The Overemphasis on “New” and “Renewed”

Liturgiam Authenticam defended the principle that the substantial unity of the Roman Rite must prevail, plainly and evidently, in and through the plurality of expressions of it allowed by Church authority. That is, the liturgy celebrated by Roman Catholics must contain and transmit a certain historical and theological identity. The progressive view of liturgy, whose partisans find support in Magnum Principium and the pope's letter to Cardinal Sarah, gives pragmatic primacy to ideological pluralism.[1] There is no concrete historical and theological identity of Catholicism: such a view is called “monolithic” and said to be outmoded in our times, having been dispensed with — or so it is claimed — by the Council.

For this reason, I was fascinated to find in the book Athanasius and the Church of Our Time by Dr. Rudolf Graber, Bishop of Regensburg, a summary of the work of the ex-canon Paul Roca (1830–1893), who, late in the nineteenth century, right around the time of the Americanist crisis, “prophesied” what the Church of the future must look like:

The divine cult in the form directed by the liturgy, ceremonial, ritual, and regulations of the Roman Church will shortly undergo a transformation at an ecumenical council, which will restore to it the venerable simplicity of the golden age of the Apostles, in accordance with the dictates of conscience and modern civilisation.[2]

Graber continues:

Roca’s dominating idea is the word “new.” He proclaims a “new religion,” a “new dogma,” a “new ritual,” a “new priesthood.” He calls the new priests “progressists,” he speaks of the “suppression” of the soutane and of the marriage of priests.[3]

Whatever may be said about Roca’s imaginary council or the actual Council that took place, it is undeniable that the past fifty years or so have presented the somewhat embarrassing spectacle of an obsession with newness. We have painted ourselves into a corner by insisting that everything be “new” or “renewed,” as if this adjective, all by itself, were the token and guarantee of the rightness of an enterprise. This places a subtle pressure on us to innovate, to change, to be different — to privilege motion over stability, acting over suffering, doing over being, work over contemplation. It somehow seems a flaw that a doctrine has remained the same for centuries, or a discipline has not been “adapted” or “updated.” Indeed, given the tendencies of fallen human nature together with the peculiar errors of the modern mentality, the insistence on new things goes in the direction of privileging ugliness over beauty, comfort over self-denial, efficiency over dignity.

Speaking of the cretinism of the liturgical reform, Stratford Caldecott wrote:

Intimations of transcendence — indeed, references to the soul — were minimized. Within the churches, walls were whitewashed and relics dumped in the name of ‘noble simplicity’. Unlike the much earlier Cistercian rebellion against the artistic extravagances at Cluny, this modern campaign for simplicity was not coupled with the asceticism and devotion that might alone have rendered it spiritually ‘noble.’ It fell easy victim to the prevailing culture of comfort and prosperity.[4]

All this has led not to renewal but to an inversion of means and ends, narcissism, anarchy, and, symbolic of all of them, dreadful art. “Many people judge a religion by its art, and why indeed shouldn’t they?”[5] The old axiom “nature abhors a vacuum” has been exhaustively demonstrated in our midst. When spiritually muscular, culturally dense religion vanishes, its place is quickly filled with feel-good sentimental claptrap, pop art, pseudo-mysticism, and bleeding-heart political advocacy. “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes anything,” as Chesterton didn’t say, but might as well have said.[6] We are left with the embarrassing spectacle of Church leaders, inheritors of millennia of wisdom and beauty, chasing after the miniskirts of modernity. One awakens in a Kafkaesque world where mitred ecclesiastics have metamorphosed into Beatles.

Why this feverish and irrational prejudice for the new? What has it got to do with the one true God who never changes; with the sacrifice of Christ, which is once-for-all; with divine revelation, which is complete at the death of the last apostle; with the principles of the spiritual life, which are perennially valid; with the greatness of the Christian tradition, which gives birth to new things conceived and nurtured by old things, and cherishes them all? We might say, inspired by St. Vincent of Lerins, that the Christian religion is a permanent wellspring of truth and holiness from which endless ages can draw fresh water, but it is always the same source, the same substance, the same qualities of refreshment, light, and peace.

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings” (Heb 13:8–9). Christ died once for all. He is the only priest who offers the sacrifice of the new covenant, with his ordained minister empowered to act on His behalf. He gives us the true religion whose dogmas never change, however much the theological understanding of them grows through the ages. The Christian religion is inherently new, permanently new, yet in essence unchanging and everlasting. That is why it is capable of never growing old.

Tradition, rightly understood, shares in this perpetual youthfulness; it is not something of the past, much less an object of nostalgia, but a vital energy in the Church that carries us forward, uniting us with the entire Church outside of our age, and with the Church Triumphant and the Church Suffering. Indeed, Jews and Christians in the past viewed our ancestors as our antecessores, those who have run ahead of us to eternity, and therefore as the ones we are following behind. This, of course, is the very opposite of how we tend to think about time and history and culture: we think that we are ahead and our ancestors are behind; they are behind the times, we are on the cutting edge. But that makes no sense, because our ancestors went before us: they have already lived their lives, they know the mysteries of life and death, and we are dependent on them. We are their pupils, their followers.

The sacred liturgy, the divine liturgy as our Byzantine brethren so tellingly call it, must unmistakably reflect the immutable essence of the Faith. As man remains essentially the same, so does Christ, and so does His Church, to whom He communicates a share in His stability. This is why the gates of hell cannot prevail against her—but only to the extent that she is living in communion with Him, the unassailable and immovable Rock. Our worship no less than our theology should not only mention or expound the divine attribute of immutability (including the unity of the history of salvation), but should contain and convey it. Even if, as a created reality unfolding in time and space, liturgy cannot be immutable in itself, it should signify all the divine attributes, so that in its ceremonies, gestures, texts, music, it is always a bearer of truths about God and His Christ, and not guilty of lying or misleading us. The liturgy we have inherited from our predecessors, the fruit of the slow growth of ages under the guiding hand of Providence, is admirably suited for this work of initiating us into the eternal mysteries of God and bringing us to perfect union with Him.


NOTES
[1] See my interview at LifeSite.
[2] Athanasius and the Church of Our Time, p. 35.
[3] Ibid., p. 36.
[4] Not as the World Gives (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2014), 180.
[5] Elizabeth Jennings, quoted by Dana Gioia in his speech "The Catholic Writer Today."
[6] See "When Man Ceases to Worship God."

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi: Bishop Conley Reflects on Liturgiam authenticam

His Excellency James Conley is the Bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska. This article first appeared on March 31st as his column in the Southern Nebraska Register. He writes:

Because we are Catholic, sacred liturgical worship should be at the center of our lives. 

Jesus Christ is present among us in the Church’s sacred worship. In the mystery of Holy Mass, we are present to the Paschal mystery, the sacrifice of Christ’s death on Calvary. Our liturgical worship is a foretaste of the heavenly liturgy, and expresses our love for God. We are made, literally, to worship God.

Jesus, drawing from the words of the Old Testament, taught that his disciples should “love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and that each one of us should “love your neighbor as yourself.” In the worship of the Church we work in communion with one another, to love God entirely. And in sacred liturgy, God, who loves us, strengthens us to love him more perfectly and to love our neighbors selflessly and generously.

In worship, we are sanctified—made holy—by the grace of union with Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. In sacred worship, we are configured to Christ; we offer our lives in union with his great act of selfless love on the cross, and thus we are formed to love the world as he does. For this reason, the Second Vatican Council taught that sacred worship of God is “the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows.”

In heaven, we will join the saints and angels in an eternal and perfect act of worship. This is the destiny for which God made us. In heaven, we will proclaim the words of the prophets and the psalmist, hear the voice of God and, through worship, share a loving communion with Christ himself—the incarnate Word of God.

Worship is an expression of our love and fidelity to God, and a mystical union with his Word, who, as St. John the Evangelist says, “is God, and is with God.”

Worship matters. And because worship is a communion with the Word of God, the words we use in sacred worship matter too.

This week, the Church celebrates the 16th anniversary of Liturgiam authenticam, an instruction of the Church issued to guide the translation of liturgical texts toward the “full, conscious, and active participation” of all Catholics in sacred worship, by calling for renewed attention to the importance of every word we speak and hear when we worship God.

Liturgiam authenticam reminded the Church that when we pray together, in liturgical acts of worship, we draw our prayers from the words of Sacred Scripture, revealed by God, and from the tradition of the saints and martyrs who have come before us, and witnessed in their lives and in their wisdom the importance of our common liturgical prayer. The instruction taught that the words and expressions of our liturgy must be “endowed with those qualities by which the sacred mysteries of salvation and the indefectible faith of the Church are efficaciously transmitted by means of human language to prayer, and worthy worship is offered to God the Most High.”

Liturgical worship does much more than simply deliver information about God. It forms our hearts and our minds and our imaginations, to give us a keen sense of the supernatural in our midst. Liturgical worship, in a very real way, transcends time and space; it takes us from this world, and puts us in contact with the divine.

There is an ancient maxim in the Church’s life—lex orandi, lex credendi—the norms of our prayers are the norms of our beliefs. Sacred liturgy teaches the faith, because its words take root in our hearts. Liturgiam authenticam reminded the Church that because we believe as we pray, our prayers must be absolutely faithful to the deposit of faith which we have been given. We are formed for holiness by the words of the liturgy when they faithfully transmit the revelation of the living Word of God, Jesus Christ.

The fruit of Liturgiam authenticam was a new English translation of the Roman Missal, the official prayerbook of the Mass, which the Church began praying five years ago. This new translation of the Mass strove to express the words of sacred liturgy clearly, directly, and faithfully—not introducing interpretations or innovations, but drawing directly from Scripture and the Church’s ancient tradition, so that our worship might clearly reveal and teach the faith, and so that we might express our love of God in union with the saints who have come before us.

As the Church celebrates the gift of Liturgiam authenticam, we have an occasion to give thanks to God for the “truths that transcend the limits of time and space,” which are proclaimed by the Church in sacred worship. We have occasion to give thanks to God that through sacred worship, “the Holy Spirit leads the Christian faithful into all truth and causes the word of Christ to dwell abundantly within them.” Together, we have occasion to give thanks that God has given us a foretaste of eternity, which frees us, and transforms us, and sanctifies us, so that we can love the Lord, now and forever, with all our hearts, souls, and minds, in the gift of sacred worship.

An Excellent Article on Revisiting Liturgiam Authenticam

I strongly recommend to our readers that they click over to Catholic World Report for a superb article by Nicholas Senz, director of Religious Education at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Mill Valley, California. In it, Mr Senz addresses the recent papal proposal to “review” the principles that guide liturgical translations, as well as the contentions of one Fr Michael Ryan that this review is warranted particularly by the pastoral style of Pope Francis. (Fr Ryan is a priest of the Archdiocese of Seattle, and a longtime vocal opponent of the new English translation of the Mass.) First, he addresses the idea that a “solemn” form of language must perforce be somber or depressing, and puts the idea of “humility” in its proper place with a quote from C.S. Lewis that should be translated into Latin and added to the GIRM.

“...you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a widespread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connection with vanity or self-conceit. …The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual.” (Back in the bad old days, this was also known as “false humility.”)

He then addresses the fact that “(d)ecades of poor catechesis have caused the average layperson’s theological vocabulary to atrophy”; I think it goes without saying that such poverty of catechesis was partly caused and partly reinforced by the poverty of the old translation. (In the latter context, we should probably add one of the adjectives commonly joined to the word “poverty”, such as “extreme” or “abject.”) And so, in regard to some of the words that have been deemed objectionable, such as “oblation” and, of course, the perennial difficult word par excellence, “consubstanital,” Mr Senz writes very wisely, “This says less about the fittingness of the words themselves than (it does about) the failure of the Church to impart their meaning. People could learn these terms again, if they were used and explained. We should always be wary of those who doubt the capacities of others—whether it’s their ability to learn, or to understand, or to live the moral life.”

The substance of his critique is addressed to Fr Ryan’s idea that the pastoral style of Pope Francis, which the latter describes as “simplicity, clarity, directness,” etc., somehow makes the use of words like “consubstantial” unjustifiable. (I am not making that up.) To this, Senz rightly replies that the liturgy is not supposed to be an expression of ANY Pope’s personal preferences, much less of his pastoral style. He uses the term “ultramontanism” to describe this, but here I hazard to suggest that this word has become loaded with too much of the history and politics of the last century and a half or more of the Church’s life. He might well have used Fr Hunwicke’s comical neologism “hypersuperueberpapalist,” as he rightly draws the unavoidable bizarre conclusion from Fr Ryan’s bizarre premise: if the liturgy must be retranslated to suit the style of this Papacy, why should it not be retranslated again to suit the style of the next one, and the next one after that, and will Fr Ryan feel the same about this if the next Pope is Cardinal Sarah or Burke?

Anyway, do yourself a favor and read the whole article.