Devotion does not a Catholic prove

In his report to the October congress of the International Una Voce Federation retiring President, Michael Davies, reported on recent discussions with Cardinal Arinze, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship.

“In July Mr. Davies, and Dr. Turrini Vita, President of Una Voce Italy , had a long meeting with Cardinal Arinze … He was very friendly and listened to all that was said with great attention. He is under the impression that if the norms that he intends issuing before the end of the year result in the new Mass being celebrated without abuses, then opposition to it would cease, and so would the demand for the 1962 Missal. It was made clear to him that this was not the case, and that with or without abuses the 1970 Missal is unacceptable to members of the Federation.”

These dry lines set out with wonderful economy why the movement to restore the classical liturgy of the Western Church will not go away.

Cardinal Arinze is an orthodox prelate, a good and witty man. He has been working on a disciplinary document on the celebration of the new Mass and had this to say about it: 

“You might sum up the words of our document with words that echo the final words of the Mass: the do-it-yourself Mass is ended. Go in peace”

Many of us have savoured this. There is no doubt about it, Cardinal Arinze has done something we should emulate. The best way of dealing with that theatre of the absurd which Catholic life has become is to mock its practitioners off the stage.

It would be a mistake to imagine, however, that the traditional Mass movement is a response to the abuses of the new Mass. We have all heard, of course, people lament, “Oh, if only they would say the new Mass devoutly, I’d be more than happy.” And there are many who belong to traditional mass communities who, in the first instance, were drawn to them to escape disorder and iconoclasm in the typical Catholic parish. For those, however, that stay in traditional Mass communities, the issue is not devotion. The issues are the symbolic content of the liturgies in question and the revolutionary nature of the very idea of a “new” Mass.

Devout deceits 

Devotion is apt to deceive. The Protestant preacher thumping his pulpit is a devout man. The Anglican divine toiling with Book of Common Prayer and communion table is a devout man. So too, in their ways, are the Buddhist bonze and the animist shaman. But, from the Catholic perspective, their devotion “doesn’t signify”. Their devotion is not a warrant for the truth, goodness, or efficacy of what they represent or claim to do. Yet their devotion has a sincerity and attractiveness. No doubt they help to explain why quite a few Catholics have turned their backs on the rigid, anti-devout style of the modern Catholic parish and resorted to preacher, divine, bonze or shaman.

Much the same can be said of Catholic priests. Among them are men incapable of devotion but who are the acme of truth and goodness. There are others for whom devotion is an instinct while they themselves are frauds. So far as the Catholic authenticity of their persons and works are concerned, their being devout is neither here nor there.

True devotion, in the Catholic sense, is not easily to be had. It is a formidable thing and it strikes one like a great light when recognised. It is also a delicate balance of elements, two of them essential: orthodoxy in belief and teaching and orthopraxy in action and style.

The problem for the traditional Catholic with the new liturgy is not that it, or its celebrants, are undevout. The problem is that it is heteropractic and (perhaps unintentionally) heterodox in its symbolic content.

Consider first its heteropraxy. The idea of designing a new liturgy and imposing it under pain of sin (disobedience) is a revolution. The people who devised this liturgy, and enforced it, could not have done so had not their minds been informed by the intellectual influences of the Reformation and Enlightenment more deeply than they (or we) could possibly have imagined.

A Catholic who sets out to create a new Catholic thing is either a fool or a knave. This is not to claim that “new” ways of being Catholic have not arisen throughout history. They have. But when they have, and they have survived, they have been found not to have been the work of human genius. They turn out to have been a gift given through the hands of someone able to receive and respect a thing not of his own making: a saint, in short. Even these “new” ways, however, have invariably been refinements and developments of existing modes of life, and their relevant principles, taken to a higher and usually more demanding level. Where no specific saint-founder is concerned, the development of the “new” takes place as an accumulation of practices - of established principles and themes imitated, embellished, and re-articulated with constant reference to normative forms and criteria of judgment.

Enlightened prelates 

To create something “new”, in the modern sense of making a break with the past, requires there to have been a Reformation and an Enlightenment, and for men subsequently to have been shaped under the impress of their defining ideas. The chief of these is that of revolution: of revolution chiefly in religion and culture. A new Mass and liturgical calendar – complete with echoes of October 1793 (Year I, Year II) – could hardly have been conceived without it. More importantly, no one could have been found to carry forward the project had not a generation of Church leaders been formed for whom the Reformation and Enlightenment had become their cultural compass.

In arguing that the new Mass is a revolution is not to claim that the new represents a complete disconnection from the past. The new, even in the modern sense, rarely does. Texts survive wholly (or almost wholly) or in part. Certain actions and symbols remain, even if simplified to the point of naïveté. Feasts and fasts remain, even if their realization is usually trivial. To claim, however, that the significantly named Novus Ordo Missae is an “authentic development” of the former liturgy is like claiming that a meeting house made of beams and glass and stone torn from the ruins of a cathedral constitute a genuine development in architectural form.

The last line of defence for the “New Order” is for its proponents to “fess up” to the revolution and justify it on the grounds that the Church has been obliged to “baptise” the Reformation and Enlightenment because they dominate modern culture just as, it is alleged, the Fathers had to do when Graeco-Roman culture and paganism dominated the world into which the Church was born. It is a powerfulseeming argument, but for one thing: to “baptise” the world created by the Reformation and Enlightenment means rejecting Catholic history and that, in turn, involves denying core Catholic beliefs which that history communicates to subsequent generations. Ultimately, it means rejecting God Himself. Against such a fall the symbolic content of the new Mass cannot stay us.

So to our second consideration. Conservative defenders of the new worship regime point to the tireless teaching of the post-conciliar pontiffs about the Sacrifice of the Mass, the character of the priesthood, and the Real Presence. Nothing, they say, could make it clearer what the Mass means. Agreed. Nothing could make it clearer … except for this: the symbolism in which the new Mass has been cast is at odds with the meanings which orthodoxy attributes to it – or, where the conflict is not patent, banality empties the liturgy of its defining significance. This explains, in part, why in the First World (with the exception of the USA ) Catholic communities have been ravaged and why, among those who continue to practice (and here the USA is not exempt) diffidence, ambivalence, and even hostility, widely characterize attitudes to pivotal doctrines relating to the role of the priest, to the sacrifice of the altar, and to the Real Presence.

To address such problems something more than rubrical discipline and greater devotion will be needed. Indeed to believe that these things have any central relevance to dealing with the pathologies in view requires an error of judgment categorical in nature. Greater discipline and more devotion will compound rather than address the crisis in worship and faith. For if discipline and devotion are called for, then we must be talking about true devotion and true discipline, and these are necessarily orthopractic. But how can we orthopractically make use of heterodox symbols? While the logical contradiction involved will not prevent people from trying to reconcile the impossible, the psychological and spiritual damage done in the attempt will be, as it has been already, enormous.

Rome is confronted, therefore, with a problem the existence of which it still steadfastly denies. The liturgical policies it has implemented since the Second Vatican Council have set up a conflict within the Church, and within the very souls of almost every Western Catholic. It is a conflict that cannot be resolved except by rejecting the tension itself either by apostasy or by restoring the traditional body of liturgical texts and symbolism.

Cardinal Arinze’s heart is in the right place, but his thought has yet to follow.

- Editor 

Return to Oriens, Summer, 2004

Return to Oriens home page