Experiences That Make One a Traditionalist

Those who have assisted at the traditional Roman liturgy for some time can usually name many things about it that they noticed over the years — things that impressed, provoked, consoled, puzzled, that made them wake up, question more, dig deeper. There is a moment of transition, I find, from being one who appreciates the old liturgy, perhaps now and again, or as a field trip, or as a pastoral duty, to being one who has fallen in love with it, who makes it his spiritual home, and who, accordingly, may justly be called a traditionalist. (As much as some people protest against the use of that word, it remains immensely handy for naming a phenomenon, which is what language is supposed to do.)

My books mention many such experiences, but here are two that are especially appropriate to share in Easter week.

The first was the contrast I noticed, several years in a row, between the modern (Paul VI) Easter Vigil and the Easter Sunday Missa Cantata of the Roman Rite. The reason for comparing these two is that I was involved at the time in providing music for both — the “Ordinary Form” on Saturday night and the “Extraordinary Form” (how quaint are those terms now!) on Sunday morning.

The Paul VI vigil had no “spaces,” no obvious opening to mystery through which one could enter. It was a flood of didactic text, spoken aloud, with musical interludes. Modern people are already awash in words. Do we really need more? In the N.O. Easter Vigil, one felt that one had been thoroughly drenched in the Bible readings conducted in Nabbish, a lengthy homily, the unsatisfying glamor of receiving some people into the church in a ritual that culminated in applause, and a celebration of the Eucharist wholly lacking in supernatural resonance or fearful majesty. It made an impression for sheer length, number of lilies, and candles, but otherwise it was like cookie dough — the same consistency throughout. 

The Easter Missa cantata, on the other hand, was full of the sound of Alleluias sung in Gregorian chant — sixteen of them (not counting the repetitions of the Communion antiphon). The chants for Easter are strong, sometimes strange, always unearthly, already half-dwelling in the realm of eternity. The church, ablaze with white and gold… the ritual nailed to the altar, from which salvation pours out like blood and water… the clouds of incense billowing… all point to the mysterious reality of the Crucified and Risen One — and this is something that can be perceived by anyone seeking God or even seeking some meaning in life. Marshall McLuhan said, decades ago, that modern culture is obsessed with images and that the Church must therefore provide images of great power: visual and audible images that are startlingly different from what secular culture offers. At the Easter morning sung Mass, I had an almost unnerving sense of stepping back through time across all the centuries that separated me from the resurrection of Christ and coming once again into His powerful presence. This was a ritual that somehow poured from His glorified wounds to bathe me in their light. There was a holy awe about the place, a restrained joy coiled like a spring ready to leap to heaven, a hushed adoration like that of Mary Magdalene when she discovered Christ in the garden and He would not let her touch Him.

Let me not be misunderstood: I am not calling into question the good will of anyone who contributed to the Easter Vigil. On the contrary, there was abundant good will, which I remember fondly. The problem is deeper than the individuals: it is in the rites they are using and the customs that have grown up around them to the point of having nearly the force of law. The face liturgy presents to us depends much more on the rites and customs than it does on the personnel who happen to be using them; the former determine and delimit the possible range of influence for the latter.

The second experience was singing, and then reflecting on, Lesson III of Holy Saturday’s Tenebrae: “Incipit Oratio Jeremiae Prophetae.”

Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us:
consider and behold our reproach.
Our inheritance is turned unto aliens:
our houses to strangers.
We are become orphans without a father,
our mothers are as widows.
Our water we have drunk for money:
we have bought our wood for a price.
We were dragged by our necks,
we were weary and rest was not given unto us.
Unto Egypt, and unto the Assyrians have we given our hand,
that we might be satisfied with bread.
Our fathers have sinned, and are no more:
and we have borne their iniquities.
Servants have ruled over us:
there was none to redeem us out of their hand.
Our bread we fetched at the peril of our lives,
because of the sword in the desert.
Our skin was burnt as an oven,
by reason of the violence of the famine.
They have oppressed the women in Sion,
and the virgins in the cities of Juda.
Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
be converted unto the Lord thy God.

Pondering these prophetic words led me to see their application to our current liturgical situation, and the parallels have only grown clearer with time. We are alienated from our inheritance; our houses of worship are sold off to Masonic lodges or Hindu ashrams; we are become like orphans without a father in Rome or, in some cases, a father in our diocese; we bought our reforms for a steep price, and were dragged along without our consent; we grew weary of hyperactive participation and longed for a contemplative rest that was denied us; we exchanged our birthright for a seat at the United Nations and the European Union; those who fomented our disasters are mostly long-gone and we suffer from their sins; slaves of fashion rule over the sons of God; we fetched our traditional bread wherever we could find it, afraid of the sword of church authority in the desert of the post-Council; the spiritual famine has been violent, and it has extended even to threatening the religious life of consecrated virgins. Jerusalem, O Church on earth: be converted unto the Lord thy God!

Someone once said of the liturgical reformers: “They took the faith out of our hands and knees.” The reform stripped away, or allowed to be stripped away, bodily spiritual formation. Catholics can get a visceral sense of the contrast when they attend their first Tridentine Mass and find that there’s a lot more kneeling than they are accustomed to (even at High Mass) and more demands placed on their attention in general. It is a liturgy that pre-dates the invention of television, so it expects a long attention span, and the ability to be quiet and sit still. The faith has to penetrate into our bones and muscles or it remains cerebral and ineffectual.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the contrasting practices of Holy Communion. In too many churches, the faithful walk up in multiple lines and receive the Body of Christ in their hands, like people queueing for bus tickets, after which they take a cup to wash it down, like teammates sharing Gatorade. In traditional communities, the faithful kneel along the communion rail and wait until the priest comes to them to bless them with the Host — “Corpus Domini nostri + Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam, Amen” — and places it gently on their tongues. These two contrasting scenes are, in reality, expressive of two different ideas of religion, if we take religion in the sense of the virtue by which we offer God our worship through concrete words and actions.

This is why I am not surprised that the former Benedictine monk Gabriel Bunge, a world expert on the Trinity icon of Rublev, left the Catholic Church to become Eastern Orthodox. No one ever introduced him to the real Western tradition that corresponded to what he was studying from the East. He came to the conclusion that the only authentic tradition left was the East. His conclusion should rather have been that the modern West had abandoned its own authentic tradition, and that we have an urgent calling to recover it.

After experiences like the two I recounted, one’s soul is seared with the truth, at once liberating and daunting: I cannot go back to the 60s and 70s, to those pathetic works of human hands. Let the dead bury the dead. It is the perennially youthful Roman Rite that gives joy to me, that shines forth light and truth.

Greater Accessibility… To Whom, To What, and Why?

Throughout the years of liturgical reform — and for many long decades thereafter — the avalanche of changes to Catholic worship were often justified by a few magical phrases that would be thrown about almost talismanically, with an air of infinite superiority to the meager mentalities of lowly laity. The leading contender was certainly the phrase “active participation,” but joining it were “Modern Man,” “meeting people where they’re at,” “doing like the early Church,” and, what is of most interest to me in this article, “greater accessibility.”

The revised liturgy was supposed to be, and was claimed and asserted to be, “more accessible,” but this is a monumental smokescreen if ever there was one. After all, nothing is more or less accessible in the abstract or without further qualification. One must always ask: “Accessible to whom? And giving access to what? And for the purpose of…?”

Almost exclusively, accessibility was understood as primarily or exclusively a verbal-conceptual phenomenon. If you can immediately grasp this bite-sized chunk of content, without further preparation, explanation, or remainder of bewilderment, then it’s considered to be accessible to you. The object of such immediate and complete comprehension obviously cannot be God, whom every orthodox theologian declares right off the bat to be incomprehensible; nor can it be man, who, as being made unto God’s image, is a mystery to himself; nor can it be the world, which is far too complicated and vast to fit into man’s mind, even if a thousand Einsteins were to chip away at it; nor can it be the mysteries revealed by God in history and delivered in Scripture, since each one of these is a combination of all of the above. Therefore, a perfectly accessible liturgy, in the sense given above, would have to be about nothing, address no one, and lead nowhere.

This, admittedly, is a limit case fortunately never reached: there is always a residue of unintelligibility in anything human beings do, even if they are trying to avoid it. To the extent that any elements of the traditional divine liturgy remained, the incomprehensibility of God, of man, of the cosmos, and of the mysteries of Christ remained. Still, the reform introduced a fundamental tension between allowing the liturgy to be mysterious, as it must be, and trying, in the name of liturgical science, to purge it of the very features that tended to make it aweful, fearful, darksome, intricate, wondrous, and yet, paradoxically, also make it orderly and ordering, familiar and comforting, unassuming and free of invasive irritation.

At Ordinations in the classical Roman rite: what’s not to love?

It seems to me that there is a mighty irony at work in the revival of the traditional Latin liturgy of the Roman church. The irony is that, in spite of everything the scholars and tinkerers were predicting, in spite of all their hand-wringing, new generations find the old rites in general quite sufficiently accessible, indeed more so than the new rites, as long as one has a broader and deeper definition of accessibility. The reason is not far to seek: the old liturgy appeals more consistently, more powerfully, to the full range of reality, natural and supernatural; of what it is to be human; of how we express ourselves, and what we are trying to express in words, gestures, songs, and sighs. It appeals to all the senses, the various temperaments and personalities, the different levels on which our interior life plays out and intersects with the external world.

The traditional Roman liturgy — and this is true of any traditional apostolic rite in Christianity — recognizes a truth on which psychologists never tire of discoursing: human beings primarily communicate non-verbally. As a matter of fact, we are never not communicating something, even if we are not talking or have no intention of conveying a meaning. Orderliness and defentiality speak volumes, just as carelessness and casualness do. A liturgy, like any human ceremony, is constantly communicating through every word, stance, gesture, position, action, silence. The old liturgy, by harnessing and regulating these things in a harmonious way to bring out their full meaning, is more communicative; in that sense, it proffers more to access, and in more ways. The reformed liturgy, by eliminating traditional non-verbal language and then leaving so much to chance and idiosyncratic habit, thins the content and its delivery, while mingling it with extraneous and contradictory matter.

Many of these thoughts were prompted by a video on body language that made me much more conscious of the importance of small and non-verbal details in liturgy (and, therefore, the importance of being aware of them and faithful to their proper execution). The expert interviewed, Joe Navarro, looks at people from the point of view of an FBI agent trying to assess potential threats, witnesses, etc. The part of the video most relevant to the liturgy runs from 7:10–8:10. Here is a transcription of some of the points he makes about body language:

• “How we dress, how we walk, have meaning, and we use that to interpret what’s in the mind of the person.”
• “We may think we’re very sophisticated, [but] we are never in a state where we’re not transmitting information.”
• “We’re all transmitting at all times; we choose the clothes that we wear, how we groom ourselves, how we dress, but also how do we carry ourselves, are we coming to the office on this particular day with a lot of energy, or are we coming in with a different sort of pace… and what we look for are differences in behaviour, down to the minutia of: what is this individual’s posture as they walk down the street, are they on the inside of the sidewalk, on the outside, can we see his blink rate, how often he is looking at his watch…”
• “You can have a poker face, but you can’t have a poker body — somewhere it’s going to be revealed.” 
• “We talk about non-verbals because it matters, because it has gravitas, because it affects how we communicate with each other.”
• “When it comes to non-verbals, this is no small matter. We primarily communicate non-verbally and we always will.”

Phrases like: “we primarily communicate non-verbally” and “we’re never not communicating something” are very relevant to the celebration of Mass. Every gesture — for example, the speed of movement around the altar; where the priest is standing or sitting, when, and why; how the sacred vessels are treated; whether the priest’s gaze is directed out to the people or modestly downcast — confesses what the celebrant, and the people, believe they are doing.

Why is it that the liturgical reformers seemed so tone-deaf or clueless about the most obvious things in life? Did they not realize that changing the bodily language, the gestures, postures, orientation, custody of the eyes, would effect a sea change in mentality and spirituality? Or . . . was it that they understood perfectly well, and therefore abolished, piece by piece, one non-verbal language, substituting for it another with a contrary message?

I am reminded of what has been said about the loss of faith in the Real Presence. This was not an unfortunate result of a lack of catechesis. It was the intended result of a renovated catechesis. It was not an accidental byproduct of liturgical reform gone awry; it was a premeditated outcome of a new ecclesiology that identified the worshiping community par excellence with the Body of Christ and sought to oppose the “fetishism” or “magic” of the Eucharistic cultus that had developed in the Church for at least a thousand years.

As Martin Mosebach points out with respect to Holy Communion:

[A]n entire bouquet of respectful gestures had surrounded the sacrament of the altar, and these gestures were the most effective homily, which continually showed priests and faithful quite clearly the mysterious presence of the Lord under the forms of bread and wine. We can be certain: no theological indoctrination of so-called enlightened theologians has so harmed the belief of Western Catholics in the presence of the Lord in the consecrated Host as the innovation of receiving communion in the hand, accompanied by the abandoning of all care in the handling of the particles of the Host.
          Yet can one really not receive communion reverently in the hand? Of course that is possible. Yet once the traditional forms of reverence were in place, exercising their blessed influence on the consciousness of the faithful, their discontinuation contained the message — and not just for the simple faithful — that so much reverence was not really necessary, and along with that there consequently grew the (initially unspoken) conviction that there was nothing there that demanded respect. (Subversive Catholicism: Papacy, Liturgy, Church, 80–81)

Fr. Roberto Spataro makes a similar but broader point:

Humility is more than a virtue. It is the condition for a virtuous life. Watch the bows and genuflections the humble man makes faithfully before God in a spirit of obedience, acknowledging His merciful sovereignty, His love without bounds, His creative wisdom. Reason is not tempted to be puffed up, as happens in the revolutionary process, because in the old rite not everything can or ought to be explained by reason which, for its part, is content to adore God without comprehending Him. It turns to Him through the means of a sacred language differing from ordinary speech, because in the harmonious order of creation that the liturgy represents in its rituals, there is never a monotonous repetition or tedious uniformity, but a symphony of diversity, sacred and profane, without opposition, respecting the alterity of each. Here reason also renounces an excessive use of words that unfortunately exists in the liturgical praxis inaugurated by the Novus Ordo, interpreted by many priests as the opportunity for pure garrulousness. In the old rite, on the other hand, reason appeals to other dimensions of communication and, besides words pronounced or sung, also gives silence a place. This silence becomes the atmosphere, impregnated with the Holy Spirit, in which believing thought and prayerful word is born. (In Praise of the Tridentine Mass and of Latin, Language of the Church, 30)

What we do with our bodies is just as communicative as what we say with our lips. The liturgy should therefore govern the motions and dispositions of our limbs and senses, harnessing them as symbols of truth and instruments of sanctification. This will help us to pray, to enter more deeply into communion with the Lord, and to yield ourselves to truths that cannot be put into words or captured in concepts. As St. Paul says in the Epistle to the Romans, we should make our bodily members “instruments of righteousness”:

“Neither yield ye your members as instruments of iniquity unto sin” — the sin of irreverence, of disrespect for holy things, of casual, haphazard, and inconsiderate behavior during our formal audience before the great King — “but present yourselves to God,” in theocentric worship that governs our self-presentation, “as those that are alive from the dead” — the living death of modern anti-natural, anti-Christic culture — “and your members as instruments of justice unto God” (Rom 6:13), the justice, namely, of the virtue of religion.

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Do Congregations Dwindle Because “People Don’t Understand What’s Going On”?

What's going on here is evidently something special...

At the often amusing and generally tendentious blog called PrayTell, Msgr. M. Francis Mannion offered readers a theory about why liturgy must be in the vernacular. In short, unless people can understand the words of the rite, attendance is sure to dwindle at an alarming rate!

Those who are attached to Latin in the liturgy (mostly in the context of the Tridentine Mass) would do well to attend to what is happening in the Greek Orthodox Church in America. A recent study by George Demacoupoulos of Fordham University proposed that the Greek Church should consider dropping the ancient Greek currently used in the liturgy and move toward English or modern Greek. The principal impetus for this is the fact that congregations are dwindling at an alarming rate due in great part to their incomprehension of the current language of the liturgy. This is especially true of young people, who are unable to connect with the liturgy because of the language problem. I bring this up because of the attachment of some Catholics to the Latin Mass. If they do not know what is going on in the liturgy (even with the use of a Latin/English missal), their attachment is apt to be merely aesthetic. Despite the myth of youthful attachment to Latin, I think the attachment will fade.

What a coincidence, I thought, that the greatest exodus in Catholic Church membership since the time of the Protestant Reformation coincided with the progressive vernacularization of the Roman liturgy throughout the 1960s and 1970s! How curious that this decline has continued, with the usual statistical variations, to the present day, as bishops consolidate and close parish after parish — in spite of a liturgy that is totally comprehensible, and indeed, invites and even enforces popular participation! [1] What’s not to love? How bizarrely contrary to all the laws of nature and culture that Latin Mass communities in the USA have grown from a handful in the 1980s, to about 250 in 2007, to about 500 today! Pretty good for a faddish attachment to an alienating ritual. Not to mention the kind of responses Latin Mass-goers give to survey questions.

In reality, we all known that there are far more factors at play than what language the liturgy is in, or whether people participate “actively” in it. There is the question of whether the rites as celebrated evoke the presence of the thrice-holy God, the Lord of heaven and earth, before whom we must bow our heads and bend our knees. There is the question of how much extraliturgical catechesis is being offered (or even whether any instruction worthy of the name is taking place). There is the question of intentional discipleship on the part of the faithful: the more seriously parents practice their faith, whether they are charismatics, traditionalists, or social justice crusaders, the more likely their offspring are to remain committed.

But back to Msgr. Mannion’s claim. In the simple world of “clear and distinct ideas” in which liturgists live, the lack of verbal, rational comprehension of liturgical texts will inevitably cause a precipitous decline of worshipers — and anyone who thinks the contrary is suffering from illusions of grandeur, induced by aestheticism.

Does this explanation hold water?

The assumption that following word-for-word the meaning of liturgical texts and making vocal responses to them is the primary way in which Catholics participate in the liturgy — a view popularized by liturgists in the 1950s and 1960s — has since then been subjected to severe critique from many angles. Sociologists have pointed out that dense, impenetrable, to some extent off-limits religious rituals are a powerful motivator for belief and devotion. Psychologists note that archetypal symbolism conveyed in gestures, clothing, and other physical phenomena, not to say the superrational language of music, are at least as communicative as words, if not more so. Theologians have always emphasized that liturgy is not, first and foremost, a human work we do for God, so much as a divine work He bestows upon us, allowing us to take part in that which is greater than anything we can grasp or control. This is one of the chief reasons why liturgy as it developed always adhered more and more to established ceremonies, texts, chants, and rubrics. All this emphasizes that we are not about our own business, but about the Father’s business, as Jesus said when His parents found Him in the Temple.

As noted above, the mainstream Roman Catholic world, like the Greek Orthodox, is also experiencing the loss of worshipers, but no one can maintain that our simplified Novus Ordo liturgy in the vernacular is beyond the reach of most individuals who speak whatever modern language happens to be used in a given area. On the hypothesis of rationalism under which they continue to labor fruitlessly, liturgists will never be convinced that the liturgy is sufficiently comprehensible. Instead, they will simplify (or advocate simplifying) again and again, and make the language simpler and simpler, until . . . what? Until there is nothing left to understand. This is what generates boredom and disengagement: in what is easily accessible, there is, or at least seems to be, nothing really worth understanding. The great mystery that saves the world flashes past like a Hallmark greeting.

When a love of reverence, beauty, and ceremony is written off as “aesthetics,” one knows that one is dealing with a peculiarly modern form of reductionism, according to which, as Martin Mosebach dryly observes, sincerity is proved by ugliness or plainness. For the Mannions of the world, the longing for a transcendent and numinous expression of the sacrifice that unites heaven and earth is reducible to nostalgia, sentimentality, or elitism. In that case, one might as well write off most of Western cultural and religious history, which produced and rejoiced in the most extravagant visual and audible fine art for the sake of glorifying God and raising the human soul to the stars. An illiterate peasant who knows nothing about the liturgy save that the Lord God is being adored and who joins himself interiorly to this movement would be sanctified, regardless of whether or not he knows the details of “what is going on.” In contrast, are we so sure that Catholics who hear all the prayers in the vernacular “know what is going on,” much less make it their own in genuine prayer?

To speak like a Thomist, I would say people in these conversations fail to make necessary distinctions. Instead of talking about participation as if it is a binary switch (on/off, active/passive), we should admit that there are at least five levels of participation:

1. Present but not paying attention.
2. Hearing and understanding words.
3. Relating to the liturgy as an act of worship: adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, supplication.
4. Joining together understanding (2) and worship (3).
5. Entering mystically into the Christus passus, as we see in so many saints. This is compatible with (2), (3), or (4), but often goes beyond them in ways that can neither be planned for nor put into words.

For someone stuck at 1, a liturgy that is linear, modular, and verbose will come across as exceedingly dull, like sitting at a meeting. Such a person desperately needs his or her attention to be caught by something out of the ordinary, something unique to the liturgy that will seem strange and offer an opportunity for puzzlement or disturbance of the closed mind. What we want is an uncomfortable seed to be planted that may germinate in memories or dreams. As memory specialists often say, we remember best that which is unusual.

For someone who has progressed to 2, the usus antiquior presents both challenges and opportunities. It challenges the worshiper to take a more active role in understanding what the liturgy is saying, so that, paradoxically, attendees of Latin liturgy often know more about the texts from having been forced to do some work to crack them open. Moreover, the guise under which the words are heard — namely, in an archaic, defiantly non-vernacular language with (when properly pronounced) a beautiful flowing sound as of streams or rivers — adds an indefinable mystique to the texts, a religious aura, a sense of set-apartness and elevation. (I develop these points in this article.) The texts are clothed in special sonic raiment, even as the liturgical ministers are clothed in their hieratic garments.

Let us be clear, however: the mere hearing and understanding of words, or, conversely, the mere hearing and not understanding of words, is not yet an act of prayer. That is why it is certainly possible for someone to sit through an entire Mass, understanding everything in the vernacular or being impressed with the sound of Latin, but never once adoring, repenting, thanking, or supplicating. (This, needless to say, is possible in any liturgy whatsoever; even the High Masses at St. John Cantius in Chicago are attended by secular Jews looking to be uplifted by a free concert.)

At level 3, symbols and ceremonies play a particularly crucial part in leading the soul to the four primacy acts of prayer with which the liturgy always concerns itself. To take one obvious example, one is far more likely to adore the Lord in the Holy Eucharist and to examine one’s conscience with contrition before receiving if the Host is surrounded by a rich ceremonial involving bowing, genuflecting, incensing, standing ad orientem, the lifting of the chasuble, etc. Notice that not a single one of these actions involves any words.

Level 4 would be the ideal for normal circumstances (that is, short of a special grace of contemplation, which is what the final level points to). Here, one understands with some facility the texts of the liturgy, which after a while one knows by heart or by a kind of connaturality, yet one is also highly attuned to its multiple forms of expression and therefore well situated to posit the spiritual acts they call forth. I say this is ideal because it prepares the one assisting at liturgy to savor and enter into the very mysteries themselves that are made present in it.

Although each level involves the support of God’s grace, since we can do nothing supernaturally good without His aid, level 5 points to a moment in which the liturgy simply opens up to contemplation. The absence of this is not to be lamented, just as its occurrence is not to be expected, since, in a way, it goes beyond the sphere of liturgical action. I have in mind the stories of saints who went into ecstasy during the Mass — often, but not exclusively, the priest offering it. St. Gregory the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Gertrude of Helfta, St. Philip Neri, and St. Pio of Pietrelcina are well known mystics of the Mass, but there are many others.

It is rather difficult, to be perfectly honest, to image level 5 occurring in connection with the Novus Ordo, as it is stubbornly opposed to contemplativity in its operative assumptions and methods. Level 3 is not especially easy to come by, either; and this lack threatens Level 4. Finally, even Level 2 is thwarted by the Novus Ordo because its very simplicity and vernacularity are so easy to zone out of. One is reminded of the frequent phenomenon in families where children will ask “Have we said grace yet?” even though the table blessing was said only a few moments earlier.

Thus, as surprising as it may seem, the Novus Ordo has a tendency to encourage, not full, conscious, and actual participation, but rather its opposite: being present but not paying attention, or what we have called Level 1. There is a reason, on the other hand, why ordinary Catholic faithful find the four acts of prayer of Level 3 coming more naturally and spontaneously at the usus antiquior; why their knowledge of the texts of the liturgy, Level 2, tends to be better, since they need to work at it; and finally, why it is fitting that this ancient rite should have prepared the souls of the greatest mystics of the Mass, those whom God summoned to Level 5, to receive the gift of contemplation.

If my analysis is correct — if it is even only partially correct — we may handily dismiss Msgr. Mannion’s prediction that youthful attachment to Latin liturgy is ephemeral. The source of the attachment is far more profound than aesthetics, although obviously it has and should have an aesthetic component; it is far more profound than nostalgia, although no one should knock the value of nostalgia, properly understood. Those who visit a Latin Mass parish are likely to see the pews populated not only with silvery heads but with black and brown-haired people, and more babies than all the neighboring parishes put together. Time indeed will tell what is going to fade and what is going to flourish, but if I were a betting man, I know where I’d put my money.

Master of Portillo, “The Vision of St Gregory”

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for information, articles, sacred music, and Os Justi Press.

The Queen of Sheba in the Court of Solomon: Liturgical Boredom and Ecstasy

Ritual action is inherently non-spontaneous, non-original, and non-extemporaneous. The more perfectly one is enacting ritual, the less of one’s creative self is present in it, and the more one is absorbed into a vastly larger mystery.

Even the pagans understood this in their mystery rites, through which the individual was meant to be drawn into the realm of the gods and to participate in their actions. The worshiper took on the identity of another, and for a moment lost sight of himself. This is the “ecstasy” about which we read so much in ancient authors: a standing “outside oneself” (ek-stasis), a going out of one’s everyday world and mind, to be drawn into something primordial, archetypal, divine.

I have noticed this about the Novus Ordo, when studying the ponderous tomes of its architects and admirers: it may look good on paper, it may have a rationale about which one can wax eloquent, but somehow it never works in practice. There, it tends to look clumsy, casual, limited in expressive range and impressive power; due to its linear modular construction, it suggests a series of tasks on an agenda, and most attendees may be forgiven their desire to see the agenda completed as expeditiously as possible.

The traditional Roman liturgy, in contrast, often looks obscure, complex, or strangely ordered on paper, but it always works in practice. It flows, sweeping all along before it. The motions of the individuals in the sanctuary are scripted and coordinated; there is an organic wholeness to it, and a smoothness like that of rocks caressed by water for a thousand years. Those involved are so intent on “the Father’s business” that it is easy for our attention to be absorbed in whatever they are doing, even when we don’t understand it. So strongly does the rite convey a sense of something extremely important and weighty happening that it has the power to make us want to understand it better.

I am reminded here of the difference between stage drama and “closet drama.” The one is a story meant to be acted out before an audience, the other is a musing to be read in the solitary comfort of one’s study. A play by Shakespeare, while far more complex than Goethe’s Faust in number of characters and subplots, works brilliantly on stage, while Goethe’s, with a relatively straightforward plot, is not nearly as dramatically effective. The one is artistically perfect, the other an intellectual construct. It is like comparing a folk dance with a mathematical theorem.

Even though it is “easier” or “more accessible” — indeed, precisely because it is so — one grows weary of the new Mass over time; it has few secrets and yields them readily. It is the opposite with the old: the longer one attends, the more one discovers in it to appreciate, and one never reaches the bottom of its secrets. The many commentaries on the cherished rites of the Roman Church (Guéranger, Schuster, Parsch, Gihr, Zundel, Vandeur…) contain an inexhaustible wealth of insights, illuminating details one hadn’t noticed before, pointing out reasons for some text or ritual or chant that one had not grasped.

Tintoretto, The Queen of Sheba and Solomon (detail)

I like to think of the Queen of Sheba as a metaphor.

When the queen of Sheba saw all the wisdom of Solomon, and the house which he had built, and the meat of his table, and the apartments of his servants, and the order of his ministers, and their apparel, and the cupbearers, and the holocausts, which he offered in the house of the Lord: she had no longer any spirit in her, and she said to the king: The report is true, which I heard in my own country, concerning thy words, and concerning thy wisdom. And I did not believe them that told me, till I came myself, and saw with my own eyes, and have found that the half hath not been told me: thy wisdom and thy works, exceed the fame which I heard. Blessed are thy men, and blessed are thy servants, who stand before thee always, and hear thy wisdom. (1 Kg 10:1–8)

What happened to the queen in the king’s court, when she cries out “The half of it wasn’t told to me!,” is the opposite of the experience of a person who hears or reads what Catholics believe the Mass and the Holy Eucharist to be — that it is the supreme sacrifice that redeems mankind, our earthly participation in the heavenly liturgy, and so forth — and then goes to check out what it’s like: “Behold, this isn’t even half as good as what I read about or imagined.” But if that same person happened upon a solemn High Mass in the classical Roman Rite, how exactly like the Queen of Sheba’s reaction would his be: “Just based on what I had heard or read about, I couldn’t have imagined such solemn splendor as this!”

The reason for these opposite reactions is simply this: the old rite is so much more than the words of which it is composed — it is thick with ceremonies, gestures, postures, vestments, incense, music — while the new liturgy is centered on and preoccupied with words and communal action, even when it has some of these “traditional elements” added on to it. Hence it cannot fill us with wonder or amazement because we are already saturated in modern times with words (“talk is cheap”), and the mode of their delivery at the new Mass — almost always spoken, and almost always towards us — is the most ordinary, humdrum, secular mode of communication.[1] In such circumstances, there will be no ecstasy like that of the Queen of Sheba.

When everything is visible, nothing is seen. When everything is audible, nothing is heard.

The old rite always exceeds its paper description, whereas the new rite always falls short of its paper description. For Paul VI’s rites, the trailer is better than the film, the advertisement better than the product. For the traditional rites to which no individual pope’s name can be accurately pinned (not even that of St. Pius V), the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the impact exceeds the force of its components, the experience transcends reason and imagination. There is always something that “escapes” our notice, our understanding, our human capacity. We do not measure the rite, because our age did not produce it; we are measured by it, and we always fall short.

Built by a Dutch artist in 1984

Like all modernist projects, the reformed liturgy always sounds better when described by its proponents than it ever comes out when executed by its laborers. One sees this with modern architecture: the plans can look spiffy, but the results always disappoint. It’s the opposite with Gothic architecture: the plans of medieval architects look like quaint doodles compared with their magnificent structures crafted in stone and glass. Or modernist poetry, which itself is never as satisfying as the thick philosophical commentaries written on it — which shows the failure of art, if not the failure of thought.

In like manner, the Novus Ordo was built by the best team of highly credentialed specialists, loquacious about their ideals, but the finished product is what one would expect from a period known for neither theological sublimity nor aesthetic brilliance. As Dietrich von Hildebrand said: “We live in the world without poetry, and this means that one should approach the treasures handed on from more fortunate times with twice as much reverence, and not with the illusion that we can do it better ourselves.”[2]

As Martin Mosebach says, we do not know the names of the saints who “wrote” the old liturgy, with the exception of a few hymnographers. But we know exactly who put together the new one—list after list of experts, carefully recorded by Bugnini in his big fat book The Reform of the Liturgy 1948–1975. This contrast makes all the difference. The old rites are something anonymous that we receive from as many centuries as the Church has offered up her corporate worship to God; the new rites are the work of a committee, imposed on us from above by the stroke of a pen. The one is a collective work of art, the other a period piece trapped in the assumptions of a frenzied and dated movement.

Man was created for ecstasy — not sexual, athletic, aesthetic, or drug-induced, but the ecstasy of faith, of love, of beatitude in union with God for ever. Truly the traditional liturgy of the Church, celebrated with all the resources Divine Providence has bestowed on us, feeds that faith, inflames that charity, and grants us again and again a foretaste of that heavenly consummation.

NOTES

[1] For further explanation, see my articles: “Why We Sing Liturgical Texts” and the quotations from Zuckerkandl contained therein; “Death by Dullness: Prioritizing Speech over Silence and Song”; “How the Liturgy May Open or Close the Door to Christ”; “Twelve Reasons Not to Prefer the Novus Ordo: A Reply to Fr. Longenecker,” point 1.

[2] The Devastated Vineyard (n.p.: Roman Catholic Books, 1985), 70.

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