Laughter, tears, & how the visible signifies the invisible: children and liturgy

If there ever was such a thing as an apostle of the sacramental worldview, it would be the late, great Thomas Howard. And by "sacramental" I mean something beyond the seven Catholic sacraments. If a sacrament is and outward sign of an inward grace, then the "sacramental" perspective sees in the visible world a panoply signs that point beyond themselves, in a way that Plato might have nearly understood, to how things ultimately are in the transcendent unseen world.

Howard, with whom I had the privilege of corresponding after he was received into the Catholic Church some decades ago, died in 2020. He was a convert from evangelical Protestantism to Anglicanism and then, finally, to Catholicism. His books, like his correspondence, are both thoughtful and profound. He is a master of English, and one sometimes needs a dictionary to catch up with his extensive and colorful vocabulary. Some of his titles include Evangelical Is Not Enough; Lead, Kindly Light; On Being Catholic; Splendor in the Ordinary; The Night Is Far Spent; but by far my favorite is a book he published before becoming Catholic entitled, An Antique Drum (introduced to me at Francis Schaeffer's L'Abri in Switzerland), which was later published after his conversion by Ignatius Press under the implausible title of Chance, or the Dance? Peter Kreeft called it his favorite book.

I have been reading yet another book by Thomas Howard, The Secret of New York Revealed: Being the Autobiographical Fragments of the Then Recently Married Thomas Howard Chronicling His Numerous Discoveries in the City of That Name (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2002). And what a book! I do not intend to review the book here, but only to illustrate what I call his "sacramental" outlook from two experiences related in his chapter entitled "The Infata Comes." The two experiences have to do with children and liturgy. What binds his descriptions of the two experiences together is his ability to move from the external perception of ugliness as a skeptical onlooker to a transforming internal perception of the at-first-hidden depths of beauty.

First: children.

In my bachelor days I would look at young couples in airports with their babies, and my soul would fill with horror. All this baggage. The babe in arms with sour milk dribbling down the front, leaning out in feverish, squalling dissatisfaction from his mother's arms, reaching petulantly into the air for he knew not what (and putting out a generally noxious miasma from both ends). And the two-year-old with a lollipop, wallowing on the floor, dragging at his mother's skirts. And the four-year-old with a dripping popsicle running down over his fist and chocolate smeared about his mouth, pulling his father to the newsstand to see some plastic Batman car. And the father all the while trying to riffle through the tickets to see what the flight number was, and the mother trying to keep tabs on the diaper bag, the stroller, the plastic car seat, the baby carrier, the folding bassinet, the bottle warmer, and the suitcases. Eheu! . . . Who are the clods who will opt for all this when you can be so patently free? . . .

Come at from that angle, it is difficult to find any rationale for the phenomenon. But you back into these things. It does not all gape upon you at once. First one thing happens (the child is conceived), then another (morning sickness, sleepiness), then another (maternity dresses), then another (natural childbirth classes), then another (the birthing). You don't suddenly find yourself one fine morning standing in LaGuardia beleaguered with a family. And the anxious bachelor has left one thing out of his reckoning: that beleaguered man loves that lady and those ragtag besiegers.

There is more here that comes toward the end of the chapter, but I shan't dally. The point is that he eventually sees beyond his external first impression into something at the heart of things and beautiful.

Second: liturgy

One of the things that happened in those early weeks of the new tack was that I set out one Sunday morning alone to scout out a church that we had heard about. We had visited a number of churches in the city, as churchgoing people are wont to do in a new place, and were still looking. We had seen in the New York Times on the page where all the churches announce themselves a little box giving the following information for one of the churches: "Catholic worship, liturgical music, gospel preaching." It was the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, just off Times Square, known to its friends as Smokey Mary's. I had heard of this church before coming to the city and thought it might be an idea to visit it one day. I was not sure the incense would be the thing for Lovelace's present delicately poisoned gastronomic situation, so I set out alone.

I took the subway north to Times Square. This is a train that, on an early Sunday morning, looks very much like the Damnation Local. . . . The train clanks and screeches balefully along, swaying and jolting violently over what must surely be a raw rock roadbed. You sit in the wan dusk of the empty care with newspapers and candy wrappers shifting about the floor. A solitary derelict in a far corner slumps in a sodden torpor. The sliding doors between the cars bang to and fro. The train lurches to a halt at the stops, but no one gets on or off. No traffic for hell today. . . .

If the subway is the Damnation Local, Times Square on a Sunday morning lies somewhere in the precincts of perdition itself. One widespread picture of hell is of a region of feverish activity, with great crowds of souls, worn out from their bacchanalia, prodded on by demons, twittering about in the ghastly search for one more diversion. You can see this in the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, or in Times Square on any night. But surely the windy and vacuous desolation of Times Square on a Sunday morning, when it is all over and no one but the odd straggler is left, is a far more melancholy picture of perdition? On Saturday night at least the illusion is still flying through the air like silver dust thrown in our eyes. On Sunday morning the dust has settled into the gutters, along with the spit and the wet tissues, and what sparkled the night before gapes flatly at you in the blank light of day. Massage parlors, "adult" book shops, moth-eaten cinemas, pinball machine arcades, souvenir stands, and restaurants sit like stupefied whores, their makeup dulled and flaking after the night's work.

Saint Mary's stands half a block from Times Square. You can pass it easily enough without noticing it, since the facade is flush with the other buildings. If you do happen to look, you will see the gray stone and the nineteenth-century gothic of the doorways. If you go into the narthex and look down the nave aisle toward the high altar, you will see what most people expect to see in a church of ancient tradition: candles, crucifixes, arches, rich brocades, and all the furniture of the church.

You can find other furnishings -- leatherette and formica and ashtrays -- in the restaurants in Times Square, and there you can droop over the sticky counter nursing your coffee and trying to collect your wits. What a terrible hand of cards life has dealt me. How did I land here? Where is someone to lift this burden off me and love me?

There are no leatherette and formica here in Saint Mary's. Only this particular assemblage of ornaments and furniture, most of it spiky and uncomfortable, and all of it grossly out of date. You travel a thousand years when you step across this threshold. Everything in here has been assembled in obedience to a vision of things that seems remote indeed from the stark realities outside. It's real life outside there, surely: people creep into a church like this only as a last resort.

For me in that Sunday morning it was something like a visit to a shrine that one has heart about. The vestments, the music, the incense, the ceremonial -- these were what people mentioned when they spoke of this church.

The Christian mysteries were celebrated that morning as they always are at Saint Mary's, and I, like all newcomers there, was overwhelmed. It was all very far removed from what you find in the "typical" American church, if by that we mean the white clapboard edifice that shows up in calendars of New England or on Saturday Evening Post covers. I was familiar with Christian rites that were plain, and this seemed lavish. The whole business of ceremony seemed to matter here. Every gesture seemed to carry some freight of significance. One minute the priest had his hands up like this, and the next they were out like that. One minute he was facing you, and the next he was sideways, and then he had his back to you. He even changed his vestments during the hour, from a cope to a chasuble. Nothing was natural or spontaneous or unstructured. In order to get from one place to another, they processed. They never merely said anything: it was all chanted. And nothing could be done without scattering smoke hither and thither. They walked around the altar with it, they swung it over books, shot it out at the priest, and finally waved it at us.

If everything else had put me off forever (which it hadn't), I would have gone back again for the music. All the antiphons were sung in Gregorian chant, the most pure, most austere of all musical forms, perfectly suited to the text of Scripture, since it liberates the words from the distracting style of any individual reader and sets them out, free from ornament, where there is nothing to do but listen to them. And the music of the Mass itself -- the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Sanctus and Benedictus, and the Agnus dei -- was sung from a loft in the back of the church: no visible choir in robes, putting on a performance for us, but rather voices articulating these ancient canticles that utter the Church's response to the great mysteries of the gospel, and all of it sung, not by tremulous, warbling concert voices, but in that "white" tone, wholly free from vibrato, that again sets the text free from any individual's efforts to impress. And the hymns! Here were no racy, breathless tent-meetin' sentiments, dilating on one's private experience, nor any enfeebled twentieth-century World Council of Churches attempts at hymnody where you end up singing about nothing closer to the Christian mysteries than aspirations toward world brotherhood. No. Here were "Christ Is Mad the Sure Foundation" and "Deck Thyself, My Soul, with Gladness" and "O Food of Men Wayfaring."

What is one to make of the liturgy? It thought. It is at a polar extreme from our era's attempts at getting things unstructured and spontaneous. A chance passerby might well think it is all horribly repressive and restricting. But what he would be missing would be the way in which all this structure, lo and behold, lifts us away from the poor little tiny circumference of our own private feelings and experience and liberates us into something that is infinitely more vast than ourselves -- the way any great ceremony does. It is odd, how the whole race, in all tribes and cultures and centuries, has always resorted to ceremony -- in the presence of life's deepest mysteries. Birth, marriage, and death: What do we all do with these purely organic, purely functional, events? We deck them and order them and set them about with ritual. Birthday cakes, wedding solemnities, funeral obsequies. What are they all about? Well, we are clearly ritual creatures. Perhaps our own era's efforts to replace pomp and ceremony with spontaneity are a tragic betrayal of the sort of creatures we are. The stars in their courses move in solemn dance; we read of seraphim and cherubim covering their faces in adoration; we see the whole world of flora and fauna repeating its yearly rituals in exuberant obedience to the rubric Shall we, alone in the universe, insist that our freedom is to be found in the random, the ad hoc, and the unstructured? Surely one way of describing the difference between hell and the City of God is to say that the former is wholly unstructured and the latter magnificently structured?

I had, I thought, seen a diagram of that structured magnificence in the liturgy on that morning at Saint Mary's.

At this point Howard returns to his first subject of children, or, rather, his experience of the birth of his first child. It is a beautifully engaging discussion, and no less profound than his observations about liturgy in teasing out the splendor and transcendent from beneath the banal and ordinary.

Twice during my reading of the chapter -- and this is not uncommon for me while reading Howard -- I am not sure whether I caught myself laughing or crying. If felt like both simultaneously. He touches something deep within.

Review of Speaking in Tongues, vol. 1, The Modern Redefinition of Tongues, by Fr. Titus Kieninger

Fr. Titus Klieninger, of the Canons Regular of the Holy Cross (ORC), has written a generous review of vol. 1 of our historical study of SPEAKING IN TONGUES. Fr. Klieninger used to live in Michigan but is now working in Brazil. Although he speaks both English and Portuguese, his native language is German. Please keep that in mind as you read his review, published in Recensões de Livros:

Philip E. BLOSSER & Charles A. SULLIVAN, Speaking in Tongues. A critical Historical Examination. Vol. 1: The Modern Redefinition of Tongues, Forewords by Dale M. Coulter and James Likoudis, Pickwick Publications, Eugene, Oregon, 2022. Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-6667-9761-9, US $50; Paperback ISBN: 978-1-6667-3777-6, US $35; E-book ISBN: 978-1-6667-9762-6; US $35.

In a time, when the Church puts in the mouth of her Bishops at the celebration of the Sacrament of Confirmation the phrase: Hodie adventus Spiritus Sancti dono linguarum non amplius declaratur ("In our day the coming of the Holy Spirit in confirmation is no longer marked by the gift of tongues”), the phenomenon of speaking in tongues” [is] widely called [to our] attention, and people are confused by it. For this reason the study of Prof. Blosser and Mr. Sullivan is so valuable. It is a study three volumes which of itself indicates the seriousness of the work.

The biographical notes on the two authors awake confidence in this “ecumenical venture”: Charles Sullivan “is a Protestant” and “has been involved in the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement for over thirty years” and Professor Blosser, “was born in China and raised in Japan by Protestant missionary parents … and is a Catholic since 1993” (cf. p. 7-10).

The fact that they found “that the current Pentecostal-Charismatic practice of speaking, praying, and singing in tongues is a historical novelty with no antecedents in Church history before the nineteenth century” (p. 6) raises interest. Among the “over half a billion adherents” of “the Charismatic movement … and combined with the world’s Pentecostal Christians” (p. 43; cf. p. 182), many manifestations (cf. p. 41) “present a dizzying and seemingly endless variety of subdivisions and sub-movements” (p. 43). These are “the point of departure for our investigation”, but require a “much needed larger framework” (p. 41). This is then the purpose of this study: the search for the causes and roots.” The present study is structured after the model of an archeological excavation or ‘dig’. Starting at the surface level with the current state of affairs … digging down … down through Church history to the New Testament; then even deeper …” (p. 10).

Still more interesting are the many questions right away in the first chapter of this volume (cf. pp. 16, 18, 22, 39, 40 …) which show the authors’ familiarity with the theme and its understanding in depth. The calm and sober approach, with “caution and circumspection” (p. 27), having listened to many, permits the authors to distinguish all the different understandings of the subject, but also points to danger “under the ambiguities of various words which attempt to introduce their errors” (Francisco Suarez, p. 39). The discussion revolves around the biblical references (Rom 12; 1 Cor 12-14; Eph 4 and 1 Pet 4). The first step is the clarification of the term, subject of the first chapter: Are we dealing with speaking or just hearing and understanding? Is it something natural or preternatural? … (p. 16-39). They continue with the “Contemporary Charismatic Culture, from 1994 back to 1967”, the third of the three waves in the twenties century (p. 40-61), followed by “The Pentecostal Crisis and Its Background, from 1906 back to 1830” (p. 62-94) which lead to the origin of “the word glossolalia” by the “German Higher Critics” in the 19th century (cf. p. 95-140).

This detailed search for historical facets and roots of the phenomena of the last two centuries shows it to be something arbitrary which leads them to find deceptions. For example, the “father of the doctrine of tongues” (p. 76), Parham, who started in 1901 in Topeka, USA (p. 64-71) pointed out to Ed. Irving in England (+ 1834; p. 77-84). Who, to justify the apparent gift of the Holy Spirit, changed the identification of “tongues”, first as unknown foreign language, to a “heavenly language unknown on earth” (p. 83). The end, what it is, remains obscure, so that people walked away from “the verge of bottomless abysses of Madness” (p. 80; Irving ”was defrocked”, p. 83).

The study of “glossolalia” is unique: “The story of glossolalia” is shown with an astonishing accuracy: “The word glossolalia is nowhere in the Bible” (p. 96). “The new interpretation of the ‘gift of tongues’ as glossolalia was first introduced in Germany around 1830” (p. 110) by “German Protestant theologians” (p. 97). A strong contribution came through “F. Schleiermacher (1768-1834), often called the ‘father of the modern liberal theology’” (p. 102) and through various disciples of his, some very influential such as F. Baur, “the celebrated professor at the Tübinger School of Theology” (p. 102), with his “new approach to biblical interpretation that purposely avoided the trappings of traditional, ecclesiastically-authorized interpretations of biblical texts” (p. 101)”. The term glossolalia found not “its way into English publications until Farrar introduced it in 1879” (p. 110).

The rich documentation of def enders and opposers (“early objections”, p. 121-124) of the new theory as “unintelligible tongues” (p. 101), “ecstatic tongues” (p. 103) or “heavenly language” (p. 111), just demanded the authors’ serious confrontation of this “virtually unquestionable dogma” with “primary, secondary, and even tertiary source books from this period,” including the examination of“translations of the Bible” (p. 120; 185-187),the consultation of many “Dictionaries before 1879” in Syriac, Greek, Latin and of modern languages and it’s just partial acceptance after 1879 until the present day (p.110-120); they humbly indicate where still further studies would be appropriated (p. 112, 120).

Due to an unsolid biblical reference, the “theological Higher Critics discovered an alternative way of explaining the idea, … the ancient ecstatic utterances of the Oracle of Delphi” (p. 99). However, our authors submitted “The Delphic Oracles and Christian Tongues” (p. 124-131) to their study. Capable of reading in the ancient languages, they analyzed the “major sources” and came to the conclusion: “The works of Herodotus, Aristophanes, Plato, Virgil, Lucan, Plutarch, Strabo, Michael Psellos, and Erwin Rhode demonstrate no viable connection between the ancient Greek prophetesses of Delphi and the modern revisionist Christian doctrine of ‘tongues’.” (p. 130): These oracles “spoke clearly in classic hexameter verse… nothing remotely like glossolalic tongues’-speech” (p.125).

The authors also “offer a critical examination of” “the bizarre babblings of the Montanists (a heretical Christian sect” (p. 99 and 131-140), with “three primary sources: Eusebius of Caesarea, Epiphanius of Salamis, and Tertullian, who was himself a Montanist” (p. 131). Finding “arguments on both sides,” having found “the issue requires a closer look” (p. 135), they went to more sources like Serapion of Thumris or examined “the issue in light of both classical Greek and ecclesiastical literature” (p. 136), including their interpretations (cf. p. 137-139). The result is: that “the Montanists were not exercising the Christian gift of tongues” so that “the modern Pentecostal-Charismatic attempt to connect Christian tongues-speaking with Montanism, in the light of these facts, is a non-starter” (p. 139-140).

Another claim of the founders of the movements with the gift of tongues is their affirmation that after the time of the apostles the gift of tongues was not granted anymore, but is [granted] now once again through them, the Pentecostals and Charismatics of today. This led Blosser and Sullivan to study what is called “Cessationism, the belief that miraculous gifts ceased in apostolic times” (p. 141–183). It “arose as a Protestant response to what was perceived as an excessive and misguided Catholic preoccupation with miracles and the veneration of miracle-working saints” (p. 143), and “developed as a counterargument against Catholics” (p. 144). The authors took it as a serious historical fact, and studied the “medieval” (p. 145-151) and “Patristic Background” (p. 152-156) and then its “Protestant beginnings” with Luther, Calvin and the development with the Puritans, Presbyterians … and Deists (cf. 156-171), first on the British Island, then its “later developments in England and the United States” (p. 171-183). What they discovered and show is the “adjective ‘unknown’ or ‘other’ or ‘strange’ as a modifier of the word ‘tongues’ in Protestant translations of the Bible” (p. 183; not something yet in Luther's translation!) [was intended] “to win the Reformation debate against Rome” (p. 183), because the Catholic Church continued to believe in miracles. “Most Charismatic and Pentecostal leaders today are unaware of the history of the ‘other tongues’ interpolation and its root in the Protestant Reformation.” (p. 184) But since 1534, including the King James Bible since 1611 (cf. p. 185f; 7 times in 1 Cor 14), the adjectives “found their way into English Bible translation, (and) became key aids in facilitating their reappraisal of the gift of tongues” (p. 184). As an example, they give: “the Baptist old world tradition was Cessationist” (p. 175); “on May 13, 2015, however, the Southern Baptist Convention changed its traditional policy and the denomination’s International Mission Board now admits missionary applicants who identify as speaking in tongues” (p. 176).

This shows one reason for the necessity of the “investigation into the origins and development of the other tongues doctrine” (p. 185). Another reason is ignorance of the rich “ecclesiastical literature through Church history” (p. 152). The entire contemporary discussion about the “speaking in tongues” seems not to be about the objective truth; this however [is] what is of interest of our authors. Consequently, what we have seen so far provoked them to go still deeper in the second volume, to see through a solid study on “how ‘speaking in tongues’ was understood through Church history”. In the third volume, they look at the biblical references themselves, and see them in their cultural and historical framework (cf. p. 12-13).

This book is written in a colloquial style, easy reading. It clears up much of what one wants to know about this current topic. And yet it is a dense and deep study that offers a very wide spectrum of information, which might rarely be found anywhere else. The authors documented everything with first sources (see the rich bibliography, p 201-217). Here, digging deeper and deeper in history, the importance of the knowledge of many ancient languages becomes clear (cf. pp. 7-9). One example is the access to “a visual survey of half the volumes of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca conducted between 1993-2003” (161 volumes, in Greek with some translations in Latin). The authors approach is sober and neutral, follows the necessary sources and still does not hesitate to declare what is sufficiently justified and what is rather just based on good faith. It is acknowledged from the Catholic and Protestant side. The authors do not dispense, themselves or the reader, from a critical attitude (“I look back and think… How I thought…”, p. 46; “this claim is debatable”, “this still does not explain …”, p. 60).

The “conclusion” of this first part summarizes, in a very simple and clear way, seven “black-and-white historical facts” which “cannot be reasonably denied” (cf. p. 193-196). “At the conclusion of the present volume, we can say with certainty that the understanding and practice of ‘speaking in tongues’ found in the Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition today is based on a nineteenth-century theory of glossolalia and a twentieth-century redefinition of ‘tongues’ that are complete historical novelties. … In this respect, we may paraphrase John Henry Newman and say, ‘To go deep into history is to cease to accept the Pentecostal-Charismatic understanding of tongues’.” (p. 199). May God help the authors to complete the work started. It brings the necessary light into the obscurity of a religious “zeal for God, but that lacks discernment” (Rom 10:2). It brings clarity to those who seek the truth and want to serve and worship God according to his will, “in Spirit and truth” (Jn 4:24).

Titus Kieninger ORC

What to make of Vatican II?

What to make of Vatican II?

Pope Paul VI, in his General Audience of Jan. 12, 1966, stated:

There are those who ask what authority, what theological qualification, the Council intended to give to its teachings, knowing that it avoided issuing solemn dogmatic definitions backed by the Church’s infallible teaching authority. The answer is known by those who remember the conciliar declaration of March 6, 1964, repeated on November 16, 1964. In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided proclaiming in an extraordinary matter any dogmata carrying the mark of infallibility.

This does not mean, of course, that conciliar documents did not contain references to Catholic doctrine previously defined as dogma and therefore infallibly authoritative, such as the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, the virgin birth of Christ, and so forth. Nor does it mean that conciliar documents did not contain anything new, such as its statements about ecumenism, religious freedom, etc. What it does mean is that nothing new in these documents was defined as infallible dogma.

The “new springtime” in the Church heralded by the post-conciliar popes and others who hoped that the simplified and more-accessible vernacular liturgy would promote the “new evangelization” seems not to have yielded quite the hoped-for results. It was not as if the police had to be summoned to Catholic churches each Sunday “to hold back the hordes of lapsed Catholics whose faith had been rekindled at the prospect of saying the Confiteor in English,” as Michael Davies quipped in his book, _Pope Paul’s New Mass_.

Can Ecumenical Councils of the Church fail in their objectives? Fr. John Zuhlsdorf writes:

Regarding General or Ecumenical Councils (all 21 of them), it is possible to be a valid council but a failed one. Consider Lateran V. Utter failure. Its legislation on ecclesiastical pawn shops went nowhere, which is a darn shame. I’d really appreciate well-regulated ecclesiastical pawn shops. And – hey! – what ever happened to the “spirit of Lateran V”? Moreover, Lateran I and Lateran II weren’t even classified as General or Ecumenical Councils until after the Council of Trent (500 years later).

In the same vein, Saint Gregory Nazianzus writes:

If I must speak the truth, I feel disposed to shun every conference of Bishops; because I never saw a Synod brought to a happy issue, not remedying but rather increasing, existing evils. For ever is there rivalry and ambition, and these have the mastery of reason; -- do not think me extravagant for saying so; -- and a mediator is more likely to be attacked himself, than to succeed in his pacification. Accordingly, I have fallen back upon myself and consider quiet the only security of life.

Again, Joseph Ratzinger, writing in Principles of Catholic Theology, 378, writes:

Not every valid council in the history of the Church hs been a fruitful one; in the last analysis, many of them have been a waste of time. Despite all the good to be found in the texts produced, the last word about the historical value of Vatican II has yet to be spoken.

There are some Catholic scholars and clerics who speak or write as if Vatican II is a sort of 'SuperDogma.' The litmus test for the fellowship of kindred spirits or its opposite -- something bordering on excommunication or being tarred and feathered – is whether or not one “accepts” Vatican II. But what does this mean, exactly?

A good friend of mine, whom I sometimes refer to as “L’Autre Phil,” says that one can never make sense of the Second Vatican Council by trying to get at it strictly in terms of its textual content. Why? Because either it functions as a wax nose that can be made to “say” whatever one wants it to say or, worse, because almost nobody cares about the text. What everyone cares about, however, is the “event” of Vatican II and what it’s made to symbolize.

Cardinal Ratzinger, in his address to Chilean Bishops (July 13, 1988), said this about the last council:

There are many accounts of it which give the impression that, from Vatican II onward, everything has been changed, and that what preceded it has no value or, at best, has value only in the light of Vatican II.

The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular Council define no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of 'super-dogma' which takes away the importance of all the rest. “This idea is made stronger by things that are now happening. That which previously was considered most holy – the form in which the liturgy was handed down – suddenly appears as the most forbidden of all things, the one thing that can safely be prohibited. It is intolerable to criticize decisions which have been taken since the Council; on the other hand, if men make question of anciet rules, or even of the great truths of the Faith – for instance, the corporal virginity of Mary, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the immortality of the soul, etc. – nobody complains or only does so with the greatest moderation.

(Hat tip to a couple of my Catholic colleagues.)

Does Good Liturgy Beget Moral Virtue?

A BOOK CRITIC’S IMPRESSIONS OF A LIVING CLASSIC

by Kenneth Colston

One scorching Corpus Christi in the first decade of this millennium, as an occasional book critic with a little time on my hands, I checked out the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) that had been recently imported from France into my violent American city. I entered a surprisingly crowded but spookily silent neo-Gothic church that had been marked for demolition until the French order of priests took it over. It wasn’t hard to find: the steeple was 300 feet high. The gilded 52-foot-high reredos and a 40-foot-wide carved altar rail would have dropped Attila the Hun to his knees. Cassocks and fiddleback chasubles were back, auricular-only confession lines jammed, genuflections and signs of the cross abundant, brown scapulars visible, long dresses and covered shoulders de rigueur, fasting obvious, and fertility robust.

Even though I taught Latin at a classical school, I couldn’t keep up with the intoned rises and falls. No worry, a priest said later, I wasn’t talking to you. Procession and benediction around a decrepit inner-city block left thousands of rose petals on potholed streets. I didn’t get loose for three hours and felt that I had fallen in and out of an artistic and sartorial time warp. Thinking as a book critic, I suspected, even at first glance, that this blast from the past portended more than a restoration in liturgy alone.

I was in the presence of a living classic.

Two movements were slowly trending together in this diocese. Month after month, year after year, the suburban pews in Pizza Hut pagodas purged themselves of polo shirts and Bermuda shorts, of music ministries imitating the 1970s pop group Tony Orlando and Dawn, and of jolly priests roaming the pews with mics like local reporters at a ribs festival. Meanwhile, this German-crafted church was filling with young faces behind fine-lace veils and shoulders-back pressed suits. Inside a nave 130 feet long and 70 feet high, congregants said they were drawn by a more fitting beauty, and they professed piety and virtue with the example of their lives. What do they mean, why are their many children so well behaved, and why do they have their stuff so manifestly together?

First, more precisely, what accounts for this kind of antique beauty, and why should it animate followers of Christ, who wrote no treatise on aesthetics? An account of beauty challenged St. Thomas Aquinas, who no doubt occasionally heard Latin in Cologne or Paris, if not in Orvieto, chanted flat, out of measure, or poorly phrased. He wondered how the transcendentals were associated. Is pulchrum a universal transcendental property of being, he asked, like bonum and verum? He made the following distinction:

Although the beautiful and the good are the same in the subject — because both clarity and consonance are included in the nature of the good — they are conceptually different. For beauty adds something to the good, namely, an order which enables cognition to know that a thing is of such a kind. (De Divinis Nominibus)

There it is: beauty helps us recognize the good and true. Moreover, it “gives pleasure.” The good and the beautiful are the same in the subject but are different notions. Aquinas explicates:

For the good, which is what all things desire, properly has to do with the idea of an end; for appetite is a kind of movement toward an end. Beauty, however, has to do with knowledge, for we call those things beautiful which please us when they are seen. (Summa Theologiae)

What are the necessary elements of the beautiful things, which “please us when they are seen”? Aquinas names them: integritas (“perfection” or “lacking nothing”), consonantia (“proportion” or “harmony”), and claritas (“brightly colored”). Apply them to any artwork or liturgy, modest or grand, miniature or magnificent, and you can judge whether it’s beautiful and whether it can be associated with the true and good. Unlike pornography, which is brightly colored but out of proportion and lacking nearly everything, you both know beauty when you see it and you can define it. Thomas adds a gentle touch: Beauty gives not only pleasure but also “peace.”

This classical, objective view of beauty cannot, however, completely account for the majestic aesthetics of the usus antiquior, for the post-Vatican II Novus Ordo Mass (NO) that knows its place within the genre can have a restrained integrity, minimalist harmony, and spare clarity. The NO has the lean suggestiveness of Henry David Thoreau’s prose, Seneca rather than Cicero: short, sober homilies; simple hymns a cappella (sometimes no music at all); the priest occasionally unaccompanied — provided the congregation be generally silent and prayerful enough for the Word to soak in and evangelize, which happens sometimes in early-morning weekday Masses but is almost always absent on Sundays. Sometimes, even in wall-to-wall, indoor-outdoor carpet, I actually enjoy the NO, as I am fond of E.B. White’s essays and folk tales and Shaker hymns, especially when it approaches the quality of a first-rate Wednesday-night Protestant Bible study or when, as J.F. Powers once joked, I don’t hear much.

What is lacking in Aquinas’s account — but certainly not in the usus antiquior itself, as Aquinas would have known it — is perhaps best explained by the famous Romantic element of the “sublime” elaborated by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759), by which the object of beauty arouses subjective feelings of terror. Nobody in the long procession of a Solemn Pontifical High Mass, not even the grammar-school altar boys, cracks a smile, glad hands, or forgets that it heads toward a commemorated sacrifice. The rumbling bass notes of the organ can freeze you in the pew; the clanking thurifer chases away demons and occupies the kids; the plaintively chanted mea culpas and lingering kyries beg for mercy through vowels that ache for infinite pardon. The Solemn High Mass is not merely reverential, for good manners and appropriate silence can achieve that. It is sublime because we are brought to the edge of death, to the bar rail of a holy Niagara Falls, to the rim of a sacred volcano of sacrificial love.

The sublime is part of high aesthetic appreciation, but, contrary to the beautiful, it does not immediately give peace, pleasure, or relaxation. Burke claims it is “terrible,” “painful,” “tragic,” and “great.” The sublime is not “clear” but “obscure,” and the usus antiquior, even the low version, solemnizes and imitates a mystery with its unfamiliar, complicated, even strange language, sounds, and vestments. The beautiful, arousing pleasure is “smooth, polished, light, delicate”; the sublime, arousing pain is “great, massive, dark, gloomy.” Though the sublime can even be “rugged and ugly,” these are not its defining qualities. Burke occasionally allows the same object to be both beautiful and sublime, but the categories are nonetheless distinct. The sublime exhibits “power,” “violence,” and “strength.” Its sources are “magnificence” and “magnitude,” like the “starry heavens,” a “rugged and broken vastness,” and the several “privations” of “darkness, solitude, and silence.” Verily, the sublime characterizes “the God of scripture,” in Burke’s account, for “wherever [He] is represented as appearing or speaking, everything terrible in nature is called up to heighten the awe and solemnity of the divine presence.”

Job testifies to God’s power over men, who cannot draw out Leviathan with a hook, and over the young, who hide from Him seated in the streets. In the Psalms, God’s anger makes the earth tremble, and He bows the heavens. Burke notes that the sublime also characterizes Satan, God’s counterfeit in John Milton’s Paradise Lost: Burke does not wish to make the sublime a transcendental of being. We don’t know whether Burke’s Catholic mother took him to Holy Mass, but his account of the sublime captures it perfectly. Through endless “succession and uniformity,” not only in Ciceronian collects and prefaces but also in the pillars and domes of “old cathedrals,” in which the usus antiquior emerged and still prospers, one source of the sublime is “artificial infinity.” The associations with the majestic Creator are manifold.

Occasionally handsome, but never sublime, the NO makes no one tremble. It is meant to put one at ease, to reach out to the nations, to welcome into the fold, and so it soft-pedals its duty of propitiation, of atonement for sin. Today especially, however, comfortable sinners need to be afflicted. No less of a classical pianist and book critic than Pope Benedict XVI noticed the frequent absence of the sense of sacrifice and propitiation in the modern spirit of the liturgy. On the other hand, giving pleasure and pain, the usus antiquior is both beautiful and sublime, even if it is not so in every respect of each, and it is particularly appropriate for our swollen times.

Alas, mea maxima culpa, as dawn only suspends night, post hoc if not propter hoc, is it a surprise that divorce and apostasy often follow tepidity? Can the liturgy turn marriage away from sin, and children from infidelity? Over many years, as I attended the TLM and eventually joined the parish, I came to know the community. It is not composed, as a friend accused, of aesthetes merely “re-enacting,” like Confederate play-actors mustering once a year for a long-lost battle. The congregants are dead serious about worshiping in such a profound way that beauty should elevate their moral lives and so, as one put it, “eventually restore Christendom.” Even more stunning than the gorgeous Masses and devotions are the old-form parish activities that keep springing up: ballroom dancing, sacred-art studios, medieval craft guilds, chant classes, etc. Did the liturgy inspire these?

To put the question more expansively: Does liturgical exactitude, even the good taste acquired simply by following scrupulously the work of superior minds, beget moral virtues? Old forms, Burke and G.K. Chesterton agreed, contain forgotten but still valid and active wisdom, for sane conventions make it easier to be good even when they are not understood. Lex orandi, lex credendi is the old formula: the manner of praying is the manner of believing. We might add, lex orandi, lex vivendi, for why do the partisans of the TLM, especially the young, seem to have their catechism down cold and their many children gently in tow, even if the occasional tattoo bespeaks wild oats gone to seed? Burke’s analysis offers two answers: the sublime evokes “terror, fear, astonishment, amazement, wonder, and awe” — words, he claims, etymologically interrelated in Latin and Greek (and in French and English) — and fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Second, “beauty,” Burke claims, “is a name I shall apply to all such qualities in things as induce in us a sense of affection and tenderness.”

Platonic aesthetics may say even more. Socrates, “no expert on modes” but a lover of moral wisdom, notes in the Republic that the various musical modes encourage specific characters: the Lydian encourages lamenting; the Ionian, drinking and relaxing; the Dorian, courage; and the Phrygian, moderation. For his well-ordered city, which both forms and flows from well-ordered souls, Socrates banned the first two sets of modes encouraging disorder, but he prized the virtues of courage and moderation promoted by the latter two, one “pleasant,” one “stern.” In addition, amateur musicologist Socrates banned certain instruments: the many-stringed harp and zither and the wide-ranging flute, which promote “luxury.” His musicology exhausted, he suggested that the maestro Damon be consulted for banning words and rhythms that express “meanness, insolence, madness, and other evils,” and for keeping those that express their opposites.

The eight basic Gregorian modes, derived from three of these Greek modes, similarly contain liturgical “affects,” which is a way of saying that they operate on our will through our bodies. In order, they include one solemn mode, one somber (Dorian courage), one mystic, one eternal (Phrygian moderation), two happy (Lydian lamentation), one grave, and one perfect (Mixolydian). It’s fascinating and fitting that the Ionian, or relaxing, Greek mode is absent from Pope Gregory’s scheme, and that the other one Socrates banned from his militarized polis; the Lydian, or lamenting, is present twice (pure and mixed), paradoxically, with an incongruous “happy” affect. These surviving three, lamenting, courageous, and moderate, depend scrupulously on the echoing Latin vowels of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate and are always at the service of the two theological benchmarks of the Church seasons: the Incarnation and the Resurrection, or Advent-Christmas-Epiphany and Lent-Easter-Pentecost. The muted modes of the third short season, Septuaginta, unique to the TLM, initiating the 70 years of Babylonian captivity, when idolaters were in exile, seem written for our benighted, chaotic age, as does the “somber,” lonely kyriale of Lent, when the organ is silent. Not alone in explaining comportment and not even its primary cause, these liturgical affects counsel in gentle sound-sermons sympathy, strength, and temperance. Unlike the classical city, moreover, the Christian polis (the fading form of Western conglomerations), more aware of its own sinfulness, needs especially to express Lydian sorrow, a sorrow that expresses also, not so surprisingly for a Christian, a sighing happiness of the felix culpa (“fortunate fault”).

Do you want to know why TLM families have their stuff together, why these web designers and IT experts read classics, learn chant, look after farm animals, sit still at classical-guitar concerts, churn raw-milk butter, form sewing guilds, organize black-tie ballroom dances, produce sacred art, and, of all things, bore wood with drill braces? “Mark the music,” answers Lorenzo in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. “The man who hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils.”

Of course, steadfast catechesis in a moral theology built on the natural moral law, the universal blueprint for human happiness, forms minds, but hearts are inspired and cultivated by the solemnized human voice and the resounding pipe organ, respectively “given pride of place” and “high esteem” by Sacrosanctum Concilium, Vatican II’s “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.” They lift “up the mind” to “God and heavenly things,” with the domes and arched walls the powerful soundboard of fitting architecture. Sacred music is the ancient school of Christ, and an electric mic non decet.

Is any direction other than “up” more needed in deeply fallen times? The two ancient throwback instruments of created grace — voice and organ — generate solemn order, quiet joy, humble piety, steadfast courage, and a gentleness that comes from looking up and looking for, along with a constant dose of the sobering “fear and trembling” of the sublime. As the U.S. Catholic bishops wrote, the human voice, “created in the likeness of God, is the primary liturgical instrument,” and it is best supported by the pipe organ, which resounds for large gatherings with “the fullness of human sentiments” and reminds us of “the immensity and magnificence of God” (Sing to the Lord: Music in Divine Worship, 2007).

I know less about Gregorian modes than Socrates knew about the Greek ones, but maybe they stanch the flow of adrenalin and help us love our enemies. Or maybe it’s the curious do-si and fa-mi half steps, the single-sex monophony, or the haunting Solesmes arsis and thesis (rise and fall). I only know this: Stumble out into the mean streets after such otherworldly high-brow worship, like leaving a movie theater set in a magical land, and weep that cacophony, tom-toms, primal screams, and rap educate vice. “If music be the food of love, play on,” said Orsino in Twelfth Night. He might as well have been talking about the voice and pipe organ’s “most holy foreplay” in the TLM. The adults become both more responsible and child-like, mirabile dictu, and their children more ordered and wholesomely playful. Let’s face it: Good liturgy involves good taste, and, as Burke said in “On Taste,” taste depends on rational judgment, emotional maturity, and education — that is to say, the virtues.

My desperate hope for the TLM in the present pontificate, therefore, clings to reports that Pope Francis loves Italian opera and tango and doesn’t use a computer.

I’m not saying that chant cures skin cancer or shields off tornadoes, but I have watched this “nuclear fission of love,” as Benedict XVI called the Eucharist, mushroom in this gang-infested city even in the year his successor slammed down Traditionis Custodes. A Chesterbellocian distributist Guild of SS Joachim and Anne sprang up and called for members to learn and teach the traditional crafts of sewing and woodworking. A homeschool cooperative with children’s catechisms took off, along with a sacred artist’s atelier, which had produced an oil portrait of St. Augustine commissioned for Benedict XVI and a towering study of Tiepolo’s Immaculate Conception.

Bonum diffusum est — it is the nature of the good to flow forth, even into the barren spaces of blighted neighborhoods. One sermon boldly proposed the rare “thirty-fold harvest” of Josephite marriage, the “sixty-fold harvest” of widowed continence, and the “hundred-fold harvest” of perpetual virginity. The priests, including a few sent from generous bishops, were clocking a thousand confessions a month. Parishioners petitioned for adult catechism: first sessions covered three hours on acedia, the sin of our saeculum, as expounded by Evagrius of Pontus and Aquinas, followed by chanted Vespers. I swear I saw a six-year-old return on his knees across the marble floor during the consecration of a First Friday Mass. The young rector rules as a prudent paterfamilias; French manners d’une bonne éducation rule the oblates. Unafraid of manual labor, the French priest — in soutane en laine, not bleu de travail — helped restore the former convent’s slate roof and install a 58-rank Wilhelm organ with 2,760 pipes. Wise scholastic aphorisms whisper from confessionals and resound from the pulpit. The bulletin has warned with Salesian wisdom against would-be liturgy warriors on the front page: “The Holy Spirit does not enter the house where there is complaining, arguing, or quarrels.” (I hope I’m not guilty with this panegyric.) A Lenten pledge to fast from electronic media was promoted. A longstanding St. Vincent de Paul conference increased its activity during the pandemic. A 380-mile penitential pilgrimage to a backwoods monastery in Oklahoma carried several cars southwest.

I know I gush, but might the TLM be a material cause of this stately, measured, and sublime outpouring of the Spirit? It exposes an exception to Burke’s thinking that the great could not be beautiful but only sublime. And yet the staggering surprise of the orderly resurgence of behavioral orthodoxy from partisans of the usus antiquior itself offers evidence that the natural elements of chant and finely tailored vestments beg also for a supernatural explanation. The Holy Spirit is evidently pleased with not only charismatic ecstasy but also quiet awe and joy in age-old forms. Seen up close or heard at a distance, who could wish this gone (our present Pope notwithstanding)?

Indeed, when Traditionis Custodes fell like a hammer, a modest counter-reformation within the diocese was quietly infusing suburban worship, where a few energetic priests were taking up the cassock, singing Vespers with traditional canons, and peppering plainsong antiphonies and commons onto the music selections. Once chalice veil and burse showed up on the altar, and candle-bearers began to illumine the Gospel, modest veils popped up, reception on the tongue and kneeling occurred spontaneously, and confession lines and processions lengthened. In one parish, just off the soccer field, a life-size, outdoor corpus was mounted by crafty sons of Bavaria, and an outdoor Corpus Christi procession intrigued unbaptized children, like pagan babies carried away by a Eucharistic revival. A dynamic diocesan seminary professor mounted another TLM oratory with studied schola within another gasping city parish. A Catholic study center at a local Jesuit university offered a kneeler, and veiled coeds sprang from the dorms. The extraordinary form was sowing tangy mustard seeds of penitential liturgical fusion back into the Roman rite, even as attendance shrank from COVID restrictions. Summorum Pontificum had propagated this ressourcement. In the foreseeable distance was a time when an enriched NO might have blended into a low TLM. If Traditionis Custodes is ever read in continuity with the earlier motu proprio on the liturgy, however, it will find its fruit in a simultaneously more terrible and more peaceful beauty.

One more point: especially in middle-brow times, the usus antiquior takes work and study by all, as the Greek root of “liturgy” suggests. It is an acquired taste, close to tragic opera in genre, and yet, at the same time, like opera, while unflinchingly highbrow, the Solemn Pontifical High Mass commands awe in first-time participants, whether peasant, accountant, or tinkerer. To be sure, holy Catholics attend NO Masses, and I still attend them by convenience and find them particularly satisfying when accompanied by chant, organ, and expressive lectors. To master a sublime spiritual experience is a way to get closer to a challenging God, however, and the traditional missal, Latin language, architectural setting, and music theory are huge helps. The payoff is that something this immediately arresting and yet also so complicated is less likely to become boring. It cannot be an argument against it, however, that we no longer have enough time for it. That might be only an explanation for why some wish it to disappear. There’s a Greek pun that sums up it and the Great Books: kalepa ta kala (“Difficult, the beautiful things”).

What do the explosions and subsequent suspensions of the TLM portend for culture generally? Russell Kirk claimed that conservatives humbly look to the past because they are more aware of their own endemic sinfulness, marked, in St. John Henry Newman’s magnificent peroration, by some “terrible aboriginal calamity out of joint with the purposes of the Creator” (Apologia pro Vita Sua), throwing a “curtain” over man’s “futurity” and yielding “the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries.” Penance is one of the distinctive rhetorical notes of both traditional worship and personal responsibility. It yields wizened joy rather than mere joviality, attempts to bring back ignored transcendence in the world, and is sorely needed now. I’ve been surprised to find sorrowful personal stories, cases of neglect and abandonment and self-abuse, alongside the teeming wholesome young families, at the usus antiquior. I’ve seen the broken homeless there on their knees. They are drawn to sublimity, solemnity, and reverence, to be sure, but also to the minor-key, grief-stricken mea maxima culpas of the second Confiteor, when fists triple-thump the broken heart. Who can’t notice the enormous desire to make resolute amendments of life in cooperation with mercy and the cry for propitiation? The irony of ironies that bites both sets of liturgy warriors, traditionalists and inculturalists, in different ways is that the usus antiquior has flourished in the very culture credited with the supposed innovation or “development of doctrine” of Vatican II — America, Land of Religious Liberty — and yet is now resisted by the supposed defenders of Vatican II with the repressive, ultramontane tactics of which those defenders accused the pre-Vatican II Church.

As a patient priest one generation younger than the recently empowered Guardians of the New Tradition once told me, “We’ve got these guys a while longer.” The true believers of a New Order in pastoral practice now possess, like aging college administrators, the authority they once questioned. They pushed iconoclasm in their youth, and it is genuinely hard for them to see the jewels they had regarded as bling. Such custodians cannot go gently into the night. Their resistance to restoration is also, in part, a question of taste, and unexamined taste cannot be disputed. It can only be brought to examination. They bristled in their youth at Latin, moral-theology manuals, rote memory, votive candles and altar rails, genuflection and reception on the tongue, and all manner of formality as liturgical fussiness and intellectual narrow-mindedness, and so they can’t believe today’s abandoned young crave that from which they had worked so hard to liberate the Church, which they see as vain and speechless idols, sounding gongs, or even amulets. They judge lacework vestments not as exquisite offerings to God but as the “dress of grandmothers.” They once misread the human heart and material reality, and now, in their graying years, as this book critic judges, they are misreading the times.

If not gently, the Guardians of the New Tradition will still go. And yet I do not believe that restorationists in aesthetics and culture, given to formalism in poetry, the natural law in morality, draftsmanship in painting, complementarity and chastity in male-female relations, balance and detail in architecture, mystery in dramaturgy, dignity in dress and speech, gentleness in manners, awe in attitude, and judicious humility in all things, however slight and circumscribed, will perish from the earth.

Kenneth Colston’s articles and reviews have appeared in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Saint Austin Review, The New Criterion, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, Crisis, and First Things.

©2023 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.

The foregoing article, "Does Good Liturgy Beget Moral Virtue?," was originally published in the June, 2023 issue of the New Oxford Review and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.

What to make of Vatican II?

What to make of Vatican II? Pope Paul VI, in his General Audience of Jan. 12, 1966, stated: “There are those who ask what authority, what theological qualification, the Council intended to give to its teachings, knowing that it avoided issuing solemn dogmatic definitions backed by the Church’s infallible teaching authority. The answer is known by those who remember the conciliar declaration of March 6, 1964, repeated on November 16, 1964. In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided proclaiming in an extraordinary matter any dogmata carrying the mark of infallibility.”

This does not mean, of course, that conciliar documents do not contain references to Catholic doctrine previously defined as dogma and therefore infallibly authoritative, such as the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, the virgin birth of Christ, and so forth. Nor does it mean that conciliar documents do not contain anything new, such as its statements about ecumenism, religious freedom, etc. What it does mean is that nothing new in these documents is defined as infallible dogma.

The “new springtime” in the Church heralded by the post-conciliar popes and others who hoped that the simplified and more-accessible vernacular liturgy would promote the “new evangelization” seems not to have yielded quite the hoped-for results. It was not as if the police had to be summoned to Catholic churches each Sunday “to hold back the hordes of lapsed Catholics whose faith had been rekindled at the prospect of saying the Confiteor in English,” as Michael Davies quipped in his book, Pope Paul’s New Mass.

Can Ecumenical Councils of the Church fail in their objectives? Fr. John Zuhlsdorf writes: “Regarding General or Ecumenical Councils (all 21 of them), it is possible to be a valid council but a failed one. Consider Lateran V. Utter failure. Its legislation on ecclesiastical pawn shops went nowhere, which is a darn shame. I’d really appreciate well-regulated ecclesiastical pawn shops. And – hey! – what ever happened to the “spirit of Lateran V”? Moreover, Lateran I and Lateran II weren’t even classified as General or Ecumenical Councils until after the Council of Trent (500 years later).”

In the same vein, Saint Gregory Nazianzus writes: “If I must speak the truth, I feel disposed to shun every conference of Bishops; because I never saw a Synod brought to a happy issue, not remedying but rather increasing, existing evils. For ever is there rivalry and ambition, and these have the mastery of reason; -- do not think me extravagant for saying so; -- and a mediator is more likely to be attacked himself, than to succeed in his pacification. Accordingly, I have fallen back upon myself and consider quiet the only security of life.”

Again, Joseph Ratzinger, writing in Principles of Catholic Theology, 378, writes: “Not every valid council in the history of the Church has been a fruitful one; in the last analysis, many of them have been a waste of time. Despite all the good to be found in the texts produced, the last word about the historical value of Vatican II has yet to be spoken.”

There are some Catholic scholars and clerics who speak or write as if Vatican II is a sort of “Super Dogma.” The litmus test for the fellowship of kindred spirits or its opposite -- something bordering on excommunication or being tarred and feathered – is whether or not one “accepts” Vatican II. But what does this mean, exactly? A good friend of mine, whom I sometimes refer to as “L’Autre Phil,” says that one can never make sense of the Second Vatican Council by trying to get at it strictly in terms of its textual content. Why? Because either it functions as a wax nose that can be made to “say” whatever one wants it to say or, worse, because almost nobody cares about the text. What everyone cares about, however, is the “event” of Vatican II and what it’s made to symbolize.

Cardinal Ratzinger, in his address to Chilean Bishops (July 13, 1988), said this about the last council: “There are many accounts of it which give the impression that, from Vatican II onward, everything has been changed, and that what preceded it has no value or, at best, has value only in the light of Vatican II. The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular Council define no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of “super-dogma” which takes away the importance of all the rest.

“This idea is made stronger by things that are now happening," the Cardinal continued. "That which previously was considered most holy – the form in which the liturgy was handed down – suddenly appears as the most forbidden of all things, the one thing that can safely be prohibited. It is intolerable to criticize decisions which have been taken since the Council; on the other hand, if men make question of ancient rules, or even of the great truths of the Faith – for instance, the corporal virginity of Mary, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the immortality of the soul, etc. – nobody complains or only does so with the greatest moderation.”

(Hat tip to a couple of my Catholic colleagues.)

Tridentine Community News - Detroit's Palestrina Institute, TLMs this coming week

February 12, 2023 – Sexagésima Sunday


"I will go in unto the Altar of God
To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"
Tridentine Community News by Alex Begin (February 12, 2023):

Detroit's Palestrina Institute

To understand our present and future, we must have some understanding of our past. The question regularly comes up, how did metro Detroit become such a hot spot for the Latin Mass? One reason is that in the years following Vatican II, before the indults that reauthorized public celebration of the Tridentine Mass, there was a thriving Novus Ordo Latin Mass scene in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Three parishes in particular stood out for offering the Latin Mass in that time period:

Old St. Mary’s did and still does offer a Novus Ordo Latin Mass on most Sundays. Fr. Eduard Perrone was the music director there before entering seminary.

St. Hyacinth Church during the pastorate of Fr. Francis Skalski offered a Novus Ordo Latin Mass one Sunday per month.

Holy Family Church offered an odd hybrid Tridentine-Novus Ordo Latin Mass ad oriéntem. Mass began with the Tridentine Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, then morphed into a Novus Ordo Latin Mass once the priest ascended the altar.

St. Joseph Church offered the most Tridentine-y Novus Ordo Latin Mass of all, celebrated ad oriéntem with a full crew of altar servers and an ambitious music program led by the late Thomas M. Kuras. Tom offered a comprehensive repertoire encompassing Gregorian Chant, Ambrosian Chant, and sacred polyphony, with an Aspérges at the beginning of Mass and Benediction after Mass every Sunday. This writer served at the altar there during the heady years of the 1980s and 90s when the holy and tradition-friendly Fr. Thomas Bresnahan was pastor.

Tom was able to offer such an unusual choral program in large part because of the formation he received as one of the last students of the Palestrina Institute, a unique formation program for church musicians that the Archdiocese of Detroit operated from 1941 – 1971. It was a diploma-granting, five-year course of study. Tom’s mentor there was Lode Van Dessel, a composer and then-organist at St. Aloysius Church. (Information taken from biography of Thomas Kuras at:http://www.musimem.com
/kuras_eng.htm)

Prayer Pilgrimages bus tour director and current St. Joseph Shrine music director Michael Semaan brought to our attention a history of the Palestrina Institute by former student Francis Brancaleone published in the Spring, 2018 edition of Sacred Music, the magazine of the Church Music Association of America: https://media.musicasacra.com/publications
/sacredmusic/pdf/sm145-1.pdf

The article explains that Archbishop Edward Mooney in 1938 endorsed the formation of the Palestrina Institute as an outgrowth of a Liturgical Music Summer School that had been held at Detroit’s Academy of the Sacred Heart, interestingly the same school that later relocated to Bloomfield Hills and whose chapel has hosted the Oakland County Latin Mass Association.

The Institute’s mission was “to provide for the instruction of Choirmasters, Organists, and Singers in the understanding, appreciation, and execution of the approved music of the Church.” In a quote obtained from longtime Archdiocese of Detroit archivist Roman Godzak, “The time is rapidly approaching, when the Church in the Archdiocese of Detroit will insist that all liturgical functions in her places of worship be conducted according to the regulations set down by the Sacred Congregation of Rites and the Apostolic See.”

From the article: “The curriculum was thorough and well-conceived with instruction in Gregorian chant, chant notation, singing, breathing (an important element in the proper rendition of chant), chironomy (chant conducting), and accompaniment. Instruction in the liturgy, church law, music theory, ear training, history, choir technique, vocal pedagogy with a specialty in boy choirs, organ registration, modulation, improvisation, diocesan legislation, bibliography, how to deal with pastors and choirs, and the deportment of a church musician.” The full curriculum is documented in great detail in the article. [Photo of Palestrina Institute Assistant Director Fr. Robert Ryan from the 1962 Dominican High School Yearbook] Though one might think that the glory days of the Palestrina Institute are in the past, as recently as 2018, there was a short-lived effort to bring back the Institute, this time with a primary focus on instruction on playing the pipe organ. However, the two individuals who were pushing for its resuscitation ended up leaving the employ of the Archdiocese of Detroit, and the idea has been shelved for the time being. Hopefully diocesan leadership will see the value of training the next generation of music directors and keeping Detroit a center for traditional liturgy.

Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

Sun. 02/19 10:00 AM: High Mass at Old St. Mary’s (Quinquagésima Sunday) – Celebrant: Fr. Cy Whitaker, SJ

[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org. Previous columns are available at http://www.detroitlatinmass.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for January 4, 2023. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]