By James Baresel
“Catholics come to church with certain expectations not widely held by earlier generations when it comes to participation in the Church’s rituals. That is largely the result of the Liturgical Movement of the 20th century, which precipitated a major overhaul of the public worship that the Church offers to God.”
Printed
on the back cover of “Sing His Song: A Short Introduction to the Liturgical
Movement” by Father Thomas Kocik, those words inadvertently point to a key
reason why many well-disposed to use of the Tridentine Mass—including some who
offer or attend it at every opportunity—find it incomprehensible that some
absolutely refuse to give it up and oppose all suggestions of reforming it. Behind
that incomprehension is a false sense of normality and consequent false
assumptions about liturgical reform.
For
well over half a century, practices and prayers which were not part of Catholic
worship for at least several centuries (in some cases for all of Church
history), may never have been universal, are entirely unnecessary and are
sometimes no more than minimally acceptable have been ubiquitous—with the
result that most Catholics now unthinkingly accept them as basic standards of
normality. Most of what is common in reverent and orthodox but not particularly
traditionalist leaning parish churches—Mass in vernacular languages, priests
facing the people, use not just of the Missal of Paul VI but of optional new
prayers (i.e. for the anaphora) rather than optional traditional alternatives
(i.e. the Roman Canon), congregational “participation” and so on—falls within
these parameters.
This
false sense of normality is not confined to those uninterested in the
Tridentine Mass. Some who consider it superior unthinkingly treat it (in
practice if not in theory) as rising to a degree of perfection above what they
treat as the “basic normal standard” set by historically unusual but now
ubiquitous texts and practices.
Because
both groups of Catholics fail to treat the Tridentine Mass as the true
historical standard of normality, they treat giving it up as tolerable
enough—not as the surrender of normality in return for the bare essentials. If
this alone cannot explain why some devoted to the Tridentine Mass oppose even
hidden disobedience by priests in canonically regular standing, it almost
certainly contributes to why at least of proportion of these do not take a
serious look at whether such disobedience might be justified.
More
limited acceptance of false normality explains why some who are highly critical
of Pope Paul VI’s reforms nevertheless insist that those devoted to the
Tridentine Mass should be open to reforms of a more moderate nature.
What is at issue here are not
purely textual changes periodically made to the Tridentine Mass for more than
three centuries after its codification by Saint Pius V, or indeed, for century
after century before he did so. None of these changes was meant to have any
impact on how people prayed at Mass, was not meant to interfere with their organically
developed pious practices. If before a particular change the laity prayed
silently—some reading missals, others saying their rosaries, others practicing
mental prayer and so on—they continued doing so after the change was made.
Church authorities were concerned only with alteration to what was said and
done by the priest and other sacred ministers.
A modern equivalent would be the use
of proper orations composed for some particular saints’ feast days in the Novus
Ordo rather than continuing to use the common orations of martyrs or confessors
or virgins in the Tridentine missal.
Insistence upon traditionalists
accepting “reform” almost inevitably means accepting not just such minor
textual changes but accepting a “reform” of piety—one that would bring it into
line with false normality. At minimum they insist upon at the laity universally
basing their prayer upon the Mass texts and “participating”—precisely because
they wrongly think of these as standards of normality rather than as pious
practices that may be useful for some people in some places during some periods
of history. This desire to change pious practices is the reason such
individuals often believe introduction of the vernacular was valuable despite also
believing that Latin should have remained widespread and the textual content of
the Mass largely unchanged.
Such use of liturgical alterations
to more or less forcibly induce people to inorganically and artificially change
their pious practices is unheard of in the history of the Roman Mass prior to
the reforms made to Holy Week by Pope Pius XII. (Changing the city of Rome’s
liturgical language from Greek to Latin in the early centuries of the Church
allowed people to preserve pre-existing “participatory piety” at a time of
changing linguistic demographics and had nothing to do with changing how people
prayed.)
It is a simple fact that all contemporary
discussions of liturgical reform—whether theoretically pondering what would
have constituted a “true reform” or making proposals for “reforming the reform”
or for “mutual enrichment” or anything else—are conditioned in favor of
reforming piety and introducing some degree of false normality.
For this reason, it not only reasonable
but wise for traditionalists to oppose all suggestions of reform indefinitely. Should
those urging us to accept “reform” wish to be taken seriously, they must make
two things clear. First, that they refer to no more than minor and purely
textual changes within the context of Mass said entirely in Latin and a few
words of Greek. Second, that they do not aim at reforming piety and are
perfectly content with silent congregations and with many of those at Mass
saying the rosary, meditating on Christ’s sacrificial death or watching the
priest at the altar.
