The hollow cult of liturgical Gemütlichkeit

Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P., writes: "There can hardly be a more important topic than the Liturgy if it really is, as the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council maintained, the source from which the Church's life flows and the summit to which that life is directed." In fact, he continues: "Liturgy, evidently, is too important to be left to liturgists."

Indeed, we have our work cut out for ourselves. As Peter Kreeft once mused: "What's the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist?" Answer? "You can negotiate with the terrorist."

What follows is an excerpt from Fr. Nichol's little book, disproportionately significant for its size, Looking at the Liturgy: A Critical View of Its Contemporary Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996):

Today the question should be determined, in my judgment, in relation to the threat of what we can call "cultic immanentism": the danger, namely, of a congregation's covert self-reference in a horizontal, humanistic world. In contemporary "Catholic communalism," it has been said: "Liturgical Gemütlichkeit, communal warmth, friendliness, welcoming hospitality, can easily be mistaken for the source and summit of the faith."¹ Not unconnected with this is the possibility that the personality of the priest (inevitably, as president, the principal facilitator of such a therapeutic support-group) will become the main ingredient of the whole ritual. Unfortunately, the "liveliest church in town" has little to do with the life the Gospel speaks of.

Henri de Lubac wrote in The Splendor of the Church:

In the present welcome efforts to bring about a celebration of the liturgy which is more "communal" and more alive, nothing would be more regrettable than a preoccupation with the success achieved by some secular festivals by the combined resources of technical skill and the appeal to the man at his lower level.... The "unanimous life of the Church" is not a natural growth; it is lived through faith; our unity is the fruit of Calvary, and results from the Mass's application to us of the merits of the Passion, with a view to our final redemption.²

De Lubac glimpsed in fact a nightmare prospect that the Church, by misjudged benevolence, could realize August Comte's prediction that Catholicism would find its last end in an apotheosis of humanity.... The dogma of the Incarnation, Comte thought, would see its final fruit in an ecclesiology where the Church becomes the sacrament of humanity, itself the one and only true Supreme Being. And de Lubac comments:

We should not be too quick to cry out in protest, as if there were never any danger of anything like that in ourselves.... No sincere Christian will go so far as to profess a "sociological pantheism"; but that is not to say that everyone will always, both in his emotional reactions and his practical conduct, be effectively strengthened in advance against the present tendency to absorb God into the human community.³

Recalling Torquemada's criticism of the Council of Basel for allowing its members to genuflect when they sang the article of the Creed concerning the Church, de Lubac concludes that a shift in our focus of interest can sometimes symptomize a doctrinal debilitation and hollowness far graver than more obvious errors. I suggest that the concentration on congregation and presider in contemporary eucharistic practice is an example of just such debilitation and hollowness, unfortunately encouraged by the versus populum celebration of the Eucharistic Prayer.

Notes

1. T. Day, Where Have You Gone, Michelangelo: The Loss of Soul in Catholic Culture (New York, 1993), 107. [back]


2. H. de Lubac, S.J., Looking at the Liturgy: A Critical View of Its Contemporary Form (San Francisco, 1986), 155-56. [back]


3. Ibid., 226-27. [back]

[Hat tip to E.E.]