JULY 2 this year marked the tenth anniversary of the Ecclesia Dei decree. Issued in 1988 by the present Pope, Ecclesia Dei restored to Catholics the right to worship according to the traditional Latin forms of the Roman liturgy.

By any measure Ecclesia Dei is a remarkable document. However, its significance will not be understood fully by Catholics at large perhaps for a century or more. The reason is that the Church is going through one of the greatest crises of its history.

When crises are protracted people begin to take the abnormal for the normal, to regard what is up-side-down as right-side-up. This is a problem for Ecclesia Dei. It offers Catholics an opportunity to be normal but is widely regarded, at best, as a concession to deviance.

Notwithstanding, those who have taken advantage of Ecclesia Dei to return to (or to discover for the first time) the worship of our Catholic heritage have found grace, consolation, happiness and peace; and they naturally wish to share this experience with others.

Looking back over the last ten years - the first decade of the Ecclesia Dei era - we can count many achievements. But by far the greatest of these is the Ecclesia Dei decree itself. (click here for text of decree.) What this document means has been contested ever since it was published. Oriens, however, has always held the view that the commonsense meaning of the document is that it grants to all Catholics who desire it the right to worship according to the traditional Latin liturgy.

Yes, Ecclesia Dei is an astonishing piece of papal legislation - and in more ways than one. Not the least is that Rome found it necessary explicitly to declare it lawful for Catholics to follow the customs of their ancestors in matters of worship. To be obliged to formulate as a law something so obvious is a measure of the Church's present crisis. However, the purpose of these remarks is not to beat the drum of doom. On the contrary, it is to point to the first stirrings of a reform movement which one day historians will trace to this paradoxical act of Catholic emancipation.

Often during the last decade it has been tempting to regard Ecclesia Dei as inadequate and to look for something more decisive. Some of us, for example, would like to have seen the findings of the 'secret' 1986 report of the Commission of Cardinals officially promulgated. This body examined the status of the traditional Mass and found, as we now know, in favour of what amounted to equality of status, and co-existence, between the new and the traditional missals. Well, should this finding not be made public and legislated into Church law?

From a practical perspective there is no need. There is no point in asking for what, in effect, has been given already. As a close study of the decree demonstrates, Ecclesia Dei has conceded the right to worship according to our traditional liturgical forms to any Catholic who desires it. The only limit on Catholics achieving their "rightful aspiration" in this matter is a practical one imposed by bishops who are, all too often, in no mood to co-operate. A more radically framed document could not grant more than has been given already. Nor could such a document remove any of the present obstacles. In fact, it could increase and multiply them.

This interpretation of Ecclesia Dei has been confirmed by the Pontifical Commission for Ecclesia Dei itself in its decisions and correspondence the most important of which, and the story behind them, we publish in this edition. (click here for full story). As these documents demonstrate, there is no limit to the kinds of Catholic who can take advantage of Ecclesia Dei: not just the old, nor the refugee Lefebvrist; not just the culturally immobile who cannot cope with change; but all Catholics of whatever age, state or degree.

Of possibly greater significance than even the decree itself are the powers conferred upon the Pontifical Commission for Ecclesia Dei. These have provided the traditional movement among Western Catholics with the capacity to reproduce itself.

Among the powers of the Commission is the faculty of erecting religious communities together with all their institutional equipment for recruiting and forming new generations of priests and religious. Recruits for such communities are, of course, intentionally drawn from among the young. Indeed, the Church intends religious communities to flourish precisely through their future recruitment among the ranks of Catholics yet unborn. This demonstrates very powerfully that the Ecclesia Dei mandate is not merely for the present but for the future. The language of the decree does not merely accommodate a liturgical alienation which might pass with the dying of a generation but, more importantly, ensures that Catholics who do not yet exist would always be free to choose the worship of Catholic tradition.

In sum, the single, most significant achievement in the past ten years is Ecclesia Dei itself. Consequently, we have no need to look for some other document with some greater possible authority and with wider powers. The fact remains that our rights have been vindicated. This is all we have needed Rome to do. The rest is a matter of work, prayer and the grace of the Holy Spirit.

 Finally, to recover Catholic tradition is not the be all and end all of our movement. It is to reconvert Christendom of which Australia forms a far flung part. The state of 'the West' is now much worse than it was when the first Christian missionaries carried the Gospel into Gaul and when later generations took it into the German forests. We have to begin all over again. If the Western world is to be reconverted, it will only be reconverted through a process which involves the integral recovery of its Catholic heritage. Of this the traditional worship of Western Catholics is the corner stone.

It would be a great mistake, however, to think that it were central to our job to proselytise practicing Catholics attached to the Novus Ordo. This kind of approach is more likely to lead to further division within the Church. 'Conversions' from this source will be drawn toward a full-blooded Catholic tradition, not by dialectical assaults, but by our elan: by our personal (and imperative) transformation in Christ; by the beauty of tradition well lived; by our soldierly bearing as missionaries to the West.

This mission should be, then, to all those who have been especially abandoned during the post-conciliar crisis: to the Catholics who no longer practise their faith; to the children of the Reformation; and, above all, to the tragic masses who do not believe in anything, let alone in God. As it has been said in these columns before, in proportion as our works bear fruit in these forgotten spiritual territories, so the influence of a fully rounded idea of Catholic tradition will spread throughout the Church.

The milestones we will need to watch for, then, have little to do with documents, pontifical acts, or significant intra-Church political manoeuvres. Our milestones will be signed instead by the numbers of men and women who have been won for Christ.

Return to Oriens, Spring, 1998

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