“Traditionalism today builds not upon nostalgia but upon an uninterrupted continuity of faith and prayer”

One of my correspondents sent me the following meditation. It has been translated from Portuguese and edited for style.—PAK

Because Tridentine Masses are rare in my region — two or three times a year, thanks to traveling priests — I can sometimes feel depressed for some days as a result of the contrast between the heights of Catholic worship and… the opposite. Perhaps this is why I made the association that I will relate below.

The other day I watched the animated film Anastasia (1997), by 20th Century Fox. The film is based on the legend that Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the Romanovs, survived the murder of her family. In the plot, Anastasia gets separated from her grandmother during the escape from the revolution, hits her head, and loses her memory. Ten years later the young woman, still in the grips of that amnesia, enters the old family palace. The atmosphere is familiar to her; as she says, it seems like “memories of a dream…” This inspires her to sing a lullaby sung by her grandmother, which she has somehow retained in her memory. As she sings, the memories take shape like ghosts — images of a destroyed life, of a family that no longer exists. The song is extremely melancholy, as we are reminded of the sad history of the Russian imperial family.

Dancing bears, painted wings
Things I almost remember
And a song someone sings
Once upon a December

Someone holds me safe and warm
Horses prance through a silver storm
Figures dancing gracefully
Across my memory

Someone holds me safe and warm
Horses prance through a silver storm
Figures dancing gracefully
Across my memory

Far away, long ago
Glowing dim as an ember
Things my heart used to know
Things it yearns to remember

And a song someone sings
Once upon a December

The scene where Anastasia enters the abandoned palace reminds me of Catholics after 1970. For those who were born before the Council, there are ghostly memories; for others, like me, not even that. In the few churches where the altars were kept and not torn down by revolutionaries, we can only imagine the Solemn Mass of old. The few signs of a glorious liturgical ceremony that remain are like ghosts of a great past. The Gregorian music available on the Internet provokes tears and longing for a time we do not know.

The villain of the film resembles modernist clergy, foaming with hatred at any manifestation of tradition. Their undead condition is reminiscent of a Council that, despite the resounding failure of its aggiornamento and “new Pentecost,” is still propagandized by the clergy as if it were superior to everything that has come before, regardless of its truth or quality or success.

And it was in the month of December that the Council closed.

Yet the memory of tradition has not been extinguished. In some places, like my region, it is almost gone, but in other regions — in France and in the United States, above all — it remained strong, it grows every year in distinctness and vividness, it spreads through families and vocations. In such places there never was a total rupture: for some clergy and families, the tradition remained alive, not a distant memory. Traditionalism today builds not upon nostalgia but upon an uninterrupted continuity of faith and prayer. Like the fire of candles held at the Easter vigil, this love of tradition is passed on from one member of the Body of Christ to another. The flame passes through the darkness, passes beyond borders and barriers, bringing light and warmth wherever it reaches.

I believe there will someday be regular traditional Masses near where I live, and I believe that the ghostly churches and chapels will come alive again in the present, with their youth renewed.

Three Nostalgia Trips: Audio Albums from 1957, 1975 (?), and 1979

It seems as if advocates of eliminating the Catholic Church’s liturgical tradition often try to explain away the surprisingly dogged adherence to older forms as a matter of “nostalgia”—even today, when the average age of many Latin Mass congregations cannot be much higher than about 18 thanks to the enormous number of babies. It is hard for them to understand that the older forms have a holy eloquence of their own, an effiacious communicative capacity, that has almost nothing to do with the age or past experiences of the ones who attend.

But one might feel a bit of genuine nostalgia looking at these three LPs that have come my way in recent times.

The first was discovered by a priest when cleaning out his parents’ house. Today there are websites on which one can practice making the responses at Mass, but back in the day, in 1957 to be precise, you could pick up an old 45 called The Mass: Serving and Responses: Latin Responses for Altar Boys and for First Level Participation in Dialogue Mass, with an imprimatur from Cardinal Stritch. Quite the time capsule of 1957.
 

The second is a rather revealing slice of history: Latin High Mass for Nostalgic Catholics, which was produced by World Library of Sacred Music in Cincinnati. There is no date, but I’m guessing, on the basis of the description on the back, that it would have come out around 1975. The cover shows scenes taken from Fr. Lasance. It features a recording of the traditional Nuptial Mass, with Casali’s Mass in G, Schubert’s Ave Maria, Franck’s Panis Angelicus, and Widor’s Toccata from the 5^th organ symphony. The celebrant is a certain Rev. Cronan Kline, OFM, and the director of the choir is, interestingly, Omar Westendorf, whose hymns show up in many a hymnal.
 

What I find especially noteworthy, and rather sad, is the justification the record offers for itself:
 

The third exhibit is something of an oddity from 1979: Lieder des Papstes Johannes Paul II in Polen. The pinkish halo surrounding the Polish pope seems already to anticipate his accelerated canonization—that seems a better interpretation than radioactivity or phosphorescence.
 

The music is all sung in Polish, of course, but the album is designed for Germans, so it offers (according to a tiny note) a word-for-word literal translation of the various folksongs and specially composed offerings for the Polish pope on his momentous return trip to his homeland, from which many date the beginning of the end of Communism in Eastern Europe.
 

 

If I were to say “Ah, those were the days!,” I would be telling a lie, since I was exactly –14, 4, and 8 years old at the time these discs were manufactured. No, they hold no nostalgic value for me, but they do prompt some thoughts. Lots of little boys are still learning and making the responses at Mass, in spite of the attempt, some twelve years after the 45’s release, to cancel out the Latin Mass forever. Second, chant, choral music, and organ music of a far higher caliber than that which is found on the Westendorf record can be heard today at actual High Masses and Solemn High Masses around the world, in spite of renewed barbarian aggression against the Latin Mass. Third, whatever one might say about John Paul II’s weaker moments, he is in fact glowing in comparison with what Providence has allowed us to suffer in the past decade.

Interview with Dr. Kwasniewski at O Clarim: “The Mass of all the Catholic centuries”

The online journal O Clarim has just published an interview about my book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness that NLM readers might like to read. A couple of excerpts here:

Aurelio Porfiri: Your book uses the phrase “noble beauty” in its title. How would you describe the noble beauty of the liturgy?

Kwasniewski: There are many different kinds of beauty. There is the simple, domestic beauty we associated with well-made furniture, carpets, blankets, plates, and books. There is an austere beauty, such as one might find in the cell of a Carthusian. There is rugged beauty, such as we see in the landscapes of Iceland or Canada or Alaska. But there is a noble beauty that we associate with sovereignty, majesty, occasions of great public solemnity. The liturgy is our courtly audience with the king of heaven and earth. It should be characterized by a tremendous sense of spaciousness, elevation, dignity, and splendor. That is what I am driving at in my title.

Porfiri: What is your ideal reader? How you imagine your audience?

Kwasniewski: One reader described me as “giving old arguments new juice.” I was born well after the Second Vatican Council ended and after Paul VI had already promulgated a new Mass. All of the traditional things I love are things that almost went extinct. My friends and I had to stumble upon them and discover them anew. I see it all with fresh eyes: I have no nostalgic memories. For this reason, my writings seem to speak especially to young people who are in the same boat. This book is largely an “apologia” for the ancient liturgy and the whole world-view it embodies—which is definitely not that of modernity. My ideal reader? Someone who has an open mind to the proposal that the past generations might have had more wisdom than we do.

Porfiri: You use the term “Mass of Ages” in your subtitle. Sounds a bit sentimental, doesn’t it?

Kwasniewski: Well, I once thought of it that way, too. But something changed for me. My careful study of liturgical history led me to see that, in fact, the Roman Catholic liturgy—by which I mean all of the interconnected rites and uses found within Latin Christendom—is one and the same over all the centuries, developing slowly and organically, until you reach the dramatic break in the 1960s. The core of the Mass of St Gregory the Great was still the core of the Mass of St John XXIII. After Trent, St Pius V for all intents and purposes codified the papal rite of Rome that stretched far back in time. Subsequent popes received this rite as a given. It really is, therefore, the Mass of all the Catholic centuries. It is a Mass that grew to maturity over the ages and reflects all that is best in the Church’s devotion and theology.

Read the rest at O Clarim.

On Needlessly Problematizing Our Situation

Are we orphans? In the Gospel for the Vigil of Pentecost (EF), Jesus assured us He would not leave us so: “I will not leave you orphans: I will come to you.” By His Spirit He will lead us, the Church, into the fullness of truth.

But if this is not to be a mere pious platitude, it must actually mean something, namely, that the Spirit really does bless the Church with gifts at each stage of her pilgrimage. These gifts, moreover, are cumulative: their effects linger in time even as they echo in eternity. Each age inherits the gifts of the saints who have gone before (and, regrettably, suffers from the crimes and vices of the sinners who have also gone before). We do not honor the Holy Spirit or our Lord Jesus Christ if we consider any age to be so different, so great, so new, so chaotic, that it must start afresh, cut the ropes that bind it to the past, reject or push away the gifts of tradition, in a bid to “modernize,” which is to say, to make orphans or strangers of ourselves within our own household. Indeed, such an approach is the only one that could not possibly be a gift of the Holy Spirit.

One day while I was driving around, I was listening to NPR on the radio, and heard them play a clip of the rock band that happened to be performing before the start of a papal Mass in Mexico. The incident seemed to me to speak volumes as to where we are in general. Here was a visit of the Vicar of Christ, Successor of St. Peter, heir of the fisherman, about to offer the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the supreme act of worship on the face of the earth, the font and apex of our entire Christian life, the axis on which the cosmos revolves until the Day of Judgment. It is the most awesome thing that ever happens or could ever happen — “the divine, holy, most pure, immortal, heavenly, life-creating, and awesome mysteries of Christ,” as our Eastern brethren ecstatically exclaim. And… it was being introduced by a rock concert, which was probably not a whole lot different from the music (weep, o Muses, at the abuse of your sweet name!) performed at the Mass itself. This kind of surreal contradiction, this towering absurdism, is so typical of our age that it almost ceases to attract notice.

Among some highly educated Catholics today, particularly those who study liberal arts and Great Books and therefore spend a lot of their time pondering the past, I have noticed a strange phenomenon, a sort of tormented or self-doubting relationship with tradition, as if they admire it and feel a longing to recover it, while at the same time fearing it is quite impossible to have this tradition any more. They will tell you at one moment how beautiful and how fraught with meaning are certain customs, prayers, or liturgies, and in the next moment will shake their heads about “those misguided people who want to bring all this back, when the Church is doing something different now” — as if the maintenance of laudable tradition always amounted to “turning back the clock,” which, as Charles Taylor assures us, is impossible.

So, in spite of the healthy wound of beauty and the sting of nostalgia that, on behalf of God, beckons us into the wide open spaces of Christian tradition, we end up feeling trapped in the shell of our late modern garbage. We try to console ourselves with the cold comfort of knowing that, even if what we’ve got is second-rate, at least it’s our own. Somehow this is supposed to be reassuring, and somehow it will guard against the temptation of escapism or elitism.

I submit, however, that this attitude is a manifestation of discouragement, which, as St. Thérèse teaches, is a form of pride. While it looks like humility to say we are stuck with our second-best and should not aspire to greatness, the attitude sharply contrasts with the true humility of an artisan who says: “This old chair is lovely. I’m going to copy it as well as I can.” Is there a rule written down somewhere that a great artist should not begin by copying the work of his predecessors? On the contrary, as anyone who studies art history realizes, that is exactly how all great artists have begun: as humble apprentices, learning, absorbing, imitating, drinking deeply from the fountain of the past.

Neither, of course, is there any rule that says we cannot believe, say, and do what our forefathers believed, said, and did. In fact, we would be fools to act otherwise. Our Catholicism would become somewhat like the sun of Heraclitus, which dies each day so that a new one can be born the next morning.

In reality, there is either continuity with our tradition, which guarantees abundant fruit, or there is rupture and severance from it, which brings exponentially compounding problems. So much that has taken place in the past half-century has diluted, distorted, divided, or otherwise needlessly complicated Catholicism by pretending it must change, catch up, try on new garb, shut out the past, and say goodbye to dogmatic certainties. The neo-Catholic perspective abandons us to groping confusion, within which our faith can offer us only mantras of kindness, mutual aid, and generic religiosity.

Such sins against truth and tradition yield the wages of death — death to liturgy and prayer, death to priestly and religious vocations, death to missionary work, death to marriage and family, death to education, death to a culture of beauty. Life, the vitality of the Church in her own nature, will come from our humble embrace of truth and tradition, or it will never come at all.

Reflecting on all of this, I have to wonder where the phenomenon of proudly clinging to our modern mediocrity comes from. Why do otherwise intelligent people needlessly problematize the situation of the Church and of the Catholic in the modern world, wringing their hands at insoluble problems, feeling tempted to rush along with fads and fashions, and resisting the still, small voice that calls them back to the potent treasury of the ages?

One cannot help wondering if this habit of inventing problems or excuses is not an unconscious or semi-conscious defense against taking the single sane action available, namely, immersing oneself deeply and humbly in Catholic tradition — in all those practices, customs, rituals, prayers, arts, and sciences that were handed down from century to century prior to the revolution at the time of the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath. Perhaps there is fear, anxiety, an unwillingness to break free from certain assumptions, comforts, alliances, or mythologies. Perhaps there have been bad experiences with traditionalists who are shell-shocked and radiate glumness instead of joy.

Whatever the case may be, let us pray and work, breaking through and breaking down this ennervating tendency to problematize what is obviously good, holy, noble, and sublime, rather than surrendering to it and embracing it wholeheartedly. It is understandable that the devil would do all he can to thwart this conversion. For in each and every soul that undergoes it, tradition lives again in our midst, and brings new life to a world out of date.

A Bit of Nostalgia

An advertisement from the 1954 P.J. Kenedy Catholic Directory. The reader who sent me this picture, Fr Albert Marcello of the Diocese of Providence, is very familiar with Belgium, and informs me that the Desclée printing house in Tournai/Doornik which produced this in 1913

is now condominiums.

Add for a two-volume breviary with the ill-fated New Psalter of Pius XII. 

"What Is Most Deeply Human": Two Contrasting Approaches to Nostalgia

(Images from St. Edmund Campion Missal used with permission)

In a talk given in Warsaw on April 9, 2011, Leo Darroch, former president of the International Federation Una Voce, had this to say:

And what is it that attracts so many young people to the Traditional Liturgy of the Church? It can’t be nostalgia, they have never experienced the Liturgy before 1962. Why are they not content with the new liturgy that is supposed to appeal especially to the young – active participation, creative liturgies, modern music, dancing – is this not everything that young people want? It is quite clear that it is not. The modern Mass, as presented to them in recent decades, has alienated them from the Church. In preparation for this talk I consulted all the members of the Federation and also those new groups that have contacted me. The comments I received, especially from the young leaders of the newly-formed groups in all parts of the world, reveal a thirst for truth, for dignity and reverence in worship, for something transcendent.

Indeed, the old guard of the “spirit of Vatican II” accuse traditionalists of wallowing in nostalgia, yet Fr. Richard McBrien once found himself caught short trying to explain how it is that young Catholics, who never grew up with the Latin Mass—who, in fact, were born long after it had nearly vanished—are today flocking to it, loving it, and passing it on to their children. A “nostalgia” for what one could never have remembered is positively indecent and categorically illogical!

In an interview for the National Catholic Reporter, Archbishop Piero Marini memorably compared the traditionalist nostalgics with the carnal Jews who, having been liberated from the bondage of Pharaoh and his evil empire, longed for the fleshpots of Egypt:

First of all, it’s important that I spoke about a path [of liturgical reform], one that I believe is irreversible. I often think about the journey of the ancient Israelites in the Old Testament. It was a difficult journey, and sometimes the people became nostalgic for the past, for the onions and the melons of Egypt and so on. In other words, sometimes they wanted to go back. But the historical journey of the church is one which, by necessity, has to move forward.

His Excellency is puzzled that so many young people are drawn to the older liturgical forms—how can this be? He shares his reasoning process with us:

I see a certain nostalgia for the past. What concerns me in particular is that this nostalgia seems especially strong among some young priests. How is it possible to be nostalgic for an era they didn’t experience? . . . I’m always surprised to see young people who feel this nostalgia for something they never lived with. “Nostalgia for what?,” I find myself asking.

In reality, what we are witnessing are the first fruits of a long-delayed genuine liturgical renewal, thanks to Summorum Pontificum and the re-introduction of traditional doctrine and practice throughout the Church. Younger Catholics who take their faith seriously are doing just that: taking it seriously. Taking it as given, not as manufactured; as timeless, not as up-to-date. They have come to see that the Mass is not a do-it-yourself experiment: it is the very Sacrifice of Calvary made present in our midst, in a hallowed form we receive from our forebears, bearing not only its own sanctifying reality, but also the sanctified history of the communion of saints. The reaction of any sane believer is to fall to his knees in thankful adoration, along with generations past and generations to come.

A More Profound Understanding of Nostalgia

People who use the word ‘nostalgia’ usually have in mind the kind of thing Darroch, McBrien, or Marini are speaking of. We might call this the conventional meaning of the term, one that often carries a pejorative connotation. It seems to me, however, that our convention may be too simplistic and that nostalgia needs to be thoughtfully rehabilitated as a positive and beautiful human phenomenon.

No less a philosopher than Karol Wojtyla considered nostalgia to be one of the most distinctively human characteristics, a sign of our awareness that we transcend the present moment. In his inaugural encyclical, John Paul II wrote:

“You made us for yourself, Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (St. Augustine). In this creative restlessness beats and pulsates what is most deeply human—the search for truth, the insatiable need for the good, hunger for freedom, nostalgia for the beautiful, and the voice of conscience. (Redemptor Hominis, 18)

Addressing artists two decades later, John Paul II fittingly quotes the same saint:

Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!” (Letter to Artists, 16)

Again, in an encyclical that has been recognized as particularly close to his heart, the same pontiff wrote:

The Apostle [in Acts 17:26-27] accentuates a truth which the Church has always treasured: in the far reaches of the human heart there is a seed of desire and nostalgia for God. The Liturgy of Good Friday recalls this powerfully when, in praying for those who do not believe, we say: “Almighty and eternal God, you created mankind so that all might long to find you and have peace when you are found”.(22) There is therefore a path which the human being may choose to take, a path which begins with reason’s capacity to rise beyond what is contingent and set out towards the infinite. (Fides et Ratio, 24)

In Jesus Christ, who is the Truth, faith recognizes the ultimate appeal to humanity, an appeal made in order that what we experience as desire and nostalgia may come to its fulfilment. (Ibid., 33)

All of these texts are believed with good reason to have been penned directly by John Paul II, and they breathe a spirit distinctively his. For Wojtyła, nostalgia seems to mean a deep longing or hunger for the fullness of beauty, a powerful movement of the human spirit towards divine transcendence, in which there is mingled restlessness, memory, a striving for completeness, a straining to the infinite from the very midst of our finitude. All this, it seems to me, has enormous implications for how we think about and celebrate the sacred liturgy.

In a document that deserves to be much better known, The Via Pulchritudinis: Privileged Pathway for Evangelisation and Dialogue, the Pontifical Council for Culture states, in language strongly reminiscent of John Paul II’s:

The way of beauty replies to the intimate desire for happiness that resides in the heart of every person. Opening infinite horizons, it prompts the human person to push outside of himself, from the routine of the ephemeral passing instant, to the Transcendent and Mystery, and seek, as the final goal of the ultimate quest for wellbeing and total nostalgia, this original beauty which is God Himself, creator of all created beauty.

Does Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI have anything to add on this subject? The most striking passage I am aware of is in his famous message “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty” sent to the Communion and Liberation meeting in Rimini in August 2002:

   Certainly, the consciousness that beauty has something to do with pain was also present in the Greek world. For example, let us take Plato’s Phaedrus. Plato contemplates the encounter with beauty as the salutary emotional shock that makes man leave his shell and sparks his “enthusiasm” by attracting him to what is other than himself. Man, says Plato, has lost the original perfection that was conceived for him. He is now perennially searching for the healing primitive form. Nostalgia and longing impel him to pursue the quest; beauty prevents him from being content with just daily life. It causes him to suffer.
     In a Platonic sense, we could say that the arrow of nostalgia pierces man, wounds him and in this way gives him wings, lifts him upwards towards the transcendent. In his discourse in the Symposium, Aristophanes says that lovers do not know what they really want from each other. From the search for what is more than their pleasure, it is obvious that the souls of both are thirsting for something other than amorous pleasure. But the heart cannot express this “other” thing, “it has only a vague perception of what it truly wants and wonders about it as an enigma.”
     In the 14th century, in the book, The Life in Christ by the Byzantine theologian, Nicholas Cabasilas, we rediscover Plato’s experience in which the ultimate object of nostalgia, transformed by the new Christian experience, continues to be nameless. Cabasilas says: “When men have a longing so great that it surpasses human nature and eagerly desire and are able to accomplish things beyond human thought, it is the Bridegroom who has smitten them with this longing. It is he who has sent a ray of his beauty into their eyes. The greatness of the wound already shows the arrow which has struck home, the longing indicates who has inflicted the wound” (cf. the Second Book, 15). 

This passage, with the others quoted above, help us to see that there is a very rich positive understanding of nostalgia that we would do well to take seriously in our reflections and actions, particularly in regard to the sacred liturgy and man’s vital experience of it.

On this basis, one could distinguish between a superficial and sentimental nostalgia, and an existential, spiritual nostalgia rooted in the human soul’s longing for immortality, transcendence, and ineffable peace, stretching out towards the beautiful with eros and pathos. The former kind of nostalgia would tend to fixate on sad recollections of the past (being in this way close to regret tinged with self-pity), whereas the latter kind is characterized by a restless search for the absolutely beautiful Beloved, for which countless particular memories, experiences, and objects would serve as symbols. Nostalgia in the bad sense is enstatic, trapped within oneself, whereas nostalgia in the Wojtyłan-Ratzingerian sense is ecstatic, taking one out of oneself.

Perhaps, then, we should not be too quick to say that nostalgia has nothing to do with our love of the Roman liturgical tradition and, in particular, the usus antiquior. We should insist on the difference between a shallow emotion and a profound, subtle, vital, and powerful spiritual current on which the human soul is borne towards the Divine. Hence, we need not apologize for our liturgical and spiritual longings but should rejoice in this bittersweet and paradoxical gift of God that reminds us of how “we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come” (Heb 13:14).

As we come to the end of this year of our Lord, A.D. 2013, a time when it is very natural to cast a pensive gaze back over the year that is past and to peer into the blurry shadows of an uncertain future that we know will bring both sorrows and joys, we should thank the Lord for His mercy in giving us a taste of that transcendent sweetness that makes all earthly delight pale, a foretaste of the eternal blessedness for which we long and of which our nostalgia is a poignant reminder.