Fr. James McLucas on the MOTIVES for restoring the Mass of Pius V

Many of us are all-too-familiar with the following, frequently-quoted sentence from Pope John Paul II's apostolic letter, Ecclesia Dei Adflicta of 1988:

To all those Catholic faithful who feel attached to some previous liturgical and disciplinary forms of the Latin tradition, I wish to manifest my will to facilitate their ecclesial communion by means of the necessary measures to guarantee respect for their rightful aspirations.

At the time, those words sounded a momentous note of hope for Catholics who had been praying, writing letters to their bishops, and otherwise fighting for the preservation of the traditional Mass. In the nearly eighteen years that have elapses since that historical intervantion, however, this language that reduces the longing for the restoration of traditional liturgy to a matter of "preference," Fr. James McLucas argues, has been turned against advocates of the traditional Mass as a verbal club to batter them with charges of "elitism," "divisiveness," and "neurotic nostalgia." So writes Fr. James McLucas in an editorial closely re-examining the motives animating the desire of traditional Catholics to see the traditional Mass of Pius V restored in the most recent issue of Latin Mass (Winter 2006), pp. 2-3.

The motive to restore the Mass of Pius V has never been that of a mere "feeling of attachment" nor has it ever been simply about Latin. Catholics of tradition should never permit their purpose to be co-opted by the restrictive language of "personal preference." The consistent effort of this journal has been to eschew the language of subjectivism and make the argument for the restoration of the ancient liturgy on the high ground of theology, philosophy and history. And scholarship -- from within the normative liturgical mainstream -- is demonstrating that this course is more than justified. What follows is a case in point.

What McLucas goes on consider next is a fourty-two-page essay that appeared in The Thomist in 2003 entitled, "The Theological Principles That Guided the Redaction of the Roman Missal (1970)," by Dr. Lauren Pristas. Pristas, a professor of theology at Caldwell College in New Jesey, it should be noted, is not only widely published in such prestigious academic journals of theology and philosophy such as The Thomist, Communio, and Nova et Vetera, but has never been associated (at least to the knowledge of McLucas) with the "traditionalist movement." She received her doctorate from the Jesuits' Boston College, and to all intents and purposes appears to be a scholar who is comfortable with the milieu of post-conciliar Catholicism. For this reason, says McLucas, what she has to say in her article should be even more disconcerting to defenders of the "normative Mass" than if it had come from within the ranks of traditionalist scholarship.

In her forty-two-page essay, "The Theological Principles That Guided the Redaction of the Roman Missal (1970)," Dr. Pristas remarks on the need for critical studies of the Missal of Paul VI in order to "definitively establish whether the reform of the liturgy was a renewal that was entirely faithful to authentic Catholic liturgical tradition, a reform that departed from the prior liturgical tradition and inaugurated something fundamentally new, or a revision that is more accurately placed between the preceding two possibilities."

Pristas procees by analyzing an article written by a Benedictine monk named Antoine Dumas, who at the time of its publication was a member of the Sacred Congregation of Divine Worship and was in charge of directing a working group of the Consilium (the liturgical commission appointed by Paul VI to reform the Roman Missal) responsible for the orations that would appear in the new, Pauline Missal. Choosing a number of representative texts, Dumas extrapolated the principles for their construction.

The conclusions Pristas draws from Dumas' article run for six pages of her essay. These are carefully nuanced and, according to McLucas, should be read in their entirety, since they cover the overall philosophy governing the new texts as well as the possible theological difficulties contained within them. He (McLucas) singles out several of her observations, however, as meriting special attention:

Both in Dumas' remarks and in the changes he cites a number of shifts [from the original liturgical texts upon which the new ones are based] that are clearly discernible: ... toward rationalism, toward an historical approach to liturgy which puts the modern person at the center; and away from such things as miraculous events.... These tendencies reflect Enlightenment preoccupations and presuppositions. They raise the question whether Enlightement presuppositions have shapted our new liturgical books and rites, and, if so, in what ways, to what extent and to what effect...(emphasis added, here and throughout.)

[I]it may be the case that all the texts of our missal [the Missal of paul VI] reflect the strengths and weaknesses the insights and biases, the achievements and the limitations of but one age, our own.... If this is indeed so, then Catholics of today, in spite of the access made possible by vernacular celebrations, have far less liturgical exposure to the wisdom of our past and the wondrous diversity of Catholic experience and tradition than did the Catholics of earlier generations.

Two years following the publication of this article in The Thomist in 2003, Dr. Pristas published another essay in Nova et Vetera (Winter 2005), a prestigious international theological journal that, according to McLucas, at that time had Georges Cardinal Cottier -- the theologian of the papal household -- as its senior editor. The thirty-three-page article, "The Collects at Sunday Mass: An Examinatin of the Revisions of Vatican II," offers an analysis comparing the vocabulary and theological content of the original Latin texts of the 1970 Pauline Missal with those of the 1962 Missal of Pius V. Because the study was a limited comparison examining only the Advent Sunday collects, Dr. Pristas warned against drawing sweeping conclusions "about the whole corpus of Sunday and Holy Day collects in the 1970 missal on the basis of the findings." But she continued:

Nevertheless, the extent both of the material changes in the full set of collects and of the substantial changes in the Advent Sunday collects raises the question of whether the new corpus of collects expresses a significantly different understanding of relations between God and his Church, and whether, in consequence, it forms the faithful who pray by means of it differently from the way in which its predecessor formed previous generations.

Pristas compares the verbs contained in the Sunday collects of the two missals, then points out three differences between the missals that present a problem she describes as "delicate":

Put simply, the Catholic faith holds that every good deed that advances us toward salvation depends on divine grace. The doctrine is formally defined and is not susceptible to modification that would reverse its import. Every nuance of the 1962 Advent collects expresses this Catholic doctrine of grace unambiguously in the sumewhat subtle, non-expository manner proper to orations. While the 1970 Advent collects do not explicitly contradict Catholic teaching on grace, they neither articulate it nor, more worrisomely, seem to assume it.

McLucas again stresses that Pristas' essay should be read in its entirety -- not so much as a caution against drawing too exaggerated a conclusion from his editorial, but because, he says, there are other troublesome aspects in the comparison of the two missals for which there is too little space for him to discuss. A partial rendering of her conclusions, however, is revelatory:

The facts and figures presented in the first part of this essay indicate that those responsible for the revision of the missal made extensive changes to the corpus of Sunday and Holy Day collects. The result is not the revival of either a Roman or non-Roman Latin liturtical tradition that fell into disuse over the centuries, but something essentially new....

The latter part of the paper is an experiment in comparative contextual analysis. The findings must be regarded as exceedingly provisional, for the analysis encompasses only four of the 66 Sunday and Holy Day collects. In these four, however, we discern a markedly different presentation of our spiritual situation and the way in which God involves himself with us. If the 1970 collects bring to mind the psalmist's petition "give success to the work of our hands," the 1962 collects remind us of Augustine's graced realization that God is more intimate to each of us than we are to ourselves.

These are not inconsequential changes... [T]he anthropological shift that we see in the new Advent prayers toward what might be described as a more capable human person is not nearly so arresting as the corresponding theological shift according to which God's dealings with us are less direct and more extrinsic....

As McLucas notes, Pristas is not addressing here the banal translations of the Missal of Paul VI from the Latin originals into the vernacular, but suggesting something a good bit more serious -- namely, that the original Latin orations and collects invoke, for those who pray them, a very different understanding of God Himself. McLucas writes: "There is the diminution of the centrality of grace and a glorification of humanity who has 'matured' to a point at which it has less of a need even to ask for it."

With more and more examples such as these, it is becoming evident -- probably even to those experts who have no desire to return to the traditional Mass -- that the men responsible for the "reform" of the liturgy after the Second Vatican Council had an agenda that was not in harmony with Catholic tradition or the principles that govern the concept of organic liturgical development. The constant tinkering with the text -- with seemingly endless revisions and directives -- in the new rite already conveys the impression that the current ritual of the Church is often more about the worshippers than the One Who is to be worshipped. For nearly fourty years, says McLucas, millions of the Church's children have protested that their Catholic sensibilities have felt violated by post-conciliar liturgical rites -- only to be told that their disquiet was a figment of their antiquated imaginations. However, candid academic research is destroying the myth that Catholics who favor traditional liturgy as simply neurotic nostalgics.

[Credits: Fr. James McLucas, "A Feast of Presumption," Latin Mass, pp. 2-3.]