There is a continuous attraction, beginning with God, going to the world, and ending at last with God, an attraction which returns to the same place where it began as though in a kind of circle. -Marsilio Ficino
With regard to the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, the monks of St. Peter’s Abbey in Solesmes, France, so long charged with composing Gregorian melodies for new liturgical feasts flat-out refused to do so for the rest of the Pius XII Pontificate so much did they (like myself) despise that feast. It was John XXIII who ordered the music written and they complied, but it has to be the most cacophonous load of rubbish you ever did hear. The monks had the final word, (or should I say notes ?) on that feast. I’m sure the conventual Mass that day was never sung in Solesmes ! I can only remember singing that Mass once in the seminary schola and one of the Alleluia verses is absolutely hideous – completely discordant and unsingable corresponding to no other piece in the Gregorian repertoire of which I am aware and I’m not surprised either !
Surprisingly, by comparison, the Introit for the feast of St. Pius X also introduced in 1955 for its first celebration in 1956 is absolutely beautiful. Even monks can send coded messages and in music ! Read the rest of this entry »
The reign of novelty in the Catholic Church in the last 100 years
The monks at St. Vincent had always sung some chant, especially for the Divine Office, but had used the old Ratisbonne edition from Regensburg in Bavaria. In the early 1930’s a young monk-musician was sent to Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight where Solesmes monks lived in exile. He was to learn the new chant and introduce it at St. Vincent. The story goes that the old monks in anger rebelled against the new and created a scene tossing the Solesmes books into the middle of the choir. According to the Bavarian tradition, clearly noted in our monastic ceremonial, each antiphon at Vespers was to be intoned by a different monk… To help the monk so designated, I would first play the melody on the organ from the Solesmes edition, only to find that many of the older monks would intone instead the old Ratisbonne version, and this about a dozen years after the old had been abandoned.
…Part of the reason that there are these notable “reversions” is that these people have not really converted (“embraced”) Catholicism.
It’s not simply a case of “assent” to doctrine, which too many converts seem to believe. One also has to embrace Catholic culture. Too many evangelicals have “embraced” Catholicism simply on the basis of agreements on abortion and other bioethical issues. They are not interested in “embracing” Catholic culture or the tradition of the Church. Too many converts assume that they can assent to dogma and then remake the Church in their own image. It’s gnostic. And too many spend most of their time endlessly criticizing and blaming the Church for everything, including their own unfulfilled ecclesial ambitions and their own starry-eyed notion of what the Church was or was not. And while many converts talk endlessly about having found the “truth” or the “fullness of the faith,” they seem to abhor Catholicism when it is incarnated. It’s just not as tidy as they would like. And the comparisons to the greater faith, fervor, community, and discipleship of evangelical Protestantism makes one wonder why they became Catholic in the first place.
For a lot of people, Internet apologetics seems to be like a gigantic role-playing game. They get to swagger around beating their chests because they are Thundarr the Terrible, Sacred Warrior of Truth and Goodness, and they wield the double-edged Unbeatable Mystical Sword of Supreme Rightness as they virtuously battle the nefarious forces of the Evil Lord Falsehood and his Abominable Army of Uruk-hai Orcs. “Aha! Take that! I just rolled a 32 to go with my Ultimate Refutation of All Heresies card! Begone thou dire demons of doubt and deception!” As the poet said, One, two! One, two! And through and through! The Vorpal Blade goes snicker-snack! He leaves it dead, and with its head he goes galumphing back. Let the people rejoice. The kingdom is saved! Truth lives to be attacked – and more importantly, defended – another day!
I forgot, in other words, how deadly serious some people take their online apologetics activities. It’s like the old caricature of die-hard Dungeons and Dragons fans in the 80’s – a lot of people online come to identify the core of their beings and the whole meaning of their faith in Christ with their online combative personas. They come to think that what they do online is a Sacred Mission for God, and that at all costs they must not fail. They come to take the cause of “giving an answer” (the only half-quoted sentence from 1 Pet. 3:15) as a life-or-death thing – if they don’t decisively win this battle on this message board or blog right now by giving an absolutely and plainly irrefutable refutation of the other guy’s “nonsense,” well, then, Truth will self-destruct and they will be left with nothing but doubt and fear and the horrific prospect of having to admit to their legion of adoring fans that this time they have to admit defeat and will have to commit to doing better next time. The resilience of Thundarr’s ego when he faces a potential defeat turns out to be inversely proportional to the verbal confidence he projects at the beginning of his arguments when he thinks nobody could ever possibly get the better of him.
…The “liturgy wars” are the outcome of precisely this kind of thing, a centralized program enacted by a politburo which said, “This is what you must do.” Away with programs! Human existence is messy, and the way out of the chaos of the past several decades will be messy and very much unpredictable. Thomas Day seems to understand this, and so does the pope, who has granted more freedoms than restrictions with respect to the liturgy.
Maybe by “program” people are looking for a declaration of loyalty from Professor Day, a statement on whether he stands with the Thisses or the Thats in the midst of the debate about worship. ”Forget chant and Latin! Do good hymns with organ like they used to do at my old middle-church Episcopalian parlor,” says one constituency. ”No! We must return immediately to Latin and all Gregorian chant and throw away everything else,” another group might claim. Day strikes me as being too wise for this. In the midst of the strife, it’s easy to fall for panaceas, but often the truth gets lost in the fog. I myself have worked in Novus Ordo parishes, in Traditional Rite parishes, and even in Protestant churches. I have visited others, as well. I have heard German Catholics blow the windows out with Grosser Gott; I have heard Mennonites wake the dead with their shape-note singing; I have been moved to tears by the sound of Lutherans singing Ein feste Burg; and on one cold February Ash Wednesday, I heard a Catholic congregation, after years of tra-la-la music, raise the roof singing Agnus Dei XVIII, unaccompanied—and they didn’t even drag. We do not need panaceas. We need culture and common sense. Thomas Day’s book will do much to help us achieve these things.
I encountered this passage from that extremely reliable and solid source of information on the Internet, Wikipedia (really, you would be surprised the stuff I have found on there, and if it’s enough to amaze me…) while “researching” something last week (is looking something up on Wikipedia, “research”?):
In the spring of 1902, in the Vatican, Moreschi made the first of his phonograph recordings for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company of London. He made additional recordings in 1904: there are seventeen tracks in all. Between these two sessions, several most fateful events occurred: in 1903 the aged Mustafà finally retired, and a few months later Pope Leo XIII, a strong supporter of Sistine tradition, died. His successor was Pope Pius X, an equally powerful advocate of Cecilianism. One of the new pontiff’s first official acts was the promulgation of the motu proprio, Tra le sollecitudini (“Amidst the Cares”), which appeared, appropriately enough, on St Cecilia’s Day, 22 November, 1903. This was the final nail in the coffin of all that Mustafà, Moreschi and their colleagues stood for, since one of its decrees stated: “Whenever . . . it is desirable to employ the high voices of sopranos and contraltos, these parts must be taken by boys, according to the most ancient usage of the Church.” Perosi, a fanatical opponent of the castrati, had triumphed and Moreschi and his few remaining colleagues were to be pensioned off and replaced by boys. A singing pupil of Moreschi’s, Domenico Mancini, was such a good imitator of his master’s voice that Perosi took him for a castrato (for all that castration had been banned in Italy in 1870), and would have nothing to do with him. Ironically, Mancini became a professional double-bass player.
Of course, I looked up, “Cecilianism”, and just what I thought, it is the movement in Church music to restore “primitive chant”, polyphony, and all that jazz. It is what contemporary church do-gooders resort to when they cringe at a Mozart Mass or sappy Irish tunes being sung at Benediction. I was trained in it; a few times a week in seminary (everyday during Holy Week), we were marched off and run through the in’s and out’s of the Liber Usualis. It’s all of that “qui cantat, bis orat” stuff that I never really bought into.
I, being the cyncial person that I am, always fault this stuff for the agonizing experience in church music that I have to be marched through Sunday after Sunday. Of course, the good anti-modernist Pope probably had no idea that he was setting us up for Marty Haugen, but the whole movement to strip Catholic worship of buxom sopranos belting out Latin prayers began with the more unsavory tendencies of Jansenism in the eighteenth century. If you had mentioned to anyone but the Jansenists a few centuries ago that there would be a solemn High Mass with nothing but chant, a bit of polyphony, and no instruments, they would have thought you mad or a filthy Calvinist (if they knew what a Calvinist really was, they just knew it was bad). Indeed the Te Deum of Charpentier, the giggling girls singing Couperin’s Tenebrae Lessons, and the grainy but ethereal sounds of a motet by Zipoli would have been more the norm in a place that could afford to have music at all. Even the California missions were renowned for their orchestras made up of Indian neophytes.
So I wonder, how bad would it have been if we stayed with the tradition of sacred music being “concert pieces” and most people keeping their mouths shut? I for one always like to imagine how Handel’s Carmelite Vespers (the video is of one of my favorite pieces from that service) would have been like, performed in 1707, when the composer was only in his early twenties. Even though a Lutheran, did the Virgin smile more on his piece of music than the guitar ensembles that have descended like the plague on Catholic churches today? I am not going to answer that question, but you can probably guess what I am thinking. Snob or no snob, bad music is just bad music.
This last weekend, I broke down and finally went to the traditional Latin Mass in Oakland. AG and I usually go to one of the churches here in Berkeley for Sunday Mass, but as she was feeling under the weather, I had an opportunity to go back to my old stomping ground. Perhaps it was a result of making myself believe various ideas about liturgy, or maybe it had something to do with the fact that I don’t go to it regularly anymore. Maybe it was just the time of day (it started at 12:30 p.m. and ended after 2.:00 p.m., which is an ungodly time to be indoors in California on a Sunday afternoon). But I just felt really disconnected from it. At this point, I just see the whole phenomenon of Catholic traditionalism as less and less real. Probably before, during my years of ecclesiastical sojourns, I had lulled myself into thinking that the liturgically bizarre is what is supposed to be the norm. But now I just see it for what it is: a bubble within a bubble.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I love the regular Catholic Mass. If anything, I really don’t like the fact that I am “talked at” so much in the post-1960’s rite. When I am at the old Mass now, all I can think is, “this isn’t normal”, “this is not what they do at the Catholic church down the street”, and other such thoughts. I suppose when I was with the SSPX, I nearly brainwashed myself into thinking that what I was doing there was what was authentically Catholic. I couldn’t come up with a good explanation of what other people were doing. I knew other SSPXer’s did, and I didn’t necessarily agree with their remnant fortress mentality. I was just there for the liturgy. I could have done without the politics or even the arch-reactionary, nearly farcical scholastic theology that they spewed. Now, I think I could do without the liturgy too.
Unlike most, there were years in my life when church WAS my life. In seminary, we went to church five times a day at least. In the monastery, services went on for hours. I thus can really not fathom why people can obsess over what they do for an hour and a half of their week. Maybe I have just learned to wean myself from it. Maybe I have just had enough church for one lifetime, and I consider all of it as something to be endured. I guess with anyone who obsesses over liturgical questions, I am just tempted to grab him from the collar and shake him saying, “This is not your life, get over it!!!!” Maybe if we looked at church going more as a matter of obedience and not edification, we would be in much better shape. Something tells me that, for better or for worse, this has always been the Catholic attitude towards Mass, in spite of what modern reformers have tried to do to it.
From a friend (and an expert) who gives much to think about:
Now the question of liturgy (of which some of my readers think very little!)
The historical question has a very practical aspect. Liturgy is basically an oral phenomenon only very rarely was it written down. Next, why no more “fuss” in the past? I suppose you could leave out the Old Believers, but they are very interesting. If you get a chance listen to their music (especially the 40 Gospodi pomiloi; it’s pure Philip Glass). Anyway, liturgy is the crystallization of the faith of the people (in its reception mode) and the crystallization of the understanding of faith by the doctors of the Church it in “emission” mode. Dumb doctors (i.e. Latin Church) means dumb liturgy. Dumb people (in all Churches) means that the liturgy falls on deaf ears.
The liturgy is also the collective expression of the faith of the Church and therefore it is non-subject and no one gives a rat’s arse how you “feel” about it. Feelings are personal and subjective, even an individual will one day be moved to tears by something, and the next find the same thing corny and funny. So the liturgy has to be looked at for its content first and foremost. The prayer of the individual must learn to conform to the prayer of the Church, just as the mind of the individual must conform to the mind of the Church. (Which goes light years beyond any “party line”.)
I remember telling you once that I thought that the Latin Church had abandoned the spiritual life to the field of the feminine. The guys (i.e. the Jesuits) “do stuff”, the chicks (i.e. the discalced Carmelites and the Visitandines and any other unfortunate gaggle of gals the SJs could get their fangs into) “pray and suffer for the Church”. The result of that is that the RC has no real conception of the maleness of Jesus and a lot of silly women want to become priests (because that’s where the action is.)
Spiritual dryness, dark night and all the “Dungeons and Dragons” games invented by a liturgy-less church are an insult to the intelligence, and a lack of intellectual and imaginative grasp. They are not “typical” of Latin Christianity before the Reformation. The Cistercians and the Carthusians don’t go in for them in a bigway, I don’t think even the Franciscans do either. It’s been impossible for anyone to escape the Jesuit blight but it’s not the same intensity everywhere.
Now if you are bored with the Church and Church things, I think that is only a sign of sanity. Anyone who would spend their time absorbed in the politics and intellectual life of a kindergarten is to be worried about. The Church is probably at its lowest point intellectually ever. We just have to learn to live with it. The great saints of the Middle Ages lived with an absolutely corrupt and ignorant clergy…A council of despair? If the situation is desperate what else can one give?
I have read many recent posts on other pages on the Internet about conversion, ecclesiastical factionalism, and general religious in-fighting. Reading my own blog, I could really ask myself, “what does all of this qualify as”. Truth be told, I am writing and thinking more and more explicitly about Catholic topics. This goes against my past admonition to myself and others not to write about theology, for theology is something we should not take lightly. While I hope to keep some sobriety when it comes to discussing religious topics, I have also come to the conclusion recently that, even if I am not the most qualified person in the world to discuss some theological topics, all the same I am certainly more qualified than some people who seem to make a living and a reputation off of it. That being said, I am still well aware that I am a “nobody” when it comes to all of this, but my experiences and readings into these topics have, in the language of the streets, “earned me stripes”. The work has certainly been put in, and I do no one a service by pretending otherwise. Read the rest of this entry »
An eloquently written blog. An excerpt from a post you can find at this link:
The trouble with this kind of systemitisation is that it often seems to suck up responsibilty for order into the system, leaving people behind doing their own thing. This could arguably be as true of the liturgical project of Pope St Pius V, as of Pope Paul VI’s. In this sense, the supporters of the early liturgical movement were not entirely wrong in their complaints about the privatisation of Catholic spirituality, or in their desire to make the prayer of the people more liturgical, or in their wish to make the liturgical prayers more immediately understandable. Yet one of the reasons that inspires systemitisation is the anarchy that can result from unbridled personal initiative; and who could deny the existence of liturgical anarchy in the Church in the 1970s, 1980s and to some extent still still today?…
While the newer liturgy was meant to promote better understanding, active participation and a more ecclesial spirituality, these days one often finds less understanding of the Sacred Mysteries, passive bench-potato-ism and a privatised spirituality which constantly treats the liturgical action as a blank canvas for creativity. Yet to blame the New Mass in itself (the system) is to make the same mistake that mid-twentieth century liturgical reformers made about the old Mass: the mistake which imagines that the problem lies with the system and not with individuals or with the prevailing culture.
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Miscellaneous notes: There is a quote going around trad-circles that the worst thing about the modern Catholic liturgy is that it turns the person in the pew into a theatre critic. While I love the old Mass and the old religion, and think the new stuff is inferior by comparison, I cannot romanticize liturgy by saying such things. If the modern devout Catholic is a theatre critic, the people who heard Mass in the good ol’ days were people vegged out in front of the T.V. at three in the morning watching infomercials. It wasn’t perfect then, it isn’t perfect now, and it will never be perfect. I think the objective cult, not what one experiences out of it, is what is most important. The realm of sentiment can best be serviced by other aspects of Catholicism. Liturgy has its own function.
Also, Steve Skojec wrote a follow-up to Mark Shea’s comments on traditionalists. The only comment I will make is that Mark Shea responded that we should have “more traditionalists like Steve”, which sort of had the same flavor as a comment like: “we should have more old aunts who aren’t gossipers” or “we should have more kids from the barrio who aren’t crooks”. He betrays his prejudices even when he is trying to be magnanimous.
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