A Personal Account by Gary Scarrabelotti
"Why have you gone back to the old Latin Mass?" That is a question which I have been asked many times recently by many a puzzled inquirer. Not infrequently, the most perplexed have been friends and comrades: people with whom I have shared a common cause - the defense and promotion of Vatican II understood in the light of orthodox Catholic teaching.
The reason why these old associates and natural allies are feeling, some of them, uneasy is because they recognize -or suspect- that by returning to our traditional Mass I am signaling a change of mind about things upon which we were once agreed.
Once we eagerly accepted the challenge -made by Paul VI and reiterated by John Paul II- to modernize Catholic life, to give the faith of our fathers a new expression in forms more attuned to the modem world. But now things have changed. What once appeared to be an obvious, common sense course has been shown in practice to be a road to ruin. For my part, I cannot tread this path further. The updating (or aggiornamento) in which we were engaged was an attempt to "inculturate" the Catholic faith into the secularist mHea of Western society. The key element in this ambitious project was the reconstruction of the liturgy.
In reality, though, the "reform" was an act of cultural hubris carried out and endorsed by people who had already accepted that contemporary Western culture should serve as a norm for Catholic life. This assumption, moreover, was not merely something which activated the advance guard of reformers; it also deeply influenced mainstream Catholics and has gravely (perhaps totally) weakened their defense of Catholic doctrine. On the liturgical level, the result has been the creation of a system of religious symbols more appropriate for sowing confusion among Catholics than for building up their faith. What is particularly dangerous about this development, I believe, is that these symbols do not exert their influence upon Catholics, as it were, from without but from within: from within one of the most intimate, nurturing places of their faith, the churches to which they resort.
I had finally reached these conclusions by 1987, but at that time their implications were not clear to me. My chief preoccupation was how to remain a believing and practicing Catholic in a Catholic world whose every nook and cranny -or so it seemed to me- have become an alien place.
The religious culture in which I had tried to live the faith had been obliterated by policies approved by the Church's leaders and applauded by people like myself. It came as a shock to discover that this up-to-date, alternative Catholic world which we had eagerly constructed for ourselves was not one in which I could live as a Catholic.
All I could do was to take refuge - and so I did (during 1987-88), in the Ukrainian Catholic Church. I owe an eternal debt to the Ukrainian Catholics. Thanks to them I was able to persevere. I also relearned many things from them, things which had become almost blotted from my mind: that God is a mystery to be worshipped; that to stimulate the attitude of worship, the cultus of God must be infused with a sense of His mystery; and that beauty is the doorway through which the mystery enters and brings men and women to their knees. And there was another thing, too, that I learned: that those who deny their past -those who make an idol of the present- are already like the dead; they are souls without a future.
It was while I was praying with the Ukrainians and under the influence of their liturgy, that I began to take stock of a store of ideas which I had inherited but whose significance and ramifications I had not seriously begun to evaluate. This did not occur systematically. A store house tends to be a jumble and one assesses its contents randomly, taking up things as they come to hand and reburying them inadvertently as one rummages through the place. Interesting things turned up, however, as I began picking over my collected intellectual baggage.
There was, for instance, something Plato had said but which at a younger and more vain age -when I was eager to appear a man of his time- I could not have understood:
"Change, except when it is change from what is bad, is always, we shall find, highly perilous, whether it be change of seasons, of prevailing winds, of bodily regimen, of mental habit, or, in a word, change of anything whatever without exception, except in the case I have just mentioned, change from bad." (Plato, Laws, VII, 797e)
True, Plato's horror of change had much to do with the kind of society he essayed in "The Republic", an ancient herald of twentieth century totalitarianism. But that did not blunt the force of his original point and I was reminded that Aristotle (whose only vice as a philosopher was his moderation) had said much the same:
"...God, whose nature is one, enjoys one simple pleasure for ever. For there is an activity not only of movement but of immobility, like that of thought, and there is in rest a more real pleasure than in motion. Yet, as the poet says, 'in all things change is sweet.' it is sweet to us because of some badness in us. For a nature that needs change is bad, and it is bad because it is not simple or good." (Aristotle, Ethics VII, Chapt 14)
Now that sentence -"For a nature that needs change is bad..."- struck me as an indictment of post-Enlightenment culture. Our need for change has become a relentless social force which has left nothing untouched. "Change is the only constant," we are told repeatedly. Nearly two hundred years ago Wordsworth wrote of his own day:
"Perpetual emptiness! Unceasing Change! No single volume paramount, no code, No master spirit, no determined road." ("England, 1802")
How much more apposite to our time than to his! And considering this, I asked myself whether the liturgical changes had been motivated by reform or driven by the "need for change". Given the optimism and naivete of the Second Vatican Council on the subject of modem culture, how many, then, who made the Council had been able to distinguish a real reason for reform from a mere prevailing cultural imperative? And what if the Council had, in its prudential judgments, been carried along on just such a current?
As this question rose in my mind I realized that, by some interior process of unconscious rumination, I had reached a crucial conviction: yes, that whatever had a need for change was indeed bad, and that any thing that was bad certainly needed to be changed, changed for the better. Then came a crucial step. The question occurred to me: The liturgy has been changed, was it bad?
I could think of many things that one might say about the traditional liturgy, It was obscure, it was inefficient, it was difficult, it was inflexible, but bad? How could the liturgy of the Church which had formed saints, consoled sinners, given joy to hearts, had filled with beauty everything it touched -the vessels, music, vestments, architecture, and above all the people- how could that be bad? And yet, it had been changed and, indeed, taken away.
I had a vague sense that something like it had happened once before -with terrible consequences which are with us still- and then I was reminded of something else I had read. It was by A. L. Rowse on the subject of Elizabethan England:
"It is difficult for anyone with a knowledge of anthropology to appreciate fully the astonishing audacity, the profound disturbance to the unconscious levels upon which society lives its life, of such an action as the substitution of an English liturgy for the age-long Latin rite of Western Christendom in which Englishmen had been swaddled time out of mind. No doubt there were factors which aided such a dating breach with the timeless past. At the same, nothing can detract from the revolutionary audacity of such an interference with the customary, the subconscious, the ritual element of life." (A. L. Rowse, The England of Elizabeth: the Structure of Society, p. 17)
Two separate but related themes emerged here: the question of overturning a custom and that of reconstructing the religious symbols to which a people had become attuned.
For a long time I had been clear about the implications of changing religious symbols. What struck me as curious, however, was the way in which consideration of the issue, initially of great importance to mainstream Catholics like ourselves, seemed to have dropped off the agenda. In these circles James Hitchcock's "Recovery of the Sacred" had been devoured during the late '70's. But by the late '80's, it seemed as if it had never been written. Was it, I wondered, because the principles masterfully formulated by Hitchcock were like an armory of modern weapons: good to have in reserve, but too terrible to contemplate using?
With such thoughts lurking in the background I went back, after a decade, to Hitchcock, thumbing fast through "The Recovery" whose arguments and conclusions were instinctively all my own. In a book unusually quotable, one long passage stood out:
"...a crisis of style always masks a crisis of identity.". If people suddenly began to find that the Latin of the Mass ... no longer spoke to them ... this indicated not simply a need for that modem panacea -'better communication'- but a desire to rethink radically the very foundations of belief and worship. "As (the liturgical innovators) peeled away the layers of historical accretions to the liturgy, they found, sometimes with shock sometimes with satisfaction, that the core of belief which underlay the traditional worship was not at all the same as their own, that what was involved in liturgical reform was nothing less than a profound revolution in the nature of belief." (James Hitchcock, The Recovery of the Sacred, The Seabury Press, NY, 1974, p 56.)
"A revolution in the nature of belief": now that is a hard saying, something we do not like I to think about. So much easier for us to discuss a far away revolution which four centuries ago devoured the Faith in England than the one which at this moment is devouring us. To admit that we are in the midst of a revolution every bit as grave as the "reformation" of Henry and Elizabeth, that would raise hard questions, questions which perhaps our loyalties might forbid us from asking.
For instance, who set these changes in motion and preserved their momentum, who protected them from criticism, and who, while wringing their hands about "unauthorized developments", subsequently gave them the patina of authority? And why? What kind of mentality had entered into Catholics that they would do these things or pretend that they had not happened? As I knelt among the Ukrainians of a Sunday, profoundly affected by the beauty of their worship, I saw that with them, unlike with us today, the service of God was determined by custom. We prayed selfconsciously and woodenly, according to "developments" contrived in a laboratory and enforced by legislation. They worshipped naturally and instinctively, according to a tradition lived out happily and unreflectively in the present.
As a modern Roman Catholic habituated from birth to an authoritarian style of religion, with its higher authorities raining orders on the Christian soldiery, it came as a shock to discover that traditionally the Church had placed great weight upon customary ways of doing things. Whereas in my own time the Church in the West had tended to operate as a "command economy" of salvation, in the past it tended to operate more out of habit, the customs which had been built in the course of history providing the foundations for Church law. In fact, according to St. Thomas, custom obtains the force of law:
"Now just as human reason and will, in practical matters, may be made manifest by speech, so may they be made known by deeds... Wherefore by actions also, especially if they be repeated, so as to make a custom, law can be changed and expounded: and also something can be established which obtains the force of law, in so far as by repeated external actions, the inward movement of the will, and concepts of reason are most effectually declared; for when a thing is done again and again, it seems to proceed from a deliberate judgment of the reason. Accordingly, custom has the force of law, abolishes law, and is the interpreter of law." (St. Thomas Aquinas, ST, Prima Secundae, Q. 97, Art. 3)
One corollary of this conclusion, St. Thomas argued, was that a lawmaker should not make a law which is contrary to the customs of the people for whom he is legislating. As I picked up this text and read it for the first time, I was astonished. In his retort to the imperialism of laws and legislators, St. Thomas chose a maxim from St. Augustine which seemed providentially intended for the post-conciliar Church:
"The customs of God's people and the institutions of our ancestors are to be considered as laws. And those who throw contempt upon the customs of the Church ought to be punished as those who disobey the law of God." (ST, Prima Secundae, Q. 97, Art. 3)
What then, I asked myself, were one to make of the case where the customary liturgy of the Roman Catholics -given, to be sure, in 1570 the form of a law- was replaced by another liturgy profoundly at odds with the traditional mentality and custom of worship? Now that opens a Pandora's Box of "natural justice" issues which no one wants to mention - least of all those whose job it is to uphold the original decision. Why, if Catholics had an inkling of the terrible problems posed by "reform", its credibility might be destroyed.
Meanwhile, I had decided reluctantly that the time had come to part company with those God-worshipping Ukrainians. A refuge can never be a home and it is a fatal psychological mistake to treat it as if it were. The problem was, though - where to turn? I did not seem to have many choices.
Although my thinking on liturgical questions had undergone a significant hardening, and I had come to reject the present liturgical regime, I was still of the mind that the way ahead for the Roman Church was reform of the New Order of the Mass activated by explicitly traditional principles. On the other hand, it seemed to me that in practice such a project was unrealizable. Why?
For most of those who rule the Church today -the people who have built ecclesiastical careers on aggiornamento- there is too much at stake in a genuine reform of the liturgy. As at least two Australian bishops have put it during recent table talk: "...if we had not changed the Liturgy, we could not have changed the rest".
Right throughout the Catholic world men like these realize that at stake in liturgical change is the very shape of Catholicism. Unlike the conservatives -whose habit is to follow whatever has been set down for them- these others at least, understand that, in order to mold the Catholic identity, liturgy is tactically more important than doctrine or theology.
Yes, in their own day the children of the world have been wiser than the children of the light. For while the children of the light have been trumpeting their defense of orthodox teaching -naively confident that Catholic identity could be preserved by right concept alone- the children of the world have taken charge of the Catholic consciousness chiefly by seizing control of the liturgy. Our would-be defenders, the Doctors of Divine Science, so preoccupied were they with the higher things, they ignored the lessons of human science: that whoever controls the public rituals controls what people believe.
Ultimately it is the cultic symbol, rather than the utterance of a creed, which touches the minds and hearts of men with the meanings which determine who they are. Understanding this, those who now control the Catholic liturgy are not going to release their hold on it without a fight. In Rome they understand this -or rather fear it- and are paralyzed.
There is another factor, and this relates to the Pontiff himself. Like almost all the rest of us, Pope John Paul is a victim of one of the great intellectual fashions of 1960's Catholicism. It is unquestionable that the Pope is a great defender of orthodox Catholic doctrine and that to this task he brings the full force of a character stamped with impressive powers and accomplishments.
Like his predecessors John and Paul, whose work he has set himself to vindicate, the Pontiff still believes what hardly any mainstream Catholic would dare to doubt: that one can manipulate the forms of religion to gain a "pastoral" advantage without harming the content of the faith.
It seems that Pope John Paul is a convinced, if conservative, proponent of the view that liturgy should reflect the changing cultural forms of the societies in which Catholics live. Or alternatively, he is not sufficiently interested in liturgy to make an issue of it when he has enough troubles on the doctrinal and moral fronts. Perhaps he believes that by agreeing, in a collegial spirit, to let his brother bishops press on with their liturgical experiments, he can preserve some authority over them rather than lose what little he has by denying them scope to tinker with the liturgy. I do not know which case applies.
But whichever does, it is clear that this Pope is not going to set in motion a reform of the new liturgy - not unless some drastic circumstance should force him to change policy. This was the conclusion I reached in 1987 and nothing has happened subsequently to make me think otherwise.
For those who still suffer painfully the abuses of the "New Order" Mass, this is a pretty grim outlook; and so I found it as I reluctantly contemplated having to leave the company of our Ukrainian brothers.
Then something quite unexpected happened. Rome did a thing which went against a quarter-century of doggedly pursued pastoral policy. Faced with the Lefebvre schism, Rome decided to offer all Catholics who wanted to make use of them the traditional Latin rites of the Roman Church which had been under de-facto ban since 1971.
Oficially, and genuinely, Rome was sticking to its guns: despite abuses in some places, the liturgical reforms which came in the wake of the Council have been a great achievement. No, this was not the liturgical reform I had been praying for. Nevertheless, Rome was now tacitly prepared to admit that a great many Catholics did not share its sanguine view of the "reform" and that it was possible for them to continue disagreeing about what was, after all, a matter of "pastoral strategy" without breaking the unity of faith. Rome's decision on this matter took legislative form in the Ecclesia Dei decree signed by the Pope on 2 July, 1988.
For me Rome's move to allow Catholics the freedom to worship traditionally -a decision not without its irony- was the greatest spiritual boon. The Ecclesia Dei Decree, combined with local circumstances, prompted my ordinary, Archbishop Francis Carroll of the Canberra-Goulburn Archdiocese, to provide for the weekly Sunday celebration of Mass according to the traditional forms. Straightaway I realized that there was, after all, some familiar place into which a spiritual refugee could turn. But at the time I had no idea what an impact returning to the traditional Mass would have on me.
It was on the First Sunday of Advent, 1988, after a break of more than 20 years, that I went back to the Mass of our Latin heritage. On that day, as off I went, I had no thought other than that I was heading out to just another refuge -some place removed from the sickly atmosphere of the modem Catholic parishes I had known- where I could await, without losing my faith, the reform of the new liturgy for which I still hoped. A strange thing, however, happened.
After the consecration of the host, as the priest raised the sacred species with, it seemed to me, all the ancient solemnity and self-effacing dignity, I was struck with a powerful thought that I will never forget: "We've made a mistake - a dreadful mistake!".
It was completely unexpected. Obviously, the liturgical reforms had all been so reasonable and so completely in accord with what seems mere common sense to our minds. Obviously it was nonsensical to offer the Mass in an arcane language. Obviously the vernacular would create a quantum leap in participation. Obviously strict rubrics fossilized the Mass. Obviously worship should be offered in a friendly communal atmosphere. Obviously...
All of a sudden, however, all the obvious unanswerable objections to the traditional forms of Catholic worship which still lingered in my convictions were blown away-like things which had never existed, not even as illusions. Those years of compromise and pain all suddenly disappeared as if they had been nothing but a bad dream, and here I was bathed in a morning light, awake, alive, and at home.
I am conscious of the fact that for many a conservative defender of the Vatican II regime the position I have been putting poses a number of difficulties. There must be many questions, quite a few objections, and some dismay, rushing into the minds of many a reader: You are being disobedient to the wishes of the Pope and the directives of the Council; the Ecclesia Dei Decree was meant only for the Lefebvrists; surely in this day and age, you are not going to say the liturgy must be in a language no one can understand.
There are a dozen such claims and objections and I appreciate the force of each one of them. But rather than attempt to meet here all the criticisms one by one, let me simply make some general, clarifying points.
In putting a case for the traditional Latin liturgy, I am advocating merely that all Catholics who choose to worship, and to receive the sacraments of the Church, according to the traditional rites should be free to do so. This means that parents who wish to bring up their children in the ambience of this rich heritage should be free to do so. And, of course, those priests and religious -or those who aspire to the priestly and religious life- who wish to serve God in the traditional forms of liturgy and community life should be likewise free.
I am not arguing for a liturgical counter-revolution to pull the Western Church back into strict accord with its Latin heritage. Apart from anything else, so many Catholics, having lost contact with traditional liturgical forms, would find them so foreign on return, that it would be an injustice to reimpose them - just as it was an injustice to deprive Catholics of their heritage and impose a new order on them without any "beg pardons".
What I want to see, however, is what the Ecclesia Dei decree has laid the foundations for. Namely, an opportunity for a number of liturgical expressions to co-exist within the Western Church - not by any means a unique situation, since that is how things were throughout the medieval period and right up to the Council of Trent. Even after that, other liturgical forms continued to exist within the Western Church until Vatican II.
But that, you might say, would threaten the Vatican II reforms. Why, if people got a whiff of tradition they would want to go back to it and that would be the end for aggiornamento.
Well, if that were to happen, so be it. Since the purpose of the Council was, according to Popes John and Paul (and many another "fathers" of the Council), to generate "pastoral" reforms, and since "pastoral" judgments are of their nature prudential, being either wise or unwise, good in their results or bad, then our faith should be unscathed if the Vatican II "hypotheses" were falsified by the test of history. The only casualties of such an outcome should be the reputation of our leaders for prudent judgment and the myth of infaffibility in church govermnent.
For my part, however, I do not believe that the new model Church which has emerged in the Western World will suddenly disappear at a "whiff of tradition". What has arisen in the wake of Vatican II will last until the collapse of secular Western culture, until the final denouncement of that civilization which arose with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, of which post-conciliar Western Catholicism has proved to be the creature.
There are, however, people far more responsible and experienced than I who would disagree: the French hierarchy, for instance. Perhaps no more bitter opponents of liturgical tradition can be found than among the French bishops. With few exceptions they believe that the game will be up for them and all they stand for, if French Catholics are allowed to have their heads, especially among the young, for pre-revolutionary French history and heritage.
Speaking of which, is it not paradoxical, now that the Catholic Church has jumped on the conservationist bandwagon -with church authorities in Sydney, for example, halting work on the new St. Mary's Cathedral complex until an alternative to rainforest timbers can be found- that Catholics who revere their own cultural and spiritual heritage are treated like enemies. Everything is worthy of respect -other religions, cultures, and trees- but never the incomparable achievements and venerable forms of the Catholic Tradition.
So, it might be replied, you are just locked into the past. You want to live as if the inexorable fact of change does not wear down older forms and cultures. No, I am not opposed to change in the forms of Catholic life, including the liturgy. While I do argue that the traditional forms of Catholic worship are liturgically superior to the present order of things, I have not claimed that the traditional liturgy was perfect, or that it could not or should not develop.
What I have argued is that the new regime is not a development of that tradition. It was and is an artificially contrived thing, drawn up by a committee and imposed on the Catholic world. Such a thing has never happened before in the history of the Church. By definition this was not a development. It was a revolution, an imposition accompanied by an unjust, almost universal, and de facto ban on the customary way Catholics of the Western Church had worshipped for generations.
It could be argued, of course, that the old liturgy had become fossilized and that the hard shell which had formed around it needed to be cracked so that a mature liturgy, free of attachments to the past, could hatch out.
It probably was the case that the possibilities of liturgical development had been limited by the control which Rome had exercised over the liturgy from the Council of Trent to the Second Vatican Council. This discipline was imposed to preserve the Mass and the Sacrament of the Altar from the sacrilege of manipulation of people who wished to turn the Mass into an instrument for propagating doctrine at odds with the Traditional Catholic faith. Given what has happened since the relaxation of this discipline, the previous caution about liturgical innovation seems to have been based upon a realistic assessment of the possible dangers.
The price paid for this was, perhaps, some inflexibility. Though to be fair, developments were taking place in the liturgy before Vatican II under the influence of the "liturgical movement", which we cannot discuss here. Suffice it to note, however -for the benefit of those who argue that without the "liturgical reforms" we could not have had a vernacular Mass- that before the Council the practice of reading the lessons in the local language was widespread in Germany and also in the dialogue Mass of the YCW in Australia.
So I am not arguing that changes should not have occurred. What I am saying is that scope for change should have been provided and, indeed, had been provided to some extent.
However, for change to constitute a genuine development, it must be steeped in tradition and develop organically from it. As Cardinal Newman put it:
"...this process (whereby an idea germinates and matures) will not be a development, unless the assemblage of aspects which constitute its ultimate shape really belongs to the idea from which they start." (John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Chriatian Doctrine, Image Books, 1960, p. 61)
Apropos, how can the New Order of the Mass constitute a development when the liturgical center of gravity has shifted from the Consecration to the Communion, when the symbolism of the rite now speaks of "supper" rather than of "sacrifice"? How can this "ultimate shape" really belong to the idea from which it started - Christ on the Cross shedding blood upon the ground?
No, the changes which came after the Council did not, occur organically. Rather, they were made artificially. The reigning principle at the time was that of change by design rather than by natural development. For the first time in Catholic history the rite of the Mass was drawn up by a team of "experts" and, in addition, by men acting under the influence of abstract theories of "good liturgy" rather than under the authoritative guidance of custom. The changes made were made not according to the principle of growth but according to that of the drawing board.
Furthermore, their design was imposed on the Latin West after a break with past practices had already been contrived. Thus a crucial break in that continuity which lies at the foundation of true development was affected at two levels. Both continuity of form and continuity of practice were broken. This is the kind of development we call revolutionary.
In accomplishing this revolution no consideration was given to the fact that a still extant and long-established custom of worship, almost universal in the Western Church, represented a vote, as Chesterton might have put it, by Catholics living and dead, which could not be overturned without breach of the natural moral law.
And granted the justice of these arguments, surely it follows that Catholics will just have to go back to the traditional liturgy?
As I have already indicated, that would itself involve an injustice. Nevertheless, if the Catholics of the Western world are to retain a genuinely Catholic identity, their traditional liturgy will have to have a palpable presence in Catholic life. Its role will be to serve as a leaven in the new liturgical dough, exerting a reforming influence on the new liturgy by bringing it back into contact with the traditional mentality of Catholic worship.
This, it seems to me, is the way ahead for liturgical reform in the Western Church. Rather than looking to Rome to design some re-jigged liturgical order -and risking an enormous international row among bishops and theologians redolent with the danger of schism- reform can take place imperceptibly at the local level under the indirect and hopefully spreading influence of tradition exerting itself, as it were osmotically, on contemporary liturgical habits. What kind of liturgy will emerge from this kind of "discussion" between the new and the traditional liturgies, is impossible to say. The crucial thing is that a germ of the traditional concept of Catholic worship be implanted within the new liturgy. After that, the course of future liturgical developments is a matter for divine providence.
In the meantime, I'll continue praying the Traditional Mass whenever I can attend one. When I can't, I'll go to the new. And should it ever get to the point that I can always go to a traditional Mass, I'll bid the new goodbye for good.