Interlocutor:
Hm... I find your blog songlists curious. Are you saying you like *no* contemporary folk music at Mass at all? ... I am a member of the [Society for a Moratorium on the Music of Marty Haugen and David Haas], because I think that their music (esp. Haugen's) is awful enough that their borderline stuff doesn't tip the scale. But though I have come to prefer traditional hymns overall, I'm very far from classing all contemporary music as "Songs I'd Just As Soon Never Have Heard." Do you like no such music at all, or are you saying that you like no such music at Mass at all? If the latter, can you name one such song you do not deem "utterly inappropriate" for Mass?Pertinacious Papist:
"Gather Us In" is unconsciounable on any grounds, in my view. Virtually any of the listed songs would be inappropriate, IMHO, on grounds of aesthetic and
cultural mis-matching – and various Vatican instructions have addressed the inappropriateness of music in popular (here: folksy) styles for liturgy, etc.
Interlocutor:
I agree about "Gather Us In." Why Thomas Day considers it a "respectable composition" (p. 119) is beyond me. But what about Bob Dufford's "Be Not Afraid" or Michael Joncas' "On Eagle's Wings"? I like both of these... what's your problem?
Pertinacious Papist:
Earlier, you asked what I like. I certainly don't like these, even thought they may have decent, biblical lyrics. They’re set to soupy melodies intended for guitar accompaniment in the 70s.
Interlocutor:
Guitars have many potential drawbacks as liturgical instruments, but soupiness is a function of more than just using a guitar. Almost any melody can be made to sound soupy, given a certain approach to it in terms of arrangement and overall instrumentation. Imagine what Percy Faith and his orchestra could do with the melody of a traditional hymn like, "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence."Pertinacious Papist:
Interlocutor:Abomination of desolation! ...
Chesterton says “The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age." These ‘songs’ enslave one to a casual, suburban 1970s American ethos with which I have little empathy ... and which I think does little to elevate anyone's spirit during divine worship. Gregorian chant, by contrast, is enslaved to no age. If it sounds alien to contemporary ears, it sounded no less foreign to the ears of men and women in the Middle Ages. It's essentially ageless.
I humbly submit that what you mostly mean by "enslave" and "is enslaved to" in the previous two indents is "reflects". I think that if a certain kind of music is related to self-satisfied Suburbianity, this means primarily that it reflects the congregation, though it could lead those already disposed in that direction further down the road as well. I agree that there are contemporary songs that reflect this, and do this. But not all of them do (or need do), and I don't think that suburban self-satisfaction is necessarily linked to any reasonable definition of a particular musical genre. (It might still be inappropriate for the liturgy, but that's a different argument.)
Pertinacious Papist:
Perhaps. The argument has been made that ancient liturgy was always in a Language foreign (or, at least, slightly alien) to the vernacular. In Jesus’ day, when Aramaic was the vernacular, Hebrew was the language of the liturgy. From the time of St. Jerome until 1970, in the western churches, it was in Latin, and in the eastern churches in archaic Greek. ICEL’s impulse to contemporize liturgical language by replacing the “thou’s” with “you’s” misses the spirit of the liturgy, which was never intended to communicate in the medium of a newspaper or television. The same with music.
While I much prefer the high Latin Mass in Mozart’s setting we heard in Chicago
to our typical suburban Novus Ordo Masses, this is a reflection of two factors – (1) the inherent superior dignitity, reverence, and holiness of the Missal of 1962 and (2) my preference for Mozart over 1970s guitar-strumming nuns (and hunch that his fare may be objectively superior). Still, I concede the argument that the Chicago Mass at which we assisted was also too much of a “performance Mass,” itself tied to the artistic tastes of the late Romantic and early Baroque periods. I might counter that I prefer these tastes, or even that these forms serve as a more fitting medium for the message of the divine liturgy, I recognize their cultural boundedness.
If there is anything that relatively succeeds more than anything else in escaping
This cultural boundedness, it is the Traditional Latin Rite itself, along with Gregorian Chant, whose roots are to be found, not with Gregory I, but in the ancient Hebrew tradition. A Traditional Latin Mass with Gregorian Chant would serve best to achieve that sort of transcendence, in my view, although I have nothing against a careful and artfully executed program of translation of portions of the liturgy into something like King James English.
Interlocutor:
I agree that Gregorian chant is "eminently suited to divine worship", and even that it should hold pride of place, not just in theory but in terms of actual use (as the Church indicates). But eminently suited and holding pride of place does not mean that nothing else can ever be used (even if we throw traditional hymns in along with Gregorian chant).
Pertinacious Papist:
Interlocutor:We can agree about “pride of place” all we want to, but it’s sort of pointless when The whole Catholic world has virtually forgotten the meaning and substance of Gregorian Chant. Paul VI published Jubilate Deo to ensure parishioners would retain a modicum of chanted Latin hymnody, and his work was promptly forgotten, just like John XXIII’s 1962 Apostolic Constitution, Veterum Sapientia, insisting on the preservation of Latin. The defense that needs to be mounted today is hardly in behalf of “Be Not Afraid” and “On Eagles’ Wings,” or would you argue that it is, after all?
Dan Schutte's "Here I Am, Lord" was one of the songs at our wedding, believe it or not -- I still like it.Pertinacious Papist (in a deep, resonant, patronizing voice):
Interlocutor:That’s forgivable, my friend. We were all young and foolish once. “The times of
ignorance God overlooked, but now He commandeth all men everywhere to repent.” (Acts 17:30)
I’m glad you like it. I wish I did, sincerely. I just don’t. It has too many Negative (saccharine) associations for me, I’m afraid, from my parish. We are the products of our experience to a large extent, sad to say. I have a great deal more sympathy for popular protestant hymns by Isaac Watts and Fanny Crosby than these sorts of songs.
Your comments and general lack of sympathy indicate to me that your background does not really include a time when you were connaturalized to "non-traditional" liturgical music (either as a Protestant or as a Catholic). This may make it difficult for you to see that this kind of music (not the songs with heretical or self-worshipping lyrics, nor those incompetently or boorishly arranged and performed) can truly assist the act of divine worship. But my background doesPertinacious Papist:
include such a season, and it does have something to with youth, though not, I think, with foolishness. I would no longer prefer to regularly attend (good) folk Masses rather than (good) traditional-music Masses. However, I am not capable of denying (because I know better) that even a song like "We Remember" (probably alone in Haugen's corpus---are you sure it's Haugen?) is quite capable of elevating the heart above the commonplace in the time surrounding reception of Holy Communion.
Interlocutor:I have assisted at the Sunday evening Life Teen Masses on occasion – the ones
with the bongos and electric guitars and snare drums. (Great preaching, by the
way.) The music, actually, is very well done for its genre, if you like that sort of thing, and with a great deal of pathos by young people and younger adults (up into their early 40s tops – which says somethings about the seventies Zeitgeist and ethos). I don’t deny that many of these youngsters (and the not-so-young ‘youngsters’) seem to have their spirits elevated by the Haugen/Haas numbers they play and sing before, during, and after Holy Communion. In a way, through a sort of bracketed aesthetic counterpart of literary suspension of disbelief, I can myself tune in and ‘participate’ in the collective mosh pit experience of praise. I can see, at least, how many people would like this sort of thing, how they might feel like they are collectively praising God “as one,” and feel connected with everybody present, and so forth. Those don’t seem to be bad sentiments.
The thing that bothers me about the feelings generated there is that they seem so much like feelings I’ve seen generated in other venues, on darkened dance floors, in concert halls, etc. Perhaps it’s simply my personal associations getting in the way, but the thing seems a bit contrived and artificial. And this will sound utterly counter-intuitive to the Bugnini-types who confected the Novus Ordo, but I long for the quiet simplicity of the Latin Mass where I do not feel so busy being manipulated that I have no mental space to center myself, to find God -- let alone to participate in liturgically worshipping Him.
Pertinacious Papist:Also, I don't think the Church views inculturation as such as a concession. Most traditional cultures have not passed through periods of decadence in the arts as ours has. What do you make of folk material used in the liturgy in Mexico or Latin America or the Philippines, for instance? Do you call that the "pre-Mozart, pre-Palestrina" phase?
Interlocutor:Read the second half of Benedict’s Regensburg Lecture to see what he thinks of
“inculturation,” by the way. But I agree it needn’t mean “concession,” and certainly didn’t mean that to the overly (ebulliently) optimistic writers of Gaudium et Spes (Ratzinger once referred to them – not in the Regensburg speech – as, at points, “patently Pelagian”).
I don’t know, frankly, much about the folk material used in Mexico or Latin America or the Philippines. It could be animistic or heathen, for all I know, put syncretically to Christian use as the Jesuits made use of native pagan materials in China in the 16th century before they were condemned. On the other hand, Arinze seems fairly sanguine about all this. Maybe it’s innocuous. Is it? Are non-western cultural artifacts “religiously neutral” with respect to Christianity? Can we inculturate the Christian story into the South Sea Islander culture by tanslating the Agnus Dei, for these sheepless porcine-loving people, “Piglet of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us”? And the Ecce, Agnus Dei at the elevation: “Behold, the Piglet of God who takes away the sins of the world ...” ? I would argue against the translation on grounds of objective unfittingness based on the nature of the objective qualities of the beast.
[Earlier you mentioned that you thought it would be more appropriate to render portions of the liturgy, if translated into the vernacular, into something like King James than into contemporary English.] Why King James English? Careful and artful English becomes impossible after the 16th century? Come now. Take the dream out of your pipe and try some nice 'baccy instead.
Pertinacious Papist:
Interlocutor:[You sure you ain't sellin' crack, brother?] Why King James? My point isn't that it would have to be King James. My point is this: I don’t think contemporary English is sufficiently dignified to express worship in the way I, at least, would like it expressed.
There’s a lot that needs sorting out here. “You” originally, if I’m not mistaken, is second person plural, not singular, as it functions now. In that sense, it might serve well to address a trinitarian God. Yet the semantic range of meaning it has today not only excludes anything resembling such a signification, but strikes me as all-too-familiar. One might argue that it could be made to accord with the familiarity Jesus’ approach to the “Our Father” when He used the term “Abba,” which is more-or-less equivalent to our “Daddy”; which has something to be said for it. But for corporate worship, my understanding is that what we suffer from today is desacralization and an utter lack of sense of holiness. We no longer have ‘sanctuaries’ in our churches – at least as recognizable spaces consecrated and reserved and set aside where not just any Tom, Dick, or Harry, or Mable, Floy, or Marie can waltz up to the Altar and take and return chalices and purificators as though he or she were preparing a Thanksgiving dinner (sometimes I wonder what Father is doing in the kitchen)! I’m not saying that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with using the vulgar tongue for worship. But a language a step or two removed from common words would remind us, I think, that liturgy is not a street conversation. Churches used to be built so that you could not enter them directly from the rear, but had to enter from an angle or side, so as to deflect a too-direct approach – yet another reminder, along with the Holy water fonts, that one was entering the precincts of the Holy, and leaving behind the secular and ‘worldly.’ ... Just some thoughts.
The Pope does not govern as an autocrat---never has, never will. Change will come (not "may"---"will") as lower diocesan levels become more friendly to the tradition here. It is very easy to become acclimated to Gregorian Chant. Its comeback could be very swift indeed.Pertinacious Papist:
In principle I agree with you, I think. Yet I wonder at the utter singlehanded fiat with which the Traditional Roman Rite was virtually obliterated by Paul VI’s promulgation of Bugnini’s 1969 Missal, and suppression of the 1962 John XXIII Missal as well as the 1965 Vatican II Missal. Benedict as Ratzinger called this a “rupture” with liturgical tradition, and many (like Gamber, Nichols, Reid, Bouyer, and Davies) agree. It did not come from the grass roots. It came by legislative fiat. There was no groundswell of agitation for a liturgical revolution (except in the fantasies of Bugnini and a handfull of self-appointed liturgical Nazis).
Interlocutor:
Traditionalists often avail themselves of a "free market" principle: "Allow the Traditional Latin Mass more freely, and let the people decide." In their mouths, I wonder whether this argument is not somewhat adventitious---i.e., I wonder whether they really believe this principle, or whether it just suits the direction of their rhetoric. Regardless, I do believe the principle. Or better, I believe in liturgical pluralism. As you say below, we are the products of our experience, to a large extent. This is why I think both your views and mine are inevitably partial, and we really should not be thinking in terms of imposing only one thing (the Best Thing(TM)) on all. You just can't get people to agree on the Best Thing. It is better, I think, to promote more widely what the tradition has to offer, and eliminate theologically deficient and grossly atmospherically deficient contemporary offerings.Pertinacious Papist:
Karl Keating argues for the ‘free market’ principle. It has something to be said
for it. My hunch is that given fair and equal play, the Traditional Latin Mass
would rapidly gain a groundswell of youthful followers – young families concerned about the liturgical and spiritual formation of their families. Eventually, I think the effect would be salutary for the Novus Ordo as well, forcing out the chaff. This, at least, is what Keating argues.
There’s one part of the laissez-faire principle that doesn’t fly, however, and you
allude to it in the last part of your paragraph where you speak of eliminating
“theologically deficient and grossly atmospherically deficient contemporary
offerings.” The problem is that the laity are sheep. They are vulnerable to the
influences of popular culture, and half the time they are inadequatedly catechized, theologically and liturgically illiterate and don’t know what they need or what is good for them or their parishes. Just look at the surburban Catholic church buildings they’ve built over the last several decades!So, yes, I would argue, give people a “free market” choice, but a limited one – a choice between what they have and the Traditional Latin Mass. There’s no question about the latter liturgy being a well-estastablished, time-tested, orthodoxy liturgy (it’s presumptuous even to raise the question)! And let their choice be between (1) that historically stable norm and (2) what they have now under the pressure of that competing norm – which should give some leverage and meaning to the desired “reform of the reform.”
Interlocutor:
What you really want is for people to open their minds. If you begin by saying that everything they like is trash.... forget it.
Pertinacious Papist:
Fair enough. As a tactical strategem, I understand and accept the advice. On theInterlocutor:
other hand, what also needs to be understood is the other side of the story: that since becoming a Catholic, what I have been told every Sunday, in effect, in my local parish – that everything I like (namely Catholic tradition, traditional Catholic music, traditional Catholic liturgy, traditional Catholic piety) is "trash." Ironic, isn’t it, that Catholics should HATE traditional Catholicism so much? What do they want, an anhistorical religion? Why don't they become Quakers or Zen Buddhists, or just accept the fact that they've embraced New Age Consciousness?
During college, I was immersed in the activities of our (very) charismatic young adult group at St. Philip's in Pasadena, including our Sunday 5 pm folk Mass. The folk group was led by a very gifted guitarist who was plugged in to the contemporary liturgical music scene, and knew people like Haas. The music was always done with sufficient amplification, and a great deal of spirit. Not watery or simpily "strummy"; lots of cojones. Haugen and Haas did not dominate the offerings. A lot of the stuff actually came out of the Catholic charismatic renewal centered at Notre Dame, and this included a lot of things that sound very different from Haugen and Haas, e.g., "Hebrew" melodies evoking images of David dancing before the ark. ... I think pathos is a good word. That characterizes youth, after all.
Pertinacious Papist:
I’m familiar with the ethos. There was a great sense back in those days, as I recall, of people re-inventing the wheel, of re-making the Church in their own new image, of freshness, newness. The newness and youthfulness seemed energizing and invigorating; but in retrospect there also seems to me to have been something a trifle presumptuous about the dismissiveness of tradition. If I’m not mistaken, there was a general turn of the culture toward the younger generation in those days, and a turning away from tradition. Little wonder that the following generations knew or cared little about their traditional roots. Which isn’t to knock those “Hebrew” melodies, which Jews-for-Jesus exploited to great advantage too.Interlocutor:
[Earlier, you said that the thing that bothered you about the feelings generated by the kind of music performed at Life Teen Masses is that they seem so much like feelings you've seen generated in other venues, on darkened dance floors, in concert halls, etc.] Are these kinds of feelings human, or not? If they are human, they can be sanctified. If the human being in question is young, this is how they (or many of them) feel things, i.e., with this kind of energy. To be able to worship in this way is to be able to direct and offer that energy to God, on whom it is not wasted. (What happens at the concert of a rock idol is a deformation of worship, but it is a deformation of worship.)Pertinacious Papist:
Again, as I've grown older, I no longer feel the "need" (or the overwhelming attraction) to worship in this way. On the other hand, the person that I was then is still within me, in some sense. So I cannot simply reject it, even as a function of my current "preference," because it would be rejecting a part of myself.
Humani nihil a me alienum puto (“Nothing human is foreign to me”), indeed. Yet what is it that sanctifies all that is human? The above quote was frequently found on Calvin’s lips, who used Geneva’s bar songs as tune settings for his hymn compositions. Surely it can be done. The question, always, is one of fittingness, and the criteria are not merely subjective. I don’t know if you saw my post on "Ultramontane Catholic Rap" (July 21, 2006), but I think it works, and I can even enjoy it in certain moods, though it’s not my favorite sort of music and I certainly wouldn’t consider anything like it appropriate for liturgical use. On the other hand, have you ever listened to any of the so-called “Christian heavy metal” artists? I don’t think that works. Marshall McLuhan’s principle “the medium is the message” ends up trumping any attempt to convey a Gospel of grace within such a medium.Interlocutor:
The example is extreme, I admit, but I wish simply to make a point. There are some media that so enform their messages, and some expressions of emotions, that are by their nature incapable of sanctification, because a basic intentionality animating their very mediating structure is inimical to sanctity. Scorn and loathing and resentment are human emotions of this sort. Music that expresses such feelings, that provokes such feelings, can hardly be healthy. The case cannot be so different with a lot of other more superfically 'positive'-seeming feelings, like narcissism. A lot of what passes for ‘love’ and ‘community,’ and the "we share"-type sentiments in contemporary songs, is little more than re-packaged sublimated collective narcissism. When the song has us singing about “loving you” (supposedly meaning “God”), what gets all-to-often sublimated is a collective unconsciously-projected “loving ourselves.” The church is built in the round so we face one another, the priest faces us, offers the sacrifice (seemingly) to us, we (through our extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion) offer Communion to ourselves. It’s a we-love-us fest. That’s the danger, at least, isn’t it.
Perhaps it’s simply my personal associations getting in the way, but contemporary music and the feelings it generates seems a bit contrived and artificial to me.
No, I think it's probably the fact that at our age(s), we are not able to be connaturalized to something like this that we weren't connaturalized to when we were younger. We can give it our best try, but age does mean something, after all.
At any rate, you should put your reservations about the sincerity and naturalness of it to bed. I can assure you at least that the sort of thing that I was involved in (and the Life Teen Mass probably resembles it quite a bit) is not contrived or artificial for those who are connaturalized to it.
Pertinacious Papist:
No, but here’s precisely one of my problems. I don’t think (and I don’t think that you think) that proper litugical worship is simply a matter of the inward disposition of the heart, as indispensable as that is. Our worship must be in spirit and truth, surely. But there’s more to it than sincerity. Remember how Korah was struck down for overstepping his religious prerogatives (Numbers 16:1-50)? Remember Uzza who was struck dead for simply trying to keep the ark of the covenant from toppling over(2 Samuel 6:3-8 and in 1 Chronicles 13:6-12)? Remember how the High Priest alone was permitted to enter the Holy of Holies once a year on the day of atonement (Lev. 16:3-10)? Until the 1994 Vatican ruling permitting female altar servers, women were not even allowed within the sanctuary of Catholic churches or to approach the altar. For whatever reason, liturgical rules govern worship.
Hence, when I discuss forms of liturgy such as Life Teen Masses, I’m not concerned only (or even primarily) with questions of inward disposition of those assisting at Mass, but with the fittingness of the liturgical form itself – standing around the Altar holding hands as opposed to kneeling in the pews, bongos, guitars, drums and ‘praise choir’ up on stage (in the space that would traditionally have counted as part of the santuary), as opposed to other sorts of hymnody or chant in a choir loft or from the congregation, etc., etc.
Interlocutor:
[Earlier you wrote: "And this will sound utterly counter-intuitive to the Bugnini-types who confected the Novus Ordo, but I long for the quiet simplicity of the Latin Mass where I do not feel so busy being manipulated that I have no mental space to center myself, to find God -- let alone to participate in liturgically worshipping Him."]
Okay, but this is a different subject entirely. Here what we have is the imperialism of a bunch of "scholarly" clerics over the liturgy. It has nothing to do with being popular. On the contrary, it is (was) thoroughly elitist. And wrongheaded. As far as inculturation is concerned, of course it
requires a critical faculty. Not everything can be baptized. Because it requires a critical faculty, it is open to (and inevitably is) abused. Abusus non tollit usum.
[Note: My apologies for the small print for Interlocutor's words! I used the automatic "Compose" formatting feature in Blogger to edit this piece and couldn't change the font size once it was finished. When I went back into the "Edit HTML" buffer, there was so much unintelligible (to me) HTML gibberish added by the automatic feature, I couldn't begin to sort it out to make the font size changes. Mea culpa! If anyone who understands how to use Blogger's automatic "Compose" feature better than I can advise me how to adjust font size changes, I'd be happy to be advised.]
Addendum 10/25/06
Interlocutor:
[You say that you don't think contemporary English is sufficiently dignified to express worship in the way you would like it expressed.] Don't you have to allow for the fact that there are many people who would be unable to shake a feeling of "artificiality" here, just as you are unable to shake a feeling of "artificiality" at a Life Teen Mass?Pertinacious Papist:
I think there's a difference. The 'artificiality' of the Life Teen Mass is effected by the lack of fittingness of the liturgical medium for the liturgical worship. The 'alienness' felt by those who hear a prayer in a liturgical language such as the King James English of the Book of Common Prayer or the Douay-Rheims Bible perceive, not inappropriateness, but an elevation of language that consecrates it and sets it apart from pedestrian use.Interlocutor:
[You insist that you're not saying that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with using the vulgar tongue for worship, but that a language a step or two removed from common words would remind us that liturgy is not a street conversation.] I fully agree with this. But it's just not the case that there can be no such thing as a sacral idiom of contemporary (meaning modern, not common or "street") English. The English translation of the liturgy of Chrysostom used in Byzantine Catholic Churches in the US (at least in the Melkite) is just such an idiom. There is nothing archaic about the English used, no thee's or thou's, and it's beautiful. 1970-vintage ICEL, it is not.Pertinacious Papist:
I don't deny this is possible, but I just don't think it's highly probable that it can be very effective, at least not widely. The current English Breviary, for example, is simply an aesthetic nightmare, in my opinion. Our vernacular lends itself to approaching Jesus as a "Buddy Christ" more than the Lord of Glory.Interlocutor:
I really think a lot your feeling here (as opposed to your basic principles, with which I am largely in agreement) come from years of frustration at your parish. I realize the things you experience are comparatively widespread, esp. outside of major urban centers where the clergy are in general better-formed--but that just means the Church has a lot of work to do, not in restoring the 1962 Missal, but in educating people better in what liturgy really is, and forming priests better in the ars celebrandi. There's simply no excuse for priests flapping their arms apart so that they almost point backwards, donning a shit-eating grin, and calling it the orans posture.Pertinacious Papist:
I agree with some of this, but not all. Liturgical education is certainly needed, but how that is possible when the index for what was to be reformed according to the mandate of Sacrosanctum Concilium, namely the 1962 Missal, has been consigned to oblivion, I do not know. One needs norms for liturgical education, and we can't get anywhere, like most of the reformers since the Council, by pretending to re-invent the liturgical wheel out of thin air.Interlocutor:
Just to lay my own position on the table. I passed through the emotional phase of myrealization of the botching of the liturgical reform many years ago (before we met). Emotion is understandable, but in the long run, I think, basically unproductive. Over time, if it is indulged too much, it tends to make one a partisan. Of course, there is much to deplore about the botched reform, and the swelled heads that carried it out, like Cardinal Stopwatch. And I do deplore it. But I am as unable to be a partisan of the 1962 Missal against the 1970, as I am unable to be a partisan of the 1970 Missal against the 1962. The Mass needed reform. This opinion is based on my own experience of that liturgy every time I have attended (excuse me, assisted), though it also, most felicitously, allows me to maintain that such people as Bouyer, Parsch, Casel, Marmion, Jungmann, and Guardini were not simply deluded. The Mass needed reform. However, the reform miscarried; it was botched, to such a degree that the reform of the reform that is needed could, with overmuch straining, be characterized as a re-doing of the reform.Pertinacious Papist:
You're preaching to the choir here, my friend. I am certainly no partisan of the 1969/70 Missal. Neither am I a partisan of the 1962 Missal, if by that you mean one who thinks that what is necessary is a restoration of the 1962 Missal with no changes in it. As you say, the liturgy needed to be reformed. Only I do not trust the subjective impressions of those habituated to Novus Ordo Masses who take in one or two Traditional Latin Masses of the 1962 Missal and think that they can immediately see what needed reforming. Subjective feelings and first impressions are all-too-often deceiving. Unfortunately, as Martin Mosebach says, the Paul VI's introduction of the liturgical rupture with the past with his Missal of 1969 has forced upon all of us the necessity of becoming liturgical experts. Of course we aren't, but we've been compelled by circumstances to educate ourselves in liturgical matters. Thus we have to study the Missals of 1962 and 1969 side by side and compare their strengths and weaknesses. There are problems in the prayers themselves of the 1969 Mass, a weakening and dilution and, in some cases, distortion of what had been there. The reform didn't miscarry merely with the aftermath after the promulgation of 1970, but with the Paul VI's cooperation with Bugnini's team in shoving aside of the reform of the liturgy wrought by the Council itself in the Missal of 1965. In short, I am a partisan of the 1962 Missal insofar as I see its recovery as indispensable to an authentic "reform of the reform." Without it, all talk of reforming the liturgy is whistling in the wind. Catholics must overcome their hatred of Catholic tradition and reacquaint themselves with the Traditional Roman Rite if they are to regain any sense of what it means to worship as Catholics rather than dummed-down New Age Unitarian Universalists at a Wiggly Party, which might be redundant.Interlocutor:
I am also pro-vernacular. I agree that the various aspects of the liturgy ought to elevate the mind; that indeed is why I am pro-vernacular. Not because I am a "verbalist", but because words mean things, and I think they ought to have the opportunity to mean something to everyone who assists at Mass. Celebrating exclusively in a language that people do not understand, or even one which is not native to them, is creating a barrier that is hard for many to get over.Pertinacious Papist:
We have more vernacular Bible translations and more biblical illiteracy today than existed in Middle Ages. I'm not convinced that having the liturgy spoken audibly in the vernacular so that people can understand it has appreciably improved their theology or their reverent liturgical participation either, if hemmorhaging Mass attendance across the nation and beachwear attire one sees at many Sunday Masses are any indication.Interlocutor:
That said, the difference between myself and some pro-vernacular folks is that I do not take pro-vernacular to imply anti-Latin. I think Latin liturgies should be common. I would even support the idea that any sizable parish ought to have its High Mass in Latin, at least semi-regularly. Cathedrals in major cities in countries that lots of people travel to on business should have Latin liturgies regularly. In chapels at international airports, there is no excuse for a Mass in anything other than Latin. (Satisfied?)Pertinacious Papist:
John XXIII, in Veterum sapientia, of course, insisted upon retaining Latin, contrary to those who celebrate his name and the "Spirit of Vatican II" but not its substance. I also think there are good reasons for retaining Latin, not only in liturgy, but as an ecclesiastical language. Of course this is done in formal documents, but not in communications between local bishops' conferences any longer. Recovery of Latin would facilitate clarity of communication and avoid many of the problems of loss of meaning and confusion in translation. That said, of course the vernacular is important when it comes to preaching, evangelization, catechesis, and communicating with one's own countrymen.Interlocutor:
I support the idea of a universal indult for the 1962 Missal, not because I am a partisan of that liturgy, but because overcoming the botched reform requires that memory be restored of the Roman Rite prior to the reform, since this is the necessary reference point for reforming (or redoing) the reform. Insofar as a universal indult would stoke the fires of partisanship (I mean of the very strident kind), it will actually delay the needed reform. Still, it is needed. I do not expect to live to see the happy denouement, since I think it is likely that the denoument will require that the partisans be six feet underground. (I don't just mean Tridentine partisans; there aren't very many of them, and I don't think a universal indult will have the effect of making lots more partisans, as they hope. I mean also, and even more, that the partisans of the vulgarization of liturgy have to be dead.)Pertinacious Papist:
Little we disagree on here. It is true that there may be very few partisans of the Traditional Latin Mass (I would prefer to call it the Mass of Gregory I, from whom it largely descends in substance). The organic development of a liturgy takes centuries. It's destruction is effected virtually with the stroke of a pen. I'm inclined to agree with your grim prognosis, though I'm not inclined to relent in my argument for reform and restoration.Interlocutor:
[You wrote that since becoming a Catholic, you have been told every Sunday, in effect, in your local parish, that everything you like (namely Catholic tradition, traditional Catholic music, traditional Catholic liturgy, traditional Catholic piety), is trash. "Ironic, isn’t it," you said, "that Catholics should HATE Catholicism so much?"] I'm not sure what you mean by "told". Aren't these people just the illiterate "sheep" you're talking about? Do they really know what it is they're "hating"? I do sympathize with your frustration here. Really I do!Pertinacious Papist:
What I mean by being "told" is having hundreds of dollars of books I donated to the church library disappear without anyone being able to account for them; being told that Adoremus Bulletin is too radical for parishioners to handle, but the dissident U.S. Catholic (for over a decade, until we got our current priest) was fine; being told that we can't change our current regimen of eight (8) Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion during Sunday Masses, even when we have a priest and deacon on hand distributing Communion; being told by the priest that he 'had to' give up using the chalace veil and had to drop an attempt at implementing Latin polyphony during Lent because too many parishioners protested; being told that we have to put up with despicable music and liturgical banality and "give it up" with the sufferings of Christ when we find such things intrude and detract from our ability to focus and 'find Christ' during Mass.Interlocutor:
Do the people know what they hate? Some do, some don't. But most don't know why they hate. Why they hate is the main thing. The ones whom I know who hate tradition most passionately hate it because it represents heteronomous authority, and they detest such authority.
[We were discussing the ethos of the seventies. You mentioned that "the newness and youthfulness seemed energizing and invigorating; but in retrospect there also seems to me to have been something a trifle presumptuous about the dismissiveness of tradition.] Newness and freshness is not the same thing as the idea of remaking the Church in one's own image, about which latter none of us had the slightest notion. It was a matter of discovering the Lord in and through youthful forms of expression. We didn't know enough about the earlier tradition to be dismissive of it. Nor were we practicing sublated collective narcissism. The point I was trying to make is that there is room in the Church, and even in the liturgy, for such forms of expression.Pertinacious Papist:
Interlocutor:And my point would be that one can unwittingly be swept up by an ethos that has its own Zeitgeist and rather innocently find himself playing guitar or bongo accompanyment to a cobbled-together liturgy on a new Titanic. When you become a Catholic from a Protestant background, it takes some time to acclimate oneself to where the Church is in her historical journey, to the particular momentum or cultural drift of the Barque of St. Peter at this precise moment of history. Depending on the background one comes from, the Catholic Church at first may strike the newcomer as relatively 'conservative' or 'liberal'; but the important thing to discern is the point of her progress and the direction of her headway.
The forms of cultural expression one finds in the music and liturgical experimentations of the seventies and eighties did not emerge from nowhere, of course, but emerged from their own ideological nexus and context. After becoming a Catholic in the early nineties, I was soon asked to become an Extraordinary Eucharistic Minister, as they were then called. I served as one for a period of several years, though I felt uncomfortable in the role, until I read the prohibitions of the disciplinary Instruction, Redemptionis Sacramentum, ##157-158. After becoming a Catholic, I was in a parish where people held hands during the Our Father. I went along with this local custom, even though my Japanese upbringing made me terribly uncomfortable with this custom, until I read that this practice was counter-liturgical and frowned upon as a general rule by the Vatican. The point here would be that my initial participation in these activities was 'innocent', but I was being swept up in the momentum of a movement within the recent history of the Catholic Church that has a life of its own, whose credentials are certainly not those of the Vatican.
[You said that there are some media, some expressions of emotions that are inimical to sanctity. Among other things, you mentioned feelings like narcissism found as a strong undercurrent in many contemporary songs. You mentioned churches built in the round so we face one another, the priest facing us, offering the sacrifice to us, and we (through our extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion) offering Communion to ourselves.] No quarrel with any of this. I agree that we've seen a lot of this phenomenon, but I frankly think that this sort of thing is becoming dated. Youth are frankly bored, even by narcissism, and are looking for something more substantive than 70's style sugary immanentist ideals.Pertinacious Papist:
I certainly would like to think so.Interlocutor:
[You wrote: " ... liturgical rules govern worship. Hence, when I discuss forms of liturgy such as Life Teen Masses, I’m not concerned only (or even primarily) with questions of inward disposition of those assisting at Mass, but with the fittingness of the liturgical form itself – standing around the Altar holding hands as opposed to kneeling in the pews; bongos, guitars, drums and ‘praise choir’ up on stage (in the space that would traditionally have counted as part of the santuary), as opposed to other sorts of hymnody or chant in a choir loft or from the congregation; etc., etc."] It's easy to agree with the principle that there is such a thing as proper liturgical form, that there is a question of (as you have put it) the "hermeneutics of fittingness". It is as we descend to matters of detail that things get less clear to me. The matters in question are not matters of the merely physical (e.g., kneeling as a physical disposition of bodily members). They are matters of signs and semeioses, of the intermingling of the physical and the spiritual/notional: not just what bodies are doing in a room, but what they are meaning. There is more than one kind of danger here. Yes, one needs to root out what amount to dangerously disordered forms of collective self-worship. But there is also the danger of becoming another kind of liturgical Nazi, by legislating what should not be legislated.Pertinacious Papist:
One recognizes most surely the disorders which one once partook of oneself--or was sufficiently close to that you know it from inside, can smell it a mile off, etc. Though even there, you may need to get closer than a mile before you smell correctly. Here is where one's ability to judge and evaluate correctly is limited by the inevitably partial nature of our experiences. E.g., you are still misjudging to a certain extent the experience that I've described in connection with our old charismatic St Philip's youth Masses.
I think here one has to judge by the fruits, not a priori. Let the flower bloom first, then judge of its condition.
I'm trying to decide whether your remarks about the dangers posed by the other (perhaps my) kind of liturgical Nazi, about not judging others' experiences, and about judging a tree by its fruits, etc., makes you sound more like St. Francis, or Jesus, a charismatic Pentecostal, or a New Ager. But of course none of those appellations would be fair.
You are raising, in effect, the question our friend, Janice, raises about the inner disposition of the worshipper--the issue Jesus addressed when He spoke of the importance of worshipping "in spirit and in truth" (John 4:24). That, of course, is the preeminent and praiseworthy focus in Protestant worship, just as it should not be neglected in Catholic worship. But as Newman stressed, the preeminent principle of Catholicism is found in the doctrine of the Incarnation, which entails a whole worldview of Sacrementality, which insists that spirit must take on flesh and express itself physically. Hence -- and unavoidably -- in Catholicism we have whole edifices of juridical structure (from canon law to liturgical law), which order our faith and morals and worship. This is not only unavoidable; it is magisterially magnificent, for it means I don't have to cobble together my own Catholic spirituality, my own Catholic ethic, my own Catholic dogmatics. Rather, it is something Mother Church has gifted to me. It is an objective gift of grace in which I can rest and to which I can, by baby steps, learn to conform my soul. Just as I learned to bow my head when my mother first taught me to pray, I have learned to genuflect upon entering a Catholic church and kneel for Canon of the Mass. Even though these outward forms are not the only fitting ones possible or the only ones found within licit Catholic rites (e.g., there are Eastern Catholic rites with other fitting forms), they are eminently appropriate, fitting and right ways of bodily expressing the spirit of divine worship. It is far from being an evil thing that these external forms are specifically legislated canonically within each rite, even though other forms are possible. These forms provide the traction required for freedom to worship so that one isn't left flailing his limbs helplessly like an untethered astronaut free-floating in space. But of course, now I'm the one preaching to the choir.
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