Benedict XVI and Turning Back the Clock 200 Years

Medieval bas-relief at Luca Cathedral

showing Mass celebrated facing the people

I mentioned in recent posts that Benedict XVI has not been completely comfortable with the direction the Catholic Church has taken since the Second Vatican Council which is ironic because he, as a theological advisor to Cardinal Frings of Cologne—one of the leaders of the Council—had much to do with shaping the Vatican II Church.  I pointed out in recent postings that his discomfort with the policies of John Paul II in regards to ecumenism and to inter-religious dialogue have led to a cooling of the friendly conversations the Catholic Church has conducted with other Christian denominations and with non-Christian religions. But Ratzinger is also uncomfortable with the liturgical revisions issued under Paul VI in the Missal of 1970. 

I have long felt that the only people who understand the changes of Paul VI—really understand them—are those who, like those who followed Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in schism—have rejected the new liturgy.  Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly support the liturgical revisions and had hoped to see even more revision, but there is a discontinuity in the theology of the Mass of Pius V in the 1570 Missal and the Mass of Paul VI in the 1970 Missal.  I think the Pauline “Novus Ordo” is more faithful to the theological/liturgical heritage received from the Fathers of the Church and that it did well to clear away many of the medieval accretions and restore the Roman Rite to some degree of its original clarity and simplicity of expression.  I wanted—and still want—to see further simplification of the Rite along with a corresponding flexibility that frees it from rubricism and would permit it to be more authentically prayerful.  Not everyone sees it that way.  Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is one who does not.

From early on Josef Ratzinger identified himself with a faction in the Church that resisted the liturgical developments of 1970.  This is not to say that Ratzinger was opposed to any liturgical reform or renewal but he obviously though the reforms of 1970 went way too far.  For years he attended various seminars and workshops at the Abbey of Fontgombault, a French Benedictine Community of the Solesmes Congregation that has opted to maintain the pre-Conciliar Rite.  Fontbombault has been a center for neo-traditionalists who are anxious to minimize the liturgical changes of Paul VI’s revisions of the Missal and Breviary.  Ratzinger also was a close friend of the late Monsignor Klaus Gamber,(+ 1987) whose book Die Reform der römischen Liturgie, (in English: The Reform of the Roman Liturgy: Its Problems and Background, Una Voce Press, 1993) was an attack on the Reforms of Paul VI. Cardinal Ratzinger wrote an introduction to this book. I have mentioned Gamber in previous postings and believe he was distinctly inferior as a scholar to Josef Jungman (+1975) and Gregory Dix (+1952) whose works have prepared the way for the liturgical reforms at the Council.  But Ratzinger, a theologian and not a historian, has not seen the flaws in Gamber’s “scholarship” and has embraced many of his ideas for their theological import despite of their being grounded in poor historical understanding.  One of the particular issues that Ratzinger/Benedict has followed Gamber’s faulty research is the matter of “orientation”—that is the idea that priest and people alike should pray facing Eastwards.  Granted, that the tradition of the Eastern Churches (Orthodox and Catholic, Chalcedonian and non-Chalecdonian) and the prevalent custom in northern Europe was for Churches to be built facing eastwards so that priest and people together would face the rising Sun—a profound symbol of the Risen Lord, but a study of the ancient Churches in Rome shows us two things.  In Rome, unlike the East, churches were built to every point of the compass.  And in Rome, unlike the East and Northern Europe, altars were positioned so that the bishop or priest presiding at the Eucharist faced the congregation over the altar.  Cardinal Ratzinger was an ardent proponent of the priest celebrating with his back to the congregation.  As Pope he has in public celebrated facing the people.  We need to do a posting on the topic of the Roman Liturgy and the issue of versus populum or versus absidem or ad orientem—three distinct positions for the priest at prayer.

Benedict was also unhappy with the translation of the Latin “pro multis” in the consecratory words over the cup “This is the cup of my blood shed for you and for ????”  Benedict insists on a literal but misleading “for many” whereas most of the translations of the 1970 Rite had long used the more theologically accurate “for all.”   We need to look at that question too.  The pro multis issue has long been a thorn for neo-traditionalists because it was not being translated literally (though, as we will see in a future posting, it was being translated accurately.) 

In expanding the use of the pre-conciliar rites with the 1962 Missal of John XXIII as the so called “Extraordinary Form” of the Roman Rite Benedict has hoped that the traditional rites will bleed back into the revised rite of Paul VI and eventually “correct” the 1970 Rite with accretions from the earlier rite borrowed into the new.  That threatens to make a bit of a “dog’s dinner” of the Liturgy, a hodge-podge as it were—but the scholarly Benedict has little experience with the pastoral issues and practices.  The more significant point, however, is that he too is one whose enthusiasm for the Council is guarded, or even tepid and this is leading to the new hermeneutic that is re-interpreting the Council far from the intentions of the Council Fathers and, presumably, the Holy Spirit who inspired them.       

Scholarly Antidotes to the "Reform of the Reform"

Yesterday I mentioned the work of Josef Jungmann and of Dom Gregory Dix as sounder histories of the Liturgy than Monsignor Klaus Gamber’s skewed work, Die Reform der römischen Liturgie, (in English: The Reform of the Roman Liturgy: Its Problems and Background, Una Voce Press, 1993).   Josef Jungmann was an Austrian scholar of the Liturgy whose monumental work The Mass of the Roman Rite has served as the classic work on the history of the Roman Liturgy.  Jungmann was born in Austria in 1889 and entered the seminary for the Diocese of Brixen.  His pastoral work in the Austrian Tyrol alarmed him in as that he found that so many of the people among whom he ministered were driven to their religious practices by fear of God’s Anger rather than by a joyfilled confidence in the mercy that God has offered us in the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. (And this insight was long before Vatican II!  For many people today religion is still a a relationship of trying to appease God rather than thankful celebration of confidence in his Mercy.)  This revelation of the spiritual and psychological sickness from which so many people suffered in the name of religion made Jungmann’s first passion not liturgy but catechetics or the teaching of sound Christian orthodoxy.  

Jungmann entered the Jesuits four years after his ordination as a priest and his work in catechetics led to his being appointed to the famous theological faculty at Innsbruck Austria where he was several times to serve as rector of the Jesuit community in addition to his teaching responsibilities.

Jungmann had the insight to realize that the strongest and most effective tool that the Church has with which to catechize the faithful is the liturgy itself.  The old axiom Lex orandi lex credendi shows us that you shape people’s faith by shaping the way they worship.  This led to his study of the historical development of the Roman Catholic Liturgy.  During World War II Jungmann and the other Jesuits at Innsbruck were kept under house arrest by the Nazis and prevented from teaching.  Jungmann used this opportunity of a forced sabbatical to research the history of the Mass and he produced his monumental work, The Mass of the Roman Rite, in this period.  His liturgical studies had a massive impact in the post-war years.  Combined with the liturgical research, writing, and experimental work done by Odo Casel and the monks of Maria Laach abbey in Germany under Abbot Ildefons Herwegen in the first part of the twentieth century, Jungmann’s work contributed to the restoration of the Sacred Liturgy for Holy Week under Pius XII and then to the 1970 Missal of Paul VI which abolished the Missal of Pius V (1570, also known as the Tridentine Mass or Liturgy) in favor of the current rites. 

Jungmann’s reputation for scholarship and his extensive influence in liturgical reform led to his being invited to the Second Vatican Council where he served as a peritus  (theological expert) and played a significant role in the writing of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Council’s Decree on the Liturgy. 

Parallel to Jungmann is Dom Gregory Dix, an Anglican Benedictine Monk, born in 1901, and like Jungmann ordained a secular priest who only afterwards entered religious life.  Dix’s choice of religious life—the Anglican Abbey of Nashdom—clearly marks his bias as an “Anglican Papalist” or an Anglican who believes that the Anglican Communion should return to union with the Papal See.  He believed in corporate reunion, however, and not individuals jumping Canterbury’s ship to “swim the Tiber.”  Before entering Nashdom Dix had had a brief career at Oxford, lecturing at Keble College.  His affiliation with Keble, like his joining Nashdom, is a clear indication of his Churchmanship which was (to some alarmingly) “High.”  In 1945 he published his magnum opus, The Shape of the Liturgy.   Like Jungmann he had done a brilliant study of the Fathers and other ancient texts and his study set off a panic among the “Low Church” or evangelical faction in England as his emphasis on the “offertory” rites as a constituent element of the Eucharistic Celebration challenged their Calvinist theory and praxis.  (I cannot but wonder what he might think of the Missal of Paul VI where you have the “preparation of the gifts” as opposed to the “offertory” of the Tridentine and Medieval liturgies.)  In any event, Dix has not had the same degree of recognition for his scholarship as Jungmann but I believe the importance of Dix, though not formally a Catholic, is that his scholarship confirms Jungmann’s work as there is a harmony between the two scholars on the historical development of the Liturgy of the Western Church.  Reading the two books one gets a very integrated understanding of development of the Mass from apostolic times until the 16^th century and sees the biases of Klaus Gamber and the flaws in his work on the Roman Liturgy that reflect those biases.     

For those interested in serious study of the liturgy, let me recommend –in addition to Dix and Jungmann—The Study of the Liturgy by Cheslyn Jones, Edward Yarnold SJ, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Paul Bradshaw (Oxford University Press, 1992).  This book contains a series of articles that is of superb scholarship and confirms the 1970 reforms.