The Organic Restoration of the Roman Rite

The Question of the "Traditional" Roman Rite

Do you remember what the Council of Vienne said about anything? No, and no one else does either. The Council of Constance fired all three popes in the 15th century, but its acts were nullified by the following successor of Peter, a pontiff eager to nip any hint of Conciliarism at its bud. In more ancient times, the 382 Council of Constantinople reiterated the Nicene doctrine of Christology and added exposition on the Holy Spirit to the Creed, but the event was disastrous enough to send Gregory Nazianzen to despair.

Councils are strange things, with as many good in history as bad, and enough forgotten out of their lack of enduring relevance. Those who know the history of the Roman rite know that what happened to the Mass and Office in the 20th century had nearly nothing to do with the Second Vatican Council and everything to do with runaway bureaucracies, antiquarians with delusions of piecemealing together an Apostolic liturgy, and an out-of-control papacy. And yet the general justification for the Novus Ordo Missae, the final completion of the liturgical reform, came from the Conciliar constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium (even the Council document's title was about itself!). In the eyes of the ignorant, to discard these mistake is to discard the Council and its legacy, something easy to the student of history but difficult for the Churchmen of Baby Boomer generation.

As Dr. Kwasniewski tightly argues, the integrity of the Roman rite took a major hit throughout the 20th century, especially regarding the Mass. Laymen in the pew may not have noticed much different at Mass after S Pius X's changes other than more green vestments and fewer sanctoral events on sundays, but Mrs. Jones and little Timmy would absolutely start seeing things differ from the time of Pius XII's accession onward. The last typical edition of the old Mass, distinct from the Office, was published by Pius XI in 1939. There is no "1950" or "1954" Missal, just a modified version of the Rattian Missal. The "1965" Missal was simply a further vitiation of the editio typica of 1962.

Ain't nothin' like the real thing

Still, all of these post-1939 Missals have some stain of mangling done out of committee of papal initiative rather than organic change. Is the answer really to go back to 1939? Is that the Roman rite? For the Mass, certainly, but for the Office certainly not.

The point of defining the traditional Roman rite becomes difficult for most traditionalists, even the most learned, at this point. Many would still defend the reforms of Papa Sarto as necessary to correct the Dominical imbalance prior to 1911 and point out that the Office of feasts changed very little aside from the lamentably broken integrity of the Laudate psalms. The Office of Divino Afflatu differs drastically, however, from the old one almost every single day that is not a major feast, especially on days that carry no feast at all. Far from address the imbalance of the kalendar, Papa Sarto mangled the psalter (effectively the same since Gregory the Great split the two Sunday nocturnes into three and moved a few psalms to Prime) while leaving the kalendar laden with Duplex saints.

No one would argue that the Breviary and Mass published by S Pius V do not reflect the Roman tradition. Does anyone wish to return to it? We would now be in the Octave of Saint Lawrence and observe him three more times, including the Octave day with its unique Mass, this week. In the Divino Afflatu schema, he will be commemorated on his Octave day this Saturday and otherwise neglected. Does Saint Lawrence deserve special notoriety when Saint Cecilia and Saint Dominic do not? After the Prince of the Apostles and Doctor of the Gentiles, Holy Lawrence is chief patron of the city of Rome and the older rite of the Roman Church reflects this relationship. In 1962 he will not be mentioned again, outside the Canon, until next August 9th.

None are clamoring, however, to return to the medieval rite of S Pius V and skip 450 years of canonizations. The Tridentine kalendar not only lacks ancient saints like Ss. Joachim and Anne, but also enduring Counter-Reformation saints like Ignatius of Loyola, Philip Neri, and Francis de Sales. A more recent edition of the Roman books prior to Pius X sound appealing to those who would like to observe S Thomas Villanova on a Sunday next month, but to most the merits of a more recent edition would be offset by the same problems which prompted the "solution" of Divino Afflatu in the first place.

On potential and un-discussed solution would be to petition for a new and restored edition of the traditional Missal and Breviary, restoring the Tridentine lectionary, sacramentary, psalters, lessons, antiphons, kalendar, and Ordo Missae with a massaged cycle for the saints. John Rotondi experimented for a few years using his "Current Tridentine Ordo", something similar to what myself and others do. It is effectively an approach that begins with the Tridentine books and adds the enduring post-Trent canonizations as Simples or Doubles depending on their gravity. In practice, almost every saint canonized after Trent was given a Double feast which could replace the Sunday Office (and even if it did not, it "eased" the onus of the ferial Office). This option is certainly far more attractive that trying to go back to an arbitrary date from when my grandparents were younger than I am now.

Is There a Path to Restoration?

source: New York Times

This approach does have its obvious short-comings. Ecclesia Dei was more accommodating in recent years than in the past, authorizing the old Holy Week and even approving diocesan ordinations in the old rite for certain conditions. Perhaps its successor body could be trusted for such an undertaking with reverent consultants, but the more interest the project gains the more [ambitious] hands will find a way into it. Also, a new edition of the old rite would not be a republication of the Roman Missal from an older form, but an alternative, "extraordinary" version of the modern form. While a minor consideration, it would continue the old rite's current legal status as a curio.

On April 15 this year, we watched in horror as Notre Dame de Paris burned into a scorched stone shell. A cathedral which, like so many from that era, took centuries to build burned within hours. Fittingly, many of those cathedrals which took hundreds of years to build succeeded smaller structures which burned to the ground. Like the Roman rite, that which took saints and centuries to build was demolished by modernity and tactlessness within the blink of an eye. President Macron immediately vowed to rebuild the structure within five years, but more realistic minds know that a thorough and proper restoration is a protracted undertaking, much to the chagrin or modern and myopic impertinence. We may want to see Notre Dame whole today, but those who built it were content to wait centuries for their work to come to perfection.

Is this not the story of the Roman rite today? A pope could order a nominal restoration or Ecclesia Dei's successor body in the CDF could issue an updated Missal, but the natural process of maturing the liturgy under the aegis of the Holy Spirit would be neglected. We enjoyed centuries of "organic development", a phrase which sparked a cottage industry of wordsmiths eager to get in their two cents on the Roman rite. Instead, let us have organic restoration.

The process is already underway. The sedevacantist associations of the pre-1962 books have faded in favor of a longer view, a situation possibly eased by the likelihood that this pope is less interested in active management of the Liturgy than his predecessors. Last year saw celebrations of the ancient Holy Week proliferate; one might point out that this followed an experimental permission granted by Ecclesia Dei, but many churches had already been doing the old rite for several years by this time. Also, the last few years, I heard of some churches skipping Saint Joseph the Communist on May 1st.

While outside the envisioned strictures of the "extraordinary form", these developments represent a crystallization of the Roman rite, an effort to rediscover in earnest that which was lost. Sing not Quomodo sedet sola civitas and instead demand allowed, "Give us the Roman rite!"

Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy (BOOK REVIEW)

The world knows Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Does it know Tim Berners-Lee? The world knows "Uncle Joe" Stalin. Does it know Ion Mihai Pacepa? Jobs gave us the iPhone and Zuckerberg some blue website, but Berners-Lee gave us the internet. Stalin took over Eastern Europe and committed genocide, but Pacepa inculcated materialism and jealously into the hearts of academics and undergraduates throughout the West. The real work of changing the world is so often obscured by those who later reap its laudatory recognition.

Similarly, Paul VI is given the credit for the final form of the Roman liturgy which emerged in the late 1960s. Responsibility for the Liturgia Horarum and Novus Ordo Missae do inevitably fall upon Giovanni Bautista Montini, who signed his regnal name under the decrees promulgating their uses, but the creation of these rites belongs to the less known and more obscure Annibale Bugnini.

We know the name Bugnini and we know the product of his work. What we do not know is the man and his life. We do not know how the man who changed how we pray actually prayed himself. We do not know how the man who influenced how we related to God himself related to God. We do now know how the man who wrote the liturgy himself understood the liturgy. Yves Chiron's Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy does not answer all of these questions, but it does open a substantial aperture into the life and decisions of a man whose traces remain in the trace of every western Christian.

The Author

Yves Chiron is a French essayist and historian who has written extensively on the history of the modern papacy, the saints, and the contemporary state of the Church. A traditionalist, but a staid one, a Francophonic correspondent likened him to a "more intellectual version of Michael Davies". Not many of Chiron's works have made it into English, but Annibale does reflect an objective approach to the sensitive subject matter, an interest in connecting the facts, and a respectable refrain from voicing an opinion until the end of the work.

The Book

Annibale Bugnini was born near Orvieto to a sharecropper and his wife. The fifth of seven children, Annibale came from a pious family that attended the great feasts of the Church and made an annual pilgrimage to Santa Maria de Scopulis during the Paschal octave. Half the children went into the religious life, Annibale himself into the Vincentians. 

Chiron follows his subject through his religious studies in Sienna and his initial interest in liturgy. He loved the major feasts with tremendous enthusiasm and would readily put on a cassock in the sacristy of any church if given the chance to introire ad altare Dei. Liturgy, Chiron suggests, was an enthusiasm for Bugnini. His real interest was in managing people, a skill which would inform his life's work much more than his expertise. A student in Sienna, he wrote his dissertation on the role of committees during the Council of Trent. 

After ordination to the priesthood, Bugnini made two pivotal moves which would determine the direction of his ecclesiastical career. First, he accepted the directorship of a failing liturgical journal called Ephemerides Liturgicae, which had fallen to 96 subscribers; under Bugnini's niche interest in "pastoral liturgy", readership increased into the thousands. The other major step was Bugnini's first and only pastoral experience as a weekend chaplain in a poor Roman suburb [presumably] celebrating low Mass for the locals. Here, he nursed his "pastoral" angle on the liturgy by having a "reader" hold up large cardboard signs which commented on the Mass or translated the priest's words into Italian and which prompted the congregation to reply in Italian. Something new was in the mix.

We then follow the aspiring liturgist to the Le Thieulin conference in 1946, a gathering of like minded promoters of the Liturgical Movement and all its aspirations. Here Bugnini met Dom Beauduin, Yves Congar OP, and the progressive Georges Chevrot. The mutual meeting effected the formation of the Centro di Azione Liturgica, which gave this particular brand of the Liturgical Movement its form and Carlo Braga his first job. 

Bugnini played his modest part in the Pian reforms to Holy Week, in which he was a passive secretary more than an active participant. After the election of John XXIII and the calling for an ecumenical council, Bugnini was appointed secretary for the new commission charged with drafting the Conciliar agenda and documents regarding the liturgy. Here emerged what the author astutely denominates the "Bugnini method." 

Normally, a secretary functions as a minute-taker, an envoy for someone in greater authority, and a delegated staffer. Bugnini employed his talents for bureaucracy and used his unique position to create various factions within the preparatory commission, isolate them, and then dictate their agenda to them. He created thirteen subcommissions, each dedicated to a particular function such as vernacular, sacred music, concelebration, the Office, and more. No one subcommission could influence the work of another subcommission nor consult them. Everything had to be done through Father Bugnini. 

In the preparatory commission, Bugnini set the agenda for each commission and by putting hitherto unconsidered matters on the table, he moved what political scientists call the "Overton window" such that some movement on these issues was inevitable. Wary of backlash, Bugnini instructed members of the subcommissions drafting sections of what would be called Sacrosanctum Concilium not to be too forward in their views on the vernacular, concelebration, or the extent to which they desired to reform the entire liturgy:

"It would be most inconvenient for the articles of our Constitution to be rejected by the Central Commission or by the Council itself. That is why we must tread carefully and discreetly. Carefully, so that proposals be made in an acceptable manner (modo acceptabile), or, in my opinion, formulated in such a way that much is said without seeming to say anything: let many things be said in embryo (in nuce) and in this way let the door remain open to legitimate and possible postconciliar deductions and applications; let nothing be said that suggests excessive novelty and might invalidate all the rest, even what is straightforward and harmless (ingenua et innocentia). We must proceed discreetly. Not everything is to be asked or demanded from the Council—but the essentials, the fundamental principles [are]." 

In 1962, Bugnini was informed that Ferdinando Antonelli OFM would be named head of the Conciliar commission on the liturgy. Bugnini, in a risible fit of extraordinary self-entitlement one usually only sees in college sororities, wrote everyone he knew asking for the job, citing his "bitterness" and the harm done to his reputation. At the same time he was fired from his job teaching at the Lateran University. He appealed to Pope John, who either willed his dismissal or consented to it.

Bugnini's double edged sword, Sacrosanctum Concilium, passed muster in Saint Peter's Basilica during Vatican II; even Archbishop Lefebvre voted for it (although bishops were hardly given the time to read the documents). Now Giovanni Bautista Montini was Pope Paul VI and he restored Bugnini to his secretariat on the Conciliar commission. What is most impressive, and new, in Chiron's research is that he has uncovered Bugnini's takeback of control of the reform project. The Consilium, under the nominal leadership of Cardinal Lercaro, was to be dissolved and the reforms to the Mass and Office would descend upon Cardinal Larraona and his Congregation for Sacred Rites. The Consilium managed to appoint itself reformer of the liturgy.

From here, we are familiar with the history. Our author does, however, supply us with new and useful tidbits, including the startling reaction of the 1967 Synods of Archbishops who viewed three experimental Novus Ordo Masses in the Sistine chapel. A two thirds majority was needed to approve the new rite and only a third voted against it, a fact already known; what was largely unknown is that another third of bishops, uncomfortable with the new Mass and equally uncomfortable opposing the Pope, voted "present." Pope Paul eventually saw a spoken rendition of the Novus Ordo himself and suggested numerous changes (returning the Kyrie, keeping the triple Agnus Dei, and retaining the Last Gospel). Apparently the new Mass was to have even less of the old Mass than it does now.

One last insight provided by the author is a debasement of the long held rumor that Archbishop Bugnini was a subversive Mason, a member of the Lodge bent on destroying the Church from within. When Paul VI decided to abolish both the Consilium and Congregation for Sacred Rites, he elected to create a new commission to handle the regulation of his new liturgy. Bugnini was the obvious choice, but was, inevitably, not the choice. Why? The author sides with those who think Pope Paul was simply tired of Bugnini, his methods, and his antics.

Montini intended to send Bugnini on a Papal Embassy to Latin America, but Bugnini objected on the grounds of his ignorance of Spanish. Instead he was sent to Tehran. Those who believe him to be a Freemason have their roots in Cardinal Oddi, who started to Tito Casini that he had seen evidence that Bugnini was an affirmed member of the Lodge. Archbishop Lefebvre repeated this rumor in 1975 and began an accusation that lingers until our own day. Ironically, while in his second exile, Bugnini wrote to Paul VI suggesting that Lefebvre and the Seminary of Saint Pius X be given permission to use the old Mass under similar conditions to the "Agatha Christie Indult" in England; he was ignored and Rome's relations with the French missionary deteriorated.

Conclusions

There is much more in Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy that cannot be covered in a simple review: his influence on papal ceremonies, his war against the collegiate churches of Rome in their effort to preserve Gregorian chant, and his very human reactions to the political situation in Iran. 

Chiron has given his reader much food for thought without explicitly telling them what to think. The cover of this book is, fitting, a picture of Msgr. Bugnini against a page for the introductory rites of the Novus Ordo Missal. We can see any number of option greetings, aspersions with lustral water, or a penitential rite. The choice is left with the reader of the Missal. Similarly, conclusions about Bugnini are left with the reader. To the progressive, he will be a noble warrior who patiently dealt with the Baroque liturgical establishment in Rome until he found the moment to spring forward and initiate renewal. To the traditionalist, Bugnini comes across as a double dealing, mealy mouthed ignoramus who spent decades destroying sacred things and replacing them with his own machinations. The moderate and the conservative, however, are so confronted with facts that they have no where to hide, no where to talk about the misinterpretation of Vatican II or the silvering linings of the reform; either Bugnini was a scoundrel or the agent of reform.

Chiron only departs from his dispassionate facts and gives an opinion on the last page. The opinion is his own, but Josef Ratzinger supplies the words:

"On the other hand, the liturgical reform enacted after Vatican II made 'the liturgy appear to be no longer a living development but the product of erudite work and juridical authority; this has caused us enormous harm'."

Bugnini & Pacelli

"You remember Eugenio, don't you?"

I have spent the last two weeks in a hospital room along side my ailing father, who the other day went to Confession for the first time in many decades. During my time alongside him in his convalescence I was able to start Yves Chiron's Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy, the first genuine biography of Msgr. Bugnini and a book which I hope to review this week or next. For many reasons it is an interesting book, bringing to light many aspects and details of the reform process which are lost in the propaganda narratives on both the conservative and liberal sides of the aisle. Among these details is the liturgical reforms of Pius XII.

We know about the Vatican II preparatory commissions, which included Msgr. Lefebvre and Cardinal Montini; they did not like each other well before 1975. We know about the parliamentary tactics at "the Council." We know about the Consilium and its members. We are inundated with facts about the Vatican II reforms. What we do not know as much about are the Pius XII reforms. We know what they were (common of Popes, three new Holy Saturdays, a new Holy Week, compressed feast ranks, no subdeacon if one wanted, dialogue Masses and much more). We know less about the people and process behind it, or at least we did until now.

Papa Pacelli's first reform was that of the psalter, re-translated from Greek into Latin by Augustin Bea, SJ, whose work was received with the criticism adauget latinitatem, minuit pietatem. Pope Pius held the accuracy of the psalter close to his heart and took the popular clerical disdain for the project, written off as "German pedantry", very personally. Down, but not out, he and Cardinal Salotti decided to convene a commission interested in the "general reform" of the Roman liturgy in 1946. The date is quite crucial because Mediator Dei and the "Pian Commission" followed in successive years. Other than the inversion of St. Prosper's dictum lex orandi, lex credendi, the most pivotal part of the encyclical comes in the pontiff's acknowledgement of organic development as the natural mode of liturgical maturation and then derogating all liturgical authority to the Holy See alone (MD 58). Far from restricting the more radical elements of the Liturgical Movement, the pope was taming them and culling from their number. Ferdinando Antonelli, OFM, a member both of the Consilium and Pius XII's group, would call Mediator Dei a magna carta for the healthy part of the Liturgical Movement.

Unlike the Vatican II preparatory sections and the Consilium, Bugnini spent most of his time on Pius XII's commission as a secretary and observer rather than an administrative leader and visionary. Hired directly by Pope Pius after reading his pastoral articles in his journal, Ephemerides Liturgicae, Bugnini was a conscientious worker who did little in the discussions and work groups. Bugnini, Antonelli, and the rest of the initial study group published a generally forgotten work called Memoria sulla Riforma liturgica, which highlighted a general desire to reform the Martyrology, the Office, the kalendar and festive system, liturgical music, Canon Law, and the Mass itself (over 343 pages). Pius's interest in the Mass is unclear, as the Memoria suggested the Mass itself would not change much, but vernacular would be introduced and the popular manner of participation would forcibly evolve. Organic change by committee.

In 1958, the year of Pacelli's death, the Commission drafted an instruction on the liturgy with a particular focus on sacred music. The document, issued fittingly on September 3rd, defined several levels of "active participation", giving popular singing of the Ordinary chants a nod of approval, but expressing a greater desire for the laity to join in singing the proper chants of the Mass! Aside from being ridiculous musically, the proper chants were a clerical function before the Ordo Romanus I in the year 800, when Latin and proto-Italian were still very similar languages. The document permitted hymns to substitute for the propers when such music might incite "devout feelings".

Perhaps most eye-popping among the Commission's internal reporting are the results of an international survey sent to 400 bishops concerning potential reform of the Breviary. The most popular things demanded were simpler hymns (23%), vernacular (18%), and a single nocturne at Mattins (17%), meaning the vast majority had no interest in these things at all, but were eventually given them in time.

So, what was the Vincentian priest, Annibale Bugnini, doing while Antonelli, Bea, and others were plotting to cut Patristic lessons from Sunday Offices? When Pope Pius declared a Holy Year in 1950 Bugnini saw an opportunity to repeat an experiment he concocted some years earlier in a poor Roman suburb. He attempted to publish a book geared toward pilgrims and their priests called La Nostra Messa, his first attempt at "paraphrasing" the existing Roman Mass. His Vincentian superiors took a look and point blank refused to publish the work, but Bugnini self-published the 36 page pamphlet through the printer of his journal, Ephemerides.

What was La Nostra Messa? Bugnini's "paraphrase" of the Mass, edited by his disciple, a young Carlo Braga, was effectively an instructed narration of the Mass read by a "commentator" or "reader", a role which would reappear in the transitional Mass of 1964-9. The priest would celebrate a spoken Mass quietly with his server while the reader—"a priest, member of Catholic Action, or a woman"—would verbalize descriptions of what was going on during the Mass and suggest certain pious thoughts or prayers people might consider during these moments. During the Lavabo inter innocentes the reader would tell people the priest was washing his hands so he could touch the Body of Christ shortly. This incessant noise would only stop for the consecration; otherwise, he or she would continue to blather through the Roman Canon. Bishop Charriere of Lausanne criticized this dialogue Mass as an imbalance between between the priest and the people, but the damage was done. The Holy Year meant two printings of La Nostra Messa were sold and made their way to parishes with modern-minded priests that year; by 1962, twelve editions of the pamphlet had come off the press, some 1,500,000 copies.

Even five years ago one would occasionally hear that Pius XII's pontificate provided genuine liturgical reform, in contrast to those novelties of Paul VI. Time, scholarship, and continually expanding use of the pre-Vatican II rites have effected one conclusion: it all needs to go. Give us the real Roman Liturgy, please.

The Great Blight

As far back as the 1600s winemakers were trying unsuccessfully to transplant European grape varieties to North America. For reasons unknown at the time these grapes would never grow in American soil, so they settled for cultivating local varieties and occasionally grafting European grapes onto American rootstock.

In the mid-1800s American vines were being transported to France to be grown there, and by the 1860s local vineyards were being obliterated by blight. Vines in the midst of a vineyard turned yellow and red, with the few grapes being produced yielding little good taste. The blight would spread quickly outward, with entire vineyards mysteriously drying up over a few years.

It turned out that the European rootstocks were unable to take root in American soil because of an aggressive species of aphid that European vines had not developed an immunity towards, and the newer transportation by steamboat finally allowed these aphids to survive the journey across the ocean. Once discovered, the reaction was swift but tardy. Insecticides proved slow to work, and many vintners turned in desperation to the aphid-resistant American rootstock.

The Great French Wine Blight was well under way. Over the course of 15 years about 40% of vineyards were affected, the French economy was shaken, workers in the wine industry had their pay cut in half, and many migrated to America. Because wine production dropped so precipitously, the French turned to another source of alcohol from Switzerland to whet their palettes—absinthe.

Pre-Blight wine quickly became a collector's item, and today only a few untouched vines remain. Although mocked as "Americanists" by the diminishing purist population, vintners found success by grafting the local vinifera onto the aphid-resistant American roots. This was dubbed "reconstitution" and hailed as a victory. Still, many claim that the robust flavors of pre-Blight wine were never again reproducible.

The public's taste had been greatly diminished due to their consumption of wormwood, leaving wine at least for a time to the connoisseurs. Wine makers joined the fight against the spread of absinthe, and the green devil was blamed for an increase in violence and general drunkenness. Jean Lanfray, a Swiss farmer, murdered his family in 1905 while presumably under the influence of absinthe. Many countries banned the drink, including Switzerland, France, and the United States. Only the Great War stopped the bans from increasing.

Today Americans can be found patting themselves on the back for saving the French wine industry with our rootstocks, completely forgetting the problem originated with us.

There is more than one way to devastate a vineyard, and sometimes it never recovers.

The Legacy of Benediktuskirche

The recently published book-length interview with the Pope Emeritus, Last Testament: In His Own Words, goes far beyond the opening discussion about his resignation and retirement, also recapitulating the childhood, youth, and unexpectedly dramatic ecclesiastical career of Joseph Ratzinger. Some items from his memoirs and earlier interviews are revisited and clarified, and some controversies—like his falling out with the heretic Hans Küng—are discussed at length. Most interesting is the P. Emeritus’s continued identification as a theological progressive, and his belief that being such was always the right choice.

I do not intend to review the book as a whole, but I will share a few interesting selections from Ratzinger’s final interview. We need to be reminded, I think, of how little of a friend he was and is to the various traditionalist movements in the Church.

After the war, Ratzinger began his studies in Freising with his brother Georg, at a school that had been founded with a monastery by St. Corbinian in AD 716. He speaks of a retreat led there by a certain Professor Angermair:

He was a fresh, new thinker who particularly wanted to take us out of the cramped piety of the nineteenth century, and into the open. You sensed the new mood, and it was a breakthrough for me, so to speak. Accordingly, your curiosity then grows while you’re in university, even if everything wasn’t quite so convincing there. (Ch. 6)

This sense of moving out of a cramped spirituality and theology was a prominent aspect of the 20^th-century Modernists and quasi-Modernists, although in many respects their accusations were true. There was a kind of tunnel vision when it came to theology and spiritual formation, especially as it was disseminated to the laity, and this sense of unjust confinement led contemporary thinkers to be careless when breaking off their shackles.

The topic comes up again when Seewald asks Ratzinger why he has seldom addressed the topic of Hitler and the Third Reich:

Well, the eyes are always looking to the future. And it was not specifically my topic. We had the experience within us, but to reflect further on it historically or philosophically was something I never saw as my task. For me the important thing was to conceive the vision for tomorrow. Where are we today? How will things proceed with the Church? How will things proceed in society? (Ch. 6)

From there the questions proceed deeper into his theological vision, and it is worthwhile to quote him at some length:

Well, I didn’t want to operate only in a stagnant and closed philosophy, but in a philosophy understood as a question—what is man, really?—and particularly to enter into the new, contemporary philosophy. In this sense I was modern and critical…. [I] didn’t simply want to learn and take on a closed system, I also wanted to understand the theological thinkers of the Middle Ages and modernity anew, and to proceed from this. This is where personalism, which was in the air at that time, particularly struck me, and seemed to be the right starting point of both philosophical and theological thought….

We were forward-thinking. We wanted to renew theology from the ground up, and thereby form the Church in newness and vitality. In this respect we were lucky that we lived in a time in which both the youth and liturgical movements had opened up new horizons, new paths. Here we wanted to press forward with the Church, so that, in precisely this way, she would be young again. At that time we all had a certain contempt for the nineteenth century; it was fashionable then. So neo-Gothic and those rather kitschy figures of saints, the narrow, somewhat kitsch piety and over-sentimentality—we wanted to overcome all that. We wanted a new era of piety, which formed itself from the liturgy, its sobriety and its greatness, which drew on the original sources—and was new and contemporary precisely because of this….

As mentioned already, I wanted out of classical Thomism, and Augustine was a helper and guide with this. In this connection it was worthwhile entering into a living conversation with contemporary philosophy. But I’ve certainly never been an existentialist….

I thought: we are young people, we have a point of entry. From this certainty that we are able to build the world anew, I was fearless before great things…. The personal struggle which Augustine expresses really spoke to me. Thomas’s writings were textbooks, by and large, and impersonal somehow….

It [the “Munich School”] was defined by the fact that it was completely biblically oriented, working from Holy Scripture, the Fathers and the liturgy, and it was very ecumenical. The Thomistic-philosophical dimension was missing; maybe that was its real benefit. (Ch. 6)

Neither I nor His Traddiness are great defenders of the Thomistic school, but the hubris of thinking that one can discard what had been a long-proven instructional tool for basic theology and exchange it for something which the beginners themselves were building from the ground up, is obvious. The theological legacy of Thomas of Aquino is no more disposable than the Fathers and Scriptures that the amatores aggiornamento supposedly respected. It is probably true that Thomism was in need of serious reform and correction, but the Summa has always been effective in its original intended use, as a beginner’s guide to theology. That is not something to be lightly dismantled.

(As a sidenote, it is interesting that at the end of this chapter, Ratzinger discusses the novels of Hermann Hesse, especially The Glass Bead Game, which ends with a spiritual-intellectual leader deciding to lay down his responsibilities and retire into a more humble life. I noted the similarities between the action of the novel and the P. Emeritus’s actions in a post last year.)

His thoughts continue as he hikes over the mountains and valleys of memory through his higher education:

In Munich we had of course grown up with a modern philosophy. Certain professors had taken us to pastures new and opened them up for us. I had taken this mood on internally, and tried to perpetuate it according to the possibilities at my disposal….

Only later was there separation between those who rejected the Magisterium and went their own way, and those who said that theology can only be done within the Church. [Meaning the supposedly divergent paths of the progressive school. -J] Then, everyone was still aware that theology obviously has its own freedom and task, that it cannot be completely servile to the Magisterium, but we also knew that theology without the Church would be theology in name only, and would no longer have any meaning. I was considered someone who is young, who opens new doors, treads new paths, so then persons who were just plain critical came to me. (Ch. 7)

He reflects later on many aspects of his experience during the recent Council:

During the period of the Council in Rome, did you sometimes stop for a couple of drinks with someone along the way?

Not as a pair, no, but as part of a small group. Especially in the theological commission. Then we often drank plentifully in Trastevere.

Plentifully?

[The Pope laughs loudly.]…

Which theologians do you actually appreciate the most?

I would still say Lubac and Balthasar….

Which camp did you belong to at that time: the progressives?

Yes, indeed, I would say so. At that time progressive did not mean that you were breaking out of the faith, but that you wanted to understand it better, and more accurately, how it lives from its origins. I was of the opinion then that that was what we all wanted….

You were charged with that [freemasonry]?

[Laughs] Yes, yes, although I really shouldn’t be held in suspicion of being a freemason…. 

Was it a mistake to convoke the Council at all?

No, it was right for sure. One can ask whether it was necessary or not, OK. And from the outset there were people who were against it. But in itself it was a moment in the Church when you were simply waiting on something new, on a renewal, a renewal of the whole…. In that respect the time was simply nigh. (Ch. 8)

Presumptions of inaugurating a new dispensation in the Church was common among mid-20^th century theologians, especially the Germans. The “new wine” apparently flowed freely across the Tiber during the Council, the same place where Fr. Bouyer famously penned the corrected text of Eucharistic Prayer II on a napkin.

It was also in Trastevere, on an outdoor table at a small restaurant in 2004, where I talked at great length with another recent American convert well into the night about the many troubles in the Church. I had barely been Catholic a full year, and already I was growing sickened by the theological and moral disintegration that most of my fellow Catholics were happy to willfully ignore or excuse. It is sad to see that Joseph Ratzinger is still so full of his youthful naïveté that he defends every principle he followed, even while weakly condemning their usual consequences.

The penultimate chapter of the interview, “Shortcomings and Problems,” is a far cry from the example of Ratzinger’s hero St. Augustine, who wrote a series of Retractationes. In here, the P. Emeritus makes a long series of excuses, and casts blame for some events (especially the “Williamson affair”) on others. He claims also that the “gay lobby” problem had been entirely taken care of before his resignation.

In the concluding chapter, he ominously describes the historical import of his papacy:

Do you see yourself as the last Pope of an old era or the first Pope of a new era?

Between the times, I would say. 

As a bridge, a kind of connecting link between the two worlds? 

I don’t belong to the old world any more, but the new world isn’t really here yet.

The new world is still being constructed around us, with the neverending “year” of “mercy” and “humility.” We can only pray that its reforms will be stopped before they are irreversible.

Sts. Benedict and Joseph, pray for us!

Against the Liturgists (alternatively: Why is Everyone So Dumb?)

Before the many changes visited upon the Church of Rome during the Second Vatican Council, the pontifical universities in the Eternal City conducted lectures and oral examinations in the mother tongue of the Latin rite as well as required papers to be written in Latin. For most national colleges, this presented little difficulty for students; most Eastern and Western Europeans were exposed to a variety of languages growing up and possessed the requisite skills to add another, even if difficultly, to their repertoire. Not so for American students, typically of Irish and Italian ethnic origin. After several generations of shaming and intentional integration, third generation Americans never spoke the languages of their grandparents; solidarity during the Second World War finally eviscerated any lingering divides between "WASP" Americans and their barely-white counterparts. Unable to speak either Italian or Latin competently, professors would read questions in Latin off a sheet of paper in front of them with the answers printed below, which the seminarian would politely read upside down back to the instructor.

This would be another quaint example of "Americanism" if the context were not so bleak. American bishops sent their most promising students to the Pontifical North American College—and supposedly still do—for instruction in all things Roman. It may not be the case anymore, but students then were almost explicitly told that they were the next generation of bishops, monsignori, and academics. In Phoenix from the Ashes, HJA Sire perceived that pre-Conciliar education produced numerous orthodox (Garrigou-Lagrange, Fortescue) and dissident (Lubac, Maritain, anyone with a German-ish name) thinkers, while post-Conciliar education has produced none of either. The Church has not managed to lay hands on anyone with a brain, Sire jeers, in six decades (or at least not anyone with a brain and the dare to compromise his security).

The de facto ban on original thought is no where more apparent than in the field of liturgy. The wake of the Liturgical Movement gave rise to many ripples of thought, some good, some bad. Authors across the spectrum visited original texts for the first time since the Tridentine Council and attempted to synthesize their influences to discern the true Roman tradition; if not for an out-of-control papacy the end result may not have been the Mass of Paul VI. Today where are the real liturgists? Even the bad ones? I have never been able to read Scott "Alcuin" Reid with interest. A few FSSP priests have put out generic books on the old Mass. The "liberals" have Anthony Ruff OSB, but he is more a cheerleader for the reform than a creative thinker. Where are the liturgists?

Thus far the only books concerning liturgy written after Vatican II that I wholeheartedly recommend are The Banished Heart and Worship as Revelation. Like the pre-Vatican II liturgical studies, both of these works are primarily surveys of history that draw conclusions rather than conclusions in search of scattered evidence. Perhaps the most interesting feature these books share is that neither was written by a priest or someone purporting to be a professional theologian. Geoffrey Hull is a layman and a linguist specializing in Portuguese, Celtic, and Indonesian dialects. Laurence Hemming is a deacon for a London parish and a philosophy professor specializing in crazy Germans. The perspectives of both men figure greatly in their insight in a way that a full-time cleric might find intimidating. Aidan Kavanagh wrote after "the Council," but belongs to an earlier generation.

Eastern Christendom finds itself similarly bereft of writers after Taft. Alexander Schmemann is interesting and worth reading as a speculative theologian, but he was not a liturgical historian and his ideas do not reflect the Eastern tradition as a whole, especially in calling the Church itself a Sacrament. In English-speaking Eastern Catholicism and Orthodoxy, liturgical research has stagnated into writing commentaries on Schmemann. One correspondent, an Orthodox seminarian knowledgeable in Greek, reduces this unoriginality to sloth; people are too lazy to learn other languages ("Learning Greek is a b****"). A general current of Lutheranism ran through the University of Paris' theology courses in the mid-20th century and modern protestants, looking for a friend in Orthodoxy against Romish ways, will postulate that the Orthodox believe in something akin to Luther's cosubstantiation. They believe no such thing, but the relevant manuals and dogmatic theological works exist only in Greek and no one thus far has bothered to translate it. Similarly, there is a genuine revival in liturgical writings in the Slavic Orthodox churches that no one has bothered and no one will bother translating. As Robert Taft himself said to students of St. Vladimir Seminary in 2009, if you are not learning Russian, you are not reading current liturgical study. His Traddiness enjoys Schmemann, but must all liturgy be footnotes on Schmemann?

Until Western Christianity once again employs the efforts of more than a handful of intelligent men, standards will continue to founder. For a proliferation of polyglots, let us pray to the Lord!

The Pre-Conciliar Church

source: ctu.ed

We spend so much time talking about the “Conciliar Church” that we often forget what the “pre-Conciliar Church” was. Indeed, the Catholic Church has been the “Conciliar Church” since the Council of Jerusalem recounted in the Acts of the Apostles or, at least, since the Nicene Council convoked by Emperor Constantine in 325. The Second Vatican Council was the latest council in the long history of the Church, but not the only. For all intents and purposes, it is the only Council that matters to most modern Latin Churchmen. They, wrongly, see it as the birth of their own incarnation of Catholicism. In this they are wrong. Their variation of Catholicism was born long before the Second Vatican Council and only was brought to full maturity during the 1950s and 1960s. The grapes had long been crushed, the juice bottled, and the product fermented. The Council only opened the cork. What was that process?

Such a question is too intimidating to answer, but hopefully we can get a head start here. It all began, of course, with the Reformation and, later, the French Revolution. We often think of these twin revolts as revolts first against the Church and then against God Himself. The Reformation and French Revolution were these things, but they were also so much more. From the Edict of Milan until 1517, the Church built a distinctly Catholic culture in Europe on the ashes of the Roman legal system and Greek philosophy, baptizing them into herself and allowing them to flourish in a renewed set of political structures. The emergent Catholic Europe was multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-governmental, but united by the faith, a remarkable feature the Greek and various Oriental Churches did not enjoy.

After the Reformation, and especially the French Revolution, there was no longer a Catholic Europe, only a Europe in which the majority of inhabitants were Catholics. The faith was undermined for political reasons. Few large blocks of territory signed onto the Augsburg Confession for reasons of belief. In the various north German states as in Henry VIII’s England, Protestantism offered a chance to break away from the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Spanish politics. In the case of England, the “stripping of the altars” was not so easy and required considerable bloodshed to eventuate. Catholic culture died a heroic death, but it died nonetheless.

A new Catholic culture emerged which separated itself from secular society. This was a culture to which one could belong if one was a Catholic, not necessarily if one were only European. European intellectual thought, particularly in Germanic states and France, began with anti-clerical cynicism, but Spinoza and Voltaire it radicalized into open anti-clericalism, anti-popery, and anti-monarchism. Lockean concepts about freedom, the blank slate man receives at birth, and economics insinuated academia everywhere. America’s revolution encouraged the seeds of France’s revolution. Everywhere the former conduits of Catholic education and intellectual thought were undermined and replaced by the Enlightened. More and more Catholics began to emphasize the Church as a “perfect society,” something akin to St. Augustine’s City of God, which exists on earth, but is beyond earthly criticism. The “perfect society” nearly received explicit expression in the First Vatican Council in the documents Tametsi Deus and Supremi Pastoris. This “perfect society” was not celestial as was St. Augustine’s. It was a society parallel to the secular one, running on even plane with it, never touching it. This perfect society, bereft now of major universities and academic credibility, but still enjoying a place in most royal courts, took the apologetics and theology of the baroque doctors as well as the art of that period and called them its own. This 16^th to early 20^th century synthesis of the baroque political establishment with the privatized Catholic faith would be the irreproachable idea of the Catholic faith that survived until World War I. The perfect society could never question itself, nor its head, the Pope. This escapism was fine while popular, but when it declined, many lapsed. Novelist Umberto Eco lost his faith during university when he discovered, to his shock, that the Church had done wrong during the Spanish Inquisition—semantics about the true nature of the Inquisition aside.

The French Revolution ended a few years and untold thousands of deaths after it had begun, yet its spirit did not subside. Despite the ascendance of the diminutive despot Napoleon, the Revolution would continue to spread. Napoleon himself spread it. He had no interest in the “rights of man” or public use of the guillotine, but he did promote liberation from ancient governments, demonstrated that one could oppose the Church publicly, and inculcated French intellectual culture wherever he held influence in Europe. The 1815 Peace of Paris nominally restored the ancient order after Bonaparte’s defeat at Waterloo, but the damage had been done over the preceding decades. The revolutionary spirit was there to stay.

The perfect society proved ill-equipped to deal with Bonaparte, the revolutionary culture he created, or with shifts in 19^th century academia. A revival in Biblical scholarship in Germany fell early to protestants and disbelievers with linguistic talents who taught that the Gospels were, at best, penned a century or so after Christ. Educated people could no longer take the Scriptures seriously despite complaints from clergy that the first century origin of the Gospels was the Church’s teaching. The beliefs of the perfect society were self-evidently true to believers and required no explanation, only instruction. To those outside the Church, the teachings looked like circular logic.

Another shock to the system was Charles Darwin’s publication of Origin of Species, in which he, perhaps with borrowed material, sought to explain variations in bird beaks in the Galapagos through evolution of creatures. "Mutability" replaced "cause" as the truth of the learned.

The perfect society, as with any subgroup within a larger society, developed what Richard Hofstadter would call “paranoid style” when describing American politics. “Paranoid style” happens when a large minority, convinced of its own value, resorts to conspiracy theories and accusations of wrong doing to explain its own futility. These theories intermingle with the facts, but do not accurately reflect them. In the 19^th century, some Catholics became enamored with what later conspiracy theorists would call the “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy,” which states that the Jews and Freemasons of Europe had united to deceive and destroy the Catholic Church from within; in some variations of this theory, the Freemasons are Satanists who knowingly attempt to invalidate the Sacraments and change fundamental teachings.

As with most examples of Hofstadter’s “paranoid style,” there are facts mixed with fiction. The Jews of Europe did support the various revolutions of 1848, including the revolt against the Pope in Rome. In the next century, Jews would support socialist and communist parties, too. Modern people looking through modern lenses lose sight of why. Prior to Pius IX, Jews were forced to live in a walled ghetto within Rome, a fetid place with limited access to infrastructure and a proclivity to disease. Marriage laws forced more recessive genes which, ironically, raised both the average IQ of European Jews and their susceptibility to certain sicknesses. Jews could hold few good jobs. Among the few lucrative positions Jews could hold was money lending, since Catholics were forbidden to lend money at interest. This had the compounding consequence of making some Jewish families, like the Rothschilds, very wealthy, while making Jewish stereotypes all the more prevalent; no one likes his debt-holder. Jewish people grew tired of their inability to participate in the now-secular society growing throughout Europe. Some progressive politicians, like Pope Pius IX, tried granting rights in moderation and removing the ghetto walls. Pius IX felt betrayed then when the Roman Jews supported the failed revolution and erected a new wall around the Jewish quarter.

Similarly, one faces difficulty in separating Freemasonic facts from Freemasonic fiction. Blaming the Freemasons for what happened in the 1960s, or 1860s, is humanly understandable. How else could the perfect society have collapsed in the years after the Second Vatican Council? A closer look reveals that, from what outsiders can know about them, they may not be all some traditionalists believe them to have been. The Masons are a cellular brotherhood, not a single organization. Fairly independent lodge systems associate with one another, but do not necessarily answer to one overarching figure. This means the Freemasons are united in their vague pseudo-religious beliefs, although not in agenda or organization. The Freemasons in France played a considerable role in the blood bath Revolution. Their evil Italian twins, the Carbonari, aided the revolts of 1820 in Rome, Naples, and Sicily. By contrast, their English and American brethren were quite well behaved. This may have been because England and America were not Catholic countries or because the communitarian character of those joining the lodges in the Anglophonic world differed from the revolutionary character of those joining Continental lodges.

The Freemasons were a force in 18^th and 19^th century politics, organizing revolts and coups in a grassroots fashion, achieving goals through networking and making the right friends. Their goals could be vaguely characterized as progress, fraternity of man, enlightened thought, and liberty. If understood loosely enough, some progressive Churchmen could join the right lodge in good conscience despite condemnations of the Craft by the Apostolic See. Several people over the years even accused Pius IX himself of having joined a lodge during his liberal years as Msgr. Mastai-Ferretti, delegate to Peru. Some lodges and Mason James Marples support this claim, while others like Jesuit Fr. Herbert Thurston denounce it in great detail. While the idea may seem outlandish—and it certainly is—it is not impossible: Mastai-Ferretti was a liberal, the John Paul II of his day, until the 1848 sent him into exile, an exile form which he returned an archconservative. Regardless, the Freemasons’ goals were to spread their secular-progressive ideas. The method of doing this was left to local discretion. Some aimed at infiltrating the State and Church. Others organized revolts. Others attended town hall meetings. And others yet did nothing other than share ideas and operate fraternal functions. To assume a concentrated effort reveals some ignorance of 19^th century European politics and of the Craft itself.

During the latter part of the 19^th century and early part of the 20^th century, the perfect society of the Church found herself shaken by vitiating movements of liberalism and liturgical reform. The liturgical reform movement, the Liturgical Movement, sought to revitalize Catholic life through the liturgy in places ravaged by the preceding century of revolutions and destruction of culture. It also offered an alternative to the Romantic movement, which rejected the excesses of rationalism, but still replaced Revelation with nature, as is evident in 19^th century artwork. This movement was also characterized by an indifference to the clericalism—a reaction to the existing anti-clericalism—of Pius IX’s long reign.

The other movement was the Modernist movement. Modernism was not, contrary to the teaching of Pascendi, the “synthesis of all heresies.” “Modernism” is a term applied too broadly to too many people. Some supposed Modernists, like Adrian Fortescue, were simply good Catholics who did not fit into the perfect society’s mold. Others, like Loisy, were outright apostates. And many others, like Tyrrell and Duchesne, fell somewhere in the murky middle. Pascendi and the anti-Modernist oath given by Papa Sarto forced all non-conformists underground and, effectively, synthesized the various dissidents and disgruntled clerics into one identity, the Modernist. Pascendi was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Modernists stayed out of the spot-light until the coast was clear after the Second World War, bidding their time by studying seemingly benign subjects such as liturgy and coopting those subjects to their cause.

Msgr. Umberto Benigni assumed that the Modernists were an organized clan intent on infiltrating the hierarchy. Benigni organized the Sodalitium Pianium to counter the Modernists. The Sodalitium was a loose network of fifty to one hundred people, mostly laymen, who never spoke to each other. They only answered to a single contact in Rome. The agents would spy on potential Modernists by reading their articles or book, sometimes by opening their mail, and even by looking up their receipts in bookstores. Once a potential Modernist had been confirmed, Benigni would either use the pope’s authority against the person or condemn said Modernist in the press. All this kept the perfect society safe from those assaulting it from the outside.

The more liberal Benedict XV succeeded the to-be-canonized Pius X in 1914 and, after the War to End All Wars, dissolved the Sodalitium, an organization which Pietro Gasparri—Pius XII’s mentor and Pius XI’s first Secretary of State—called “occult.” The perfect society was gone. The Church from Benedict XV onward would live in the world and work with the means available to her.

The Church struggled working within secular politics for the coming decades. The Integrist movement and Action Francaise was met with some measure of success in advocating a Church-friendly right-wing agenda that would be the first breath of fresh air for the French Church in nearly a century and a half. The Cristero movement opposed Calles’ openly secular aims and desire to suppress any public expression of religion. The Church, although effectively disestablished, still possessed enough popularity and prestige to wield political power that would ensure her longevity in Europe. “The faith is Europe and Europe is the faith,” Hillaire Belloc wrote. It was not to be. While Pius XI was writing about the “social reign of Christ the King,” his Secretary of State and Under-Secretary were suppressing the Cristeros and the Action Francaise movements. This did not mean the Church was out of politics, only that the Vatican and the “Rampolla clique” were out of right-wing politics. Newspaper editor turned activist Giorgio Montini’s Popular Party, a center-left Christian democrat faction, enjoyed the patronage of Cardinal Gasparri and Eugenio Pacelli. The Vatican often supported or did not obstruct worker organizations or other types of granges formerly associated with working class collectivism. The Vatican was discreetly pandering to yesterday’s liberal causes while the contemporary forces surged faster towards a new wave of revolutions and political disruptions, namely the rise of Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. The Second World War destroyed the first two of these, leaving the third untouched until the joint efforts of Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II accelerated the Soviet Union’s internal decay. The Second World War not only destroyed Germany, but also the remaining relics of the perfect society incarnation of the Church. The emerging materialist and existentialist Europe would have little use even for the vestiges of its Catholic heritage.

Pius XII’s papacy marked a transition period between the perfect society and the “Conciliar Church.” The perfect society—entered by Baptism and juridically governed in a visible way by the Roman Pontiff—replaced the temporal Catholicism of pre-Revolutionary Europe. Now the Church of the “Mystical Body” would supplant the perfect society. For several centuries now, Catholics in the Latin Church assumed the Church was a self-contained society with its own intellectual and inerrant theological systems, ruled by the Pope. Then, in 1943, Pius XII wrote that he could find no description of the Church to be “more sublime” than “Mystical Body.” The new paradigm of the Church as a mystical union with the person of the Pope was certainly a shock to theologians and a departure from the spirit of Vatican I—Vatican II was not the first Council with a spirit which departed from the letter. The liturgical revolution was revived in 1948 and began in earnest with the new Holy Saturday in 1951 and a new Holy Week as well as radical changes to the calendar in 1955. Progressives looking to foster good relations with other religions or seeking to create new interpretations of older teachings thrived on the lecture circuit and in conferences. Many conservatives were irate that when the Society of Jesus suppressed Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s works the Vatican seemed indifferent. Above all, the Vatican seemed to share in the United States’s post-War optimism about the future. The perfect society and the Europe of ideology were both dead. A renewal was both necessary and inevitable.

At this point, the familiar story begins. Religious forces long simmering under the lid blew the top off the pot between 1962 and 1965. German theologians and ecumenists used their influence in the schema committees and in parliamentary proceedings to interpolate controversial statements at the choke points of several documents. The justification for the long-planned new liturgy is finally given. While those following the Vatican since Pius XI’s reign were hardly surprised, the faithful still operating on the perfect society model were throw into paralysis and, often, disbelief.

The point of this article is to give readers an understanding of the political and social place of the Roman Church and the forces pushing her in the years prior to the Second Vatican Council, not to summarize the Vatican’s politics or the reform movement itself, a loaded topic for another time. If context is key, we must know why so many reform movements arose and why the Council played out the way it did.

Perhaps the mistakes of the Vatican in politics were a felix culpa? The perfect society was going to collapse eventually. Nothing could survive the Second World War intact, not even, as the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 proved, the planet itself. The traditionalist movement originates in the French countryside, a place which had enough Gallican common sense to ignore the problems in Rome and to continue what had been done for centuries. The French traditionalist movement was a strange mix of bedfellows: Ultramontane doctrine, Gallican action, and quasi-Jansenistic moral rigidity. This odd blend ensured some semblance of tradition survived for us today in the mainstream. Perhaps one day we will have them to thank within a smaller, more vibrant Church, one dissolved from concerns about the City of Man and focused narrowly on the City of God.

Who Was Malachi Martin?

Some time ago I acquired the hobby of learning more about early figures in the traditionalist movement (there will be a series on some of the less prominent persons in a month or so). One figure, who I have never been able to understand, is former Jesuit priest Malachi Martin.

Martin studied at Louvain, earned three doctorates, was ordained following the Second World War, had stints at Oxford and Hebrew University, worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and was an adviser to Cardinal Bea (SJ) and Pope Paul VI. At some point during the Second Vatican Council he was laicized by Pope Paul and moved to New York City, where he won the Guggenheim fellowship twice and worked as the Religion Editor for William F. Buckley's journal National Review (he was Mary Ball-Martinez's superior and her opinion of him is more than apparent in her books). In the above video he is interviewed by Buckley on the program Firing Line about his book Jesus Now.

His early post-priesthood books displayed liberal undertones and a more broadly Christian perspective. In the 1980s his work threw the rudder hard right. He championed Marcel Lefebvre and Ultramontanism (yes, both at once) as well as writing a generally reliable exposé on the Society of Jesus called Jesuits. At some point in the late 1980s or early 1990s his books and appeal branched into the world of conspiracy, world domination, and late night talk radio. His Windswept House purported that Lucifer was "enthroned" in St. Peter's Basilica during Vatican II, almost a reverse Sacred Heart enthronement. He delved into the world of Masons, Bugnini, and Cardinal Casaroli—all working to overthrow the Church and create a "new world order."

Most bombastically he claimed to have been a secret priest all along, not laicized, providing Sacraments to the "underground Church" and performing more exorcisms that Fr. Gabriel Amorth (as an aside, Martin did write Hostage to the Devil, which is a summary of five exorcisms performed by other priests). He believed John Paul II was a good pope surrounded by evil people preventing him from following the demands of Fatima. He also believed the Pauline liturgy to be more or less invalid on all counts. As a result of all these disparate things he had a broad audience: truckers and late night radio listeners looking for a good scare story about demonic possession, ordinary Catholics seeking to discuss private devotions or Fatima, and hard line traditionalists who wanted simple explanations for what happened in 1962. Somehow his audience could include a sedevacantist, Art Bell, Richard Williamson, and a man making a FedEx delivery.

All of this elides into one question, who was Malachi Martin? Was he a furtive priest fighting the devil and exposing the "Novus Ordo Church?" Was he a liberal gradually overcome with buyer's remorse? Was he an opportunist who used varying parts of Christianity, especially Catholic traditionalists, as a cash cow? As long as there is YouTube there will be questions about Malachi Martin.

As an aside, his Art Bell interviews are great late night entertainment for those occasions of insomnia. He had a soft, velvet voice and was an excellent conversationalist. Combined with talk of murder, Masons, the Papacy, demonic possession, and American callers the result is the modern version of a campfire ghost story!

Note: the series next month (if I ever finish the series on French rites) will cover some of the less luminous early traditionalists. The goal of the series will be to show what the emerging traditionalist movement looked like prior to the FSSPX's rise to prominence. Nowadays it seems everything is a variation of their position ("indult" traditionalists, the "Hermeneutic of Continuity" traditionalists, sedevacantist traditionalists etc.), yet this was not always the case. With the help of some correspondents who knew these people, I hope to cover:

• Fr. Quintin Montgomery-Wright
• Fr. Ronald Silk
• Mary Ball-Martinez
• Fr. Bryan Houghton
• Anyone else readers can suggest!

Of Impending Canonizations (and one that is not happening)

In a matter of days Pope Francis will canonize two of his many mis-understood 20th century predecessors, declaring them saints fit for universal veneration and examples given their state of life. I generally shy away from blogging about politics—and that is precisely what these canonizations are—but the significance of this event warrants some thoughts.

Why are John XXIII and John Paul II mis-understood? Because modern people think them more important and influential in the modern Church than they really were. In principle, I am entirely indifferent to the canonization of Papa Giovanni. He was elected to do three things: 1) make Pius XII's true successor, Msgr. Montini, a cardinal 2) call Pius XII's Council and 3) die. In some sense he was the first pope since Gregory XVI to live up to expectations! So why has the Roman bureaucracy undertaken effort to canonize John? It is an attempt to canonize a particular narrative and aesthetic of the Second Vatican Council.

When he died on the feast of the Transfiguration in 1978, ABC news reporter Stuart Laurence said  of Pope Montini "Romans never really in fact warmed up to Pope Paul because he was not gregarious and grandfatherly like his predecessor Pope John. John, of course, was loved. Pope Paul was only liked." Pope John represents a kinder, gentler means of looking at the transitional years of the Church than the harsh, turbulent years of Pope Paul. Paul VI's pontificate was more the reality of the transition, with the drop of Mass attendance in America (it plummeted in Europe decades earlier), the fallout over Humanae Vitae, the open resistance of Lefebvre, the failure of ecumenism and ostpolitik, and the decay of the Vatican's potency in political affairs. John's pontificate, for those lacking in perspicacity and historical knowledge, saw a fleetingly vibrant Church—rich in faith and dignity—opening itself up to a changing world with open arms. Rome has chosen to canonize a strong Church entering renewal rather than a long collapsing Church emerging from self-inflicted chaos. They have chosen to canonize a fuzzy, paternal pope rather than a morose one full of regret. The canonization might actually make Vatican II into "Pope John's Council" rather than "Pope Pius' Plan" and "Pope Paul's Burden."

The other canonization has nothing (I cannot emphasize this enough) to do with Vatican II and everything to do with crowd pleasing. He traveled everywhere. He touched everybody. He smiled for everyone. He was something for ever Catholic to behold. John Paul II was the first media superstar pontiff. He trotted the globe over the course of four decades and cemented himself into every living person's memory for good or ill. Two generations of Catholics (those born in the '60s-70s and those born in the '80s-90s) and Catholic priests know John Paul as their pope. He was against abortion. He had a warm, vague, way of inspiring confidence for people of all walks of like while maintaining the tenets necessary for orthodoxy. Conservatives could point to him as a living example of "renewal": he was clearly on board with many brands of spirituality, he favored the new liturgy, he was pro-life, he was against Russian Communism, he was friendly with people of other walks of life, and he had the occasional humorous moment when he defended orthodoxy, such as forcing a monarch to receive Communion on the tongue. He was everything a college student wants in his campus chaplain: Catholic, fun, and not too demanding.

Even Traditionalists got something out of him. Many favorite saints in the Traditionalist milieu—Padre Pio, Juan Diego, and Maximilian Kolbe—were canonized by John Paul. He also gave both domesticated Traditionalists and neo-conservatives the Divine Mercy devotion (never quite understood it or the Sacred Heart). Indeed, National Review religion editor and ex-priest Malachi Martin succeeded in convincing many Traditionalists that John Paul really did believe everything they did and with the same sensus fidelium, hence the 1984 indult and attempts to smooth out relations with the potentially schismatic Lefebvre. He even invoked infallibility against women taking priestly orders!

The truth about the man is probably somewhere in the middle. He was elected because he was a charismatic man who could appeal pastorally to Catholics and non-Catholics while not disturbing the Vatican political machine, which continued to run the administrative side of the Roman Church into the ground. It is likely the same reason the prior pope and namesake of Wojtyla was elected.

The canonization of John Paul II will be an act of self-affirmation for hundreds of millions of modern Catholics following his unusual synthesis of doctrine, engagement, and outlook. "My pope is a saint," the average Mass-going Catholic between ages 20 and 50 will say in a manner akin to answering a question out of a self-help book. Whether he was actually a good pope is entirely irrelevant. Rome wants to keep its young faithful and young priests content. This, like the canonization of Celestine V by Rome and that of Emperor Constantine by Constantinople, is highly political in its motives and meant to continue to steer the barque of Peter in a particular direction.

Which brings me to my last point: the canonization I hope I never see. Readers know exactly who I mean. Given that yesterday's reformers are getting their canonization with John and today's youth are getting their's with John Paul, Traditionalists (particularly here, here, and here) are asking "Why not Pacelli?" Religiously and historically I cannot see any reason to canonize the man. His papacy was one of the all-time worst, certainly the worst since the Renaissance, replete with an immense relaxation of discipline, an undermining and re-programming of priestly education, friendly relations with Communists (except when it came at the cost the Christian Democratic party in Italy), liturgical destruction on a scale—at the time—unseen, bureaucratic centralization, and he put the people in place to finish the revolution which he began. Politically speaking his canonization would make even less sense: he wore the tiara, defined a dogma, and issued a large volume of encyclicals that go into the Magisterium file. Liberals see Pacelli as the last of the old guard while neo-conservatives have no substantial acquaintance with the popes before John Paul. Who, other than American and FSSPX-affiliated Traditionalists, gains from the canonization of Papa Eugenio?

American Traditionalists are fond of Pope Pius because the American branch of the Church seemed to be growing at an exponential rate: more vocations, more seminaries, more parishes, more converts. As Cardinal Spellman said, in a hundred years America would be a Catholic country. Then came the 1960s and the "fresh air" of the Council blew over the house of cards that was American Catholicism. The numbers touted by American Traditionalists are quite ignorant. The growth in the 1950s and 1960s was due to the Baby Boom generation, progeny of World War II veterans and their wives, reproduction at a rate unseen since the 19th century. Yet many of these Boomers were second and third generation descendants of immigrants and, often, practicing the faith out of cultural obligation. The first generation Italians would go to Mass and carry on the traditions of Catholic Italy with conviction. The second generation would continue the same out of devotion to one's parents. The third would do so out of habitual custom, far removed from the source of custom and devotion. American Catholicism had no firm roots. It was in many ways Catholicism-lite made for a protestant country: low Masses, devotions, and church organizations allowed for the "personal relationship" with God emphasized by protestants while upholding the administrative and communal side of the Church. What was missing was a strong foundation grounded in liturgy, martyrdom (very little devotion existed to the North American martyrs), local traditions, and episcopal authority. The American Church's structure was planted during the mid-19th century, when the previously mentioned trends were in vogue. The Church in Europe had long collapsed. America, demographically vibrant but spiritually frail, shattered at the shock of the Council. The growth had nothing to do with Pope Pius and its end had nothing to do with Gaudium et spes. It was about the young tree of American Catholicism that was turn up and was exposed to have not taken root. Canonizing Pope Pacelli would add him to the museum of 1950s American Catholicism. Nothing more.

The canonizations of Popes John and John Paul indicate a Vatican ready to affirm itself and the psychological needs of its devotees. For the same reason, the Rad Trad thinks a canonization of Pope Pius quite unlikely, unless Francis is overcome with nostalgia for the pope of his youth and early formation.

Alright. Enough politics for a month or two. Time to do something spiritually productive. Christ is risen after all.

Have We Been Wrong?

Have we been wrong about the liturgy and Vatican II's Sacrosanctum Concilium? I have tried on this blog to dispel the myth that the liturgical overhaul of the 20th century descended from the Council or even from the same people who acted as the main players at the Council. The trend towards change began earlier during the days of Jansen and during the 19th century Liturgical Movement. For various reasons those forces merged with Modernism in the early 20th century after Pascendi Dominici Gregis drove that movement underground in the academies and forced it to study seemingly benign subjects like liturgy (ironic that the Pope who issued Pascendi blew the first salvo against the old rite).

My thesis until recently has been that Sacrosanctum Concilium, the document on liturgy written by Msgr. Annibale Bugnini either during the waning years of Pius XII—who began the study groups for an Ecumenical Council—or early days of John XXIII—who called Pope Pius' Council, was meant as a pretext for greater changes. The vague instructions on the place of Latin, of chant, and the variety of readings could justify the 1962, 1965, and 1969 Ordines Missae. The document was a stepping stone, not an end. Indeed, I would side with the "neo-cons" in saying that the document was never implemented. Where their position fails is in claiming that the document was mis-interpreted, as though the man who wrote it did not know his own intentions.

What has caused me to revise my views slightly is a book called From Breviary to Liturgy of the Hours by Stanislaus Campbell, a thorough account of the re-structuring of the already altered Divine Office which took place between 1964 and 1971. The book traces the process using the records and meeting notes from the various study groups within Consilium, the commission Pope Paul established to circumvent the impossibly baroque SCR. The suggestions and discussions are frighteningly irreverent to the past, to patrimony, and the common worshipper—despite the prevalence of the word "pastoral." Study group 9's records reveal the memorandum: "Today, Lauds and Vespers are not popular, and they require a radical restoration." I now think that Sacrosanctum Concilium and the Council were actually a slight moderating influence on the Consilium and the new liturgy. How?

Some of the most radical moves, such as the de facto abolition of the minor hours, came from the top. The death of Prime/Terce/Sext/None and the creation of an optional series of hours descended from the mind of Papa Montini himself. Pope Paul even thought the novel cycle for Lauds and four week cycle for the rest of the hours too cumbersome for pastoral reasons. He favored an alternation between psalms and readings. Another example would be the endless options in the Pauline liturgy. There could have been even more profound differences in the options. At one point Consilium wanted a three psalm scheme for the major hours when celebrated with laity present and a five psalm scheme for private recitation. The three psalm scheme seems absurd to those who favor the older liturgy, but would it not be even more absurd to have two Divine Offices: one for the parish and one for the priest at his desk? The Consilium even describes Sacrosanctum Concilium 89 as "dangerous" because it could elicit repetition among the psalms during the little hours, as was done from the start of the little hours until 1911.

As troubled as the reform was, it seems the Council and particularly Sacrosanctum Concilium prevented the finished product from being an even greater departure from the traditional liturgy than it already was.

P/S - the book is available for purchase on Google Books for $15, a reasonable price in contrast to the $1,085 for a copy on Abe Books.

Today 50 Years Ago (EXPANDED)

Paul VI concelebrates Mass according to the 1965 Missal,
essentially the 1962 rite with some modifications
according to Sacrosanctum Concilium

Sacrosanctum Concilium was released. Today we are still trying to figure out what it means, or what it was supposed to mean.

EXPANDED:

The main issue the Rad Trad has always had with Sacrosanctum Concilium is its meaning. What exactly does it mean when it says "rites should be simplified" or that change in the liturgical should only be done for the "good" or that chant occupies a special place or that Latin ought to be preserved? There were really three groups of people who votes on this document, and they all virtually voted for it:

1. The liberal periti: the periti at the Council were by and large liberals freshly minted by a revolutionized Catholic seminary education system. They wanted to tear down the barriers to a reform of the Roman liturgy. Holy Week was an early triumph, but SC was, on the whole, just as great. This crowd looked at SC as an opportunity for further expansion. Although not of the same origin, I would classify Pope Paul VI in this crowd.
2. The moderately conservative: these men were the bishops under the influence of their periti. These men held onto the basics of the traditional liturgy, yet thought some expansion of popular participation through the use of vernacular and other experiments, like lay readers, would be a minor change with great reward. These were apodictic fellows, excited and uneasy about the changes they were passing along.
3. The old guard: the Roman Curia. Paul VI had to bypass these men, which included the intractable Congregation for Rites, and create a shadow liturgical commission, the Consilium—which had more real power than the actual Congregation for rites. Men like Enrico Dante had no illusions about where this document was headed.

Unlike the other documents of the Council, SC was not drawn up by a committee of dubious periti, so one cannot accuse it of sloppy style, unintentional ambiguity, or even a double meaning. It was one of the original schema drafted by the preparatory commission (which included Marcel Lefebvre) after John XXIII called the Council and, in all likelihood, had its origins in drafts written during the last years of Pope Pius XII, during which much of the Council was conceived.

 

Many, including the Pope emeritus, have said that this document was misapplied, that the Council called for authentic liturgical development for the benefit of the faithful, that the Pauline rites were a "banal" and "on the spot" fabrication inconsistent with this call. Unfortunately the same man who wrote this document, Msgr. Annibale Bugnini, also headed the same commission, the Consilium, which created the Pauline Mass and Liturgia Horarum, which throws the misinterpretation hermeneutic out the window. Did Msgr. Bugnini not know his own mind, or that of Pope Paul, when he crafted the new Roman rite? The Pauline Mass, although it has a very skeletal Ordo Missae, has a three year lectionary, 1,300+ orations, an endless series of special blessings, a unique kalendar from the older rite's, and a matching breviary with a four week psalter and a three year reading cycle. Is there the slightest chance that the majority of this new liturgy was not already drafted by the time SC was presented to the bishops at St. Peter's Basilica in December of 1963? It did not appear out of no where in 1967 when Paul VI presented it to the Roman Synod (which in turn rejected it, oh well).

 

The man who wrote it and the Pope who approved it meant for SC to ratify a transitional liturgy. In some sense the 1955 kalendar and Holy Week, the 1960 Missal, and 1961 Divine Office are transitional, but these changes would have gone unnoticed by the majority of the laity. SC would put most men in the pew on notice that more major changes were in the makings. Any hope the semi-conservative bishops had for a reformed or tinkered "Tridentine" rite was short lived.

 

Christmas Mass at Our Lady of the Lake, Verona, NJ
in 1965.

Despite its transitional nature, if one wanted to test the principles of SC one could hardly say it was ever implemented. I once had access to a 1964 Missal (1962 with modifications before the new typical edition of 1965) and studied it in depth. The changes made were mind numbingly odd: the Ordinary of Mass (unchangeable day to day) was put into vernacular (even though these were the parts people would be able to learn) while the orations remained in Latin! There was the nonsense of the priest beginning Mass from a chair, as if he was a bishop. The prayers at the foot of the altar remained in an abbreviated form and the Last Gospel dropped (it could have remained instead as a private prayer). The Missal actually calls for lector to read the Epistle and the proper chants (rather than sing them in vernacular or Latin) and a commentator who, at the ambo, explains what is happening! Concelebration was permitted so long as there was room at the altar for all the concelebrants (which is why, in the picture above, the altar of St. Peter's was expanded). It begs the question: what were these people thinking? In a very real way the Oratorian style Latin Novus Ordo Mass is more popularly accessible and in line with SC than the confusing 1964 Mass promulgated along the lines of SC. Were these changes for the common good? Did they make the rites more understandable? When were the changes supposed to stop? Did the bishops know what they were getting when they voted for SC?

 

Five decades later the answers to these questions are as ambiguous as they were when the document made its debut appearance.