Some Thoughts on Motu Proprio Mania
I am gratified that the long-awaited motu proprio from Pope Benedict, urging a wider celebration of the Tridentine Rite, is out. I’m happy for those, including my son, who love to worship in that way. More power to ’em. Some of the loveliest Catholics I know are devotees of the Tridentine Rite.
That said, I was not personally excited when news of the motu proprio broke, since it doesn’t especially affect me. I attend a Paul VI Mass that is reverently celebrated by the Dominicans of Blessed Sacrament parish in Seattle. My attitude toward liturgy is “Just give me my lines and my blocking.” I then endeavor to learn and forget about them in precisely the same way I endeavor to break in my shoes. The point of shoes is not to notice them, but to walk in them. Shoes you constantly notice are Bad Shoes. Liturgy you focus on is liturgy that’s not doing its job, which is to refer us to God, not to itself.
Now there are two basic reasons people focus on liturgy instead of God, just as there are two reasons a person will focus on his shoes.
The first reason is that the shoes hurt. Lord knows that, in a time of widespread liturgical abuse, people have been hurt by badly celebrated liturgy, and I empathize with those who have. Many have suffered from self-styled “progressives” who regard the Paul VI Rite as their personal playground and laboratory. Worse, they have treated the Tridentine Rite and those who attend it as throwbacks to some imagined Dark Ages. In place of the authentic Paul VI Mass, many Catholics have had to endure a perpetual Feast of St. Narcissus celebrated by Fr. Heylookatme at what Amy Welborn has aptly called the “Church of Aren’t We Fabulous.” Instead of the worship of God, we get perpetual hymns such as the execrable “Anthem” celebrating our Usness, affirming us in our okayness, and glorifying our wonderfulness for being kind enough to admit God into those parts of our lives where we feel comfortable with Him. The notion among such “progressives” often seems to be that the Mass isn’t enough. They appear to think that people who come for the Christ Who is present in Word and Sacrament have to be bludgeoned into a sort of plastic bonhomie with glad-handing and yuk-it-up homilies about sports and TV shows. The phoniness of such “community-building” experiments on the lab rats in the pews can be awfully wearying for those who have lives and who do not require that the Mass be transformed into a Kiwanis Club meeting in order for them to be socially fulfilled. We like our commandments in the proper order: Love God, then neighbor.
That’s one of the reasons for the motu proprio, to try to give succor to those injured by dreadful abuses of the Paul VI Rite. I wish fans of the Tridentine Rite well in finding a Mass that is reverently celebrated and in receiving redress for legitimate grievances about real abuses, just as I hope the man with painful shoes will soon get new and comfortable shoes—so that both can get on with the business of walking with God.
But I also note that there is another reason some people become focused on their shoes, or the liturgy: oversensitivity. Some people are hypochondriacs who imagine injury where there is none or who grossly exaggerate small irritations into great big ones. Did the priest hold the Host high enough during the Consecration? Is that person dressed in a way I think fitting for Mass? I can’t bear altar girls! Those people held hands during the Our Father! There’s a parish “renewal” program in the bulletin—I wonder what that’s supposed to mean? I see they’ve added that 15th Station of the Cross. That tells me all I need to know about this place.
Some people become so inflamed over such matters that they sacrifice the love of neighbor on the altar of liturgical correctness. Some can even reach the point where they regard those who attend the Paul VI Mass—even a reverently celebrated one—as second-class Catholics. I know this, because I’ve been on the receiving end of such judgments repeatedly. When I’ve stated that I believe the Mass is the Mass is the Mass and so I’m content with either the Tridentine or Paul VI liturgies, I’ve been asked by Tridentine enthusiasts, “Is a Black Mass a Mass also?” (Talk about telegraphing contempt!) I’ve been told repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that the only reason I like the Paul VI Rite is that I don’t know any better, am still a Protestant at heart, or need to have exposure to the true Mass, which is vastly more nourishing to the soul than the pathetic desiccated “Novus Ordo.”
When I reply that I have been exposed to the Tridentine Rite and offer my chief impression from the experience (“Ah! Now I see why they wanted to reform the liturgy!”), there are frowns of disdain. Now, I don’t mean that I think the Tridentine Rite “inferior” any more than I think the Paul VI Rite inferior. I think my proper response to the Mass is gratitude, not a critical spirit. But, speaking only for me, I find the Paul VI Mass more spiritually nourishing (though any liturgy promulgated by the Church is good enough for me).
For this sin of believing and professing that any approved liturgy of the Church is good enough for me and that it’s not my job to find fault but to receive gratefully, I’m told that what I’m really saying is “it is all about me and what the liturgy does or doesn’t do for me.” In that marvelous “heads we win, tails you lose” arrangement, I am supposed to feel the superiority of the Tridentine Rite, and if I don’t feel it, it’s because I’m selfishly putting my feelings ahead of the TRUTH, which is fully expressed by the feelings of Tridentine Rite fans.
I don’t think those who prefer the Tridentine Rite are, for that reason, either better or worse Catholics than those who are at home in the Paul VI Rite. Nor do I regard the Mass as something we are commissioned by Christ to weigh in the balance and find wanting. To be sure, I dislike liturgical abuses, whether they be the apocryphal clown Mass or the five-minute Tridentine Hunting Masses of European nobility (in which the Mass was sped along at light speed so m’lord could get on with his fox-hunting expedition). But I don’t throw the babe out with the bath and say that, because the Paul VI liturgy is often abused, it is therefore an abuse itself.
Consequently, I lack a lot of interest in the motu proprio. I’m glad Benedict is interested in it. That’s his job. I simply don’t see why it’s my job. My parish is reverently celebrating the Paul VI Rite. My job is to receive that gift, not to look it in the mouth. Nor is my job to suggest that, if you like the Tridentine Rite instead, you are a second-class Catholic and a narcissist. It would be nice if many enthusiasts for the Tridentine liturgy could return the favor.
Mark Shea blogs at Catholic and Enjoying It!
This article first appeared in the October 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
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If I understand your question, it doesn't stop...He just provides it through the canon. Of course, He can provide it through personal insight/conversation/pronouncements by church leaders/etc. However, those things are normed and therefore subjected to Scripture. I would say the Catholic church has erred not in believing that the guidance continues, but that is must come via perpetual or new media (and that those elements are equal to Scripture). The Protestant position is certainly that the Holy Spirit continues to guide us, but this guidance is via the Bible above all else.
This is a bit off topic, but I need to vent. The official voices of "movement" conservatism, both Catholic and Protestant, are really showing their true colors. Bob Jones III endorsed Romney. Pat Robertson has endorsed Rudy. And Paul Weyrich (Catholic) has endorsed Romney. (I actually thought Weyrich was coming around.)This is absolutely outrageous.
This looks like a well orchestrated effort to solidify Christian conservative support around Romney. It seems like Robertson threw a wrench into that plan, and was apparently acting on his own. (What was he promised?) From what I hear, Laura Ingraham went nuts about the Robertson endorsement because it interfered with the consolidating support around Romney plan.
Cort, could you put a word in Terry Jeffery's ear to endorse Ron Paul? Then there will be at least one respectable voice left on the "movement" right. I should add that Viguerie hasn't thrown in the towel yet.
@Jeff Anderson:
Of course, the Holy Spirit provides guidance through the canon, but He also provides guidance through the same mechanism through which He provided the guidance in making the canon.
The way that you're presenting this seems to suggest that, once He provided guidance through the Church (including through a Church council) to make the canon, the canon takes over as the primary form of guidance:
"The Protestant position is certainly that the Holy Spirit continues to guide us, but this guidance is via the Bible above all else."
Why? What changed after the canon was fixed, and how do we know that it changed?
Red,
I suspect that the "lesser of two evils" effect has now come to play even at the level of the primaries -- i.e., I don't know anything about Pat Robertson, but wrt the others, from their point of view probably it's a matter of "Romney is not Giuliani".
Mr. Anderson,
Setting aside origins of Scripture... perhaps another way of putting this is that you argue that individuals should interpret Scripture via the guidance of the Holy Spirit, whereas we Catholics argue that the Church as a body interprets Scripture *for* individuals, via the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
I think that's an accurate way of framing the question. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
If Scripture is normative, how did it come to be normative? On a naive level Roman Catholics may argue that the church—the Catholic church—gave us the Bible and that church authority authenticates it. Protestants answer that it is the Scripture that creates the church. It is certainly true that it is the Word that creates the church, which is built on the foundation of the prophets and apostles (that is, on their word), but it would be an historical anachronism to say that the Bible created the church. . . .
[T]here is no way to make the New Testament older than the church. It is evident that Christians were preaching, baptizing, witnessing, and frequently enduring martrydom for years before the written Gospel texts were in circulation, and that the church was there a century or more before the whole of the New Testament became available. The message of Jesus was proclaimed and handed down in oral form even before the final versions of the Gospels were put into writing and long before the New Testament as a whole was available. But does this mean that it was the church that produced the Scripture and the authority of the church that authenticated it?
No, that would be saying too much. The counterargument also makes sense. New Testament books were accepted as the Word of God and placed in the New Testament canon because the churches of the time recognized them to be the Word of God; the work of the Holy Spirit enabled the human writers to write God's words, and it is this work of the Spirit that makes the Scriptures divinely authoritative and preserves them from error. In addition the Holy Spirit was active in the early congregations and councils, enabling them to recognize the right Scriptures as God's Word and to reject others, such as the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, as inauthentic.
. . . When the Scripture is acknowledged to be the very Word of God, it necessarily becomes the norma normans, the "norm that norms" the other standards, such as creeds, catechisms or manuals of discipline.
—Reclaiming the Great Tradition: Evangelicals, Catholics & Orthodox in Dialogue
The Holy Spirit guided the early Church Fathers to Peter, apostolic succession, ordination and the priesthood, and belief in the Real Presence - all before the Canon of Scripture. Evangelicals and Fundamentalists retain only Scripture?
@G.S.: I do not deny that bad people can produce good things, but of course it is always in spite of and not because of their evil. I do still believe that the level of truth is, in the grand scheme, a good predictor of beautiful outcomes. A few quick points, as it's late and I've still work to do:
1. Beautiful women, virtuous or not, are not the product of their own inner beauty but the grace of God. (Although there are healthy and unhealthy lifestyles, and adherence to healthy patterns tends to have some correlation to physical beauty: women who eat real food rather than artificial McD slop, to name only the most obvious example, and because we are on truth and beauty.)
2. By the 18th century, the taste of the degenerate French aristocracy can be called into serious question. The Palace at Versailles, while still the product of a Christian culture, has a kind of Islamic excessive edge to it, which I personally find repulsive (and I think it is no coincidence that Louis XIV was branded a "Christian Turk" in his own day--it was for the belligerent attitude of his reign but that quality was beginning to show through in his tastes).
3. Whatever beautiful things the French Republic have created--romantic realist paintings, Hausmann's Beaux-Arts urban design--are snaked from the centuries of Christian capital left behind. The French Revolution has just about reached its nadir in penetrating every nook and cranny of French life and thought, and it is showing in their aesthetic and philosophical tastes--take it from someone who has worked among them for years.
And sure, there are modernist Frenchmen who rightly admire their country's fine baroque literature and splendid Gothic Cathedrals, but try looking for a contemporary example of readable French philosophy or non-offensive French artwork that does NOT come from the marginalized ultraroyalist faction in that country. Show me a contemporary modernist who has produced rather than admired anything of beauty. I am still searching.
@Mr. Wolf's post of Dr. Brown (206)
Brown writes: "But does this mean that it was the church that produced the Scripture and the authority of the church that authenticated it? No," he says, "that would be too much."
But then Dr. Brown goes on and says exactly that.
If it weren't the Church that authenticated Scripture and speaks with authority about it, who did and does? Indeed, Dr. Brown's last two grafs answers the question in favor of the Catholic Church. The Holy Spirit not only protects Scripture from error, but also, in inspiring the Church fathers to authenticate Scripture, protected them from error in speaking about it. In other words, the Church did not "produce" Scripture, as Dr. Brown says. But it collected the Scriptures with the Divine help of the Holy Spirit and with that same help gave them to the world.
If, as Dr. Brown says, the Spirit worked in those early Fathers to do these things, clearly it was working in the Church 1500 years later. There was, after all, only one Christian Church. It was that Church, the one Dr. Brown says was guided by the Holy Spirit and protected from error in the beginning, that Luther rejected.
Dr. Brown's last graf is interesting: He begins, "When the Scripture is acknowledged to be the very word of God ..." Acknowledged by who?
Answer: The early Church fathers first acknolwedged it to be the very word of God because the Holy Spirit, as Dr. Brown says, inspired them to do so. Thus, Divinely given authority did enable the Church to authenticate the scripture. That authority comes from Christ Himself, as several passages in the New Testament tell us.
Did the Church lose this authority somewhere along the line, and if so, how and when? Further, if the Church lost this authority, was it because this authority was not mandated in perpetuity? Now, if, as Dr. Brown says, the early Church spoke with authority and authenticated Scripture and was indeed protected from error, then how could the early Fathers have claimed an eternal mandate if one were not given? For this is precisely what they claimed and the Church still claims. If they were protected from error, could they have misunderstood the words of our Lord and the guidance of the Holy Spirit?
Anyhow, I think the passage inadvertently supports the one true Church.
Mr. Moses,
My beauty/virtue query was clumsily overcryptic -- I was thinking in Tolkienesque terms, with beauty for women (in Galadriel's case "all shall love me and despair") analogous to power for men (Gandalf's desire to "do good" with the Ring).
In America generally and (if my memory serves me faithfully, you are in school at the moment) college campuses particularly, the cultural brew is such to encourage succumbing to temptation wrt any particular good -- be it beauty or power -- and turn it to vanity. (Which is why we should be all the more grateful when we are fortunate enough to have in our lives those rare individuals who "pass the test" in either regard.)
"Show me a contemporary modernist who has produced rather than admired anything of beauty."
This is an excellent point. WRT the past, modernity is parasitic.
@210: Indeed you are right. Youth have always been rebellious and for many it seems almost natural; the problem is a university structure that now encourages and accompanies said rebellion. In the U.S., contrary to (traditional, at least) European academic ways, students and teachers are not even remotely antagonistic, as they should be (controversy generates ideas). Each generation swallows the poison of the last.
Actually, I am no longer a student, and for that I am grateful, but as memories of condescending medievalists and smarmy postmodernists move further behind me, I come to think that four years of passive resistance to such indoctrination was a worthwhile mental exercise, even if I have yet to learn much of what I really want to know.
@ Mr. Moses (211):
Mr. Moses writes: "Youth have always been rebellious and for many it seems almsot natural ..."
That is not true. Rebellious young people are a 20th-century phenomenon that arose with the concept of adolescence in the early 1900s.
Mr. Kirkwood, have you read Jon Savage's Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture?
http://www.amazon.com/Teenage-Creation-Culture-Jon-Savage/dp/0670038377
If you have, what do you think of it?
"That is not true. Rebellious young people are a 20th-century phenomenon that arose with the concept of adolescence in the early 1900s."
"Rebellious" was probably the wrong word, wrought as it is with revolutionary connotations. "Rambunctious" may be more like it... let's face it, hormonal changes do strange things.
203 Red Phillips,
While you may well be right about the endorsements for Romney, I predict, based on my having listened to numerous radio talk shows by my evangelical and fundamentalist brethren, that we may see emerge the most unholy alliance of them all: Rudy Giuliani for President and Mike Huckabee as Vice-President.
There are nearly 17 million Southern Baptists. Right now, the leadership and many members with whom I have talked or listened to on the radio are tending Huckabee. Rev. Don Wildmon, of the American Family Association, has come out for Huckabee. AFA has a radio network with about 200 stations. They do not speak to or for Baptists as much as they do for the growing number of independent Christian congregations and are nevertheless evangelical and fundamentalist. I do not believe that Huckabee will even finish second in the primary fiasco; however, if he is a strong third or fourth, I believe that Rudy will consider him. Huckabee is 100% pro-Israel -dispensationalist/rapture all the way. He is for, if necessary, the first use of a nuclear devise on Iran. He supports the Patriot Act and the other pieces of legislation which flow out of and around it.
The main thing is that he can cover Rudy's weak side: abortion, gay marriage and the 2nd amendment - he is against abortion and for a federal solution of that "problem." He is against gay marriage and for a federal solution of that "problem." In this regard, Huckabee is a cunning and very true Republican; for he knows that there will never be any such amendments; yet, he and the Republican strategists can keep my evangelical and fundamentalist brethren in the fold with the promise of such solutions.
208 Mr. Moses,
Evil people, i.e. those who reject the Christ, do indeed produce good things; but therein do they have their reward. I am convinced that the good which the Christ accomplishes through his Church - through individual Christians, congregations and the universal Church - will be revealed in Heaven in great beauty. I am convinced that when the nun raises the head of a dying man and gives him water, the beauty of her act done in Christ will be made manifest in Heaven in a way in which we cannot imagine. I am equally convinced that when the great cathedrals of Europe, erected in love to Him, have fallen into decay and ruin, that they will be found anew in Heavenly Realms. They will not be facsimiles of the old; they will be the old made new by Him whom has the keys to death and hell. The music of Mozart will be heard in a way in which it has never been heard. I do not know if Mozart ever uttered these words, but in the movie made about him several years back, the screen writer placed words similar to the following in the mouth of the actor: "I am indeed decadent. But my music is not; it was made in Heaven!" He takes what we do in His Name in our imperfection and makes it into something eternally beautiful where moth and rust can never corrupt.
Without Christ, there is no hope, there is naught be decay and meaninglessness around me. But when in faith I turn to Him - faith which itself comes from Heaven - and am thereby made anew, I can then, in paradox turn with the Gospel and the salt and light which He has given me to the dying and decaying world and bring hope, for where I touch things in His name and with His authority, they are made new, here at my touch with only a transient foreshadowing of their ultimate beauty in eternity which is a work which He alone can finish.
With this in mind, sometimes wondering why a do it, I get up on Monday morning and go to the little country school with only ten students, isolated in the cut over hills of north Louisiana, and make a difference which I do not necessarily see or understand in His name. It is with great anticipation that I await the By-And-By to see the beauty which He has wrought with our small and insignificant efforts, and that beauty will be to His glory and certainly not to mine.
Neocons rejoice... San Antonio "Pastor" Says Jesus Was Not The Messiah:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzdziGln5Qc