Morello on Rationalism as Part of Modernity’s Anti-Liturgical Hex

Early in December, Os Justi Press released Sebastian Morello’s Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality. The following 2-minute video sums up its main points:

The book is full of rich reflections on the thought and culture of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity, and the spiritual and liturgical implications of the shifts. Rather than attempt a mere summary, I thought I might offer some quotations chosen specially for NLM readers.

« Part of adopting a premodern mind is first acknowledging that every people in history has accepted that our world is a world pregnant with magical forces and the activity of spiritual beings. And Christianity has never denied that curses, hexes, and many kinds of evil spells exist, or that evil spirits can be contacted and succumbed to, in order to attain evil ends. So too, Christians—alongside their practices of meditation and contemplation—have ever believed in sacred magic, or “theurgy,” but they have held that such magic possesses the power to conquer demons and sacralise the world only when united to the eternal and singular priesthood of Jesus Christ, and to this baptised theurgy Christians have given the name of liturgy. This brings us to the great political work to which Christians ought to be dedicated, namely the endeavour to establish liturgical nations in fraternal union with each other, for the alternative to such a civilisation is the accursed dominion in which nations are first fragmented and then dissolved altogether in the grey mass of a diabolical slave settlement. » (p. 4)

« The pre-eminence of the mystical life understood not as spiritual ascent out of the created order, but rather as embodied induction into shared life with a personal God who meets us in the world that is an emanation of His own inner life, is emphasised by me largely because I observe that in the epoch of ideology—namely, modernity—we have lost a sense of the existentiality and immanence of the Sacred Mystery. Tragically, this spiritual blindness has encroached on many aspects of religious devotion and piety. In turn, religion is understood ever less as ongoing transformation through the liturgical and sacramental life, and it is instead understood as mere intellectual assent to doctrinal propositions and spiritual ascent away from the concrete reality in which we find ourselves. Religion is hence tacitly reframed for a people formed by virtual reality lived from an online existence. Unfortunately, such a life is no life at all. And the upshot is the reduction of Christianity, or whatever we mean by Christianity today, to a base species of ideology, just one among a plethora of squabbling ideologies in the modernist arena of competing “systems.” » (p. 11)

« I dare say we must rediscover our liturgy as a baptised form of “theurgy,” a term largely gone from Christian theology today, but one that was repeatedly deployed to discuss Christian worship by such an eminent authority as St. Dionysius the Areopagite. By Christian theurgy, I mean the fulfilment of all religious sacrifice, during which those offering the sacrifice commune with the divine spirits and call God down into the inner chamber as they chant the sacred words and perform the sacred rituals. » (pp. 38-39)

« Latin Christians have long emphasised “assent,” and hence the possession of ideas, over existential transformation through right worship (an emphasis that has only swelled due to the unexamined acceptance of the rationalist paradigm). It is unsurprising, then, that serious Catholicism is more likely to be found online— where ideas are offered and bought up— than in the local church. And those Catholics who have retained the organic conception of the Church as the institution that gifts to the baptised the virtues of right relationality with God—a conception of the Christian as a liturgical creature—have for some time now been actively persecuted by the incumbents of the Church’s highest offices. Such Catholics are seen as betrayers of the modern project of Enlightened man, whom the Church’s leaders have enthroned in their demotion of Christ the King. And in seeing such Catholics in this way, the Church’s government is entirely correct. » (p. 66)

« Whenever I step foot onto Benedictine grounds, I feel as if I have come home. The chanting of the psalms, the sacrifice offered on the altars, the way of life lived under a Rule that’s over a millennium and a half old— all the sacrality of these abbeys seems to have seeped into the stones themselves. Even after all the scandals, the collapse in vocations, and the ruination of the liturgy following that unhappy Vatican Council that baptised the fleeting fever of the 1960s— from which it will take many, many centuries for the Church to recover— the monasteries still appear as loci of divine grace, by which little parts of the diabolical principality we call the world has been captured and placed under Christ’s kingship.» (pp. 97-98)

« In late modernity, the Church’s supreme office, the papacy, got its first middle-class pope, when hitherto this office had been occupied only by nobles and peasants. Pope Paul VI had all the characteristics of a middle-class manager. He was a social climber with a sympathy for tabula rasa ways of governing. Just as the bourgeoisie, with their privileging of ideas over realities—and their pathological impulse, rooted in rationalism, to conform the latter to the former—had overseen every modern revolution, so too Pope Paul oversaw an analogous revolution in the Church. He reduced the sacred liturgy from a mystical conduit of grace expressed in a sacred language to a vernacularised, didactic exercise to entertain a new, educated population.» (pp. 109-10)

« Tragic it is, then, that the Church’s current hierarchical incumbents seem, generally speaking, to be neither elders themselves nor to love their elders. They appear as frustrated rascals who have undergone all the humane development and civilisational induction of Tolkien’s orcs. Perhaps this ought not to surprise us. After all, the men who fill the Church’s higher offices today were all formed in the crucible of the Second Vatican Council’s progressive theology, and their intellectual habits were fashioned by daily exposure to the so- called liturgical “reform.” The “experts” who subjected the Church’s liturgical heritage to ongoing experimentation did so on the grounds that it was somehow legitimate to call into question— and redact or even reject altogether— huge swathes of prayer and mystical experience inherited from our ancestors in religion, the sum total of elder-wisdom in ritual form. The very Council, then, that claimed power to renew the Church’s youth in fact emptied the churches, and by so doing it aged the Church rapidly, in turn aging the civilisation she once animated.... And this process of aging the Church, far from recovering her charism as the Great Elder of our civilisation, merely rendered her decrepit.» (p. 124)

In the midst of his critique Morello examines the paths of and conditions for renewal or regeneration in the Church, and offers very concrete advice for how tradition-loving Catholics struggling with the hierarchy and the postconciliar devastation can strengthen their faith, love, and perseverance.

N.B. Os Justi Press is running an Epiphany sale from now through January 6, with 10% off sitewide. Discount is automatically applied at checkout.

17 books released in 2024

Historical Falsehoods about Active Participation: A Response to Dr Brant Pitre (Part 1)

Just over two weeks ago, on the anniversary of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the YouTube channel of Catholic Productions published a video by Dr Brant Pitre, who is the Distinguished Research Professor of Scripture at the Augustine Institute Graduate School. The video is part of a series called “The Mass Explained”, which was published a bit over a year ago through the Catholic Productions website. This specific video is now being offered on YouTube as an encouragement to explore the full series; its subject is the much-debated concept of active participation in the liturgy.

Dr Pitre is a Biblical scholar, and by far the most successful part of this video is his attempt to give a solid Scriptural foundation to the concept; a useful endeavor, given the hopeless ambiguity of so much of Sacrosanctum Concilium. Unfortunately, his presentation is marred by a considerable number of really drastic historical errors, including one on which the whole narrative arc, so to speak, of his presentation rests. The errors are in fact too many to describe in a single post, and this response will have to be presented in more than one part.

I wish to be clear that I certainly do not ascribe to Dr Pitre any conscious dishonesty. There are plenty of liturgists and people who have written about the liturgy who can be excused of the charge of deliberate lying only if one grants that before attempting to deceive others, they have first gone to enormous pains to deceive themselves. (I wish I could take credit for this bon mot, but it comes from Sir Peter Medawar’s brilliantly savage review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man.) I see no reason to think that Dr Pitre is among them; indeed, I think it very likely that he himself is among those whom others have deceived.

Nor does he fall into the fatuous excesses that so many others have fallen into when writing or speaking about this topic specifically, and claim that “active participation”, however defined, is incompatible with the historical Roman Rite. Indeed, he acknowledges that active participation of the lay faithful has been a part of it in the past. His gigantic historical error lies in his would-be description of when, how, why and to what degree this changed, leading the Second Vatican Council to call for its restoration. (I will cover most of what he says about this in part 2 of this article.)

He begins (2:55) with the first occurrence of the term “actuosa participatio – active participation” in Sacrosanctum Concilium, paragraph 14, saying that it is “arguably the most important topic of the Second Vatican Council.” Unfortunately, the translation of Sacrosanctum Concilium which he cites contains a very significant mistake, which is no less of a mistake for being repeated on the Vatican’s own website. The English version which he gives is as follows: “In the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy, this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else.” (His emphasis.)

But the Latin original does not say that active participation “is to be considered before all else,” which would be a license for doing anything and everything in the liturgy, provided the claim were made that it fostered active participation. And of course, in the so-called “spirit” of Vatican II, many people, including the very men who invented the post-Conciliar Rite, have taken it as just such a license, in order to excuse their ignoring significant parts of Sacrosanctum Concilium itself, and all of the Church’s earlier magisterial teaching on the liturgy, to say nothing of others justifying the most appalling abuses in the actual celebration of the liturgy.

Much active. Very participation.

The Latin words of the Constitution are “actuosa participatio … summopere attendenda est”, which would be properly rendered “active participation … is to be given the greatest attention.” And it is in fact so rendered in the Italian, French, Spanish and German translations also available via the Vatican’s website. (I cannot vouch for the Arabic, Chinese, Swahili or various Slavic versions.)

This would have also been the perfect place to add that there is a solid case to be made that “actual participation” is a better translation of the words “actuosa participatio” than “active participation.” This case was laid out very thoroughly by Fr Peter Stravinskas in a paper which he delivered to the CIEL conference in Paris in 2003, and graciously allowed NLM to reprint in 2016. (Part 1; Part 2) For of course, as we all know, the word “active” has deceived many within the Church into confusing activity with achievement, and thus taking it for granted that as long as the laity are doing something, they are actively participating, and it doesn’t much matter what exactly they are doing or how they are doing it.

In regard to the Council’s statement that the people’s participation in the liturgy should be “full”, Dr Pitre very rightly points out (6:45) that this means fully participating in the parts which properly belong to them, “and only those parts which belong to them, and the people shouldn’t be doing what is exclusive to the priest, and vice versa.” For of course, it was the furthest thing from the Council Fathers’ minds to foster the participation of the laity by blurring this necessary distinction. This would have been a good place, therefore, to point out that “active” participation in the modern liturgy has been brought about in no small part by redefining “what is exclusive to the priest”, and giving to the laity liturgical roles that the tradition of the Church has always given to the clergy: the reading of the Scriptures, and the distribution of Communion. Perhaps this comes up elsewhere in the series.

At 7:50, Dr Pitre very rightly notes that the phrase “actuosa participatio” goes back to St Pius X’s famous motu proprio Tra le sollicitudini on sacred music in the liturgy, and that singing the parts proper to them is above all the most important way in which the faithful actively participate in the liturgy. Perhaps some other part of the series points out that in practical terms, Tra le sollicitudini has been completely overthrown by the post-Conciliar reform, since the confusion between activity and achievement, a confusion which the word “active” positively invites, often leads to the replacement of good music with bad music or no music, because it is easier for the congregation to sing bad music than good, and easier still to recite than to sing.

It would also be worth mentioning somewhere along the line that Sacrosanctum Concilium itself does not cite Tra le sollecitudini, because in the last phase of its redaction, the numerous citations of the Church’s prior magisterial teaching on the liturgy qua liturgy, and particularly those related to sacred music, were expunged. This includes not only multiple references to Tra le sollecitudini, but also to Pius XI’s 1928 Apostolic Constitution Divini cultus, Pius XII’s encyclicals Mediator Dei (1947) and Musicae sacrae disciplina (1955) as well as the instruction issued by the Sacred Congregation for Rites in 1958, De musica sacra et sacra liturgia. (This removal was documented by Susan J. Benofy in an article entitled “Footnotes for a Hermeneutic of Continuity: Sacrosanctum Concilium’s Vanishing Citations”, published in the Adoremus Bulletin in 2015.)

At 9:30, Dr Pitre introduces a few key Biblical texts that refer to active participation in the liturgy, and as I stated earlier, this really is the strongest part of the video. The first of these is a description of the assembly in Nehemiah 8, which he describes as “actively listening” to the word of God read to them by the priests. This passage occupies a prominent and very ancient place in the historical Roman Rite, as the second reading of the Ember Wednesday of September. With the suppression of the Ember days in the post-Conciliar Rite, it has been assigned to a Sunday of Ordinary time in year C, and a Thursday in year 1. (This might have been the place to mention that the books of Ezra and Nehemiah refer much more often to the organization of trained cantors among the ministerial orders of the Temple, since the use of professional choirs will later be noted as one of the developments within the Church which putatively detracted from the participation of the laity.)

The second quotation is a foundational passage for the priesthood of all the baptized, 1 Peter 2, 9, which is cited in the aforementioned paragraph 14, and this is followed by the passages which describe the heavenly liturgy in the Apocalypse, and the various ways in which all of the different orders of the Church participate, including silent participation. And since the “heavenly model provide(s) the template for what worship should look like on earth, if all of the members of the mystical body of Christ are actively engaged (in the liturgy) in heaven, then the same thing should be true of the liturgy on earth.”

At 18:00, Dr Pitre begins to adduce examples from the history of the Church which show that “for the first thousand years or so of Christian worship, this is precisely what we’re going to find.” Unfortunately, this is precisely the point where he begins to run his ship aground. For his reference to the “first thousand years or so” implies that a change took place after that point, a change which he will later explicate very wrongly; wrongly enough that, as I said earlier, I will need a second part of this article to explain it all. (The words “or so” are also being made to do far too much work here.)

There follow six examples of things in which the people fully participated in the liturgy during those first thousand years: in his order, the Sanctus, the giving of the peace, the responsorial psalm (sic), the Amen at the end of the prayers, including the Canon, the Creed and the Our Father. Regarding the last of these, he correctly acknowledges that it has always been the Roman custom for the priest to sing it alone (except, of course, for the final words), and just as correctly notes that in some other Western liturgies, it was sung by everyone, as it still is in the Byzantine Rite.

First of all, I note that with four of these, the Sanctus, the Amens, the Creed and Our Father (i.e. the end of it), it has always been possible for the faithful to sing them. It has always been possible for the faithful to pray the Our Father silently along with the priest. There are of course ways of singing them in which not all the faithful can participate, such as the very rich polyphonic settings of the Lord’s Prayer composed for the Byzantine Divine Liturgy. There have been specific sociocultural and historical circumstances in which the faithful did not sing them, although apologists for the post-Conciliar reform have habitually exaggerated the degree to which this is true, and regrettably, Dr Pitre falls into this trap. Nevertheless, the faithful have never been excluded from singing them in principle.

A polyphonic setting of The Lord’s Prayer in Church Slavonic, by the Ukrainian composer Maxim Berezovsky (1745 ca. - 1777).

Concerning the Sanctus, he cites the statement of the Liber Pontificalis that it was instituted by the eighth Pope, St Sixtus I, who reigned from roughly 115-125. But the liturgical notices in the Liber Pontificalis, the statements that “Pope so-and-so instituted such-and-such a custom”, are notoriously anachronistic, the more so the earlier they go. For example, the very next entry attributes the institution of Christmas to Sixtus’ successor St Telesphorus (125-36 ca.); all scholars recognize that the feast dates to about two centuries later. It is not per se impossible that St Sixtus instituted the Sanctus, but we have no real evidence that he did in fact do so.

Secondly, the Liber Pontificalis has come down to us in very rough condition, and is full of textual problems. The relevant part of the entry for St Sixtus says, “Hic constituit ut intra actionem, sacerdos incipiens populo hymnum decantare, ‘Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabahot’, et cetera.” As written, the infinitive “decantare” (to sing) is a grammatical error, and the passage is marked in modern editions as corrupt; an easy emendation has been proposed, “decantaret.” If this is correct, the passage would mean, “This one (viz. Pope Sixtus) established that within the action (i.e. the saying of the canon, as is written above the Hanc igitur in the Missal) the priest as he begins should sing to the people (‘populo’ in the dative case; my emphasis) the hymn ‘Sanctus…’ ” etc.

One might object that it makes no sense to say that the priest sang the Sanctus and the people did not. But there is some evidence that this was in fact a custom of the Ambrosian Rite on certain penitential days, on which the priest alone sang the Sanctus as part of the preface. But even if this custom was never observed in the Roman Rite, this text does not say that the people sang the Sanctus; quite the opposite.

After references to the giving of the peace, Dr Pitre goes on to say that “in the fifth century, St Augustine tells us that the people would sing the responsorial psalm,” and the video cites The Confessions, book 9, 8.15, as given in Lawrence Johnson’s Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology of Historical Sources (3:12). But this passage does not refer to the people’s participation in the Mass. It refers to an event of St Ambrose’s episcopacy for which Augustine and his mother were present, when the Empress Justina planned to turn one of the basilicas in Milan over to the Arians. The Catholic faithful occupied the church, and the custom was therefore established that the people should hymns and psalms “after the manner of the eastern regions, lest the people pine away in the tediousness of sorrow…”

Augustine does go on to say that this custom, “retained from then till now, is now imitated by many, and nearly all of (the Lord’s) flocks throughout the rest of the world.” But nothing about it suggests that it was a specifically liturgical custom, much less that it involved anything like what we now call a responsorial psalm.

After a mention of what St Isidore of Seville says about the readings being for the instruction of the people, i.e., that they are meant to be actively listened to by the faithful, Dr Pitre now turns (at 20:50) to a text known as the Ordo Romanus Primus, the “First Roman Order”, an ancient description of a Roman stational liturgy. This text is presented to set up a supposed contrast with the later medieval manner of celebrating the liturgy in the papal chapel which gave us the so-called Tridentine Missal. This contrast, however, is so thoroughly and so badly misconstrued that it must be described in another part of this article.

“Ten Years That Shook the Church”: Archbishop Dwyer’s 1973 Critique of the Reform and the Post-Council

Dwyer as a boy and as a bishop

Archbishop Robert Joseph Dwyer (1908-76), amidst his copious writings, penned not a few scathing critiques of the liturgical reform, at least two of which had not yet been made available online—a problem I sought and seek to remedy between last week and this. Last week, we published a newspaper column of his from July 1971 that pronounced a failing grade on the Bugnini Rite and, in particular, on the horrendously bad translations, music, and parochial balkanization that accompanied the roll-out of the Novus Ordo. Today, I publish the transcription of an article from the Twin Circle, which appears to have been launched in 1967, was sold to the Legionaries of Christ in 1995 (they bought the National Catholic Register at the same time), and was renamed Faith & Family in 2000, before folding in 2011.

Once again, it is nearly impossible to imagine a bishop writing this openly and bluntly in a Catholic newspaper today. To my mind, this suggests that the much-vaunted parrhesia is quite lacking, probably because knowledge of the traditional liturgy, of the Council, and of the details of the reform is quite lacking among those who did not personally experience all of it as Dwyer had done.

Ten Years That Shook the Church
Archbishop Robert Dwyer
Twin Circle
October 26, 1973

What happens when an institution, be it a religious body or a nation state or what you will, deliberately cuts itself off from its historical and cultural roots? Rarely according to the record have such institutions been able to survive, the shock being too great, the trauma too devastating.

They may seek in desperation to renew those roots, by some legerdemain to recover them, or to substitute some seeming equivalent, but unless any such an institution has some sort of divine guarantee, the chances of its success are, as the airline stewardesses never fail to assure us in soothing tones, exceedingly remote.

Toward the end of the Second Session of the Vatican Council, late in November 1963, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was triumphantly voted in by an overwhelming majority of the assembled Fathers. As we trooped out of St. Peter’s basilica that day, spreading our amaranthine stain over the great parvis, a palpable euphoria thrilled through the entire body. Something at last had been accomplished, one item of the business which had called us to Rome had been nailed down.

The members of the Commission which had hammered out the Constitution and guided it through the grueling tests of debate and modification, were obviously elated, and the most prominent American member, the late Archbishop Paul Hallinan of Atlanta, was the glowing recipient of hearty and even gleeful congratulations.

Good Fun

It was all in good fun and no one, least of all perhaps the drafters and proponents of the Constitution in question had the slightest notion, not to say intent, of tampering with the cultural life-lines of the Roman Catholic Church.

Nor was there, on candid reading, anything in the text or in the spirit of the document which would suggest the least deviation from the historic past of the liturgy, its sacred traditions, its venerable usages.

There was, of course, a loosening of certain restrictions. The vernacular was to share with the Latin the role of liturgical communication, not by any means to replace it. Greater simplicity in ritual was to be introduced.

Though the term had not yet swung so prominently into orbit as it was to do a year or so later, the liturgy was to be made more “relevant” to contemporary man, with his increasingly secular preoccupations.

Who dreamed on that day that within a few years, far less than a decade, the Latin past of the Church would be all but expunged, that it would be reduced to a memory fading in the middle distance? The thought would have horrified us, but it seemed so far beyond the realm of the possible as to be ridiculous.

So we laughed it off.

As a personal footnote, we had been visited by some misgivings in regard to the vernacular, by way of certain apprehensions that it could lead to invidious comparisons between those prelates and priests who read well and have all the arts of elocution, who have the gift of acting their part with dignity and conviction, the Suenenses and the Sheens, and those not so happily endowed, all the way down to the poor fellows who can only mumble as unintelligible in English or Swahili as in the ancient language of the Church.

With the difference that nobody expected to understand them in Latin, whereas the whole point of the vernacular was to make the liturgy, once again, relevant. But having voiced this unworthy fear, and told to go to the corner and hide our head for very shame for entertaining such an anti­democratic notion, we lapsed into chastened silence.

And when the vote came round, like wise Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, “We always voted at our party’s call; W never thought of thinking for ourself at all.” That way you can save yourself a world of trouble.

Cultural Cut-off

Well, here we are 10 years later, and what results do we see? The result, plainly and bluntly, is that the Western Church has just about completely cut herself off from her cultural roots, the Latin tradition of the West.

Latin is practically banned from the liturgy and banned as well from the courses of study required of candidates for the priesthood.

Fewer and fewer Masses in Latin are sanctioned or approved by local ordinaries, and fewer and fewer seminarians and young priests have now more than a nodding acquaintance with the language which nourished the devotion of countless generations of Christians and gave to theology and the other sacred sciences a common tongue, so that, even though imperfectly, communication was possible.

The Church which so long had preserved Latin consciously as a bond of unity, had quite suddenly decided to discard it as a useless encumbrance.

New Tune

With this rejection, and as an almost inevitable consequence, went out the window also the whole magnificent musical heritage of the Church. For when you change your language you also change your song.

The Jewish exiles hanging their harps beside the waters of Babylon, so long ago, made that discovery.

Pope Paul VI, the other day, made an earnest plea for the revival of some parts of the Mass in Latin, the Kyrie, the Gloria, etc., with the obvious hope of salvaging something of our immense musical treasure, one of the glories of the Christian accomplishment; but whether his words will carry weight, whether his “cri de coeur” will be heard, is anyone’s guess.

Not, surely, until realization dawns on many minds how drastically we have robbed ourselves of our cultural wealth.

Less immediately cognate to the Latin past, yet in strict relationship, is the whole violent artistic rejection of the past. It is not a question of contemporary art being good or bad; it is a matter of its repudiating, often with contempt, those principles and traditions which gave art, visual or tactual, substance and meaning.

The creation of an anti-art, the sole pitiable boast of the contemporary schools, is mighty thin provender for souls hungering and thirsting for something greater than themselves, something of beauty and nobility. But we go along with the crowd, because we too have lost our way.

And the same rejection, not merely of our cultural and esthetic roots, but of our philosophical and theological foundations, is the reaction and reality of the moment. Who would be caught dead today citing a theologian older than Karl Rahner or a philosopher more antique than Bernard Lonergan?

The substitution of Teilhardism for Thomism, if not complete in our schools, our seminaries and universities, is within an ace of carrying the day. But only too insistently is it borne in on us that we are a cracked record, flawed by a fixation.

Is anything of this important? Does it matter that the Church has been led down the path of rejection, slowly at first and by imperceptible stages, then ever more rapidly and finally at breakneck speed?

Does it matter that we as Catholics have succeeded in cutting ourselves off from those cultural sources which nourished our fathers and gave support and assurance to their faith? Is it inevitable that in this last third of the 20th century the Catholic mind should seek a new milieu, new associations, new roots?

Doubtless Dr. Leslie Dewart [1] and his disciples would return a resounding yes to this.

But before we commit ourselves farther, and if there is still time for reflection, might we not do well to catch the echo of a great and now almost forgotten Father of the Council, the late Cardinal Michael Browne, who, at a decisive moment in the debate on the Constitution on the Church, raised his voice in warning with all the richness of the Irish brogue in Latin: Caveamus, Patres, caveamus! Let us take heed, Fathers, let us beware!

We thought it amusing then; we might take it a little more seriously now.

Illustration in the original newspaper article

NOTE

[1] “Leslie Dewart (1922–2009) was a Canadian philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the Graduate Department of Philosophy and the Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto…. Late in 1969 an investigation by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was convened to examine the theological opinions in Dewart’s writings, particularly The Future of Belief. However, no condemnatory action was taken by the authorities…. While Dewart was not a theologian, his philosophy lays a new foundation for contemporary Catholic theology that does not rely on the traditional epistemological foundation of Hellenic philosophy. His philosophical insights are a conscious, reflective ‘transposition to another key’ of the experience of the Christian faith…. Although not widely recognized at the time, the revolutionary experience was, in fact, a process of ‘dehellenization,’ as Dewart understands the process throughout in his writings. Thinkers will conceive of God, in a dehellenized future of thought, as an existential reality…. Western philosophy, “come of age,” does not experience the world as hostile, as did the Hellenists, but rather, as stimulating and challenging and Western philosophy must dehellenize its interpretation of experience accordingly. This dehellenization requires the abandonment of scholasticism, with the subsequent development of a conscious re-conceptualization of experience.” (source)

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s Substack “Tradition & Sanity”; personal site; composer site; publishing house Os Justi Press and YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.

“The Liturgy Has Been Dismantled”: Portland Archbishop Robert Dwyer’s Assessment in 1971

Robert Joseph Dwyer (1908-76)

Those who read the works of Michael Davies will come across quotations from a wide variety of sources, and will sometimes wonder just who these people are, and what their full views might be (since Davies, like any author, seldom quotes more than a few sentences). One such figure is the American Robert Joseph Dwyer (1908-76), who was the second bishop of Reno, Nevada from 1952-66 (and in this capacity participated in all four sessions of the Council), and the fifth Archbishop of Portland, Oregon from 1966 to 1974.

Dwyer was a prolific writer, as the fine collection recently published by Arouca Press, Ecclesiastes: The Book of Archbishop Robert Dwyer—A Selection of His Writings, edited by Albert J. Steiss, makes plain: we find articles on European history and American history, lives of major Catholic figures, a fairly detailed account of his time at the Council (deserving to be mined: see pages 131–206), apologetics on behalf of the Faith, critiques of liturgical reform, reflections on the fine arts, pastoral letters, and bagatelles. In fact, he’s like a quieter version of Archbishop Fulton Sheen.

Where he differs decisively from Sheen is in his increasingly outspoken critiques of the liturgical reform. The famous quotes are those shared by Michael Davies:

The great mistake of the Council Fathers was to allow the implementation of the Constitution to fall into the hands of men who were either unscrupulous or incompetent. This is the so-called Liturgical Establishment, a Sacred Cow which acts more like a white elephant as it tramples the shards of a shattered liturgy with ponderous abandon.

And:

Who dreamed on that day that within a few years, far less than a decade, the Latin past of the Church would be all but expunged, that it would be reduced to a memory fading into the middle distance? The thought of it would have horrified us, but it seemed so far beyond the realm of the possible as to be ridiculous. So we laughed it off.

Could a bishop really have written such things? Or might this be a case of mistaken attribution or misquotation?

For the first quotation, Davies cites The Tidings of July 9, 1971 (see Pope Paul’s New Mass [Kansas City, MO: Angelus Press, 2009], 651). For the second, he cites the Twin Circle, October 26, 1973 (see Liturgical Timebombs in Vatican II [Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 2003], 65). In order to hunt the original articles down, I did what any sensible person would do: I hired Sharon Kabel as my research assistant!

Sure enough, she located both articles, and since our searching online indicates that these have never been transcribed and made available, I took the time to type them out, while attaching the originals below. If only we had a few more bold bishops like this today! (And can you imagine the newspaper of the archdiocese of Los Angeles—or any Catholic diocesan newspaper—publishing something like this today?) A piece like this, from 1971, counts as good evidence that at least some public figures were willing to state the obvious: the Catholic liturgy had, in fact, been dismantled past recognition, and this was an evil deed. Moreover, this bishop’s presence at all four sessions of the Council makes his claims about what the Council Fathers intended—at least to the extent that any on-the-ground participant could know the mens patrum from conversations, meetings, and documents—credible.

In any case, enjoy the crisp and piquant style of the good archbishop.
 

(Click to enlarge)

The Liturgy Has Been Dismantled
Archbishop Robert Dwyer
The Tidings (Catholic Newspaper of Los Angeles)
July 9, 1971

In the remote caverns of memory the image flickers in the candlelight: Marius on the Ruins of Carthage. What somber text of Ancient History this was designed to illustrate we have long forgotten, but the figure of the Roman general, triumphant at last over the Punic power, contemplating the wreckage of war, meditating upon the Dead Sea fruits of victory, has never quite faded.

The other day the image was refreshed by a re-telling of the familiar jest at the expense of a gun-and-camera tourist: “Mrs. C. Humphrey Jones on the Ruins of Carthage (the ruins are to the left).”

But another image, alas, overlays that of the baffled conqueror in our contemporary illustration. It is that of Mother Church seated amid the ruins of the liturgy. No less disconsolate is she, no less sorrowfully pensive.

Some six years ago she had reached that point in her Renewal where it seemed beyond question or cavil that she could summon to her aid, in her monumental task of re-interpreting the Christian message to the modern world, all the services of liturgical art and drama, all the treasures of biblical science and patristic lore, all the riches of music and sacred literature, to enhance the supreme act of divine worship, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Surely that was the confident expectation of the Council Fathers when they hailed with overwhelming affirmation the Constitution on the Liturgy.

In the euphoria of that moment cankerous doubt and cantankerous misgivings were cavalierly set aside. All would be well, we assured ourselves, and all things would be well, as Blessed Juliana of Norwich had so calmly predicted. All that was needed was a touch of genius to muster all the arts of expression and exposition to achieve the perfect rendering of the liturgy in every language under the sun, and for every living culture known to man. We all devoutly made our act of faith in the immediate availability of that touch of genius.

Documents Insipid

Wherein, under the blessing of hindsight undoubtedly we made our first mistake. For there are times and seasons in man’s history, the history of his culture, when genius touches the liturgy, and times, alack, when it simply does not. It is as though the lines of communication, faithfully relaying its messages, were abruptly to be cut off.

It is not necessary, in our reading of the liturgical texts which have been foisted upon us, to suspect the poisoned pen of the heretic or the velvet glove covering the mailed fist of the Communist conspiracy working through the channels of the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship. It is enough to note that the touch of genius has so far absented itself from these documents which reach us with such monotonous regularity and insipidity, as to suggest a total substitution of dross for gold.

It was not so in ages past when Basil and John Chrysostom and Gregory formulated the texts and set the patterns for the prayer of the Church, East and West. It was not so when those unknown masters of rhythmic melody devised and developed the liturgical chant, the noblest music man has ever sung, nor was it so when the flowering of polyphony enriched the musical treasury of the liturgy with works of classic dignity and grace.

The Renaissance and Trent hardened the liturgy into molds perhaps too rigid and ungiving, but the authentic note of dignity and greatness was by no means wanting. With the Baroque the liturgy left the austere confines of the sanctuary to mingle with the multitudes crowding the nave and aisles, to undergo, at least in some aspects, a process of vulgarization, but however much the liturgy stood in need of refurbishing and reform as our day approached, it was still recognizable as an original work of religious genius. It was by no means a shambles.

The malady must be reported of the rendering of the liturgy into the vernacular. To focus exclusively here upon our English experience, it is commonly recognized that only once or twice in a millennium have we any right to expect a translator of such power as Thomas Cranmer. Whatever his other merits or demerits, he possessed the gift of noble expression and haunting phrase, so as to mold the language our forebears have spoken these 400 years and more. And while he had no Catholic rivals to contest his mastery, he set a standard to which they must needs approximate or publicly confess their inadequacy.

Liturgists Incompetent

And for the most part, those commissioned or inspired to render the liturgy into the vernacular for the English-speaking Catholic world had done a commendable if not a brilliant job. [1] Why their work, present and available, was ignored and set aside, and even spoken of with contumely by the current generation of Martin Mar-Texts [2] is a mystery beyond our ken.

The liturgy needed reform by 1965; there was no call for dismantling it. It was intended that the vernacular would enhance the Latin, not supplant it. It was not, emphatically, the mind of the Council Fathers to jettison Gregorian Chant, or to encourage the banal secularization of Church music, so as now to surpass in crudity the worst aberrations of the Howling Pentecostals.

It was anticipated that the liturgical texts, along with the Biblical readings for the Mass and the Divine Office, would be so translated as to reflect the beauty and suppleness of our tongue in the praise and worship of God. If any Council Father—for this we can vouch—leaving the aula of St. Peter’s on that day when the Constitution on the Liturgy was proclaimed, had seen in vision the liturgical calamities which have befallen us in this short span of time, it is conceivable that he would have had a heart attack, then and there.

The first mistake, then, was dependence upon the Dabitur Vobis [3], a brash confidence that the touch of genius would not be lacking. The second, in uncomfortably close alliance, was to allow the interpretation and implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy to fall into the hands of men who were either unscrupulous or incompetent. This is the so-called “Liturgical Establishment,” a Sacred Cow which acts more like a White Elephant as it tramples the shards of a shattered liturgy with ponderous abandon. [4]

The third mistake, fully as destructive as either of the foregoing, was the genial supposition that widespread “experimentation” could be sanctioned, with any hope of holding the line thereafter. This is not to condemn experimentation; it is useful and necessary from time to time, under certain controlled circumstances.

But the broad permissiveness granted or even encouraged by the Sacred Congregation and by various Episcopal Conference committees, has led to what must be described, without exaggeration, as a state of chaos. Everyman is now his own liturgist, just as he is his own pope; the Parish Liturgical Commission, made up, for the most part, of good and well-meaning folk whose liturgical competence is on the kindergarten level, legislates for all the world as though it were the Sacred Congregation itself. Or perhaps, what is by no means unthinkable, with far greater assurance and authority.

How long, do you suppose, will it take for another Hercules to clean up these Augean Stables?

Next week, we will publish the transcription of His Exellency’s 1973 article. 

NOTES

[1] Dwyer is referring here to the first translations from the 1960s, which were all replaced by the tawdry claptrap of ICEL when the Novus Ordo was rolled out. He may also be referring to the many translations that existed in hand missals for many decades prior to the Council.

[2] This seems to be a reference to “Martin Mar-prelate,” “the name used by the anonymous author or authors of the seven Marprelate tracts that circulated illegally in England in the years 1588 and 1589. Their principal focus was an attack on the episcopacy of the Anglican Church” (source).

[3] See Luke 11, 9: “Petite, et dabitur vobis” (Ask, and it shall be given).

[4] This is the paragraph quoted by Davies, with some minor differences that do not alter the meaning.

A young Dwyer holding a model of a church (backstory unknown)

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s Substack “Tradition & Sanity”; personal site; composer site; publishing house Os Justi Press and YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.

Rich Historical and Religious Reflections in New Memoir of Modern English Catholicism

A new book, Two Families: A Memoir of English Life During and After the Council, contains many narratives and reminiscences that will be of great interest to readers of NLM for their liturgical and musical insights.

In running through his eventful life, Joseph Bevan describes the practice of English Catholicism before, during, and after the Council: he shows the strengths and weaknesses of the preconciliar routine, the confusion unleashed in the 1960s, the collapse of the liturgy and especially of sacred music “in real time,” as it was unfolding.

Eyewitness accounts are important for the history of the traditionalist movement, as they flesh out our more abstract claims with concrete examples, and help fend off accusations that we are inventing or exaggerating the problems.

Those who are interested in Benedictine monasticism will learn a lot of intriguing (and sometimes disturbing) things about Downside Abbey in this book, including the time when some students got themselves involved with demons, and one of them died on account of it.

Downside Abbey, where many events in Two Families took place.

Two Families takes the form of contrasting the family into which Bevan was born with the family that he himself established later on. His family of origin was largely swept along with the tide of the times. Joseph Bevan and his wife decided to pursue the opposite course as they rediscovered tradition in the Society of St. Pius X and turned their lives upside-down to ensure a proper upbringing for their own large family of ten children.

At a time when it was not fashionable to homeschool, they homeschooled, and later on moved to a town from which their older children could more easily get to traditional schools in France; at a time when priests were being persecuted for fidelity to tradition, they welcomed into their home an old and faithful priest. God has blessed them with two priest-sons and a daughter who is a nun (and, in fact, just made her solemn vows).

The memoir is filled with honest self-assessment of failings and opportunities, falls taken and graces received; it contains some excellent, hard-won advice for parents. Kennedy Hall contributes a fine Foreword. The book has received glowing endorsements from The Right Reverend Dom Cuthbert Brogan, OSB, Abbot of St. Michael’s Abbey, Farnborough; Dom Alcuin Reid, OSB, Prior of Monastère Saint-Benoît, Fréjus-Toulon; Edward Pentin, Senior Contributor, National Catholic Register; James Bogle, barrister, retired army officer, former President of the Una Voce Federation; and Anthony P. Stine of the Return to Tradition Podcast.

Now for some excerpts of particular liturgical and musical interest.

A view of Somerset, the county where the Bevans lived for much of their lives

Wise words, to which we can all relate:

Although this book contains some stern criticisms of monks and priests who have crossed my path, I still regard them as belonging to my Church, and the wholesale collapse of the clergy is something I mourn. I have no idea how God is going to put things right, but I am sure that, sooner or later, he will, and it might take 100 years. In the meantime, I just carry on in my own quiet way, trying to save my soul and the souls of my nearest and dearest. (xix)

Speaking at one point of Westminster Choir School where he attended for a short time, Bevan describes the daily routine of the choristers. This is a great passage for giving the lie to the idea that the artistic standards were not high prior to the Council. In fact, they were much, much higher than they would ever be afterwards. Even now, we have not quite caught up to “the way things were,” and I doubt we ever shall until there is a complete restoration of tradition.

The choir school supplied the sopranos and altos for the cathedral choir. Even in the 1960s it was being proclaimed as one of the best choirs in Europe, and its schedule was punishing. There was a Sung Mass every morning, and new music had to be prepared to a professional standard. We would rise early and have a school Low Mass in the crypt of the cathedral. After breakfast there would be lessons followed by sung Mass but, as a probationer, I was too young to sing in the choir, so we juniors sat in the front two rows in the nave….
          The cathedral choir sound was utterly unique and a total contrast to the politeness of its Anglican cathedral rivals. We had daily High Mass in the cathedral. Even with my disturbed brain, I could see how beautiful and solemn was the drama being played out before my eyes— all accompanied by music which was often sublime. My musical tastes were maturing rapidly, and I was transported by Victoria and Palestrina….
          It was a rare privilege as a youngster to witness daily the dignity and the beauty of the liturgy at the cathedral, which managed to cling to the traditional rite of Mass well into the 1970s, until the death of Cardinal Heenan. Once the glories of Catholic worship have been seen at first hand, one cannot fail to be unimpressed by the sterile and turgid offerings of the reformed liturgies in the Catholic Church following on from the Second Vatican Council, known as Vatican II. I happen to know that anyone who sang in that choir was probably marked for life, as I was, and many ex-choristers still keep in touch with each other and often meet up to sing. The old cathedral is affectionately referred to as “the drome,” but nowadays the previously grand liturgy has degenerated into a patchy concert of words and music. My three elder brothers, who attended the school at Westminster, spent their lives campaigning for proper music to be incorporated into the New Mass and have found the going extremely bumpy in the face of reluctant clergy up and down the country….
          The lasting benefits of the choir school on my life were a love of the liturgy and a love of prayer. I learned to pray, and this stayed with me even during my non-churchgoing period. I never completely lost touch with Our Lady and the Saints, and this saved me from disaster, I think. (24–27)

There was a lot of confusion, silliness, and Pelagianism in the shift from the old rite to the new rite: 

We [the Bevans] were the official choir at St Michael’s Church in Shepton Mallet, and every Sunday in the holidays we sang the Mass. My father was the conductor and organist, and he laid out treats for the congregation in the form of plainchant and polyphony. With the closing of the old Catholic church in Shepton we moved to a spick-and-span affair of concrete and glass, which had been built by the diocese to accommodate the new springtime in the Church anticipated by the recent Second Vatican Council. With the new building came the New Mass. I was first made aware that something wasn’t right when, during the Canon, I received a dig in the back from Neville Dyke, who was sitting just behind me. I turned round in surprise and said, “Hello, Neville!” I received the reply, “Peace be with you!” I answered, “Talk to you later.” I can still see the Catholic families of Shepton Mallet sitting in their habitual pews: the Tullys, the Dykes, the Quins, the Dampiers, the Todds, and many others with lots of young children. With the advent of the New Mass in December 1969, the services became chaotic. The parish priest, Father Carol, wrestled with the new liturgy; he would suddenly break into Latin and correct himself.
          The music we sang as a family in church was becoming irrelevant to the goings-on at the altar, and the congregation became restless for more change. Mrs Todd, the wife of the owner of Darton, Longman & Todd, which was a leading Catholic publisher, became an agitator for change in the music. One Sunday, as we struck up with some William Byrd, she simply marched out of Mass in full view of the whole congregation.
          Pa, like the Elizabethan composers before him, adapted to the demand for change and started writing “congregational Masses” to be sung by everybody at Mass. I have to say that these compositions were so trite and turgid that we got thoroughly bored with them. In actual fact, Mass on Sunday became a frightful bore with its “sweet nothings” prayers, “hello children everywhere” readings, and faulty microphones. It took a great personal effort to rise on Sunday morning and go to church. As it dawned on our new parish priest, Father Meehan, that the reformed liturgy was turning out to be a bit of a flop, he decided upon a more “energetic” approach to the liturgy. As a result, we were made to endure all kinds of humiliating displays, such as parading the children in the sanctuary and the priest quizzing them over the microphone.
          We all hated it, but Pa said, “If you live at home you go to church!” I think Pa liked the changes. In fact, he did say in an unguarded moment— following a session with the gin and martini bottles— that it was like coming home to his Church of England past. Ma endured the revolution patiently and, much later, embraced Catholic Tradition again.
          In those days we were witnessing the changes in the Mass, which were bad enough. Little did we know that there was a wholesale offensive against the Catholic faith going on at the highest levels, and the New Mass was just a symptom of this attack. My mother has testified to the gradual meltdown in Catholic moral theology amongst her own teenage daughters, who were only following the example of their friends. (33–35) 

This next passage reminds me strikingly of my own experience in a private Benedictine high school, when by my senior year I was acting the role of conservative in the midst of almost exclusively liberal teachers and largely indifferent, if not contemptuous, fellow students:

There were various Benedictine monks at the school who occupied the senior positions such as headmaster and housemasters. My instincts informed me that most of these gentlemen lived a fairly soft life and seemed to wear expressions of self-doubt, evidenced by furrowed brows and the inability to look one in the face. This was the period after the Second Vatican Council and, as I mentioned before, the whole Church seemed to be indulging in an orgy of self-doubt. Religious Instruction (RI) classes were pure comedy, where the boys would come up with bizarre theories and discuss them in a free-for-all. The monk running the class almost seemed to be more avant-garde than his charges.
          Needless to say, I had conservative leanings and was by nature abrasive. Accordingly, I became an obvious target for the whole class, which regularly produced the situation of “Bevan contra mundum.” That was the trouble with knowing things but not knowing why. Everything was subject to scornful ridicule without limit. Apart from RI classes at Westminster Cathedral Choir School, where we studied the Penny Catechism, I had received no further formal training in religion. Hence, I knew nothing whatever about the faith apart from the odd phrase which had stuck. My classmates at Downside, however, knew absolutely nothing about their religion and used the RI classes as an opportunity to let off steam about how boring the school Mass was (indeed it was). Time-worn words were bandied about such as “irrelevant” and “participation.”
          I found myself—although I had no idea at the time— defending the Novus Ordo Mass, which all 500 boys had to endure in the abbey church every Sunday. I became identified with it alongside my father, who was organising the music, and this inflamed further antipathy towards my family. I do not believe that anyone in the school or the monastery next door liked the New Mass. There were many plots afoot to undermine it, and grievances were aired during RI classes all over the school.
          There was a very sharp and outspoken member of the class by the name of Grace, ironically, and his opinions were deferred to by everyone except me, of course. During one session in the RI class of Dom Ambrose Lambert, Grace pointed out that we should dispense with incense at Mass because, “after all, it was only introduced in the Middle Ages to keep off the smell of the plebs!” Everyone nodded, and I could see the furrowed brow of the monk also nodding in thoughtful sympathy. I instinctively made a fuss simply because this did not sound right at all, but as my knowledge of these things was non-existent, I was quickly shouted down.
          I have alluded to the school Mass in the abbey church. The abbey had been closed for two years to allow the bulldozers in to reorder the interior, in accordance with the liturgical movement’s slogan “out with the old, in with the new!” In the meantime, the school theatre was used for the Sunday Masses. I was not present at these events, as they were just before my time. However, I am assured by people who were present— my father among them— that the Masses degenerated into a riot, as the boys would constantly bang the sprung theatre seats up and down in the auditorium.
          My arrival at Downside coincided with the grand reopening of the abbey church for school Masses. Although the sanctuary had been rearranged with an altar placed in the middle (as opposed to at the far end), the congregation area was untouched, which led to wholesale discontent and open rebellion by the boys. The point of the New Mass, as it is called, is to encourage outward participation by the 500-odd boys, which they would do by joining in the prayers and singing the hymns. In spite of the hugely expensive loudspeaker system recently installed, the boys were really isolated from what was going on in the distance at the altar and responded to the energetic blandishments booming over the loudspeakers with a stony silence. I was present when, during an evening benediction, the lights failed. As we were plunged into darkness, a huge cheer went up from the whole school.
          The whole experiment with the New Mass was— and still is— an unmitigated disaster because the whole point of Mass is to achieve union with Christ, which is essentially an interior union necessitating silent prayer and adoration. (55–57)

Long-time musicians will recognize, with a groan, the truth in Bevan's discussion of the problems with transferring the treasury of great sacred music that grew up organically in the old rite to a new rite that was not designed with it in mind, and in fact works at cross-purposes to it:

I joined the Schola Cantorum, which provided the music for the New Mass in the abbey church, and Pa was the conductor. Because Pa thought we should sing music from the treasures of the Renaissance as though there had been no liturgical revolution at all, noses were put out of joint amongst the innovators in the monastery. The boys also complained (and who can blame them?), so an attempt was made to curtail Pa’s counter-revolutionary activities by the organising of a folk Mass in the abbey. That, too, was a flop and the last we heard of the guitars.
          I have to say that my father was mistaken in his belief that the boys would in any way profit from listening to William Byrd and plainchant in the context of the New Mass. Effectively, his critics were correct. He was turning the Mass into a concert, and a rather dull one at that. Renaissance church music was written for the Tridentine Rite of Mass, the “Old Mass.” It was strictly liturgical and as much a part of the Mass as the priest was. In the New Mass, the proceedings at the altar are interrupted and the irritable priest sits down with a thump while “Bevan and his choir strikes up!”
          Writing about these matters now, nearly sixty years on, all arguments in favour of the Old Mass are as relevant now as they were in the 1970s, but nothing gets done. This is why I now believe, in retrospect, that the attack on the traditional Mass was on ideological grounds and had nothing to do with getting the best out of the liturgy. The Old Mass had to be completely destroyed to clear the decks for what was to follow, and that was not the Catholic faith. In fact, it hardly mattered what replaced it. The liturgical anarchy that has been prevalent in the Catholic Church for sixty years is preferable, in the eyes of the reformers, to the pre-Vatican II Mass. At worst, the new liturgy is irreverent, blasphemous, and chaotic. At best, it is turgid, vacuous, and boring. It is almost as though the Catholic Church was deliberately trying to put people off religion, which it succeeded in doing, deliberately or not. (63–64)

Although Hamish Fraser played no role in my coming to tradition, Michael Davies certainly did, as he has done for countless people. The seeds planted by good reading bear fruit in due season:

By the time I had left school, my religious feelings were at a very low ebb. I was what could be described as a semi-lapsed Catholic, and this was the same for my brothers and sisters, so far as I could see. My mother, I think, had a prayer life and shared it with my father. We offspring were not interested. It was one afternoon in the spring of 1976 that we received a visit from Martin Blake, a retired French master who taught at Worth monastic school in Sussex. He was a frequent visitor, as he was Jeremy’s godfather. Whereas normal godparents would donate money and presents, as mine did, Martin would give Jeremy holy books. On this visit, he dumped a pile of tatty magazines entitled Approaches, which were edited by a certain Hamish Fraser. As nobody else was interested, I scooped up the pile and took them to my bedroom.
          Much later, for want of anything else to read, I sat up in bed and flipped through the pile of literature, which was badly reproduced on a home printer. I began to read about a certain archbishop in Switzerland who was being persecuted by the Catholic authorities for running a seminary that was out of step with the modern direction of the Catholic Church. My reaction was one of outrage for everything which annoyed me about the Church, such as the palsy-walsy clergy, the boring Mass, the warfare between the Downside monks and my father, the attacks on the faith in RI classes at school and the complete lack of religious education. It was all explained by Hamish Fraser. What I had dismissed until now as simply an emotional attachment to a vague conservatism was clarified by the rebellion of Archbishop Lefebvre. In all my time at Downside, the Second Vatican Council was hardly mentioned by the monks, who tried to give the impression that the Church was always like this.
          It would be stretching things to say that I now became more virtuous or religious, as I was happy in my state of semi-lapsation. However, the thoughts of returning to the true faith of the Church were never far away, and I had privately resolved to do something about it— but what? I knew that I would have to change my life and pull up my socks, so any thought of a real conversion was put on the back-burner, as they say… In the end, I forgot all about Archbishop Lefebvre as soon as I entered into my legal studies, because my whole position was built on sand. I still knew nothing about my religion and was easily disposed of by my intellectual superiors. I was glad, though, that Hamish Fraser, and later Michael Davies, were both planted in my sub-conscious and never left me. (73–74)

I could keep quoting all day long, but that would spoil the pleasure of discovering the work for yourself! So I’ll stop here, but do consider reading this meaty but still compact (under 200 pages) memoir of a Catholic caught between a false modernization that failed to fulfill its promises and a return to tradition that actually delivers the goods—the interesting story of a man, typical of his era in many ways, who was led by grace from lazy lapsation to burning zeal for the Faith.

The author (far left) with his family

Two Families is available directly from the publisher in paperback, hardcover, or ebook, as well as from Amazon.

The Spirit of Sacrosanctum Concilium

It is impossible to deny that a great deal of progress has been made to restore beauty and dignity to the Sacred Liturgy after the post-Conciliar eclipse, and will continue to be made, despite ongoing efforts to hamper it. But it is equally impossible to deny that there is still a great deal that needs to be done. The spirit of Sacrosanctum Concilium is alive and well, and, as Dietrich von Hildebrand once observed, with Vatican II, a strange inversion took place, and it is now the spirit that killeth, and the letter that giveth life. Case in point: we still live in a Church in which a priest can interrupt the Mass in order to yell at the choir for... doing what Vatican II said should be done.

“Don’t you have a Gloria in Portuguese? I’m asking you. Excuse me, please. Let’s go, please. (starts singing the Gloria in Portuguese) Do you guys know any hymns in Portuguese, do you? I’d like one. Please. (If not) then don’t sing. No; I want you to sing in Portuguese. (inaudible) Can you stop that hymn/singing please. It’s bothering me. Can you stop it?” (Thanks to Mr Marco da Vinha for the translation.)

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I waited a day to post this after yesterday’s 60th anniversary of the publication of Vatican II’s first document, partly to see whether it would be met with the same general indifference as the 50th anniversary (it was), partly as my vivax repraesentatio of the amount of time it took for the spirit of the document to begin killing the letter. But much more importantly, I wanted to mull over another superb essay on the topic by Dom Alcuin Reid, whose expertise in this matter is known to all, published yesterday at OnePeterFive.

https://onepeterfive.com/sacrosanctum-concilium-60/

Back in January, we shared his essay in response to a series published by Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal (republished in one post just over a year ago), a series which, while admitting that the post-Conciliar reform goes well beyond the letter of Sacrosanctum Concilium, basically contends that the Church was inspired to do so by the Holy Spirit, so that’s alright. At the time, I wrote “In the meantime, I also vehemently encourage all of our readers to read and share as widely as possible this absolutely superb column by Dom Alcuin Reid... which no summary can do justice”, and the same holds true for the one he published yesterday, an assessment of how Sacrosanctum Concilium is doing at the 60-year mark.

The simple answer is, of course, Not well, as the video above (one of hundreds of possible examples) shows. Dom Alcuin, who has spent decades researching this topic, gives a very useful explanation and summary of why this happened, tracing all the important steps: the drafting of the document, and what the Council Fathers actually intended and approved; the willful betrayal of it by the Consilium ad exsequendam (with Paul VI’s permission); St John Paul II’s halting attempts to correct the problem; and finally, the solution proposed by Pope Benedict XVI, after a lifetime of thoughtful consideration.

I say “finally” because I firmly believe that the Church will rediscover the profound pastoral wisdom of Pope Benedict, later, perhaps, than we wish for, but sooner than we hope, and that the current rejection of it will be forgotten as thoroughly as... well, as thoroughly as Sacrosanctum Concilium was by Paul VI and the Consilium. And so, if I had to chose one paragraph to sum up Dom Alcuin’s essay, it would be this one.

“...the brutal imposition of ideological diktats has convinced no one where the reasoned and truly pastoral arguments of Pope Benedict and Cardinal Sarah long since did. Many good priests thus formed—and a number of bishops also—are simply not able to support such oppressive and divisive measures that are predicated on gross falsehoods. They may be forced into external obedience in their parishes and dioceses (in some cases causing great harm and suffering and damage to souls) whilst Ratzingerians who are young enough yet to be ambitious may hide in the shadows, but the argument has not been won. Sacrosanctum Concilium has now been joined in exile by Summorum Pontificum, but their integrity has never successfully been impugned.”