In regard to my last post, I received
this following comment that merits some attention.
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| Mark 4:35-41 |
A noble attempt that will fall on deaf ears for
the tired Catholics who would like to believe that there's something more to
Catholicism than toeing an ever-changing Party Line. The Traditional Latin Mass
is not the Mass of power-hungry reactionaries, but of defensive, bewildered
Catholics who yearn for at least symbolic stability in a world of doctrinal
ambiguity. Right or wrong as they may be, those "preconciliar
teachings" are what generations of Catholics have been taught and have
told their children to believe and take seriously. It's one hell of a reverse
course that they are being asked to take lying down.
I think the commentator highlights
two of the problems with the neo-traditionalists who favor the usus antiquior, or as it is popularly
often called, “The Traditional Latin Mass,” or the Tridentine Mass.
The first problem the commentator
identifies is the problem of change and the fact that change is a very
threatening concept for many people. In a
world in which so much is changing so fast—from the Supreme Court’s legal
establishment of Same Sex Marriage to the shifting geo-political boundaries of
Central and Eastern Europe; from the rise of militant Islam to the breakdown of
gender identities; from issues of global climate change to electronic
video-games and instantaneous communication, the world seems at times to be
spinning out of control. In such an environment
of a perceived chaos, the image of a Church which offers a fixed and immovable standard
of practice and belief provides a refuge for those suffering from a
sociological vertigo set off by this spinning planet. Entry into a darkened church with candles
providing pin-points of light and air scented with beeswax, incense, and musty
vestments provides us not only with a respite from the confusion of daily life
but entrance into a magical world that offers escape from the realities of
today’s world. We are permitted to hide
ourselves in a fixed past that lets us, at least for an hour or two, avoid facing
the uncertainties of the future. Expand
this magical world now with the gentle tones of Gregorian chant, the aroma of
the incense, the white-noised drone of Latin prayers from the altar, and
mindless immersion into the sensual stimulation of it all and you have a
Spiritual Spa Day that gives you the emotional strength to face a week of the
madness of the world around us.
Sounds wonderful but the problem is
that is not a life of discipleship. The disciple
is called not into a passive endurance of the spiritual vicissitudes of the
world in which we live, but a confrontation with that world. As Blessed Titus Brandsma, a Carmelite Friar
who died at Dachau for his resistance to Nazi policies in occupied Holland
wrote: “If you want
to win the world for Christ, you must have the courage to confront it.” We cannot retreat into the past, no matter
how comforting. We cannot take our Catholic Faith and make it a freeze-dried
relic of the Eisenhower years to be our spiritual security blanket. God did not incarnate himself into this world
so that we can escape it; Christ did not preach a Gospel of hiding ourselves in
the Temple instead of facing the realities of human suffering—and human sin;
Jesus did not hang on the cross for us to find comfort and escape and he was
not raised from the dead so we could bury our faces in piety and pretend that
we are somehow close to him because we feel the thrills of religion.
The Christian knows that he or she
must put on the armor of God so that we may stand firm against the tactics of
the evil one and having done everything possible to hold our ground. We cannot flee in this conflict to places of
refuge but we must stay on the field of battle.
Change is inevitable. The struggle
is to make the changes work for the better.
Blessed John Henry Newman wrote “To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed
often.” The strategies and tactics of our struggle to be faithful
cannot be the strategies and tactics of our parents and grandparents. The world has changed. An insistence on unchanging dogmas and doctrines
may have served well in the past to fend off the challenges of Ratramnus of
Corbie or Abelard but today they fail to win the hearts and the minds of the
potentially faithful. The baroque architecture
and glorious strains of Palestrina or Gabrielli may have drawn the faithful of
the 17th century to faith, but today their power is lost on all but
the effete and the savant. The Liturgy
of the 1570 Missal was a powerful tool in combatting the Protestant
Reformations but it is totally ineffective against either the inroads of the
self-proclaimed “evangelicals” or the far more dangerous religious and
spiritual indifferentism that infects contemporary western culture. You must remember, I am a historian and I
love a visit to colonial Williamsburg. However, I have no reason to want to
live—or pray—in the eighteenth century. If
God had wanted me to live in Rome of the Counter-Reformation he would have had
been born in Rome in the Counter-Reformation.
But God had me born for the dawn of the 21st century—and you
too—and he expects us to live in our time and place.
But this
brings me to the second element of the above response to my previous post: it
is not only a matter of change, even more basic is the understanding of what is
faith. The response presumes “faith” to
be an acceptance by intellect and will of certain doctrines and practices or
disciplines of the Church. This has been
a common misconception of “faith” by many Catholics at least since Leo XIII’s
establishment of Neo-Thomism as the Church’s official theological framework. Faith empowers the will and intellect to
accept certain doctrines and practices but it should not be confused with the
assent of the intellect and will. Faith
is a dynamic of the individual’s relationship with God, not with the Church or
doctrine or even morals. It is the relationship
in which the believer is graced to put his or her trust in God. An individual can have faith and yet not pass
theological or even moral muster. A person
can have faith and be mistaken as to faith and morals. This is not to imply that faith is a feeling—like
charity and hope, the other theological virtues—faith is an act of the will in
which the individual, empowered by God’s loving action (grace) yields to God’s
will as the individual perceives it.
Abraham had faith—this yielding to God’s will—and it was counted to him
as justice. Faith is in many ways the
antidote to the sin of Adam who trusted not in God but in his own will. This sort of faith in which we put our trust
in God enables us to ride the waves of change undisturbed knowing that while he
may seem to be asleep, Christ is indeed in the barque of Peter and while the
winds of the world and the waves of change may buffet the boat and even blow it
this way and that, God will bring the barque to port. Faith empowers us to face change without
panic knowing that, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “It was necessary that there should be sin; but
all shall be well, and all shall be
well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Or, as Teresa of Avila
writes: “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten
you, all things are passing away: God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God
lacks nothing; God alone suffices.”
Of course, faith—to be
authentic—must not be some abstract surrender of the will to God but one that
bears fruit in concrete action of “hearing the Word of God and putting it into
practice” as Jesus himself says in the Gospels.
But that Will of God is not something frozen or even stable. The Law of Moses forbade certain work on the
Sabbath but Jesus permitted his disciples to pick grain on the Sabbath: Jesus
did not perceive the Law to be a frozen ideology, immutable and unbending, as
did the Pharisees. Jesus stopped the
crowd from stoning an adulteress, even though that was the punishment prescribed
by the Law. Jesus did not mandate his
disciples to keep the traditional Jewish fasts.
He was not concerned with the ritual purity that mandated the washing of
various household items when they had been “contaminated” by something or
someone that rendered them unclean. He himself
broke the Law by sitting at table and sharing a meal—a sacred action in Judaism—with
sinners and the most gross sort of sinners.
Jesus warned the religious of his day that he would see the tax
collectors and prostitutes enter the kingdom of God before them. My impression is that the stability for which
some are looking for when they turn to pre-Conciliar Catholicism is in fact a
lack of faith, an empty piety. I think
it is dangerous pastoral practice for the Church to offer what is essentially
an unsafe harbor. To sum it up, a quote I
recently heard and found thought provoking: “the opposite of faith is not doubt,
it is certainty.” Should this be true how sinful it is of us to look for those
islands of certainty in the name of faith.
