ch-year-old.

Adornment, love, and the liturgy

Invoking the Mexican experiences of a great modern novelist, Kirk Kramer (who writes from Miami, Oklahoma) explains here something of the old liturgy's treasures.

Evelyn Waugh's Robbery Under Law is an account of a two-month journey he made through Mexico in 1938. The active persecution of the Church during the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s and 1920s – a persecution which saw the martyrdom of Father Miguel Pro, SJ, and many other priests and layfolk – had largely abated in most parts of the country by the time of Waugh’s visit. But reminders of those years of repression, and its effects on the life of the Church, were everywhere evident in 1938.

Robbery Under Law (published in America with the title Mexico: An Object Lesson) includes this account of a visit Waugh made to a village rendered priestless when large numbers of the clergy were driven into exile.

“Another thing,” Waugh wrote, “is meant by the ‘riches of the Church’; the splendour of the actual churches. All along the tourist route one heard the same comment, sometimes prompted, more often than not spontaneous. ‘Think what it must have cost! Think what good they could have done to the poor with all that money’; it is a cry that goes back to Judas and Mary of Magdala – ‘To what purpose is this waste?’ – and when I heard it I thought of another incident in my journey in a church that had nothing about it to attract the tourist.

“We stopped at the place by chance on the main road between Puebla and the famous tiled church of San Francisco Cholula. It was a drab little village of Indian houses clustering around a shabby, unremarkable church. The presbytery was empty and desolate, for there had not been a parish priest for ten years; the people were not even sure of a weekly Mass. When we arrived, the men of the village at first pretended that they had lost the key of the church; they thought we were ‘from the government’ and had come to destroy something or take it off to Mexico City. We assured them of our good intentions and at last they gave way; even then half the male population of the place followed us in to keep an eye on us. The dark little building was full of the rough, highly coloured carving in wood and stone in which the country abounds. It would create a stir in a Bond Street gallery, for it has remarkable qualities of design – but after a few weeks in Mexico one gets used to it. Our genuflections to the altar reassured them a little and they began showing us their possessions, explaining, as had been explained to them, the identities of the various saints and telling us the stories of the biblical events portrayed. Then they showed us with great pride what they themselves were doing, for since the priest went away the building had been in their sole care. They had got hold of a tin of gold paint and were ‘doing the place over’. It was the nastiest kind of gold paint that dries with a dull, powdery surface and rapidly turns green, but they were all poor men and it must have cost them considerable saving. They were dabbing it about everywhere, even on the bells, and were about to start on a pair of fine estofado figures. All of them lacked the things which we consider necessaries and they had clubbed together to buy imitation gold paint; aesthetically the result was deplorable; they had ruined the patina and rendered their statues quite unsuitable for the drawing-rooms of Cuernavaca. . . . To what purpose was this waste? The answer, quite simply, was carved on the lintel: A.M.D.G., to the greater glory of God. The splendid age of trained and directed craftsmanship, of gold leaf, ivory and majolica was over; it was left for the peasants to preserve the memory of it.

“For the impulse to adorn is a part of love; and those who see in the glories of Mexican church decoration only the self-advertisement of a clerical caste and the oppression of a people, do not know love.”

What Waugh here expresses so movingly about the adornment of those old churches also goes a long way towards explaining certain characteristics of the traditional rite of the Mass whose celebration such churches were built to house. I mean the richness and ornateness of the actual rituals and gestures of the priest at the altar.

To those brought up on what is termed – aptly or not – the “noble simplicity” of the revised rites introduced in recent decades, a first experience of the old Mass can be puzzling, and its ceremonies can seem unnecessarily complicated. The actions of the priest and those serving him at Mass – the bows, the genuflections, the multiple blessings and Signs of the Cross during the Canon and at other times, the beating of his breast, the repeated kissing of the altar and the sacred vessels, the rubrics governing the priest’s posture and even how he holds his hands, the incensations, the poetry and rich language of the prayers – are in contrast to the minimalist principles that obtain today. To men of a cool, austere, rational, modern temperament, it is all a bit too extravagant, too theatrical, too overblown. To what purpose is this waste?

As well to ask the same question of a young man who buys a diamond ring for the girl he wants to marry, or of a husband who gives his wife a string of pearls for the anniversary of their wedding day, or of a nation that builds a great memorial to honor the soldiers who have given their lives for its defence. The practical-minded will deprecate such actions as extravagant, as theatrical, as overblown. To what purpose is this waste?

The old curmudgeon Waugh understood something about the human heart that modern reformers seem to have forgotten: the impulse to adorn is a part of love. Liturgical archaeologists may be able to prove that in the fourth century the priest at Mass did not kiss the paten and make the Sign of the Cross with it during the prayer Libera nos following the Our Father. So what? If the devotion of the centuries and the love of the saints have adorned the liturgy with such actions, as they have adorned the churches with gold leaf and ivory and majolica, we should treasure and cherish such testimonies to love – not ruthlessly strip and prune and demolish And we should pray that these riches from the past will awaken in our hearts a desire for the same burning love for God that inspired our fathers to adorn their churches and their worship itself with the splendours our Holy Mother the Church has preserved and handed on to us.

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