Within the Octave of Pentecost: Latin Holy Ghostology

"We aren't very good about the Holy Spirit, we Westerners, we Latins," said the sermonist at the Mass I attended on Pentecost Sunday. "We will pray to God the Father, and the Son, Our Savior, and of course to the Blessed Mother, but we don't really pray to the Holy Spirit."

As jarring as this sounds it is all very true and speaks to the enduring antiquity of both the pre-Conciliar liturgy and the general Latin approach to theology. Prior to the Gallican additions of certain prayers to the Holy Spirit or Trinity (cf. Veni Santificator and Placeat tibi), the Roman Mass has little mention of the Holy Spirit aside from the Gloria Patri, itself an glaring addition to existing psalmody. Without the Gallican emendations one could reasonably imagine the old Roman Mass, textually, being said before the first general council at Nicaea, something that could never be said of the far more advanced Greek liturgy.

Then again the Greeks have a far stronger view of general councils and conciliar decisions than the Latins traditionally have. To the Greek an ecumenical council is almost an act of revelation, an enhancement of the extant deposit of faith that now builds upon the received Tradition and is an event to the celebrated every year with a particular Sunday in the Divine Liturgy. For the Latin the Christian life is the promise of the Temple worship met and fulfilled in the Sacrifice of the Cross, renewed at Mass; it is an extraordinarily primitive, antique mindset compared to the more refined Greek view; under this scheme of things a general council may issue canons or statements on any array of topics, but only what it says de fide is worth remembering and only then as an act of clarification of what had already been held.

"We Westerners, we Latins" do not have the pneumatology developed by the Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth century. We have general works on the Trinity by the likes of Ss. Ambrose and Augustine as well as later writers like Richard of St. Victor. The Holy Spirit and the Holy Trinity seem to be taken for granted in the Roman liturgical and theological tradition and why should that be a bad thing? Would it not speak to our pre-conciliar belief in such things? John Henry Newman wrote in one of his "plain and parochial" sermons that he rarely preached specifically about the Holy Ghost because the cardinal felt He was already and always at work within the Christian populace, moving hearts, directing paths, and forming instincts.

Our sermonist did concede that we Latins sing to the Holy Spirit and about the Holy Spirit quite well. "The Veni Sancte Spiritus is meant to be sung beautifully today, not mumbled at the altar," he told us at the spoken Mass. I was able to hear Veni Creator Spiritus during Vespers at the Brompton Oratory for Pentecost and on [what should have been] the Octave day of the Ascension at Westminster Cathedral's new rite Vespers.

A happy Pentecost to all you Latins who do not deliberate too often on the question of the Holy Spirit because you know He's been with you all along, ever since Baptism.