Rejoice, Jerusalem, and all who love her. Be joyful, all who were in mourning;
exult and be satisfied at her consoling breast. (Introit for the 4th Sunday of Lent)
Our Goal is Almost in Sight
Why rejoice in the middle of Lent? Isn’t Lent a solemn and penitential season? And haven’t we banned Allelu . . . um, I mean the “A Word” until the Easter Vigil? What’s up with Laetare Sunday?
Good question. Yesterday’s mass opened with the introit at the top of the post, which comes from Isaiah 66:10. The first word of the introit in Latin is laetare, “rejoice,” for which reason we have long called the fourth Sunday Laetare Sunday. On this particular Sunday a priest may wear rose colored vestments (which can look suspiciously like pink to those who are not in the know). It does seem out of place in the middle of Lent.
The primary reason for the (admittedly, subdued) theme of rejoicing on the fourth Sunday of Lent is as a reminder of where we’re heading. We have just passed the midpoint of the penitential season. The Church is reminding us that our goal, the joy of the Resurrection at Easter, is almost in sight. Don’t lose hope!
A Distant Glimpse of Heaven
As always, we can find other levels of meaning. We can look at Lent, for instance, as representing our time of exile in this world. Here we “dwell in the world, yet are not of the world,” as the Letter to Diognetus puts it. The joy-tinged reminder of our goal that we encounter on Laetare Sunday is like the promise of Hope that we find in the Revelation of Jesus Christ. The flash of rose against somber purple is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). It’s a distant glimpse of Heaven amidst the gloom of our fallen world.
I chose today’s musical selection with that idea In mind. This is a little unlike my usual music posts. Ok, it’s a lotunlike my usual music posts. A gospel song with banjo, guitars, and mandolin is a clear contrast to the usual classical pieces. Kind of like the difference between bright rose pink and dark purple. In any case, I like the evocative way this song expresses our longing for Resurrection and for the Presence of Jesus as we experience the darkness that surrounds us in this life. Not only that, it really rocks.
Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down
This performance is from the Southern Gospel Revival Series. Jamie Wilson sings lead and plays the banjo. Courtney Patton, Drew Kennedy, Ben Hester, Marty Durlam, and Jesse Fox are the backing musicians.
Red Mass at the Basilica of St.s Peter and Paul, Lewiston, Maine (https://www.sunjournal.com/)
Christ is Our Model in All Things
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . . (John 1:1,4)
Any truly Christian anthropology needs to start with the Gospel of John, chapter 1. The incorporeal Eternal Word, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, takes on human flesh and lives a material existence in the world. In a similar (albeit limited and human way) we are composed not only of flesh and blood, but also an immaterial soul that God has created to last for eternity, for an immeasurable time after our earthly bodies are gone. In this, as in other things, Christ is our model.
One consequence of our body/soul composition is that we need tangible things to help us grasp abstract or spiritual realities. That’s why Jesus taught with parables, and with images such as the mustard seed, or salt that has lost its savor. For the same reason we use spoken prayers, liturgical gestures, sacred music and art, and a whole range of sacramentals. No doubt Jesus chooses to use Sacraments as a means of bestowing Grace for this reason as well.
Needless to say, it follows that church buildings are also an important means of communicating, in a nonverbal and non rational way, the truths of the faith. I touched on this idea in last year’s piece, “Has Tradition become a Dirty Word?” I’m returning today to an article I published a number of years ago. I discuss these issues in the context of a particular church, the beautiful Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston, Maine.
The Basilica: a Beacon on a Hill
Basilica of St.s Peter and Paul, Lewiston, Maine (ladphotography.com)
Many a visitor to the old textile city of Lewiston, Maine, experiences surprise when, driving through a run-down neighborhood of shabby old New England triple-decker tenements, he suddenly finds an enormous and beautiful church looming over him. This is the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, formally consecrated in 1938.
Its location is not at all as incongruous as it might at first seem. It was the most natural thing in the world for the inhabitants of those cheap apartment houses to put all their extra money and effort into building the most magnificent church possible. At the time, the parishioners were mostly French Canadian immigrants who had come to Lewiston to work in the dark red-brick mills that lined the Androscoggin River.
And yes, it was those poor laborers, not wealthy benefactors or (Heaven forbid) government grants, that built the Basilica. “Religion is the opiate of the people” is not the least foolish of the foolish things Karl Marx said. Opiates deaden the soul and weigh down the limbs: nobody pushes themselves to the limit to build monuments to those. No, the Faith these humble workers brought with them from Quebec didn’t numb them into acquiescence, it gave them real assurance that they had something worth working toward: admittance to the presence of the living God.
More Than a Building: Enormous Sacramentals
And so naturally it was a Church that they chose as the focus of their devotion. Churches are much more than just buildings. They are enormous sacramentals, consecrated objects that can help connect us to the Grace of a God who is pure Spirit. Churches are iconic representations that teach us at an unconscious level about an ordered Universe with God at the apex . . . or at least they used to be. They are also places closely connected to some of the deepest experiences of our lives, such as baptisms, weddings and funerals. Finally, they are places that gather communities together. Sometimes families and communities build these connections over many generations. That’s why the closing of a church is so much more traumatic than the closing of a movie theater, for instance, or a department store. The local church is, for most people, their concrete connection to transcendent realities.
Current Portland Bishop Robert Deeley (far right) attends a Traditional Latin Mass at the Basilica (https://latinmassme.com/)
The Basilica of Peter and Paul, fortunately, is still going strong. It no longer draws its community, however, mostly from the immediate neighborhood. People have come from miles away to attend Mass in the Extraordinary Form every Sunday since 2008. That’s when then-Bishop Richard Malone designated it as one of two churches (the other being the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland) to host a new Latin Mass Chaplaincy. There is also a Mass in the Ordinary Form celebrated with a reverence that draws worshipers from a wide area, and a French language Mass that is very well attended by French speakers from all over southern Maine. Many other churches, to the great sorrow of parishioners who have been orphaned, have not been so lucky.
The New, New Evangelization
It’s in that connection that this post on Fr. Z’s blog (here), about parishioners in Buffalo who have enlisted the Vatican’s help in their attempts to keep their parish open, first caught my eye. Buffalo Bishop Richard Malone is the same man who, as Bishop of Portland, helped keep the Basilica thriving. Here, he comes off as the Bad Guy of the piece.* As it happens, Bishop Malone also oversaw the closing of many parishes in Maine, a practice he seems to have continued in Buffalo. Unfortunately, that appears to be one of the first lessons they teach in Bishop School these days. In any case, Fr. Z’s post made me wonder. Would it have made a difference if some of those other parishes had thought to appeal to the Pope?
There are bigger questions, of course. Fr. Z asks:
What sort of faith in an effort of “New Evangelization” do we evince if, while chattering about it, we are closing the churches we need to fill in the very places where the “New Evangelization” needs to be pursued?
That’s a good point. Today, all those triple-deckers around the Basilica in Lewiston still overflow with people. The difference is, they are no longer (mostly) people who actually attend the church that dominates their neighborhood. We can say the same of many churches we are decommissioning. The populations around them are (mostly) as large as when the churches boasted full congregations every Sunday. The difference is, they aren’t making up for the shortfall with people from further afield. And, yes, bishops and their staffs around the country should certainly learn to think more like Evangelists and less like Administrators. We lay Catholics, also, (and I include myself) need to do our part. What more we can do to invite all those people on the outside into the Church? If earlier generations with fewer resources but great faith could build the basilicas, could we not at least put enough people in the pews?
*A few years later, sorry to say, Bishop Malone’s tenure in Buffalo ended very badly indeed. Happily, that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.
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.
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.
We live in strange days indeed. The German bishops seem intent on dismantling the Catholic Church in their homeland. Pope Francis sent them a letter two years ago in which he suggested (I think) that they apply the brakes:
The current challenges as well as the answers we give demand a long maturation process and the cooperation of an entire people over years . . . This stimulates the emergence and continuation of processes that build us as God’s people, rather than seeking immediate results with premature and medial consequences that are fleeting because of lack of deepening and maturation or because they do not correspond to the vocation we are given.
As I said, that’s what I think it means: I admit that there are any number of other possible interpretations. The German bishops themselves, for instance, apparently took it to mean “full speed ahead!” Their persistence in what they call “The Synodal Way” has, however, provoked another letter, this time a closely reasoned, scripturally and theologically rich refutation of the abdication of apostolic authority that is taking place in Germany. You can’t explain the situation more succinctly than this:
Yet the authority of the apostles and their successors is not their own. It is a share in the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Truth (see John 14:6). Every successor of the Apostles must resist the temptation to imitate the “senseless prophets who follow[ed] their own spirit” in Ezekiel’s time, promoting their own opinions and ideas (Ezek. 13:3). Every successor of the Apostles must also resist the temptation to imitate the prophets and priests of Jeremiah’s time, who adjusted their teaching according to the preferences of the people (Jer. 5:30–31).
Yet the authority of the apostles and their successors is not their own. It is a share in the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ . . .
“Priest Offering Mass”, Simone Martini, early 14th Century
The only problem is that this letter does not come from Rome, but from Denver, Colorado, where it was promulgated by Archbishop Aquila, who has absolutely no authority over brother bishops across the Atlantic Ocean. The appropriate authority in Rome is instead occupied with rejecting the proffered resignation of Cardinal Marx of Munich, one of the chief perpetrators of The Synodal Way.
Another thing distracting the authorities in Rome from the misbehavior north of the Alps, if we are to believe the rumors, is the urgent need to suppress Pope Benedict XVI’s Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificorum, which freed the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) from restrictions widely imposed in the aftermath of Vatican II.
I intend to discuss the TLM and more traditional expressions of liturgy in greater length soon, but today I’m reposting a revised version of a piece I wrote a few years ago. At the time Cardinal Sarah, then head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, made a strong appeal to bishops and priests to reintroduce the practice of saying the Mass ad orientem (facing the altar). Sadly, his suggestion was quickly squelched. It was a good idea nonetheless (a great idea, really), and in the post below I explain why, with the help of Captain Picard, the Starship Enterprise, and some extraterrestrials from the far side of the galaxy. So, let’s boldly go . . .
Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra
Just about everybody knows something about Star Trek, especially now that there have been half a dozen (?) different television series and who knows how many movies. I’ve made profitable use of Star Trek material in my classroom and on my blogs on many occasions (almost all from the original series and The Next Generation – some other time we can talk about why it’s limited to those two). One of my all-time favorite episodes is “Darmok”, from the 5th season of Star Trek The Next Generation.
In “Darmok” the (mostly human) crew of the starship Enterprise encounters an alien race called Tamarians, with whom humans have previously had several frustratingly unsuccessful attempts at communication. It seems that the Earthling’s Universal Translators (ah, the wonders of science fiction!) are able to discover the meaning of the Tamarians’ words, but can’t figure out how the words combine to express meaning. What is one to make, for instance, of utterances such as “Shaka, when the walls fell”, or “The river Tamarc, in winter”? The aliens seem to be talking in metaphors and allusions drawn from stories known to them and to nobody else.
Troi and Data explain how the Tamarian language works
Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Starship Enterprise experiences the same frustration as his predecessors in his attempts to communicate with the commander of a Tamarian ship, a frustration clearly shared by his alien counterpart. Once it becomes clear that their efforts are going nowhere, the Tamarian captain holds up two daggers and declares “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!”, at which point both he and Picard are transported (more sci-fi wizardry) down to the surface of a planet below. Picard soon learns that the captain is not challenging him to a duel as he at first supposes, but what he does intend, or what he means by his insistent repetition of “Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra!” remains a mystery.
Eventually, after the two captains together encounter a deadly creature (which mortally wounds Picard’s Tamarian counterpart), Picard puts the puzzle together. Darmok and Jalod were two heroes, perhaps rivals or enemies, who together fought a beast on an island called Tanagra, and formed a bond of friendship. The alien captain had hoped that, by putting himself and Picard in a similar situation, they might likewise achieve through shared experience what they couldn’t find through mere words. Understanding too late his counterpart’s intent, Picard is able at least to comfort the dying Tamarian by recounting to him the ancient epic of Gil-Gamesh.
Captain Picard informs the Tamarians of the death of their captain
We Are Formed by Experience
The Tamarians, as is the way with Star Trek aliens, are really humans in disguise (literally, of course, but figuratively as well). In this particular story the creators of the television show have put their finger on something that goes to the very heart of what it is to be human: we are formed by our experiences, not only as individuals but as peoples. The “aliens” they have created here view the world only through the lens of the stories that have been passed down about the history of their people, and in their everyday experiences they consciously relive the experiences of their forebears. Their only way to communicate abstractions is through the concrete: people, places, and events.
Tamarian Captain and Captain Picard
Now, we Earth-dwellers may not look very much like the Children of Tama at first. We have a wealth of language that communicates abstractions and ideas . . . and yet we are more Tamarian than we might appear at first glance. Notice how easily, for example, the name of the Nazi’s hand-picked Norwegian puppet Vidkun Quisling has become the common noun “quisling”, a synonym for “traitor” . . . or how easily we use a metaphorical term such as “puppet”, as I did just now. Often, we quickly forget that the expressions we are using are metaphors at all. I remember for instance during the 1992 presidential campaign in the U.S. when former (and future) California governor Jerry Brown was asked about the “anointed front-runner” Bill Clinton. Brown asked whether he was running for president, or running for pope. Some allusions are even more deeply buried: how many people even know when they use the word “mentor” they are alluding to Homer’s Odyssey, where the goddess Athena, in the guise of a wise old man named Mentor, accompanies Odysseus’s son Telemachus to guide the inexperienced young man on his journey and, to speak metaphorically, “show him the ropes”.
It’s a Mystery to Me
There’s even more going on here than the use of language. The Tamarian captain understands that actions, that experiences, can communicate in ways that words cannot, which is of course as true of human beings as much as it is of fictional extraterrestrials. This is a large part of why so many religions rely on ritual and formal rites: the actions communicate to us much more deeply than mere words, because we are actually living out what they want to convey. In fact, the true meaning of the term “mystery” (from the Greek μυστήριον) is not something unknowable, but something that can only be known experientially, through doing. Traditional Christianity tells us that God uses these mysteries as a means not only of imparting His Grace, but of revealing himself to us. Once we understand that, we can more easily see why μυστήριον translates into Latin as sacramentum, because sacraments involve not only knowing or thinking, but acting.
Most religions rely, to some degree or other, on mystery. At the very core of Christianity we find the Profoundest Mystery, the Supreme Sacrament: The Infinite God become Man in order to experience our humanity, and to invite us, in turn, to share in His Divinity. We live out this mystery concretely when we receive the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, the “Summit and Source of the Christian Life.” While Catholic Christianity includes countless lesser ways of living out spiritual realities as well, such as the other Sacraments, sacramentals, devotions, and so on, the Eucharist, and the Sacrifice of the Mass in which we receive it, is the most important thing we do.
Turning Toward The Lord
Cardinal Robert Sarah, (CNS photo/Paul Haring)
It can be helpful, I think, to bear these considerations in mind when we look at the suggestion made by Cardinal Sarah, head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, that priests start re-introducing the practice of saying the Mass ad orientem, “toward the rising sun”, which is to say facing the altar rather than the congregation. The Cardinal made the suggestion in a talk delivered at a liturgical conference in London a few years ago (full text here). Cardinal Sarah asked his fellow shepherds in the episcopate to support him in this matter, saying:
I very humbly and fraternally would like to appeal also to my brother bishops: please lead your priests and people towards the Lord in this way, particularly at large celebrations in your dioceses and in your cathedral. Please form your seminarians in the reality that we are not called to the priesthood to be at the centre of liturgical worship ourselves, but to lead Christ’s faithful to him as fellow worshippers united in the one same act of adoration.
Implicit in the part of the quote I have put in bold type above is the idea that what we do and what the priest does during the Mass is a part of the message.
I first came across a similar suggestion in regard to ad orientem worship some years ago in an article by Fr. Joseph Fessio called “The Mass of Vatican II”. In his essay Fr. Fessio explains what the documents of Vatican II actually say about the Mass; for instance, that it should remain mostly in Latin, and that Gregorian Chant “should be given pride of place in liturgical services”, and various other directives that appear not to have much influenced the post-conciliar revision of the liturgy. Fr. Fessio points out that one thing that was done does not appear, anywhere, in the Council’s documents, just as it had never been part of the tradition of the Church over the previous 18 centuries: turning the priest at Mass around to face the congregation, rather than having him face the altar, the liturgical East, along with the people he is leading in prayer. In defending the traditional practice Fr. Fessio more explicitly makes some of the same points that Cardinal Sarah does in his London talk:
It’s true that when the priest faces the people for the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, there may be a sense of greater unity as a community. But there is also a danger of the priest being the performer and you being the spectator – precisely what the Council did not want: priest performers and congregational spectators. But there is something more problematic. You can see it, perhaps, by contrasting Mass facing the people with Mass facing East or facing the Lord. I don’t say Mass “with my back to the people” anymore than Patton went through Germany with his “back to the soldiers.” Patton led the Third Army across Germany and they followed him to achieve a goal. The Mass is part of the Pilgrim Church on the way to our goal, our heavenly homeland. This world is not our heavenly homeland. We don’t sit around in a circle and look at each other. We want to look with each other and with the priest towards the rising sun, the rays of grace, where the Son will come again in glory on the clouds.
The Medium is the Message
Marshall McLuhan famously said of television that “the medium is the message”. The same can be said of all media, including sacred media. How we celebrate the Mass sends a message. The symbolic “message” of the ad orientem Mass is clear: that all of us together, priest and people, are making an offering to God; we all face our Lord together. When priest and people face each other, who is offering what to whom? The message seems to be that we are there to see each other, not to turn to Our Lord. The little cartoon to the left (which, I confess, I stole from Fr. Z’s blog) gives a good illustration of the problem. Cardinal Sarah himself recently made the same point in a talk deliveredto the bishops of Sri Lanka,
In recent decades in some countries the Sacred Liturgy has become too anthropocentric; man not Almighty God has often become its focus.
But that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Instead,
In every Catholic liturgy, the Church, made up of both minister and faithful, gives her complete focus – body, heart and mind – to God who is the centre of our lives and the origin of every blessing and grace.
That’s the beauty of the traditional ad orientem celebration of the Mass: we don’t merely read or hear but experience for ourselves the Truth that God is the center of our lives, and we all turn to Him together in our worship .
It’s Greek to Me
Which brings me to one of my few real quibbles with “Darmok”. In the final scene of the episode we see Captain Picard reading a book when his first officer, Commander Riker, enters the room. Riker looks at the book curiously, and says, “Greek, sir?” (did I mention that Captain Picard is the consummate Renaissance man? Starship captain, interstellar warrior, student of Latin and Greek, etc.), which leads to this exchange:
PICARD: Oh, the Homeric Hymns. One of the root metaphors of our own culture.
RIKER: For the next time we encounter the Tamarians?
PICARD: More familiarity with our own mythology might help us to relate to theirs. The Tamarian was willing to risk all of us just for the hope of communication, connection. Now the door is open between our peoples. That commitment meant more to him than his own life. Thank you, Number One.
Now, the Homeric Hymns is not a bad place to start, as far as it goes, but if Picard really wants to get at the “root” of what it is to be human, I have a better suggestion for him, one that goes like this:
There’s something a little unsettling about Palm Sunday. It appears that the same people who welcome Jesus as a victorious king at the beginning of the week are screaming for his death by its end. The liturgy reminds us of this incongruity by putting Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday together (at least in the Ordinary Form; in the Extraordinary Form last Sunday was Passion Sunday). I’ve heard a number of possible explanations for this apparent change in the crowd. I read once (I’m sorry to say I can no longer remember where) that the supporters greeting Jesus with palm fronds and hosannas on Sunday may not have been the same angry mob demanding his crucifixion on Friday. Maybe they were all different people.
There may be some small element of truth to this theory, but I can’t help but think that there must have been a very significant overlap between the two groups. How likely is it that the entire mass of people who were so enthusiastic just a few days earlier would simply stay away from their new king’s trial? I find the more traditional explanation more likely, that a large portion, at least, of the first crowd had soured on the whole Jesus phenomenon over the intervening days.
“Trial of Jesus”, artist unknown, 1545
Which brings us back to the original question: why did so many change their minds? The likeliest thing seems to be that when they found out that Jesus had no intention of being the sort of savior they were looking for, disappointment and disillusionment turned to disgust and hatred. They thought that Jesus was a conquering hero who would free them from the oppression of the foreign Romans; when they discovered that his real aim was to free them from sin, well, no thanks, Jesus.
This explanation rings true, because it fits with human nature: I’ve experienced it in myself, I’ve seen it in other people. The fact is that, very often, we don’t really want to be saved from our sin. We would be happy to have Jesus take on our external hardships for us, to battle “Caesar” out there on our behalf, but we’re all too comfortable with the inner tyrants who hold us bound in a way no emperor can do. How often have we welcomed Christ as our savior, only to turn away when the freedom he offers comes with the admonition “Go, and sin no more” (John 8:11)? But Christ still rides into Jerusalem, receiving acclaim from a crowd that he knows will soon turn against him. He does it because he loves them . . . just as he loves every one of us.
Featured image (top of page):“Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem” Hippolyte Flandrin, (1842-1848)
