Ss Athanasius of Alexandria and Gregory of Nazianzus

Today is the feast of St Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria and Doctor of the Church, the foremost champion of the true Faith during the great crisis caused by the heretic Arius in the 4th century. May 2nd is universally recognized to be the day of his death; there is a particular fittingness to celebrating him on this date, one week after the feast of St Mark the Evangelist, the founder of the See of Alexandria, as a sign of continuity between the Gospel and Nicene orthodoxy. The Roman Rite shares this arrangement with the Coptic calendar and the Byzantine, although in the latter, today is noted as the feast of the translation of Athanasius’ relics, and his principal feast, which he shares with another Patriarch of Alexandria and Doctor, St Cyril, is on January 18th. Likewise, the western Church keeps the feast of St Gregory of Nazianzus on May 9th, a week after Athanasius, as a sign that he inherited his mantle as the greatest theological writer in the controversies over the Trinity and Incarnation. Also in the Byzantine Rite, his feast is kept one week after Athanasius’, on January 25th.

Ss Athanasius and Cyril, from the Menologion of Basil II, 985 AD: public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

St Athanasius was always known to the western Church from his Life of St Anthony, which was translated into Latin close to the time of death in 373; St Augustine mentions it in the Confessions. However, many of his most important theological works were not known to the West until the 15th century; in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas, for example, St John Chrysostom is mentioned about 20 times more often. His feast does occur in western liturgical books of the pre-Tridentine period, but almost exclusively in France and Spain, and almost never before the later decades of the 15th century; it does not appear to have been kept at all in Rome.

Much the same holds true for St Gregory of Nazianzus. He was known to the West from the mentions of him in the writings of his student, St Jerome, e.g. in the well-known treatise On Virginity against Jovinian, and the book On Illustrious Men, in which he calls him “a most eloquent man.” But again, very little of his writing was translated into Latin, and he is mentioned by St Thomas even less often than St Athanasius. Before the Tridentine reform, his feast was kept almost nowhere outside Spain, and even there, only from the very beginning of the 16th century.

In 1568, when Pope St Pius V, fulfilling a request of the Council of Trent, published a revision of the Roman Breviary, both Saints were included not just as bishops and confessors, but also as Doctors of the Church, and at the highest of three grades of feasts. The same titles and rank were also given to Ss Basil the Great and John Chrysostom; among these four, only Chrysostom had been widely celebrated with a feast thitherto. Up to that point, the title “Doctor”, and the use of the liturgical texts associated with it, had been formally granted to only four Saints whose writings were always particularly influential in the West, Ss Gregory the Great, Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome.

In the Counter-Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church was greatly concerned to assert that its traditional doctrines were those held “always, everywhere and by all”, and not medieval corruptions, as the early Protestants often claimed. The pairing of four Eastern Doctors with the traditional four Western Doctors therefore asserted the universality of those teachings which were held by Rome and defended by the Council of Trent, and also held by the Eastern churches. The inclusion of St Thomas Aquinas among them then asserted the continuity in teaching between the patristic and medieval Church, also frequently denied by the Protestants. Three of these new Eastern Doctors also have special connections to Rome and the Papacy. During the second of his five exiles, St Athanasius was a guest of Pope St Julius I, who defended him against the Arian heretics; relics of Ss John Chrysostom and Gregory of Nazianzus were saved from the iconoclasts in the 8th century and brought to Rome, later to be placed in St Peter’s Basilica.

The Gregorian Chapel in St Peter’s Basilica, built by Pope Gregory XIII to house the relics of his namesake of Nazianzus, which he translated here from the Roman church of Santa Maria in Campo Marzo in 1580.

Furthermore, these same Fathers are witnesses not just to Catholic teachings that the early Protestants rejected, but to others like the Trinity and Incarnation, which they not only accepted, but considered necessary for salvation. This was of course one of the strongest points in the Catholic Church’s favor during the controversies of the 16th century: if one accepts Athanasius, for example, as a witness to the doctrine of the Trinity, on what grounds does one reject him when he says, “So long as the prayers of supplication and entreaties have not been made, there is only bread and wine. But after the great and wonderful prayers have been completed, then the bread is become the Body, and the wine the Blood, of our Lord Jesus Christ”? If one accepts Basil’s defense of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, on what grounds does one reject his teaching that “It is necessary to confess our sins to those whom the dispensation of God’s mysteries is entrusted”? And more broadly, once the Fathers have been admitted as witnesses to the Christian Faith at all, one has in effect admitted a tradition, by which the teachings of some Christians in antiquity are recognized to be true, and those of others false, a further undermining of the original logical impossibility known as sola Scriptura.

There is an aspect of St Gregory of Nazianus’ career in particular which is less well known than his role as a theologian, and which should perhaps be better known today.

For most of the half century after the death of Constantine in 337, the Roman Emperors were supporters of Arianism, rather than of the orthodox faith. It should therefore not surprise anyone that the see of the imperial capital was dominated for most of that period by Arian bishops. However, with the death in 378 of the Emperor Valens, an enthusiastic persecutor of the orthodox, and the accession of Theodosius I, the tide began to turn strongly against the Arians. St Gregory, having retired some years earlier from a bishopric which he had been practically forced into, was then living a quiet and contemplative life in a monastery near Seleucia on the southern coast of Asia Minor, over 400 miles away from the capital. A number of Catholic bishops, anxious to reestablish the true faith in Constantinople, suggested that he come to the city, not as its bishop, but as a missionary; as with his earlier bishopric, he was prevailed upon to take up this new role only with the greatest reluctance. (Pictured right: Icon of St Gregory of Nazianzus, by Andrej Rublev, 1408, originally in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow, now in the Tretyakov Gallery; Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Gregory was accepted by almost none of the city’s clergy, and had access to none of its many churches; as Butler’s Lives of the Saints puts it, he was a bishop in Constantinople, but not the bishop of Constantinople. He therefore opened a small chapel attached to the house of a relative, which he called “Anastasis – the Resurrection”, a sign that it would become the place from which the true faith would rise again. His preaching, and especially the series of sermons on the Trinity, was in fact incredibly effective; more and more people were attracted by his eloquence, and his flock began to grow.

This brought with it many difficulties, of course, including persecution from the Arians and other heretics, which more than once came to physical violence, as well as calumnies and insults. At the Easter vigil during his first year in the city, the Arians broke into his church; Gregory himself was wounded, and another bishop present was killed. But among his many disciples, he would soon come to number not only St Jerome, but also Evagrius of Pontus, who would himself become one of the most influential theologians of the era.

The following year, Theodosius, newly baptized by an orthodox bishop, issued the Edict of Thessalonica, recognizing as the true faith “that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter, as it has been preserved by faithful tradition, and which is now professed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria.” Towards the end of the year, on arriving in Constantinople, he expelled the Arian bishop for refusing to embrace the Nicene confession of faith, and set Gregory in his place. It may seem that this victory was short-lived; within a few months, in the midst of every sort of intrigue and new acts of violence, Gregory obtained the emperor’s permission to resign his see and return to Nazianzus. But in point of fact, it did not matter. At the very moment when it seemed that heresy had triumphed in one of the most important and influential sees of Christendom, the true faith was reborn from a single place, and largely through the work of single man. Nor was this the first or last time such an event happened in the life of the Church. Let it therefore be an object lesson to us, never to despair over the sorry condition in which the Church finds itself in a particular time and place, including our own.

Organic Development as a Useful Metaphor in Liturgical Discussions

Gregory DiPippo has written two thought-provoking pieces about the limits of appeals made to “organic development” (part 1, part 2). I agree with Gregory’s critique of a ham-handed or naïve application of the language of “organic” and “inorganic” to the history of the liturgy. He is right to say that liturgy, which is a free human work or really a gigantic gathering of human works, changes because of human decisions, and that these decisions can be either good or bad, can be evaluated as improvements or corruptions in reference to their own merits or demerits. On the whole, he makes his case convincingly, and has introduced into the discussion a long-overdue caution about putting too much argumentative weight on a concept that cannot bear it. In what follows, I am not so much intending to reject his position as offering a counterpoint to it. Not to sound too Hegelian, I would hope there is some higher synthesis.

I wonder if we might be overlooking the way, or at least a way, in which “organic” is used in Catholic discourse—namely, as a metaphor for a set of qualities. This is how it is first used by St. Vincent of Lérins in his famous Commonitory:

The growth of religion in the soul must be analogous to the growth of the body, which, though in process of years it is developed and attains its full size, yet remains still the same. There is a wide difference between the flower of youth and the maturity of age; yet they who were once young are still the same now that they have become old, insomuch that though the stature and outward form of the individual are changed, yet his nature is one and the same, his person is one and the same. This, then, is undoubtedly the true and legitimate rule of progress, this the established and most beautiful order of growth, that mature age ever develops in the man those parts and forms which the wisdom of the Creator had already framed beforehand in the infant.
       In like manner, it behooves Christian doctrine to follow the same laws of progress, so as to be consolidated by years, enlarged by time, refined by age, and yet, withal, to continue uncorrupt and unadulterate, complete and perfect in all the measurement of its parts, and, so to speak, in all its proper members and senses, admitting no change, no waste of its distinctive property, no variation in its limits.[1]

Now, clearly the development of doctrine is not something that happens automatically, spontaneously, or involuntarily, as the growth of a body does. But the metaphor is useful because it is as if in the Church certain developments unfold with a kind of inevitableness that suggests the growth of an organism. In the midst of the Trinitarian and Christological disputes no one would have said “this is an organic process,” since at the time it would have seemed like a bar-room brawl, but in retrospect, when one looks at the great lines of the debates, one sees a progression from topic to topic that seems compellingly logical, almost… inevitable.

Once a given question was raised about Christ, someone was bound to raise the next one, and the next one. Are there two natures in Christ? Yes. Well then, are there two wills in Christ? Yes. Well then, are there two energies in Christ? One can see lines of thought unfolding like this in regard to many areas of Christian doctrine. It is never perfectly logical, since human free agents are involved, and surprises like wars, disasters, and famines, but looking back one sees why the developments happened as and when they did. That is why Newman could write his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.
  

Thus, when you look at it from a later vantage point, growth in doctrine or dogma seems like the growth of an organism: it has an appearance of right, proportionate, and necessary growth, in spite of the intervention of so many individual human wills; and that is why Vincent’s comparison can be understood and approved, even if, when pressed too hard, taken too literally, it would fall apart.

Perhaps the profound root of this metaphor is our conviction that the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ—a mystical organism that does have an inner principle of motion and rest, of movement toward goals and rest in them (at least partial rest; eternal rest is not for this world). It is not only bishops, popes, and councils that run this gardening operation; Providence is the ultimate gardener that tends and prunes this mystical vine, which is composed of rational beings, but is governed by the God who, without violating their freedom, can guide them along paths He has preordained, while also permitting evils to occur.

Moving over to the sphere of liturgy, it seems to me that what we mean by “organic” is not “mindless” or “necessitated” but “in accord with the inner principles of a thing” and therefore, in a way, explicable given its own nature. Moreover, it is crucial for this metaphor’s efficacy that the rate of change, or at least the rate of most changes and of perceived change, be relatively slow—measured in centuries, as was the case with the Roman Rite prior to Pius X, rather than in mere decades or years, as occurred in the twentieth century, with increasingly hasty and wider-ranging reforms. When significant changes happen by individual intellects and free choices only once in a while—a new Sequence here, a new feast there—the broad picture will be that of a gentle and gradual process, the way leaves grow on a tree, and then buds, and then fruits. Each day brings a little more growth but you don’t notice it as growth. It’s not like the magic lamp-post in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which grows up in real time out of the ground before your very eyes.

In short, what is organic is not so much the individual change to the liturgy as the entire trajectory of changes over long periods. Instead of saying “the feast of Christ the King was an organic development,” which would rightly fall afoul of Gregory’s point that it was very obviously Pope Pius XI who willed to insert a new feast into the calendar (voluntary rather than organic), we should apply the label “organic” to the overall sanctoral and temporal cycles of the Roman Rite, which have indeed developed much over sixteen centuries, but which preserve all along the core elements and embellish them in ways that are appropriate (or at least not inappropriate) to the original spirit and purpose of such cycles. In contrast, what Paul VI did to these cycles can in no way be reconciled with this spirit and purpose, nor with the attitude of respect that Catholics have instinctively felt it is right to give to the results of the history through which we have passed.

Moreover, one could say that the devotion to Christ as King is, as Pius XI himself notes, something present in Scripture and Tradition and seen in countless works of art from all ages, and accordingly, that his liturgical insertion, made at a specific time for specific reasons, is truly in continuity with elements already present. It accentuates those elements without burying them or distorting them.
 

The Consilium hard at work for the benefit of Modern Man

Let’s take a more controversial example: communion received on the tongue and kneeling. The double shift from standing to kneeling and from receiving in the hand to receiving on the tongue is certainly a change that had to be willed by various local churches here and there before it became a universal custom, but the rationale behind this change is easy to see. It was always profound reverence for Our Lord present in the Blessed Sacrament that was dictating the Church’s policy in regard to its reception, and as awareness grew and spread that there were better ways to express this reverence and to avoid dangers in the use of the sacrament, to that degree did the new practices take hold and become universal. They did so, in other words, not because of an all-powerful pope in Rome saying to every local church: “You must receive communion in thus-and-such a way”—the Church before the sixteenth century did not legislate universally about liturgy in that manner—but because a custom with evident benefits, a lex orandi with a better claim to conveying the lex credendi, had sprung up here and there, and spread from one local church to the next.

That is the kind of development that looks, in retrospect, “organic”: though the result of human wills, it popped up here and there like seeds sprouting, and spread like seeds carried by the wind, and gradually covered the Catholic world, until it seemed inevitable. We see that it is dignum et justum. There would certainly never be a reason to go backwards artificially to pick up an earlier practice that was rightly discarded.

Then there are equally obvious cases of developments that look, metaphorically, inorganic. Can anyone seriously say that the body of Latin hymn texts possessed by the Church needed to be rewritten in a classicizing manner? I mean, was there a principle within Christendom that dictated that ancient pagan Roman verse should be asserted as normative? Or was this the hobby-horse of a particular pope who abused his papal authority to promote his personal poetic preferences? The same could be said of the utterly failed “Bea psalter” of Pius XII, which he thought he would successfully impose on the Latin Church in displacement of the age-old translation by St. Jerome that had been prayed by innumerable monks, nuns, and clerics. Critics said: “adauget latinitatem, minuit pietatem.”[2] It seems to me that no one will ever look back at history and say “Urban VIII’s imposition of classicized hymns and Pius XII’s imposition of a classicized psalter were changes prompted, nay, demanded, by the inner nature of Catholic worship, and better expressed it.”

In a lecture entitled “Beyond ‘Smells and Bells’: Why We Need the Objective Content of the Usus Antiquior,” I formulated five laws of “organic liturgical development”:

(1) There is true development in regard to liturgical rites;
(2) Authentic development begins from and remains faithful to what the Lord entrusted to the apostles;
(3) The “truth” into which the Holy Spirit guides the Church includes the development of her liturgy;
(4) As the liturgy develops, it becomes fuller and more perfect;
(5) To the extent that a liturgy is perfected, its changes will be proportionately incidental or accidental.

The fourth law has three corollaries:

(i) The rate of liturgical change decreases over time, as the rite achieves the plenitude intended for it by Divine Providence;
(ii) One should expect a rite, after a certain point, to be relatively permanent and immobile, so that it is a compliment rather than a criticism to say of it that “it has hardly changed for centuries”;
(iii) The clergy offering and the faithful assisting at a particular rite can see that it is appropriate for a rite to have the qualities of permanence and immobility. Those who are interested in reading a fuller account of these laws, with illustrations, should refer to that lecture.

To my earlier comparison with Vincent of Lérins on doctrinal development, someone might object that doctrine is one kind of thing and liturgy is another.

However, as we must continue to remind over-eager papal apologists, anything of any significance in the liturgy can never be considered merely disciplinary; the liturgy always bears doctrinal content or testimony. And therefore many (most?) changes in liturgy will have doctrinal implications, either for good or for ill, as Michael Davies memorably demonstrated in his work Cranmer’s Godly Order. The comparison to a growing body works (and doesn’t work) to the same extent for dogma and for liturgy, a point Newman recognizes in passing:

It appears then that there has been a certain general type of Christianity in every age, by which it is known at first sight, differing from itself only as what is young differs from what is mature, or as found in Europe or in America, so that it is named at once and without hesitation, as forms of nature are recognized by experts in physical science; or as some work of literature or art is assigned to its right author by the critic, difficult as may be the analysis of that specific impression by which he is enabled to do so. And it appears that this type has remained entire from first to last, in spite of that process of development which seems to be attributed by all parties, for good or bad, to the doctrines, rites, and usages in which Christianity consists; or, in other words, that the changes which have taken place in Christianity have not been such as to destroy that type,—that is, that they are not corruptions, because they are consistent with that type. Here then, in the preservation of type, we have a first Note of the fidelity of the existing developments of Christianity.[3] 

Not organic in any way, shape, or form

Given the foregoing, I think we can say (in agreement with Gregory) why Sacrosanctum Concilium 23 is, and could only ever be, totally implausible on the face of it. When a council votes to make a lot of changes all at once, and then the body entrusted with the realization of the desiderata makes a thousand more changes all at once—on a scale, quantitatively and qualitatively, never before seen in any natural process except perhaps for atomic explosions, or, in the political sphere, by something like the French Revolution (to which, indeed, Cardinal Suenens compared the Second Vatican Council)—it is perfectly obvious that such an affair could never have the appearance of organic development, that is, change over time “as if” by a natural process. By no stretch of the imagination can the work of the Consilium be called “organic,” even allowing for the most elastic metaphoricism imaginable. Rather, it looks decidedly violent, which, as Aristotle shows, is the opposite of natural. And that is why Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger could famously write in his Foreword to Dom Alcuin Reid’s book on our subject:

[G]rowth is not possible unless the Liturgy’s identity is preserved… proper development is possible only if careful attention is paid to the inner structural logic of this “organism”: just as a gardener cares for a living plant as it develops, with due attention to the power of growth and life within the plant and the rules it obeys, so the Church ought to give reverent care to the Liturgy through the ages, distinguishing actions that are helpful and healing from those that are violent and destructive… [W]ith respect to the Liturgy, he [the pope] has the task of a gardener, not that of a technician who builds new machines and throws the old ones on the junk-pile.

This quotation suggests that at least one of the reasons people use the term “organic” is to contrast the liturgy with a machine—the contrast between something alive that follows its own internal principles, and something we build solely by our own lights and are very willing to throw on the junk pile when we come up with the next model. For indeed the liturgy is a living reality, but that is not because it itself is an organism, but because it has the living God for its author and animator, and makes Him present to us and unites us with Him in praise and in sacrament.

The liturgy is also living because it bears within itself content that was caused by the living God at every stage of the Church’s history. From that point of view and in that specific sense, the “reformed” liturgy after Vatican II, which repudiates so much of that history, cannot be said to be alive or to have the living God as its author. It has God for its author in the general sense in which any being—such as the bullet of a criminal and its flight through the air to the heart of an innocent victim—has God for its author; it also has God for author in the validity of the sacramental action narrowly construed.

The parallel here with doctrine is evident: we can speak of “the living Magisterium” in the sense of the teaching authority that is one and the same, consistent with itself across all ages because it emanates from the ever-living Christ. But we cannot speak of a “living Magisterium” in the sense of a “Magisterium of the moment,” ever changing to reflect the current incumbent’s whims.

The elephant in the room here is, without a doubt, the centralization of authority in the hands of the pope and of the Vatican. Sure, popes have always made contributions to the liturgy, but the history of the subject shows that, until the Tridentine period, Rome was perhaps as often reacting to changes elsewhere as it was inducing change itself (e.g., we know that Rome received back its own rite enriched by its sojourn among the Carolingians, and that Rome added a Creed rather late, after everyone else had done so)—and most of all, the popes were just not changing things on a regular basis, and certainly not “for the good of everyone,” with that arrogant populist attitude that dictates what the people need best, whether they know it or not.

As Fr. Hunwicke has mentioned many times, the simple fact that, for most of the Church’s history, liturgical books were difficult to copy by hand for most of the Church’and therefore rare and valuable, together with the slowness of communication, meant that local custom would be tenacious. The combined invention of the printing press and the massive reassertion of sovereign papal authority during the Protestant Revolt opened the way to a tinkeritis that only grew worse with the passing of centuries.

The second elephant in the room (there are a lot of elephants these days, and one wonders when the room will run out of space for them) is a point that I feel is neglected in the pair of essays to which I am responding, namely, the pope’s boundedness to tradition, meaning, the moral obligation he has, in virtue of his office, to receive and preserve the inherited rites. I have spoken about this at length elsewhere so I will not dilate upon it here.[4]

Liturgical history is not primarily people cooking up new ideas, trying them out, and responding to whether they succeed or fail. Liturgical history, especially as time goes on, is much more about retaining and handing down what is already there, accumulating over time. It would be wrong and arguably illicit for a pope to, e.g., abolish the subdiaconate or create female “ministries.” New things are added somewhat in the manner of ornaments to a great big Christmas tree—a tree that abides. What happened in Paul VI’s reform was more like planting a new tree that looks a bit like the old tree and then building a wall to keep people away from the old tree.

 

Indeed, it’s worth pointing out that the image that comes most readily to mind for organic growth in the liturgy is that of a tree. Unlike animals that grow quickly and die after a few years, trees can live for hundreds and even thousands of years. They grow more slowly than animals, and although they put out more and more branches and leaves and fruits, they remain rooted in one place.

Every analogy limps, and the comparison of the liturgy to a tree limps, too; but it has some striking parallels. The liturgy is rooted in divine revelation and apostolic tradition. It remains itself while it gets larger and bigger. Like the mustard seed, its beginning is modest, but its final, fully perfected form is massive and grand, with the lush foliage of the riches of culture as we see them in the great cathedrals, the baldachins and choir stalls, the gold and silver vessels, the ornate vestments, the chant and polyphony, and so on and so forth. The same as ever, and yet more itself than ever. We can see, once again, why the modern liturgical reform could never be called organic: it moves in the opposite direction. As Hugh Ross Williamson memorably put it:

The return to the “primitive” is based on the curious theory of history, sometimes referred to as “Hunt the Acorn.” That is to say, when you see a mighty oak you do not joy in its strength and luxuriant development. You start to search for an acorn compatible with that from which it grew and say: “This is what it ought to be like.”[5]

For all these reasons, I am convinced that the language of organic and inorganic still has some value as long as we recognize it to be metaphorical and not metaphysical — descriptive of patterns (as are sociological or economic laws) and not deterministic (as are scientific laws).

NOTES

[1] Commonitorium 23, 29.

[2] It increases Latinity but diminishes piety.

[3] Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, chapter 7.

[4] See “The Pope’s Boundenness to Tradition as a Legislative Limit: Replying to Ultramontanist
Apologetics.”

[5] Cited in Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 353.

Photographs by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. (Flickr).

The Theological Virtues and the Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Codex Aureus of Echternach (c. 1030), Manuscript (Hs. 156142)

Lost in Translation #14 

The readings for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost have as their focal point the power and importance of supernatural faith. It is faith, the Gospel tells us (Luke 17, 11-19), that makes us whole; and it is faith, the Epistle tells us (Galatians 3, 16-22), that helps us inherit God’s promises. But lest we slip into the heresy of Sola Fides, the Collect provides a succinct and yet packed framework in which to understand this precious gift:

Omnípotens sempiterne Deus, da nobis fídei, spei et caritátis augmentum: et, ut mereámur ássequi quod promittis, fac nos amáre quod praecipis. Per Dóminum.

Which I translate as:

Almighty and everlasting God, grant unto us an increase of faith, hope, and charity: and so that we may merit to obtain what Thou dost promise, make us love what Thou dost command. Through our Lord.

There is much in this brief Collect. Like clever children who know how to get their mom and dad to say Yes, the Orations of the Roman Missal usually flatter God by praising His attributes in a “who” clause before asking Him for a favor. This prayer, however, cuts right to the chase: there isn’t even the standard deferential “we beseech Thee.”

Moreover, by requesting the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the Collect reminds us that faith alone does not save, but must be accompanied by hope and charity, especially the latter. St. Thomas Aquinas goes so far as to call charity the “form” or animating principle of faith, that without which faith is a lifeless corpse (for even the demons believe in God, but it does them little good [see James 2, 19]). Stephen Beale rightly argues that the key difference between Protestants and Catholics is a soteriology not of “faith alone” versus “faith and works” but of “faith alone” versus “faith and charity.”

But the Collect aims even higher, praying not simply for faith, hope, and charity, but their increase. These virtues were infused into our souls by the sheer generosity of God when we received the sacrament of baptism, but they can increase or decrease after that signature event, and we obviously want them to increase. God may have infused these virtues “in us, without us” as Aquinas puts it, but they cannot be maintained without us. The Council of Trent cites this Sunday’s Collect in its articulation of the Catholic doctrine of sanctification, which involves progressing in the state of justice until death (session vi, chapter 10).

Indeed, the amount of faith, hope, and charity a person has at the moment of his death is the amount that he will have for all eternity. Purgatory does not increase one’s virtues but pays off the debt of temporal punishment that is owed to God. This decontamination shower (or refiner’s fire, if you prefer) at Heaven's doorstep simply burnishes what is there; it does not bestow what is not there. There is no growth in Heaven either, only perfection of various kinds that creates a “holy ranking” of heavenly souls and spirits, or to use the Greek term, a “hierarchy.” Therefore, if you wish your soul to have a maximum of faith, hope, and charity, now is the time to go for it. The theme of increasing the theological virtues also pairs nicely with the Postcommunion for this Sunday, which prays that through the working of the sacraments we have just received “we may advance in the increase of eternal redemption” (ad redemptiónis aeternæ, quaesumus, proficiámus augmentum), that is, an increase in the effects of the Redemption on our souls.

The second half of the Collect teaches us how to increase the theological virtues, although the answer seems contradictory. Does the Catholic Church teach that we are saved by God’s grace or by human merit? Yes, the Collect replies. We need merit to obtain God’s promises, and merit is obtained by good works and the exercise of virtue. But it is still God who gives the increase (1 Cor. 3, 6). As the well-trained Thomist Blessed Columba Marmion explains, God is the efficient cause of the increase of virtue in our souls while our acts are “the meritorious cause,” which simply means that “by our acts, we merit that God should augment these vital virtues in our souls.” [1]

And what makes these acts meritorious? The Collect has an answer to that question as well: we must love what God commands. As Aristotle pointed out long ago, simply doing good deeds does not make one a just man, for if one only acts out of fear of punishment or a desire for reward, one is not truly just. What makes a good man good is that he loves the good as well as does it. But to love the good--or to put it back in more biblical terms, to love what God commands--takes nothing less than a root-and-branch conversion that only God can give us, for our hearts are desperately wicked from their youth (see Jeremiah 17, 9). We again return to the theme of reordered desire that emerges during this portion of the Time after Pentecost and to the paramount importance of undergoing an internal transformation. 

Put differently, there is no “works righteousness” doctrine undergirding this Collect, and still less is there Luther’s belief in “imputed righteousness” which has even souls in Heaven remain piles of dung covered by gracious blankets of snow. The Catholic dogma concerning salvation does not teach that we earn our way into Heaven by sole dint of our own efforts but that any merit we have earned and must earn is, paradoxically, a gift from God. For, as we never tire of citing, when God rewards the merits of His saints, He is rewarding His own gifts (see Gallican Preface for All Saints Day). 

In the case of this Collect, the Church asks for an increase of faith, hope, and charity through a two-step process. First, she begs God to make us true lovers of His will, which we have absolutely no hope of accomplishing on our own but which, when accomplished by God’s grace, internally transforms our dark hearts into shiny, bright Temples. Next, the Church asks God to give us, based on the merits that flow from being God’s true lovers, what He has promised to such blessed folk (see James 1:12, 2:5). Not a bad plan, that.

[1] Christ the Life of the Soul (Angelico Press, 2012), 222.

Ss Athanasius of Alexandria and Gregory of Nazianzus

One week ago today was the feast of St Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria and Doctor of the Church, the foremost champion of the true Faith during the great crisis caused by the heretic Arius in the 4th century. May 2nd is universally recognized to be the day of his death; there is a particular fittingness to celebrating him on this date, one week after the feast of St Mark the Evangelist, the founder of the See of Alexandria, as a sign of continuity between the Gospel and Nicene orthodoxy. The Roman Rite shares this arrangement with the Coptic calendar and the Byzantine, although in the latter, today is noted as the feast of the translation of Athanasius’ relics, and his principal feast, which he shares with another Patriarch of Alexandria and Doctor, St Cyril, is on January 18th. Likewise, in the Extraordinary Form, the western Church keeps the feast of St Gregory of Nazianzus on May 9th, a week after Athanasius, as a sign that he inherited his mantle as the greatest theological writer in the controversies over the Trinity and Incarnation. Also in the Byzantine Rite, his feast is kept one week after Athanasius’, on January 25th.

Ss Athanasius and Cyril, from the Menologion of Basil II, 985 AD: public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

St Athanasius was always known to the western Church from his Life of St Anthony, which was translated into Latin close to the time of death in 373; St Augustine mentions it in the Confessions. However, many of his most important theological works were not known to the West until the 15th century; in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas, for example, St John Chrysostom is mentioned about 20 times more often. His feast does occur in western liturgical books of the pre-Tridentine period, but almost exclusively in France and Spain, and almost never before the later decades of the 15th century; it does not appear to have been kept at all in Rome.

Much the same holds true for St Gregory of Nazianzus. He was known to the West from the mentions of him in the writings of his student, St Jerome, e.g. in the well-known treatise On Virginity against Jovinian, and the book On Illustrious Men, in which he calls him “a most eloquent man.” But again, very little of his writing was translated into Latin, and he is mentioned by St Thomas even less often than St Athanasius. Before the Tridentine reform, his feast was kept almost nowhere outside Spain, and even there, only from the very beginning of the 16th century.

In 1568, when Pope St Pius V, fulfilling a request of the Council of Trent, published a revision of the Roman Breviary, both Saints were included not just as bishops and confessors, but also as Doctors of the Church, and at the highest of three grades of feasts. The same titles and rank were also given to Ss Basil the Great and John Chrysostom; among these four, only Chrysostom had been widely celebrated with a feast thitherto. Up to that point, the title “Doctor”, and the use of the liturgical texts associated with it, had been formally granted to only four Saints whose writings were always particularly influential in the West, Ss Gregory the Great, Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome.

In the Counter-Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church was greatly concerned to assert that its traditional doctrines were those held “always, everywhere and by all”, and not medieval corruptions, as the early Protestants often claimed. The pairing of four Eastern Doctors with the traditional four Western Doctors therefore asserted the universality of those teachings which were held by Rome and defended by the Council of Trent, and also held by the Eastern churches. The inclusion of St Thomas Aquinas among them then asserted the continuity in teaching between the patristic and medieval Church, also frequently denied by the Protestants. Three of these new Eastern Doctors also have special connections to Rome and the Papacy. During the second of his five exiles, St Athanasius was a guest of Pope St Julius I, who defended him against the Arian heretics; relics of Ss John Chrysostom and Gregory of Nazianzus were saved from the iconoclasts in the 8th century and brought to Rome, later to be placed in St Peter’s Basilica.

The Gregorian Chapel in St Peter’s Basilica, built by Pope Gregory XIII to house the relics of his namesake of Nazianzus, which he translated here from the Roman church of Santa Maria in Campo Marzo in 1580.

Furthermore, these same Fathers are witnesses not just to Catholic teachings that the early Protestants rejected, but to others like the Trinity and Incarnation, which they not only accepted, but considered necessary for salvation. This was of course one of the strongest points in the Catholic Church’s favor during the controversies of the 16th century: if one accepts Athanasius, for example, as a witness to the doctrine of the Trinity, on what grounds does one reject him when he says, “So long as the prayers of supplication and entreaties have not been made, there is only bread and wine. But after the great and wonderful prayers have been completed, then the bread is become the Body, and the wine the Blood, of our Lord Jesus Christ”? If one accepts Basil’s defense of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, on what grounds does one reject his teaching that “It is necessary to confess our sins to those whom the dispensation of God’s mysteries is entrusted”? And more broadly, once the Fathers have been admitted as witnesses to the Christian Faith at all, one has in effect admitted a tradition, by which the teachings of some Christians in antiquity are recognized to be true, and those of others false, a further undermining of the original logical impossibility known as sola Scriptura.

There is an aspect of St Gregory of Nazianus’ career in particular which is less well known than his role as a theologian, and which should perhaps be better known today.

For most of the half century after the death of Constantine in 337, the Roman Emperors were supporters of Arianism, rather than of the orthodox faith. It should therefore not surprise anyone that the see of the imperial capital was dominated for most of that period by Arian bishops. However, with the death in 378 of the Emperor Valens, an enthusiastic persecutor of the orthodox, and the accession of Theodosius I, the tide began to turn strongly against the Arians. St Gregory, having retired some years earlier from a bishopric which he had been practically forced into, was then living a quiet and contemplative life in a monastery near Seleucia on the southern coast of Asia Minor, over 400 miles away from the capital. A number of Catholic bishops, anxious to reestablish the true faith in Constantinople, suggested that he come to the city, not as its bishop, but as a missionary; as with his earlier bishopric, he was prevailed upon to take up this new role only with the greatest reluctance. (Pictured right: Icon of St Gregory of Nazianzus, by Andrej Rublev, 1408, originally in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow, now in the Tretyakov Gallery; Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Gregory was accepted by almost none of the city’s clergy, and had access to none of its many churches; as Butler’s Lives of the Saints puts it, he was a bishop in Constantinople, but not the bishop of Constantinople. He therefore opened a small chapel attached to the house of a relative, which he called “Anastasis – the Resurrection”, a sign that it would become the place from which the true faith would rise again. His preaching, and especially the series of sermons on the Trinity, was in fact incredibly effective; more and more people were attracted by his eloquence, and his flock began to grow.

This brought with it many difficulties, of course, including persecution from the Arians and other heretics, which more than once came to physical violence, as well as calumnies and insults. At the Easter vigil during his first year in the city, the Arians broke into his church; Gregory himself was wounded, and another bishop present was killed. But among his many disciples, he would soon come to number not only St Jerome, but also Evagrius of Pontus, who would himself become one of the most influential theologians of the era.

The following year, Theodosius, newly baptized by an orthodox bishop, issued the Edict of Thessalonica, recognizing as the true faith “that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter, as it has been preserved by faithful tradition, and which is now professed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria.” Towards the end of the year, on arriving in Constantinople, he expelled the Arian bishop for refusing to embrace the Nicene confession of faith, and set Gregory in his place. It may seem that this victory was short-lived; within a few months, in the midst of every sort of intrigue and new acts of violence, Gregory obtained the emperor’s permission to resign his see and return to Nazianzus. But in point of fact, it did not matter. At the very moment when it seemed that heresy had triumphed in one of the most important and influential sees of Christendom, the true faith was reborn from a single place, and largely through the work of single man. Nor was this the first or last time such an event happened in the life of the Church. Let it therefore be an object lesson to us, never to despair over the sorry condition in which the Church finds itself in a particular time and place, including our own.

The Incomparable Perfection and Beauty of (Traditional) Catholic Worship

Not too long ago, I brought back into print an old catechetical textbook, The Life of Worship: Grace, Prayer, Sacraments, and the Sacred Liturgy [original title: Exposition of Christian Doctrine, Part III: Worship], written by an anonymous seminary professor of the Christian Brothers in France in the late nineteenth century, and published in English in the early twentieth.

It is a classic of its genre. Although written in a question-and-answer format, the well-formulated, wide-ranging questions and thorough answers — including frequent references to Scripture, Church Fathers, and scholastic doctors — puts to shame any of the catechetical materials produced in the past half-century, the supposed new springtime of the Church. I would wager to say, on the contrary, that a new springtime will only start blooming if we take up materials like this textbook and humbly put them to good use again, building on the truly substantial accomplishments of our predecessors.

In any case, there is a particular section of this book that I would like to share with NLM’s readers, both for its inherent interest, and because it gives a sense of the confidence and clarity typical of Catholic writers of the past. It could serve as a model for us today, who are at last finding our way out of self-doubt, ecumenical relativism, aesthetic brutalism, and millimeter-thin religious content. The author is speaking about why Catholic worship is “of incomparable perfection and beauty.” May it once again become so! May it remain so where tradition has been retained or recovered; may it spread across the world and reclaim it for Christ, on whom aggiornamental churchmen have turned their backs.

The worship rendered to God outside the true religion, consists for the most part either of puerile ceremonies, gross rites, cruel and obscene practices, as among the pagans of old, and the followers of Brahmanism [Hinduism] and Buddhism of to-day; or of innumerable prescriptions and prohibitions, many of which are totally wanting in religious character, as among the Mahometans [Moslems]. Even within the Christian fold, the sects that took private judgment for their rule of faith have so mutilated dogma that they have ended by impoverishing worship and drying up its sources, to such an extent that nothing in their temples and their ceremonies recalls the infinite greatness and the unspeakable goodness of God.
          In the Catholic Church alone, the worship given is of incomparable perfection and beauty. Now these qualities manifestly indicate the presence of divine revelation in its essential elements, and when they are found in the work proper to the Church, they give testimony also to the assistance of the Holy Ghost.
          The first perfection of Catholic worship is to be at one and the same time a means both of honoring God and of obtaining His grace. In it the glory of God and the salvation of man are inseparable. God wills to place all His glory in saving us, and we shall be saved only by glorifying God. All the practices of worship, prayers, the sacraments, the celebration of Sundays and festivals, correspond to this double end. They are so many acts of adoration, praise, and thanksgiving, and at the same time, so many appeals for God’s mercy, that He may forgive us our sins and grant us the spiritual or temporal favors of which we stand in need in our short and painful journey to our heavenly country.
          Another perfection of Catholic worship is its intimate union with dogma and morals. There is not a ceremony, not a word, not all outward sign, that does not embody the idea of a mystery or a precept of our religion. Thence comes that admirable unity, that harmony of parts, which is the seal of God’s works. To illustrate: prayer supposes the dogmas of the existence of God, of His providence, of grace, and of free will; and at the same time, it implies the command to adore Him, and indeed all the rules of morality. The celebration of feasts lifts our hearts above the perishable things of this life and attaches them to the blessings of life everlasting. Here too faith teaches that we were created by God for a life that will never end, and the moral law forbids us to make the miserable pleasures of this world the last end of our actions. The holy sacrifice of the Mass, the representation and renewal of that of the cross, is founded on the very dogma of redemption and on the law of atonement. The sacrament of baptism is inseparable from the dogma of original sin and from the precept which God imposed on the first man after his fall, of earning his bread by the sweat of his brow. The sacrament of penance supposes a transgression of the moral law, and consequently it implies the dogma of reparation. Indeed, in all the sacraments without exception, in all the sacred rites of Catholic worship, may be found the like intimate relation with both dogma and moral; for there is neither rite nor sacrament that does not remind us of some truth to believe and some duty to fulfill.
          A third perfection of worship is its admirable unity. Every thing in it converges to the one centre, the adorable sacrament of the altar. The Eucharist contains the Very Author of divine grace, who is communicated to us through prayer and the sacraments. Moreover, this sacrament is the end for which all the others exist, it is the very motive of sacred orders, the principal object of all feasts, the most excellent means of fulfilling all our duties to God and of obtaining His graces and blessings.
          It is to honor the holy Eucharist and to give sensible testimony to its adoration and gratitude, that Christian genius has created those magnificent temples, in which architecture, sculpture, and painting have rivaled one another in their efforts to reproduce, in the most brilliant and most touching forms, all that is majestic and ravishing in this august mystery. It is to celebrate the God of the Eucharist that so many masterpieces of poetry and eloquence have been composed, and so many melodies have been written, now joyous, now sad, according as the Church contemplates, on the one hand, the glory and the triumph of her divine Spouse, or, on the other, His sufferings and death. The altars and their ornaments, the vestments and the sacred vessels, the ceremonies of the holy sacrifice with their symbolic signification, the divine office, processions and pilgrimages, the whole liturgical year with its feasts for every day—everything in worship has for its object Jesus Christ reigning in heaven and residing among us; and, through Jesus Christ, the most holy and adorable Trinity. (pp. 809–11)

Link to this book at Amazon.

Thanksgiving Day Mass? No, thanks

This post will probably be of interest primarily to readers in the United States, as it concerns the upcoming American holiday of Thanksgiving Day (26 November). Yet it addresses theological and liturgical issues of more global import. What follows is an article of mine that was published in the June 2004 issue of Homiletic and Pastoral Review (pp. 57-60), titled "Thanksgiving Day Mass." I present it here in the hope of dissuading readers who are priests from using the Mass propers for Thanksgiving Day, as found in the Sacramentary for use in the United States. Instead, for reasons that are explained in what follows, I suggest using the propers for either of the two Masses "In Thanksgiving" (No. 39 of the "Masses and Prayers for Various Needs and Occasions" [No. 49 in the Missale Romanum of 2002]). And so, good Fathers, for what you think it's worth...

Like many of my brother priests and faithful Catholics, I eagerly await the arrival of the new English translation of the Missale Romanum, currently in the works. Now that the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) has been revamped and the Vox Clara Committee has been established to exercise “quality control” over vernacular liturgical texts, we can reasonably expect, in tempore opportune, a noble and accurate English translation of the Latin Missal. In addition, we will have Mass propers for many of the saints canonized – or, in some instances, whose feasts/memorials have been restored to the General Roman Calendar – since the previous [second] editio typica of the Roman Missal was published in 1975. There is, however, something I am hoping not to find in the new and improved English-language Missal, whenever it may appear, and that is the Mass of Thanksgiving Day, used in the dioceses of the United States. At best, it is unnecessary; at worst, it is misleading.

For starters, American Catholics do not need a special feast or liturgical service for thanking God. The Eucharist is the supreme act of thanksgiving, celebrated throughout the world in various rites every day except Good Friday. Besides, the Roman Missal already provides two formularies for Masses offered in gratitude for blessings received.[1] By the same logic, one could object that the Missa pro remissione peccatorum[2] is likewise unnecessary, since every Mass makes present, here and now, in sacramental form, Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross for the forgiveness of sins. But my chief objection to the Thanksgiving Day Mass is not that it is unnecessary; my principal objection is theological. In its current form, the Preface of this Mass plays into a distinctively American misconstrual of divine election. Here is the full text:[3]

¶1 / Father,

we do well to join all creation,

in heaven and on earth,

in praising you, our mighty God

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

¶2 / You made man to your own image

and set him over all creation.

Once you chose a people

and, when you brought them out of bondage to

freedom, they carried with them the promise

that all men would be blessed

and all men could be free.

¶3 / What the prophets pledged

was fulfilled in Jesus Christ,

your Son and our saving Lord.

It has come to pass in every generation

for all men who have believed that Jesus

by his death and resurrection

gave them a new freedom in his Spirit.

¶4 / It happened to our fathers,

who came to this land as if out of the desert

into a place of promise and hope.

It happens to us still, in our time,

as you lead all men through your Church

to the blessed vision of your peace.

¶5 / And so, with hearts full of love,

we join the angels, today and every day of our lives,

to sing your glory in a hymn of endless praise:

Holy, holy, holy…

Since this Preface is used solely on Thanksgiving Day, it is easy to understand how worshipers could mistake the People whom the Lord delivered from bondage (¶2) for the Pilgrims. Before potential misapprehension could be dispelled, half the Preface would already be prayed, at which point we are told (rather, God is told), albeit obliquely, that the liberated People who bore the promise of blessings and freedom were the Jews: “What the prophets pledged was fulfilled in Jesus Christ…” (¶3). God delivered His People, Israel, from slavery in Egypt and eventually brought them to freedom in the Promised Land. Later, through the Prophets, God promised to redeem the People of the Old Covenant from that true slavery which is sin – a promise fulfilled in Christ. The identity of the chosen nation could be made clear at the outset simply by inserting the word “Israel” after the word “people” (¶2): “Once you chose a people, Israel, and gave them a destiny…”

More problematic, however, is the remainder of the Preface. It rightly presents Israel’s Exodus as an archetypal event of epic proportions, but invites the disputable (to my mind, at least) connection of that event with the American experience: Just as God freed the Chosen People from slavery, so “in every generation,” through the grace of the Paschal Mystery (¶3), He frees people from captivity to sin and the devil; indeed, “it happened to our fathers” and it “happens to us still, in our time,” through the Church’s witness and mediation (¶4) – “it” being the salvation pledged by the Prophets and realized in every generation for those reborn in Christ. Since the identity of “our fathers” is not indicated, I presume the term refers either to the Pilgrims and other Puritans who came to America beginning in 1620, or to all our immigrant forebears regardless of their place of origin. If the former, the Preface is potentially misleading; if the latter, it is historically inaccurate.

It is unlikely that “our fathers” is a general reference to all immigrants of yesteryear, since the context provided by the preceding (third) paragraph would include these fathers among “all men who have believed that Jesus by his death and resurrection gave them a new freedom in his Spirit.” Surely, however, the Preface’s author knew that not all who came to this “place of promise and hope” were Christians (though after Vatican II it was fashionable in some theological circles to speak of “anonymous Christians”).

Given that this Preface is used solely on Thanksgiving Day, I think I can safely suppose “our fathers” to have been the 17th-century Puritans. They were all Christians, even if their ultra-Protestantism placed them decidedly outside the Tradition of historic Christian orthodoxy (which is why they were persecuted in England and sailed to these shores). If I am correct, then I do not think I am out of line in questioning, with all ecumenical regard, whether a Catholic liturgical text should memorialize (however implicitly) a sect whose flight to America was necessitated by its zeal to purify the (Anglican) Church of the old leaven of Catholicism. But I have a weightier objection.

While I acknowledge that, in one way or another, all generations of Christians have given expression to the mystery of redemption in analogies suggested by their culture and circumstances, I nonetheless think that paralleling the Pilgrim exodus (¶4) with Israel’s Exodus (¶2) encourages a false typology. Appreciative of Christianity’s Hebraic heritage and convinced that the Church was apostate, the Puritans saw themselves as the New Israel, the uncorrupted remnant of the faithful, freshly sprung from transatlantic captivity and striking out into the wilderness. (Christian history is littered with faithful remnants that have reestablished the “true Church,” usually in opposition to the allegedly false Roman Church, and then, later, in opposition to their own previously true churches.) Like biblical Israel, they viewed themselves as having entered into a special covenant with God to be His People. It is worth noting that Thanksgiving Day, first celebrated in the autumn of 1621, derives from the Jewish harvest festival of Tabernacles (or Booths), the annual eight-day ceremonial anticipation of the great Messianic ingathering of all nations to occur at the end of time.[4] The Puritans’ self-identification as Israel Reconstituted gave rise to the notion, now long-embedded in our national psyche, that America is the darling of divine Providence, a (the?) chosen nation whose every aspiration is underwritten by the Almighty.[5] Wrong. The Church, not America, is the New Israel, the fulfillment of the promise that Israel would be “a light to the nations” (Isa. 49:6), the center to which all nations are destined to converge in order to see the glory of God. While I love my country, I do not hesitate to add that America is one nation among many, no less loved by God, but no more. Texts facilitating a misunderstanding of the one People of God (for which there is no plural) do not belong in our liturgical books.

I am sure that the agents of a liturgical “reform of the reform” have much bigger fish to fry (or turkeys to cook). And I would be surprised to learn that the Thanksgiving Day Mass has crossed anyone else’s mind when taking into account the long overdue improvements to be made to the English-language Missal [for use in the United States]. Still, it is not too late to consider either excising this Mass altogether, or at least revising its Preface so as to obviate misidentifications of God’s chosen, pilgrim People and the City they inhabit. For that, I would be truly thankful.

ENDNOTES

[1] Missale Romanum, 3rd typical edition (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002), Missae et orationes pro variis necessitatibus vel ad diversa, No. 49 (“Pro Gratiis Deo Reddendis,” pp. 1153-54. These two Mass formularies appear also in the previous editions of the Missal of Paul VI (1970 and 1975).

[2] Ibid., No. 38 (“Pro Remissione Peccatorum”), pp. 1139-40.

[3] Preface #84 in the English Sacramentary for use in the United States. The numbers at the beginning of each paragraph do not appear in the Sacramentary; these are meant to facilitate reference.

[4] See Lev. 23:33-43. Unlike the other two feasts celebrated each year by mass pilgrimage to Jerusalem, namely, Passover and Pentecost, the Feast of Tabernacles has no counterpart in the Christian liturgical cycle. The Puritans tolerated no religious celebrations lacking precedent under the Old Covenant, not even Christmas.

[5] The “theologizing” of the American experience has a venerable heritage, from the Puritans to the founding fathers, to Lincoln (perhaps its most eloquent and nuanced exemplar), and, after Lincoln, to Presidents Wilson, Reagan, and […] Bush. Having fallen out of vogue for some time, that tradition was revived in our public rhetoric especially after the attacks of September 11, 2001. For a critical analysis of this current in American thought, see Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); for a fine short essay, see Peter J. Leithart, “Typology and the Public Church,” First Things 77 (November 1997): 12-13.

The Sacred Liturgy: The First School of the Faith

Speak to most any teacher and they will tell you that students learn through more than just their intellect. They know that students also learn through their experiences and through their senses. Ideally, for optimal learning, both the intellect and experience need to be engaged. Our nature is very much tied to these two aspects, for while we are creatures gifted with an intellect, we are also physical beings who learn through our senses, and the latter often engages the former.

"It [the sacred liturgy] is therefore the privileged place for catechizing the people of God." CCC

But what does this have to do with the liturgy? Our approach to the liturgy shares in these two aspects: the sensory/experiential and the intellectual. Sometimes there are those who focus upon the intellectual teaching of the Faith who question the importance of the liturgy in its outer aspects; they would suggest that what matters is not so much how we do something, but rather that we simply know (intellectually) what we are doing. In regards the sacred liturgy, they often think that it does not matter so much how the liturgy is celebrated so long as one knows what the liturgy is all about in general. But, this thinking is not in accord with the mind of the Church and fails to understand how the actions of the liturgy connect to doctrine and pass on the Faith; it also fails to recognize the importance of the experiential aspect of human learning. Two comments that often reveal a lack of understanding of the liturgy-doctrine connection are these: "all that matters in the Mass is that Our Lord is present in the Eucharist" or "to be concerned about vestments, music, and other externals in the Mass is pharisaical."

Now, we should be clear from the outset that the didactic aspect of the liturgy is not its primary aspect; rather, the worship of God is the primary aspect. But this said, the Church teaches us that the liturgy, by its nature, does have a didactic dimension. This didactic, or catechetical dimension comes to us not only through the intellect (e.g. studying our catechism and homilies) but it also comes to us through our experience of it; that is, through our senses.

Lex orandi; lex credendi (The law of prayer is the law of belief.)

I spoke earlier of our human nature and how we learn, and who would know this nature better than God, our Creator? It makes perfect sense, then, that God would provide and inspire, through the authority of the Church, all that is necessary for the faithful to learn about Him, to worship Him and ultimately draw closer to Him through the liturgy by way of its words, beauty, ceremonies, gestures, postures, signs, symbols, sacred art, and sacred music. All of these visible things help to draw us from the visible to the invisible; they draw us toward the transcendent that we may be able to more deeply unite ourselves to the sacred mysteries taking place in our midst. Of course, this is not to deny the place of intellectual catechesis as well. It is also through mystagogical catechesis -- the intellectual explanation of the sacred mysteries, gestures, etc, within the liturgy -- by way of the homily, personal study, catechism classes, and so forth, that the faithful are able to know what the visible realities represent in terms of spiritual realities.

"For the Sacred Liturgy is quite intimately connected with principles of doctrine.."(RS)

The Holy Father has been drawing our attention, through his words and deeds, to the understanding that everything matters in the sacred liturgy. He has written and spoken of the need to see the liturgy as a whole that cannot be taken apart, added to or subtracted from, without affecting all of the other parts. This is because everything in the liturgy, words and gestures, is intertwined with Catholic doctrine; the Church safeguards this through the authorized texts, rubrics, and instructions. It is for this reason, therefore, that introducing aspects into the liturgy which are not authorized is prohibited. It is for this reason that the liturgy cannot and should not be arbitrarily changed; abuses in the liturgy obscure Catholic doctrine and subsequently the errors are passed on to the faithful. It is also for this reason that everything (licitly) done within the liturgy, and in continuity with liturgical tradition, can serve as a light to brighten and make clearer the doctrines of the Church and the sacred mysteries being encountered. As the Holy Father has stated and witnesses to us, the external forms of the liturgy are not inconsequent or mere pharisaism rather they are of great importance for the experiential in teaching and passing on the Faith.

"The entire liturgy, therefore, has the Catholic faith for its content.." (Pope Pius XII)

The sacred liturgy is an essential means for the transmission of the Faith. The Catholic faith cannot be passed on and learned through the intellect alone; it must be understood that an experiential aspect is necessary to fully teach the Faith and make it incarnate in each of the faithful. The catechical nature of the sacred liturgy is an important aspect to realize since the majority of the faithful do not study the catechism or theology on their own and often the weekly liturgy may be the only contact they have with their Catholic faith. It is through the authorized liturgical rites celebrated with a sense of mystery, beauty, and reverence, evidenced in every word, gesture, and every piece of sacred art, that the truths of the Catholic faith will be learned, experienced and passed on.

Quotes

I would like to simply share a few relevant quotes that may be helpful in driving some of these points home. Perhaps they might be useful to priests for catechetical purposes as well:

"The liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; it is also the font from which all her power flows." It is therefore the privileged place for catechizing the people of God. "Catechesis is intrinsically linked with the whole of liturgical and sacramental activity, for it is in the sacraments, especially in the Eucharist [the liturgy], that Christ Jesus works in fullness for the transformation of men." (Catechism of the Catholic Church #1074)

"[I]t must first be said that "the best catechesis on the Eucharist [the liturgy] is the Eucharist itself, celebrated well." By its nature, the liturgy can be pedagogically effective in helping the faithful to enter more deeply into the mystery being celebrated. That is why, in the Church's most ancient tradition, the process of Christian formation always had an experiential character. While not neglecting a systematic understanding of the content of the faith, it centred on a vital and convincing encounter with Christ, as proclaimed by authentic witnesses." (Pope Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis #64)

"The liturgy is the first source of the divine communion in which God shares his own life with us. It is also the first school of the spiritual life." (Pope Paul VI)

"There is thus a close connection between dogma and the sacred Liturgy, and between Christian worship and the sanctification of the faithful." (Pope Pius XI, Divini Cultus)

"The sacred liturgy.. is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit." (Sacrosanctum Concilium #14)

"For the Sacred Liturgy is quite intimately connected with principles of doctrine, so that the use of unapproved texts and rites necessarily leads either to the attenuation or to the disappearance of that necessary link between the lex orandi and the lex credendi." (Redemptionis Sacramentum #10)

"The liturgical words and rites, moreover, are a faithful expression, matured over the centuries, of the understanding of Christ, and they teach us to think as he himself does; by conforming our minds to these words, we raise our hearts to the Lord. All that is said in this Instruction is directed toward such a conformity of our own understanding with that of Christ, as expressed in the words and the rites of the Liturgy." (Redemptionis Sacramentum #5)

"For abuses “contribute to the obscuring of the Catholic faith and doctrine concerning this wonderful sacrament”. (Redemptionis Sacramentum #6)

"We observe with considerable anxiety and some misgiving, that elsewhere certain enthusiasts, over-eager in their search for novelty, are straying beyond the path of sound doctrine and prudence. Not seldom, in fact, they interlard their plans and hopes for a revival of the sacred liturgy with principles which compromise this holiest of causes in theory or practice, and sometimes even taint it with errors touching Catholic faith and ascetical doctrine." (Pope Pius XII - Mediator Dei #8)

"[A]s Catholic doctrine on the Incarnate Word of God, the eucharistic sacrament and sacrifice, and Mary the Virgin Mother of God came to be determined with greater certitude and clarity, new ritual forms were introduced through which the acts of the liturgy proceeded to reproduce this brighter light issuing from the decrees of the teaching authority of the Church, and to reflect it, in a sense so that it might reach the minds and hearts of Christ's people more readily." (Pope Pius XII - Mediator Dei # 52)

"The entire liturgy, therefore, has the Catholic faith for its content, inasmuch as it bears public witness to the faith of the Church." (Pope Pius XII - Mediator Dei #47)