A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

The deforming of the Roman Rite May 31, 2013

A long post for your weekend reading. I discuss how the liturgical movement of the 20th century went severely awry, and left the Church gravely weakened with an inorganic Mass that leaves souls starved.

I’ve been continuing to read Dom Alcuin Reid’s The Organic Development of the Liturgy.  The book has many strengths but some glaring weaknesses. The biggest weakness is that while Reid lays out all the evidence for how the liturgical movement, begun with such good intentions, transmogrified into a vehicle of modernist revolutionary destruction of the Mass, he fails to make the final conclusions to definitively tie the radicalism in the liturgical movement from ~1935-1962, to the actual “product” that was “manufactured,” to use Pope Benedict’s expression, after Vatican II.  But I will say the book has gone a long way to fill in gaps in knowledge I had regarding how the liturgical movement began, how it became radicalized (he rarely uses this term, he in fact frequently apologizes for the modernists who moved into liturgy after Pascendi and at first subtly, and then increasingly openly, directed the small liturgical movement away from it’s original goal of improving liturgical piety into one of revolutionary “reform”) and was eventually permitted to dominate the post-conciliar liturgical reforms.

One thing that is remarkably clear after reading several books on the subject, and this is really key: there was never, ever, a broad-based movement in the Church involving laity, priests, and hierarchy, calling for the radical changes to the Mass that were made after Vatican II.  In point of fact, the liturgical movement so talked about was really little more than a small cabal of self-anointed elites (college professors, typically, but also monastery priors, a few diocesan officials, etc – the vast majority had limited experience as parish priests), the overwhelming majority of which were from a few northern European countries.  There were some adherents in the United States, a few in Britain, and a very few (but highly influential ones) in Italy, but for most of the world, this movement, such as it was, did not hold much sway.  Not many parish priests were on board with it.  All told, it’s doubtful there were ever more than a few thousand who bought into this movement, and the vast majority of those adhered to its original intent: to leave the Mass as it had been for well over a dozen centuries, perhaps allowing for a few minor revisions, while striving to improve the liturgical piety of the souls in their charge. A noble goal, and something I certainly have no problem with.

But, oh for that small but exceedingly loud and influential group who did advocate for radical change!  Led by Joseph Jungmann, a protestant convert and modernist through and through, as the liturgical movement developed in the years before WWII, it gradually changed from being about liturgical piety, to being about changing the Mass.  It seems a few of these radicals did try to encourage the experience souls had at the Mass, but they found that work hard, and discouraging. They found it was much easier, more interesting, and much better for their careers in academia, to talk about making sweeping, unheard changes to the Mass.  And over the 20 years prior to Vatican II, those calls for change became more and more extreme.

One example ought to serve to show both how elitist, and how revolutionary, the liturgical movement had become by the mid 50s.  John Murphy is described by Dom Reid as being rather a liturgical moderate by the mid-50s, calling for substantial changes to the Mass but not going as far as some of the more extreme liturgical elites. But he developed some beliefs that I think reveal just how far askew from right understanding of the Liturgy the whole movement had become.  To quote:

Yet, in discussing the “problems of participation,” Murphy goes further, and arrives at a questionable position.  He fixes his attention on the ‘typical’ person attending Mass in his parish (John Jones, who works in a steel factory). Such a person, he maintains, has little inclination for singing chant and partipating in similarly exclusive liturgical enthusiams…….Murphy thus regards the liturgical movement as having reached a critical junction. He asserts: “There are two alternatives: either do something to bring about an active sharing in the present liturgical practice, or – if that proves to be well-nigh impossible – do something to the Liturgy so that such participation will be possible.”  He further quotes Clifford Howell, SJ (when a Jesuit starts talking liturgy, like Jungmann, it’s time to run, screaming, in the other direction): “The present Mass-Liturgy, though venerable from long usage, though filled with treasures of doctrine and devotion and beauty and art which are the delight of cultured people, is not fully functional as the vehicle of community worship of the ‘toiling masses.'”

I think the preening elitism is readily apparent to anyone.  The basic implication is that John and Jane Q. Public are simply too stupid to appreciate something like the Mass as it was then – what we now call the Traditional Latin Mass – and that it must be radically changed to suit their low standards.  This ignores the fact that the very same Mass they wanted to destroy through revolution had successfully catechized, sustained through Grace, and raised up innumerable Saints, through generations of people much, much less well educated than John and Jane Public, who could almost certainly at least read, which the vast majority of people in the Mass’ long history could not. It also reveals that, by the mid-50s, the self-anointed leadership of this movement had pretty much given up on the original goal of forming the laity in a better practice of participation at Mass, and were now just agitating for a Mass they could make their own, sure that it would work wonders in improving participation.  That is to say, but the mid-50s, and really much earlier than that, the liturgical movement had given up on trying to help people particpate better in the Mass as it was then, and instead decided it was much better to manufacture – in a scant 5 years! – a new Roman Rite.

One final note on vernacular translations that I found interesting.  Getting the Mass out of Latin and into local vernacular languages became the sine qua non of the liturgical movement by the 1950s. Of all the changes the more radical liturgists wanted to make, vernacular Mass was probably at the very top.  But vernacular Mass is problematic for many reasons.  One, it destroys the universal character of the Roman Rite – what was once the same Mass everywhere in the world becomes different from one country to another (and with “inculturation” – the incorporation of elements of various local cultures into the Mass, it changes even more significantly).  And, two, those translations can be a source of grave problems themselves, as H.A. Reinhold, a more traditional member of the liturgical movement, pointed out (I add all emphasis):

What I am personally afraid of…is a “commission” of professors who know all about their fields but do not speak the language of the people, or the Saints, or the poets, or whose spirituality is and has been fed on an individualistic, subjective diet, who will smooth over, streamline, modernize, make more dogmatic, [or way less dogmatic!] less shocking, more elegant, less uneven, what they find. And then we shall be stuck with it. And that would be worse  [much, much worse] than what we have now, because it would falsify the spirit of our Roman Liturgy…If……what the Martyrs, the Fathers and Popes created will once have been watered down in its entirety to our bourgeois mentality and speech, the damage may prove grave – and permanent.

Indeed, it did. In fact, I cannot think of a better one paragraph summation of what happened to the Mass in the period 1962-1970 than what I just typed above. It describes almost perfectly what occurred, years after Reinhold wrote it. In fact, Roman Eucharistic theology was gravely weakened in the Missal of 1969, as were many other elements of belief. Scripture was ostensibly emphasized, but only Scripture of a certain sort: references to death, judgment, and hell were almost totally exorcised from Sunday Masses, and were greatly limited even on weekday Masses. And,  as some Italian bishops said recently to Pope Francis “the ecclesiology of the Old Mass is incompatible with that of the Second Vatican Council.”  What we got, to repeat what Pope Benedict said, was a liturgy fabricated by a small group of self-anointed elites (“experts”), which even included some protestant “advisors.”

Enjoy your weekend.