As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. (Genesis 50:20)
There are no dead ends with God. Most of us are familiar with the story of Joseph in the Book of Genesis, how his jealous brothers sold him into slavery. It looks like a dead end: he is carried away from his homeland into servitude in Egypt. But that’s not the end of the story: in Egypt Joseph rises to a place of prominence he never would have enjoyed if he had remained a shepherd tending the flocks of his father Jacob. He becomes a blessing for the land of Egypt when he protects it from the ravages of famine, and a source of blessing even for his wicked brothers when they come asking for his help (see the quote above).
In my post “Liturgy Wars: What’s Latin Got To Do With It” we saw in the ugly wounds that Christ retained in his glorified, perfected, body that God doesn’t waste anything: “in everything God works for good with those who love him.” (Romans 8:28). There are no dead ends with God.
St. Monegundis
We see a wonderful example of God’s economy in the life of one of today’s lesser-known saints, St. Monegundis, who died in the year AD 570. Monegundis was a married woman with several daughters. She was overcome with grief when her daughters died, and with her husband’s permission became a recluse, a hermitess devoted to prayer. She soon moved from Chartres to Tours, where she established herself near the tomb of St. Martin. As is often the way with holy hermits, she was unable to keep her light under a bushel (Mark 4:21): her sanctity attracted companions who wanted to share in her life of prayer and who, as the hagiography at Catholic.org puts it, “forced her to establish a rule that led to a convent founding” (which was the convent at St. Pierre-le-Puellier). Even after her death St. Monegundis continued to share the graces she had received: numerous miracles were reported by pilgrims at her tomb.
Even a millennium and a half later we can still benefit from those same graces. First of all, St. Monegundis offers us a lesson in Christian suffering. The death of her young children undoubtably caused her enormous emotional distress. Rather than giving in to despair, or seeking escape in some worldly pursuit, she turned her life over to God, and found consolation in a life of prayer. Not only that, her holy example brought her many more spiritual daughters, and not only in her lifetime, but for generations afterwards in the convent she founded.
We also can see something of the working of Divine Providence, in that whatever plans we make for ourselves, God may have something else in mind. St. Monegundis first set out to live her life as a wife and mother; when tragedy robbed her of that prospect, she next settled upon a simple life of prayer. That also did not turn out as she expected. In the end, however, her Lord in his wisdom gave her something else that combined her two previous plans in a way she never intended: spiritual motherhood (as we saw above), and the leadership of a whole community of prayer. A beautiful concrete image of this aspect of God’s economy is the modern church building which visibly incorporates in its walls remnants of the older church from St. Monegundis’ convent of St. Pierre-le-Puellier.
Church of St. Pierre-le-Pellier, Tours
God doesn’t do it all, of course: he wants our active participation: as St. Paul reminds us, “Brethren, do not be weary in well-doing.” (2 Thessalonians 3:13) Just because she couldn’t control, or even foresee, the outcome, we should not conclude that St. Monegundis’ efforts played no part in it. If it weren’t for her fidelity to Jesus Christ it all would have ended very differently, and we would be talking about somebody else today. And that faithfulness , after all, is what makes a saint a saint. St. Monegundis reminds us that we all experience setbacks and detours in our personal lives, and defeats both private and societal (some of which I have recently discussed in these pages); those things can be very painful, but they are beyond our control. God is in charge. As Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta, another woman of sanctity, is said to have remarked, we are called not to be successful, but to be faithful.
In recent years we’ve seen no shortage of reasons in both Church and state to become discouraged. The life of St. Monegundis is just one reminder that God always wins in the end. I’ll leave the last word to another saint whose life also turned out very differently than he expected:
You may for a time have to suffer the distress of many trials; but this is so that your faith, which is more precious than the passing splendor of fire-tried gold, may by its genuineness lead to praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ appears. (1 Peter 1:6 – 7)
Seven years ago, in the run-up to the Synod on the Family, there was a mild controversy over the Pope’s decision to remove Latin from its place of honor as the official language of the meeting. By the time the synod convened the language issue had largely been overshadowed by . . . other things. Nevertheless, I don’t think the Latin question should be forgotten. I felt compelled to write the post below at the time, both because the Latin language is a particular interest of mine (as I explain in the article), but more importantly because the discussion of its place in the Church helps illustrate some important aspects of Catholicism. Now, with a rumored return to the bad old days of restricted opportunities to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass (as I discuss here and here), it seems like a good time to rerun my old (slightly revised) post:
Lingua Latina Aeterna
Thus the Roman tongue is now first and foremost a sacred tongue, which resounds in the Sacred Liturgy, the halls of divinity, and the documents of the Apostolic See. In this same tongue you yourselves again and again address a sweet salutation to the Queen of Heaven, your Mother, and to your Father who reigns on high. This tongue is the key that unlocks for you the sources of history. Nearly all the Roman and Christian past preserved for us, in inscriptions, writings and books, with some exceptions of later centuries, wears the vesture of the Latin tongue. – His Holiness Pope Pius XII’s Address to the Student Youth of Rome, January 30, 1949
Over the last couple of days I have been watching two gentlemen going back and forth in the comments section about the Pope’s decision not to use Latin as the official language of the Synod of Bishops. They both make some interesting points about the place and importance of the Latin language in the life of the Church. Their spirited discussion has got me thinking not just about the Latin language, but about some of the distinctive features of Catholicism.
Passing the literary torch: Virgil and Dante Meeting Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan by Nicola Consoni (c.1850)
A God of the Particulars . . .
Don’t get me wrong, I have some definite opinions about Latin: after all, teaching it has been my main source of income for more than three decades. Aside from my personal interest, however, the language itself provides an excellent opportunity for exploring a broader topic. And, really, it’s something of a paradox. I agree with Chesterton when he says: “It [Catholicism] is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” Catholicism gives us an allegiance that is infinitely larger than those other things that try to make a claim on us, such as political parties and ideologies, nations, athletic teams and any number of false gods, including The Conventional Wisdom; and it is not just something larger, but something truer, something that is infinitely true, because it is our connection to the Infinite Omnipotent Creator. At the same time, one of the Catholic Faith’s unique features among the world’s religions is its interest in particulars, following the lead of its Lord, of whom I wrote on another occasion:
. . . He is a God of particulars. He chose a particular people to whom he first revealed himself in order that he might incarnate himself among them in the person of the God-Man Jesus of Nazareth; he carefully chose and prepared Mary as the human mother of Jesus; he likewise chose and prepared particular individuals such as Peter and Paul to carry forward the mission of Jesus.
The Church has carefully preserved, in Scripture, in creeds, and in the broader tradition these names and the names of many others: and not only Saints, but Sinners such as the various Herods and Pontius Pilate. The Gospels often don’t simply tell us that Jesus entered a town, but name it, a place the readers (or more likely, listeners) would know, such as Tiberias or Betheny. We are told about real, individual men and women who were known to people at the time, in well-known places that you can see, where you can walk down the same streets. And it doesn’t end with Biblical figures and events: the Catholic Church has carefully preserved not only the names and stories of thousands of Saints over the past two millennia, but actual pieces of their bodies as tokens, as tangible evidence, that they were real people, not myths or abstractions.
. . . And Yet Universal
It may seem like a contradiction that Catholicism is at the same time the only truly Universal Religion and one uniquely focused on individual people and concrete things. But the living center of it all is the Incarnation, where the Second Person of the Trinity, the Eternal Word, becomes the Man Jesus of Nazareth: Infinite God in a finite human body. It is the glorified body of the Risen Christ that I find most telling here, particularly the passage where Jesus shows himself to the “doubting” Apostle Thomas:
Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:27-28)
The Incredulity of St. Thomas by Caravaggio (1601-1602)
Who would have expected the Glorified Body, the Eternal Perfected Body, to include the horrible wounds inflicted on the flesh-and-blood human body here on Earth?
It seems to me that the Church, Christ’s Mystical Body on Earth, follows the model of the Master in incorporating into itself many of those things that happen to it along the way. As St. Paul says:
We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)
I’m not saying that the various experiences and traditions (including liturgical languages) that have been part of the history of the Church enjoy the same status as Christ’s Wounds. Rather, in the passage about Thomas we see a supreme example of a pattern that is reflected in lesser things as well. It does seem that God doesn’t want anything to go to waste, and that He can use those things to join us more closely to Himself and to each other. Just look at how the stories of the Saints, from the very earliest days of the Church, have been incorporated into her liturgical life, and how devotion to them has brought countless Catholics closer to their Lord. The same can be said of many devotional practices.
What’s Latin Got to Do With It?
This is where the discussion of Latin comes in. It’s true that it wasn’t the first liturgical language of the Church (and for much of the Church never has been). In the Western Church, however, the Latin Church, it replaced Greek within the first few centuries, when there was still a Roman Empire. For the past fifteen centuries Latin was the language in which great theologians (St. Augustine, St. Thomas) formulated their thoughts, and the medium through which Catholics, including most of the greatest Saints, prayed to their God and heard His Word.
The Last of the Romans: Saint Augustine by Antonio Rodriguez (17th century)
That common language, on a purely human level, is a tangible way that we share in their experience. I often describe to people, when we’re discussing the study of Latin in a purely secular context, my experience studying English as a graduate student. I found that in the work of authors writing in English prior to the mid-twentieth there always seemed to be a sort of substrata of allusions and knowing nods to the literary tradition of the Greeks and Romans, and a rich admixture of Latinisms; most of this was invisible to the vast majority of my fellow English students who had never studied Latin (never mind Greek) or classical literature. They were simply blind to an entire dimension of the literature they were reading. Consider how much more profound a loss that is in the context of the Church whose Scripture, traditions, and institutions go back to a time before any language we could call English existed.
Of course, the Church is not merely an institution, and our predecessors in the faith are not merely our forebears: they are our fellow Christians, participants right now from their eternal heavenly home in the same Church, which is the Mysticum Corpus of Christ our Lord. If we venerate bits of their bone and tiny snips of their clothing, surely we must derive some spiritual benefit from praying the same prayers, not just the same thoughts but the exact same words, and singing the same songs as they did? We are both body and soul, and we need tangible things to help us understand spiritual realities. We can’t survive on abstractions: that’s why Our Lord has given us Sacraments. The Latin language has been one of those tangible things for most of the history of the Western Church, one of the most prominent of those things (sociologists call them “identity markers”) that help us understand who we are and with whom we belong.
Look Before Leaping
As I said above, this is not merely about Latin, because the gentleman is correct who said that the Church has changed her liturgical language in the past, and may do so again. No human language is essential for Salvation, and the Church will go on (see Matthew 16:18), with or without it; also, she continually needs to assess whether the things she has picked up on the on the way are really helpful for her mission (Ecclesia reformans et semper reformanda, if I may indulge in an antique tongue). At the same time, it would be wise to consider long and hard before jettisoning things that have a long history of uniting those of us in the Church Militant with our predecessors who are now in the Church Triumphant, and beyond them to “Our Father who reigns on high,” as Pope Pius XII reminds us. Whatever happens in future synods (and I concede the practicality of a language in which most bishops are conversant), we would be unwise to abandon completely the Language of our Fathers (Lingua Paterna) too quickly.
Giaochino Rossini was, in his time, considered the most successful composer of operas in history, creating such enduring favorites as The Barber of Seville, La Cenerentola, and William Tell. Then, having composed an astounding 39 operas before his 37th birthday in 1829, he simply stopped. For the rest of his life, until his death almost four decades later in 1868, his few compositions were mostly religious music.
The clip below is the moving “Agnus Dei” from Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle, which is one of his last works, completed in 1863.
Featured image above: Agnus Dei by Francisco Zurburan, 1640
Once upon a time I was a teacher in a (more or less) Catholic school, where I was occasionally called upon to teach an introductory theology course to the bright-eyed young men & women of the ninth grade. Of the roughly 16 students per class there would usually be 2-3 Catholic students whose families attended Mass at least weekly, and a like number of non-Catholic Christians who were regular church goers. The rest were raised in a secular environment, ranging from occasionally religious to explicitly atheist.
I soon found that most of these young people, even many of the regular church attendees, had been so indoctrinated into a materialist way of thinking by teachers, mass media, and society in general that I found it difficult to explain even basic religious ideas. It was almost like speaking a foreign tongue. Some of these students were fans of the then-popular “new atheists” (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.), and most had been affected to some degree by “scientistic” thinking, that it, the idea that scientific explanations were the only serious or valid explanations. I found that I had to get them outside of these narrow ways of understanding reality before they could even begin to understand the purpose of or the need for religious faith.
Many of my blog posts grew out of discussions with these students, including some republished here (“Has Pascal’s Wager Really Been ‘Debunked’?“, “God’s Existence Isn’t A Dark Matter“). The post below is another of these, in which I try to get my students to look at the world from a different – ahem – angle:
What is both seen and unseen?
“The Catholic Church,” according to G.K. Chesterton, “is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside.” Those of us who have been out and now are in (back in, for some of us) know how true it is. And it stands to reason: as both a worldly and a spiritual entity, the Church cannot be contained within purely physical bounds.
“The Catholic Church is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside.” -G.K. Chesterton
This sounds like sheer nonsense, of course, to those who are formed in a materialist worldview, because they reject a priorithe existence of a non-physical reality. It may be a decided minority who consciously embrace such a worldview, but many, many more unthinkingly see the world in the same way. Explaining Catholicism and the Catholic Church under these circumstances (except, maybe, in the most zealously orthodox Catholic schools) sometimes feels like trying to converse with someone who speaks a completely different language.
Instructing the unknowing, however, is one of the Spiritual Works of Mercy, so we must always search for new ways to communicate the experience of faith. In the “Dark Matter’ post, for instance, I use the cosmological theories of “dark matter” and “dark energy” as an analogy to answer the common idea that, because we can’t detect God directly using scientific instruments, it’s unreasonable to believe in him. I point out that scientists believe that 95% of the matter and energy in the universe is completely undetectable, but they are convinced it is there because of its observed effects on things we candetect; likewise, we can be sure of the existence of God, even though he is beyond this world, because of his effect on things (and people) that we are able to see.
The Faith Postulate
In a similar way, there are things we can know only by experiencing them: the love of God as we experience it in His Church is a prime example. The outsider will often dismiss this sort of knowledge as requiring an irrational, unsupported belief, since the proof comes after our initial commitment. We might ask such skeptics to consider geometry as an analogy. Euclidean Geometry, for instance, starts with the parallel postulate, which requires that parallel lines never meet. It’s not proven, you simply have to take it as a given. Once you do, of course, you find that the entire system is consistent, which validates your starting assumptions. More importantly, you find that when you apply it to the real world, for measuring property lines, for instance, it is absolutely reliable.
Likewise the Catholic Faith: once you “step inside” and see the results, the most “reasonable” response is belief (this is Blaise Pascal’s proscription for those who remain unconvinced by the logic of his famous wager). We can see it in our own lives, where despair and dysfunction give way to joy and productivity; we can see it in large and loving families of believers. We can even see it in the fact that, as measured by consistently higher birthrates, religious societies show greater confidence in the future. Faith works.
All analogies are imperfect, of course, and a skeptic might point out that, while the Catholic Church claims to hold immutable truths, we can change the parallel postulate and still come up with other internally consistent systems of geometry, systems which may not work on a plane, but work perfectly well in other contexts. In spherical geometry, for instance, parallel lines (which are actually lines of longitude) meet exactly twice, at the poles. This system is much more accurate than Euclidean geometry for measuring on a globe. Spherical geometry shows us, for example, that what looks like shortest distance from, say, Seattle to London (a straight line from west to east) on a flat map is actually much longer than a route which loops north (or appears to “loop” north) over Greenland.
The “great circle” route looks longer on a “flat” mercator projection . . .. . . but on the gnomonic map, which measures global distances more accurately, we can see that it’s really more direct*
The Fullness of Truth
The fact that there are different geometries, however, doesn’t weaken the analogy at all: if anything, it develops it further. Like Euclidean geometry, which only works on a two-dimensional plane, the scientific worldview is an accurate and quite useful tool for interpreting reality . . . within a certain narrow focus. It enables us to learn about and work with things that are physical and measurable, but it cannot tell us about things like love, justice, or any other reality that might exist outside of the purely physical realm. Just as a bathroom scale can tell us how much we weigh but can’t tell us our age, scientific knowledge cannot alone tell us anything about things outside of its set boundaries. The Christian Revelation, on the other hand, reaches beyond the material world and gives us access to a much fuller reality, and once we accept its premises, we can see both its internal consistency and its Truth when applied to our experience.
“Archimedes Moves the World”, the title page of The Mechanic’s Magazine London, 1824
Maybe when we look at it in this way, it can help us explain what St. Paul means when he says: “Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God” (1 Corinthians 3:18-19). He is not rejecting reason, but saying that, to someone who thinks in only two dimensions, three-dimensional reasoning is incomprehensible. Likewise with Chesterton: those on the outside of the Catholic Church often think they are looking at a plane, while from the inside we can see it in all its three-dimensional fullness.
Finally, one last quote, from one of the greatest of geometricians, Archimedes: “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world!” Everything depends on that “place to stand”, and there’s no firmer ground than the Church founded by Jesus Christ.
*images from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/15424/what-is-the-minimum-knowledge-to-navigate-with-only-a-compass
My Monday Music selections are usually compositions from the treasury of Catholic sacred music, some of them centuries old. There are still some composers even today, however, who are composing music worthy of that tradition. A couple months ago I posted a setting to the “Te Deum” by Pedro Camacho. The words to the hymn go back to the earliest centuries of the Church, the music premiered less than two years (Camacho has also composed music for video games: a guy has to make a living, I suppose . . . )
Ola Gjeilo playing piano
Another promising recent composer is the Norwegian-born Ola Gjeilo, who is very recent indeed, having been born in 1978, the same year St. John Paul II was elevated to the Papacy. I can’t tell from the biographical information I’ve seen whether or not he is a believer, or whether he simply finds the Christian (particularly the Catholic) tradition a particularly rich vein to mine for musical inspiration. Whatever the reason, religious music has been a large part of his output to date: he has composed a Mass, for instance, a breath-taking “Sanctus”, and his own musical setting for the ancient hymn “Ubi Caritas”.
The piece below is called “Dark Night of the Soul”, a musical accompaniment to several verses from St. John of the Cross’ work of that name. The musical composition premiered in 2010. Gjeilo says that, when he was introduced to St. John’s text, “I fell in love with its passionate spirituality right away.” He adds that, musically, “One of the things I wanted to do in this piece was to make the choir and piano fairly equal, as if in a dialogue; often the piano is accompanying the choir, but sometimes the choir is accompanying the piano (or violin).”
The Ensemble of the Chancel Choir performs Gjeilo’s composition in the clip below. I have posted the words under the video.
One dark night, fired with love’s urgent longings —ah, the sheer grace!— I went out unseen, my house being now all stilled. In darkness, and secure, by the secret ladder, disguised, —ah, the sheer grace!— in darkness and concealment, my house being now all stilled. On that glad night, in secret, for no one saw me, nor did I look at anything, with no other light or guide than the one that burned in my heart.
The scene is a parish church. A congregation has assembled for Sunday Mass. The opening hymn begins with a grand flourish. The celebrant processes into the church amid alleluias and mighty blasts from the organ. We reach a mini-climax. The music ends. Then, there is a moment of silence while the celebrant adjusts his microphone. He smiles. And what are the first words out of his mouth? “Good morning, everybody” THUD! You can almost hear something collapsing . . . The church building, the music, and the celebrant in flowing robes all seem to to say, “This is a ritual,” an event out of the ordinary. Then, the “Good morning” intrudes itself and indicates that this is really a business meeting and not a liturgy, after all. -Thomas Day, Why Catholics Can’t Sing
Church or file cabinet?
In Why Catholics Can’t Sing Thomas Day takes a close and often acerbic look at what is wrong with the liturgy as it is all too often celebrated in Catholic churches. A major theme, as we can see in the excerpt above, is that reformers and others (both clerical and lay) who are responsible for planning and conducting liturgical celebrations ignore the importance of ritual – of sights, sounds, scents, and actions – in fostering our relationship with God. While there have been some marked improvements since Day’s book was first published in 1991 (most notably Pope Benedict XVI’s Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificumin 2007, about which more below), we’re nowhere near out of the woods yet.
This is not just a matter of aesthetics, by the way. Yes, a poorly celebrated or even a lackadaisical Mass can still be valid, and the Eucharist confected by an irreverent priest is still the Body and Blood of Christ. The Mass, however, is more than just a delivery system for the Eucharist. It is also the highest form of prayer. It helps us to find communion with our Lord on a number of different levels, and prepares us, ideally, to be properly receptive to the Grace of the Eucharist. And, if we truly believe that the Mass is bringing us the Real Presence of the Second Person of the Trinity, well, can we possibly be reverent enough?
It might be helpful to consider the Ark of the Covenant, the receptacle for the Hebrews’ holiest objects. The Book of Exodus takes three whole chapters (Exodus 35-37) to describe its construction in exacting detail. Later, a man named Uzzah dies because he touches the outside of the Ark unworthily, and King David himself is afraid to take so holy an object into his home. (2 Samuel 6:6-10) Now, the Ark of the Covenant contained manna, the staff of Aaron, and the tablets containing the Ten Commandments. Those are certainly very holy objects, but can they compare to the actual body and blood to the Divine Son of the Living God, for which every one of our churches, and the liturgy of the Mass itself, are the receptacles? Shouldn’t we celebrate the Mass with at least the same reverence as the Hebrews showed when they approached the Ark of the Covenant?
“David Bearing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem” by Domenico Gargiulo, c. 1640
Our failure to see the Mass for what it is can be called a lack of vision. Proverbs 29:18 is sometimes translated, “When there is no vision, the people will perish.” Should we be surprised at what happens when our celebration of the Mass embodies a diminished or even altogether missing vision of the miracle at its center?
I’ve had some very concrete experiences related to this issue just in the past week. The church my family regularly attends is not a Latin Mass parish, but it has been steadily moving in a more traditional direction over a number of years: there is plenty of incense; chant and polyphony were a regular feature before Covid and now are coming back; extraordinary ministers who were displaced because of Covid show no sign of returning, and the kneelers in front of the altar that encourage kneeling and receiving on tongue look like they’re staying. Last year the free-standing altar in the attached chapel was removed, leaving only the original high altar against the back wall. Masses there (including all daily Masses) must be conducted ad orientem, with the priest and people together looking in the same direction, facing the Lord as one body [see my previous post, “Cardinal Sarah was Right: Darmok and Jalod Ad Orientem“, for the story of Cardinal Sarah’s sadly squelched attempt to encourage this venerable practice].
Last Sunday I had occasion to attend a second Mass at a different parish, and it was a different parish indeed. The church was filled with loud conversation before Mass, until a white-haired gentleman holding a guitar greeted the congregation with an explanation of the musical selections for the day’s Mass. The music itself was the all-too-familiar selection of quasi-folk music concocted by Dan Schutte and company back in the 1970s. The atmosphere was casual, and (horribile dictu) the congregation clapped at the end of the liturgy.
Facing the Lord together: Mass ad orientem (NCR)
Not that it was all bad. The celebrant was a young, orthodox priest who had arrived in the parish just a couple years ago. He himself had a reverent demeanor, and delivered a very good homily that channeled St. Thomas Aquinas in the first half, and St. Ignatius of Loyola toward the end. He did not start with a joke. The young pastor may be trying to move things in a more traditional direction (it was better than it had been the last time I was in that church before his arrival), but it’s hard to change the local culture of a parish in a short period of time.
Another thing that jumped out at me: in contrast to Mass I had attended at my usual church earlier in the day, which had been attended by people of all ages, with plenty of young people and more than a few large families, the vast majority of the congregants here were over 65 years old. There were only a handful of young people and children. I found myself wondering if this parish would still exist in twenty or thirty years (without vision, the people will perish). The young, enthusiastic, faithful pastor simply wasn’t enough: Catholics don’t go to church for the priest, they go for the Mass.
I attended daily mass at yet another parish later in the week. Yet again, the priest was fairly young, energetic, and orthodox, but again the music was trite, and again the congregation was casual and mostly elderly. I was the only person who knelt for communion. When I was back in my home church for weekday Mass Friday morning, Fr. offered up the sacrifice ad orientem, facing toward the Lord at the head of a congregation of all ages who filled the pews behind him. A line a dozen people long waited to go to confession after the liturgy was over. Again the contrast was stark. Proverbs 29:18 tells us the people need vision to survive; the next verse says “By mere words a servant is not disciplined, for though he understands, he will not give heed.” (Proverbs 29:19) We need more than words, we need to act.
My experience of the past week was not out of the ordinary, not for me, and not for other people I know personally or who have recounted their experiences in public fora. Since I returned to the practice of the faith three decades ago I have lived in four different states and have attended Mass in numerous churches, including Traditional Latin Masses in at least three different places. The more traditional the liturgy, the more committed and diverse the crowd. What is especially striking is that young adults and young families, the future of the Church, are found in much greater numbers at the more old-fashioned Masses.
“[Young Catholics] felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the mystery of the Eucharist particularly suited to them.”
Pope Benedict XVI, Summorum Pontificorum
When it comes to the Mass, you can’t get more old-fashioned than the Mass of Pius V, commonly known as the Tridentine Mass or the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). The TLM is the liturgy as it was celebrated from the time of the Council of Trent (and in most respects much earlier) until the post-Vatican II reforms of fifty years ago or so. This ancient form of the liturgy was almost completely unavailable to lay Catholics in the 1970s. Pope St. John Paul II responded to the desires of many Catholics by making it available with permission of the local bishop in 1984 (the Indult Mass). The TLM continued it’s steady come-back, and Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2007 Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificum, lifted most restrictions. In his letter Pope Benedict pointed out that the older form of the Mass “had never been abrogated.” He also recognized is wasn’t simply older Catholics nostalgically asking for the Mass of their youth, but also younger people who have “felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the mystery of the Eucharist particularly suited to them.”
If you’ve been to a TLM Mass anywhere in the past twenty years you know that people in the the second of those two categories far outnumber the first. In every Latin Mass I’ve attended the number of people old enough even to remember the pre-Vatican II Mass was tiny, about proportional to the meager handful of under-twenties I saw at the guitar Mass I described above. Young families, I repeat, are the future of the Church, and they are powerfully attracted to, and sustained by, the Traditional Latin Mass.
It’s not only the still relatively small number of Catholics who attend the TLM who benefit from its gradual revival. When he issued Summorum Pontificum Pope Benedict expressed the wish that “the two Forms [i.e., the TLM and the new Mass of Paul VI] of the usage of the Roman Rite can be mutually enriching.” I believe that the appeal and vitality of the older usage has indeed been a big influence on the return a more traditional celebration of the new usage in my home parish, and in many others like it.
That, I think, is why ideologues imbued with the Spirit of Vatican II see the TLM and Summorum Pontificum as such a threat. The more Catholic worship returns to more traditional forms, the more their vision of a Church in the image and likeness of the secular world seems to be slipping away. It’s not simply the Latin Mass: the Mass represents the entire project of remaking the Church that is summed up in the “Spirit of Vatican II” label. Predictably, when the Vatican published a few slight additions to the 1962 missal that governs the TLM last year, some of the ideologues published an “open letter” expressing shock and dismay that the Church would do the slightest thing to suggest that the Mass of the Ages was anything other than a dead letter: “it no longer makes sense to enact decrees to ‘reform’ a rite that is closed in the historical past, inert and crystallized, lifeless and without vigor. There can be no resuscitation for it.” In other words, believe us, not your lyin’ eyes. Those faithful, devout, enthusiastic young Catholics you see flocking to the TLM are just a figment of your imagination; our real future lies with the dwindling crowd of geriatric guitarists.
Given all of the above, the rumors that the partisans of the Spirit of Vatican II have prevailed upon the Pope to rescind Summorum Pontificum seem surreal. In a time when church membership has reached a historic low and shows every sign of continuing to drop it seems near suicidal to try to throttle the one area of vibrant growth in the Catholic Church.
Before we hit the panic button, however, there are a couple of things we should bear in mind. First of all, the rumors, well-attested though they may be, are still only rumors until the Vatican actually publishes something. It might be a false alarm; there might be a real document, but one substantially different from what we’ve been hearing; it might be just a trial balloon to see what the reaction to a future move might be.
Or, on the other hand, it might all be true. Suppose the Pope does rescind Summorum Pontificum? Does that mean the TLM goes back underground, and we all need to learn to sing the harmony parts to “On Eagles Wings”?
The Battle of the Bulge
By no means. If the ideologues couldn’t crush the Traditional Mass fifty years ago when they were young, vigorous, and riding the crest of the Vatican II wave, they’re not going to do it now. Their moment has passed. This is their Battle of the Bulge, the last dying gasp of an already defeated and all but dead power. The sensus fidelium, the “sense of the faithful,” which never demanded the diminished liturgy of the 1970 missal in the first place, is now actively against them.
I’m not saying the Battle of the Bulge was a joke, by the way: the Americans suffered an additional 90,000 casualties, the Germans a similar number, and it probably delayed the end of World War II in Europe by one to two months. But it was futile, doomed to fail. If in fact the expected blow against the TLM comes, there will be bad consequences, and spiritual casualties, but like all worldly enterprises, it will eventually fail and pass away.
. . . now for a little while you may have to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold which though perishable is tested by fire, may redound to praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 1:6-7)
The most fervent Catholics are the ones most attracted to more traditional expressions of liturgy, including the Traditional Latin Mass. As we see Joseph Ratzinger’s prediction of a smaller but more committed Church become more of a reality, it’ pretty clear where the core of that future Church is coming from. The Traditional Mass is not going away.
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was probably the most important composer in the transition from Renaissance Polyphony to Baroque. This beautiful piece from his Vespers composition, Vespro della Beata Vergine (1610), is a musical setting for Psalm 127 (sometimes listed as Psalm 126).
This particular psalm (printed in full below the music video) has always resonated with me. It is fairly short (four stanzas), but beautifully reminds us of our dependence on God and his providential care. The psalm opens with the image of house construction: “Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” (Ps 127:1) The psalmist then presents a series of images illustrating how useless our efforts are without God’s help:
Unless the LORD watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.(Ps 127:1-2)
What an eloquent reminder that it is only through Grace that our efforts bear fruit!
We see a shift of focus in the last half of Psalm 127: instead of building a house, here we are building our “house”, that is, our family, again only through the Grace of God: “Lo, sons are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward.” (Ps 127:3) Here, too, God is the real author; and our children are His Providence in tangible form: both gift and blessing, which is to say their source is God, and that’s a good thing. And not good in only a spiritual sense:
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the sons of one’s youth.
Happy is the man
who has his quiver full of them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.(Ps 127:5)
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the sons of one’s youth. -Psalm 127:4
You can’t ask for images more down-to-earth than these: our sons are like weapons, they’ll back us up when we face our enemies . . . and all through the generosity of the Lord.
It will come as no surprise that the idea of our progeny as gift and blessing is not as common as it once was. More than forty years ago, in his introduction to Pope John Paul I’s Illustrissimi, John Cardinal Wright wrote:
The present almost pathological lack of joy shows up in every vocation and in every area of life. There already exist among us people who rejoice as little in the coming of children as once used to do only some of our neo-pagan neighbors. Among descendents of people who, only yesterday, spoke of the coming of a baby as a “blessed event,” maternity is no longer thought joyful.
That train has gone much further down the track since 1979, so that now even a recent President of the United States is on record as having remarked disapprovingly on young women being “punished with a baby”.
We need to speak out, of course, against this anti-child attitude, the anti-family ethos and what Pope John Paul II called the Culture of Death. But we also need to remember, as Cardinal Wright points out, that our message is at root a message of Joy. Our children, and children in general (sadly, not all who wish to have their quivers filled in this way are granted that grace) are “a heritage from the LORD,the fruit of the womb a reward.”. We need to say it often, and live it publicly, and always give thanks to God for building up our house.
The clip below features a perfomance by The Green Mountain Project on January 3, 2013 at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York City.
Featured image top of page: “The Tower of Babel” by Pieter Breugel the Elder, 1563
PSALM 127
Unless the LORD builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the LORD watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.
Lo, sons are a heritage from the LORD,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the sons of one’s youth.
Happy is the man
who has his quiver full of them!
He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.
It’s often the way that a well-regarded artist falls out of fashion and, despite the worthiness of his work, is forgotten by subsequent generations. This fate can befall even truly great artists: The 16th century poet John Donne was mostly unknown until rediscovered by another poet, T.S. Eliot, in the 20th century; Johann Sebastian Bach was largely forgotten for a century until his music was revived by composer Felix Mendelssohn in the 1820’s.
Antonio Salieri, by Joseph Willibrord Mähler, 1815
Not every forgotten artist has an Eliot or a Mendelssohn come to his rescue . . . although sometimes redemption comes from an unexpected direction. Consider the case of Antonio Salieri: had he not been cruelly libeled four decades ago by Peter Shaffer in the play & film Amadeus, in which he was portrayed as the murderer of Wolfgang Mozart, it is quite possible that his music would not be performed at all (incidentally, Shaffer did no favors to the memory of Mozart either, who was the purported protagonist of his story). The real story is that, although Mozart distrusted Salieri as an obstacle to his career when he first arrived in Vienna, the two eventually developed a friendly and respectful professional relationship. Salieri, in fact, responded very favorably to Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, and in his final letter Mozart mentions taking Salieri to a musical performance in his own carriage. Needless to say, Salieri did not murder Mozart (nor anyone else that we know of). The truth is that, while Salieri was no Mozart, he was a good and well-respected composer in his time, and a much sought-after teacher (among his pupils were Mozart’s own son Franz Xaver, as well as Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, and Ludwig Von Beethoven). The lovely piece below is the “Gloria” from Salieri’s Mass in B Flat, one of his four Masses.
Featured image at top of page: “The Holy Trinity” by Pierre Mignard, 1663-1665
Today, in the traditional liturgical calendar, would be Monday in the Octave of Pentecost. Although the Octave of Pentecost has not been observed in the Ordinary Form of the Mass since 1969 (for more on this liturgical change, with feeling, see HERE and HERE on Fr. Z’s blog), it would be a shame to let so significant a feast pass without a little time for reflection. In that spirit, our Music Monday selection for today is the Pentecost Sequence, Veni Sancte Spiritus, which has been sung during the Mass every year on this Holy Day for the past millennium (give or take a few years).
Let me also take a brief minute to explain a little bit about the sequences (sequentiae in Latin) that we occasionally hear at Mass. The origins of the sequence can be traced back to the 9th century. The sequence began as an elaboration on the alleluia verse before the Gospel reading; the name comes from the Latin verb sequor, “follow”, because it follows the scripture verse. In sequences the melody usually changes from one stanza to the next, as opposed to ordinary hymns where the same melody repeats.
Sequences became very popular in the first half of the second millennium of the Church, until there were literally hundreds that you might hear at Mass. The Church did some drastic trimming in 1570 and limited the number of sequences at Mass to four: Victimae Paschali Laudeson Easter Sunday; Veni, Sancte Spiritus on Pentecost Sunday (at that only at the Mass during the Day); Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem on the Feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi), and Dies Irae at Requiem Masses. To these four Pope Benedict XIII in 1727 added the Stabat Mater Dolorosa for the Feast of the Seven Sorrows of Mary. A further pruning in 1969 left only two (at least in Ordinary Form Masses), the Easter and Pentecost sequences.
The video below features The Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. The artwork is the second “Pentecost” painting by Fray Juan Bautista Maíno; I used his first painting in last week’s video of Palestrina’s “Veni Creator Spiritus”.
The words of today’s musical selection, the Pentecost Sequence “Veni Sancte Spiritus”, can be found underneath the video.
Video: Veni Sancte Spiritus, sung by the Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos
Artwork: “Pentecost” by Juan Bautista Maíno (1615-1620)
VENI, Sancte Spiritus, et emitte caelitus lucis tuae radium.
COME, Holy Ghost, send down those beams, which sweetly flow in silent streams from Thy bright throne above.
Veni, pater pauperum, veni, dator munerum veni, lumen cordium.
O come, Thou Father of the poor; O come, Thou source of all our store, come, fill our hearts with love.
We are now in the last week of the Easter Season. Christ has ascended to Heaven, and we are awaiting the coming the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. In anticipation of that ancient feast, often called the Birthday of the Church, our Music Monday selection is Palestrina’s “Veni Creator Spiritus.”
The Latin Hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus” itself dates back to the first millennium of the Church, and was and had traditionally been sung in Gregorian Chant. Palestrina has the tenors sing the traditional Gregorian Chant melody and composes parts for the other voices which he weaves around them to form a shimmering musical tapestry.
I chose the painting “The Pentecost”, by Fray Juan Bautista Maíno, to complement Palestrina’s beautiful music. This is actually the first of two famous paintings of Pentecost by this artist. Maíno created this one as part of a series decorating the altarpiece of the monastery Church of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo, Spain, which he worked on between 1612-1614. Fun fact: during the course of the project he became a monk in the monastery. I like the way the artist isn’t deterred by the problem of fitting a large number of figures into the narrow space dictated by the dimensions of the altarpiece. The Blessed Mother, Mary Magdalene, and the Apostles are densely crowded at the bottom of the composition, but the artist takes pains to make each face distinct: we get a sense of the individual personality of each. The contrast between the mass of people below and the lone dove representing the Holy Spirit above with his light shining on the upturned faces heightens the dramatic feeling of the piece. In the video I try to capture the vertical space in the piece by slowly panning up the painting.
Finally, I have posted the Latin text of the traditional hymn, along with an English translation, beneath the clip.
1. Veni Creator Spiritus, Mentes tuorum visita Imple superna gratia, Quae tu creasti, pectora.
2. Qui diceris Paraclitus, Altissimi donum Dei Fons vivus, ignis, caritas, Et spiritalis unctio.
3. Tu septiformis munere, Digitus Paternae dexterae Tu rite promissum Patris, Sermone ditans guttura.
