June 1981 Print

IT IS A GREAT MISTAKE on the part of the renewalists to claim that it is the old people who most desire a return to the Tridentine Mass and to the firm and clearly defined teachings of the past. No doubt many of them do; and no doubt it is true, as has recently been remarked, that they will "die out." They will die, one might add, deprived of the only rite of Mass and of the Last Sacrament that they can comprehend and recognize—and even a request for a Requiem in the old rite is not always respected. But there is another group of people who wish for the same thing; and though they, like everyone on this earth, will also die out, it will be a rather long time before they do, and they will, please God, outlive the present renewalists. That group is the young: a group of people who were scarcely born when the ravages of Vatican II began: a group of which I have the honor to be a temporary member. It is we who live in this world now as young people who may have another half-century of the battle of life ahead of us, which we must fight in faith and sub umbra alarum Dei;¹ the pilgrim Church on earth may be our only visible support; and that Church is becoming less and less visible. People may be surprised that a young person should be so inflexible, so unwilling to take up the challenge of his new-found freedom; to conform to a Church which is doing her best to be "new" and "young."

Inflexibility in the Face of Vagueness

As to inflexibility, that is the only possible way in which the orthodox can react to increasing vagueness and denial of absolutes. As always, there is an appropriate quotation from G. K. Chesterton—how we need someone like him in these days of confusion—from the first chapter of The Thing: "A man may walk at the edge of a chasm on a clear day; he will keep miles away from it in a fog ... one can meet an assertion with argument, but healthy bigotry is the only way in which we can meet a tendency." If there is a dogma, we can be daring and explore; if there is only a tendency we dare only be conservative. If one is to explore, he must start from a fixed point; the base camp at the foot of Mount Everest, the oasis in the desert; else he is just wandering in the wilderness.

 

True and False Freedoms

As to freedom, there are many different sorts of freedom, and even more sorts of pseudo-freedom. The freedom that they seem to be offering us at the moment is that freedom which was gained for us by our first parents, and which we have whether we want it or not: the freedom to sin. But it is another sort of freedom that the Catholic Church offers to us, or at least offered in the "old days": the freedom not to sin, if only we were perfect enough; the freedom to know, at least, whether we were sinning or not. One can scarcely give the name of freedom to the possibility of making any choice one likes, but without knowing what are the points at issue, or the criteria upon which one must base his choice. Sin continues to exist whether or not men accept its existence; and the real sin, the sin of Lucifer, is to exalt ourselves above the will of God—which in human terms also means exalting ourselves above the authority of His Church on earth. No doubt a sin committed in genuine ignorance is less serious than one committed with full knowledge, but can it be ideal to bring up an entire generation in ignorance so that their sins should be less serious? Much will be required from him to whom much is given—but can it be right to give a whole generation only a little, so that little is required of it? To give it a stone so that it need not share the bread?

No one who is present at the old Canon of the Mass, with its strict rubrics that made it the same whichever priest celebrated it at whichever altar, with its many repeated gestures, its genuflections, its repeated ringing of the bell, and so on, will think that they have ever seen it before. No one who says three times the "Domine, non sum dignus" will say it three times in the same way. If one were to hear the Tridentine Mass every day of his life (would that that were possible!), the last time he heard Mass he would still hear it for the first time. The Tridentine Mass is always new, always relevant, because it is timeless; always meaningful, because its meaning transcends time, as does God Himself.

 

God Speaks through Silence

God speaks through silence, as the contemplatives understand. What were they about, those liturgists who saw fit to tear away from the Church—from us, who are of the Church of the future—her most perfect expression of the holiness—of God—for Whom, through Whom and in Whom she exists (she does not exist "for" the "believing community"; she is the believing community, which exists for God)—and of His devout service, and replace it with a "new, living, growing liturgy" in which we can participate; nay, in which we must participate, in an ever-increasing clatter of banality and pseudo-spontaneous enthusiasm that overlays and drowns the silent mystery of the Sacrifice of the Mass. Can it be by chance that so many of those old, beautiful Christmas carols, when they speak of Christ's first coming on earth, stress again and again the silence and stillness of that night and of His coming? Did our Blessed Lady, do they suppose, feel less joy, did she participate less, because her reaction to the gradual unfolding of the mystery of her divine Son was to "keep all these words, pondering them in her heart" in silence? God speaks through silence; so what is this modern enthronement of speech and activity? It seems very strange that these renewalists, who deny the relevance of the outward signs such as religious habits, priestly vestments, genuflection, or even the position of the celebrant's hands after the consecration, should insist on all this outward participation of words and actions which are, after all, only outward signs of inner disposition—just like genuflection, the religious habit, and so on, only with less meaning. If we do not participate inwardly, no amount of outward participation is any use; if we do participate inwardly, the disposition of our bodies, and our eyes fixed on the action of the altar is sufficient outward participation. Perhaps the answer to my question is to be found in Thomas Merton's remark that "those who cannot bring themselves to live in time as if they were meant to spend their eternity with God resist the fruitful silence of their own being by continual noise ... even when their tongues are still, their minds chatter without end ...." Similarly, those who do not want to look into their own soul fill it with noise and speculation; those who do not want to see the true meaning of life, or of the liturgy, avoid at all costs passing it in silence.

 

The Old and True View of Life

It is becoming fairly clear that the Church is splitting in two on almost every issue; splitting in two, indeed, in her entirety, for once a person's view on one of the issues is known, his views on the others can be predicted with near certainty. Two different views are emerging of the purpose of this life and the correct way of living it; of the nature of the Church; and of God and the right way to serve Him. One view remains as it has always been: God is central; apart from Him we are nothing, apart from His law we can find no freedom. This life is only a preparation for the real life, a battle in which we must each win our own victory, by the grace of God, by becoming as Christ-like as possible. Our view of life therefore must be conformed to the timeless and transcendent God; we must believe His Truth, which is the only, absolute Truth, and to which we are guided by His Church, not by having warm, comfortable feelings about Him, but by exercising our will: credere nihil aliud est quam cum assensione cogitare;² and we must do His will. The first, most important Commandment is to love God; the second Commandment, which is dependent on the first, is to love our neighbor. We love our neighbor because we love God, not the other way around.

 

The New and False View of Life

The second view, the new one, seems to be something like this: restraint and discomfort are the great evils; the Church therefore is seen as a sort of super social organization, with rules that may be relaxed or changed for convenience. Her task is to construct an earthly paradise, in which God is seen alternately as a subject for speculation and the head of that social organization, approving all she does. This good God surely cannot want man to deny himself anything or suffer in any way (though one only needs to glance through the Gospels to see whether that is true)—so man may conform his view of God and His will to the morality and views of the world in his own time.

And man's view of things is necessarily small—as small as he is. Those who hold an extreme form of the second view seem to think that they are too big to need such props as belief in the literal truth of the Resurrection, of the divinity of Christ, of His true presence in the consecrated Host. In reality they are too small, as men who refuse the guidance and standards of God, to admit that there is something bigger than themselves; things that are so big that they can neither comprehend nor explain, nor even fully express them: things so big that they can only be accepted in adoring silence: tibi se cor meum totum subjicit quia, te contemplans, totum deficit.³ It is that admission that makes a man truly great; the admission that has always made the Catholic Church truly great. She may claim supremacy in this world, but that is only because she alone realizes her total deficiency and impotence apart from God.

 

Heresy and Smallness

It is strange that all heresies, from Gnosticism and Manichaeanism to Lutheranism and Christian Science, have only succeeded in making the thing smaller; nothing can make the Catholic Church greater—or be greater—than she is: for she is already Catholic. And can it be denied that this new viewpoint is also succeeding in making the thing smaller? Unwillingness to accept the truly great things of God, the stress on the local, not the universal, Church, the limiting vernacular (limited not only to one country but, in English, at least, to one particular—and rare—mode of expression), the blurring of once clear boundaries, of thought, of truth ... need one say more?

 

The Timeless Church

A thing with no definition can have no existence; if the Catholic Church exists, she must have a definition, and it is difficult to see how that can genuinely include both the above contradictory viewpoints. One side or the other must capitulate, or define itself out of the Church. The onus is upon those with the same viewpoint to prove either that the two views are really the same, or that theirs is the correct one. If the Church is to be equally appropriate to all centuries and yet remain one, then clearly the view that is timeless must be right. If it is only now that the Church and her relationship with God and His Creation have been understood, and this new understanding expressed in the new liturgy (which, through its ambiguity and flexibility, can be seen as expressing either viewpoint, though not both at once)—lex orandi, lex credendi—let them have the courage to say so: not "it was all right for its time but in our time must be understood differently" (some of the things they seem to want to change have been "all right" since the time of the Apostles, and others at least from the time of the Church Fathers—scarcely, I think, one uniform period); but "until now it was wrong." That is what they are implying; let them say it openly. The Holy Father has not said so; nor will he say so; because he knows it is not so. The Papacy, founded by our Blessed Lord Himself, is as timeless as the Church. If the Catholic Church is the one Church that follows Christ's Vicar on earth, it will not be those with the first viewpoint who find themselves defined out of that Church.

It is, I believe and hope, though with little encouragement from my elders, that first viewpoint that will prevail and endure; timeless, eternally young, eternally new, like the liturgy that once accompanied it, and that so many of us still love; how could a young person see as irrelevant and inapplicable to him and to his age a liturgy that begins: "Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam"?

 

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1. under the shadow of God's wings.

2. to believe is nothing other than to think with assent.

3. my heart submits itself to Thee completely because in contemplating Thee, it wholly fails.