Exalting Tradition and Refuting Rupture: New Work Argues for Total Restoration of the Tridentine Rite

I am pleased to announce to readers of New Liturgical Movement the release of my latest book, The Once and Future Roman Rite: Returning to the Traditional Latin Liturgy after Seventy Years of Exile (TAN Books, 2022). It has been several years in the making.

Although it was initially conceived as a response to the fiftieth anniversary of the Novus Ordo (1969-2019), it developed over time into a full-on response to the numerous errors and lies of progressive liturgists as we find them regurgitated in Traditionis Custodes and its accompanying letter.

The fruit of decades of research, experience, reflection, and debate, Once and Future Roman Rite argues that the guiding principle for all authentic Christian liturgy is sacred Tradition, which originates from Christ and is unfolded theologically and liturgically by the Holy Spirit throughout the life of the Church, in each age and across the ages. The prominent identifying traits of all traditional rites, Eastern and Western—including, of course, the classical Roman Rite—are markedly and designedly absent from or optional in the Novus Ordo, estranging it from their company and making it impossible to call it “the Roman rite” at all.

Paul VI’s new liturgical books, drafted in unseemly haste by an audacious committee of arrogant men who placed themselves above and outside of the stream of tradition as its jury, judge, and executioner, visited upon the longsuffering Roman Catholic faithful a hasty and far-reaching reform permeated with nominalism, voluntarism, Protestantism, rationalism, antiquarianism, hyperpapalism, and other modern errors. But this much is always true and will always be true: man is not master over divine liturgy; rather, all of us, from the lowest-ranking layman to the pope himself, are called to be stewards of God’s best and choicest gifts. This law, in turn, imposes genuine moral and ecclesial duties upon us and bestows corresponding rights.

The only possible Catholic response to this crisis of rupture is a full return to the Roman rite in its robust perennial richness as codified after the Council of Trent (i.e., the pre-55 form of the rite: hence “seventy years of exile”). No special permission is or could ever be needed to embrace this heritage and to hand it down to future generations. Fidelity to the traditional Latin Liturgy is, at its root, fidelity to the Roman Church as such and to Christ Himself, Who has inspired the growth and perfection of our religious rites for two thousand years.

In addition to its preface, twelve chapters, and epilogue, the book contains a foreword by Martin Mosebach, nine reproduced artworks, several diagrams, an appendix of (highly revealing) texts by Paul VI on the liturgical reform, a topical bibliography, and a detailed index. At the bottom of this post will be found the Table of Contents. Chapters 1 and 12 (the latter being the lengthiest of all) appear in this book for the first time. The chapters in between, although published in earlier versions online (including, in a few instances, here at NLM), have been extensively revised and expanded for their inclusion in this volume.

In the following short video, I share a bit more on what the reader will find in this unique book, which has, as far as I know, no exact parallel in the traditionalist literature: 

Some reactions:

“This work is a splendid introduction to the key issues of the liturgical debate, in the necessary historical context of liturgical development and of the 1960s reform. I recommend it wholeheartedly.” —Dr. Joseph Shaw

“In this passionate book, Dr. Kwasniewski makes a compelling case for the traditional Roman Rite.” —Stuart Chessman

“At once logical and lyrical, this book is a profound reflection on the meaning of tradition both in general and in the Roman liturgy in particular.” —Fr. Thomas Crean, OP

“At once liturgical, historical, theological, and spiritual, The Once and Future Roman Rite assures the author a place of first rank.” —Dr. Roberto de Mattei

“Dr. Kwasniewski’s detailed and unanswerable paean to Christ in Sacred Tradition.” —Dr. John C. Rao

“This eloquent apologia, written by a man obviously in love with Christ, the Church, and the Mass, deserves a wide exposure.” —Fr. Richard Cipolla

The Once and Future Roman Rite: Returning to the Traditional Latin Liturgy after Seventy Years of Exile. Hardcover • 6 x 9 • 472 pgs • ISBN: 978-1-5051-2662-4 • $32.95

Available from TAN Books, all Amazon outlets, and other online retailers.

In Defense of Cluttered Calendars

A few weeks ago, on July 12th to be precise, I mentioned on Facebook that it was the feast, on the traditional Roman calendar, of St. John Gualbert, Abbot, with a commemoration of Saints Felix and Nabor, martyrs who were praised by St Ambrose and enshrined by him in Milan. I noted that the Collect for the commemoration of the latter is very interesting:

Praesta, quæsumus, Domine: ut, sicut nos sanctorum Martyrum tuorum Naboris et Felicis natalitia celebranda non deserunt; ita jugiter suffragiis comitentur. Per Dominum... [Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that just as the celebration of the birth of Thy holy Martyrs Nabor and Felix never abandons us, so may they always accompany us by their prayers. Through our Lord…]

Nearly every time I post a comment in praise of a “lesser” saint’s feast on the traditional Roman calendar for the Mass, or publish a blog article along those lines, inevitably several comments arise: “We should get rid of a lot of these obscure or territorial saints and leave more room for more local or modern saints.” The ones who make these comments love the traditional liturgy, but they seem to agree with the rationale that led to the removal of over 300 saints from the general calendar in 1969.

I would like to suggest, in all kindness, that this gigantic overhaul was excessive, disproportionate, harmful, and uncharacteristic of liturgical history, which tends to prune rather than to purge, and which prefers to add more than to cut away. Yes, I’m quite aware that St. Pius V removed quite a few saints from the Roman calendar, but even his cuts could not compare with Paul VI’s — and besides, his successors pretty quickly began adding back ones that Pius had removed.

A university student once wrote the following note to me:

In my liturgy class, we discussed the calendar. What you wrote at Rorate about St. Felix of Valois — “Who is this obscure saint, and why is he cluttering our calendar?” — was the exact mindset the professor strove to pound into students’ minds that day. He described how over the centuries, “certain elements crept into the calendar” (his words), and these elements had clouded over the meaning of Sunday, plus many saints and feasts days held no meaning for us anymore and sometimes were mythological. But, he said, as if to clinch his point, “other popes have cleaned out the calendar before.”
         Thank you for being willing to defend the old calendar and its rich sanctoral cycle and prayers. Any time I’ve tried to defend the beauty of the traditional rites in class, the things I’ve pointed to have been declared “unnecessary for modern man.” Well, to that I respond, the Mass should not have changed for modern man; modern man should have changed for the Mass.

That’s what all the modern liturgists said and still say: “The calendar was too cluttered, it needed a lot of pruning.” I used to think so, too — until I got to know the traditional missal well, over years of daily Massgoing, and came to love the richly-encrusted cycle of saints, famous and obscure, ancient and modern, and how they crowd into certain clusters, sometimes even forming “octaves” of a sort.

My appreciation of the density of the old calendar grew still more when I began attending Mass with the Institute of Christ the King, whose clergy follow (somewhat inconsistently, but with growing conviction) a sanctoral calendar of circa 1948. In this calendar there are even more saints, and frequently double commemorations. I have to say: so far from seeming cluttered, it’s like a big Catholic family with kids all over the place, and everyone happy. The multiple orations enrich the liturgy’s prayerfulness and power, rather than detracting from a “simplicity” or “focus” conceived in rationalist terms. Anyone who knows great works of art knows that they achieve their cumulative effect through multiple simultaneous means, and that unity and coherence are not foreign to but actually reliant upon a carefully balanced harmony of many parts, including tiny and seemingly insignificant details. Multiplicity and complexity are not the problem; pointless multiplication and a random or confused complexity are the problem.

I am reminded of the insight of Martin Mosebach:

It was the new Western way of perceiving the “real” sacred act as narrowed down to the consecration that handed over the Mass to the planners’ clutches. But liturgy has this in common with art: within its sphere there is no distinction between the important and the unimportant. All parts of a painting by a master are of equal significance, none can be dispensed with. Just imagine, in regard to Raphael’s painting of St. Cecilia, wanting only to recognize the value of the face and hands, because they are “important,” while cutting off the musical instruments at her feet because they are “unimportant.” (Heresy of Formlessness, rev. ed., p. 185)

Doubtless, we cannot say of the details of the sanctoral cycle that all are of equal importance; this claim would be easier to sustain of the fixed Order of Mass. Nevertheless, we love our saints — especially that somewhat “arbitrary” group that our tradition, in its slow meandering, has put right in front of us in the missal. The combination of famous and obscure saints, and the concentration of martyrs and confessors of antiquity, is itself a resounding lesson: we do not pick and choose our saints at Mass to reflect our preoccupations or favoritisms; the saints pick us, as it were, by coming to us down through centuries of devotion. It is another expression of the “scandal of the particular” in which the very essence of Christianity consists. No matter how wonderful a more recent or more local saint may be, this quality, in and of itself, does not justify the suppression of another saint who has been liturgically venerated by countless Christians for many centuries.

The solution we should favor is to let saints pile up on a given day, but decide which one gets the Mass (so to speak) and which one gets the Commemoration. The main cause of the purge in 1969 was a positive dread of having more than one set of orations per Mass, since evidently Modern Man™ is too stupid to follow more than one thread at a time. How differently we think in the era of emails, texting, and social media.

And even if, as the liturgists say, calendric simplification has happened before in the history of the Roman Rite, was it necessary to do so between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s? Who was clamoring for it? The People of God? The parochial clergy? Truth be told, it was no one but the professional liturgists, lovers of “clear and distinct” Cartesian modernity, with its glassy, steely mien, as of hygienic instruments, silver aeroplanes, and whirring time-saving appliances. The resulting empty-headedness of Catholics regarding their own heroes is, needless to say, not caused exclusively or even primarily by the loss of a rich sanctoral cycle, but surely we cannot avoid seeing a connection.

Consider the following exchange between two art historians, Martin Gayford and Philippe de Montebello, in a book called Rendez-vous with Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014):

MG: Some would say that putting a religious work in a museum removes its most crucial meaning. It wasn’t intended — or at least only intended — to be appreciated as a painting; it was made to be prayed before, to stand on an altar while a priest performed Mass.
         PdM: Well, the meanings are in danger of disappearing anyway. The modern public by and large no longer reads the Bible, no longer knows the stories represented in the pictures. The role of museums in re-educating people in sacred stories and doctrines is very large. One could almost make the case that museums fill a gap that the churches are increasingly leaving in teaching the lives of the saints, Christ, and the Virgin, plus the stories of the Old Testament. All of the pictures and sculptures in most museums carry a label briefly telling the story, something that you do not find in church. 

“The pictures and sculptures . . . carry a label briefly telling the story, something that you do not find in church.” Yet this is exactly what my St. Andrew’s Daily Missal (reprint of the 1948 edition) and countless other hand missals did and still do for the laity: they tell us something about every saint, and make them beloved companions of the journey.
 

Note that this banishment of the cultus of saints goes hand in hand with the ecumenical downplaying of all that is distinctive, the pseudo-purity of “focusing on Christ” when even He is pushed away from the closed circle, and the utter ineffectiveness of the verbal didacticism of reading so much Scripture. The people in the old days knew more about the saints and the stories of the Bible than modern believers, who are so much more “literate” and “educated.” However many causes there are of the stygian vacuity of the modern Catholic mind, we can say without hesitation that the traditional Roman liturgy emphasizes the saints vastly more than the modern liturgy does, and was capable, accordingly, of serving as a crucial pillar in a culture that saturated with the cultus of the Virgin and the saints. As Dom Guéranger writes in the general preface to The Liturgical Year:

In order that the divine type may the more easily be stamped upon us, we need examples; we want to see how our fellow-men have realized that type in themselves: and the liturgy fulfils this need for us, by offering us the practical teaching and the encouragement of our dear saints, who shine like stars in the firmament of the ecclesiastical year. By looking upon them we come to learn the way which leads to Jesus, just as Jesus is our Way which leads to the Father. But above all the saints, and brighter than them all, we have Mary, showing us, in her single person, the Mirror of Justice, in which is reflected all the sanctity possible in a pure creature.

I have to say, in passing, that the older Roman calendar reminds me much more of the Byzantine calendar, which expressly names saints in the liturgy practically  every day. Of course, it works differently because their daily liturgy is not nearly as shaped and “governed” by the saint as the Roman one is — there is no concept of a “Mass of a Virgin” or a “Mass of a Confessor” in the Divine Liturgy: it has a few special antiphons sprinkled throughout for the saint, and then the rest is generic. Still, the Eastern and Western traditions bear witness to the norm throughout Christian history until the Protestant revolt: “the more saints, the merrier.” The presence of saints on the calendar augmented the glory of Christ rather than detracting from Him, as indeed the original placement of the feast of Christ the King, right before the feast of All Saints, emphasized.

Twenty-five years of working under both Roman calendars, old and new, gave me a vivid experience of the truth of Louis Bouyer’s acerbic estimation of the reform:

I prefer to say nothing, or little, about the new calendar, the handiwork of a trio of maniacs who suppressed, with no good reason, Septuagesima and the Octave of Pentecost, and who scattered three-quarters of the Saints higgledy-piggledy, all based on notions of their own devising! Because these three hotheads obstinately refused to change anything in their work and because the pope wanted to finish up quickly to avoid letting the chaos get out of hand, their project, however insane, was accepted! (The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer, trans. John Pepino [Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2015], 222–23) 

To return, then, to our starting point, Saints Nabor and Felix. For many centuries the Church at prayer told her Lord that the birthday of these martyrs “never abandons us” and saw this recurring date as a promise that their intercession, too, would always be ours. Every time I encounter these “obscure” saints, I thank God for making them part of my life, for connecting me to the memory of their triumph and the power of their living intercession. Nor will this grand old calendar of saints ever cease to be followed within the Catholic Church, notwithstanding the feeble fulminations of faded flower-children.

A page from my 1838 Ordo from Baltimore

Greater Accessibility… To Whom, To What, and Why?

Throughout the years of liturgical reform — and for many long decades thereafter — the avalanche of changes to Catholic worship were often justified by a few magical phrases that would be thrown about almost talismanically, with an air of infinite superiority to the meager mentalities of lowly laity. The leading contender was certainly the phrase “active participation,” but joining it were “Modern Man,” “meeting people where they’re at,” “doing like the early Church,” and, what is of most interest to me in this article, “greater accessibility.”

The revised liturgy was supposed to be, and was claimed and asserted to be, “more accessible,” but this is a monumental smokescreen if ever there was one. After all, nothing is more or less accessible in the abstract or without further qualification. One must always ask: “Accessible to whom? And giving access to what? And for the purpose of…?”

Almost exclusively, accessibility was understood as primarily or exclusively a verbal-conceptual phenomenon. If you can immediately grasp this bite-sized chunk of content, without further preparation, explanation, or remainder of bewilderment, then it’s considered to be accessible to you. The object of such immediate and complete comprehension obviously cannot be God, whom every orthodox theologian declares right off the bat to be incomprehensible; nor can it be man, who, as being made unto God’s image, is a mystery to himself; nor can it be the world, which is far too complicated and vast to fit into man’s mind, even if a thousand Einsteins were to chip away at it; nor can it be the mysteries revealed by God in history and delivered in Scripture, since each one of these is a combination of all of the above. Therefore, a perfectly accessible liturgy, in the sense given above, would have to be about nothing, address no one, and lead nowhere.

This, admittedly, is a limit case fortunately never reached: there is always a residue of unintelligibility in anything human beings do, even if they are trying to avoid it. To the extent that any elements of the traditional divine liturgy remained, the incomprehensibility of God, of man, of the cosmos, and of the mysteries of Christ remained. Still, the reform introduced a fundamental tension between allowing the liturgy to be mysterious, as it must be, and trying, in the name of liturgical science, to purge it of the very features that tended to make it aweful, fearful, darksome, intricate, wondrous, and yet, paradoxically, also make it orderly and ordering, familiar and comforting, unassuming and free of invasive irritation.

At Ordinations in the classical Roman rite: what’s not to love?

It seems to me that there is a mighty irony at work in the revival of the traditional Latin liturgy of the Roman church. The irony is that, in spite of everything the scholars and tinkerers were predicting, in spite of all their hand-wringing, new generations find the old rites in general quite sufficiently accessible, indeed more so than the new rites, as long as one has a broader and deeper definition of accessibility. The reason is not far to seek: the old liturgy appeals more consistently, more powerfully, to the full range of reality, natural and supernatural; of what it is to be human; of how we express ourselves, and what we are trying to express in words, gestures, songs, and sighs. It appeals to all the senses, the various temperaments and personalities, the different levels on which our interior life plays out and intersects with the external world.

The traditional Roman liturgy — and this is true of any traditional apostolic rite in Christianity — recognizes a truth on which psychologists never tire of discoursing: human beings primarily communicate non-verbally. As a matter of fact, we are never not communicating something, even if we are not talking or have no intention of conveying a meaning. Orderliness and defentiality speak volumes, just as carelessness and casualness do. A liturgy, like any human ceremony, is constantly communicating through every word, stance, gesture, position, action, silence. The old liturgy, by harnessing and regulating these things in a harmonious way to bring out their full meaning, is more communicative; in that sense, it proffers more to access, and in more ways. The reformed liturgy, by eliminating traditional non-verbal language and then leaving so much to chance and idiosyncratic habit, thins the content and its delivery, while mingling it with extraneous and contradictory matter.

Many of these thoughts were prompted by a video on body language that made me much more conscious of the importance of small and non-verbal details in liturgy (and, therefore, the importance of being aware of them and faithful to their proper execution). The expert interviewed, Joe Navarro, looks at people from the point of view of an FBI agent trying to assess potential threats, witnesses, etc. The part of the video most relevant to the liturgy runs from 7:10–8:10. Here is a transcription of some of the points he makes about body language:

• “How we dress, how we walk, have meaning, and we use that to interpret what’s in the mind of the person.”
• “We may think we’re very sophisticated, [but] we are never in a state where we’re not transmitting information.”
• “We’re all transmitting at all times; we choose the clothes that we wear, how we groom ourselves, how we dress, but also how do we carry ourselves, are we coming to the office on this particular day with a lot of energy, or are we coming in with a different sort of pace… and what we look for are differences in behaviour, down to the minutia of: what is this individual’s posture as they walk down the street, are they on the inside of the sidewalk, on the outside, can we see his blink rate, how often he is looking at his watch…”
• “You can have a poker face, but you can’t have a poker body — somewhere it’s going to be revealed.” 
• “We talk about non-verbals because it matters, because it has gravitas, because it affects how we communicate with each other.”
• “When it comes to non-verbals, this is no small matter. We primarily communicate non-verbally and we always will.”

Phrases like: “we primarily communicate non-verbally” and “we’re never not communicating something” are very relevant to the celebration of Mass. Every gesture — for example, the speed of movement around the altar; where the priest is standing or sitting, when, and why; how the sacred vessels are treated; whether the priest’s gaze is directed out to the people or modestly downcast — confesses what the celebrant, and the people, believe they are doing.

Why is it that the liturgical reformers seemed so tone-deaf or clueless about the most obvious things in life? Did they not realize that changing the bodily language, the gestures, postures, orientation, custody of the eyes, would effect a sea change in mentality and spirituality? Or . . . was it that they understood perfectly well, and therefore abolished, piece by piece, one non-verbal language, substituting for it another with a contrary message?

I am reminded of what has been said about the loss of faith in the Real Presence. This was not an unfortunate result of a lack of catechesis. It was the intended result of a renovated catechesis. It was not an accidental byproduct of liturgical reform gone awry; it was a premeditated outcome of a new ecclesiology that identified the worshiping community par excellence with the Body of Christ and sought to oppose the “fetishism” or “magic” of the Eucharistic cultus that had developed in the Church for at least a thousand years.

As Martin Mosebach points out with respect to Holy Communion:

[A]n entire bouquet of respectful gestures had surrounded the sacrament of the altar, and these gestures were the most effective homily, which continually showed priests and faithful quite clearly the mysterious presence of the Lord under the forms of bread and wine. We can be certain: no theological indoctrination of so-called enlightened theologians has so harmed the belief of Western Catholics in the presence of the Lord in the consecrated Host as the innovation of receiving communion in the hand, accompanied by the abandoning of all care in the handling of the particles of the Host.
          Yet can one really not receive communion reverently in the hand? Of course that is possible. Yet once the traditional forms of reverence were in place, exercising their blessed influence on the consciousness of the faithful, their discontinuation contained the message — and not just for the simple faithful — that so much reverence was not really necessary, and along with that there consequently grew the (initially unspoken) conviction that there was nothing there that demanded respect. (Subversive Catholicism: Papacy, Liturgy, Church, 80–81)

Fr. Roberto Spataro makes a similar but broader point:

Humility is more than a virtue. It is the condition for a virtuous life. Watch the bows and genuflections the humble man makes faithfully before God in a spirit of obedience, acknowledging His merciful sovereignty, His love without bounds, His creative wisdom. Reason is not tempted to be puffed up, as happens in the revolutionary process, because in the old rite not everything can or ought to be explained by reason which, for its part, is content to adore God without comprehending Him. It turns to Him through the means of a sacred language differing from ordinary speech, because in the harmonious order of creation that the liturgy represents in its rituals, there is never a monotonous repetition or tedious uniformity, but a symphony of diversity, sacred and profane, without opposition, respecting the alterity of each. Here reason also renounces an excessive use of words that unfortunately exists in the liturgical praxis inaugurated by the Novus Ordo, interpreted by many priests as the opportunity for pure garrulousness. In the old rite, on the other hand, reason appeals to other dimensions of communication and, besides words pronounced or sung, also gives silence a place. This silence becomes the atmosphere, impregnated with the Holy Spirit, in which believing thought and prayerful word is born. (In Praise of the Tridentine Mass and of Latin, Language of the Church, 30)

What we do with our bodies is just as communicative as what we say with our lips. The liturgy should therefore govern the motions and dispositions of our limbs and senses, harnessing them as symbols of truth and instruments of sanctification. This will help us to pray, to enter more deeply into communion with the Lord, and to yield ourselves to truths that cannot be put into words or captured in concepts. As St. Paul says in the Epistle to the Romans, we should make our bodily members “instruments of righteousness”:

“Neither yield ye your members as instruments of iniquity unto sin” — the sin of irreverence, of disrespect for holy things, of casual, haphazard, and inconsiderate behavior during our formal audience before the great King — “but present yourselves to God,” in theocentric worship that governs our self-presentation, “as those that are alive from the dead” — the living death of modern anti-natural, anti-Christic culture — “and your members as instruments of justice unto God” (Rom 6:13), the justice, namely, of the virtue of religion.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website, SoundCloud page, and YouTube channel.

Martin Mosebach on the Coptic Martyrs of Libya

Today is the fourth anniversary of the martyrdom of a group of 20 Egyptians and one Ghanaian, collectively known as the Coptic Martyrs of Libya, who were beheaded by Islamic terrorists on the Libyan seashore. These men were working abroad to provide for their families, braving the dangerous conditions in Libya; several of them were married, the oldest among them was only forty-six, the youngest twenty-two. The Ghanaian, Matthew Ayariga, was seized along with them, and although he was not a member of the Coptic Church, refused to embrace Islam, even at the threat of being beheaded; seeing how the others prayed and called upon the Holy Name of Jesus as they died, he said of them, “Their God is my God,” and was slain in their company. They were canonized as martyrs by the Coptic Pope Tawadros II very shortly after their death; one year ago, a large church named in their honor was dedicated in the village of El-Aour, Egypt, where thirteen of them came from. Their relics, which were recovered in September of 2017, were brought back to Egypt, and are now housed in this church.

A widely-diffused icon of the Coptic Martyrs of Libya, by Antoun Rezk.

Last year, Martin Mosebach, who is well-known to our readers, published a book about them in German, an account not only of the Saints and their martyrdom, but also of the author’s visit to Egypt and meetings with several members of their families and community. The English translation, The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs, has just been published today. An essay adapted from the book, typical of Mosebach’s simple and beautiful writing, has just been published on First Things, and is very much worth your time.

“So the martyrs’ family members weren’t surprised when people came to visit. Their husbands, sons, and brothers had experienced the most amazing transformation of all: they had left home as poor migrant workers, and would never return, but had become saints and were now more present than ever, albeit in a different form. They now wore crowns, even though they had only done what was expected of them, and what all their brothers were equally prepared to do. Unexpectedly, this natural fulfillment of duty that would otherwise be taken for granted was surrounded by the greatest splendor—but this served only to prove that little more than the thinnest tissue separates earthly life from the heavenly sphere. One must always be prepared for the possibility that this tissue could tear, letting a golden ray of light fall into the realm of everyday life. Precisely by accepting such a cruel fate, their husbands, sons, and brothers were magnificently exalted. The martyrs’ relatives made no pretense of sharing their late loved ones’ glory, but they did take calm pride in the dead.”

Letter from Martin Mosebach Responding to “Pastoral Clergy”

NLM is delighted to be able to share with our readers an exclusive translation of a refreshingly direct letter written by the German novelist Martin Mosebach, who is well-known to lovers of the traditional liturgy for his book The Heresy of Formlessness, recently back in print in a revised and expanded edition by Angelico Press (see here).

Mr. Mosebach’s letter, which appeared in Die Tagespost on July 28, was prompted by an article of Fr Engelbert Recktenwald FSSP that had appeared in the same paper exactly one month before. (Readers may recall that Fr Recktenwald’s charges of aestheticism, rubricism, and purism have been the subject of two rebuttals at NLM: this and this.) Those who love the usus antiquior will find this letter a most succint and elegant statement of the essence of the matter. Our thanks to Stuart Chessman of the Society of St. Hugh of Cluny for his translation, and to the author for his permission to publish it here.

Lefebvre Provided Emergency Aid to the Church

We only can agree with Fr Recktenwald FSSP when he regards with pride and joy the thirtieth anniversary of the Fraternity of St Peter (of which he is a cofounder). There can’t be enough orders, fraternities, and institutes that are dedicated to the preservation of Tradition. Based on this success, it would perhaps also have been still possible not to emphasize all too strongly the conflict with the FSSPX from which the FSSP emerged. It is an incontestable fact that liturgical Tradition would have come to an end except for the actions of Archbishop Lefebvre. In a critical hour in the history of the Church, Lefebvre provided emergency assistance to a Rome impaired in its freedom of action, and in so doing took upon himself the odium of disobedience. It seems that Rome also has adopted this view, by revoking the excommunication of the bishops consecrated by Lefebvre and by the papal declaration that the old Rite had never been abolished because it really never could be abolished. Gratitude for the 30 years of the FSSP must always go hand in hand with gratitude towards Archbishop Lefebvre — even if the FSSP arose from a conflict with him.

Very surprising is Fr Recktenwald’s criticism of laymen knowledgeable in the liturgy, who stand up for Gregorian chant and the reading of the Gospel in Latin. As for the preservation of Tradition, Fr Recktenwald obviously has in mind the practice of the 1950’s, in which the singing of lengthy hymns often obscured the liturgical action. The liturgical reform was felt necessary in part just because of this two-track situation. Whoever would like to get to know the old rite better is disturbed by the singing of (not always first-class) hymns. The locations where the old rite is celebrated are not so numerous that a great variety of celebrations of the Mass can be offered. He who is seeking out the old rite will primarily be looking for a Mass that is “totally other” than the usual celebrations of the Eucharist — even, it should be noted, those completely reverential new Masses that fortunately exist in many places. But adoration is impaired because the priest, not the Cross, is the center. The norm of the Mass is precisely the solemn chanted liturgy.

Fr Recktenwald should rather rejoice that the liturgical crisis has brought forth so many laypeople knowledgeable in the liturgy. But it may be difficult for him that this same crisis has discredited the concept of “pastoral.” “Pastoral” is understood more than ever as a clerical paternalism that pretends to know “what’s good for the people.” We cannot reproach anyone for this distrust. We continue to remember that the great crisis proceeded from the clergy. In this respect, the movement for liturgical Tradition belongs absolutely to the new spiritual movements, which are distinguished by a strong participation of the laity. In the interest of justice, it should be mentioned that, internationally, the line propagated by Fr Recktenwald is probably in the minority. The grand liturgies in Ssma Trinità dei Pellegrini, the Roman church of the FSSP, can be considered exemplary for the universal Church.

Martin Mosebach

60322 Frankfurt am Main

(The original German may be found at the Pro Missa Tridentina website.)

The One and Only Pentecost: Against the Neo-Joachimite Heresy

(The continuation of the argument of “Divergent Political Models in the Two ‘Forms’ of the Roman Rite” will be published next week. Today’s post honors the Solemnity and Octave of Pentecost.)

The Second Vatican Council was billed as a “new Pentecost.” But a new or second Pentecost is impossible. Pentecost is the mystery of the Church’s identity and vitality down through all ages until Christ returns in glory; Pentecost is not a simple event like a Fourth of July fireworks display, repeatable at will, but a permanent dynamism, expressed in the perennial freshness of the liturgy over which “the Holy Ghost … broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings” (1), warmly remembered in all those “Sundays after Pentecost” that fill the authentic Roman calendar with bright green.

There can be a new Pentecost only if the old one has failed; and in like manner, there can be a new Mass only if the old one has failed. (2) If there can be a new Pentecost, there can be a new form of Catholicism, with new doctrines, new morality, a new liturgy, for a new humanity in a new creation — all of which can be openly in conflict with their old counterparts.

Martin Mosebach eloquently diagnoses the problem:

The “spirit of the Council” began to be played off against the literal text of the conciliar decisions. Disastrously, the implementation of the conciliar decrees was caught up in the cultural revolution of 1968, which had broken out all over the world. That was certainly the work of a spirit — if only of a very impure one. The political subversion of every kind of authority, the aesthetic vulgarity, the philosophical demolition of tradition not only laid waste universities and schools and poisoned the public atmosphere but at the same time took possession of broad circles within the Church. Distrust of tradition, elimination of tradition began to spread in, of all places, an entity whose essence consists totally of tradition — so much so that one has to say the Church is nothing without tradition. So the post-conciliar battle that had broken out in so many places against tradition was nothing else but the attempted suicide of the Church — a literally absurd, nihilistic process. We all can recall how bishops and theology professors, pastors and the functionaries of Catholic organizations proclaimed with a confident victorious tone that with the Second Vatican Council a new Pentecost had come upon the Church — which none of those famous Councils of history which had so decisively shaped the development of the Faith had ever claimed. A “new Pentecost” means nothing less than a new illumination, possibly one that would surpass that received two thousand years ago; why not advance immediately to the “Third Testament” from the Education of the Human Race of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing? In the view of these people, Vatican II meant a break with the Tradition as it existed up till then, and this breach was salutary. Whoever listened to this could have believed that the Catholic religion had found itself really only after Vatican II. All previous generations — to which we who sit here owe our faith — are supposed to have remained in an outer courtyard of immaturity. (3)

What we have seen in the past half-century is a clumsy revival of the medieval Joachimite heresy by which the Church would have entered the third and final age, a new age of the Spirit, which leaves behind the Old Covenant of the Father, represented by the tables of the decalogue and the animal sacrifices, and the New Covenant of the Son, represented by the Constantinian conjunction of Church and State and the holy sacrifice of the Mass. The new age ecumenically and interreligiously “moves beyond” commandments and Christendom and traditional divine worship. With Paul VI’s liturgical reform, we move beyond the inherited liturgical tradition; with John Paul II’s Assisi meetings, we move beyond the absolute difference between the true religion and false religions; with Francis’s Amoris Laetitia, we move beyond the rigid confines of the Decalogue and the Gospels.

Now, obviously, all this novelty would be nothing but a new religion, and a new religion is a false religion. In this way, the most distinctive features of the so-called “new Pentecost” or “new springtime” are manifestations of a neo-Joachimite heresy that is incompatible with confessional Catholicism. The collapse of the Church in our times has been the divine stamp of disapproval on the deliberate departure and the passive drifting away from Scripture, Tradition, and (yes) Magisterium, in these decades when amnesia has replaced anamnesis and sacrilege has supplanted sacredness. As a writer at Rorate Caeli noted on May 2, 2014:

It is the general untrustworthiness of much of the official Catholic media and printing houses that has made blogs so popular. This is especially true regarding the obvious cognitive dissonance any serious Catholic feels between the placidity and jolliness of the official media, and the reality seen on the ground, from the abuse of children to the abuse of sacraments, from the abuse of liturgy to the abuse of confidence, from the promotion of dissidents to the hiding of the statistics of the general collapse of Catholic demographics and practice in most of the world since this wintriest of springtimes began.

The Church today suffers from heart disease: she is lethargic from fatty tissue and clogged arteries. She needs a heart transplant — but rather than getting a different heart, she needs to get rid of the artificial mechanical heart installed by her ill-informed doctors and take back the heart of flesh that her tradition grew within her. When this occurs, we shall witness, not a new Pentecost, but a renewal of the worship of God in spirit and in truth, even as Our Lord prophesied and has already provided for us. Dom Paul Delatte (abbot of Solesmes from 1890 to 1921) wrote, concerning the traditional sacred liturgy:

In it the Holy Spirit has achieved the concentration, eternalization, and diffusion throughout the whole Body of Christ of the unchangeable fullness of the act of redemption, all the spiritual riches of the Church in the past, in the present, and in eternity. (4)

It is no wonder that Dom Guéranger, in a line I love to quote, said: “The Holy Spirit has made the liturgy the center of his working in men’s souls.” This is where our Pentecost is to be found; this is where the Church is perpetually reborn in her youth, finding ready to hand the one common language with which to praise, bless, glorify, and adore her heavenly King, until He returns from the east in glory. “I will go up to the altar of God, to God, who giveth joy to my youth.”

NOTES

(1) Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur.”

(2) A “new Mass” is a contradiction in terms; the Church has no mandate to do such a thing.

(3) “On the Occasion of the 90th Birthday of Benedict XVI,” Foreword to P. Kwasniewski, Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness: Why the Modern Age Needs the Mass of Ages (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2017), xii–xiii.

(4) Commentary on the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, 133.

New Book from Angelico Press: Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness: Why the Modern Age Needs the Mass of Ages

I am very happy to announce the publication of my new book with Angelico Press, which is now available on Amazon.

(Here follows the publisher's announcement:)

THE TRADITIONAL LITURGY OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH is a highly formal ritual unfolding in layers of elaborate gesture, rich symbolism, whispered Latin, and ancient plainchants. “Experts” after the Second Vatican Council were convinced that such a ritual was irrelevant to “modern man.” To the shock of some, the delight of many, and the surprise of everyone, the old Latin Mass (and much that went along with it) has tenaciously survived during the past half-century and become an increasingly familiar feature in the Catholic landscape. What are the reasons for this revival, especially among the young? And why is this development so important for the renewal of Catholicism?

Peter Kwasniewski offers a lively account of the noble beauty and transcendent holiness of the traditional Roman liturgy, which humbles us before the mystery of God, stirs us with its pageantry, carries us into sacred silence, and bears us to a world of invisible realities. He contrasts this priceless treasure with the rationalistic reforms of the sixties, which yielded a Catholic liturgy severed from its own history, inadequate to its theological essence, unequal to its ascetical-mystical purpose, and estranged from its cultural inheritance. His conclusion: if there is to be a new springtime in the Church, the widespread restoration of the traditional liturgical rites will be at the heart of it.

“With a delightful variety of insightful angles, Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness is an admirable contribution to reminding the Church how to move the world with her irreplaceable liturgical traditions.” — MICHAEL P. FOLEY, Baylor University

“This tremendous new book is an eloquent and erudite confrontation with the very root of the liturgical debate: whether the radical de-mystifying of the Catholic liturgy has been for the good of souls. It is a ringing affirmation that the kind of liturgy that pleases God, softens the hearts of sinners, and raises the pious towards sanctity, is the mysterious product of centuries of development.” — JOSEPH SHAW, Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales

“Peter Kwasniewski illustrates the total collapse of the hierarchy of values brought about by a modern world that has ‘turned its back to God,’ and man’s need for the Traditional Mass to spin him round to a recognition that all good things—temporal things included—flow only from aiming our attention firmly at the Creator.” — JOHN RAO, St. John’s University

“Dr. Kwasniewski has a genius for making a fresh case for Catholic tradition, with a blend of perspectives from the entire 60-year Catholic traditionalist movement. A unique reading experience.” — ROGER A. MCCAFFREY, President, Roman Catholic Books

PETER KWASNIEWSKI is a founding faculty member of Wyoming Catholic College, where he teaches theology, philosophy, music, and art history, and serves as choirmaster. He is a prolific writer and a composer of sacred music.

Order the book from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. Available in paperback and hardcover.

Two Articles of Interest, by Martin Mosebach and Stuart Chessman

Here are a couple of recent articles which will certainly be of interest to our readers, and which I think it profitable to read together, as I will explain below. The first is a lengthy piece in First Things by Martin Mosebach, called “The Return to Form”, subtitled “A Call for the Restoration of the Roman Rite.” It is fairly long, but certainly worth reading in its entirety; I was especially struck by his take on the nature of what Pope Benedict did for the liturgy as a whole when he promulgated Summorum Pontificum.

“When Pope Benedict had the greatness of soul to issue Summorum Pontificum, he not only reintroduced the Roman Rite into the liturgy of the Church but declared that it had never been forbidden, because it could never be forbidden. No pope and no council possess the authority to invalidate, abolish, or forbid a rite that is so deeply rooted in the history of the Church.

Not only the liberal and Protestant enemies of the Roman Rite but also its defenders, who in a decades-long struggle had begun to give up hope, could barely contain their astonishment. Everyone still had the strict prohibitions of countless bishops echoing in their ears, threats of excommunication and subtle accusations. And one hardly dared draw the conclusion that, in view of Pope Benedict’s correcting of the wrongful suppression of the Roman Rite, Blessed Pope Paul VI had apparently been in error when he expressed his strong conviction that the rite long entrusted to the Church should never again be celebrated anywhere in the world.

Benedict XVI did even more: He explained that there was only a single Roman Rite which possesses two forms, one ‘ordinary’ and the other ‘extraordinary’— the latter term referring to the traditional rite. In this way, the traditional form was made the standard for the newly revised form. The pope expressed the wish that the two forms should mutually fructify and enrich each other. It is therefore natural to assume that the new rite, with its great flexibility and many possible forms of celebration, must draw near to the older, steady, and fixed form of the Roman Rite, which provides no latitude whatsoever for encroachments or modifications of any kind.

.... Whenever Pope Benedict spoke of a mutual influence and enrichment between the two forms of the rite, he surely did so with an ulterior motive. He believed in organic development in the area of liturgy. He condemned the revolution in the liturgy that coincided with the revolutionary year 1968, and he saw the connection between the liturgical revolution and the cultural one in world-historical terms, for both contradict the ideal of organic evolution and development. He regarded it as a serious offense against the spirit of the Church that the peremptory order of a pope should be taken as warrant to encroach upon the collective heritage of all preceding generations. After decades of use throughout the world, Benedict not only considered it a practical impossibility simply to prohibit the new rite with its serious flaws, but in all likelihood he also perceived that such an act, even if it had been feasible, would have continued along the erroneous path taken by his predecessor, one of reform by fiat. The correct path would be found, so he hoped, in a gradual growing together of the old and new forms, a process to be encouraged and gently fostered by the pope.”

And also this passage on this Reform of the Reform.

“It is with downright incredulity that one reads (the prescriptions of Sacrosanctum Concilium), for their plain sense was given exactly the opposite meaning by the enthusiastic defenders of post-conciliar ‘development.’ One cannot say that Ratzinger’s call for a reform of the reform intended in any way to go back ‘behind the council,’ as the antagonists of Pope Benedict have maintained. As any fair-minded reading of Sacrosanctum Concilium makes clear, the reform of the reform has no goal other than realizing the agenda of the council.”

The west choir of Bamberg Cathedral, which is still quite splendid despite being vandalized by the King of Bavaria in the 1830s, and again after Vatican II. From an article published in 2009 by Gregor Kollmorgen.

The website of the Society of St Hugh of Cluny has an article by Stuart Chessman about a “first encounter” with the traditional liturgy which took place over 200 years ago, when a German law student from solidly Protestant Berlin visited the Catholic city of Bamberg, then still “a world of processions, relics and devotions, of overflowing public and popular piety, of splendid masses accompanied by orchestras, gunfire salutes and trumpet blasts!” The student, one Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, writes as follows of his experiences of the ceremonies which he witnessed, all still untouched by any of the horrors of revolution or enthusiasms of modern reformers.

“As I entered the venerable church I found it already almost full. I pushed forward up to the main altar and waited now for the solemn scene. Oh! – truly I had not expected very much. Everything was new for me. The ceremonies, which every minute always changed, made an ever stronger and wonderful impression on me the more they were mysterious and unintelligible. I was standing among nothing but Catholics: men, women and children. Some were constantly reading prayer books; others prayed the rosary while standing, yet others reverently knelt right next to me.

Here I found proved so clearly what Nicolai relates: that fixed raising of the gaze in prayer, which suddenly blazes up to heaven without resting on earthly objects; the making of the sign of the cross in holy zeal; the heartfelt firm striking of the breast which, with expressive glances towards heaven and with deeply felt sighs, shows such special depth of feeling. …One is totally initiated into the Catholic faith here and almost driven to participate in all the ceremonies.”

Wackenroder would become one of the founders of German Romanticism, and Chessman gives a long quote from one of his books, the title of which almost summarizes the entire movement: “Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk” In it, his experience of Bamberg is transformed into a fictionalized account of a solemn Mass in the Pantheon in Rome, which ends with a conversion experience. “I could not leave the temple after the end of the celebration, I fell down in a corner and wept, and then passed with a contrite heart all the saints, all the paintings – it seemed that only now could I really contemplate and revere them. I could not resist the force within me – dear Sebastian, I have now crossed over to your faith, and my heart feels happy and light. It was art that had all-powerfully drawn me over, and I can say that only now can I understand and grasp art. ”

In the first article, Mosebach writes, “In a period such as the present, unable to respond to images and forms, incessantly misled by a noisy art market, all experimentation that tampers with the Roman Rite as it has developed through the centuries could only be perilous and potentially fatal. In any case, this tampering is unnecessary. ... The peasant woman who said the rosary during Mass, knowing that she was in the presence of Christ’s sacrifice, understood the rite better than our contemporaries who comprehend every word but fail to engage with such knowledge because the present form of the Mass, drastically altered, no longer allows for its full expression.” Likewise, Chessman concludes his article with the observation that in Wachenroder’s case, “... this Mass, so foreign to him, and that he could not ‘understand,’ had clearly communicated to him the most profound sense of worship and of the Divine. Such is the transformative power, both in 1793 and today, of this Mass – the Mass of Tradition!”

18th Cologne International Liturgical Conference – March 29- April 1

The 18th Cologne International Liturgical Conference will take place from March 29 to April 1st this year in Herzogenrath bei Aachen, Germany. Among the participants are Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland, Oregon, who will speak on “The Rediscovery of the Classical Roman Liturgy in North America,” celebrate one of the Masses, and preach at another. Bishop Steven Lopes of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter will speak on the development of the Ordinariate Missal, and celebrate a Pontifical Liturgy according to that Missal. Our own Dr Peter Kwasniewski will be giving a lecture (in German), and launching the German translation of his book Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis. Dr Martin Mosebach, author of “The Heresy of Formlessness”, will deliver a tribute to Pope Benedict XVI. The liturgies at the conference will be celebrated according to the Extraordinary Form; the full program in English may be see at the following link: http://www.liturgische-tagung.info/programme.html

The Liturgist Manifesto

By now, most of our readers have probably already seen or read about the article on the website of The Guardian, in which the actor Bill Murray commented on the post-Conciliar liturgical changes.

One new saint he does approve of is Pope John XXIII (who died in 1963). “I’ll buy that one, he’s my guy; an extraordinary joyous Florentine who changed the order. I’m not sure all those changes were right. I tend to disagree with what they call the new mass. I think we lost something by losing the Latin. Now if you go to a Catholic mass even just in Harlem it can be in Spanish, it can be in Ethiopian, it can be in any number of languages. The shape of it, the pictures, are the same but the words aren’t the same.”

Isn’t it good for people to understand it? “I guess,” he says, shaking his head. “But there’s a vibration to those words. If you’ve been in the business long enough you know what they mean anyway. And I really miss the music – the power of it, y’know? Yikes! Sacred music has an effect on your brain.” Instead, he says, we get “folk songs … top 40 stuff … oh, brother….”

As a side note, St John XXIII was actually from a small village in Lombardy called “Under-the-Mountain (Sotto il Monte)”, near Bergamo; and, as we all know very well, he promulgated Veterum Sapientia, but not one of the documents of Vatican II. It is one of the saddest testimonies to the legacy of Pope Paul VI that so many people “remember” John XXIII as the architect of changes he would never have countenanced, like celebrating Mass entirely in the vernacular. A few years ago, Italian television broadcast a docudrama about Paul VI. (In Italian, a docudrama is called, without any deliberate irony, “un fiction.”) The actor who played him, Fabrizio Gifuni, noted in an interview that,

If you go around the area of St Peter’s Basilica, you will see souvenir shops overflowing with postcards of John XXIII, John Paul I and John Paul II. But you will not find one, not a single one, of Paul VI… This is surprising, when you consider that (he) guided the Church for fifteen years, from 1963 to 1978, perhaps the most critical in its recent history.

While looking through the reportage on the Bill Murray article, I stumbled across some comments made by another fellow named Murray, on changes to the liturgy made even before the Council ended. In a letter to the Tablet published on March 14, 1964, Dom Gregory Murray, O.S.B., of Downside Abbey in England, wrote:

The plea that the laity as a body do not want liturgical change, whether in rite or in language, is, I submit, quite beside the point. … (it is) not a question of what people want; it is a question of what is good for them.

Michael Davies quotes this in his book “Liturgical Time Bombs in Vatican II”, and rightly observes that it reflects the same mentality as that of the Soviet Communist Party. Just as the Party “ ‘interpreted the will of the people,’ so the ‘experts’ interpret the wishes of the laity,” and were willing to inflict any amount of suffering on them to make them accept what they, the experts, had determined was for the people’s good. And so I find myself reminded of two stories from those troubled days.

The first was something which my mother and grandmother told me many times about the first Mass celebrated in English in their home parish in White Plains, New York. Most of the congregation left the church in tears, an episode which disturbed my mother greatly, and which my grandmother, who hated to hear any criticism against the Church, preferred not to comment on. Like many Catholics who grew up before the Council, they were both quietly but decidedly indignant at the idea, so common afterwards, that they must have been ignorant of the Mass because it was in Latin, a righteous and proper indignation which I have encountered in a great many other people since. A former colleague once told me something in a similar vein about her Catholic grammar school: “We all had our missals in Latin and English, and those sisters made darn sure that we knew how to use them!”

The second concerns this commemorative plaque from the church of All Saints in Rome,

which reads in part:

His Holiness Paul VI, as the liturgical reform decreed by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council was beginning, was pleased to celebrate in this church the first Mass in Italian, amid the excited exultation of an entire people…

A Roman friend of mine explained to me this is actually the third version of this plaque, because, in fact, not quite all of the people were excitedly exulting about Mass in the vernacular. After the first two plaques were badly vandalized, the third was placed well out of reach, and above a statue that no one would dare climb on. (The current plaque seems however to have a stain on it, of unknown origin, not visible in the photograph.)

No intelligent person would seriously defend the claim that all Catholic liturgical practice before 1962 was always and everywhere ideal. In the 1950s, my father’s parish had ten or more Masses every Sunday between the upper church and the crypt; the only one with music was the last one in the upper church, which he described as “the one nobody went to.” To me, this is simply unimaginable, (perhaps the choir just wasn’t very good), but the preference for low Mass and the dislike of high Mass was undeniably real in many quarters. But far too many of those who (rightly, in my judgment) saw this as a problem, chose to remedy it, not with patience and charity, not by educating the faithful to a greater love of and appreciation for sacred music. They chose rather to force upon them “what was good for them”: bad but easily singable music, and a vernacular version of the Mass as ugly as it was inept.

For those who wish to remedy these failures, and give back to Mr Murray, and countless others like him, something of what they loved and lost, it is hard not to sympathize with Dom Gregory, and just impose necessary reforms immediately. In many cases, this can be done and should be done. Most parishes could probably ban some of the more truly awful hymns, for example, without anyone noticing or caring. Likewise, it is hard to imagine that when the long-overdue ban on the use of the NAB finally comes, we will see resistance and protest comparable to that seen among some Protestants over the use of any Bible other than the King James.

On the other hand, as the great Martin Mosebach recently wrote, we have to a very large degree “lost our liturgical innocence” in the Latin Church. We can no longer simply accept the liturgy as a thing that is what it is, as Mr Murray and my parents did when they were children; we are constrained by our circumstances to treat the liturgy as a thing which we collectively make, more than a thing that makes us. And this means that every Catholic has opinions about liturgy, of a sort which it would have never occurred to ordinary people like my parents to have before the reform. I have known priests who would, of their own initiative, correct some of the more grotesque errors of the old English translation of the Mass, before they were officially corrected; conversely, I have met laypeople who passionately defend some of those same errors afterwards.

Every effort to drive out bad liturgical practice with good will probably encounter some resistance; if it is to be a truly Christian reform, resistance must be overcome with patience and charity, but also with fortitude and courage. Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, has recently given the Church an excellent example of this, by having Masses in his cathedral celebrated ad orientem on the Sundays of Advent, and the midnight Mass of Christmas. Other churches in the diocese may do the same, but are not ordered to. God willing, examples like this and proper catechesis will steer us to the day where no Catholic ever thinks that the priest is “turning his back on the people.” And God willing, by following such a model, the liturgy can be reformed without reproducing the tragic experience of the 1960s.

The Danger of Equating Vatican II and the Liturgical Reform

Pope John Paul II pointed out: “For many people, the message of the Second Vatican Council was perceived principally through the liturgical reform” (Vicesimus Quintus Annus, 12).

That’s just the problem in a nutshell, isn’t it? If the liturgical reform itself was bungled—and, in the wake of the scathing critiques of Gamber, Ratzinger, Nichols, Lang, Mosebach, Robinson, Reid, et alia, it is no longer intellectually honest to think that it was not, in some very important respects—and, what is worse, if its implementation was still further compromised by the prevailing secularism of the environment into which it was launched, one must ask: What version, or rather, what caricature, of Vatican II did those many people perceive whose idea of the Council came, perhaps exclusively, from the liturgical revolution?

They took in little or nothing of the authentic doctrine of the Council—the salubrious doctrine that, according to John XXIII’s intention and the very words of Vatican II itself, fully accorded with the teaching of former ecumenical councils, especially those of Trent and Vatican I. Instead of bread, the faithful were given a stone. Instead of substantive content, the faithful were given a hermeneutic, a manner of viewing the Church, her teaching, her tradition, her liturgy—and it was decisively one of rupture and discontinuity. To be Catholic in those heady days meant to be different, to be other, to be up-to-date; it certainly did not mean to be stably the same, consistent with one’s past, reliant on tradition. The Church was no longer the Mystical Body and Immaculate Bride of Christ; the Church was reform, reform without an end in sight, without even much of a plan, reform for the sake of reform. As the famous Protestant theologian Karl Barth asked in the wake of the Council: “When will the Church know that it is sufficiently updated?” I think that’s what you call a rhetorical question.

Tragically, generations of clergy have been trained in the same hermeneutic of rupture and discontinuity, including most of the world’s bishops. That is why the unexpected resurgence of traditional forms of faith and worship among young people, mounting at times to passionate commitment, is a source of bewilderment, consternation, and even anger to them. Due to their training and mental habits, such clergy equate today’s liturgy and its multitudinous aberrations with Vatican II, and hence equate a love of or preference for the traditional liturgy and the culture surrounding it with a rejection of Vatican II. This might be true for some people, but it isn't true across the board, and it need not be true at all.

It does not seem to matter that the traditional liturgy and the integral Catholic life it sustains is, in fact, profoundly in harmony with the best and greatest teachings of the Council—one need only think of Lumen Gentium, Dei Verbum, and even Sacrosanctum Concilium. It does not matter that Pope Benedict XVI, the greatest theologian to sit on the Chair of Peter for centuries, saw continuity between his own liturgical doctrine and praxis and that of the Council to which he made significant contributions. No, it does not matter, because it doesn’t look that way to Catholics ignorant of the Council’s documents, ignorant of the liturgical patrimony of the Church, and poorly formed by almost fifty years of liturgical abuse.

What is necessary today is to show, patiently, persistently, and accurately, with the humility and confidence born of careful study, that the fathers of Vatican II did not desire or ask for the liturgical reform that came out of Bugnini’s Consilium, that the Novus Ordo Missae is not in full accord with Sacrosanctum Concilium (see here or here), and that the teaching of the sixteen official documents of Vatican II supports rather than dismantles traditional Catholic theology and piety. The least we can do, in any case, is not to allow ourselves to be tossed to and fro, carried about by every wind of secondhand half-truths or tendentious readings that emphasize rupture, whether modernist or traditionalist in source.

It is true that there are problems, difficulties, and ambiguities in the conciliar documents. It is true that not every formulation is immune to legitimate criticism—even Ratzinger complained that parts of Gaudium et Spes were “downright Pelagian.” And it is beyond doubt that there were bishops and periti at the Council who sought to infuse modernism into the documents and, to some extent, succeeded in influencing the formulations. But it is still more certain that the final documents, reviewed so many times and passed through the crucible of papal and conciliar scrutiny, are, with few exceptions, sound in content and form; and it is most certain that they are free from error in faith and morals, being the formal acts of an ecumenical council and solemnly promulgated by the Pope. We must never, as it were, abandon the Council to the modernists; this would only play into the devil’s hands.

Pasquale Cati, Council of Trent

In any case, it is not simply this most recent Council that gives us our map and marching orders; it is the entirety of Catholic Tradition and the totality of the Magisterium for the past 2,000 years, of which this Council is but a part, and within which it is rightly understood. We know that in principle, no reading of Vatican II can possibly be right that results in formal contradiction between past and present. We are guided by all of the Church’s teaching, not just the most recent. Indeed, we are blessed to belong to a body that, while it develops over time, cannot essentially change. The partisans of perpetual change can have their bizarre liturgies and politically correct catechisms, but they will no longer—or not for much longer—be Catholics.

In the Liturgy, Man is Most Active—and Most Receptive

For this feast of St. Pius X on the traditional Roman calendar and St. Gregory the Great on the new calendar (two great pontiffs whose legacies are fittingly thus intertwined), it seemed appropriate to offer a meditation on a fundamental principle of liturgical theology.

Although liturgy is the greatest act of man, it is never an act of man by himself, but always and essentially the action of Christ the High Priest, true God and true man, who allows and enables us to participate in His theandric action, His all-sufficient Sacrifice for the salvation of the world. This being so, liturgy is a peculiar kind of action, one in which man is also most passive, in the sense of being utterly receptive to the gift God wishes to give him, through the hands of the Church.

If we were to fall into a way of thinking about the liturgy as a kind of workshop, an evolving sphere of self-expression, a communal celebration of the here and now, then we would be truly guilty of Pelagianism. We would be making ourselves the central agents or actors—activists instead of imitators of the Virgin Mary who received the angel’s greeting, gave her consent to the divine initiative, and conceived by the Holy Spirit to bring forth the ultimate gift to mankind: the Son of God, in flesh and blood. The liturgy and its music have and must have this Marian dimension of receptivity, a virginal intention to stay untainted by the profane world and a faithful mothering of the Word-made-flesh.

One important expression of our Marian receptivity is that we receive the liturgy from the Church and her Tradition, we do not create it, and we follow her rubrics and rules, not our own. Although duty has been given a bad name by Immanuel Kant, rightly understood it remains a fundamental reality of Christian life. It is our duty, as Catholics, to follow the Church’s doctrine and discipline concerning the liturgy (especially the Mass). For example, when it comes to sacred music for the Ordinary Form, we must follow the full and clear teaching of the Second Vatican Council, the General Instruction on the Roman Missal, and other documents such as Sacramentum Caritatis that have made clear how we should be singing the Ordinary and the Propers, giving Gregorian chant the foremost place in the repertoire. There are norms, rules, standards, because the public worship of the Church does not belong to us, it belongs to her Master, the Lord she worships.

Recently I read this moving passage from Martin Mosebach’s endlessly insightful Heresy of Formlessness:

Many people regard the rubrics as the most distinctive—and most problematical—feature of the old Missal. . . . . Rubricism stands for a liturgy where all subjectivism, all charismatic enthusiasm, all creative inventiveness has been condemned to silence. . . . Public prayer, not the prayer of the individual but of the Church’s whole Mystical Body, possessed a binding quality that, in an atmosphere of emancipation from all pressure whatsoever, could be felt as a kind of dictatorship. Now, however, after more than a century of the destruction of forms in art, literature, architecture, politics, and religion, too, people are generally beginning to realize that loss of form—almost always—implies loss of content. . . . Formerly, seminarians learned rubrics so well they could perform them in their sleep. Just as pianists have to practice hard to acquire some technique that is initially a pure torture, but ultimately sounds like free improvisation, experienced celebrants used to move to and fro at the altar with consummate poise; the whole action poured forth as if from a single mold. These celebrants were not hemmed in by armor-plated rubrics, as it were: they floated on them as if on clouds.

Along the same lines, Ryan Topping, in his book Rebuilding Catholic Culture, has this to say about rubrics:

If you no longer see yourself as the servant of a tradition, but as its master, no longer believe that the rubrics veil a mystery, that the soul requires truth to be wrapped in the garment of beauty, then reasonably you are likely to treat the Mass more as a gathering of friends than as a sacrifice of God.

Is this not precisely what has happened, in spite of the noble witness and teaching of Pope Saint Pius X and many of his holy successors?  There is such sanity and sanctity in these words of Dom Mark Kirby of Silverstream Priory:

To begin with the liturgy is not to set about tinkering with it; it is to submit to it, as it is. To begin with God is not to engage in a critical analysis of theology; it is to fall prostrate saying, “The Lord he is God, the Lord he is God” (1 Kings 18:39). To begin with adoration is, in the inspired words of the Cherubic Hymn of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy, “to lay aside all earthly cares” in homage to “the King of Kings who comes escorted invisibly by Angelic hosts.” 

It almost sounds like an examination of conscience that we might pursue: do we truly begin with liturgy as something first, something that preexists us and will continue long after we are gone, rather than something we master, manufacture, produce, shape at will? Do we submit to the liturgy, not as we think it should be for “modern man,” but as it has come down to us from holy tradition, passing relatively unchanged through centuries of doubt, dismay, and disaster like a strong ship sailing over the churning waves of a stormy sea?  Is our most characteristic action to fall prostrate before the mystery and majesty of God as He deigns to reveal Himself in the ritual words, actions, and signs that He has left among us?

Traditionalists might have a tendency to think that such questions need not be put to them, as if they are automatically “covered” by their faithful adherence to traditional forms. I think this is an incorrect and perhaps spiritually dangerous assumption. We, too, need to be sure that we are following the full teaching of Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to our offering of public worship. For example, in our zeal to set aside a widely prevalent superficial understanding of active participation, are we zealous to embrace and promote Saint Pius X’s clarion call for the active participation of the people in the singing of the Gregorian chants of the Ordinary of the Mass and the responses that belong to them in a High Mass? Are we careful, as we sift the good results of the liturgical movement from the bad, not to throw out the baby with the bathwater? Would St. Pius X, Pius XII, and John XXIII, among others, recognize us as their children, as the ones who have finally taken their magisterium to heart and made it shine forth more brightly in the world, for the spread of the light of Christ?

St. Pius X and St. Gregory the Great, pray for us.