By JAMES MONTI
In reading through the numerous news stories regarding the issuance of the Motu Proprio Traditionis Custodes of Pope Francis, I came across a reference to one bishop who has decided not only to ban entirely the Traditional Latin Mass in his diocese but also to call upon his priests to “avoid” the use in the Novus Ordo of traditional-style vestments, including curiously enough the humeral veil, a vestment that is actually required for several rites in the Novus Ordo.
While it is not for me to judge the intentions of this prelate in his decision, such a mandate does seem to suggest a way of viewing the Church’s past and her liturgical patrimony that is quite troubling — that there is somehow something harmful in continuing to put in the service of God the things of the Church’s past. Such an attitude is by no means confined to any one diocese or locality — it became commonplace decades ago, and seems to be on the rise of late.
Critics of those who love the Church’s theological, spiritual, liturgical, and artistic patrimony are wont to say that we mustn’t “live in the past.” There is in all this an underlying assumption that traditional beliefs and practices are inherently a suspicious thing, a cumbersome thing, a bad thing that traps us in the past. Yet the Church is by her very nature “traditional,” for the Latin root of the word “traditional” is “tradere,” meaning “to hand down,” which is precisely what the Church does all the time in preaching the Gospel, offering divine worship, and administering the sacraments: “For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you” (1 Cor. 11:23).
Yes, we as Catholics are in a real sense “living in the past,” because the Lord and Master we follow walked this earth two thousand years ago; yet our doing so, and embracing the traditions that have gracefully spanned those two thousand years, are not a denial of the present, for “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever” (Heb. 13:8).
The pastor of my church has made the very insightful observation regarding priestly ordination that he and his brother priests possess the powers of the priesthood because of an unbroken chain of the imposition of hands by bishops on the heads of ordinandi stretching back over nearly two thousand years to the Apostles, who received the sacrament from Christ. Thus the Church’s sacramental life is inexorably rooted in her past.
How then is it possible to think that the path to the Church’s future is to be forged by becoming alienated from her past, by purging from her churches, her liturgies and even her theological textbooks this vast patrimony of sacred things handed down from generation to generation? In the Old Testament, in the history of the children of Israel, time and again God identifies Himself and is identified as the God of their fathers: “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you:’ this is my name for ever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations” (Exodus 3:15).
Conversely, while it is certainly true that the Church must engage the world in order to win souls for Christ, it has nonetheless been the perennial habit of the Church to put a healthy bit of distance between herself and “the present age” lest she become ensnared by the profane values and passing fads of this world; for the Gospel she proclaims “is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age” (1 Cor. 2:6). She has learned to do this from Our Lord Himself:
“This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah” (Luke 11:29). Since the 1960s, there has been the incessant proposal, “If only the Church would open herself up more to the world, if only she would catch up with the times, all would be well.” After over half a century of this, the fruits of such a “catching up with the times” speak for themselves: thinly attended churches, empty seminaries and convents, closed Catholic schools and hospitals, and a culture more alienated from God than ever.
There are those who seem dismayed and even angry that so many young people have developed a deep love for the centuries-old treasures and traditions of the Church, that these young people find in such time-tested precious things a sense of the sacred and a deep spiritual refreshment and nourishment that they can’t so readily find in more “contemporary” practices.
Is this really such a mystery? When is there going to be at long last a frank admission that much of what has constituted contemporary church art, architecture and liturgical furnishings since the 1960s (since the 1950s in some places) is just ugly, an insulting repudiation of beauty, starving the soul by offering it little more than barren, colorless, lifeless walls and grossly distorted depictions of the human face and form totally divorced from the truth of man being made in the image and likeness of God?
When is there going to be a frank admission that since the 1960s, in all too many places, Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament has been treated in the most appalling and sacrilegious manner, with His continual presence in the Tabernacle exiled to some remote corner in so many churches?
One of the images that has remained with me following a recent visit to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was the sight of the shimmering gold of an exhibit of sixth and seventh century chalices. Those chalices, wrought from precious metal to hold the most precious treasure on the face of the earth, stand as vivid proof of the Church’s continual belief in the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, serving to undermine the modernist myth that the doctrine of transubstantiation is merely an “invention” of the theologians of the High Middle Ages.
The reason for gold chalices, magnificent vestments, and the like in the sacred liturgy is superbly explained by the French Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (1081-1151), the man credited with setting in motion the architectural revolution of the Gothic cathedral:
“I confess that it has appeared most fitting to me that whatever is more precious, whatever is most valuable, ought above all else to be devoted to the administration of the sacrosanct Eucharist. If gold pitchers, gold phials, and gold bowls were devoted to the collection of the blood of he-goats and bulls or red heifers by the command of God, how much more should gold vessels, precious stones, whatever of all creatures is most precious, be devoted for the reception of the Blood of Jesus Christ, to Its continual service, with full devotion.
“Certainly neither we nor our things suffice to be devoted to this. Even if by a new creation our substance could be transformed into that of the holy Cherubim and Seraphim, even the service they render is unworthy of so great and ineffable a victim. Yet we have so great a propitiation for our sins. Yes, there are those who object by asserting that a holy mind, a pure soul, a faithful intention should suffice for this ministry. And these things indeed we have particularly, properly, especially esteemed to be important.
“Yet we believe we ought to serve [God] also in the exterior adornment of the sacred vessels, in all interior purity, in all exterior nobility, and nowhere more than in the service of the holy sacrifice. For it most becomingly behooves us to be devoted in all things universally to Our Redeemer, who in all things without any exception has not refused to provide for us” (Liber de rebus in Administratione Sua Gestis, chapter 33, in Oeuvres completes de Suger, ed. A. Lecoy de la Marche, Paris, 1867, pp. 199-200).
We Need Our Heritage
I recall too that while visiting one of the Metropolitan Museum’s European art galleries which contained a variety of masterpieces depicting our Lady, the room felt like a veritable Marian sanctuary. These centuries-old works of art, most of which were created for liturgical settings, have lost none of their power to convey the timeless truths of our Catholic faith. Such expressions of the faith shouldn’t be confined to museums. We need such voices from our Church’s past to continue resonating within the sanctuaries of our churches now, in our own time.
In developing strategies for pursuing the very worthy cause of a “New Evangelization,” there has been in at least some cases an underlying assumption that the evangelical strategies of the Church’s last big “New Evangelization,” namely the Catholic “Counter-Reformation,” need to be rejected as too “doctrinaire.”
As a student of history who had had the opportunity to familiarize myself with quite a bit of what was written, preached, painted, sculpted, built, and sung over the two centuries following the Council of Trent in an effort to renew the Church, I believe we have many valuable lessons to learn from what proved to be one of the most fruitful campaigns of evangelization in the Church’s history.
There are many people of other faiths who have come to admire the legacy of the great Catholic artists of the Counter-Reformation: Rubens, Bernini, Zurbaran, and Murillo, to name but a few. Why should we Catholics of all people become estranged from and repudiate what is our own wonderful heritage?
In a 2016 interview with the journalist Peter Seewald, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI explained his 2007 decision to authorize the wider celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass by stating, “It was important for me that the Church is one with herself inwardly, with her own past; that what was previously holy to her is not somehow wrong now” (Last Testament in His Own Words: Pope Benedict XVI with Peter Seewald, tr. Jacob Phillips, London, Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 202).
The Church cannot be seen as repudiating her past, as regretting her past, as repenting of her past, as if she had reason to be ashamed of it. Surely the many sins of her children across the centuries are a cause for shame and repentance. But the Church herself as the sinless Bride of Christ has every reason to rejoice in her patrimony, and to preserve it for future generations, not merely in museums, but also in the life of prayer, worship, and service that she is living now.
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