Humility of Service in Fixity of Form: The Policy of St. Benedict of Nursia

March 21 is the dies natalis of one of the most influential of all saints, Benedict of Nursia, Patriarch of Western Monasticism and Co-Patron of Europe. Highly pertinent to this blog’s concerns are the many profound liturgical lessons contained in the Holy Rule. Today I would like to consider a point from chapter 5.

According to St. Benedict, the root of humility is that a man must live not by his own desires and passions but by the judgment and bidding of another: ambulantes alieno judicio et imperio. When St. Benedict comes around to ordering the monastic liturgy, he makes continual reference to how things are done elsewhere: the psalms prayed by our fathers, the Ambrosian hymn, the canticles used by the Church of Rome. Even when fashioning his monastic cycle of prayer, he is constantly looking to the models already in existence. In like manner, chapter 7 warns us against “doing our own will,” lest we become corrupt and abominable.

This is the true spirit of liturgical conservatism, piety towards elders, and the imitation of Christ. We are not the ones who determine the shape of our worship; we receive it in humility as an “alien judgment” that we make our own. To do otherwise is to put the axe to the tree of humility. (St. Benedict allows for a redistribution of the psalms, as long as monks rigorously hold to the principle of praying the full psalter in one week. Therefore it would not conflict with humility for a monastic community to make some adjustments to the cycle of psalms, yet it would smack of temerity to reject the most ancient and stable pillars of the office, such as the praying of the whole psalter each week, and, to take a couple of specific examples, Psalms 109–112 for Sunday Vespers and Psalms 66, 50, 117, 62, and 148–150 for Sunday Lauds.)

Liturgical prayer has always been the foremost way of inculcating submission to Christ and His Church, so that we can learn His ways, and assimilate His prayer, and drink of His wisdom—which will certainly not be something we ourselves could have “cooked up.” Thus we take His yoke upon us…the yoke of tradition.

Prior to the middle of the twentieth century, it was taken for granted in Catholic circles that it is a special perfection of the sacred liturgy to be fixed, constant, stable, an immovable rock on which to build one’s spiritual life. The liturgy’s numerous and exacting rubrics were understood as guiding the celebrant along a prayerful path of submissive obedience, in which he could submerge his personality into the Person of Christ and merge his individual voice with the chorus of the Church at prayer. The formal, hieratic gestures transmitted an eternally fresh symbolism while limiting (if not eliminating) the danger of subjectivism and emotionalism. The priest or other minister was conformed to Christ the servant, who came not to do His own will but the will of Him who sent Him; he is commanded what to speak and what to do; he never speaks of himself.

The Father who abides in the Son does the work of the Son, and the Son who abides in the priest likewise does the work of the priest. In this way, even as the Son was “emptied of glory” in taking on the form of a slave, so, too, is the priest who enters His kenosis, sharing the hiddenness, humiliation, passion, and death of Christ. We may even say that the priest imitates and participates in the descent of Christ into hell by offering the Holy Sacrifice for the release of souls in Purgatory, which has a certain resemblance to the limbo of the fathers.

The last Holy Communion of St. Benedict

Our Lord, the great High Priest of the New Covenant said: “I cannot do anything of myself” (Jn 5:30). Here we have perhaps the most radical statement of the priest’s being tethered to the liturgy. It is a tethering so complete that he may truthfully say: “I cannot do otherwise.” If he thinks or acts otherwise, he has not yet become a slave, in imitation of the One who assumed the likeness of a slave. Worse, if he is allowed to do otherwise by a liturgical book, that book is a smudged and fractured mirror that does not reflect the Word.

This is why we ought to be unnerved by one of the most notable novelties in the Missal of Paul VI and in all the revised liturgical books, namely, that by which the celebrant is given many options among which he may choose, as well as opportunities for crafting his own speech: “in these or similar words.”[1] Confronted with such a phrase, one might legitimately ask: “How similar is similar?” In reality, the word of the liturgy and the word of the minister ought to be homoousios, of one and the same substance, not homoiousios, of a similar substance.

In the action of selecting options and extemporizing texts, the celebrant no longer perfectly reflects the Word of God who, as the perfect Image of the Father, receives His words and does not originate them, who does the will of another and not His own will. The elective and extemporizing celebrant does not show forth the fundamental identity of the Christian: one who receives and bears fruit, like the Blessed Virgin Mary; one who conceives with no help of man, by the descent of the Spirit alone.[2]

Instead, he adopts the posture of one who originates; he removes this sphere of action from the master to whom he reports; he carves out for himself a zone of autonomy; he denies the Lord the privilege of commanding him and deprives himself of the guerdon of submission; for a moment he leaves the narrow way of being a tool and steps on to the broad way of being somebody. He becomes not only an actor but a playwright; his free choice as an individual is exalted into a principle of liturgy. He joins the madding crowd that says, in the words of the Psalmist: linguam nostram magnificabimus, labia nostra a nobis sunt; quis noster dominus est? “We will magnify our tongue; our lips are our own; who is Lord over us?” (Ps 11:5).

But since free choice is antithetical to liturgy as a fixed ritual received from our forebears and handed down to our successors, choice tends rather to be a principle of distraction, dilution, or dissolution in the liturgy than of its well-being. The same critique may be given of all of the ways in which the new liturgy permits the celebrant an indeterminate freedom of speech, bodily bearing, and movement. Such voluntarism strikes at the very essence of liturgy, which is a public, objective, formal, solemn, and common prayer, in which all Christians are equally participants, even when they are performing irreducibly distinct acts. The prayer of Christians belongs to everyone in common, which means it should not belong to anyone in particular. The moment a priest invents something that is not common, he sets himself up as a clerical overlord vis-à-vis the people, who must now submit not to a rule of Christ and the Church, but to the arbitrary rule of this individual.

In the liturgy above all, we must never speak “from ourselves,” but only from Christ and His beloved Bride, the Church.

The deepest cause of the missionary collapse of the Church in the Western world is that we have lost our institutional and personal subordination to Christ the High Priest, the principal actor in the liturgy, the Word to whom we lend our mouth, our hands, our bodies, our souls. For the past fifty years it has not been perfectly clear that we are in fact ministers and servants of another, intelligent instruments wholly at His disposal. On the contrary, the opposite message has been promoted over and over again, ad nauseam, whether in words or in deeds: we have “come of age,” we are shaping the world, the Church, the Mass, the entire Christian life, according to our own lights, and for our own purposes. It is not difficult to see both that this is an inversion of the preaching of Christ and of the tradition of the Church and that it cannot produce renewal, but rather, confusion, infidelity, boredom, and desolation. We see here an exact parallel to what has happened with marriage: when so-called “free love” entered into the picture, out went committed love and heroic sacrifice, and in came lust, selfishness, dissatisfaction, and an unspeakable plague of loneliness. “Without me, you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5). In the realm of sexual morality as in the realm of liturgical morality, we have given a compelling demonstration of what we can accomplish without Christ and without His gift of tradition—namely, nothing.

As if the Church had suddenly developed an autoimmune disease, churchmen in the twentieth century turned against ecclesiastical traditions, against greatness in music, art, and architecture, against rites and ceremonies, in a sterile love-affair with nothingness. We have witnessed an inbreaking of the underworld, an influx of demonic energy and chaos. Rejecting one’s past is rejecting oneself; this is what makes the comparison to an autoimmune condition apt. It does no good to pretend that we are dealing with anything less harmful than this, less dangerous, or less in need of exorcism.

I believe that we are much more on our guard now: the enemy of human nature has shown his cards and we are better prepared to detect his wiles. I would include in this category the flurry of thinking and writing that has taken place in recent years about the inherent limits of papal authority, the obligation of the pope to act as servant of the servants of God rather than an oriental (or South American) despot, and the inner connection between liturgy, dogma, and morality. As time goes on, I have no doubt that the truth of the axiom lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi will be made manifest in a blazing light of obviousness that will swell the ranks of Catholic traditionalists and expose the modernism of their opponents past all gainsaying.

The liturgical humility taught and practiced by St. Benedict will be, once again, as it had already been for so many centuries of Church history, a vital force in the restoration of worship for which we pray and labor.

NOTES

[1] See Rev. Paul Turner, In These or Similar Words: Praying and Crafting the Language of the Liturgy (Franklin Park, IL: World Library Publications, 2014). A synopsis may be found at http://paulturner.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ml-in-these-or-similar-words.pdf.

[2] See “The Spirit of the Liturgy in the Words and Actions of Our Lady” in Peter Kwasniewski, Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness: Why the Modern Age Needs the Mass of Ages (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2017), 53–87.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Martin Mosebach points out with respect to Holy Communion:

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

Fr. Roberto Spataro makes a similar but broader point:

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

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

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

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Running Humble: The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

James Tissot, Le pharisien et le publicain(1886-94)

Lost in Translation #11

The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost teaches us much about Christian humility. The Introit urges us to cast our care upon the Lord (Ps. 54, 17; 18; 20; 23), and the Offertory Verse speaks of trusting in God rather than ourselves (Ps. 24, 1-3). Trust in God is needed in order to have humility, the subject of both the Epistle and the Gospel. Jesus tells the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke 18, 9-14) to correct those who “trusted in themselves as just and despised others.” The hero of the story, a humble Publican, is justified by God while the proud Pharisee is not, for “every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” In the Epistle, St Paul’s admonitions to the Corinthians are an implicit call to humility. Don’t get cocky, he is basically saying: you were once all as dumb as the idols you worshiped, and if you have the ability now to recognize Jesus as Lord, it is only by virtue of the Holy Spirit. Further, if you have any special talents or position within the Church, those too are a gift from God and have nothing to do with your innate merit. (1 Cor. 12, 2-11)

All of which makes the Collect somewhat puzzling, thanks especially to one word:

Deus, qui omnipotentiam tuam parcendo máxime et miserando manifestas: multíplica super nos misericordiam tuam; ut ad tua promissa curréntes, caelestium bonórum facias esse consortes. Per Dóminum.

Which I translate as:

O God, who dost manifest Thine omnipotence chiefly by sparing and showing mercy: increase Thy mercy upon us, that Thou mayst make us, who are running towards Thy promises, partakers of Thy heavenly goods. Through our Lord.

The puzzle is not the appeal to mercy or its connection to humility, which the Publican demonstrates clearly when he strikes his breast and says “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” I remember hearing that Church officials a century ago, perhaps affected by a Jansenist spirit, were startled by St. Faustina’s claim that God’s greatest attribute was His mercy. Apparently these officials didn’t pay much attention to what they were praying every year on this Sunday.

No, the puzzle is the use of currentes, which is from the verb to run or hurry up. The image in the Gospel is of a humble man practically hiding in the shadows and not even daring to raise his eyes. The Publican is not exactly a picture of alacrity. But the Collect gives us an image of God's faithful racing, hustling to His promises, eager to partake of His heavenly treasures. Are these two images incompatible?

Rubbing these two sticks together, it seems to me, triggers an important spark of insight into the nature of humility. Christian humility is not masochism or self-defeat. On the contrary, as St Thomas Aquinas so marvelously explains, whereas pride is the disordered and excessive pursuit of excellence and despair the disordered and defective pursuit of excellence, humility is the well-ordered and smoothly running pursuit of excellence, including even one’s own excellence (Summa Theologiae II-II.160.2, II-II.161.6). Let that sink in for a moment. Humility is the habit for the pursuit of excellence. It is not the state of thinking and acting like a doormat but, “so to speak, a certain disposition to man’s free access to spiritual and divine goods.” (II-II.161.5.ad 4). And when that access is free, we run to it freely, unencumbered by vice or a delusional self-regard. Notice the similarity between Aquinas’ wording (“spiritual and divine goods”) and the Collect’s (“heavenly goods”). Was the Angelic Doctor inspired by this prayer when he wrote his treatment of humility?

The point is that humility is a paradox. The virtue of lowliness gains the heights; the virtue of trusting in God and not in oneself imparts a confidence that all the pep talks in the world about high self-esteem cannot muster; and the virtue of looking down contritely and staying put looks up gleefully and runs to the prize. So run as to obtain it.

The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Liturgical Wisdom

The son honoureth the father, and the servant his master.
If then I be a father, where is my honour?
And if I be a master, where is my fear? saith the Lord of hosts.
To you, O priests, that despise my name, and have said:
Wherein have we despised thy name?
You offer polluted bread upon my altar, and you say:
Wherein have we polluted thee?
In that you say: The table of the Lord is contemptible.
(Mal 1:6–7)

As St. John teaches, if our charity reaches perfection, we no longer stand in a slavish fear of God as our master and judge (1 Jn 4:18). Rather, we love Him as “all good and deserving of all our love.” In this way we do still fear Him, but with the fear of sons who reverence their Father and are afraid of offending Him or of doing less for Him than they ought. This is what the Catholic tradition refers to as “filial fear” or “reverential fear.” Perfect love does not cast out virtuous fear, but rather intensifies it.

The Introit for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost combines explicit joy and implicit fear in a striking juxtaposition: “Clap your hands, all ye nations: shout unto God with the voice of joy. Ps. For the Lord is most high, He is terrible; He is a great King over all the earth.” The Church is teaching us that our joy is rooted in the Lord’s sovereignty, our exaltation in His aweful might. The nations clap their hands because God is a great King over all the earth; otherwise they would cower in fear of their enemies, visible and invisible. The Psalmist never lets us forget this fundamental truth of creaturehood: Servite Domino in timore, et exsultate ei cum tremore. “Serve ye the Lord in fear, and exult in Him with trembling” (Ps 2:11). “In your fear I will worship toward your holy temple” (Ps 5:8).

It is therefore cause for spiritual concern that the note of holy fear is minimal in the reformed liturgical books, considering how enormous a role it plays in the Bible — in both Testaments! — and in the traditional Latin liturgy that transmits the pure spirit of Christian worship to us. Evidently it was decided that “modern man” had transcended the relationship of subordinate to superior, of son to father, and consequently had outgrown the need for that “fear of the Lord” so often emphasized in Scripture. (Just to have a rough sense of it, the phrase “fear of the Lord” appears 52 times in the Douay-Rheims translation.)

The most poignant symbol of the universal loss of reverential fear was the abandonment of the practice of kneeling before the Holy One of Israel, really present in the Blessed Sacrament, and of receiving Him on the tongue from an ordained minister. This old custom, which happily survives here and there, literally embodies man’s dependency on God, his lowliness and unworthiness, his desire to give to God who reigns in heaven the adoration due to Him alone, and his desire for healing and elevation. One must first be low in order to be raised up on high, as the Magnificat proclaims. In this practice is contained the humility of willing to be fed like a baby bird by its parent or a child still too small to feed itself. In the supernatural domain, we are all children who need to be fed by the Father, fed with the bread that is His Son.

The great Advent hymn Conditor alme siderum contains this marvelous stanza:

Cuius forti potentiae
genu curvantur omnia;
caelestia, terrestria
nutu fatentur subdita.
At whose dread Name, majestic now,
All knees must bend, all hearts must bow;
And things celestial Thee shall own,
And things terrestrial, Lord alone.

The modified Creator alme siderum conveys the same message in a more classical form:

Cuius potestas gloriae,
Nomenque cum primum sonat,
et caelites et inferi
tremente curvantur genu.
Thy glorious power, Thy saving Name
No sooner any voice can frame,
But heaven and earth and hell agree
To honor them with trembling knee.

“Heaven and earth and hell agree / To honor them with trembling knee.” But we of the modern West are too arrogant to do so anymore. “Live Free or Die,” proclaims the motto of New Hampshire; our knees will not tremble before tyrants. When we worship the god of liberty, we “sit down to eat and drink, and rise up to play” (cf. Ex 32:6), no bowing and scraping, no genuflecting. Our collective head must be big indeed, a microcosm without a God, like the world of the Pharisee in the Gospel of the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost. We’re not even good enough for hell, since, as Scripture says, “the demons believe — and tremble” (Jas 2:19), while we prance right up to the table of plenty and take the wafer like a chip at a snackbar. “Wherein have we polluted thee? In that you say: The table of the Lord is contemptible.”

As time goes on, we see ever more clearly that the reasons that were invoked to justify changing the liturgy for the supposed benefit of “modern man” are either the same as or analogous to the reasons that have been and will be invoked for redacting or suppressing Sacred Scripture as well. The message of the Bible must be carefully filtered so that the fear of the Lord, His wrath, His justice, His punishments, His uncompromising demands, will not invade and annoy the minds of modern sophisticates, long since graduated from the savage anthropomorphism of the patriarchs and matriarchs. In reality, we are more like mentally challenged Kindergarteners who have not even reached the threshold of the medieval mind that imagined and executed the transcendent judgment scenes carved across the tympana of Romanesque and Gothic churches.

The Jesuit Superior General, Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, made news a couple of years ago when he said we can’t know for sure what Jesus taught because we didn’t have a tape recorder to capture His exact words. According to this Jesuit, we have received Christ’s teaching through the lens of people who may not be entirely trustworthy, so today we must reinterpret Christ’s message through the lens of our own discernment and the voice of our conscience. In other words, we have to grow up, stand on our own two feet, stop depending on what we have been given already, and update Jesus for our times.

Don’t we see the same dynamic at play in the past half-century of liturgical reform? We can’t know for sure what the Eucharistic Sacrifice was supposed to be because we don’t have a tape recorder of the Last Supper or the post-resurrection discourses. We have received our liturgy from people who may not be entirely trustworthy, particularly if they lived in the allegory-addicted Middle Ages or the lavish courts of the Counter-Reformation. Today we have to reinterpret liturgy through the lens of our own “hopes” and “dreams.” Let’s stand on our own two feet as we queue up for the token of belonging.

Evidently, this is what the Eucharist has become to a great number of Catholics: the much-discussed recent Pew Research Center survey shows that huge numbers of Catholics, even those who regularly go to Mass, either do not know the teaching of the Church on transubstantiation or, knowing it, do not believe it. Catechesis is good, but it is not enough; what is needed is a form of liturgy that cries out Real Presence and humbles itself to the dust in adoration. What is needed, in short, is reverential fear.

Back in the 1960s, kneeling for communion and receiving it on the tongue was scoffed at as childish. In our own day, believing that marriage is really indissoluble for life, or that the death penalty is a legitimate response to some crimes, is considered naïve, immature, unrealistic, cruel. The basic move is the same: what the Bible says, what Catholic tradition says, what the liturgy says in words and signs, has to be reinterpreted and adapted for our contemporary situation. If this means outright contradiction, so be it. The thesis demands its antithesis, which will lead us to a new and better synthesis — right?

The line linking Hegel and Feuerbach to Jungmann and Teilhard to Kasper and Bergoglio may not always be obvious, but it is nonetheless intrinsic and profound. The traditional liturgy is absolutely incompatible with this line and is its only remedy.

When Our Lord was praying Psalm 22 upon the altar of the Cross, letting go of His lifeblood for us sinners, He would have prayed these verses:

You who fear the Lord, praise Him;
all you seed of Jacob, glorify Him;
and stand in awe of Him, all you the seed of Israel.

A triple imperative: praise Him, glorify Him, stand in awe of Him . . . you who fear the Lord. May this be the mind we put on (cf. Phil 2:5) when we assist at the same sacrifice.

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