There is no need to bore anyone by recapitulating the details of Guardians of Betrayal, “Latin” version Traditionis Custodes, promulgated on a Marian feast last month by the Pope. For the best reading on the subject, I advise looking and these two articles from NLM (here and here).
Instead, during this brief return from the dead of the
internet, we shall endeavor to accomplish two things: 1- to provide some
context, and with it, some self-criticism, for this document and 2- to ask what
it means for the future.
Origins of the Traditio
What are the origins of this betrayal? Nominally, Pope
Francis attributes this intervention to pastoral and doctrinal necessity, the
need to rescue the reputation and adherence to Vatican II from traditionalists,
the epicenter of Vatican II-denial. Further reading suggests TC came at
the directive of the Italian bishops’ conference, who, although an unimpressive
lot, are not quite as progressive as Pope Francis on matters of Church
government.
The Pope is eager to have his synodal view of the Church—a
great immobilizer for the Eastern Churches—and the Italian bishops have
resisted this move. The Italian Church, much like the Church in America some
decades ago, is both in decline and living off the merits and capital of the
past, both spiritually and financially. In Naples they will still come out for San
Gennaro and in Rome they will flood St. Peter’s for the Christmas midnight
Mass, but the churches are only sporadically filled throughout the remaining
Sundays of the year. Some bishops are quite progressive while others follow a
Siri-esque line. Indeed, there is not much to commend or unite the bishops of
this decaying Christian nation than a dislike of the “Tridentine” liturgy. Why?
Is there a fear of neighboring France?
France is a nation of 67 million people, of them about 50
million self-described Catholics. Prior to the outbreak of the Coronavirus,
only about 5% of that 50 million heard Mass on Sunday, or 2.5 million people. Some
numbers I saw years ago, during the controversy surrounding their attempted
rehabilitation by Benedict XVI, estimated adherence to the Fraternity of St. Pius
X around 100,000 Frenchmen and a similar number for “indult” Masses. Those
figures may have grown in the last decade, but with the drop in Mass attendance
due to COVID-19, a figure unlikely to recover to its former mediocrity when
this pandemic ends, the traditionalists will continue to be much bigger fish in
an ever-shrinking pond.
Italy is not France, but it has the potential to become a
traditionalist hub. Many of the more prominent traditional and conservative
thinkers in the Latin Church are either Italian or live in Italy just as they
tended to come from France decades ago. There are less than a hundred Latin
Masses available in Italy and only half of those Masses take place every
Sunday. Some years ago, Una Voce reported that there were hundreds of
petitions for Latin Masses in Italy going unanswered. I wish I could find this
report and scrutinize it; reasonably, many of these requests probably overlap
(multiple people in a parish or village asking for the same thing), but there
is a bottled-up demand. Moreover, the horror of the Pope when hearing about “rigid”
seminarians underscores a fear of young priests who could unilaterally promote
the old Mass for the next five decades in a withering liturgical milieu. The
bishops’ concern, if they see the Roman Mass as a threat rather than as a
spiritual treasure, is in fact warranted.
Among these factors, it is also worth remembering that the
Italian Church is liturgically behind the rest of the Church in terms of
liberalization. They did not have Communion in the hand, for instance, until
John Paul II. Msgr. Bugnini looked at the papal basilicas as his enemies because
they guarded the Gregorian musical tradition, and, indeed, in Rome and throughout
Italy, many cathedrals and collegiate churches retained a daily sung Mass with Lauds
and Vespers daily until quite recently. The expulsion of Giovanni Vianini’s Schola
Gregoriana Mediolanensis from the basilica of San Vittore is a symptom of
the same. Andrea Grillo may be the prophet of modern Italian liturgy, but there
is also clearly a fear that the new, “rigid” seminarians may be his Jeremiah.
They See Themselves
in Us
Guardians of Betrayal is principally about power, not
liturgy. It is an attempted dis-enfranchisement of a hub of people who have a
different spiritual bent, a different view of the world, and a different desire
for the future of the Church than the Pope does or his Age-of-Aquarius
collaborators. Their predecessors, the revolutionaries of the ‘40s and ‘50s, began
their revolution occupying a smaller portion than we do today of a Church much
more uniform in faith and worship than we have today. They achieved their
revolution through finding the right levers of power to pull, manipulating
their way through committees, bureaucracies, and clerical appointments until
they could convince the 2,000 bishops of the Church that a wholesale refresh was
the only way to keep the Church relevant. They kept underground during the
papacies of Pius XI and Pius XII, while still finding ample opportunities to
introduce dialogue Masses, versus turbam worship, and to mention the
inevitability of the “Mass of the Future” (a book by Gerald Ellard SJ).
Traditionalists are, unfortunately, often more “conservative”
by temperament than militant. This is a crucial problem because conservative
people tend to value their individual liberty over the broader picture. There
are evangelical and militant people in the Latin Mass movement who would find
themselves at home with the 17th century Spanish missionaries to the
Americas or with the early Franciscans, but most I think are content to stay in
their parishes and make their first Saturdays. They assume, not unreasonably,
that the demographic trends in the Church mean the inevitable fall of the progressive
faction and a better future. They are not entirely wrong, but they do not see
the entire picture as well as the well-aged reformists.
People who are conservative by temperament, like most men,
tend to want things clear, obvious, out in the open. In a word, they naturally
expect affairs to be settled openly and honestly. These are noble attributes
and ones which we have inherited from the image and likeness of God, damaged
though they are by our limits and the effects of Original Sin. These are not
traits generally shared by people who are good at politics or politicking. The
necessity of making friends and doing the “art of the possible,” rather than
doing what is obviously right, is bothersome to us. At some level, the decade
of “TLM good, Novus Ordo bad” articles and books are directed toward this open
and honest perception of human decision making, whereas the more relational
method is what really creates change.
Progressive churchmen know this full well, and while there are
relatively few sympathetic prelates and cardinals who would die on the hill of
the old Mass, their number has grown. Would it be wrong to pull one’s self away
from one’s parish and play the game of politics for the greater good? St.
Gregory the Great lamented the loss of silence and his difficulty praying since
being ripped out of his monastery to become Pope; administrative affairs
depressed him, whereas his ears were once full of divine silence, they were now
full of gossip, positioning, and frivolities. Yet, he endured.
Similarly, St. Peter Damien is remembered as a firebrand
polemicist and preacher, but he also left his monastery to participate in the “art
of the possible.” In his fight against sodomy in the clergy, he would visit
bishops, present the idea that homosexual clergy should be excommunicated and
only given the Sacraments in extremis, and then backpedal to a more
moderate position, such as a suspension for a few years or perhaps laicization
for the worst offenders. He promoted monasticism, both for its roots in
Christian life and because the monasteries he founded were generally answerable
to the Apostolic See rather than to the local ordinary, creating a rival sphere
of influence and orthodoxy. A true reformer, the saint possessed a strong
vision of the Church and sought it through every means available rather than
abiding in perfunctory hope.
Progressives recognize their own past ascendancy with our current potential. What is more, the old Mass has created a rallying point and a pivot for organization that progressives in the past lacked, which is why the result of their reforms was so disparate from place to place. Traditionalists would do well not just to appreciate their position, but to learn how to use it.
“Be ye wise as serpents and simple as doves.”
Vatican II
Nominally, Guardians of Betrayal originated out of a
concern for the integrity of the Second Vatican Council and concern that its
rejection would sow seeds of dissent and division within the Church. Much can
be said of Vatican II, but this article is not the place. Readers of this blog
will know that the mid-20th century liturgical reform had next to
nothing to do with Vatican II, that it was in fact the independent project of
the papacies of Pius XII and his protégé, Paul VI, that under the Consilium
it became a runaway train, and that Vatican II was used to justify the reforms
through parliamentary manipulations.
All the same, TC makes official the conflation of the
Novus Ordo with Vatican II and the old Mass with not-Vatican II. Aside from underscoring
the historical and liturgical illiteracy of its authors, Guardians of Betrayal
brings about a new issue: in merging the New Mass with Vatican II, and in turn
the old Mass with not-Vatican II, does not banning the old Mass effectively
sweep the pre-November 1969 Church into the dustbin? And with it the authority
and prestige of the Pope’s very office? Benedict XVI’s “hermeneutic of
continuity” received some just criticism from liberals and traditionalists, but
it had with it the noble goal of keeping the Church whole throughout its
history. Even Paul VI lamented the difficulty of moving past the old Mass and
stories of his private disconsolance confirm that those feelings were quite
genuine. The guise of Vatican II and the near-universal adaptation of the Novus
Ordo in 1969 could at least suggest that the liturgical change of the time was
an act of the Church in a particular direction. TC is a one-way,
unilateral decree which scornfully looks upon the souls and consciences of
people who find fulfillment in the same place where most saints found it.
The Future
In part 2 we will consider what all of this means for the
future of the liturgy, of Church government, the “biological solution”, and
what we should do.
I also hope to post a review of the wines produced by the
monks of Le Barroux soon.
In the interim, keep the faith.
