Whither the Roman Rite?

The contemporary liturgy is not only something less than the Traditional Latin Mass; it is an imposter. So holds Peter A. Kwasniewski in his admirably arranged volume The Once and Future Roman Rite: Returning to the Traditional Latin Liturgy after Seventy Years of Exile. Beautiful works of art throughout the book call to mind what has been lost: a solemn, God-directed liturgy, tied to the venerable faith of the Church.

Ironically, this loss is represented no more vividly than in the heartbreaking words of Pope Paul VI himself as he explained the move away from the Latin language: “We are parting with the speech of the Christian centuries; we are becoming like profane intruders in the literary preserve of sacred utterance…. We have reason indeed for regret, almost reason for bewilderment.” But that loss was judged worth the gain of a liturgy more comprehensible to modern man. Paul VI quoted Scripture to assure that ejecting Latin was for the good: “In Church I would rather speak five words with my mind, in order to instruct others, than ten thousand with a tongue” (1 Cor. 14:19). Similar pastoral considerations justified other changes. The substance of the Mass was said to be unaltered; differences, rather, were of a superficial nature. The new, simplified rite was in continuity with the old — it was the same lex orandi (law of prayer) and, thus, the same lex credendi (law of belief). Kwasniewski does not buy this judgment. The New Mass (Novus Ordo), he argues, lacks continuity with the Mass of the Ages and is substantively different — the same conclusion he applies to reforms of liturgy in general (i.e., the other sacraments, as well as the breviary, or Divine Office, prayed by clerics and religious orders).

Arguing that the Novus Ordo Missae is substantively different from the old Mass is not necessarily easy, even as it is immediately plain that something is very different between the new rite and the old. A basic philosophical question pertains here: What appearances, what accidents, are revelatory of a substance, and which are accidental? For example, I can have a blue, red, or green car, but all are cars. If I have a car without doors or a windshield, it is still a car, though less useful. However, if I remove the wheels and install skis, is it still a car? Probably not. Regarding the Mass, what things are paint colors and important accessories, and which are the wheels, as it were? Which “accidents” are revelatory of the substance of the Roman rite? Note that this is a different matter than whether we have a valid Eucharist; here we are talking about the totality of the rite. The Mass is more than a delivery system for the Eucharist; it is an article representing the whole Catholic faith. Kwasniewski is correct that most of the little motions and words of the Mass, though perhaps not directly effective to the eucharistic consecration, are nevertheless important, not merely optional material that can be rearranged or discarded at will, even (and perhaps especially) if their use is not well understood. The seemingly minor acts subliminally speak truths of the faith, revealing substance, which is to say, they reveal the Christian faith. Lex orandi, lex credendi.

Kwasniewski proposes a list of nine crucial elements of the Roman rite (i.e., the necessary “accidents” without which we cannot say we have the Roman rite): the Roman Canon, use of Latin, Gregorian chant, the lectionary, the calendar, the Offertory, ad orientem celebration, parallelism in liturgical action, and separate communion of the priest. To elaborate on one of the nine: parallelism, the quality whereby the priest seems to be moving on a somewhat different time schedule than the congregation, hits close to the obvious difference between the new and old rites. The new rite appears as a sequential presentation — a collection of pieces laid one after the other for plain comprehension by the intellect. Yes, the Novus Ordo has mysterious elements (e.g., confection of the Eucharist), but these are as a few pieces set within a generally dialectic framework. Silence is cordoned off to designated times (e.g., after the homily and after purifying the vessels). The traditional Mass, on the other hand, is contemplative through and through. Not a presentation aimed at an audience, it is instead a solemn reaching out to God, directed at God and not us. The liturgy includes what may occur only to the spirit — that which rings mystically through the ranks in parallel word and action. The faithful do not comprehend this with their intellects so much as they bask in it.

The Novus Ordo, of course, does not measure up well in any of these nine criteria, and for this reason Kwasniewski’s list may strike the reader more as distinguishing the New Mass from the old and cause him to think, therefore, that the list rather begs the question of what is definitive of the Roman rite. Kwasniewski’s central claim is that the Novus Ordo is not a form of the Roman rite; it is something else. Presumably, this is the case in the way the Chaldean or Byzantine Catholic rites are different from the Roman rite, but with a major difference: The Novus Ordo, which Kwasniewski calls the Modern Papal rite, cannot claim adherence to an unbroken tradition, while other Catholic rites can do so. Moreover, an overarching difficulty is that the Mass — any Mass — represents the faith in the way a work of art represents an idea. Exemplary though a painting or sculpture may be in delivering the experience of an idea, a work of art cannot be definitive of that idea. Ideas are defined in text, not in works of art. Thus, the Creed is spoken or sung out loud every week to reinforce exactly what all the gestures of the Mass are getting at. Of course, some works of art are objectively better than others, and there is no reason to think the same could not be true for liturgy.

Continuity with tradition seems an easier judge of authenticity: Liturgy is carefully received from the tradition, carefully practiced, and carefully handed off as received. To vary from this is to break with tradition. Though the liturgy before Vatican II was not identical to the liturgy of antiquity, previous changes happened gradually and only in additive fashion. This development mirrors the development of doctrine, whereby immutable truths are understood more completely over time but never changed from their original meaning. Thus, the relatively simple liturgy of the patristic era flowered into the regal form eventually codified by Pope Pius V at Trent in the 16th century. Moreover, change has moved asymptotically toward a fixed standard, additively closing the distance between where things are and the ideal. Changes early on were relatively large, but moving forward they necessarily became ever smaller. Thus, the Tridentine Mass, which holds centuries of refinement, is a nearly perfect representation of the truths of the faith.

But reform-minded critics of the late 19th century viewed the Tridentine Mass as something heavy with Baroque accretions and rigid hierarchy. Its opacity made distant observers of the laity, who waited in boredom until they were allowed to step forward and receive from the hands of clerics. Bad changes were already being made to the liturgy before the start of Vatican II, but these ill-conceived revisions were mere infractions compared to what happened following Vatican II. A completely new liturgy was brought forth, bolted together from the pieces of the old liturgy. Abandoning the principle of organic growth in favor of a pastoral-oriented liturgy, a reductivist attitude was taken. Key elements of the Mass were pulled out, trimmed down to their “essence,” and reassembled.

On this point Kwasniewski makes perhaps his most convincing argument of the book. Development of the New Mass does not follow the same pattern as previous liturgical development. While giving deference to Pope Benedict XVI, Kwasniewski takes issue with his characterization in Summorum Pontificum (which opened the door to broad celebration of the Traditional Mass) of the Novus Ordo and Traditional Mass as two forms of the same Roman rite. On the contrary, with only 13 percent of the original text retained, the Mass was reworked in a manner never before seen in the Church. Even Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger admits as much in his oft-quoted introduction to Alcuin Reid’s The Organic Development of the Liturgy (2005): The liturgy was treated like a mechanism that could be refitted or even junked if doing so better served current purpose. And Kwasniewski is relentless in disabusing the reader of any idea that this happened despite the wishes of an unwitting Paul VI. No, the Novus Ordo was under his direction and approval. This action vis-à-vis the liturgy is an extreme case of the centuries-long ultramontanist tendency in the Church, whereby the pope is regarded as almost above tradition, capable of positively steering the Church into new directions at will. (How the perhaps over-authoritarian papal model figures into the story of the New Mass is a topic beyond what can be covered in this review.)

Overall, Kwasniewski makes points worthy of consideration regarding both apparent traditional discontinuity (at least in a formal sense) and substantive differences between the new and old Masses. These questions set up the troublesome matter of magisterial authority. If errors were made, at what level did they happen? Obviously, the higher we trace any missteps, the more it becomes a knock on the Church’s self-understanding of infallibility in matters of faith and morals. Kwasniewski suggests that the liturgy we ended up with is more or less what Vatican II intended. On this reading, the call of Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC), the council’s “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” only for changes that grow organically out of the existing liturgy is window dressing for a contrary program of complete renovation. The details of the text of SC include multiple calls for revision, for “a new rite to be drawn up,” which admittedly sounds not much like organic growth. However, given that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre himself (who formed the Society of St. Pius X because he refused to celebrate the New Mass) signed off on SC, it is fair to wonder if some of the issue is due to translation preferences from the original Latin. For example, the Vatican website’s English translation of textus et ritus ita ordinari oportet from paragraph 21 is “both texts and rites should be drawn up”; but the phrase can also be rendered as “it is appropriate therefore that texts and rites be adjusted.” Apparently, there is a range of possible meanings in the Latin. Why would not “organic growth” govern translation?

A similar question is raised on the matter of “active participation.” Kwasniewski uses the following English translation of paragraph 14 of SC (which is the translation found on the Vatican website): “In the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy, this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else” (emphasis in Kwasniewski’s quote). But a call for active participation to be considered “before all else” could never be taken literally as the master principle since, on its face, doing so admits absolutely every absurdity for the sake of participation. And it turns out there is good reason to doubt this is actually what the council asked for. The Latin text of paragraph 14 of SC is actuoso participatio…summopere est attendenda, which means “active participation…is to be exceedingly/highly attended to” (emphasis mine). A better Latinist may correct me here, but this does not sound like a call for putting active participation above all else. The more modest reading fits with a not-so-revolutionary vision for reform, one marked by SC’s call for respect of tradition and for educating the laity about the Mass.

Even if there is more a cause to impugn Vatican administration than the Second Vatican Council, Kwasniewski is not wrong to point out some of the well-known issues with the council’s texts; their ambiguity has been an avenue for mischief. We should be striving to read those texts in line with tradition; to do otherwise leads to the more serious problem of how the Church’s claim to infallible teaching authority might be damaged if it turns out a duly promulgated council was basically a robber council.

While acknowledging the validity of the New Mass, Kwasniewski also lays the grave charge that “the reformed liturgy represents a sin against the Father,” which seems to mean that the Church has been leading the faithful into sin. I was uncomfortable to read this. Does blame fall on the council or on later churchmen who came up with the New Mass? The gravity of the reproach increases the closer the blame lies with the council itself. What happened to Christ’s promise that the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against the Church? Kwasniewski does not take up this question.

Likewise, I did not find in the book engagement with the idea that there might have been good reasons behind the liturgical reform. Kwasniewski appreciates the complexity of the run-up to Vatican II; the 19th- and early 20th-century sides of reform versus resistance are not easy to categorize into the camps of the present-day liturgy wars. Kwasniewski points out that while Pope Pius X indeed pushed back against modernism with his encyclical Pascendi Domini Gregis (1907), he also reaffirmed Pope Urban VIII’s revised hymnal, which had ejected a snip of tradition by favoring classical Latin over traditional ecclesial Latin. And though Pope Pius XII is regarded by some as the last traditional pope, he attempted to update the Latin of the psalter, and he completely revised the Holy Week liturgy. All this was before Vatican II. The welcome understanding Kwasniewski brings to Vatican II precursors would have been improved by a serious look at why the liturgical reform was sought.

This oversight might relate to not seeing what Benedict meant by identifying both liturgical traditionalists and progressives as susceptible to a neo-Scholastic reductionism in the Mass. The progressives have distilled the Mass to an essence — a valid Eucharist is the one nugget we must continue to preserve, and, doing that, almost everything else is subject to revision. Kwasniewski makes a strong case for why the so-called accidentals of the liturgy are actually revelatory of its substance and cannot be cast aside or modified at will. What he misses is how traditionalists also can fall into reductionism. If I may attempt to elaborate on what Benedict seems to have meant here: For most people, the doings and words of the Traditional Latin Mass are occluded. The rich symbolism might not be absorbed (except perhaps indirectly through the priest) because the people don’t even perceive much of the symbolism; they neither see nor hear it. Not engaging in the totality of the Mass, the congregation reduces it to the essential thing they get from it: the Eucharist. Thus, the remotion of Roman-rite fundamentals causes the same effect as did progressive renovations: the sacrament becomes the all-in-all. Overcoming this occluded view of the Mass is what Vatican II was aiming for — to engage the lay faithful in the Mass, so they might partake of the symbolism and unite themselves to the motions and words on the altar. Again, much of this is remedied by better education of the laity, which SC called for.

The bold thesis of The Once and Future Roman Rite — that the New Mass is not a form of the Roman rite and, therefore, should be left behind — does not necessarily have to be affirmed for one to agree that, indeed, something went wrong with the liturgical reform. Kwasniewski’s book probes the gap that was formed between the new and old and should serve as a reminder that finding a happy end to the liturgy wars requires more than pushing the Latin Mass into a memory hole and marginalizing its adherents. Small in number though they may be, they raise serious questions that deserve serious attention.

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