The little needful

Since the election of Benedict XVI on 19 April 2005, and more so in recent months, Catholics attached to traditional worship of the Church have been tossed about by waves of speculation, excitement, disappointment, and gloom as rumours of the pontiff’s hoped for decree on the traditional Latin Mass have risen up, rolled by, and subsided. With the approach of 5 May, the Feast of St Pius V who codified the Roman liturgy, the tide of expectation is rising again.

The papal document, if it comes, will lift – so we believe – the restraints under which the Latin Mass and its lovers now labour, ending an era of persecution within the Church of orthodox prayers and believers, and opening a new age of religious freedom.We should be under no illusions. While the expected event might prove an occasion of some immediate joy – and provide a sense of justice done to our ancestors, and to ourselves from whom the heritage they left us had been stolen – the reality will be faint lights of dawn on a day that opens cold, dark, and threatening.

Grim dawn

Few Catholics will greet with gladness this solemn event. A good many, perhaps most, will be staggered, perplexed, silenced; while those who claim to “own” the post-Conciliar revolution will shake the Church – or rather its ruins – with their anger and resentment. Divisions will harden. It is the way we are. We ought not to underestimate how far most Western Catholics have been cut off from their history, now a foreign thing to them, and how many are those who, not being entirely free of the Catholic past, still feel the claims of it upon them, and hate it all the more for that.

We do not live in a benign moment. The Church is not just bumped, bruised and giddy after a twentieth-century round of fisticuffs with the world, the flesh and the devil. This time it is different. The Church is not “reeling but erect”. It is being crucified. Christ died, so too will the Church – and, indeed, we are dying.

Oriens will not essay here all that has happened since 1959 when, with breathtaking insouciance and complacency, John XXIII threw open to the world the windows of the Church. But we do call to witness the assessment offered in 1980 by Henri de Lubac S.J., one of the greatest theological influences upon that ill-starred Council:

"The drama of Vatican II consists in that fact that, instead of having been conceived by saints – as Trent was – it has been monopolised by intellectuals. Above all, it has been monopolised by certain theologians whose theology begins with the assumption that faith should be updated in accord with the demands of the world, and emancipated from its supposed condition of inferiority in relation to modern civilisation. The locus of theology is no longer the Christian community – that is, the Church – but has become the interpretation of lone individuals. In this sense the post-Vatican II period represents the victory of Protestantism over Catholicism from within."

These words should be engraved upon the tombs of Popes Roncalli and Montini. For whatever good they intended, the fuzzy inspirations of the one, and the anxious labours of the other, were the catalyst for an explosive act of self-demolition.

Despite the perduring wretchedness of our condition, we continue to find among so-called “conservative” and even “traditionalist” Catholics a Micawberish optimism. For years now a palpable, if vaguely formed, expectation has persisted that good Catholic times “are just around the corner.” If only.

Secular markets

The people who are triumphing over the Church, both within and without, do not intend that their moment should pass. Contrary to its propaganda of freedom, the victor’s dispensation does not permit a free market contest of ideas in which it is possible to contemplate Catholic teaching and morality competitively carrying the day. The secular market in ideologies is not, and has never been, free for the Church. It was created, in fact, to check, roll back and, ultimately, to destroy it. This is what freedom in Western secular society means and – make no mistake – its most committed adherents will fight to keep it that way.

Italy will prove to be the cockpit for this contest, for it is in Italy that the Church in the West is showing the most marked signs of recovery. Although it lost its battles over divorce and abortion long ago, in 2005 the Church in Italy defeated a referendum aimed at repealing restrictions on artificial insemination and embryonic research. This year it is pressing Italian legislators to reject proposals to legalise homosexual and lesbian ‘marriages’. Catholic lay movements, priests and religious have rallied in the streets. The fury of the now contested cultural establishment is rising. Threats have been made against the Pope and the President of the Italian Episcopal Conference, the Archbishop of Genoa, Angelo Bagnasco. His cathedral was spray painted by radical homosexual activists with “Shame, Bagnasco”, and some of his parish churches with “Death to Bagnasco”. He now goes about accompanied by armed guards.

To newspaper readers and TV watchers far away, this might sound like no more than the theatre of liberal democratic politics. It would be a mistake to think so. Italy has a long and visceral tradition of anti-clericalism, and it intersects in a murky underground with red-shirt Jacobinism, Trotskyite and mainstream communism, Masonic money, and now radical feminist, homosexual and environmentalist groups. What we might describe as “card carrying” Catholics, including clergy, belong to all of these. Should they judge that the Church is winning back lost ground in Italy, the disparate network will converge. The consequences for the Church will be, let us say, frightful as predicted.

Given the potential correlation of forces, the business of restoring freedom to the historic Latin Mass will be no light matter. It is something that is not supposed to happen. It will signal to the worldly powers, and their friends in the Church, a revival of a dangerous adversarial spirit thought to have been, if not extinguished, then tamed at least. This is why, especially in Europe, they watch Pope Benedict’s every move. They fear that he will reinforce the pro-life, pro-family campaign (no more at present than a manageable irritant) with new energies revitalised by a liturgical reform that harks back explicitly to the great Catholic tradition. This is something the secular powers-that-be know that they cannot match – and that, for them, is an alarming thought. The culturally sensitive, ultra-tolerant mask of modern Europe is about to drop.

Just do it

Can such things be pre-empted? What must be done? The answers in turn are Yes and Very little.

Every priest, who has even a little courage, can go to his church or chapel at an empty hour, bar the doors, and celebrate the Old Mass. With or without his celebret, with or without the support of new pontifical legislation, he should just do it.

Next behind those same locked doors, and in the privacy of his heart – in some ways this is more challenging bit – every priest can consecrate himself, his parish, diocese, city and country, and even other particular countries mentioned by name, to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. With or without theological comfort, with or without the professional sanction of his peers, he should just do it.

These are terrifying assignments to ask of anyone, of course. But we need to remember that in any battle the enemy is just as frightened as we are and, in this one, more so. There is nothing more fills secular man with dread than the secret work and prayer of a priest. There is great danger here, for from within these spiritual enclosures One might be invoked who can “pull down the mighty from their thrones.”

So, we do have a choice. We can continue as we are, down and dying. Or we can just get up and do the very little needful.

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