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polyphonia: better than the fat of rams
May. 8th, 2007 07:38 amfpbAnd Samuel said, Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.
Catholic traditionalists are notoriously vocal creatures, and as such are rather overrepresented among bloggers. To hear some bloggers, there is nothing wrong with the Church that could not be resolved by the abolition of the modern Roman missal and the return to Latin and the Tridentine Mass.
They have a certain amount of justification. The (comparatively) new Roman ritual was brought in in a way that was both aggressive and poorly executed. Ecumenical Councils of the Church are as a rule either preceded or followed, or both, by periods of instability, reckless experimentation, and schism. To people who knew church history, the turmoil that followed the Second Vatican Council would have been neither unexpected nor surprising; but the fact is that it took place in a period in which the intoxication of historicism, the notion that the world was changing in every way and that change was good in itself, was at its height. Even among educated clergymen, who should have understood something of church history, the mania for change had taken hold. And so the new ritual was introduced in the sixties in a sudden, bewildering way, accompanied with a virtually complete prohibition of the previous form of Mass which seemed to tell the faithful that the way in which they and their fathers had prayed and received the Eucharist was illegitimate and inferior. It was taken as obligatory to translate the Mass in the vernacular (although the Council had ordered the exact opposite) and the translations were frequently inadequate. The English version was particularly bad. And since then, even though successive Popes have tried to encourage the use of the old rite, a great many Bishops have as good as forbidden it in their dioceses.
In truth, though, the issue has been blown far beyond its real value. It is not only the case that it has attracted all the victims of that particular pathology, the dreamers of golden ages that never existed - people who are unfortunately drawn to the Catholic Church in any case, because of its enormous and resonant antiquity; worse, it has become the focus of a peculiarly subversive rhetoric whose worst excesses are easily comparable to those of the late unlamented Marcel Lefebvre. Natural malcontents identify the crazed abuse of the ritual carried out - especially in the Americas - by foolish ecclesiastics, with the ritual itself; while it should be clear that those who cut and paste the Mass according to their whim, introduce "liturgical dancers", ordinary bread instead of unleavened hosts, and so on and so forth, are acting not according to the new ritual, but against it. The truth is that these people would never be satisfied anywhere; I debated them online, and I think I can say that their problem has no solution. And certainly not that of changing the Liturgy. They would soon be as discontented with the Tridentine Rite as they are with the current one.
It goes without saying that such people reinforce the very resistance they want to break down. They are, in effect, the mirror image of the very modernist zealots who, entrenched in the diocesan bureaucracy, make it difficult or impossible to celebrate one Tridentine Mass anywhere. And the conflict has become, on both sides, unbelievably bitter.
Now, the rumour has spread - don't ask me how or why - that, in the absence of progress at a diocesan level, Pope Benedict is to issue a motu proprio - an edict - ordering the free celebration of the Tridentine Mass in more or less any parish that wishes to do so, in despite of the will of the local Bishop.
This is a strange story on the face of it. The Vatican takes the role of Bishops very seriously; each of them is the successor of the Apostles in his own diocese, and it is only in rare and serious cases that the Vatican interferes even with the worst-managed dioceses. (The Apostles, after all, included Judas.) Such a step can only mean that the Pope is exasperated with mass episcopal resistance to the old ritual; and that he regards the matter as important enough to risk a conflict within the Church.
So there would be reasons to be careful even of the best authenticated rumours. The Vatican is a place of rumours, eighty per cent of which never come true; and this one is unlikelier than many. (Though not than those which Ruth Gledhill of the Times insists on circulating!) However, the bloggers and the Press have all shown all the prudence of a lemming on drugs. For months now, the motu proprio has been confidently predicted within a week or two, and the continuous disappointment has never stopped either the fertility or the confidence of the predictions.
Now if I were the Pope, and if I were meditating such a grave step as an edict depriving the Bishops of their power to decide on a serious matter, I think this attitude would have made me stop and think even further. The disrespect for the modern ritual, which is after all a ritual of celebration of the Mass mandated by the Church of Rome, show a spirit which may be highly contemporary and up-to-date, but is not very Catholic. To be Catholic means basically to accept the teachings of 2000 years, even where you do not necessarily understand their point or even agree with them. And the obsession with the Tridentine Mass shows three ugly features: a focus on the inessential, a tendency to believe historical myths, and a tendency to make all faults into one. For instance, I have lost count of the number of people who, without having any experience of Pope Paul VI's pontificate, treat him as a heretic for imposing the change - forgetting the heroic struggle fought by that unhappy man, almost alone, against the world, the flesh and the Devil, in the matter of sexual ethics and abortion, from Humanae Vitae (1968) to the day of his death. When one considers the desolate solitude in which his defence of Church teachings placed him, and the incredible degree of hatred and vilification to which he was exposed, I very much doubt whether a single one of our heroic traditionalists would have the guts and endurance to stand it. As for failing to distinguish between different faults, Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles is by far the worst offender in liturgical matters; so a certain kind of people are astonished when he fearlessly preaches against abortion. Because of course, if you promote bad liturgy, you must also be a coward in other matters, right? Wrong. And just as a man may be a rotten liturgist but still loyal to the truth in other matters, so, conversely, even if every last liturgical abuse were suppressed, faults without number would still be present in the Church. As for focussing on the inessential, some people speak as though the poverty of the new Mass' English translation did anything to negate its sacredness. But the Lord never said: take and have an impressive aesthetic experience; He said, take, eat, this is My Body. Tell me, what is so hard to understand about "Take, eat; this is My Body" and "Take, drink: This is My Blood" - the words of Consecration throughout the world?
Don't get me wrong. I would love to see the Tridentine rite back. Indeed, I love to see a variety of rites throughout the Church, and I would like to see even more - such as an Anglican Rite preserving as much of the beautiful langauge of the Book of Common Prayer as can be used without heresy. I think it is wonderful that, as a Catholic, you can go to a Byzantine parish and see the famous ritual of St.John Chrisostomos; or to a Syrian parish; and that in all of these a valid offering is given. But the modern Mass, for all its faults, is a true Mass, mandated by the authority to which we Catholics must, in matters of faith and morality, defer. The story says that King Saul thought he had good reason for ignoring the order of the Lord; and, what is more, he was a King, crowned by God Himself - which is more than we can say for any of us. And yet, Samuel said, Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.
Catholic traditionalists are notoriously vocal creatures, and as such are rather overrepresented among bloggers. To hear some bloggers, there is nothing wrong with the Church that could not be resolved by the abolition of the modern Roman missal and the return to Latin and the Tridentine Mass.
They have a certain amount of justification. The (comparatively) new Roman ritual was brought in in a way that was both aggressive and poorly executed. Ecumenical Councils of the Church are as a rule either preceded or followed, or both, by periods of instability, reckless experimentation, and schism. To people who knew church history, the turmoil that followed the Second Vatican Council would have been neither unexpected nor surprising; but the fact is that it took place in a period in which the intoxication of historicism, the notion that the world was changing in every way and that change was good in itself, was at its height. Even among educated clergymen, who should have understood something of church history, the mania for change had taken hold. And so the new ritual was introduced in the sixties in a sudden, bewildering way, accompanied with a virtually complete prohibition of the previous form of Mass which seemed to tell the faithful that the way in which they and their fathers had prayed and received the Eucharist was illegitimate and inferior. It was taken as obligatory to translate the Mass in the vernacular (although the Council had ordered the exact opposite) and the translations were frequently inadequate. The English version was particularly bad. And since then, even though successive Popes have tried to encourage the use of the old rite, a great many Bishops have as good as forbidden it in their dioceses.
In truth, though, the issue has been blown far beyond its real value. It is not only the case that it has attracted all the victims of that particular pathology, the dreamers of golden ages that never existed - people who are unfortunately drawn to the Catholic Church in any case, because of its enormous and resonant antiquity; worse, it has become the focus of a peculiarly subversive rhetoric whose worst excesses are easily comparable to those of the late unlamented Marcel Lefebvre. Natural malcontents identify the crazed abuse of the ritual carried out - especially in the Americas - by foolish ecclesiastics, with the ritual itself; while it should be clear that those who cut and paste the Mass according to their whim, introduce "liturgical dancers", ordinary bread instead of unleavened hosts, and so on and so forth, are acting not according to the new ritual, but against it. The truth is that these people would never be satisfied anywhere; I debated them online, and I think I can say that their problem has no solution. And certainly not that of changing the Liturgy. They would soon be as discontented with the Tridentine Rite as they are with the current one.
It goes without saying that such people reinforce the very resistance they want to break down. They are, in effect, the mirror image of the very modernist zealots who, entrenched in the diocesan bureaucracy, make it difficult or impossible to celebrate one Tridentine Mass anywhere. And the conflict has become, on both sides, unbelievably bitter.
Now, the rumour has spread - don't ask me how or why - that, in the absence of progress at a diocesan level, Pope Benedict is to issue a motu proprio - an edict - ordering the free celebration of the Tridentine Mass in more or less any parish that wishes to do so, in despite of the will of the local Bishop.
This is a strange story on the face of it. The Vatican takes the role of Bishops very seriously; each of them is the successor of the Apostles in his own diocese, and it is only in rare and serious cases that the Vatican interferes even with the worst-managed dioceses. (The Apostles, after all, included Judas.) Such a step can only mean that the Pope is exasperated with mass episcopal resistance to the old ritual; and that he regards the matter as important enough to risk a conflict within the Church.
So there would be reasons to be careful even of the best authenticated rumours. The Vatican is a place of rumours, eighty per cent of which never come true; and this one is unlikelier than many. (Though not than those which Ruth Gledhill of the Times insists on circulating!) However, the bloggers and the Press have all shown all the prudence of a lemming on drugs. For months now, the motu proprio has been confidently predicted within a week or two, and the continuous disappointment has never stopped either the fertility or the confidence of the predictions.
Now if I were the Pope, and if I were meditating such a grave step as an edict depriving the Bishops of their power to decide on a serious matter, I think this attitude would have made me stop and think even further. The disrespect for the modern ritual, which is after all a ritual of celebration of the Mass mandated by the Church of Rome, show a spirit which may be highly contemporary and up-to-date, but is not very Catholic. To be Catholic means basically to accept the teachings of 2000 years, even where you do not necessarily understand their point or even agree with them. And the obsession with the Tridentine Mass shows three ugly features: a focus on the inessential, a tendency to believe historical myths, and a tendency to make all faults into one. For instance, I have lost count of the number of people who, without having any experience of Pope Paul VI's pontificate, treat him as a heretic for imposing the change - forgetting the heroic struggle fought by that unhappy man, almost alone, against the world, the flesh and the Devil, in the matter of sexual ethics and abortion, from Humanae Vitae (1968) to the day of his death. When one considers the desolate solitude in which his defence of Church teachings placed him, and the incredible degree of hatred and vilification to which he was exposed, I very much doubt whether a single one of our heroic traditionalists would have the guts and endurance to stand it. As for failing to distinguish between different faults, Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles is by far the worst offender in liturgical matters; so a certain kind of people are astonished when he fearlessly preaches against abortion. Because of course, if you promote bad liturgy, you must also be a coward in other matters, right? Wrong. And just as a man may be a rotten liturgist but still loyal to the truth in other matters, so, conversely, even if every last liturgical abuse were suppressed, faults without number would still be present in the Church. As for focussing on the inessential, some people speak as though the poverty of the new Mass' English translation did anything to negate its sacredness. But the Lord never said: take and have an impressive aesthetic experience; He said, take, eat, this is My Body. Tell me, what is so hard to understand about "Take, eat; this is My Body" and "Take, drink: This is My Blood" - the words of Consecration throughout the world?
Don't get me wrong. I would love to see the Tridentine rite back. Indeed, I love to see a variety of rites throughout the Church, and I would like to see even more - such as an Anglican Rite preserving as much of the beautiful langauge of the Book of Common Prayer as can be used without heresy. I think it is wonderful that, as a Catholic, you can go to a Byzantine parish and see the famous ritual of St.John Chrisostomos; or to a Syrian parish; and that in all of these a valid offering is given. But the modern Mass, for all its faults, is a true Mass, mandated by the authority to which we Catholics must, in matters of faith and morality, defer. The story says that King Saul thought he had good reason for ignoring the order of the Lord; and, what is more, he was a King, crowned by God Himself - which is more than we can say for any of us. And yet, Samuel said, Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-08 01:29 pm (UTC)I'm sorry, but this is the kind of generalisation that gives the traditionalists a bad name because it's so outrageously sweeping that it bears no relationship to reality. Regardless of the possibility of liturgical abuses in the NO (and, incidentally, why does everyone seem to be so certain that the Tridentine Mass would be immune to abuses by its very definition?), the fact of liturgical practice which I observe every Sunday here in central Europe is that an NO Mass, even in the vernacular, is an exceedingly reverent one when it's done right. There isn't a shred of folksiness or clubby community focus about the Mass I attend, and I'd defy anyone to point out a congregation anywhere that's more attentive and focused on what's going on up at the altar. The fact that it's a low altar and that people subsequently line up to receive the Eucharist standing and in the hand has nothing to say to anything. I'm sorry, but just assuming a specific position doesn't automatically generate a right or wrong attitude; if the inner attitude isn't there to start with, the outward position is meaningless. Though of course this is a premise that doesn't sit well with the average disgruntled traditionalist blogger (and I'm speaking in general terms here; this is not directed at you personally).
no subject
Date: 2007-05-08 05:31 pm (UTC)Absolutely true. I'm not even Catholic (really shouldn't be jumping in here, should I?), and have worshiped in Protestant services that would doubtless scare or annoy or intimidate many people who are used to older liturgies. I have found both the liturgical service (I attended an Anglican church during university) and the freer forms of worship to be deeply focused on our Lord. Not always, and either can be abused, but as you say--the inner attitude is the most important.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-08 08:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-08 08:44 pm (UTC)I told you I'm not Catholic. Because of that, I don't think I *should* be too serious about this--it's not my place to judge between the traditional and non-traditional services of a denomination to which I do not belong.
I absolutely believe that, as St. Paul says, "everything should be done decently and in order." That doesn't mean that one has to do it the exact same way that a specific order of the Church has done it, necessarily. I don't expect you to agree with me on this, because you do sound like a traditionalist, but I believe that there has to be a place where those who follow Christ understand the difference between obeying Him and His Word and following rules established by men. (As I said, I don't expect you to agree with this; as a Catholic, I understand you have a much broader view of what counts as having been directly communicated to the Church by God.)
no subject
Date: 2007-05-09 09:23 pm (UTC)This is the kind of generalisation that makes anti-traditionalists sound like they live in cloud-cuckoo land. I would totally read an alternative universe novel that gave a plausible account of the last 40 years that ended up with male liturgical bellydance iat a Tridentine, though.
But you know what? Let's all make nice. You extend some charity to us poor suffering Americans and we'll extend the benefit of the doubt to your assertion that this mythical creature, the reverent NO, actually exists. You take some time to reflect on the fact that nothing in our experience would lead us to ever believe that on our own, though, ok?
no subject
Date: 2007-05-10 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-10 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-10 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-09 09:40 pm (UTC)Your description of your church-attending experiences and what I've experienced myself remind me of that famous statement of Flannery O'Conner's that the Protestant churches are full of good people, but the Catholic Church is full of people who accept what She teaches. An NO full of good people can be all the things you say. I'm not a good person. I need the Tridentine.