Liturgy is a given

The traditional Latin Mass has been liberated.

On 7 July 2007, in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI decreed by a personal legislative act – or motu proprio – that the traditional Latin Mass can be celebrated privately by each and every priest of the Roman Rite without seeking the prior approval of his bishop, or even of the Pope himself – and that such Masses may be attended, without let or hindrance, by the faithful.

He also decreed that in every parish “where there is a stable group … who adhere to the earlier liturgical tradition”, their request to worship according to that rite should be met “willingly” by the parish priest – or, if not by him, then by the bishop; or failing him, then Rome itself will act.

Furthermore, the Pope laid down that religious communities may elect to use – even on a permanent basis – the traditional Roman Missal to celebrate their conventual or “community” Mass.

Most significantly, the papal enactment – entitled Summorum Pontificum – established that the traditional Roman Missal, traceable at least to Pope St Gregory the Great (590-604), finally codified and promulgated by Pope St Pius V in 1570, and reissued by Blessed John XXIII in 1962, had never been abrogated by Pope Paul VI when he issued his own “New Order of the Mass” in 1969-1970.

Risk of judgement

We live amid events about which it is difficult to write in a measured way. Hyperbole and exaggeration pose a temptation for the writer, if not at every turn in the argument, then at least at the principal ones. To make a just evaluation, undisturbed by the shock waves of history in the making, seems beyond the power of the ordinary observer. This is true whether he attempts to explain what is happening in the world at large or within the Catholic Church.

So far as the Church affairs are concerned, the task has been made the harder by the promulgation of Summorum Pontificum. The contents of the document are tremendous; its implications seem to reach far beyond the horizons of recent experience. Papa Ratzinger’s law is the most important piece of Church legislation since 1970 and Pope Paul’s new Mass. That is obvious. But what is manifestly true does not describe the whole reality. People will be writing about Summorum Pontificum for generations. This is because it has ended an era and begun a new. A long time from now, Church historians may well look back in judgement upon Summorum Pontificum and find that it ended the modern post-conciliar era – not just that of Vatican Council II, but also that of Vatican I.

On 7 July Benedict XVI overturned an unprecedented forty-year “ban” on the traditional liturgy of the Church instituted by Pope Paul VI. The term “ban” we use advisedly because – and this is the central point of the motu proprio, and of its accompanying Explanatory Letter to Bishops – Paul VI had never banned the traditional Mass de jure.

At one level Summorum Pontificum is unfinished business from the pontificate of John Paul II. In 1986 a special Commission of Cardinals was appointed to report to the old pope on two questions: Had Paul VI abolished the old Mass? And, if not, how could it and the new co-exist? The Commission found that Paul VI, whether or not he intended it, had not abrogated the traditional missal and proposed a series of protocols whereby two liturgies might live together symbiotically.

The report of this Commission, though discreetly leaked, was never released. It was kept under wraps thanks to pressure on John Paul II exerted by liberal European and American bishops. Their visitations to Rome, and threats of fiscal retribution, were supported by a chorus of conservative voices demanding, some sotto voce others fortissimo, adherence to the new missal as the acme of orthodoxy and of fealty to the Pope. Benedict, who as Cardinal Ratzinger sat on this Commission, has proved as Pope unfazed by the cajoling and menaces that undid John Paul at crucial points in his career. Benedict has brought to light what had been hidden, and completed what another could not finish.

That might have been the end of the story were it not for Ratzinger’s critique of the new liturgy and his deep sense of liturgical tradition expressed in several books and interviews during the period 1981 to 1999. It is against these that the motu proprio must be read.

The context

In his The Spirit of the Liturgy, published in English in 2000, we find this striking passage:

After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the public consciousness of the West. In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope’s authority is bound to the Tradition of faith, and that also applies to the liturgy. It is not “manufactured” by the authorities. Even the pope can only be a humble servant of its lawful development and abiding integrity and identity.

The first point to make is that, at this stage in his essay, Ratzinger was discussing how there is much in common between the Western and Eastern views of liturgy. That while the West allowed, in contrast to the East, for organic historical development in the liturgy, embedded, nevertheless, in Western liturgical thought was a concept shared by both traditions. Both recognised the liturgy’s “independence from human control”. The difference was that in the East liturgy was regarded as a divinely painted icon, whereas in the West it was held to be a tree divinely planted and husbanded. In other words, whether we are speaking of an icon, or of a sapling governed by internal principles of growth, liturgy is a given.

This is what is behind the central positions taken in Summorum Pontificum and the Explanatory Letter, the latter expressing them, if possible, more powerfully than the former:

That this Missal [of 1962] was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted….

and, more importantly,

[That] in the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.

This is as near as a consummate gentleman-Pope can steer toward condemning one of his predecessors. But the implication is clear. Paul VI did not abolish the old Mass, nor could he have done so.

This is a shock – though perhaps less so for so-called “liberal” Catholics, who, on the whole, understand liturgical questions better than most, than for their conservative critics. This brings us to the second point.

Spirit of Vatican I

Blame for the revolution in liturgy and doctrine that has convulsed the Church since Vatican II is not something that can be sheeted home solely to liberals. The assault of modernism could not have advanced so far without the complicity of conservative Catholics.

The problem is traceable to Vatican I. At that time the infallibility of the Pope was defined in a way that proved a partial defeat for its key advocates, and at their head, for the great Cardinal Manning. These, then and afterwards, were called “ultramontanes”. They saw the Pope as an “absolute monarch” whose infallibility in teaching extended to his government of the Church in matters spiritual and temporal. Although the latter proposition was rejected at Vatican I, subsequently loyal Catholics have tended to think of the Pope as if Manning and his men had won the entire debate. Just as after the Second Vatican Council the “spirit of Vatican II” trumped the Council itself, so also after the First when the “spirit of Vatican I” trumped the Council’s limited definition of papal authority.

What happened after Vatican II, when the Pope and his closest advisers set to reforming the liturgy, was a hijack. It was planned and executed by Annibale Bugnini and a coterie of liberal Cardinals. Pope Paul VI provided (pseudo-) canonical cover. It was at this point that the “Spirit of Vatican I” clicked in. Instead of rebuffing the Pontifex for attempting the unthinkable, the bishops caved. Loyalty and obedience to the “absolute monarch” demanded it. Less than a handful stood their ground.

The collapse of the bishops, and with them the intellectual elite of lay and clerical conservatism, handed the liberals a victory they could not have won on their own. Given that the Pope and his loyalists had forfeited practical control of the liturgy, there was nothing effective that he, or they, could do thereafter to roll back the doctrinal revolution that now smote the Church.

The Great Game

All of this ended on 7/7/7, as numerological wits have dubbed the day. Liberals lost their monopoly of the liturgy. Ultramontanes lost their papal monarch. A modest man employing the most understated yet solemn language cut the ground from beneath them. He decreed that he and his successors have no mandate but to hand on what the Church has received both in doctrine and liturgy.

Three days later on 10 July 2007, with the approbation of the Pope, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a wordily titled document: Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects on the Doctrine of the Church. This spelled out what everyone understands to be the actual teaching of the Church about itself, that only the Catholic Church is the one true Church founded by Christ. Like Summorum Pontificum for its impact on the liturgy, the 10 July document has been declared a rejection of another great Vatican II project for its impact on ecumenism.

It’s true. Pope Benedict XVI has destroyed the ideological basis for the post-conciliar experiments in liturgy and ecumenism. Here Oriens agrees with the liberals. What is astonishing, though, is that Benedict has done so, not as a reactionary, but by formulating an initiative in which he resets both the liturgical and ecumenical agendae. By positioning himself as the servant of tradition, and restoring the traditional liturgy, Pope Benedict has opened a new front in the ecumenical diplomacy between Rome and Orthodoxy.

The full import of these events can only be guessed at. Benedict XVI, however, has just set in motion a movement within the Western Church to study and reformulate the nature and rôle of both the papacy (as servant of tradition) and the liturgy (as gift of God) as the basis for reunion with the Orthodox churches.

Stunning.

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