proved quite correct. SP was, indeed, only the beginning.

Mass in Latin: The Great Illusion
Romano Libero
Golias
July 20, 2017

Summorum Pontificum, Benedict XVI’s motu proprio liberalizing the Pius V Mass (it became the “extraordinary form” of the Latin rite, alongside the conciliar “ordinary” rite of Paul VI), is—ten years on—a success, if the Catholic press is to be believed.

In France, for example, before the German pope’s decision, one hundred and twenty Tridentine Masses were celebrated every week; in 2017, we’re at 221. Bravo! Thank you, Papa Ratzinger! Especially since so many young people take part, sometimes coming from afar to admire the back of the priest reciting the Institution and the Consecration in a low voice, fingers held together, with a deacon and subdeacon assisting him, not to mention the male altar boys in red cassocks. Incense serves as a reminder that we are entering the mystery; magic is not far away, the sacred is everywhere! It’s no longer a question of celebrating Mass but of attending it, as when you go to the cinema, the theater, or a concert to enjoy a fine show. It’s a feast for the eyes and ears, a “divine theater” (see Ph. Martin, Le théâtre divin: Une histoire de la messe XVIe-XXe siècles, Paris: CNRS Editions, 2010).

At the time, Benedict XVI wanted to take the wind out of the sails of the integrists. The aim was to bring the Mass out of the never-ending discussions between Rome and the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) founded by Archbishop Lefebvre, even after the schism provoked by the latter in 1988 with the ordination of four bishops without papal mandate. In this way, the now-pope-emeritus thought that theological differences (including the acceptance of Vatican II) would be refocused. Rightly so, but it was a Pyrrhic victory.

The motu proprio caused a great deal of damage: in dioceses, parishes, seminaries... It was now necessary to make room not only for the usus antiquior but also for the ideology that goes with it: that of the extreme Catholic right, which saw in this decision a validation of its theses. Summorum Pontificum accentuated the desertion of conciliar Christians, for whom it was clear that the Church had not understood anything, that it was better to take certain side-roads to free themselves from this numbed institution, terrified of a future it did not understand (this has not changed), and which had become inattentive to the signs of the times. All that the motu proprio did was to reunite hitherto isolated traditionalist Christians, who sometimes traveled dozens or even hundreds of kilometers to “attend” the Tridentine Mass. “They set out with five hundred, but by a swift reinforcement, they saw themselves with five thousand by the time they reached port…”

Today, these good people are delighted to see young seminarians and lay people taking the path of traditionalism, which has an Answer for Everything and, above all, positions itself against the world. For these young people who have no reference points (or difficulties with their own personalities), the rubricated, codified Mass, in which the priest acts “in the place of Christ” with that feeling of omnipotence, is a reassuring framework that helps to heal their suffering egos. These chosen ones are set apart, chosen to serve—hence the cassock (or even the biretta, here and there), the defense of reactionary theses, as the distinctive signs that condition encounters with others.

In fact, it’s not for nothing that the number of diocesan priests is falling while the number of priests from these communities is rising: only integrists are left to choose the presbyteral path (hardly an exaggeration). Those who have opted for the service of a diocesan territory have conditioned their commitment to the traddy agenda (just look at the various diocesan websites for the latest ordinations) and are struggling with the pastoral orientations defined by the bishops, themselves overwhelmed by this romantic surge in the Church.

But this allowed them to delude themselves. For the appeal to traddy communities—such as the Community of Saint-Martin, the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter (FSSP), and the Institute of the Good Shepherd (IBP), to name but the most famous—enabled them to postpone the inevitable debates on the presbyteral ministry, the formation and place of lay people, the place and role of women in the Church… It’s a short-term vision that—if they don’t change their tune—runs the risk of isolating the Church even further on major issues, notably political and societal ones.

Francis would like to abolish this motu proprio, recognizing the SSPX as the only body authorized (in the more or less long term) to celebrate the ancient rite within the framework of a personal prelature. No other action would be taken; the various pronouncements of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) disconcert even the Society, and the dismissal of the intractable Cardinal Müller, replaced by the Jesuit Archbishop Ladaria Ferrer, does not reassure the Lefebvrists, for whom all this is a change in continuity.

Be that as it may, repealed or not, Summorum Pontificum will have instilled a vivid venom into the veins of the Church that never ceases to poison it. This motu proprio was not just a papal decree, it was also the legitimization of the most arcane ideas to which Vatican II had—we thought—definitively turned its back. Ten years on, Summorum Pontificum has solved nothing; on the contrary, it has exacerbated difficulties, created disorder and division; and what’s worse, it’s only the beginning!

(Join Dr. Kwasniewski at his Substack “Tradition & Sanity.” Visit his personal site and composer site, his publishing house Os Justi Press, and his YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.)

Translation of Ratzinger’s Preface to the French Edition of Klaus Gamber

One often comes across references to Cardinal Ratzinger’s famous preface to the French edition of Klaus Gamber’s The Reform of the Roman Rite (La Réforme liturgique en question, éd. Le Barroux: Sainte-Madeleine, 1992). Yet for some reason, this preface was not included in the English edition published by Roman Catholic Books, and it does not appear to be available in English on the internet. When I discovered this lacuna, I decided to search for the French preface (which I found here and checked against a scan of the book) and prepare a translation for NLM. It may be considered an addendum to the “best quotes on liturgy” from Ratzinger/Benedict XVI that were published here on January 2.

Klaus Gamber: The Fearlessness of a True Witness

by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

A young priest recently said to me: “Today we need a new liturgical movement.” This was the expression of a concern which, in our day, only the willfully superficial could dismiss.

What mattered to this priest was not to conquer new and daring freedoms: what freedom have we not already arrogated to ourselves? He felt that we needed a new beginning from within the liturgy, as the liturgical movement had wanted when it was at the height of its true nature, when it was not a matter of fabricating texts, inventing actions and forms, but of rediscovering the living center, of penetrating the very fabric of the liturgy, so that the fulfillment of the liturgy would come from its very substance.

The liturgical reform, in its concrete realization, has moved ever further away from this origin. The result has not been a revival but a devastation. On the one hand, we have a liturgy that has degenerated into a show, in which people try to make religion interesting by means of fashionable nonsense and enticing moral maxims, with momentary success in the group of liturgical fabricators, and an attitude of retreat all the more pronounced among those who seek in the liturgy not a spiritual showmaster, but an encounter with the living God before whom all “doing” becomes insignificant; for only this encounter can make us reach the true riches of being. On the other hand, there is the conservation of ritual forms whose greatness is always impressive, but which, pushed to the extreme, manifests an obstinate isolation and finally leaves only sadness.

Certainly, between the two there remain all those priests and their parishioners who celebrate the new liturgy with respect and solemnity; but they are called into question by the contradiction between the two extremes, and the lack of internal unity in the Church finally makes their fidelity seem (wrongly for many of them) to be merely a personal variety of neo-conservatism. Because this is so, a new spiritual impulse is needed to make the liturgy once again a communal activity of the Church for us and to remove it from the arbitrariness of parish priests and their liturgy committees.

One cannot “manufacture” a liturgical movement of this kind — any more than one can “manufacture” something living — but one can contribute to its development by striving to assimilate the spirit of the liturgy anew and by publicly defending what one has thus received. This new beginning needs “fathers” who are models and who do not merely suggest the way forward. Those who are looking for such “fathers” today will inevitably meet the person of Mons. Klaus Gamber, who was unfortunately taken from us too soon, but who perhaps, precisely by leaving us, has become truly present to us in all the strength of the perspectives he opened up for us. Precisely because in leaving us he escaped the quarrel of the parties, he could, in this hour of distress, become the “father” of a new beginning.

Gamber carried with all his heart the hope of the old liturgical movement. Perhaps because he came from a foreign school, he remained an outsider on the German scene, where he was not really accepted; even recently a dissertation ran into serious difficulties because the young researcher had dared to quote Gamber too extensively and with too much benevolence. But perhaps this sidelining was providential, because it forced Gamber to go his own way and spared him the burden of conformity.

It is difficult to express in a few words exactly what, in the liturgists’ quarrel, is essential and what is not. Perhaps the following indication might be helpful. J. A. Jungmann, one of the truly great liturgists of our century, defined liturgy in his time, as it was understood in the West, especially through historical research, as a “liturgy of development”; probably also in contrast to the Eastern notion which does not see in liturgy a process of historical becoming and growth but only the reflection of the eternal liturgy, whose light, through the sacred unfolding, illuminates our changing time with its unchanging beauty and grandeur. Both conceptions are legitimate and are not irreconcilable.

What happened after the Council is quite different: instead of a liturgy that is the fruit of a continuous development, a fabricated liturgy has been put in place. They left the living process of growth and becoming and entered into the manufacturing process. We no longer wanted to continue the organic becoming and maturation of a living thing that lives through the centuries, and we replaced it — in the manner of technical production — by a fabrication, a banal product of the moment.

Gamber, with the vigilance of an authentic seer and the fearlessness of a true witness, opposed this falsification and tirelessly taught us the living fullness of a true liturgy, thanks to his incredibly rich knowledge of the sources. As a man who knew and loved history, he showed us the multiple forms of the development and the path of the liturgy; as a man who saw history from within, he saw in this development and the fruit of this development the intangible reflection of the eternal liturgy, which is not an object of our making, but which can continue to mature and blossom marvelously, if we unite ourselves intimately to its mystery. The death of this eminent man and priest should stimulate us; his work may help us to gain new momentum.

A Follow-up on Vocal Prayer and Mental Prayer: Wisdom from Benedict XVI

As we approach the one month anniversary of the death of Joseph Ratzinger, I wish to share with NLM readers one of my favorite parts of the ever-quotable Jesus of Nazareth series — namely, the place in volume 1, From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, where Ratzinger is commenting on the Our Father.

He has what strikes me as a perfectly balanced understanding of the relationship of vocal prayer to higher forms of prayer: he sees how they are intrinsically and necessarily connected, so that the lower is not reduced to a ladder to be kicked away. Since my own article “The Denigration of Vocal Prayer in the Name of ‘Mental Prayer’: A Recipe for Disaster” was misunderstood by some as a denigration of mental prayer (!), I thought it would be worthwhile to share the wisdom of Benedict XVI on the matter. After the selection from this book, I have included a pertinent passage from Spe Salvi.

* * *

This is what prayer really is — being in silent inward communion with God. It requires nourishment, and that is why we need articulated prayer in words, images, or thoughts.

The more God is present in us, the more we will really be able to be present to him when we utter the words of our prayers. But the converse is also true: Praying actualizes and deepens our communion of being with God. Our praying can and should arise above all from our heart, from our needs, our hopes, our joys, our sufferings, from our shame over sin, from our gratitude for the good. It can and should be a wholly personal prayer.

But we also constantly need to make use of those prayers that express in words the encounter with God experienced both by the Church as a whole and by individual members of the Church. For without these aids to prayer, our own praying and our image of God become subjective and end up reflecting ourselves more than the living God. In the formulaic prayers that arose first from the faith of Israel and then from the faith of praying members of the Church, we get to know God and ourselves as well. They are a “school of prayer” that transforms and opens up our life.

In his rule, St Benedict coined the formula Mens nostra concordet voci nostrae — our mind must be in accord with our voice (Rule 19,7). Normally, thought precedes word; it seeks and formulates the word. But praying the Psalms and liturgical prayer in general is exactly the other way round: The word, the voice, goes ahead of us, and our mind must adapt to it. For on our own we human beings do not “know how to pray as we ought” (Rom 8:26)–we are too far removed from God, he is too mysterious and too great for us. And so God has come to our aid: He himself provides the words of our prayer and teaches us to pray. Through the prayers that come from him, he enables us to set out toward him; by praying together with the brothers and sisters he has given us, we gradually come to know him and draw closer to him.

In St Benedict’s writings, the phrase cited just now refers directly to the Psalms, the great prayer book of the People of God of the Old and New Covenant. The Psalms are words that the Holy Spirit has given to men; they are God’s Spirit become word. We thus pray “in the Spirit” with the Holy Spirit.

This applies even more, of course, to the Our Father. When we pray the Our Father, we are praying to God with words given by God, as St Cyprian says. And he adds that when we pray the Our Father, Jesus’ promise regarding the true worshipers, those who adore the Father “in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:23) is fulfilled in us. Christ, who is the truth, has given us these words, and in them he gives us the Holy Spirit.

This also reveals something of the specificity of Christian mysticism. It is not in the first instance immersion in the depths of oneself, but encounter with the Spirit of God in the word that goes ahead of us. It is encounter with the Son and the Holy Spirit and thus a becoming-one with the living God who is always both in us and above us. […]

The fact that Luke places the Our Father in the context of Jesus’ own praying is therefore significant. Jesus thereby involves us in his own prayer; he leads us into the interior dialogue of triune love; he draws our human hardships deep into God’s heart, as it were.

This also means, however, that the words of the Our Father are signposts to interior prayer, they provide a basic direction for our being, and they aim to configure us to the image of the Son. The meaning of the Our Father goes much futher than the mere provision of a prayer text. It aims to form our being, to train us in the inner attitude of Jesus (cf. Phil 2:5).

This has two different implications for our interpretation of the Our Father. First of all, it is important to listen as accurately as possible to Jesus’ words as transmitted to us in Scripture. We must strive to recognize the thoughts Jesus wished to pass on to us in these words. But we must also keep in mind that the Our Father originates from his own praying, from the Son’s dialogue with the Father. This means that it reaches down into depths far beyond the words. It embraces the whole compass of man’s being in all ages and can therefore never be fully fathomed by a purely historical exegesis, however important this may be.

The great men and women of prayer throughout the centuries were privileged to receive an interior union with the Lord that enabled them to descend into the depths beyond the word. They are therefore able to unlock for us the hidden treasures of prayer. And we may be sure that each of us, along with our totally personal relationship with God, is received into, and sheltered within, this prayer. Again and again, each one of us with his mens, his own spirit, must go out to meet, open himself to, and submit to the guidance of the vox, the word that comes to us from the Son. In this way his own heart will be opened, and each individual will learn the particular way in which the Lord wants to pray with him. [1]

* * *

For prayer to develop this power of purification, it must on the one hand be something very personal, an encounter between my intimate self and God, the living God. On the other hand it must be constantly guided and enlightened by the great prayers of the Church and of the saints, by liturgical prayer, in which the Lord teaches us again and again how to pray properly.

Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, in his book of spiritual exercises, tells us that during his life there were long periods when he was unable to pray and that he would hold fast to the texts of the Church's prayer: the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the prayers of the liturgy.

Praying must always involve this intermingling of public and personal prayer. This is how we can speak to God and how God speaks to us. [2]


NOTES

[1] pp 130-33 in Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 1
[2] Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi, n. 34

Minutes from the Commission of Cardinals That Advised John Paul II to Lift Restrictions on the Old Missal

Most people who have read about the liturgical reform and the revival of the traditional Roman Rite have stumbled across references to the commission of cardinals set up by Pope John Paul II in 1986 to evaluate several questions—among them whether Paul VI had abrogated the preconciliar Missale Romanum in promulgating his own missal in 1969.

Since there is a lot of misinformation circulating nowadays about the old and new missals, some of it sadly disseminated from the Vatican, I consider it important to publish here at NLM a translation of an Italian text by Cardinal Dario Castrillón-Hoyos and retrieved from the “clerus.org” website, that is, the Congregation for the Clergy’s site before it transitioned to “clerus.va.” This Italian text is still there, albeit only discoverable if you have the URL (here), dated to October 2008. Below is a screenshot to show where I found it, in case it is taken down after the appearance of the present article. (I have also copied into a file the complete Italian text for the same reason. We would not want to lose this precious historical evidence.)

His Eminence discusses not only Summorum Pontificum but also the work of the 1986 commission that prepared the way for Summorum Pontificum; he quotes at length from the minutes of this commission. It is truly remarkable just how much of that momentous motu proprio of 2007 was already present in nuce as far back as 1986. As far as I can tell, very few know about this text, which is not only a precious historical document but a witness to principles that will someday be vindicated anew under better leadership.
 

Responses of the Cardinal President of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei to Certain Questions

Since the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei has received frequent questions on the reasons for the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, some of which are based on the prescriptions of the Document Quattuor Abhinc Annos sent by the Congregation for Divine Worship to the Presidents of the Bishops’ Conferences on October 3, 1984, the President of the same Commission, His Eminence Card. Dario Castrillon Hoyos, saw fit to give the following answers:

Question: Is it licit to refer to the Letter Quattuor Abhinc Annos to regulate matters pertaining to the celebration of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, that is, according to the 1962 Roman Missal?

Answer: Evidently not. For, with the publication of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, the prescriptions for the use of the 1962 Missal, previously issued by the Quattuor Abhinc Annos and, subsequently, by the Motu Proprio of the Servant of God John Paul II Ecclesia Dei Adflicta, come to an end. In fact, the same Summorum Pontificum, from Article 1, explicitly states that “the conditions for the use of this Missal established by the earlier documents Quattuor Abhinc Annos and Ecclesia Dei are replaced.” The Motu Proprio enumerates the new conditions. Therefore, one can no longer refer to the restrictions established by those two documents, for the celebration according to the 1962 Missal.

Question: What are the substantial differences between the latest Motu Proprio and the two previous documents pertaining to this matter?

Answer: The first substantial difference is certainly that it is now licit to celebrate Mass according to the Extraordinary Rite without the need for a special permission, called an “indult.” The Holy Father Benedict XVI established, once and for all, that the Roman Rite consists of two Forms, to which he wished to give the names “Ordinary Form” (the celebration of the Novus Ordo, according to the Missal of Paul VI of 1970) and “Extraordinary Form” (the celebration of the Gregorian Rite, according to the Missal of B. John XXIII of 1962), and confirmed that this Missal of 1962 has never been abrogated. Another difference is that in Masses celebrated without the people, any Catholic priest of the Latin Rite, whether secular or religious, may use either Missal (Art. 2). Furthermore, in Masses without the people or with the people, it is upon the pastor or rector of the church, where it is intended to celebrate, to give permission to all those priests who present the “Celebret” given by their Ordinary. If they deny permission, the Bishop, according to the Motu Proprio, must see to it that permission is granted (see Article 7).

It is important to know that already an ad hoc Cardinal’s Commission of December 12, 1986, formed by the Eminent Cardinals Paul Augustin Mayer, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, Agostino Casaroli, Bernardin Gantin, Joseph Ratzinger, William W. Baum, Edouard Gagnon, Alfons Stickler, and Antonio Innocenti, had been created by the Holy Father’s will, for the purpose of examining the possible measures to be taken to remedy the established ineffectiveness of the pontifical indult Quattuor Abhinc Annos about the restoration of the so-called Tridentine Mass in the Latin Church with the Roman Missal of the Typical Edition of 1962, issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship with Prot. No. 686/84 of October 3, 1984. This Commission had proposed to the Holy Father John Paul II, even then, for this purpose, some substantial elements that were [only] taken up in the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum.

Allow me to make a summary of the minutes presenting the interventions of the Eminent Cardinals in order to understand how the later documents substantially reflect the vision achieved by such an important Commission of Cardinals shortly after Quattuor Abhinc Annos. Indeed, in the minutes it was stated that:

“The concern, desire and mind of the Holy Father [John Paul II] is the promotion of internal concord in the Church and the edification of the brethren within it.

“This is to be accomplished also through the primary rebuilding of communion in the practice of the lex orandi, such as the sound implementation of the liturgical reform, while dutifully respecting the legitimate needs of minority groups that are often distinguished not only for full theoretical orthodoxy but also for authentic exemplarity in the practice of intensely lived Christian life and of sincere and devoted attachment to the Apostolic See.

“Therefore, there must be a commitment of conscience on the part of all—bishops, priests, and faithful—to remove the scandalous arbitrariness that a misunderstood ‘creativity’ has produced, giving rise to the so-called ‘wild Masses’ and other desecrations that have wounded many of the aforementioned faithful by alienating them from the easy acceptance of the liturgical reform and the new ritual books, including the Missal, which erroneously appeared, unfortunately and precisely because of such unedifying desacralization, almost as the cause of it.”

In the same Commission it was proposed that:

“It shall be reiterated, on the part of the competent Dicastery, that the Pope desires internal pacification among all the faithful of the local Churches through the concrete implementation of the concession he made with the indult.

“The bishops shall carry out the will of the Supreme Pontiff by placing themselves spiritually in harmony with His intentions [for granting the indult generously].

“An adequate response is to be given, from the bishops, to those who wanted to discourage the implementation of the indult by presenting it as a reason for division instead of rebuilding. The response was to be not polemical but pastoral, explaining, with delicacy and patience, the letter and spirit of the indult.”

Furthermore, it was stated with authority that:

“The real problem at issue does not seem to be so much the artificial conflict that the indult is intended to resolve, but rather the one that lies upstream of it and was its real cause—that is, the conflict between the rightful implementation of the liturgical reform and the tolerated abuses produced by uncontrolled fantasy. Therefore, in addition to the indult, a far more general level of intervention is required on the part of the Holy See to eliminate the aforementioned habitual abuse that deforms the conciliar liturgical reform.

“The indult, as it stands, on the one hand, gives the impression that the Latin Mass, so-called ‘Tridentine,’ was an inferior and second-rate reality, which was restored only out of tolerant commiseration with those who requested it, and, on the other hand, gives the impression, precisely with all the heavy conditions it contains, that the Holy See itself considers it as such and would not have granted it unless it was forced to do so.

“It is necessary to reiterate and clarify to the bishops the true will of the Holy Father, which consists, not negatively in a concession of tolerance, but positively in a real pastoral initiative taken not to quiet the reaction to the abuses but to recompose the disagreement into reconciliation.

“It is necessary to remove all the conditions contained in the Indult, in order to eliminate the impression bishops have that the Holy See does not want it and the impression on the part of the faithful that they are asking for something almost barely tolerated by the Holy See.”

In the interventions of the assembled Eminences, it emerged that:

“One was in favor of granting the indult to all the faithful and priests who wished to make use of it in aedificationem [for edification] and without anti-Conciliar instrumentalization.

“It is necessary to make it clear to the Bishops that the indult corresponds to a will of the Pope meant to be observed, and it is necessary to make it clear to the faithful that they should respectfully request the implementation of the Pope’s will, so that the Bishops, when faced with respectful requests, will no longer have reason to refuse.

“It should be asked whether, in order to foster reconciliation, it is really necessary to ask the bishop’s consent at all to celebrate Holy Mass in Latin.

“As a general mentality, it would be opportune to tone down the strictness of the limiting conditions of the indult and to eliminate the additional conditions on the Bishops.

“As far as any restriction to particular groups is concerned, since the indult was conceived for them, it should be maintained—but iuxta modum, that is, on the one hand, not meaning by ‘groups’ just three or four persons and, on the other hand, not prohibiting that other persons [not part of the original group] may join the groups that took the initiative in the practice of the concession obtained.”

In the same Commission it was pointed out that:

“There is no difficulty in allowing readings in the vernacular.

“As to the optional use of the [new] Lectionary, there were reservations, fearing some confusion may arise because of the imperfect correspondence between the calendars of the two Missals, while no difficulty was seen in allowing the use of the Prefaces of the new Missal.

“The conditions added by the Bishops and also conditions regarding [the use of] non-parish churches and groups contained in the Indult would have to be removed.

“Under the premise that Latin, as an expression of unity, cannot and must not disappear from the Church, and desiring the Bishops to be ‘helped’ more than to be too ‘respected’ in their prerogatives, it is necessary to come to their aid by reducing the complex conditioning casuistry of the indult to criteria of greater simplicity; it could also thus eliminate the impression that, with those conditions, the Holy See wanted to make it clear that it had granted the indult only obtorto collo [having been seized by the neck]. Moreover, in doing so, the evolutionary coherence of the corrective pontifical measures could be highlighted by obviating their contradictory contrasts.

Citing then No. 23 of Sacrosanctum Concilium “concerning the criteria to be observed in reconciling tradition and progress in liturgical reform, and No. 26 of the same conciliar document, on the subject of the norms that must preside over such reform, as deriving from the hierarchical and communal nature of the liturgy, it was proposed (a) to insist, in the eventual document revising the indult, on the objectivity and not the arbitrariness of the implementation of liturgical reform; (b) to make it equally clear how both the use of the Latin language and the use of one or another edition of the Roman Missal should be considered within the framework of that logic; (c) to grant, at least in large cities, that on feast days there be a Holy Mass in Latin with free choice of one or the other typical edition (1962 or 1980) of the Roman Missal.

“It was proposed, likewise, to extend the granting of the Indult also to Ordinaries, religious Superiors General, Provincials, and others.

“About the necessity or otherwise of the Bishop’s assent for the celebration of the Holy Mass in Latin, it was recalled that Paul VI had said that, per se, the Priest, privately, should celebrate in Latin, since the concession made for the use of vernacular languages is only of a pastoral order, to enable the faithful to understand the contents of the rite and, thus, to participate better.

“The need to leave free the option of the use of either Missal for the celebration of the Holy Mass in Latin was reiterated.

“About the type of intervention [to be desired—i.e., what eventually became Summorum Pontificum], one would opt for a new papal document in which, taking stock of the current real situation of liturgical reform, the aforementioned freedom of choice between the two Missals in Latin would be clearly established, presenting one as a development and not as a juxtaposition of the other and eliminating the impression that each Missal is the temporary product of each historical epoch.

“Referring to the previous concerns expressed, the need was reiterated to ensure the [presentation of] evidence of the logical developmental linearity of the documents of the Church and the free option between the two Missals for the celebration of the Holy Mass, and it was proposed to emphasize that they cannot be considered except insofar as one is a development of the other, since liturgical norms, not being true ‘laws,’ cannot be abrogated but only surrogated—the preceding in the following.”

A report of all this was made to the Holy Father [John Paul II].