On September 2nd, Mr. Martin Mosebach delivered the following lecture at the Liturgy Convention of the Archdiocese of Colombo held Sept 1st – 3rd 2010 at Aquinas University College. I think it is very encouraging that The Archbishop of Colombo, the Most Rev. Dr Malcom Ranjith would have Mr. Mosebach at this important Archdiocesan function to address his presbyters. Here’s hoping and praying that they listened to what he had to say!

 
Martin Mosebach at the Liturgy Convention of the Archdiocese of Colombo

THE OLD ROMAN MISSAL: LOSS AND REDISCOVERY

The history of the Holy Catholic Church is full of mysteries; and as well as good mysteries there are evil mysteries, The Apostle Paul speaks, significantly, of the mysterium iniquitatis, the “mystery of iniquity.” Down the centuries the so-called Theodicy—that is, the question “How can there be evil in a Creation that God made good?”—has constantly been bursting into flame. It is a question that comes from a profound unease, from a deep distress. St. Paul’s “mystery of iniquity” recognizes the distress caused by the existence of evil, but he absolutely refuses to give an answer to it. As for myself, I will not say whether the mystery of which I am about to speak is good or evil, or an inseparable mixture of both elements. Why am I reticent on this point? Each one of history’s great events has consequences that send ripples down the centuries, and these consequences are constantly changing their aspect. Something that is a curse in one century may turn out to be a blessing in a later century. But it is also the case that diseases can persist while their manifestations change.

These introductory remarks, I must admit, express a certain hesitation on my part. This is because I am deeply aware of the seriousness of my subject. I wish to speak to you about the tremendous upheaval in the Church’s history since the Second Vatican Council. For it was then that something entirely new happened: something that, until then, was unthinkable. Whenever a Catholic hears the word “new” in connection with the Church, he must always be on his guard. What is really “new” in the history of the world is the Incarnation, God’s becoming man; and this has already taken place. At the same time this Incarnation never ceases to present itself to us as something new: it is something so new that we cannot fully grasp it. It points ahead to a time after the end of times when the world will be re-created. It anticipates this new creation, but until then the Incarnation lodges in the world’s body like a annoying and irritating thorn.

Besides Jesus Christ nothing can be “new” unless it is totally saturated with him. On the contrary, anything that tries to modify, intensify, re-touch or re-vamp what has been revealed once-and-for-all will always remain doubtful and possibly even dangerous, however interesting and attractive it may sound. There is a cultural axiom that states, “Old things are best”: this is surely the experience of every culture, every civilization. Culture is necessarily connected with confidence in the tradition: culture consists in the expansion of a brief human life into the wide horizons of the past and the future. Culture gives people the opportunity to assimilate the experiences of earlier generations and to hand them on the future generations. Based on the experience of past generations, trees can be planted now so that, eventually, generations to come will be able to enjoy their fruit. What is old has proved that it can survive over many generations. It has not sunk into oblivion like things that are valueless and dead, but has demonstrated its fruitfulness over centuries or even millennia. As Goethe, the great German poet, observed: “Only the fruitful is true.” What is old and has remained a living reality can even be the visible form of truth in past and present.

Christians, however, have a further reason for holding fast to what is old and traditional. The Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ cannot be equated with belief in pagan myths, existing in the eternal present, not involved in history. Christians believe that the Creator of heaven and earth became man at a particular moment of history, in the early period of the Roman Empire and in the most despised province of that Empire. In the Creed, one of the most sacred Christian texts, Christians utter the name of the Son of God and of his holy Mother alongside the name of a mediocre and unsuccessful Roman provincial official. This was Pontius Pilate who, on account of his weakness, became associated with the work of Redemption. He owes his immortal fame to the will of the Fathers of the Council of Nicaea, who determined to make it a part of the Christian faith that Jesus was a historical figure. God became man, and being a man meant having a particular country, a particular language, particular traditions, and being born into a particular political and cultural situation. Jesus was a Jew and also a Roman subject. When his Church subsequently incorporated Jewish and Roman characteristics, it was quite literally continuing the Incarnation. And these perpetuation of incarnation is to be the Church’s mission until the end of time.

All Christians are therefore bound to look to the future, to the Lord’s return. But in order to know who it is who will return, they must look back into the past. And the “past” here does not mean the murky abyss of the earliest beginnings of the human race, but the decades of the reigns of the emperors Augustus and Tiberius. This was the time of those who witnessed the Lord’s glory and went to their deaths for the sake of their faith. And their faith was more a knowing than a believing. It is they who handed on the faith to us. No Christian priest and no Christian layman, giving a reason for his Christian faith, can give a greater or better explanation than that given by St. Paul when he says, “I have handed on to you what I have received.” In explaining their faith, Christians are part of a chain that links the present with the past. The bodily act of the laying-on-of-hands, which cannot be replaced by any kind of spiritualism, connects them with the Apostles of the earliest time. What we learn from them is that the presence of Christ is the life of his Church, and this does not come about by way of auto-suggestion, meditation or internal disposition: it occurs by means of the transformed figure of the Incarnate Christ as he passes by, blessing people by laying his hands on them, radiating miraculous powers from his clothes; as his feet are washed by the woman who was a sinner and as they are pierced by the nails; as he weeps for Lazarus and roasts a fish for his disciples. Jesus had taught his disciples that they were constantly to re-create his presence. And this presence was infinitely more precious than his teaching, because it contained not only the entirety of that teaching but far, far more: things that can only be approached through contemplation, not through intellectual comprehension. His Apostles were to become his instruments, making him present, present in the highest and most concentrated moment of his earthly life; that is to say, his sacrificial death on the Cross. 

Early Christians knew as a matter of course that the cult bequeathed to them by the Lord was far more than a repetition of the Last Supper. They knew that the Last Supper was itself only a sign of the real work of redemption that was to take effect in his anguished death on the Cross. That is why they clothed this cult in the most sublime and beautiful forms of prayer and sacrifice that mankind had developed in the thousands of years before the coming of the Redeemer. These forms had no author; they were not devised by wise men: they arose from the sensibilities of all people who desired to worship the Divinity. Only one thing distinguished this new Christian sacrifice from its antecedents in all religions: in making present the sacrifice of Jesus, it was not so much the work of pious and religious men as the work of God himself. It was a work performed by God for the benefit of mankind. It was a work which men—even the most religious men—could not have done for themselves. They could come to it only by the grace of the Redeemer. This is a central axiom of Christian worship, without which it remains unintelligible: it is not a human work, and therefore must not be allowed to appear to be a human work. It must be seen to owe its origin not to the will of man, but to the will of God.For Catholics this should be beyond dispute. But we have to acknowledge that in many parts of the Catholic world, and particularly in the Catholic Church’s historical bedrock territory, this axiom is no longer taken for granted.

After this lengthy introduction I will now return to the developments that took place in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Something happened then that had never happened before. It was new. It was new in such a way that Catholics can only see it with fear and apprehension. I have tried to describe the Church’s relationship with her liturgy: for almost two thousand years the Church’s liturgy was accepted without question as the bodily presence of Jesus, the Head of the Church. It was the Church’s visible body. For a Catholic this visibility is not some subordinate quality: it is not subordinated to some higher, invisible world. God himself took a human body and even bore his wounds with him into glory. Ever since the God-man saw with our eyes and heard with our ears, our senses (which are by nature so easily deceived) are fundamentally empowered to recognize truth. As a result of Christ’s Incarnation the material world is no longer the realm of illusion: now, matter can again be seen for what it is: God’s thoughts, expressed in terms of the material world. This realization gave rise to the absolute seriousness with which the Church used to perform all the physical actions of the liturgy. Every gesture of the hand, every inclination of head or body, every genuflexion, every kiss given to sacred objects was performed seriously and deliberately. The candles, the vessels and the sacrificial gifts of bread and wine were handled with respect. The language in which the divine thoughts were expressed was regarded literally as an instance of revelation. Thus St.Basil the Great, one of the Eastern Fathers, expressly said that Holy Mass was just as much revelation as Holy Scripture. A small example will illustrate the Church’s attitude towards the world of things that she draws into her Sacraments (or did prior to the Second Vatican Council). In medieval times the Cistercians often used to engrave their gold chalices with the name of Mary: just as Mary’s body had carried the God-man, the chalice contained the divine Blood. In this way the whole story of salvation history came to a point in the objects used in the Eucharist. The Second Vatican Council expressly and emphatically repeated the traditional theology of the Mass; it solemnly recognized the sacred language and the sacred music (Gregorian chant, which hovers between West and East, not belonging exclusively to any one culture). The Council called only for a cautious revision of the liturgical books – the kind of revision that was usual every couple of hundred years or so, in order to prevent any misunderstandings creeping in. Let us remember what the Catholic liturgy had achieved up to this time. Beginning with Asia Minor it had conquered the Roman and Greek world. Ultimately it had triumphed in the pagan Empire, had witnessed the latter’s demise and had won over the pagan peoples of the North and East. It became the instrument of a missionary success that is unique in world history. How many historical disintegrations and revolutions did it survive! It expanded beyond the borders of Europe and came to

Asia, Africa and America, and everywhere it was initially something alien – to German and Irish people just as much as to Indians, Singhalese and Chinese. The Germans did not understand Latin, nor could they read, when the great missionary, Boniface, brought the Holy Mass to them. This remained the case for a long time, notably in the Church’s most brilliant periods, when the faithful felt that the most important thing in the celebration of Mass was not that every word should be understood, but that the presence of the Redeemer should be experienced. A man might understand every individual word of the Mass, but if he did not experience this presence, he understood nothing at all, strictly speaking. Revolutions caught fire all over the world, dictatorships mushroomed, only to collapse and shrink, but the Holy Mass remained always the same. To the whole world, Holy Mass tangibly represented the Church’s unchangeable nature down the ages. Even the Church’s enemies recognized that her strength lay in her untimeliness – that is, not that she was old-fashioned, but that she and her liturgy were not completely identified with any particular period or culture; she always had one foot outside time in every period of history. The liturgy was not celebrated in the present time but per omnia saecula saeculorum, for all time since the world’s foundation, right up to the world’s end, and then in eternity. This eternity has already begun and is the gold-leaf background behind all historical times; it is against this backdrop that the liturgy – “The Marriage of the Lamb” as it is called in the Apocalypse – has always been celebrated and always will be.

I realize that I keep losing the thread of my discourse! The reason for this is that I am somewhat inhibited when I come to give an account of the unique event that has taken place in the Church. Of course I can give plenty of sociological, political and historical reasons for this event, which in its effects can only be compared, perhaps, with the hundred years of the Iconoclastic controversy in Constantinople, though Iconoclasm affected only a small region within the vast compass of the universal Catholic Church. But I find none of these reasons convincing. I believe in the Church’s supernatural essence: this means that I cannot be satisfied with any natural explanations for the Church’s triumphs and disasters. Consequently I refuse to guess or surmise the reasons that moved many reformers of his time to surrender the Church’s inherited treasure, her very heart, and draw up a new liturgy. This new liturgy was constructed out of elements of the old liturgy but, as Pope Benedict has said, it tends in a direction that is in many ways opposed to that of the old.

I have already said that this reform was totally unlike anything in the Church’s history. It was fundamentally new and novel and constituted a profound break with tradition. There was also something especially unfortunate about the reform as regards, not only the intention of the reformers, but the time at which it was introduced. For it took place in the fateful year 1968, a year that needs to be given more attention by historians. We give the name “axis years” to years when – without any obvious intellectual or political connections – similar ideas and religious movement spring up all over the world. For instance there are the years when Buddha was teaching in India, Confucius in China, Zoroaster in Persia, Jeremiah in Israel and Pythagoras in Greece. It was as if all these events turned around a single world axis. And also 1968 was such an axis year. It saw the outbreak, throughout the whole world, of a revolt against tradition, authority and inherited values. In France the western world’s last patriarchal head of state, General de Gaulle, was toppled from power. In North America an apparently irresistible youth movement sprang up, making it impossible to continue the war in Vietnam. In Germany the traditional and highly efficient system of free universities was destroyed as a result of strikes. In Prague there was a revolt against the Soviet Union, and China saw the Cultural Revolution with its great devastation. In 1967 the new order of Mass was promulgated against the clear wishes of a synod of bishops specially summoned to consider the issue. It was the first Missal in the history of the Church to have been put together on the desks of academics and largely written from scratch. Now, however, the reform, which we could just as well call a re-invention, was dragged into the tornado of the 1968 Year of Revolution. At a time when the Zeitgeist [the spirit of the times] was utterly out of control, when every form of obedience, authority, respect and reverence was fundamentally rejected, this radical measure was to be implemented in the entire universal Church, from Rome to the most isolated Chinese catacomb community. And we must remember all the time that this measure was itself utterly contrary to the spirit of the Church. The result was that in many places, above all in Europe and the United States, but also in Latin America, it was as if all dams had burst. What was untouchable had shown that it could be touched. This meant that, from now on, there would never again be anything untouchable. From now on everything would be available, at will, to every generation. Everything was in principle available and amenable. [Everything was now "up for grabs"] 

Pope Paul’s reform itself had weighty consequences, but the way it was carried out, particularly in most dioceses of Europe and the United States, trashed everything that, in the Pauline Rite, still had links with Catholic tradition. In this axis year, 1968, reform turned into revolution. It began with the liturgy. And here we can see liturgy’s central role in the Church: everything else, theology, the person of the priest, the hierarchical constitution of the Church, the everyday prayers of the faithful, the edifice of Catholic culture, missionary work, and ultimately even the core articles of faith, were intimately connected with the liturgy. With the liturgy they all stood or fell. The liturgy was not a historically conditioned form that could be replaced and adapted to everyday needs without doing damage to its substance. This should have been obvious even to people who mistakenly thought that love for the traditional liturgy was a morally dubious, a kind of religious aestheticism. Pastoral requirements had been cited as the strangest argument for the reform. A severely simplified rite, with vernacular prayers that were theologically general and unchallenging in tone, would surely help to keep modern people within the Church. Even this notion should have made people ask questions; in the mission lands of Asia, for instance, with their advanced civilization, people had been accustomed to extraordinarily rich rites in difficult sacred languages for millennia. To withhold Catholic tradition from them was equivalent to an act of colonialist paternalism. In the Christian heartlands, however, the reform’s simplifications had devastating consequences. When, in spite of much resistance, the reform was pushed through in a last exercise of power on the part of the Roman central authorities, the faithful began to pull out of the churches. As someone wrily observed, “The reform of the Mass was intended to open the Church’s doors to those outside; what happened was that the people inside escaped and ran away!” The solemn, hieratic cult was abolished, and the attempt was made, so to speak, to run after the faithful with the sacraments. But they declined this offer. In whole areas of Europe all understanding of the sacraments disappeared. The entire development was baffling: now that every word – allegedly – could be understood, the whole eucharistic event had become somehow alien to people. The Church’s great work of making God present no longer made sense. Simultaneously, knowledge of the Catholic faith withered away. Today, in Europe, there are many Catholics who can hardly say an Our Father, let alone a Creed. Many have only the vaguest notion of the Church’s teaching.

Terrible damage has been done to the Catholic priesthood in the wake of the reform. In the west the ancient awareness that the priest at the altar is acting in persona Christi has faded. The reformed [and refashioned] clergy has remodeled itself along fashionably democratic lines. It cannot bear the idea that the priest is homo excitatus a Deo (a man called out from among the crowd). A modern priest feels the distinction between laity and priesthood – a distinction found in the Acts of the Apostles – to be something deeply upsetting; he cannot deny this distinction, so he tries to forget it. Lay people invade the sanctuary, women act as altar servers (and in doing so they obscure the fact that acolytes actually belong to the lower ranks of the clergy). In Europe, generally speaking, priests have abandoned clerical dress. They no longer want to be recognizable; they find their role in a secularized society a source of embarrassment. In German there is an old saying, “The habit does not make the monk.” This is correct, but the opposite is equally true, and we have come to understand this in our time: “It’s the habit that makes the monk.” In other words, it is the harmony of outer form and inner attitude that makes the Catholic priest. He is meant to exercise his role in persona Christi in a bodily way: he should be visible and tangible to everyone.

Liturgy, leiturgia in Greek, means “public service” or “service to the public”. Liturgical prayer is contrasted with the prayer of the individual. The individual speaks to God in whatever language he knows and with whatever words he can, whereas the Church prays in the name of Angels, of Saints, of the souls in Purgatory and of the living on earth. This prayer of all and for all must therefore be shaped by a form that is open to everyone’s scrutiny. The western Church was afraid that there would be a widening gap between a religionless, libertarian consumer society and the world of faith; accordingly it tried to suppress everything that was specific to itself and might therefore give offence [be a stumbling block] in the secular sphere. It tried to support the modern world’s principles. As a result, as someone said, “it baptized ideas that had not been converted.” Forty years went by in this way and the western Church lost more and more clarity of profile, trying more and more obsequiously to adapt itself to the ideas of a religionless society. There is something mysterious and magical about these numbers. The People of Israel spent forty years wandering in the desert. The Communist occupation of East Germany with its puppet regime also lasted for forty years. [Forty years were spent "reforming" the Church;] and when these forty years were up, the fruit had ripened. It burst and spread its evil-smelling contents all around. I am speaking here of the immorality scandals that have shaken many of the Church’s western provinces. Of course we can say that in the present environment, which is hostile to the Church, the scandals have been maliciously exaggerated, distorted and generalized. But what the scandals reveal above all is a Church that is speechless and helpless, having secularized itself. Having shamelessly courted the public, it can no longer communicate its own being; it can no longer communicate its core reality. Forty years of aggiornamento, forty years of popularizing and secularizing the sacrament of the altar, have produced a catastrophe of the gravest proportions. This is no exaggeration. And as for those people who, right from the start, watched the secularization experiment with anxiety and apprehension, they are not saying smugly, “I told you so!” There is no satisfaction in being in the right when all of us are faced with this terrible collapse and the Church’s moral ostracism [banishment from society]. We realize that whole generations have been abandoned and lost, and that any reconstruction will be infinitely hard and laborious. The blood that has haemorrhaged from the western Church will take a very long time to replace.

There was a time before, in the Church’s history, when the faith began to shift its dwelling-place. It left areas in which had settled and won new territory elsewhere. Few Christians now live in Christianity’s original homelands, Palestine, Egypt, Asia Minor particularly – places where the young Church blossomed and the first important Council took place. Why should Christian Europe be any different? Christianity has traveled all around the world from its base in Europe. In Asia it may be as yet a minority, but a minority that is spiritually and intellectually strong, resolute and ready for sacrifice. It is a minority that is regarded with respect by the majority. 

It is clear to me that the destruction of Catholic tradition did less damage in regions where it was not linked with the spirit of 1968. Though these reforms were plainly contrary to the Church’s tradition, it was possible, of course, to implement them in a spirit of devotion and with a heart that had been fashioned by this tradition. Furthermore, many of the most offensive infringements committed against the law of Catholic tradition were in no way rooted in Pope Paul’s reform. They arose from the disobedience that proliferated everywhere in the West as a result of the structural collapse during the pontificate of this unfortunate pope. Once Paul VI had begun to realize the extent of the destruction, he observed with great emotion that “the smoke of Satan had entered the Church.” The Missal of. Paul VI, for instance, did not order the altars to be turned round – one of the most grievous acts against the tradition of prayer in the entire world. Pope Paul did not necessarily want to put an end to the tradition whereby the priest, together with the faithful, faces the Crucified Christ, the Christ who is to come again from the East; nor did he want to suppress the tradition according to which the priest addresses his prayers, together with the congregation, to Christ, present on the altar in the form of the transformed [transubstantiated] gifts. This reversal of the orientation of prayer did more harm in Europe and the United States than all the relativizing, demythologizing and humanizing theologians. It struck the simple believer immediately that the prayers were no longer addressed to God but to the congregation. Now, the purpose of prayer was to put the congregation in the right mood, the right frame of mind so that it could celebrate itself as the “People of God”. Something similar happened when Holy Communion was given in the hand instead of on the tongue, as formerly. This change, also, was not foreseen in the Missal of Paul VI: it was enforced by some German bishops. 

Prior to the changes a whole garland of reverent gestures had accumulated around the sacrament of the altar, and these gestures gave a most eloquent sermon, constantly reminding priest and people of the Lord’s mysterious presence in the [consecrated] Bread and Wine. We can be sure of this: no theological indoctrination on the part of so-called “enlightened” theologians did as much damage to the belief of western Catholics as did communion in the hand. It immediately abolished all the former precautions [care] with regard to particles from the Host. Is it impossible, then, to receive communion in the hand reverently? Of course it is possible. But once the etiquette of reverence exists and has had its beneficial, elevating influence on the consciousness of the faithful, it stands to reason that withdrawing the etiquette gave a clear signal (and by no means only to simple believers). What was this signal? That the earlier degree of reverence was not required. This in turn, logically, produced the conviction — a conviction not initially made explicit — that there was nothing present that might command respect.

As I have said, these things were the result of the baneful combination of the liturgical reform with the West’s politicalZeitgeist. Absurdly, this “spirit of the age” demanded the democratization of Catholic worship, as if the Church were a political organization like a state or a political party. In Asia, by contrast, the Church’s growth, its Spirit-filled and charismatic power seems not to have been undermined by the reform; every Catholic must be heartily thankful for this. Where the fire burns, it can be given to others. It would not be the first time in the Church’s history that missionary territories had re-transmitted the faith to Christian homelands that had lost it. After the fall of the Roman Empire, France was re-Christianized by Irish monks, who in turn owed their Christianity to Egyptian missionaries. In this way the Christian law of mutuality was fulfilled, brothers strengthening each other in faith. But we must also remember the poet John Donne’s line, “No man is an island,” – in this sense: in the universal Church there are no Isles of the Blessed, no places that are spared the fortunes and misfortunes of the wider body in the long run. The crisis in the wider body of the Church will one day reach all its parts; we must be prepared and equipped for this. So regions that have not yet produced the symptoms of decay and debility [weakening] must ask what the causes of such decay were, and what can be done to forestall them. The attack on the inherited liturgy by the reform of the Mass remains a problem in the strictly philosophical sense of the word, because it has. created a situation that has no obvious solution. People say, “problems have no solution, only a history.” And this history of the problem of liturgical reform has only just begun. Even before his election, our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI was one of the very few bishops who knew that the radical break with tradition represented a great danger for the Church. Now, in his famous Motu proprio he has asserted that the Church’s Traditional Rite was never forbidden because, by its very nature, it could not be forbidden. The Pope is-not the master of the liturgy but its protector. The Church never forsakes its inherited rites, which it regards as a spiritual heritage. On the contrary, it urges the faithful to study them and make their hidden treasures available here and now. 

The Pope had no intention of ignoring the past – a futile enterprise in any case – and pretending that the last forty years did not happen. He took a decision that was aimed, above all, at reconciling the reform party with the defenders of Catholic tradition. According to the papal statement there is now one single Roman Rite in two forms, the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary”. The two forms stand side by side in a relationship of equality. Either of these two forms can be celebrated by any priest at any time without episcopal permission. They are related to each other in such a way that the celebrant of the New Rite (the “ordinary” form) is meant to learn from the Traditional Form (the “extraordinary” form) how the Church’s tradition understands Holy Mass. The Pope has urged the Church to re-examine the old books of rites and learn, from the fathers and saints of past centuries, how to perform the solemn work of making God present. We are all summoned, then, to give thanks for the rescuing of the traditional Missal, which was almost lost, to open it – perhaps even at the eleventh hour – and read how the Church, and all those faithful people to whom we all owe our faith, used to pray. Perhaps we too can try to pray again as they did. We should not forget that this was the Missal of the Roman Popes; it was prescribed for the whole Church at the Council of Trent. Why? Because, with absolute certainty, it contained not a single error, nor even the possibility of any misunderstanding. In the great crisis of the Reformation it was regarded as a kind of spiritual Noah’s Ark for the Church, saving it from the Flood of universal apostasy.

Let us then rediscover the Psalm Judica, with which the traditional Mass begins at the foot of the altar, this unique preparation for the rite. We are summoned to leave behind our individual, everyday concerns, to turn away from the godforsaken world and put away our anxieties, cares and deep-seated doubts. We are to go up to the sanctuary of the Lord on the Temple Mountain. This Psalm invites us to Holy Mass as to a pilgrimage, in which we set out and leave behind everything that obstructs our prayer. Next the priest makes his confession of sin and the congregation listens to him in silence before praying for his sins to be forgiven. Then the congregation makes its own confession of sin to the priest. In fact, the confession of sin only makes sense in this dialogue form, because a confession needs someone to listen – and someone who, while listening, is not speaking at the same time. Let us rediscover the great Creed of Constantinople, which was formulated to clarify the Creed of Nicaea and ward off the errors of Arianism. Just like the Church when it was threatened by Arianism, we need again the profession of faith that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” In Germany, at least, this Creed has disappeared almost entirely from worship, as has the genuflexion at the central article of our faith, “et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria virgine et homo factus est.” With wonder and astonishment let us read the Orations, especially those of the Sundays after Pentecost, many of which were composed by St. Jerome himself. They are masterpieces of rhetoric [oratory], formulating theological truths that nourish meditation even outside the Mass, and uniquely giving voice to the Christian relationship between God and man. One of the greatest losses in the reform of the Mass is the loss of the Offertory prayers, during which the veiled sacrificial gifts are brought to the altar and the sacred event of the Lord’s sacrificial death begins. These prayers come from earliest times; they speak, for the first time in human history, of the dignity of man, a dignity God gave to his creatures from the very beginning, a dignity that was wondrously renewed by Jesus’ sacrificial death. The Epiclesis, too, is of the greatest importance: in it the Holy Ghost is called down upon the gifts. The Eastern Church regards this prayer as having an essential effect on the act of transforming the gifts; but the Western Church, too, knows that it is the Holy Ghost who will bring about the miracle of transubstantiation. Then comes the Roman canon, which is still contained in the new missal, though it is prayed in only a few places nowadays. The Roman canon, listing as it does all the saints of the city of Rome, connects every offering of Mass with Rome, with the Pope and therefore with the universal Church. In this way those who share in the Mass come forth from their home countries and become citizens of Rome, members of the one Church that embraces the whole world. In one highly significant prayer the Roman canon links the present altar sacrifice with the sacrifices of all men at all times: with the sacrifice of Abel (representing revelation in its first form), the sacrifice of King Melchizedek (who was not a Jew and so represents the sacrifices of non-Jewish peoples) and the sacrifice of Abraham, which – in terrifying explicitness – anticipates the sacrifice of the Cross, this drama that is acted out between Father and Son.

I can give only the barest indication of the wealth of forms to be found in a ritual language that has undergone thousands of years of refinement. The old Missal is full of references and allusions, which only yield their meaning after decades of use. Its aim is to change the lives of the faithful. It demands life-long meditation. It is not an instrument for instant propaganda; rather, one must allow it time to penetrate the soul.

And what of the language of the Missal? The English-speaking faithful, at least, will soon be able to use correct translations that will replace the many very damaging simplifications and falsifications to be found [in the current English language missals.] Other nations, where modernist arrogance is more established, will have to wait longer for this. It is therefore all the more important for priests, as well as the faithful, to get to know the Church’s mother tongue, in which the Church’s teachings have been preserved in such clarity and conciseness. A sacred language has the advantage of being the language of no individual nation. We enter this language like entering a sacred building; it breathes a prayer that is more powerful than the prayer of the individual. It speaks a prayer that is pre-existent, that is there before us; we only have to associate ourselves with it, join ourselves to it. The Church we belong to is above time and above nations; and she is present in this sacred language.

It may be that the present crisis is presenting us with an opportunity: we should not allow ourselves to drown in pious routine but seek to rediscover the Church’s visible form, learn to love and defend it like a precious treasure that we thought had been lost: to our great surprise and joy we find it again, and realize – perhaps for the first time – that nothing can replace it.

By Martin Mosebach

Amidst the swirling tempest of false and misleading reporting stirred up by the MSM in an attempt to de-rail the papacy of Benedict XVI, a number of important posts have begun to surface about the blogosphere which can help, not only in clearing the name of an unjustly maligned pope, but perhaps more importantly, by re-focusing the attention upon the true source of the crisis – and thereby upon it’s solution.  Chief among those is a wonderful interview between Alexander Goerlich of The European and Martin Mosebach, the award-winning German author of The Heresy of Formlessness helpfully translated from the original German by the folks at The Society of St. Hugh of Cluny.  I reproduce the entire interview (with some added emphasis) here because not only is the topic so important, but Mosebach so clearly “connects the dots” in ways that we simply *must* learn to do if we are to recognize the crisis for what it truly is, and to thereby recognize it’s solution.

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A Conversation with Martin Mosebach led by Alexander Goerlach of The European.

The European: Personally, how do you assess the five years in which Benedict XVI has been in Office?

Mosebach: Benedict XVI has set for himself the most difficult mission. He wants to heal the evil consequences of the Church’s Revolution of 68 in a non-revolutionary manner. This pope is precisely not a papal dictator. He relies on the strength of the better argument and hopes that the nature of the Church will overcome that which is inappropriate to her if certain minimal assistance is provided. This plan is so subtle that it can be neither presented in official explanations nor understood by an almost unimaginably coarsened press. It is a plan that will show its effects only in the future – probably only with clarity after the death of the Pope. But already now we can recognize the courage with which the pope establishes reconciliation beyond the narrow limits of the canon law (through the integration of the Patriotic church in China; in relation to Russian and Greek Orthodoxy) or by his novel fusion of traditional and enlightened biblical theology that leads us out of the dead end of rationalistic bible criticism.

The European: Don’t we also have to prepare for cases of abuse in Catholic institutions in other countries? In your view how should Pope Benedict react to them?

Mosebach: The Church of course always has to be prepared for the fact that individual educators will sexually abuse students in her schools and boarding schools. That’s the nature of things. Wherever children are instructed, personalities with pedophile inclinations are always found. We have to ask ourselves, however, why just in the years immediately following the Second Vatican council the sexual crimes of priests occurred so frequently. There is no way of avoiding the bitter realization: the experiment of “aggiornamento”, the assimilation of the Church to the secularized world, has failed in a terrible way. After the Second Vatican Council, most priests dropped their clerical garb, ceased celebrating the mass daily and did not pray the breviary daily any more. The post-conciliar theology did everything in its power to make people forget the traditional image of the priest. All the institutions were called into question which had given the priest aid in his difficult and solitary life. Should we be astonished if many priests in these years could no longer view themselves as priests in the traditional manner? The clerical discipline that was deliberately eliminated had been largely formulated by the Council of Trent. At that time the mission was likewise to resist the corruption of the clergy and to reawaken the consciousness of the sanctity of the priesthood. It is nice that the leaders of the church ask the victims of abuse for forgiveness but it will be still more important if they tighten the reins of discipline in the sense of the Council of Trent and return to a priesthood of the Catholic Tradition.

The European: How will the Catholic Church look which Benedict will eventually leave behind him?

Mosebach: One would wish that this Pope might perceive himself the first manifestations of a healing of the Church. But this Pope is so modest and lacking in vanity that he hardly would view any such glimmerings as the result of his own actions. I believe that he wants to spare his successor thankless yet necessary labors by assuming them himself. Hopefully this successor will utilize the great opportunity that Benedict has created for him.

The European: The “Reform of the Liturgy” has fundamentally changed the Catholic Church – in what way?

Mosebach: The interventions of Paul VI in a liturgy over 1500 years old are called only “reform of the liturgy.” In reality it was a revolution that was not authorized by the instruction of the Second Vatican Council, to “gently” review the liturgical books. The “liturgical reform” centered upon man a celebration that had been orientated for the last two thousand years to the adoration of God. It undermined the priesthood and largely obscured the doctrine of the Church on the sacraments.

The European: In the late sixties there were many upheavals: the Cultural Revolution in China, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the student riots here at home, the Vietnam War – and the Second Vatican Council. Can we name all these upheavals in the same breath?

Mosebach: 1968 is, in my opinion, a phenomenon that is still not sufficiently understood. Here in Germany we like to occupy ourselves in this context with happy memories of communes and battles over the right interpretation of Marx. In reality, 1968 is an “axial year” in history with anti-traditionalist movements in the entire world that are only in appearance fully separate from each other. I am convinced that, when sufficient distance exists, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Roman Liturgical Reform will be understood to be closely connected.

The European: Pope Benedict XVI participated in this upheaval as a theologian of the Council. How do you experience today his commitment to revive individual liturgical elements of the pre-conciliar Church?

Mosebach: Benedict XVI views as one of his main tasks making the essence of the Church more clearly visible – for Catholics and then also for non-Catholics. The Pope knows that the Church is indissolubly bound to her Tradition. Church and revolution are irreconcilable contradictions. He attempts to intervene where the image of the Church has been distorted through a radical break with the past. Now the Church, like its Founder, has exactly two natures: historical and timeless. She cannot forget from where she came and cannot forget where she is going. Especially the Church in the West has problems with this. She has neither any sense for her historical organic evolution nor for her life in eternity.

The European: The reintroduction of the old rite allowed again the petition for the conversion of the Jews, as it was in use prior to the Council. Was that the right step?

Mosebach: When the organic liturgy was permitted again (which had been suppressed, very often violently, under Paul VI) so also was the petition for the conversion of the Jews once again admitted into the official liturgical books of the Church. It dates from early Christianity and forms part of the Good Friday petitions. This early Christian petition, based on wording of the Apostle Paul, contains the wording that God might liberate the Jews from “their blindness” and “lift the veil from their hearts.” These expressions appeared to the Pope to permit the misunderstanding of contempt for the Jews because of recent history. Therefore he intervened when the traditional rite was authorized again and ordered a new formulation in the old rite. It also asks God to lead the Jews to Jesus Christ, but excludes the interpretation of contempt for them. The Pope has been condemned because he permits praying for the conversion of the Jews to Jesus Christ at all. But can the Church of the Jews Peter and Paul be expected to renounce such an intention?

The European: How do you assess the relationship of the Pope to the Jews and Israel?

Mosebach: Benedict XVI is probably the first pope since Peter to understand Christianity so closely from out of Judaism. His book on Jesus reveals in many passages the attempt to read the New Testament with the eyes of the Old Testament. The relationship of the Pope to Jewry is not superficial, political or a mere liking derived from a trendy philosemitism but is theological and rooted in faith. One has at times the impression that if Benedict were not a Christian he would be a Jew. To accuse this Pope of anti-Semitism betrays an ignorance and incompetence that should exclude one from public discourse.

The European: The controversy surrounding the FSSPX has yielded no visible success for the Vatican up till now. In your view what does this group bring to the Catholic Church other than its love for the old liturgy?

Mosebach: Other than the old liturgy? What is there more important for the Church than the liturgy? The liturgy is the body of the Church. It is faith made visible. If the liturgy falls ill, so does the entire Church. That is not a merely a hypothesis but a description of the current situation. One can’t present it drastically enough: the crisis of the Church has made possible that her greatest treasure, her Arcanum, was swept out of the center to the periphery. The FSSPX and especially its founder, Archbishop Lefebvre, are due the historical glory to have preserved for decades and kept alive this most important gift. Therefore the Church owes the FSSPX above all gratitude. Part of this gratitude is to work to lead the FSSPX out of all kinds of confusion and radicalization.

The European: The FSSPX don’t appear to be heading towards Rome.

Mosebach: In the discussions with the FSSPX what is important is the patient labor of persuasion, as is appropriate in spiritual questions. The discussions appear to be proceeding in a very good atmosphere. If one day it is successful in integrating once again the FSSPX in the full unity of the Church, the papacy of Benedict XVI would have obtained a success whose importance exceeds by far the number of FSSPX members.

The European: Christianity is one of the foundations of Europe. In the future will it still be relevant for the continent?

Mosebach: Christianity is the foundation of Europe – I don’t see any other. All intellectual movements of modern times, even when they opposed Christianity, owe their origins to it. We have also received ancient philosophy and art from the arms of Christianity. If European society should turn away totally from Christianity, it would mean nothing less than it would deny its very self. What one doesn’t know or want to know nevertheless exists. Repression cannot be the basis for a hopeful future.

The European: You were in Turkey for a while. Would Turkey enrich the European Union as a full member or is it difficult to integrate a land dominated by Islam into the Western community of values?

Mosebach: You surely understand that I cannot give you a political or legal answer. I can only see that Turkey – especially the anti-Islamic, modernizing Turkey – has had enormous difficulties with its Christian European minorities. Until the 1950’s there was still a Greek-dominated Constantinople. But living together with Christians was intolerable for the modern Turks so they put an end to it. Now they seem to find desirable drawing near to Europe because of economic concerns without, however, rethinking in their internal politics the battle against Christians. I believe that we are very far removed from what you call “integration into the Western community of values.”

Translation by kind permission of Martin Mosebach.

V. Allelluia, surrexit Christus!
R. Dominus surrexit vere, alleluia!

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I shared an excellent article (H/T Pertinacious Papist) recently on Google’s “BUZZ” which elicited a question from a (protestant) friend of mine.   Since my response seemed quickly to outgrow the limitations of the format of the BUZZ com-box, I thought I’d post the full response here, and simply link to it there.

NOTE:  Please do read the original article first, including the footnotes, as it will be important for understanding the context for the question!

With that noted, here was my friends’ question:

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 i know i’m not considered part of the family, but i find the question interesting. i don’t have a view on whether a priest should do a mass before doing another one in public. i think the author makes too strong a case for private masses. if private masses should be done before public ones for all the reasons he cites, then additional private masses should be done prior to those private masses just prior to the public ones…and additional ones for those too, etc. 
i’m sure this kind of reply has been made by someone not for private masses.

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Much could be said on this topic, but allow me to offer a couple of points in answer to the questions you raise:

1) Nonsense: whatever the problems with Vatican II, or with it’s implementation, there is certainly one truth which shines out from it’s documents: and that is that if it can be said that many elements of sanctification and truth exist within the ecclesial communities of the separated brethren (including protestants), then these ecclesial communities must indeed be “brethren” (by virtue of their baptism) even if they are, for the moment (and sadly) “separated”.  

Nevertheless, to honor the kernel of truth in your comment about not being “part of the family,” it is a sad fact of “separation” that over time it creates barriers of understanding because the common foundations for that understanding have not all been passed down within the ecclesial communities of the separated brethren, and without that context, discussions of this sort become complicated by the need to create some meaningful context in which such questions can be asked and in which the answers to such questions will be meaningful. 

But my point (e.g. my “Nonsense:”) is that such is due not to myself or any other catholic not “considering” someone to be a “part of the family”, but rather to the sad objective reality of such separatedness, and the sad barriers to communication which necessarily flow from such separatedness – particularly when it has extended, as with protestant communities, for over 500 years.

2) Some of these barriers to communication can be observed, I believe in your next statement where you speak of “whether a priest should do a mass before doing another one in public”.  It might not be so obvious coming to this article from the context of a separation extending back 500 years or more, but that’s not what the article is talking about – indeed, it is specifically rejected in footnote 4. which states:

“Note that if there are twelve Priests in the community, one of them would not celebrate a private Mass that day in order to be the Priest who offers the conventual Mass in the midst of his brethren. No Priest celebrates twice a day (bination) unless pastoral need requires it, which would not be the case in such a community.”

This point about the traditional norm of “1 mass per priest per day” (in both it’s positive – e.g. “at least” interpretation, and it’s negative – e.g. “no more than” interpretation) is, on one level, merely an issue of cannon law and it’s interpretation. However, cannon law is a codification of the will of, and itself a tool of, the Holy Spirit, who, since he is, as St. Augustine said, “the bond of charity flowing between the Father and the Son”, works through the the norms, laws, and traditions of the Church’s sacraments to build up the Body of Christ in charity, and to vivify it towards the goal of that charity in the glorification of the Head, Christ himself, who in turn, seeks the glorification of the Father – “that God may be All in all.” (1 Cor. 15:28)

And that is why, on another level, what has to be understood is bigger than merely an argument about the interpretation of some canon or other, be it Canon 904 or 906 or whatever.  What is at stake here is the root question of why do we even HAVE priests at all?  What is a Priest? For what purpose are priests ordained?  Here is where the context becomes important.  Within the unbroken tradition of the Catholic Church (and to a great extent, this statement applies to our separated Eastern Orthodox brethren as well) a man is ordained a Priest “in order to offer the sacrifice of the Mass for the living and for the dead”.  Another way of saying this is to say that the sacrifice of the Mass is offered to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Ghost, “for” (in the different senses pertaining to each) the Church in each of it’s Militant, Expectant, and Triumphant manifestations – and, through and as a consequence of this, also “for” the whole world. 

What I’m getting at here particularly is the way in which the Sacrifice of the Mass is an expression of the faith, hope, and particularly, the charity, of the Church - charity flowing between, and thus creating a bond between, not only herself and her Divine Lord, but also a bond of charity flowing between one another – which is another reason why Masses are offered *both* for living and for dead, since two thirds (and indeed, far MORE than two thirds if measured numerically!) of that Militant/Expectant/Triumphant-complex refers to those who have “fallen asleep in the Lord”. 

Furthermore, this bond of charity flowing between the faithful – both living and dead – results in an overflowing of grace which spills out into the world as well. I’ll never forget the chill that ran up my spine when it hit me, while watching the FSSP training video for the Latin Mass, that the final Trinitarian “Blessing” at the end of the Mass is still spoken, “versus populum” as-it-were, *even if* the church building is empty and no one else but the priest himself is present – e.g. it is pronounced towards an “empty” room!  The reason?  This blessing is placed, in fulfilment of the Church’s commission to be a blessing to all the families of the earth, as an objective reality, not merely upon the faithful, but upon the whole world.  It is the final aspect of the great Cosmic “Yes” which Christ, through his Sacrifice on our behalf, and not only on our behalf, but on behalf of the “whole world” has offered to the Father, that such a blessing is pronounced, even if there is no one else (visibly) present but the Priest.

It should not go without mention, since we’re discussing the Mass in it’s aspect of charity, that the “intentions” of the priest at Mass are one of the primary ways in which the bond of charity, subsisting among and flowing between the faithful within this Militant/Expectant/Triumphant-complex, is made fruitful in the honoring of one another (in the case of the Triumphant and Expectant), and in the procurement of grace and blessings for one another (in the case of the Militant and Expectant).  This is another element of the “context” behind this discussion of so-called “private” masses which could easily be mis-understood or overlooked by someone coming at the discussion from the quite different context of a separated protestant ecclesial community.  Because within the protestant context, this aspect of the Mass as the primary means by which the “whole” Church celebrates and actualizes that bond of charity betwixt her members, and betwixt herself and her Lord, is often truncated, and the result is that what is offered or celebrated there tends to be understood as only applying with reference to the particular individuals living within that particular ecclesial community and in attendance at that particular moment.

As a result, from a protestant context, it would seem silly and irrelevant to celebrate a Mass in front of an empty church building – e.g. with no one else there but the priest.  Leaving aside completely for the moment the question of whether the Mass is or could be a conduit for God’s Grace and Blessing – which is not going to be necessarily granted by a protestant anyway – there is the further problem that in the protestant understanding, what is celebrated exists, and can only exist, “for” whoever is in that building at the moment – after all, as a protestant praying for the dead (e.g. the Church Expectant) is frowned upon, and praying “to” the dead (e.g. the Church Triumphant) is, in the immortal words of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, ”RIGHT out!”   This is, in one sense, merely another part of (perhaps the core of?) what I have meant in the past when I have spoken more generally about the ecclesiological differences between the Catholic Church and the ecclesial communities of protestant brethren separated from her, which, as I recognized even before becoming convinced of the truth of the Catholic Church’s position, had reduced the protestant ecclesial community to a “merely” horizontal, political organization – which exists, and accomplishes whatever rites it celebrates, “of, by, and for The People”.

By contrast, from a catholic perspective, ANY Mass, including so-called “private” Masses *even if* no one is (visibly) present but the Priest who is celebrating, is FULL of rich meaning and import – to say nothing of the graces which it contains – with which it blesses the WHOLE Militant/Expectant/Triumphant Church, and, in so doing, enriches and blesses the whole world.

In conclusion, I can say that I definitely understand why this question would occur to you, and while I can’t claim that I’ve necessarily given a “complete” or “satisfying” answer, hopefully I’ve at least broached upon some of the issues of difference in context which affect the asking, and answering, of such a question.

Now that we have entered the season of “Greater Lent” (as the period from Septuagesima through Holy Saturday is sometimes known) it seems appropriate for me to continue following the path of penitence by confessing some of my own sins, liturgically speaking.  While there are many of these – and no doubt too many to enumerate – I trust that God’s mercy covers the many things done in ignorance, which most of my sins were, to a greater or lesser extent.  Nevertheless, it is true that some of my liturgical sins were more harmful to my fellow-Christians than others, and so it is probably those for which I ought to be most sorry and to do the most penance, as they were most likely to have provoked a breach in the bond of charity. 

Of these, probably the greater number, subsumed under the heading “a little knowledge is a very dangerous thing,” occurred not too many years after the period of “liturgical awakening” in my life, when I and my family first ventured from the safety of the fold of generic Evangelical Christian worship, and found our way to an small Episcopal parish.  It was a wonderful time of exploring a richness of worship experience that was unprecedented in our prior experience, and which, further, seemed to offer the promise of connecting us on the level of praxis with the great Tradition which stretched back to the Apostles and our Lord himself.

What I did not understand at the time, however, was that what I was experiencing was not nearly so “historic” as I had been led to believe, but was rather a slightly modified version of the Novus Ordo cooked up by trendy Episcopalian liturgists during the ’70s following the lead of Monsignor Annibale Bugnini (who was chief architect of the disastrous “Reform” of the Roman Liturgy which followed the Second Vatican council) and, as it turns out, often working in conjunction with the ICEL and used it’s translations of the “real” Novus Ordo that had been rolled out in by Paul VI in 1969.  

Since my background had been so devoid of anything which could connect with the historic Church’s liturgy, even this “liturgy-lite” seemed a wondrous banquet, and I dove in head-first, with great zeal, but very little knowledge and even less understanding.  As a result of this lack of knowledge, I found myself a willing pawn in the battle of the Bishop vs. the Traditionalists in my own parish.  Without knowing where the new-fangled “tradition” begun with the promulgation of the 1979 Episcopal Prayerbook had really come from, I simply accepted it and it’s claims to represent the historic Christian Tradition at face-value, and simply assumed that what the Bishop was trying to do must have a good reason. 

I understood so little about the basics of liturgical sense and even less about the true Historic Christian liturgy, that I was completely insensitive to the Traditional architecture of our parish, with it’s wonderfully carved High-Altar.  To me, it simply put the Priest “too far away” from everyone.  So I wholehearted agreed with and supported the Bishop’s move to install and consecrate a new versus populum Altar located not “far away” at the eastern end of the building, but right in the midst of the people – at East end of the crossing.

While it is true that there were some positive gains from the “renovation” – such as the opening up of the North and South transepts which had been walled off for many years – nevertheless, those gains were more than over-matched by the many other changes (such as moving the font from it’s traditional position near the entrance to front-and-center at West entrance to the crossing, and moving the choir and organ from the traditional “monastic” location in the East transept immediately West of the High Altar into the newly re-opened North and South transepts) which were made, so that in truth the “renovation” should be classed more as a “wreck-o-vation”.  But I knew so little at the time, that I couldn’t have begun to understand why much of what we were doing was so fundamentally wrong and out-of-sync with the true historic Tradition of Christian worship.

Over time I have come to understand that it was largely many of my unquestioned “protestant” assumptions about “the point” of the liturgy which functioned to help insulate me from being more sensitive to how wrong and out-of-sync with the great Tradition of historic Christian worship most of what we were doing was.  As a “reformed protestant with a prayerbook,” I simply assumed what all protestants inherently assume, which is that worship is “of the people, by the people, and for the people”.  Now, I should be clear, if you were to ask a protestant “is worship for man or for God” he would quickly say, “God, of course!”  and might even follow it up with “what a silly question!” But the fact is that in practice, all of the decisions about what is done and what is not done stem, in one way or another, not from the Divine but from the Human.  This is necessarily so, because protestantism has no concept of the historic Center of Christian Worship, which is the propitiatory Sacrifice of our Saviour made present by the Holy Ghost upon the Altar through the agency of the ordained Priest who offers up the Consecrated Host to the Father as our Lord himself offered his body and blood for the life of the world. 

Without this Divine aspect at the Core of Christian worship, all that is left is the human aspect – an either more or less elaborate club meeting where songs are sung, and preaching and catechesis is done, and in the more “high-church” settings, a communal meal (the “Lord’s Supper”) is tacked on in what, without the anchor of it’s being a re-presentation of the Propitiatory Sacrifice of the Cross, easily degenerates in practice, and in the minds of protestant worshipers, into not much more than a kind of “team-building, community-enhancing activity”.  And this fact is reflected in both “what” is done, and “how” it is done.

For example, in such a (protestant) context, it makes PERFECT sense to move the focus of the liturgical activity from the High Altar, versus Deum, to a versus populum “Holy Table”, situated “in the midst” of the people for whom the Supper is prepared and celebrated. 

You see, without the understanding that the Sacrifice is being offered TO GOD and on BEHALF OF the faithful, and only secondarily and derivatively is it received back FROM God (by the power of the Holy Ghost through the agency of the ordained Priest) “for” the faithful – without this understanding, there is no readily intelligible *reason* for worshiping versus Deum – which ends up being interpreted as the priest “turning his back” on the people.

You see the difference?  It is only because the Sacrifice of Christ’s Body and Blood is FIRST offered, as it was on the Cross, TO GOD for the Church, and ultimately, for the life of the world, that it THEN, in union with and AS that same Body and Blood which hung upon the Cross, can it be given back to the faithful, not before, and not without.  Thus, it is according to it’s nature as a re-presentation of Christ’s Propitiatory Sacrifice, that the priest stands versus Deum, and, conversely, it is AGAINST that same nature that the Mass is performed (as it is almost exclusively in the Novus Ordo) versus populum.

In that kernel of truth, lies hid most of what separates truly Historic Christian worship – and thus the Traditional or Tridentine Mass of the Ages – from the Novus Ordo and all it’s near imitators in the mainline Protestant denominations (TEC/PECUSA, ELCA, UMC, PCUSA, etc.).

In that kernel of truth, lies the reason why Catholic Churches have always had, not a “bare” cross, but a CRUCIFIX at the center of the Church above the Altar – to emphasize the unity of the offering which takes place there with that which took place so long ago on the Cross, and is thereby “re-presented”, NOT primarily “to us”, but TO the Father, FOR us.

Now, I must quickly state, for the record, that none of what I have said addresses the *validity* of the Novus Ordo.  As I have said recently, “validity” per se is not what I am discussing here.  But if you are a serious Catholic, how can you not see the trajectory which is operating in this so-called “Reform”?  Remember, that NOTHING in the documents of the Second Vatican Council ever changed any of the Magisterial teaching regarding the Sacrifice of the Mass, or the Priesthood ordained to celebrate it.  But those agenda-driven modernists who crafted the “Reform” of the Liturgy were hell-bent on changing what they wanted to change regardless of what any Council – or any Pope, for that matter – wished, and for reasons which had nothing to do with what the Council Documents themselves asked for.

Just as the New, post-conciliar Breviary was replaced by a mutilated facsimile, censoring God the Holy Spirit himself through the excision of “certain” (and you can guess which) Psalms and certain verses (again, you can likely guess which) of certain other Psalms – quite to the contrary of the wishes of the Concilium, so the Mass of the Ages was replaced by a dumbed-down, mutilated facsimile (again, please note, that I’m not saying it’s “invalid”) which was crafted so as to mute as much as possible, through excision of many prayers and portions of prayers containing important theological content, and through the extremely potent use of non-verbal sub-text (versus populum, lay ministers and readers, altar girls, etc. to say nothing of the architectural and artistic “wreck-o-vations” many of which exceed my own liturgical sin described above), all-together cooperating in massively attenuating, if not out-right contradicting, the unchanged teaching of the Magisterium concerning the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Priesthood ordained to celebrate it.

So it is in this context, that, while very concious of my own sins and failings including, but not limited to, those described above, I must nevertheless note that these days there are many – sometimes for the best of motives (like our friend over at Libera Me) , and sometimes maybe ”not so much” – who just want us all to be able to “get along”, whether we agree with the liturgical “reform” or whether we see it as in fact a “wreck-o-vation”.  Sometimes this is an admirable sentiment, and sometimes it is even a necessary posture.  However, there are many times when it turns into merely a way of blunting, slowing down, and otherwise hindering what our Holy Father is trying to accomplish by freeing the Traditional Latin Mass (or, as he calls it, the “Extraordinary Form” of the Roman Rite).  While such maneuvering may be done in a variety of ways and, as I’ve said, for a variety of reasons, it usually focuses on, in one way or another, attempting to claim the “moral high ground” by framing the attempts which are being made, in the light of the Holy Father’s Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum to bring back to life in every parish the Theological and Aesthetic beauty, glory, and richness of the Traditional Latin Mass as somehow (e.g. Fr. Longnecker) “putting pomp ahead of people”.

But the truth is that it’s not a matter of “pomp”, rather it’s a matter of presenting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, of our Catholic Faith, in all it’s liturgical beauty, and goodness, and NOT attempting to undercut and contradict that truth with conflicting signals and non-verbal sub-text.  In this respect there is not, and can never be, any comparison between the two forms of the Roman Rite.  It is for this reason that I can say that Traditional or Tridentine Mass is the only form of the Roman Rite (not saying anything about the Eastern Divine Liturgy) which can truly connect one with the great Tradition of Historic Christian worship, since the Novus Ordo, dispite being technically “valid”, is not part of that great Tradition of Historic Christian worship, but rather an imposter, based upon a faux-tradition, as has been increasingly admitted even by those in the field of Liturgics.

As I repent of my past (liturgical) sins, I pray and work for, and I urge you also to pray and work for, the success of the Holy Father’s initiative to restore a place for the Traditional Tridentine Mass in each and every parish – for Truth’s Sake, for Beauty’s sake, and for Goodness Sake!

I believe that in Friday’s post, I have misconstrued the point being made by our friend at Libera Me, and so I thought it only proper to correct that mistake, and offer a heartfelt apology for any aspersions unjustly cast in his direction. 

The mistake I made was in misinterpreting the referent of the pronoun “that” in his statement about “those who would disagree with [that] are, at best, in schism” into applying more broadly to those who might disagree that “it doesn’t matter whether it’s 1962 in cloth-of-gold or EP2 in polyester”, and then taking this in combination with his statement that “The externals of the Rites, and matters of Church furnishing and ordering, are, on the whole, inessential; and we are therefore at liberty to hold what opinions we choose . . .”  without noting the important point that his statement identifying a schismatic attitude was limited only to those who disagree that the Novus Ordo is *valid*, not those who may, as I do, disagree with the idea that the “externals” as he defines them, are “inessential” so that in some sense “it doesn’t matter” what those externals might be.

I still disagree with the latter point, and I think that in my posts (both before and since) I’ve made at least a stab at beginning to explain some of the reasons why.   But I find in re-reading his post more carefully that in fact, I agree that one cannot safely believe a Novus Ordo Mass to be *invalid* simply because it is Novus Ordo, nor is it safe to assume that a Novus Ordo Mass is invalid (as opposed to inappropriate) simply because it may not have been celebrated with the reverence with which it ought to have been celebrated. 

Validity is not my primary concern in these posts, as such a determination is ultimately “above my pay-grade”. What I do address is congruity and “meetness”, and the many ways in which the *manner* in which the Mass is celebrated affects people’s perceptions of, and confidence in, the teachings of the Magisterium, not only about the Mass and the Priesthood, but ultimately, about anything at all.

I am sincerely sorry for having made it sound like he was branding people (like me) who care about the things that he labeled “inessential” as schismatics, when that was not what he said at all.  I honestly don’t believe my mistake to have been malicious, but rather due to reading too fast the first time, but when one takes it upon oneself to pontificate online about someone else’s post, one must bear the responsibility when one fails to correctly ascertain the true intended meaning, and attempt, as best as possible to correct the error.

I am therefore revising my original Friday post to remove the offending matter, but I will leave this post here if nothing else, as a reminder to myself to read other’s blog posts more carefully before assuming I understand what they meant to say - and then proceeding to prove to everyone that I don’t!

Before closing, I should be remiss if I failed to point out how ironic it is that a post he no doubt intended in a completely irenic manner should be construed by me in such a way as to risk a breach of the very charity he was seeking to encourage amongst all Catholic Christians - as we “trads” are so fond of saying, “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!”

And finally, I would also like to offer my sincere best wishes to the author of the Libera Me blog, and encourage him to keep up the good work, as I’m sure that many others profit, as I do (even when I occasionally disagree) from regularly reading his blog.  

I received a VERY good question in the comments on my last post, and I thought it was important enough to give at least a “start” of an answer.  First, though, the question:

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I have a wonder, and it is something that comes out of our experience over the last 8 years of trying to bring the neighborhood kids into the life of the church.  When we are living in a city where there are so many, both young and old, who are almost completely illiterate, even those who are not immigrants, and barely read English let alone being able to follow along in a missal with side-by-side Latin and English, how is the Extraordinary Form better for these people than a liturgy in plain English?  

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Thanks for the interaction, and especially for raising such an important and serious question!   I need to begin by acknowledging that MUCH more could be said (and deserves to be said) on this topic than what appears below, but for starters at least, here are some preliminary thoughts:

It is an unquestionable fact of history that most Christians have been illiterate, and have been nourished and lived their faith in the context of a liturgy which was celebrated in a language other than the common speech they used in every-day commerce.   And this is true whether in the West with ecclesiastical Latin, or in the East with “Old Church Slavonic”.  Moreover, without microphones and speaker systems, it is also certainly true that much of the Liturgy, whether in East or in West, was not “heard” per se, unless it was sung by the Schola or choir (often by monastics).  In the West, the Canon, the “core” of the Mass, was said silently.  In the East, most of the “meatier” prayers are said by the Priest in a low voice while the Choir is singing various litanies, completely drowning out the sound of his voice.

Nevertheless, these poor illiterate Christians did learn parts of the liturgy, not by “studying it” or reading a translation out of a book, but by being catechized, and by experiencing the liturgy from within, intrinsically.  This can be hard for us modern-day rationalists, particulary anyone (like myself) raised in a Protestant setting, because we have absorbed a very rationalistic and “book-centered” idea of what Christianity is, and how it should operate.  However, it simply is a fact that the Church’s primary means of communicating the Faith are and always have been *personal*, not literary, or even (necessarily) intellectual.  Jesus Christ is the Word of God, full stop.  The Word of God is a PERSON.  Even the Scriptures, as important as they are, are not primarily a *written* document, but are more like the “soul” of her Lord, whose teaching still echoes in the ears of the Church.  I believe this is part of what Hebrews (quoting Jeremiah) means when it talks about the New Covenant being written on the heart. 

And historically this is exactly what we see:  the faith is transmitted primarily through *personal* means: through spoken word and action, not primarily through books and “book-learning”. The example of priests and holy men, combined with their verbal teaching. The mother teaching her children to pray the Rosary.  The Catechist teaching the Catechumens to memorize the Creed, line by line, through spoken repetition. The daily and weekly masses, with the ebb and flow of the liturgical year, *lived* from within, intrinsically.  The art and architecture of Churches: Icons, stained glass, statues of saints. The solemnity and beauty of the liturgical actions, the incense, the vestments.  The kneelings and prostrations.  All these things teach us by personal means, how to worship God, and through this teach us also about the greatness and majesty of the God we are called to worship, and therefore about who we are ourselves as worshipers of this great God.  

And this is important, because it is through these *personal* means, we can learn the Truth and pass it on to others, in ways that are far deeper and more wholistic than what could be learned merely by reading a book, or intellectually “processing” a theological lecture.  After all, if this weren’t the case, what would be the point of a mentally handicapped person assisting at Mass?

When one sees it in this light, the historic, traditional liturgy becomes far more compelling, since it communicates so much more, to so much more of the person, than the modern, *even though* it may be in a language which is not used for common, every-day commerce.  In fact, the mere fact that Latin is the common ecclesiastical language, the same in China or Japan, or India or Zimbabwe, as here in America, *itself* teaches something very profound and important about the UNITY and CATHOLICITY of the Church.  And, in a real sense, this teaching is actually *lost* when one celebrates the liturgy in the common, every-day vernacular. Because then all you have is a local, culturally-bound – and chronologically-bound (for living languages change their meaning over time) – liturgy, not a liturgy which is ageless and crosses every cultural and linguistic boundary – in other words, a truly CATHOLIC liturgy.

It should not go without notice, at this point, that if one is truly interested in having a ethnically and culturally diverse Church which respects the equal dignity of each Christian no matter what language they speak, then one cannot *rightly* argue for a liturgy *in English*, since that will automatically exclude (on this logic) those for whom English is unknown, or, for some reason, distasteful – and the same would go for any other language which represents a currently existing nationality or ethnic group.   Consider, for a moment, the situation in a Europe following the Second World War:  if you were French, would you have wanted to be forced to celebrate or assist at Mass auf Deutsch? how about the reverse en Francais?  And yet, both French and German, as well as English and Italian, can and did celebrate or assist at the Traditional Latin Mass *on an equal footing*.  Because using the Latin language does not favour any particular national, political, or racial entity.  And what better way to teach us that all, whether rich or poor, educated or illiterate, handicapped or whole, Havasupai or Hottentot, are equal before God? 

To bring this point closer to home, there are two Catholic Churches which celebrate the Latin mass regularly here in Phoenix, one with a Spanish sermon and one with an English sermon.  But the point is, when the Mass is in Latin, it doesn’t matter which one I go to – it’s the same Mass, because it’s the same Catholic Faith.  What unites us is NOT that we share the English language, or the Spanish language, rather the Mass, the liturgy itself becomes a *focus of UNITY and EQUALITY* rather than a *focus of DIVISION and INEQUALITY* which it can easily become when it must be celebrated in the vernacular.  If you must use the vernacular for the liturgy, you are forced to choose to favor one set of people over the other set.   Why should we be forced to discriminate in this way - ESPECIALLY in the liturgy?  If we follow the wisdom of the Historic Catholic Church in using Latin we don’t have to!

Moreover, as we can see by the seemingly endless political battle over the implementation of the new English translation of the Novus Ordo which was mandated by the Holy See under Pope John Paul II, what happens when you celebrate the liturgy primarily if not exclusively in the local, culturally and chronologically-bound vernacular, is not *just* that you loose the element of CATHOLICITY, but you actually create a situation where people of each generation feel they must *fight* these political battles to hang on to “their” English Mass.  We see this in the reaction of those who are resisting the changes in the English translation of Novus Ordo mandated by the Holy See.  They constantly criticize the changes which the Pope has demanded because those changes don’t fit the prevailing “politically correct” view of language, or are “insensitive” to the “nuances” of the English language, etc., etc., ad nauseam. 

What has happened to the Novus Ordo, is that because it is primarily celebrated in the local, culturally-bound, and chronologically-bound vernacular, is that it has become itself a political football, a tool of those who have other political and ideological goals than the mission of the Catholic Church.  But even if that weren’t the case, even the best of all possible English translations of the Novus Ordo would eventually wear out, and need to be replaced because the meanings of words in a “living language” like English change over time.  And at that point, you would then start to have these same battles all over again.  Some holding onto the old “familiar” English, and others agitating, some for better and some for worse reasons, for something “new”.

Question: Granted the *necessity* in this instance for the Holy See to correct the inaccuracies in the English translation, nevertheless, how in ANY way is the type of dispute we are seeing played out over these years since JPII first mandated the changes, meet or *useful* in the mission of the Catholic Church?  I can answer that easily: not in any way at all.  It has become for many, a PURELY a political battle, and it highlights one of the primary reasons WHY we need the Latin Mass – why the Church was RIGHT to establish a COMMON, UNIVERSAL, *CATHOLIC* language for her Creeds, Canons, and Liturgy. Because with Latin you will never need to waste time on these kinds of disputes!  

At LEAST if the Novus Order were to be celebrated in Latin, those political battles over language and style, as well as the concerns having to do with faulty, inaccurate English translations, go away.  But, of course, if the Novus Ordo is celebrated in Latin, that removes one of the biggest stumbling blocks which people trot out to place in front of the Traditional Latin Mass of the Ages.  Furthermore, once the Novus Ordo in Latin is placed beside the Tradition Latin Mass, the comparison does not favor the Novus Ordo at all.  In terms of depth, profundity, clarity, comprehensiveness, and complete correspondence with the teachings of the Magisterium concerning the nature of the Mass and the priesthood ordained to celebrate it, the Tridentine Latin Mass will win every time in *that* comparison. 

Perhaps most significantly, the focus of the Traditional Latin Mass is always centered upon the propitiatory Sacrifice of our Saviour on the Cross, made present on the Altar through the ministry of the ordained Priest who stands as an Alter Christus at the head of the faithful, representing them (as Christ himself did) to the Father.  This is reflected in the orientation of the priest ad orientem which is almost never done in the Novus Ordo.  Of course, it is *possible* technically to do a Novus Ordo Mass ad orientem, though doing so removes yet another major stumbling block which is usually toted out to place in front of the Traditional Latin Mass.  Yet even when the Novus Ordo is celebrated ad orientem, there is still a problem with bifurcation of focus, because the musical numbers in the Novus Ordo almost always alternate and *compete* for attention with the focus on the Sacrifice happening at the Altar, whereas, in the Traditional Latin Mass, the chants are *integral* to the liturgy itself (that is why they are called “Propers”!) and they operate as an additional layer, a “parallel track”, NOT alternating and competing for attention with action at the Altar as in the Novus Ordo.

[Nota Bena: the Propers are one of the elements intrinsic to the liturgy which, simply by complete omission, have been and continue to be, the most often abused in the Novus Ordo as it is celebrated in most parishes today.  No document of the Second Vatican Council ever intimated that these Propers, which are usually Scriptural, should be omitted, and yet they have been and continue to be omitted by most Novus Ordo parishes, in favor of what is usually trite, saccharine, and theologically vacuous popularly-styled "hymns" or choruses.]

So to answer your question, when all aspects of the question are considered, it turns out that the Catholic Church actually had it right all through the centuries – the Traditional Latin Mass is a far better context in which to communicate the Truth and Grace of the Catholic faith to the whole *person*.  It’s kind of reassuring to know that all those illiterate, non-latin-speaking Christians who lived the faith through all those centuries actually *weren’t* being “gypped” by God by not having access to the Novus Ordo liturgy in the vernacular!

And it’s wonderful to know that we don’t have to be “gypped” by not having access to the Mass of the Ages, which fortified and consecrated the lives of so many millions of poor, illiterate faithful throughout this planet of ours for so many centuries, for our Holy Father has freed the Traditional Latin Mass – the “Extraordinary Form”, as he calls it (and it IS extraordinary!) – with the desire that it be offered in every parish.  While it will take time for priests and seminarians to learn to celebrate it, the spiritual pay-off, both for priest and lay, for individual and for parish, as well as for the Catholic Church as a whole, is HUGE, and makes it well worth the effort.  Let us pray and work for the day when our Holy Father’s desires for the Mass of the Ages will be realized!

This poem/animation has been making the rounds recently, so perhaps many have already seen it, but I repost here for several reasons, first, the poem is an engaging critique of the level of much of today’s discourse, second, the person reciting the poem is very good at navigating the “voices” needed to bring out the humor in the middle of the poem, but then elevating to the necessary rhetorical level at the end of the poem, third, the animation is very clever and assists in communicating the points the poem is trying to make, and finally, because it brings to my mind one of the reasons why it is that the Church has always used Latin -  a language which, by virtue of it’s being “dead” doesn’t change in meaning, nor is it subject to fads or trends – such as those that are so effectively shown up by this poem. 

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo

But there is a more important reason why I post this video, and that is to highlight an aspect which relates to how we do the Mass – how the truth in the texts of the Liturgy is communicated, both by verbal and by non-verbal means.  And this includes not only the language (and here I take this word “language” in its’ most inclusive sense, including the style of address – compare the poem’s “tragically hip interrogatory style”) but also the music to which texts are set, and vestments worn (or not worn) by those who are leading the worship, the way the sacred space is defined, both architecturally, and by means of sacred ritual movement (what was once possible to refer to as the “sacred dance” – that is before the advent of “liturgical dance” spoiled that term) the use (or non-use) of liturgical art, etc.

The point I am trying to make is this: if we take the general point of the poem above and apply it specifically to the way we communicate those truths which we, as Catholic Christians, hold to be most sacred – in other words, apply this principle to the way we do Mass – then we come away with the recognition that it DOES matter “how” we do Mass.  It’s not an irrelevant matter – something which can and should be left to the taste of the individual.  Because what we are saying (among other things) when we relegate these matters (how we do Mass) to the realm of “taste” is that we are dealing with a topic where it just “doesn’t matter”, and therefore “how” we communicate – all the non-verbal messages communicated by, for example, using a hip-hop, popular/informal style of address, or the use of traditional vestments vs. rainbow-multi-coloured “modern-style” chasuble-alb, or the use or non-use of icons and statues of of Saints, or the presence (or absence) of a communion rail, or whether non-vested individuals roam freely about the sanctuary reading lessons and distributing the Holy Sacrament, or whether organ and Schola sing the liturgy, or whether a band of microphone-wielding pop-singers backed up by drums and electric guitars lead the singing, using the musical styles borrowed from the Jazz club or the Rock concert – all of these things, then, communicate a “sub-text” which either confirms the truth of the message or undermines that message.

To show one example of how this works, I’m going to quote from one of the comments sent to Fr. Z in response to his “Old Mass/New Mass question“:

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My first memory of beginning to care about liturgical forms and styles is of Holy Thursday services one year. I had grown to love Holy Thursday because all the traditional Holy Thursday rituals seemed so very timeless and traditional: It was the one day of the year where it seemed there was always incense and chant (the Pange Lingua), and for those reasons I found myself looking forward to it.

However one year, instead of singing Pange Lingua during the Eucharistic procession they sang “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom …”, over and over, ad nauseum. I was extremely disappointed. Then, instead of the usual beautiful manner of exposing the Blessed Sacrament: in a monstrance on a covered table surrounded by flowers, they had it in a glass bowl with a lid, sitting on top of a feaux bronze cylinder, inside of which was a light bulb which shined up through the top of the cylinder, illuminating the glass bowl-o’-hosts. This cylinder was set in the middle of a circle of chairs, so that we all sat around looking at each other, rather than all kneeling in the same direction facing the exposed Host.

After it was over, my son, who was then 7 years old, made this heartbreaking comment to me in the car: “I felt like it was just bread and we were all just pretending”. This, I felt, was what happened when people made up their own liturgies and liturgical styles: It feels like we’re kids putting on a show, because the made-up rituals don’t have the weight and depth of the centuries-old, time-tested ones. And as a result my son was experiencing doubts at the cynical old age of 7. (He is now 16 and has overcome them, praise God!)

This was the first time I can remember being mad about the liturgy, or rather the abuse thereof, and felt that I and my children had been robbed of our heritage by people who wanted to make the liturgy more “relevant” to modern people.

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What this commenter reveals is how impressively this “non-verbal subtext” of “how” we do Mass can undermine everything which the “texts themselves” are trying to communicate.  What should be clear from this example, especially in the context of the video/poem above, is that if the Church is to speak truth to a fallen world with the authority which properly accrues to that truth, it makes ALL the difference “HOW” that message is communicated, and when the non-verbal subtext is undermining much if not most of what the Magisterium teaches, and has always taught, about the Mass, and about the Priesthood which is ordained to celebrate it, then one ought not to be considered a “disloyal” Catholic for pointing this fact out, and letting people know that this is NOT congruent with what the Church means when it teaches what it has always taught concerning the Mass.

I say this because these days one frequently comes across rebukes delivered by fellow Catholics (for example, see this post) which, whether conciously or not, can have the effect of marginalizing Catholics who DO notice (and then dare to comment publicly on) the ways in which the non-verbal subtext during many Novus Ordo Masses is undermining the truths which the Magisterium has consistently taught regarding the Mass and the Priesthood.  Now I should be quick to point out that the writer of the post is a faithful Catholic – I believe he is a monastic - and I am sure he is trying as hard as he can to be holy in accordance with what the Church teaches.  However, I believe he is seriously mistaken when he dismisses as merely “inessential” the power of non-verbal subtext to over-ride the truth of the teachings which he rightly holds to be “essential”.  While the things he classes as “inessential” may not directly affect the *validity* of a given Novus Ordo Mass, it would *not* be correct to assume that therefore ”it doesn’t matter” what we decide to do about them.  As  I hope I am in the process of showing here, it just isn’t that simple.   

[NB: the preceding paragraph was updated on 1/30/10 to correct a mistake I found I had made in misreading Libera Me's post linked above - see here for detailed apology.]

There are many places in the world, particularly in the developed world (take, for example Quebec, where prior to the liturgical “Reform” there was close to 90% church attendance, and today it is closer to 10%) where the power of the non-verbal subtext has, since the post-conciliar liturgical “Reform”, simply emptied Churches, Seminaries, Convents, and Monasteries – and this has led to strikingly detrimental effects upon related works such as Schools, Hospitals, and other charitable endeavours.  Why? Because the non-verbal subtext is powerful enough to communicate even to a 7-year old child, whether or not we “really” believe what we are saying about the Mass and the Priesthood, or whether it is “just bread and we were all just pretending“. And because eventually that 7-year old becomes a 16-year old, and then what is to stop him from shaking the dust off his feet as he leaves the faith of his baptism?  While (laus Deo) this did not happen in the case of the child referred to in the quote above, if we judge by the experience in Quebec (and elsewhere in the developed world) not much. 

Real charity is not opposed to truth, and real charity does not seek to make excuses for hiding the truth behind a veneer of secular culture, or worse, for pronouncing the truth “with the lips” but only with “crossed fingers” – by contradicting that same truth through the MANNER (the “how”) of what is said.  It’s time we all were able to speak honestly – to speak truth with charity – about the travesty which the liturgical “Reform” has visited upon the Church, because only if we can face it honestly can we hope to find a way back from the edge of the precipice.

Fortunately, there is a clear pathway to safety, lighted by the Holy Father himself, who has freed the celebration of the Traditional or Tridentine Latin Mass in his Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, and has stated that he desires that it be offered in every parish.  For in the Mass of the Ages, there is no conflict between the non-verbal subtext and the text of the Mass itself, still less between the text of the Mass and the official teachings of the Magisterium concerning the Mass and the Priesthood ordained to celebrate it.  In the Mass of the Ages, the Church speaks with confidence, clarity, consistency, and with authority, those truths which are most central to the Catholic faith.  And you don’t have to be a PhD to understand this – even a 7-year old can sense the difference.

Let us pray that there will be a growing awareness of the need to follow the Holy Father’s expressed desire to see the “Extraordinary Form” of the Roman Rite celebrated once more in every parish, that the Church may recover it’s lost sense of identity, and may proclaim once again with confidence, clarity, consistency, and authority, the message of the Truth to a lost and dying world.

One of the reasons why I love the Traditional or Tridentine Latin Mass is that I believe it is simply how one would want to do Mass if one really believed what the Church teaches – and has always taught – about the Mass itself, and therefore about the Priesthood which is ordained to celebrate it.   One of many aspects which demonstrates this difference can be related in the following two interviews with Bp. Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of Karaganda in Kazakhstan (about whom you can read more here - H/T Hermeneutic of Continuity):



Here is a more recent interview with Fr. Mitch Pacwa of EWTN:



Of course, it is true that it is “technically possible” (in the abstract) to receive the Sacred Host kneeling and on the tongue even in a Novus Ordo Eucharist – after all, that’s how the Holy Father himself has decreed that the Sacrament will be received by anyone fortunate enough to assist when he is celebrating.  However, it is rarely provided for in any practical way, making it (concretely) “practically impossible” for the greatest majority of Catholics attending the average Novus Ordo parish Mass.  After all, very few Catholic Churches still have their altar rails – if they ever did have them, they were removed -  and most parishes don’t provide a kneeler in order to allow for reception kneeling and on the tongue.  For some reason – and I believe I know at last part of the answer - there is a great deal of resistance to following the Pope’s lead in this area of liturgical practice.  

One of the more pernicious aspects of the “Reform” which was inflicted upon the Catholic faithful following (and, mis-leadingly in the name of) the Second Vatican Council was the degrading of the doctrine of the Eucharist into “merely” a communal meal – essentially a function of (and therefore primarily *about*) the Community of Faith itself, rather than as it had always been seen, primarily about the encounter of the Faithful with Jesus Christ, the God-Man himself under the forms of bread and wine.  This has the effect of reducing the Eucharistic liturgy to merely a horizontal, human, political type of meeting, rather than allowing it’s vertical, divine, and Spiritual nature to be seen.

Let us be clear:  it is not that the Second Vatican Council at ANY point called for such a degrading of the Liturgy, nor did the Council change any of the doctrines which the Catholic Church has always taught about the nature of the Eucharist and of the Priesthood ordained to celebrate it.   However, as a result of the disconnect between the operating presuppositions of those who were tasked with updating the Liturgy, that is exactly the effect which has occurred at the parish level for almost all Catholics today.  And, because lex orandi, lex credendi, is simply a fact – a “law” if you will – of life, this attitude has worked its way back into the teaching in the seminaries in liturgics, and into the administrative structure – the bureaucracy – of the various dioceses and down to the parish level.

It will take a great deal of patience and consistency, as Bp. Athanasius reflects, in teaching by younger Priests and Bishops who haven’t succumbed to this false and reductionist idea of the Eucharist, for this practical degradation of the parish-level attitude about what’s going on in the Sacrament of the Altar to be overcome.  

Of course, it is much easier if one recognizes that there is no need to re-invent the wheel here!  The Traditional or Tridentine Latin Mass is simply waiting to be said by any priest – now that it has been definitively freed by the Holy Father in his Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum.

Gentlemen, start your engines!

In Tuesday’s post, I used the term “true Liturgical Renewal” and connected this term with what the Holy Father has desired, written in description of and support of, and, in his very deliberate and pastoral way, gradually begun to put into place.  

Today I wanted to share a short quote which comes from a book he wrote called “The Spirit of the Liturgy“.   I had read this excellent little book just over a year ago, but was reminded of it recently by an excellent post over at “Gregorian Rite Catholic” – and, by all means, please check out the whole article, as it is well worth the read! 

(NOTE: then Cardinal Ratzinger is here speaking about the Tridentine or Traditional Latin Mass using the figure of an ancient fresco which had been “protected” by being largely covered over with whitewash):

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“[The fresco] had been preserved from damage, but it had been almost completely overlaid with whitewash . . . . In the Missal from which the priest celebrated, the form of the liturgy that had grown from its earliest beginnings was still present, but, as far as the faithful were concerned, it was largely concealed beneath instructions for and forms of private prayer. The fresco was laid bare by the Liturgical Movement and, in a definitive way, by the Second Vatican Council. For a moment its colors and figures fascinated us. But since then the fresco has been endangered by climatic conditions as well as by various restorations and reconstructions. In fact, it is threatened with destruction, if the necessary steps are not taken to stop these damaging influences. Of course, there must be no question of its being covered with whitewash again, but what is imperative is a new reverence in the way we treat it, a new understanding of its message and its reality, so that rediscovery does not become the first stage of irreparable loss” (Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Ignatius Press, 2000, pp. 7-8).

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I believe it is worth pointing out a distinction which is not made often enough, in my experience: namely, the distinction between what was “laid bare”, according to the Holy Father’s words above, by the Liturgical movement, “and, in a definitive way, by the Second Vatican Council” on the one hand, and on the other, the Liturgical outcome of the so-called “Reform” which followed the Council proper.   Many readers, I’m sure, have read this sentence without reflecting that the subject in this sentence is still the ancient fresco of the Tridentine or Traditional Latin Mass!  Unfortunately, rather than continuing to allow the “colors and figures” of this venerable work of art to be seen and to “fascinate us”,  what has happened instead is that this ancient fresco has indeed been “threatened with destruction” by a combination of adverse climatic conditions, unsympathetic ”restorations and reconstructions”, and other damaging influences. 

Which is as much as to say that what the Catholic faithful got in the way of “Liturgical Reform” after the council, despite the fact that it may have been promoted and authorized by some of the major players who were in attendance at that council, was NOT what the council itself, in it’s official documents had authorized – indeed quite to the contrary.

And which, in turn, is as much as to say that just because someone has been authorized by God to prophesy truly, doesn’t mean that that same person will necessarily interpret his own prophecy accurately, nor that he will necessarily act in a manner appropriate to, or congruent with, that prophecy.  For example, consider what happened in the following passage, recounted by the Apostle John, after Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead:

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Therefore the chief priests and the Pharisees convened a council, and were saying, “What are we doing? For this man is performing many signs. “If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all, nor do you take into account that it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish.” Now he did not say this on his own initiative, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but in order that He might also gather together into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. So from that day on they planned together to kill Him. (Jn 11:47-53)

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Here you have the “Pope” of that time – Caiaphas, who sat in the “cathedra” of Moses, actually prophesying truly about Jesus, but yet missing the point of his own prophecy – that Jesus was indeed the promised Suffering Servant-Messiah, and going on to plot how to kill Him!

Now, I should be clear that I’m not saying that Paul VI was as bad as Caiaphas!  However….the principle may indeed apply - and I think it can be seen to have applied at various other points in history as well, where ”bad” (or perhaps merely “weak”) men have been in positions of authority in the Church, and, as a result, the Church has gone through a period of declension and/or suffering.

Just so, I believe it is possible to see that the Council Fathers, while under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, asked for one thing in the official documents of the Second Vatican Council, and yet, some of those same men, later, because they were blinded by various contemporary agendas and fads to the true interpretation of those council documents, ended up implementing NOT what the council documents actually proposed, but instead, something else entirely.

Should, then, faithful Catholics have all revolted against this hi-jacking of the Council?  Perhaps creating another “Protesting Church” and claiming that the Pope was really the Anti-Christ, like Luther did?   As a former Protestant myself, I can certainly understand why many would be tempted to follow this path – and why some in fact DID follow it in the years after the Council.  And yet at the same time, since I have come to see the folly of the “Protesting Church” vision and its’ rejection of God-ordained authority, I must instead point to the words of our Lord in dealing with what was, in some ways, a very similar problem existing in his own day:

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Then spake Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples, Saying The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat: All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not. (Mt 23:1-3)

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So…how are the Catholic faithful of today to follow our Lord’s teaching and “observe and do what they bid you, but do not ye after their works?”  Well, perhaps our Holy Father is showing us a way – a way to observe and do what the council documents call for, but not to do so in the way in which those misguided men did who threatened the ancient fresco of the Liturgy with destruction by their ill-considered (if not actually ill-intentioned) “reforms”.  A way forward which involves going back – through the restoration of much that these misguided men sought to destroy and expunge, first (and most obviously) by the liberation of the Tridentine or Traditional Latin Mass and it’s taking root in every parish as the Pope has called for in his Moto Proprio Summorum Pontificum. But not, as he has stated in the quote above, for the purpose of merely re-covering the ancient fresco with “whitewash”, but rather so that the Liturgical goals stated in the council documents (e.g. of true active participation of the laity in the Mass, of the primacy of the Latin language, and that pride-of-place be given to Gregorian Chant) might be realized.

Let us all heed the teaching of our Holy Father and follow the path forwards into true Liturgical Renewal which he has marked out for us, that ALL the Catholic faithful, in every corner of the globe, may come to rejoice in the beauty of the ancient fresco of the Liturgy, fully restored, unhindered and unfettered by the blind and misguided efforts which have unfortunately prevailed since the close of the council, so that the Church may emerge from the dark and cold of its’ 40-year winter into a new springtime of faith and hope; of truth and love; of piety and fervor.