"Traditionis Custodes." The Commentary of Pietro De Marco

Pietro De Marco, a learned Italian liturgist, looks at Traditionis Custodes. His analysis is not exactly approving! In fact, Sandro Magister calls it 'scathing'.

From Settimo Cielo

By Pietro De Marco

(s.m.) Published as received. The author of this scathing commentary on the motu proprio Traditionis custodes of Pope Francis, Professor Pietro De Marco, former professor of religion at the University of Florence and at the Theological Faculty of Central Italy, is a recognized expert on liturgy.

It was precisely on the previous motu proprio of Benedict XVI now abrogated by Francis that in 2013 he published a book with another liturgist, Andrea Grillo, as a critic:  “Ecclesia universa o introversa? Dibattito sul motu proprio ‘Summorum Pontificum’,” San Paolo Edizioni.

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ON THE MOTU PROPRIO “TRADITIONIS CUSTODES”

by Pietro De Marco

A collection of essays from the mid-1960s (Groot, van Hess, Poeisz and others, Study of Dutch Catholics) already contained the whole Catholic drama. “One of the first things,” A. van der Weyer wrote, “is the exclusion of all that is not essential in order to lay bare the fundamental structure of the liturgical event”. The new prayers were conceived according to these premises: “It is no longer the transcendent God but the Father who is close to us in Christ; no longer the God who appears in his glory but the hidden God of the Gospel; no longer the objective sacral relationship with God, but the human love in which we unite ourselves with the man Jesus Christ.” No objective mystery, no sacrament in all this, of course, only an irrational “event.” In addition, the Church must become “aware of being one with humanity as a whole and realizing itself [this thing alone] in the sacraments, in God, and in the faith.”

I believe the interpretation I have to make here is that it is humanity as such that “realizes itself” in the sacraments, according to the mystical evolutionism widespread in the 1960s, boosted by the success of Teilhard de Chardin. Almost sixty years later, this seems to be the basic theology (humanistic without transcendence and without supernatural life), much more than liturgical, among the majority of Catholic clergy and theologians, in part by virtue of the astute ambiguity of those formulas. An ambiguity so suitable for justifying any subjectivism in convictions and practices that it has been deliberately cultivated by theological dissemination and is now spreading among the unwitting clergy and laity.

One moment of resistance (aware of the ongoing degradation) on the part of the living liturgical tradition was the pontificate of Benedict XVI. One act, timid for many and for others deplorable, not of magnanimity but of right governance and shrewd theological balance, was the 2007 motu proprio letter "Summorum Pontificum." Pope Joseph Ratzinger entrusted to the protection of the Spirit a dialectic between “vetus” and “novus ordo” in the Church, so that the presence of the secular canon could act as corrective experience and theology for the universe of abuses small and large, and of dominant, shameful superficiality produced not by the Council but by the liturgical reform of the late 1960s (a true betrayal of the liturgical movement, on which I wrote extensively in 2017).

It is against this holy balance that the publication now comes, dated July 16, of the threatened and feared repeal of "Summorum Pontificum". It will have to be carefully re-examined, but at first reading this is what appears: as usual in the current pontificate, a cover letter with a mild and at times heartfelt appearance accompanies a normative act entitled "Traditionis Custodes" whose partisan and destructive motivation (which perhaps escapes the pope) cannot deceive anyone. Naturally there is room for a juridical defense of the rights of the faithful, and this must be used.

The two documents, in addition to broadening the legitimate power (and burden) of the bishops to supervise the manner and content of celebrations according to the 1962 Missal, speak, in symptomatic and aberrant terms, of “groups” to be monitored and prevented from multiplying. Why is the term “group” aberrant? Because it suggests that fidelity to the “vetus ordo” is a matter of organized minorities leaning toward schism: a hypothesis far from reality and devoid of any discernment. It is alleged that persons and practices are treacherously stirring up a nefarious state of affairs: “groups” are cultivating hostility toward the Council and presenting themselves as “the true Church.” When this is not the case, persons and groups are referred to as “minus habentes,” who put off or struggle to accept conciliar innovation. Two observations, in the face of this display of diagnostic obtuseness, which is more worrisome than disloyalty.

The first. The blame for the widespread, growing, and studied resistance, and its increasing entrenchment, to a large extent lies with the rhetoric and liturgical practice that proclaims itself as “conciliar.” The theological flimsiness, as we know, and the main objective - the “participation” to which everything was sacrificed - of the liturgical reform, far removed from Sacrosanctum Concilium, are stubbornly traced back to the will of the Council Fathers. This has also been happening in the same way, for decades and today even more blindly (who reads the conciliar texts?), with the different and chaotic theological, pastoral, and missionary dynamics, all of which claim always to be implementing the Council. How could the Council not consequently appear to more vigilant believers as the source of all evil? In this context, a certain dishonesty typical of every intelligentsia is also operating among the theologians who have become intelligentsia: it is well known that the Council (its texts, its “intentio”) justifies almost none of the current practices, except as “event,” or rather as a purported “caesura” that can be interpreted at will. One knows but keeps it quiet.

The second. Feeling like the “true Church” or catacomb or monastic Church is certainly an error, or at least a form of naivety that is circulating through the widespread ecclesial resistance; it surprises me in some friends, whose sincerity and longsuffering I still admire. But what display of missing or uncertain or betrayed preaching of the Christian mystery (that is, of Christ truly the Son of God) is made by many parishes in the world, not a little of the hierarchy, in short, much of the Church “in capite et in membris?” Into what humiliating disaster are the remains of the national Churches that helmed the Council not wandering? What flood of parlor gossip is overwhelming the essence of the faith?

With what authority, then, will a “quidam” - as prescribed in the motu proprio - present himself to oversee the practices and beliefs of a community that I would call “Summorum pontificum?” Latin will not be enough for him, for what would he do with it? Verify the orthodoxy of the “Nobis quoque peccatoribus?” Wouldn't it rather be the case that, before letting him in, the parish priest or the rector of that church should ask this conciliar commissioner (to be presumed as having too many powers and little understanding of the facts) if he believes in something? For example in the divinity of Jesus, in the supernatural action of the sacraments, in grace, in the saving sacrifice, in the Trinitarian mystery? What will the investigator of the faith of others answer, since on this center of the faith, focused as he is on life and love, he has not been used to thinking for a long time? But of course commissioners are not asked questions.

The point is important: the common layman who applauds the pope or his likable pastor or the latest writer of theological things does not know how many distortions and ruins of Catholic truth clutter the heads of priests and laymen and saturate documents and articles. To the injury (resulting from the incomprehension that Rome shows for the Catholic reality as a whole) is therefore to be added the insult that the motu proprio is entitled "Traditionis Custodes." Since when does pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio want to be “traditionis custos”? Undoubtedly, we expect our bishops, the bishops of the whole world, to be so. But if they are to be so (and I add with sorrow: if many of them had been so in recent decades) they cannot help but notice where “traditio” is and where it is ignored or explicitly mocked: isn’t everything new and different in the Church after the Council? Isn't everything in the faith and in the Church entrusted to the future so that past and present may not get in the way? Isn't the liturgy a happy and creative performance? In short: who if not this class, this “société de pensée” of reckless and overly influential people, is mainly responsible for “widening the gaps, reinforcing the divergences, and encouraging disagreements that injure the Church and block her path?” It is not long since I read the calembour (from an abyss of Catholic self-destruction) according to which the time of Lent is not a time of “mortification” but of “vivification.”

The writer does not belong to any ecclesial group. Memberships long ago were, if anything, in progressive groups. I have long been a simple Catholic believer, a “civis” of the “civitas Dei,” theologically equipped, I presume, but (what matters) from my early years led to believe firmly in what my lips said: “lex orandi lex credendi.” Not by right, a “constitutional” perspective on the Church that doesn't thrill me, but out of duty, the impulse of a believer, I evaluate what happens in the Church, who is truly my Mother. This is why I have agreed with those who dared to warn His Holiness of the risk of grave errors in his positions and statements. This is why I will be closer than ever to priests and “christifideles” laity who grasp and live in the Mass of the "vetus ordo” (according to the “typica” of 1962) the fullness of the confession of faith and the apex of sacramental life in the Eucharistic Christ. Under the age-old guidance of the saints, not of pedagogists and organizers. Nor of liturgists. I fear that the Holy Father will have to regret having succumbed, while still ill, to the pressure of anti-Ratzinger groups, to extremists of dubious doctrine and with no discernment of the damage they (for their part) have been causing for decades.