A Formidable Apologia for Traditional Catholicism, by Dr Joseph Shaw

In a time like ours, when ignorance, half-truths, and outright lies seem to dominate the airwaves, classrooms, halls of power, and even church pulpits, Catholics need access to the unvarnished truth of the Faith as it powerfully confronts the errors and misdirections of the modern age. But where are we to find such help?

Dr. Joseph Shaw, president of the International Federation Una Voce and Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England & Wales, has distinguished himself as one of the finest writers today on a host of difficult and controversial questions. Os Justi Press is pleased to announce the release of Dr. Shaw's latest book: The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity.

The book is divided into three parts.

The first part examines the place of the ancient Catholic liturgy in modernity, defending it, against the misunderstandings of modernists, as something supremely suited to engage our deepest instincts towards the worship of God. Chapter 1 tells what Shaw discovered about the Church along the path of discovering the ancient Roman rite; chapter 2 looks at the purpose of liturgy; chapter 3 gives an account of the history of liturgy, explaining how it is conceptually and practically possible for a heritage to be both received as a “changeless given” and also enhanced and developed over time; chapter 4 develops the role of Latin in fostering participation (yes, you read that correctly!); and chapters 5 and 6 delve into the ways in which rituality, contrary to a standard narrative, is a cause of freedom rather than of confinement.

The second part turns to the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and addresses a series of lines of attack on those Catholics attached to the traditional Latin Mass—notably the attempt to link them to the crisis of clerical abuse. Here Dr. Shaw fearlessly probes what Vatican II actually accomplished “on the ground”; the intimate link between orthodoxy in doctrine and tradition in liturgy (and the contrary); true and false notions of diversity; the Freudian origins of the discourse about the “rigidity” of conservatives or backwardists; the need to assess rightly the meaning of “clericalism” and how it relates to abuse; and the damage done by means of so-called “sex education,” which has been allowed to take over unresisted by the postconciliar hierarchy.

In the third part Dr. Shaw addresses one of the most contested issues of our times, sexuality and gender roles, and asks what, if anything, the Church can still say about them. Partly agreeing with and partly correcting the theory of Leon Podles, Shaw explains the sense in which there has been a “feminization” of Christianity -- yet one that was to a large extent resisted in the Catholic Church by a patriarchal theology, liturgy, and structures until after the Council. He offers what is certainly one of the best expositions of male headship, natural and supernatural, in any available literature, and offers a powerful critique of the sexual revolution as a betrayal of women. Lastly, he looks at the family as the locus of culture and transmission of the faith, especially in an era when the hierarchy have largely abandoned both.

Your gut feeling that something has gone badly wrong in the Catholic Church is, in fact, correct; your intuition that it has something to do with our divine worship is right on target; your instinct that the response must come from deep within the family and deep within our bimillenial tradition is entirely accurate. Dr. Shaw's book explains just how all this is true; how we ought to evaluate the secularizing path the Church has trodden in recent decades; and what we, who wish to live the Faith, can do, here and now, to restore a healthy and sacred culture.

The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity is available either directly from Os Justi Press (shipping within the USA) or from any Amazon outlet.

Here is a video about this book:

“Shaw doesn’t propose that we turn back the clock, but reveals a path ahead out of the current crisis through a mature dialectic with those modern ecclesiastical developments that allow for a recovery of the tradition that belongs to all Catholics by a claim of right.” – Dr Sebastian Morello, European Conservative

“I commend it very enthusiastically.” – Fr John Hunwicke, Mutual Enrichment Blog

“With this book, Joseph Shaw provides Traditionalist Catholics with an antidote to such madness when dealing with our own deepest concerns, showing how the problems of the liturgy, the family, and the crises brought about by Modernity's Original Sins must be tackled as a unit, and with respect for historical mistakes.” – Dr John Rao, Roman Forum

“For after all these years, it is rare to find something as fresh, as thought-provoking, as original as the exploration of the crisis in these pages—one that marries acute, up-to-the-minute observation of unfolding secular trends with a striking inquest into the deep, underlying reasons for these trends (or rather tragedies).” – Roger Buck, author of The Gentle Traditionalist

“These essays are marked not only by clarity of style and breadth of knowledge, but also by something even more welcome: fresh thinking.” – Fr Thomas Crean, O.P., author of The Mass and the Saints

* * *

N.B. For readers in the United Kingdom:

There will be an official book launch with a talk by the author, refreshments, and a chance to buy the book at a reduced price, on Thursday, March 9, at 6:30 pm, in St Wilfrid's Hall at the London Oratory.

Are Women Permitted to Sing the Propers of the Mass?

In the wider Catholic world, the question posed in the title is not even on the radar screen. If you can have altar girls and female lectors — indeed, apparently, acolytesses and lectresses, in a veritable salmagundi of sanctuary servants — then why not women singing music for the Mass? (Never mind the fact that the concept of “propers” has more or less disappeared outside the world of the usus antiquior.) However, traditionalists, myself included, reject both altar girls and female lectors, arguing that it is only appropriate for males to fill these roles, and, in general, that the patronizing and vocationally deviant clericalization of the laity should be avoided. It might therefore be thought that, as a matter of logical consistency, we ought to maintain that women should not form a chant schola to execute the propers of the Mass. Yet this conclusion does not follow.

While I am an adamant opponent of feminism, I am no less staunch an opponent of chauvinism wherever I see it — and I do see it reappearing in the traditional movement, along with other -isms (e.g., antisemitism, libertarianism, sedevacantism) that are incompatible with Catholic tradition. The revival of traditional liturgical practice has permitted the reappearance of some extreme points of view that deserve refutation. For example, not only have I heard traditionalists argue against women singing the propers; I’ve heard them argue that none of the laity whatsoever should sing any of the Mass Ordinary or responses. (On that last point, see here, here, and here.)

The point of departure for the question on women chanters is the rather blunt statement of Pope St. Pius X in his famous 1903 motu proprio Tra le Sollecitudini:

With the exception of the melodies proper to the celebrant at the altar and to the ministers, which must be always sung in Gregorian chant, and without accompaniment of the organ, all the rest of the liturgical chant belongs to the choir of levites, and, therefore, singers in the church, even when they are laymen, are really taking the place of the ecclesiastical choir…. On the same principle it follows that singers in church have a real liturgical office, and that therefore women, being incapable of exercising such office, cannot be admitted to form part of the choir. Whenever, then, it is desired to employ the acute voices of sopranos and contraltos, these parts must be taken by boys, according to the most ancient usage of the Church.

Stated thus, it sounds cut and dried. But is it self-evident that “all the rest of the liturgical chant” (would this include the Ordinary?) “belongs to the choir of levites” (whatever that means exactly)? It seems that Pius X has in view singers in the sanctuary or the “choir” area of a transept of a monastic-style church, where their placement and vesture suggest that they are performing a ministerial function. The operative conception here, it seems to me, is that of a cathedral, seminary, or boys’ school.

If singers are, in contrast, somewhere in the nave, whether on the floor or up in a loft, it is more difficult to see that they constitute a “choir of levites” with a “real liturgical office.” Just as laywomen were not forbidden to sing the Ordinary of the Mass (indeed Pius X and his successors encouraged this) even though the Ordinary is manifestly a liturgical text also said by ordained ministers, by the same logic women would be competent to sing the propers.

To make the situation clearer, Pius XII in his encyclical Musicae Sacrae of 1955 lifted the ban for lay women as long as they were not in the sanctuary (the internal quotations are from three earlier decisions of the Sacred Congregation of Rites):

Where it is impossible to have schools of singers [scholae cantorum] or where there are not enough choir boys, it is allowed that “a group of men and women or girls, located in a place outside the sanctuary set apart for the exclusive use of this group, can sing the liturgical texts at Solemn Mass, as long as the men are completely separated from the women and girls and everything unbecoming is avoided. The Ordinary is bound in conscience in this matter.”

Granted, Pacelli’s words are not exactly a resounding encouragement to have women, but it shows that there is no ban on women singing, as long as they are outside the sanctuary.

Let’s think this through, with attention to the symbolism of church architecture. The development of choir lofts, which can certainly be said to be the norm in most churches built in the century prior to Vatican II, perfectly accords with the role of the choir as a body that provides chant and polyphony for the liturgy, with mixed voices as needed or desired, and in a way that does not involve the singers in the ceremonies taking place below. This preserves the anonymity of the choir and bypasses the danger of distraction for the congregation, since the musicians do not so easily risk “putting on a show.” If the propers can be sung polyphonically with men and women, does that not establish that women may sing the propers by themselves?

Admittedly there is a longstanding tradition of having only men singing, inasmuch as the choir was seen as fulfilling a properly liturgical role. Yet just as it is possible for altar boys to substitute for acolytes, and even for any laity (such as girls in a girls’ school) to make the responses at Mass provided they are in the pews and not in the sanctuary, so too it is possible for non-vested laity to substitute for a properly liturgical choir. Put differently, lay people from outside the choir area can fulfill a liturgical function, but not in a properly liturgical manner, which would involve their being vested and being more closely associated with the ritual action in or near the sanctuary, as we see in solemn Vespers when the singers in cassock and surplice process into the sanctuary, genuflect, bow to each other, and split off to their seats on the sides for the chanting of the psalmody. (It also seems clear enough that whenever there is a schola of clergy or male religious singing the propers, as Pius X envisioned, women should not join them.)

We should also take into account the not inconsiderable witness of centuries of women religious singing the sacred liturgy, and doing so not because there are no men around to do it (although that will usually be true), but because it is proper to themselves: it is a requirement of their consecrated life, expected and indeed demanded of them by the Church. They do not “substitute” for anyone else but do it by a right proper to and inherent in them. Moreover, depending on the order or congregation, the nuns might perform this opus Dei in the choir area of a monastery church (still with a symbolic separation from the sanctuary), chanting all the parts of the Mass except those of the major ministers. It is true that this fact in and of itself does not establish an analogous right for unconsecrated lay women to do the same, but it does establish, once and for all, that women as such are not disqualified from singing the chants of the liturgy, provided that good order is maintained.

Once again we can see what a fine and helpful development the choir loft was, and why it should be present in every Catholic church. How many blessed hours of my life have been spent in choir lofts, leading or singing with scholas and choirs of men and women, in Santa Paula, California; in Washington, D.C., and Silver Spring, Maryland; in Gaming and Vienna, Austria; in Lander, Wyoming and in Lincoln, Nebraska!

We cannot leave history and prudence behind. There has been an evolution in the attitudes toward women in the Church, even while we still hold fast to the ancient truth, now contradicted by Pope Francis, that women should not be vested and serving in ministerial roles (cf. 1 Cor 14:34). One need look no further than the redoubtable Justine Ward to see that women were heavily involved in the resurgence of Gregorian chant in the twentieth century and taught people how to sing it, which means that they were in the lay schola.

It’s not clear to me what we could possibly gain by trying to prevent women from singing the propers, provided the singers are musically qualified (and the same holds, obviously, for men — no one’s sex makes him or her more adept for the art of singing). Unlike the minor orders of acolyte and lector, there has never been a minor order of cantor/singer. It is therefore impossible to classify women singers along with altar girls/acolytesses and female readers/lectresses as part of the same progressive “slippery slope” for the ordination of women as deacons or priests. Musicologists and musicians are free to argue about whether a higher-pitched or lower-pitched rendering of chant works better from the point of view of liturgical aesthetics, and sociologists or anthropologists of religion could argue about cultural expectations and associations, etc., but none of this pertains to the question at hand.

On a practical level, unless there is some extenuating circumstance like a CMAA Sacred Music Colloquium with its pedagogical aims, it would be strange to have a men’s schola and a women’s schola dividing up tasks at the same liturgy; this is best avoided. When only men or only women are singing the propers, the worshiper can more easily forget about it and pay attention to the chants, the texts, and the ceremonies. When the two scholas go back and forth, it draws attention to the octave difference between men and women — that is, it draws attention to the performers, which is not ideal. Similarly, chant sung by men and women simultaneously is sometimes an unavoidable necessity, but chant tends to sound best in a true unison, not in organum of parallel octaves. If a chapel or parish has two scholas, a men’s and a women’s, it would be better to have one or the other sing all the propers at Mass. This is what I did at Wyoming Catholic College. The men’s schola sang multiple times a week; at a certain point, a women’s schola was created to give the women a chance to immerse themselves more fully in the chant and to give the men a much-needed rest. Here, too, a certain complementarity developed that was beneficial for all.

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

Doctrinal Foundations of All-Male Sanctuary Service and the Problem with Ignoring Them

In the Temple of Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies was a place solemnly set apart, separated from the rest of the temple and its surrounding courtyards, on account of the mystery contained within it: the presence of God above the mercy seat, in the midst of the physical reminder of the covenant in blood. Out of fear and reverence for the Lord, lay men and women, lower ranks of priests and Levites, would not dare to enter the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest could enter, under precise conditions, ready to offer to the Lord his own prayers and the prayers of all the people.

Jesus Christ, our great High Priest, has pierced the veil and entered into the true tabernacle not made with human hands, preparing for us a way to follow Him into beatitude — even preparing for us, in this mortal life, a mystical banquet of His precious Body and Blood, so that we may be made sharers of the food of immortality. Yet, for all this intimacy of communion, He remains no less the Sovereign High Priest, crowned with glory, and we are no less His lowly servants in via. As we walk in pilgrimage towards the heavenly temple, there is still the distinction in kind between sacred and profane, baptized and unbaptized, the holy and the sinful, as well as the distinction of offices between ministers and laymen.

Far from being cut off from its ancient roots, worship in the New Covenant retains the spirit of chaste fear before the Lord, the awareness of stages of ascent into the holy presence of God, and a ministerial hierarchy that reflects the nature of the cosmos and the descent of grace from the Redeemer through the members of His mystical Body. These truths are consummately expressed in the spaces and structures of classic church architecture, furnishings, vestments, and vessels, and poignant prayers and gestures of homage, adoration, and humility.

Traditionally, the sanctuary above all was seen as the domain of Christ the High Priest, and therefore an area symbolically set apart from the rest of the Church, with all-male ministerial service — a custom that Roman Catholics kept intact for nearly 2,000 years in continuity with the Israelites who went before us, and that the Eastern Churches preserve in full integrity to this day.

Let us recall the rationale behind the custom of limiting service in the sanctuary and at the altar to men only. Servers and lectors are in some way an extension of the ministry of the priesthood, to which it properly belongs to handle the divine mysteries and all that is associated with them. Only men can be priests; therefore only males are suited to priestly functions. Moreover, servers and lectors are a substitute for clerics in minor orders, who, in optimal conditions, are the ones called upon by the Church to fulfill these very offices. The formal ministries of acolyte and lector, even after Pope Paul VI’s simplification and reconfiguration thereof, are open only to men. Ministers are men set apart by the Church for a special function that is not equivalent to general lay participation in the liturgy. Finally, serving as an altar boy was and still is a much-valued way to encourage vocations to the priesthood.[1]

Not long after the Council, this hitherto unbroken practice was abandoned, with the allowance of female lectors and, later, female altar servers. Now women and men freely mingle in the sanctuary and even at the very altar of sacrifice. Not only is this development contrary to the religious instincts of most cultures[2] and to well-known psychological requirements of boys,[3] it is also contrary to the common good of modern Christians who are living in an age of massive sexual confusion, where distinctions are blurred and the combination of reductive feminism and democratic egalitarianism treats men and women as if they were interchangeable.[4]

While Christian anthropology is sufficiently different from that of other cultures and religions to allow St. Paul to say that “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female” (Gal 3:28), the context itself and the exegesis of the Church Fathers show us that the Apostle is referring to the dignity of baptism and the goal of salvation: the grace of eternal life is freely available to all, with no distinction of race, class, or sex. Heroic charity is in the reach of every baptized man, woman, and child, and the hierarchy of heaven is established according to charity. This fundamental truth simply does not touch on how the Christian religion, as visibly and socially embodied in this world, makes use of the God-authored order of creation (and, in particular, the permanent features of human nature) for the hierarchical form of its organization and worship.

The ideological shotgun wedding of feminism and egalitarianism strikes at the fundamental language of revelation, wherein God/Christ is the bridegroom who acts and fertilizes, becoming the father and head of the family, and man/Israel/the Church the bride who receives as wife and bears fruit as a mother. As I have written elsewhere:

To ignore differences of sex or to pretend that such differences make (or should make) no difference in the fulfilling of liturgical roles is surely to ignore, and probably to contradict, the “theology of the body” given to the Church by Pope John Paul II. Especially in our times, when confusion about sexuality is rampant, how we conceptualize and implement male and female roles in the Church cannot fail to have huge ramifications in our theological anthropology, moral theology, and even fundamental theology, extending all the way to the inerrancy of Scripture and the trustworthiness of apostolic Tradition.[5]

At the very least, it is not beneficial to the faithful to allow traditional practices to be canceled out as if they were arbitrary exercises of power, mistaken to begin with — particularly when these practices have sound anthropological and dogmatic foundations.

In the case at hand, the gradual breaking down of various distinctions such as those between sanctuary and nave, ordained and non-ordained, ministers and recipients, has been able to feed into and feed upon the larger societal dissolving of distinctions between men and women, creating a perfect storm of confusion for the faithful.

A failure to see how the natural distinction of sexes is ordered to the common good of mankind and of the Church has, without a doubt, led to many abuses of power on the part of pastors or laity who take it upon themselves to create, abolish, or innovatively redefine offices, functions, symbols, and rites.

Pastors concerned with communicating and reinforcing authentic Catholic doctrine should become more concerned with the many ways, open and subtle, in which our liturgical practices symbolize certain truths of creation and redemption or, on the contrary, obfuscate that symbolism and risk undermining those truths.


NOTES

[1] See this article for further argumentation.

[2] See Manfred Hauke, Women and the Priesthood: A Systematic Analysis in Light of the Order of Creation and Redemption, trans. David Kipp (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), esp. 85–194; cf. idem, God or Goddess? Feminist Theology: What Is It? Where Does It Lead?, trans. David Kipp (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995).

[3] I am referring here to the oft-observed pastoral phenomenon of male servers dropping away and recruits drying up when girls flow into the ranks and take over (something known to be off-putting for boys of a certain age range in particular), and the opposite phenomenon of boys and young men volunteering in large numbers to serve when the ministry is all-male, exacting in its duties and run along the lines of a disciplined band of soldiers.

[4] See Peter Kwasniewski, “Incarnate Realism and the Catholic Priesthood,” originally published in Homiletic & Pastoral Review 100.7 (April 2000): 21–29; online here.

[5] Published as Benedict Constable, “Should Women Be Lectors at Mass?”