Pope Paul VI: Liturgical Rationalist

Paul was the first Pope to wholeheartedly embrace the Revolution and introduce it into the Church. The Church and the World are still suffering the effects of his actions.

From The European Conservative

By the Hon. Joseph Shaw, DPhil (Oxon), FRSA, Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and President of Fœderatio Internationalis Una Voce

Paul VI seemed to suggest that a love of the Church’s ancient liturgy is actually a moral failing.

Anthony Trollope’s series of novels on the inhabitants of a fictional cathedral city, Barchester, focused on its Anglican clergy, is well known for its wit and psychological insight. It was in general very well portrayed in a BBC TV adaptation in 1982, in which the late Alan Rickman, now probably best known as Snape in the Harry Potter films, made his early breakthrough, with a brilliant portrayal of the odious clergyman, Obadiah Slope.

Trollope is not a party-minded novelist. Good and bad Whigs and Tories, High Churchmen and Evangelicals, rub shoulders in his stories. It just so happens that Slope is an Evangelical, and also one of the most unattractive characters in English fiction: ruthless, manipulative, and social-climbing. The only flaw in Rickman’s portrayal, for which the great actor can hardly be blamed, is that Rickman was not, as Slope is described as being, physically repellent.

Soon after his appearance in Barchester, Slope preaches against liturgical music, immediately after the Cathedral choir had finished singing. Trollope published this book, Barchester Towers, in 1857; this passage comes at the end of Chapter IV:

His object was … to cry down any religious feeling which might be excited, not by the sense, but by the sound of words … There were many, he was aware, of not sufficient calibre of thought to perceive, of not sufficient education to know, that a mode of service, which was effective when outward ceremonies were of more moment than inward feelings, had become all but barbarous at a time when inward conviction was everything, when each word of the minster’s lips should fall intelligibly into the listener’s heart. Formerly the religion of the multitude had been an affair of the imagination: now, in these latter days, it had become necessary for a Christian to have a reason for his faith—should not only believe, but digest—not only hear, but understand. The words of our morning service, how beautiful, how apposite, how intelligible they were, when read with simple and distinct decorum! But much of the meaning of the words was lost when they were produced with all the meretricious charms of melody! etc. etc.

Something remarkable about Slope’s argument is how close it is to the ideas of the reformers of the Catholic liturgy a century later. Introducing the new Mass, Pope Paul VI explained (on the 26th of November 1969):

Understanding of prayer is worth more than the silken garments in which it is royally dressed. Participation by the people is worth more—particularly participation by modern people, so fond of plain language which is easily understood and converted into everyday speech.

We have here both of the main points of Slope’s argument. First, liturgical participation must be rational: “each word of the minster’s lips should fall intelligibly into the listener’s heart.” Second, that this is a particular need of the modern age. Formerly, Slope tells us, “outward ceremonies were of more moment than inward feelings.” Now this is done away with—even if the less educated have yet to catch up with this development. In same way, Paul VI emphasises that the reform is necessary for the sake of “modern people.” 

For both Slope and Pope Paul VI, the passage of time has brought an improvement. A religion of “outward ceremonies” rather than of “inward feelings” is surely the false religion of the Pharisees criticised by Jesus Christ: as he expressed it, “this people honoureth me with their lips: but their heart is far from me” (Matthew 15:8). 

Pope Paul VI remarks in the same speech: “We shall notice that pious persons are disturbed most, because they have their own respectable way of hearing Mass, and they will feel shaken out of their usual thoughts and obliged to follow those of others.” He does not intend “pious” and “respectable” here as compliments. 

Four years earlier, when Latin had first been replaced by the vernacular, Pope Paul had observed that this would “shake the passivity of the faithful, who could never again be quiet and devout or lazy in the way they had been before—before it was good enough to attend Mass, now it is necessary to participate” (17th of March 1965). The word “devout” here is associated with the idea of “devotions”: for example, saying the Rosary during Mass.

If anything, Slope’s characterisation of the Catholic past is more flattering than Pope Paul’s characterisation of the traditionally-minded Catholics of his own day. Slope concedes that they had genuine “religious feelings.” Paul VI seems to suggest that a love of the Church’s ancient liturgy, whose beauty he readily concedes—“we are giving up something of priceless worth,” he admitted in 1969—is actually a moral failing.

It is not that nothing had changed in the 113 years between Barchester Towers and Pope Paul’s 1969 allocution. That period had seen the rise and also the fall of Romanticism. Slope’s opponents were theologians like Newman, Pusey, and Keble; the Pre-Raphaelite painters; architects like Pugin and, later, Comper. Their influence was enormous, but by the time Pope Paul was speaking they were regarded by the theological and artistic establishments as old hat. Indeed, their star continued to wane for a few decades more. A major exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the Tate Britain in 2012 was advertised as the first of its kind for nearly 30 years. This exhibition was itself a marker of a new, positive reassessment: “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.”

The eclipse of Romanticism gave Pope Paul and others of his generation the chance to dust off the arguments which had been used, in vain, by that movement’s early opponents, like the fictional Slope. However, Slope would have described himself as opposing the encroachment of the Catholic spirit into Anglicanism, and he would have been astonished to hear a Pope echo his words. After all, Catholic liturgy, spirituality, sacred music, and devotional art, had always striven to reach people through non-rational means. 

From the feelings evoked by the mysterious, silent, central section of the Mass, the Canon, which characterized Catholic liturgy at least from the time of the Emperor Justinian, to the enchanting chords of Fauré’s Requiem in the late 19th century, no visual, aural, tactile, or olfactory means were neglected to communicate the sacredness of the object of worship. This effort is something the Catholic Church has in common with more or less all the traditional religions of the world. But from its position at the centre—first, of the Roman world, and then of the Italian Renaissance—the Church was able to bring to her task all the achievements of Classical and European culture.

It is not, indeed, simply a generalised sense of the numinous which is evoked by the traditional Catholic liturgy. The worshipper’s non-rational faculties are guided through the winding paths of compassion, gratitude, joy, grief, and wonder, in contemplating successive objects, according to different stages of the liturgy, and the Church’s varying seasons and feasts. Again, the closer one gets to the centre of the mystery, the more subtle and economical are the means used. The Church forbade crashing cords and wheedling melodies at the moment of consecration, and allowed them at other points in the liturgy only with limitations. When the greatest moment comes, it’s significance is conveyed by simple gestures and complete silence. 

The 20th century liturgical scholar Louis Bouyer compared the faithful’s experience of the liturgy to the initiations of the mystery religions of ancient Greece, and then went on to observe that, “the main business of the liturgy is not to teach us this or that lesson easily converted into pat formulas; it is to place the faithful, without them quite knowing how, into a certain state of mind which it would be perfectly fruitless to try to recreate by explaining it.” This is a matter of exciting religious feelings, of establishing habits of prayer, and of transforming the worshipper from the inside.

It would be natural to want to supplement this liturgical formation by an appeal to reason, for example through sermons and books. What seems strange is the desire to see it destroyed. Does God really only wish to speak to us through explicit, rational means? In the words of the Congregation for Divine Worship under Pope Paul’s successor, Pope John Paul II, a generation later: “The sacred liturgy engages not only man’s intellect, but the whole person, who is the ‘subject’ of full and conscious participation in the liturgical celebration” (Liturgiam authenticam, 2001).

Indeed, one can find statements among Pope Paul’s writings which pull in a non-rationalist direction. In particular, he appeared to think that, although the simple faithful should be deprived of the ancient Mass for their own good, an educated elite did truly benefit from it—perhaps because they understood the Latin. His defence of Gregorian Chant in religious communities, however, goes beyond anything sanctioned by rationalism:

that choir from which is removed this language of wondrous spiritual power [sc. Latin], transcending the boundaries of the nations, and from which is removed this melody proceeding from the inmost sanctuary of the soul, where faith dwells and charity burns—We speak of Gregorian chant—such a choir will be like to a snuffed candle, which gives light no more, no more attracts the eyes and minds of men.” (Sacrificium laudis, 1966)

Nevertheless, he will be forever remembered as the Pope who snuffed out this candle.

Pictured: The interior of the Basilica of the Holy Trinity in Fatima, Portugal