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.Interlocutor:
Do the people know what they hate? Some do, some don't. But most don't know why they hate. Why they hate is the main thing. The ones whom I know who hate tradition most passionately hate it because it represents heteronomous authority, and they detest such authority.
[We were discussing the ethos of the seventies. You mentioned that "the newness and youthfulness seemed energizing and invigorating; but in retrospect there also seems to me to have been something a trifle presumptuous about the dismissiveness of tradition.] Newness and freshness is not the same thing as the idea of remaking the Church in one's own image, about which latter none of us had the slightest notion. It was a matter of discovering the Lord in and through youthful forms of expression. We didn't know enough about the earlier tradition to be dismissive of it. Nor were we practicing sublated collective narcissism. The point I was trying to make is that there is room in the Church, and even in the liturgy, for such forms of expression.Pertinacious Papist:
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.Interlocutor:The forms of cultural expression one finds in the music and liturgical experimentations of the seventies and eighties did not emerge from nowhere, of course, but emerged from their own ideological nexus and context. After becoming a Catholic in the early nineties, I was soon asked to become an Extraordinary Eucharistic Minister, as they were then called. I served as one for a period of several years, though I felt uncomfortable in the role, until I read the prohibitions of the disciplinary Instruction, Redemptionis Sacramentum, ##157-158. After becoming a Catholic, I was in a parish where people held hands during the Our Father. I went along with this local custom, even though my Japanese upbringing made me terribly uncomfortable with this custom, until I read that this practice was counter-liturgical and frowned upon as a general rule by the Vatican. The point here would be that my initial participation in these activities was 'innocent', but I was being swept up in the momentum of a movement within the recent history of the Catholic Church that has a life of its own, whose credentials are certainly not those of the Vatican.
[You said that there are some media, some expressions of emotions that are inimical to sanctity. Among other things, you mentioned feelings like narcissism found as a strong undercurrent in many contemporary songs. You mentioned churches built in the round so we face one another, the priest facing us, offering the sacrifice to us, and we (through our extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion) offering Communion to ourselves.] No quarrel with any of this. I agree that we've seen a lot of this phenomenon, but I frankly think that this sort of thing is becoming dated. Youth are frankly bored, even by narcissism, and are looking for something more substantive than 70's style sugary immanentist ideals.Pertinacious Papist:
I certainly would like to think so.Interlocutor:
[You wrote: " ... liturgical rules govern worship. Hence, when I discuss forms of liturgy such as Life Teen Masses, I’m not concerned only (or even primarily) with questions of inward disposition of those assisting at Mass, but with the fittingness of the liturgical form itself – standing around the Altar holding hands as opposed to kneeling in the pews; bongos, guitars, drums and ‘praise choir’ up on stage (in the space that would traditionally have counted as part of the santuary), as opposed to other sorts of hymnody or chant in a choir loft or from the congregation; etc., etc."] It's easy to agree with the principle that there is such a thing as proper liturgical form, that there is a question of (as you have put it) the "hermeneutics of fittingness". It is as we descend to matters of detail that things get less clear to me. The matters in question are not matters of the merely physical (e.g., kneeling as a physical disposition of bodily members). They are matters of signs and semeioses, of the intermingling of the physical and the spiritual/notional: not just what bodies are doing in a room, but what they are meaning. There is more than one kind of danger here. Yes, one needs to root out what amount to dangerously disordered forms of collective self-worship. But there is also the danger of becoming another kind of liturgical Nazi, by legislating what should not be legislated.Pertinacious Papist:
One recognizes most surely the disorders which one once partook of oneself--or was sufficiently close to that you know it from inside, can smell it a mile off, etc. Though even there, you may need to get closer than a mile before you smell correctly. Here is where one's ability to judge and evaluate correctly is limited by the inevitably partial nature of our experiences. E.g., you are still misjudging to a certain extent the experience that I've described in connection with our old charismatic St Philip's youth Masses.
I think here one has to judge by the fruits, not a priori. Let the flower bloom first, then judge of its condition.
I'm trying to decide whether your remarks about the dangers posed by the other (perhaps my) kind of liturgical Nazi, about not judging others' experiences, and about judging a tree by its fruits, etc., makes you sound more like St. Francis, or Jesus, a charismatic Pentecostal, or a New Ager. But of course none of those appellations would be fair.Notes:
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment