Some moving quotes from Martin Mosebach’s The Heresy of Formlessness

I’ve been reading Martin Mosebach’s The Heresy of Formlessness. The Ignatius Press version, from which Fr. Fessio personally removed some of the more provocative bits. He didn’t want it to be “too controversial.”  Whatever.  There is still plenty of gold.  I quote some random bits below, particularly pithy or effective quotes that I thought made important points.  I hope you enjoy them.  The book is a must read, even in its somewhat truncated and neutered Ignatius version. I do add some comments.

Quote 1:

……the reformers of the Mass, preoccupied with their notion of early Christianity, were intent only on impoverishing and curtailing; they were actually pursuing a late Catholic puritanism rather than drawing on the wealth of forms of worship of the first millenium.  [Indeed, if the reformers were so set on slavishly returning to early Christian practice, why aren’t women and men segregated at the Mass, as they were for the first several hundred years of Church history?  Why don’t we have the severe penances and public Confession?  For that matter, why is the Mass not in Latin?  The Mass was never offered in Old English or one of the hundreds of Germanic languages.  In point of fact, the “return to early Church practice” was simply an excuse to impose the revolution.]

Quote 2:

…..a low Mass in the traditional Rite, read silently in a garage, is more solemn than the biggest Novus Ordo church-concert with spiritual trimmings…….if there is ever to be significant religious art again, this art will come from the “old” Liturgy, which expresses the sacred. [The first part might be debatable. I tend to agree, but it’s an arguable point.  I don’t think any argument can be made against the latter.]

Quote 3:

The Mass is not some basic core activity to which various decorations can be added [or taken away] , according to opportunity, in order to height the participant’s awareness.  The rites “contain nothing unnecessary or superfluous.”  [The Council of Trent solemnly declared that the Mass contained nothing unnecessary.  But Vatican II called for the removal of pointless accretions and “useless repetitions.]  Who would dare to pretend to find “unnecessary or superfluous things in a great fresco or a great poem?……..At all times there have been people who have made themselves ridiculous by trying to eliminate the “mistakes” in masterpieces, applying their half-baked scholarship to Michelangelo’s frescos and Shakespeare’s tragedies. Great works have a soul: we can feel it, alive and radiant, even where its body has been damaged.

The Liturgy must be regarded with at least as much respect as a profane masterpiece of this kind.  Respect opens our eyes. Often enough, even in the case of a profane work of art, if we study conscientiously and ponder the detail, especially the apparently superfluous detail, we find that the offending element comes unexpectedly to life; in the end it sometimes happens that we come to see it as a special quality of the work.   This is always the case of the rites of the Sacred Liturgy. There is nothing in them that, given intensive contemplation, does not show itself to be absolutely saturated with spiritual power.  [I agree wholeheartedly, and would add, that those older folks who tell us how very, very glad they were when the Novus Ordo was put in place and they finally got rid of that terrible old Latin Mass never understood the Mass.  They don’t understand it now.  Well prior to the Council, a sense had permeated many in the Church that the Mass was old fashioned and out of date.  They didn’t understand what was going on.  This is a damning indictment of the priests and bishops of the pre-conciliar era, that so many people apparently never came to appreciate the Mass in all its glory. But then again, that bad catechesis and priestly formation was at least in part a result of the growing modernist influence in the Catholic seminary and university, thoroughly laced with a good deal of hostility towards the Mass.  In the end, the modernists are at least partly responsible for everything, although there was a good deal of just plain ol’ apathy around, too, I think.]

Quote 4:

The [preconciliar]  liturgy became a rich image with a welter of tiny details, greater than the sum of its parts; thus it must be contemplated and can never be entirely understood.  [Yes!  And in order to make the Mass “understandable,” it had to be so dumbed down and stripped of content that it became a banality.]

Quote 5, on why the Consecration should take place “secretly,” obscured by the priest, or, in the Byzantine Liturgies, behind the ikonostasis:

The hermetic aspect, the aspect of rapture, that surrounds the Consecration in the “old” Latin Liturgy represents nothing other than the Holy Sepulcher, shut with a stone, in which the God-man awoke from death. This even had the whole cosmos for a witness, but no living man saw it. Something that, in the Liturgy, seems to be a later accretion, an accompaniment found in Byzantine basilicas and Gothic cathedrals, thus proves to be intimately connected with the core of salvation history.  Christian liturgy is a withing beneath the Cross and outside the grave.   This is another image the liturgical reform has tried to erase.  [Why?  Why can there be no mystery in the Mass?  Why must everything be conducted like a crass commercial display?  In fact, the hiding of the Consecration is about as ancient a liturgical act as one can find.  Ever since the Christians built churches, the Consecration was especially set apart.  But modernists didn’t like that, because the vast majority of them DON’T BELIEVE IN THE REAL PRESENCE. To even hint at the Real Presence is hateful to them.]

————End Quotes————-

That’s enough for one day. If you like, maybe some more, later.