Does the form of the liturgy not matter much?

I used to think it was only evangelical Protestants from non-liturgical, congregationalist traditions who thought "external forms" in didn't really matter, that all that really counted was on the inside, "in your heart." On this view, the Lord doesn't really care about the outward appearances, but is really interested only in what was going on inside one's soul. The view has a certain prima facie logic to it, because of what we all know about the possibilities of hypocrisy. However, the logic collapses as soon as one sees the implications of the Catholic sacramental worldview, according to which the exception proves the rule, and what is within our hearts and souls naturally seeks outward forms of expression. Even the marital embrace, thus, becomes sacramentally an outward sign of an inward grace.

But the extent to which Catholics have succumbed to this dichotomized way of thinking over the last decades came home to me as I recently read an article which caused me to reflect on my experiences at Catholic Sunday Mass. In many ways, it seems to me, the sacramental worldview has been eroded in contemporary Catholic experience. Christ's Presence in Catholic churches seems to be perceived much more in a spiritual way as apprehended personally and subjectively by individual believers in the congregation (just listen to how Protestant that language sounds!), rather than corporeally as spatially locatable in the Tabernacle or on the Altar. This tendency would seem to be reinforced by the versus populum stance of the priest, as well as by the frequent 'in-the-round' construction of church interiors that has parishioners genuflecting across the aisle towards one another (rather than towards Him) if they genuflect at all. Where the Tabernacle has been removed altogether, along with the kneelers, the erosion is nearly complete. The article that prompted my reflections is by Nicholas Postgate, entitled "Liturgy Forms Christ in Us," in the Spring 2006 issue of Latin Mass magazine. The whole article is well-worth reading, but here is a summary with some excerpts. See what you think.

Postgate argues, initially, that as the Virgin bears Christ in her womb and presents Him to us, so the liturgy bears Christ and presents Him to us. Just as we go to Him through her -- ad Jesum per Mariam -- so He comes to us through the Church and her liturgy as through a mother.

To say, then, as so many Catholics do, that the form of the liturgy doesn't matter that much ("because, after all, Christ is truly present when the consecration is valid; what difference ultimately should it make? Should so much trouble be made over Tridentine vs. Novus Ordo, when we just ought to be humbly grateful that our Lord is truly present?") is like saying it doesn't matter what kind of mother Jesus has, what kind of woman or what kind of character Mary has -- virginal, sinless, graceful, gentle, or their opposites. These things would be accidental, incidental, not of the essence of the Christ who comes to us through her.

Postgate points out, however, the deep falsity of this position that becomes apparent when one begins to discern the profound connection between, on the one hand, Mary's sinlessness and the glory of the Redeemer, and on the other, our heavenly mother Mary and our sacramental mother, the Mass. It was not long, he points out, before early Protestantism severed the connection between the believer and the visible Church, and then went on to sever also the deep connection between the Savior and his Mother. Mary was quickly reduced to little more than an ordinary Jewish peasant girl, who had several children from ordinary marital relations, etc. No wonder Catholic tradition has insisted from the days of St. Cyprian, that "A man cannot have God for his father who does not have the Church for his mother"; and, one must add, as the patristics often did: "A man cannot have Jesus for his brother who does not have Mary for his mother."

Coming to the heart his thesis, Postgate writes:

The liturgy has two purposes: to worship God with all due reverence and love, and to feed, nurture, shape, and perfect the worshiper. God is not changed or moved for the worse by our bad liturgies; it is we, the Christian people, who are deformed by the Novus Ordo Missae as it is celebrated in most of our churches.... I disagree with those who say that we should seek our consolation solely in the presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. The liturgy has a far greater purpose than to give us an opportunity for a moment's adoration in the midst of an ocean of banality and noise; indeed the liturgy is not supposed to be itself a mortification, a cause of pain, but a consolation, a reservoir of peace and joy. The purpose of the liturgy is to form our souls in the beauty of holiness; and if the human elements of the liturgy are, on the contrary, deforming our souls, then we must not allow it to do so unless, again, we have no choice in a given situation. The "spirit of the liturgy" rightly understood cannot change; that is why the new liturgy, insofar as it is an experimental and non-traditional liturgy, has either to be brought firmly back into conformity with tradition, or to be suppressed utterly (in a sense these amount to the same, for to bring it back sufficiently to its roots would be to abolish it in its current form, even as one who has to relearn a subject from the roots has also to unlearn the faulty version he got first). When push comes to shove, it is not tradition but the departure from tradition that has got to go.

By attending poor liturgy one implicitly accepts it -- that is, one says to it: "Shape me, shape my soul, form my spirit. Make me like yourself." But this is what one must not allow to occur with experimental, horizontal, anti-sacral liturgy; its habits, as it were, must not become my habits. Sadly, the vast majority of Catholics who still attend Mass, including their bishops and priests, have been habituated precisely to this poverty, so much so that it is no longer possible for most to be made aware of the impoverishment, let alone persuade them of its remedies. This is one among many reasons that the Church, for all who have eyes to see things as they are, has entered upon a second and more perilous "Babylonian captivity," from which she cannot be liberated until the empire of rationalist liturgiology and neo-modernist theology crumbles under its own dead weight. The captivity of the Jews lasted some seventy years (ca. 586 to 516 B.C.); the Avignon papacy lasted for nearly the same (1309-1978 A.D.). Will we be delivered from the disgrace by the year 2040? It is too soon to tell, or even to guess.

What is certain is that we have no more excuse for despair than had the Jews or our brethren six and a half centuries ago. The arm of the Lord is not shortened, however crippled his earthly members may seem. We are in a waiting pattern where humility and patience, longsuffering and prayer, is the lesson we are forced to learn, if we wish to remain faithful to the Lord. (emphasis added)

How, then, does good liturgy properly shape our souls? Essentially Postgate argues that, like the Virgin Mary, and like Christ on the Cross, the ancient rite of the Mass allows God's glory to shine through self-effacement:

Reflect on the ethos of humility inculcated by the traditional rite of Mass. In the classical liturgy, all the "weight" is on the priest and the sacred ministers. This is a good thing entirely, though a difficult one for fallen nature. It is good because, first, it enables the faithful to lean upon their pastor, to go with him to the altar; the liturgy is not suddenly thrown into their hands, but paradoxically, because of the centrality of the cleric, the faithful are able to enter more deeply into the sacrifice "under his chasuble," like the medieval paintings of the nameless faithful crowding under the copious mantle of the Blessed Virgin. The reason is that the objective "place" of worship is in the sanctuary, with the sacred ministers, but subjectively everyone can place himself into this place and follow in his heart the offering made by the priest -- there is not a false shift to the "heart of the individual believer" as in Protestant worship. The focus remains on Jesus Christ, Head of the Mystical Body, because the focus remains on His sacerdotal icon, the priest who is the self-sacrificing image of the High Priest.

One might object (and many did object in the fifties and sixties): Doesn't all of this place too much weight on the priest, too much of a psychological burden? The answer is obvious: the priesthood is the most sublime, the most arduous, the most demanding of all vocations -- that is how it should be, in fact it cannot be otherwise. The fact that today some priests are little more than social workers or parish event facilitators reveals a serious amnesia, not to say corruption, of the theology of Holy Orders and its assimilation to the High Priest. (The writings on the priesthood by Saint John Chrystostom or Saint John Fisher, among others would make a good corrective to modern tendencies.) When Christ is present in our midst, the right reaction is to worship Him, not one another. The priest "disappears" into the Holy Sacrifice when he faces ad orientem and offers the sacrifice with his face invisible to the people. Jesus alone is the center, the one Sun whose light illuminates all the worshipers, including the priest. In this sense, the ancient liturgy places at once all the emphasis and none of it upon the priest: he is the most visible and the most invisible, central and at the same time peripheral. He is central as an icon of Christ, he is peripheral as Jones or Smith. Now things are reversed: Jones or Smith, "this man," is central; what has become peripheral is the unique Mediator between God and man.

* * * A friend of mine once remarked that the ancient rite preserves the important act of the priest praying with the people, at the end of Mass when all kneel towards the tabernacle to recite the Hail Marys and other Leonine prayers. It struck me powerfully the other day that at a Novus Ordo Mass, it is possible for the priest never to be standing otherwise than towards, which is to say, over against, the people --which, in an ironic twist, increases the hieratic distance in an artificial way and makes the priesthood seem like a political office rather than a sacred weight. At the old rite, it is clear that everyone is focused on one and the same act of worship, the priest in persona Christi, the people by their baptismal participation in Christ's priesthood.[*] The roles are vividly distinct yet seen to be convergent and harmonious because all are facing ad orientem in common, and at the end of Mass all are praying together, beseeching the Mother of God for her protection. The anonymity of the priest in the old rite paradoxically increases his visibility as minister of the sacred mysteries and hides him, decreases his idiosyncratic presence as the individual man: "He must increase, I must decrease." This is what the entire ancient liturgy does in every respect: it brings forth Christ the Lord and suppresses the fallen ego that wishes to assert itself. (emphasis added)

There is much more to this article, of course, that bears reading in the original. The article, again, is by Nicholas Postgate, entitled "Liturgy Forms Christ in Us," Latin Mass magazine (Spring 2006), pp. 12-15. For anyone interested, a subscription to the magazine can be purchased online at LatinMassMagazine.Com.

Notes:

[*] See St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, IIa, q. 63 on sacramental character, where the Angelic Doctor explains that all Christians participate in the one priesthood of Christ through the character imprinted on the soul at baptism. This character is a power of receiving divine realities from God through the ministers of His Church. The sacerdotal character is, in contrast, a power of giving divine realities to the people, not by an independent authority, but by sharing in Christ's unique authority.

[Nicholas Postgate, Ph.D., teaches philosophy at the university level in Europe. He has published articles on a wide variety of subjects, especially on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and on Catholic social doctrine.]

Of related interest:

• Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality: The Healing Power of Formal Prayer