Whys and Wherefores

Been there, done that, not going back

I do get asked from time to time why I do this blog.  It is time consuming and I have a fairly heavy set of responsibilities as it is.  I do enjoy the research and the thought processes preparing the blog entails.  It keeps me learning new things and finding new perspectives.  But the primary reason that I do it is that I had been finding over the past several years that the understanding of the Church was, for many Catholics, growing more and more narrow because of a lack of historical perspective that was letting them drink the Kool-Aid of the Catholic religious right. 
I am a child of Vatican II.  I was born and mostly raised before the Council.  I remember the Traditional Latin Mass well.  I was an altar server.   Being both the altar boy MC for Solemn Masses and a weird kid, I knew the rubrics and ceremonial in great detail. Moreover, I have had six years of Latin in school (and later became a Latin teacher) and always liked the Latin stuff.  Pius XII was the pope of my childhood and I remember the October night when they broke into the television shows to tell us that he had died.  I remember the meatless Fridays, the Ember Days, the Lenten fast.  When I made my first communion there was nothing to eat or drink ( but water—I am not that old) from midnight.  Nuns were dressed in yards of black serge and heavily veiled.  We had may-crowning every May, Benediction every Wednesday, Stations of the Cross every Friday in Lent.  We stood when Father came in, knelt for Holy Communion, and learned to genuflect on the left knee to kiss the Bishop’s ring. It was Full Monty Catholicism. 
Moreover we were a very religious household.  My Dad was for many years a daily mass-goer as was his father.  Mom went to Mass on Sundays.  We said the rosary after dinner during Lent and whenever else it would strike my parents that we should do so.  We had grace at table.  There was a crucifix in every room but the bathroom.   The Infant of Prague presided over the living room, the Sacred Heart in the foyer.  Various other images and pictures could be found elsewhere around the house. Dad’s sister was a nun, his aunt a Reverend Mother.  Masses were said regularly for deceased relatives.  Candles were lit in Church.  And there were always priest friends in the house.
Maybe it was the priest-friends but ours was not a thoughtless Catholicism.   Religion was discussed and argued.  We had books and magazines about our faith.  My parents belonged to CFM (Christian Family Movement) and several couples would gather monthly in our house with one of the parish priests to study their faith. Dad would ask us at dinner what we had learned in school that day and paid particular attention to religion.  God help the nun who was tinged with Feeneyism.   When priests were over—which was often several times a week—we kids could listen to the conversations and we could ask questions.  Our religion was not something hard and fast, something embalmed or mummified, but something alive and vital.  It certainly wasn’t something somber or joyless.  And it was never above questioning.  You followed the rules—especially Sunday Mass and frequent confession—but you could question anything and anyone.
I remember when Vatican II was announced.  I had no idea what an Ecumenical Council was—who did?  There hadn’t been one in our lifetimes.  We were fascinated by this opening the door to our Protestant neighbors.  (There were, in my family, no Protestant relatives.)   After all these years of cold shoulder, they were now  to be “separated brothers?”   I remember first hearing “A Mighty Fortress” being belted out on the pipe organ in our Church—it was a postlude after Benediction one Wednesday evening and it was Art Smith, a seminarian from our parish at the keyboard.  I knew Luther had composed it; but then I always knew things I wasn’t supposed to know.  I told  you I was a weird kid who had a lot of useless information.  And I knew hearing it that a new day was dawning for me and my Catholic faith.  I have never lost the thrill of that dawn and for me Catholicism represents a continuous dawn.
I began to panic about twenty years ago that the sun that had been so long dawning was now beginning to set.  I could see the slow but steady shutting down of the optimism generated by the Council.  The windows once opened were now being closed and locked.  I was willing to allow the changes to come progressively—not all at once; the slow pace of change made that dawn last.  But now changes were not only coming more slowly, they were being reversed.  I saw things creeping back into the liturgy.  Some priests were refusing to give people communion in the hand.  Others were banning women from serving as lectors or Eucharistic ministers.  Churches where communion had been given under both species were now backtracking on that.  Under the banner of “dignity” the liturgy was being reduced to rubricism in some places.   I was in the diocese of Arlington Virginia at the time and that diocese is particularly weird, or I should say has more than its fair share of abnormal clergy, but there was Father Fessio and Adoremus and there was Mother Angelica and EWTN and there was the Diocese of Lincoln and the Diocese of Peoria and I saw the seeds of this (what one colleague of mine calls) “Mordor Catholicism” starting to propagate like dandelion fluff on a summer breeze. Were we going to lose the Council and the Church of the ordinary folk?
It was at this time that I was offered an editorial position in Rome.  It had nothing whatsoever to do with the Vatican, of course, but it was Rome and it put me into the stream of international Catholicism.  I had lived in Rome before—while doing my graduate work—and was a frequent visitor to the city, but living there deepened my experience of a genuinely Catholic culture that is far richer and more diverse than the ultramontane knock-off Catholicism some people were trying to push as “authentic” Catholicism back in the States.   I saw that the parishes of Rome had altar girls and Eucharistic ministers and women lectors and contemporary music choirs.  I saw that they not only stood for communion but for the consecration at Mass. Italian priests wore regular clothes.  (We always said that if you saw a priest on the street in Rome in a cassock, nine times out of ten he was American, and eight times out of that nine he was an American on vacation in Rome.)  Most of the religious sisters in Rome wear regular clothes. 
Modern religious art is highly valued in Rome—and one of the best collections is in the Vatican museum. 
Coming back Stateside I grew more and more concerned that an unhealthy distortion of Catholicism was being pushed by certain segments of the Church in this country as somehow or other “more Catholic” than mainline Catholicism.  In my work as an academic I have been able to travel extensively and I saw that the Church through most of the world was still alive and vibrant.  I was puzzeled that it was easier to find a Tridentine Mass in Washington DC or New York than it was in Rome and yet this revival of the TLM was allegedly at the desire of the Pope.  I was puzzled to see priests wearing things here (birettas, fiddle-back chasubles, ferraiolos) that you weren’t seeing in Rome.  And prelates in the cappa magna and with the winter cappa of fur—which had been banned by Paul VI—but there were prelates like Cardinal Burke sashaying into TLM’s like the Queen Mother going to the opera.  What was this all about??? 
I don’t make any claim to be any more authentic than anyone else’s blog or that my Catholicism is any  more orthodox than the next Catholic’s.  But I do want to look at our history—both accomplished and in the making—as a voice that sometimes seems to cry in the wilderness to look to draw from the past but to trust the future rather than to build a future on a poorly thought-out appreciation for a distorted past.    More to come. 

The "New Translation" of the Mass IV: The Liberal/Conservative Battle

Well if this isn’t an evil plot by Benedict and his cronies to destroy the Second Vatican Council,  how did we get to this new translation? 

Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Archbishop

of Chicago 1982-1996, leader of the

moderates and liberals among the

American Bishops. 

      We Americans like things simple.  Romans like Byzantine intrigue.  We Americans always think people have black hats or white hats, that between good and evil there is a clear divide and that no one can cross from our side (good) to theirs (evil) or from theirs to ours.  Would that human nature was so simple.  It is our Calvinist heritage.  There are those destined to salvation (good, white hats, we love Vatican II) and those destined to damnation (bad, black hats [or maybe, in this case, red] they hate Vatican II).   Romans—long Catholic (not so sure about Christian, but Catholic for sure)—know the reality of the human heart and that the wheat and tares grow together.  Life doesn’t fall into neat patterns.  
      It was actually the “liberals” who were calling for a new missal and a new translation.  we wanted further changes.  We needed more flexibility in the rite.  Maybe every Sunday didn’t need a penitential rite.  Maybe we should be able to use a variety of canticles and not just that same old “Glory to God in the Highest” every week.  The more variety in Eucharistic Prayers the better.  We wanted change to be an ongoing process, so let’s get a new edition of the missal—and as long as we were at, let’s get a more poetic translation of the prayers.  The Anglican Prayer Book has a nice ring to it; the Lutheran Book of Worship flows more smoothly.  Can’t we do better than this bland and boring makeshift sort of translation we had after Vatican II.   
        It was a reasonable suggestion.  The current sacramentary is pretty pedestrian.  We could do better. What we weren’t watching was that the wind had changed.  While we liberals were busy linking arms for the Lord’s Prayer, the Catholic neo-cons were steadily building their case.  (I say neo-cons as such groups as the “Reform of the Reform” are not genuine conservatives or traditionalists—they Church they want to “restore” is the Church of the early twentieth century, not the classic Catholicism of the Patristic era.)  
        Neo-cons are always better organized than liberals.  Liberals are naïve and think that people will instinctively do the “right thing.”  Neo-cons cling to the doctrine of original sin and know that people will act in self-interest.  Liberals think that everything should  be free and are cheap bastards; neo-cons know that the world belongs to those who are committed and they are ready to invest heavily in advancing their agenda.  Consequently those who were appalled by the changes in the liturgy and even more by the effects of those changes, quickly began organizing and cementing their opposition.  Father Fessio organized Adoremus.  Priests in the Diocese of Arlington organized CREDO.  Organizations such as the Latin Mass Society sprang up.  New colleges were founded such as Christendom and Saint Thomas Aquinas.  They invited Cardinals from Rome to come and give talks and to sit on boards.  Mother Angelica’s television network was organized—to give the devil her due, she was in her day one fine businessman—and it broadcast masses that demonstrated Reform of the Reform principles.  There was lots of Latin and never a Eucharistic minister to be seen.  Only men served in liturgical roles and while they did have concelebration, communion in both kinds was restricted to the clergy.  Despite her lack of Episcopal sponsorship for her EWTN network, Mother Angelica created the impression that hers was an official voice of the Church.  Meanwhile letter writing campaigns flooded Roman desks with countless questions: does the priest have to give me communion if I insist on kneeling for it;  Does our pastor have to provide a Tridentine Rite Mass each Sunday if we have fifty people who ask for it; does the priest have to permit girls to be altar servers at his mass.  Letters of complaint went to Rome about earthenware chalices, communion flagons, home-baked bread for the Eucharist.  Priests were accused of celebrating mass dressed as clowns, of permitting women to “concelebrate” Mass with them; of giving communion to non-Catholics.  Bishops would come to Rome for their ad limina visits and be confronted by curial officials with stacks of letters of complaint alleging abuses in their dioceses.  Letters were believed without proof.  Charges were made without substance.  Allegations were accepted on no more than hearsay.  The American Church appeared to be out of control.  
         At the same time there was a leadership vacuum in the American hierarchy that allowed power to devolve on Cardinal Bernard Law, then Archbishop of Boston.  Law has since become legendary for his moral and spiritual bankruptcy, but from the death of Cardinal Krol in 1988 until his resignation in the midst of the sex abuse scandal in 2002 Law was the most powerful bishop in the United States—a “Kingmaker” whose stamp of approval was on every nomination for bishop sent to Rome.  I want to make it clear that His Eminence has never been accused of sexual abuse but his failure to comprehend the seriousness of the problem and his blatant arrogance in defending the indefensible position of most Catholic Bishops, including himself,  in how they handled allegations of abuse have rendered him the reputation as being the single person most responsible for the biggest scandal in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.  Law, with the assistance of the equally unscrupulous Cardinal Hickey of Washington,  took on the moderately liberal Archbishop of Chicago Joseph Bernardin and broke the liberal camp of American bishops.  Bernardin, dying of pancreatic cancer, had tried to rally the centrist bishops with his “common ground” proposal to build a consensus among American Catholics on important social and theological issues.  In a rare suspension of the protocols that mandate that members of the Sacred College speak only well of each other in public, Cardinal Law savaged Bernadin and his proposals, falling just short of accusing the dying prelate of compromising with heresy.  It was a shameful performance; but not nearly as shamefilled as Law’s fall would be five years later.  Nonetheless, the damage had been done and Law’s years of influence in Rome have assured an intellectual mediocrity in the American episcopate which is distinguished by their lack of perspicacity as they see a vital American Church erode beneath their buskined feet.   It was this lack of backbone that permitted the hierarchy to fall like wheat beneath the wind to the recent wave of liturgical revisions including the new translations. 

Is Vatican II in Danger? V Reform of the Reform

In 1996—eleven years before Summorum Pontificium, Monsignor M. Francis Mannion, then rector of the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City, a church well noted for the high quality of its liturgical celebrations under his direction, wrote an article for America Magazine in which he analyzed five distinct liturgical movements in the Church in the United States.  One of these schools of thought called for the restoration of the preconciliar rites, a goal at least partially achieved by Summorum Pontificium.  A second school of thought, or liturgical movement, Mannion termed “Reforming the Reform.”  This group was profoundly unhappy with the post-conciliar developments of the liturgy claiming that they went far beyond the reforms explicitly mandated by, the council. (And, by the way, I believe he was right. That is in part what I implied in a previous post when I said that the only people who truly understand the New Rites are those who have objected to them on the basis of their discontinuity with the 1570 Rite.)   Mannion cited a book published by the late Monsignor Klaus Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Liturgy, published in English in 1993 as providing the ammunition the “Reform of the Reform” advocates have used as a basis for their plan to restructure the post-conciliar liturgy.  Gamber admitted that the Council needed to address the issue of the Liturgy as the Roman Rite had become “ossified” and devolved into mere rubricism.  Nevertheless, he believed that the Missal of Paul VI, issued in 1969, had not only gone far beyond the changes mandated by the Council but represented some serious breaks with the Tradition of the Church.  Mannion, in his article, wrote that the Reform of the Reform movement put particular blame for the Novus Ordo of Paul VI on ICEL (The International Committee for English in the Liturgy) and faulted the bishops for abdicating their responsibilities to “specialists and scholars.”  The Reconstitution of ICEL in 2003 by mandate of the Holy See and the subsequent retranslation of the Roman Missal, the translation which will be effective in the United States in Advent of 2011, indicates the strength of the “Reform of the Reform” school even though the new missal does not reach all their objectives.  

The objective of the Restorationist  movement, at least as regards liturgy, is the restoration of the pre-conciliar liturgy as the only liturgy, or at least the preferred form, in the Western Church.  This goal has been partially achieved by Summorum Pontificium in giving a carte blanche to priests to celebrate Mass in the “Extraordinary Form” at their discretion regardless of the pastoral oversight of the bishop or even the preference of the congregation.  What are the objectives of the Reform of the Reform?  Father Brian Harrison, a spokesperson for the Reform of the Reform, suggested in bulletins of Adoremus, the leading American voice of the Reform of the Reform movement, called for the following changes in the liturgy:

1.      The abolition of all other Eucharistic Prayers other than Prayer I—the “canon” of the Mass in the Tridentine Liturgy

2.      The recitation of the Canon in Latin

3.      The restriction of communion to one species for all but the celebrating priest

4.      The priest and people facing the same direction in the liturgy

5.      The use of two scripture readings at Sunday Mass rather than three

6.      The exclusive use of men in liturgical ministries

Other changes often proposed—and often implemented in parishes by pastors sympathetic to the movement—by Reform of the Reform advocates are

1.      The elimination of the sign of peace

2.      The use of black or purple vestments for the funeral liturgy

3.      The restoration of kneeling for holy communion

4.      The administration of holy communion directly on the tongue

5.      The elimination of extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist at the liturgy

6.      The elimination of concelebration of the Liturgy

7.      The use of “Roman” vestments –the “fiddleback” chasuable

8.      The revival of various customs that had been suppressed or fallen into disuse such as the use of the biretta, the maniple, “subdeacons,” etc.  

Slowly but with certainty various elements of the Reform of the Reform have been introduced in many parishes and dioceses.  It is not unusual, for example, to see purple or even black vestments used for a “Requiem” liturgy along with various other accoutrements of the old requiem mass—the candles around the catafalque or the use of the Requiem Aeternum and other chants.  The Swine Flu epidemic gave rationale for suspending the sign of peace and communion from the chalice, but these practices have not been restored in many places even though the crisis passed.  Bishop Slattery of Tulsa wrote a letter to his faithful informing them that henceforward he would—at least in his cathedral—be celebrating the Liturgy ad absidem—that is facing the back wall of the church.  He is not alone in this practice. According to the website of the New Liturgical Movement, one of the voices of what Mannion called The Reform of the Reform—though also an advocate of restoring the pre-conciliar liturgy—the following notice appeared in the bulletin of St. Benedict’s Church in Duluth MN. 

All the Masses at St. Benedict's parish (with the exception of the early Sunday morning Mass) are celebrated in the common posture turned towards the Lord (ad orientem) in the direction of the liturgical east.

We will continue this topic in our next blog, but a clarifying word about “ad orientem.” I hope in the next few weeks perhaps to do an expanded article on the historical issue of “ad orientem” which means “towards the east” and refers to the ancient (but not universal) custom of Christian worshippers—officiants and participants alike—to face eastwards for prayer.  The Sun, a symbol of the Resurrected Christ, rises in the East.  When a church building is “oriented”—that is laid out with the altar at the eastern end—one can say that worship is “ad orientem,” but this term is often used to simply to mean that the priest and congregation stand (or kneel) face the same direction, that is facing the altar and the wall beyond it.  Except in those situations where the church is actually laid out facing eastwards, the correct term is actually ad apsidem (toward the apse or rear wall).  When advocates of the ad apsidem posture use the term “the liturgical east” they create an artificial pole that actually mocks the theological significance of the eastwards position.