Grace or Infection: Making the New Mass Look Old

The New Liturgical Movement and
the New Old New Mass 

Not all of the Katholique Krazies (I know, the spelling keeps evolving—English is, after all, a living language unlike Old Church Slavonic or its Western equivalent) are careless in their appropriation of catholicitatis antiquae.  One of the better sites—an often serious academic investigation of liturgical history though directed towards a bat****crazy agenda—is “New Liturgical Movement.”  An intriguing assortment of scholars, professional and amateur, covering a wide range of topics from the Ambrosian Rite to Sacred Architecture regularly post meticulously researched articles aimed at stemming the tide of the Novus Ordo and restoring credibility to the usus antiquior.  I regularly read their postings—not because I agree with their agenda of Instaurare Omnia in Vanitate, but because, well because they are worth reading from a historical point of view.  The interpretation of historical data can be skewed towards their particular agenda, but the data itself is fascinating.  But I was a bit taken aback by a recent posting that implied that the “Ordinary Form” of the Liturgy is somehow in need of a strong infusion of spirituality as was found in the golden days of yore when the 1570 Rite was the ordinary rite and before we surrendered to all this vulgar tongue and even more vulgar guitars and more vulgar yet, women on the altar, and all the other abominations brought about by that detestable crypto-Freemason, Annibale Bugnini.  (By the way, I notice that New Liturgical Movement not only keeps women off the sanctuary but off their editorial board.  Hmmm,  that’s the problem you know: first the editorial board and then altar girls and who knows where it ends up.  The Church of England began its steady decline into post-modern Witchery when they started to let women serve on vestries.) 

In any event, I can’t quite figure out what the folks over at New Liturgical Movement mean by “spirituality” in this context. I used to teach courses in spirituality back in the day.  Admittedly it was the classic Catholic approach—monastic spirituality, John of the Cross, the devotio moderna,  17^th century French Spirituality—you know, the usual diet.  I think what they are speaking about is not spirituality proper, but piety.  There is a difference, one that unfortunately is not often covered in seminary classes leaving many priests to confuse the two.  Now, piety is not a bad thing; to the contrary.  But it is not spirituality.

I always over-simplified it to my students until they could get a sense of it for themselves from reading the texts, as: Spirituality marks the relationship of God with the person in which God takes the initiative and invites the person into relationship and sustains the person in that relationship by God’s grace.  Piety, which comes from the Latin pietas, meaning our duty towards our deities, our parents, our mentors and others who have guided us through our formative years or who otherwise have a claim over us, piety marks the relationship of the person to God in which the person, inspired by grace, takes the initiative and seeks a deeper relationship to God.   Though I never used this image in class, it is somewhat like who does the leading when we dance.  Now piety is often the foundation on which God builds the relationship we call spirituality, though piety can easily become short-circuited and engender religious feelings without the genuine sort of conversion God works in us through spirituality. 

So back to the New Liturgical Movement and its suggestions how to infuse the New Liturgy with Old Time “Spirituality.”  Some of my favorite suggestions are:

1.   Wear the maniple and biretta, and the cope for processions or the Asperges/Vidi Aquam. 

2.   be sure to lower your gaze so not as to make eye contact with the people when greeting them with “the Lord be with you” and other liturgical greetings.

3.   Stand at the altar with your back towards the congregation, the ad absidem position. 

4.   Add all the old offertory prayers silently alongside the current rite (also to be done silently) as a “private devotion.” 

5.   Recite the Canon (Roman of course) is a “more subdued voice.”  A footnote suggests that it might even be said inaudibly 

6.   Bend noticeably over the host and chalice when reciting the Words of Consecration and recite them slowly and deliberately so as to give them “due metaphysical weight.”

7.   Omit the sign of peace which is, after all, optional (again, we don’t want too much intimacy with the folk—nothing destroys spirituality like other people)

8.   Hold one’s thumbs and forefingers together from the consecration to the ablutions

9.   Omit the prayer of the faithful whenever possible. 

10.                 Use only the Roman Canon, mentioning all of the saints and using the “through Christ our Lord conclusions. 

11.                 Say the prayer “Placeat tibi” or the Prologue of John’s Gospel (the “last gospel” of the TLM) as a “community devotion” at the end of Mass. 

While such practices may increase a certain piety in the liturgical celebrations, I am not sure, given the difference between piety and spirituality, how all this relates to “spirituality.” The article’s author, Professor Peter Kwasniewski of Wyoming Catholic College, claims

Since the usus antiquior preserves in a specially intense way the theology and piety of many centuries of faith, a judicious emulation or adoption from it of elements of holiness and “good form” will make a real difference in the devotion of the celebrant and the ensuing fruitfulness of the Mass.

I can’t disagree that the usus antiquior preserves the theology and piety of many centuries of faith, but that is no guarantee that it will bring about an increase of holiness for either the priest-celebrant or the faithful attending.  I have no doubt that the faithful attending a devoutly celebrated TLM can benefit from the graces thereof, but I have seen no convincing evidence that there is either a quantitative or qualitative superiority of the graces bestowed in one rite over the other. 

Certainly Professor Kwasniewski’s suggestions go back to the Liturgy as theatrical performance model as his suggestions push the faithful to the edge of irrelevance to the Rite, something that might inspire a certain sense of awe but which would not normally be taken to result in a deepening of spirituality.   That sense of awe or mystery, taken for itself alone, remains a subjective experience which is not to say it could not be a channel of grace but it remains only piety.  I think this is the problem when people have not studied Christian spirituality sufficiently well and they confuse feelings of aesthetic pleasure of spiritual experience.  As I have often said before, go and see the last scene of Act 1 of Tosca and you will be transported to the seventh heaven with incense and chierichetti and copes and ombralline galore.  I confess that the “New Mass” is too often poorly celebrated with ugly churches, overly chatty priests, servers that show little attention to their duties, music that is banal at best, and people who come late, leave early, and show precious little interest in what is going on at the altar.  I don’t go to those churches and I don’t know why other people do.  But I am old enough to remember fly-specked altar clothes, albs with ripped lace, altar-servers who kept nudging one another to make each other laugh, a old lady with a chipped larynx warbling the Missa de Angelis from the choir loft, and a priest with last night’s whiskey still on his breath.  I know now that the old rite is so rarely done, few priests are still quite so casual about it, but why does it now have to reduce the celebration of the Mysterium Fidei to something akin to Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo?  No, the Novus Ordo doesn’t need to look to the Usus Antiquior for guidance.  It just needs to be done with an incarnational mixture of human authenticity and divine gravitas.

We All Have Our Agenda

In my blog entries for March 21 and 22 I mentioned that this blog, What Sister Never Knew and Father Never Told You had come to the notice of Father Anthony Ruff, OSB of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville and the blog he edits, Pray Tell: Worship, Wit, and Wisdom (http://www.praytellblog.com).  What I should have realized is that the positive recognition I received from Father Anthony would bring down the plague of Katholic Krazy gnats that buzz around his site looking for something with which to disagree (and be disagreeable).  I am a little naïve about the blogosphere and don’t spend a lot of time trolling around.  A friend of mine alerted me to be Father Anthony’s tip o’the hat and I have since learned to check out Pray Tell from time to time and have found it to contain excellent material that has stimulated much conversation and even more thought on my part.  But for some reason the other day I ended up on the site of The New Liturgical Movement/Novus Motus Liturgicus (http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org).  Now, to be fair, the various authors that blog on this site are not, at least for the most part, Katholic Krazies but men and women who, for the greater part, know what they are writing about.  I probably would not agree with much of what they write, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate both their work and their thoughtfulness.  Of course, they have an agenda and their agenda lines up with a significant group of the KK’s—and guarantees their readership.  The self-appointed mission of TNLM/NML is to put the toothpaste back into the tube and restore the Church to its monarchial model that we can remember from the 1950’s.   While they are not, for the most part, the Society of Saint Pius X sort of strict restorationists,  TNLM/NML follows the “Reform of the Reform” philosophy outlined by Monsignor M. Francis Manion in an article he wrote for America Magazine about twenty-two years ago.  (Unfortunately I don’t have immediate access to the article and so can’t give you the exact date of publication.)  The Reform of the Reform approach to liturgical renewal is that the Novus Ordo of Paul VI far exceeded the reforms of the Roman Rite called for by the Council and should be dialed back in favor of a Rite that would still be celebrated—for the greater part—in Latin with the priest facing away from the congregation, and without the structural changes of the 1970 Missal.  Gregory DiPippo, the managing editor of the TNLM/NML blog, recognizes the threat to this agenda posed by What Sister Never Knew and Father Never Told You’s critique of the old liturgy and why Father Anthony picked up on it.

Fr. Ruff’s reason for bringing them to the readers’ attention is, as he writes, that the original author “… shows why for so many of us there can’t be a going back to the old rite – no way, no how.”

And that is precisely my point.  We aren’t going back; we can’t go back. The Tridentine Rite, and some of those medieval rites on which it was based, have several serious theological flaws.  (By the way, so does the Novus Ordo and—in my opinion—the recently revised translation has not only failed to clear them up, but made them worse.  Notice I refrain from saying “humble opinion” as I am the first to admit there is nothing humble about my opinions.  Humility would deprive me of the pleasure I have in doing this blog.)  In the end, there will always be flaws in the Liturgy.  Our faith, or at least the doctrinal expression of our faith, is always a living reality that needs constant modulation to approach ever more closely the Truth of the Divine Mystery.  And that is one reason why we cannot ever again allow the liturgy to be frozen for four hundred years—or forty years, for that matter.   Like it not, we live in history and not yet in that timeless realm where there is no benefit in change. 

In any event, Mr. DiPippo, a graduate student studying for his Master’s Degree (more probably the License or STL) in Rome at the Augustinianum (The Pontifical Institute for Patristics which is one of Rome’s more credible faculties), goes on, by clipping quotes from Father Anthony or myself, to set up a straw man whom he can refute.  By quoting Peter Lombard (whom I agree is the “gold standard” of medieval theologians) he implies that all Scholastic theologians who followed him were orthodox in their doctrines of Eucharistic Sacrifice.  Would that there was truth to that.  We may have been saved the Reformation.  But alas and alack, to use one of my favorite archaisms, all one has to do is read medieval sermons or devotional books or even popular hymns to see that there were gross exaggerations of the Church’s authentic faith in the popular imagination.  And those exaggerations became part of the commonly accepted teaching of the Church over time.  Bad liturgy does that.  The lex orandi becomes the lex credendi which is why the reform of the liturgy is a constant task and needs to be an ongoing work. 

Mr. DiPippo  makes his error in methodology when he writes:

As a first principal, I will take it for granted that liturgical texts must be understood according to the sense in which the Church gives them to us. Furthermore, I take this to be true, even when another sense at variance with the Faith may be plausibly found within them. (http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2014/03/the-theology-of-offertory-part-3.html#.U3j92b8-aX0) 

The liturgical texts should be understood according to the sense in which the Church gives them to us.  But they often aren’t.  Unfortunately once I utter a word or commit it to paper it no longer belongs to me but to the listener or the reader. This is what permits Mr. DiPippo to put his interpretation on my text and while I may insist that is not what I meant or said or wrote, I can’t deny his understanding.  The same is true for the teachings of the Church whether Papal Encyclicals, Council Documents, or Liturgical texts.  One of my favorite Latin axioms is Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur.  (That which is received is received according to the manner of the recipient.   Or in other words, while I can tell you what I said, only you can tell me what you heard.)  No, maybe Peter Lombard or Thomas Aquinas never said that bread and wine become a secondary sacrifice in the offertory of the Mass—and depending on the rite with which they were familiar perhaps there was no ambiguity about this.  But by the time we had the Mass of Pius V for 350 years the Catholic Encyclopedia would have something to say in refutation to Mr. DiPippo’s claim that

Now obviously, the claim that the Scholastics (or anyone else) thought that there were two sacrifices in the ritual of the Mass, one of bread and wine, and another of the Body and Blood of Christ, is absurd.

So no one thought there were to two sacrifices in the Body and Blood of Christ?  Check out the pre-Vatican II edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10006a.htm ).  

The question therefore arises first: Is the sacrifice comprised in the Offertory? From the wording of the prayer this much at least is clear that bread and wine constitute the secondary sacrificial elements of the Mass, since the priest in the true  language of sacrifice, offers to God bread as an unspotted host (immaculatam hostiam) and wine as the chalice of salvation (calicem salutaris).  So much for no once claiming that there were two sacrifices in the Mass. 

Now to be fair, the article in the older Catholic Encyclopedia clearly locates the essential sacrifice of the Mass in the Consecratory Prayer, but it does above admit to the offertory rites involving offering in sacrifice to God bread and wine.  This is a clear flaw in the Tridentine Liturgy and the revised 1970 Rite does not eliminate sacrificial language but redirects the focus away from the bread and wine and places it on the Eucharist in which we proclaim the Death of the Lord until he comes again.  Does this mean that the Tridentine Liturgy is not valid?  By no means.  But it does mean, at least to those of us who value a clear focus on the Sacrificial Death of Christ on the Cross, that we have no desire to return—“no way, no how” to use Father Anthony’s words—to the old liturgy.  That may make TNLM/NML folk unhappy but be content that you can find your Summorum Pontificium and your Reform of the Reform versions of the Novus Ordo while the rest of us sing a little Gospel or have our Mass for kids with special needs or just enjoy the fruits of Vatican II and how the liturgy helps us to pray.  O—and by the way—we aren’t finished yet and the work of Liturgical renewal (and reform) is an ongoing mission. 

Know Your Sources

Our friend over at Les Femmes recently published an attack on Pope Francis and his liturgical style.  The video was prepared by John Vennari who was at one time connected with sede vacantists such as, among others, Marion Horvat  from Tradition in Action and Gerry Matatics, a prominent Evangelical turned Catholic turned Sede Vacantist.  (A Sede Vacantist is one who believes that there is no legitimate Pope at the moment because the alleged Pope is a heretic.  The “See is Empty”: Sede Vacante in Italian.   Most Sede Vacantists allege that every Pope since and including John XXIII has been in heresy and that the Second Vatican Council is a “false council,” its decrees being, according to them, heretical.  This Sede Vacantist connection was probably unknown to the author of the Les Femmes site who, while ignorant of (or disagreement with) most legitimate changes in liturgical and canonical law over the last forty years, is sincere in adhering to papal authority, or at least papal authority that support her somewhat eclectic choice of political and devotional positions.
Mr. Vennari seems to have left his Sede Vacantist position to edit Catholic Family News, a website that manages  to stay just on the Catholic side of the schismatic line.  Catholic Family News is the source of many of the Videos posted on the Les Femmes site.  Vennari’s site also has a consistent stance of rejecting the Council and its changes without formally renouncing papal authority.  It has been extremely critical of Pope Francis and especially for his liturgical style.  The Papal Mass at World Youth Day sent Catholic Family News over the edge and its video is replete with allegations of liturgical violations in the Papal Liturgy as if Tra le Sollecitudini of Pope St. Pius X and other pre-conciliar legislation had not been superseded by Sacrosanctum Concilium of Vatican II and Post Conciliar legislation.  The only effect of such biased videos is to undermine not only the Conciliar liturgical reforms but papal authority itself. 
What the Oracle of Woodstock doesn’t seem to realize is that videos like this are an attack not simply on a style of liturgy which perturbs her, but an attack on the Pope who celebrated this Mass and celebrated it with an obvious enthusiasm and enjoyment.  Granted that the more introverted Pope Benedict would have been somewhat discomforted by its enthusiasm, but even in the days of Pope Benedict and his penchant for liturgical restorationism it was clear that the best the neo-trads could hope for was space for their particular liturgical preferences.  There was never a realistic chance for “The Reform of the Reform” to reestablish its ideal of liturgy draped as tragic opera to be the normative worship of the Catholic Church in the United States much less in Latin America, Asia, or Africa where indigenous cultures have been integrated into Catholic worship.  Francis has made it clear from the first moments of his papacy that he was not going to permit the Church to go backward.  He is no liberal and liberals must take note of that, but he is thoroughly committed to the program of the Second Vatican Council as it was originally understood before Cardinal Ratzinger’s attempts at the “hermeneutic of continuity” began revising the Council.   No, I think we are going to see plenty of liturgical dancing and music with a beat and roaring crowds at future World Youth Days as well as at other gatherings.  But then the Oracle of Woodstock dreams of her new Catholic Scouts sitting around a campfire saying the rosary and singing Latin hymns (see posting for June 13, 2013).  Just what do they smoke in Woodstock?

The Old Order Passes, Francis I continued

Cardinal Brogoglio washing the

feet of young men and women

on Holy Thursday

Well the Pope is around for 48 hours and the honeymoon is over. The Left is insistent that his behavior during the Argentine “Dirty War” (from 1976-83) be investigated, especially the allegations that he hung two fellow Jesuits out to dry.  Fathers Francisco Jalics and Orlando Yorio had been kidnapped and tortured by the Argentine military in 1976 because of their work among the poor in the slums of Bajo Flores.  A week prior to their disappearance Brogoglio, as their religious superior, ordered them to leave the district.  The priests refused and Brogoglio suspended their priestly duties.  They were kidnapped, held in a military prison where they were tortured, and found released but drugged and naked five months later.  Brogoglio claimed that the order for them to leave Bajo Flores was to remove them from danger and they refused.  Jalics and Yorio later claimed that suspending them from priestly ministry removed the protection of the Church and gave the military junta the impetus to arrest them.  Jalics and Brogoglio since reconciled.  Yorio died in 2000.
The New York Times alleged today that Brogoglio was elected because he was not as threatening to the Curia as Italian Front Runner, Angelo Scola, Archbishop of Milan.  In other words, the choice of Brogoglio was a choice against the much needed reform of the Roman Curia.  This charge is probably not totally fair but as an outsider Brogoglio will not be as wise to the wily ways of the Curia party and have more difficulty in dislodging the powerful control blocs in which several curial Cardinals have entrenched themselves.  Only time will tell.
Well, the discomfort of the left is exceeded by discomfort on the right.  Francis I has made it clear the Benedict’s liturgical “Reform of the Reform” is over.  As Archbishop of Buenos Aires Brogoglio had actively—and successfully—worked to thwart Benedict’s edict Summorum Pontificum granting priests the “right” to celebrate the unreformed Roman Liturgy of the 1962 Missal.  There allegedly was not a single “Tridentine Rite” Liturgy offered on a regular basis in the Buneos Aires Archdiocese.  Conservatives noticed immediately his refusal to wear the velvet mozetta and lace rochet prepared for his first appearance and were very upset that when he offered Mass for the Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel following his election, he had a temporary altar facing the congregation set in place.  Pope Benedict, an advocate of the priest celebrating with his back to the people, had used the traditional altar in the chapel that faces Michelangelo’s great fresco of the Last Judgment.  Moreover, pictures are now surfacing of then Cardinal Brogoglio washing the feet of women during the traditional Holy Thursday rite despite Vatican instructions that only men were to be seated among those representing the apostles. 
Jesuits are notorious for their sloppy liturgy (despite their staffing some of the finest liturgical centers in the United States such as Holy Trinity Church, Georgetown).  “A successful Jesuit Liturgy—no one was hospitalized” and “as confused as a Jesuit in Holy Week” are frequent snide remarks by the Catholic effete.  Not unmerited.  I think that Pope Francis is going to show us that there are more essential things to our mission than keeping women from the altar or wearing court dress.  As to the complaints of the left, we regret that Jesus isn’t available to serve in this office personally, but we must settle on a mortal with some mistakes in his past.  Personally I think we need as a Church to move on beyond the whines of the modern day Cathari.  Phariseeism and hypocrisy is not the sole province of the religious right—liberals too forget that we are not about moral perfection but about the forgiveness of sins.          

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. 

Roots of Liturgical Reform: Maria Laach and Odo Casel 1

Maria Laach Abbey

Following up on the last blog but one, I should say something about the Abbey of Maria Laach and the liturgical scholarship that was done there under Abbot Ildefons  Herwegen in the first part of the twentieth century.  Laach Abbey is an ancient foundation in the German Rhineland Palatinate going back to 1093 and was known in the Central and High Middle Ages as a center of monastic scholarship.  It had a revival in monastic observance and scholarly work just before the Protestant Reformation and it survived the Reformation only to be suppressed by Napoleon in 1802.  For several decades in the 19^th century, the Abbey buildings were occupied by the very non-monastic but scholarly Jesuits until Bismark’s Kulturkampf expelled them from Prussian territory.  It was in the Jesuit era that the name “Maria” was added to Laach Abbey.  The Benedictines returned in 1892 and the Abbey Church, a brilliant example of a Romanesque  Basilica, was restored through the efforts of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, though a Lutheran with no Catholic sympathies, recognized the nationalistic value of such an ancient monastic foundation.   Among the daughter houses of Maria Laach is Mount Savior Monastery in New York State founded by Dom Damasus Winzen OSB, a monk of Maria Laach.

Among the most distinguished monks of Maria Laach and its liturgical studies and experimentation was Dom Odo Casel (1886-1948).  Dom Odo had entered the monastery at the age of 20 and was sent to Rome where he earned the Doctorate in theology, writing this thesis on the Eucharistic theology of Justin Martyr.  In his scholarship, Casel recaptured the concept of Mysterium.  Our English word “mystery” just doesn’t cut it.  The Mysterium speaks of an encounter with the Divine, our immanence being united to the Divine Transcendence—a lifting up of the creature into the very Life of the Creator. (The capitals are no mistake, they have significance.)   All that is very abstract, I realize—but it speaks of that experience of God that we have which defies description, where the veil between heaven and earth is parted and we find ourselves “in a Time that is beyond time, and a Place which is beyond place.”  In the experience of Contemplative Prayer one encounters this Mysterium directly and without mediation but that is a gift given but rarely except to the spiritually proficient.  To whet our appetite for such a face to face encounter with the Living God, our Catholic heritage tells us that God chooses to reveal himself to us through the mediation of created things.  Such creatures become “symbols” that mediate the Divine Encounter.  And so in the various collages of images—in oil and flame and water and bread and wine and chant and sacred words, and holy gestures and consecrated persons, the veil is pulled back and the Divine is revealed to the human. 

This still is not explaining it to my satisfaction, so let me relate a historical event and employ it as a parable.  In 987 the Prince of Kiev, Vladimir the Great, sent delegates to Rome and to Constantinople to make a choice over what sort of Christianity he and his nation were to embrace.  In Rome, the ambassadors saw the Roman Liturgy done with the bland shabbiness characteristic of that low point in Catholic history.  (See entries for July 28, June 29, July 1, August 26, 2011   February 21, June 30, 2012 for more information on this low point in Catholic morale.)  In Constantinople, however, it was a different story.  The Byzantine Empire was still strong and wealthy and the liturgy in the magnificent Church of the Hagia Sophia reflected the earthly splendor of the Imperial Court in an effort to mirror Heavenly Splendor. And it worked: the ambassadors reported “We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth—nor such beauty, and we know not how to tell of it.” The music, the icons, the incense, the mosaics, the jewel-studded sacred vessels and silken robes became vehicles by which the imagination could ascend to the God who is beyond our power to image. 

The problem is that in the Western Church this appreciation for the Mysterium has pretty much been lost.  Avery Dulles speaks of this in his book The Catholicity of the Church (Oxford University Press, 1987).  Dulles cites Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich and his concept of “Catholic Substance and Protestant Principle.”  Catholic substance is this idea that God reveals himself in created things—bread and wine, oil, sacred persons, etc.  The Protestant principle is the warning that while God may reveal himself in created things, these created things—bread and wine, oil, sacred persons, etc. are not God and have no claim on the Divine.  You need to have a balance between Catholic substance and Protestant Principle.  Catholic substance, without the balance of Protestant principle leads to magic, superstition, and idolatry.  But the Protestant principle without the balance of Catholic substance leads to irreverence, skepticism, and sacrilege.  The super-rationalism of the western mind has robbed most people of the ability to imagine—that is to “image”—and so such things as incense or oil or laying on of hands, or even bread and wine remain only incense or oil or laying on of hands or even bread and wine and never become the Symbols by which we can ascend from created to Creator.  In the extreme of this—in non-liturgical denominations the sacramental aspect has been allowed to all but disappear.  (Actually in Quakerism and some other Christian denominations, the sacramental aspect has disappeared.)  But even in Catholic circles neo-Scholastic theology has robbed Mysterium of its power. Intellectual assent to doctrine has been substituted for mystical encounter.  This is one of the weaknesses of Tridentine and post-Tridentine (including contemporary Vatican II) Catholicism—it has reduced us to intellects and does not nourish the deeper realities of the soul.  Thus liturgy in the western Church tends to be reduced to either “rubrical”—the exact carrying out prescribed ceremonies—or spectacular, the theatrical production.    Often when I attend the “new Mass” I find myself entertained, even stimulated—but it is like Chinese food—three hours later, I am hungry again.  (Actually I find Chinese food sufficiently filling, but I know that many others claim its reputation for being only a passing satisfaction of hunger.)  I go to the Tridentine Mass and—though I am fluent in Latin and understand every word—I find it (at best) to be no more than Swan Lake in Vestments—aesthetically pleasing but a tired conceit.  (At worst, the Tridentine “Low Mass,” it is nothing but dry toast.)  When I attend the Divine Liturgy, however, whether in an Orthodox or Byzantine Catholic Church—“we no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth.”  Why is that?  What can we learn from the difference?

Well, I have drifted a long way from Odo Casel and Maria Laach, but I think laid a foundation for some other comments I want to make over the next week or so.  But let me in the next posting return a bit to Mysterium and hopefully find our way back to the main topic. 

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.