For the Love of the Latin Mass

Mr Dougherty explains why he loves the TLM and the egregious error Francis is making in attempting to suppress it in the life of the Church.

From the National Review

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Pope Francis is making a battlefield of Catholic liturgy

Early in 2007, I sat on a red couch at a home near the seaside in Stamford, Conn. The man who summoned me there was asking a bit about my background — the schools I had attended, my parents’ lives, and my pending engagement to marry. He even asked for my worst opinions about him and his life’s work, which he met with laughter or sorrow as it struck him. And finally he came to my religious views. I reported to him that I had started searching out the old Latin Mass in 2002 and had been looking for it in the few tucked-away parishes where it was offered at deliberately inconvenient times. And then he — William F. Buckley Jr. — brightened up and immediately asked if I would like to go with him to the chapel at St. Mary’s at 3 p.m. I was in full rebellion against the mainstream Catholic Church’s modern liturgy. Buckley simply resented it.

Later that year, Pope Benedict XVI would confirm that the old Latin Mass was never “abrogated” — never abolished. In fact, he all but said it could not be. “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful,” he wrote. The painful post–Vatican II deprivation of the beauty and mystery in the Mass of Ages — from priests who wanted to say it, and the faithful who wanted to hear it — was ended before Buckley died. I was married in that rite. And since then my children have been baptized in the old rite too.

All of a sudden this summer Pope Francis has completely reversed and contradicted Benedict. In Traditionis Custodes, he envisions that all people who are devoted to this form of worship will in due time be made to give it up. To do this, he sets up the ecclesiastical machinery for suppressing it forever, saying that it is a source of division.

The document that effects this change is premised on a lie about Francis’s still-living predecessor’s intentions and the facts on the ground. Francis holds that Benedict’s generosity was aimed primarily at encouraging unity and has failed, leading only to division. But Benedict premised the freedom of the old Mass on the truth that it was still holy and good for the faithful. And doing so dramatically decreased the rancor between liturgical traditionalists and their bishops. By bringing us in from the margins, Benedict allowed the traditionalist movement in the church to mature, and to grow into real communities that had peace with the larger church.

This papal act now means that in the past two decades my attendance at the traditional Roman rite of the Mass has gone from being vaguely suspect under Pope John Paul II, to welcome and increasingly mainstream under Benedict, and back to nearly criminal and seditious under Francis. For a church that claims extraordinary consistency in its authority and brags about “thinking in centuries,” the past two decades of turmoil over the traditional liturgy suggest something more like manic episodes. The Barque of Peter — the Catholic Church — is tacking and jibing in a way to make passengers like myself seasick. Some of us suspect that the man at the helm has been given too much grog.

But we need to be clear that we are talking about more than the Latin language. Often people born after 1970 mistakenly think that the old Mass and the new Mass available at most Catholic churches are the same ritual, the second merely translated into our spoken language from the first. It is not so. While still in the flush of fervor after the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI instituted a new liturgy for the Roman rite of the Catholic Church. It was an unprecedented thing to do; previous popes had tended to endorse and consolidate changes already extant in Christian worship, not replace wholesale the central act of worship with a synthetic creation by committee. Almost all traditionalists acknowledged the validity of the new Mass, but that was just about all they’d say — it was legally valid.

Of the prayers said throughout the year in the old Mass, not even 20 percent survived unchanged into the new liturgy as translations. Perhaps more consequential were the ritual changes. The old is ordinarily performed “ad orientem” — with the priest and people facing the altar together, as opposed to “versus populum,” whereby a priest effectively hosts the congregation across the Lord’s table. The priest’s prayers in the new Mass are chattier, and more hortatory. It’s often unclear whether they are meant as instruction for the faithful or as petitions aimed at the Almighty. In the old Mass, the priest is too busy addressing himself to God to insert his personality or “take” on the Mass; this is a welcome restraint. The old rite gives wide berth to the people attending it to prayerfully enter into the mysterious drama unfolding at the altar. And in that space, the great treasury of the church’s traditional music — Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony — fits in. Considering this vast sweep of historical development — its connection to the saints, its antiquity, and the culture it produced — I have tended to follow one dear priest who calls this liturgy “the actual Roman Rite.”

There were several contradictory motives for changing the Mass after Vatican II. One was ecumenism, expressed in the belief that the new liturgy would be less offensive to our separated Protestant brethren and allow them to join us. Another was that the new liturgy, in vernacular languages, would further encourage lay participation; many priests had complained that lay Catholics were not really making themselves part of the Mass. And for some, clearly, the motive was revolutionary — a desire to overthrow the traditional understanding of the Mass as the re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice, including the real presence of His body and blood under the forms of bread and wine.

And yet such was the authority of the modern papacy over the Roman rite that this new liturgy was accepted immediately and universally. The old one, the traditional Mass in Latin, which had its roots deep into the sixth century, was just about stamped out of existence in a few short months.

But there were a few hardy souls who loathed these reforms — or came to loathe them years later. For Buckley, the objections were aesthetic and ritual. He confided to readers of The Remnant magazine: “I have abandoned hope for the liturgy, which, in the typical American church, is as ugly and as maladroit as if it had been composed by Robert Ingersoll and H. L. Mencken for the purpose of driving people away.”

He also deemed the attempt at generating more involvement from parishioners a disaster. “The idea of recruiting the congregation into hyperactive participation simply hasn’t worked,” he wrote in Nearer, My God. Yes, more laypeople were involved in the ceremony itself. Buckley himself served as a lector in his parish. Later would come the proliferation of eucharistic ministers, and the extension of the role of altar-serving to include girls as well as boys. But this was superficial for him. Buckley’s attitude was similar to one expressed by Evelyn Waugh as the changes were being implemented: “That is a key idea: the responses, the English, the jumping up and down, shaking hands and so on ‘disturbs our devotions’: the serious business of engaging prayerfully in the Mass.”

For others of us, it wasn’t just that the old Mass happened to be more conducive to our prayer, more respectful of our intellects, and more beautiful. In addition, all these goods were related to the ancient liturgy’s theology, to its substance as a full expression of the Catholic faith in the redeeming sacrifice made on Calvary. This sacrifice was re-presented on our altars, by priests acting in persona Christi, reconciling us to God. At the words of consecration, the elements of bread and wine were changed into the body and blood of our Lord, so that we might fulfill our Lord’s words:

Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.

Liturgical traditionalists have compared our resistance to the lonely stand of Saint Athanasius against the Arian heresy. We justified criticism of the popes by citing Saint Catherine of Siena’s remonstrating with Gregory XI; she called upon him to return the papacy to Rome from Avignon. For us, the apocalyptic child-abuse scandal, engulfing mainstream progressives and conservatives alike, was just more evidence of the general apostasy.

More Catholic than the pope? Well, as it sometimes happens . . .

For traditionalists and progressives alike, the new, post-1970 liturgy was an attempt to smuggle in a new theology, one that deemphasized the sacrificial character of our worship — so as not to offend Protestants. In place of the spiritual presence of Christ in the congregation, the new emphasis was on the unity of the congregation or mankind. One sees the more revolutionary ideas of the Mass in the work of progressive theologians such as Karl Rahner or Edward Schillebeeckx.

We say that the way we pray shapes our belief. So what is the effect of the reform of the Mass? Can any Catholic observer fail to notice the dramatic diminution in the practice of sacramental confession after Vatican II? Or the cratering belief in the Lord’s real presence in the Eucharist?

It would be easy to get lost here in the details of Catholic sacramental theology. But it’s worth just sharing the observations made by the heart. The falloff in confession and the lack of belief in the real presence are signs. They’re signs that presumption reigns. The practice of confession leads us to pray, to affirm that we “dread the loss of heaven, and fear the pains of hell,” but that we regret our sins because they “offend Thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love.”

Why should presumption now be the default? Because the new rite inculcates a view of God that is deficient in love, a God who merely affirms us as we are. No need to go to confession. But affirmation is perilously close to indifference.

The traditional Latin Mass annoys people precisely in the way that love annoys us. At first, putting yourself into it is like attending to the mother who keeps piling on your plate the meal she slaved to prepare, who encourages you to get married and needles you to give her grandchildren to love. Or the father who occasionally allows you to be put to the test, to show yourself capable under challenge and even threat. We shrink from love, thinking it is too much to bear. Because love seeks out our good and seeks to make us better.

In my life the old Mass has been the astounding, knee-buckling declaration that God is not indifferent to me, or to anyone. The Lord’s sacrifice on Calvary was not just the hinge of human history, it is the center point of human existence. It is not just in a book, recounted to us; it is graciously made present for us at every Christian altar. I cannot say that this form of the Mass has yet made me a particularly good Catholic, but it has helped me to remain a Catholic. If the full reality of what we witness at the Mass were to strike a man’s soul, he would crawl across a battlefield to be present at it.

Pope Francis has declared war on his own faithful, intending to make our liturgy a battlefield. The dark days of the early 1970s are back again. Or is it the dark days we see in scripture — when Israel’s kings put up falsities in the liturgies of the “high places”? All one can know is that God loves us too much to allow this oppression forever.