200 Years Out of Date --Who Turned Back the Clock?

I had mentioned in the previous post that John Paul II at the beginning of his reign appointed liberals such as the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini SJ to the Sacred College (and, in Martini’s case, to a key diocese, Milan) because John Paul seemed to have wanted to develop a consensus among the episcopate to support his planned “corrections” to the Vatican II course the Church was on.  I also wrote that there was, at least in Martini’s case, another agenda item and that was to move the liberal Jesuit out of the leadership role in the two leading Roman theological faculties: the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Biblical Institute.  Martini was “kicked upstairs” as it were from academia where he had a very definite liberal influence to the busy life of the leader of a huge diocese that demanded all his attention.  This second reason, while perhaps the more pressing, doesn’t overshadow the first, however.  The elevation of Americans Roger Mahony and Joseph Bernardin and the French Henri de Lubac are other cases of liberals being advanced to positions of power and influence in the first ten years or so of John Paul’s pontificate.

John Paul, as Karol Wojtyla,  had been a participant in the Second Vatican Council, in the first three sessions as the auxiliary bishop of Krakow and in the final session as the Archbishop of that city.  He was not an enthusiastic supporter of the Council and its agenda, however.  It is important to keep in mind that from the time Wojtyla was nineteen his country had been under the thumb of two of the most ruthless totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century—the Nazi occupation of Poland from 1939-45 and the Soviet dominated Communist government that succeeded the Nazi regime and which fell only in 1989.  As difficult as the Communist years were for the Church, the Nazi occupation was actually worse.  The Poles—and the Polish Church—survived only by forging an unshakeable unity of the Polish people around the Church and the Church around the Primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski.  Because this consolidation of People and Church depended on the total identification of Polish Culture and Identity with their Roman Catholic faith where the Church was Poland and Poland was the Church, there was great resistance to any change lest the change provide a crack in the impenetrable façade of Catholic Polonialism/Polish Catholicism.   Liturgical changes were minimal and certainly the pre-conciliar pieties were preserved intact.  Ecumenism and inter-religious relationships were somewhat of a moot point in Poland.  There were few, almost no Protestants.  The Orthodox were identified with the Russians and relationships were cool at best with no desire to build ties with a Church that was seen as “Russian.”  And the Jewish population had been all but wiped out in the Nazi years—not, incidentally, without the support of many of the Polish people for whom anti-Semitism was part of their Catholic faith.  The Social Justice message which had flowered with John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra and then went into full bloom with the Council’s Gaudium et Spes never reached Poland where Wyszynski feared it could be distorted to support the Marxist regime’s policies.  Vatican II, for the greater part, never penetrated the Polish Church during those years under communism. At the Council, the Polish participants hung back from an enthusiastic support for the new programs of John XXIIII and Paul VI because they feared the effects of change on their homeland and the solidarity of the Poles with the Church in resisting the political tyranny under which they lived. 

When John Paul was elected to the papacy he seems to have wanted from the beginning to put a different “spin” on the Council.  Certainly the final years of the pontificate of his predecessor but one, Paul VI, had been painful—both for Paul and for the Church.  Humanae Vitae, the encyclical repeating the Church’s proscription of contraception had crashed the Vatican II optimism into the wall of ugly ecclesial reality and the carnage was complete.  Paul VI was bewildered by his loss of popularity.  Bishops, in an orgy of loyalty to the Holy See, were crushing any objections to the Encyclical from the Catholic intelligentsia.  The theological idols of Vatican II—scholars such as Bernard Häring and Hans Kung who had been major players at the Council—were falling from their pedestals. Moreover, the reactionaries were in open revolt under dissident French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.  John Paul wanted to reverse the damage and put the Church back onto a major key sound-track.  He couldn’t annul the Council—that would undermine all authority and credibility—and nor did he want to, but he did want to give its decrees a new interpretation. 

John Paul wasn’t totally wrong.  In some ways the Council was out of step.  In a globalizing world, the Council wanted to decentralize Church authority, giving more authority to local bishops at cost to the power of the central administration in Rome.  In a world of totalitarian governments, the Church seemed to want to democratize with greater roles and responsibility for the laity.  In a culture where people were becoming increasingly passive in their entertainment, the Church’s liturgy was demanding increased participation.   

The election of John Paul took the world by surprise, but it probably didn’t take Karol Wojtyla by surprise.  Biographers say that at various times throughout his life people had foretold he would one day be pope and he apparently began to take this message with some seriousness.  He was not an ambitious man and I don’t think it could be said that he sought the office, but he had a preternatural bent to his personality.  He was no mystic—the demands of having to outwit the communist regime at every turn kept him a “feet on the ground” sort of fellow—and I hesitate to use the word superstitious as he was both intelligent and educated, but he was a believer in destiny and I think he came to believe the papacy was in his destiny.  His strong showing in the election that chose his predecessor, John Paul I, probably “sealed the deal” though I doubt he realized just how soon it would be before he sat in the Chair of Peter himself.  But I think he came to that chair with a mission.  He had that single-mindedness, that focus, of the Polish temperament and I believe he was determined from the beginning to refashion the Council into something that he could believe in, a Church that was a global macrocosm of the Polish Church he knew—a Church that was internally strong and united against its external opponents.  It would be, as he was used to in Poland, authoritarian in its internal discipline and populist the face it showed to the world.  John Paul found a Curia anxious to work with this agenda so that it could take back its power from “the College of Bishops” and be even stronger than it was before the Council.  Unfortunately, the pressure of the authoritarianism, instead of forging unity has revealed cracks in the foundation—cracks that need to be fixed before they can no longer bear the weight they are under.  Neither John Paul nor Benedict has been able to close those fissures nor do they seem to know how.

One final anecdote about John Paul and his re-vision of Vatican II.   One of the people I was privileged to come to know in his final years was Denis Hurley, the retired Archbishop of Durban, South Africa.  When Hurley was named a bishop at age 31, he had been the youngest bishop in the world.  When I knew him he was an old man in his 80’s.  He was the voice against Apartheid in South Africa when Desmond Tutu was only a young priest.  He had served on the preparatory Commission for Vatican II.  He was a founder of ICEL.  The last time I saw him was just two weeks or so before his death.  He was in Rome for some meetings with the Communità di Sant’Egidio and I had lunch with him.   He said to me: “I met with the Holy Father (John Paul, just a year before his own death) this morning.  I said to him ‘Holy Father, you and I are both old men.  You know how it is when we get old.  We forget things.  But I distinctly remember that we had a Council.  What did you do with it’?”  They say that Archbishop Hurley, despite his early and prophetic voice against apartheid and his tireless work at Vatican II, had never had been made a Cardinal because he refused to congratulate Paul VI on Humanae Vitae.  It is probably true.  Right to the end he spoke his mind.  What had happened to Vatican II? 

Roots of Liturgical Reform: Maria Laach and Odo Casel 2



Monastic Liturgy at St. Joseph's Abbey,

Spencer  MA

 My last entry mentioned Dom Odo Casel of Maria Laach Abbey and his scholarly work to reintroduce the idea of Mysterium into Catholic sacramental theology. I had mentioned that the western obsession with the human person as an embodied intellect has so overemphasized the dogmatic aspects of religion as to strip the human person of the capacity for the mystical encounter with God.  This is one of the reasons that mysticism, indeed spirituality, is all but dead in the Western Church—Catholic and Protestant.  In its place there is a sort of pallid piety that is no more than a combination of doctrinal assent and moral rigidity.   But I don’t want to overstate the insipidness of western liturgy—pre and post Vatican II—completely.  While my experience in most parishes is that Sunday worship is shallow and lacking an appreciation for the sacred and that the pre-conciliar liturgy, the so-called “Extraordinary Form,” is the exaltation of form over substance, an empty show of an effete and effeminate fussiness, I do find worshipping in a monastic community that the (new) liturgy, when done well, has both a measured pace and solemn gravity that facilitate its being a genuinely prayerful and prayerfilled experience.  While I am sure that this is not true of the liturgy of all religious communities, I would commend especially the Cistercians (Trappists) for letting the liturgy be of what the Fathers of the Church wrote and Dom Odo was trying to express by his use of the concept of Mysterium. 

I asked one of the monks at an abbey to which I occasionally go for Mass what approach to the liturgy he employs to make the Mass as prayerful as it is when he presides.  I was surprised to learn that he had studied the Zen tea ceremony for several years, learning to carry out this ritual that is simultaneously both minimalistic and extremely complex.  He told me—“if the Zen Master can put so much effort into an effortless making of a cup of tea for his guest (note the paradox of effortless effort), I learned how much effort I must make to present Christ to you in bread and wine.  And as the Zen Master and all the ritual calls the guest’s attention not to himself or to the ritual itself, but only to the tea, so I must celebrate the Mysteries (not in the same precise sense Dom Odo’s use of the word) so as to call attention not to myself or to the ritual, but only to Christ who comes to have tea, or in this case his supper, with us.”

The Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh makes a similar point in his book Living Buddah, Living Christ (Riverhead Trade, 2007—10^th anniversary edition).  Thich Nhat Hanh speaks specifically of the Eucharist and gives an amazing testimony to the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but he marvels how many Christians approach the Sacrament without “mindfulness.”  I know exactly what he is speaking of.  I see priest after priest going mechanically through the ritual with all the passion of a tired housewife ironing shirts.  And I don’t mean this as a slap at the “New Mass,” I remember it well from my days as an altar boy long before Vatican II.  And indeed, if there is an insipidness in the western liturgy—old and new—it is probably not in the rite itself but rather in the lack of spiritual depth in those leading the celebration.

It was against this perfunctory and robotic approach to the Mass that Casel tried to resurrect the idea of Mysterium, the Divine inbreaking into our liturgy when our poor efforts at worship are washed out in the splendid light of God’s Revealing himself to us; that sacred moment when the emphasis shifts from our offering God worship to his shining forth grace into our being.

In any event, Maria Laach became a great workshop for liturgy in the first half of the 20^th century as all sorts of “experiments” were tried from restoring the ancient Holy Week ceremonies (thirty and more years before Pius XII authorized the changes for the whole Church) to laying the groundwork for the “new” Mass that Paul VI would mandate for the entire Roman Rite of the Church in 1970.  Most of these experiments were “illegal” of course—but they weren’t make-it-up-as-you-go-along experiments but rather the implementation of changes determined by sound historical scholarship.  And while I am not always happy (personally) with the ways that the current Liturgy is carried out, I am grateful to have shed the bonds of spiritual slavery represented in the rigid (rigid as in rigor mortis) pre-conciliar rites.  I have no desire to go back to those Fleshpots of pre-Vatican II slavery in the Egypt of the Tridentine Church.    

Unfortunately, there is a shadow side to the Maria Laach experience as it was a gathering place for many of the right-wing Catholics who wanted to restore the Hohenzollern monarchy after the Kaisers abdication following the German defeat in World War I.  As a restored monarchy became less and less a possibility, these Catholic right-wingers evolved from their mere hatred for the Weimar Republic into a core of support for Adolph Hitler and his Nazi party.  Most distressing in this connection with the Nazi regime, Maria Laach became associated with anti-Semitic publications during the Hitler years. It was the connections with these pro-Hitler conservative Catholics that preserved the Abbey from being confiscated—the only Abbey in the Rhineland not confiscated—during the Nazi regime.  On the other hand, the Abbey provided refuge to Konrad Adenauer for a year when he was in trouble with Hitler’s Reich.   An interesting subject to explore would be the role of the Catholic Right in bringing Hitler to power.   Hmmm, might it have relevance for us today?  Fortnight for Freedom?—what is the real political philosophy of Archbishop Lori and friends?  No, I’m sure I am wrong, couldn’t be. Hmmm. 

Benedict's Flawed Understanding of Evangelism

Pope Benedict grew up surrounded
by the rich cultural heritage of the 

Catholic Baroque in his native

Bavaria 

  In a recent posting (July 30), I mentioned that the re-Christianization of Europe is a priority for the papal ministry of Pope Benedict XVI.  Indeed, when Josef Ratzinger was elected pope in 2005 he chose the regnal name Benedict precisely because Saint Benedict, the great sixth century Abbot and monastic lawgiver is both one of the patron saints of Europe and the patron saint of culture.  Benedict’s followers, the great Benedictine Order of Monks and Nuns, has been one of the great sources of European—and thus Western—Culture.  We will do some entries on Benedict (the Abbot, not the Pope) sometime soon, but much of western art and architecture, music, literature and other cultural manifestations was conserved by or created for the Abbeys and monasteries of this Order.  Since the ninth century, and to some degree even before, the Benedictines have been great educators and their abbey schools—and this is true for the nuns as well as the monks—kept the liberal arts alive through the Viking invasions and incessant feudal warfare of the Central Middle Ages.  Names like the Venerable Bede, Alcuin, Suger, Peter the Venerable, Abelard (albeit somewhat reluctantly a monk), Heloise (as a second career), Hildegard of Bingen and other luminaries of the eighth through the thirteenth centuries are associated with the Benedictine Order.  Cluny, Westminster, Saint Gall, Monte Cassino, Saint Denis, the Nonnberg, and the great English Cathedral priories are (or were) all  Benedictine foundations.  So Benedict, both the pope and the saint, deserve our acknowledgement; but still it must be said that the pope gets culture wrong.   
     The Holy Father is a refined and cultured relic of the pre-Hitler German bourgeoisie.  His father, also Josef, recognized how Hitler’s policies were not only evil but undermined the rich German cultural heritage that had been so shaped by Christian faith and practice and was a firm anti-Nazi. Nevertheless the senior Ratzinger was a policeman who served in the German police both before and during the Hitler regime, retiring at the age of 60 in 1937.  The future pope had two older siblings—his brother Georg (also a priest) and his sister, Maria, who never married and kept house for Josef until her death twenty years ago.  The family were devoutly Catholic and like most Bavarian townspeople of the inter-war years wanted a classical education and exposure to German culture for their sons.  In school Josef studied Latin, Greek and French (subsequently he has learned several other languages) .  He also studied piano and is an amateur classical pianist.  (His brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, is an acknowledged musician, director of the famous Regensburg Dom (Cathedral) choir.  Georg claims that his brother has an “interesting” approach to Mozart and other German composers).  Ratzinger’s early education, typical to both his peasant/bourgeois background and seminary education, was remarkably narrow and while exposed to the artifacts of culture seems never to have explored the concept of culture itself.  While he became a significant theologian—in his own right and not merely as pope—his university studies would have focused quite narrowly on the philosophical grounds of theological reflection and it seems quite unlikely that he ever did address the issue of culture qua culture.  His mistake, and it is a common one and one shared by most Americans, is to confuse “culture” with its products.  Culture is not music or art or literature, it is a system of values inculcated in the consciousness, subconscious, and unconscious of a people.  It is a weltanschauung (a word often translated as “worldview” but meaning something even more pervasive) both unarticulated and articulated at every level of the society whose “culture” it is.  It is this set of fundamental understandings that influence and produce the art, the music, the literature, the architecture and every other expression of the society, including its religion. 
      As Ratzinger knew well growing up in Hitler’s Germany with its attempted revival of the ancient German mythology, the pre-Christian Nordic culture gave the German people a vivid but violent—extremely violent—vision of the world and their place in it.  Christianity came along and modified, indeed drastically altered this culture which is one of the reasons that the Hitler regime planned ultimately to destroy Christianity and replace it with a Germanic neo-paganism.  Indeed, while German Protestantism fragmented into different factions—some working with the Regime to varying degrees while the Confessing Church remained opposed to Hitler—in some Protestant Churches particularly tied to the government, the so-called “German Christians,” the Old Testament was rejected, the altar bible was replaced by Hitler’s Mein Kampf  and the cross by an upraised sword.   Both this Nazi altered “Christianity” and the more overt neo-pagan revival encouraged by such Nazis as Alfred Rosenberg saw that the introduction of Christianity to the Germanic peoples in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages weakened the German Spirit.  The Catholic interpretation of the same phenomenon, a view espoused by Ratzinger and indeed by most Euro-centric historians, is that Christianity and its Gospel transformed, indeed purified, the ancient Nordic—and Celtic, Slavic and other European root cultures—from their violent self-identities and unified them in a common culture that brought a civilizing Christian humanism to Europe and from Europe in the age of colonization to the larger world.   
      There is truth to this theory, but there are also dangers and, true or not, it doesn’t correct the mistaken view that culture consists of its products and that the task before us is to reinforce the products—the classical literature, art, music, etc.  After all, while rejecting the Christian contribution to European Culture, the Nazis kept—and manipulated to their own non-Christian ends—much of the product, whether the great classical German musical heritage so valued by Ratzinger himself, or the art, or the literature.  But much like the Nazi philosophers, the Europeanists presume that European culture is inherently superior to other cultures;  its music, art, etc. superior to that of other cultures; and that Christianity is exclusively linked to European culture.   I write this as a person who prefers Mozart to Indian music, Shakespeare to Kabuki, and Michelangelo to Aztec pottery, but I realize that is my subjective preference and does not denote an objective superiority of my cultural tastes over others.  And while I may prefer a Latin Sung Mass (or an Italian Opera for that matter) over an African Liturgy with drums and dancers, that does not mean that my preferred liturgy is more Christian, more pleasing to God, or more effective a means of salvation than an a Mariachi Mass, a “Guitar Mass,” or a Gospel Mass.   
        Two millennia of European Christian cultural tradition does not mean that the Christian faith and liturgy cannot be refitted into Japanese Culture,  Australian Aboriginal Culture, or the First Nations Culture of the Canadian West.  Christianity is not indigenous to Europe.  A Semitic system of doctrine and a Jewish practice of prayer had to be adapted to the Graeco-Roman world in the second and third centuries and then again adapted and adopted into the cultures of the ancient Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic peoples from the fourth through the eleventh centuries.  It has given us the beauties of the Russian Divine Liturgy, the devout Bach’s superb settings for the (Lutheran) Mass, the Catholic glories of the agnostic Mozart, and the ambiguously Catholic-Anglican liturgical settings of Tallis and Byrd.  But none of this is culture—it is only the manifestation of culture and that Christian culture can manifest itself in a wide variety of world cultures today if only we learn to think outside the very limiting box of what has  been and learn the possibilities of what can be for Christ’s Church and his Gospel.  A reformation today must be one that is open and inclusive ; not a looking back towards an admittedly glorious past but a looking forward to the New Creation Jesus proclaimed as the Kingdom of God