False Antiquarianism and Liturgical Reform

Origin of Corpus Christi procession? Charles Walter Stetson’s “A Pagan Procession” (1892)

Lately my wife and I are reading aloud Ronald Knox’s masterpiece Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, first published in 1950, and not a whit less marvelous today than it was then. The parallels one can see with the Charismatic movement and (to be rigorously fair) among some traditionalists give pause, to say the least.

At one point (p. 60) Knox quotes an author named Monceaux:

It is a common trait among the heretics and schismatics of all ages; schism and heresy have almost always, for their point of departure, a regret for the past, the claim or the dream of going back to the fountain-source of a religious idea, to the discipline or faith of an apostolic age.

As all are well aware, the current leadership in Rome frequently chides tradition-loving Catholics as “backwardists” in the grip of a hopeless nostalgia, etc. The same Catholics find it very tempting to reply that their opponents are themselves quite stuck in the 1960s/70s, and show the keenest signs of nostalgia for those halcyon days after “The Council,” when the first winds of the “new Pentecost” were howling. This is a game easy enough to play; except that the charge of nostalgia really sticks where the average age is in the 80s, and sticks less easily where the average age is about 14, if you look at any typical trad congregation.

Back to Monceaux: it does indeed seem true that all wild-eyed reformers in Church history cry out that they are bringing the Church back to its original purity, to the primitive apostolic faith and practice, discarding centuries of man-made superstitious accretions. We can see this especially among the Protestants, whose entire view of and approach to liturgy is permeated with that assumption, and whose vastly different, indeed contradictory liturgical practices effectively indicate the impossibility of coherently acting on it.

In an article at NLM back in 2019, I quoted a passage from a popular Protestant homeschooling textbook, World History and Cultures in Christian Perspective, published by Abeka:

The pagans who flooded the imperial church [after the Edict of Milan] inundated it with heathen beliefs, practices, and traditions. Public worship was described by Justin Martyr in the second century as a simple meeting of believers on the Lord’s Day to hear the Scriptures read and explained along with the singing of hymns, the offering of prayers, the celebrating of the Lord’s Supper, and the receiving of gifts.
            The influence of paganism began to change the worship service into elaborate rites and ceremonies with all the trappings of heathen temple worship. The presbyters now became sacerdotes who offered up the Lord’s body and blood as a sacrifice for the living and dead. Little by little, these errors and distortions grew and developed into the false teachings and practices of the medieval church. … Some devout followers even purchased and worshipped relics.…
            The demands of their religion led the people to regard Christ as a stern and merciless Judge rather than a compassionate and loving Savior. They sought to placate the Son’s wrath against their sins by praying to His mother, the Virgin Mary, and seeking her intercession. Because even Mary sometimes seemed unapproachable, they also prayed to the long-departed apostles and other saints (deceased Christians officially recognized by the Church as holy because of martyrdom, miracles, or other merits). But the Bible clearly teaches that there is only one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 2:5).

Surely, a caricature of this magnitude will not be found in reputable Catholic authors; yet one will find passages that are too close for comfort. A book entitled Catholic Faith Handbook for Youth, published by St. Mary’s Press in 2008, is a case in point. Here is how it describes the changes in the liturgy:

The liturgy we experience today is quite different from that of fifty or sixty years ago. Over the ages, what began as a gather of friends and followers of Jesus sharing a meal and remembering his teachings became an increasingly elaborate ceremony of sacrifice. The celebrations of the Lord’s Supper, held in secret in people’s homes during the times of persecution, gave way to highly ritualized ceremonies held in beautiful churches. By the Middle Ages, the priest was saying Mass while the people watched in silence. The focus was primarily on Jesus’ sacrifice, which diminished the symbol of a shared meal. Those attending were not participants as much as watchers. In the 1960s the bishop from around the world gathered at the Second Vatican Council. They called for important reforms to renew the liturgy. The language of the liturgy changed from Latin to the vernacular, so that for the first time in hundreds of years, the people could hear and understand the prayers being said. People were also encouraged to receive Communion, in the hand, and from the cup. The idea of a shared meal around a table was reclaimed from the early years of Christianity.

This book comes equipped with nihil obstat and imprimatur.

Traditionally, a more typical line of thought: Gustave Doré, “Le triomphe de Christianisme sur le paganisme” (1868)

Self-consciously modern liturgists follow this line of thought completely. A case in point is an interview with Sr. Marie-Aimée Manchon, a professor at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, conducted by La Croix’s Clémence Houdaille (the full article may be viewed here). Sr. Manchon’s initial move is to warn again confusing beauty with aestheticism—a convenient way of signaling that one is actually not all that interested in the serious pursuit of beauty in worship. Sister then launches into her main exposition:

When coming to Mass, some people are looking for a friendly, relaxing time with Jesus. Others want a solemn moment, a break from the ordinary. Aspirations differ, and the liturgy will not be able to respond perfectly to them. In his apostolic letter Desiderio desideravi, the pope reminds us that the liturgy is there to help us enter into the great aspiration of God, which is much greater than our small aspirations of the moment. It is not just about the rite, about worship. It is about entering into a gaze, that of God upon us, says Romano Guardini, the major theologian of the Liturgical Movement, who inspired Vatican II.

(Pause: it is highly doubtful that Guardini would have been able to recognize his thought in the “plumber’s work” of the Consilium. Resuming with Sister:)

God’s great desire is to make us his sons and daughters, saints, and that all be saved. There is a filial, eschatological, and missionary dimension to the liturgy that flows from the Paschal Mystery. We do not celebrate it for ourselves. When we understand this, it does not matter if it does not correspond to our sensibility. The pope reminds us that the liturgy guarantees us the possibility of an encounter with Christ. Isn’t the key to getting out of the divide to remember that? The liturgical celebration must allow this encounter with Christ in the sacraments and in the brothers and sisters. For this, the rubrics and rituals are necessary, the pope tells us again. It is not a question of military discipline, but of allowing it to flow from the source and that we find ourselves there.... There is a good habit of the rite which allows us to inhabit the actions we make. But this habit must not become a routine, otherwise we fall into the trap denounced by Charles Péguy, that of being a “habitual Christian,” “impervious to grace.”

As before with “aestheticism,” so too with the attack on routine, habit, discipline: all this is code language for an anti-ritual mentality, the justification for changing things up to avoid “ossification.” It is not habit that is the problem, but a lack of spiritual or interior life, and this lack will not be met by liturgical experiments. On the contrary, the stability of traditional rites, their silence, their contemplative nature, is more likely to encourage higher levels of prayer. In any case, Sr. Manchon does not leave us guessing about her fundamentally anti-liturgical stance:

Some people are convinced that they are great liturgists because they know the form, whereas they do not seek the spirit. But form must be erased, and returned to the presence of Christ, because it is at the service of this encounter…. Liturgy in the Church differs from the sacred, which exists in all religions and can remain very pagan. The sacred is important for people, but it can also be a vector of separation and domination, of power, through prohibitions (do not touch, etc.). Through the Incarnation, we pass from the sacred to the holy.

This tidy formulation suggests that the history of liturgy after Constantine is a passing from the holy to the sacred, that is, from informal spontaneity and improvisation to formal rigidity and fixity, from humble homes of hospitality to grand worldly churches rife with sacerdotalism, from the post-religious breakthrough represented by Christ the New Man to the reasserted paganism of regimented rituality. And so forth. In short, “the pagans flooded the imperial church”, and the early Christian “breaking of bread” was swept away.

If you dig, dig, dig, you will always find this antiquarianism at the root of all the arguments in favor of the liturgical reform. It is the essential premise, the unquestioned axiom, the point of departure. It is not a Catholic premise and cannot yield anything worthwhile. In fact, it will yield interminable disagreements because there is no way to arrive at a definite, knowable, actionable truth; everything is lost in the mists of speculation and imagination, subject to the agenda of a given sect of antiquarians.

Károly Ferenczy, “Archeology” (1896)

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

From Extemporaneity to Fixity of Form: The Grace of Liturgical Stability

Catholics who love the traditional liturgical rites of the Church maintain that a fixity and stability of sacred formulas is essential both to the nature of liturgy as such and to the fruitful participation of the laity. But some liturgical scholars might object: Wasn't liturgy in the earliest centuries of the church extemporaneous and improvised? The answer is: yes — and no. Few things are as important as understanding how and why we moved from liturgy-in-flux to fixed and stable liturgy.

For starters, in their gatherings for worship, ancient Christians do not seem to have practiced “casual” or “informal” prayer in the way in which the relaxed Christians of today might practice it. All the records we have indicate set prayer forms not only among the Jews whose Scriptures are full of formulaic prayers but also among the earliest Christians, several of whose hymns are preserved in the New Testament and in Patristic literature. Gregory Dix, Adrian Fortescue, Paul Bradshaw, and other scholars note that the prayers of the Christians, offered up by their leaders in a spontaneous but tradition-informed manner, acquired consistent formulaic patterns over time and settled into repeatable rites and ceremonies. After a few centuries of ever-solidifying praxis, improvisation ceased to be a feature of the liturgy — and this, for obvious reasons.

Christianity is a religion with deeply conservative instincts: we are holding on to what has been given to us once for all in the revelation of Jesus Christ, the depositum fidei. A devout bishop who celebrated the Eucharist would arrive at satisfactory ways of speaking to which the people became habituated [1], and his successor, drawn from within his own clergy, would naturally wish to follow in his footsteps and model his liturgical prayer after that of his father in Christ. As Michael Davies observes, when a community had a holy bishop who was accustomed to praying in certain ways, his successor would have had every reason to imitate him, and the people every right to expect that continuity. Otherwise, how would the ancient sacramentaries, with their carefully-formulated orations, have ever developed?

The eloquent and polished prayers we find in the oldest extant liturgical books did not suddenly drop down from heaven; they are the faithful reflection of the actual practice of Catholic communities gathered around their God-fearing bishops. In this way it was normal, one could say inevitable, that fixed anaphoras, readings, collects, antiphons, etc., would develop and stabilize over time. Thus, it should come as no surprise to find, no later than the seventh century and possibly as early as the fifth, a complete cycle of propers for the Roman Rite. Gennadius of Massilia (5th cent.) says of St. Paulinus of Nola, “Fecit et sacramentarium et hymnarium – he made both a sacramentary and a hymnal” (De viris illustribus, XLVIII). There is an account in Gregory of Tours of a bishop who had everything memorized, and when the book was removed (maliciously) he was able to do everything by memory.

In short, improvisation has not been a characteristic of the liturgy for 1,500 years. The evidence we have points to the relatively rapid development of fixed forms.

It is, moreover, absurd to think that the Holy Spirit did not intend this state of affairs as a positive good, or that the Church erred in remaining a jealous guardian of the spelled-out content of liturgical books. It would be no less ridiculous to assert that the same Spirit, after having willed such a state of affairs for 1,500 years, would suddenly will its dissolution, dilution, or replacement. So much for improvisation—or optionitis, which might be called a soft version of improvisation. [2] 

A key principle in liturgy is “the principle of stability.” The early Church was in a divinely-willed state of formation, and had wider and freer powers precisely because she was in an embryonic condition, growing rapidly and establishing her institutions under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. [3] The same Spirit guides her gently and gradually into set forms, which are the fairest flowers of those early developments. He prunes what is less worthy and nourishes what is more worthy. We should therefore expect, as time goes on, that the liturgy will become more and more solid, definite, fixed, and perfected. It will be handed down increasingly as a family inheritance, an approved profession of the Church’s one faith.

We see the same kind of development in the dogmatic debates of the early councils, with their ever more precise creeds that cut off all heretical depravity. We do not have the “freedom” to go back to the looseness and ambiguity of the early centuries, although modernists seem to wish they could do so. [4] Catholics have the immense blessing and privilege of carrying more refined and more precise formulas on our lips. Those who live after an Ecumenical Council — any of the councils except the last one, that is — are at a decisive advantage compared with those who lived before it, since they can now profess their faith in the Lord and confess His holy Name using a more perfect expression of the truth, and with less danger of lapsing into error about the highest, best, and most difficult things.

The development of the liturgy in this respect is much like the development of languages. Yes, a language such as French or German or English is ever developing, but it is much more the same than different from decade to decade and even, as time goes on, century to century. English as we write it today is much the same as that which was written 300 years ago; any literate person can pick up Samuel Johnson and read him without much difficulty (perhaps looking up a word here or there).

Yet a notable difference obtains between “hieratic” languages — those that, having attained a certain richness or fullness of development, were then taken over into religious practice as sacral tongues — and vernacular languages. The hieratic languages — e.g., Hebrew, ancient Greek, ecclesiastical Latin, Church Slavonic — are, as regards their use in divine worship, unchanging and unchangeable. They do not need to develop any more, since they are perfect at expressing what their respective liturgies need them to express. Only if revelation were to change would the language conveying it need to change. A hieratic language becomes an external sign of the internal stability, consistency, and timelessness of the religious truths conveyed through it. It does not deviate to the left or to the right in its unerring delivery of the message. Its linguistic completeness not only participates in divine attributes but helps bring about our participation in these attributes. In this way, a sacred language has a sacramental function.

A vernacular language, on the other hand, is intended to be the medium of daily discourse, the supple tool of life in the world, which is rife with change. The vernacular will never be done changing, reflecting the hustle and bustle of the people who use it. It is just this mutability and instability that explain why the religious instincts of all peoples have enshrined their highest forms of worship and doctrine in hieratic or classical languages. The vernacular is for this world of change, of Heracleitian flux; the hieratic is for the eternal world that always abides, like Parmenidean Being, and penetrates through the veil of this world in the form of dogma and doxology.

Think of the Eastern Christian liturgies, which are extremely conservative (at least where modern liturgists have not defaced them). The priest might add a personal intention during the litanies, but the fixed prayers are exactly that: fixed, finalized, admitting of no improvement. It would be a species of sacrilege to tamper with these glorious prayers. That, too, was the attitude of the Latin Church towards the pillars of the liturgy: the antiphons, the readings, the offertory, the Canon, the calendar, the use of certain psalms at certain times of the day or in certain seasons. We might augment, extrapolate, enhance, ornament, and even occasionally prune the dense growth, but in no sense did we throw off what earlier generations held to be sacred and great.

Hence, the essential response to the objection with which this essay opens — “Wasn't liturgy in the earliest centuries of the church extemporaneous and improvised?” — is at once simple and profound: we are not in the same position as the early Christians. They had the first contact with Christ’s life, death, and resurrection; they had the guidance of the Apostles and their immediate successors; they had to develop for themselves a liturgy out of Jewish precedents and apostolic oral tradition. It was a unique situation. Tollite vobiscum verba: “take with you words” (Ember Friday of September). The need to design or write a liturgy is, on the one hand, a sign of imperfection, because it belongs to a phase of institutional immaturity.

On the other hand, because of how central the liturgy is and will be for all future generations until the end of time, the writing of liturgy requires a special charism of the Holy Spirit — a profound spiritual maturity, discernment, and inspiration on the part of anyone who would dare to write liturgical texts or chants. It follows that already elaborated liturgical rites possess an inherent sanctity and nobility that will not and cannot be surpassed by later generations. [5] Since, as time went on, such rites had become more stable, refined, explicit, and expressive of their sacred content, Christians received them accordingly with reverence, as gifts handed down from their forebears. This process of development — which is at the same time a process of explicitation and solidification — must be held to be a work of the Holy Spirit, as Pope Pius XII reminded the Church in Mediator Dei. [6]

After 1,500 or 2,000 years of development, the situation is not and could never be the same for us as it was for the early Christians in the decades and centuries immediately after Christ. The reformers’ argument from antiquity is invalid from the word “go.” Nor has this argument the wherewithal to be taken seriously. Henry Sire demonstrates in Phoenix from the Ashes that the twentieth-century reformers invoked antiquity as an excuse for their modernist agenda, since as a matter of fact (1) they did not restore much that was ancient; (2) they abolished many things that were known to be ancient; (3) and they invented much that was utterly novel. How such people, whose motley work is clear for all to see, can expect us to credit their affected motives is quite beyond me.

The main argument of the postconciliar reformers, expressed in countless pamphlets and publications, boils down to this: “We are now celebrating the Mass as the early Christians did, and dropping away all the ‘accretions’ that accumulated like soot over time and obscured the original purity of worship.” But there are three devastating flaws to this argument.

1. We don’t really know what the early Christians did, and evidence from cultural history suggests that it was probably quite elaborate, rather than the contrary.

2. Many arguments based on antiquity have subsequently been shown to be false, such as the main argument in favor of Mass facing the people (St. Peter’s basilica).

3. Most importantly, Pius XII taught in Mediator Dei that we must believe that the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit throughout the ages and that the developments that occur are part of God’s plan. So the development of “medieval liturgy” and “Baroque liturgy” are, if not in every detail, at least in the main, providential. To cast them away and try to return to a questionably reconstructed “primitive church model” is not only to exalt mere hypotheticals over real facts, it is an assertion that the Holy Spirit guides the Church less and less as time goes on, and that we must strip away what each age has added in order to return to the purity of the origins. This is liberal Protestantism, this is higher criticism, this is Modernism. All of it is condemned by the Church.

NOTES

[1] Funnily enough, we see this even today, among well-practiced Protestant preachers when they are offering public prayers, for which they have developed their own vocabulary and formulas. The result is not random but carefully channeled, almost predictable. I have seen the same thing in the Catholic Church. For example, in a certain diocese, almost every “spontaneous” prayer I have heard begins: “Good and gracious God…” I don’t know who originated this alliterative phrase, but it reproduces itself successfully in the wild.

[2] An objection might be raised: Are there not aspects of the old liturgy that are also up to the celebrant’s discretion? And should you not argue against them, as well? The truth is that the realm of choice in the old liturgy is extremely narrow, and is always a choice between fully articulated elements. In some commons, there is a choice between two epistles or Gospels. On a solemn day, a priest may choose to wear gold instead of a different liturgical color. He may choose to sing the most solemn Preface tone rather than the more solemn tone. If his missal has the Gallican prefaces, the rubrics allow him to use them on specified days. But notice how small a range of choice is allowed, and how its components are already fully spelled out — the priest invents nothing. There is no putative right to extemporize; and the most essential elements, such as the Canon, can never be altered. The holiest thing is beyond the realm of choice; it is a given. The Byzantine liturgy is the same: which of the anaphoras is to be used is dictated to the priest by the calendar, not left up to his pastoral discretion.

[3] One may consider what Charles Cardinal Journet said about the difference between the apostolic period and the succeeding ages, and apply it analogously to the early age of worship in contrast with later ages of worship.

[4] Pope Francis, for instance, preaches with such sloppiness that one would think none of the Ecumenical Councils had ever occurred, nor any of the Church Fathers had preached.

[5] John Henry Newman recognized this fact as well.

[6] To question, therefore, the inherited forms in the radical way they were questioned in the 1960s was nothing less than a sin against the Holy Spirit, the sin for which Our Lord says there is no forgiveness.

In Defense of Side Altars

Side altars in a splendid German neo-Baroque church: St. Anna in Altötting (built 1910-12)

A reader of NLM wrote to me:

I attended a conference in Rome in which a respected liturgist gave a talk about church art. He criticized the phenomenon of “side altars” as a deviation from early Christian practice. I’m not sure if there’s something online that defends not only private Masses for priests but also the architectural phenomenon of side altars, and why, further to that, it is okay for different Masses to be happening simultaneously in one church — say, the parish Mass and a priest’s (or priests’) private Masses.

The critique of side altars is, like so much else, an expression of unsophisticated antiquarianism and misplaced Byzantinophilia.

It is true that the Christian East has held on tightly (as they have done with so many features of worship) to the original architectural plan of a sanctuary centered on a single altar, which signifies Christ, the one and only High Priest and Mediator between God and Man. This is why the altar is dedicated and anointed, and later, kissed and incensed. Liturgy is celebrated solemnly in song once a day at this altar.

The symbolism is magnificent, yes, but it is not exhaustive of the possibilities of the cult of the saints and devotional liturgy, which were to develop prodigiously in the West. In the first millennium, side altars developed as a way to house the relics of the saints. Most side altars, even to this day, are associated with a particular saint or devotion, while the high altar retains an obvious primacy, prominence, and centrality for the solemn conventual Mass. As Enrico Finotti comments:

The side altar keeps its liturgical function intact and it is rather harmful to transmit to the faithful the idea that the emergence of the side altars is the sign of a decadent and incorrect phase of liturgical development. The side altars celebrate with amazing artistic expressions the wonderful fruits of the only Sacrifice of Christ: the Saints and their works. Their memory, erected in connection with the altar, affirms that from the Sacrifice of Christ they received the grace of their holiness and the efficacy of their witness. Wanting to deprive such monuments of the table [i.e., the mensa for offering Mass] is to disrupt them theologically from their divine source. The multiplicity of the side altars is the visual manifestation of the infinite prism of the fruits of the one Altar and of the only Sacrifice, Christ Jesus. This is why the side altars cannot be “museified,” but must remain “alive” with all their own signs, open to the exercise of their liturgical function.

In the West, with the general absence of concelebration, and with the proliferation of monastic and cathedral clergy, the custom arose of priests offering their own daily low Mass, a Missa lecta or Missa recitata or Missa privata — as still occurs in a number of traditional religious and clerical communities today. Therefore, quite apart from the cult of the saints, which requires suitably beautiful repositories for their relics, the essential defense of side altars rests on the legitimacy in itself, and the value for the Church, of the priest’s daily, individual, “devotional” offering of the Mass, over against the postconciliar imposition of the alien custom of concelebration in a feeble imitation of the East.[1]

Nor should it cause any surprise to recall that the claim that there should only be one altar in each church was specifically condemned by Pope Pius VI in the Bull Auctorem Fidei as one of the numerous errors of the Synod of Pistoia:

Propositio Synodi enuntians, conveniens esse, pro divinorum officiorum ordine et antiqua consuetudine, ut in unoquoque templo unum tantum sit altare, sibique adeo placere morem illum restituere: temeraria, perantiquo, pio, multis abhinc saeculis in Ecclesia, praesertim Latina, vigenti et probato mori iniuriosa.
       [The proposition of the synod enunciating that it is fitting, in accordance with the order of divine services and ancient custom, that there be only one altar in each church and, therefore, that it is pleased to restore that custom: rash, injurious to the very ancient pious custom flourishing and approved for these many centuries in the Church, especially in the Latin Church.] (Denzinger 2631)

In response to the reader’s question, let me mention that the definitive study has been written by the Carmelite priest Joseph de Sainte-Marie, OCD, The Holy Eucharist—The World’s Salvation. Studies on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, its Celebration, and its Concelebration (reviewed here). I have defended the fittingness of the daily private Mass in chapter 10 of my book Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis (“The Loss of Graces: Private Masses and Concelebration”) and in two articles at NLM (“Celebration vs. Concelebration: Theological Considerations” and “The Mounting Threat of Coercive Concelebration”). Dr. Joseph Shaw has also made a contribution on this topic (“What Are Side Chapels For?”).

Once one admits the legitimacy of a priest offering his Mass each morning (when not otherwise engaged for public Mass), the existence of side altars is basically unavoidable, for the clergy cannot be reasonably accommodated otherwise.

In the monastery . . . 

. . . and during retreats or workshops . . .

. . . and at times of pilgrimage or international events.

From a symbolic point of view, it may not seem appropriate to have many priests offering many Masses at many altars in a church, as if this detracts from the unity of Christ, His priesthood, and His sacrifice. On the other hand, since symbolism cuts many ways, a counterargument can be made that the many offerings symbolize the multiplication of Christ’s priestly power in His ministers and into His Mystical Body, which has many members, all of which, being persons, are temples of the Holy Spirit. The very fact that the one all-sufficient sacrifice is renewed unbloodily at many altars glorifies and exalts the priestly power of Christ, who sanctifies all places and all times, giving rise to many springs from one reservoir, gathering all streams together in a measureless ocean. Moreover, it emphasizes the subordinate nature of the ministers and of the liturgy as compared with the one Mediator Himself and His heavenly self-offering “beyond the veil” in the true Holy of Holies. In other words, as we can see to be typical of Western liturgy, it both welcomes Christ into our midst and emphasizes, in obvious and subtle ways, the distance between the earthly realm and the heavenly kingdom, unlike the Eastern liturgy which tends to see the earthly liturgy as a direct reflection of and immediate participation in the heavenly kingdom.

I do not want to overemphasize this contrast, as one can find features of the Eastern liturgy that deeply express man’s fallen condition and his exile from heaven, just as there are aspects of the Western liturgy that symbolize or enact the union of earth with heaven (most notably, the “Supplices te rogamus” of the Roman Canon). We also find Sacrosanctum Concilium giving prominence to this point, in a paragraph that would become all but unintelligible in the wake of the Consilium’s reform:

In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, a minister of the holies and of the true tabernacle; we sing a hymn to the Lord’s glory with all the warriors of the heavenly army; venerating the memory of the saints, we hope for some part and fellowship with them; we eagerly await the Savior, Our Lord Jesus Christ, until He, our life, shall appear and we too will appear with Him in glory. (n. 8)

Two, then, can play this game of symbolism. A symbolic argument will never, by itself, be sufficiently determinate to decide between two conflicting practices. One has to justify any liturgical practice based on theological, spiritual, pastoral, and aesthetic arguments — not simply on the basis of archaic practice or Eastern practice or a modern penchant for simplicity, which usually comes out as horizontal, democratic, undifferentiated, and plain, when not ugly.

As for side altars, we may well say: in the East, anathema sit; in the West, “multiply and fill the earth.”

Stift Wilten (Norbertine) in Innsbruck

St. Gallus, Bregenz (h/t Fr Jerabek)

NOTE

[1] Additionally to the question of relics, there is another major motivator for the creation of side-altars, which really takes off in the age of the canons regular (who emerge as a major force within the Church in the 12th century) and the mendicants (13th century): since they were largely an urban phenomenon, and did not have stable foundations based on owning land, as monks did, canons regular and mendicants had to provide for themselves from their apostolic works; as St Paul says in 1 Timothy 5:18, “the worker is worthy of his wage.” Within a large house of (e.g.) Dominicans like Santa Maria Novella in Florence, each side-altar was privately owned by a family, who paid for everything, including all the accoutrements necessary for saying Mass, and the priest’s salary. All the Masses were therefore said for that family’s intentions. This was one of the things that made the apostolic ministry of such communities possible, and in addition, gave us a lot of really amazing art, since the families that could afford their own chapel could generally also afford to hire the best artists to decorate it.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website for articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Newman, Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen, Roguet, Croegaert), his SoundCloud page for lectures and interviews, and his YouTube channel for talks and sacred music.

Why Restoring the Roman Rite to Its Fullness is Not “Traddy Antiquarianism”

The broad stole (and not visible, the folded chasuble), both abolished by Pius XII

In a recent address, Archbishop Thomas Gullickson, Papal Nuncio to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, made a rousing case for “pressing the reset button” on the Roman liturgy by abandoning a failed experiment and taking up again the traditional rites of the Catholic Church. He is giving us a brisk version of what the newly-published book The Case for Liturgical Restoration provides in much detail.

Then, with admirable candor, Archbishop Gullickson broaches the million-dollar question:

I am avoiding the burning issue of setting a date for the reset. I used to think that going back to the 1962 Missal and to St. Pius X and his breviary reform was sufficient, but the marvels of the pre-Pius XII Triduum as we have begun to experience them leave me speechless on this point. Perhaps the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI on the mutual enrichment of the two forms will provide the paradigm for resolving the question of which Missal and which breviary. My call for a return to the presently approved texts for the Extraordinary Form, then, is inspired by a certain urgency to move forward, to further the process. I do not feel qualified to take a stance in this particular matter of where best to launch the restoration.

The position that has dominated the Tradisphere for a long time is that we should be content with 1962 as our point of departure for a healthy liturgical future. After all, 1962 is the last editio typica prior to the upheavals occasioned by the Council; it is still recognizably in continuity with the Tridentine rite; and it is enjoined upon us by Church authority in the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum.

In a contrasting position, Dom Hugh Somerville-Knapman of Dominus Mihi Adjutor urges that we must still take seriously the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium and that, accordingly, the 1962 Missal will not pass muster:

I still see a validity in a mild reform in the liturgy along the modest lines actually mandated by the Council: vernacular readings, setting aside the duplication of the celebrant having to recite prayers, etc., that were being sung by other ministers, a less obtrusive priestly preparation at the beginning of Mass, etc. And the conciliar mandate for reform cannot be just forgotten as though it never happened: it must be faced and dealt with, either be reforming the reform made in its name, or by a specific magisterial act abrogating it.
       That is why the interim rites interest me – OM65 [The Ordo Missae of 1965] is clearly the Mass of Vatican II while also clearly being in organic continuity with liturgical tradition. It left the Canon alone as well as the integral reverence of the liturgical action. Even Lefebvre was approving of it. What distorts our perception of OM65 is that we have seen 50 years of development since, and cannot help but see OM65 as tainted by what came after it.
       Moreover MR62 is a rather arbitrary point at which to stop liturgical tradition. For some committed trads this is an imperfect Missal, even a tainted one. Is a pre-53 Missal better? Or a pre-Pius XII one? Or maybe pre-Pius X? Why not go the whole hog and argue for pre-Trent — after all, Geoffrey Hull sees the seed of liturgical decay there? We end up in a situation in which each chooses for himself on varying sets of idiosyncratic principles. It is ecclesiologically impossible. The Catholic Church has a magisterial authority which establishes unity in liturgy. That this has been sadly lacking for some decades is not an argument for ignoring magisterial authority altogether. Then we may as well be Protestants.

Dom Hugh is willing to admit that Bugnini and Co. were busy behind the scenes throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, plotting and eventually carrying out the rape and pillage of all that remained of the Western liturgical tradition. He nevertheless thinks that, in the world outside the Politburo, the 1965 Missal was generally seen — and can still be seen today — as the reform that lines up with the Council’s desiderata. This, then, should be where the reset button takes us. (To brush up on what the 1965 Missal was like, read this account by Msgr. Charles Pope.)

A missal from the mid-60s: trying to keep up with the changes

As far as I can tell, however, the purist 1962 and reformist 1965 positions are rapidly losing ground throughout the world, particularly as the internet continues to spread awareness of the ill-advised and sometimes catastrophic reforms that took place throughout the twentieth century to various aspects of the Roman liturgy, with Holy Week looming largest. Since I, too, disagree with the 1962 and 1965 positions, I would like to make the case for returning to the last editio typica prior to the revolutionary alterations of Pope Pius XII: the Missale Romanum of Benedict XV, issued in 1920. [1]

The principal argument used to defend adherence to 1962 is that we should all do “what the Church asks us to do.” But who, or what, is “the Church” here? In this period of chaos, it is no longer self-evident that “the Church” refers to an authority that is handing down laws for the common good of the people of God. From at least 1948 on, “the Church” in the liturgical sphere has meant radicals struggling to loose the bonds of tradition who have pushed their own agenda of simplification, abbreviation, modernization, and pastoral utilitarianism on the Church, with papal approval — that is, by the abuse of papal power. These things are not rightful commands to be obeyed but aberrations that deserve to be resisted — of course, patiently, intelligently, and in a principled manner, but nevertheless with a firm intention to restore the integrity and fullness of the Roman rite as it existed before the Liturgical Movement in its cancer phase took over at the top level and drove the Roman rite into the dead end of the Novus Ordo.

For a long time, I sincerely tried to understand, appreciate, and embrace Sacrosanctum Concilium. But it was not possible, after reading Michael Davies, and later Henry Sire’s Phoenix from the Ashes and Yves Chiron’s biography of Annibale Bugnini, to see in this document anything more than a carefully contrived blueprint for liturgical revolution. It contradicts itself on several points and takes refuge more often than not in massive ambiguities that were deliberately put there — and we know this based on documentary research, no conspiracy theories are needed.

For me, the evaporation of the validity of Sacrosanctum Concilium came from a deeper reflection, thanks to a lecture by Wolfram Schrems, on the meaning of its abolition of the Office of Prime. A Council that would dare to abolish an ancient liturgical office of uninterrupted universal reception vitiates itself from the get-go. Since none of the documents of Vatican II contains de fide statements or anathemas, the charism of infallibility is not expressly involved. Given their very nature, a bunch of practical pastoral recommendations can be mistaken, and there is ever-mounting evidence that the aims and means of the radical arm of the Liturgical Movement were grievously off-target. The assumptions of the Council about what “had to be done” to the liturgy misread the sociology and psychology of religion. Their proposals for reform bought into modern assumptions that have not stood the test of time and had, indeed, already been effectively criticized before and during the Council. So it seems to me somewhat immaterial that ‘65 better reflects the conflicting and at times problematic ideas of the Council.

Moreover, the idea that the 1965 Ordo Missae represents the implementation of SC is hard to sustain in the light of repeated statements by Paul VI that what he promulgated in 1969 is the ultimate fulfillment of the liturgy constitution (see here and here for examples culled by the selectively papolatrous PrayTell; I discuss the infamous addresses of 1965 and 1969 here). 1965 was presented publicly (though not always consistently) as an interim step on the evolutionary process away from medieval-Baroque liturgy to relevant modern liturgy.

The “moment of truth,” I think, is when students of liturgy realize that the 1962 is extremely similar to 1965 in this respect: it was an interim Missal in the preparation of which Bugnini and the other liturgists working at the Vatican had changed as much as they felt they could get away with. Even assuming all the good will in the world, these liturgists had experienced a triumph of renovationism with the Holy Week “reform” of Pius XII — a reform that was notable as a dramatic deformation of some of the most ancient and poignant rites of the Church — and they were rolling along with the momentum. The abolition under Pius XII of most octaves and vigils, multiple collects, and folded chasubles, inter alia, is part of this same sad tale of cutting away some of what was most distinctive and most precious in the Roman heritage. [2]

This is why it is not arbitrary for traditionalists to say that the Missal ca. 1948 — which means, in practice, the editio typica of 1920 — is the place to go. The reason is simple: except for some newly added feasts (the calendar being the part of the liturgy that changes the most), it is in all salient respects the Missal codified by Trent. It is the Tridentine rite tout court. For those of us who believe that the Tridentine rite represents, as a whole and in its parts, an organically developed apogee of the Roman rite that it behooves us to receive with gratitude as a timeless inheritance (in the manner Greek Catholics receive their liturgical rites, which also achieved mature form in the Middle Ages), a pre-Pacellian Missal gives us all that we are looking for, and nothing tainted.

People like to point to “improvements” that could be made to the old missal, but those who have lived long and intimately with its contents are usually the last to be convinced that the suggested improvements would actually be such. I have addressed some examples here, here, and here. [3]

A Maria Laach altar missal from 1931

Wait a minute, an interlocutor might say. Isn’t all this “traddy antiquarianism”? Aren’t we guilty of doing the same thing we blame our opponents for doing, namely, reaching back to earlier forms while holding later developments in contempt?

No, none of what I am proposing amounts to “traddy antiquarianism.” What is clear is that the Liturgical Movement after World War II went off the rails. Changes to the liturgical books from that point on were motivated by global theories about what is “best for the modern Church,” which led to the abundant contradictions and ambiguities of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Montini-Bugnini reign of terror, and the crowning disgrace of the 1969 Ordo Missae and other rites of that period.

The point is not to go back indefinitely, but to take a missal that is essentially the one codified by Trent and Pius V, with the kind of small accretions or small emendations that characterize the slow progress of liturgy through the ages. As Fr. Hunwicke likes to point out, for many centuries since Pius V, it is possible to take up an old missal and put it on the altar and offer Mass. The changes are so minor that the missal is virtually the same from Quo Primum to the twentieth century. [4] Saints come on and saints come off, but even the calendar is remarkably stable. After Pius XII’s reign, however, it is much harder for an “old” missal and a “new” (i.e., 1955 Pacellian, 1962 Roncallian, 1965 Montinian) missal to share the same ecclesial space; they cannot be swapped one for the other, including at some very important moments in the Church year. This already shows, in a rough and ready way, that a rupture has occurred — and this, prior to the Novus Ordo.

Pius V’s condition that only rites older than 200 years could continue to be used after his promulgation of the Tridentine Missal is another way to see that our argument here is backed by common sense. A rite younger than 200 years old might seem like a local made-up thing, but a rite that’s clocked up two centuries of age or more has an “immemorial” weight to it — something not to be disturbed or replaced. This, indeed, is the basic reason for the illegitimacy of the Novus Ordo: that which it replaced was not merely something older than 200 years, but something with a 2,000-year history of continual use that shows no momentous ruptures but only a gradual assimilation and expansion. But the 200-year rule of Pius V also suggests that the revival of something less than 200 years old need not be an example of antiquarianism, but could be simply an intelligent recovery of something lost by chance, error in transmission, or bad policy. Thus, if certain octaves and vigils were abolished only a few decades ago, and if the rationale for this change deserves to be rejected, their recovery cannot be considered, by any stretch of the imagination, an example of antiquarianism. After all, as The Case for Liturgical Restoration points out (pp. 14, 16), the Old Testament gives us examples of liturgical restoration far more dramatic than the recovery of pre-Pacellian rites is for us.

Antiquarianism or archaeologism — often qualified with the adjective “false” — is the attempt to leap over medieval and Counter-Reformation developments to reach a putatively “original, authentic” early Christian liturgy. The term does not correctly apply to setting aside modernist, progressive, or utilitarian deformations. How ironic if a move against false antiquarianism were now to be targeted as being itself an example of the same! Let us put it this way: Catholics have always been intelligently antiquarian in that they care greatly for and wish to preserve their heritage and seek to restore it when it has been plundered or damaged. The Liturgical Movement, on the other hand, presented us with the spectacle of an arbitrary, violent, and agenda-driven antiquarianism. The two phenomena are as different as patriotism and nationalism.

Our situation in the Latin Church has achieved the clarity of a silverpoint drawing: (1) the modern papal rite, risibly dubbed the Roman Rite, has established itself as a pseudo-tradition of vernacularity, versus populism, informality, banality, and horizontality, as NLM contributor William Riccio described with gut-wrenching accuracy; (2) the “Reform of the Reform,” on which hopeful conservatives during the reign of Benedict XVI had gambled away their last pennies, is not only dead but buried six feet under; (3) the traditional Latin liturgy, though by no means readily available to all who wish for it, is firmly rooted in the younger generations on all continents and in nearly every country, and shows no sign of budging. Many traditionalist clergy would already prefer to use a missal from the first half of the twentieth century, and of those who remain, there are plenty who, in moments of honesty, and with trustworthy friends, will admit they have some problems with the ersatz Holy Week and the John XXIII missal. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis: if you have made a wrong turn, the only way to go forward is to go back. That is the fastest way to get on.

In this article, I explained why it is legitimate, praiseworthy, and indeed necessary to seek the restoration of the fullness of the Roman liturgy that was lost in the postwar period. I am not touching on the more delicate and controversial question of what kind of permission, and from whom, is or may be required for utilizing an earlier edition of the missal. It does not follow, simply because an earlier edition of the missal is better, that anyone is ipso facto entitled to give himself permission to use it. But regardless of permissions already in effect or still remaining to be ascertained, we should not see 1962 as a neighborhood where liturgical life may settle down. In comparison to the strife-ridden ghetto of the Novus Ordo, where opposing gangs of progressives and conservatives engage in a neverending turf war, the 1962 status quo comes across as far safer, lovelier, more commodious. It is, nevertheless, a trailer park, a way station along the road to a better place.


NOTES

[1] Needless to say, particular feasts that subsequently entered the calendar, such as that of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, should be included.

[2] Archbishop Gullickson says, in the same address: “While we are at it: When it comes to calendar… isn’t older better? From me you will get a resounding ‘yes’, especially if we are talking about vigils and octaves, and giving the proper denomination to times and seasons.”

[3] The question of the reform of the Divine Office under Pius X is a separate can of worms. It is easy to see that the Church should restore some elements of the traditional Roman office that were lost, such as the Laudate psalms in Lauds, but it is by no means easy to see exactly how that should happen. The situation with the Office is vastly more complex than the situation with the altar missal or the other sacramental rites. Fortunately, at least Benedictine monks have the option of using an Antiphonale Monasticum largely untouched by the rupture of Pius X.

[4] One does see more dramatic change in the explicitation of rubrics. Pope Clement VIII did a major “reboot” of the Missal of Pius V aimed at clarifying the rubrics. Any edition of the missal from Pius X onwards includes an enormous bloc of rubrics added at the front, which wasn’t there before. Nevertheless, the broad point that one could use any edition of the missal is indisputable; it would apply to the majority of feasts and the temporal cycle.

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

Can We Love Tradition Too Much?

NLM received permission to republish this article by Dr. Kwasniewski, which first appeared at OnePeterFive on March 18, 2019.

Can We Love Tradition Too Much?

by Peter Kwasniewski

The indefatigable blogger Fr. Dwight Longenecker is at it again. In a new article from March 15, 2019, entitled “Tradition is the Democracy of the Dead,” he writes to assure us that he is a lover of tradition — but not excessively.

He rightly says one should be or become Catholic for the sake of its 2,000-year-old tradition — or, more accurately, its 4,000-year-old tradition, since the law, prophecies, and worship of Israel are fulfilled in the Church. But he also says that, since tradition is not static or unchangeable, we need to be willing to change with the times, according to the judgment calls emanating from Rome, and not make an “idol” of the past.

Well, one can certainly live free of fear that today’s Rome is in danger of making an idol of the past. One might rather fear its making an idol of the present or of the future.

This all too easy reduction of one’s opponents to idolaters, which is one of the characteristic rhetorical moves used by Pope Francis and other progressives who are impatient of analysis and argument and wish to get on with modern pastoring, reminds me of what I like to call “A Corollary of Godwin’s Law”: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison of a defender of Catholic tradition to a Pharisee approaches 1.” Perhaps we could expand this to say “a Pharisee or an idolater.” This slight adjustment makes it more interreligious too — surely an important consideration in this age of joint statements from popes and imams.

Moreover, this brings the corollary more into harmony with “Bergoglio’s Hypothesis.” That is surely a welcome step in building the new paradigm. In my formulation, this hypothesis reads:

If there is a discrepancy between Catholic doctrine and European liberalism, then the former needs further “development” until it harmonizes with the latter. If Catholics resist modernity or modern ecclesiastical reforms, they are guilty of nostalgic insecurity, temperamental rigidity, pharisaical neo-Pelagianism, and lack of fraternal charity. [1]

In his article, Fr. Longenecker makes the classic move of the Anglican Newman: wanting to be in the sweet spot of the via media. Unlike the revolutionaries, I love tradition; unlike the traditionalists, I don’t idolize tradition as an unchanging thing.

The first problem here is the caricature. Traditionalists fully recognize that liturgy develops over time. However, as with the development of doctrine, they see the development as tending, in broad lines, toward greater amplitude and perfection. So just as we don’t decide to cancel out at some point the Nicene Creed for the sake of going back to the more ancient and pristine Apostles’ Creed, in like manner, we don’t cancel out the medieval and Baroque developments of the liturgy in our search for a more ancient and pristine Christian worship. Pius XII warned against “antiquarianism,” but that became one of the two battle cries of the liturgical reformers — that and their aggiornamentalism, by which everything had to be adjusted and proportioned to the mentality of Modern Man (whoever he is).

The second and bigger problem is that the Catholic Newman came to reject the via media approach when he realized that, on some questions, the right answer was found in the “extreme” position, not in the middle position. For example, at the time of the Arian crisis, there were (to simplify things) the Arians, the Semi-Arians, and the Nicaeans. In all the political battles and regional councils, the Semi-Arians were able to position themselves as the reasonable middle between the extremists who denied the divinity of the Son and the other extremists who conflated the Son and the Father by identifying them both as God. In this, needless to say, they showed that they did not grasp, or did not wish to grasp, the position of St. Athanasius and other orthodox fathers, who, though a beleaguered minority, nevertheless held the truth and ultimately prevailed. [2]

So too in our present situation. The traditionalists maintain that there is nothing “traditional” about the Novus Ordo and the rest of the papally imposed liturgical rites from the ’60s and ’70s. Even when the reformers claimed to be “recovering” elements lost in antiquity, the way they went about it was distinctively modern: they took what chimed in with their fancy and filtered out difficult bits that could have been disturbing or distressing to modern audiences. And these men say outright in their articles and books that this is what they are doing; no conspiracy theories need apply. Moreover, they freely amputated and suppressed many extremely ancient features of the liturgy, such as the Pentecost octave and season, Septuagesima, the Ember Days, and the lectionary on which St. Gregory the Great preached in the late sixth century (how’s that for ancient?), replacing them with innovative and hybridized material fashioned by scholarly brains. Constructivism on this magnitude and with this method is unprecedented in the Church’s history. It is impossible to see what could be “traditional” about this approach or the results.

Thus, when Fr. Longenecker says: “I do what I can to pray the tradition, live the tradition, and worship in the tradition,” it is a perfect study in the art of equivocation. To “pray the tradition” and “worship in the tradition” is to pray and worship in union with all the centuries of Catholicism as they are glued together in the one Roman liturgical tradition that was ours until 1969, not to hit the ecclesial reset button as the conciliar enthusiasts did. One may admire conservatives’ efforts to bring traditional elements in through the back door — when the local bishop’s not looking too attentively, and the neighborhood climate is favorable — but one should have the candor to admit that this is a desperate and somewhat pathetic attempt to put old Humpty-Dumpty back together again. Fortunately, the real McCoy is still there, waiting to be rediscovered, and until a man has rediscovered it, he cannot quite say he has “done what he can.”

It is telling when Fr. Longenecker implies that the only things unchangeable in the Church are her dogmas and proceeds to identify the essence of the Mass as the miracle of transubstantiation. Neoscholastic reductionism [3] has been a problem for some time, but it is galling to see it in the context of an article that is supposed to be about Catholic tradition. Traditional liturgies are categorized into their ritual families and subfamilies (Latin or Byzantine, Slavic or Greek, Roman or Ambrosian or Mozarabic, etc.) based not on whether transubstantiation occurs, which is something they all have in common, but on exactly what their content is. Imagine saying to a Byzantine Catholic: “You know, at the end of the day, your Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and our Novus Ordo are pretty much the same, because they both do the one essential, immutable thing: convert the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ.”

I’m afraid what we are seeing is the result of speaking about such grave matters without the requisite knowledge of details. It is all too easy to say “the Roman rite remains intact” when the only thing one is looking at is an outline of the order of Mass from 30,000 feet in the sky. But the devil’s in the details — and the angels, too, whose role was greatly reduced in the Novus Ordo. Liturgical rites exist not as outlines or abstractions, but as concrete codifications of text, music, rubric, ceremonial, and cast of supporting artefacts. The more one drills into what the classic Roman rite actually is — its ancient ad orientem stance, its particular calendar and lectionary, its more than a thousand orations, its set of Prefaces, its monolithic Roman Canon, the early medieval offertory rite, and so forth — the more one can see how abruptly and comprehensively the Novus Ordo severs itself from that venerable rite. They are, in truth, two different liturgies that share some common elements, somewhat as the Eiffel Tower might be said to share in the verticality of the Gothic cathedral.

Gargoyles atop Notre Dame discussing verticality and modernism

It is thus more than ironic when Fr. Longenecker cites G.K. Chesterton’s famous words — “Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead” — when the postconciliar liturgical reform was, in fact, the most autocratic imaginable in its contempt for the collective voice of our ancestors, and democratic only in the sense that it proceeded by way of the voting of “experts” on a panoply of committees that sliced up the parts of liturgy into study groups, like teams of computer programmers testing new operating system modules. [4]

In the finest, most lyrical passage of his article, Fr. Longenecker compares Catholic tradition to a giant old mansion with extensive gardens:

I sometimes think that being a Catholic is like living in a grand old house like the one in Brideshead Revisited. It is an ornate, ancient and venerable structure, full of corridors of memories and alleyways of tradition. The walls are lined with the banners from ancient battles and the ancestors of grand reputation. The attic is full of curious and precious antiques and the kitchens and cellars are full of fine wine, casks of provisions and bundles of equipment for battle and for housework. The gardens are lush and expansive — some formal and fruitful, some still wild and untamed. The modernist would demolish such a house and send the contents to auction. But a Catholic should decide to live there, dust and shine the antiques, clean the carpets, polish the silver, restore the paintings, sharpen the halberds and shine the armor … and then he should draw back the drapes to open the windows and let in the fresh air and the morning light.

The last phrase, a deliberate echo of John XXIII’s famous remark about how the Church needs to open her windows and let in the air from the world (how’s that workin’ out for ya, postconciliar Church?), could be refurbished as a reminder that without the Holy Spirit, without the grace of God, we cannot produce good fruits, regardless of how handsome the tree may be. Fr. Longenecker would be the first to agree, I’m sure, that this interior necessity by no means suggests there is something wrong with the old house and its contents, which the First Cause of all things — the architect and first interior decorator, so to speak — intended to put there by His Providence.

It is ironic, again, that our author should choose just this metaphor of the old house and its rambling grounds, since it has always been the traditionalists’ favorite comparison when they wish to describe the result of twenty centuries of gradual development in the liturgy, gently tended by gardeners and janitors. There is no question whatsoever that Archbishop Bugnini and his fellow experts had no patience for this old mansion. They wanted to raze it to the ground and build rational modern flats in its place. In his own words, Bugnini sought to “rejuvenate the liturgy, ‘ridding’ it of the superstructures that weighed it down over the centuries.” This is why the new missal is so “rationally” ordered, using simple blueprints over and over again instead of the wonderfully unpredictable variety in the old missal. [5]

Archbishop Bugnini was not the only liturgist who thought in terms of architectural images of demolition and reconstruction. Consider this passage from Demain la liturgie (1976) by Fr. Joseph Gelineau, S.J., who played a prominent role on the Consilium:

If the formulae change, the rite is changed. If a single element is changed, the signification of the whole is modified. Let those who like myself have known and sung a Latin-Gregorian High Mass remember it if they can. Let them compare it with the Mass that we now have. Not only the words, the melodies, and some of the gestures are different. To tell the truth, it is a different liturgy of the Mass [c’est une autre liturgie de la messe]. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists [le rite romaine tel que nous l’avons connu n’existe plus]. It has been destroyed. [Il est détruit.] Some walls of the former edifice have fallen while others have changed their appearance, to the extent that it appears today either as a ruin or the partial substructure of a different building.

Could Fr. Longenecker’s mention of Brideshead Revisited be a subtle hint to the cognoscenti that he does not, in fact, see eye-to-eye with the liturgical reform? It is well known that the author of this splendid novel, Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), was fiercely opposed to the dismantling of the Catholic liturgy, conducting a regular correspondence with Cardinal Heenan to see if anything could be done to halt the madness that was beginning to bleed the churches of their congregations, and publishing anguished articles on the subject in periodicals (readers will find all of this in the book A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes). Though he was spared the ultimate indignity of witnessing the Novus Ordo, as he died more than 3½ years before it was rolled off the assembly line, Waugh was utterly horrified by the changes that had been made to the liturgy, which at that point were not insignifcant, but had certainly not become the great tsunami of 1969.

Among Catholics who care deeply about the sacred liturgy (and why should they not, when Vatican II calls the “Eucharistic sacrifice” the “font and apex of the entire Christian life”?), one finds several camps: those who believe that the changes after the Council went too far; those who believe that the changes were not comprehensive and radical enough; those who think that whatever happened happened, and we might as well make the best of it we can today; and those who think that approaching the liturgy with the mentality of progress and relevancy is the wrong way to let it be itself and do what it alone can do and, moreover, a path doomed to self-parody and implosion the more one goes down it.

The traditionalist takes the last view. It is based, first of all, on real and repeated experiences of the beauty and riches of the classic Roman rite, against which the impoverished text and ceremonial of the new rite stand out glaringly. There can be no substitute for familiarity. No one who is not intimately familiar with the old Roman rite is in a position to make any global commentary about how it compares with its intended replacement. It is time for those who make out their fellow Catholics attached to the usus antiquior to be actual or potential idolaters to step down from their high horses and walk a few miles in the same shoes, out of charity if for no other reason. Get to know the old rite — not just the Mass, but all the sacramental rites and blessings. See its qualities firsthand, and not from a distance.

Such people might be surprised at how different the view is from the ground. They might, indeed, come to see that the danger of idolatry — in the form of an unquestioned, perhaps even unrecognized, adulation of aggiornamento — is more real for those who endorse the Consilium’s modern construction. It was, after all, the attitudes and antics of liturgical progressives that Joseph Ratzinger compared to the episode of the golden calf.

Unbeknownst to himself, Fr. Longenecker is ready to become a traditionalist if he merely discovers the applicability of his words to the entire liturgical reform:

One of the disastrous results of the Second Vatican Council is that liturgists, clergy, and religious who were so zealous to make the faith contemporary and relevant, felt that they could best do this not by valuing and re-invigorating the traditions of the Church, but by demolishing them in revolutionary zeal.

Amen. Now just use your editing pen to excise some of the other misleading bits of the sermon.

NOTES

[1] This hypothesis is based on a more fundamental assumption that I call “Maritain’s Axiom”: “Given the leavening of Greek philosophy, Roman law, Hebrew prophecy, and the Christian Gospel, Europe will develop the finest conscience, most ample respect for human rights, and most consistent rule of law that the world has ever known.” This axiom is true descriptively, in the context of Catholic civilization. It fails prescriptively, in the sense that the outcome is not guaranteed simply from the availability of the ingredients. Yet it is assumed as the basis of, e.g., Pope Francis’s stance on the death penalty.

[2] I’ve written elsewhere about “the use and abuse of the via media.”

[3] This phenomenon is defined and critiqued in two articles: “The Long Shadow of Neoscholastic Reductionism” and “Against Reducing the Mass to a Sacramental Delivery System.”

[4] This comparison, incidentally, was made by Fr. Thomas Reese in an article called “Reforming Catholic liturgy should be like updating software,” in which he compared the old liturgy to DOS and the reform to Windows — with the 1965 interim missal being 1.0, the 1969 missal 2.0, etc.

[5] See here for several examples.

The Continual Spectre of False Antiquarianism

Excavating Roman ruins in London

A friend of mine once wrote to me about a forum on the Eucharist that he attended at a well-known Catholic institute, taught by a teacher who, though talented, said a few things that were, at best, misleading. They illustrated well the sort of half-truths that people occasionally use to justify a kneejerk preference for a liturgical form that, if only they were to research it better, they would come to see as the fruit of Enlightenment rationalism, the fulfillment of the ideals of the Synod of Pistoia, and not authentically Roman, or even Catholic for that matter.

Here were three points made by this teacher:

1. The Emmaus story prefigures the Novus Ordo Mass because Jesus broke open the Scriptures (“Liturgy of the Word”) and then broke bread (“Liturgy of the Eucharist”).

2. Origen’s commentary on Exodus 35, 4–5 shows that people received Communion in the hand at the inception of the Church: “How carefully and respectfully you receive the Lord’s body when it is distributed to you, for fear even a crumb might fall and a little part of this consecrated treasure might be lost. You would even blame yourself — and rightfully so — if a fragment were lost through your negligence.”

3. St Justin Martyr’s First Apology describes a Mass far closer to the Novus Ordo than to the traditional Latin Mass. Even the term “president” is found there, as the term “presider” is found in the context of the Novus Ordo. Thus, the Novus Ordo is a return to the “true” Mass of early Catholics.

Note that there is a common thread running through all of these points: “false antiquarianism,” as Pius XII called it. This appeal to antiquity is always selective: the reformers pick the early elements that fit with their modernist agenda, and effortlessly discard the rest — even things that are equally ancient or more ancient, such as the ad orientem stance.

In other words, there is a modern filter that determines what antiquity means and what makes an ancient element acceptable to moderns. In this way, all such “recoveries” are inherently and unavoidably modern rather than ancient. Thus, antiquarianism is doomed to collapse into the self-referential modernism that picks and chooses items still deemed “relevant” out of the indifferent mass of ateleological matter into which the Church’s past has been converted by modern philosophy. Nothing is valued simply on account of its being handed down; it is valued because it is wanted by a reformer according to his own lights and for his own purposes, be they good or ill. It could almost be turned into a motto for an organization called Planned Prayerhood: “No rite an unwanted rite.”

For example, the reformers liked Communion in the hand because it suited their anti-medieval, anti-scholastic, anti-metaphysical, anti-Tridentine mentality, dressed in the fancy clothing of ressourcement. But when it came to Septuagesimatide, which is from the 6th century and even older than Ash Wednesday, they just chucked it out the window. One can cite dozens of such examples. There are, however, patently good reasons why the liturgy of the Church developed as it did over the centuries — when, for example, a period of preparation for Lent was introduced, or when it was experienced as safer and more reverent to give Communion on the tongue to kneeling faithful.

The modernist agenda is thus very clever in how it appeals to the ancient practice while conveniently forgetting (or denying?) that the Church’s worship is perfected over time, under the guidance of Divine Providence. In spite of his own unfortunate dabbling with liturgical reform, it seems that Pius XII saw this truth and underlined it in the 1947 encyclical letter Mediator Dei, in three paragraphs that should have been engraved on the wall of the Consilium’s headquarters:

62. Assuredly it is a wise and most laudable thing to return in spirit and affection to the sources of the sacred liturgy. For research in this field of study, by tracing it back to its origins, contributes valuable assistance towards a more thorough and careful investigation of the significance of feastdays, and of the meaning of the texts and sacred ceremonies employed on their occasion. But it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive table form; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in churches; were he to order the crucifix so designed that the divine Redeemer’s body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; and lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See.
          63. Clearly no sincere Catholic can refuse to accept the formulation of Christian doctrine more recently elaborated and proclaimed as dogmas by the Church [a reference to the Council of Trent], under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit with abundant fruit for souls, because it pleases him to hark back to the old formulas [of antiquity]. No more can any Catholic in his right senses repudiate existing legislation of the Church to revert to prescriptions based on the earliest sources of canon law. Just as obviously unwise and mistaken is the zeal of one who in matters liturgical would go back to the rites and usage of antiquity, discarding the new patterns introduced by the disposition of divine Providence to meet the changes of circumstances and situation. 
          64. This way of acting bids fair to revive the exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism to which the illegal Council of Pistoia gave rise. It likewise attempts to reinstate a series of errors which were responsible for the calling of that meeting as well as for those resulting from it, with grievous harm to souls, and which the Church, the ever watchful guardian of the “deposit of faith” committed to her charge by her divine Founder, had every right and reason to condemn. For perverse designs and ventures of this sort tend to paralyze and weaken that process of sanctification by which the sacred liturgy directs the sons of adoption to their Heavenly Father for their souls’ salvation.

Notice how many of the things that Pius XII singled out for condemnation ended up being done, to the letter, by Captain Bugnini and his novelty-mongering crew. (In my book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness, I go into all these things in more detail, especially in the chapter contrasting the original liturgical movement with what it devolved into.)

Let us consider briefly, then, the three points made by the teacher that were mentioned at the top of this article.

Ad 1. The division of the Mass into the Mass of the Catechumens and the Mass of the Faithful is far more ancient than the division between Liturgy of the Word and Liturgy of the Eucharist. This latter division hails from the Protestants. Sure, you can get it out of Emmaus, just as you can get Luther out of Romans or Calvin out of Augustine. But it’s not traditional and it’s not Catholic.

Ad 2. Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s book Dominus Est is the definitive refutation of the idea that the early Church did “just what we’re doing now” with Communion in the hand. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, the ancient way was more careful, more devout, and more solemn. Second, the numbers of faithful were far smaller. Third, the reason the Church moved to Communion on the tongue for kneeling recipients is the very piety one finds in the Fathers of the Church. Take the attitude you find in St. Cyril of Jerusalem and compound it by several centuries of meditation, adoration, and experience, and you will end up with the medieval custom. (It should hardly need to be said that the Byzantine manner of distributing communion, in spite of superficial differences, has far more in common with the traditional Roman way than it has with the contemporary Romish way.)

Ad 3. Yes, the primitive liturgy described by St. Justin sounds a bit like the Novus Ordo. That’s because there had not yet occurred 1,800 years of natural and supernatural development to enrich the solemn official worship of the Church, especially after this worship had become legal and public. St. Justin must be rolling over in his grave to see people depriving themselves and Our Lord of due reverence and beauty in order to simulate the fiction of a primitive liturgy.

The redactors of the Novus Ordo used selective (and, as we now know, often erroneous) scholarship on early Catholic practices as an incentive and a justification for creating their own novel product, which, in its totality as in its particular constellation of details, bears little resemblance to any actually existing liturgical rite whose complete form we know, such as the Latin rites and uses at the end of the first millennium, or the Roman Rite from the middle of the second millennium. Or rather, it bears the same resemblance as a teddy bear to a black bear: they both have the same shape, they both have eyes, ears, nose, a mouth, and four paws, they are both furry. But one is large, heavy, alive, and hungry, while the other is small, lightweight, lifeless, and stuffed.

To return to our point of departure, the well-intentioned but ill-informed teacher who presented this half-information to his Catholic audience was doing them a disservice by implying that the Novus Ordo is somehow more in continuity with the ancient Church than the developed Latin liturgical tradition. In so doing he inadvertently made himself a “useful idiot” running interference for the modernists who carried out the liturgical reform with a hatred of the traditional Catholic faith, and who removed every so-called “medieval or Baroque accretion” they could get away with removing. The result is the stripped-down Bauhaus liturgy that will haunt the reputation of Paul VI until the end of the ages.

In order to cover the new rite’s nakedness, people inclined to “Reform of the Reform” add as many “smells and bells” as they can think of or get away with. But there is no amount of Latin that will change what the prayers say (and do not say); there is no amount of chant that will change the damaged structure of the propers, the lectionary, and the calendar; there is no mountain of incense that will mask the sharp smell of the electric dynamo, the spirit behind the reform. ROTR is a huge band-aid placed over a gaping wound that refuses to heal. It refuses to heal because rupture with tradition cannot be blessed by God. Many people will be saved in spite of it, but it can never be a good thing in itself.

Why, then, do Catholics still adhere to the ROTR when they could (in many cases) so easily move over to the TLM? When, let us say, a parish run by the Fraternity or the Institute is just across town, or even down the road, or where a parish priest has added the usus antiquior to the Sunday schedule? Why settle for the Citroën or Renault when you could have the Jaguar or Rolls Royce? Why is it that those without special training or academic credentials can often see the rightness of the old ways and the emptiness of the new, while those who should be leading their brethren by precept and example turn out to be hoodwinked and benighted?

I believe there is a moral reason and a cognitive reason.

They do not see it because they do not want to see it. This is the moral dimension. It stems from a false ultramontanism, whereby Paul VI or any pope can do no wrong, and from a fear that if the liturgy he promulgated turns out to be flawed, it will somehow call into question the indefectibility of the Church — which it certainly does not. It also stems from a fear of personal instability: if the new liturgy is seriously defective, that may mean the new theology and pastoral approach introduced by Vatican II is worthy of critique (as indeed it is). And that would require an interior spiritual and intellectual reorientation that many are unwilling to entertain, let alone execute — although Pope Francis has been making this reorientation tempting and even irresistible, for which we can be grateful to him.

They do not see it because they have not tried to see it. This is the cognitive or perceptual dimension. One has to let the traditional liturgy wash over one’s body and soul like waves at the ocean, patiently getting to know it, adjusting to its gentle rhythm, before its secrets fully reveal themselves. Those who discover these secrets are proving once again the efficacy of the prayer of Our Lord: “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to the little ones” (Mt 11:25).

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for news, information, article links, sacred music, and the home of Os Justi Press.