Reason 2 For Why the "New Mass" Is Superior To The Old Rite

The most valuable experience in our process of being catechized in the faith is our participation in Liturgical Prayer and thus the prayer must reflect fully the authentic Catholic Faith.  

I attended the Divine Liturgy today in the Byzantine Rite—something I like to do—and I noticed that in the Byzantine/Orthodox calendars July 20 is the feast of the Prophet Elijah.  In the First and Second Book of Kings, Elijah was the great defender of True Faith against those Israelites who had fallen into superstitious practices.  The wealthy and secure of Israel had fallen into the worship of the Baals—the local deities, mostly fertility cults—that promised them prosperity.  Elijah was an especial defender of the poor as the Protected of Yahweh, against those of the great and powerful who tried to exploit them for their own gain. 

History shows us that this often happens with religion, even Christianity, when religious leaders for their own greed or power become too close to the politically and economically powerful interests.  Religion, for its own power, will often forget the interests of the poor.  In the history of the Catholic Church we see how this happened in the Ancien Regime, the alliance of Throne and Altar that came tumbling down with the French Revolution.  In the late Middle Agnes and in the Age of Absolutism in the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th century, the Church too often was part of the problem and not part of the solution—the Gospel Message of Good News for the poor. 

This wasn’t just a Catholic problem.  I remember writing a paper for a course in graduate school in which I explored how the Anglican Prayer Books of 1549, 1552, 1559 and 1662 incorporated a political ideology into the Liturgy that reinforced the absolute authority of the King as well as instructing people to be happy with their subordinate places in society. 

One of the reasons that I am committed to the liturgical changes of the Second Vatican Council is that the Church’s worship embodies and teaches the faith of the Church and the current rites most accurately reflect the faith of the Church as it stands today.  People’s belief is shaped by the way in which we worship.  Liturgy is highly symbolic and the symbols impress on our hearts and our minds the Truth in which we put our faith.  Indeed, not the catechism or the documents of the magisterium, but the liturgy itself is the primary agent of catechesis: faith formation. 

The liturgy in the pre-conciliar rites expressed a theological worldview which was appropriate to the time but to which the Church no longer adheres.  In 1570, when Pius V issued the Missal that incorporated the liturgical changes and direction ordered by the Council of Trent, the Church still held that the earth, not the sun, was the center of the solar system, indeed the center around which the entire universe revolved.  This, in turn, reflected a cosmology which presumed that man was the main point in creation and that all else in creation was subordinate to the relationship of Creator and his human creation.  Stars were not known to be suns and the universe itself was seen to be much smaller than we have come to know it to be.  God was in a heaven only an angel-laden ladder away and the devil was in a hell that occasionally belched fire and brimstone into our atmosphere in Vesuvius and Etna.  In 1570 the Catholic Church still held that absolute monarchy was the best form of government because the (supposed) Divine Authority of Kings modeled in an earthly fashion the Divine Authority of God himself and thus kings were to be obeyed and reverenced.  In the 16^th century the Church still held that European culture was inherently superior to the other cultures of the human family and the Church produced a Liturgy that in language and symbol system was exclusively European with a disregard for the newly discovered worlds of the Americas, Africa, and the Far East.  In the sixteenth century the Church still held to the idea of the Great Chain of Being in which each person occupied the position: King, rich person, woman, leper, bishop, mental defective, widow, etc. to which the Divine Plan had ordained them and in which they must remain.  The Mass reflected these and other ideas which over the subsequent centuries faded.   The Liturgy was designed to mimic the ceremonial of a royal court.  Women, because of their menses, were excluded from entrance into the altar area and were not permitted to exercise certain functions.  The Liturgy was designed to emphasize the mediatorial role of the priest between God and the mere faithful.  The priest offered the sacrifice on behalf of the assembled faithful whose role was to watch and to listen.  They were separated from the sacrifice by railings that divided the church into the section for those ordained and those assisting the ordained, and where the ordinary people could gather. The use of an arcane language which only a few of the faithful understood (and not all priests really understood) was another separation keeping the ordinary faithful at a distance from the sacred action.

Over the intervening centuries the Church’s understanding of the world—both this world and the Eternal—evolved.  The French Revolution swept royal absolutism into the dustbin of history.  The rise of the Middle Class due to the Industrial Revolution made the common person an agent of history, no longer a bystander to history.   The Church accommodated to this.  Through the course of the nineteenth century bishops increasingly came from the Middle Class and no longer from the aristocracy.  As more and more people became educated, class and social status played less and less a role as the Church itself democratized.  While for centuries Popes had come from the nobility, with Pius X the son of a peasant sat on the Throne of Peter.  But the liturgy was fixed and frozen and reflected a world of hierarchy resting on the base of a people who were mere sheep to be guided by their betters.  Baptism no longer conferred dignity and the royal priestly and prophetic character of the baptized was totally obscured.

Moves to unfreeze the liturgy began over a century ago.  Pius X wanted to increase the active role of the faithful in the Liturgy and wrote the motu proprio Tra la Sollectitudine relegating polyphony to the concert hall and restoring the primacy of chant to the Mass precisely to break the monopoly of choirs and encourage congregational singing.   It was, of course, highly ignored.  Pius also permitted the ordinary Catholic to receive communion daily without permission of his or her pastor or confessor and he restored the communion of the faithful to a place within the Mass and not a private ceremony for the few communicants after Mass was over.  Such changes may seem rather minimal to us, but it heralded a different approach to the Liturgy than had been taken for four centuries. 

Even before Pius’ legislation to increase the participation of the faithful in the Liturgy, he and his predecessor Leo XIII had taken the Church for an interesting turn towards recapturing its own historical character.  Both Leo and Pius—and even Leo’s predecessor the arch-conservative Pius IX—were big on restoring the ancient churches of Rome.  They went into many of the older churches—San Giorgio in Velabro, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Santa Maria in Dominica, San Stefano Rotondo, Santa Costanza, Santa Sabina and others—and stripped away the baroque ornamentations that had been added in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  They recovered the ancient Roman basilica form.  Their work showed that Rome had never oriented its churches—they did not all face east but the churches of Rome faced every direction of the compass.  Moreover, their historical restorations revealed that the custom in Rome had always been for the priest to face the people across the altar.  Stripped of the baroque decorations, the churches stood in their ancient simplicity devoid of statues though often decorated with ancient mosaics and icons.  Suddenly the baroque liturgy of 1570 was startlingly out of place in these ancient temples. It triggered historians and patristic scholars to research the development of the rites and suggest modifications to the Roman Rite to restore its ancient character.  Those modifications began to take shape with the restoration of the Holy Week rites in 1955 and then more and more appeared in the years during and after the Council until the Missal of 1970 gave shape to the current official rite. 

Pius XII who reigned as pope from 1939-1958 encouraged these studies and wrote two encyclicals that reflected the developing theology of the Church and understanding of its liturgy: Mystici Corporis (1943) and Mediator Dei (1947).  The first—appropriately—returned to a patristic theology of the Church (as opposed to the scholastic approach of Trent and the post-Tridentine theologians such as Bellarmine) and the second gave a vision of the Liturgy that reflected this patristic ecclesiology.  These documents—among other writings of Pius XII—provided the theological basis for the Second Vatican Council. 

The Council itself marked significant developments in Catholic doctrine.  The priestly role of the laity was clearly restored in the Dogmatic (repeat Dogmatic) Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium.  (Some people dismiss Vatican II as not being a dogmatic Council: they need to read the documents that are dogmatic constitutions to see their error.)  The Church abandoned its proclaimed right to be established by law in civil society and affirmed the right of the individual conscience to believe according to whatever lights were given it.  It was acknowledged that the Church is the community of the baptized and not only those in full communion with the Roman Pontiff—though, the fullness of Christ’s Church subsists in the Roman Communion.  There were dramatic changes.

And the Liturgy issued by Pope Paul VI to implement the changes mandated by the Council has been designed to express more fully the theological realities as proclaimed by the Church today.  Safeguarding the unique graces and responsibilities conferred upon the ordained, all the baptized share in the priestly, royal, and prophetic office.   All the faithful, with each according to his or her proper order, join Christ the High Priest in offering the Eucharistic Sacrifice with full active conscious participation.  New church buildings reflect this ecclesiology with the faithful gathered around the altar.  Railings have been removed so as to unite priest and people around the Lord’s Table.  The Eucharist is more clearly both meal and sacrifice.  The Chalice has been restored to the faithful to fulfill Christ’s command: “take and drink…”  While the properly vertical nature of the Mass has been maintained, the communal nature of worship has been emphasized over the private by restoring an appropriate horizontal awareness among the community of worshippers.  The baptized are recognized by being given ministries proper to them as lectors, cantors, and even “extraordinary” ministers of the Eucharist.  Indeed the artificial distinction (see Galatians 3:28) of male and female has been—to an extent—removed as women join men in the various ministries open to the Order of the faithful.  There remains more work yet to be done for a fuller expression of our ecclesiology to be reflected in our Liturgical celebrations. 

The cultural variations of the Church as it finds itself around the globe—and even as it finds itself in certain societies such as our multi-cultural America—gives varied expression to the Mass and indeed to all our prayer.  Gospel Music in one place, Mariachi in another, and the Fauré Requiem have all found their place.  In Africa you need dancers if you are to consecrate a church; in America only if you want to give the bishop a coronary.  A priest in India might be seated at a low table-altar for Mass while a priest in Nigeria dances around it holding a bowl of incense.   

The 1970 and the 1570 rites each express the faith of the Church as it was defined at that particular period in history.  I always enjoy a trip to colonial Williamsburg, but that is not the America of today.  I don’t particularly enjoy the usus antiquior of the Mass and I am troubled by it because, unlike Colonial Williamsburg, the Mass is something far to sacred to relegate to historical re-enactment. The Mass embodies and enshrines the faith of the Church, not the Church that was in God’s yesterday but the Church that is in the grace of God’s Present moment.  Of course, if your faith is static and removed from this world in which the Divine Word incarnated himself, that is another matter—one for Elijah who stood against the false gods of his day.  

The Foundational Problem of the Contemporary Liturgy

Sorry for the break--an unexpected hiccup in schedule came along and i didn't have access to the internet to make the posting. 

I observed in my last posting that my experience is that the Liturgy, at least in the Western Church (this would include Anglican/Episcopalians and Lutherans who follow a “Mass Model” for the Eucharistic celebration as well as Catholics), leaves me somewhat spiritually unengaged.  In the better parishes the music might be quite good and the preaching well-prepared and delivered, but even there I am finding that the Liturgy is not much more than a ritual through which I and others must go (at best) out of a sense of responsibility to a particular community or (at worst) sheer duty imposed by Church Law.  I don’t think the vapidity of our worship is a fault of the Liturgy itself.  I have, as I pointed out, found it at times and in very particular circumstances, to be a deeply prayerful experience.  I am even finding that—by and large—I am liking the “new missal” with its rather elegantly idiosyncratic syntax.  (The vocabulary, however, can be over the top, even for a lexophile.)  Some people blame the insipid quality of the liturgy on the architectural setting found in most churches and while I do find much of the contemporary church architecture—both for new buildings and renovated ones—lifeless, even spiritless—I don’t think that is the problem but rather a symptom of a much deeper lack in our Catholic life. I think it comes down to that most of us—including (especially) our priests—just don’t know how to pray and so can’t lead public prayer.   I think we confuse prayer with bothering God by our incessant babbling and the offering of spiritual or material trinkets in bargain for hoped for and needed favors.  I go to some churches and all I can think of is the scene in 1 Kings where the priests of Baal are hopping around their altar chanting and screeching in a frenetic ritual.   While I think today’s priests, especially the younger ones, are much given to piety, I am not sure that know the difference between piety and spirituality.  They consider their devotional life, which is often quite elaborate, even intense, to be their “spirituality” but I don’t see in them the marks of a genuine spiritual depth.

I just finished correcting a Master’s thesis which speaks of this subject—not in terms of clerical piety but in terms of a mature and authentic spirituality as distinguished from a personal piety.  Of course, piety can serve as the introduction to the spiritual life—Teresa of Avila makes that very clear—but piety can also short-circuit and then it only reinforces our prejudices and confirms us in our spiritual and psychological immaturity.   The student thesis I am correcting measures spirituality by its ability to open us beyond our own universe and its ego-specific constructs and even beyond our group-consciousness and collective prejudices to an appreciation of how all creation stands in its relationship to the Creator—or rather, how God stands in relationship to all his creation.  Perhaps this inclusive vision is what I find satisfying in the Byzantine Liturgy—it bespeaks an earth in profound communion with heaven—a harmony of the cosmos in which all creation is brought into union with its Creator whereas in the West I find that we tend to divide the Creator and creation.  We divide the sacred and the secular instead of seeing the sacred as the flowering of the secular.  We distinguish clergy from laity instead of seeing the unity of the Body of Christ.  We include the righteous and exclude those whose lives don’t “measure up” to our standards instead of seeing that we all stand as sinners and we all stand beneath the shower of grace.  It’s curious that I find the Byzantine Liturgy more prayerful than the Roman because in general I am somewhat “Low Church.”  I don’t like incense and elaborate church buildings and a lot of what appears to be no more than a self-conscious fussiness.   I will not attend a Mass where the priest has his back to the people or determines to use Latin for the audible parts of the Mass.  (On the other hand, I do like much of the Latin Music and am happy enough when we sing it, but I also like good traditional (Protestant) hymnody and most of the contemporary Church music as well.)  Yet I found when I have lived in Rome, many Sundays I would head off to the Russicum for the Divine Liturgy in Old Slavonic  (of which I understand not a word), with the priest(s) not only facing away from me but hidden by the iconostasis, and with enough incense to put an asthmatic on a respirator.  What is it that makes me transcend all my principles about a Liturgy in which one can participate fully and with understanding (those old principles of Vatican II)?  I doubt that the average Byzantine or Orthodox priest is any more deeply spiritual than his Roman counterpart, it may just be that the western emphasis on the human person as an embodied intellect has deprived us in the west of a more integrated spiritual development and that consequently our Liturgy—our communal prayer—lacks the depth and richness that a holistic approach to spirituality might produce.  And it may be—which is to say I think that it is—time for us in the west to grow beyond the narrow visions of reality that religion and religious people permit us and let God open for us the vistas he enjoys.  To embrace the world as God knows it rather than as we have been taught to see it is a significant step towards the “Kingdom of God.”  The great mystics of our Catholic tradition show us that—that we are called to a transformation of our human natures to the Divine Nature; that we are to be so united to God as to see the world through his eyes and love the world with the love that fills his heart.  Unfortunately while this doctrine can be found from Iranaeus and Athanasius up through John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila to Merton and contemporary authors, we never hear it in Church.  Moreover, our Sunday morning experience concentrates on turning bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood whereas God’s purpose is that we ourselves should be transformed into the Image of the One who himself is the Image of the Divine Father.   It is you and I who are to be transformed in the Eucharist but the mediocrity of our celebrations makes that task all the more difficult even for an omnipotent God. 

Is Vatican II in Danger? I

I want to introduce a new line of conversation here—and it reflects a topic that I have been hearing with increasing frequency over the past ten or more years, becoming so frequent that now not a week goes by that I don’t hear it discussed—“What’s going on with Vatican II? Are we going backwards?” Last week I had an opportunity to give a lecture I entitled “Is Vatican II in Danger?” To be honest, I had made a commitment for a talk in a parish and not given sufficient thought to a topic, so I pulled out a paper I had prepared for a more academic lecture last October and trimmed it down to a more popular audience. Both times I gave the talk the reaction from those present was: “I’ve seen things change over the past few years and I was wondering what was happening to the Church?” People had seen the same signs I referred to—signs that the Council was being “reinterpreted” or more bluntly was being dismantled under the guise of a more “authentic” interpretation.
One of the people I have been privileged to know in my lifetime was Archbishop Denis Hurley OMI, Archbishop emeritus of Durban, South Africa. I had met this feisty old gentleman at an annual conference we each attended in Rome and would look for him there each year. I would offer to carry his briefcase and vestment bag and help set him up for the concelebrated mass each day of the Conference. He was an incurable extrovert and recognizing that he had a fascinated audience in me, stuck by my side during these conferences, so that we often took our meals together and sat with each other for the talks. I was only too willing to run and get him a cup of tea and some biscuits at the breaks because the reward was some of the most fascinating stories about the life of a phenomenal man in the midst of the very controversial society (South Africa during and after Apartheid) and a Church that was at times supportive and at times resistant. The Archbishop told me stories about his conflicts with the white regime, about his participation the Second Vatican Council, and his relationships with a wide variety of people from Archbishop Tutu to the then Cardinal Ratzinger. The last time I saw the Archbishop was the end of January 2004 just two weeks before his death. His Grace was a feisty personality and not hesitant to speak his mind. That Tuesday morning when I came into the conference hall and sat next to him, without even saying “hello” he began—“well, I had a meeting with the Holy Father.” (This was just over a year before Pope John Paul II died.) “I said to him: Holy Father, I am an old man and we old men—you understand this, you’re only a few years younger than me—we old men sometimes have problems with our memory. But I distinctly remember: we had a Council. What did you do with it?” The Archbishop was concerned—I won’t say angry, that might be an interpretation—but concerned over issues such as the revision of the work of ICEL (International Commission on English in the Liturgy, a commission which he had chaired for many years.) He rarely criticized directly, most often using humor and incomplete sentences with significant glances to get his point across. I wish now that I had been a more conversant respondent, evoking more explicit statements from him, but if I had fished more eagerly for specifics he may not have been as free-spoken. As I said, I tended to listen and to laugh at his anecdotes, but up to his death he remained not only sharp but slightly acidic when he talked about—not the Church, but the ecclesial bureaucracy.
Let me share a letter that points out some of the reason that the late Archbishop may have been concerned. It is all over the internet and it is from Father Anthony Ruff, a monk of Saint John’s Abbey, Collegeville. Dom Anthony was very involved with the re-constituted ICEL and the production of the “new missal” that will be introduced this autumn. Read his explanation of why he is distancing himself from the missal. You will see another voice that is concerned that we are sliding back down the mountain from the goals that the Popes and Bishops of Vatican II set for us. This is an open letter to the American Bishops, Archbishops, and Cardinals. The fact that it is “open” means that Father wanted to share it with the whole Church and that is perhaps his principal point—the Church is not a body of bishops, it is the whole People of God and there must be mutual respect and accountability.

Your Eminences, Your Excellencies,
With a heavy heart, I have recently made a difficult decision concerning the new English missal. I have decided to withdraw from all my upcoming speaking engagements on the Roman Missal in dioceses across the United States. After talking with my confessor and much prayer, I have concluded that I cannot promote the new missal translation with integrity. I’m sure bishops want a speaker who can put the new missal in a positive light, and that would require me to say things I do not believe.
I love the Church, I love the sacred liturgy, I love chant in Latin and English, and I treasure being involved with all these as a monk and priest. It has been an honor to serve until recently as chairman of the music committee of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) that prepared all the chants for the new missal. But my involvement in that process, as well as my observation of the Holy See’s handling of scandal, has gradually opened my eyes to the deep problems in the structures of authority of our church.
The forthcoming missal is but a part of a larger pattern of top-down impositions by a central authority that does not consider itself accountable to the larger church. When I think of how secretive the translation process was, how little consultation was done with priests or laity, how the Holy See allowed a small group to hijack the translation at the final stage, how unsatisfactory the final text is, how this text was imposed on national conferences of bishops in violation of their legitimate episcopal authority, how much deception and mischief have marked this process—and then when I think of Our Lord’s teachings on service and love and unity…I weep.
I see a good deal of disillusionment with the Catholic Church among my friends and acquaintances. Some leave the Catholic Church out of conviction, some gradually drift away, some join other denominations, some remain Catholic with difficulty. My response is to stay in this church for life and do my best to serve her. This I hope to do by stating the truth as I see it, with charity and respect. I would be ready to participate in future liturgical projects under more favorable conditions.
I am sorry for the difficulties I am causing others by withdrawing, but I know this is the right thing to do. I will be praying for you and all leaders in our church.
Pax in Christo

“handling of the scandal” “secretive…process” “little consultation” “allowed a small group to hijack” “unsatisfactory” “was imposed” “violation of their legitimate episcopal authority” “deception and mischief” I am sure Dom Anthony is going to get nine kinds of hell—not from his Abbot or community—but from the very people he had served in his work on the liturgy for his frankness. Here we have someone saying “The emperor has no clothes!” This is the role of the Religious priest, brother or sister—to be prophetic, to raise their voice and start leaping around and pointing like a mad person announcing that the Emperor is walking down the street—thinking himself clad in magnificent cope and miter—but in fact quite nude.
History is not about the past. Those who study the past for its own sake are not historians, they are antiquarians. Antiquarianism is fun. You get to play dress up and pretend you live in some sanitized version of the days of Yore. History is using the past as a means of talking about the present and the future. It requires thought and analysis. In looking at “What is happening to Vatican II” we get to see history as it unfolds—a rare opportunity. I won’t be doing a steady diet of it. I have a lot more to say about the history of anti-Catholicism in the United States as well as the role of Religious Women—both in the Civil War and in the life of the Church in the States. I am anxious to get back and look at the development and construction of St Peter’s Basilica and I am trying to figure out how to approach a history of the Liturgy in the West. So this episode on Vatican II and whether or not it is in danger is only one topic but I think it will be an interesting one and probably take about a dozen postings over the next month. It is not as interesting as Whispers in the Loggia, but I bet it gets me “reported” to somebody or other. There is more than one wicked witch of the west and each has her flying monkeys.

The image today is the dome of St. Peter's taken from the Apostolic Palace