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| Evangelising by doing something recognisably sacred: Easter Vigil in London |
Cross-posted on LMSChairman.org
I have an
article in the current issue of Inside the Vatican, and by coincidence
it is preceded by one by Dr Gavin Ashenden, the former Anglican cleric received
into the Catholic Church just before Christmas. Ashenden has become an
important commentator on Catholic affairs, so I was dismayed to read his
treatment of the movement for the Traditional Mass, which is the subject of his
article. I think, however, that Dr Ashenden’s analysis may appeal to many, in
trying to put together the kinds of things Pope Francis has said along with a perhaps
superficial knowledge of the movement itself. For this reason, as well as
because of the respect I have for him as an intellectual, I would like to make
a response.
His article
is not freely available online but it is possible to buy access to just this
issue of Inside the Vatican, May-June 2022, through the ISSUU
platform, for a small sum, if anyone thinks I am misrepresenting him.
The first
thing with which I would like to take issue is the background Ashenden proposes
for the debate about the liturgy. He writes:
The civil war that dominates our day has narrowed down to a fight over liturgy. But only because liturgy has become emblematic of two ways of looking at the world; two perspectives, two competing theologies.
This seems
to me a very odd, and potentially a very distorting, way of looking at the
current situation of conflict in the Church. Perhaps supporters of the Traditional
Mass should be flattered, because it makes them seem very important, but the
fact is that opposition to Pope Francis’ real or imagined agenda, which is what
the ‘civil war in the Church’ is presumably about, does not have traditional
Catholics as major protagonists or the traditional liturgy as a major issue.
It may be
objected that traditionalists punch above their weight in Catholic journalism, and
so the liturgical issue is endlessly discussed. This is true, but this is not
where the fight is centred. Traddies have scarcely any presence among bishops
and cardinals—they have been systematically excluded from these roles for fifty
years, after all—and it is among bishops and cardinals that the war is raging. The
wealthy, powerful, and numerous German bishops persist with their ‘Synodal
Pathway’ towards same-sex unions, holy communion for the divorced and remarried,
and women’s ordination; in March this was publicly criticised
by the Episcopal Conference covering Scandinavia, and in April, it was attacked
by 70
bishops from the USA and other countries. These criticisms make public in
an extraordinary way a conflict which is theologically profound and global in
scale.
No doubt
there is a correlation between friendliness towards Latin Mass communities and
opposition to the German agenda of blessing same-sex unions and ordaining
women, but it would be easy to give examples on both sides which buck the
trend. The Traditional Mass is far more welcome in Germany than it is in
Tanzania, and yet fourteen Tanzanian bishops felt moved to sign the petition
criticising the Synodal Pathway. I don’t think any of the relevant documents on
either side even mention the old Mass.
There is,
of course, a fight about the liturgy going on, and within this rather niche
area in the life of the Church the ancient Mass has a bit more significance. Ashenden
describes it in this way:
Tradition presents the fruit of a long steady
development of depth under the hand of the Holy Spirit; the contemporary quest
claims to re-connect with the earliest sources, and at the same time attempts
to build a bridge between the Church and secular proprieties in a society
experiencing rapid change.
There is virtue in both a liturgy
that prioritizes transcendence and virtue in one that prioritizes immanence.
One prioritizes profundity over easy access, and the other facilitates
evangelism in a culture that finds the Faith increasingly strange and
unfamiliar.
This is the
second area in which I would like to object. Here Ashenden does no more than
summarise a few conventional views on the old vs. new debate, so perhaps
it is not him I am criticising here so much as those widespread assumptions which
he has summarised for us.
First, I
have, frankly, no idea what work the ‘immanent’ vs. ‘transcendent’
contrast is supposed to be doing here. It would be interesting to hear how the
reformed Mass creates a sense of the immanent presence of God, but I’ve never
seen an attempt to make this case. What I have heard is that the reformed Mass simply
has a tendency not to create a sense of God’s presence at all. Indeed, this is
implied by the words of Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, who all noted
the ‘sacrality’ of the ancient Mass, and also of the Eastern Rites, and
contrasted this with the reformed Mass as all too often celebrated.
People may
be surprised to hear that all three Popes can be quoted to this effect, but I
am thinking of Pope John Paul II’s 2001 address
to the Congregation for Divine Worship, Pope Benedict’s 2007 Letter
to Bishops, and an interview
of Pope Francis in July 2013.
I have a
similar problem with the idea that the reformed Missal ‘facilitates evangelism
in a culture that finds the Faith increasingly strange and unfamiliar’. Certainly,
the reform implemented strategies to this effect, but so does the older Missal.
In some ways
the reformed Missal signally fails to ‘build a bridge’ with culture. Thus, the
world celebrates St Valentine’s Day on 14th February and the Church,
as far as the reformed liturgy goes, fails to do so. In this case, far from
building a bridge with culture, the reform seems to burn down a bridge which previously
existed. Annibale Bugnini expressed his frustration that he was unable to break
the similar connection between Ash Wednesday and Mardi Gras (The Reform of
the Liturgy, p307, n7). The reformers’ problem with these bridges to
popular culture is that they felt the Church had become too culturally weak to cope
with the distorted popular meanings of these events. The thing to do in
response is to withdraw: to pull up the drawbridge, to retreat into our shell.
Nevertheless,
there is a strategy for engaging the world implicit in the liturgical
reform. This is the theory that if people experience the Mass as something less
alien, more everyday—fresh modern language, pottery chalices, a plain table for
an altar, the priest in ordinary clothes—then the message of the Mass will
carry over more easily into their everyday lives. Whether this works, of course,
is an empirical question.
One problem
with this approach, hinted at in my examples, is that the Church has never done
this wholeheartedly. The stilted English of the 1974 ‘old ICEL’ has now given
way to a deliberately elevated liturgical register in the 2011 ‘new ICEL’
translation. Pottery chalices are actually forbidden. Priests are obliged to
wear vestments. And so on.
Leaving that
problem aside, one can accept that there was a sincere and heartfelt attempt to
evangelise the world in this way, and still notice that the ancient Mass also
attempts to evangelise culture, also builds bridges, in a very different
way. This is the strategy of a maximally clear differentiation between the
sacred and profane, to create a really palpable sense of the sacred, which can
stay with the worshipper from Sunday to Sunday.
Ashenden
has slipped into characterising the contrast between the two liturgical
forms in terms of the self-understanding of just one of them. Because
the reform aimed to make the liturgy more effective for evangelisation, he
assumes that this effectiveness now marks the difference between the two
liturgical forms. Is there, however, any reason to think that the reform
actually worked in this respect? This is, let us say, far from clear. The
recent research
presented by the sociologist of religion, Prof. Stephen Bullivant, suggests
that the strategy of contrast, of contrasting the sacred with the profane,
of building walls around the community, and of encouraging visible testimonies
to the truth of the Faith—all-night vigils, long walking pilgrimages, demanding
fasts—is actually more effective in maintaining and spreading the Faith than
trying to erase the boundaries.
Related to
this is Ashenden’s unqualified acceptance of what Pope Francis says about ‘rigidity’.
Pope Francis is using the word rigid as
a criticism. He perceives opportunity. The rigid are those who cannot see
opportunity or be sufficiently flexible to make anything of it.
Pope
Francis is no doubt sincere in saying this kind of thing, but he is not
necessarily correct. The idea here, ultimately derived from Freud via Adorno, is
that ‘rigid’ people are attached to traditional forms, due to the childhood repression
of sexuality, and are cursed with a lack of creativity and morbid risk aversion.
For all the influence this theory has had, it was never very well supported by
the empirical data, and intellectual fashions have long since moved on. The
ideas of the 1940s and ’50s don’t necessarily provide the best lens for
understanding the 2020s.
As Ashenden
must have noticed, evangelising creativity and effectiveness today is often associated
with the more conservative and demanding forms of the major world religions,
and Catholicism is no exception. Indeed
he has noticed ‘the growth of the young traditionalists’. Where does
he think they came from?
A final
point I would like to raise in this already over-long response to this article
relates to this very puzzling sentence:
[Ashenden wants to ask] why those supporters of
the Tridentine mass, like the head of SSPX, Fr. Davide Pagliarani, repudiate
the validity of the Novus Ordo that mediates immanence?
First, it is
strange to make Fr Pagliarani a kind of representative or spokesman for the
movement in dialogue with Pope Francis over Traditionis Custodes. Because
it is canonically irregular, the SSPX is not affected by Traditionis
Custodes or by anything else Pope Francis might decree. If it were the
views of the SSPX that brought forth this document, it would be unjust to the
point of weirdness. Why punish non-SSPX traditional Catholics for the views of
the SSPX?
Second, I
think Fr Pagliarani would be pretty surprised, and not very pleased, to hear it
suggested that he ‘repudiates the validity of the Novus Ordo.’ I really
wish Ashenden, and others, would be careful in what he says on this subject, as
it is a matter of considerable sensitivity. It has never been the
official view of the SSPX that the Novus Ordo Mass, if celebrated according
to its own rules, is sacramentally invalid. Such a view is extremely marginal
in the traditional Catholic world, and unsurprisingly so as its implications
are mind-boggling. If you start saying that the reformed sacramental rites are
invalid—and if the Mass is invalid, where do you stop?—then by today the Church
would have essentially ceased to exist outside a few beleaguered enclaves.
This is
nonsense, and Dr Ashenden really should not give it credibility.
