Cold and Hot Media: The Mass as a Medium

“Let’s Throw the Microphone Out of the Church!”

Paweł Jarnicki

Part 3

(See Part 1 | Part 2)

The difficulties in understanding McLuhan’s views on microphones may also stem from the fact that he assumes that the reader is familiar with his concepts presented in other texts. It is obvious that a microphone is a transmitter, that it is a medium. There is the one who speaks, there is the one who listens, and there is the message transmitted through the microphone.

But a casual reader may be surprised that McLuhan seems to suggest that the use of what he considers a “cold” microphone could “warm up” the Latin Mass (which he considers “cold”). What does it mean for media to be “cold” or “hot”?

In the simplest terms, a hot medium delivers information in “high definition”, in a form that minimizes the cognitive activity of the recipient. Take, for example, a contemporary entertainment film with surround sound and special effects. The recipient does not have to conjecture the details, does not have to imagine how something explodes, what someone is wearing, what a given interior looks like, what the background of a scene is, etc. (to stick to the realm of appearances). The recipient simply sees it, and is cognitively passive, because everything is “served on a plate.”

Cold media, on the other hand, provide information in “low definition”, in a form that requires cognitive activity on the part of the recipient; in order to assimilate the message, the recipient must “warm it up”. Someone who reads a novel has to conjecture a lot, has to imagine what the scene described in words looks like, has to complete a lot of details, construe a lot, and can do it in many ways to a certain extent. [1] So, although on the surface, just like a movie viewer, they do nothing (they do not move or speak), we understand that a book reader is more active than a viewer who simply surrenders to impressions.

Hot media make the audience cognitively passive, while cold media force cognitive activity, which is why, among other things, “the medium is the message,” because in the long run it changes the level of knowledge of a larger group of recipients. Continuing with our book-film example, let us note that the knowledge of students who have watched the film adaptation of a school reading is different from the knowledge of students who have carefully read the book.

In this sense, the type of medium has a greater impact on culture and society than the content of the message being conveyed. Regardless of whether it is Pan Tadeusz [the Polish national epic] or another story, more is “gained” from the reception of a cold medium. This is because a cold medium requires cognitive activity on the part of the recipient, an act that de facto creates a community.

After all, it is not state-issued ID cards or church baptism certificates that make us a community, but rather socialization into similar ways of “warming up” – completing, conjecturing, construing. If this seems too abstract, try to recall a social gathering. Jokes are often told at such gatherings, especially at the beginning, to build a shared mood. Jokes often involve some kind of understatement or mistake; the audience has to make a mental effort to “get it,” and shared laughter is proof that despite the ambiguity of the message, we “get it,” meaning we understand each other better and think alike. A momentary community is created. [2]

Another device that requires completion is... the parable. We usually think that their ambiguity served to ensure that only the chosen few understood them, so as not to cast pearls before swine, and we do not notice the other – or perhaps the first – side of the coin, that the ambiguity of certain statements, by forcing similar cognitive activity, builds a community.

Pius XII offering Mass at an altar with four microphones (only three visible). Photo courtesy of Nico Fassino

McLuhan writes about the microphone, but he also seems to think of the Mass as a medium, although he does not make this distinction explicitly. [3] If the Mass is a medium, then the speaker is the Church, the listener is the people of God, and what is communicated through the Mass is the deposit of Faith. Viewing the Mass as a medium helps us understand why the “cold” microphone “warmed up” the Holy Mass, because in the new Mass – with sound amplification, in vernacular, with the priest facing the people – everything is to be “high definition”: visible, audible, and understandable.

The traditional Mass was “low definition” – cold (“demanding”), like reading a book: the faithful had to complete for themselves what the priest was doing. They had dogmas as their guideposts. The new Mass is hot (“easy”), like watching a movie. However, even though the priest says everything loudly and in understandable language, it does not help at all to feel that he is addressing God and re-presenting the Sacrifice of Christ in an unbloody manner on behalf of the faithful. Continuing our analogy, the “plot” is supposedly the same (the deposit of Faith has not changed), but the level of “knowledge” of the faithful is radically different.

It is possible that illiterate people of past eras (raised on the old Mass) had a deeper faith than those among contemporary intellectuals (raised on the new Mass) who have remained in the Church and so “actively” participate in the new Masses. They read the readings, carry the gifts, and above all, they do not pray the rosary during Mass (a very common example!). “Traditionalists” often mock this “activism.” However, no one can explain what is wrong with it.

The paradox is that although the theoretical goal of the Mass reform was to increase the participation of the faithful (participatio actuosa), in practice the effects are the opposite of what was intended. The changes introduced (which were intended to increase clarity and comprehensibility, i.e., to “warm up” the Mass) have only increased external activity and suppressed internal activity, which is truly community-building. Contemporary Catholic communities that shake hands after meetings and say, “It’s good to have you here,” may in fact be superficial communities. Only internal, cognitive activity creates a deeper community, creates the Church.

If during the new Mass, where everything is seemingly clear, obvious, and understandable, the faithful do not have to complete anything themselves or conjecture anything (which is very difficult anyway, because they are flooded with many more stimuli), then they absorb the content of the reading to a much lesser extent, and their membership in the Community becomes increasingly formal. They cease to feel unity with other members of the Mystical Body. This is the first, painful consequence of introducing the microphone into the Church, concerning the Community. The second concerns the Word.

The church of St Matthäus in Düsseldorf, Germany. Notice the obligatory centrality of the mic, with the processional cross and candles to the side. The overhead crucifix only partly cancels out the effect.

Omnimediatization

After my conversion, I saw and heard many Masses. Very different ones. I quickly turned to traditional Masses, although I never rejected the new ones. I read about the reform, about non-believers and Protestants who once converted, enchanted by the beauty of the Latin Mass. And then they experienced the reform and the pentecostalization of Catholicism. And I began to wonder if today’s Mass could “captivate” someone enough to convert them. If I bring a non-believing friend to Mass in my parish, is there anything here that might delight them? It’s a difficult question...

The vast majority of new Masses are chaotic, and at times even noisy and cacophonous. The new Mass is not appealing at all. I have often wondered whether it is inertia or a miracle that people still come here. In today’s churches, too many things are shoddy, kitschy, and inconsistent. Plastic chasubles and hubbub stand in stark contrast to the thoughtful design and ornamentation of old churches.

Among the more “difficult” experiences, I include the contemporary new Masses known as “children’s,” “for children,” or “family” Masses. Much could be written about them, but I will focus here on one way in which the microphone is used during them. The moment of the homily arrives. The priest does not approach the pulpit or climb into the ambo, but takes a portable microphone, leaves the presbytery and goes into the nave (in front of the balustrade, which is not there) and calls the children to him. They crowd around him. Instead of a sermon, he gives a catechesis and asks the children questions. The children answer. The priest is happy, the parents are happy, because the children are “actively participating” and the content is good and pious. What’s wrong with that?

We already know that the content is actually secondary, because the primary message is the medium. And no one at this Mass is surprised that the priest speaks through a microphone to the children who are within arm’s reach. No one is surprised that they answer him through the same microphone, even though they are standing right next to him. And once during such a Mass, the priest, who after his sermon-catechesis had already asked all the children about their Mass intentions, turned – of course through that portable microphone, of course – to the adults remaining in the pews with the question: “Perhaps the floor has some intentions?”

This servant of the Lord’s constantly devasted vineyard, whose piety and good faith I am firmly convinced of, simply picked up the message from the microphone. He called the faithful who participate in the Sacrifice “the floor.” But it’s really not his fault. He was about 40 years old, so he was raised on Mass with a microphone.

It was only while writing this article that I realized how mediatized our world is, how it is mediated by the means of communication. [4] I tried to find contemporary social events that are not mediatized, and the only things that came to mind were school classes and some funerals of “insignificant people.” It was a shocking discovery for me that there are basically no more social events that are not mediatized. We have to see and hear everything.

Nothing should be left unbroadcast.

And yet, a hundred years ago in Fatima, over 70,000 people came, even though they couldn’t see. They came because they heard that something was occurring. But there was no sound system or zoom on site. They had no guarantee that they would see or hear anything, even if they were right in the center of events. The photos from Fatima in 1917 are, of course, a means of communication, but they are only documents; the events in Fatima themselves were not mediatized for their participants. That is, the means of communication were there, but they were... children, flesh-and-blood children.

Our world has changed significantly over the past hundred years. This would not have been possible without microphones and sound systems. The first such systems were developed around 1915, and two years later, during Christmas 1917 in San Francisco, the Magnavox sound system was publicly presented. In the same year, Our Lady of the Rosary appeared in Fatima. The carbon microphone was invented forty years earlier, in 1876. In 1877, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception appeared in Gietrzwałd. And seven years later, in 1884, Pope Leo XIII had a truly Job-like vision, or rather “hearing,” because the revelation was (indeed!) acoustic in nature. Jesus spoke with Satan, who, wanting to attempt to destroy the Church (the deposit of Faith!), demanded [5] time (from 75 to 100 years) and greater power over those who would devote themselves to his service. Jesus was to allow this, and Satan chose the “coming” century (usually interpreted, but on what basis is unknown, as the 20th century).

Terrified by this revelation, Leo XIII decided that all priests would recite a set of prayers after low Masses (during the week), kneeling at the foot of the altar (the old one, i.e., together with the people, versus Deum), which were later called “the Leonine Prayers.” These prayers are no longer recited today except at the old Mass (though sometimes their echo can still be heard when, after a parish Mass, the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel is recited). The obligation to recite the Leonine Prayers as an “add-on” was abolished by the Consilium led by Bugnini in 1964.

I must admit that when I heard that the new pope had chosen the name Leo, I felt hopeful that this was not a random choice. Although the content of Leo XIII’s revelations is known to many believers, and many believers are familiar with other predictions of a crisis in the Church, priests today do not explain this to the faithful in a convincing manner. For believers, can such temporal coincidences as those mentioned above be purely accidental? Is the intensification of Marian apparitions accidental? Has Jesus really allowed Satan to destroy the Church? When? When will it end? Has it already begun? What would it consist of? Is it a coincidence that God’s people are lost in conjectures and conspiracy theories when the voice of the shepherds has become a processed voice?

Although succession in the Church must still be accomplished through the direct laying on of hands, the Word that priests proclaim today is transmitted. This may seem insignificant to us, but the sound that comes from the speakers is, contrary to appearances, heavily processed, so that the sound does not overlap with the echo of what was said a moment ago. [6] In addition, the priest’s voice today reaches the faithful from all directions (the nearest speaker may even be behind them); it is a “dis-placed” voice. In the past, it had one natural source in the priest’s body. This causes confusion, which is not visible in adults today because they are already accustomed to it, but it can be seen in some of the youngest children (who enter the space of a mass event with a transmitted human voice, not only in church). The microphone created, as McLuhan put it, a “sound bubble.”

This led to the actual elimination of the age-old division of the Temple into three zones (tabernacle – Holy of Holies; presbytery – Holy Place; nave – vestibule), which, in short, does not help the faithful understand that the most important part of the Mass takes place there, in the presbytery, in a slightly different space behind the balustrades. In fact, today the balustrade is often no longer there, because the sound bubble has made the space of churches a homogeneous space of encounter around the Table-Altar.

The voice also sounds at a similar volume all the time (in the old Mass, the priest sometimes spoke loudly, sometimes moderately, sometimes in a whisper). The microphone not only dis-placed the Word proclaimed during Mass, but also, as McLuhan puts it, discarnated it. It is precisely this second, painful consequence of the introduction of the microphone into the Church that concerns the Word.

TLM, Rome (Italy), Church of the Most Holy Trinity of the Pilgrims. A medium-sized church during a traditional Mass does not require a sound system; the cross is the axis of the celebration.

TLM, Vilnius (Lithuania), Church of St. Anne. A church without a single microphone, neither at the altar nor at the ambo.

Discarnation of the Word

The lord of death is unable to be born of a virgin like God. The lord of death cannot have his own body. At most, he can enter the bodies of those born naturally. The Church has developed methods to combat possession. But it has not noticed the new trick of the lord of death – a trick with a much greater destructive power than possession: the trick of the discarnation of the Word, which distorts the transmission of the deposit of Faith. That is why I say: Let’s throw the microphone out of the Church!

“Even then Cassandra, who, by the god’s decree, is never / to be believed by Trojans, reveals our future fate with her lips.”

I saw that on most of the new altars, the microphone had taken the place of the cross. The cross stood to the side or behind and became an ornament. Priests today move around the microphone.

But whatever happens, as the Church says, the Lord will come. He was born at night, he comes in silence, he will rise from the heights and illuminate the darkness.

Christmas Day, 2025

NOTES

^[1] Let us note in the margin that after a film with special effects, it is more difficult to have a meaningful conversation with other viewers (often these conversations do not go beyond “did you see that” or “that was great”), it is more difficult to talk about such films because we saw the same thing and everything was obvious. When, on the other hand, someone has read the same novel (I don’t mean a crime novel) at the same time, it is often easier to talk about it because we understand many issues and imagine them slightly differently.

^[2] Of course, it happens that a narcissistic character dominates a party that consists only of jokes, or that jokes quickly reveal that we will not understand each other, that there will be no community, because completing them would mean repeating stereotypes that offend us. Metaphors are a community-building device similar to jokes, although not as easy to notice. Due to their ambiguity, they also force the listener to make cognitive effort and create a community. In the presence of those who use metaphors that do not offend us, but are close to us, ones that we understand almost instinctively, we feel better.

^[3] This is how, by the way, Ashil D. Manohar develops McLuhan’s idea in his thesis entitled The Mass is the Medium: Marshall McLuhan and Roman Catholic Liturgical Change (2021). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/8817. Such an approach may seem strange at first, but it is not foreign to official church documents. Cf. e.g. p. 11 of the pastoral instruction on social communications Communio et progressio: “Communication is more than the expression of ideas and the indication of emotion. At its most profound level it is the giving of self in love. Christ’s communication was, in fact, spirit and life (Jn 6:53). In the institution of the Holy Eucharist, Christ gave us the most perfect and most intimate form of communion between God and man possible in this life, and, out of this, the deepest possible unity between men.”

^[4] I also realized that this world is coming to an end because of “Artificial Intelligence,” because it is beginning to eat its own tail. Trust in the media began to crumble earlier (because we began to realize that “the press lies” and “television lies” also today, and not just “during communism” behind the Iron Curtain), but AI will complete this process — once we realize that with its help, our and foreign intelligence services, criminals, and enlightened minds are able to generate hyper-realistic fake news, we will completely lose trust in our “extended senses.” In my opinion, it is only a matter of time before zones free from all kinds of technology begin to emerge. Churches could be at the forefront of this!

^[5] I do not have access to the relevant sources, but in reports that can be found on the Internet, Satan’s voice is described as “guttural” or “harsh” , and Artificial Intelligence confirms that early microphones caused such sound distortion and that the human voice transmitted through them was often described as “harsh,” “distorted,” or “raspy.”

^[6] This is necessary due to the “outdated” architecture of churches, which was designed for natural voices. Traditional methods of amplifying sound, apart from architecture, were based on the construction of the ambo — raised above the people. A canopy was installed above the pulpit, whose function was not only decorative — the canopy reflected the sound and directed it downwards towards the people, and in addition, a soundboard was often placed in it. However, all these measures amplified the priest’s live and unprocessed voice.

The Microphone as a Social Actor

“Let’s Throw the Microphone Out of the Church!”

Paweł Jarnicki

Part 2

(See Part 1 | Part 3)

McLuhan coined two well-known phrases, the first being “global village” and the second “medium is the message.” While it is easy to understand that, due to the rapid circulation of information, we all live in a “global village” today, it is more difficult to comprehend that the medium itself is also a message. McLuhan meant that the medium itself has a strong influence on the audience. It is not that, for example, the type of telephone affects the content of everyday conversations, because intuitively this influence seems minimal, but that the telephone (especially in the form of a “smartphone”) has changed the nature of interpersonal relationships in the long term and even influences our personality and perception. The impact of landline telephones was not as easily noticeable as the impact of instant messaging on the peer relationships and state of mind of young people is today, as seen from the perspective of people in their forties and fifties.

Some inventions profoundly change life in the world, in ways we cannot predict at the time of their implementation. This was obvious to McLuhan in the 1970s. A decade later, Bruno Latour popularized this idea by developing the “actor-network theory.” In this theory, society is not just people, but a network of “actors” that influence it, including material objects and... abstract concepts.

When society adopts a new technology, it does not usually discuss the possible long-term consequences of the actions of such an inhuman actor. We have imposed a series of tests on the production of new drugs, but we did not discuss the possible effects of social media before its introduction. Only after some time do we begin to realize the consequences of including them in our network: serious analyses appear that show that these new actors have a destructive effect on democratic systems, and artists also begin to explore the topic of their negative impact on young people (let us mention the recent success of the difficult mini-series Adolescence).

In the actor-network theory, the concept of bacteria is also such a social actor. It is not that bacteria did not exist before this concept. The point is that the organization of the human world did not take this concept into account. And when this concept became an actor in our societies, our behaviors and habits in terms of hygiene changed fundamentally.

The Church had always been very cautious about introducing technical innovations, especially in churches, so the influence of such worldly, soulless actors on the liturgy was relatively small. And sometimes the Church was able to harness technical innovations to achieve its own goals. When it came to “media” inventions, this was certainly the case with the invention of printing.

NOM, Vilnius (Lithuania), Sanctuary of the Divine Mercy. At the new Mass, everyone must hear and see everything.

The Church’s reactions to the inventions of printing and the microphone

For McLuhan, as a media theorist, two inventions were revolutionary for our civilization: the printing press and the microphone. He realized that these (from today’s perspective) simple creations radically changed the world we live in, and changed it in ways that the people who witnessed the introduction of these inventions could not have predicted. These two inventions have twice reinforced the position of vernacular languages, i.e., the languages we speak every day.

The first reinforcement was visual, because printing completed the process initiated by the invention of the phonetic alphabet and caused us to move from an oral-acoustic culture to a visual-linear culture. It sounds complicated, but the point is that sight became the dominant sense in our perception of the world and in our culture. Earlier culture was more “auditory,” centered around hearing, and in fact multisensory with a slight advantage for hearing. According to McLuhan, printing has led us to a visual culture, one in which sight clearly dominates. What is the difference?

Hearing does not “see” contours [1] and works more synthetically. It integrates our experience of the world into a whole; we also hear from many sides at once. Sight sees contours, analyzes and divides our experience of the world into pieces – it has made our perception more sequential and abstract; we also focus our sight in one direction. Thus, our perception of the world and our culture have changed, which, thanks to printing – thanks to the shift in emphasis to visuality – has gained unprecedented momentum. But at the same time, all contours have become more important: divisions, segmentations, specializations, and in the longer term... nationalisms.

These cultural changes also had an impact on liturgy. As McLuhan writes, it might seem that “the demand for a vernacular liturgy arose spontaneously in the sixteenth century, but it isn’t so. In fact, that demand was linked to the invention of print, an invention that accentuated people’s need to push towards individualism and nationalism. Add to that the fact that printed texts gave rise to textual exegesis from the pulpit. And finally, the new accent on the visual favored placing the celebrant face to face with the congregation: we needed to see him and he wanted to be seen.” [2] According to McLuhan, the fact that greater emphasis was placed on preaching in the 16th century and that Protestant priests turned to face the people was a consequence of the invention of printing. According to him, “Medieval liturgy was mostly acoustic,” and in Reformed churches it became more visual.

In response to the invention of printing, the Council of Trent developed the Decretum de edendis sanctis litteris et facultate utendi iis, and Pius V issued the apostolic constitution Quo primum tempore, thus defining the rules for the use of the new invention and regulating its use during ceremonies. Thanks to this, Catholics living in the world after the invention of printing, in the (as McLuhan describes it) “Gutenberg Galaxy,” that is, those who already had the need to see everything, accepted that there are certain things that cannot be seen in the sacred liturgy of the Church. This is important because we use our sight to construct the world as a set of static, permanent objects that have contours (for the ear, everything is more “fluid”), so making everything visible, to put it mildly, did not facilitate belief in the transubstantiation and Real Presence of God in the sacrament of the Altar. When you see the contours, it is more difficult to believe that the host is transformed into the Body of Christ. The effects of shifting the emphasis to visuality are clearly visible among Protestants, who have lost their belief in the Real Presence.

In the 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church not only resisted the worldly impact of the invention of printing, but also harnessed the new technology to standardize and consolidate existing liturgical practices and centralize the one and only Church. And how the Church transformed the worldly emphasis on visuality, i.e., the need to see that was created among the laity living in the world, can still be seen today in Baroque churches.

NOM, Vilnius (Lithuania), Catholic church; I don’t remember which one. This beautiful high altar surmounted by a crucifix became simply a decorative background.

The second historical reinforcement – auditory – was given to vernacular languages by the microphone.

First, new mass media appeared, thanks to the microphone, radio and television developed. The circulation of information, this time also in the form of sounds, accelerated even more. In public spaces, we began to hear different sounds from all sides at the same time. Television began to use sight like hearing, and we began to perceive images as sound, with our eyes focused on a single point, we could begin to see and hear the entire scene.

Secondly, the nature of mass events changed: without the microphone, there would be no numerous competitions and championships, popular concerts, or demonstrations.

Thirdly, thanks to the microphone, new figures emerged. As McLuhan significantly notes, without the microphone there would have been no Gandhi or Hitler. The vernacular began to reign supreme in the public sphere, in a version increasingly close to colloquial language.

According to McLuhan, the overall impact of the microphone on culture is the opposite of that of print; because of the microphone, we have begun to return to an acoustic culture. Today’s culture is in some ways more reminiscent of that of the pre-literate era; we are returning from individualism to tribalism (we are more empathetic today, but only towards people from our own “tribe”); our perception has become non-sequential (non-linear), but immediate and holistic (rather than abstract, because it is difficult to “hear” contours).

So how could a microphone, which reversed the “visual” effects of printing on culture, cause the same “visual” changes in Catholic liturgy that printing caused among Protestants? Although the overall impact of the microphone on culture seems to be the opposite, both inventions have intensified the mediatization of our experience of the world. Today, we have a deeply rooted need to see and hear everything through the media, which are like extensions of our senses. If we cannot see and hear something through the media, we find it difficult to believe in it. [3] And since, with the microphone, we introduced into the Church the worldly need to hear everything, its older sister – the need to see everything – came along with it. And that is why, in the liturgical dimension, thanks to the microphone, the Church quickly “made up” for what it had previously “neglected” during the first visual reinforcement of vernacular languages. Priests who turn to the people and speak in their vernacular often behave as if they do not believe in the Real Presence.

The Church did not notice that the microphone was a new “actor.” Although the Second Vatican Council issued the decree Inter mirifica in 1963, it concerns social media, i.e., those used in the world. [4] The last council did not issue any document that would harness the microphone for the Church’s own purposes. And since the Church did not consider the issue of the microphone, this new worldly “actor” has been influencing the liturgy for almost a hundred years in the same way that it influences the world. And Catholics born into servitude should know who rules this world.

This approach sheds light on the contemporary crisis of the Church without attributing ill will to anybody, and explains the reason for the pentecostalization described in contemporary academic literature, i.e., the similarities between contemporary Catholic liturgical practices and Protestant practices. Some “traditionalists” (I believe in good faith) suggest that the new Masses imitate Protestants. This superficial observation often rightly outrages “new Catholics.”

In fact, these are deeper processes. “New Catholics” do not imitate Martin Luther, but succumb to the worldly influences of printing technology and microphones; they enter God’s temples with the same expectations there as they have in the world. Moreover, even many Church documents from the second half of the 20th century say that the faithful should “hear without difficulty.” [5] However, no one has considered whether it is really necessary for the faithful to hear everything during Mass. Isn’t it enough for them to assist at Mass, as they have done for eons?

By placing microphones on altars – in the place where God appears – we have introduced a Trojan horse into the Church: the microphone, and in it, the worldly need to hear and see everything. However, just as it is not necessary to see everything during Mass, it is also not necessary to hear everything. It is enough to look, listen, and... believe.

Against appearances, these are not subtle but fundamental differences, because the need to see and hear everything introduced into the Church by microphones has serious consequences. In Part 3, I will discuss two of them: those concerning the Community and those concerning the Word. [6] 

NOM, Vilnius (Lithuania), Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn. If the altar can’t be turned around, the speaker will ensure that everyone can hear everything

NOTES

^[1] The piano keyboard is an artificial creation.

^[2] Pierre Babin, Liturgy and Media: (Marshall McLuhan’s) Third Conversation with Pierre Babin, in: Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (eds.), The medium and the light: Reflections on Religion, Toronto: Stoddart 1999, p. 142.

^[3] This trend will most likely be reversed by artificial intelligence; see footnote 22.

^[4] Subsequently, based on Inter mirifica, a very enthusiastic pastoral instruction on the means of social communication, Communio et progressio, was developed in 1971 (“So, ‘among the wonderful technical inventions’ (Inter mirifica) which foster communication among human beings, Christians find means that have been devised under God’s Providence for the encouragement of social relations during their pilgrimage on earth”). On its twentieth anniversary, another instruction was published, entitled Aetatis Novae, which is no longer so enthusiastic (“the application of communications technology has been a mixed blessing”), but fails to identify the cause of the problem. These documents are about the press, radio, and television, and do not recognize the inventions from which they originated. It is like considering the impact of various computer programs without noticing the invention of the computer.

^[5]General Introduction to the Roman Missal (2010), point 311: “Care should be taken to ensure that the faithful be able not only to see the Priest, the Deacon, and the readers but also, with the aid of modern technical means, to hear them without difficulty.” See also no. 34 in the General Introduction to the Lectionary (1981): “Provision must also be made for the readers to have enough light to read the text and, as required, to have modern sound equipment enabling the faithful to hear them without difficulty.”

^[6] I will present more arguments against microphones in churches in a separate text, which will be included in an anthology that I will publish in Polish.

Could the Introduction of Microphones Have Caused the Reform of the Mass?

We are very pleased to share the following thought-provoking essay by Paweł Jarnicki, which was first published in Polish at Christianitas. The text has been translated into English with the support of machine translation and will be published at NLM in three installments, this week and next. It is one of the most insightful treatments of the question I have ever seen, and deserves a careful read. – PAK

“Let’s Throw the Microphone Out of the Church!”

Paweł Jarnicki

Part 1

I narrated battles
bastilles and ships…
and forgot about tamarisk. [1]

Eleven years ago, shortly after my conversion, as I listened to a priest muttering a bland sermon, a postulate arose in my mind that has returned to me regularly ever since: Take the microphones away from the priests! After all, if this priest spoke without a microphone, he couldn’t mutter like that. He would have to know what he wanted to say. He would have to speak loudly and clearly. He would have to exert his body... Since when have there been microphones in churches anyway?... I looked around. There were definitely no microphones when this church was built. How did everything work before microphones came along? At that time, I knew nothing about the reform of the Mass.

I talked to several people about my postulate from time to time, and even started taking some notes, but it was only a year ago that I checked if anyone had already written anything on the subject. I searched exclusively on the Internet. I found literally a few valuable texts in English and a few paragraphs in Polish. I am trying to put my own thoughts and what I have read into a coherent whole here. This is by no means an academic text or a complete study of the subject, but rather a text written by a believer in the hope that it will spark discussion and provoke more competent people to conduct in-depth research and take action.

Let’s start with what is certain. It is certain that microphones are found in almost every Catholic church today — at organs, pulpits, ambo, and altars. Sometimes portable microphones are also used. They are accompanied, of course, by an amplifier (usually in the sacristy or near the organist) and loudspeakers — at least a few — even in the smallest churches and chapels.

It is also certain that for the vast majority of time, there were no microphones in churches. Although the carbon microphone was invented in the 1870s, and the first sound systems (microphone + amplifier + loudspeaker) were developed in the mid-1910s, they were not installed in churches until the 1920s and 1930s.

Available publications indicate that there were no serious discussions about the use of microphones in churches. And yet, at that time, there were disputes about broadcasting Mass on the radio or introducing projectors and players... But microphones? It seems that they were treated as something natural and fundamentally good. Just as glasses allow us to see more clearly, microphones allow us to hear more clearly. What could be wrong with hearing better?

In official church documents, the first mention of the amplification system can be found in the 1958 instruction On Music. It prohibits the use of automatic organ, phonograph, radio, tape or wire recorders, and other similar machines (71), and projectors (73), but “loudspeakers may be used even during liturgical functions, and private devotions for the purpose of amplifying the living voice of the priest-celebrant or the commentator” (72). [2] The microphone was therefore treated as something that merely “amplifies the living voice,” as an object as neutral, in fact, as a pair of glasses. Later documents that I have been able to find treat the “altar microphone” as something so obvious that they only require a second, separate microphone to be placed on the pulpit. [3]

Today, practically no one is surprised by microphones in churches, because they are ubiquitous in the world, transparent, and we swim like fish in water in amplified sounds, both in public and private spaces. Since microphones and loudspeakers are everywhere, it seems normal that they are also in churches. However, reading texts about microphones by other authors led me to the surprising thesis that the microphone caused the reform of the Holy Mass. I have read a lot about the reform over the last nine years, but that it was caused by the microphone?

NOM, Łukęcin (Poland), Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland. In newly built churches, the cross is usually placed next to the altar, and the microphone becomes the axis of the celebration.

Two narratives about the reform of the Mass

In order to reconstruct the impact of the microphone on the 1969 reform of the Mass, it is good to familiarize ourselves with the current narratives about this reform. Especially since many contemporary Catholics know nothing about it, even though many “epics” have already been written about the controversy surrounding it... There are basically two narratives. Those enthusiastic about the reform and its critics. The enthusiastic narrative says: The reform of the Mass is the work of the Council, so it is good. The critical narrative says: The reform of the Mass is a consequence of the invasion of modernism, so it is bad. Although today (after Benedict XVI) the enthusiasts of the reform more often speak of continuity, and its critics of a break, there are also reverse variants. There were and are enthusiasts of the reform who speak of a break, and there are also critics of the reform who acknowledge continuity.

Critics of the reform argue that the world and people have not changed in essence, so there was no need to change the Mass, yet it was changed significantly. Enthusiasts of the reform say that as a result of increased well-being and technological development, “times” have changed, so the reform of the Mass was necessary to adapt it to contemporary pastoral needs, and only the envelope has changed, not the essence of the Mass.

The most radical critical narrative can be found among sedevacantists (those who believe that there is currently no legitimate pope) — recognizing the new Mass as invalid must also undermine recent pontificates, because several popes have already celebrated the new Mass. Therefore, the greatest concern of humble critics of the reform is how to criticize the reform without denying the validity of the new Mass and the continuity of the Church as an institution headed by the pope, and how not to cast the Second Vatican Council as the “villain.” The latter term allows reform enthusiasts to easily place critics outside the Church, because the Holy Spirit is at work during the council, and it is clear on whose side those who fight against the Divine Person are.

More moderate critics of the reform point out that the conciliar constitution on the liturgy neither recommended that the priest turn towards the people (versus populum) nor recommended a complete transition to vernacular languages. This was only done by the Consilium led by Annibale Bugnini — the reform is therefore a “distortion” of the Council’s decisions. Enthusiasts say that the Consilium implemented the “spirit” of the Council, while critics say that there is no such thing — that its “letter” has been violated. More radical critics point out that the errors of modernism (the omission of some ideas and the vague formulation of others) were already present in the conciliar documents and that the last council was not dogmatic, but only pastoral.

In any case, the common denominator of both narratives is the awareness of a crisis in the Church, the most striking manifestation of which is the decline in the number of priestly vocations. And no one has any idea how to break out of the trenches of their own convictions. Those on one side of the dispute see aggressive madmen, while those on the other see thoughtless blind men. This inability to reach an agreement confirms that some kind of break has indeed occurred. After all, it is easy to see that the new Mass is unlike the old one and that Catholics behave differently during the new and old Masses. Catholics raised on the new Mass who are unaware of the reform, when they encounter the old Mass, even have the impression that it is some kind of “different faith.” In the critical narrative, it is pointed out that since the way we pray has changed, our faith has changed (lex orandi lex credendi), but enthusiasts treat these critics as a threat to the unity of the Church, which today prays mostly according to the new Mass. These “accomplished facts” are the final argument of new Mass enthusiasts, but critics who emphasize continuity consider them dishonest because they imply a profound break — can the Mass on which the saints from before the last council were raised be so bad that it is forbidden to celebrate it in all parish churches? There seems to be no possibility of agreement.

The weaker, critical side feels — not without reason — that it is a victim of institutional violence (which to some extent explains, but does not excuse, the “aggressive” behavior of “traditionalist” circles). The problem, or perhaps its solution, is that here the “perpetrators” may also turn out to be victims of deception... For both narratives, both radical and moderate, forget about the microphone... which, like a Trojan horse, we ourselves introduced into the Church without considering the possible consequences.

NOM, Wrocław (Poland), St. Faustina Church. The object between the altar and the cross is not a Paschal candle but a portable loudspeaker.

Could the microphone have caused the reform of the Mass?

Although the hierarchs did not debate the issue of microphones, there was one layman who, in 1974, five years after the reform of the Mass, wrote:

“Many people will lament the disappearance of the Latin Mass from the Catholic Church without realizing that it was a victim of the microphone on the altar.” [4] And he repeated this thought three years later: “Latin wasn’t the victim of Vatican II; it was done in by introducing the microphone. A lot of people, the Church hierarchy included, have been lamenting the disappearance of Latin without understanding that it was the result of introducing a piece of technology that they accepted so enthusiastically.” [5]

The statements of Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) have gone almost completely unnoticed, even in today’s so-called “traditionalist” circles. [6] Why? I think that the rest of his text is too “dense.” It is a challenging text, difficult to understand even for readers educated in the humanities. Although McLuhan was a Catholic, he was neither a historian nor a theologian; his voice was the voice of a representative of what was then a new discipline of knowledge — media theory. What McLuhan says in this text also contradicts the (enthusiastic) intellectual mood that prevailed after the Council and for decades thereafter — McLuhan points to church architecture as a second victim of the microphone, alongside the Latin Mass, and predicts that the publication of the Holy Scriptures in vernacular languages by official committees will be counterproductive to the spread of the Good News. In a situation where literature adapts subsequent variations of the living colloquial national language, the Church rigidifies the vernacular in its official and archaic translation. And yet every vernacular continues to evolve, so rigidifying it detaches faith from the living language of national communities and significantly hinders the transmission of faith.

McLuhan says all this in a deliberately vague way, wanting to force readers to make a cognitive effort. In addition, it seems that in the following years, the prevailing belief was that the widespread use of microphones in churches was a consequence of the reform of the Mass (chronologically, microphones were first introduced in more important churches, and only after the reform in all churches).

It was only Nico Fassino’s article three years ago that showed that McLuhan may be right, that the opposite may be true [7] – that there would be no new Mass if it weren’t for the microphone. Not only because during the Council it could have been turned off and Cardinal Ottaviani silenced, [8] but above all because the microphone was placed on the altar.

Fassino’s article is, so far, the only one that begins to describe the process of introducing microphones into churches from a historical perspective. Thanks to him, we know that in the 1920s, microphones began to be used in pulpits and the first Masses were broadcast on the radio. However, the first radio broadcasts did not necessarily involve sound systems in the church itself. It was probably Pius XII, who had been in office since 1939 and still celebrated the old Mass, who was the first pope to place microphones on the altar. [9] We do not yet know the exact date when this happened, but it was most likely between 1939 and 1945. And since microphones were placed on the papal altar, this must have gradually become more common practice in the post-war years.

But could such a seemingly neutral object have brought about a reform of the Mass? How? In the following reconstruction, I draw heavily on McLuhan’s text:

1. The microphone on the altar made the Latin texts audible, which until then had largely reached the faithful only as incomprehensible whispers and murmurs (especially during quiet Masses celebrated on weekdays, but also during the quiet parts of solemn Masses on holidays).

2. The amplification of the words spoken in Latin created a need to hear them clearly — if someone amplifies sound, it means that they want to be heard, that there is something that needs to be heard). [10]

3. And since the faithful began to hear words rather than murmurs, the need to hear clearly was followed by the need to understand what was being heard [11], and thus

4. the need to speak during Mass in the languages used in everyday life, in languages known to the faithful — in their vernacular languages.

5. And since the faithful began to hear and needed to understand every word, the impression arose that it was they who were being addressed.

6. This led to an inconsistency in the communication situation — when someone speaks to us and we speak to someone, it is natural to expect that we will have our faces turned towards each other.

The priest’s reversal was therefore a consequence of placing a microphone on the altar. But at the same time, it also reinforced the needs created by the use of the microphone – hearing and understanding – and thus speaking in an understandable vernacular language. This is why reversing the Mass reform seems impossible today – the faithful must now see and hear everything. In any case, it was the microphone that set off the avalanche of the reform. If anyone doubts this, let them imagine the new Mass at the sanctuary in Łagiewniki, Krakow – without a sound system. [12]

Wait a minute, someone will say, microphones are now used even in “Latin rite ministries”. I think that microphones at traditional Masses are only acceptable in “ghettos” where rebellious believers are sent, who are not only resigned to hearing Latin, but actually consciously want to hear it (which is often the basis of their sense of superiority, and for “new Catholics” this “exaltation” is an unacceptable barrier). Moreover, microphones have become so ubiquitous in the world today that almost no one – even the most ardent “traditionalists” — would dream of questioning their use. Why should we give up the achievements of science and technology?

This question will be taken up in Part 2.

NOM, Jarnice (Poland), St. James Church. Today, sound systems are installed even in the smallest churches (both inside and often outside).

(See Part 2 | Part 3)

NOTES

[1] Zbigniew Herbert, Tamarisk, 1961.

^[2]Instruction on Sacred Music and Sacred Liturgy of the Sacred Congregation for Rites according to the guidelines of Pope Pius XII’s encyclicals Musicae Sacrae Disciplina and Mediator Dei of September 3, 1958. The role of the commentator may seem peculiar today, but it was someone who translated what the priest was doing and saying (in Latin) into the vernacular.

^[3] See, for example, the Polish Episcopate’s Instruction in connection with the publication of the new altar missal of March 11, 1987.

^[4] Marshall McLuhan, Liturgy and the Microphone. First published in: “The Critic” 1974, vol. 33, no. 1, October-December, pp. 12–17; reprinted in: Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (eds.), The medium and the light: Reflections on Religion, Toronto: Stoddart 1999, pp. 107-116, quote from p. 112.

^[5] Pierre Babin, (Marshall McLuhan’s) Third Conversation with Pierre Babin, in: Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (eds.), The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, Toronto: Stoddart 1999, pp. 141-149, quote from p. 143.

^[6] It seems that the issues surrounding the microphone escaped even Marcel Lefebvre, the most vocal critic of the Mass reform, and even the Society of St. Pius X uses microphones in its chapels and churches.

^[7] Nico Fassino, Lift up thy voice with strength, handmissalhistory, October 10, 2022, https://handmissalhistory.com/feature-microphones/, September 25, 2025.

^[8] As an aside, let us ask ourselves how earlier councils were possible without microphones? If there had been no microphones, would the “progressive” faction have been audible enough to significantly change the preliminary documents?

^[9] “By 1945, Pope Pius XII regularly celebrated mass with four microphones installed on the high altar in St. Peter’s Basilica and even had two microphones on the altar in his private chapel.” [Nico Fassino, Lift up thy voice with strength, handmissalhistory, October 10, 2022, https://handmissalhistory.com/feature-microphones/, September 25, 2025]

^[10] Nico Fassino notes that, paradoxically, the microphone has led to the creation of “cry rooms” for children in American churches. If the words spoken by the priest are to be heard, other sounds, especially noisy children, must not interfere.

^[11] To understand what this is all about, it is enough to experience at least once a new Mass in a country where the language is so foreign that we are unable to distinguish individual words from the stream of speech (for me, these were Latvian and Finnish). During such a Mass, it is difficult not to ask yourself the question: “What am I doing here?”

^[12] The Basilica of Divine Mercy in Łagiewniki (Kraków, Poland), consecrated in 2002, elliptical in shape, the interior — covering approximately 5,000 square meters and accommodating around 5,000 worshippers.

Experiences That Make One a Traditionalist

Those who have assisted at the traditional Roman liturgy for some time can usually name many things about it that they noticed over the years — things that impressed, provoked, consoled, puzzled, that made them wake up, question more, dig deeper. There is a moment of transition, I find, from being one who appreciates the old liturgy, perhaps now and again, or as a field trip, or as a pastoral duty, to being one who has fallen in love with it, who makes it his spiritual home, and who, accordingly, may justly be called a traditionalist. (As much as some people protest against the use of that word, it remains immensely handy for naming a phenomenon, which is what language is supposed to do.)

My books mention many such experiences, but here are two that are especially appropriate to share in Easter week.

The first was the contrast I noticed, several years in a row, between the modern (Paul VI) Easter Vigil and the Easter Sunday Missa Cantata of the Roman Rite. The reason for comparing these two is that I was involved at the time in providing music for both — the “Ordinary Form” on Saturday night and the “Extraordinary Form” (how quaint are those terms now!) on Sunday morning.

The Paul VI vigil had no “spaces,” no obvious opening to mystery through which one could enter. It was a flood of didactic text, spoken aloud, with musical interludes. Modern people are already awash in words. Do we really need more? In the N.O. Easter Vigil, one felt that one had been thoroughly drenched in the Bible readings conducted in Nabbish, a lengthy homily, the unsatisfying glamor of receiving some people into the church in a ritual that culminated in applause, and a celebration of the Eucharist wholly lacking in supernatural resonance or fearful majesty. It made an impression for sheer length, number of lilies, and candles, but otherwise it was like cookie dough — the same consistency throughout. 

The Easter Missa cantata, on the other hand, was full of the sound of Alleluias sung in Gregorian chant — sixteen of them (not counting the repetitions of the Communion antiphon). The chants for Easter are strong, sometimes strange, always unearthly, already half-dwelling in the realm of eternity. The church, ablaze with white and gold… the ritual nailed to the altar, from which salvation pours out like blood and water… the clouds of incense billowing… all point to the mysterious reality of the Crucified and Risen One — and this is something that can be perceived by anyone seeking God or even seeking some meaning in life. Marshall McLuhan said, decades ago, that modern culture is obsessed with images and that the Church must therefore provide images of great power: visual and audible images that are startlingly different from what secular culture offers. At the Easter morning sung Mass, I had an almost unnerving sense of stepping back through time across all the centuries that separated me from the resurrection of Christ and coming once again into His powerful presence. This was a ritual that somehow poured from His glorified wounds to bathe me in their light. There was a holy awe about the place, a restrained joy coiled like a spring ready to leap to heaven, a hushed adoration like that of Mary Magdalene when she discovered Christ in the garden and He would not let her touch Him.

Let me not be misunderstood: I am not calling into question the good will of anyone who contributed to the Easter Vigil. On the contrary, there was abundant good will, which I remember fondly. The problem is deeper than the individuals: it is in the rites they are using and the customs that have grown up around them to the point of having nearly the force of law. The face liturgy presents to us depends much more on the rites and customs than it does on the personnel who happen to be using them; the former determine and delimit the possible range of influence for the latter.

The second experience was singing, and then reflecting on, Lesson III of Holy Saturday’s Tenebrae: “Incipit Oratio Jeremiae Prophetae.”

Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us:
consider and behold our reproach.
Our inheritance is turned unto aliens:
our houses to strangers.
We are become orphans without a father,
our mothers are as widows.
Our water we have drunk for money:
we have bought our wood for a price.
We were dragged by our necks,
we were weary and rest was not given unto us.
Unto Egypt, and unto the Assyrians have we given our hand,
that we might be satisfied with bread.
Our fathers have sinned, and are no more:
and we have borne their iniquities.
Servants have ruled over us:
there was none to redeem us out of their hand.
Our bread we fetched at the peril of our lives,
because of the sword in the desert.
Our skin was burnt as an oven,
by reason of the violence of the famine.
They have oppressed the women in Sion,
and the virgins in the cities of Juda.
Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
be converted unto the Lord thy God.

Pondering these prophetic words led me to see their application to our current liturgical situation, and the parallels have only grown clearer with time. We are alienated from our inheritance; our houses of worship are sold off to Masonic lodges or Hindu ashrams; we are become like orphans without a father in Rome or, in some cases, a father in our diocese; we bought our reforms for a steep price, and were dragged along without our consent; we grew weary of hyperactive participation and longed for a contemplative rest that was denied us; we exchanged our birthright for a seat at the United Nations and the European Union; those who fomented our disasters are mostly long-gone and we suffer from their sins; slaves of fashion rule over the sons of God; we fetched our traditional bread wherever we could find it, afraid of the sword of church authority in the desert of the post-Council; the spiritual famine has been violent, and it has extended even to threatening the religious life of consecrated virgins. Jerusalem, O Church on earth: be converted unto the Lord thy God!

Someone once said of the liturgical reformers: “They took the faith out of our hands and knees.” The reform stripped away, or allowed to be stripped away, bodily spiritual formation. Catholics can get a visceral sense of the contrast when they attend their first Tridentine Mass and find that there’s a lot more kneeling than they are accustomed to (even at High Mass) and more demands placed on their attention in general. It is a liturgy that pre-dates the invention of television, so it expects a long attention span, and the ability to be quiet and sit still. The faith has to penetrate into our bones and muscles or it remains cerebral and ineffectual.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the contrasting practices of Holy Communion. In too many churches, the faithful walk up in multiple lines and receive the Body of Christ in their hands, like people queueing for bus tickets, after which they take a cup to wash it down, like teammates sharing Gatorade. In traditional communities, the faithful kneel along the communion rail and wait until the priest comes to them to bless them with the Host — “Corpus Domini nostri + Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam, Amen” — and places it gently on their tongues. These two contrasting scenes are, in reality, expressive of two different ideas of religion, if we take religion in the sense of the virtue by which we offer God our worship through concrete words and actions.

This is why I am not surprised that the former Benedictine monk Gabriel Bunge, a world expert on the Trinity icon of Rublev, left the Catholic Church to become Eastern Orthodox. No one ever introduced him to the real Western tradition that corresponded to what he was studying from the East. He came to the conclusion that the only authentic tradition left was the East. His conclusion should rather have been that the modern West had abandoned its own authentic tradition, and that we have an urgent calling to recover it.

After experiences like the two I recounted, one’s soul is seared with the truth, at once liberating and daunting: I cannot go back to the 60s and 70s, to those pathetic works of human hands. Let the dead bury the dead. It is the perennially youthful Roman Rite that gives joy to me, that shines forth light and truth.

The Dire Need for a “New Habit of Mind”: MIT Argues for the TLM

Yes, you read that correctly: MIT, as in Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, my title is a bit deceptive. MIT isn’t arguing explicitly for the traditional Latin Mass; they are not quite so avant-garde. Rather, a recent podcast by an MIT professor, Alan Lightman, in discussing how technology and society have affected the way humans spend time and how society itself is ordered, touches on several dire needs of modern men that find a powerful remedy in the traditional worship of Catholics.

Prof. Lightman’s talk begins and ends with an anecdote about a trip to Cambodia, when he asked a village woman how long it took her to ride every morning ten miles on a dirt road to get stuff for the kitchen. He was surprised when she responded that she hadn’t thought about how long it took. Compared to how closely he, as a modern Westerner, monitored “time cost,” he was taken aback that someone could live with a calm indifference to the passage of time. She just took the time that was needed for the task.

How long does Mass take? This is a question that seems to be of great importance in the mainstream Catholic world, where people want to “get in and get out” in as “timely” a manner as possible. There is brunch to be made, or a sporting event to get to, or yardwork to be done, or some shopping delayed all week; in any case, who wants to be in church for very long? When I attended Georgetown University for a year (1989–1990), I learned about a Jesuit priest there who was famous for an 11-minute Sunday Mass at 11pm. It was very popular with students who wanted to “fulfill their obligation.”

We know that Catholics who attend the traditional Latin Mass are a self-selecting group (this already tells us something significant, namely, that those who love the liturgy are drawn to its traditional forms!). It is nevertheless worth pointing out that, on the whole, they are much less concerned about “how long Mass is going to take,” and are willing to attend, or even gladly look forward to, lengthy solemn liturgies. Like the Cambodian woman, they are willing to take time to travel the long road to the town and back. Apprehending that the liturgy is the best and most important thing we do as Catholics, they want to spend time with it.

The example of walking on a road is a humdrum one, but more generally we can say that we spend time on the things and people we love. The saying “time is money” is familiar, but a more correct version of it would be “time is life.” Our life is measured out in time. What we spend time on is what we spend life on. It does not seem too likely that the Lord will ask us on judgment day whether we spent enough time on sports, shopping, work, or sleep. It seems more likely He will ask us why we didn’t pray more when we could and should have done so.

Returning now to Prof. Lightman, I was particularly struck by these remarks of his, which begin 25 minutes into the podcast:

I think that we are destroying our inner world now via the wired world [after having destroyed the natural world]. It’s more subtle, it’s not as obvious, but we’re beginning to document the bad effects of our frenzied, hyperconnected lifestyle.... I think that the situation is dire. I think in some ways it’s just as serious as the destruction of our environment, even though it’s partly invisible. And we may already be at the point of no return.... We’re losing our ability to know who we are and what’s important to us. So is there anything that we can do? Somehow we need to create a new habit of mind, both as individuals and as a society. We need a new mental attitude that values our inner reflection, values stillness, values privacy, values personal reflection, that honors the inner self.

He then makes a number of suggestions: for K-12 students, a ten minute period of silence daily. For all students, more time to reflect on academic work, rather than pumping out assignments. He suggests quiet rooms in offices where people can go to read a book, close their eyes, or pray. For families, the evening meal should be entirely “unplugged.” Everyone should take walks. At the societal level, there should be “screen-free zones.” (This last suggestion was music to my ears. I have noticed over the years that almost every public space—in hotels, restaurants, airports, wherever people gather—is dominated by a giant TV screen. This makes it practically impossible for the center of gravity, the weight of attention, to reside in a single person reading a book, or in a conversation among friends.) A last point made by Prof. Lightman is our need for what he calls “unstructured time,” that is, time when we are not being made to do anything in particular, but are free to be alone with our thoughts.

This podcast is especially interesting because it shows a prominent secular thinker noticing a deep crisis and searching for a way out. I think that implicit in his searching is a sense that the foundation of the society is deeply flawed. Prof. Lightman gives us a glimpse at modern society stumbling around trying to find a way out of the mess it has made in all its novel cleverness. He gets the correct diagnosis, but are his proposals likely to be effective—or even taken seriously? One could say they are good but not radical enough. Will a quiet room in an office make a big difference? Doubtful. Not without some other change in mental disposition.

The fundamental decision is how we order our lives. Are we ordering our lives as the world directs, or should we try something else? It is not easy to get out of the wiring of modern society. Lightman says we need to find “a new habit of mind.” I don’t know if he knows about the ancient Latin Mass and the other rituals of traditional Catholicism, but it cannot fail to strike us how well these things, which were once widespread and are returning again in our day, embody the slow, reflective, low-tech, hands-on approach Lightman recommends as necessary for sanity and survival. As someone once pointed out, the gimmicky work by John Cage, 4’33, which consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of non-performance and the ambient sounds of the concert venue, was “written” at a time (1952) when millions of Catholics every week experienced about this much silence every week during the silent Roman Canon. Cage was hailed as a path-breaking genius, but he was an infantile dilettante compared to Holy Mother Church.

One of the great virtues of the traditional liturgy is that it enables the practice of a new habit of mind that can free humans from their enslavement to superficial things; it reflects the fundamental choice of Christianity to order all things to God, to make time for Him, to make room for Him. The traditional liturgy proved itself able to be the axis of Christendom, the burning heart of religious life, the source of strength for marriage and family, the glue of a Catholic society. Can we say this about the New Order liturgy, as it is practiced almost everywhere — and due to its own systemic features, as understood by its promulgator?

The radical theocentricity of the classical Roman Rite, which has as its counterpart the primacy of the interior life over external activity and phenomena, paradoxically leads to the fullest possible development of the external physiognomy of the rite and the aesthetic phenomena associated with it. This is not a contradiction but a necessary consequence of taking first things first. The Tridentine liturgy makes possible an unstructured interior freedom precisely by its dependable discipline of ritual form and its continual orientation to God. Never does a priest pray as intensely as he does when facing ad orientem and whispering the sacred words; never do laity pray as intensely as when they are kneeling at Mass, letting it envelop their senses and prompt their hearts.

In contrast, under the reign of liturgy designed as a social workshop or “school of Christian sociology” (Paul VI’s description), it will be a perpetual struggle for worshipers to recover the theocentricity and interiority that have been lost, and, ironically, a further struggle to acquire for it the splendor of external features as well. They will always seem like “glued on” accretions rather than emergent properties.

Other architecture at MIT is rather more like the reformed liturgy

Prof. Lightman’s observations, which are echoed by many commentators on modern society and technology (e.g., Marshall McLuhan, Augusto Del Noce, Ivan Illich, Neil Postman, Mark Bauerlein) fly in the face of the basic assumptions of the liturgical New Order, namely, that modernity is, or contains, a movement of the Holy Spirit that we should embrace. Instead of offering a truthful counterpoint to the worldly spirit, the New Order regurgitates that worldly spirit under quasi-liturgical trappings. The lost modern man will not find his way back to that which is perennial and, in that sense, unmodern in the one place he should be able to find it: the liturgy of the Mass.

Hence the vital spiritual, psychological, and sociological need in our time for the usus antiquior. The traditional Mass is not merely a question of aesthetics; rather it concerns all of the crises that we face as a society, as a race, as a planet. The only way forward is a reordering to God. This begins with traditional liturgical rites, Eastern and Western, which instill in man the practice of this ordering, without openly or subtly contradicting it. A key idea here, understood well by the wisdom of Catholic tradition, is that this reordering takes daily effort and work. We must apply ourselves carefully to this work. It goes against the grain of fallen nature. It’s not a whimsical word or profession now and then that makes the practice effective. This is one of the great virtues of the traditional liturgy. It helps us in this work when we need help the most. It is folly to set aside that help.

One last thought. It is sad that the most common reflex for people who become aware of the inner crisis of modern Western society is to turn to Far Eastern or New Age spiritual practices rather than to the beautiful Christian tradition. A friend of mine once met a nice young woman from the American South. She was reading a book on Buddhism. The friend mentioned in passing that Christianity, too, had a rich spiritual and mystical tradition, and gave her some titles to look up. Many years later, she wrote to him out of the blue to say “Thank you for helping me find my way back to the Catholic faith.”

In spite of decades of churchmen doing their best to obscure, deform, abandon, or proscribe the rich spiritual and mystical tradition of Catholicism, Our Lord will not allow it to be taken away from His Church. Most Catholics do not know it yet, but this tradition is still alive, as health-giving as it ever was and ever will be. We must do our part to make it known and loved.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for events, articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).

"Liturgy that requires ecstasy": McLuhan Meets Ratzinger

I don't know how I managed to miss this superb article, "The Mode in Which We Go to Mass," by Marc Barnes. Credit goes to Musings of a Pertinacious Papist for alerting me to it. The article is just wonderful: it strikes me as a blending of key ideas from Marshall McLuhan and Joseph Ratzinger, among others. Here are some excerpts:

The mode in which a message is delivered has the power to negate the content of the message. ... Catholics have, for the past 60 years or so, tended towards presenting the Divine Liturgy in a mode of similarity. We want to “get people to come,” and so we strive to make our liturgies similar to other experiences, to provide that condition by which some one may enter comfortably into its presence, as I am comfortable to be in the presence of someone I already know, comfortable to engage a conversation with people who have similar interests, similar views.
          The music of the Mass is made similar to the music of our culture. The demeanor of the Mass is made similar to the “Christian services” of our culture. The clothing we wear to Mass is made similar to our everyday clothing. The posture, structure, language, architecture, the position of priest to people — all this, and nearly anything that can be presented in a mode of similarity is thus presented. And, in a sense, it works. People come. But what does the mode of similarity do to the way in which people encounter the Mass? What does the mode do to the message?
          To understand this, we need a deeper understanding of similarity and dissimilarity. Similarity may be a condition for comfort, but dissimilarity is the necessary condition for love. Because a boy and a girl have “something in common” they can meet, comfortably enter into each other’s presence, and strike up a conversation, but only because of the fact that they are not ”in common” can they fall in love, can she — utterly dissimilar to him — and he — dissimilar to her — strive for personal communion — that difficult, wonderful embrace of two entirely unique and dissimilar lives.
          Because I am used to something, I am not afraid to participate in it, and in this sense, a liturgy of similarity succeeds. But because I am not used to something, because it is utterly other, I am pulled into the heart of a mystery. Similarity may provide the occasion for a meeting and a grouping, but dissimilarity provides the occasion for a binding. Because I do not know her, I strive to understand. Because I cannot fathom her, I gaze all the longer. ...
          What good is it if the mode of similarity brings every man in the world to the Divine Liturgy, if by the very mode that it brings them there, it undoes the entire point, which is not simply being there, but being in love? Similarity engenders comfort because it requires nothing of us. If a person is just like me in every respect, then there is no effort required of me to get to know them, to strive after them. There is no ecstasy, that is, no getting beyond myself. The fact that something is similar may just as well be an occasion for boredom as for unity — and hasn’t millennial boredom with the liturgy been an equally observable outcome of the mode of similarity as millennial presence at the liturgy?
          To say something is similar is to say it is already known, but the point of the Divine Liturgy is that it is the Pascal Mystery, the Pascal Unknown, and precisely because it remains unknown, it remains something worth applying the passion of our entire lives towards, to strive towards knowing.If the point of the Church is to make her children comfortable with God, a liturgy of similarity that “meets people where they are” make sense. If the point of the Church is to call her children to love God, to strive after him and to seek intimate communion with him, then a liturgy that opposes us makes sense, a liturgy drenched in a dissimilarity that accentuates the mysteries that we cannot understand — and thus must strive for, bow before, and commit our lives to surge towards. In short, what is needed is a liturgy that requires ecstasy of us. This reconciles itself in a series of paradoxes, that the unrelatable is the most relatable, the irrelevant is the most relevant, and the unfamiliar the greatest source of our desire for familiarity, for intimacy, and for union.
          ... The good news is that we are not caught between the choice of attracting people to Mass and letting the Mass be precisely what it is, in all its incens-y, ringing, silent, dark, unbearably bright and grotesque mystery, its complex simplicity and its simple complexity. For precisely by letting the Mass be what it is, and indeed, working hard to reveal the Mass as the Paschal Mystery in accordance with the rubrics and teachings of the Church, we attract, for dissimilarity is always a more attractive and binding force than similarity. An intentionally dissimilar liturgy may be more uncomfortable, but we were not made for comfort. We were made for love, that wonderful, uncomfortable ecstasy towards that which we are not.

The points made here are fundamental to the divide—a growing divide, it seems—between the modernizers of liturgy (whose main concerns are inculturation, relevance, immediacy, vernacularity, accessibility, familiarity, fellowship, etc.) and the lovers of traditional liturgy (whose main concerns are loyalty, fidelity, identity, mystery, silence, sacrifice, sacredness, beauty, transcendence, etc.). Properly understood, of course, many of these opposing qualities can and should be reconciled, but only if one begins from the right first principles that are capable of ordering into a unity the liturgy's complex elements. The horizontal dimensions of the liturgy emerge spontaneously and indeed more powerfully when we unambiguously prioritize the vertical dimensions—if, in short, we seek first God's kingdom and His righteousness, so that all these other things can be added unto us (cf. Mt 6:33). In contrast, if we look first to the horizontal, the doors to the transcendent are shut upon us by a kind of divine jealousy that brooks no divided mind.

Part of what appealed to me in Barnes' article was the use of the concept of ecstasy, which, properly understood, is an extremely powerful tool for understanding how the liturgy "works" on the human soul, by drawing it outwards and upwards into mystery. Some years ago I published an article in the journal Nova & Vetera entitled "Aquinas on Eucharistic Ecstasy: From Self-Alienation to Gift of Self," which mounted an argument comparable to Barnes':

The solemnity [of the liturgy] draws attention to, and keeps attention on, the symbolic representation of our being loved as no one else loves us, our being taken hold of and carried into something totally beyond our ken, yet offered to us through ordinary things which in turn provoke us to reconsider how we relate to the world itself. … [T]he avoidance of merely “common” modes of speaking and acting in the liturgy is by design, to help us break free from a profane mindset, to awaken us to the Presence that surrounds and penetrates the entire world. Hence, making the liturgy more common, more everyday, casual, horizontal, is self-defeating; it obliterates the liturgical as such, exactly where it cultivates the holy, the divine, the Other who is more myself than I. Ironically, too, a liturgy stripped of its mysterious alteritas would be reduced to the place of last among worldly equals, for it cannot compete against the secular on the latter’s terms. And so, it would be effectively sterilized in its power to fecundate outlying culture, prevented from casting an otherworldly light on the potential sacredness of the ordinary elements of this-worldly life.
          … Liturgical worship offers us an opening or clearing in which to practice, and thus to make our own, a sacred mode of thinking, feeling, acting, receiving—a mode that challenges our profane assumptions, the worldliness in which we tend to lose ourselves if we are not careful to cling to Christ. … If the liturgy ever became fully domesticated, if it ever struck us as perfectly clear and distinct, it would ipso facto cease to be a provocation to the shattered, alienated mentality of fallen “enlightened” man that pretends to be sweet reasonableness.
          … The true “unsettling” of which Preston speaks is accomplished primarily by a confrontation with the purest ritual manifestation of both the divine otherness and the divine condescension, a paradox that is vividly communicated in traditional liturgical rites—in their prayers, gestures, trappings, and overall complexion. …
          Without a mystagogical focus, liturgy will do little more than validate a community’s collective conceit, when it does not drive away the congregation from sheer boredom.

This link will take the reader to the full article at Academia.edu.

Meanwhile, I also encourage you to go over and read the whole article by Barnes.