Reason 3 For Why the "New Mass" Is Superior to the Old Rite.

Reason 3: True prayer comes out of the depth of our graced experience and thus is rooted in the particulars of our own culture.

One of my favorite historical quotes is from the Emperor, Charles V (1519-1556) who said

I speak Spanish to God

French to my soldiers

Italian to my women

And German to my horse.

(In those days, unlike today, the French had the reputation for being the bravest of soldiers.)  Charles prayed in Spanish because it was his primary language—his everyday language which he knew best and in which he was most comfortable.  I am always amused, wryly amused, when people claim that the Latin Mass was “universal” because Latin is a “universal language.”  A universal language that (almost) no one speaks and few know.  I am not sure that that qualifies Latin as “universal.”  It certainly doesn’t qualify as a language of prayer except for those few who have not only a rudimentary education in it (4 years secondary or 2 years college minimum) but some genuine facility with the language.  (I am a former Latin teacher and can pretty much tell how much exposure to the language it takes for one to have a sufficient level of comfort to more than read it.  I remember being at morning Mass one day some years back at a little parish church in Clifton, Virginia where I was staying with friends.  The priest—a somewhat young man—came out and began Mass in Latin.  It was painful.  I mentioned to him afterwards that no one present, including himself, other than God and I, knew what he was saying.  He took his breathes and pauses at times that made no sense, his pronunciation was way off, accents falling on syllables they didn’t belong, no awareness of the idiosyncrasies of the pronunciation of Latin letter combinations or consonants.   It was absolutely dreadful.  It was worse than dreadful.  And I wish it were the exception—but it is far from so among these junior clergy who think a year or two of seminary Latin has made them ready for their attempts to simulate a Pontifical High Mass.  But I have digressed too far.) 

Prayer is not some mindless repetition of words, much less nonsense syllables.  A recent comment addressed to this site, in an attempt to justify the Latin Mass as a normal rite, said “Latin is not mumbo-jumbo.”  I beg to disagree.  Unless one knows the language, Latin—or any other language we attempt to use whether at Church or ordering in a restaurant or watching an Art Film—is mumbo jumbo.  The nuances of Shakespeare are lost on a person who does not have a pretty deep knowledge of English.  The Divine Comedy is best read in translation if you do not know 14^th century Italian pretty well.  And so too with the Liturgy. 

Ann and Barry Ulanov wrote about prayer:

In prayer we speak to and of ourselves, of what lies heavy on our minds, of what rumbles in fear at the pit of our stomachs, of the grudges and resentments we hold behind our eyes below the surfaces of our outward being.  We speak what we have to say, whatever that is, and however we are moved to say it.  

This is not limited to liturgical prayer but extends to all prayer.  In prayer we must come truthfully and honestly into the Divine Presence.  It is precisely why the Church ordinarily begins the Liturgy with a “penitential rite” that makes us look deep inside and acknowledge the disorder into which we have fallen.  We can’t pray, truly pray, until we do so.  And then the Church confronts us with the Word of God which is meant to pierce our hearts like a two-edged sword:

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.  And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.  (Hebrews 4: 12-13). 

And we proceed on to make an intelligible affirmation of our adherence to the key doctrines of the faith in the Creed—an intelligible affirmation of what we believe and ponder in our hearts.  The gifts that represent our lives are then presented on the altar and the Great Mystery of Faith unfolds.  While in contemporary English “mystery” means something not-understood, in Latin and in the Tradition of the Church it means something that transcends understanding: something we know in our being without having to intellectualize it.  It is not meant to be something veiled by human confusion but something that in clarity reveals the Divine Essence being made manifest in it.  That is the splendor of the Eucharistic Prayer.  (Well, not the so called Roman Canon that delights in that sheer multiplicity of words that Jesus warns us against in Matthew 6:7).  The oldest of the Eucharistic Prayers, so-called Prayer II on which III and the Eucharistic Prayer for Special Needs are each modeled, has a very austere outline: epiclesis (consecratory invocation of the Holy Spirit), consecratory Last Supper narrative, anamnesis, oblatio, communio of the Church and its hierarchs,  communio of the departed,  communio of the Mother of God and the Saints, and the Doxology.  The simplicity of the prayer reveals the complexity of the Eucharist and at the same time keeps our focus on the Mysterium.  The prayer reveals the action of the Holy Spirit as the one who transforms the Bread and Wine—and by extension we who offer it and whom it represents—into the Body and Blood of Christ.  The Prayer centers in the Sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross and establishes the identity of the Bread and Wine (and us whom the bread and wine represent) with the Body sacrificially broken on the Cross and the Blood sacrificially there shed for the forgiveness of our sins.) The Prayer draws us there gathered into unity with the Church spread through the world.  The Prayer keeps us in union with those whom we have loved and cherished and who have gone before us.  The Prayer celebrates our identity in communion with the Mother of God and all the saints.  And finally the Prayer leads us to the great Doxology in which we, in gratitude for all God does for us in the Eucharist and indeed in life, sing the Praise of God.  This prayer, to which we are given access when it is in a comprehendible language, gives us direct and immediate participation in the Eucharistic Sacrifice without diminishing the unique ministry of the ordained priest celebrating the Mass.  We are not passive spectators but can join our entire person—heart and mind—into the great act of Worship.

What makes the Mass “universal” is not its language, or even its Rite.  The joke was always told that Mass should not be in a language that only some understood—the vernacular, but a language, Latin, in which no one understood.  In my travels I have often been faced with attending Mass in a language I don’t understand—Polish, Czech, Arabic, even Irish on one occasion.  It wasn’t a problem because my familiarity with the Mass in my own language keeps me very much aware where I can pray in my own language with those whose language is different.  But I am familiar with it, know it by heart at this point, only because day after day I pray it, and can pray it deeply, in my own language.   I am familiar enough with the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom that it isn’t a huge problem when I have been at the Liturgy in Greek or Old Slavonic but I must admit that I not only miss the nuances of the prayers, but much of the particularities.  While I enjoy the experience—especially the music—I can’t say that I have the same direct and conscious access to the Mysterium as when I am praying in my own language regardless of rite. 

And then there are times when I am in an unfamiliar rite and language—the Syro Malabar Rite when I was in India or the Chaldean in Iraq.  They are lovely rites—well, I found the music to the Syro-Malabar rite non-conducive to prayer but that is my subjective experience—but it does push me out of the community into private prayer while those around me are immersing themselves in the common experience.  I like private prayer.  I spend a considerable amount of time each day in silent prayer.  But that is not the Liturgy or the essence of Liturgical Prayer. 

I am not saying there is no room for Latin in our worship.  There is a treasury of great Latin Music and like the wise steward we need to bring forth both the old and the new from our storeroom.  A Pie Jesu, or an Ave Verum Corpus, can offer a respite from the vernacular in which we can give ourselves over to a moment or two of prayerful reverie, but the Mass is not meant to be prayerful reverie but our participation in the salvific Death and Resurrection of Christ.  

The Spirituality Beneath This Synod's Agenda

C.S. Lewis 

The krazies are besides themselves in anxiety over this Synod on the Family and the direction in which it is going.  Michael Voris, the current dean of the self-appointed magisterium since Mother Angelica’s health crises forced her from the scene, has decided to head to Rome and join the various forces from LifeSite News and other neo-trad lobbies that are determined to resist any change in Church discipline.  Voris and others have gone so far as to oppose the baptism of children of same-sex couples or the “welcoming” of those in non-canonical unions in Catholic parishes. 

A theme proposed at the Synod for dealing with people in irregular family situations is “gradualism,” a solution based on what some moral theologians call “The law of graduality.”   This is a different approach than the somewhat clear-cut, right or wrong, black or white, approach with which most of us have long been familiar. 

Perhaps the clearest statement of which I am aware on the Law of Graduality or Gradualism is found in C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain.  Lewis (1898-1963) was an Irish born agnostic-turned-Anglican who was successively a Don at Oxford and then at Cambridge.  He was a novelist, an essayist, an academic, a poet, a literary critic, a noted public speaker, a theologian and an apologist. He wrote serious novels for both young and mature audiences, but his theological reflections, and especially The Screwtape Letters, are what has made him most famous.  Perhaps due to his own spiritual journey and its complexities he had an extraordinary understanding of the human soul and its relationship with God.  Let me offer the following quote in which Lewis foreshadows the tone Pope Francis has set for the Synod: 

Some modern theologians have, quite rightly, protested against an excessively moralistic interpretation of Christianity.  The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection.  …God may be more than moral goodness, he is not less.  The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.  The moral law may exist to be transcended, but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure. —C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain.

 This paragraph is rich in ideas.

1.    …rightly protested against an excessively moralistic interpretation of Christianity.

2.    The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection.

3.    God may be more than moral goodness, he is not less.

4.    The moral law may exist to be transcended,

5.    …but there is no transcending it (the moral law) for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them.

6.    … and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim,

7.    … and fairly and square face the fact of their failure.  

Each one of these ideas is worth frequent and long meditation.  Perhaps the final line is the crucial one—that we must fairly and square face the fact of our failure to  meet the claim of God’s moral law.   The sort of rigid moralistic “Christianity” offered by those who imagine themselves to be the truly religious in a world that has abandoned God’s Law is a false road to go down because it invariably leads to a denial of one’s own moral failures.  We may disguise those failures.  We may set up the straw men of lesser sins to distract ourselves from the greater ones.  We may even, like the Pharisee in the Gospel account about himself and the Publican,  design a moral schema which relativizes our particular sins to be less than those of others and thus not as worthy of our condemnation as the sins of our neighbor.  But in the end, if we are to be truthful with God and with ourselves, we must come to see ourselves in such a light that it eclipses any fault of any other person. 

In the end I must acknowledge that my “white lie” is far more grievous than my neighbor’s adultery.  I must acknowledge that my slightly off-color remark is a worse sin than my neighbor’s abortion.  I must acknowledge that my impatience with my spouse is a far more serious sin than my neighbor’s same-sex relationship.  I must do this because it is my sin and that is the only sin for which I am accountable before the Throne of Grace. 

In the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, the priest—immediately before receiving Holy Communion—prays, echoing 1 Timothy 1:15;

I believe and confess, Lord, that You are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first.  This is the attitude we must have as we come before God and we will be far less quick to judge others.  In fact, we might even mature to where we can say with another well-known voice in our Catholic family: “Who am I to judge?”  Then we will know that we have arrived at a certain level of spiritual and moral maturity. 

Ann and Barry Ulanov wrote in The Study of Spirituality (1986, Oxford University Press, edited by Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarlold SJ)

For what one brings to prayer is either the true self or the lying self.  One prays, if one prays in all honesty, with as much knowledge of oneself as one can muster for the occasion and with as much charity. … Under every circumstance one must be honest with oneself.  That is the special scourging that is in prayer.

And this is precisely the problem with moral rigorists—they are not honest in their prayer, in their relationship with God.  They may admit their faults, granted, but always putting them in the context their sins are not as serious as the faults of others.  The sort of humility/honesty in prayer of which the Ulanovs wrote, on the other hand, makes us far less worried over who is receiving the Eucharist and what is the state of their soul as we come, through our own acknowledgement of the seriousness of our own sin, to comprehend that “worthiness” has nothing to do with receiving the Sacraments and that the Eucharist in particular is the table of sinners.  We know, from our own spiritual experience, that we are on a journey and that we have yet to arrive; and moreover, that the Eucharist is the food for our journey to the promised land and not the putative feast that awaits us once we are there.  But if one rejects the reality of moral gradualism in one’s own life, one simply cannot comprehend this idea.