What Is At Stake in the Attempted Suppression of the TLM?
Dr. John R.T. Lamont
(III) Is Dr. Kwasniewski right?
As we have demonstrated in the preceding parts, Fr. Donneaud’s objections to Dr. Kwasniewski’s traditionalist claims about the TLM and the Novus Ordo lack any force.
That does not in itself mean that Dr. Kwasniewski’s theses are left in possession of the field. Fr. Donneaud’s arguments may not be any good, but it could be said that there are nonetheless no good reasons for taking traditionalism seriously, and hence that Fr. Donneaud’s failures do not undermine his dismissal of it. We may accept that Dr. Kwasniewski is right about the fundamental differences between the TLM and the Novus Ordo. But that is, after all, no more than a statement of the obvious. Why should these differences matter? Why should they mean that the TLM has a right to preservation, as Dr. Kwasnieswki contends?
The dogmatic fact taught by Benedict XVI answers this question:
Some, like Prof. Grillo, will deny this dogmatic fact in itself; but it is more common for Catholics to not realise why this fact applies to the TLM, and hence to not see why the preservation of this liturgy is really a vital task for the Church. It is important to understand why this is the case.
A good place to start in arriving at such an understanding is with a question asked by Prof. Thomas Pink:
To answer this question, we should first introduce a certain conception of the notion of civilization. According to this conception, civilization, in its highest form, is made up of components that are the product of a conscious and deliberate effort to reach the highest level of human attainment, and that for the most part substantially succeed in reaching this level. Individual geniuses such as Homer may reach this level of achievement without belonging to a civilization; what makes a civilization is a collective resolve to reach this level as far as is possible, and to preserve what has reached it.
This makes the components of a civilization different from the typical components of a national or ethnic culture. The latter are generally not the work of a conscious, deliberate act. Languages, customs, national costumes, are on the whole not the conscious creations of individuals. When such a conscious creation occurs in a nation or culture, as in the formulation of a legal code such as the code of Hammurabi, we see the beginnings of civilization emerging. Civilizations make use of and incorporate features of human culture, such as languages, that emerge naturally, but they often transform them for their purposes. Classical Latin, for example, is a language that was produced by gifted and cultured Romans who transformed a language of peasants and soldiers into a vehicle that could express and found a civilization. The high standard and conscious construction of the products of civilization means that an educational process is needed to fully grasp and appreciate them. This is seen in the languages of civilizations, which can be properly mastered only by a process of formal education and are often no longer spoken as cradle languages. Examples of such languages are classical Latin, classical Greek, Sanskrit, classical Arabic, and classical Chinese.
The goal of reaching the highest level of human achievement, when it is realized, confers a universal status and ambition upon the products of a civilization. Because they are meant to be supreme forms of human achievement, these products attempt—and often explicitly claim to attempt—to be among the best achievements of humanity, not just of one nation or section of humanity. As such, they aim at an universal appeal, and relate to universal features of human life and society.
In consequence, a fully developed civilization must have both a religion and a philosophy. A religion relates the human race, which a civilization aspires to represent, to the cosmos and its ruler; a philosophy gives a rational understanding of the human race, the cosmos, and mankind’s place in the cosmos. This philosophy must actually be some good, it must have some success in understanding the subjects it is concerned with, in order to serve as the basis of a civilization; to the degree that it fails to do this, it limits the civilization’s scope and achievements.
The universal aspirations of a civilization mean that it is willing to borrow and incorporate any achievements that it comes across. The Greeks borrowed massively from the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, the Romans simply copied most of their literary forms from the Greeks. The universal nature of civilization means that the adoption of civilization by a group or nation is not a rejection of their national or ethnic character, of the sort that would occur if an individual leaves one nation and assimilates into another one; instead, it is an enhancement of that character. Civilizations can contain many nations and peoples, and the adoption of a civilization enables a people to realize its potential. This process is clearly seen in the adoption of Latin Christian civilization by barbarian groups such as the Franks and other Germans after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Christianity was from the first a civilized religion—that is, a religion that used and incorporated the resources of civilization in its belief and practice, that was aimed at civilized people (among others), and that was intended to be suited to civilized people and to be capable of functioning as the religious part of their civilization. This was dictated by the logic of Christian theology: the human nature redeemed by Christ should be shown to reach its highest potential; the divinely revealed message should be expressed with the greatest power and majesty possible; the worship of God should be carried on using the highest forms of human culture.
The civilization in which Christianity took being is Hellenistic civilization, which includes Latin and Syriac branches as well as Greek civilization. This development of a civilized religion can already be seen in Alexandrian Jews prior to the advent of Christianity, and is evident in Philo. In the New Testament, we can see that St. Paul and St. Luke both mastered the literary skills of a civilized man, and their works could not have been written without these skills. The works of the Fathers of the Church, and the teachings of the ecumenical councils, were products and components of a civilization. The councils use philosophical concepts that were developed by Greek philosophy. The works of St. Augustine and St. Basil are the works of supremely civilized men—men who were masters of the culture, language, and thought of their civilization, and raised these aspects of civilization to their highest pitch in their theological work.
The character of Christianity as a civilized religion includes its liturgy. The development of Christian liturgy as a form of civilization was hindered by the legal persecution of the religion by the Roman Empire in its first three centuries, but after Christianity was legalized by the emperor Constantine in 311 AD, this development was rapidly undertaken. The TLM is the civilized liturgy produced by Latin Christian civilization, as the Byzantine Rite is the civilized liturgy produced by Greek Christian civilization. The TLM, together with the music and architecture developed to accompany it, is indeed the central part of Latin Christian civilization, which would not exist if these things were removed from it.
This gets us part way towards an answer to Prof. Pink’s question. The idea that a pope could replace the TLM by a new rite composed of texts of even more eloquent orthodoxy and piercing beauty is absurd. The richness of the TLM is the product of an entire civilization, and required a civilization to produce it; an entirely new rite would have to emerge from an entirely new Christian civilization. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote the office for the feast of Corpus Christi at the behest of Pope Urban IV. This office was a success, but it took one of the greatest saints and doctors of the Church to write the liturgy for a single feast. We do not and will not have over 300 St. Thomas Aquinas’s at our disposal to write the offices for the other days of the Christian year. Even if we did, that would not on its own suffice to produce a new rite. St. Thomas used an established liturgical structure and established models of prayer and hymnody to produce the office of Corpus Christi. The framework within which he worked was the product of a civilization with millennial roots. An equivalent Christian civilization cannot be produced at will, and we cannot expect that another one will come into existence. If it ever did, it could only be put to use by our remote descendants many centuries from now.
The idea of adopting a new rite because it is equal or superior to the TLM in beauty and orthodoxy also presupposes that such a rite could be evaluated in absolute terms, independently of its relation to us and our past. This is not the case, for several reasons.
One reason is loyalty to the traditions of our fathers. The TLM was produced by our fathers in the faith—St. Damasus, St. Gregory the Great, and others—building on the liturgical foundations laid by Christ and the apostles. The fourth commandment, and the implications of belief in the communion of saints, require that we follow and keep the religious traditions established by these fathers who built up the Roman church, and from whom the members of the Roman Catholic Church have received the Faith itself. God, being omnipotent, could have arranged that the liturgical traditions that they passed on to us were better than they in fact are. But He didn’t, and we must accept and practice these traditions in order to honour these fathers. We cannot be dispensed from this obligation. To reject it is to cut ourselves off from communion with these fathers, and hence from the Church.
A second reason is that Latin civilization existed at the time of Christ, and that Our Lord and the apostles were in contact with it and interacted with it. Latin Christian civilization thus provides us with a direct link to the life and activity of Christ and the apostles, as do the Greek and Syriac civilizations of the other traditional rites of the Church. This connection to the milieu of Christ and the apostles is an invaluable and irreplaceable feature of the traditional Christian rites.
A third reason is the fact noted above, which is that the TLM is not of purely human origin. It contains divinely established elements, and these elements include both particular liturgical texts and actions and broader principles that govern the liturgy as a whole. We do not have sufficient independent knowledge of these divinely established broader principles to design a new rite that would be governed by them. The only way for us to follow these principles is to adhere to the traditional Latin rite that we actually possess.
One may indeed reasonably hold that these divinely established principles were not simply intended to govern whatever liturgies happened to be produced by the Church in the postapostolic era, but were intended by the plans of divine providence to give rise to the traditional liturgies that we actually possess. This is substantially the thesis advanced by Dr. Kwasniewski when he claims that the TLM was produced by the Holy Spirit’s influence on the Church. Whether or not we want to accept this claim in theory, there is no doubt that it must be accepted in practice. We are not capable of properly distinguishing between the divinely established aspects of the TLM and its merely human element—assuming that the idea of making such a distinction even makes sense—and so we are bound to accept the TLM as it stands. In any case, in view of the fantastic richness of even those elements of the TLM that might with most plausibility be identified as being of purely human origin, it would be foolish to do anything else. We do not now have the civilizational resources to create anything that would even come close to the human elements of the TLM.
The connection between the TLM and civilization illuminates the importance of the TLM for the Church, and shows that the traditionalist position is more important than traditionalists themselves are inclined to think. During the twentieth century, the notion of civilization as an ideal was replaced by the ideal of an “advanced” society—an “advanced” society being one that is strong in science and technology, and in consequence wealthy. This new ideal was understood to require the rejection of the old one. The elements of civilization in Western societies—e.g., education in classical languages, art and architecture in classical styles, formation in high literary culture—atrophied, or were deliberately attacked and eradicated. The assumption behind this programme is that an “advanced” society can be carried on without civilization; whether or not this will be true in the long run remains to be seen.
Developments in the Church from the 1950s onwards thoroughly implemented this destruction of civilization, with the intent of adhering to the new, anti-civilizational model. Traditional religious art and architecture ceased to be commissioned and were physically destroyed as far as possible. The TLM was totally suppressed, and the music developed for it ceased to performed (at least in a religious context). The Latin language and the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas were removed from clerical formation. The collapse of religious orders, and the eradication of the tradition of Latin scholasticism and liturgy in the remnants that remained, meant that the scholarly study of Latin Christian philosophy and theology also collapsed. Medieval Institutes closed down, universities were laicized and abandoned their Catholic tradition, journals ceased publication, publishers went out of business.
The Novus Ordo is part of this anti-civilizational project; this leaps to the eye when the ritual of Paul VI is examined in the setting of the architecture and music produced for it. This process of course had a religious goal—realization of the modernist urge to reject and destroy Catholicism. But since Catholicism is a civilized religion, destruction of Catholicism and destruction of civilization went together. We may add that opposition to civilization was to some extent a distinct motivation for this orgy of destruction. Some people are barbarians. They hate civilization as such, because it makes them feel inferior, presents them with standards they are unwilling and unable to meet, excludes them from status and importance. Such barbarians were important auxiliaries in the modernist war against the Faith.
The abandonment of the Latin language by the Church is a particularly significant aspect of this project. Until the early 1960s, priests were taught in Latin in seminaries, and were required to converse and write in that language. Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Veterum sapientia, issued in 1962, called for this tradition to be not only continued but strengthened. This educational tradition was ended in the 1960s. Most Roman Catholic priests are incapable of reading the simplest Latin text, and virtually none of them can write in the language, let alone speak it. This has incalculably grave consequences. No human community can exist without a shared language. The Roman Catholic Church now has no such common language, in the most ordinary sense; its priests and bishops from different linguistic areas cannot talk to each other. Contrast this with Orthodox Judaism, where not only every rabbi but every adult male Jew must be able to read the Hebrew text of the Torah in order to participate in the religion.
This loss of Latinity has almost entirely destroyed the unity of the Church on a human level. Not coincidentally, the main bond of unity for Roman Catholic clergy is now their subservience to the clerical apparatus in Rome. This is unlikely to prove a very strong bond as time goes on. It is debatable if a valid ecumenical council of the Church could now be held. As we have seen, such a council requires a real mutual understanding and agreement of minds among its participants. Such an understanding cannot be reached in an assembly where the participants depend on interpreters for an understanding of the proceedings, and must in consequence follow closely the plans, programs, and schedules of the organisers in charge. Events of this character naturally lend themselves to bureaucratic manipulation and direction, which exclude honest debate, obstruct the action of the Holy Spirit, and undermine the authority of the assembly.
We can thus see what is at stake in the attempt to suppress the TLM for good and all. As well as an attempt to suppress the divinely established liturgy of the Roman rite, it is an attempt to suppress one of the few remaining components of Christianity as a civilized religion, and to suppress the last place in which the Latin language is still in current use in the Roman Catholic Church. This helps to explain the zeal with which the goal of complete suppression is pursued by the enemies of the faith.
(IV) Fr. Donneaud and Prof. Grillo
Fr. Donneaud can be seen to have comprehensively betrayed the Dominican motto Veritas. He has falsified the meanings of the magisterial pronouncements that bear on the subject of the traditional liturgy and has upheld a claim on the liturgy that is heretical or proximate to heresy; and in the course of doing these things, he has falsely accused Dr. Kwasniewski of the very crimes against the faith and the Church that he is committing himself.
Although Fr. Donneaud’s positions cannot be taken seriously theologically, they are not just a farrago of nonsense. His insistence that the magisterium supports his position has a rational purpose. It is meant to convey to his audience that he has the backing of ecclesiastical power, and that if they should oppose or contradict him, this power will be used against them without scruple. This is a common tactic for those in the Church who have the means to take advantage of it. The absurd character of many of his statements is a help in conveying this message. This absurdity makes it clear at the outset that truth or reason are not going to play a role here, that it does not matter how good your arguments are if you disagree. Compelling people to agree to absurd statements that they know to be false is also a standard and effective tool for humiliating them and breaking their will.
Fr. Donneaud’s calumnious attacks on Dr. Kwasniewski are also a tool for exercising power. Traditionalists have long been the target of contemptuous abuse. The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner characterized traditionalists as “tragicomic, peripheral human failures.” Prof. Grillo has dismissed the views of the scholarly Dom Alcuin Reid by saying “I believe I have already wasted too much time on these pointless ravings.”[2] This abuse relieves the feelings of its perpetrators, and may convince some hearers of its truth. Its most important function, however, is to identify its targets to third parties as outcasts who deserve no respect and are entitled to no protection, in order to encourage others to persecute them.
The liturgy is not the area of Fr. Donneaud’s theological specialization. It seems likely that the stand he has taken on liturgical matters is at least to some extent a consequence of his involvement in certain affairs of ecclesiastical politics, rather than a prime intellectual interest. This may help to explain the weakness of his argumentation (as was also the case with Cavadini, Healy, and Weinandy).
Pope Francis has given him a position of authority over the Dominicaines du Saint-Esprit, a French teaching order of nuns that runs excellent schools. This order was founded by Fr. Victor Berto, a traditionalist who was Abp. Marcel Lefebvre’s theologian at the Second Vatican Council. It has always used the old liturgy, and was under the Ecclesia Dei commission when that body still existed. It has been wracked by political struggles of the kind that tend to convulse groups of religious. Cardinal Ouellet now controls the affairs of the order, and Fr. Donneaud has been tasked with making the nuns abandon the traditional liturgy and adopt the Novus Ordo. By all accounts, he has set to work on this task with zeal.
What was Fr. Donneaud to do when he came across the arguments of Dr. Kwasniewski, translated into French where they might be more accessible to his compatriots? Was he to give these arguments a fair hearing, and acknowledge that there was at least a good amount of truth in their conclusions? This would mean admitting to himself that he was outraging the worship of God by attempting to suppress a legal and holy form of it, trampling on the legal and spiritual rights of the Dominican sisters attached to the traditional liturgy, ruining their lives, and attempting to deceive them about the faith and worship of the Church.
The making of such admissions is not in human nature. Fr. Donneaud would have had to make different moral and religious choices much earlier on in order to appreciate the force of Dr. Kwasniewski’s case. He would have had to reject the idea of religious obedience as based on a slavish obedience to a pope with tyrannical powers whose every word must be believed and acted on without question, and to have rejected the combined pleasures of domination and self-righteousness that are available to zealous lieutenants who execute the commands of such a tyrannical power.
Prof. Grillo seems, at first sight, to be more honest than Fr. Donneaud. He insists that the Novus Ordo is fundamentally different from the TLM, openly attacks the Catholic faith (in addition to the criticisms of the Faith cited above, he is constantly insisting that the Church should accept and praise homosexual activity), maintains that the TLM should be rejected because of its theological content, and upholds a modernist conception of theology that denies the immutability of Catholic dogma.
One might qualify this by saying that he is more honest in what he says, but not in what he does. It is fundamentally dishonest for a man with his beliefs to hold an academic post in a Catholic theological institution. If he tried to advance these beliefs from outside the Church or as a simple layman, no one would pay any attention to him. By holding the post of professor in theology—and drawing a salary for this post, it might be remarked— he is enabled to work much more effectively at destroying the Catholic Faith he loathes. This is to make a career of treachery.
It would, however, be a mistake to portray Fr. Donneaud and Prof. Grillo as opposing characters. Men of both their types are needed to advance the anti-traditionalist cause. At the centre, in Rome—Prof. Grillo is rumoured to have had a role in the composition of Traditionis custodes, but there is no way of confirming this—leaders like Prof. Grillo are needed, who understand the reality of the liturgical situation and face up to it soberly. Only leaders of this description can correctly formulate a strategy against the old Mass and the faith it expresses.
Yet on the ground, and in contact with the faithful, a different sort of person is needed. If Prof. Grillo were tasked with converting the Dominican nuns to the Novus Ordo, his honesty and realism about liturgical questions would backfire. The nuns would clearly grasp what was at stake in the choice between the two liturgies, and many of them would be moved by Prof. Grillo in a traditionalist direction. Someone like Fr. Donneaud, who insists that magisterial teaching and Catholic tradition require the acceptance of the Novus Ordo and the repudiation of the TLM, and who on the surface has impeccably Thomist associations, has a far better prospect of success.
It is a nice question to judge the precedence of evil between Fr. Donneaud and Prof. Grillo. However, there is much more to be learned from the refutation of Fr. Donneaud than from the ideas of Prof. Grillo; and for that, at least, we owe thanks to the Dominican of Toulouse.
NOTES
[1] https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-18/is-traditionis-custodes-lawful
As we have demonstrated in the preceding parts, Fr. Donneaud’s objections to Dr. Kwasniewski’s traditionalist claims about the TLM and the Novus Ordo lack any force.
That does not in itself mean that Dr. Kwasniewski’s theses are left in possession of the field. Fr. Donneaud’s arguments may not be any good, but it could be said that there are nonetheless no good reasons for taking traditionalism seriously, and hence that Fr. Donneaud’s failures do not undermine his dismissal of it. We may accept that Dr. Kwasniewski is right about the fundamental differences between the TLM and the Novus Ordo. But that is, after all, no more than a statement of the obvious. Why should these differences matter? Why should they mean that the TLM has a right to preservation, as Dr. Kwasnieswki contends?
The dogmatic fact taught by Benedict XVI answers this question:
What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.
Some, like Prof. Grillo, will deny this dogmatic fact in itself; but it is more common for Catholics to not realise why this fact applies to the TLM, and hence to not see why the preservation of this liturgy is really a vital task for the Church. It is important to understand why this is the case.
A good place to start in arriving at such an understanding is with a question asked by Prof. Thomas Pink:
Suppose on the other hand that Paul VI had avoided the destruction of this culture of lay devotion but still fussily changed many texts (as Pius XII was already fussily beginning to change calendars and liturgical colors), yet somehow—hard to imagine, I know, given the culture of the time, but let’s suppose—managed to replace them with ones of even more eloquent orthodoxy and piercing beauty. Would we care whether he had, strictly speaking, legislated the replacement of one rite by another?[1]
To answer this question, we should first introduce a certain conception of the notion of civilization. According to this conception, civilization, in its highest form, is made up of components that are the product of a conscious and deliberate effort to reach the highest level of human attainment, and that for the most part substantially succeed in reaching this level. Individual geniuses such as Homer may reach this level of achievement without belonging to a civilization; what makes a civilization is a collective resolve to reach this level as far as is possible, and to preserve what has reached it.
This makes the components of a civilization different from the typical components of a national or ethnic culture. The latter are generally not the work of a conscious, deliberate act. Languages, customs, national costumes, are on the whole not the conscious creations of individuals. When such a conscious creation occurs in a nation or culture, as in the formulation of a legal code such as the code of Hammurabi, we see the beginnings of civilization emerging. Civilizations make use of and incorporate features of human culture, such as languages, that emerge naturally, but they often transform them for their purposes. Classical Latin, for example, is a language that was produced by gifted and cultured Romans who transformed a language of peasants and soldiers into a vehicle that could express and found a civilization. The high standard and conscious construction of the products of civilization means that an educational process is needed to fully grasp and appreciate them. This is seen in the languages of civilizations, which can be properly mastered only by a process of formal education and are often no longer spoken as cradle languages. Examples of such languages are classical Latin, classical Greek, Sanskrit, classical Arabic, and classical Chinese.
The goal of reaching the highest level of human achievement, when it is realized, confers a universal status and ambition upon the products of a civilization. Because they are meant to be supreme forms of human achievement, these products attempt—and often explicitly claim to attempt—to be among the best achievements of humanity, not just of one nation or section of humanity. As such, they aim at an universal appeal, and relate to universal features of human life and society.
In consequence, a fully developed civilization must have both a religion and a philosophy. A religion relates the human race, which a civilization aspires to represent, to the cosmos and its ruler; a philosophy gives a rational understanding of the human race, the cosmos, and mankind’s place in the cosmos. This philosophy must actually be some good, it must have some success in understanding the subjects it is concerned with, in order to serve as the basis of a civilization; to the degree that it fails to do this, it limits the civilization’s scope and achievements.
The universal aspirations of a civilization mean that it is willing to borrow and incorporate any achievements that it comes across. The Greeks borrowed massively from the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, the Romans simply copied most of their literary forms from the Greeks. The universal nature of civilization means that the adoption of civilization by a group or nation is not a rejection of their national or ethnic character, of the sort that would occur if an individual leaves one nation and assimilates into another one; instead, it is an enhancement of that character. Civilizations can contain many nations and peoples, and the adoption of a civilization enables a people to realize its potential. This process is clearly seen in the adoption of Latin Christian civilization by barbarian groups such as the Franks and other Germans after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Christianity was from the first a civilized religion—that is, a religion that used and incorporated the resources of civilization in its belief and practice, that was aimed at civilized people (among others), and that was intended to be suited to civilized people and to be capable of functioning as the religious part of their civilization. This was dictated by the logic of Christian theology: the human nature redeemed by Christ should be shown to reach its highest potential; the divinely revealed message should be expressed with the greatest power and majesty possible; the worship of God should be carried on using the highest forms of human culture.
The civilization in which Christianity took being is Hellenistic civilization, which includes Latin and Syriac branches as well as Greek civilization. This development of a civilized religion can already be seen in Alexandrian Jews prior to the advent of Christianity, and is evident in Philo. In the New Testament, we can see that St. Paul and St. Luke both mastered the literary skills of a civilized man, and their works could not have been written without these skills. The works of the Fathers of the Church, and the teachings of the ecumenical councils, were products and components of a civilization. The councils use philosophical concepts that were developed by Greek philosophy. The works of St. Augustine and St. Basil are the works of supremely civilized men—men who were masters of the culture, language, and thought of their civilization, and raised these aspects of civilization to their highest pitch in their theological work.
The character of Christianity as a civilized religion includes its liturgy. The development of Christian liturgy as a form of civilization was hindered by the legal persecution of the religion by the Roman Empire in its first three centuries, but after Christianity was legalized by the emperor Constantine in 311 AD, this development was rapidly undertaken. The TLM is the civilized liturgy produced by Latin Christian civilization, as the Byzantine Rite is the civilized liturgy produced by Greek Christian civilization. The TLM, together with the music and architecture developed to accompany it, is indeed the central part of Latin Christian civilization, which would not exist if these things were removed from it.
This gets us part way towards an answer to Prof. Pink’s question. The idea that a pope could replace the TLM by a new rite composed of texts of even more eloquent orthodoxy and piercing beauty is absurd. The richness of the TLM is the product of an entire civilization, and required a civilization to produce it; an entirely new rite would have to emerge from an entirely new Christian civilization. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote the office for the feast of Corpus Christi at the behest of Pope Urban IV. This office was a success, but it took one of the greatest saints and doctors of the Church to write the liturgy for a single feast. We do not and will not have over 300 St. Thomas Aquinas’s at our disposal to write the offices for the other days of the Christian year. Even if we did, that would not on its own suffice to produce a new rite. St. Thomas used an established liturgical structure and established models of prayer and hymnody to produce the office of Corpus Christi. The framework within which he worked was the product of a civilization with millennial roots. An equivalent Christian civilization cannot be produced at will, and we cannot expect that another one will come into existence. If it ever did, it could only be put to use by our remote descendants many centuries from now.
The idea of adopting a new rite because it is equal or superior to the TLM in beauty and orthodoxy also presupposes that such a rite could be evaluated in absolute terms, independently of its relation to us and our past. This is not the case, for several reasons.
One reason is loyalty to the traditions of our fathers. The TLM was produced by our fathers in the faith—St. Damasus, St. Gregory the Great, and others—building on the liturgical foundations laid by Christ and the apostles. The fourth commandment, and the implications of belief in the communion of saints, require that we follow and keep the religious traditions established by these fathers who built up the Roman church, and from whom the members of the Roman Catholic Church have received the Faith itself. God, being omnipotent, could have arranged that the liturgical traditions that they passed on to us were better than they in fact are. But He didn’t, and we must accept and practice these traditions in order to honour these fathers. We cannot be dispensed from this obligation. To reject it is to cut ourselves off from communion with these fathers, and hence from the Church.
A second reason is that Latin civilization existed at the time of Christ, and that Our Lord and the apostles were in contact with it and interacted with it. Latin Christian civilization thus provides us with a direct link to the life and activity of Christ and the apostles, as do the Greek and Syriac civilizations of the other traditional rites of the Church. This connection to the milieu of Christ and the apostles is an invaluable and irreplaceable feature of the traditional Christian rites.
A third reason is the fact noted above, which is that the TLM is not of purely human origin. It contains divinely established elements, and these elements include both particular liturgical texts and actions and broader principles that govern the liturgy as a whole. We do not have sufficient independent knowledge of these divinely established broader principles to design a new rite that would be governed by them. The only way for us to follow these principles is to adhere to the traditional Latin rite that we actually possess.
One may indeed reasonably hold that these divinely established principles were not simply intended to govern whatever liturgies happened to be produced by the Church in the postapostolic era, but were intended by the plans of divine providence to give rise to the traditional liturgies that we actually possess. This is substantially the thesis advanced by Dr. Kwasniewski when he claims that the TLM was produced by the Holy Spirit’s influence on the Church. Whether or not we want to accept this claim in theory, there is no doubt that it must be accepted in practice. We are not capable of properly distinguishing between the divinely established aspects of the TLM and its merely human element—assuming that the idea of making such a distinction even makes sense—and so we are bound to accept the TLM as it stands. In any case, in view of the fantastic richness of even those elements of the TLM that might with most plausibility be identified as being of purely human origin, it would be foolish to do anything else. We do not now have the civilizational resources to create anything that would even come close to the human elements of the TLM.
The connection between the TLM and civilization illuminates the importance of the TLM for the Church, and shows that the traditionalist position is more important than traditionalists themselves are inclined to think. During the twentieth century, the notion of civilization as an ideal was replaced by the ideal of an “advanced” society—an “advanced” society being one that is strong in science and technology, and in consequence wealthy. This new ideal was understood to require the rejection of the old one. The elements of civilization in Western societies—e.g., education in classical languages, art and architecture in classical styles, formation in high literary culture—atrophied, or were deliberately attacked and eradicated. The assumption behind this programme is that an “advanced” society can be carried on without civilization; whether or not this will be true in the long run remains to be seen.
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| Christi Auferstehung Kirche, Cologne, 1963-1970 |
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| Templo del Señor de los Rayos, Aguascalientes, 1957 |
The Novus Ordo is part of this anti-civilizational project; this leaps to the eye when the ritual of Paul VI is examined in the setting of the architecture and music produced for it. This process of course had a religious goal—realization of the modernist urge to reject and destroy Catholicism. But since Catholicism is a civilized religion, destruction of Catholicism and destruction of civilization went together. We may add that opposition to civilization was to some extent a distinct motivation for this orgy of destruction. Some people are barbarians. They hate civilization as such, because it makes them feel inferior, presents them with standards they are unwilling and unable to meet, excludes them from status and importance. Such barbarians were important auxiliaries in the modernist war against the Faith.
The abandonment of the Latin language by the Church is a particularly significant aspect of this project. Until the early 1960s, priests were taught in Latin in seminaries, and were required to converse and write in that language. Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Veterum sapientia, issued in 1962, called for this tradition to be not only continued but strengthened. This educational tradition was ended in the 1960s. Most Roman Catholic priests are incapable of reading the simplest Latin text, and virtually none of them can write in the language, let alone speak it. This has incalculably grave consequences. No human community can exist without a shared language. The Roman Catholic Church now has no such common language, in the most ordinary sense; its priests and bishops from different linguistic areas cannot talk to each other. Contrast this with Orthodox Judaism, where not only every rabbi but every adult male Jew must be able to read the Hebrew text of the Torah in order to participate in the religion.
This loss of Latinity has almost entirely destroyed the unity of the Church on a human level. Not coincidentally, the main bond of unity for Roman Catholic clergy is now their subservience to the clerical apparatus in Rome. This is unlikely to prove a very strong bond as time goes on. It is debatable if a valid ecumenical council of the Church could now be held. As we have seen, such a council requires a real mutual understanding and agreement of minds among its participants. Such an understanding cannot be reached in an assembly where the participants depend on interpreters for an understanding of the proceedings, and must in consequence follow closely the plans, programs, and schedules of the organisers in charge. Events of this character naturally lend themselves to bureaucratic manipulation and direction, which exclude honest debate, obstruct the action of the Holy Spirit, and undermine the authority of the assembly.
We can thus see what is at stake in the attempt to suppress the TLM for good and all. As well as an attempt to suppress the divinely established liturgy of the Roman rite, it is an attempt to suppress one of the few remaining components of Christianity as a civilized religion, and to suppress the last place in which the Latin language is still in current use in the Roman Catholic Church. This helps to explain the zeal with which the goal of complete suppression is pursued by the enemies of the faith.
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| An all-Latin Ordo (Baltimore, 1838) for parish priests in the USA; this would now be all but unintelligible |
(IV) Fr. Donneaud and Prof. Grillo
Fr. Donneaud can be seen to have comprehensively betrayed the Dominican motto Veritas. He has falsified the meanings of the magisterial pronouncements that bear on the subject of the traditional liturgy and has upheld a claim on the liturgy that is heretical or proximate to heresy; and in the course of doing these things, he has falsely accused Dr. Kwasniewski of the very crimes against the faith and the Church that he is committing himself.
Although Fr. Donneaud’s positions cannot be taken seriously theologically, they are not just a farrago of nonsense. His insistence that the magisterium supports his position has a rational purpose. It is meant to convey to his audience that he has the backing of ecclesiastical power, and that if they should oppose or contradict him, this power will be used against them without scruple. This is a common tactic for those in the Church who have the means to take advantage of it. The absurd character of many of his statements is a help in conveying this message. This absurdity makes it clear at the outset that truth or reason are not going to play a role here, that it does not matter how good your arguments are if you disagree. Compelling people to agree to absurd statements that they know to be false is also a standard and effective tool for humiliating them and breaking their will.
Fr. Donneaud’s calumnious attacks on Dr. Kwasniewski are also a tool for exercising power. Traditionalists have long been the target of contemptuous abuse. The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner characterized traditionalists as “tragicomic, peripheral human failures.” Prof. Grillo has dismissed the views of the scholarly Dom Alcuin Reid by saying “I believe I have already wasted too much time on these pointless ravings.”[2] This abuse relieves the feelings of its perpetrators, and may convince some hearers of its truth. Its most important function, however, is to identify its targets to third parties as outcasts who deserve no respect and are entitled to no protection, in order to encourage others to persecute them.
The liturgy is not the area of Fr. Donneaud’s theological specialization. It seems likely that the stand he has taken on liturgical matters is at least to some extent a consequence of his involvement in certain affairs of ecclesiastical politics, rather than a prime intellectual interest. This may help to explain the weakness of his argumentation (as was also the case with Cavadini, Healy, and Weinandy).
Pope Francis has given him a position of authority over the Dominicaines du Saint-Esprit, a French teaching order of nuns that runs excellent schools. This order was founded by Fr. Victor Berto, a traditionalist who was Abp. Marcel Lefebvre’s theologian at the Second Vatican Council. It has always used the old liturgy, and was under the Ecclesia Dei commission when that body still existed. It has been wracked by political struggles of the kind that tend to convulse groups of religious. Cardinal Ouellet now controls the affairs of the order, and Fr. Donneaud has been tasked with making the nuns abandon the traditional liturgy and adopt the Novus Ordo. By all accounts, he has set to work on this task with zeal.
What was Fr. Donneaud to do when he came across the arguments of Dr. Kwasniewski, translated into French where they might be more accessible to his compatriots? Was he to give these arguments a fair hearing, and acknowledge that there was at least a good amount of truth in their conclusions? This would mean admitting to himself that he was outraging the worship of God by attempting to suppress a legal and holy form of it, trampling on the legal and spiritual rights of the Dominican sisters attached to the traditional liturgy, ruining their lives, and attempting to deceive them about the faith and worship of the Church.
The making of such admissions is not in human nature. Fr. Donneaud would have had to make different moral and religious choices much earlier on in order to appreciate the force of Dr. Kwasniewski’s case. He would have had to reject the idea of religious obedience as based on a slavish obedience to a pope with tyrannical powers whose every word must be believed and acted on without question, and to have rejected the combined pleasures of domination and self-righteousness that are available to zealous lieutenants who execute the commands of such a tyrannical power.
Prof. Grillo seems, at first sight, to be more honest than Fr. Donneaud. He insists that the Novus Ordo is fundamentally different from the TLM, openly attacks the Catholic faith (in addition to the criticisms of the Faith cited above, he is constantly insisting that the Church should accept and praise homosexual activity), maintains that the TLM should be rejected because of its theological content, and upholds a modernist conception of theology that denies the immutability of Catholic dogma.
One might qualify this by saying that he is more honest in what he says, but not in what he does. It is fundamentally dishonest for a man with his beliefs to hold an academic post in a Catholic theological institution. If he tried to advance these beliefs from outside the Church or as a simple layman, no one would pay any attention to him. By holding the post of professor in theology—and drawing a salary for this post, it might be remarked— he is enabled to work much more effectively at destroying the Catholic Faith he loathes. This is to make a career of treachery.
It would, however, be a mistake to portray Fr. Donneaud and Prof. Grillo as opposing characters. Men of both their types are needed to advance the anti-traditionalist cause. At the centre, in Rome—Prof. Grillo is rumoured to have had a role in the composition of Traditionis custodes, but there is no way of confirming this—leaders like Prof. Grillo are needed, who understand the reality of the liturgical situation and face up to it soberly. Only leaders of this description can correctly formulate a strategy against the old Mass and the faith it expresses.
Yet on the ground, and in contact with the faithful, a different sort of person is needed. If Prof. Grillo were tasked with converting the Dominican nuns to the Novus Ordo, his honesty and realism about liturgical questions would backfire. The nuns would clearly grasp what was at stake in the choice between the two liturgies, and many of them would be moved by Prof. Grillo in a traditionalist direction. Someone like Fr. Donneaud, who insists that magisterial teaching and Catholic tradition require the acceptance of the Novus Ordo and the repudiation of the TLM, and who on the surface has impeccably Thomist associations, has a far better prospect of success.
It is a nice question to judge the precedence of evil between Fr. Donneaud and Prof. Grillo. However, there is much more to be learned from the refutation of Fr. Donneaud than from the ideas of Prof. Grillo; and for that, at least, we owe thanks to the Dominican of Toulouse.
© John R.T. Lamont 2023
NOTES
[1] https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-18/is-traditionis-custodes-lawful
[2] https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2014/01/andrea-grillo-replies-to-alcuin-reids.html
