Against Vernacular Readings in the Traditional Mass

The motu proprio Traditionis Custodes has reignited the debate over doing readings at the TLM exclusively in the vernacular. As most are aware, Summorum Pontificum had already opened up this possibility for low Masses, but it was seldom used, since people tend to understand that the readings are an integral part of the missal and of the act of worship, and that a continuity ought to be kept among all elements of the liturgical action. In addition, readings were already being given in the vernacular from the pulpit prior to the homily, and most of the faithful have translations in their hand missals. By and large, it is a non-question and a non-starter within the TLM world, and the latest assault on the integrity of the Latin liturgical tradition has met with principled and pragmatic resistance (see here and here).

Nevertheless, this question deserves to be revisited from time to time in order to understand better the rationale for sticking with the tradition. Here’s what a friend who is quite sympathetic to the TLM wrote to me:

I personally find that one of the best things about the Novus Ordo is vernacular readings. I take a via media approach; I don’t believe “pastoral” adaptions should be made in the liturgy, but I do enjoy how, in the Novus Ordo, the Word is proclaimed in the vernacular. When I have been at Latin Masses, I love the chanting of the Epistle & Gospel, but then when the priest goes and reads it from the pulpit before the homily, it is often done in a rushed, sloppy, and awkward manner. Perhaps you have written a response to my objection, and I missed it. What is the justification for retaining the readings in chanted or spoken Latin? Like I said, I think it’s beautiful, but in my idealized liturgy which I imagine to be the fruit of a Third Vatican Council called for by Cardinal Sarah-turned-Pope Benedict XVII, it largely looks like the 1962 Missal but with vernacular readings.

This is indeed a complex question. There are two aspects of the issue. First, what is the purpose of the reading of Scripture at Mass? And second, how can we practically overcome the language barrier that Latin presents to most?

In terms of the first aspect, there is no doubt that the traditional liturgy understands everything as doxological and latreutic. Nothing is merely didactic or informative. (In fact, this is why the homily strikes us as an interruption in the action: it is certainly merely didactic and informative, and therefore doesn’t smoothly harmonize with the rest of the liturgy, which is a ritual, a sacred action.) Because of this orientation to God, the readings are chanted like prayers, incense is used, a ceremonial with a procession is followed. The Novus Ordo was unfortunately composed at a time when it was all the rage to think of readings at Mass as a sort of communal Bible study, and that is why the Liturgy of the Word is so dreadfully verbose and static. Everything is read (almost never sung), towards the people, from the ambo, and without a sense that this Word is being offered up to God and raising the minds of the faithful up to Him in prayer. [1]

At the Latin Mass, everything is done for God as well as for the people: nothing is “just for the people,” as if we’re turning our backs on God and saying: “Pardon us, we have some business to take care of now; we’ll come back to You later.” The classical phrases used to describe the two main parts of the Mass — “Mass of the Catechumens” and “Mass of the Faithful” — each speaks of a missa, and this, not only because there are certain categories of people “sent away” (first, the catechumens, and then the faithful), but also because, as the medieval commentators explain, missa est means “it is sent”: our offering to God is sent up to Him by the hands of angels! In ancient Israel as in the Church, much of our worship consists in offering words up to God as a verbal sacrifice, parallel to our offering up of incense to Him. As incense pervades the church but also rises up, so too does the Word of God: it is not shot forth to the people (as if they are the pupils drilled by a teacher), but exalted so that it may rain down on them. Yes, there is something sacramental and mystical in this descent: there is a blessing in the repetition of the hallowed words of the liturgy that goes beyond their rational content. In the Liber specialis gratiae, St. Mechtild of Hackeborn says that Christ spoke to her these remarkable words:

You shall understand that when you say any psalm or prayer which any saints prayed when they were alive on earth, then all of those saints pray to me for you. Additionally, when you are in your devotions and speak with me, then all of the saints are joyful and worship and thank me.

It is surely no small thing for us to be reciting and singing the very same words that most of the saints of the Latin or Western half of the Church have had on their lips across all the centuries. These are words of diachronic unity, reverberating harmony, and revelatory power.

In terms of the second aspect mentioned above, it seems there are better ways to accomplish the good of comprehension than chucking out a stable practice of over 1,600 years’ duration and replacing it with the use of embattled and prosaic compromise translations that please no one, being (depending on who you are talking to) dated, too casual or too formal, too loose or too literal, etc. Most modern Westerners are still literate enough to find following along in a missal no difficulty, and since the translations in the missals are not official, they can vary in style. I have come to prefer this multi-sensory and more laissez-faire approach. If the reading from the pulpit is done well, it reinforces the proclamation. On most Sundays I engage with the reading multiple times: at Mass when I hear it in Latin and possibly read it; again when it’s read from the pulpit; and then in the parts that come up in Vespers. The old approach in fact saturates you slowly in Scripture rather than spraying you with it in great buckets.

We can and should also make a concerted effort to be teaching Latin to all Catholics, children and adults. Any serious religion teachers serious stuff to its followers: the Jews teach Hebrew, the Moslems teach classical Arabic, etc. If we cared about our heritage, you can bet that every schoolchild would be translating passages from the Vulgate, which is a more enormously consequential text in the history of the West than Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, or [insert favorite famous name].

I deliberately place the next consideration after the foregoing points because I do not wish to be accused of aestheticism. However, it is quite true, and rather obvious, that the Tridentine liturgy possesses a colossal unity of form and substance, a unity to which the use of Latin makes a significant contribution. I’m reminded of a passage from Samuel Johnson, commenting on an epitaph he saw that was half in English, half in Latin:

It may be proper here to remark the absurdity of joining in the same inscription Latin and English or verse and prose. If either language be preferable to the other, let that only be used; for no reason can be given why part of the information should be given in one tongue, and part in another on a tomb, more than in any other place, or any other occasion; and to tell all that can be conveniently told in verse, and then to call in the help of prose, has always the appearance of a very artless expedient, or of an attempt unaccomplished. Such an epitaph resembles the conversation of a foreigner, who tells part of his meaning by words, and conveys part by signs.[2]

At the same time, the liturgy, which is too great for any one of us to say he “understands” in full, can legitimately be compared to Johnson’s “foreigner who tells part of his meaning by words, and conveys part by signs.” For the words alone are not enough, nor are the non-verbal signs, but together they constitute a whole that is greater than its parts. We understand the uniqueness and the divine authorship of the words of Scripture better when we hear them read or chanted in Latin than if we heard them only in the vernacular; but their exalted status is no less emphasized by the treatment of the book, the kissing of it, the incensing of it, the processing with it. We don’t do that kind of thing to ordinary books.

It is often said that a major driving force in the Catholic liturgical reform was the secret Protestantizing sympathies of many of the liturgists and their not-so-secret obsession with lowest-common-denominator ecumenism. That seems to be true in all kinds of ways. We should not forget, all the same, that most of the early Protestants were a good deal more conservative, more “traditional” in their instincts, than the Catholic liturgists of the 1960s or their ragtag sympathizers today. I wrote about this elsewhere in connection with the manner of receiving Holy Communion, but here is a quotation from Martin Luther talking about his desire to preserve the ancient languages in worship:

Now there are three different kinds of Divine Service. The first, in Latin, which we published lately, called the Formula Missae. This I do not want to have set aside or changed; but, as we have hitherto kept it, so should we be still free to use it where and when we please, or as occasion requires. I do not want in any way to let the Latin tongue disappear out of Divine Service; for I am so deeply concerned for the young. If it lay in my power, and the Greek and Hebrew tongues were as familiar to us as the Latin, and possessed as great a store of fine music and song as the Latin does, Mass should be held and there should be singing and reading, on alternate Sundays, in all four languages—German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. I am by no means of one mind with those who set all their store by one language [in context, this seems to mean German].[3]

Of course, I wouldn’t say we should do anything, or keep something, because Luther said so or did so. Rather, the point is that the “Catholic” liturgical reformers and implementers — including Paul VI — were, in certain ways, more Lutheran than Luther himself. That’s why the pope’s good friend Jean Guitton was right to say in an interview that Paul VI’s intention was “to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist Mass [sic].”

Meanwhile, the truly universal or catholic, and dare I say Pentecostal, attitude of the Catholic Church was well expressed by Maisie Ward in 1937, in sentiments that have been echoed and reechoed by countless laymen and clergy down through the centuries:

This union of localization and universality finds expression in the miracle of tongues on Whit Sunday and to-day in the language and liturgy which unites, at one altar, men severed by national languages and national interests.[4]

NOTES

[1] I recommend the FIUV position paper on this subject, which packs a lot into a few pages.
[2] On the “Epitaph to James Craggs,” from Johnson’s Life of Pope.
[3] Documents Illustrative of the Continental Reformation, ed. B. J. Kidd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 195.
[4] The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition, vol. 2: Insurrection versus Resurrection (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1937), 7.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Martin Mosebach points out with respect to Holy Communion:

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

Fr. Roberto Spataro makes a similar but broader point:

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

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

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

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