Chairman's Blog

Taking the Blessed Sacrament to the Altar of Repose on Maundy Thursday.

Reposted from January 2016.
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Austen Ivereigh claims that in opening the Mandatum to women, Pope Francis is 'restoring an older Tradition'. Claiming the change has 'infuritated traditionalists' (sorry, Austen, I'm not infuriated), he explains:

Yet Francis has been restoring what once was tradition. The custom in the seventeenth century, for example, was for bishops to wash, dry and kiss the feet of 13 poor people after having dressed them and fed them. Nor is there any obligation for the foot-washing to be part of the Mass of the Lord’s Supper.

This is a bit thin as an explanation, so let me fill it in a bit. Because Ivereigh has a point.

It is the rubrics of 1955 and 1970 which say that the foot-washing of Maundy Thursday should happen (a) after the Gospel, (b) in the choir or sanctuary of the church, and (c) to 'viri', men as opposed to women.

N.b. the word 'viri' (plural of 'vir') is only used if you want to exclude women. There is another Latin word for 'men' in the sense of 'people': 'homines' (plural of 'homo'); again, you might expect the gender neutral 'christifideles' (the Faithful) or some such term to be used, if gender was not an issue.

Before 1955, and in accordance with an organically developing tradition going back to the earliest times, the Mandatum took place (a) after Mass was over, after the 'stripping of the Altars' ceremony, (b) not in the sanctuary, and (c) to 'pauperes': the poor. Also, interestingly, as as Ivereigh notes, the number of pauperes was 13, not 12. Indeed, the Mandatum carried out in the context of a parish celebration of the Mass of Maundy Thursday, by a parish priest, was simply a particular case of a wider phenomenon, of Maundy Thursday foot-washing by bishops, abbots, abbesses, kings and queens, lords and ladies, of poor folk. Rubricarius (who knows about these things) tells us in my com-box that the Parish Priest, in line with the wider phenomenon, would have been expected to give these pauperes food, clothing, and money afterwards.

Male foot-washers would have washed male feet, and female washers female feet, as a matter of pudicy. If Ivereigh thinks that a 17th century bishop would have washed the feet of women, he's wrong. (I love the way he implies they did, without quite implying that they did.) Such considerations of pudicy are still relevant in our multi-cultural world: yes, multi-culturalism can mean taking care not to offend people with more old-fashioned attitudes that your own, such as those of American gangsters (bad language warning). What that famous scene from Pulp Fiction demonstrates is that a man touching a woman's feet has an erotic meaning.

I really wouldn't want any priests to 'develop a speech impediment' as a result of washing ladies' feet.

What happened in 1955 was that the Mandatum was made a liturgical act, in the middle of Mass and in the sanctuary, in the form of a literal-minded re-enactment of the scene described in the Gospel of St John (13:1-17). As has often been pointed out, Our Lord washed the feet of His Apostles, His priests: but that is not how it has been understood and imitated in the Latin liturgical tradition. Rather, the command has been understood in a more general sense that the higher should serve the lower, whether the higher is religious or secular, whether the relationship is sacramental or economic. Indeed, one can see in the tradition an application of a specifically lay obligation, to conform secular relationships to the reign of Christ.

As for the 1955 rite, it goes along with a current of thought which understands the liturgy as re-enactment in a way it had never been understood before, a form of antiquarianism. The argument that the 'original meaning' or 'original form' of something should be restored, often on the basis of bad scholarship or simple fantasy, was heard even more loudly in 1970 than in 1955. Along with supposedly authentic vestments and pottery chalices, we have a 'restored' kiss of peace, 'restored' bidding prayers, and a 'restored' offertory procession, and it is common to hear people unable to understand why the priest does not break the Host while saying the words 'He broke the bread', and why the Feast of the Holy Innocents is celebrated before Epiphany, when the event it commemorates took place after. In every case the wisdom of the developed tradition is lost, along with the continuity of what we do with what our immediate predecessors did - usually for at least the last eight centuries, and often for a lot longer.

I said in my last post that the latest change to the Mandatum reflects the results of the contradictions of the 1970 Missal. I should make clear that in this case, the contradiction was inherited from the 1955 reform of Holy Week, for which I have no brief to defend. The contradiction consists specifically in the way the rite uses the sanctuary. The sanctuary is a space for the clergy and their assistants, and the nave is the space for the Faithful. The distinction between the sanctuary and the nave is similar to the distinction marked by the use of Latin, marking out sacred time and space. It is just inappropriate for a dozen lay men to troop into the sanctuary, wearing ordinary clothes, and start taking off their shoes and socks. Adding lay women to the mix doesn't help. The result of the conflict between seeing the sanctuary as a sacred space, and seeing it as a handy 'performance space' for all sorts of activities, results in the disappearance of the former idea. The placing of the Mandatum there wasn't the decisive move, but it was part of a problematic trend.

Maundy Thursday with the FSSP in Reading: the Altar of Repose.

For the meaning of the distinction between sanctuary and nave, see the Position Paper on Altar Girls.

For the problems of the 1955 Holy Week Reform, see the Position Papers on that, Part I and Part II.

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St John Fisher was the learned and heroic Bishop of Rochester, was the only one of all the Bishops of England and Wales refused to consent to Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy of 1534, the Act supporting to separate the kingdom from the jurisdiction of the Holy See. He was executed on 22nd June 1535.

He had earlier written a book against Luther defending the Catholic theology of the priesthood: ironically, in support of Henry VIII's own work against Luther, to which Luther had made a characteristically intemperate response.

Fisher's work deserves wider recognition, and I am pleased to see this new edition and printing available. It can be bought from Amazon here.

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I see from my stats a small spike of interest in this post: someone must have linked to it somewhere. So I thought I'd repost it. I'll repost a follow-up post on the same subject tomorrow. They both first appeared in January 2016.

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It is tempting to see the decree allowing women's feet to be washed on Maundy Thursday as an indication of an acceleration of liturgical decay underway with Pope Francis, following his breaking of the rule up to now. However, what has happened is no different from what happened under his predecessors.

Bl Pope Paul VI gave in to the pressure of endemic abuse when he allowed the reception of Communion in the hand. But there are other examples too from his troubled reign. One of the most peculiar documents of the Papal Magisterium is his Sacrificium laudis, an Apostolic Letter directed to religious superiors, begging, cajoling, and ordering them to preserve Latin in the Office. You won't find this document in the Acta Apostolicis Sedis, and only in Italian on the Vatican website. The speed of its transformation into waste-paper gives new meaning to the phrase 'dead on arrival'. (You'll find an English translation on the LMS website.)

Pope St John Paul II gave way, again because of the pressure of abuses, on Altar girls. It was he, also, who permitted another set of countries to take up Communion in the hand. It was on his watch, again, that the restrictions on Communion under Both Kinds fell by the wayside - this was forbidden on Sundays, in theory, and for 'large congregations', but the American bishops defied him, and he gave in. It was under him that major investigations of American seminaries and women religious were turned into whitewash, liturgical abuses were established on an industrial scale at the World Youth Days, and being blessed by witch doctors, kissing the Koran, and putting Buddha on altars became de rigeur. Religious sisters not wearing their habits sat right in front of him at a Papal Mass of beatification in Australia in 1995. That day, liturgical discipline was dead.

Pope Benedict XVI allowed Communion in the hand in Poland, where Pope John Paul II never had. Did Pope JP know something his successor did not? It was Pope Benedict who chose to continue JPII's Youth Day Masses, and Assisi ecumenical gatherings, at a moment when it would have been perfectly possible to let both series stop, and merely tried to make them less awful. But he did not continue JPII's series of Instructions lambasting liturgical abuses: he must have realised it was pointless. It was under Pope Benedict that the investigation of the American women's religious lost its conservative mojo: yes, he was the one who appointed João, Cardinal Braz de Aviz as Prefect of the Congregation for Religious, in 2011, with entirely predictable results.

There is, however, an important difference between the actions of these three Popes and Pope Francis. As far as one can tell, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Pope Benedict believed that poor liturgical discipline was a bad thing. Paul VI lamented Communion in the hand and the loss of Latin. John Paul II apparently dislike Altar girls, and condemned abuses vigorously before permitting them. Pope Benedict surely had no sympathy with the ghastly things which were happening in American convents. There is no reason to think that Pope Francis is similarly conflicted when he allows the washing of women's feet on Maundy Thursday.

And another thing: to be crass about it, the Mandatum is not all that important. It happens once a year, and it is optional. It is not an integral part of the Maundy Thursday service - despite its name. Allowing Altar girls and EMHCs and syncetistic pagan rites during Mass are far more serious issues.

Let's not get on a high horse about Pope Francis at this juncture. This is just another step, and not a particularly large one, in the development of the Ordinary Form away from Tradition, and it is not happening because of the personality of the Pope. It is happening because the Novus Ordo Missae of 1970 was unstable. It included a series of compromises which were never going to last. Given the direction of pressure, these compromises were always going to unravel the same way.

This is the real lesson to be learnt. Attempting to shore up the tottering edifice of the Novus Ordo with ferocious-sounding rules has failed. JPII and Pope Benedict didn't manage it, and obviously - obviously - Pope Francis, though not a liturgical 'meddler', is not going to succeed in a project in which he has no interest. If it is collapsing, it is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.

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James MacMillan, Patron of the Latin Mass Society, has signed a joint letter on musical education in response to an article by Charlotte Gill wrote in the Guardian. Gill wrote:

For a creative subject, music has always been taught in a far too academic way, meaning that theoretical knowledge is the main route to advancement. While there are routes into musical careers for the untrained, and many pop, rap and grime artists have never studied music formally, there are also dozens of choirs and amateur collectives that put a huge focus on musical notation.

This is a cryptic, tricky language – rather like Latin – that can only be read by a small number of people, most of whom have benefited from private education. Children who do not have the resources, or ability, to comprehend it, are written off. Even when they are capable performers.

Gill is winding a good few issues up together here. We might agree with her criticism of the 'Grade' system of learning instruments, followed by many children, that it can make learning an instrument something of a grind. But a more important issue she has left out is the poor quality (or motivation) of many music (instrument) teachers. This is not be unrelated to their poor pay, and their poor treatment by many schools, where they have to eke out an existence on the fringes of the timetable and the school community, often working for several schools at once, resented by the teachers of other subjects for taking children out of their classes. It's a pretty bad system, all things considered. (Would anyone tolerate this for sports? For art? For Maths?)

When she points out that people who can't or simply haven't mastered musical notation have many opportunities to make music in contexts where this lack isn't a problem, it is hard to know what she is actually complaining about. The choirs who do need it, or at least find it vastly convenient, and the classical music world in general, are perfectly rational and within their rights to demand it.

The comparison with Latin is telling. Being able to read musical notation, or Latin, opens up to you a whole world of Western culture. Gill is right to deplore one result of the most recent educational reorganisation (the 'English Baccalaureate' focusing attention on core academic subjects), which is the narrowing of the opportunity to enter this world to children whose parents can afford private music tuition. We might say something similar about Latin's disappearance from state schools (though it is now coming back).

But Gill then makes the wholly illogical, Guardianisty inference that, despite having just said that the reason for the decline in musical literacy is a shift of resources, somehow the mere fact that it has become the preserve of an elite means that it is intellectually beyond the children of the less wealthy. As if this were not crazy enough, her next assertion is that, apparently for this reason, reading music shouldn't be taught as much as it is now. She seems to be angry with the elite who preserve this skill, though it certainly isn't its fault that music budgets have been cut, and out of anger with this elite she does not want ordinary children to join it.

It is important to understand Gill's position, because it is widely held in the progressive educational establishment. There is a sneaking idea that poor people are stupid, and a less hidden idea that highly skilled and cultured people are wicked. The first means that it would be impossible to give people from materially deprived backgrounds real intellectual skills or an appreciation of culture. The second means that it would not be desirable to do so. Grasp this mindset, and you grasp a lot of what has gone wrong with education since 1960.

Nothing more destructive, educationally, could be imagined. Applied to music, this attitude excludes children not only from a closer engagement with their culture, but the chance of making music a career, or a better one. John Lennon, one of the 20th century's most commercially successful musicians, lamented the poor musical education he had had, which made it harder for him to express his musical ideas as he wished to. At least there was no one at that time actively stopping him from learning about music, as Gill would apparently want to do today. Memo to the Guardian: ignorance is not liberating.

James MacMillan et al. (the letter has more than 600 signatories), has pointed out the patronising and oppressive absurdity of Gill's sequence of thoughts: let's not call it an argument.

Gill will at any rate be pleased to hear that the many Chant choirs singing at the Traditional Mass tend not to expect people to be able to read music: chant notation isn't the same as modern music anyway. With familiarity, the square notes can serve as an excellent aide-memoir to singers not able to sight-sing. But the educational point she is making is chilling: that the correct response to declining standards should be to drive them still lower, to exclude more and more people from the West's cultural patrimony.

Of course musical notation can be taught more widely, as could Latin: it is a matter of educational priorities. Unfortunately, before we can have a useful debate about timetable hours, we'd need to have at our disposal enough enthusiastic and skilled teachers to use those hours. Not only do we not have enough today, but on present trends we will have even fewer tomorrow.

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