Is Modern Man “Incapable of the Liturgical Act”?

In 1964, “forty-six years after the publication of his seminal work, The Spirit of the Liturgy, and just after the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, Romano Guardini reflected on the challenges of the Liturgical Movement in a letter to a Congress on the Liturgy in 1964.” [1] He famously claimed that Modern Man is “no longer capable of a liturgical act”:

Is not the liturgical act and, with it, all that goes under the name of “liturgy” so bound up with the historical background – antique or medieval or baroque – that it would be more honest to give it up altogether? Would it not be better to admit that man in this industrial and scientific age, with its new sociological structure, is no longer capable of a liturgical act? And instead of talking of renewal ought we not to consider how best to celebrate the sacred mysteries so that modern man can grasp their meaning through his own approach to truth? [2]

In the same letter, Guardini states:

The question will arise whether our present liturgy contains parts which cannot mean much to modern man. I remember a conversation with the late Abbot Ildefons Herwegen of Maria Laach, the great champion of liturgical renewal. We had been considering various aspects and I said a sign that the work for liturgy was really coming to life would be a liturgical crisis, and Abbot Herwegen thoughtfully agreed.[3]

While Guardini himself only a few years later would dismiss the Consilium’s drafts as “plumber’s work,” it would be impossible to exaggerate the harm he himself caused by the remarks he made in the 1964 letter, which seemed to suggest, as many other semi-modernists had done, that the entirety of Christian liturgy from as early as Constantine, and certainly no later than the Middle Ages onward, was irrelevant, useless, inaccessible, ready for the scrap heap. What is surprising is that a theologian of Guardini’s stature, who was so attuned to the sacred liturgy's “irrelevance” and “uselessness” (properly understood) [4], was able to embrace this kind of chronological relativism.

On the one hand, we might sympathize with Guardini to this extent: the liturgical reform seemed to be premised on the idea that if the liturgy as it stands “isn’t working,” then all we need to do is redesign it — find a “working” model — pack it up, ship it out, and roll it off the skids to the expectant populace. In this vision, the problems are all on the side of the liturgical rites; it is not men who need to be reformed, but only the rites.

Yet what if the problem is in man? If he were judged to be incapable of the liturgical act, then he would be incapable of any liturgy, whether it comes from the scriptorium of Gregory the Great or the desk of Annibale Bugnini. He might be capable of something else, like a Bible study, a soup kitchen, prison ministry, or volunteering for scouts, but the leitourgia, the sacrificial action of one on behalf of the many [5], will not have any purchase in his individualistic world. In that sense, perhaps the avant-garde liturgists underestimated the challenge they were up against. It’s not about “tweaking” something to get it to “work” better, much less of piling on more and more Scripture so that one can check off a box that says “Bible is being read—done.” For it is not the reading or the text, the chant or the ritual, that is a problem, but the modernity of modern man, which prevents him from engaging, cosmically, symbolically, ascetically, and mystically, with the very realities Scripture is about, and short of which it fails of its aim.

“More than words: Signs, symbols, metaphors”

On the other hand, in defense of the common man, it might be asked: Why should we buy this typically pessimistic German view to begin with, reminiscent of Wotan lamenting the ineluctable collapse of Valhalla, the Götterdämmerung? To say that moderns are not able to be liturgical in the same way that all men prior to them have been is a path leading to despair: as if man were now a different species that requires a different religion, that is, a different system of signs ordered to divine worship. This subterranean despair was part of the motivation for the Novus Ordo. It led to the belief that a simplified, abbreviated, intelligible, vernacular, communal celebration will obviously appeal to modern man, who is incapable of vertical, theocentric, densely symbolic, archaically uttered ritual. But this seems to be basically false, and has led to a massive falling-away, as well as to the surprising resilience of the old rites that were supposed to be outdated and unapproachable.

The truth that is really inevitable is not Guardini’s fatalism, but an acknowledgement of the requirements of human formation. Just as we cannot give ourselves permission to stop teaching each new generation how to speak, how to read, how to write, and how to think, so we must not fail to immerse ourselves in ritual that is uncompromisingly ritualistic, for this is the logic, grammar, and rhetoric of revealed religion, in both Testaments and in the history of the Church. It enjoys a universal anthropological basis that makes it always learnable, but since it is rather strange within rationalistic modernity, it is now more capable, not less capable, of confronting us with the transcendence of God, which calls us out of our comfort zone, as Abraham was called from Ur of the Chaldeans. When people have the sense that in the liturgy they are entering the domain of the sacred, somehow stepping into the realm of the divine, then their ears will begin to open to listening to the words of God in Scripture. The focus, the starting point, has to be elsewhere than Scripture. That is exactly contrary to where the reformers, in their homotextuality (so to speak), wanted to place the emphasis.

Another way of seeing this is to look at the repetitiousness of the old rite, much maligned of course by the reformers. In “Repetition Is the Mother of a Great Many Things,” I discuss the value of the frequent use of the same pericopes and verses of Scripture (and non-Scriptural texts) in the traditional liturgy precisely as a method for making us deeply familiar with the words. Eventually these words, or many of them at any rate, will be memorized; they come to live within us, forming our consciousness as the floor, walls, and ceiling of our inner architecture. The way to get modern Christians to take Scripture more seriously would be to take memory more seriously, and to preach and teach about ways in which our modern way of life is sapping or emptying our memories of what is divine and filling them with what is secular, profane, and, at times, diabolic. Once again, what modern man needed and still needs is what traditional liturgy rites and practices give him, not something newly fashioned à la Guardini.

Learning the old liturgy in the midst of ruins

It is also true, and I will be the first to admit it, that without some catechesis, whether outside of liturgy or in the homily, most modern people will not be able to grasp enough of the message of liturgy to get a good grip, a good foothold, for making further progress. In that sense, education simply cannot be bypassed. Dignified and beautiful liturgy can accomplish immense good, even conversions from atheism or paganism; but for most people, entering deeply into all that the liturgy has to offer is going to require at least some investment of work, slowly, over a long period. And it has always been so; there’s a reason St. Benedict speaks of the opus Dei, the work of God. It is work that, as the Holy Rule stresses, requires repetition, study, and expertise, though — as Guardini rightly says — it is also the highest-level play, since it does not have an ulterior motive, an end for which it is merely a means.

Let us return to our starting point. Guardini said that modern man could no longer perform the liturgical act. This was taken by many in the later phase of the Liturgical Movement as an indisputable truth and a warrant for unlimited experimentation, with the goal of equipping the liturgy to elicit or solicit the “correct” participation from the faithful. Ironically, what happened instead is that the liturgical act was transformed into its opposite: the celebration of the community itself by itself. In a strange twist, Guardini’s dour assessment was not disproved by the Novus Ordo but inculcated by it: what had been a risk of missing the properly liturgical became a habit of missing it with confident ease. In short, it is above all the reformed liturgy that has made modern men, to the extent humanly possible and divinely permitted, incapable of performing the liturgical act.

NOTES

[1] Editorial introduction at Corpus Christi Watershed.
[2] “1964 Letter from Romano Guardini.”
[3] See Christopher Carstens, “Romano Guardini Was Careful What He Asked For: A Liturgical Crisis.”
[4] See Fr. Daniel Cardo, “At Prayer in the Fields of the Lord: The Playfulness of the Liturgy.”
[5] See William Daniel, Christ the Liturgy (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2020), 1-39, on the correct meaning of the term leitourgia.

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

“Plumber’s Work!” : Romano Guardini and Petrus Tschinkel on the Liturgical Reform

Pius Parsch

The Augustinian Canon Pius Parsch (1884–1954), of Klosterneuburg Abbey outside of Vienna, was among the greatest lights and most influential partisans of the Liturgical Movement in the mid-twentieth century. His classic work The Church’s Year of Grace appeared in many editions in Europe and in two English editions in the United States. While it is streaked with some of the poor scholarship and excessive antiquarianism of the original Liturgical Movement, this multi-volume set is generally regarded as a worthy successor of Dom Guéranger’s The Liturgical Year and Cardinal Schuster’s The Sacramentary, and an essential resource for anyone seriously interested in the traditional Roman rite. Romano Guardini (1885–1968), from the same generation, also contributed many valuable books that aimed to help Catholics better understand and assimilate the riches of the liturgical tradition, such as his short but powerful book Sacred Signs.

Parsch and Guardini both dabbled in unauthorized experiments that, in retrospect, look like anticipations of the Novus Ordo, such as celebrating versus populum and with the vernacular. Later liturgists have been only too willing to invoke them as forerunners of the new liturgy that emerged in the late sixties. It is therefore important, for the historical record, to document that one of Pius Parsch’s closest and most devoted students, Petrus Tschinkel (1906–1995), was not at all enthusiastic about the final result of the liturgical reform, and relates a first-hand experience of Guardini speaking of it in a highly dismissive manner.

Petrus Tschinkel (photo from 1958)

We are fortunate to have access to this information by way of an interview that Dr. Rupert Klötzl of Una Voce Austria conducted with Fr. Tschinkel on April 15, 1992, at Stift Klosterneuburg bei Wien. The interview was recorded and transcribed (those who are interested in either may contact me directly).

At one point Fr. Tschinkel says to Dr. Klötzl:

Pius Parsch, das kann ich sagen, wäre mit den Veränderungen der nachkonzilaren Ära in keiner Weise einverstanden gewesen. Das ist nicht das, was er gewollt hat. Jawohl—in der Muttersprache. Das ist aber alles. Aber nicht die Messe als Mysterium—als eine Wirklichkeit hic et nunc, jetzt und hier. Und die wundervollen Perikopen so gewählt, daß sie Mysterienbilder sind für das, was sich jetzt ereignet. Das war sein Anliegen.

Pius Parsch, I can say this, would not have agreed in any way with the changes of the postconciliar era. This is not what he wanted. Yes—[liturgy] in the mother tongue. But that is all. But not [changing] the Mass as a mystery—as a reality hic et nunc, here and now. And the wonderful pericopes chosen so that they are “mystery pictures” for what is happening now. That was his intention.

St. Gertrude, Fr. Parsch’s parish

A little later Fr. Tschinkel expresses his own view, which aligns with that, apparently, of Guardini:

Und diese liturgischen Formen, nach dem Zweiten Vaticanum, ist ein reiner Leerlauf: nur Texte, Texte. Von einer inneren Haltung keine Spur, vom Mysterium auch nicht. Guardini, wenn Ihnen der Name etwas sagt, den ich sehr verehre. Ich habe, das ist viele Jahre her, da hat Guardini noch gelebt, einen Priester aus München auf Besuch gehabt in St. Gertrud, der wollte St. Gertrud studieren, und da habe ich ihm gesagt - das war gleich nach dem Konzil - ja, ich habe ihm gesagt, wissen Sie, wie Romano Guardini zu den neuen Texten steht? Da sagt er, ja, das kann ich Ihnen sagen. Ich komme sehr oft mit ihm zusammen, und wie er die neuen Texte bekommen hat, hat er sie lange angesehen, ... und dann hat er zu mir gesagt: Klempnerarbeit!

And these liturgical forms, after the Second Vatican Council, are nothing but idling: only text after text. No trace of internal disposition, no trace of mystery either. Guardini—if the name means anything to you, I adore him—many years ago, when Guardini was still alive, I had a priest from Munich visiting St. Gertrude, who wanted to study St. Gertrude, and I said to him—it was right after the Council—yes, I said to him: Do you know how Romano Guardini feels about the new [liturgical] texts? He says: Yes, I can tell you that. I meet him very often, and when he got the new texts, he looked at them for a long time... and then he said to me: “Plumber’s work”!

The German word Klempnerarbeit means work done in a hasty, slipshod way, with inadequate care, and botched results. The reference to a hack plumber doing a mechanical job carries the implication that the reform of the liturgy was approached like the fixing, cutting, adapting, or welding of pieces of metal pipe, rather than as a subtle work of skill on a delicate living reality that would require holiness, discretion, and learning. Klempnerarbeit might also convey in this case a lack of aesthetic value in the misnamed “reforms.”

Fr. Tschinkel then translates Guardini’s German word into colloquial Viennese:

Ja, ich würde als Wiener sagen: Pfuscherarbeit. So ist das. Die Texte sind gewählt ohne irgend einen Zusammenhang mit dem Mysterium. Es war Pius Parsch sein Anliegen, dem Volk das Mysterium nahezubringen—jetzt und hier sich das ereignet durch die Realpräsenz Christi in der Eucharistie. Das ist Religionsunterricht. Ja, und dann muß ich sagen: In dem Punkt ist Lefebvre sicher ein Retter. Er wird eine Zukunft haben. Wäre nicht das erste Mal. Jeanne d’Arc wurde als Hexe verbrannt, später heilig gesprochen. Athanasius exkommuniziert—der große Kirchenlehrer.

Yes, as a Viennese, I’d say botched work. That’s the way it is. The texts are chosen without any connection to the mystery. It was Pius Parsch’s concern to make the mystery accessible to the people—now and here it happens through the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This is religious education. Yes, and then I must say: In this point Lefebvre is certainly a savior. He will have a future. Wouldn’t be the first time. Joan of Arc was burned as a witch, later canonized. Athanasius excommunicated—the great teacher of the Church.

According to a friend of mine in Vienna, Pfuscherarbeit means not only sloppy work but illegal work. Fr. Guardini, to the extent that he saw what was happening before his death in 1968, wrote it off as Klempnerarbeit; Fr. Tschinkel, heir to Fr. Parsch, concurred that the Bugnini reform was Pfuscherarbeit.

In the interview Dr. Klötzl also mentions Dr. Erwin Hesse, who from 1946 to 1979 was the pastor of the (current) Oratorian church in Vienna, St. Rochus. Fr. Tschinkel talks about his fondness for Fr. Hesse and their agreement with Lefebvre’s action to preserve traditional liturgy and doctrine. Fr. Hesse, in fact, taught some classes for the SSPX. It is important to realize that we are dealing here with people who studied and followed Pius Parsch — who, so to speak, inherited his mantle.

It seems to me that this is the intellectual and spiritual environment out of which we should understand Joseph Ratzinger to have emerged, as witness his elegiac remarks in the Foreword to Alcuin Reid’s book The Organic Development of the Liturgy:

The Liturgical Movement had in fact been attempting to . . . teach us to understand the Liturgy as a living network of Tradition that had taken concrete form, that cannot be torn apart into little pieces but has to be seen and experienced as a living whole. Anyone who, like me, was moved by this perception at the time of the Liturgical Movement on the eve of the Second Vatican Council can only stand, deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were concerned for.

I would like to thank Mag. theol. Dr. med. Rupert Klötzl of Vienna, who conducted the interview with Fr. Tschinkel and sent me the transcript, for permitting the use of the quoted material and of the photos. The entire interview of 5,000 words deserves to be translated (any volunteers?).

A newspaper article from 1962, showing Fr. Tschinkel (his name is misspelled in the caption) celebrating Mass versus populum -- a favorite pseudo-antiquarian pasttime. With the wisdom of hindsight, Fr. Tschinkel later regretted the haste with which debatable theories were turned into premises for major liturgical change.

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

Guardini's Spirit of the Liturgy Centenary - Call for Papers of the Society for Catholic Liturgy

Call for Papers
Centenary of the Publication of
The Spirit of the Liturgy by Romano Guardini

September 27–29, 2018
Cathedral of St. Mary
Miami, Florida

A touchstone of the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement, Romano Guardini’s Spirit of the Liturgy marks its centennial year of publication in 2018. For the occa

sion of its annual conference, The Society for Catholic Liturgy invites submissions for academic papers and pastoral presentations on topics related to Guardini’s work.

• Expositions on the life and work of Romano Guardini
• The legacy of Guardini and The Spirit of the Liturgy
• The place of Guardini within the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement 
• The Spirit of the Liturgy and the Second Vatican Council 
• Problematics posed or introduced by The Spirit of the Liturgy 
• The relationship between Guardini’s and Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy 
• Relationships between the following in The Spirit of the Liturgy: 
• Nature and grace, or nature and “cultural heritage”/civilization 
• The individual and the community, the parish and the universal Church, or more generally the particular and the universal 
• Change and stability 
• Emotions, the mind, truth, or the will, etc. 
• Vertical and horizontal aspects of the liturgy 
• Liturgy and the moral life 
• The subjective and the objective 
• Popular piety/devotions, the spiritual life, and the liturgy 
• Lex orandi and lex credendi 
• Externality and internality 
• Freedom and restraint 
• Individual “style” and universality of expression 
• The material and the spiritual 
• Purpose and meaning 
• Beauty, truth, and goodness 
• Logos and ethos 
• Contemplation and activity 
• The role of the following in the liturgy, according to Guardini’s work 

• Christ as figure or actor 
• Repetition 
• “Active participation” 
• Sacrifice 
• Humility 
• Sensibilities of the modern man 
• Mystery 
• Symbolism and typology 
• Playfulness 
• Minimalism or simplicity 
• Rubrics and rules
• The problems of aestheticism, moralism, Kantianism, or didacticism vis-à-vis the liturgy 
• Reception and application of principles of The Spirit of the Liturgy in the post-modern context, or within Guardini’s own time 
• The place of The Spirit of the Liturgy within Guardini’s oeuvre 
• Guardini’s liturgical praxis and ars celebrandi 
• Guardini’s work with youth 
• Liturgy and technology 

Other proposals will be considered, but primary consideration will be given to proposals that are related to the conference theme.

Paper proposals of approximately 250 words should be emailed to Jennifer.Donelson@archny.org or mailed to Jennifer Donelson, 201 Seminary Avenue, Yonkers, NY 10704. Proposals must be received by Friday, May 4, 2018.

Presentations will be 45 minutes in length, followed by 15 minutes of discussion. Papers presented will be considered for publication in the SCL’s journal Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical Renewal. Presenters must register for the full conference and will be responsible for their own expenses.

Romano Guardini on Evening, Death, and Eternal Life

On this day, the Commemoration of All the Souls of the Faithful Departed, we pray the Lord, in His abundant mercy, may deign to raise up the faithful departed to the vision of His supernal glory. Requiem aeternam, dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Reflections on death, judgment, heaven, and hell were abundant in Catholic preaching and literature of the past, but one is saddened to see that these topics have suffered an enormous eclipse since the Second Vatican Council, an eclipse that has barely abated. Death has been, in a sense, forbidden as a theological topic or pastoral theme, "papered over"; we spend our efforts (at least in affluent Western societies) putting off the day of human reckoning as long as possible, and when it finally comes, nobody knows what to say, think, or do, as evidenced by a widespread lack of profound rituals of mourning and suitably somber liturgical ceremonies focused on praying for the salvation of the departed. As for divine judgment, the pendulum has swung from a supposedly exaggerated fear of the Pantocrator in olden times to our modern non-judgmental God of Elysian fields who holds out crowns for every man, woman, and child, like free tickets to a public event. No matter how one looks at it, there is a serious need for a serious return to traditional meditation and preaching on the Four Last Things.

I have always been struck by a particular meditation offered by Romano Guardini in his marvelous little book, Sacred Signs. Many will already know of this book, because it is one of the best introductions to liturgical symbolism ever written. I remember first finding out about it through a lecture by Fr. Cassian Folsom, O.S.B., Prior of Norcia, in which he took various points from Guardini and used them as a way of explaining how we can pray liturgically with greater understanding of what we are doing and why we are doing it, and with a greater integration of body and soul.

Here is Fr. Guardini's reflection on the meaning of the day's ending, each day's ending:

EVENING

         Evening also has its mystery. The mystery of evening is death. The day draws to a close and we make ready to enter the silence of sleep. The vigor which came with the morning has by evening run down, and what we seek then is rest. The secret note of death is sounded; and though our imaginations may be too crowded with the day’s doings or too intent on tomorrow’s plans for us to hear it distinctly, some perception of it, however remote, does reach us. And there are evenings when we have very much the feeling that life is drawing on to the long night “wherein no man can work.”
         What matters is to have a right understanding of what death means. Dying is more than the end of life. Death is the last summons that life serves on us. Dying is the final, the all-decisive act. With individuals as with nations the events that precede extinction in themselves conclude and settle nothing. After the thing has happened, it remains to be determined, by nations as by individuals, what is to be made of it, how it is to be regarded. The past event is neither good nor evil; in itself it is nothing. It is the face we put upon it, our way of viewing it, that makes it what it is. A great calamity, let us say, has overtaken a nation. The event has happened, but it is not over with. The nation may give way to despair. It may also think the matter through again, rejudge it, and make a fresh start. Not until we have decided how to take it is the event, long past though it may be, completed. The deep significance of death is that it is the final sentence a man passes on his whole life. It is the definite character he stamps upon it. When he comes to die a man must decide whether he will or will not once more take his whole life in hand, be sorry for all he has done amiss, and plunge and recast it in the burning heat of repentance, give God humble thanks for what was well done, (to him be the honor!) and cast the whole upon God in entire abandonment. Or he may give way to despondency and weakly and ignobly let life slip from him. In this case life comes to no conclusion; it merely, without shape or character, ceases to be.
         The high “art of dying” is to accept the life that is leaving us, and by a single act of affirmation put it into God’s hands.
         Each evening we should practice this high art of giving life an effectual conclusion by reshaping the past and impressing it with a final validity and an eternal character. The evening hour is the hour of completion. We stand then before God with a premonition of the day on which we shall stand before him face to face and give in our final reckoning. We have a sense of the past being past, with its good and evil, its losses and waste. We place ourselves before God to whom all time, past or future, is the living present, before God who is able to restore to the penitent even what is lost. We think back over the day gone by. What was not well done contrition seizes upon and thinks anew. For what was well done we give God humble thanks, sincerely taking no credit to ourselves. What we are uncertain about, or failed to accomplish, the whole sorry remnant, we sink in entire abandonment into God’s all-powerful love.

SOURCE

Sacred Signs. First published 1911. Trans. Grace Branham (St. Louis: Pio Decimo Press, 1956). [Last year, I took the public domain text and re-typeset it completely so that my students could have a nice edition. Then I decided to make it available to the public: see here.]

Other excerpts from this book — the sections on kneeling and incense — may be found here.

Classics of the Liturgical Movement: Romano Guardini (2)

Two weeks ago we saw how masterfully Guardini spoke of the objectivity, preeminence, and emotional restraint of the sacred liturgy as the Church’s public prayer, and how tradition has bestowed on it a peculiarly balanced, well-rounded expression of the fullness of truth and integrity of doctrine, as well as how liturgy eagerly draws upon culture to enrich and elevate this expression.

This week, we take up at a gem of a work by the same author, Sacred Signs, first published in 1911. It would be difficult to exaggerate the beauty, power, and usefulness of this little book, which I have successfully used as a homeschooling assignment as well as a reading in college theology (it could serve many other purposes, too, such as a parish study circle). For many, this book has been a defining moment in coming to grasp the symbolic language of the liturgy, a language founded in a kind of heightened sensitivity to cosmology and psychology that moderns often lack. The table of contents reads like a grammar of ascent: “The Sign of the Cross, The Hands, Kneeling, Standing, Walking, Striking the Breast, Steps, Doors,  Candles, Holy Water, Fire, Ashes, Incense, Light and Heat, Bread and Wine, Linen, The Altar, The Chalice, The Paten, Blessing, Space Sanctified, Bells, Time Sanctified—Morning, Evening, Midday, The Name of God.”

In this book, Guardini helps us to see the Mass as the crown jewel of the liturgical “work” of Christ, who works through His Mystical Body to continue our divinization through sign, symbol, and sacrament. It is the Church's supreme and ancient love affair with Christ, where He has met to court her sweetly mid-way between heaven and earth, using the tools of every lover—song, word, gesture, symbol. In this splendorous spectacle of their love, we too are invited to join. We yearn to be an active partner in this drama of “fairest love.” To do that, we must make our own the Church's liturgical love-language, taught Her by Christ, so that with all the angels and Saints we can adore God with that “fairest love” we all desire. Through liturgy, Holy Church teaches us to love God as he deserves. Let us learn from Her!

Sacred Signs has been out of print for a very long time, and used copies are scarce. Since the text itself is in the public domain, I decided to produce a new edition of it, available here for $7.00. I'm pleased with the way it turned out.

Now for some tastes, to show why this has been a favorite book of so many readers over the past century!

* * *

Kneeling

          When a man feels proud of himself, he stands erect, draws himself to his full height, throws back his head and shoulders and says with every part of his body, I am bigger and more important than you. But when he is humble he feels his littleness, and lowers his head and shrinks into himself. He abases himself. And the greater the presence in which he stands the more deeply he abases himself; the smaller he becomes in his own eyes.
          But when does our littleness so come home to us as when we stand in God’s presence? He is the great God, who is today and yesterday, whose years are hundreds and thousands, who fills the place where we are, the city, the wide world, the measureless space of the starry sky, in whose eyes the universe is less than a particle of dust, all-holy, all-pure, all-righteous, infinitely high. He is so great, I so small, so small that beside him I seem hardly to exist, so wanting am I in worth and substance. One has no need to be told that God’s presence is not the place in which to stand on one’s dignity. To appear less presumptuous, to be as little and low as we feel, we sink to our knees and thus sacrifice half our height; and to satisfy our hearts still further we bow down our heads, and our diminished stature speaks to God and says, Thou art the great God; I am nothing.
          Therefore let not the bending of our knees be a hurried gesture, an empty form. Put meaning into it. To kneel, in the soul’s intention, is to bow down before God in deepest reverence.
          On entering a church, or in passing before the altar, kneel down all the way without haste or hurry, putting your heart into what you do, and let your whole attitude say, Thou art the great God. It is an act of humility, an act of truth, and every time you kneel it will do your soul good.

Incense

          “And I saw an angel come and stand before the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given to him much incense, and the smoke of the incense of the prayers of the saints ascended up before God from the hand of the angel.” So writes Saint John in the mysterious book of the Apocalypse.
          The offering of an incense is a generous and beautiful rite. The bright grains of incense are laid upon the red-hot charcoal, the censer is swung, and the fragrant smoke rises in clouds. In the rhythm and the sweetness there is a musical quality; and like music also is the entire lack of practical utility: it is a prodigal waste of precious material. It is a pouring out of unwithholding love.
          “When the Lord was at supper Mary brought the spikenard of great price and poured it over his feet and wiped them with her hair, and the house was filled with the odor of the ointment.” Narrower spirits objected. “Whereto this waste?” But the Son of God has spoken, “Let her alone. She hath done it against my burial.” Mary’s anointing was a mystery of death and love and the sweet savor of sacrifice.
          The offering of incense is like Mary’s anointing at Bethany. It is as free and objectless as beauty. It burns and is consumed like love that lasts through death. And the arid soul still takes his stand and asks the same question: What is the good of it?
          It is the offering of a sweet savor which Scripture itself tells us is the prayers of the Saints. Incense is the symbol of prayer. Like pure prayer it has in view no object of its own; it asks nothing for itself. It rises like the Gloria Patri at the end of a psalm in adoration and thanksgiving to God for his great glory.
          It is true that symbolism of this sort may lead to mere aestheticism. There are imaginations in which the fragrant clouds of incense induce a spurious religiosity; and, in such instances, when it does so, the Christian conscience does right to protest that prayer should be made in spirit and in truth. But though prayer is a plain, straight-forward business, it is not the so-much-for-so-muchness which the niggardly imagination and fleshless heart of the religious Philistine would make of it. The same spirit persists that produced the objection of Judas of Kerioth. Prayer is not to be measured by its bargaining power; it is not a matter of bourgeois common sense.
          Minds of this order know nothing of that magnanimous prayer that seeks only to give. Prayer is a profound act of worship, that asks neither why nor wherefore. It rises like beauty, like sweetness, like love. The more there is in it of love, the more of sacrifice. And when the fire has wholly consumed the sacrifice, a sweet savor ascends.

SOURCE

Sacred Signs. First published 1911. Trans. Grace Branham (St. Louis: Pio Decimo Press, 1956). Now available again in print, here.

Classics of the Liturgical Movement: Romano Guardini (1)

Last year, I started an open-ended series, which I introduced with these words:

I have decided to start a new series here, introducing readers to older and newer authors who have a valid claim to be considered representatives of that authentic Liturgical Movement to which this blog has been contributing for years, and of which Pope Benedict XVI is the greatest recent exponent.

The mention of Pope Benedict reminds us, of course, of his great teacher, Romano Guardini, who is a sort of grandfather of NLM. So famous an author, with so many wise and penetrating books to his credit, hardly needs an introduction. It may be as well to admit that Guardini, like most modern Catholic authors, is not always reliable or sound on certain points, but when he’s on, he’s really on. The excerpts presented below, from chapter 1 of The Spirit of the Liturgy, are just a taste of the exquisite insights one can find in his work, particularly when he is writing on the liturgy, which he loved so ardently. Indeed, I prefer to think that certain problematic practical applications with which his name is connected were the result more of a misjudging zeal for sharing the riches of the Church’s liturgy than of a considered desire to modernize or transmogrify it, and it is obvious that he would have been sorely disappointed in the postconciliar collapse of the liturgy, the stripping of its symbols, the reduction of its majesty, the evisceration of its eloquent prayers and gestures, and the general loss of the awareness of the sacred, a category central in his thinking.

When we read the best of Guardini, we seem to hear, as from a distance, the future coming of Joseph Ratzinger and the unsurpassed writings on the theology of the liturgy that Pope Benedict the Great (for he, in truth, deserves such a title) would bequeath to the Church, as a heritage that can vie with the golden age of the Fathers. Without further ado, let us hear some excerpts.

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The Catholic liturgy is the supreme example of an objectively established rule of spiritual life. It has been able to develop kata ton holon, that is to say, in every direction, and in accordance with all places, times, and types of human culture. Therefore it will be the best teacher of the via ordinaria—the regulation of religious life in common, with, at the same time, a view to actual needs and requirements. The significance of the liturgy must, however, be more exactly defined. Our first task will be to establish the quality of its relation to the non-liturgical forms of spiritual life.
          The primary and exclusive aim of the liturgy is not the expression of the individual’s reverence and worship for God. It is not even concerned with the awakening, formation, and sanctification of the individual soul as such. Nor does the onus of liturgical action and prayer rest with the individual. It does not even rest with the collective groups, composed of numerous individuals, who periodically achieve a limited and intermittent unity in their capacity as the congregation of a church.
          The liturgical entity consists rather of the united body of the faithful as such—the Church—a body which infinitely outnumbers the mere congregation. The liturgy is the Church’s public and lawful act of worship, and it is performed and conducted by the officials whom the Church herself has designated for the post—her priests. In the liturgy God is to be honored by the body of the faithful, and the latter is in its turn to derive sanctification from this act of worship. It is important that this objective nature of the liturgy should be fully understood. Here the Catholic conception of worship in common sharply differs from the Protestant, which is predominantly individualistic. The fact that the individual Catholic, by his absorption into the higher unity, finds liberty and discipline, originates in the twofold nature of man, who is both social and solitary.
          Now, side by side with the strictly ritual and entirely objective forms of devotion, others exist, in which the personal element is more strongly marked. To this type belong those which are known as “popular devotions,” such as afternoon prayers accompanied by hymns, devotions suited to varying periods, localities, or requirements and so on. They bear the stamp of their time and surroundings, and are the direct expression of the characteristic quality or temper of an individual congregation.
          Although in comparison with the prayer of the individual, which is expressive of purely personal needs and aspirations, popular devotions are both communal and objective, they are to a far greater degree characteristic of their origin than is the liturgy, the entirely objective and impersonal method of prayer practiced by the Church as a whole. This is the reason for the greater stress laid by popular devotion upon the individual need of edification. … But in spite of the fact that the liturgy and popular devotion have each their own special premises and aims, still it is to liturgical worship that pre-eminence of right belongs. The liturgy is and will be the lex orandi. Non-liturgical prayer must take the liturgy for its model, and must renew itself in the liturgy, if it is to retain its vitality. … All other forms of devotional practice can always measure their shortcomings by the standard of the liturgy, and with its help find the surest way back to the via ordinaria when they have strayed from it. The changing demands of time, place, and special circumstance can express themselves in popular devotion; facing the latter stands the liturgy, from which clearly issue the fundamental laws—eternally and universally unchanging—which govern all genuine and healthy piety. …
          The first and most important lesson which the liturgy has to teach is that the prayer of a corporate body must be sustained by thought. The prayers of the liturgy are entirely governed by and interwoven with dogma. Those who are unfamiliar with liturgical prayer often regard them as theological formulae, artistic and didactic, until on closer acquaintance they suddenly perceive and admit that the clear-cut, lucidly constructed phrases are full of interior enlightenment. To give an outstanding example, the wonderful Collects of the Masses of Sunday may be quoted. Wherever the stream of prayer wells abundantly upwards, it is always guided into safe channels by means of plain and lucid thought. Interspersed among the pages of the Missal and the Breviary are readings from Holy Scripture and from the works of the Fathers, which continually stimulate thought. Often these readings are introduced and concluded by short prayers of a characteristically contemplative and reflective nature—the antiphons—during which that which has been heard or read has time to cease echoing and to sink into the mind. The liturgy, the lex orandi, is, according to the old proverb, the law of faith, the lex credendi, as well. It is the treasure-house of the thought of Revelation.
          This is not, of course, an attempt to deny that the heart and the emotions play an important part in the life of prayer. Prayer is, without a doubt, “a raising of the heart to God.” But the heart must be guided, supported, and purified by the mind. … Only thought is universally current and consistent, and, as long as it is really thought, remains suited, to a certain degree, to every intelligence. If prayer in common, therefore, is to prove beneficial to the majority, it must be primarily directed by thought, and not by feeling. It is only when prayer is sustained by and steeped in clear and fruitful religious thought, that it can be of service to a corporate body, composed of distinct elements, all actuated by varying emotions.
          We have seen that thought alone can keep spiritual life sound and healthy. In the same way, prayer is beneficial only when it rests on the bedrock of truth. This is not meant in the purely negative sense that it must be free from error; in addition to this, it must spring from the fullness of truth. It is only truth—or dogma, to give it its other name—which can make prayer efficacious, and impregnate it with that austere, protective strength without which it degenerates into weakness. If this is true of private prayer, it is doubly so of popular devotion, which in many directions verges on sentimentality. Dogmatic thought brings release from the thralldom of individual caprice, and from the uncertainty and sluggishness which follow in the wake of emotion. It makes prayer intelligible, and causes it to rank as a potent factor in life.
          If a prayer therefore stresses any one mystery of faith in an exclusive or an excessive manner, in the end it will adequately satisfy none but those who are of a corresponding temperament, and even the latter will eventually become conscious of their need of truth in its entirety. For instance, if a prayer deals exclusively with God’s mercy, it will not ultimately satisfy even a delicate and tender piety, because this truth calls for its complement—the fact of God’s justice and majesty. In any form of prayer, therefore, which is intended for the ultimate use of a corporate body, the whole fullness of religious truth must be included.
          Here, too, the liturgy is our teacher. It condenses into prayer the entire body of religious truth. Indeed, it is nothing else but truth expressed in terms of prayer. For it is the great fundamental truths which above all fill the liturgy—God in His mighty reality, perfection, and greatness, One, and Three in One; His creation, providence, and omnipresence; sin, justification, and the desire of salvation; the Redeemer and His kingdom; the four last things. It is only such an overwhelming abundance of truth which can never pall, but continue to be, day after day, all things to all men, ever fresh and inexhaustible. …
          Individuals, or short waves of enthusiasm, can to a wide degree dispense with learning and culture. This is proved by the beginnings of the desert Orders in Egypt, and of the mendicant friars, and by holy people in all ages. But, generally speaking, a fairly high degree of genuine learning and culture is necessary in the long run, in order to keep spiritual life healthy. By means of these two things spiritual life retains its energy, clearness, and catholicity. Culture preserves spiritual life from the unhealthy, eccentric, and one-sided elements with which it tends to get involved only too easily. Culture enables religion to express itself, and helps it to distinguish what is essential from what is non-essential, the means from the end, and the path from the goal. The Church has always condemned every attempt at attacking science, art, property, and so on. The same Church which so resolutely stresses the “one thing necessary,” and which upholds with the greatest impressiveness the teaching of the Evangelical Counsels—that we must be ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of eternal salvation—nevertheless desires, as a rule, that spiritual life should be impregnated with the wholesome salt of genuine and lofty culture.[1]

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The internal revival of the Catholic community will not make progress until the liturgy again occupies its rightful position in Catholic life. And the Eucharistic movement can only effectually distribute its blessings when it is in close touch with the liturgy.[2]

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Certainly the grace of God is self-sufficient; neither nature nor the work of man is necessary in order that a soul may be sanctified. God “can awaken of these stones children to Abraham.” But as a rule He wishes that everything which belongs to man in the way of good, lofty, natural and cultural possessions shall be placed at the disposal of religion and so serve the Kingdom of God. He has interconnected the natural and the supernatural order, and has given natural things a place in the scheme of His supernatural designs.[3]

SOURCE
From chapter 1 of The Spirit of the Liturgy. Trans. Ada Lane (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1935). Amazon link.

Other installments in this ongoing series "Classics of the Liturgical Movement":

• Canon G. A. Simon's Commentary on the Rule
• Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard's Soul of the Apostolate
• Dom Paul Delatte's Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict

Conforming Our Secular Selves to Sacred Signs

In the movie Into Great Silence there is a great moment when a group of monks are talking and one of them mentions that another monastery has dropped a bunch of its practices in order to adapt to the times. An elderly monk says:

Our entire life, the whole liturgy, and everything ceremonial are symbols. If you abolish the symbols, then you tear down the walls of your own house. When we abolish the signs, we lose our orientation. Instead, we should search for their meaning … one should unfold the core of the symbols. … The signs are not to be questioned, we are.

That is monastic wisdom, pure and simple.

It furnishes us a lesson that may, in fact, be the most important lesson of all in our age of constant change, planned obsolescence, the myth of progress, the seductions of postmodern pluralism. The liturgy, like the divine revelation out of which it emerges and to which it ministers, is our lifeline to God, giving nourishment to our faith, oil to the fire of our charity. If we lose our hold on the sacred symbols that come to us from the cosmos and from revelation, we will indeed lose our orientation to God; we will tear down the walls that surround us, and will lose our faith, our charity, even ourselves. We must not adapt the signs to ourselves, for that will bring about nothing more than an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors that reflects only us. We must rather conform ourselves to the sacred signs, and be molded by them, for they are tools used by the potter’s hands.

For this reason, it is a sovereign, non-negotiable, utterly fixed principle that if a certain long-standing practice has (as people will say) “lost its meaning,” we do not get rid of it—we rediscover its meaning, and perhaps, as our ancestors often did, we even invest it with a new meaning. Under no circumstances do we abolish it. As Fr. Guido Rodheudt says, apropos the "gigantic purge of traditional treasures" in the 1960s:

Astonishingly, it never occurred to anyone to attempt to encounter what had been forgotten by remembering or to regain the lost understanding, or with the devotion of a child for his grandparents to have the past recounted anew so as to understand it or to learn to love it, because in the tales told by the elderly we have a guarantee that what once was must never sink into oblivion, because it is vitally necessary for today. Especially when—as with liturgical treasures—it is a question of forms that developed in this way and only in this way, so that they might timelessly unite man with the eternal, regardless of where and how he lives. (The Sacred Liturgy, ed. A. Reid, p. 279)

In reality, nothing “automatically means” this or that: human beings still have to learn the language of symbols, just as an infant has to learn how to breastfeed, then crawl, walk, speak words—even if all of this is natural to us and will usually happen in due course. Because we are aesthetic-linguistic creatures, the use and recognition of symbols together with a certain delight in them is certainly natural to us, but the sheer variety, subtlety, and density of symbols, together with supervenient meanings established by convention, requires a lengthy education, or better, initiation. It is for this reason, among others, that so much great literature of the past is becoming increasingly inaccessible to modern young people: they do not have the intellectual equipment, or sometimes the first-hand experiences, required for relating to the elements and connecting them into a coherent whole. They don’t “get it”; it doesn’t “speak to them.”

By the modern logic of cutting out symbols that no longer speak to our contemporaries, one might very well end up with nothing left. “Candles? Oh yes, those were important to people before electricity. But since we now have other sources of light, candles don’t really speak to us anymore.”

“An altar? Oh yes, that was fine when people still had primitive ideas about sacrificing to angry gods and that kind of thing, but now we know that Jesus just wants a family meal, we should really have a table in the center that people can gather around.”

“Incense? Oh yes, people used to imagine prayer rising up like smoke to God in the heavens, but that’s a naïve idea that modern astronomy has proved false. God is everywhere and he knows our hearts, so we don’t need to burn perfume to him.”

Listen to what William Durand, the great 13th-century commentator on the liturgy, says at the start of his magnum opus, the Rationale Divinorum:

Whatever belongs to the liturgical offices, objects, and furnishings of the Church is full of signs of the divine and the sacred mysteries, and each of them overflows with a celestial sweetness when it is encountered by a diligent observer who can extract honey from rock and oil from the stoniest ground (Deut 32:13). . . . I, William, bishop of the holy church of Mende, by the indulgence of God alone, knocking at the door, will continue to knock, until the key of David deigns to open it for me (Rev 3:20), so that the king might bring me into his cellar where he stores his wine (Song 2:4).

What Bishop William is saying (and goes on to say at some length) is that he knows the liturgy is a treasure trove of mystical meaning, a means of purification, illumination, and communion, and so he will knock continually at the door of the Lord, with all diligence and zeal, until he understands everything he can, turning it to his own advantage and that of the flock he shepherds. Now this is an attitude of true humility, of trust in the ways of Providence, of heartfelt surrender to the sacred liturgy so that it may shape us through and through, unto the image of the New Adam.

And this, too, is the reason why a full parish life is required to sustain the liturgy and to initiate generation after generation into this sacred inheritance. The formation of the New Adam is a formation of the whole person—the imagination as well as the intellect, the child as well as the man, the family as well as the individual, from cradle to tomb, before and beyond. As a gem shines more beautifully when set in gold or silver, the traditional Mass is but a part—the most important part—of a whole that surrounds it and endows it with maximal power to form the Christian.

The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter produced a lovely booklet for their silver jubilee, which contained several statements of just this point:

All the activity of the parish life are a preparation for the Holy Sacrifice, or a flowering of it. Because of the sacred nature of the Mass and Holy Eucharist, Catholics require a strong doctrinal and spiritual formation. … Within these [sodalities and confraternities], the faithful have a greater sense of the parish as the locus of their participation in the Mystical Body of Christ. … The parish life in a Fraternity apostolate may be characterized as imbuing Catholic families with a true Catholic identity. … The parish today must also be a bright beacon of light, a sign of contradiction, and a haven for hungry souls in an ever-secularizing world. This mission is carried out first and foremost by the outward expression of its worship of God.

Dom Alcuin Reid has often made a related point: the most curiously neglected passages of Sacrosanctum Concilium are those in which the Council Fathers indicate that the only way liturgical reform will be fruitful is if the clergy and the faithful are profoundly immersed in the spirit of the liturgy. Only by a true formation in and by the sacred liturgy in all its objectivity and splendor can there be authentic Christian renewal and, with it, prudent liturgical reform, as Guardini before the Council and Ratzinger after the Council recognized.

This is what the Liturgical Movement was all about; this is what the New Liturgical Movement is also about. We should never forget either our central aim or our primary means—the aim of glorifying the Triune God and saving souls, through the fullest, deepest participation of the faithful in the sacred liturgy. It seems only fitting to give St. Pius X the last word:

Filled as We are with a most ardent desire to see the true Christian spirit flourish in every respect and be preserved by all the faithful, We deem it necessary to provide before anything else for the sanctity and dignity of the temple, in which the faithful assemble for no other object than that of acquiring this spirit from its foremost and indispensable font, which is the active participation in the most holy mysteries and in the public and solemn prayer of the Church. And it is vain to hope that the blessing of heaven will descend abundantly upon us, when our homage to the Most High, instead of ascending in the odor of sweetness, puts into the hand of the Lord the scourges wherewith of old the Divine Redeemer drove the unworthy profaners from the Temple. (Motu proprio Tra le Sollecitudini)

Carrying Forward the Noble Work of the Liturgical Movement

I have a personal library chock full of books of liturgical theology and popular devotion from the early twentieth century to the eve of the Second Vatican Council. As I have studied these works over the years, one thing has struck me with increasing amazement and a growing melancholy: the vast majority of these authors, in their publications before the Council, evinced a deep and tender love of the traditional liturgy of the Church. They knew its every phrase, gesture, and chant, its vessels and vestments, its historical development, the delicacy of its minutiae no less than the grandeur of its broad features. They desperately wanted the faithful to appreciate just these treasures. Through indefatigable labors of preaching and publishing, they dedicated their lives to making known the glorious splendor of the Church’s public worship, which had tended to be locked away as the preserve of specialists. What the Liturgical Movement wanted above all was this: intelligent, active participation of the faithful in the traditional liturgy of the Church—not in some other kind of liturgy.

In short, many famous proponents of the liturgical movement would get classified today as traditionalists. Were you to take their major writings and quote portions of them chosen more or less at random, without attribution of authorship, probably 90% or more of the readers would peg the authors as members of an ultra-conservative or traditionalist school. It is not as if these authors lack innovative or problematic ideas; it is not as if some of them did not go off the deep end in the mid- to late sixties, as did so many priests, monks, sisters and nuns in the same period. Rather, it is we ourselves, in our liturgical thinking and practice, who have deviated so far from the Catholic tradition that even the more radical proponents of change in the mid-twentieth century can nowadays look moderate, restrained, and old-fashioned compared to the voluntaristic chaos in which the local churches find themselves today. Some of the better theologians saw the destruction coming and lamented the day: noble souls like Louis Bouyer, whose searing book The Decomposition of Catholicism (1969) plotted the suicidal trajectory on which the reform was headed, although he himself had earlier been an eager participant in the liturgical movement.

So, what did the liturgical movement want, if we can judge from the vast mass of publications it left behind, most of which are now forgotten? In practice, they wanted greater awareness of the meaning of the rich tapestry of prayers, rituals, and symbols; greater congregational singing of the responses and the easier chants of the Ordinary of the Mass (and this really is easy enough, as I have seen in 24 years of experience as a choir director); and a generally more serious and solemn character for the daily liturgy, instead of the omnipresent low Mass. They wanted the people to be knowingly and lovingly involved in the celebration of the mysteries, not as mute spectators, to use a phrase from Pius XI, but as engaged participants—engaged, however, in the complex and subtle manner appropriate for human persons: interiorly and exteriorly, in mind, heart, and body, with voice and silence, acting when appropriate, but also, and more fundamentally, receiving, listening, watching, absorbing.

In all of these goals, they were disappointed, and indeed repudiated. If anything, such men as Romano Guardini and Louis Bouyer are not the fathers of the superficializing revolution that took place, but rather of groups seriously dedicated to the liturgical apostolate, like the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter or the Institute of Christ the King; and Joseph Ratzinger, not Annibale Bugnini or Piero Marini, is the legitimate heir of their theology.

What the Liturgical Movement turned into in its late cancer phase was second-rate modern(ist) theology embedded in a prosaic, earthbound, unimaginative spirituality, along with a tremendous naivete about sociology and worship, plus a good bit of plain dishonesty in their lopsided ressourcement, advocacy scholarship, narrow agendas, and peculiarly modern form of archaicism that did not seek to restore the mentality and spirituality that corresponded to the external elements they purportedly recovered from early Christianity.

Let us consider just this last aspect, as does Catherine Pickstock in the short Blackfriars essay she published prior to her book After Writing. Are we trying to make a mockery of ourselves by talking about returning to the practices of the early church? Are we ready to restore solemn penances—the sending out of penitents on Ash Wednesday and their public reconciliation on Maundy Thursday? Shall we revive the severe, almost crushing ancient penances that were part and parcel of the Church’s daily life? Are we ready to begin each Mass with a slow and beautiful procession down the main aisle, accompanied by the chanting of psalms? Are we prepared to heap incense upon the burning cinders and fill the church with the sound of men’s choirs? Are we really willing to follow St. Paul and the whole ancient tradition by forbidding roles to women in public worship? Are we ready to have bishops pronounce, in the context of the solemn Sunday Mass, excommunications on stubborn heretics and apostates? This sort of thing was bread and butter to the early Christians. Or are we trying to get back to the simple “house worship” of the very first generation of Christians? How very convenient that we know so little about those first Christians! We can make things up as we go along, supported by highly imaginative hypotheses and reconstructions—reminiscent of artistic renderings of our distant ancestors, hairy broad-browed cavemen, tossing a log on the bonfire—so that unhistorical and revolutionary agendas may be cloaked under an appearance of scholarly authority and pastoral solicitude.

Once, a friend and I were talking about whether the laity have a vocation to the mystical life. It is sadly ironic that the Catechism of the Catholic Church decides the question positively for the first time, when never before in the history of the Church has there been so little in her liturgical life to foster contemplative prayer and the mystical gifts. The Catechism also notes that conscience can be properly formed and heard only when there is sufficient interior silence—another condition well-nigh abolished in the new liturgy as it is celebrated almost everywhere. The old liturgy opened to many serious Catholics a path of asceticism and a path to contemplation. Its beautiful stillness, pregnant silences, richly nourishing prayers, poignant gestures, and (in those fortunate locales where a musical revival had occurred) its exquisite chant melodies made the regular life of public worship a continuous schooling in the prayer of the heart, a repeated call to ever deeper penetration of the mysteries of faith, a recurrent opportunity for exercising the theological virtues, a convivial context for receiving higher graces from God.

All saints agree that the mystical life is founded upon a healthy asceticism. Where is this asceticism present in the new liturgy? Are the Ember Days and Rogation Days celebrated? Is the pre-Lenten season observed? What of the daily Lenten fast and the multitude of days of abstinence? Why were the character of the Lenten collects and postcommunions so radically altered away from the constant theme of detachment from the world, salutary hatred of self, contrition for sins? The changes, which are many and significant, represent a practical repudiation of the fullness of ascetical spirituality, and thus a closing-off of the steep and narrow path of mystical initiation attained at the cost of intense spiritual warfare and discipline. The ancient liturgy is truly ancient: it breathes the spirit of the martyrs, the Fathers, the monks and hermits, the mystics. Where is that spirit today? Which Catholics are coming face to face with it, week after week, day after day?

Pierre Hadot wrote an influential book entitled Philosophy as a Way of Life, showing that philosophers of antiquity were more than mere intellectuals; they were striving to be, you might say, saints of the rational life, mystics of logos, priests of sophia. The traditional Catholic already has his Way of Life: it is the ancient Liturgy. In this school of endless subtlety and abiding simplicity, he finds an entire way of life which encompasses and transcends the truths and blessings of human or philosophical wisdom. The liturgy gives him at once a broad and clear teaching on holiness and an inexhaustible wealth of new insights, new layers of meaning he may never have noticed before but which are already present in the texts he has always known. The liturgy is where he goes for his identity, purpose, and strength. He does not think of changing the liturgy to conform it to himself; he rather strives to conform himself to the liturgy, to be formed by it and for it, so that Christ Jesus may be formed in him.

This is what the original Liturgical Movement was all about, and this is the work to which we of the New Liturgical Movement are called today. Be the challenges what they may, let us carry forward the noble work, the best principles, of our forebears, as we seek to spread far and wide the inexhaustible riches of the traditional liturgical life of the Catholic Church.