Religious humor:

Sometimes humor stikes at the issues in ways that a homily or a lecture cannot:

• Bad Vicar - That Mitchell and Webb Look
  
  
• David Mitchell discusses The Heaven and Earth Show

Okay, a bit of it does go quite over the edge, I admit; but several points are hilarious as well as dead-on.

Continuing "Regensburg Effect" ...

Sandro Magister, in a post entitled, "The Church and Islam: A Sprig of Dialogue Has Sprouted in Regensburg" (www.Chiesa, Roma, October 30, 2006), writes: "After the storm, the Muslim world is also producing signs of discussion “according to reason.” An erudite question-and-answer between the Catholic Martinetti and Muslim theologian Aref Ali Nayed." A previously unpublished text on the subject by the Vatican Secretary of State, Tarcisio Bertone, is also published under the title, "Dialoguing with the thinking élites in order to reach the masses." What is this -- Benedict contra mundum?

"Statism, Post-Modernism, and the Death of the Western World"

Recently a friend sent me the following link to an article by Stephen LaTulippe, entitled "Statism, Post-Modernism, and the Death of the Western World," published at LewRockwell.com, the blog of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. A quotation from Oscar Wilde caught my attention:

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without creating a civilization in-between."

The article began with LaTulippe describing his first impression of seeing the HBO TV show, Sex and the City, how he found it simultaneously brilliant and horrifying. To give the Devil his due, he says, the script, acting, cinematography are amazing, and the comedy truly hilarious.

But brilliance of production aside, Sex and the City has a number of profound socio-political nuances that dovetail with an issue I’ve been kicking around for quite some time; namely, that the Western world is experiencing the final stages of a cultural struggle between two radically different versions of social organization (which I call "organic culture" and "post-modernism"). This struggle is the single dominant issue of our age, and it defines a variety of conflicts both within Western civilization and between it and other civilizations, stretching from the relentless expansion of our government to our misbegotten "war on terror."

Sex and the City represents the post-modern paradigm. The thirty-something single women living in New York City live a life that is, says LaTulippe, while all too common today, perhaps unprecedented in human history, particularly for women. They are completely uprooted and homogenized, with no discernable family connections. They have no religious convictions. They wander around Manhattan, eating in chic restaurants, maxing-out their credit cards in fashionable boutiques, and engaging in a bewildering variety of casual sexual relationships. Their lives are more like those of animals than anything fully human, dominated by impulses and sensations rather than intellect and spirit, indulgence rather than purpose. They have no reverence for the past and no regard for the future, living only in the present. Even more disturbingly, says LaTulippe, their lifestyle has a "spooky passivity" to it, "a sense of slavery" to their vices: "If someone takes them to a swanky Thai restaurant, they’ll eat. If someone hands them a martini, they’ll drink. If a handsome guy appears, they’ll copulate." This, in effect, is the sum total of their lives, illustrating the fact that post-modernism isn't really a culture, but an anti-culture, or a parasite upon what remains of a past culture in the absence of any present culture.

At the opposite end of the spectrum lies what LaTulippe calls "organic culture." The most extreme examples of this type of social organization, he says, are the Amish and the Hasidic Jews. Organic cultures are characterized by a "chain of being," by which an individual sees himself linked in a chain extending back through innumerable generations, as well as to future generations of descendants. "Respect of one’s ancestors and concern for one’s descendants are thus wrapped together in a religious and culture milieu that is of profound importance in everyday life," says LaTulippe. And, obviously, this sort of culture has been severely eroded as our intellectual and cultural elites have long abandoned whatever remnants of organic culture they may have had and now totally embraced the new, dysfunctional cultural Weltanschauung of post-modernism.

Post-modernism, in LaTulippe's view, suffers from three major flaws: (1) ethical relativism, (2) auto-genocide, and (3) the death of the sacred. LaTulippe developes his analysis at these points more extensively in a political direction than I am able to give space to here, but here are a few highlights.

(1) Ethical relativism. Here LaTulippe looks at foreign policy and domestic policy, focusing, in particular, on the financial scandals that have come to light in connection with the latter. These have as their common root, he suggests, "the amoral quest for the unearned, which is perhaps the final common denominator of our entire political system." Post-modernism, he says, is locked into a "dysfunctional synergy with statism," in which each feeds the other, and they are sucking all of us down with them. He writes:

As for organic culture, I’ve often mused that the Amish are a clear and present danger to our system. As Lew Rockwell noted recently, they take no welfare, they pay for their own medical care (in cash), they save for their own retirement, they don’t join our military on its exciting escapades, and they educate their own children.

At some point, I fully expect to hear of government bureaucrats recommending that Amish children be whisked away from their families and redistributed to urban housing projects for a less "antisocial" upbringing.

After all, if the Amish worldview should spread, our entire welfare-warfare system would literally collapse.

(2) Auto-genocide. "Post-modern culture treats children as an expensive and peculiar hobby, something like a curious fashion statement. Children are, after all, expensive, messy, and they interfere with an active dating life. And if children are seen as a mere fashion accessory or an emotional indulgence, then one will do just as well as two (and much better than three or four)," writes LaTulippe. This attitude is reflected in the precipitously falling birthrates of those countries that suffered erstwhile panic attacks from fear of "population explosions."

By contrast, the view of children reflected in 'organic culture' is poignantly summed up in a quotation LaTulippe offers from Oswald Spengler's The Hour of Decision:

A woman of [tribe] does not desire to be a "companion" or a "lover," but a mother; and not the mother of one child, to serve as a toy and distraction, but of many: the instinct of a strong tribe speaks in the pride that large families inspire, in the feeling that barrenness is the hardest curse that can befall a woman and through her, the tribe....

LaTulippe writes: "Western elites believe they can avoid a demographic collapse by importing replacement populations and corrupting them with post-modernism before the newcomers are able to impose their own organic culture on the host nations. This may work for America and its largely Hispanic immigrant population, but its prospects with European Islam are, to say the least, highly suspect."

3. The Death of the Sacred. Post-modernism is this-worldly, recognizing nothing beyond the immediate, concrete world. It has no higher aspirations. It offers no spiritual sustenance. "If a man has food stamps, a welfare check, and a place in a government housing project, it believes he has everything he could possibly need or want. (Actually, that is true only as far as the commoners are concerned. For the post-modern elites, they require exotic ethnic cuisine, cheap immigrant household labor, and a custom Maybach...but this is a difference in degree, not kind.)" Whatever one's income level, however, the shift in frames of reference is that from the Sistine Chapel and Bach's requiem mass to the vulgar creations of contemporary cultural nihilism.

By way of conclusion, LaTulippe laments that it is difficult for contemporary generations to even imagine what has been lost. That is why he likes, he says, cinematic portrayals of Jane Austen novels and their depiction of a past world of complex manners and morals with their vibrant sense of right-and-wrong and even the bad guy carries a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets in his pocket. He observes:

Those of us born during or after the sixties social revolution have no living memory of even a vestigial remnant of Western culture, but rather have experienced only the degenerate post-modernism, drenched in stifling humanism, absurd universalism, and fatuous egalitarianism, that has dominated ever since.

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe noted so trenchantly, democracy has led us down the primrose path to decadence, which in turn has provided continuous justifications for yet more statism. This system of decadence, however enticing and delectable it may sometimes be, is unsustainable. This cannot go on. It will ultimately end in bankruptcy, demographic implosion, or Road Warrior-style chaos."

Whether LaTulippe's grim prognosis is right, and the die is cast, and the women of Sex and the City will be our civilizational epitaph, only time will tell. There is always, especially for Catholics, the possibility of rebirth -- given that Beauty "ever ancient, ever new."

Food for thought ...

"If somebody has a bad heart, they can plug this jack in at night as they go to bed and it will monitor their heart throughout the night. And the next morning, when they wake up dead, there'll be a record."

Mark S. Fowler, FCC Chairman







"Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances."

-- Department of Social Services, Greenville, SC (source: Newsweek)

Feeling any better?

Dignitatis Humanae and Benedict

A reader writes:

Fr. Neuhaus is not at a loss for words on any subject concerning the Roman Catholic Church. However, he chooses to ignore Benedict XVI's constant overtures to the Lefebvrists since he became pope in April 2005. The reason is not far to seek. Fr. Neuhaus regards Dignitatis Humanae as the charter document of First Things. The Lefebvrists are adamantly opposed to Dignitatis Humanae:

"There remains the focal point of the conciliar heresy: the declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae. Since his accession, Benedict XVI has not ceased to affirm that this declaration claims nothing more than the libertas Ecclesiae, the freedom of the Church in her relations with civil society. It is nothing more than that, it is a principle that could not be more traditional, and our opposition is no longer founded. But the letter of the conciliar text and forty years of practice show that it is a question of something quite different: before the Council, the principle was the man who holds the truth has the right to freedom. And yet, the Council declared that the right to freedom is born of the human being, of his dignity: Dignitatis Humanae. The Abbé de Nantes synthesized this heresy that is setting the planet on fire today, from Rabat to Djakarta: 'Liberty in religious matters is an imprescriptible and sacred right, based on the dignity of the human person, which is equal in all and universal, authorizing the public practice and open propaganda of any religion, independently of its objective character of truth or falsehood in the eyes of God and the Lord Jesus Christ. Anathema sit.'" (Brother Bruno of Jesus, "The Unity of the Church," He is Risen, November 2006)

Benedict XVI's new emphasis on the 'freedom of the Church' is surely anathema to Fr. Neuhaus. Benedict XVI even dared to suggest in his December 22nd address to the Roman Curia that the martyrs are the true exemplars of human freedom.

[with minor editing by Pertinacious Papist]

So much for 'expertise'

John L. Allen, Jr. has an article in the National Catholic Reporter (October 24, 2006) entitled "Expert says new translation may curb appetite for older Mass." The expert in question, Fr. Bruce Harbert, executive director of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, said that he suspects traditionalists will be better satisfied by the new translation, because it includes more literal translations such as "and with your spirit," rather than "and with you." This is indeed an improvement. True, the band aid may be much too small for the hemorrhage. Nice band aid, though.

[Hat tip to Sean Fagan]

A conversation about liturgical music (part 2)

Some of you may remember the post entitled "A conversation about liturgical music" (October 14, 2006), based on a correspondence with an intelligent reader and good friend of mine. The original exchange was sparked by the post, "'Songs' I'd love never to have heard" (Oct. 5, 2006), as you may recall. Though the original exchange, despite being edited for brevity and extraneous content, was substantial, your comments suggest that you found it provocative and stimulating, as I hoped you would. Here is a second installment in that conversation with my friend, whose thoughts on such matters I always find insightful, provocative, and sometimes far wiser than my own. Your comments are welcome:

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. [Note 1]

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. [Note 2]

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 my realization 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, 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 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. [Note 3]

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.

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.

Interlocutor:

[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:

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.

Interlocutor:

[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.

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.

Pertinacious Papist:

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.

Notes:

1. Peter Kreeft once suggested that if what was needed for ‘active participation’ of the laity in the reform of the liturgy was an audibly spoken Eucharistic prayer, then why not simply use the elegant English translation (from the King James and Douay-Rheims era) of the 1962 Missal. While overly simplistic and neglecting other necessary considerations, I have to admit that this, whatever its problems, would be a vast improvement over the status quo.
   
   
2. You [my Interlocutor] suggest that clergy are in general better-formed in major urban centers. Is this true, as a rule? I would agree that in major urban centers one can more easily find churches where the Mass is celebrated without the general abuses one finds in typical American suburban parishes, but isn't that another matter. In a number of dioceses I’m familiar with, non-dissident clergy are marginalized by exiling them to the hinterlands while the plumb urban parishes are awarded to the team-playing good-ol’ boys who won’t rock the boat of the revisionist episcopal captain. In the case of our parish, we’ve had revisionist priests who’ve supported women’s ordination and birth control, as well as loyalist priests who’ve upheld Church teaching, even if often somewhat fearfully because of the large, well-financed liberal lobby that hasn’t hesitated throwing its weight around in and out of parish committees.
   
   
3. You [my Interlocutor] say that you're pro-vernacular, not because you're a "verbalist," but because you think words mean things and they ought to have the opportunity to mean something to everyone who assists at Mass rather than create a barrier. I’m not sure this doesn’t miss something important about the imposed silence of the Traditional Mass. You have observed to me once after assisting at a Traditional Mass that it made the Novus Ordo seem comparatively ‘chatty’. Add to this the fact that Pope Benedict has said in various places that the versus populum stance of the priest makes the priest in many ways far "too important" (the priest must carry the weight of the liturgy, rather than the liturgy carry the priest). It also elevates the assembly to a position of excessive self-consciousness. Further, you have observed, as well as many scholars, how natural it was that the Protestant Reformation was born in a university setting, amidst the academic study of the Bible and academic debate of university lecture halls. There is something about going to a Mass where the whole of the Sacramentary is basically read aloud to the people, in my humble opinion, that feeds into this sort of ethos. I’m not inclined to be all that sanguine about the notion that having the Eucharistic prayers spoken aloud in the vernacular “breaks down barriers” and offers the opportunity to have the Mass “mean something to everyone,” any more than I’m inclined to believe that “active participation” requires the laity to be always serving as lectors, alter servers, Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, or everyone in the pews to be always doing something. In fact, I'm tempted to think I smell a red herring here. The silence of the Traditional Mass, in fact, can be a profound avenue for inner active participation for those who come to the liturgy looking for God. They’re not apt to be distracted by extraneous dissonance and come away “theatre critics” either.

"How Should We Worship?" by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Alcuin Reid's magisterial The Organic Development of the Liturgy: The Principles of Liturgical Reform and Their Relation to the Twenthieth-Century Liturgical Movement Prior to the Second Vatican has been out now for a couple of years, and just became available in paperback last November. Now Ignatius Insight has published Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's Introduction to the book, "How Should We Worship?" online. Here are a couple of excerpts:

There are the relentless supporters of reform, for whom the fact that, under certain conditions, the celebration of the Eucharist in accordance with the most recent edition of the missal before the Council–that of 1962–has once more been permitted represents an intolerable fall from grace. At the same time, of course, the Liturgy is regarded as "semper reformanda", so that in the end it is whatever "congregation" is involved that makes "its" Liturgy, in which it expresses itself. A Protestant "Liturgical Compendium" (edited by C. Grethlein [Ruddat, 2003]) recently presented worship as a "project for reform" (pp. 13-41) and thereby also expressed the way many Catholic liturgists think about it. And then, on the other hand, there are the embittered critics of liturgical reform–critical not only of its application in practice, but equally of its basis in the Council. They can see salvation only in total rejection of the reform.

Between these two groups, the radical reformers and their radical opponents, the voices of those people who regard the Liturgy as something living, and thus as growing and renewing itself both in its reception and in its finished form, are often lost. These latter, however, on the basis of the same argument, insist that growth is not possible unless the Liturgy's identity is preserved, and they further emphasise that proper development is possible only if careful attention is paid to the inner structural logic of this "organism": Just as a gardener cares for a living plant as it develops, with due attention to the power of growth and life within the plant and the rules it obeys, so the Church ought to give reverent care to the Liturgy through the ages, distinguishing actions that are helpful and healing from those that are violent and destructive.

* * *
Because it is often all too obvious that historical knowledge cannot be elevated straight into the status of a new liturgical norm, ... archaeological enthusiasm was very easily combined with pastoral pragmatism: people first of all decided to eliminate everything that was not recognised as original and was thus not part of the "substance", and then they supplemented the "archaeological remains", if these still seemed insufficient, in accordance with "pastoral insights". But what is "pastoral"? The judgments made about these questions by intellectual professors were often influenced by their rationalist presuppositions and not infrequently missed the point of what really supports the life of the faithful. Thus it is that nowadays, after the Liturgy was extensively rationalised during the early phase of reform, people are eagerly seeking forms of solemnity, looking for "mystical" atmosphere and for something of the sacred. Yet because–necessarily and more and more clearly–people's judgments as to what is pastorally effective are widely divergent, the "pastoral" aspect has become the point at which "creativity" breaks in, destroying the unity of the Liturgy and very often confronting us with something deplorably banal. That is not to deny that the eucharistic Liturgy, and likewise the Liturgy of the Word, is often celebrated reverently and "beautifully", in the best sense, on the basis of people's faith. Yet since we are looking for the criteria of reform, we do also have to mention the dangers, which unfortunately in the last few decades have by no means remained just the imaginings of those traditionalists opposed to reform.

Salvaging Assisi?

Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., for whom I have considerable respect, writes an intesting essay entitled "The Spirit of Assisi: On Praying With Other Religions," in Ignatius Insight (October 16, 2006). In it, he offers an exegesis of Pope Benedict XVI's address to the local bishop of Assisi (September 2, 2006) in commemoration of the World Day of Prayer. Benedict refers to John Paul II's call to prayer at Assisi as a "daring and prophetic initiative." But in order to show its prophetic nature, he has to offer a clarification, showing that what his predecessor had intended was no syncretistic confusion of religions, but a call to representatives of the world religions to pray together for peace, each in their own way, maintaining their integrity, in the bloody and violent face of world events. Schall's account gives the Assisi agenda a particularly world-historical political cast that strikes me as interesting, at least; and I suppose if anyone can salvage Assisi, it would be Benedict. However, I remain far from happy about the confusion Assisi left in its wake, which is a matter of empirical and sociological record; and I suspect that Benedict is sensitive to these concerns as well.

Index Canticorum Prohibitorum

George Weigel has written some wonderful things and some less-than-wonderful things. Whatever one thinks of Weigel, however, I think most of us will agree that he makes some important points in his essay, "Heretical Hymns?" (published by the Catholic Education Resource Center). The essay, which is not long, is worth reading in its entirety.

Weigel begins by noting that he only began to think about hymns theologically after making the acquaintance of certan old school Lutherans, who took their hymns very seriously. By contrast, he notes:

Most Catholics don't. Instead, we settle for hymns musically indistinguishable from "Les Mis" and hymns of saccharine textual sentimentality. Moreover, some hymn texts in today's Catholic "worship resources" are, to put it bluntly, heretical. Yet Catholics once knew how to write great hymns; and there are great hymns to be borrowed, with gratitude, from Anglican, Lutheran, and other Christian sources. There being a finite amount of material that can fit into a hymnal, however, the first thing to do is clean the stables of today's hymnals.

Thus, with tongue only half in cheek, I propose the Index Canticorum Prohibitorum, the "Index of Forbidden Hymns."

Weigel provides only three categories by way of example, but they are well-worth noting:

(1) "The first hymns to go should be hymns that teach heresy. If hymns are more than liturgical filler, hymns that teach ideas contrary to Christian truth have no business in the liturgy. 'Ashes' is the prime example here: 'We rise again from ashes to create ourselves anew.' No, we don't. Christ creates us anew."

(2) "Next to go should be those 'We are Jesus' hymns in which the congregation (for the first time in two millennia of Christian hymnology) pretends that it's Christ. 'Love one another as I have loved you/Care for each other, I have cared for you/Bear each other's burdens, bind each other's wounds/and so you will know my return.' Who's praying to whom here? And is the Lord's 'return' to be confined to our doing of his will?"

(3) "Then there are hymns that have been flogged to death, to the point where they've lost any evocative power. For one hundred forty years, the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony sent shivers down audiences' spines; does anyone sense its power when it's morphed into the vastly over-used 'Joyful, Joyful We Adore You,' complete with 'chanting bird and flowing fountain'?"

These are but some of the illustrations Weigel furnishes. But the points he makes here are insightful wise, it seems to me. An Index Canticorum Prohibitorum? Hm ... Perhaps Weigel has an idea here that may potentially upstage even the venerable Society for a Moratorium on the Music of Marty Haugen and David Haas!

[Hat tip to Chris Garton-Zavesky]

"BBC confesses bias on religion, politics"

Internal memo reveals execs saying Bible tossed in trash OK, not Quran
A WorldNetDaily.com report entitled "BBC Confesses Bias on Religion, Politics" (October 23, 2006) states that an "internal British Broadcasting Corporation memo reveals senior figures admitted the national news agency was guilty of promoting left-wing views and anti-Christian sentiment." News of the memo, reported by the British media, comes amidst claims of biased reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and global fight against terror, according to the Israeli YnetNews.com, says the report. The admissions of bias were reportedly made at a recent "impartiality" summit the held by the BBC. Most executives admitted BBC's representation of homosexuals and ethnic minorities was unbalanced and disproportionate, according to YnetNews.com.

At the summit, executives were given a fictitious scenario in which they were asked to make a judgment.

In the illustration, Jewish comedian Sasha Baron Cohen would participate in a studio program in which guests were allowed to symbolically throw in a garbage bin things they hated.

What would you do, the executives were asked, if Cohen decided to throw kosher food, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bible and the Quran in the trash.

Everything would be allowed, the executives said, except for the Quran, for fear of offending the British Muslim community.

Thankfully, there is no such bias at NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, LA Times etc.... Read more.

[Hat tip to Michael Forrest]

Pray for the Holy Father

Over the next weeks and months, the Holy Father will be facing some major challenges, even threats. The major threats will come during his Nov. 28-30 visit to Turkey, despite expressed dangers. The immediate challenges I have in mind are those surrounding the prospective publication of his Moto Proprio granting a universal Indult for the Traditional Latin Mass. Already he is meeting with the predicted stiff resistance. Yesterday's Washington Post carried an article by Tom Heneghan reporting on the French hue and whine entitled "French clerics criticize Pope's Latin mass plans." As one of our readers said, Benedict will have hell to pay if he has the courage to go through with this. I am sure there are many who would not be unhappy if he were assassinated in Turkey. Pray for him.

Were strophed hymns historically foreign to Catholic liturgy?

The Center for Theology at Lenoir-Rhyne College recently hosted its 14th annual Aquinas-Luther Conference, this year on the subject of "Spirituality, Holiness, and the Saints." Conference speakers included Dr. Regis Martin (Franciscan University), Dr. Amy Schifrin (St. Peter's Lutheran Church, York, PA), Dr. Ronda Chervin (ret. Loyola Marymount, Los Angeles; currently Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Lenoir-Rhyne College), and Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon (Senior Editor of touchstone Magazine, A Journal of Mere Christianity and Pastor of All Saints' Orthodox Church in Chicago). Here is an online Conference Schedule with titles of their presentations.

My purpose is not to review the presentations of the Conference, which were excellent, but to address a question that one of the presentations raised in my mind in subsequent reflection. Amy Schifrin's presentation addressed Martin Luther's hymnody, and, in the course of her fine presentation, she made the point that Luther decisively shaped the 'Western Rite', as she put it (she was thinking of the Reformation traditions, of course), by his particular use of strophed hymns. However, she went farther, suggesting also that strophed hymns might be seen, now at least, as essential to the liturgical worship of God.

Now, coming from a Protestant background as I do, I have reason to be inclined to be sympathetic to this view. It's common knowledge that most Protestant traditions have historically rich hymnodies and that Protestant congregations -- especially of the more evangelical or conservative end of the spectrum -- sing very well. Like many from Lutheran, Baptist, Presbyterian, Anglican, Mennonite, or Methodist backgrounds, I was raised in a home where we were taught to sing four-part harmony. My parents ran a boarding facility for missionary children in Japan, so we had plenty of voices, which naturally divided into a range from sopranos, and altos among the women to tenors and bass among the men. It was surprising to me when I started going to a Catholic church back in the 1980s that the hymnals did not show printed parts for four voices, but only the melody line. It was also surprising to discover how poorly Catholic congregations sang, and never in harmony, except for the choir (and that was sometimes debatable).

But here's my question: were strophed hymns historically foreign to Catholic Mass? I knew there were great hymns in Catholic tradition, such as the Te Deum, and it's more recent pre-Vatican II strophed hymnodic forms, such as "Grosser Gott, wir loben Dich!" or "Holy God, We Praise Thy Name." But then I ran into the following remark by Martin Mosebach:

Luther's Reformation was a singing movement and the hymn expressed the beliefs of the Reformers. Vernacular hymns replaced the liturgy, as they were designed to do; they were filled with the combative spirit of those dismal times and were meant to fortify the partisans. People singing a catchy melody together at the top of their voices created a sense of community, as all soldiers, clubs, and politicians know. The Catholic Counter-Reformation felt the demagogic power of these hymns. People so enjoyed singing; it was so easy to influence their emotions using pleasing tunes with verse repetition. In the liturgy of the Mass, however, there was no place for hymns. The liturgy has no gaps; it is one single great canticle; where it prescribes silence or the whisper, that is, where the mystery is covered with an acoustic veil, as it were, any hymn would be out of the question. The hymn has a beginning and an end; it is embedded in a speech. But the leiturgos of Holy Mass does not actually speak at all; his speaking is a singing, because he has put on the "new man," because, in the sacred space of the liturgy, he is a companion of angels. In the liturgy, singing is an elevation and transfiguration of speech, and, as such, it is a sign of the transfiguration of the body that awaits those who are risen. The hymn's numerical aesthetics -- hymn 1, hymn 2, hymn 3 -- is totally alien and irreconcilable in the world of the liturgy. In services that are governed by vernacular hymns, the believer is constantly being transported into new aesthetic worlds. He changes from one style to another and has to deal with highly subjective poetry of the most varied levels. He is moved and stirred -- but not by the thing itself, liturgy: he is moved and stirred by the expressed sentiments of the commentary upon it. By contrast, the bond that Gregorian chant weaves between liturgical action and song is so close that it is impossible to separate form and content. (Martin Mosenbach, The Heresy of Formlessness, pp. 40-41)

Then, in the latest issue of Adoremus Bulletin (October 2006), one finds this: "St. Mark's -- A Liturgy Without Hymns," an article by Dr. Joseph Swain, Professor of Music History at Colgate University for 22 years and author of the forthcoming Dictionary of Sacred Music (Scarecrow Press, December, 2006). The printed edition of the article carries the headline: "Is the Liturgy at this great Venitian Basilica what the Council Fathers had in mind?" The article is fascinating. One thing Swain points out is that the current liturgical fixation on "four songs" -- at the beginning of Mass, at the offertory procession, after the reception of Communion, and at the very end -- is a product of a mostly German pre-conciliar tradition. He writes:

This peculiarity derives from a mostly German pre-conciliar tradition of singing congregational songs and hymns at a “low Mass”, that is, a Mass entirely spoken with no music, at those points where Mass Propers would ordinarily be chanted by the choir at a more solemn liturgy. The celebrant would say the prescribed texts while the congregation sang a versified paraphrase in the best conditions, or just a familiar devotional song otherwise. The tradition, dating from the 18th century at least, was an outlet for the natural desire of congregants to sing in praise of the Most High at Mass. The Second Vatican Council, in the interests of such “active participation”, charged the congregation with singing the actual liturgical texts, but Proper chants are not easy, and so bishops seized upon the more elastic clauses in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy and its subsequent instructions and allowed easier and by now much more familiar hymns to substitute.

With one exception, “the four” continue to act as placeholders for the texts prescribed in the Roman missal for particular feasts, that is, for the Proper texts of ancient tradition: the Introit or entrance antiphon, the Offertory antiphon, and the Communion antiphon. (They are all “antiphons” because it is thought that in ancient times these were not sung by themselves but in response to the verses of entire Psalms.) The exception is the modern recessional or closing hymn, which stands in for nothing at all, but merely satisfies our modern aesthetic need for the big finale as in an opera or Hollywood movie.

But note what Swain says about this in view of the Council:

Nevertheless, our fixation on “the four” stands in some contradiction to the exhortations of the Council. “To promote active participation, the people should be encouraged to take part by means of acclamations, responses, psalmody, antiphons, and songs...” (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Art. 30). Songs are last in priority. Preconciliar documents on sacred music Mediator Dei (Pope Pius XII, 1947) and Musicae Sacrae (Pope Pius XII, 1958) and American guidelines such as Music in Catholic Worship (1983) set the same priorities, sometimes in more specific detail. But in a typical American parish, when resources limit the music, congregations will not sing Psalmody and Mass Ordinary settings (e.g. “Glory to God”) to the exclusion of “the four”, but rather the other way around.

But read the whole article, which is actually more interesting for Swain's detailed account of the liturgy at St. Mark's Basilica in Venice where he lived for five months as directer of an off-campus study group sponsored by Colgate University. His analysis of the liturgy shows that there is singing aplenty, but not of the kind one finds in "the four" strophed hymns in contemporary liturgies. And this is what makes the practice at St. Mark’s so interesting and instructive, as Swain points out. At the half dozen solemn Masses he attended there, there was but one hymn, a Marian entrance song to the tune “O Sanctissima” for the Vigil of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Otherwise there was no music that Americans would call congregational songs or hymns, and yet the active participation of the people in a richly varied liturgical music was both frequent and fervent.

In fact, this reminds me of the antiphonally chanted plainsong Mass discussed and proposed by Fr. Samuel Weber at the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars at Kansas City in September (see "Back from Kansas City," September 26, 2006).

Your thoughts?

Laputans to the rescue!

Religion, evidently, is the culprit. So they say. Religion, what with fanatical jihadists and patriarchal Muslim-baiting Papists, is responsible for leading us to the brink of geo-political ruin. To the rescue: enter the Laputans -- the self-appointed spokesmen for the Age of Reason: the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER).

Note the word "SCIENTIFIC." We're talking serious wild turkey Voodoo here. Remember Marx's "scientific socialism" and the splendid Stalinist and Maoist societies it gave us? Oh, but that was a wee little mistake. Marx was an ideologue. He let his ideological biases distort his theories. But we're talking SCIENTIFIC REASON here. Genuine whoop-ass wild turkey voodoo science.

The good news is that you can rest a little more easily now and sleep a little more soundly tonight, because the Laputan Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion has just published its flagship issue of the CSER Review Vol. 1, No. 1 (Fall 2006)! (This is evidently the step-child of the promised Quarterly Review for the Scientific Examination of Religion, with its CSER Quarterly Live, featuring an online news and reviews page to be updated monthly, which, to date, has not yet materialized.) But Hark! The Herald Chairman and Founder of the Center for Inquiry/Transnational declareth (in his opening editorial):

There is a pressing need today for the careful and scientific examination of religion. [Note that word "SCIENTIFIC" again!] ...

In today's world, there is a violent confrontation between different revelatory traditions. Consider the importance of the Rapture for Protestant fundamentalists ... or the intense interest of the devotees of Islam ... which promises heaven for those martyrs who engage in jihad.

Objective, scholarly, and scientific inquiry [ah, those reassuring words!]--independent of theological commitments [can't have any believing scientists, of course: might prejudice their research!] --needs to be pursued today as never before and made available not only to the scholarly community but to the broader public. Hence, we are pleased to announce the launching of a new journal, the CSER REVIEW, published by the Center for Inquiry/Transnational and devoted to the careful and critical examination of religin. The Center is interested in extending science, reason, and free inquiry to every area of human interest. (p. 3)

Does anyone hear in these summons an echo of that "self-limitation of reason" that Benedict XVI took to task in his Regensburg Address? You know, that "self-limitation of reason" that is both the product of Kantian Critical philosophy and the general pathology modernity -- a pathology exhibited, for instance, in the de-hellenization of Christianity found in the modernist historical-critical reading to the biblical text, which leaves you with a risen "Christ of Faith" you can personally choose to believe in even if the SCIENTIFICALLY CERTIFIED "Jesus of History" is dead? Of the consequences of this view, Benedict wrote: "The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective 'conscience' becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to constuct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate."

In his "Welcome to the SCER Rreview," current Chair of CSER, R. Joseph Hoffmann writes:

There has never been a greater need for a review shuch as this. The rise of fundamentalism gnaws at the fabric of American democracy and liberal and secular movements throughout the world. In a disturbing recent poll by the Barna Group, as many as 45 percent of the adult American Christian populatin can be classified as "born-again Christians" ... apreciably up from the 31 percent figurerecorded in 1983 when the first such poll was taken [The Christians are coming! The Christians are coming! Lord, save us from them Christians!].

While Rome burns, the megachurch phenomenon sizzles.... School boards waste taxpayers' money by debating scientific issues about which they are largely illiterate ... [while we alone have the competence to tell you the objective unadulterated absolute TRUTH about SCIENTIFC FACT]. According to a depressing recent survey, as many as ... 85 percent [of Americans] in a literal heaven and hell. More recenly, the American administration has secured the appointment of justices to the Supreme Court chosen specifically for their solidity of their religious ideology rather than the quality of their jurisprudence [i.e., jurisprudence from the point of view of nowhere]. God and Caesar have never been more at odds over which tribute belongs to whom.

Hoffmann tells us that the acronym, CSER, by which the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion is better known, is pronounced caesar. Rather imperial, I should say. But why should he think that the tribute claimed by Caesar should not also belong, ultimately, to God? Such dualizations and pigionholes. How quaint.

What is the CSER, finally? Let me translate: the Committee for the Anti-supernaturalistic Explanation of Supernaturalistic Claims. The chief audacity lies in this: in presuming to do this without pre-theoretical pre-commitments.

Muslim paydirt

Ever since Pope Benedict's Regensburg lecture, I have contended that his 'incindiary' reference to the Byzantine emperor's quotation citing Mohammed was no accident but a calculated risk intended to precipitate a fruitful dialogue with and among Muslims about the relationship of reason to faith in Islam (see "Andrew Sullivan, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: fellow-fideists contra Benedict," October 6, 2006; cf. "Islam’s Unreasonable War Against Benedict XVI," September 18, 2006). Now, one month after his Regensburg lecture, Benedict has received an "open letter" signed by 38 Muslim personalities from various countries and of different outlooks, which discusses point by point the views on Islam expressed by the pope in that lecture. In a post entitled "The Regensburg Effect: The Open Letter from 38 Muslims to the Pope" (www.chiesa), Sandro Magister writes:

Instead of saying they are offended and demanding apologies, they express their respect for him and dialogue with him on faith and reason. They disagree on many points. But they also criticize those Muslims who want to impose, with violence, “utopian dreams in which the end justifies the means.”

... Exactly the sort of beginning for which His Holiness was hoping, I should imagine. Let us pray that the dialogue continues to proliferate and grow within the Muslim community, betweem Muslims and Christians, and that the discourse of reasonable faith may prevail and overtake the insanity of irrational fideist terrorism -- as well as the insanity (in the West) of an etiolated rationalism cut off (by self-censorship) from rational discourse about faith and morals.

Lefebvrists see return to Roman fold, possibly soon

Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor of News.Scotsman.com, writes in an article entitled "Catholic schismatics see return to Roman fold soon" (October 16, 2006):

PARIS (Reuters) - After almost two decades of schism, Catholic traditionalists hope the Vatican will soon take them back into the fold by granting two key concessions and leaving unresolved the main issue that drove them away.

Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), says the expected revival of the old Latin mass that was replaced in the 1960s by modern liturgy in local languages would be a "grand gesture" meeting one of his demands.

The Swiss bishop, successor to the late SSPX founder French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, also expects the Vatican to lift the 1988 excommunications of Lefebvre and four bishops -- including Fellay -- whom he consecrated without Rome's approval.

"Things are going in the right direction. I think we'll get an agreement," Fellay told journalists in Paris at the weekend. "Things could speed up and come faster than expected."

A conversation about liturgical music

An intelligent reader (a good friend) and I have been carrying on a conversation about liturgical music, sparked by the post ("'Songs' I'd love never to have heard," Oct. 5, 2006), and I thought it only a propos to bring it back to blogsville to the larger ongoing conversation. Here it is (edited for brevity, since it's substantial):

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:

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.

Interlocutor:

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:

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?

Interlocutor:

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):

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.

Interlocutor:

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 does
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.

Pertinacious Papist:

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.

Interlocutor:

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?

Pertinacious Papist:

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.

Interlocutor:

[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:

[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.

Interlocutor:

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 the
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?

Interlocutor:

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.)

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.

Pertinacious Papist:

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.

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.

Interlocutor:

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.

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.

Interlocutor:

[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:

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.

Interlocutor:

[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.

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.

Pertinacious Papist:

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.