Reason 6 On Why The Revised Rites of Vatican II Are Superior To The Preconciliar Rites

Let’s go back to our series on why I maintain that the current Roman Rite of the Mass is superior to the unreformed rites used previous to the Council.  I had enumerated 10 reasons—in response to a rather supercilious article by the ever supercilious Professor Peter Kwasniewski of Wyoming Catholic College making the counter-claim—that I believe make it clear why the current Rites, though still in need of much work, are a vast improvement over the Traditional Liturgy.  We had looked at the first five claims.   Now let’s go to the sixth.

The liturgy walks us through the cycle of Christ’s birth, life, teaching, suffering, death, resurrection and sending the Holy Spirit. 

Now, remember I am not giving a set of abstract reflections here. I am talking from experience.   I grew up under the Tridentine Liturgy.   I was an altar boy with that Rite.  I went to Mass daily under that Rite.  I am not some armchair pontificator still in my 40’s or 50’s (or late 20’s) that whines about some supposed loss of reverence or why women don’t invest more in mantillas when a lace shawl makes them look so much more sexily piously subservient to male fantasies authority. When it comes to the Traditional Latin Mass, I’ve been there; done that; and got the cotta.  (A cotta is a sort of ecclesiastical T-shirt, a type of surplice that ends at about the line of the pubis.)

One of the things I remember most of being an altar boy in the old days of the TLM was the constancy of the Black Mass.  No, I am not referring to Satanic Worship.  We didn’t know about such things in those days before Stephen King.  I mean that weekdays, despite a rich and deep calendar of saints that kept being ignored were given to Requiem Masses.  Day after day, week after week, Mass was invariably the same.  The same introit.  The same epistle.  The same gradual. The same gospel. The same cradling voice of the aged Mrs. Steffans coming from the choir loft as she pedaled the harmonium.    Everything was Requiem Aeternam dona eis Domine. Mass after Mass, day after day, week after week.   And of course once one got into the “Mass of the Faithful” (more or less equivalent to today’s Liturgy of the Eucharist) nothing ever changed. Nothing.  Ever.  One didn’t get to hear the gospels unfold the cycle of Jesus’s Incarnation, birth, teaching, miracles, suffering, death, and Resurrection.  O sure, there were Advent Sundays and Lent Sundays and Easter Sundays where you got a somewhat bare-bones account, a sketchy outline of the gospel story, Gospel Highlights as it were, but it was all so abstract and far-away because it just wasn’t tied together through the week.  All in all, we heard less than 15% of the Gospels read to us during the liturgy—and that presumes, of course, that we knew our Latin well enough to comprehend the readings that were being mumbled by the priest at the altar without a vernacular repetition.  Yes, we had missals, but who used them.  Mass was good for two, maybe three trips around the beads.  I mean, really???  It just removed by mystery of Christ’s Life, Death, and Resurrection to a sort of mental tableau for us to contemplate through the veil of the centuries, sucking life and color from it to reduce it to nothing more than a spiritual representation of the same cheap plaster tableaux with which our churches were over-decorated. 

These many years later I am all but a daily communicant.  There are days, relatively few, when I am not at Mass. There is always a reason if I am not.  I want to go to morning Mass.  I find that the systematic reading of the scriptures and especially the Gospels nourishes me and makes the reality of Christ’s life something very tangible.  My Latin is more than sufficient that were the Mass in Latin I would still find great value in it—but it is infinitely richer for me when I can pick up the nuances of the prayers without doing the mental gymnastics of interfacing two languages.  (I have studied the Latin texts, and especially those of the Eucharistic Prayers, carefully in order to better understand the precise theology they contain and I must say, Liturgiam Authenicam be damned, Vox Clara has done a huge screw-up of those translations in which they have sacrificed sound theology for their own political purposes.)  I find that the role of the Holy Spirit in consecrating the Eucharist and in uniting us in Eucharistic Unity is so much more developed in the new Eucharistic Prayers over the faint epiclesis of the Roman Canon.  The Mass is the highlight of my day, not simply in the way of some pious reverie, but in what integrates my day, what gives it shape and depth.  I have come to not just understand but in some way appropriate the cycle of Christ’s life, from the appearance of the Baptist in the desert until the rush of the Holy Spirit upon those in the Upper Room, into my life.  Part of this is that it has been long journey through sixty-some years, but it is the collapse of the TLM in favor of the Novus Ordo that let it be a journey and not be stuck in that short-circuited cycle of an infinity of Black Masses which marked my youth.  It is, to cite Jaroslav Pelikan, the difference between living faith and dead faith.  

Reason 4 For Why the "New Mass" Is Superior to the Old Rite

The Monks of Notre Dame d'Acey Gather For
the Liturgy 

 I am a faithful reader of New Liturgical Movement, a blog which is somewhat unique in the world of the Katholik Krazies in as that the articles are usually well researched and informative expositions on the history of the Liturgy. Gregory DiPippo, the managing editor, does an especially fine job in mining the arcane for information which is, while not relevant to anything in the Church’s mission of witnessing to the Kingdom of God, of considerable interest to historian and antiquarian alike.  In fact, I first discovered New Liturgical Movement when it took exception to something that Dom Anthony Ruff of Saint John’s Abbey, Collegeville—a noted liturgical scholar and one of established reputation—wrote regarding my objections to the “offertory” rite of the pre-Conciliar Mass.  Mr. DiPippo produced a series of excellent article on the various late medieval rites that support his thesis—and my objection—that scholastic and post-scholastic theology introduces the non-orthodox (i.e. contrary to the Patristic Tradition) notion of a double sacrifice in the Mass: a   sacrifice of bread and wine offered to God by the priest that is preliminary to the Sacrifice of Christ which Christ has offered on the Cross and to which we become present in the Mass.  The “offertory rites” are a particular bone of contention for those who reject the 1970 Missal which more or less replaces the “offertory” (sacrificial) with a “preparation of the gifts” which is exactly what it says it is: a preparation of the bread and wine which will then become the mysterium by which we become participants in Christ’s once and for all Sacrifice on the Cross. 

Sadly, not all of New Liturgical Movement’s entries meet Mr. DiPippo’s standards of research and theological reflection.  Peter Kasiniewski recently did an entry on ten reasons why one should choose the pre-Conciliar “Extraordinary Form” over the 1970 “Ordinary Form.”  He made some outrageously unsupported claims for the usus antiquior that, to my mind, express exactly why the old rite should not only not be preferred but be suppressed altogether.  But it has triggered this series of equally unresearched and data-free reflections on why the “New Mass” is superior to the old rite.  I have already posted reasons one through three: now we go for four. 

Reason 4 For Why the “New Mass” Is Superior to the Old Rite

True and authentic prayer is intelligible. 

Saint Teresa of Avila—whose fifth centenary of birth we celebrate this year—describes prayer as “an intimate conversation with Him whom we know loves us.”  What a great description!  Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, a spiritual daughter of Teresa of Avila, wrote in her journal about prayer: “I say very simply to God what I wish to say, without composing beautiful sentences, and he always understands me.  For me, prayer is an aspiration of the heart, it is a simple glance directed to heaven, it is something great, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites me to Jesus.” She elaborates on this in another place and says: “I say quite simply to the good God what I want to tell Him, and He always understands me.”

This makes me question why we feel the need to gild the lily beyond recognition and make our chief prayer, the Mass, into something artificial and even arcane.  It seems to me that the more prayerful the Liturgy the more nobly simple the celebration.  I am not saying that the Mass should not be beautiful—I firmly believe that it should be gorgeous in its every detail; I only believe that its beauty shines out most brilliantly when its essential nature is not buried beneath the baroque trapping that have overlaid it for the last five centuries. 

I remember seeing a production of Madama Butterfly at the Houston Opera forty some years ago.  I have seen this exquisite opera by Puccini many times in many venues: the Rome Opera House, La Fenice in Venice, The Met in New York, the Lyric in Chicago.  What makes the Houston production stand out in my memory from all the others was the utter simplicity of the production.  The story, as you probably know, takes place in Japan at the turn of the 20^th century.  The Houston production, in line with Japanese artistic tradition, was rich in quality but absolutely minimalist in the sets which allowed the music to gleam without distraction.  I don’t think I will ever be able to forget the aria Un Bel Di in Scene II where Butterfly sings of her anticipation for Pinkerton’s return. The stage was awash in blue light but otherwise bare except for the drooping pink branches of a weeping cherry.  This incredible aria totally captured one’s attention with the only competition being the brilliant pink of Butterfly’s Kimona stage left and the delicate pink branches stage right and the rich blue light making the plain background look alive in moonlight.  Reducing the beauty of the Opera to its purest essence impressed it most deeply on both the emotions and the memory. 

I had a similar experience some years later while staying at the Abbey of Notre Dame de Aiguebelle near Avignon.  That first March evening as the monks filed in for Vespers, I was reminded of Houston’s Madama Butterfly.  Cistercian architecture permits no extra ornamentation.  The slow toll of a single bass bell in the tower signaled the hour for prayer.  The abbey church is devoid of all decoration except for a statue of the Blessed Virgin in a recessed chapel to the left of the altar and a large crucifix on the northern wall of the choir.  Plain frosted glass fills the windows.  There are but two fat wax candles at the altar, both in holders made of iron and a carved wooden processional crucifix standing to the altar’s right.  The monks entered clad simply in their white cowls.  The walls are unrelieved white stone as is the pavement.  Only the wooden staff he carried distinguished the abbot from the other monks.  There was no organ, only the human voice which, once all were in their place, exploded into breathtaking prayer.  There was no ceremony save a single monk coming up and spooning incense into an iron censer at the Magnificat.  It was pure, unadorned prayer.  You could feel the spiritual energy gathered beneath the ancient vaults of the 12^th century church.  The memories of Puccini’s opera faded fast as the psalms of vespers overtook my memories of Butterfly and began to speak their pressing but plaintive message to look within the heart and surrender all to the mercy of God. 

The next morning at Mass—and subsequent mornings of my visit—the Mass spoke profoundly.  Only the cross and its Divine Burden, wooden and roughly carved, stood at the altar to remind us of what we were about.   There was an absolute economy of movement and an avoidance of any hint of ritual for ritual’s sake.  Four priests and a deacon stood alone at the altar, three in cowls and one in an enveloping but unadorned chasuble of deep purple.  On the altar stood a large silver cup and a silver bowl of rough unleavened bread. The bare bones of the liturgy, sung in a deep but somewhat wistful chant by the monks, kept us focused on the Sacrifice being offered.  There was no fuss and bother, no bowing and scraping, no brocades and jewels.  There was no booming organ.  There certainly was no corpulent Cardinal trailing yards of scarlet silk.  There were only men standing, eyes focused on the altar, deep in prayer as they sang the Church’s prayer. 

I know that the average Joe and Josie in the pews need a bit richer diet than this Spartan Trappist spiritual fare offers, but I think that there is too much a danger today of priests becoming old aunts—or let me rephrase that—I have seen too many priests today becoming old aunts who fuss over lacey petticoat-albs and copes that look like they were cut from funeral home drapes as they prance around and bob up and down and bend over wiggling their hind-quarters as they lisp the Sacred Words that should focus our attention not on them but on the Holy Spirit descending upon bread and wine and into stony hearts alike to transform all into Christ.  I don’t mean to leave the ladies out of the equation, but please give us men who are strong, loving, and wise to speak clearly and simply to God and lead us, in our hearts, to do the same.

And yes, I am aware that that it isn’t only the Tridentine Tinkerbelles that are the problem.  Equally awful are the liturgical left’s Jimmy Kimmel wanna-bees who think their job is to entertain us.  I mean, I don’t mind a few laughs during the homily as long as there is some Gospel substance, but I want someone who can lead us in prayer—who is aware that God is part of this equation and that means there needs to be some degree of gravitas.  And I may disagree with the neo-cons about what constitutes beauty in art, architecture, and music—just like there are those philistines who want their Madama Butterfly in a garish red kimono and on a flower laden hilltop with a busy harbor beneath filled with ships sailing to and fro just like it probably was at La Scala that night in 1904 when Butterfly was first sung.  But please don’t make me sing “Here I am, Lord” one more time.  And I don’t want word-strewn felt banners hanging where the statues used to stand.  And I don’t want cheap pottery any more than I want those cheap Knights of Columbus chalices on the altar.  But in all honesty, I find that sort of crap in fewer and fewer places.  I think we still have a long way to go to make the Liturgy as conducive to prayer as it can be, but we have come a long way from the days when a hung-over Monsignor stood scratching his Roman chasubled behind while he stood facing away from us reading the epistle on the right side of the altar.  We have a ways to go yet, but we have come a long way and like Moses said to the children of Israel: I ain’t goin’ back.  

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.

Politics and Rite

Archbishop Romero 

receives a sack of beans

 at the presentation of the 

gifts at Mass 

Yesterday, just to have something to post, I grabbed the famous quote of Pope John Paul about the failure of “trickle-down economics” to bring about greater justice and inclusiveness to our world-wide human community.  (It hasn’t worked well here in the U.S. either.)  I entitled the post: a short musing to keep this liturgical thing in context.  Aaron replied “I see what you did there.”  Well, it wasn’t all that subtle and nor was it meant to be, but I am glad that someone picked up on it.

You see, Liturgy is a highly political thing.  A few months ago I received this comment to my posting of March 12 this year:

 I have always believed that the most subversive product of the conciliar reform was the Lectionary and Pope Francis has proved my point. While conciliar documents and papal encyclicals have their value -- though go, as you say, mostly unread, much less acted upon -- it is the broad, daily exposure to the Scriptures, and the Gospels in particular that are likely to rankle the conservative mindset even more. To wit, the daily Domus homilies by the pope. There has been nothing more offensive to the wingnuts than the almost daily harangue against them based straightforwardly and without varnish on the day's readings. I have always been amazed at how the worst of right wing Republicans and Katholic Krazies of my acquaintance can attend daily Mass and retain their political and religious views when they hear, over and over again, the diatribes against pharasaic religion, the prophetic denunciations against social injustice, the narratives of divine mercy, and the pauline invective against religion grounded in mere tradition and works righteousness. All of this has been the subject of Francis' daily preaching and it has driven them to utter distraction. This is also why, I believe, they are so enamored of the "Extraordinary Form" -- it effectively shields them from such uncomfortable exposure to the Bible behind clouds of incense, the cover of a foreign language, the distraction of rubrical obsessions and the comparative paucity of reading from Scripture.

It is an old axiom in our Catholic tradition that if you want to change what people believe change the way the pray.  (Lex orandi, lex credendi)  The Novus Ordo has been extremely effective in raising the Catholic social consciousness for several reasons.

1.   The direct participatory access to the liturgy of the current rite vs. the pre-conciliar rites changes the hierarchal self-expression of the Church

2.   as you cite—the direct exposure to the Scripture, read in one’s own language, from a more widely inclusive lectionary, and preached on a daily basis.

3.   The integration of the horizontal and vertical dimension of our faith with a shared awareness of the Presence of God and the presence of our neighbors.

4.   The move away from monarchial models of worship and environment for simpler, plainer vestments, vessels, décor.

5.   The inclusion of new music that not only expressed our relationship to God, but to each other and often emphasizes the needs of the poor or the special place in God’s care which is given to the poor. 

6.   A church architecture that often places the altar in the midst of the assembly and thus emphasizes not only our common participation but our personal responsibility to God 

I can’t help but think that much of the opposition to the current Liturgy isn’t motivated by a desire to preserve the socio-economic and political status quo. When I read blogs like Rorate Caeli or Father Z’s Blog I cannot but notice the political undertones (admittedly no stronger than the political undertones readers find in my blog).  I don’t think Pope Benedict realized the political impact the liturgy was taking in his pontificate, but I do think that Pope Francis is far more savvy about the relationship between cult and politics.  (We expect Jesuits to be savvy, even well, Jesuitical.)  And I think that much of the opposition to Francis and the protests against his style of liturgy (and his style of papacy) is in fact a protest against the shift to the left on highly politicized issues in which he has sunk the pontifical dentures.  The place of immigrants is one of these issues; the environment is another; income inequality is a third.  Certainly the projected beatification (and possible canonization) of Archbishop Romero has generated a flood of Internet complaints.  And now Dom Helder  (“When I feed the poor you call me a saint; when I ask you why they are poor you call me a communist”) Camara is being considered for posthumous promotion to the dismay of those whose model for sainthood is the late great 40^th POTUS.  And then of course there is our dear friend in Malta who from his liturgical style seems to be waging a campaign to be elected to fill the slippers of the late Queen Mother.  Unfortunately for him it is not an elected position. When you see how at home he is at the Palace in Gricigliano he would be so good at it.