Why Louis Bouyer Is Delightful and Frustrating to Read

One experience I think many of us have had with liturgical authors who wrote prior to the Council and/or the imposition of the Novus Ordo is that we find in their works so many wonderful insights, mingled with passages of excruciating naivete, baffling optimism about the possibilities of reform-in-continuity, strange flights of reformatory fancy, embarrassingly erroneous theories (such as “the canon of Hippolytus” and “early Christian clergy celebrated versus populum”), and the like. It can feel a bit schizophrenic to go from a glowing paragraph on the glories of tradition to another paragraph about how this and that have to be rethought and reworked. One suffers from intellectual whiplash.

This experienced plays itself out with a wide variety of authors: Romano Guardini, Pius Parsch, Ildefonso Schuster, Joseph Jungmann, Joseph Ratzinger, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, A.-M. Roguet, J.D. Chrichton, and others less famous. But the whiplash author par excellence must surely be Louis Bouyer—a theologian who, let’s say on page 35, was capable of dismissing as buffoons the squadrons of tinkering liturgists, and then on page 37 of declaring that Baroque excrescences had to be purged from the liturgy (presumably, by specialists like himself). His soaring lyricism about traditional aspects of the liturgy is matched only by his acerbic criticism of just about everything to do with the concrete liturgical life of the preconciliar era.

A good example of the mingling of true, dubious, and erroneous may be found in his important 1963 work Rite and Man, recently republished by Cluny Media. In what follows, I will first present an overview of major themes, then look at Bouyer’s take-away for the liturgical reform taking place at the very time he was writing, and lastly, discuss why Bouyer shows the fracture-lines he does.

What Is Required for Ritual Activity

Essentially, this work is an extended prelude to Guardini’s Sacred Signs that tries to explain the natural religious presuppositions of Catholic liturgy. Unless we deeply understand the roots of liturgy in human nature and Christian tradition, we are destined to misunderstand, misappropriate, and deform it even further.

Bouyer draws on recent discoveries of depth psychology and comparative religion to show how man, naturally religious, has expressed his religious experience in history. He shows empirically what we confess in faith: that the Christian religion is the fulfillment of all natural religion. He shows the origin of religious rituals, their relation to divine word, developing notions of sacred time and space, showing in each case how Christian rituals recapitulate and consummate these universal features of natural religion. Finally, he suggests how this study might inform the Liturgical Movement.

Primitive Rites and Natural Sacramentality. In its earliest stages, religious man felt himself surrounded by divine hierophanies: fire, mountains, woods, the rhythmic seasons. Each of these was a manifestation of divine power in which man participated out of reverence and fear. Thus, rites developed spontaneously as man’s attempt to participate in these divine revelations (e.g., fertility rites) and attain union with the divine powers. Each natural object had its hierophanic meaning (water, fire, earth, etc). Men understood these rites to be somehow divinely instituted—actions of the gods in which man was privileged to participate. 
 

Rite and Divine Word. These rites naturally gained expression in priestly prayers and in myths. Myths exist to justify the divine institution of primitive rites—this is a fascinating point: rites actually precede myths and give rise to them, but, at the same, thereby dangerously objectify them. Priestly prayers, too, though necessary for human participation in the ritual, can devolve into mere magic: a human arrogance that believes a set rite or prayer in a sacred language may obligate the deity. One may think of the Carmina Saliaria, the ossified antique Latin prayers used in religious rites even in the Late Republic: no one understood them anymore, but their supposed magical powers made them last.

Thus, the natural relationship between rite and divine word is essential to the survival of genuine cultus. The rite is established by divine word, because it is divine action. Only when clothed in the living divine word can the rite be what it really is: the gratuitous re-enactment for us by God of a divine action. If the divine word does not constitute the rite, then the rite devolves into magic: a collection of formulae and gestures whose validity binds the divine agent to confer certain boons. The Bible makes copious protest against such magic-making, when it insists on the radically conditional presence of God among His people. The sense of divine theophany is lost, and the rites become a mere instrument—a work of human hands.

Here is a marvelous passage that makes for painful reading when we think about the liturgical reform and the extent to which it falls afoul of the fundamental law Bouyer discerned:

This is why at all times and in all places rites are considered to be the work of the gods. The men who celebrate these rites would not celebrate them as they do if they thought that they were themselves their authors. And, in fact, the rites soon cease to be observed when men get the idea that they were instituted by other men before them…. Far from being an exception to this rule, Christianity is a transcendent realization of it…. Where this conviction fails or becomes obscured, the sacraments are emptied of their substance, just as in any case where rites come to be regarded as simple human actions, as pious means of teaching the people invented by theologians. In such a hypothesis, the theologians themselves have no need of these rites since they are supposed to have already been in substantial possession of the religion itself and to have later created the rites as a means of transmitting it to the people…. This aspect of the matter should be pointed up in more detail since it is so fundamental that if sight of it is once lost, the very possibility of a substantially religious ritual is also lost. (p. 69)

Bouyer also tarries for two chapters on the nature of sacred space and sacred time. He concludes by drawing several practical applications for the liturgical movement.

Applications to Liturgical Reform

First, he maintains that a sense of natural religion must be restored. This is where one feels the kinship with Guardini the most: we must “not attempt to rationalize [liturgy], to empty it not only of its mystery but also of its expressions that are not strictly rational. They should, on the contrary, seize again upon the chords in the heart of modern man which respond to these eternal expressions in order to restore to them their maximum efficacy. At the same time, we must do everything in our power to revive modern man’s atrophied faculties…and to bring back to our contemporaries a religious culture….,” that is, one rooted in the natural sacramentality of the world. Otherwise, there is no hope for man to live the liturgy.

A photo I took in Wyoming years ago at a ranch

This point has major implications in all kinds of spheres: family life, parish life, education. For example, ideally, schools should educate in natural religion, in two phases: first, students should be immersed in literature and poetry that fascinate with their beauty and indeed their superintelligibility, which escapes what the rational mind immediately grasps; then, they should be immersed in the wilderness, which will create a great void of silence and a sense of grandeur. (It could go in the other order, too; indeed, best of all would be some alternation between poetry and the wilderness.) With these experiences in place, the traditional liturgy is capable of capturing the soul with its beauty, transcendence, seriousness, and holiness. This is the process all students of the college should go through, because it is the true end of a liberal education: being truly free to worship God as He planned. Everything falls into line behind this supreme final goal!

Second, we should restore the primacy of the divine word. In Bouyer’s view, current liturgical practice—when the congregation stands silently by, either subjected to rationalistic commentaries on the sacred action or devoutly praying their private devotions—is a clear devolution into the sort of white magic that, according to his historical analysis, is an ever recurring danger in established rites when the ceremony is seen as a formulaic means of binding the divinity’s power. The Divine Word in the Eucharist is made present through the divine words of consecration as a consummation of the divine words of Scripture. Thus, according to Bouyer, the faithful should hear the Scripture (and much of the Canon) proclaimed in the vernacular, so that the liturgy is sufficiently manifest as divine word, rather than seeming to be a distant apotropaic relic.

Here, of course, is where red flags should be popping up. It seems like Bouyer, though he cites the dogma of ex opere operato efficacity, does not fully appreciate the objectivity of it; on his own account it might be criticized as magic (a description Sebastian Morello would take as a compliment). Bouyer is right to take a dim view of a liturgical minimalism content with validity and rubrical correctness, but surely there is quite a bit of terrain lying between magical thinking and the view that immediate verbal comprehension is the only way to see the liturgy as God speaking to us and accomplishing His salvation.

Third, purging the rites of “dramatic” substitutes for living rites clothed in the divine word. He is reticent about giving particulars in this book, but elsewhere he complains about certain elements of pomp and circumstance, the accumulation and duplication of ceremonial gestures that could seem fussy or superfluous, the importation of allegories, and other elements that seem to belong to a staged religious drama. This emphasis on “the word” as the be-all and end-all might prompt one to wonder if the old Protestant pastor in Bouyer has not quite let go of his grip.

Fourth, Bouyer approves of a certain adaptation of liturgy to modern man. At the same time, he explicitly condemns rationalizing the liturgy, turning altars around (!), etc. But he remains vague. What does he mean that the liturgy must be “adapted to modern man with his technical and rational outlook”? Is he too confident about the work specialists can do? How exactly is a technical and rational outlook compatible with the wellsprings of natural religion he so eloquently canvased? How is it compatible with spiritual perception of the divine word that brings Christian man into being? One might think, rather, that the Church needs somehow to work against the technical and rational outlook in order to prevent it from undermining liturgy altogether.
 

Modernity does not seem especially conducive to liturgy.

An Insoluble Contradiction

Bouyer was very influential in his day, yet he expressed himself in ways that were easily misconstrued and exaggerated. He regretted all this later when it was much too late; he could have made his own the words of Joseph Ratzinger:

Anyone like myself, who was moved by this perception [viz., that liturgy is a living network of tradition that cannot be torn apart] in the time of the Liturgical Movement on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, can only stand, deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were concerned for.

Case in point: Bouyer generally criticizes liturgy from the late medieval period through the Baroque as “theatrical” and “courtly,” but doesn’t seem to recall that Scripture heavily uses the language of God as a King surrounded by His court (as I discuss here). He criticizes the Tridentine liturgy for being too privatized, ritualistic, and intellectual, but does not see that it connected people consistently with the numinous, with the real presence of our Lord, and spoke to their souls—the souls of very common people, of farmers, artisans, laborers, as well as the educated and sophisticated. That is, he was overlooking strengths that are obvious to us in retrospect, now that a banal fabrication has been substituted in its place. Again, he lamented the rationalization and verbalization of the Mass, but all too late.

It seems to me that Bouyer, like Guardini, was trapped in an insoluble contradiction. For them, religion begins in something primeval, natural, essential, vital; and yet modern man is trapped in technology, subjectivism, egoism, calculative reason, and is cut off from his natural roots. So how do we build a bridge? Well, we can either try to awaken man to what is natural and primordial, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, or we can adapt and modify liturgy to his peculiar condition in an effort to educate him “as he is” and “where he is.”

The problem is that doing the latter—judging and reworking the liturgy, in other words, in contrast to submitting to a liturgy handed down from tradition—puts man in the pseudo-divine position of fabricating rites, when this is contrary to the very notion of a rite; or, one might say it implicitly makes him a god, the measure of all things, even of the sacred. Hence it compounds his alienation from the divine and makes the overall situation even worse. In contrast, the principle of tradition—namely, that one should have immense respect for what is given as a result of long centuries of organic development—has at least the merit of taking a man out of himself, out of his age and its limitations, and connecting him with, or at least confronting him to, something greater, deeper, broader, other than himself and his age.

Bouyer, it seems to me, is caught on the horns of this dilemma, which is why he will say in one chapter the sort of things traditionalists say, and then in the next chapter, the sort of things Bugnini or Lercaro say. Ultimately, I do not think his liturgical theology is altogether coherent, and yet it is extremely thought-provoking. It exercised a seductive power over the minds of men who genuinely wanted the faithful to be enthusiastic participants in the Church’s liturgy. The irony is that, in the effort to move away from “magic” to “word,” we ended up with a Protestantized “liturgy of the word”—and here I include the Canon inasmuch as it is said aloud in the vernacular—that lacks the dimension of mystery at the heart of the authentic notion of the word: the mysterion, the secret both hidden and revealed. Thus, we departed not merely from the Tridentine heritage of the preceding four centuries, but from the most ancient heritage of the Fathers, who already speak of the liturgy as something fearful, awesome, tremendous (as verified in this article).

It is true that Bouyer considered the experts of his day to be well-qualified for the work of revising the liturgical books, but as John Pepino recounts in his superb article “Cassandra’s Curse: Louis Bouyer, the Liturgical Movement, and the Post-Conciliar Reform of the Mass” (Antiphon 18.3 [2014]: 254–300), already as early as the 1950s Bouyer was complaining about would-be reformers impatient to replace the genuine liturgy of the Church with a pastoral construction of utilitarian aims. Like many churchmen, I genuinely believe Bouyer did not think it was possible or conceivable that the liturgy could or would be jettisoned in the manner in which it actually was jettisoned. He would have instinctively viewed it as monolithic, permanent, dominant, almost immovable, so that the reformers would have functioned more like men who were simply cleaning off the old mosaics or repositioning the pillars—not removing or replacing them. When things turned out differently, he was among those most surprised at the wreckage.

It is fair to say that Guardini and Bouyer would have heartily approved of what students at Wyoming Catholic College are doing: climbing mountains, memorizing poems, and learning Latin as a spoken language, among other full-immersion activities. By taking seriously the senses, the imagination, the poetic, the literary, in confrontation with God’s First Book, their souls are opened to receive the powerful divine message of the sacred liturgy. Perhaps this is the principal reform that needs to take place: a reform of our minds and hearts, so that the revelation of God will not fall on deaf ears.

Traditional Art Cannot be Revolutionary: Modern Churches and Traditional Parishes - Guest Article by Mr Joseph Bremer

We are happy to share this article by Mr Joseph Bremer, a PhD student at the London-based King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, studying western iconography, and specializing in the art and architecture of the Romanesque period. He also currently teaches theology and history at Holy Family Cathedral School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

There seems to be no artistic spirit of our age. Future generations of Church historians will have a profoundly unenviable task ahead; for we can examine a 6th century mosaic covered domed cross church and definitively call it ‘Byzantine,’ a 12th century thick walled stone basilica and recognize it as ‘Romanesque,’ or identify a 17th century sprawling marble-clad church as definitively ‘Baroque.’ One could even travel back 30 years and identify our large monochrome iconoclastic churches as definitively modern, but that simply doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Many Catholic churches currently in use were constructed in the now-outdated styles that dominated the late 20th and early 21st centuries; and it is no secret that most practicing Catholics now find this commitment to post-modern art and architecture deeply problematic. We still inhabit the bones of these modern spaces, but the Church’s architectural turn in the late 20th century is now considered by many priests and parishioners to be a mistake. Our future church historians will have to make sense of a well-meaning, albeit disparate traditional patchwork independent of any overarching style or meaning as we try to patch modern churches with what bits of tradition we can.

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles

This is especially true in America, where the Church eagerly married itself to the spirit of the age, but the last few decades has seen her, at least aesthetically, widowed. Our artistic inheritance is the fruit of jaded and betrayed post-modern optimism, and now these modern churches have been all but rejected by the very youth they were designed to appease. A new generation of young, eminently conservative, and overwhelmingly well-meaning priests have been assigned to these modern churches, with a strong will to traditionalize them, but the walls and artwork of our churches preach a theology altogether rejected by many of her parishioners and most of her priests. The pulpit is at war with the building it inhabits, and we are all left wondering ‘what now?’

It is an all too familiar question in our day and age: What is a traditionally minded parish, or at the very least a parish that rejects the maxims of artistic postmodernism, able to do if they inherited the all too familiar 70’s square?

Many parishes understandably see the need to construct an entirely new space. One such example is St. Philip the Apostle Church in Lewisville, Texas; a congregation not known for being exceptionally traditional.

The Old St. Philip the Apostle Sanctuary, construction completed in 1977

The parish, over the course of many years, was able to raise the money for a brand new neo-Gothic church in Flower-Mound, the interior of which is currently incomplete and pictured below.

As beautiful and preferable as the building of a new church is for most parishes, this is rarely an option. The recent agglomeration of small local parishes into larger urban ones makes this very difficult. The late 20th century shortage of priests coupled with a declining percentage of mass attendance meant dioceses in the 1970s and 1980s shut down many small local parishes, and built very large, very central and very modern churches in their place. Building a new large church is a monumental expense most parishes simply can’t afford; and it doesn’t help that construction, labor, and land costs are at an all time high with no sign of decline in the near future.

So can a parish traditionalize a space designed to be antithetical to tradition? This question must be necessarily answered on a church by church basis, but let's first examine what is currently being done. An example I am intimately familiar with is the Church of the Incarnation, a parish located at the University of Dallas which serves as a stark archetype for the difficulties and pitfalls of traditionalizing modern spaces. The University of Dallas teaches us three important lessons in the traditionalization of modern churches: the importance of continuity, of artistic telos, and of recognizing the realities of your space.

The church was designed and built by architects Duane and Jane Landry in 1985 in the spirit of most modern churches, with an express emphasis on the community rather than the liturgy. Its circular form was derived from Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome, but the processional aisle was deliberately placed so that it wasn’t the focal point of the very large narthex. (A cheeky former chaplain reserved the URL www.bigbrowncircle.com for the church’s website) The altar is pushed forward to the center to emphasize communal participation. It is also situated on a North-South axis, and there is no entrance to the church except for from the East. Its paneled walls prevent any other liturgical art but a crucifix. The sanctuary naturally feeds into the narthex, but the narthex rather awkwardly blocks entry into the sanctuary. The sanctuary simply doesn’t feel like the focal point of the church. It is awkward to enter and almost entirely barren.

The blueprint of the Church of the Incarnation 

Continue Reading this Article. . .

“Modern formlessness is repellant... We are beginning, perhaps, to recover from our blindness”

What modern liturgists thought we needed... (source)

The reaction of an Italian reader to the Italian translation of my book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness (Nobile bellezza, sublime santità, Fede & Cultura, 2021), struck me as quite interesting and I wanted to share it, slightly adapted, in English.

It is not surprising that the Church has been infected by the temper of the times and its denigration of beauty — albeit as a laggard follower of contemporaneity, with the usual delay and very little awareness of changing fashions. Modernity was already giving up the ghost to postmodernity when a Council was called finally to meet and embrace it.

Since the death of Pius XII, there has been a vocal urgency in Catholicism, fatuous yet urgent, to recover the “Jewishness” of Christ, supposedly obliterated by two millennia of Latinity (there is much irony here, considering that the reformed liturgy removes so many Jewish elements that had had a place there); the “Kerygma” or “original message of the first community,” supposedly obscured by twenty centuries of commentary and interpretation; the “simplicity and poverty” of the liturgy, which is felt to be distorted by Latin and Gregorian chant and really anything elaborate or majestic.

Purveyors of novelty rewrite hymns and paintings to the measure of little kids, who, I suppose, are to them a symbol of a “new” humanity without history or education. They ask ultra-modern architecture to build churches as much like “tents” as possible (because God “pitched His tent among us”), or that at least look like casual, unadorned containers of refugee crowds (since we are a “people on the move”): denied the lofty vaults and uplifting domes, the roofs have to be flat jetties or skylights, the walls of bare concrete so that brutal matter gets the better of form (perhaps form would be a distraction from what is essential…). Everything reminds one of industrial architecture, the highest point of coincidence — according to a certain way of thinking — between the Archaic and the Functional.

The whole approach has an unequivocal meaning: the ecclesiastical innovators believe they are hurling the (original) Revelation against the (subsequent and deviating) Tradition. Neither do they realize, I fear, that the era of the contemporary as a return to the archaic, which has scattered external and internal carnage and ruin, is coming to an end — has run its course. The exhaustion of totalitarian ideologies is its most conspicuous symptom.
 

...was not the tradition in which Catholics were at home, and in which many still feel most at home, in spite of decades of suppression (photo from 1950s: source).

A subjective indication of that exhaustion is the combination of nausea and boredom we feel in the face of yet another “abstract” or “informal” painting, or yet another rational and functional piece of architecture, even as painters and architects continue to recycle their tired utilitarian forms, unable to find a beautiful form for the “postmodern” breakthrough to which they pay lip service. Yet it was (in some disciplines at least) precisely the penetration of the true archaic layers of humanity that began to put us on the road to recovery, the road to rediscovering the primal sources of religion in awe, wonder, mystery, infinity, and the necessity of sacrifice, purification, and rituality. But our reformers have managed to make the archaic not a source of new life, but a stylized archaeological remnant of past (and sometimes imaginary) phases of Christianity.

Every human coexistence — except our own “mass” one — is the present emergence of a traditionary past. We begin to guess that the archaic removed from the living process of handing-down is nothing more than museum residue, enigmatic and dead. That is why what Christians were arguably doing in the year 300 is much less important than what they were doing, well or poorly, throughout all the modern centuries right into the decades before the Council. That continuity with a truly active tradition, whatever its flaws (and flaws are never absent in human endeavors), was and remains the most faithful channel for us to tap into the origin of our culture: the living Archaic that it preserves and passes on. There is more of the Church of the year 300 in the Tridentine Mass than there could ever be in the reformed one, in spite of this or that oration plucked from an old manuscript.

My hope is that one day the Catholic world will realize this, too. Contemporary forms that disgust us by their vacuity, artificiality, or arbitrariness indicate that we are beginning to miss Tradition, that we feel a terrible want, and that our modern formlessness is repellant, at least among those who have a sense of beauty left within. We are beginning, perhaps, to recover from our blindness.
 

From a midnight Mass in 2023, in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe: modern men gratefully participating in an age-old ritual.

As a number of authors have emphasized in recent years, it is the stubbornly unmodern character of the traditional Roman Rite that wins for it a uniquely potent place in the "marketplace of ideas" or, for that matter, the "marketplace of religious practices." It does not present itself as a product of our own technical skill, or an expression of our (purportedly) superior judgment as we gaze out over a past littered with discarded prejudices; it is not an appendage to any program, party, or philosophy. It is more like a literary tradition that grows over many centuries and retains a unity-in-diversity that is stronger than the various tendencies of all of its parts, and greater than any one participant in it.

This rite offers itself to us as a whole and complete body of rite, symbol, text, chant, and gesture that belongs to no one and opens itself to every one. This overwhelming trait makes it both deeply challenging (for it is vast and subtle) and serenely unthreatening (for it remains aloof, inevitable, and impersonal) — at least, to those who are serious about prayer.

Right the way it is and has been and will be.

How Liturgical “Forms” Concretely Define Religious Belief — or Undermine It

For a thousand years, priests offering Mass in the Roman rite observed the rule that they should hold their thumb and forefinger together from the time of the consecration until the ablutions (a rule still observed, of course, wherever the traditional Latin Mass is celebrated). This custom reflects the Church’s profound faith in the Real Presence. After the consecration, Our Lord is really, truly, substantially present wherever the outward appearances of bread and wine are present, which means in every last particle of the host. For this reason, the priest should not casually handle other things after touching the host, but keep those two fingers together except when distributing communion, until he is able to wash them in the ablutions. In this way, too, the priest is continually reminded of the awesome mystery he is handling with his fingers — and so are the laity.

As a layman, it bothered me that this longstanding and sensible custom had disappeared, so I decided to pose a number of questions to a sizeable group of priests who celebrate the usus antiquior, primarily to learn the importance they themselves attach to the custom. The results were published at NLM in five installments, with a concluding reflection (links may be found here). One priest responded to the series with the following account:

At the Mass in which I was ordained a deacon, the Eucharist was “served” from a glass dish of sorts … I purified it with great care after Holy Communion; it required a rather noticeable period of time to do so, which was obviously more than local clergy and people were used to. After that Mass both the vocation director and the ordaining bishop “corrected” me on this matter, with the bishop reminding me that the purification was only a “ritual purification” and that such care was not needed in carrying it out, since a sacristan would wash everything after. (A totally incoherent position.)
          This was my introduction — and a rather painful one, at that — to the practical lack of faith on the part of the clergy in the Real Presence, which I have witnessed and experienced many times in the 11 years since then. I say “practical,” because few would deny the Real Presence and most would even defend it quite eloquently. But the way they actually handle the Eucharist betrays their lack of understanding and/or belief. (This is particularly the case with how they handle the Precious Blood, the purificator, etc. — but this is the topic of another discourse.)
          Therefore, when I began to study the usus antiquior and learned about the detailed and systematic process of purification, which really leaves little room for error, and of the practicalities such as holding the consecrating digits together until purification, my faith was confirmed. And, although knowledge of the Church’s historic practice served, perhaps, to heighten my awareness of just how bad things generally can be now, and thus heightened my sense of pain, yet at the same time, it was a consolation to know that I was on the right track.

This author has put his finger (if I may say so) on the nub of the problem. The Catholic faith is not something purely abstract that we learn and assent to as an intellectual exercise. We learn our faith and we discern its meaning through practice, through what we do with or to the words, things, and persons that embody this faith. How we speak to Our Lord or about Him; how we handle the sacramental signs and, above all, His all-holy and life-giving Body and precious Blood; how we treat our priests and how they treat their people. This is where we find out, experientially, day after day, what the Catholic religion is — and whether it has been replaced by a rival system of belief.

In our practice, we teach ourselves; by our example, we teach those around us, especially children. This is where modern liturgy has grievously failed, in numerous ways and as a matter of practice, through its repudiation of the meaning of vital forms of expression, forms that convey the essence and purpose of the Mass. What is at stake in the escalating tensions between divergent liturgical “sensibilities” is not just mere “form” (as if we were talking about matters of taste or fine art), but rather, the meaning inherent in form and expressed by it — that is to say, truth. And not truth alone, but justice, as in the virtue of justice by which we give to God and the things of God that which they rightly demand and which we owe as His creatures and dependents. Thus, the divergence between “old rite” and “new rite” is a divergence of truth and justice: two different “religions,” taking this word in its Thomistic acceptation.

Just as the reverent forms and practices of the traditional liturgy point to and express vital truths for our faith, the numerous casual practices that permeate Novus Ordo liturgies are not coherent with the meaning and the purpose of the Mass. A friend of mine, a young lady who transitioned a few years ago from the Novus Ordo to the traditional rite, sent me a reflection that illustrates this point:

In my years attending the N.O. at very mainstream parishes (not like Oratorians at all), I experienced a palpable and oppressive sense of what I can only describe as a dictatorship of the casual. It wasn’t that I didn’t personally wish for more reverence, but the atmosphere just made it feel very out of place. It felt strange to be one of the few who bowed in the creed (we never dreamed of making a genuflection). It felt equally strange to show extra reverence such as bowing of the head after adoring the host at the consecration. Some faithful received on the tongue, but this was unusual. If one stayed in the pew, even for a moment, to make acts of thanksgiving after Holy Mass, one was most certainly in the minority. Then of course there was the chit-chat about sports games, social events, and all kinds of trivialities that took place in the Sacred Presence. Also there were frequent rounds of applause tucked into liturgies. Rounds of applause for a good joke in the homily, for a speaker advertising the parish picnic, for the choir upon completion of the rousing recessional song — the occasions were all too frequent.
          There is a pervading “bad attitude” that results in this oppressive dictatorship of the casual. It is a mystery to me what drives this insidious force. It took root years ago, but why does it still thrive when many good people in these parishes desire, if only in a vague way, greater reverence? Now, I know that we should all be willing to openly express our faith in God even unto death. However, something has gone terribly wrong when one feels a furtive sense, almost guilt — a feeling of “Well, who do you think you are, acting all holy!” — when one expresses reverence in a visible act.
          I’ll give a vignette that comes to mind. My sisters and I thought wearing veils would be kind of nice, but I remember my argument against it was: “We’re already such a distraction up in front of church playing our instruments in view of everyone. Then we’re going to throw veils into the equation? Besides they don’t ‘go’ with the kind of music we play.” I really don’t know if that reasoning was sound, but it illustrates the conundrum of reverence-hungry faithful who find themselves in the rigid N.O. framework. It’s a framework where piety and devotion often look ridiculous. Think of it: we have on our hands an atmosphere where showing due honor to Our Lord in what is supposed to be His house, at what is His Sacrifice, looks ridiculous. This is a brazen evil.

It is ironic that some Novus Ordo proponents criticize those who favor the traditional liturgy as people fixated on form, when in reality it is impossible not to care about form, since there is no truth accessible to us humans without the clothing of form. Every liturgy comes to us as a definite concrete set of forms with their own inherent meaning, and this meaning will be either full, rich, accurate, and nourishing of orthodoxy, or banal, impoverished, ambiguous, and inadequate to our needs. In this sense, everyone is fixated on form because human language and spiritual activity are formal through and through. The primacy of form, and the corresponding priority of getting it right, are inescapable; there is no “essential thing” independent of form that is “enough” for us.

No doubt, truth is known by the divine intellect apart from any created form; but men know the truth as expressed in a definite way, under sensible and intelligible signs. Some signs are well suited to the truth they signify, and others are not. For example, solemnity is compatible with, indeed required by, the notion of the sacred, while casualness and spontaneity are not.

Martin Mosebach’s The Heresy of Formlessness illuminates the folly (and ugliness) of imposing on ourselves the modern faith in abstract society and an abstract world with abstractions reigning globally and governing relationships individually, in contrast to the real spiritual vitality that can be found in things, real things, and how real things and actions resonate in the spiritual realm. This sensitivity to material reality is something our society has lost — not only the idea that there is a spiritual reality encompassing the material world, but also that we touch the spiritual through what we do with matter, or, in other words, that the form of things and what we do with them matters in the life of the spirit. One sees the same Cartesian contempt for the flesh in the liturgical reform, which strips barren the inherited treasury of forms in order to present as purely verbal and conceptual a worship as is still consonant with public human activity.

As the historical record indicates, Modernity fears Catholicism because Catholicism reminds it — reminds us — that reality includes the supernatural, that which encompasses and penetrates the natural with mysterious powers that reason can approach, but only through faith and analogy. This approach requires a surrender to the divine and an acceptance of tradition that modern epistemology in its egocentric rationalism and voluntarism cannot tolerate. Like liberalism in Newman’s analysis, a halfway house between Catholicism and atheism, the Novus Ordo is a halfway house between a time-embracing and time-transcending tradition and a modernity trapped in its own death spiral.

In conclusion, the past fifty years of liturgical praxis have taken a serious toll on the faith life in our communities. The Novus Ordo perspective dwells erroneously on abstractions like validity and fails to recognize the deep (human and divine!) connection between form, meaning, and truth. The consequences of this error are now unmistakable. According to Bishop Barron, for every new Catholic, six are leaving the Church. In a survey of Catholics, 80% under age 50 do not believe in the Real Presence. The pandemic has only accelerated the already glaring differences between the traditional practice of Catholicism and its modern substitute. The loss of faith evidenced statistically is understandable, even predictable, given that the main catechism for most Catholics is the Mass. A concerted return to the traditional liturgy is not simply beneficial but necessary for the continued life of our churches. Bishops who do not grasp this in time will preside over the white-chasubled funerals of their cremated dioceses.

In the cycles of history, including the history of salvation unfolded for us in Scripture, we perceive times of exile, as well as the varied responses people make to their exilic condition. It seems that we are living in a peculiar time marked by institutional self-exile, as if the Church had become its own Pharaoh and Pilate. That is no excuse for failing to do what we can and must as children of Israel, as disciples of Christ; rather, it is the perfect opportunity to pray for and seek a return to Catholic tradition, having at its heart a liturgy that is worthy of — and truly communicative of — the most important work the Church does, and, consequently, that is capable of serving as the foundation for a coherent future.

Is Modern Man “Incapable of the Liturgical Act”?

In 1964, “forty-six years after the publication of his seminal work, The Spirit of the Liturgy, and just after the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, Romano Guardini reflected on the challenges of the Liturgical Movement in a letter to a Congress on the Liturgy in 1964.” [1] He famously claimed that Modern Man is “no longer capable of a liturgical act”:

Is not the liturgical act and, with it, all that goes under the name of “liturgy” so bound up with the historical background – antique or medieval or baroque – that it would be more honest to give it up altogether? Would it not be better to admit that man in this industrial and scientific age, with its new sociological structure, is no longer capable of a liturgical act? And instead of talking of renewal ought we not to consider how best to celebrate the sacred mysteries so that modern man can grasp their meaning through his own approach to truth? [2]

In the same letter, Guardini states:

The question will arise whether our present liturgy contains parts which cannot mean much to modern man. I remember a conversation with the late Abbot Ildefons Herwegen of Maria Laach, the great champion of liturgical renewal. We had been considering various aspects and I said a sign that the work for liturgy was really coming to life would be a liturgical crisis, and Abbot Herwegen thoughtfully agreed.[3]

While Guardini himself only a few years later would dismiss the Consilium’s drafts as “plumber’s work,” it would be impossible to exaggerate the harm he himself caused by the remarks he made in the 1964 letter, which seemed to suggest, as many other semi-modernists had done, that the entirety of Christian liturgy from as early as Constantine, and certainly no later than the Middle Ages onward, was irrelevant, useless, inaccessible, ready for the scrap heap. What is surprising is that a theologian of Guardini’s stature, who was so attuned to the sacred liturgy's “irrelevance” and “uselessness” (properly understood) [4], was able to embrace this kind of chronological relativism.

On the one hand, we might sympathize with Guardini to this extent: the liturgical reform seemed to be premised on the idea that if the liturgy as it stands “isn’t working,” then all we need to do is redesign it — find a “working” model — pack it up, ship it out, and roll it off the skids to the expectant populace. In this vision, the problems are all on the side of the liturgical rites; it is not men who need to be reformed, but only the rites.

Yet what if the problem is in man? If he were judged to be incapable of the liturgical act, then he would be incapable of any liturgy, whether it comes from the scriptorium of Gregory the Great or the desk of Annibale Bugnini. He might be capable of something else, like a Bible study, a soup kitchen, prison ministry, or volunteering for scouts, but the leitourgia, the sacrificial action of one on behalf of the many [5], will not have any purchase in his individualistic world. In that sense, perhaps the avant-garde liturgists underestimated the challenge they were up against. It’s not about “tweaking” something to get it to “work” better, much less of piling on more and more Scripture so that one can check off a box that says “Bible is being read—done.” For it is not the reading or the text, the chant or the ritual, that is a problem, but the modernity of modern man, which prevents him from engaging, cosmically, symbolically, ascetically, and mystically, with the very realities Scripture is about, and short of which it fails of its aim.

“More than words: Signs, symbols, metaphors”

On the other hand, in defense of the common man, it might be asked: Why should we buy this typically pessimistic German view to begin with, reminiscent of Wotan lamenting the ineluctable collapse of Valhalla, the Götterdämmerung? To say that moderns are not able to be liturgical in the same way that all men prior to them have been is a path leading to despair: as if man were now a different species that requires a different religion, that is, a different system of signs ordered to divine worship. This subterranean despair was part of the motivation for the Novus Ordo. It led to the belief that a simplified, abbreviated, intelligible, vernacular, communal celebration will obviously appeal to modern man, who is incapable of vertical, theocentric, densely symbolic, archaically uttered ritual. But this seems to be basically false, and has led to a massive falling-away, as well as to the surprising resilience of the old rites that were supposed to be outdated and unapproachable.

The truth that is really inevitable is not Guardini’s fatalism, but an acknowledgement of the requirements of human formation. Just as we cannot give ourselves permission to stop teaching each new generation how to speak, how to read, how to write, and how to think, so we must not fail to immerse ourselves in ritual that is uncompromisingly ritualistic, for this is the logic, grammar, and rhetoric of revealed religion, in both Testaments and in the history of the Church. It enjoys a universal anthropological basis that makes it always learnable, but since it is rather strange within rationalistic modernity, it is now more capable, not less capable, of confronting us with the transcendence of God, which calls us out of our comfort zone, as Abraham was called from Ur of the Chaldeans. When people have the sense that in the liturgy they are entering the domain of the sacred, somehow stepping into the realm of the divine, then their ears will begin to open to listening to the words of God in Scripture. The focus, the starting point, has to be elsewhere than Scripture. That is exactly contrary to where the reformers, in their homotextuality (so to speak), wanted to place the emphasis.

Another way of seeing this is to look at the repetitiousness of the old rite, much maligned of course by the reformers. In “Repetition Is the Mother of a Great Many Things,” I discuss the value of the frequent use of the same pericopes and verses of Scripture (and non-Scriptural texts) in the traditional liturgy precisely as a method for making us deeply familiar with the words. Eventually these words, or many of them at any rate, will be memorized; they come to live within us, forming our consciousness as the floor, walls, and ceiling of our inner architecture. The way to get modern Christians to take Scripture more seriously would be to take memory more seriously, and to preach and teach about ways in which our modern way of life is sapping or emptying our memories of what is divine and filling them with what is secular, profane, and, at times, diabolic. Once again, what modern man needed and still needs is what traditional liturgy rites and practices give him, not something newly fashioned à la Guardini.

Learning the old liturgy in the midst of ruins

It is also true, and I will be the first to admit it, that without some catechesis, whether outside of liturgy or in the homily, most modern people will not be able to grasp enough of the message of liturgy to get a good grip, a good foothold, for making further progress. In that sense, education simply cannot be bypassed. Dignified and beautiful liturgy can accomplish immense good, even conversions from atheism or paganism; but for most people, entering deeply into all that the liturgy has to offer is going to require at least some investment of work, slowly, over a long period. And it has always been so; there’s a reason St. Benedict speaks of the opus Dei, the work of God. It is work that, as the Holy Rule stresses, requires repetition, study, and expertise, though — as Guardini rightly says — it is also the highest-level play, since it does not have an ulterior motive, an end for which it is merely a means.

Let us return to our starting point. Guardini said that modern man could no longer perform the liturgical act. This was taken by many in the later phase of the Liturgical Movement as an indisputable truth and a warrant for unlimited experimentation, with the goal of equipping the liturgy to elicit or solicit the “correct” participation from the faithful. Ironically, what happened instead is that the liturgical act was transformed into its opposite: the celebration of the community itself by itself. In a strange twist, Guardini’s dour assessment was not disproved by the Novus Ordo but inculcated by it: what had been a risk of missing the properly liturgical became a habit of missing it with confident ease. In short, it is above all the reformed liturgy that has made modern men, to the extent humanly possible and divinely permitted, incapable of performing the liturgical act.

NOTES

[1] Editorial introduction at Corpus Christi Watershed.
[2] “1964 Letter from Romano Guardini.”
[3] See Christopher Carstens, “Romano Guardini Was Careful What He Asked For: A Liturgical Crisis.”
[4] See Fr. Daniel Cardo, “At Prayer in the Fields of the Lord: The Playfulness of the Liturgy.”
[5] See William Daniel, Christ the Liturgy (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2020), 1-39, on the correct meaning of the term leitourgia.

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

A Glimpse into Catholic Life in Ireland in the Early Sixties

Some weeks ago, a priest friend alerted me to the online archives of Radharc, “one of Ireland’s most important independent documentary production companies,” founded in 1959 and the producer of “over 400 documentaries which were screened on RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster, between 1961 and 1996.” My correspondent was particularly interested in the short films made from 1961 to 1966, with two priests, Fr Peter Dunn and Fr Desmond Forristal, as the hosts. It should be noted—and this is a matter of surprise especially for Americans—that it did  not seem strange in any way for a public film project to be run by priests and to center so closely on religious and cultural matters (which were often the same).

Several of these films would be fascinating to NLM readers, so I shall comment on my favorites. There are many more worth exploring at the Irish Film Institute Radharc archive. (As the videos are not on YouTube, only still shots can be inserted here.)

The New Ritual

For an absolutely fascinating glimpse into Catholic life at the time of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, watch the seven-minute film from 1962 about “The New Ritual.” “New,” at this time, refers to the Tridentine sacramental rites done partly in Latin and partly in English. The film speaks as if this modest step is a sufficient response to modern needs.

As regular readers will know, I’m opposed to having so much vernacular in the traditional rites of the Church of Rome, but no one can deny that if what the video shows had been the only step taken towards liturgical reform, the faithful wouldn’t have been thrown into disarray and there would be a great deal more peace and unity in the Church today. The traditional movement as we know it would not exist were it not for the flagrant overreaching of the Consilium and the accompanying absolutism of Paul VI.

Most interesting to me is the interview at the end with an Irish liturgist who says: “Some people want the Foremass [Mass of Catechumens] in English, but the rest of the Mass—especially the Canon, the heart of the Mass—will remain in Latin.” He seems quite sincere in his assertion. How many, at this time, could have imagined what would be happening only a few short years later? (On this point, I recommend William Riccio’s fine article “Back to the Future? No Thanks, I’ve Been There,” in which he recounts, inter alia: “We were told the Canon, that most untranslatable prayer, would never be in the vernacular because it is too steeped in meaning. In 1967, it was put in the vernacular.”)

Sick Calls

This four-minute video was made in 1962, when the traditional rite of the sacrament of extreme unction was still being used by everyone. Today it is used by communities like the FSSP and the ICRSS, and, I would suppose, by individual diocesan priests who are familiar with it.

What a remarkable glimpse into how sick calls used to be done — and, please God, how they can and should still be done today!

Blessing the Airplane Fleet

Made in 1962, this film tells the viewer about Aer Lingus, Ireland’s national airline. Each plane is named after an Irish saint—and after showing us lots of examples, the film gives a quick history of Irish missionaries of old. (As far as I know, the Aer Lingus airplanes have retained their saint names to the present.) We get a tour of the primitive instrumentation panel of a Boeing. We see a priest blessing the fleet with holy water, and a Sunday Mass conducted in the hangar. We get to see the prayer card (I’m not kidding) that used to be included in every seat of an Aer Lingus plane, and a view of nuns wearing habits one would never see today.

In general, the people flying on the planes as well as those seeing them off are dressed impeccably. One would not have dreamed of going out in public any other way.

The Village with the Most Vocations

Another remarkable film concerns a village in rural Ireland that had a long history of high numbers of priestly and religious vocations. A fascinating glimpse into Irish village life in 1962: there’s not even a hint of the collapse that would come later.

All the explanations given about why this village’s vocations flourished are quite similar to the reasons we might give today for the greater number of vocations among traditional Catholics: hard-working family life, the family Rosary, the cheerfulness of the sisters, and a relatively simple life. The sisters don’t put pressure on the girls; certainly no “vocations office,” “discernment retreats,” or baby-faced agents.

The sisters depicted in this 1962 film left for good in 2016, after 151 years. Seduced by the “spirit of the Council,” they had become “Eucharistic ministers” and Lord only knows what else. Corruptio optimi pessima.

People often say to traditionalists: “If Catholicism was so great before the Council, why did it fall apart so quickly?” And I reply: “How well do you know yourself? There but for the grace of God go I…” We don't have to pretend that there were no problems before the Council (and Ireland surely had its problems too) to know that things were a far sight better than they were afterwards, when the spirit of rebellion had taken hold and churchmen couldn't throw off the shackles of commandments, customs, and cultural heritage quickly enough. Things can fall apart rapidly when we let fallen human nature take the driver’s seat. Look at the history of Israel, God’s chosen people. Look at the Church in various periods of her checkered history. It’s not as if we should be shocked. Greatness is a daily moral and spiritual conquest, and it can fall to pieces in a matter of years, months, even days. These objectors might as well pose their question to Our Lord: “If you are the Son of God, why did one of your Apostles betray you, and the others run away?” It was not the fault of Our Lord; and neither was the (post)conciliar apostasy the fault of the Catholic tradition built up over the ages by the Holy Spirit, sent to the God-loving disciples in the one and only Pentecost of the Church, which lasts until the end of the ages.

Can Modernity Bring Anything to the Liturgy?

Photo by Lucas Carl on Unsplash

Today’s revival of traditional approaches in the fine arts and particularly of traditional liturgical practices has been greeted by many with skepticism and disapproval. “Surely, it is not possible to ‘go back’ to an earlier age, whose ideals are so different from ours? Have we not made significant progress in doing what none could do before? As for anything we might need, it will not be what former generations needed.”

The history of the arts and of reform/renewal movements tells a different tale. All great artists began by apprenticing themselves to a tradition and copying its masterpieces. In like manner, all great movements of reform in Church history looked back for inspiration to what worked in the past in order to fix what was broken in the present. The noble cultural ideals of Western civilization — largely imparted to it by the vigorous activity of the Catholic Church — are possessed of a perennial vitality and creative fecundity against which the self-consciously “modern,” with its fading faddishness, cannot successfully compete.

The reinveintion of the liturgy after the Council was merely the last and most tragic of a long series of unnatural dislocations and distortions of human forms in the 20th century. This was a century that prided itself on taking everything apart, breaking it down, and gutting it out: first painting and poetry, then dance and music, social customs, politics, education. It was only a matter of time before the liturgy, the cumulative and culminating art form, the king in his court, was also deposed. Once all the subsidiary arts, both material and spiritual, that made liturgy possible were reviled and denied, how could liturgy itself stand? If all of culture was declining throughout the modern period, how could liturgy — that supreme expression and concentration of culture — be left unaffected? Would there not be a terrible risk that men without chests and without taste would eventually hold the reins of power and change it to reflect their simplistic rationality? And so it happened.

In the aftermath of this sad story, is it inopportune and premature to ask whether or not there might be something, anything, that modernity can bring to Catholic ritual in a positive sense? Let me explain the basis for the question.

Each era seems to have added — one might say, grafted — something distinctive onto the tradition. The Christians of the Middle Ages were masters of symbol, Scripture, and allegory, and gave us rites and commentaries in that spirit. The medieval liturgy in its tropes, ritual elaboration, architectural framework, and commentary tradition, is an exquisite glorification of the sacrifice on which salvation history centers. The Baroque brings something startlingly new: the unveiled sanctuary, the focus on ecstatic vision and overwhelming sensual experience, even a surprising penchant for the dramatic (i.e., stages, machines, flying angels for the Forty Hours’ devotion). In one way, it is a departure from tradition, even in some way a narrowing, as the Neo-Classical and humanist mind shied away from the dense layers of Scripture and mystery in medieval liturgy and tended toward an “open” sanctuary, emphasizing in ritual the adoration of Christ in His Real Presence rather than placing weight on the many symbolic words and gestures of the rites. Nevertheless, all of this seemed well-suited to the times, fruitful in sanctity, and eventually absorbed into our heritage.

It is a sign of vitality and true mastery of the tradition to be able to enrich it with the gifts of one’s own time. Every vigorous age has produced its own liturgical spirit and forms. Could modernity, too, add to the tradition, enriching it? Has it any legitimate aspirations? Can the excruciating pains and confusion expressed in modernist literature and architecture be given some liturgical answer, spoken in the same dialect? We might look to the composer Arvo Pärt as an example: his music is distinctly modern, but also grounded in tradition. Is there a liturgical analogy to Pärt? What might it look like?

Would that a positive answer were easier to give. “Modernity” is, or at least has been characterized by, waves of disorder: the progressive dismantling, doubting, destabilizing, and distorting of elements that were deemed inopportune, inefficient, oppressive, clericalist, etc. It is defined by its rebellion against classical and Christian order. This is unmistakably seen in the fine arts. Atonal music is defined with an alpha privative. Abstract art is not representational, not recognizable, not indwelling in this world, but flying off to some uninhabitable world where man cannot dwell, a cold planet hung in empty space, lacking water or life. Moreover, since modernity is not one positive spiritual-cultural force, the way that (say) English Gothic and French Baroque were, it is hard to see how it could exercise causality per se. Privation does not act.

Leaving it at this point would, however, be too pessimistic. Human nature and God’s grace reassert themselves. Past culture never completely dies out but is passed along in the “genes” of a society or a civilization. “Modernity,” whatever it means, includes within it that which is not rebellious, not unnatural, not privative, but rather in a loose continuity with the preceding cultural matrix, with some openness to the transcendent, like poor soil still capable of nourishing a plant, awaiting the sower and the seed. This, it seems to me, explains why young people can encounter the traditional liturgy, which is so very unmodern, and immediately resonate with it. In a corner of modern man’s soul is found a desire, vague and tentative though it may be, to escape from the prison that recent generations have built.

Perhaps this, then, is a special grace of modernity: it has placed people into a hunger and thirst for expressions of the sacred and the divine that lift them out of the horizontal immanent void and confront them with the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the overpowering and the alluring. Would we not be in a better position than any earlier generation to be struck by such a thing — what Benedict XVI called “the shock of the beautiful” — since we no longer live familiarly with it, take it for granted, or even expect to have it around us?

Now, of course, I’m not one to say that men of today are essentially different from their predecessors, such that they would need something radically different in their Catholicism from the ample treasury already at hand in our tradition. The tradition as it is can save him, whether in its more monastic-medieval or more Baroque instantiation. Love of the Church’s tradition is always totally contemporary and totally ageless. Modern man needs what every man needs — or even more of it! — and that is sacredness, solemnity, beauty, and a deep sense of connection with the human race, the Church, and his fellows. Only the use of the same fundamental forms of life, worship, and art, however varied in presentation, can accomplish this diachronic and synchronic unity.

My answer, then, to the question posed in the title would be this. Modernity left the Church a long time ago; it partly fled in rebellion, and was partly driven forth as a demon. It can therefore contribute nothing to the restoration of the sacred. All it can do is bring moderns to the Church’s threshold, and leave them there, like orphans abandoned on the doorstep of a convent. The traditional sacred liturgy will take them up in its arms and provide for their healing and elevation. It is our job to let ourselves be cared for (yes, that will take swallowing some pride), and if the Lord deigns to raise up a new Christendom over many centuries, He will give us the light and strength right now to play our small part in paving the way for its emergence.

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

This stained glass window, to me, speaks volumes...

The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Liturgical Wisdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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