The correspondence between Cardinal Heenan of Westminster and Evelyn Waugh before the promulgation of the Novus Ordo Mass is well known, in which Waugh issues a
crie de coeur about the post-Conciliar liturgy and finds a sympathetic, if ineffectual, ear in the Cardinal.[1] What is not as well known is Cardinal Heenan’s comment to the Synod of Bishops in Rome after the experimental Mass,
Missa Normativa, was presented for the first time in 1967 to a select number of bishops. This essay was inspired by the following words of Cardinal Heenan to the assembled bishops:
At home, it is not only women and children but also fathers of families and young men who come regularly to Mass. If we were to offer them the kind of ceremony we saw yesterday we would soon be left with a congregation of women and children.[2]
What the Cardinal was referring to lies at the very heart of the Novus Ordo form of the Roman Mass and the attendant and deep problems that have afflicted the Church since the imposition of the Novus Ordo form on the Church in 1970.[3] One might be tempted to crystallize what Cardinal Heenan experienced as the feminization of the Liturgy. But this term would be inadequate and ultimately misleading. For there is a real Marian aspect of the Liturgy that is therefore feminine. The Liturgy bears the Word of God, the Liturgy brings forth the Body of the Word to be worshipped and given as Food. A better terminology might be that in the Novus Ordo rite of Mass the Liturgy has been effeminized. There is a famous passage in Caesar’s
De bello Gallico where he explains why the
Belgae tribe were such good soldiers. He attributes this to their lack of contact with the centers of culture like the cities. Caesar believed that such contact contributes
ad effeminandos animos, to the effeminizing of their spirits.[4] But when one talks about the effeminization of the Liturgy one risks being misunderstood as devaluing what it means to be a woman, womanhood itself. Without adopting Caesar’s rather
macho view of the effects of culture on soldiers, one certainly can speak of a devirilization of the soldier that saps his strength and resolve to do what a soldier has to do. It is not a put-down of the feminine. It rather describes the weakening of what it means to be a man.
This is the term, devirilization, that I want to use to describe what Cardinal Heenan saw that day in 1967 at the first celebration of the experimental Mass.[5] In its Novus Ordo form, what Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio:
Summorum Pontificum somewhat cumbersomely, if understandably, calls the Ordinary Form of the Roman rite, the Liturgy has been devirilized. One must recall the meaning of the word, vir, in Latin. Both
vir and
homo mean “man”, but it is
vir alone that has the connotation of the man-hero and is the word that is often used for “husband”. The Aeneid begins with the famous words:
arma virumque cano. (“ I sing of arms and the man-hero.”) What Cardinal Heenan presciently and correctly saw in 1967 was the virtual elimination of the virile nature of the Liturgy, the replacement of masculine objectivity, necessary for the public worship of the Church, with softness, sentimentality and personalization centered on the motherly person of the priest.
The people within the Liturgy [6] stand in a Marian relationship to the Liturgy: attentiveness, openness, pondering, waiting to be filled. Within the Liturgy it is the priest as father who pronounces, announces and confects the Word so that the Word may become Food for those who stand within the supreme activation of the
Ecclesia that is the Liturgy.[7] It is the priest who offers Christ to the Father, and it is this act that contains the defining role of what it means to be a priest. And so the role of the priest as father makes his role distinct not merely in function but in the very ontology of sexuality.[8] The priest stands at the altar
in persona Christi,
in persona Verbi facti hominem, and this not merely as
homo, which word in a sense transcends sex, but in persona Christi viri: in a sense
homo factus est ut fiat vir, ut sit vir qui destruat mortem, ut sit vir qui calcet portas inferi: God became man in order that he might be that man-hero who would destroy death and crush with his own foot the gates of hell.
The devirilization of the Liturgy and the devirilization of the priest for all practical purposes cannot be separated. In what follows I wish, however sketchily and incompletely, first to talk in more specific terms about the devirilization of the Liturgy itself in the Novus Ordo form of the Roman rite. Secondly I will address the the necessary (coming from the devirilized rite) devirilization of the priest using specific examples.
The description of the Roman liturgy using adjectives like “austere”, “concise”, “noble” and “simple,” is commonplace among many who have written about the liturgy in the modern liturgical movement of the twentieth century. Many of these writers, however, have romanticized this austerity of the Roman rite or have used it to further their own agenda of stripping the rite of the organic growth of the ages, labeling such organic growth with censorious terms like “Gallican accretions “or “useless repetitions”. Rather than denoting the Roman rite as austere, an adjective that arguably has puritan overtones, it is better to speak of the masculinity or virility of the traditional Roman rite. To do necessarily demands a definition of masculinity in this context. This is somewhat difficult, and this question needs deeper study. But I will offer several characteristics of the traditional Roman rite that help to explain what I mean about the inherent masculinity and virility in the context of that rite.[9]
First, masculinity is opposed to sentimentality—not to sentiment, but to
sentimentality. There is an absence of any trace of sentimentality in the Traditional rite, also called the Extraordinary Form. This is seen in its collects and prayers that are succinct and to the point without sacrificing beauty of language, and in its rubrics that prevent the personality of the priest from inserting his own feelings and choices into the rite itself. If we take note of Cardinal Newman’s insight that sentimentality is the acid of religion, meaning that it destroys true religion, then the rubrics of the Traditional rite are the little purple pill that prevents the reflux of sentimentality into the liturgy.[10]
