The future of the liturgy
Traditionis Custodes
The Pope has decided to end a 14-year-old experiment in permitting two forms of the Roman Rite to exist side by side. Largely overlooked amid the sound and fury is that he has restored responsibility for ensuring liturgical unity in the local church to the bishops
“My dear Michael”, he said, emerging from the College chapel with his hand to his brow, like someone with a migraine. “This is madness. This is anarchy. This is Enthusiasm.”
Sixty years on, while most Catholics have got used to participating,
the liturgy continues to be the most neuralgic of issues. Intense
emotion has surfaced once more with the publication of Pope Francis’
motu proprio, Traditionis Custodes, in which restrictions on the
pre-Vatican II Rite of the Mass have been tightened once again. Francis’
document comes 14 years after a motu proprio from his predecessor,
Benedict XVI, had eased the restrictions on the Old Rite that had been
in place during the papacies of Paul VI and John Paul II.
It
seems that the problem remains the same one that Miles identified in How
Far Can You Go?: enthusiasm. Except this time, the problem is not so
much the enthusiasm for the novus ordo that shocked Miles but what
appears to be a growing enthusiasm – at least in the United States and
Britain – for the Tridentine Rite. In 2007, Pope Benedict said the Old
Rite could be celebrated whenever a “stable” group of believers
requested it. This rite – which Benedict described as the “Extraordinary
Form” of the Roman Rite – and Paul VI’s post-Vatican II liturgy of 1970
– the “Ordinary Form” – could live side by side, he believed, each
enriching the other, and bringing an end to the liturgical factionalism
that was damaging unity in the Church. But, after consulting his
bishops, Francis said he had to act, because he has been told that
Benedict’s initiative has been “exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce
the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church,
block her path, and expose her to the peril of division”. So, he has
ordered that individual bishops must now give their permission before a
priest can celebrate the Old Rite, and that it should not take place in
parish churches.
In other words, it seems the enthusiasm of the
Tridentinists has ruffled episcopal feathers. Now the Old Rite devotees
must be reined in. That enthusiasm, indeed love, for the Old Rite is
evident when one talks to those who attend Tridentine Mass.
According
to Joseph Shaw, chairman of the Latin Mass Society, people like “the
sacrality of it; there is an atmosphere and sacredness which assimilate
contemplative prayer. With the reformed Mass it is very wordy, all the
symbolism is swept away and it wants you to think about it”. Michael
McMahon, a former LMS chair, also mentions the Old Rite Mass’s sense of
the ineffable. “There is a transcendence about it, a prayerfulness, and a
connection with the past and what has gone before.”
While many who
love the Old Mass are of a certain age, filled with nostalgia for a
Brideshead time of their far-off youth, others, much younger, are also
drawn to it. Maria Jones is 35 and a mother of five, with another baby
on the way. Raised a Catholic with the new Rite, she lapsed from her
faith, became a single mother and then returned to it and met and
married her husband Peter. It was concern about the children that led
her to catechism classes offered by Fr James Mawdsley, of the
traditionalist Priestly Fraternity of St Peter. Through him they
discovered the Old Rite at the Latin Mass centre in Bedford, which they
continue to attend. “There is a heightened reverence,” she told me. “I
am undistracted and there is a calm about it. It’s even easy to keep the
children quiet and still.”
According to Shaw, people such as
Maria Jones, and others even younger, are turning to the Old Rite as an
act of rebellion “against a thoroughly desacralised culture”. Just how
many are doing so is debatable. The LMS says another 80 people have
joined it since the Pope’s motu proprio, but given that there are 5
million Catholics in the UK, this is barely a blip. However, devotees of
the Old Rite have defended their cause loudly and eloquently, punching
well above their weight. Many argue that those who prefer the Old Rite
are usually a certain kind of Catholic, old fogeys – whatever their age
– found only in the poshest of churches, and are relieved that Francis
has decided to phase out the Extraordinary Form and return to the
liturgical unity of the years after the Council.
Simon Bryden-Brook, secretary of Catholics for a Changing Church, was
first received into the Catholic Church in 1959 and readily embraced
the Tridentine Rite that was then the norm, joining a choir to sing at
Mass. But he would never wish to return to that time. “With the novus
ordo we have the full conscious participation of the laity in the Mass,”
he told me. “And the greater use of Scripture is a huge blessing,” he
added. “Younger people I meet who are attracted to the Old Rite like
religion to be a comfort, not a challenge. That is a temptation. You
close the door on the world, it’s about Christianity being a club. But
when I go to a novus ordo Mass at Westminster Cathedral it’s noisy, it’s
a huge mix of people, a rabble – and I’m one of them.”
There are
some Old Rite devotees who are also keen to be part of that noisy mix –
but outside Mass. Michael McMahon, for example, expressed his faith as a
prison chaplain and then through work with the St Vincent de Paul
Society, and says the meditative aspects of the Old Rite sustain him in
this work. John Macrory, a solicitor raised as a Scottish Presbyterian
who now, as he puts it, dips his toe in Catholic water, combines
attending the Old Rite with volunteering for Urban Table, a Catholic
Worker-linked initiative that provides free meals for the homeless and
other vulnerable people. “What is attractive about the Catholic Church”,
he said, “is that it is not just about saving souls but it is
Christianity in action. For me, the Old Rite is also part of it, it
grounds me. The solemnity matters; so does the Latin, which makes it
more mysterious”.
This is at the heart of the arguments between followers of the two
forms – whether Mass is a celebration of the sacred otherness of God, or
is more focused on the gathered assembly, coming together to
communicate prayerfully with God made man. Fr Derek Reeve, one of the
founders of the Vatican II group A Call To Action (ACTA), celebrated the
Old Rite in his first decade as a priest. He does not want to return to
it. “Younger people don’t always realize it represents such a different
ecclesiology,” he said. “It is not participatory.” When done well, it
could be beautiful. “But it could also be awful, mumbled fast.”
Fr
Reeve is based in the Portsmouth Diocese, where the Old Rite has been
particularly contentious. Many Portsmouth Diocese Catholics are
concerned about the views of priests who celebrate the Old Rite. One lay
member of the diocese told me: “It comes as a package. A certain kind
of traditionalism includes extremely offensive sermons that do not
cherish every local person. There is a crisis of leadership and
spirituality.” The parish of St Mary’s, Gosport, for example, declares
on its website: “All non-Catholic religions are false and only the
Catholic Church contains the entire deposit of faith given to the
Apostles by Christ. Although these statements are denied and scorned by
today’s world, it is fully in accord with common sense and the constant
teaching of the Church that there is ‘No salvation outside the Catholic
Church’”. There seems little room here for Vatican II’s spirit of
ecumenism.
The problem of disunity is not just about how Catholics relate to
people of other denominations and faiths. The row over the liturgy is
about how Catholics relate to Catholics, and the diplomats in the middle
of this turmoil are the bishops. The Archbishop of Westminster,
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, has already expressed his view, saying that
people need to be on their guard against the divisive tendencies linked
to the Old Rite highlighted by Pope Francis, but that he intends to
grant faculties to those wishing to celebrate the Tridentine Mass, as
long as the terms are fully accepted. Cardinal Nichols shares the Pope’s
intention to eventually re-establish the unity of a “single and
identical prayer” throughout the Church of the Roman Rite. Declan Lang,
Bishop of Clifton, has asked priests to cease saying the Old Rite in his
diocese. Other bishops are biding their time before they decide what to
do.
Bernard Longley, Archbishop of Birmingham, is planning
consultations in September both with priests who celebrate the Old Rite
and with others, such as members of ACTA. The archdiocese has 220
parishes; the Old Rite is celebrated in 13 churches, including the
Oratories in Edgbaston and Oxford.
Archbishop Longley explains
that the Pope’s motu proprio emphasises the importance of unity, and is a
reminder that liturgy must always be at the service of the Church.
There is a need to understand the Old Rite’s appeal to some Catholics,
he told me, but he is worried about the danger of polarisation in the
Church that the use of an alternative form of the Rite can lead to: “The
exclusivity does concern me”.
Archbishop Longley thinks the
issue here is not just the Old Rite itself; there is a need to consider
how good people’s experience of the celebration of the New Rite is. “I
think we need to ask, is it purely nostalgia [that is attracting people
to the Old Rite] or is there something that they are not finding in the
liturgy [of the novus ordo]. This thinking has to be at the heart of our
discussions; it has to be a concern.”
While Longley recalls the Tridentine Rite from his childhood, he has
always celebrated the New Rite since his priestly ordination in 1981,
apart from one or two recent occasions when he was invited to celebrate
the Extraordinary Form at the Oratory in Edgbaston, and had a quick
training in the prayers and rubrics. “I saw the intense devotion of
people there”, he said, “they had their own way of participating in the
Mass, but what struck me was a greater sense of distance. There is a
more direct and immediate sense of communication in the ordinary form of
Mass.”
Longley is also aware of another message of Traditionis
Custodes, one that has been largely overlooked amid the sound and fury
over the restored restrictions to the Old Rite, and that is the Pope’s
focus on collegiality.
The new ruling, “brings the question of
the form of Mass under the guidance of the bishop. With Benedict XVI’s
guidance, a priest could decide [to celebrate Mass in the Old Rite]
without reference to the local bishop. With Pope Francis, it is the life
of the local church that is so important.” Now it is the bishop that is
once again in charge of the liturgy in his diocese, and is able to
ensure it is a source of unity rather than discord. “The unity of that
local church really matters,” Longley concluded.
Catherine Pepinster is a former editor of The Tablet.
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