Chairman's Blog

The Dominican Rite celebrated in Oxford, alongside the Traditional Roman Rite, and, of course, the Novus Ordo. The Carthusian Rite is also regularly celebrated in England; before the Council, the Norbertine and Carmelite Rites were also found here. Before the Reformation, the Roman Rite was celebrated by the Franciscans, and secular clergy would have celebrated the Sarum Rite.

Fr Baldovin complains, however, that it is anomolous to have two 'forms' or rites in the Latin Church. He appears to have forgotten that the Roman Rite has long embraced Dominican, Norbertine, Carthusian, and other usages, the remnants of a still greater variety from the days of the Sarum and Gallican Missals. The anomoly, surely, is in the post-conciliar liturgical homogenisation, which flies in the face of the Council's instructions: Sacrosanctum Concilium 37 rejected 'rigid uniformity' (cf. Unitatis redintegratio 17).

What puzzles me most however is Fr Baldovin's quest for ulterior motives in those attracted to the ancient Mass, such as a stronger Catholic identity, or a rejection of the Council. He himself writes that it can be 'wonderful, a thing of beauty', 'a kind of reverent transcendence that is often lacking' in the OF. Isn't this explanation enough? And should we not be encouraging the celebration of such a liturgy?

Yours faithfully,

Joseph Shaw, Chairman, The Latin Mass Society

Support the work of the LMS by becoming an 'Anniversary Supporter'.

Prayers for the Absolution at the Catafalque at a Requiem Mass: Fr Mark Elliot Smith (centre) at Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street.

Clifford Longley is not a man I expect to agree with: still less his column in The Tablet, which I've criticised here and here. Last weekend, however, he said something, in his own way, which I have been saying a lot recently, particularly in the talk I gave at the Roman Forum in the Gardone Riviera.

This is an extract. Subscribers can read it all here.

He starts by noting that people who attend the Mass in English do not, actually, understand it: 'They get the essentials, but it’s a fair bet a lot of important stuff goes right over their heads – as it does over mine.' He continues:

The obvious reason for changing the language in the liturgy to that normally spoken by the congregation was to help them understand it. Latin was seen as a barrier. But the use of Latin also conveyed something else – that what the liturgy was dealing with were sacred mysteries, with hints of hidden meanings that could never be fully expressed or explained and did not belong in the ordinary day-to-day world of everyday speech.

For instance, take the phrase from the Gloria – Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, which is translated into English as “Seated at the right hand of the Father”. That is a solid mental image, stripped of poetry and mystery. Translating it into English rips away the veil that the Latin supplied. That veil served a purpose. It said: “Here is something out of reach, something more than poetic analogy, that should not be exposed to the merciless light of rational analysis.” The Gloria is a love poem, not a seating plan.

Yet rational analysis and the use of literal imagery are precisely what the use of English invites. It certainly does not make the mystery easier to understand. Whatever Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris was meant to convey, the original thought sails over our heads uncomprehended, like a cricket ball beyond the outstretched hands of the fielder, while our mind wrestles with impossible questions – “How can the Son of God sit? How can God have a right hand?” – and we draw a puzzled blank expression.

The argument is made at greater length in the Position Paper on 'Latin as a Liturgical language' here.

Support the work of the LMS by becoming an 'Anniversary Supporter'.

The Prophecies of the Ember Saturday (of Lent, in this case). A feature of the OF lectionary which I haven't even mentioned.

The debate about the possible development of the 1962 Missal in the direction of the Ordinary Form, raised by Cardinal Sarah, has brought to light some extra points I'd like to highlight.

Fr de Souza, whose Catholic Herald article on an interview given by Cardinal Sarah initiated the discussion, has written a follow-up piece in which he refers to my Catholic Herald blog post, a post on the New Liturgical Movement by Gregory diPippo, and one by Fr John Zuhlsdorf. It is nice to see us presenting a completely united front, which Fr de Souza notes. But he doubles down on his claim that the superiority of the Ordinary Form Lectionary is 'almost unanimous', except, it would seem, among those (like the three of us) who disagree...

It is certainly very widely said that the OF Lectionary is superior, but though I have seen this sentiment expressed countless times, I have not encountered much in the way of reasoned defence of it in light of criticisms. People think it is just obviously better because it is larger, a quite amazingly lazy argument which runs out of steam as soon as anyone points out that 'more is not necessarily better'. Very few supporters of the OF have bothered to read anything about the liturgy written by Traditionally-minded Catholics, but doubts about the new Lectionary have been around for a long time. I recall one of the first things I read on the liturgical reform, Michael Davies Pope Paul's New Mass, in which Davies suggested out that the three lections on a Sunday overloaded the 'Liturgy of the Word' in relation to the 'Liturgy of the Eucharist', and overloaded the listener who could not be expected to take in three different texts, all probably unfamiliar, some rather obscure, and one not thematically related to the other two.

Davies, who was a long-standing prep-school teacher, further pointed to the fact that if you tell children two stories in quick succession, afterwards they can usually only remember the second. That suggests, in fact, a more optimistic assessment than the facts of experience are able to confirm. Just ask the people coming out of a Novus Ordo Mass what the readings were for yourself.

This is hardly the last word on the subject; I mention Michael Davies because he was making these criticisms, which should at least be addressed, back in the 1980s. Few, I fancy, of the OF supporters who glibly say that their lectionary is 'obviously better' have caught up even with these venerable points, let alone the FIUV Position Paper on the subject, or Matthew Hazell's book comparing the two lectionaries, or any of the rest of the stuff which has come out recently.

As Gregory diPippo says:

I also cannot imagine why Fr de Souza writes that “there is wide consensus that the OF lectionary is superior,” when almost every feature of it has been argued against and contested from every point of view. The new lectionary’s creators were thoroughly convinced that they were restoring an ancient custom of the Roman Rite when they introduced the three-reading system for Sundays and solemnities; this is now known to be completely untenable.

On the more general question of co-existence, Fr de Souza appears to concede the point. Fr Z quotes a speech of Pope St John Paul II which I did not know, which is helpful here (26 October 1998) (Fr Z's emphasis):

In order to safeguard the treasure which Jesus has entrusted to her, and resolutely turned towards the future, it is the Church’s duty to reflect constantly on her link with the Tradition that comes to us from the Lord through the Apostles, as it has been built up throughout history. According to the spirit of conversion in the Apostolic Letter Tertio millennio adveniente (nn. 14, 32, 34, 50), I urge all Catholics to perform acts of unity and to renew their loyalty to the Church, so that their legitimate diversity and different sensitivities, which deserve respect, will not divide them but spur them to proclaim the Gospel together; thus, moved by the Spirit who makes all charisms work towards unity, they can all glorify the Lord, and salvation will be proclaimed to all nations.

Gregory diPippo makes the important distinction between the Temporal and Sanctoral Cycles of the two Forms. Talking about the Lectionary and Feastdays in the same breath obscures this very important distinction. Certainly, saints' days have, of course, changed over the centuries, as new ones are added and so forth.

The Temporal cycle, on the other hand, was one of the stablest parts of the Roman Rite throughout its long and varied history. There are few notable differences between the features of it attested in the oldest Roman lectionaries and sacramentaries in the seventh and eighth centuries, and that of the Missal of St Pius V; those which do exist consist almost entirely of the addition of feasts such as Corpus Christi. It hardly needs repeating that the fathers of Vatican II did not in any way ask for or envision the drastic mutilation of the Temporal perpetrated by the post-Conciliar reformers.
Fr de Souza notes another point of Fr Z's: that adherents of the Traditional Mass have been, to put it mildly, been traumatised by their experiences of recent decades, and any talk of 'reconciliation' needs to take this into account. The obvious thing, in fact, is to let some time pass without any further wrenching changes to the Old Mass: however strong the case may be for tinkering with the New Mass.

Support the work of the LMS by becoming an 'Anniversary Supporter'.

It seems that the most trad-friendly Prelates of the Church actually want the Traditional Mass to disappear. Thus, Cardinal Burke said in 2011:

It seems to me that is what he [Pope Benedict] has in mind is that this mutual enrichment would seem to naturally produce a new form of the Roman rite – the 'reform of the reform,' if we may – all of which I would welcome and look forward to its advent.

Cardinal Sarah has now said the same thing.

It is a priority that, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can examine through prayer and study, how to return to a common reformed rite always with this goal of a reconciliation inside the Church,

Cardinal Sarah's concrete suggestions point to an intermediate state, in which the two 'Forms' have converged somewhat. I have addressed these suggestions in a post on the Catholic Herald blog here. Notably, the Novus Ordo Lectionary cannot be simply be inserted into the Vetus Ordo Missal, because it reflects a liturgical vision which is completely different from that of the ancient Mass: which is why all the other changes were made at the same time. A compromise between these two two understandings of what the liturgy is for and how it should work will not produce a perfect synthesis, but a muddle.

I've made the argument about the Lectionary at length here, and about the 'Reform of the Reform' falling between two stools here.

Leaving open the question of how Cardinal Burke's thinking may have developed since 2011, why would he or Cardinals Sarah want to get rid of the ancient Mass?

One justification appears to be the idea that the existence of two Forms of the Roman Rite is, regardless of the merits or demerits of the forms themselves, itself a problem. I suppose this idea is related to a certain conservative yen for centralisation and uniformity, but I doubt either Cardinal would want to apply it to the Eastern Rites, even in the West, and I suspect they would not really want to stop the Dominicans, Norbertines, or Carthusians - or the former Anglicans - from celebrating their own rites and usages. So although talk of 'disunity' has a superficial force I don't think this is really driving their thinking here. They don't really want to contradict Vatican II's praise of liturgical diversity. (I have written about liturgical pluralism here.)

I think the more powerful consideration is that they are unhappy with the Ordinary Form. Cardinal Sarah, in particular, has taken up points hammered by Cardinal Ratzinger in The Spirit of the Liturgy, notably about how celebration 'facing the people' was a mistake, and how the reformed Mass should have more silence in it. This is the argument of the 'Reform of the Reform', and it is an argument which has no direct connection with the Extraordinary Form. But Sarah and others seem to think that the existence of the Extraordinary Form creates an extra reason to undertake the Reform of the Reform. 'Look!' he seems to be saying: 'Here are a whole lot of Catholics who refuse to go to the Novus Ordo because it lacks silence, and the priest usually faces the people. Let's make those changes and draw these people back in.'

In other words, his sympathy for some of the arguments about the merits of the Traditional Mass made by its adherents has given Cardinal Sarah the idea of making a purely tactical use of the movement to leverage his position on the future development of the Ordinary Form.

Perhaps things would be different if the EF looked about to take over the whole Church, but if that is going to happen, it would seem it would take at least a century.

I can't say I'm too worried by these proposals. They revive discussions on liturgical matters, which is positive, but opposition by progressive and - let's be honest - middle-of-the-road Novus Ordo priests and faithful to the Reform of the Reform makes the implementation of Cardinal Sarah's programme by fiat from Rome unimaginable, even if he were to become Pope tomorrow.

It should, all the same, stimulate supporters of the Church's ancient liturgical traditions to explain ever more forcefully the point of the ancient Lectionary, and any other threatened features of the Mass they love.

Support the work of the LMS by becoming an 'Anniversary Supporter'.