Refuting the Commonplace that “Liturgy” Means “Work of the People”

In 2020, Angelico Press released a very interesting book entitled Christ the Liturgy by William Daniel. Serious students of liturgical theology should pick it up if they have not already done so. While I do not agree with all that the Anglican author presents, he offers unique perspectives I have not seen elsewhere and, in particular, makes a deft and profound use of both Church Fathers (Clement, Ignatius, Cyprian, Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus) and modern philosophers (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Voegelin, Gadamer, Pickstock).

Chapter 1, worth the price of the book all by itself, delves into true and false, or perhaps we should say truer and falser, meanings of the term leitourgia, “a word,” writes Daniel,

that has been mistranslated, the first instance of which appears to have been at The Fourth General Council of the Alliance of The Reformed Churches holding The Presbyterian System (London, 1888), whereby liturgy is translated as “the work of the people.” To speak of “the work of the people” assumes a work, an offering, or the human capacity to give something to God that God doesn’t have. Translating leitourgia as “the work of the people,” a distinctly post-Enlightenment translation, inverts the human’s relation to the salvific offering of the Son to the Father. That is, this redefining of liturgy elicits a lack in God—the lack of God’s own worship. Additionally, liturgy as the “work of the people” separates the liturgical action from the creative agency of the Son and the human’s volitive participation in the re-creating of the world, infinitely actualized—recapitulated—in Christ. The Transcendent is hereby absolutely transcendent; there is no mingling of God and creation. What is important to note at the outset is that to translate or (re)define leitourgia as “the work of the people” detracts from the inherent, relational nature of liturgy as that which gathers the people of God into the eternal life of reciprocity that is Holy Trinity. (1–2)

This mistranslation is very prominent among supporters of the liturgical reform in the Catholic Church. For example, Kevin W. Irwin in his book Responses to 101 Questions on the Mass (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999) speaks of “the Greek term leiturgia, meaning “work of the people” (p. 31).

The author then looks carefully at instances of classical and patristic texts that employ the term leitourgia to make his case. His goal is 

to lay the foundation for understanding liturgy as the manifestation of divinity in Christ, attested to by the early and medieval church, and as the anagogic relation of participation that is the essence of the church Catholic. Liturgy is hereby to be understood not as “the work of the people” but as “the work of the One for the sake of the many.” Christ himself is this “work,” this event, who is the Liturgy he enacts—both priest and victim, an offering to the Father for the life of the world. (2)

In ancient Greek authors, leitourgia first means “public work” or “public service” (laos ergon), which often took the form of a sacrificial gift or financial offering without expectation of repayment, solely for the common good, such as sponsoring a festival or holding (without pay) a public office. In Aristotle, leitourgia names the bearing of a communal burden for the benefit of the many. Not just the rich who fund banquets, choruses, and lyric contests, but also priests, doctors, the miliary, and innkeepers are all “liturgists” in this context. It is always a gift of one for the sake of the many.

St. Paul uses the term in continuity with Plato and Aristotle to refer to the one who gathers and offers funds for the sake of the building up of the Church, in analogy with the priests of the temple who gather the offerings to give glory to God. Paul describes himself as a libation poured out for the people. The one ministers to and for the many:

Paul is the liturgy he enacts—Christ. His liturgical role is to serve as Christ, to gather the offerings of the faithful into the offering Jesus is in himself. Only in this way do the liturgical actions—offerings—of a people become bound to the offering of Jesus to the Father—the one, holy acceptable offering. (8)

In the first epistle of Clement, leitourgia points to the hierarchical office that belongs to the various members of the body, all acting in and through Christ to participate in His high-priestly offering; but most especially the bishop, whose role is to gather up the many into the One (11). “Leitourgia is a sacrificial offering to God, which is consequently beneficial to others” (12). 

Office and action, as in the ancient world, are inseparable in Christ. The hierarchical administration of the liturgical economy is a division of labor, not a partitioning of classes. Just as the bishop makes the people available to God, likewise do the people make God available to the bishop. There is a logic of reciprocity embedded in the action. By necessity of her communion with God, the Christian must be in fellowship with Christ’s holy church, through its bishops. (19) 

We are led to see from the sources that in no sense is liturgy understood as the working of the people at some activity that is primarily theirs to claim or to conduct. On the contrary, they are the receivers of the largesse of the Father in Christ poured out by the Spirit through the Church’s rites enacted in obedience by those who are in the position of rulers and benefactors, who bear the communal burden, who “put on” liturgy (so to speak). In this vision there is no competition between parts of the body, but only gratitude for the complementary roles that allow worship to come alive. God gives the offering to the priest, and the priest returns it to God for the people: “the work of the One”—Christ, or His hierarchical representative—“for the sake of the many.”

The politicization of the liturgy, the jockeying for roles, the spreading out of activities, appears therefore to be a fundamental misreading of the economy of worship, in which “God is the sole giver of gifts; and it is only God who can receive God. Abraham’s giving and receiving are to be understood, therefore, as a participation in the giving and receiving of God from and to God” (24).

Daniel reaches his conclusion, invoking a major theme of the theologians associated with Radical Orthodoxy: 

The commonplace (mis)translation of leitourgia as “the work of the people” describes a chasm between what Christians do when they gather to worship and who the God they confess to worship is. The modern translation of this term dislocates the human from the action of Christ, thereby suspending the gift from the recipient—giver and receiver remain separate. In a falsely humanistic attempt to emphasize the work of humans in liturgy, “the work of the people” actually narrates a deistic understanding of the human as completely separate from God, or univocally maintains a sameness between God and humanity in “Being.” (34)

Almost as a corollary, Daniel points out how this univocity traps God in a human construct and evacuates our experiences of the possibility of redemption:

Paul’s sufferings (cf. 2 Cor 4:8–12; Col 1:24) are the sufferings of Christ, born in his body, for the sake of the church. It is the cross that is paradigmatic for participating in divine action—in the Liturgy-Christ. The cross is also that which makes all suffering intelligible and meaningful. The oft-repeated notion that Christ suffers when we suffer is yet another aggrandizing of the human in relation to her sufferings. We must not invert the relation between the suffering of Jesus and the sufferings of humanity. Again, while it may at first seem to elevate the suffering of humans to say that God suffers with us, it has the adverse effect of flattening human suffering as something that in no way transcends the present sensation of pain. What makes human suffering meaningful is that it participates in the bodily suffering of God on the cross. (35–36) 

At the end of the chapter, Daniel ties together his research into a thundering critique of the contemporary misappropriation of a noble ancient term:

We have seen how liturgy as “the people’s work” locates a person’s identity in her own hands—the human nature entirely separable from divinity—a liturgical nominalism, as it were. Naming, as it does, the service of worship of the church, liturgy has been mistaken to be humanistic in the worst sense of the term. It has been wrongly understood as an isolated act in time, either performed by a professional class of persons (clergy) for an audience (laity) or enacted collectively as a body of people (priesthood of all believers), which can only be assented to by faith, not participated in through the reason of the body.
          In each instance the understanding is the same: God has given salvation to those who follow Christ; Christians, therefore, perform liturgies to offer thanks and praise for the gift of salvation. The assumption here is that the baptized have a gift to offer unto Almighty God, i.e., their selves. To say that the human has something she can give—even herself—to God, is to suggest that a person possesses within her being the capacity to initiate contact with God, thereby inverting the Creator-created relation. It is at once a rejection of human contingency and a denial of God as his own absolute contingency. God becomes somehow dependent on creation.
          This “self-possession” is the ultimate affront by the created to her Creator; it is the sin of all sins—it is Adam and Eve. Leitourgia as illuminated throughout the writings of the early fathers refuses both the Gnostic rejection of matter and the humanist departure from metaphysics. The modern mistranslation is more than a matter of semantics; it is an ontological chasm. (38–39)

He returns to this point at the start of chapter 4, providing an especially helpful summary of his position, which certainly shares much in common with the traditionalist critique of the radical branch of the Liturgical Movement and its triumph in the post-Vatican II liturgical reform with its humanist, activist, utilitarian, consumerist, and reductionist assumptions and stylings:

What is often misunderstood about liturgical action, specifically as it regards Christian liturgy, is that it is neither performative nor initiative. That is, it is not a performance before God to somehow please God or curry favor, nor is the Christian to understand herself as one who initiates contact with God. As outlined in the first chapter, this is a gross misrepresentation of liturgy that stems from a mistranslation and misunderstanding of the word and meaning of leitourgia. Any claim that liturgy is instigated by, or an experience simply to be taken in or enjoyed by, humans reduces liturgical action to a temporary, flattened affair that has little or nothing to do with God, save the gross objectification of the same. Such a reduction bears an implicit, disenchanted anthropology, a conception of humanity that is biological at best and animalistic at worst.
          Liturgy, however, does not originate in human action, even though it implicates humanity in its activity and elicits human participation. Liturgy is the creative agency of God who in Christ has gathered human nature into divine reciprocity, a reciprocity that is without beginning or end. The human’s participation in this eternal action is medial by nature. That is, the human is caught up in the divine self-relation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Liturgy hereby names the self-relation of eternal reciprocity that God himself is. To worship, therefore—to participate in the liturgical action—is to be involved in an action that begins outside of human agency yet implicates the human in divine agency. (121–22)

Based on this conclusion, Daniel then goes on later in the book to emphasize that liturgy is “medial”—that is, neither pure activity on our part, nor pure passivity, but both and neither, like the “middle voice” of some ancient languages.

One way to say this, however awkward it might strike the modern English-speaker’s ear, would be to say, “I was gathered into the offering of the Son to the Father.” Shorthand would be modestly simpler: “I participated in the self-offering of God today.” (127) 

One can see the care with which he banishes the idea that the worshipers are the primary agents, which has been the bane of liturgical reform for the past hundred years, and has led to many absurdities: making everyone say all the responses and do all the actions together in lockstep; giving clerical tasks to laity; opening up space for creative and spontaneous expression and motion on the part of the clergy; the statement that “I like Fr. So-and-so’s Mass best”; mobilizing the chickabiddies to make felt banners for their first communions; erupting into applause for the efforts of musicians or other groups; and so forth. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that the entire framework of the Liturgical Movement was always tainted with a certain Pelagianism, with what Jordan Aumann called “the heresy of activism.” The middle voice was lost: the insertion into the action of God that begins before we even exist and is eternally simple, circular, fruitful, and silent. Daniel concludes:

Liturgy, hereby, is not a matter of self-expression. It is not to be governed by the whims of any one individual’s sensibilities. Rather, liturgy is the confluence of linguistic worlds which have passed through the torcular of Christ, who is the wine press of God…. It is in this sense that liturgical mediality can be understood as an active-passivity, perhaps our best way of pointing toward the middle voice. It is a giving of ourselves to an action happening to us, to an agency that is not our own. Hereby do we become leitourgia—the work of God. We become Christ in proportion to our participation in the work of the One, which is for the sake of the many. (157–58)

To sum up: leitourgia does not mean “the work of the people.” It means “the work of One on behalf of many.” This definition is properly theocentric and Christocentric; it justifies, even as it relativizes, the “sacerdotalism” (in Dix’s expression) of all traditional liturgical rites.

There is much else of value in this book, such as its treatment of church architecture in chapter 3 (about which I will write separately). I encourage you to check it out.

William Daniel. Christ the Liturgy. Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2020. 206 pp. Paper ISBN 978-1621385554, $17.95. Cloth ISBN 978-1621385561, $32.00.

“The Sacrifice of Praise and the Ecstatic Orientation of Man”: Dr. Kwasniewski’s Davenport Lecture

The following lecture was given in Davenport, Iowa, on March 2, 2022, at the invitation of Una Voce Quad City. I am grateful to the organizers for making a video, which is now on my YouTube page.

I am convinced that one of the greatest errors we are facing in the Church today—and one that, in a hidden way, drives a lot of other problems we are suffering under—is the dominance of an activist, utilitarian, this-worldly notion of what Christianity is all about. It’s taken for granted that religion is for the sake of social justice and improvement of quality of life, that it’s a matter of being busy with charitable projects, of making ourselves “useful,” and so forth—quite as if God is not very good at ruling His universe and needs a lot of help from us (“excuse me, Lord, let me step in and take care of this disaster”). At its extreme, as we see it too often in Vatican documents and activities, Catholicism looks like an interreligious, humanitarian social services operation, the “chaplain to the United Nations” as some wags have put it.

In my talk this evening I would like to present to you a totally different way of thinking of the meaning of Christianity and of the purpose of human life. I will offer you the traditional vision, which, needless to say, is not well understood. And I will do so starting from a book of the Bible that used to be at the heart of all of theology but has suffered enormous neglect in the modern Church, namely, the Epistle to the Hebrews, which is all about priesthood, sacrifice, and heaven, and the very title of which underlines the profound continuity between the worship of Israel instituted by God through Moses and its fulfillment in the worship of the New Israel instituted by the God-man Jesus Christ.

In this Epistle, whose author I will take to be St. Paul or certainly of St. Paul’s circle, a climactic verse of chapter 13 exhorts us: “By Him [our Lord Jesus Christ], therefore, let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is to say, the fruit of lips confessing to His Name” (Heb 13:15). Given the relative paucity of explicit references in Hebrews to the Christian liturgy and how it is to be conducted here on earth,[1] this exhortation rings out all the more loudly, summoning us to a certain way of life: one in which we offer unto God, continually, the “sacrifice of praise,” which is the fruit of interior faith and its verbal confession. One might ask: Why does St. Paul sum up the Christian religion as a sacrificium laudis? What might we learn from the emphasis on praise?

Before digging into that question, it is worthwhile to point out how frequently Sacred Scripture uses this language. Apart from Hebrews 13:15, here are some other instances:

Offer to God the sacrifice of praise: and pay thy vows to the most High. (Psalm 49:14)

The sacrifice of praise shall glorify me: and there is the way by which I will shew him the salvation of God. (Psalm 49:23)

And let them sacrifice the sacrifice of praise: and declare his works with joy. (Psalm 106:22 )

I will sacrifice to thee the sacrifice of praise, and I will call upon the name of the Lord. (Psalm 115:8)

And offer a sacrifice of praise with leaven: and call free offerings, and proclaim it: for so you would do, O children of Israel, saith the Lord God. (Amos 4:5)

But I with the voice of praise will sacrifice to thee: I will pay whatsoever I have vowed for my salvation to the Lord. (Jonah 2:10)

And thou hast taken pity upon two only children. Make them, O Lord, bless thee more fully: and to offer up to thee a sacrifice of thy praise, and of their health, that all nations may know, that thou alone art God in all the earth. (Tobit 8:19)[2]

And there are countless verses that suggest the same in different language. We have, for instance, Psalm 70:8: “Let my mouth be filled with praise, that I may sing thy glory, thy greatness, all the day long”—a verse, incidentally, that is sung in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom immediately after the reception of Holy Communion, in a way identifying Our Lord with the very act of praise: “Let my mouth be filled with praise.”[3] The Prophet Jeremiah says: quoniam laus mea tu es, “for Thou art my praise” (Jer 17:14).

Of all forms of prayer, praise is the one most “for its own sake.” In a sense, it is useless, in that it has no further ulterior motive or result we are seeking out of it.[4] Praise looks to the greatness, glory, beauty, and worthiness of the one praised and seeks to render to him a selfless homage; in the words of the Gloria, propter magnam gloriam tuam, or in the words of the final Psalm: laudate eum secundum multitudinem magnitudinis eius, “praise him according to his exceeding greatness!” (Ps 150:2). All forms of prayer, of course, are directed towards God, this being part of the very definition of prayer. That explains why the publican in the parable went home justified rather than the Pharisee, since the publican actually turned to God in self-abnegating repentance, whereas the Pharisee turned to himself in admiration of his own excellence.

All the same, other forms of prayer besides praise are unavoidably wrapped up with oneself. When we give thanks to God, we are recalling the good things He has done for us. When we supplicate Him, it’s about our own needs or the needs of others, and that’s perfectly fine; we are needy creatures, and the worst thing we can do is to pretend otherwise. When we accuse ourselves of wrongdoing and repent of it, we are recognizing that we have failed to live up to God’s just expectations of us, that we are at fault and deserving of punishment, and we beg for pardon. But when we praise, we are lifting up our hands, our voices, our minds, towards God who is almighty, all-glorious, awe-inspiring, worthy in Himself of the homage of the entire cosmos for all eternity, worthy of the total surrender of myself to Him. In a short story called “The Castle: A Parable,” George MacDonald gives us this magnificent prayer:

We thank Thee for Thyself.
Be what Thou art—our root and life,
our beginning and end, our all in all.
Thou livest; therefore we live.
Thou art—that is all our song.[5]

In order to have a concrete model in front of us, we might think of the sequence of psalms in the office of Lauds in the monastic tradition. On Sundays of Paschaltide, on Sundays in special seasons, and on Solemnities, Lauds is a time of prayer given over entirely to the pure praise of God: Psalms 66, 62, 92, 99, the Benedicite, and Psalms 148 to 150 (from which Laudate psalms the office derives its very name).[6] In contrast, when we look at Prime or the Little Hours, we can see how concerned they are with the labors and trials of the day, the ongoing struggle with our enemies who seek to surprise us and capture us, the need for help, mercy, and consolation in a time of exile or pilgrimage. While not excluding these themes, Lauds is principally a “sacrifice of praise,” a burning up of the incense of our time and of the fruit of our lips. It is an office we perform not in order to “get” something, but propter magnam gloriam tuam. May all the earth praise the Lord: every creature, every order of being, every man, woman, and child. We will stand in for them, voicing the praises of creation; we will announce and obey the divine imperative, laudate Dominum; we will give utterance to a sleeping world on its behalf.

As with the religious life in general, Lauds is not concerned with going out into the streets, knocking on doors, engaging in conversations, making the Gospel relevant or intelligible. Those things are important and have their place, but first comes praise, the precondition and promise of the fruitfulness of anything else we may do.[7] A priest once wrote to me these words:

I know of no great thinker, no great advocate of justice or mercy or great keeper of an institution, who was not first an ardent laudator (giver of praise). I also do not know true intercessors who did not do this ministry in the context of praise. Self-forgetting praise is our foretaste of Heaven.[8]

This is the message we modern Christians need to hear in the expression “sacrifice of praise.” We are steeped in a world of pragmatism, utilitarianism, and activism, where we place such a high premium on doing and making, where we ask “what good is it” and “what’s in it for me,” where we look for results, the bottom line, the cash value, the pay-off. It is so interesting to see how Our Lord in the Gospels repeatedly refuses to lower Himself to the level of quick victories over the roiling crowds, how He insists on the disciples taking time off to recollect themselves and to pray, and, most mysteriously of all, how He Himself spends whole nights in “the prayer of God,” as St. Luke says.[9] He who, as God, could not pray to Himself; He who, as man, was hypostatically united to the Word and therefore perpetually and perfectly communing with the Most Blessed Trinity in His human mind and heart, nevertheless really and truly exercised all the acts of prayer, including praise.

In this way He revealed to us that prayer is not something superficial and optional to man but, rather, is constitutive of his inmost identity as a rational creature fashioned by God, dependent on God, and destined for God. The one who does not pray is not living as a man; in any case, he cannot inherit the kingdom that a saint—that is, a man of prayer—is competent to receive. Jesus showed His disciples that prayer is an activity as necessary and as refreshing as eating and drinking when the body needs nourishment, as vital and fundamental as breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide.[10] The poignant little prayer before the Divine Office brings out this point: “O Lord, in union with that divine intention with which You Yourself praised God while on earth, I offer You this hour.” This short prayer addresses Our Lord as the one who first lived and always lives the sacrificium laudis with utter completeness, with inexhaustible superabundance; we wish to unite our will to His pure, lofty, all-sufficient intention.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Liturgy as Labor versus Liturgy as Leisure

(Part 2 of a two-part series, “Exorcising the Demon of Activism.” For Part 1, see here.)

Last week I spoke of the tendency of modern Christians to prioritize activity, good works, social work — in short, the “horizontal” dimension — over the “vertical” dimension of the individual and corporate relationship with God and His kingdom that we find in, and cultivate through, personal and liturgical prayer. It is no secret that a pragmatic and utilitarian attitude dominates our world and, regrettably, our Church. Rare is the pastor of souls who takes seriously himself, and then teaches others by example and word, that seeking contemplative union with God is absolutely the first priority in the life of every man who has ever lived and who will ever live, and that this means giving Him the best of our time and resources. I sometimes have a mental picture of our final judgment being initially about why we gave God so little of our time, attention, and love when He was present in our midst in symbols and in His Real Presence; and, only after that fundamental defect has been thoroughly examined, launching into the terrifying review of our particular sins, offenses, and negligences.

The heroic Jesuit Fr. Willie Doyle, S.J. (1873–1917), who expended his life for his men on the battlefield of World War I as a much-loved and courageous army chaplain, and therefore cannot be accused of pious daydreaming, once observed: “Did it ever strike you that when our Lord pointed out the ‘fields white for the harvest,’ he did not urge his Apostles to go and reap it, but to pray?” (Recall Matthew 9, 37-38: “Then he saith to his disciples, The harvest indeed is great, but the labourers are few. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth labourers into his harvest.”)

Pope St John Paul II’s critique of the impoverishment of personal relations in a materialistic society suggests a striking parallel with the confusion of primary and secondary in the life of the Church:

The criterion of personal dignity — which demands respect, generosity, and service — is replaced by the criterion of efficiency, functionality, and usefulness: others are considered not for what they “are,” but for what they “have, do, and produce.” (Evangelium Vitae, §23)

The liturgical reformers committed an analogous blunder. The criterion of liturgical dignity — which demands profound respect for tradition (a prerequisite to internalizing its wisdom), generous self-surrender to its ascetical and rubrical demands, and sincere service to the faithful in offering them ongoing formation — was replaced by the activist criteria of efficiency, functionality, and usefulness ad extra. Liturgy was to be judged not by what it is in its innermost essence, but by its externals, its facilitation of us, its meeting of our untutored needs, its satisfaction of our desires, and (in a best-case scenario) its stimulation of our apostolic activities. It became a Mutual Aid Society for Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, with a decorative Catholic touch.

A contemplative ritual such as the Church had offered to God prior to the mid-1960s will never be able to withstand the relentless demands of the pragmatist for instant results or continual production of “output.” This is due to a fundamental error: work is taken as the paradigm of actuality, rather than rest. We would do well to dwell on this point.

Aristotle introduced into philosophy one of the most useful distinctions ever made, the difference between “first act” and “second act” (or, as some translations have it, first actuality and second actuality). We understand this distinction, which is not logical but metaphysical, by considering a lot of examples from common experience and intuiting what they have in common: being able to see versus actually seeing; being alive but asleep vs. being awake; being equipped with intellect or habitual knowledge vs. actually understanding an essence, which is when knower and known, subject and object, are one and the same. This latter state is being “fully-at-work” (in the Heidegger-influenced language of Joe Sachs), but paradoxically, it is not working at something laboriously; it is actively resting in the possession of a form or a perfection. Capacity for work is ordered to working (attaining actuality), but working is ordered to a certain “rest” (actuality fully achieved). What Abraham Maslow called “a flow state” or, colloquially, “being in the zone,” is just this second act/actuality of which Aristotle speaks, at its peak.

The solemn public liturgy of the Church, though it involves the combined efforts of various people, is essentially the latter kind of work: being fully-at-work in Christ’s actuality, which He now shares with us as an overflow, a redundantia, from heaven, and to which we unite ourselves more as twigs or leaves floating downstream than as trucks carrying gravel or streamrollers flattening asphalt. We are not making a better world by the work of our hands; we are being remade in the image of God, who is pure act.

Josef Pieper’s best-known book is called Leisure, the Basis of Culture. By “leisure” Pieper means what we do for its own sake when all our other practical needs are met. Leisure is not relaxation, which is an interval of inaction before resuming exertions. Nor is leisure exactly the same as recreation, when we entertain ourselves or one another in a more or less dignified manner. Leisure is the reflective and contemplative activity of rejoicing in what is real, with a full mind and heart, with no other business pressing on us and pulling us away; it is resting with wonder and gratitude in the goodness of creation and its Creator; it is what the virtuous man labors to make room for, because it is the best human activity and, in fact, something more than human.

Seeing “Liturgy as Labor” and seeing “Liturgy as Leisure” are, then, the two basic ways of seeing it. The former is activist, the latter contemplative; the one is based on a paradigm of involvement and production, the other on a paradigm of receptivity, surrender, and rest. The partisans of the first conception think of themselves as doing the right thing, bringing the right state of affairs into being, and thus feel that their opponents are “passive” and “mute observers”; the partisans of the second conception think of themselves primarily as beholding and loving what is beautiful or noble in itself, and therefore consider a certain kind of passivity a virtue, and quiet observation a form of opening one’s soul to the power of another who acts to conform the soul to Himself. As Andrew Louth remarks, “To participate by beholding seems a shortcoming only to the busy Western mind.” (The Study of Spirituality, p. 187)

Monastic professions: everyone in this photo is receptive in stance and action

Monastic private Masses (see here for more recent photos)

Fr. Ray Blake asks the question “Why are contemplatives problematic?” and answers:

It is presumably something about the ‘otherness’ of their lives. . . . their values are not those of the contemporary world: they tend to stand still rather than go out to the peripheries of contemporary thought, stat crux dum volvitur orbis, which means they don’t get “with the program.” There is something about the transcendence and otherness of their lives that says some important things about God; that he is above and beyond us, that he is unknowable, ineffable, which means he is beyond the control of Kings and governments, or even Churchmen. The war on Liturgy that speaks of the transcendent of the post-conciliar period uses the same arguments, or lack of argument, as those who have difficulty with the contemplative life. Liturgy that is pure worship, that does not seek to teach, or build community or to “celebrate” in the contemporary sense of the word, is equally incomprehensible; it is about esse [to be] rather than agere [to act]. 

In his fine work Love and Truth: The Christian Path of Charity, Jean Borella brilliantly analyzes the mentality behind suppressing prayer and liturgy because of “social needs”:

Being universal, this commandment [of love] is by definition and a priori applied to every man, but its realization does not require, for it to be accomplished in perfection and for us to be perfect, that we apply it successively to all men. A similar interpretation is implied, however, in the manner in which our contemporaries have become intoxicated with a quantitatively unlimited charity. Besides, why limit the import of this commandment to humanity? Does not the cosmic order concern the whole of creation, and has not Christ ordained the teaching of the Gospel to every creature and not to man alone? And on the other hand, imperfection, misery, and injustice being by definition inexhaustible, the work of justice claims the totality of my time and therefore the totality of my life.
          Consequently, everything not directly an individual or social work of justice is [regard as] mortal sin. Prayer and liturgy, momentarily requiring the whole man and the cessation of every action for the sake of the collectivity, become mortal sins themselves. For to pray, we must withdraw from the world. It is not we ourselves but Christ who is saying this, and we only need state that the commandment on prayer comes immediately after the just-quoted passage, as if the Gospel wished to forestall the modern errors of interpretation: “For yourself when you wish to pray enter into your chamber, close the door and pray to your Father who dwells in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matt 6:6).
          The hic and nunc of our existential situation implies a unicity of acting. We cannot do several things at once. The act of prayer and the liturgy concretely exclude the social act and vice versa. If active charity is to absorb the totality of the charitable power, everything opposing it should be eliminated. And this is why we think the modern conception leads directly and logically to the elimination of liturgical worship and the spiritual life, that is to say ultimately of the Church and theism, for their opposition, in concreto, is strictly inevitable. (225–26)

Now, what Borella describes may well be considered a “limit case” that will never be reached on earth, regardless of the combined effects of activism, indifference, and wickedness in high places as in low; nevertheless, the logic driving toward it leaves a path of carnage behind itself, along which are strewn the lost or never-awakened vocations of tens of thousands of contemplative religious after the Council — a gaping hole in the Mystical Body on earth that no campaign of charity, no pastoral programs, no liturgical reform, could ever fill. Precisely when and where the primacy of contemplation and the true leisure of liturgy are rediscovered and embraced will there be a restoration of the Church’s missionary dynamism and her once-unparalleled charitable work in the world. Delightfully, the way to reach that longed-for goal is the same as the goal itself: prayer and worship. The means and the end coincide, even as our “daily bread” par excellence is the Maker of bread and the Life it imparts.

Lay Ministries Obscure Both the Laity’s Calling and the Clergy’s

The recent motu proprio Spiritus Domini has a personal resonance for me. Under the regime of progressive Catholicism in which I grew up, I recall hearing one message loud and clear: “Show your faith by signing up for XYZ ministry.” The underlying assumption was that merely assisting at Mass was not quite good enough; that was for the uncommitted, the uninterested, the unmotivated.

So I dutifully signed up to be first an altar boy, then a lector, and finally, an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion (this would have been in the 1980s). Throughout boyhood and adolescence, I didn’t understand at all what the Mass was about; I hardly had a clue what the Eucharist was; I’m not even sure my views would have differered, in essence, from how Protestants view their services. Actually, that’s not true; a Protestant would have had a much higher view of Biblical inspiration and inerrancy than I would have had. I was serving at something, I knew not what; I was reading something, I knew not what; I was distributing something, I knew not what.

It was for me a huge breakthrough, a profound liberation, to discover through the traditional Latin Mass that one can simply be at the liturgy and soak it in like a sponge; one can come to find this receptivity utterly fulfilling. Perhaps that is the saddest lesson of Spiritus Domini: its change to canon law makes sense only in the context of a liturgy that has lost its raison d’être.

The motu proprio once again raises the question of the vocation of the laity. What are laypeople supposed to be doing? Have they a proper work of their own, or do they just collect the scraps that fall from the clergy’s table — better yet, climb up and jostle elbows?

The Church’s answer has always been consistent: the laity’s work is to influence, purify, and elevate temporal affairs, bringing them as much as possible into conformity with the law of God and the Church’s mission to glorify God and save souls. The Second Vatican Council espoused this traditional point of view: Gaudium et Spes exhorts the laity “to impress the divine law on the affairs of the earthly city” (n. 43), while Apostolicam Actuositatem sets as our goal “rectifying the distortion of the temporal order and directing it to God through Christ” (n. 7).

The latter document establishes a distinction between those who teach principles and those who implement them: on the one hand, “Pastors must clearly state the principles concerning the purpose of creation and the use of temporal things and must offer the moral and spiritual aids by which the temporal order may be renewed in Christ” (ibid.); on the other hand, the “apostolate in the social milieu,” which is proper to laity, involves “the effort to infuse a Christian spirit into the mentality, customs, laws, and structures of the community in which one lives” (n. 13). As John Paul II wrote in Ecclesia in Oceania: “It is the fundamental call of lay people to renew the temporal order in all its many elements. In this way, the Church becomes the yeast that leavens the entire loaf of the temporal order” (n. 43).

Police taking part in a Sacred Heart procession

Thus, in spite of Pope Francis’s talk about the “co-responsibility” of the ordained and the lay faithful, we may say that the true responsibility of the laity is not the taking on of tasks inside the church, but taking on the world outside the church. Confronting unbelief with Christian witness, defeating secular narrowness with the grandeur of the Gospel, leavening temporal occupations with a supernatural perspective and motivation, and doing all this consistently and courageously, is far more challenging — and far more urgent — than mounting an ambo and reading a text, or donning an alb and passing cruets. In fact, the more that laity see themselves as fulfilled in aping the clergy, the more they will be deceived into thinking that they have done what they were supposed to do as Catholics. They have, as it were, punched their religion ticket, and can get back to secular life in its total secularity.

In the sacred liturgy, the laity exercise the Marian role of receiving divine gifts, which is the creature’s highest activity. No charism can be more honorable or more important than this receptivity. The gifts bestowed upon the clergy, and the various liturgical ministries, are at the service of the charity and holiness of the Church; they do not exist as ends in themselves, but as instruments for the pilgrimage of mankind to the City of God, where there will be no sacraments and no temple, since God will be “all in all” (cf. Rev 21:22–23; 1 Cor 15:28). The Marian receptivity of laymen and laywomen furnishes the light and strength necessary for their active, transformative mission in the family and in the world. Without drinking deeply from the wellspring, there can never be watered gardens. How ironic and how tragic that the laity’s misplaced liturgical activism seems inversely proportional to their zeal for the irreplaceable mission that is theirs in the home, on the land, in the city! The laity are meant to offer themselves up in sacrificial love (cf. Rom 12:1), so as to be a leaven in the world. That is their domain, that is their honorable and salvific “service.”

The Catholic peasants and aristocrats of the Vendée lived a pure Marian faith during the Terror by fully assuming their role to defend the Faith, to protect Catholic cities and families, to do battle against hostile forces; never did they try to substitute for clergy when their priests went missing. They knew, intuitively, the teaching of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 12 — how the Body of Christ has many diverse and unequal members that depend one upon another; that the eye has to be the eye, the hand the hand; each part has to be just what it is, to the best of its ability, and not a poor substitute for some other one. The “dignity” of the laity is in no way augmented by their taking on of quasi-clerical liturgical functions, just as neither is their dignity diminished by being spouses, parents, workers, citizens.

The Virgin Mary receiving her Son from the hand of St John

I couldn’t help noticing this past weekend in the usus antiquior, in which we celebrated the Second Sunday after Epiphany, that “the liturgical providence of God” furnished us with an Epistle and a Gospel that both referred expressly to “ministries.” We can learn some important lessons from meditating on these readings.

The Epistle is Romans 12:6–16:

Brethren: Having different gifts, according to the grace that is given us: either prophecy, to be used according to the rule of faith; or ministry, in ministering [Vulg.: ministerium in ministrando]; or he that teacheth, in doctrine; he that exhorteth, in exhorting; he that giveth, with simplicity; he that ruleth, with carefulness; he that showeth mercy, with cheerfulness. Let love be without dissimulation. Hating that which is evil, cleaving to that which is good: loving one another with the charity of brotherhood, with honour preventing one another: in carefulness not slothful: in spirit fervent: serving the Lord: rejoicing in hope: patient in tribulation: instant in prayer: communicating to the necessities of the saints: pursuing hospitality. Bless them that persecute you: bless, and curse not. Rejoice with them that rejoice, weep with them that weep: being of one mind one towards another; not minding high things, but consenting to the humble.

The Apostle gives us here a rich portrait of the true variety of gifts to be found in the Holy Church of God. There are gifts of ministry, but there are also gifts of prophecy, teaching, exhorting, ruling, and works of mercy. The passage then shifts from special charisms to the fundamental Christian vocation of loving: loving without dissimulation, with the charity of brotherhood; hating what is evil and cleaving to what is good; honoring, serving, praying, and offering hospitality.

When we read about offering hospitality, should we not be thinking of the baptized and confirmed laity? Hospitality has always been seen as one of the great duties and privileges of lay people: to open their homes, to share with the needy, to welcome friends and strangers. Indeed, what greater hospitality can husband and wife exercise than by giving food and shelter, love and education, to the children who are their common bond and the chief calling of their life? They own and manage property precisely for that reason: to share generously. Their primary calling is to bring Christian prayer, witness, and virtues into the home, and thence, into the workplace and marketplace, the political arena, the broad world of culture. The sanctuary is not their home, but their home can become an extension of the sanctuary. They do not “mind high things,” as if seeking a rank or a task that does not belong to them; rather, they consent to be found among the humble (another translation has: “do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly”).

The clergy, stewards of the mysteries of Christ, are busy with their own proper work, according to the gifts bestowed on them in the Mystical Body. Their primary calling is within the temple of God, offering Him exalted praise and ministering to the people, and in this work they will find fulfillment and sanctity, if — and this is a crucial if — they enjoy the freedom to be fully what they are and to utilize fully the armory and treasury of the Church’s liturgical inheritance. In short, they must have the best wine, drink it freely, and give it to others to drink.

The Gospel for the Second Sunday after Epiphany is John 2:1–11:

At that time there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee: and the mother of Jesus was there. And Jesus also was invited, and His disciples, to the marriage. And the wine failing, the mother of Jesus saith to Him: They have no wine. And Jesus saith to her: Woman, what is that to Me and to thee? My hour is not yet come. His mother saith to the waiters [ministris]: Whatsoever He shall say to you, do ye. Now there were set there six water-pots of stone, according to the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three measures apiece. Jesus saith to them: Fill the water-pots with water. And they filled them up to the brim. And Jesus said to them: Draw out now, and carry to the chief steward of the feast. And they carried it. And when the chief steward had tasted the water made wine, and knew not whence it was, but the waiters [ministri] knew who had drawn the water: the chief steward calleth the bridegroom, and saith to him: Every man at first setteth forth good wine: and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee; and manifested His glory, and His disciples believed in Him.

In this Gospel, Jesus is the Eternal High Priest who will offer the perfect sacrifice when “his hour” has come to glorify the Father (note how His Holy Name is mentioned seven times, which underlines His perfection as God and man — readers of St. John will know that this is anything but accidental); wine will be the symbol of the sweetness and abundance of His redemption. The architriclinus or chief steward is like the deacon who ministers to the priest at Solemn Mass; the “waiters” (ministri in Latin) are like the subdeacon and the acolytes who minister, in turn, to their superiors.

The guests at the wedding feast are the congregation. They are not serving, they are not busy with providing the food and drink; they are simply taking it all in and feasting. Theirs, in a sense, is “the better part” of Mary of Bethany.

The Virgin Mary is neither a minister nor a simple guest. Like the ministers, she brings about results, but in the mode of an intercessor — one who joins the power of the priest to the needs of the people, even as she joined in her womb the supreme deity with the neediness of human nature. Like the guests, she gratefully and joyfully receives good things from the Lord.

The Epistle and Gospel of the Second Sunday after Epiphany remind us of the wisdom of the Catholic Church in her traditional hierarchical and Christocentric liturgical praxis. Compared with the irrefutable coherence of the usus antiquior as it returns to more and more altars, the “polyesterdays” of liturgical experimentation are shown to have no staying power, no future — even on the artificial life support of canon law. 

Litany for the Clergy

In times such as our own, and particularly with the Synod on Youth taking place under circumstances far from optimal and seemingly bent on a tired regurgigation of outworn mantras, we would do well to pray a great deal more for our clergy — however angry or hopeless we might feel, and indeed, especially when there is so much to be angry or discouraged about. For, whatever else one may say, the worst or at least the most pervasive error of the postconciliar period has been the worldly activism that has sucked dry the wellsprings of contemplation, adoration, and reparation from the daily life of the Church. As we know from the dialogue betwen Abraham and the Lord, if there are only a few righteous men beseeching the Lord for mercy in any city, it will be spared; but if not, the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah is inescapable.

With this in mind, I would like to share a Litany for the Clergy that was recently published at the always edifying blog Vultus Christi, associated with Silverstream Priory. I have prayed this Litany a number of times during the silent Canon of the Mass and found that it well suited the pressing need of my heart to offer earnest petition at this time for our hierarchs, our clerics, and our seminarians (indeed, in a way that harmonizes with the Canon's opening, the Memento for the living, and Memento for the dead).

Crucifixion by Mikhail Nesterov (1912)

Litany for the Clergy

(for private use)

Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. 
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.
Christ, hear us. Christ, hear us.
Christ, graciously hear us. Christ, graciously hear us. 

God the Father, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named, have mercy on us.
God the Son, Eternal High Priest and Sovereign King, have mercy on us.
God the Holy Ghost, Source of sanctity, Guide of shepherds, have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us.

For the Pope, Vicar of Christ, hear us, O Lord, and have mercy.
For all the cardinals of God’s Holy Church, hear us, O Lord, and have mercy.
For all the bishops of God’s Holy Church, hear us, O Lord, and have mercy.
For all the priests of God’s Holy Church, hear us, O Lord, and have mercy.
For all the deacons of God’s Holy Church, hear us, O Lord, and have mercy.
For all the seminarians of God’s Holy Church, hear us, O Lord, and have mercy.
For all ministers of God’s Holy Church, hear us, O Lord, and have mercy.

For clergy faithful to their promises, precious Blood of Jesus, fortify them.
For clergy striving to be holy, precious Blood of Jesus, fortify them.
For clergy reverent in liturgy, precious Blood of Jesus, fortify them.
For clergy orthodox in doctrine, precious Blood of Jesus, fortify them.
For clergy courageous in preaching, precious Blood of Jesus, fortify them.
For clergy generous with Confession, precious Blood of Jesus, fortify them.
For clergy devoted to works of mercy, precious Blood of Jesus, fortify them.

For disoriented clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, console them.
For demoralized clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, console them.
For exhausted clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, console them.
For unappreciated clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, console them.
For calumniated clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, console them.
For persecuted clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, console them.
For silenced clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, console them.

For abusive clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, wash over them and convert them.
For ambitious clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, wash over them and convert them.
For irreverent clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, wash over them and convert them.
For heretical clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, wash over them and convert them.
For cowardly clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, wash over them and convert them.
For vindictive clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, wash over them and convert them.
For tepid clergy, precious Blood of Jesus, wash over them and convert them.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, spare and save Thy priests.
Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, heal and purify Thy priests.
Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, multiply Thy holy priests.

V. Arise, O Lord, into Thy resting place: Thou and the ark, which Thou hast sanctified.
R. Let Thy priests be clothed with justice: and let Thy saints rejoice.

Let us pray. O Lord Jesus Christ, be merciful unto Thy Church and let the light of Thy countenance shine upon us, that we who dwell in the valley of the shadow of death may be delivered from the evils that afflict us, and may receive many shepherds after Thy Sacred Heart, who will lead Thy flock in holiness to the pastures of grace and glory, where Thou livest and reignest with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.

Our Lady, Queen of the Clergy, pray for us.
St. Joseph, chaste spouse of the Bride, pray for us.
St. Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
St. John the Baptist, pray for us.
St. John, beloved disciple, pray for us.
St. John Chrysostom, pray for us.
St. John Vianney, pray for us.

Traditional Liturgy Attracts Vocations, Nourishes Contemplative Life, and Sustains the Priesthood

Monks at Clear Creek: no lack of vocations here!

In my post “Divergent Political Models in the Two ‘Forms’ of the Roman Rite,” I argued that people who bring a well-developed life of faith to the Novus Ordo are equipped to derive spiritual benefit from it, while those who attend the traditional Latin Mass are confronted by a strong and definite spirituality that drives them deeper into the mysteries of faith and the exercise of theological virtues. The new form is a loosely-demarcated playing field for liturgical intramurals, whereas the old form is an ascetical-mystical bootcamp through which soldiers of the Lord are driven. The former presupposes virtue; the latter produces it.

Can we find any external confirmation that this analysis is correct?

I would say yes. A sign of its truth is how often one encounters young people who either converted to the Faith or discovered a religious vocation precisely through the traditional liturgy. It was the liturgy itself that powerfully drew them in. Conversion and vocation stories in the Novus Ordo sphere seem to have a lot more to do with “I met this wonderful person” or “I was reading the Bible” or “I found this great book from Ignatius Press” or “I got to know the sisters in my high school” or “their devotion to the poor was so moving.”

All these motives are truly good, and the Lord wants to use them all. But it is still noteworthy that the Novus Ordo is rarely the powerful magnet that draws them in; it is a thing that people who are already drawn in for other reasons will go ahead and do as a regular prayer service. It’s the difference between relying on a neighbor for help and falling in love. Young people today rely for help on the Novus Ordo; they fall in love with the traditional liturgy. Or it is like the difference between acting from duty and acting from delight. We dutifully attend the Novus Ordo because it’s seen as “good for us,” like oatmeal; we get excited when the Latin Mass is available, because it’s delicious to the spiritual palate.

Perhaps readers may object that I am exaggerating the contrast. It may be that I am. But I can only speak from my own experience, as well as from conversations I’ve had as a teacher, choirmaster, or pilgrim with hundreds of young people over the past twenty years. There seems to me to be a vast difference in the perception of the attractiveness or desirability of the old liturgy versus that of the new — so much so that if a Catholic college or university wished to increase daily Mass attendance, all they would have to do is to provide the old Mass, or to provide it more frequently, and the number of communicants would significantly increase. It might seem utterly counterintuitive, and yet it is borne out again and again at chaplaincies across the world.

A psychologist or a sociologist would say that this can have many causes, but what concerns me at the moment is that there is a real theological explanation. One can see, in liturgical terms, why the old form of Mass (and Office and sacraments and blessings, etc.) would be powerfully attractive to today’s youth who discover them. These age-old, pre-industrial, pre-democratic forms are so much richer and denser, more symbolic, involved, and mysterious, pointing both more obviously and more obscurely to the supernatural, the divine, the transcendent, the gratuitous, the unexpected. They are seductive, as only God can be seductive. Seduxisti me, Domine, et seductus sum: fortior me fuisti, et invaluisti (Jer 20:7). This, after all, is what Pope Benedict XVI had in mind when he wrote to all the bishops of the world: “It has clearly been demonstrated that young persons, too, have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction, and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist particularly suited to them.”

The reformed liturgy in its Genevan simplicity has never won any awards for seductiveness. It can barely be looked at head on before people feel embarrassed about its nakedness and try to clothe it with every accoutrement they can find or invent. We have to bring to it a devotion or a seriousness of purpose that we ourselves possess, if we are going to be in a position to benefit from the divine sacrament it spartanly houses. Without love of the Lord presupposed, this would be a wearisome, unrewarding business, rather like having to convince an indifferent person to be friends with you. It’s an uphill battle from the start. Why should young people be interested in something that is so boringly lecture-like, so logical and efficient, or so much in need of artificial sweeteners, like sacro-pop music? Most of them would rather be anywhere else.

A nun of the traditional Benedictines of Mary

In attempting to understand how liturgy helps or hinders priestly and religious vocations, we should also take into account the demands of active life and contemplative life. Religious communities nowadays tend strongly in the direction of the active life, with apostolates in the world. As Dom Chautard and others have pointed out, modern people are strongly tempted to fall for the “heresy of activism,” whereby we believe that by our hard work we will bring about the kingdom of God on earth. Liberation Theology is an extreme example of the same tendency, but it has been at work since at least the heresy of Americanism diagnosed by Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae, according to which the so-called “active virtues” of work in the world have surpassed in worth and relevance the so-called “passive virtues” of religious and contemplative life.

Since the Novus Ordo valorizes the active and denigrates the passive, it seems to fit well with the activist or Americanist mentality. Thus it seems that active religious orders could find it somehow amenable, as long as they could keep bringing to it an interior life cultivated largely through other means. But the priesthood, which must be rooted in the mysteries of the altar in order to remain strong and fruitful, and the contemplative religious life, which focuses on offering up the sacrifice of praise and not on an external apostolate, cannot flourish on a subsistence diet. What may seem “good enough” for the laborer in the vineyard is perilously inadequate for the priest and the contemplative, who need a truly sacerdotal and contemplative liturgy if they are fully to realize their great callings.

This is why we see everywhere across the world that serious priests and contemplatives will either “traditionalize” the Novus Ordo as much as they can, or adopt the traditional Mass and Office, or both. Examples of this variety of tradition-friendly approaches may be found in communities such as the Abbey of St. Joseph de Clairval, the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius, the Community of St. Martin, and the monks of Norcia, Fontgombault, Clear Creek, and Heiligenkreuz.

Am I saying, then, that the (relatively few) healthy religious communities that use the Novus Ordo would be even better off with the Vetus Ordo? Yes, absolutely. The good they have would be multiplied, their power of attraction and intercession greatly intensified. Unfortunately, however, even those who have come to recognize the superiority of tradition will be discouraged by the hostile climate introduced under this pontificate from returning to the Church's authentic lex orandi, lest they suffer the fate of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate or the Trappists of Mariawald. In this official opposition to the desperately-needed restoration of Catholic tradition we can see the telltale signs of the Devil's implacable hatred for the celibate priesthood and the contemplative religious life.

But neither human nor angelic opposition should prevent any community from quietly and judiciously incorporating the traditional liturgy into its daily life. “Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints” (Rev 13:10). The ancient Latin liturgical rites and uses have nourished the saints of the Western Church for over 1,600 years. They have an imperishable power to do the same for all the saints Our Lord desires to raise up today. Traditional liturgy never failed to attract vocations of every kind or to support the Christian life of the laity; it continues to exercise the same fascination and fortification among us. The new-fangled liturgical rite of yesterday, like the Americanist world in which it was inculturated, is failing. A healthier Church, a healthier spiritual polity, is in the making.

Seminarians of the FSSP in Germany

Time for the Soul to Absorb the Mysteries — Part 5: Concluding Reflections

Looking back over our survey of the classical rite of Mass (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4), we see that all of the elements we have considered produce the effect of a certain timelessness, of a floating in between matters of mere practicality or business. One is not checking items off of a list, but rather, ceasing to think just about getting things done; one is “setting aside all earthly cares” and letting oneself be carried along by an action that is so much vaster and deeper than oneself, a reality that shows its face only in response to our patience, attentiveness, and surrender. The more we talk, do stuff, make noise, and carry on, the less we see of that reality, the less we enter that cosmic and eternal action. When the liturgy is allowed to be itself and to do what is proper to it — slowly, repetitiously, carefully, and beautifully — we are pulled out of ourselves, our finite world and ticking time, and made to be partakers of the divine nature. This is when liturgy is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet and gives us the strength to persevere in the long pilgrimage towards it.

In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that the Novus Ordo, in its very design and especially in its typical instantiation, stands in tension with interiority, recollection, self-awareness, and sensitivity to the divine — that keen sensus mysteriorum that is practically convertible with the traditional Roman Rite in any of its levels (Low, High, Solemn, Pontifical). The old rite, in contrast, forces us to develop habits of prayer — self-motivated prayer, since you are thrown, to a large extent, on your own resources. As a blogger once rather insightfully put it:

One can still hold the new rite to be integrally Catholic, and yet consider that the culture of the extraordinary form, where the people are supposedly passive, tends to teach people to pray independently, while the culture of the ordinary form often tends to create a dynamic in which people just chat to each other in church unless they are being actively animated by a minister.[1]

Fr. Chad Ripperger expands on this point:

St. Augustine said that no person can save his soul if he does not pray. Now it is a fact that mental prayer and prayer in general have collapsed among the laity (and the clergy, for that matter) in the past thirty years. It is my own impression that this development actually has to do with the ritual of the Mass. Now in the new rite, everything centers around vocal prayer, and the communal aspects of the prayer are heavily emphasized. This has led people to believe that only those forms of prayer that are vocal and communal have any real value…
        The ancient ritual, on the other hand, actually fosters a prayer life. The silence during the Mass actually teaches people that they must pray. Either one will get lost in distraction during the ancient ritual or one will pray. The silence and encouragement to pray during the Mass teach people to pray on their own. While, strictly speaking, they are not praying on their own insofar as they should be joining their prayers and sacrifices to the Sacrifice and prayer of the priest, these actions are done interiorly and mentally and so naturally dispose them toward that form of prayer. This is one of the reasons that, after the Mass is said according to the ancient ritual, people are naturally quieter and tend to pray afterwards. If everything is done vocally and out loud, then once the vocal stops, people think it is over. It is very difficult to get people who attend the new rite of Mass to make a proper thanksgiving by praying afterward because their appetites and faculties have habituated them toward talking out loud.

Fr. Ray Blake wonders aloud if the very emphasis on the spoken word has led us away from the interior spirit of worship, to such an extent that we might not be engaged in the supreme act of adoration or latria at all, but only filling the air with well-meaning verbiage, as if the church were a holy lecture hall.

True worship leads us to contemplate the God who is always beyond us, the God before whom Old Testament patriarchs and prophets fall on their faces in worship. Practically at every Mass I have celebrated over the thirty years I have been ordained I have felt the need “to break the bread of the word,” to preach — except at the Traditional Mass, where all I want to do is adore the Father through the Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. I am beginning to believe that if the Word of God does not lead us to the act of worship, there is something wrong in its presentation, and if the Mass does not lead us to fall on our knees to be fed by God, there is something wrong here, too. Contemplating the Mystery of the Trinity should lead us to be lost in the immensity and beauty of God, realising His greatness and our nothingness, desiring only to abandon ourselves to Him, crying out with Christ: “Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit.” If this realisation is not the result of worship, perhaps we are not worshipping at all![2]

Joseph Shaw contrasts the scripted, regimented participation of the new Mass with the freer “open worship” characteristic of the old liturgy, which generates a peculiar sense of togetherness by the intensity of each individual worshiping the same mystery, each in his own way:

What is quite out of the question, in this kind of liturgy [viz., the Novus Ordo], is that you should engage with it at your own pace, on your own level, in prayer. Prayerful contemplation is simply not allowed: it will be interrupted within a few minutes, and you’ll get funny looks. The opposite is the case with the Traditional Mass. You are, essentially, left alone, but left alone united with the community in the act of worship. You may have things given to you to help you follow the Mass, there may even be responses (especially at a sung Mass), but no one will think you odd if you just look at what is happening on the altar in prayerful silence. And for the Canon, that is what everyone is doing. You are drawn in: it may be to something unfamiliar, if contemplative prayer is unfamiliar, but it is something which you can do your own way. It is not a Procrustean bed; you can make of it what you will.

Thus, ironically, considering that the Catholic liturgy was practically turned upside-down and inside-out to promote “active participation,” the faithful who attend the old Mass today evince a superior personal engagement in what they are doing. Why is this the case? Dom Alcuin Reid suggests two reasons: first, that people who are drawn to traditional worship must make significant sacrifices to find it and have often invested seriously in forming their own understanding. But there is a second reason having to do with the rites themselves:

Perhaps also it is due to the very demands they place on the worshipper — one has to find ways of connecting with these rites, or indeed of allowing them to connect with us, because of their ritual complexity. Their multivalent nature has a particular value: it provides varying means of connection with Christ acting in the liturgy that perhaps better correspond to our differing temperaments and psyches.[3]

In my book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness, I talk about the effort involved in carrying out a traditional Tenebrae service at Wyoming Catholic College, and how many hours of practice and years of iteration it has required to reach the stage we are now at: “The best and deepest things take time to assimilate, to understand, to perfect. When it comes to liturgy in particular, we have to fight tooth and nail against the modern spirit of immediate gratification and quick results” (p. 185). Nowadays, prayer and liturgical services are prone to being shortened (perhaps “short-circuited” would be a better term), since the participants are either in a hurry to get to other business, or their span of attention is just too short. For Holy Week, the very highpoint of the Church’s year, one may observe in many places that the customary procession of palms on Palm Sunday is omitted and the blessing is done after communion instead; the Reproaches on Good Friday are skipped, in spite of their immense antiquity, beauty, and spiritual power. The Novus Ordo liturgical books are characterized by the option of shortened versions of readings and prayers. The modern impatience with anything not immediately gratifying extends even to pious/liturgical activities. To this mentality, St. Josemaría Escrivá already replied, years before it reached its peak: “‘The Mass is long,’ you say, and I add: ‘Because your love is short’” (The Way, n. 529).

Let us give the last word to a priest who discovered the liturgical tradition and fell in love with it.

When you truly love God, you are not miserly in sharing your time with Him in prayer, in the Holy Mass, and other liturgical exercises, since He is constantly sharing His time with you, His beloved. Since youth, I had been accustomed to the Vatican II revisions of the liturgy. Thank God, through dear Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum, I came to discover the solemn beauty of the traditional Latin Mass and other Catholic practices. Yes, these are more demanding of our time, but if one allows them time to penetrate the depth of the soul, one will exclaim joyfully: “Lord, it is good for us to be here.”

NOTES

[1] Unfortunately this site, The Sensible Bond, was disabled, so this text is available only in cache.

[2] Online here; text slightly modified.

[3] From Dom Alcuin Reid’s review of Andrea Grillo’s Beyond Pius V.

Confronting the Heresy of Activism with the Primacy of Prayer

In Henri de Lubac’s Vatican Council Notebooks — a resource already put to good use here at New Liturgical Movement in discussions of splendor and Latin — we find the following summary of a speech by Cardinal William Godfrey, archbishop of Westminster, on Friday, November 9, 1962, during the debate over the Divine Office:

Some people exaggerate the onus sacerdotum in opere pastorali [the burden of priests in pastoral work]. I have been a parish priest; I see a large number of priests; I have never met any who have told me that they no longer have time for the breviary. Do not legislate universally for a few exceptional cases. Be careful of the haeresis bonorum operum [the heresy of good works]. Work must be subordinate to prayer. The breviary has already been made lighter. It must remain the essentiale nutrimentum nostri laboris [the essential nourishment of our work]. … In our cathedral, the office is recited or chanted every day; our work is not neglected because of that. [1]

On Saturday, November 10, Bishop Martin Jaime Flores of Barbastro, Spain, made the rather obvious but important point that “Oratio est labor pastoralis”—prayer is, in a way, a pastoral work: it is something that benefits the people more than any other work. [2] Later that day, Bishop Luigi Carli of Segni spoke out against what he called “activismus exaggeratus,” an exaggerated activism, and said that the reduction of the breviary would be “shocking, a scandal to the whole Christian people.” [3]

Bishop John Ireland, father of Americanism

To find the roots of this “exaggerated activism” — which Fr. Jordan Aumann, O.P., went so far as to call a “heresy” [4] — we need to go back to the Americanist controversy of the late nineteenth century. Fr. Walter Elliott’s 1891 biography of Fr. Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulists, appeared in a French translation in 1897. This translation included the controversial Introduction by Bishop John Ireland of St. Paul, which was to occasion Leo XIII’s letter Testem Benevolentiae of 1899, addressed to Cardinal Gibbons and the American bishops. As related in the 1976 book Histoire des crises du clergé français contemporain by Paul Vigneron, the biography of Hecker became a bestseller among the French clergy then under siege from an anticlerical government. Soon there was a turning away from the interior life towards activism, or, as we might nowadays call it, “being pastoral.” Vocations to the diocesan priesthood plunged. Only the publication of Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard’s book L’Ame de Tout Apostolat [The Soul of the Apostolate - 1907, 1909, 1913] would reverse the trend. Vocations flourished until 1946, by which time over 250,000 copies of Chautard’s book had been sold. Then, Fr. Marie-Dominique Chenu, national chaplain of the worker priests, publicly attacked L’Ame de Tout Apostolat as outdated: the conditions under which Dom Chautard wrote no longer exist. Vocations to the diocesan priesthood plunged, never to recover. [5]

Marie-Dominique Chenu, opponent of Dom Chautard

Thus, by the time of the meeting of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, the battle lines were fairly well drawn up between those who, in accord with Catholic tradition as enunciated by Chautard, saw the inherent priority of prayer and contemplation over works of the active life, and those who, following the modern trend from Ireland to Chenu, wished to lessen the “burden” of prayer in favor of pastoral efficiency.

There is no doubt about which side won in practice: all of the liturgies of the Roman Catholic Church, from the sacramental rites to the Divine Office to the blessings, were greatly shortened, simplified, and streamlined; the people were given much to “do,” and the celebrant was given the more “active” roles of interlocutor, animator, commentator, improviser. Religious life was redefined in terms of social apostolate. Contemplatives, in particular, felt they had to justify their existence by pointing to concrete benefits they conferred on society. As vocations to the diocesan priesthood plummeted, so too, and for much the same reason, religious vocations plummeted, never to recover in the mainstream Church. [6]

Today, many decades into the weary aftermath, the costly “collateral damage,” of all this frenzied activism, we are in a position to see more clearly than ever the wisdom of Godfrey, Flores, and Carli, the wisdom of Leo XIII, Chautard, and Aumann. No less a figure than Joseph Ratzinger frequently and perceptively writes about the problem of activism, which he considered symptomatic of a loss of confidence in the reality of Jesus Christ and the primacy of His kingdom. In a poignant section of The Ratzinger Report, he speaks of the loss of the dimension of feminine receptivity in the Church:

Activism, the will to be “productive,” “relevant,” come what may, is the constant temptation of the man, even of the male religious. And this is precisely the basic trend in the ecclesiologies . . . that present the Church as a “People of God” committed to action, busily engaged in translating the Gospel into an action program with social, political, and cultural objectives. But it is no accident if the word “Church” is of feminine gender. In her, in fact, lives the mystery of motherhood, of gratitude, of contemplation, of beauty, of values in short that appear useless in the eyes of the profane world. Without perhaps being fully conscience of the reason, the woman religious feels the deep disquiet of living in a Church where Christianity is reduced to an ideology of doing, according to that strictly masculine ecclesiology which nevertheless is presented — and perhaps believed — as being closer also to women and their “modern” needs. Instead it is the project of a Church in which there is no longer any room for mystical experience, for this pinnacle of religious life which not by chance has been, through the centuries, among the glories and riches offered to all in unbroken constancy and fullness, more by women than by men. [7]

In a lecture he gave on “The New Evangelization” in the year 2000, Ratzinger, like Chautard, pointed to the necessary foundation of apostolate in prayer:

“Jesus preached by day, by night he prayed.” With these few words, he [Don Didimo] wished to say: Jesus had to acquire the disciples from God. The same is always true. We ourselves cannot gather men. We must acquire them by God for God. All methods are empty without the foundation of prayer. The word of the announcement must always be drenched in an intense life of prayer. … Theocentrism is fundamental in the message of Jesus and must also be at the heart of new evangelization. … To proclaim God is to introduce [others] to a relation with God: to teach how to pray. Prayer is faith in action. And only by experiencing life with God does the evidence of his existence appear. [8]

Pope Benedict XVI returns to this theme in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, of 2005:

Prayer, as a means of drawing ever new strength from Christ, is concretely and urgently needed. People who pray are not wasting their time, even though the situation appears desperate and seems to call for action alone. Piety does not undermine the struggle against the poverty of our neighbors, however extreme. … It is time to reaffirm the importance of prayer in the face of the activism and the growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work. Clearly, the Christian who prays does not claim to be able to change God’s plans or correct what he has foreseen. Rather, he seeks an encounter with the Father of Jesus Christ, asking God to be present with the consolation of the Spirit to him and his work. … Our crying out [to the Father] is, as it was for Jesus on the Cross, the deepest and most radical way of affirming our faith in his sovereign power. [9]

Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1655)

One of the most developed treatments of this theme is found in Benedict XVI’s General Audience of April 25, 2012, explaining the Apostles’ decision to ordain deacons to assist them. The pope sees in the Apostles’ focus on the Word and the deacons’ handling of the poor a reflection of the distinction between Mary and Martha of Bethany, and notes that each aspect supports the other: prayerful meditation on the Word leads to its convincing proclamation, and, at the same time, the men to be chosen for works of mercy must be imbued with the Holy Spirit, not mere social workers. He then comes to his central point, which deserves to be read with the “burden” of the recitation or chanting of the Divine Office in mind:

We must not lose ourselves in pure activism but always let ourselves also be penetrated in our activities by the light of the word of God and thereby learn true charity, true service to others, which does not need many things — it certainly needs the necessary things, but needs above all our heartfelt affection and the light of God.
          In commenting on the episode of Martha and Mary, St. Ambrose urges his faithful and us too: “Let us too seek to have what cannot be taken from us, dedicating diligent, not distracted, attention to the Lord’s word. The seeds of the heavenly word are blown away, if they are sown along the roadside. May the wish to know be an incentive to you too, as it was to Mary; this is the greatest and most perfect act.” And he added that “attention to the ministry must not distract from knowledge of the heavenly word” through prayer (Expositio Evangelii secundunm Lucam, VII, 85; PL 15: 1720).
          St. Bernard, who is a model of harmony between contemplation and hard work, in his book De consideratione, addressed to Pope Innocent II to offer him some reflections on his ministry, insists precisely on the importance of inner recollection, of prayer to defend oneself from the dangers of being hyper-active, whatever our condition and whatever the task to be carried out. St Bernard says that all too often, too much work and a frenetic life-style end by hardening the heart and causing the spirit to suffer (cf.II, 3).
          His words are a precious reminder to us today, used as we are to evaluating everything with the criterion of productivity and efficiency. ... Without daily prayer lived with fidelity, our acts are empty, they lose their profound soul, and are reduced to being mere activism which in the end leaves us dissatisfied. … For pastors, this is the first and most valuable form of service for the flock entrusted to them. If the lungs of prayer and of the word of God do not nourish the breath of our spiritual life, we risk being overwhelmed by countless everyday things: prayer is the breath of the soul and of life.[10]

Looking back over these valuable texts from Ratzinger (and there are many more like them), we cannot avoid posing some uncomfortable questions for ourselves—for clergy, religious, and laity who are striving for holiness, which we know is not a product of our actions but a gift given to those who ask for it in prayer, who seek, who knock.

Do we actually believe in God? If we do, we will believe in His lordship, His primacy, His precedence over all created things, material or spiritual, visible or invisible—such that He always deserves priority in our daily life, the best of our time, energy, attention. That goes for liturgical prayer as well as private prayer.

Do we believe Our Lord’s word when He openly says: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Mt 6:33), or when He says: “Without Me, you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5)? If so, we will reject at its very root the secular Pelagian mentality that has crept into and corrupted so many “good works” sponsored by the Church or practiced in the name of Christianity.

Do we believe that Our Lord receives more honor and glory when we put on our lips and fix in our hearts the words of the very Psalms He inspired for Himself to recite as man on earth, as the Church bids us do in the Divine Office? If we do, our thinking about the “burden” of the Office will change; we will consider taking up some form of the preconciliar breviary, be it Roman or monastic; we will not seek shortness, speed, and efficiency; nor, if we are praying in Latin already, will we cut corners by a thoughtless rapidity of recitation.

Do we believe that the same Lord Jesus Christ is really, metaphysically, bodily, personally present to us at Mass? If we do, it should be obvious in the way we are worshiping, and the place that worship occupies in our daily life.

Ultimately, do we believe in the power and mystery of prayer? That is the question Cardinal Godfrey’s words, spoken 55 years ago, should prompt in us today.

NOTES

[1] Henri de Lubac, Vatican Council Notebooks (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015), 1:258–59. The Latin is not italicized in the book.
[2] Ibid., 266.
[3] Ibid., 268–69.
[4] Jordan Aumann, O.P., “The Heresy of Action,” in Cross and Crown, vol. 3 (1951), pp. 25–45.
[5] I owe this information to Anthony Sistrom. Vigneron cites more than 300 biographies and memoires of French priests in establishing his narrative.
[6] See Hilary White’s fine article "What is the Catholic Religion Actually For? A Monastic Answer."
[7] The Ratzinger Report (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 103.
[8] Available here.
[9] Deus Caritas Est, nn. 36-38.
[10] Available here.