Bible Vigils: Guest Article by Sharon Kabel

Last month, we published two items (here and here) about the paraliturgical “Bible vigils” which are mentioned in Sacrosanctum Concilium, and were fashionable to one degree or another during the fairly brief period when the letter of that document was still taken seriously. Writer Sharon Kabel has done some more extensive research on them, and we thank her very much for sharing the results with NLM. She has also an extensively bibliography on the subject available for consultation here.

“Include New Vigil in Family Weekend.” The Catholic Advocate, Sept. 27, 1962

Bible vigils were a Catholic phenomenon of the 1960s. They were called by a variety of names, “Bible vigil” being the most common but also “Bible” or “Biblical” “ritual, service, devotion”, “celebration of the Word”, and most confusingly, sometimes used synonymously with Vespers. The most generous timeline for their use spans 1959-1978, but their most active period was about 1963-1967 (see graphic below). While the service may have originated in Germany, they were popular around the world, popping up in Brazil, Hong Kong, Korea, and East Germany. Cardinals Bea and Döpfner celebrated one in 1964; Thomas Merton discussed them; Paulist Press and Liturgical Press both published books on them; Worship, The Bible Today, The Furrow, and Review for Religious all published numerous articles on them; at least half a dozen twentieth century archival search aids mention them; and Pope St Paul VI closed the Second Vatican Council with an interfaith Bible vigil, at perhaps the peak of their popularity.

Two men commonly associated with the development of Bible vigils were Fathers Clifford Howell and Lawrence Dannemiller. Fr Howell’s obituary notes his famous progressive positions, liturgical innovations during his World War II chaplaincy, and his relief at having four options for the Eucharistic Prayer. Most notably, he was a peritus for an Australian bishop at the Second Vatican Council, and had a significant hand in the writing of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the document that was the justification for Bible vigils. Fr Dannemiller wrote Reading the Word of God, a work frequently referenced by those who wished to construct Bible vigils. (In 1970, he married a woman without requesting formal laicization.)

Liturgy and Laity, a handbook for Bible vigils published by the Confraternity of the Precious Blood, said of Bible vigils:

Essentially, this is a prayer book for personal and liturgical use. The first part, a series of reflections followed by discussion questions, treats the fundamental truths that underlie the liturgical outlook and spirit… Personal prayer and discussion, however, are not enough. We must actually pray together if we are to be truly the family of God, His people on pilgrimage to Heaven united in His Perfect Son, Jesus. The Bible Vigils, which constitute the second part, were selected and designed to foster a continual renewal of the action of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in the Church. Prayed together in our homes, study groups, parishes, they will be a source of true Christian spirit. [emphases added]

Liturgy and Laity provided Bible vigils (and explanations, in a separate section) for 31 feasts or topics - including Septuagesima, a season which would be suppressed shortly afterward.

Sample Bible vigils

But what was a Bible vigil? Its exact structure and order varied, but it was explicitly modeled after the Liturgy of the Word, including Bible readings, a homily/sermon, prayer, silence, and music. They were usually celebrated on an important feast or liturgical season, and seem to have dovetailed neatly with the desire for Catholics to have greater exposure to Scripture, and for more use of the vernacular. They were frequently described as paraliturgical or quasi-liturgical, and the fluid format allowed for both instruction, commentary, and meditation on Scripture.

Two outlines of Bible vigils can be found here:
● Father Gerard Dubois, O.C.S.O., “Celebrations of the Word.“ Liturgy 2, no. 3 (October 1967): 1-8. This source is quite valuable, because it is open about the significant overlap between the Liturgy, the Divine Office, and Bible vigils.
● Hiley H. Ward, Documents of Dialogue. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966. Book.

Two examples of complete Bible vigils can be found here:
● Kevin Nies O.C.S.O., “Holy Cross Abbey: A Short English Vigil.“ Liturgy 2, no. 3 (October 1967): 12-23.
● Carl J. Pfeifer S.J., “An Evening Service for Thanksgiving Day.” Review for Religious 20, no. 6 (1961): 397-407.

In all four of those resources, one can see a substantial degree of customization and flexibility allowed. Some parts are fixed, such as the reading of a specific psalm, but very often, several options for prayers, readings, and songs are provided.

Below is the Bible vigil for marriage from Liturgy and Laity: The vigil begins with an announcement from the leader, a silent prayer, a reading of Tobias 8, 1-10, a silent prayer, and an antiphon that borrows from the Nuptial Blessing. (The Introit for the Misso pro Sponso et Sponsa is Tobias 7, 15; 8, 19.)

After the antiphon, a reader reads Ephesians 5, 22-33, the Epistle for the Missa pro Sponso, followed by a silent prayer, and an antiphon from Psalm 70.

After the antiphon, all stand for the reading of John 2, 1-12, the Wedding at Cana, a pericope not used in the Missa pro Sponso, but thematically relevant.

The Gospel reading is followed by a homily or a silent prayer, a renewal of vows where appropriate, an antiphon, or prayers of the faithful, and the leader reading the Collect of the Missa pro sponso (the words “what is administered by our service” are changed to “what is performed by our ministry”), and closing with a prayer said by all.

This is basically the same format as the Liturgy of the Word, with both Old and New Testament readings, a homily, silence, communal prayer, and, in this instance, occasional mirroring of the actual nuptial liturgy. And indeed, the introduction of this book refers to Bible vigils as “liturgical events”.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Following Up on “Bible Vigils”

Earlier this month, I posted some photos which Dom Hugh Sommerville-Knapmen of Douai Abbey in England very kindly shared with us from a variety of liturgical publications, mostly from the 1960s. One of these was a book produced by the monks of Douai for the celebration of “Bible services”, as recommended by paragraph 35.4 of Sacrosanctum Concilium, during the brief period when the Church still held that the letter of a document promulgated by an ecumenical council is a thing to be taken seriously. A friend of mine then shared with us a story about how these Bible vigils popped up and disappeared within a very short time

Here is what some other readers very kindly shared with us, in response to our request for further information about their own experiences with Bible vigils, and the shift in devotional life in the post-Conciliar period.

Reader A.M. send in several items from British and Irish newspapers with “Bible vigils” listed among the church services in the mid-to-late ’60s.
– A Catholic Youth Day held at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Knock in Ireland lists among the events “Concelebrated Mass with full liturgical participation by the Youth ... Bible vigils (readings by teenagers)”, followed by “the usual Pilgrimage Devotions.” It does not appear that this event is held at all any longer.
– Another article states that “In order to make the liturgy of Holy Week more meaningful, Fr B. began ‘Easter and You’ weeks... they involve bringing mime (!), drama and Bible vigils into the churches in preparation for the liturgy.” Should this be taken as a confession that the reformed Holy Week of 1955 failed to achieve its stated goal of bringing the services closer to the faithful?
– Dr John Barkley, Professor of Church History at Assembly College in Belfast, a theological college of the Irish Presbyterian Church, in an article titled “What is happening in Rome”, with the subheader “Wyclif would have welcomed this move to Bible study”, writes with approbation of “the introduction, instead of evening services (my emphasis), of Bible Vigils based on Scripture, and meditation thereon.” The cathedral of the Roman Catholic prelate named in the article does not currently list anything like a “Bible vigil” on its schedule of services, nor any kind of evening devotions, or a single Hour of the Divine Office.

M.F.: In the late 1960s we used a book for these services called The Liturgy and the Laity, produced by the Confraternity of the Precious Blood. It provided services for seasons, feasts and devotions like First Fridays. We used to dress these up with a procession with the Bible, candles and incense,  and those participating wore surplices. There was a short homily by a friar, sometimes a priest was present and vested. On the night before Thanksgiving, a priest or a new reader would bless bread wine and fruit for dinner; in Lent we had veneration of a relic of the cross. At the church of — in —, we transformed the devotion of the 13 Tuesdays in honor of St Anthony into a Bible vigil,  with the better elements of the devotion, the singing of (the miraculous responsory) Si quaeris Miracula, the blessing with the relic and the veneration of the relic at the altar rail. The prayers were edited carefully.” The church currently lists devotions on its regular schedule (Adoration on First Friday, Rosary before every Mass, etc.), and a twice monthly Bible study, but no Bible vigil.

C.O. wrotes in to note that this book is still available; here is part of the description. “Liturgy and Laity is a prayer book designed to help average Catholics share deeply in the Church’s rich, liturgical life. (It) offers a series of reflections on the doctrines underlying the Liturgy as outlined in the Constitution on the Liturgy, and a series of prayer exercises known as Bible Vigils, which are meant to increase our knowledge and love of the Word of God. Liturgy and Laity is a complete guide to the liturgy of the Church offering both the theological basis of the liturgy as well as liturgical devotions. This book is perfect for use in group prayer among the family, study groups, and parish life.”

B.D.: I remember attending a Bible vigil service once during my freshman year at — seminary. It was celebrated on a Friday afternoon with music and a touch of ceremony. The lector was a senior, attired in cassock and surplice, hymns were sung, but I don’t recall Benediction being celebrated. I do recall that the next vigil was canceled and never heard of again. We had a perfectly horrid prayer book with ugly drawings and uglier hymns. The 1964/65 Missal was used during two years of my time there. I can still hear the pronunciation of various celebrants of the Latin Canon amongst other prayers. No attempt was made at celebrating the Office.

The following comments originally appeared on the post requesting people to share their experiences with Bible vigils.

D.V.: I received my First Holy Communion in 1968. I remember that on the Friday evening before that Sunday we had a ‘Bible Vigil”. It was a Liturgy of the Word and we were, at the conclusion, enrolled in the Brown Scapular. There was no Benediction as I recall.

S.M.: Bible Vigils in Baltimore were usually synaxes of the Word with 3 lessons, hymns, and intercessions. They were frequently followed by Benediction or some other devotion, e.g., Stations.

S.F.: Bible services were all the rage in the 1960s. Essentially, from the examples that I have seen, they were what became the Liturgy of the Word in the Novus Ordo Missae. There was an introduction, first OT reading, psalm, NT reading, Gospel, homily and prayers.

D.A.: I was in the parish grade school through the 1960s, and I do remember seeing "Bible vigils" published, but I do remember a desire to become more aware of the Bible. Looking back, that makes little sense. There was always a bible in our home, and obviously the Scriptures were read at Mass, and repeated in the vernacular during the homily. And at my parish, it was generally about the Epistle and/or Gospel reading for that day, as opposed to whatever was on the pastor's mind.

On the subject of devotional life in general:

D.P.F.: I’m happy to share that Rosary continues to be said daily in our parish church every day at 4 am, followed by a 5 a.m. Mass. Devotion to Our Lady Perpetual Help is said every Wednesday, and occasional vigil and procession of St Peregrine whenever there is a pandemic of anything. Lenten Stations of the Cross are an annual thing for each community and villages, same thing for visiting 7 churches during Maundy Thursday, attending siete palabras or communal reflection on the 7 last words of Christ lead by the parish vicar or an assistant priest.

What is lamentable is the gradual disappearance of domestic devotions. Until the late 90s, it was not uncommon for grandparents to call us kids who were still playing in the streets in for the evening Rosary, lead by them or our parents. A picture or statue of Christ the King was displayed in front of our houses during last Sunday of October, even though the feast is now celebrated in November. Every kid in my generation learned the Spanish prayer Bendito (de Altar) before any other prayer, since it is still said every after Rosary or novenas. Friday meat abstinence was still a common practice for most Catholic families until the mid ’90s; the Holy Saturday night vigil at homes to anticipate the Easter Mass by the whole family is practiced by very few families today.

Basically, Catholic kids in the Philippines still experienced in the 1990s a kind of domestic church, where parents and grandparents observed the changing of the liturgical season and major feasts of the Church.

A Note on “Bible Vigils”, and a Request for Information

Last week, we published pictures of advertisements from a variety of liurgical publications, mostly from the 1960s, taken by Dom Hugh Sommerville-Knapmen of Douai Abbey in England. The post also included a book produced by the monks of Douai for the celebration of “Bible services”, as recommended by paragraph 35.4 of Sacrosanctum Concilium, during the oh-so-brief period when the Church still held that the letter of a document promulgated by an ecumenical council is a thing to be taken seriously.

After seeing the post, an old friend of mine, Mr John Boyden, sent me the following message. “Regarding the recent NLM post, I recall a priest friend who was ordained in 1968 lamenting those days. He said devotions were discarded to be replaced by what was meant to be the newest rage in parish devotion, ‘Bible vigils’; but no sooner had they begun than they were likewise discarded. I had never heard of anyone else mentioning Bible vigils, nor any text of them, save once. I was looking over a hand missal, printed in the first days of the revolution... and I discovered a section in the back indicating Bible vigils. This was 30 years ago, so I don’t recall much of what I saw, other than the devotion seemed to be nothing more than one long liturgy of the Word with nothing else. It’s no wonder that they lasted two years--at most--before they were discontinued, probably for lack of interest by the faithful, for whom they were a rubbing of salt in the wound of having parish rosaries and novenas taken from them, and replaced first by this and then, nothing.”

I would like to invite our readers to share similar reports that they have heard from that era, or their personal experiences - what was going on with the devotional life of your church in the post-Conciliar era, both in regard to traditional practices like the Rosary and Benediction, and new things like Bible vigils? Do you know of similar flashes in the pan, or new things that were introduced and lasted? Feel free to answer in the combox or to my NLM email address: gdipippo@newliturgicalmovement.org, and if possible, include pictures. If we get some interesting replies to this request, I will make a post out of them.

Revolution, Rebuilding and Reform

In the course of rearching something, I recently stumbled across this rather interesting painting.

This work by the Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904) represents one of Napoleon’s generals, Louis-Nicholas Davout, the Marshal of the French Empire, using the sanctuary of the Chudov Monastery in Moscow as his office. (This was a very important center of learning, inter alia, the place where the first complete Old Church Slavonic Bible was produced.) Vereshchagin, who was born 30 years after the infamous Russian campaign, specialized in depicting the horrors of war; some of his paintings were so graphic that they were never exhibited publicly. This work is one of his series of twenty paintings known simply as “1812”, which also includes this image of French soldiers stabling their horses in the Cathedral of the Dormition.

And this painting, known as “Bad News from France”, in which Napoleon himself is camped out in a Russian church.

It seems to me that when considering the current parlous state of the liturgy, we often forget what an unbelievable amount of damage was done to the Church’s whole patrimony (liturgical, scholarly, artistic, etc.) in the long and disgusting period of Europe’s history that runs from the French Revolution to the Second World War, and well beyond that in the lands dominated by Communism in the 20th century. These paintings are but a few examples of a scene which was repeated an incalculable number of times, as all over Europe, monasteries, canonical chapters and religious houses were closed down and plundered by the French Revolution, Napoleon, the Austrian Emperor Joseph II, the Italian Risorgimento, and so on. Religious orders like the Premonstratensians and Cistercians, that once numbered hundreds or thousands of houses, were reduced to a shadow of their former greatness; cities that once boasted 20 religious houses were lucky to preserve one as a parish in the hands of the secular clergy.

This map of Liège from 1627, long the seat of an ecclesiastical principality, contains in the legend at the bottom 295 entries of notable places, 83 of which are churches and religious houses. (Click to see in close-up; public domain image from Wikipedia.)

Of course, as canonical and religious life disappeared from most of Christian Europe, for a great many people, there disappeared with it their contact with the fullness of the liturgical life, the regular celebration of the Divine Office and the Solemn Mass. Solesmes Abbey has managed to persist, despite the fact that the monks were expelled from it by their government three times in the 1880s, and the entire community had to live in exile for over 20 years, from 1901-22. But in most places, the liturgical life that was revived after the age of revolutions was partial at best, and merely functional at worst. No honest person denies that the post-Conciliar reform changed the liturgy far more than the Fathers of Vatican II imagined it would. However, the reformers’ imprudent haste was all the more imprudent for the fact that they did their work while the Church as a whole was still very much recovering from the damage done to it over the previous 200 years.

When the time comes to undo some of their unhappier deeds, as it surely will, though we know not the day nor the hour, we should remember Pope St John Paul’s famous admonition that the Church needs to breathe with both its lungs. Without romanticizing the current state of things in the Eastern churches, both Catholic and Orthodox, we can see that many of them have come through some of the most ferocious persecutions Christianity has ever suffered, and many of them still undergo it on a regular, even daily basis. They seem, however, to be blessedly untouched by the idea that the best way for them to recover, and to bring the faithful closer to the public worship of the Church, is to radically divorce the liturgy from its own history and tradition. The West would do well to follow their example, even if that means shifting into reverse.

Missals from Silverstream Priory (4): A Defaced Missal from the Post-Conciliar Revolution

In our series of missals from the library of the Benedictine Monks of Perpetual Adoration, we have so far looked at magnificent works of art from the 20th century (Maria Laach, Regensburg) and from the 18th century (the Augustinians).

Today, instead of basking in beauty, we will come face to face with the diabolic disorientation of the Church in the mid- to late 1960s, when prayers and practices of half a millennium’s duration or longer were being discarded and burned like so much chaff. Not even the Roman Canon, that ancient pristine shrine of Romanitas, was safe from this barbarian appetite for conquest, this insatiable lust for violating the sacred under the guise of “simplification” and “modernization.”

Too much kissing!

It is not surprising, in fact, that this massive appetite for cultural destruction paralleled the sexual revolution, and that the same generation of radicals that was dismantling the liturgy was also leaving the consecrated celibate life in droves and favoring so-called “liberation” of the id or the libido. As Augustine pointed out in The City of God, power among fallen human beings, without the grace of God, is exercised as libido dominandi, the lust for domination.

In the liturgical sphere, this took the form of standing in arrogant judgment over centuries of the most holy practices of faith and laying profane hands on a sacred inheritance, following the principle (if it can be called a principle) of “might makes right.” In the sphere of religious life, it took the form of abandoning the choral office and high Mass, casting off habits and veils, diluting constitutions, softening rules, and losing one’s supernatural identity by amalgamation with secular social work and civil rights. The so-called “superiors” who guided the process were guilty of the same libido dominandi as the liturgical revolutionaries, and left in their wake a similar post-nuclear desolation.

What was important for the Catholic radicals of the mid-twentieth century was to shatter, bit by bit, the taboo of an untouchable liturgy, an object of collective veneration transmitted from generation to generation.[1] They started by messing with the existing prayers and rubrics, as if to say: “See what we can get away with! We haven’t been struck dead by lightning yet. You see now that all these things must be merely human inventions; we can do as we please. Suppress or invent rubrics; omit, rearrange, bawdlerize, or make up new texts; throw out the entire aesthetic of ‘awe’ and replace it with one of ‘brotherhood’ or ‘caring community’ — we must do all this and more, quickly, before our game’s called and our time’s up.” Their eventual success, more complete than they could ever have dreamed at first, is a remarkable testimony to the limits to which Divine Providence permits evil, in order to demonstrate His power in bringing forth good from it and in spite of it, as the phoenix rises from the ashes.

To me, a poignant sign of that Providence is the fact that Catholics are returning in growing numbers to the use of just those liturgical books that were placed on the butcher’s block half a century ago, and are now praying those very prayers that were canceled out and pasted over. The Benedictines have a motto: Succisa virescit — cut down, it grows back again. It’s a variation on one of the oldest sayings of all: sanguis martyrum semen christianorum. Perhaps there is a special fruitfulness in the blood that, over the centuries, so many priests and faithful have shed (literally or metaphorically) as their Catholic worship was attacked by iconoclasm, be it of the Byzantine, Protestant, or Modernist variety.

The movement to recover and restore Catholic worship cannot be eradicated. That has been tried and it failed. It can be cut down by persecution or lack of support, but its roots remain and the new growth will be taller and stronger.

Below are additional photos from this melancholy "interimized" missal.

NOTE

[1] Before you write in the comments that the liturgy has never been untouchable and that there have been countless little changes down through the centuries, pause for a moment and ask yourself whether it is likely that I am unaware of this fact. What I am talking about is a general attitude of conservatism and respect for the liturgical rites, such that even archaic elements whose function or meaning may no longer be clear to us (or may have acquired a different, allegorical meaning over time) are jealously preserved. The trend was almost always towards retaining what had been added over the centuries; and certainly the magnitude of the modifications from the 1950s and 1960s has nothing remotely like it in the entire history of the Catholic Church.

A comparison of two similar missals -- one defaced, one unharmed

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Liturgical Insights in The Gentle Traditionalist

Back in December, I posted a short review of a new book from Angelico Press, Roger Buck’s The Gentle Traditionalist. (Have a look at that review if you are interested in a more general description of the book.) At the time, I promised to follow up later on with a few specifically liturgical thoughts.

Some passages in the book struck me as highly pertinent to the plight of the sacred liturgy today. Early on, we discover that one of the characters, Anna, has abandoned the New Age movement for traditional Catholicism and a vocation to the religious life — to the bewilderment of her former lover, Geoffrey Peter Luxworthy, who is still very much in love with her. He muses at length about her inexplicable conversion:

Nor could I understand why she wanted to go to a Mass in a dead language. From what I understood, the Catholic Church had changed the Mass when it liberalised itself in the1960s. This liberalisation looked like a good thing to me. But Anna thought the changes in the Church were slowly killing it. Since the ’60s, she told me, there’d been massive declines in vocations — as well as Catholic baptisms, marriages, etc. People were abandoning the Church in droves. She was particularly worried that very few people bothered with Confession anymore. The new liturgy, according to her, was a major part of the problem. Apparently, a “mystic life-force” was being drained from the Church. (pp. 25-26)

As the story continues, Geoffrey (GPL) meets a mysterious character called the Gentle Traditionalist.

     GPL: It is indeed odd to find you here. In fact, I’ve been wanting someone to help me understand the exact issues you describe: those which separate modern, liberal people, as you call them, from conservatives. I’ve met this conservative type — a woman. Really, I cannot understand half the things she’s talking about.
     GT: Yes — your culture never provided you the means to understand.
     GPL: Well, I don’t know about that…
     GT: You’re intelligent, educated — and yet her different views are completely unintelligible to you. There must be a reason. Is it not possible you’ve been culturally denied the keys to understanding? (p. 38)

This phrase has haunted me ever since I read it: some people have been culturally denied the keys to understanding the Faith and its traditional practices. This is not to say that unbelievers have no personal responsibility, that all can be blamed on the surrounding culture. It is but a sobering acknowledgment that so many people, even within the Church, have never been given the basic “means to understand” what she is talking about in her doctrine, what she is doing in her rites. Very few (comparatively speaking) are deeply, intimately familiar with the teaching, life, and rituals of the Church in their preconciliar fullness and clarity. This is why reading older authors for the first time can bring us up short: “I cannot understand half the things she’s talking about … her views are completely unintelligible.” We see the dynamics of rupture and discontinuity at work.

GT: Well, the 1960s are just a handy approximation. Although some people are even more specific than that. They identify 1968 as the turning point. But think about what I’m saying: Wherever previous generations disagree with the post-1960s worldview — let’s call it that for short — previous generations are always wrong. Post-’60s is always right. At least, according to modern media and education.
       Post-’60s says a woman has a so-called “right to choose.” Post-’60s must be right; everyone who felt differently, before the ’60s, is obviously wrong.
       Or take freedom of speech. Only the other day, someone told me pornography was “the price we have to pay” for free speech. All kinds of people say that — now. Nobody ever said that before the ’60s. Westerners believed in freedom of speech in 1950, too. Still, they banned things like Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence. Literature was prohibited — to say nothing of pornography. But according to the post-’60s worldview, freedom of speech means pornography should be allowed everywhere. Why didn’t people ever think that before the ’60s? […]
       If you belong to the New Secular Religion, the 1960s revelation is your creed, your Bible. Every generation of people before you, who believed differently, was wrong. In other words: wherever pre-’60s beliefs differ from post-’60s ones, post-’60s is always, always right. (p. 47)

Free Speech Movement, UC Berkeley, November 20, 1965

Although at this juncture in the story the characters are talking about the wider problem of the modern creed of secular relativism, the observation here is strikingly applicable to the liturgical question. The 1960s marked a turning point, a watershed moment. Although there were liturgical modernists well before that decade, it was only then that the above-described mentality firmly entrenched itself — namely, that whatever in the realm of liturgy was said and done and believed before the 1960s is always wrong and that what is being said and done and believed now is always right. Everyone who felt or thought (or feels or thinks) differently is wrong: they are stuck in the past, they have not caught up with modernity and its new insights and requirements. Prior to the 1960s, there was a long line of Popes who spoke with great determination and seriousness about the normativity of Catholic tradition, the immense respect due to it, and the danger of innovation and experimentation. During and after the 1960s, tradition had become a bad word, respect for it a sign of spiritual regression or mental feebleness. Proponents of liturgical revolution were able to prevail based on a fundamental premise that was never allowed to be challenged.

Only the material world counts in the New Secular Religion. Either no other world exists or it if it does, it doesn’t matter. It counts for nothing. You have a materialist metaphysic — either de jure or de facto… It’s the same with all religions. Buddhists don’t believe in God. Inevitably, that helps form their ethics. Christians do believe in God — a personal God—and their ethics are formed by that. Secular Materialists don’t believe in an afterlife and that, likewise, shapes their ethics. (p. 51)

As many have noted, Catholics today, due to a powerful desire to accommodate themselves to the secular world, to be welcomed by it and “competitive” with it, run the serious risk of imbibing the materialist metaphysic, the New Secular Religion, and even reproducing and reinforcing it in and through their corporate acts. Sadly, we cannot exclude the causal influence of a worship that no longer confronts them with and immerses them in otherworldliness, the primacy of the invisible, inaudible, transcendent, as underlined by rich symbols of the sacred, hallowed chant, hidden ritual, and reservoirs of silence. If most Catholics in the contemporary West have the mentality of secular materalists, must we not resolutely and fearlessly look to the root causes of this debacle, and not be content with a superficial prognosis?

In this vein, the Gentle Traditionalist says to his interlocutor:

[T]he English often have the whole idea of the Church mixed-up. You think it’s a place where someone preaches a sermon, you sing some hymns, maybe say a prayer or two. Then come home again. For Catholics, that’s a travesty of the Church! I warned you this wouldn’t be PC — but it’s the tragedy of the English-speaking world. Millions and millions of English people — also Americans, Australians, etc. — they all think a church is somewhere you gather on Sundays for spiritual instruction. Rules! … The Reformation never took hold in most countries like it did in England. So this state of confusion doesn’t exist in Greece or Russia or Spain. Plus, in some countries, they use separate words for Protestant and Catholic sites of worship. But in English, it’s just one word — church — for two entirely different realities. To your ordinary American, a church is something like a meeting hall — an assembly room! To a Catholic, it’s a place where the most sublime ritual on Earth is enacted.

That the Mass itself has been reduced in the minds of many to a community gathering for songs and homilies — as evidenced by the relative emphasis given to each of the parts in many celebrations today — only sharpens the point Buck is making: the Protestant notion of “church” and “church service” has massively invaded the Catholic sphere, to the point where it is almost unknown that the Mass is primarily an oblation of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of the Most Holy Trinity, a propitiatory sacrifice on behalf of the living and the dead, and only secondarily an occasion for instruction and fellowship. One might put it this way: the Mass is pleasing to God and sanctifying for man because of its inherent nature as the unbloody renewal of the all-sufficient sacrifice of Calvary, the fruits of which we share in Holy Communion; its didactic and social functions are premised on that sacrifice, ordered to it, and derived from it.

But isn’t all this talk of blood, sacrifice, adoration, penance (one could easily add many other words to the list) redolent of an old-fashioned perspective that Modern Man, with all his progress and science, simply cannot share any more? Ah, that’s the whole problem in a nutshell. There is the truly Christian worldview and there is the distinctively modern worldview, and the two have nothing to do with each other. They are, in fact, totally opposed to each other, as opposed as Christ and Antichrist. Buck sees this opposition in terms of sacramental or non-sacramental, tradition or rationalism:

GT: … Clearly, I advocate Sacramental societies over non-Sacramental societies. If you study traditional Catholic cultures, capitalism does not develop so strongly. Likewise, you don’t see the same hyper-individualism, atomisation of society, breakdown of the family, social decay… Unfortunately, today’s Church doesn’t understand the power of its own Sacraments. Or sacramentals — like this Holy Water or the Rosary. This is the tragedy of the post-Vatican II Church. Large parts of it have surrendered to faith in rationalism, rather than keeping faith in tradition. The Church must recover her tradition. Only tradition understands the immense, healing power of the Sacraments. That power can save civilisation. If people returned to Confession, if people took the Mass seriously again, there’s no telling what would happen. But how can ordinary people take those things seriously, when the priests and bishops don’t either?  (p. 161)

American Catholics are blessed with many priests and bishops who take the sacraments seriously, which might prompt one to think the Gentle Traditionalist guilty of exaggeration. If one looks to the dire European scene (as this book does), however, there is no question of exaggeration. One may indeed wonder if the Son of Man will find any faith left when He returns. Without a doubt, there are still the valiant who cling to the Church, her sacraments, and her sacramentals, but they can see their societies and their churches crumbling around them. In our times, to continue to be supernaturally hopeful and to persevere in the faith despite appearances and a lack of institutional support is a form of heroism that may well produce the great saints of the end times.

[T]he Church has been given the power to resurrect. Resurrection applies not only to individuals, but also society. The Sacramental Church has the power to resurrect society, but it must claim it once more. That’s why Benedict XVI — against considerable opposition — was working to restore the liturgy. (p. 162)

Exactly: the Church cannot take anything for granted; her earthly leaders must claim her power and use it, rather than being embarrassed or afraid or reticent or too sophisticated. I am reminded in this connection of something often stated and experienced by Juventutem groups: If only the Church’s leaders would bring forth the treasures of tradition with pride, joy, and generosity, spreading them as a banquet before the starving men and women of our profaned world, all would see their immense sanctifying and evangelizing potency. It can already be seen in the places where the “experiment of tradition” has been attempted without any artificial restrictions.

These are only a few snippets from the book, which again I recommend for its well-rounded and humorous treatment of the problem of modernity and the necessity of a “counterrevolutionary” response to it. Buck has shown convincingly, in the form of a dialogue of ideas, why a compromise with the anti-natural, anti-traditional, anti-sacramental spirit of modernity is impossible and has been, in fact, the root cause of our present malaise. It comes down to rationalism (the mental disease introduced by an era we would do well to call “the Endarkenment”) or tradition (which bears in itself the true enlightenment brought by Christ). Like water and oil, they can be blended with violence but they do not mix and must eventually separate.

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The Balance Scale: Nineteen to One

In an article here at NLM, Gregory DiPippo beautifully summed up the fundamental difference between the original Liturgical Movement and its increasingly revolutionary successor prior to, during, and after the Second Vatican Council:

Before World War I, the major figures in the Liturgical Movement believed that instilling true devotion to the liturgy, and curing the neglect thereof, was principally a matter of education. The liturgy was seen as an inexhaustible treasure-trove for the spiritual life, and the goal of men such as Dom Guéranger and Fr. Romano Guardini was to raise both the clergy and the laity up to a greater appreciation of it. In the period between the wars, the attitude shifted towards the idea that if the run of the clergy and faithful were uninterested in the liturgy, the problem lay not with them, but with the liturgy. The cure for this neglect would then become, not to educate the faithful up to the level of the liturgy, but to alter the liturgy to suit the needs of “modern” man.

DiPippo goes on to ask the logical questions that no progressive or liberal or modernist could ever answer without undermining his own position:

Since all of the architects of the post-Conciliar reforms were formed as churchmen in the aftermath of the two World Wars, the question should also be asked: how much of their era’s way of looking at the world, how many of their attitudes and ideas, are as perennially valuable as those of, say, Saints Augustine, Benedict, and Gregory the Great? If they could ask the question “how much longer must we live according to the ideas of the preceding centuries?”, and answer “no longer, starting from today”; can we not also ask “how much longer must we live according to the ideas of the preceding century?” (These questions are pertinent not only to the liturgy, of course, but to all of the aspects in which the Church struggles through the aftermath of the post-Conciliar reforms.)

These questions could sound like an endorsement of perpetual revolt: each generation has to throw off that which came before. But he’s not saying that at all. Rather, he’s saying that there are two views: the one that chucked out tradition, arbitrarily mixing archaic and modernist elements (the decadent liturgical movement), and the one that honored and respected tradition in its slow development over time (the original liturgical movement). The former specializes in throwing the past overboard, or tinkering with it ad libitum and injecting modernity into it — Fr. Gelineau’s concept of the liturgy as “a permanent workshop”[1] — while the latter wishes to hold firm to the received treasures and to live them with the understanding that comes from love.[2] It is the essential difference between the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary: one tears down and reconstructs on a new plan, the other maintains a sound identity by preserving, repairing, and enriching.

One might think of it this way. Let us say you have a balance scale for the history of the Church, and you want to determine what is heavier, weightier, worthier. In one dish is more than nineteen centuries of tradition (and with it, reverence for the given forms of worship); in the other dish, not even one century of theory-based experimentation (and with it, a notable lack of reverence for given forms). Which way will the balance tilt? Which way will you tilt? For each of us is, in a way, the balance scale, and how we tilt amounts to a small gain or loss in the renewal of the Church.

Consider a different use of this metaphor. Some practices are extremely widespread, and others are rare. Say you are weighing precious metals and common metals. The weight of the common, since there is far more of it, may greatly exceed the weight of the precious, but you would be foolish not to take the precious over the common, the gold over the lead. Here, it is not weight that counts, but quality. Take the one piece of gold over the nineteen pieces of lead.

The traditional Catholic joins his lot with nineteen and a half centuries of organic development rather than half a century of inorganic innovation. He searches for the precious handmade works of great anonymous masters and values them above the lackluster assembly-line products of committee barons. He knows how to use — and how to be — a reliable balance scale.

NOTES

[1] See here for the full quotation.
[2] See my article "Carrying Forward the Noble Work of the Liturgical Movement" for more on the contrast.