That being said, I did receive some messages recently from
one John Drake. I published one message
and then received a second. The first
was fine; the second was a bit odd. Mr.
Drake was not happy with my making fun of Cardinal Burke for his remark that
“men should dress and act like men.” I
know I should not make fun of His Eminence; it is the proverbial shooting fish
in a barrel. He is just too easy a
target. If I could only muster a firm
purpose of ammendment, I would even confess it.
Alas, I can’t even find imperfect contrition much less firm purpose of
ammendment. But that is not my
point. Mr. Drake went on to chide me
because he has seen “your (meaning my) heroes” such as Cardinal Roncalli (later
John XXIII) and Cardinal Montini (later Paul VI) in cappae magnae. Of course he has. It was standard dress for Cardinals at the
time. We were working with a different
model of Church: still in the monarchial model with a royal court. People wear all sorts of unususal things in
royal courts. Have you ever seen Prince
Charles decked out as a Knight of the Garter? Even the indisputably
heterosexual Prince Andrew gets frocked out like his grandma, the late Queen
Mother, when it is time to put on the Garter robes. The problem is that Paul VI abolished the
papal court in 1968, eliminating many of the offices and reorganizing and
retitling his remaining retinue as the Papal Household. The following year he made drastic revisions
in the costume of prelates. The only
rank that is explicitly mentioned as still having a right to the cappa magna
are Cardinals; the protocols are somewhat ambigious regarding its use by
Patriarchs, Archbishops, or Bishops. Presumably it is not to be worn by Abbots
as even in the old rules, it had to be granted as a privlege to an abbot
and was not an automatic privelege of rank.
Even for Cardinals, however, the winter cappa—that is with the fur
hood—was definitively and totally abolished.
Cardinal Burke and several other prelates seem not to have gotten this
message but that is probably the fault of Gamarelli’s as they can make some
bucks of sewing dead rabbits into capes.
Also the cappa is not permitted—even to Cardinals—in Rome itself. Pope Paul’s reforms of prelatial dress was an
attempt to simplify the costume of prelates and move away from the princely
model of the defunct royal courts. Of
course farm boys from Richland Center Wisdconsin appear to dream of growing up
and becoming either cowboys out on the range or Princes of the Church in all
their finery. Chacun à son goût as the French say, but it does put His
Eminence in a somewhat different camp, so to speak, from where Paul VI was
leading the Church forty-some years ago and where Francis is pushing it
today. Cardinal Dulles (curse these
Jesuits and their influence) made an important observation in his book The Catholicity of the Church
(1985). Dulles said that the for the
papacy—and by that he meant the Church—the first thousand years were about
spreading the Gospel; the second thousand were about power; and the third
millennium will be about service. In
other words, we are at that shift of the Church’s tectonic plates where we move
from the model of power to the model of service. This is a difficult paradigm shift for many
to accept and I think resistance to the Church adopting the service model is
the chief gripe of Francis’ critics.
All
that being said, let me come back to Mr. Drake.
He loves Cardinal Burke. He loves
the yards and yards of scarlet watered silk.
And then he makes a curious shift.
He praises the Traditional (what I would call “neo-traditional”) and the
Anglo-Catholic clergy for their retaining the trappings of the bygone era and
concludes with the puzzled admission that he wonders that the whole world isn’t
Anglican. Isn’t Anglican? Why doesn’t he write Cardinal Burke and get
Burke’s insight on why we don’t all become Anglicans? I sincerely doubt that for all his being enamored
of a level of ecclesiastical foppery that would make the Highest Churchman in
the world blush, Cardinal Burke would have any sympathy for the opinion that we
should all float our boats down the Tiber and across the Channel.
But
I will give you one reason for not becoming an Anglican. As the American Catholic priest, Father
Joseph Goetz, allegedly said to his Cambridge mentor Anglican Bishop J.A.T. (Honest to God) Robinson when Robinson
asked the anglophile (actually Anglophiliac) Goetz why he didn’t just become an
Anglican: “Your Lordship, I am not one to desert a sinking ship for a sinking
lifeboat.” I am a great admirer of the
Anglican Tradition. We are treating in
this blog the Caroline Divines. You have
the stellar Lancelot Andrews and you don’t get better than Jeremy Taylor. I even admire Thomas Cranmer—for his command
of the English language, not for his theological eclecticism or his moral
ambiguities. In the nineteenth century
you get Pusey and then later there was Benson and Randall Davidson. But alas, save for a few bright stars such as
Rowan Williams or Desmond Tutu the picture has become bleak. Good heavens, when you have John Shelby Spong
as your theological wunderkind you
had might as well just close up shop.
I
was at a cocktail party in some brownstone down on Capitol Hill some years back
and there was a former Catholic raving about his new parish: Saint Mark’s
Capitol Hill. Episcopalian; American for Anglican. “Oh,” it’s wonderful he gushed. “Every August we have ‘Crab Sunday.” (You
have to understand the place of the Maryland Blue Crab in the Chesapeake
culture; somewhat akin to the quail God sent to console the starved appetites
of the children of Israel in the desert.)
“The Choir call comes in wearing crab hats. And we give the “Crab of the Year Award” to
the parishioner who has been most bothersome to the Rector that year. And the Eucharistic bread is baked in the
shape of a large crab!” The Eucharistic
bread is baked in the shape of a large crab?!?
I was willing to allow that Leo XIII may be wrong about Anglican Orders
and the question should be reexamined, and I am all in favor of using real
bread for the Eucharist rather than something that appears to be an anemic necco
wafer, but nobody who takes the Real Presence seriously would bake the
Eucharistic bread to look like a giant crab.
Or even a normal size crab. This
is the problem. To my mind too many
people today ‘play church’ and don’t understand the gravitas sacra of being Church.
I
remember reading an advertisement for a Service commemorating the 100th
anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic at a Unitarian/Universalist Church
back in 2012. It sounded very nice. The music advertised was particularly well
chosen. But then, at the end it said
something like “worshippers are encouraged to come in period costume.” Years ago I read Harvey Cox and The Secular City. I remember that I liked Cox’s approach to
Liturgy. There was an element of
playfulness in ritual. I was young then
but I would still agree that drab solemnity can too easy implode into
idolatry. But worship is never
frivolous. It is never giddy, or silly
or flippant.
All
that being said, there is little difference between Unitarians in corseted
gowns and hats replete with feathers, fruit, and birds and Catholics dressed
for the court of Louis XIV. The TLM is
often very little other than an exercise in antiquarianism. And whether you wear a crab hat down the
aisle or a galero, religion becomes not only mockable but a mockery.
Change your article quickly! OMG! I'm roaring here. Poor Mr. Drake didn't write that comment. I did just to get your reaction.msorry, very Irish of me.
ReplyDeleteGood points, but to ask what is perhaps a dangerous question:
ReplyDeleteSince, as we well know, chasubles, stoles, albs, cinctures, dalmatics, copes, and the other vestments that have been retained to the present time are holdovers from the street dress of antiquity...isn't saying Mass according to the rubrics bound to be a touch "antiquarian" by definition? Where is the line? And why?
you have a point but I think it is a bit more complex. First of all I am somewhat low church for a Catholic but I would not want to do away with vestments. I think they add a certain dignity to the liturgy. I guess I feel about vestments like I feel about my academic gown. There is a time and a place where it adds dignity to the occasion But I would also point out that while the various vestments have their origins in the street dress of the late Roman Empire, they have evolved in both shape and decoration over the centuries. An ancient Roman would't recognize a 17th century Spanish chasuble. And today the better vestments, such as those from Holy Rood Guild or Almy tend to reflect a contemporary taste in the simplicity of design, ornament, and fabric. I think a second point too is that vestments are auxiliary to the liturgy, props as it were, and the liturgy itself has been transformed from a 16th century rite to a form of worship to which the contemporary mind has access. Attending a TLM is a bit like a visit to colonial Williamsburg--a re-creation of a bygone era that is interesting enough but an escape from modern life. Prayer is never an escape from life but the Lord's leading us to engage in our contemporary world under the guidance of his grace, his Word, and his Sacraments. Being a historian, I am fascinated by the past but have no desire to live in it--or "pray" in it.
DeleteI think vestments are an important expression of continuity with the past in the best sense, the sense of the communion of saints, of the identity of our act of worship with that of the past milennia, and, despite their origins in Late Antiquity, have also come to represent the cultural transcendence of Christianity.
DeleteWhilst I agree that the vocation of a Christian is not to escape into a virtual reality filled with piscinae and fanons and in which the tribe of thurifer are mighty, I think it is healthy to a balanced understanding of the Christian vocation *towards* culture that liturgy be to a certain level transcendent of the time and place in which it is enacted. This certainly does not mean tracking down the most arcane and obscure customs and obscuring the sense of what is being done, but rather a worshipper should feel those elements that are countercultural to his time and place as an enrichment, as a source of identity and, when the surrounding culture is noxious, perhaps as a source of strength, a reminder that this world and its trappings, no less than buckled shoes and galeros (galeri?), will one day pass away, and that his time and his moment in history enjoy no special Hegelian right to be, no pride of place that needs to make a Christian feel ashamed of being in a certain sense a stranger in their midst, but will be judged indifferently before the Gospel, and, like the ages before them, can certainly add to the understanding and expression of the Gospel (as the ages before that endowed us so richly with the outward signs of the sacred that we are discussing), but which will also melt away before eternity.
We don't have, I think, to understand our vocation towards the culture in which we find ourselves as being absolutely suffocated by it. We engage the culture, but from a vantage that is also beyond it. And if our liturgy can give a symbolic taste of that vantage, that is not so much an escape from culture as a perspective above and beyond it, so much the better.
i think you have made some very good observations
DeleteBut surely you know the story of the two devout old ladies coming away from mass in the old rite? "But what does he do, Mabel? I always wonder what he's actually doing when he starts all the busy work with his elbows." "Oh my gran told me. They let a crab loose on the altar and he has to catch it and put it back in the box."
ReplyDeletea more serious analogy is that some years back I was in Zimbabwe to give some lectures and a priest there told me that he had never seen the TLM until doing graduate work in London. He said that he had found it very moving because it reminded him of his youth when his grandfather, a village shaman, had sacrificed a goat. The precision of the ritual and its regimented acts and the ritual's abstraction from any references outside itself along with the arcane language brought back memories of this pre-Christianization religious act.
Delete