Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Hierothee suggested I do a post on my research about the connection of sacrifice to consumption.  This is very difficult to do in the space of a standard post so this will necessarily be a broad sketch of what one day may be a much more compelling (I hope) manuscript.

I suppose the place to start is with John Paul’s Trinitarian anthropology.  Man is made in the image of a Communion of Persons.  He explains this Communion, starting from traditional Processional theology, in terms of total self-gift.  Communion is total self-gift.  This total self-gift  is thereby the archetype for the human person in his relationships.

The human person is a hylomorphic entity; that is, a unity comprised of a spiritual soul and a material body.  Man exists at once,  in the realm of the spiritual and the animal.  As a spiritual being man shares in the capacity for communion by use of his rational faculties, intellect and will.  These faculties give him he capacity for total self-gift, for communion.

Animals also, in some way, must reflect God’s perfection.  As fundamental as communion is to God’s being, one might expect that there should be some way in which sub-personal animals participate in communion.  Certainly sub-personal beings do not have the rational faculties necessary for the communion of gift.  They do however, experience a sort of communion in which they join themselves to something of a lower nature (hopefully).  However, this union is through annihilating the lower nature and raising it into a higher nature.  They become one with it, though this is a defective communion because the “other” has lost its being.

Man lives in both of these dimensions.  He experiences both this spiritual communion of persons–most perfectly when the giving accords with the archetype, that is total, disinterested self-gift.  He also experiences the communion of consumption when he eats…though I would argue he can consume in other ways…when he treats another person as a means rather than an end…but this requires more discussion than we have space for.

Man now exists in a deficient condition; he is fallen.  It is very interesting to look at the third book of Genesis and the story of the fall in light of the above discussion.  The mythic (this does not mean untrue of course) imagery shows our first parents with the task of total self-gift–that is, to give themselves in trust and thanksgiving to God, very much the way that John Paul describes the second Procession of the Son.  There is a detailed discussion of the theology of creation in relation to the Son and the second Procession which should be inserted here but neither is there space for that so this might seem less compelling than it should be, but the support will have to wait a longer work.

The Genesis imagery of the fall indicates that the instead of achieving communion through this act of total-self gift, they instead chose consumption.  I would argue that whatever the act of rebellion might have actually been, the choice of the consumption imagery is significant.  It suggests that consumption–communion on man’s terms rather than God’s terms–is to be a perennial problem.  In fact, consumption now often masquerades as communion.  I believe that this is the anthropology behind what we know as “comfort foods” which are standard recourse for many of us, particularly when we have trouble with relationships of communion.

Man’s fallen state means that his capacity for love takes upon itself, potentially a bitter aspect.  It is now the case that one has to die in different ways, when one loves.  In the very least, he must die to himself and his selfish inclinations if he is to love the other for the other’s sake.  This is a type of sacrifice.  In fact, the challenge to love disinterestedly requires varying degrees of sacrifice.  Sacrifice is to give of yourself for the sake of the other to the point that you experience loss in some manner or another.  This is ultimately what the divine Processions are…though it may not be appropriate to use the term sacrifice for the divine Procession because of the attendant connotation of loss in sacrifice and there is no loss in the divine Communion.

However, the remedy to the fall, in which man’s failure to emulate the second Procession, will take on the proper meaning of the term sacrifice.  The Son Incarnate will freely choose to manifest temporally what He does eternally.  He will, in love, trust and thanksgiving, return to the Father all that the Father has given Him…including His human life.  This Sacrifice on the cross will restore the conditions of possibility for communion, but interestingly enough, it does so in a way the redeems the consumption by which man’s initial communion was lost.

Of course we know well the fact that the Cross draws together the eternal with the temporal.  It draws into itself the last Passover seder in the upper room before Christ’s Passion, as He transforms this  seder into the New Testament Passover–the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Cross also brings forth the economic manifestation of the second Procession, that is Pentecost–in an analogous way in the first Procession brings about the second.

This one Paschal act, beginning with the Incarnation and ending with the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, is liturgically made present in the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Mass re-presents the Sacrifice of the Cross through the memorial enactment of the New Testament Passover proleptically celebrated in the Upper Room.   It culminates in an efficacious symbol of communion which looks very much like animal consumption–we call it Holy Communion.

The consumption in the Garden of Eden which destroyed man’s communion with God  is now redeemed by the Son.  The Son, who in an act of total self-gift reflective of His eternal gift, continually gives up His Body and Blood in every Mass celebrated throughout the ages, that through an animal act of consumption the faithful are restored by this life-giving communion with the Son and thereby, inserted into Trinitarian Communion.

In a hylomorphic act of love which eclipses Aristotle’s greatest thoughts, both aspects of the human person, animal and spiritual, are incorporated during this divinizing rite we call Holy Communion.  The human person is inserted into the hypostatic order giving him entrance into Trinitarian life when he consumes the Flesh of the Son of Man and drinks His Blood…he now truly has life in him.

Consumption has been redeemed and is immutably implicated in spiritual communion.  This doesn’t mean that consumption no longer masquerades as communion; it does.

It does mean though, that when this masquerading does lead to sin, it is now the source of its own ultimate undoing…because where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.  The love revealed and effected on the Cross, is poured out in time via the mediation of the Sacrifice of the Mass, restoring communion where souls choose to turn again to God.  Sacrifice has redeemed consumption and made it the material cause of communion.

Edward Oakes has a post up at First Things about Rene Girard. There has been much talk about Girard at First Things lately, as Oakes himself notes, but as well at National Review, where Peter Robinson has an interview up (but which I was unable to find in a quick search). It has inspired me to post a stinging criticism of Girard’s theory of the origin of religious sacrifice taken from Louis Bouyer (Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, 1988, p. 238, n. 14). In explaining the tenor of the following quotation, I should point out that Bouyer had a strong aversion to theories of the necessary evolution of a religionless Christianity, such as one could find in Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, and he seems to have seen Girard as a proponent of this sort of thinking. In other words, anathema to him were those who think that Christianity is necessarily secularizing and that Christ’s sacrifice put an end to religion.  Also, he had a strong aversion to annihilationist theories of sacrifice. Sacrifice, he held, is divine self-gift to humanity in which we are ourselves incorporated and made fully self-gift, and it is consummated in the sacred meal, wherein our being comes to fulfillment. Sacrifice is not consummated in the putting to death of a sacrificial victim. The sacred meal is the fundamental activity of man, and the pre-Christian religions pre-figured the Christian Eucharist in this regard, without ever having had access to a truly efficacious communion with deity:

The ideas developed by Rene Girard on the nature of sacrifice have recently created a considerable stir in learned circles. But his brilliant speculations overlook virtually all the contributions made in the last hundred years on this undeniably fundamental aspect of religion. Which may be why he considers supremely indicative of the meaning of sacrifice the apotropaic rites now recognized by all specialists as never having been looked upon as sacrifices by those who practiced these rituals. Quite simply, scapegoats and all variations on the theme, far from ever being considered as sacrifices to God, were always sent to the devil! On the materiality of sacrifices — the necessary starting point before any attempt to unravel their meaning — one may refer to works such as R.K. Yerkes’s Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and in Primitive Judaism. This kind of factual study inevitably leads to a firm conclusion: it is not the killing which determines sacrifice, even when the victim is put to death, which is far from always being the case (see in this respect E.O. James, Origins of Sacrifice, London, 1953, pp. 256 ff.). Neither is its nature established by the oblation to the divinity. Instead, a sacrifice is a meal, but a meal considered as sacred because the divinity partakes of it, whether the sacrifice is exlusively intended for the deity (as in the holocaust), whether priests alone also take part (as in the Hebrew sacrifices for the expiation of sins), or finally whether the entire people participate with them, as in the sacrifice of communion. Or indeed in the Passover, and this seems to have been a characteristic of the very earliest sacrifices, in which all is consumed by the participants, with no role clearly reserved for the divinity.

This explains why, in the most ancient mythic expression of their significance, sacrifices are far from appearing as tremulous attempts of terrified humans to placate a bloodthirsty divinity through some kind of ritual murder. Instead, the gods themselves, acting either directly or through kings deemed to embody or represent them, are the initiators of sacrifices, and thereby show themselves as the quintessential benefactors of mankind, and more particularly the sources of human life in that which maintains it (nourishment) and produces it (sexuality). The idea of sacrifice as a ritual murder is nothing but the fabrication of self-styled scholars, who thus prove that they belong with the pathetic dupes who persist in taking seriously the alleged Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The numbers* are indisputable, and it speaks volumes as to the mindset of the people who elect law makers who reject the common sense approach to abstinence only education. It’s an indictment of  the twisted will, which rejects the biological evidence which reveal the child’s brain is not yet equipped or developed enough to make adult like decisions.

I came across a planned parenthood news letter (pdf page 12) which attempted to prove that “comprehensive” sex education was superior to abstinence only education, based on their own generalized and vague abortion statistics from a handful of  “cherry picked” states. To test their theory, I ran the latest abortion numbers from All the states which reported to the CDC in 2005. I compared the teen abortion rates of the (17) states which reject abstinence only education funds with those ( 31) which accept them, using the 2002 census estimation. I discovered that the 2005 abortion rates for teens were 46% higher in states which reject funding for abstinence only when compared to those which accept them.

AZ, CA, CO, CT, IA, MA, ME, MN, MT, NJ, NM, NY, OH, RI, VA, WI and WY (fund rejecting states) need to stop playing politics.

Interpret from this what you will, but the numbers are just too big to be ignored.

(The Effectiveness of Abstinence Education Programs in Reducing Sexual Activity Among Youth – 2002)

* Updated with corrected numbers

And the final portion…

Toward a Renewal of the Liturgy

For the two theologians who interest us here, it is of no doubt that heaven opens itself, tears itself open: if not, liturgy is only role playing, or nothing happens. The liturgy is an opus Dei, the act of God over us and with us. Romano Guardini emphasizes the fact that the essential in liturgy is not the making of something but of being. Activity is not a value of the whole. It often hides a false interpretation of what is the Church. Just as the liturgy must proceed from a Catholic Christology, it must also be born from a Catholic ecclesiology where the Church is not seen as an institution, a bureaucracy pertaining to worship, and where the priesthood is not considered as the monopolization of sacred privileges. Cardinal Ratzinger writes: “If we want the liturgy to survive, to see it renewed, it is elementary that we rediscover the Church. I will add: if we want to free man from his alienation, if we want that he rediscover his identity, it is indispensable that he rediscover the Church, which is not a misanthropic institution, but that new Nous without which the Je cannot find its rooting and its home.” In effect, the true subject of liturgy is the Church, communio sanctorum of all times and of all places. Also, not only is the liturgy not created by the arbitrary will of an individual or a group but even more profoundly does it unfold three ontological dimensions, described by Guardini and found in all the work of Bouyer and Ratzinger: cosmos, history, and mystery. Ratzinger contests that the liturgy which is not rooted in these three elements runs off track: “The liturgy of the group (…) is not cosmic, for it holds its life in the autonomy of the group. It is not historical: that which characterizes it is precisely the emancipation of connection to history and of self-fabrication, even if one uses the decors of history. And it does not know mystery, because everything is explained to oneself and must be explained. This is why development and participation in it are as foreign as obedience, which opens onto a sensibility which surpasses the explicable alone. In place of all this we have now creativity, which tends to confirm the autonomy of those who are emancipated.” Liturgy rooted in Catholic Christology and ecclesiology is the fruit of a continuous and natural historical development. This millennial process has been broken apart in the post-conciliar drift: “In the place of the liturgy which is the fruit of a continual development, one has put a fabricated liturgy. One left the living process of growth and came to enter into fabrication. One has no longer wanted to continue the growth and maturation of living across the centuries, and one has replaced it – in the manner of a technical production – by a fabrication, a banal product of the moment.”

If Christology and ecclesiology are shaky, the crisis of the liturgy can only ensue, reinforced even more by the trouble shaking the sacerdotal body for which the passion for truth seems sometimes to be absent. Cardinal Ratzinger cites Bernanos to this purpose when this last depicts the Basque bishop: “The boldness of this brilliant priest deceives only him. His base intellect is immense (…) Alas! No one is less worthy of love than the one who lives only to be loved. Such souls, so skillful in transforming themselves to the tastes of everyone, are only mirrors (…) But he never takes notice that he denies each time the eternal sign by which he is marked.” When the suffering of truth is rejected by a priest, or a religious community, liturgy constructs itself on the sand and comes to shift with it. When the Je of Christ in the person of the priest becomes simply the je of the priest who desires to please his community or even to impose on it his views, the Eucharistic mystery is degraded into spectacle. Father Louis Bouyer, with his habitual humor, which did not win for him only friends in this world, will write: “What to say then of that new type of priest/bad-actor, drawing all the attention on himself and orating like a vulgar bartender behind his counter, for the benefit of a wholly passive crowd?” Whereas the liturgy is the school of truth and it will come to transform the priest in the sacred mysteries which he celebrates. Cardinal Ratzinger recalls to his seminarians: “What makes the Eucharist a terrifying mission, is that the priest is authorized to speak with the Je of Christ. To become a priest and to be a priest is constantly to advance on the way of this identification. We will never complete it, but if we search for this identification, we are on the good path: on the path which leads to God and to men, on the path of love.” So that the liturgy rediscovers its sacred character, it is necessary that the priest is conscious of his own sacred character, which is invested to him in spite of his human weakness. He integrates himself then, not in a particular community concerned with its image and in diverting itself, but in the totality of cosmic contemplation, which is impressed upon the facades and tympanums of Moissac, Conque, Vézelay, Autun, Chartres, and many others, which is sumptuously expressed in the Byzantine liturgy and which is still expressed, there is little of the times in this, in the Latin Rite.

The spiritual renewal necessary for the liturgy passes by a return to the true sense of the reality of the Tradition. The conciliar constitution on the liturgy emphasized the fact that Christian cult is the most effective method for teaching Christianity. In effect, all the senses, and not simply the intellect, are involved there and nourished: “(…) in the liturgy one does not only understand in a rational manner, as when I understand a course, but in a complex manner, with all the senses, and one is admitted to a feast which is not invented by some commission, but which comes to me from the greatest depths of the millennia, and, in the end, from eternity,” clarifies Joseph Ratzinger. But the thinking here is particularly needling, because spirituality and liturgy cannot be reserved only to the domain of the emotions. Louis Bouyer emphasizes the danger which lies in wait in cult doing away with intellect: “The effort to make a living liturgy abandon not only the Tradition, but also dogma, the revealed belief in order to awake the emotions in interesting man simply in his human, terrestrial perspectives, and in seeing God only as the means of galvanizing, with a halo of new prestige, of new bursting, the simple conscience that man takes of himself and of his possibilities.”

This is why nothing is neutral in the liturgical use of language, of vocabulary, of symbols, of architecture, of music, of the plastic arts, of the orientation in space, of silence, of the word…. These remarks have not as their objective to present the developments of Joseph Ratzinger and of Louis Bouyer on these specific problems, crucial for a truly sacred celebration. It suffices to consult their numerous and illuminating writings on the subject. An essential element is of course the orientation of the celebration, always turning toward the presence of the Lord. The direction of the altar reveals, even more than the language utilized, the subjacent theology. [Klaus Gamber's] Turning Toward the Lord is prefaced by Cardinal Ratzinger and post-faced by Father Bouyer. This last inspired Gamber moreover, as he is turned to again by Ratzinger, in certain of his works, such as, for example, Architecture and Liturgy.

The adhesion of Louis Bouyer and Joseph Ratzinger to the liturgical movement in France and in Germany was quickly tempered, then struck down, by the reforms instituted and put into practice. Both denounced very quickly the drift coming from the work of the commissions and from the “specialist” centers. They were the pioneers for reclaiming a liturgical movement capable of correcting the errors of the liturgical movement. Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledged that he would test, even before the last Council, a reserve vis-à-vis the rationalism and the historicism of certain representatives of the liturgical reform. Conquered by the content of the conciliar constitution on the liturgy – even though he was theological counselor of Cardinal Frings – he was surprised and disquieted by the almost immediate turn taken by the liturgy in its post-conciliar application. “I could envision that the negative aspects of the liturgical movement would reappear of no more beauty, leading all straight to the self-destruction of the liturgy.”

The liturgy in its actual state – which is not irreversible – is without doubt the mark of the more visible stagnation of hoe and of love which touches the contemporary world and rebounds to the Church itself. Saint Paul speaks of the sadness of this world leading to death, the Fathers of the desert combated the acedia which corrodes the heart, and Saint Thomas Aquinas speaks of a metaphysical indolence which is more than a lack of taste but rather the rejection of what is good and beautiful. And the Angelic Doctor names the daughters of indolence: despair, agitation, wandering of the spirit, verbosity, curiosity, interior inquietude, instability of the will and of being, torpor, pusillanimity, rancor, and malice. Here is a large family which reflects very justly the psychological situation today most widespread in the West. This diagnosis is severe but it comprises its own remedy: “Only the courage to find the divine dimension of our being and to accept it can give a new interior stability to our souls and to our society.” It is not astonishing that in such a stagnation, where the daughters of indolence do not cease to lead us in a macabre dance, the liturgy is the first to suffer. But at the same time it can be a privileged instrument of cure if it helps to direct attention toward the sacred. Tradition and renewal go hand in hand: “(…) to want to choose between the two or to oppose them is exactly to do as if it were wanted that an oak display its foliage in striking the most that one can at its roots. It is, to the contrary, to the degree where its roots are founded very deeply in the earth that the foliage can develop itself most amply,” remarks Louis Bouyer.

The time has come to find its roots, because all did not die and it is enough that they are watered so that the oak recovers its verdure and continues to grow.

Conclusion: In Hope

Cardinal Hans Ur von Balthasar would consider Christianity as the religion of and, not or, not in the addition of things which remain exterior to one another or in the confusion of their identities, but in a profound communion. The liturgy expresses well this and. In effect, it is the reconciliation, always actual and springing up again of the humanity and the divinity of Christianity. Louis Bouyer and Joseph Ratzinger have known to recall to the Church, with faith and brilliance, courage and tenacity, at the heart of a crisis without precedent, that it risks losing its soul in selling off the liturgy, in evacuating the sacred. Each in his domain and in filling the vocation and the task which was his own did not cease from reawakening our intelligence and our conscience. Louis Bouyer has rejoined the old men of the Apocalypse and participates forever more, with the grace of God, in the choir of the cosmic liturgy, after being himself beaten like Gandalf the White Rider of Tolkien. The Divine Providence has placed on the chair of Saint Peter, the object of Eucharistic meditation of the Bavarian cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger. Henceforth, Benedict XVI is in a position to put in place the reforms which impose themselves and which he calls his vows in his work as theologian, in his heart as priest: “(…) the Eucharist is our ground, it becomes our share, such that we can say “Fate has allotted an enclosure of delights and my heritage is splendid.”

The one and the other, so near and so concordant in their thinking, offer to us the necessary material in order to restore what our lack of faith has disfigured.

Here is the fourth part of the translated article:

The Essence of the Liturgy

The particularity of Christian theology is that of being Eucharistic, contrary to all the other religions which always oppose the action of grace for the well-being received from God and the praise of his transcendence. The liturgy reveals therefore to man that he is adopted by God, as is all of creation. Louis Bouyer emphasizes: “Is not the object (of the Eucharistic prayer) that man becomes a child of God and all the cosmos to which man is inseparable, not only adopted in his only Son, but, if one can put it thus, espoused in his very filiation?”

The fruit gathered is indeed the most precious there is. The liturgy is truly Catholic, universal, embracing in its very action man and cosmos. To reduce it to a personal action, independent of the tradition in which it appears, ends in depriving the universe of what gives it life, no more, no less. Joseph Ratzinger insists: “Catholicity is not simply an overflowing pleromatic, still less an exterior appearance of the organization of the whole. It is a central internal dimension of the Eucharistic mystery itself. And it is not necessary to separate it from apostolicity. The condition of apostolicity is Catholicity; the content of Catholicity is apostolicity.”

Louis Bouyer and Joseph Ratzinger both wholly share the conviction – which should appear to be at the source for every believer but which now is no longer in evidence – that one cannot dispose of the Eucharist and the liturgy as one wants, otherwise care for unity and universality disappears. When one lessens or throws out the Catholic dimension of liturgy, this last does not cease to change, to impoverish and to transform itself into communal naval-gazing. Cardinal Ratzinger continues: “The Eucharist then becomes a communal meal, the place where the community realizes itself, finding there the symbol of the reciprocal action of its members (…) At the same time the sacramentality, the sacrality, would soon appear an offensive notion, and one sees in fact stand out, in place of sacramental service, an organization which decides for itself and can then only set up functions and not true vocations. The danger then appears menacing of seeing the community devolve into a simple club.”

Meditating on the symbolic and artistic significance of Bernini’s Chair of Saint Peter in the Vatican basilica, when he was not yet Sovereign Pontiff, Joseph Ratzinger insists on the fact that the Eucharist constitutes the foundation of the Church and that order, as well as love, is inherent to it. This order present in the Eucharist is even, according to him, the “unyielding nucleus” of the order of the Church. The Chair of Saint Peter returns to this unity of order and of love presiding at the Holy Liturgy: “It indicates that the mass is the very center of the Church, that the Church can only be one with the crucified Christ in consideration of the community that it forms with him. Its unity would not be guaranteed by any organizational disposition (…) The Church is not governed by the decisions of the majority, but by the faith which ripens in the Eucharistic encounter with Christ.” And even more, he would add that the throne of the Eucharist is not only the throne of domination, but the seat of uncomfortable service, before concluding with these lines: “The Mass can be compared to the eternal light penetrating in our world and like the sound of the joy of God resounding here below. It is at the same time the means that we have of coming to touch the comforting bursting of this light, coming forth from the depth of our questions and our troubles. The Mass is the guiding ladder of faith and love and, indeed, opens our vision to hope.”

Louis Bouyer, for his part, utilizes the Parable of the prodigal son in order to illustrate the movement which leads us to the liturgy. Each Christian lives only in order to return to the Father. The Mass is what presents before each believer the mystery of the divine Word who searches for him and calls to him. And which crushes him in order to recreate him in the Eucharistic immolation, rendering him conformed to the Cross of Christ, transforming him into another Christ. It is in this way that the Mass is Eucharistic, which is to say the action of exultant graces, jubilant for this return to God, for this rediscovery of the beauty of creation: “In spite of its initial and fundamental aspect of immolation, the Mass indeed comprises, as the final successful return of prodigal humanity fallen far from him, flows and streams of joy. It is in this, which is to say in participating in it and doing it, by a living faith, giving our whole life, that we understand how the liturgy can say by the wood of the cross, joy has come to the world.”

If the liturgy, in all its sacraments, is communion in the Cross of Christ, it would suffer each time that the Christological faith becomes vague, plunged anew in some heresy arisen from the woodwork. Cardinal Ratzinger thinks that the renewal and restoration of liturgy passes by the question present in the Gospel of Saint Matthew: “Who do you say that the Son of Man is?” He affirms: “The theology and practice of the liturgy can only know a fecund development in close connection with Christology.” He rejoins the conviction of Bouyer cited above. The influence of luminaries will bring little by little even believers to have the historical Christ only of yesterday, sidestepping Saint Paul and even the synoptics, in order truly to keep a Jesus who has only ever existed in abstraction. Time is for them only an instant which vanishes irrevocably, nothing of which can be grasped. Whereas the Letter to the Hebrews insists on the fact that: “Jesus is the same, yesterday and today; he will be for eternity.” To know Christ is therefore a path which unfolds itself in the three dimensions of time. Joseph Ratzinger cites Saint Augustine: “Come to Christ you also…Do not think of long voyages…It is by love alone, not by traveling through the oceans, that one joins oneself to him, the Omnipresent. But because this voyage comports sufficiently of vagaries and of tempests of the most diverse temptations, think of the crucified, in order that your faith can climb upon the wood. Then you will not founder.”

Only faith in Christ can lead to a salutary awakening in the domain of liturgy. If the Son of God has not come into the world in order to save us from sin in dying on the Cross, if his agony is not until the end of time, then the first object of cult is not the God of Jesus Christ, but the “we” of those who celebrate, beginning with the “me” of the priest. In such a liturgy, adoration and sacrifice no longer have reason for being: “It is necessary for the participants to assure themselves of their mutual community and to burst forth in this way from their isolation, in which modern existence has enclosed the individual. It is necessary to nourish sentiments of liberation, of joy, of reconciliation, to denounce what is hurtful and to give motivation for action. This is why it returns to the community to create for itself its liturgy and not to receive traditions become incomprehensible; the community represents itself and celebrates itself.” Such a manner of making is opposed to a conception of liturgy such as that held by Romano Guardini, who will consider liturgy as life becoming art.

Such is also the spirit which guides Louis Bouyer from 1943, which is to say just after his conversion and before his ordination as Catholic priest, in his famous letter to Father Pie Duployé, O.P., at the moment of the founding of the Center of Pastoral Liturgy [in Paris]. He expresses the triple hope of rendering and cultivating knowledge of the liturgy, of bringing to it a revivifying historical explication, not at all fastidious or archaeological, and giving access to everyone the entire spiritual world in which it bathes. It seems though that this triple purpose has not been attained for reasons which hold in the crisis of the authority at the center of the Church, whereas the liturgical reform has in course and in the main taken over the liturgy by elements whose first purpose was to accomplish their own agenda and not to give luster again to the work of art bequeathed by centuries of faith. Louis Bouyer will note sadly as the years gradually go by: “The Catholic liturgy has been turned upside down under the pretext that it can no longer be accepted by the secularized masses.”

… and part three…

Upstream: the Sacred

Louis Bouyer has always sustained that the reality of the sacred can only be understood in its diversity and complexity by a phenomenological study on the basis of a comparative history of religions. He would dedicate, among other writings, a whole volume to this question. His authors of reference on the subject were R. Otto, G. Van der Leeuw, and Mircea Eliade.

The separation opened by the Protestantism of Albert Ritschl and the disciples of Karl Barth, followed by a certain brand of Catholicism, between faith and religion, between transcendence and immanence, between the grandeur of God and the reality of creation, leads to an “a-theology,” to a radical naturalism, to an a-cosmic theism which rejects God. The desire to obtain such a Chrisitianity, purified of its human elements, no longer permits the divine to find where it can rest itself. But nothing is more essential to Christianity than of being the reconciliation, according to the words of Saint Paul, of man with God that God himself worked.

The sacred precedes the religious, permits it of being, because it is the remnant manifestation of the presence, of the activity of God, the revelatory sign of His existence. It is therefore essential to the religious, the unity of all our existence in our relation to the world, which has its source directly in God: “To refuse the sacred is to refuse to God all possibility of manifesting himself in the world which He has created. To want therefore a Christianity where all sacrality will be surpassed or abolished is to want a Christianity where God will no longer be named, nameable, or expressible. Whether one wants it or not, the rejection of the sacred ends up therefore in what has been called “the death of God,” but it is really just “the forgetfulness of God.”

The Pagan and Hebrew sacred are transfigured, since the Christian sacred reestablishes the union lost between God and man. We are here in a domain which escapes that which is transitory, hence the necessity to maintain the stability of the liturgy, which expresses what is inalienable in relation to the Creator and his creatures. Joseph Ratzinger declares on this subject: “The liturgy is not a show that needs brilliant producers or talented actors. The liturgy does not live off of “sympathetic” surprises, or captivating “ideas,” but from solemn repetitions. It must not express the present moment and the ephemeral but the mystery of the Sacred.”

The language of the natural Christian sacred has been capable of saying things never said before. This language can not be transformed according to the will of the humors and its ways, because it is the total comprehension of the divine mystery and of its connection with the man who suffers for us. Bouyer and Ratzinger do not believe in the beneficence of the demythologization pronounced by Bultmann. The divine Word, who can only express himself humanly, must explode myth (which was of great utility for guarding at the heart of man the nostalgia for what he had lost since the Fall), and re-found them in radical fashion. Revelation uses the very words of myth but makes appear something radically new, as a great poet is capable of bringing forth inspired images from common vocabulary. Also the Christian symbols and rites take up those that have preceded them but they are charged with the fullness of reality. Myth can be false in the interpretation that it gives of reality, but the symbols that it utilizes remain. Human thought is therefore not only rational but symbolic.

Bouyer remarks that the Fathers of the Church had greatly profited from symbolic thought, which Hugo Rahner calls “nautical theology,” namely the Christian assimilation of symbols contained in the Homeric poems. Following them, Louis Bouyer will search in the myths for that which can be christianly illuminated. This is for him an essential condition in order to escape from the split between man and God and from sin. To refuse it is to expose oneself to Evil in acting as if it did not exist or to espouse it in divinizing oneself, as happened with communism and Nazism: “Man can only live in a world of symbols because that is his situation of spiritual being immersed in the cosmos. If one rejects the truly fundamental and explicitly religious myths which, recast by faith, will be like stepping-stones for the arrival of Christianity, then he will produce demoniac myths, those of his own divinization, obtained by his own force and the eviction of God,” Bouyer warns. The one who pretends to rid himself of myth, of what the myth contains of wholesome power to reveal the holy, condemns himself to refuse the sacred, to repel the divine, to refuse Revelation. Such is the situation of the contemporary world that has rejected myth and the sacred and which is consequently invaded by a return of what myth possesses of the most primal and demonic. Louis Bouyer does not hide his unrest in the face of this movement which touches also the interior of the Church: “Those who pretend to humanize (the Church) in detaching it from the sacred, from the religious, from transcendence, deliver it in fact to this falling back over itself which is the very essence of sin whose issue, when the occlusion is complete, is damnation…”

Before attaining to this abyss of which Bouyer speaks, the practical visible consequence is the leveling of liturgical acts reduced to those auto-celebrations which are no longer differentiated from the multitude of “feasts” instituted by a society which desires to fill up its empty religious metaphysic.

Cardinal Ratzinger comments severely: “A certain post-conciliar liturgy, become opaque and tedious because of its taste for the banal and the mediocre, to the point of making it cold…” The cult which provokes such a trembling of horror has scarcely any connection with the sacred; it is the cult of man by himself. Cult introduces God into the social order which, without him, would diminish man. Such is the experience of the people of Israel whose cult goes beyond the liturgical act and orders human existence in its totality, already preparing it, introducing it even now, to an anticipation of the future and eternal life. Its opening toward heaven gives it its breadth in the present life. Without it, existence would be immured, empty, and desperate. And when the cult falls into the aberration of adoration of the golden calf, there is apostasy, since it is a cult which is not received from on high, but which believes in itself, celebrates itself with delight, and declares itself all-powerful. Joseph Ratzinger, applying this to our contemporary drift in the bosom of the Church, notes: “The story of the golden calf constitutes without doubt an admonition: it dissuades us from all forms of arbitrary and egocentric cult, where it is thought finally no longer necessary to approach God, but fabricates from whole cloth an alternative world. At this stage, liturgy is no longer only a game empty of content. Even worse, it is an apostasy under the mantle of the sacred. It can only result in a sentiment of frustration, a sensation of emptiness – far removed from the liberating experience which is always produced from true encounter with the living God.”

Three stages in Sacred History have been noticed by the Fathers in reading Holy Scripture: from the shadow, to the image, then from the image to the reality. Because we are situated between image and reality, we have need of symbols that connect us to that which is at once present and yet partly hidden. This is why we still have need, partially blind as we are, of a sacred place, of a sacred time, of signs, of symbols, because by these images we will find the heavens. Joseph Ratzinger compares this moment to the march of the Good Shepherd who has taken us on his shoulders and who brings us to the lost fatherland: “Liturgy accomplishes the reversal of exitus to reditus, from dispersion to peaceful contemplation, from the descent of God to our ascension. Graced by it, terrestrial time enters into the present of Christ. It is the great turning in the process of redemption. The Shepherd takes the lost sheep on his shoulders and brings it to his home.”

Such a conception is radically detached from the sociological theories of religion developed by Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim. The myth and the symbols which lead little by little to the sacred are not first of all etiological but more so pertain to worship. The rite is not an artificial action, outside of rational life and the whole of life, but it is essentially vital, giving its meaning to existence, discovering the presence of God in man, in the universe, and indeed the presence of man in the cosmos. Louis Bouyer concludes in affirmation: “This is why the sacred, that is to say, all that evokes in this world the mysterious divine reality, must be considered at the origin of the efforts of man as much to conceive his situation in the world as in order to establish himself in it: rendering him master of his own life in submitting to the law, or better to say, the fundamental inspiration of all life and of all being.”

Here is a continuation of the aforementioned translation:

Preamble

To render homage to Louis Boyer by accompanying his thought with that of Joseph Ratzinger, today Benedict XVI, is immediately to emphasize to what degree the eminent French theologian was, by his encyclopedic culture, in symbiosis with diverse thinkers, certain of whom were German, and above all how he would carry out with the future Pope, in troubled periods in the Church, the very creation of Communio.

Cardinal Ratzinger justly emphasized this fact in one of his conferences in 2002, before the Eucharistic Congress of Bénévent. Recalling the origin of Communio, he cites the names of Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Louis Bouyer, and Jorge Medina. And he continues by emphasizing that the Church is not first of all a concilium, but koinonia, not simply horizontal but first of all vertical since the communio roots itself in the first place in the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist.

But how can we aspire to a veritable communion, with God and with others, if the liturgy is no longer understood as “the traditional expression of the Christian mystery in all its plenitude, as gushing fountain?” Louis Bouyer, zealous for the edification of the communio, contests that the instrument has disappeared or has been singularly disfigured: “It is necessary to say it without ambiguity: there is at this actual hour practically no longer anything of the liturgy in the Church worthy of the name. The liturgy now is scarcely more than a decomposed cadaver.” In his first magisterial work, which followed his conversion to Catholicism, he had warned: “We guard therefore against the temptation to substitute for the living liturgy an archaeological reconstruction. But we try to find, in the historical sources of our present liturgy, the inspiration which would permit us the burning atmosphere of its life to our times. Then the immalleable pleats of its hieratic robe would find their ancient suppleness, and the stiff characteristics of its impassible mask would find themselves in the light of a divine source.” This divine delight promised by a liturgy respectful of the sacred is the sign that what is at play is the very relation of love between God and man. The abandonment of the living tradition does not precipitate communion, it precipitates on the contrary its greater impossibility. Certain men of the Church, following in the train of the world, have dangerously replaced living continuity by that which changes, by chaotic movement, by the direction of the wind, abandoning all reference to the past, in what proceeds from Revelation. Believers are the tributaries of the cult which has preceded them, which they receive as a heritage of life. “The liturgy, which is the life of prayer and of adoration of a unique community: the Mystical Body of Christ, which progresses across history to partake of a unique source, the teaching and salvific action of our Savior, always active in us graced by the Holy Spirit,” wrote Louis Bouyer.

With the turmoil that has been stirred up of late in regard to the Holy Father’s lifting of the excommunications on the SSPX bishops, I thought that it would be timely to do a brief exposition of the Holy Father’s thoughts on the deformations in liturgical reform that have been one of the sad marks of the post-conciliar age. For anyone who is not hopelessly naive on ecclesial affairs, it is plain to see that the bitter animosity expressed by Catholics toward the SSPX, and toward the Holy Father’s extension of an olive branch to them, has little to do with Bishop Williamson and much to do with the contemporary Church’s aversion to sacrality.

Frankly put, many Catholics, even those whom one would hope would know better (George Weigel comes to mind)  are not comfortable with an “overly” religious Church. Sacrality has its bounds or limits for them: it is okay as long as it does not become obtrusive or unseemly in one’s life. The sacred should not, for these Catholics, interfere with secular affairs, or obtrude too deeply into the horizontal domain of everyday communal interaction. The SSPX, natural allies to the Holy Father in his desire to renew the Church’s Sacred Liturgy, are bitter enemies of those who are comfortable in a profaned Church. It is not so much their rebellion that draws ire as their preservation of the ancient liturgy of the Church, in which the sacred shines forth in reflection of the divine source and redeemer of all things and bids us to become transformed in its ambiance.

These criticisms I make of secularized Catholics may seem like extreme words, but the Holy Father has himself been quite ”extreme” about the matter of liturgical desacralization in the post-conciliar era. It would be worthwhile to do a close examination of his pre-papal writings on the issue, when he was freer to express his concerns publicly. But I thought that a good way to give a brief exegesis on the Holy Father’s thinking about the sacred and liturgy would be to provide a translation of a brief article from the French-language edition of the international journal Communio, from 2006.

The article was written by a French Jesuit priest, Jean-Francois Thomas, in an issue of the journal commemorating the life and work of the French Oratorian theologian, Louis Bouyer, who died in 2004. Bouyer was himself a great theologian of the liturgy, and his work was influential to the Holy Father. The article gives a beautiful reflection, drawing on some of the writings of Bouyer and Ratzinger, on the essential place of the sacred in Christian liturgy and in Christian life as a whole. But, be forewarned: the respective admonitions of Bouyer and Ratzinger toward the post-conciliar liturgical destruction are well-represented in the article.

I would note, before we begin, that this is a rough translation, and that I do not provide the article’s footnotes. For those, you would have to consult the original article. Here is the bibliographical information: Jean-Francois Thomas, “Notes sur le sacre et la liturgie chez Louis Bouyer et Joseph Ratzinger,” Communio, XXXI, 4 — July-August 2006, p. 45-62.

We shall break the posting of the translation into five parts, providing the first part today. We start today simply with the brief introduction. In the next part, Thomas expounds some of Bouyer’s most important ideas. Ratzinger’s voice will first be heard in the following part. But the two voices are concordant. They flow seamlessly into one another on the question of liturgy.

Remarks on the Sacred and the Liturgy in Louis Bouyer and Joseph Ratzinger

The pages which follow have no other pretension than to propose a gathering of considerations which do not proceed from the pen of a theologian, a specialist of the authors in question, or of the idea of the sacred, but of notes drawn from readings, at random visits in libraries, and which rest on the basis of a priestly conviction: the major and terrifying crisis traversed by the Church for more than 40 years will only be surmounted by a return to the sacred, of which the liturgy is the eminent expression. Such an affirmation can immediately be accused of being reactionary, conservative, or integrist.

The two theologians who concern us have not escaped and do not escape at all this kind of critique, thrown by the very ones who have replaced their catechism with tolerance. It seems to us most fruitful to listen attentively and humbly to these two following, concordant voices in order better to grasp what is the essence of Catholic liturgy.

Here is the final installment for my letter to Fr. “Gary.”  It is perhaps, worth noting that the final report for the Apostolic Visitation showed up on the USCCB website recently without much fanfare.  In general, the findings are that diocesan seminaries are by and large (but not universally) healthy.  Seminaries run by religious, not so much.  The latter have problems with fidelity to Church teaching, an authentic understanding of the priesthood, and recognition that same sex attraction disorder is in fact a disorder.

However, even within the healthy seminaries there are problems of dissent from moral teaching with at least a few faculty members.  By and large, spiritual formation is lacking in most seminaries.  However, things are not as dire as they were as recently as the 1990s.  They point out, however, that this is based upon spot checking of seminaries and there is no guarantee that the visitation has uncovered all problems.  In fact, since there was plenty of warning about the arrival of the visitation, one wonders that even this much was uncovered.

I would say that this report corresponds with what I understand from my contacts with seminarians and priests going through various seminaries around the US.  Things are getting better at the larger diocesan seminaries but there is still a long row to how before we might call seminary formation solid, as a whole, in the US, .  This perhaps explains the reason so many of us are familiar with the problems reflected in Fr. Gary’s homiletics.  Here is the last installment of what I shared with him:

Finally, I think that content wise there are several messages of which so many Catholics are desperately in need.  I think these messages are what the laity is missing if it is to be motivated to change.  Now I agree that the emphasis should be upon the what and why before we address the consequences for all too long the lacunae in preaching on some matters has sent the message that  there are no consequences for one’s actions or non-action.  Here are the lacunae to which I refer:

Hell – I am not trying to suggest that we need to go back to the “fire and brimstone” sermons that were more popular prior to the late 60s.  What I am suggesting is that what we have lost is the connection between our actions and their consequences as if we get to choose both.  People need to understand anew that hell is real; furthermore, it is a real possibility if we choose to live a radically selfish life that is closed to God’s will (not as difficult to do these days as some theologians would have us believe).  If we radically choose our will over/against God’s (i.e. the truth) then we are choosing for ourselves how we will spend eternity; that is, separated from God which is the very definition of hell.

Purgatory – There are many others items that need to be heard, the need to pray for the souls in Purgatory and to live lives that will avoid the need for purification after we die (assuming we do so in a state of grace).  This is a teaching that is infallibly taught by the Extraordinary Magisterium and can never be reformed.  The mystics are emphatic about the need to pray for souls of the faithfully departed, especially for those who have no one to pray for them.  With so few people who are hearing about this reality these days, there are less and less people who are making reparations for those in Purgatory.  This is kind of like the problem with Social Security, more and more people are in need of reparations for them but there are less and less people who are providing for their needs.

Chaste living – the need to live chaste lives in our sex lives.  For example, married couples need to shun artificial birth control and endeavor toward chaste marital relations and those not validly married need to live chaste lives.  We need to be more discriminating in the movies and the TV shows we watch, in the magazines we read, and in the video games we play, etc.  The lack of chaste living, I believe can be correlated with the sociological ills of our society and I am convinced this explains why we see abortion as commonly accepted today as it is; why we are seeing the family and society fall apart; and why the West appears to be on a trajectory to repeat the Fall of the Roman Empire.

I will save you the details but to summarize that the lack of chaste living has taught us to think of others as objects rather than persons and has led to this culture of death in which we are now mired.  While some say that a priest has no credibility to talk about such subjects, I suggest that he, as one who has heroically (especially in our hedonistic culture which assaults chastity) dedicated his life to chaste living in the single state, provides the living example that chaste living is a gift from God if we are open to it.  There is no one else who has the credibility to say that it cannot be done when we have tens of thousands of examples showing that it not only can be done but that there are great graces for doing so.  These are the primary sources of grave sin today and nothing psychiatrists or moral theologians say will be able to change the grave nature of impure thoughts and acts.  This is something Catholics need to be taught once again.

Sacraments and Grace – Most Catholics do not understand that sanctifying grace is a share in God’s very nature and radical communion with the Three Persons of the Trinity through the Son.  They do not understand the Sacrifice of the Mass -that Calvary is made present at Mass.  They do not understand the Real Presence- that they join with Jesus Christ, Body, Blood, Soul and divinity in Holy Communion.  They do not understand that the ordinary means for our being made holy is through the Sacraments, especially Confession and the Eucharist.  This alone explains the lackadaisical attitude people have toward the Mass and the Eucharist.

Confession – The need for regular, individual, private, confession again needs to be emphasized.  The fall off in the numbers of faithful who make use of this awesome grace is staggering and I believe the primary reason that we see no difference between Catholics and the general population in all of the categories of societal ills such as divorce, prison populations, etc.  For Catholics who ignore this, their ordinary means of grace, it is difficult to see how they will get that grace otherwise.  Hebrews 2:3 comes to mind here and frightens me, “…how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation.”  Not reject, not ignore, just neglect…

Father Gary – I don’t know if you have made it this far.  If so, I sincerely hope that I have not sounded condescending or lecturing.  If so I apologize, that was not my intent.  I have tried to, with all humility, and  understanding that I am a sinner in great need of God’s mercy, to identify those things that I sincerely believe are critical for any priest to effectively pastor souls in today’s hostile environment.  I am most open to your feedback and/or criticisms if you desire to dialogue on any or all of my points.  None of this lessens my love for you as one of the pastors of my soul and I have earnestly prayed that for you it does not damage our relationship. I continue to keep you and your priesthood in my prayers.

Here is the third in the installment:

I believe that the next issue is perhaps the fundamental reason for any disagreements that we may have had.  I would characterize this as the misconception of a conflict between love and obedience.  Forgive me if I have misunderstood your position on this issue, but I will restate here what I have interpreted it to be based upon your homilies:

Jesus’ Gospel message was one of love.  Love now replaces the legalism of the Old Testament and therefore rules are to be avoided and even disregarded if they seem to conflict with a loving pastoral response in any given situation.  This is exemplified in Jesus’ continual berating of the scribes and Pharisees for their legalism.  Jesus freed us from rules which get in the way of love.

I would argue against this position.  The canard that viewed the Pharisees as rule following legalists was an artifact of Reformation polemics that placed Catholics in the same boat.  In fact, the above reflects view reflects Luther’s “law and the Gospel” dichotomy.  Even among Protestants, this view is beginning to change.  There is a new perspective upon Paul led by scholars such as N.T. Wright and E.P. Sanders that are reevaluating the Reformation’s interpretation of Paul.

Posing “love” against “obedience” is a false dichotomy.  Our culture is dominated by a legalism which presupposes that rules are arbitrary human inventions that necessarily impose themselves upon human freedom.  This is a deficient view of freedom however.  In reality, rules are supposed to be based upon the truth about the way things are.  It is true that we multiply laws in the West at a dangerous rate.  However, this is because we have done away with fundamental moral principles and now we are trying to clean up the mess by legislating against the problems that arise because of it.  When it comes to the Church, rarely does a conflict arise between the Church’s “rules” and a loving pastoral response any particular situations.

Rather, the Church’s canons are aimed at helping the faithful live according to the message of love that Jesus gave us.  Because of this, I think that one needs to be very careful to understand the rationale behind a particular rule before one disregards it.  I know that there are many periodicals, many of them I have seen on your desk, that caricature Church teaching and discipline as arbitrary and archaic human inventions, but for whatever their motivation, the caricature they make of the Church’s hierarchy and Her rules does a great injustice to those who have faithfully labored to instruct the faithful in the ways of the Gospel and an even greater disservice to the faithful for whom these rules are put in place to help them grow in holiness and grace.  The laity needs pastors to love their souls at least as much as the pastors are concerned for their feelings.

The Church teaches there is no difference in God’s message in the Old and New Testaments.  The Old Testament is the New Testament veiled, the New Testament is the Old Testament revealed.  Jesus’ message was that love means obedience and that love can only be demonstrated by obedience to His Truth (cf. John 14:15-16,21, 23-24).  Obedience extends beyond just the 10 commandments and mortal sins, but it demands we do God’s will in everything.  Since Jesus’ authority is exercised by the Church in discipline as well as in teachings of faith and morals, obedience to these disciplinary rules is also paramount.

Far from being pharisaical, this is a response of love for God and His Will in our lives.  I see that the teachings of Jesus in Scripture that may seem harsh, make much more sense when viewed from this perspective.  A truism is that ultimately people will only be genuinely moved by the truth, and if this is the truth it must be made part of one’s thinking if he is to motivate others to change their lives.

One note of interest, the drastic decline in Mass attendance and practice of the faith in the West have corresponded very closely to the general trend in homiletics of avoiding discussing the difficult issues and infusing teaching with opinions which contradict Church teaching.  While there may be some negative feedback initially when presenting the difficult truths, the overall positive fruit will eventually eclipse the negatives.

So what is Jesus saying to the Pharisees and scribes if he is not telling them stop pushing the rules?  Jesus is telling them to change their hearts.  His point is that the rules are meant to transform themselves interiorly through observance of exterior behavior.  Both are necessary.  Jesus never said anything close to the assertion that rules are bad or opposed to His message.  In fact He did the opposite, for example He cited some rules (the 10 commandments) to the young man in response to his question about what he had to do to be saved.  Furthermore, Jesus told His disciples that they had to obey the spiritual authority of the Scribes and Pharisees because they sat on the “cathedra” of Moses (see Matthew 23:2).

Jesus was trying to change the Pharisees’ hearts and to help them to realize that they could not save themselves through external observance of the law without a corresponding interior transformation.  Moreover, they needed a Savior Who would give them the grace enabling them to reach perfection.  He, likewise, showed them the rules they were implementing were not in fact carrying out God’s plan.  Not that all rules were bad.  It is a logical fallacy called a “hasty generalization” to say that because the Pharisees and scribes went astray with their rule making that everyone who makes up rules does the same thing. Thus, comparing the number of canons in Canon Law with the number of laws the Pharisees imposed is not a valid argument for disobeying Church discipline.

What the Church has that the Scribes and Pharisees did not is God’s grace and the protection of the Holy Spirit and this should give us confidence that the Church, in general, applies rules in the way God wants, in order to carry out the Gospel message.  But even for those few cases where Her disciplines are not the most well advised, we still have to go back to Matthew 23:2, and do what the Church says because She has God’s authority.

Only in those rare cases where following a rule would in reality contradict what the Church really directs because of some uniqueness to the situation, should a rule be dispensed with and then discreetly so as to not scandalize (in the true sense of the term) the faithful.  I don’t think this applies to minor inconveniences and dispensing of Church discipline definitely is not justified due to preference or the desire to avoid hard feelings.   It also requires a thorough understanding of the intent of the rule and the ramifications of dispensing with it.  In truth, almost every canon in Canon Law provides for these eventualities anyway.

If we look at the source of this dichotomy between obedience and love we will not find it Scripture, nor in the writings of the Fathers of the Church.  It is not in the saints or the mystics writings.  Rather, we find it in faulty philosophies of Nominalist voluntarism, in Reformation extrapolations upon this, and in Enlightenment rebellion against authority.

All the evidence throughout Church history show me that it is safest to stay close to Mother Church because she always leads us in the right direction.  If I am left to my own devices, I can see that I make more mistakes in a week than even the worst critic of the Church says She has made in Her 2000 year history.  Without reliance on the authority of the Church we are left with the confusion seen in Protestantism today, perhaps around 40,000 different communities/denominations all teaching different things.  This confusion, I fear, is what we effectively have among so many Catholics today.

I have no illusions about convincing you, but I could at least hope you might see this from another perspective rather than dismiss it as rigid legalism.  In the end, I think that the chances of convincing your listeners to allow God’s grace to change them will only be successful when they are convinced with rock solid certainty that they are being given the truth and can trust in it.  Otherwise, they are being asked to go completely against what their culture says is good with no reason to think that the message they hear from the pulpit is any more certain than the message they hear from the television.

I want to courteously suggest that obedience also applies to the priest in the liturgy.  The lack of apparent concern that too many priests seem to have for the rubrics of the Mass is the perhaps the most significant thing that grieves so many of us, and for which we feel obligated to dedicate much of our reparations.  I am not talking about the legitimate selection of options, but changing of words in the Mass for a variety of reasons (inclusiveness, attempts to be clearer, to save time, or for personal preference), the dropping of required parts of the Mass, etc.

The Vatican II Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium paragraph 22, subparagraph (3) says specifically, “…no other person, not even a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority.”  The CDF has called these changes grave matter and therefore this appears to me to be one of the most serious issues, potentially undermining many of the intentions of the Masses themselves.  I cannot imagine a greater slap in the face of Christ.  To take His perfect act of obedience and turn it into an act of disobedience (to a greater or lesser extent) is the very definition of sacrilege. There is probably nothing else that undermines a priest’s authority in the eyes of the laity than for that priest to ignore the authority from which he derives his own authority.  Having said this, I am not making any judgments of anyone’s intention in this.  Personally, I honestly believe that most priests sincerely do not believe their adaptations are considered serious.  Most probably do not consider the gravity of what they are doing.  However, because of these disobedient changes are objectively grave, great harm is done.

Here is the second issue with regard to homiletics which I brought up with Fr. Gary.  Now Fr. Gary is a difficult to understand man and this comment reflects something of that.  He would not want to be said to be disobedient to the Church.  However, he was all too often able to rationalize such disobedience.  Thus, this comment in written with the presupposition of fidelity to the Church while trying to show ways in which he may not always have been:

Another comment which I would like to offer may seem insignificant, but I think that it is not.  It is the way one treats difficult passages of Scripture in homilies.  Too often recourse is made to interpretations which seem more palatable to the faithful but I would argue that this tends to undermine the authority with which an ordained priest speaks, especially when he speaks in union with the Church.   In general I think that these difficulties can be divided into three categories:

- an apparent contradiction between the words of Scripture and the Gospel message as taught by the Church;

- an apparently harsh statement by Christ or one of His disciples that would seem to be at odds with what the preacher perceives to be the message of the Gospel;

- an apparent contradiction between history/science and Scripture

For the last 50 years or so, all too many critical scholars are all too quick to dismiss this or that scriptural assertion as an error.  If it is true that it is possible for Scripture to err in any matter that it asserts to be true, then intuitively people will begin arrive at the logical consequence that Scripture is not completely trustworthy.

While this realization remains in the “preconscious” mind of the faitful, it can result in a selectiveness in accepting Church authority based upon the impact it has on them given their life situation. If the ramifications of the undermining of scriptural inerrancy reaches their consciousness, it very well could compromise their faith.

In any case the assumption of error on the part of these scholars is incorrect.  It is clear that the Church has infallibly taught there can be no error in Scripture.  I understand some Catholics teach that Dei Verbum, paragraph 12 indicates that there could be error in Scripture if an assertion does not have to do with faith or morals.  This is based upon seeing a supposed restrictive clause in the text dealing with inerrency, which says “for the sake of our salvation.”  I believe that this is a misunderstanding of the paragraph.

Without going into the details of why this is the case, I think the previous sentence makes any discussion of the supposed “restrictive clause” unnecessary.  The previous sentence says, “…as true authors … they consigned to writing whatever [the Holy Spirit] wanted and no more”  (DV 11).  The logical consequence to saying there is any error in Scripture then is to say that the Holy Spirit wanted the inspired authors to convey error; a theological impossibility.  What then remains is that what we think to be an error is, rather, our misunderstanding of the author’s meaning or our understanding of Church teaching.

Unfortunately to suggest that either Jesus or the inspired author was wrong and the modern scholar or priest is correct, not so subtly implies to the listeners that they are on their own when it comes to discerning the truth.  If God Himself can make errors then it makes no sense to trust Him or His Church.  Again, this implicitly supports the relativism prevalent in modern society and makes it nearly impossible for any homilist to motivate the laity to change their lives if it is in the least bit inconvenient…much less difficult.

It is all too common today for many homilists to rely upon the opinions of theologians and Scripture scholars.  Unfortunately, this can be the case even when these opinions contradict the teaching of the Church.  While there are plenty of Catholic theologians who deny the ability of the Church to be authoritative (much less infallible) in anything, much more common for homilist to rely upon are those who incorrectly divide matters down a hard line between infallible/irreformable teachings and reformable/opinions of the Church.

These scholars treat a teaching that is not infallibly taught by the Extraordinary Magisterium (ex cathedra statements or declarations of ecumenical councils) as if it were on the same grounds as the opinion of a theologian.  This is an incorrect distinction and disregards the teaching authority given by the Lord to His to the Church.

First, they miss the fact that there are infallible teachings of the Ordinary Magisterium. The CDF has given the examples of the Church’s teaching on women’s ordination and artificial contraception as infallible teachings of the Ordinary Magisterium.  Second, even teachings that are not infallibly taught by the Ordinary Magisterium still carry significantly more weight than a theological opinion.  Vatican II’s  Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium paragraph 25 advises that even papal teachings that are not infallible still must be given the submission of intellect and will (i.e. beyond mere outward obedience, but a areligious assent) if they are taught by Him as something that must be held by the faithful.

A theological opinion carries no such weight.  Therefore a theological opinion that contradicts what the Church teaches, as expressed by the pope when he is teaching as pope, can never be used as a possible alternative teaching.  When this is done it again undermines the authority of the Church and therefore the authority of the homilist.  Again, people intuitively understand that truth does not change (times change, secular values change, but God and His truth cannot-even if we sometimes understand the truths more deeply or describe them in different language); therefore, if the Church contradicts itself in any dogmatic teaching then it is not worthy of trust in anything.

Without the confidence that the priest is teaching with God’s own authority, through the authority of His Church, the laity will be inclined to follow only that guidance already in line with the way they currently live.  And I suggest that this is very logical, after all if there is not human authority on earth that has God’s authority and infallible protection, then we don’t even know that we can believe in the Gospel.

Confidence on the part of the faithful in the inerrancy of Scripture and the infallibility of the Church are foundational for the homilist’s authority because his credibility and authority to speak are derivative upon these. Uncritical use of critical theories which will probably change tomorrow, may make the homilist look erudite and modern, but it works at cross purposes with his vocation.  A more integral use of all senses of Scripture in accord with Catholic tradition is the most effective and appropriate approach to homiletics.

I was in the USAF for twenty years and during that time, I had the opportunity to experience a wide variety of priests, both active duty and civilian, around the world.  In general, I would say that most of them more poorly formed in their homiletics.  That is not to say that most were poor public speakers.

Actually, most of them could speak relatively well from the pulpit.  Rather, most seemed to use the same tired formula for homilies.  It begins with some personal experience that some how relates to the theme that the homilist intends to convey.  Then, if it does any explanation of the biblical text under discussion at all, it is usually to provide a popular critical theory which serves no purpose other than to undermine the authority of Scripture in the minds of the faithful.  Then it ends with some sort of exhoration that seems aimed at others, that is what happens when sin is only committed by social structures I guess, who are not as generous with their time or taxes as we are.

A number of years ago before leaving one assignment, a retired priest who assisted at the Air Force chapel that I attended asked me to provide him my assessment of his homilies.  Now this priest was not the worst that I had encountered but he did exemplify many of the problems that I see in homilies.  I ended up with a 7 page response; the first page and a quarter were encouragements to continue in strengths that I saw.  This left 5 and 3/4 pages of criticisms.  I thought I might share some of these in a series of posts.  Let me know if any one has seen similar problems in their Mass experience or has an opinion to share with respect to my response to, we will call him, Fr. Gary:

The first content comment is that it appears that you subscribe to the prevalent perspective among liturgists today that the purpose of homiletics is to inspire rather than teach. I understand that this philosophy goes so far as to explicitly rule out incorporating catechetical instruction as part of the homily.

In an ideal world, I would agree with this philosophy as it better fits the artistic nature of the Sacrifice of the Mass. However, this approach presupposes a sufficient catechesis of the listener so that he has the ability to respond to the message and therefore I don’t think this approach can succeed.

I do not believe that my experience is a unique aberrance, but the CCD I received provided me with far LESS than the bare minimum understanding an adult Catholic should have. I think that this is true of the vast majority of lay Catholics; and compounding the problem—I think that very few do any type of continuing catechesis. Therefore, the necessary background is missing.

Most Catholics know neither the “what” of how we are supposed to live much less, the “why” they should be living that way. Therefore, there is no foundation from which to inspire them. For a homily to challenge and inspire the listener, he must know what he is being inspired to live up to and why.

Therefore, for any priest to have a fighting chance of getting his parishioners to be equipped to respond to his message, I think that basic catechetics must be part of almost every homily. The primary reason we see little to any response is that most Catholics do not understand:

1) that they must be saints to enter heaven (Rev 21:27 “…nothing unclean shall enter [heaven].” Also see Lumen Gentium #40);

2) beyond this they do not recognize that Jesus Christ established a Church, the Catholic Church (cf. Matt 16:18);

3) that the Catholic Church has Jesus’ authority over them to bind and loose  in matters of discipline as well as in faith and morals (cf. Matt 16:19);

4) that the Church and Her Sacraments (most especially the Mass/Eucharist) are their ordinary means to achieving what Vatican II terms the “universal call to holiness;”

5) that they have a moral obligation to follow the spiritual direction of Church through their bishop and priest in all aspects of their lives “for they are keeping watch over [their] souls, as men who will have to give account.” (Heb 13:17) when they are directing them in union with the Church.

These are realizations which “floored” me when I came to understand them after living through 30+ years of a veritable “spiritual coma.” These realizations are what have caused me to reform my life and with respect to the topic at hand, they continue to cause me to take everything I can from a priest’s homily regardless of his talent as a preacher.

Without these truths, the average Catholic will feel he has no reason to follow anything a priest or anyone else says because he is influenced by today’s predominant philosophies of: relativism which suggests there is no absolute truth, or skepticism claiming that even if there is, no one can know it any way.

Therefore, “it” is all opinion, one opinion is as good as another, and so the easy, hedonistic opinion which we are pummeled with from the mass media is the “opinion” we are most often going to go with. I think that this is what we are generally seeing in the life of Catholics in the West today.

As the passage from Hosea I cited earlier said (and I really do believe it applies to us today): “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…” (Hos 3:6). Unless obligatory catechetical classes for adults were implemented I fear the only way to get these basics across is using the homily.

Recently I saw an article about a married, former Baptist minister who was ordained as a Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of Louisville. In the Diocese of Peoria in which I currently reside, we had a former Episcopalian minister ordained as a priest. Shelray goes to an Anglican Use Rite parish in San Antonio, the first established in the US I believe, in which the priest is married.

One thing that this article that irritated me was the comment from his spiritual adviser. She mentions that the Church will benefit from it because he knows what it is like to be married. This is a most asinine canard and has nothing to do with the decision. A man knows only his marriage from experience and a particular experience may help with empathy but it does not go much further than that when it comes to understanding and helping with the myriad of issues that married couples are faced with. One might just as well say he prefers a psychiatrist who has suffered from his pathology because he understands it from experience. But this is an aside.

The article itself calls to mind the difficulties some people have with the provision that the Church has made for some time, in allowing former ministers from the traditions arising after the Reformation, to seek ordination to the Catholic priesthood. I had one friend who was convinced (perhaps he still is, I don’t know) that married Catholic men would soon be allowed to be ordained. His reasoning was that this prohibition is not dogmatic and there is already provision which allow it for those “ordained” in non-Catholic traditions. Thus, he reasoned, as a matter of fairness it is something that must also be open to married Catholic men.

I strongly support the pastoral provision but I also vigorously disagree with my friend’s line of thinking. First of all, ordination is not a matter of one’s rights. As such, the language of unfairness has no place in the discussion. Second, regardless of the fact that ordination of married men to the priesthood is not prevented by a dogmatic prohibition, this does not lead to the conclusion that it must, therefore, be opened to married Catholic men.

There is a solid theology which prevents married men from becoming priests. I would argue that the historical evidence supports this contention as it indicates that this prohibition has always been in place. That is not to say that in various times and cultures, the law was not widely disregarded. In the Eastern Church, unfortunately, married priest were permitted as a concession to human weakness and then only for the priesthood. The concession was allowed under the relatively permissive theologoumenon of the “oikonomia” which also is used to permit divorce and remarriage and artificial contraception.

Rather, the theological rationale behind the unmarried priest is, of course, that he is already married to the Bride in the Person of the Bridegroom. Therefore it is not proper for the vicar of the Bridegroom to have a singular bride as well. The East recognizes this in its prohibition against married priests being ordained as bishops, as they more perfectly manifest the Bridegroom than does the priest, who is the bishop’s vicar, if you will. All of this is without mentioning the significant practical problems and negative family impacts for the family of a married priest.

Then why allow anyone who is married to become a priest? This is the important question. Again, it is not a matter of fairness to the man because neither he, nor anyone else, has a right to ordination. The answer, it seems to me, is in understanding this as fulfilling the authentic vocation that the man imperfectly, but sincerely, responded to before he had come to know the fullness of the truth. In other words, he heard God’s call to serve him as a priest but due to his invincible ignorance because of his upbringing in a non-Catholic tradition, he assumed that this call to ministry was in the tradition to which he was attached. The problem is to then discern whether God is still calling him. That is why the provision requires the man to enter the Church for some time before even beginning the discernment, and then it is done in union with his bishop.

This situation is not significantly unlike the Pauline privilege in which, after a non-baptized person is baptized, their non-baptized spouse refuses to accept them any longer because of their baptism, the newly baptized person is permitted to remarry and the non-sacramental, one-flesh union is allowed to be dissolved.

The parallel here is that the assumption is that both persons had invincible ignorance about the fullness of truth of the faith and this ignorance allowed them to enter into a commitment which would eventually become an impediment to their future vocation. In both situations, the person responded to God’s call in trust and selflessness (ideally any way). Therefore, the canonical law can be waived for the sake of permitting the person to fulfill his vocation. Of course, the cases are not exactly equivalent. However, they do have sufficient parallels to make this connection.

Clearly, not everyone who is ordained as a non-Catholic minister and then comes home to the fullness of the Church, is being called to the priesthood. Even if they had imperfectly responded to what had been an authentic call. Just as God does not continue to call Catholic men to ordination after they miss the initial calling and get married, He does not continue to call non-Catholic ministers to the Catholic priesthood.

So, my old friend was wrong on all counts. We discussed this many times but of course, when someone has made up their mind about something, it usually requires a change of heart rather than a change of mind in order for one to over come the mindset that something is just not fair…

I have recently had the pleasure to read Tracey Rowland’s new book on the Holy Father, Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI.

I hope to do a thorough review of it at some point in the future. But, for now, something struck me quite forcefully while reading it, and that I want to bring up. The Holy Father, who cut his theological teeth on Saint Augustine and Saint Bonaventure, has in the past expressed a connection between the Thomist mode of theologizing and unconcern for the ambience in which the liturgical act is carried out. As everyone knows, Cardinal Ratzinger had been sharply critical of the Lercaro/Bugnini-led implementation of post-conciliar liturgical reform. But how did a certain type of Thomist theologizing contribute to the pragmatism and utilitarianism that marked the reforms implemented by Lercaro and Bugnini?

In chapter 6 of Rowland’s excellent book, we see that Cardinal Ratzinger saw two factors from within the Thomist tradition that contributed to the misdirection of liturgical reform. The first was an over-reliance on the form-matter distinction in sacramental theology. According to Ratzinger, theologians operating from within the Thomist tradition (or the Neo-Scholastic tradition generally) tended to reduce the central core of liturgy to the matter that is the bread and wine of the Eucharist and the form that is the words of institution. Everything else in the liturgy was considered to be a disposable element. Taking this as one’s starting point for liturgical reform, liturgists were free to engage in a process of incessant “updating” of all the other elements of the liturgy – precisely the lamentable situation that the post-conciliar Church has found herself in.

The second problematic aspect of the Thomist tradition in regard to liturgy, according to Ratzinger, has to do with a pragmatic understanding of the role of music in liturgy. This understanding of liturgical music goes back to Thomas himself. It is not just a product of his later followers. In question 91, article 2, of his Summa Theologica, Thomas said that it is justifiable to use music in liturgy because “the minds of the weak are more effectively summoned to piety” by it. Ratzinger (according to Rowland) takes this to mean that, for Thomas, church music has nothing more than a pedagogical function and is subject to the standards of utility: it is reduced to its utilitarian function – it must be a popular form of music and usefulness for instruction. In fact, Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler had used this very notion of Thomas’s to defend the replacement of “sacred music” with “utility music” (folk music, pop music, etc.). Ratzinger, contra the Thomist presupposition of Rahner and Vorgrimler, defends sacred music on p. 118-19 of his Feast of Faith:

The movement of spiritualization in creation is understood properly as bringing creation into the mode of being of the Holy Spirit and its consequent transformation, exemplified in the crucified and resurrected Christ. In this sense, the taking up of music into the liturgy must be its taking up into the Spirit, a transformation which implies both death and resurrection. That is why the Church has had to be critical of all ethnic music; it could not be allowed untransformed into the sanctuary. The cultic music of pagan religions has a different status in human existence from the music which glorifies God in creation. Through rhythm and melody themselves, pagan music often endeavors to elicit ecstasy of the senses, but without elevating the sense into the spirit; on the contrary, it attempts to swallow up the spirit in the senses as a means of release. This imbalance toward the senses recurs in modern popular music: the ‘God found here, the salvation of man identified here, is quite different from the God of the Christian faith. (Quoted by Rowland, p. 132)

In reading Rowland, one gets the sense that, at root, the difference between the Holy Father and the Thomists has to do with placing a different level of importance on the transcendental of beauty. The Holy Father, much like Hans Urs von Balthasar and the entire tradition of Christian Platonism, thinks that beauty, truth, and goodness are coequal with being as such. Many in the Thomist tradition, however, tend to drop beauty from the list of transcendentals. This leads to a certain level of utilitarianism when it comes to considering the role and value of culture and cult in Christian existence.

Interestingly, Rowland, in her concluding chapter, shows that John Paul II and Benedict XVI, for all of their profound sympathies with one another, differ on precisely this issue. John Paul II took a more pragmatic, Thomist view of Christianity in relation to the culture: because beauty did not have the same importance for him as it does for Benedict. Benedict takes a more Augustinian view (I would broaden the category and refer to it as a more “Christian Platonist” view). However, it is important to note that Rowland dismisses dubious attempts by the likes of the American theologian Joseph Komonchak to pit JP II and Benedict XVI against one another precisely on their “Thomism” and “Augustinianism.” Komonchak makes the claim that JP II’s Thomism made him more optimistic toward modern culture, while Ratzinger’s Augustinianism makes him more pessimistic toward modern culture. Rowland rightly points out, in refuting Komonchak, that, on the one hand, JP II condemned the “culture of death,” and, on the other hand, Benedict XVI is open to dialogue with modern culture. Still, there does seem to be a palpable difference between them on the role and value for Christian liturgy and proclamation of modern art and music, and Rowland does not deny it. The difference between them, I would point out, might be illustrated by their respective choices for Master of Pontifical Ceremonies.

So, I come back to the question in the title of this post. Do Thomists make bad liturgists?

The story starts out, “Not even the death of a worshipper was enough to stop Mass in a small church in the northern Italian town of Trento.” Pio Lieta, 86, suffered a fatal heart attack and instead of waiting around for an ambulance to remove the body, Father Mario Peron asked for the body to be covered with a white cloth church while he completed the sacrifice of the Mass. While one unidentified parishioner allegedly said the Mass should have been stopped out of respect for the deceased, the deceased man, priest and the family apparently knew of at least 15 reasons the Mass must go on.

Grace from Mass (A Catholic life)

1. The Mass is Calvary continued.

2. Every Mass is worth as much as the sacrifice of our Lord’s life, sufferings, and death.

3. Holy Mass is the world’s most powerful atonement for your sins.

4. At the hour of death, the Masses you have heard will be your greatest consolation.

5. Every Mass will go with you to judgment and plead for pardon.

6. At Mass, you can diminish more or less temporal punishment due to your sins, according to your fervor.

7. Assisting devoutly at Holy Mass, you render to the sacred humanity of Our Lord the greatest homage.

8. He supplies for many of your negligence and omissions.

9. He forgives the venial sins which you have not confessed. The power of Satan over you is diminished.

10. One Mass heard during life will be of more benefit to you than many heard for you after your death.

11. You are preserved from dangers and misfortunes which otherwise might have befallen you. You shorten your Purgatory.

12. Every Mass wins for you a higher degree of glory in Heaven.

13. You receive the priest’s blessing which Our Lord ratifies in Heaven.

14. You kneel amidst a multitude of holy angels, who are present at the adorable Sacrifice with reverential awe.

15. You are blessed in your temporal goods and affairs.

Zenit ran a letter today from a reader, commenting on a previous Zenit article discussing the need for the organic element to be a governing factor in the adoption of liturgical music. If found the letter writer’s terminology very telling. Here is the short letter:

…I would like to add my 2 cents worth on the subject, being involved in Church worship services for many years.

I believe it is high time to consider the value and significant contribution of Catholic praise and worship music to the millions of people who have experienced transformed lives as a result of anointed, inspiring worship during prayer meetings and also other services.

I appreciate the Gregorian chants and also traditional hymns, at the same time we need to look at how praise and worship songs (most of which are based on verses from Scripture texts) have a very important role in today’s Church services.

Let’s all together work for the greater glory of God!

Now, I can agree with the sentiment of coming together and glorifying God. However, if one compares this letter writer’s language to that of the article to which he refers, one will see a stark difference. The previous article discusses comments from Monsignor Valentín Miserachs Grau, director of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music from a conference on sacred music. His comments reflect a recognition and appreciation of the Catholic understanding of liturgy. In contrast, the words above such as “Church worship services” and “anointed, inspiring worship” seem to suggest the Protestant Evangelical confusion between affective experience with “anointed” worship.

It leads one to ask what this writer might understand by his reference to “the greater glory of God.” I wonder if he understands that St. Ireneaus’ teaching that “the glory of God is man fully alive” (Against Heresies) means man fully himself. That is, man who is fully self-possessed such that he can give himself fully to God–traditionally we call this holiness. Does he recognize that “man fully alive” comes about by overcoming his concupiscent desires such that he can easily choose to pursue the authentic good and put aside the apparent, lower goods when the are in conflict.

Man can accomplish this task only through superhuman strength and he can find this strength only from grace–i.e. participation in the divine nature (2 Pt 1:4). The grace is mediated to us through the Sacraments, of which the Eucharist is the source and center. The problem with praise and worship music at Mass, as I have indicated before (see here for a related post), is that it reverses the direction of the liturgical movement. The liturgy brings into time, the divine condescension (God reaching down to and finally becoming Man) in order to divinize man and allow him to return to God through man’s cooperation with His grace. The cooperation has a purpose. It restores to fallen man the capacity for him to fully possesses himself in order to fully give himself back to God. The fruitfulness of grace does not come by means of passive reception. Fruitfulness requires man’s full cooperation.

The structure of liturgy reflects the manner of God’s invitation to man and so must the accidents of its atmosphere. God does not come to man in the earthquake but in the gentle breeze (cf. 1 Kings 19:12-13). Our affectivities (emotions, appetites, etc.) are good and we need them (see my concupiscence post linked to above). However, they must be trained because of our fallen state. While in our original condition of integration they were “trustworthy,” now they tend to draw us away from God and toward the material world. By contrast, the liturgy ontologically brings us to God and we are called to follow this movement, volitionally, with our whole selves.

This volitional following is hampered often by our affectivities. The affectivities were created to be subordinated to reason and to follow its direction, this now is a challenge because they often do not do so readily. This presents us with the problem of concupiscence. We are drawn most compellingly to the affectively good. With this background, we can see how the admonition from the Church that sacred music is meant to adorn the words and not drown them out follows from this. The words in the liturgy should first move our minds to God. The music should then have the capacity to draw our whole selves from this earth up to God. In this way, the structure of the music and word relationship allows our affectivities follow the intellect. The liturgy can actually help us train them. When we start with our affectivities, which is the effect of praise and worship music, we reverse this action. In other words, we do not subordinate the affectivities to the intellect, but interpret the intellect in terms of our emotions. This is why so many who acclimate themselves to praise and worship mistake the lack of affective experience for the lack of the “anointing” of the Holy Spirit.

Moreover, the heightened affectivities inhibit the silent contemplation of God in His Word and in the Word’s Eucharistic action. Ironically, we are drawn away from active participation in the liturgy and we don’t realize it because the affective experience is masquerading as active involvement when it is really passive reception of the experience.  Praise and worship music is antithetical to the liturgical grammar because it works at cross purposes with fallen human nature. Thus a good musical form (I have said before that I do listen to praise and worship…though I will admit that I have been told by those better musically formed that I have no musical taste) can become an evil in the wrong context.  Therefore, we must not allow the “consumer” mentality to drive our liturgy.  We must give people what they need, not what they think they want.

I applaud this writer’s desire to glorify God. However, God is not glorified by bodies swaying with arms raised in affective intoxication. Rather, He is glorified when man understands who God is and who he is. God is glorified by man’s holiness which is only possible through His grace, i.e. cooperative communion with God. It takes much effort on fallen man’s part. He must soak himself in grace and cooperate with it such that he is able to become “virtuous,” from the Latin term which perhaps could be equated with St. Irenaeus’ dictum. The Mass is the starting place for practicing self possession.  It is the place for moving away from the noise of the world which distracts us from the emptiness we have inside because we are not yet what we were made to be. It is the place to move toward God in silent, communal self-gift which is enabled by  self-possession and self-mastery.  Praise and worship may be fine for prayer meetings.  Hymnody is perhaps better placed in other venues such as the Liturgy of the Hours. But for the Mass, we must return to the foundation of chant and sacred polyphony and require that future developments in liturgical must must arise organically from these venerable traditions.

So yes, let us by all means consider the possible benefits of praise and worship, but let us first consider the meaning of the liturgy and a mature Christian anthropology and only then will we be prepared to discern the proper venues in which this musical style can be put to fruitful use. That’s my two cents worth…

Recently, I have had a number of opportunities to consider the current state of theological inquiry and the prevailing approach to Catholic theology that has been called “the current emphasis.” I will argue, that this new approach, the “Nuptial Mystery” reflects a new synthesis of authentic previous theology on the order of that established by St. Thomas. But first some background.

In the 13th century there was a watershed in Catholic theology which would establish the approach to Catholic theological inquiry for the next seven hundred years. If one allows St. Anselm of Canterbury to be identified as the progenitor of the scholastic method, this event occurred about a century and a half into the development of this systematic approach to doing theology. The watershed to which I refer, of course, is arrival on the scene of the intellectual giant, St. Thomas Aquinas, who not only mastered and perfected this method but he employed it in such a way as to synthesize (almost) literally, all available sources of authentic knowledge up to that time. At the outset, I must say that I am not reducing all medieval theology to Thomism. However, even the the most hostile scholars to Thomism must admit that since Augustine, no single theologian has had the wide-ranging influence of St. Thomas.

St. Thomas was not only a brilliant personality, but as Etienne Gilson points out, he possessed in uncommon abundance an attribute that magnifies intellect in a synergistic way–a great humility. St. Thomas was not simply an intellectual giant, he was a humble saint and these together allowed him the ability to synthesize knowledge in such a way that even almost eight centuries later, we have not finished plumbing the depths of what he left us. His great synthesis began with adapting and purifying the intellectual tools of philosophy, and integrating recently rediscovered Aristotelian metaphysics into this, for Christian theology. With these tools, he integrated the best of biblical scholarship with his mastery of theological wisdom and insights from the patristics and scholastics up to his time.

Because his insights and completeness of thought were so formidable, the greatest effort of the vast majority of theologians who came after him was in plumbing its depths rather than in adopting his method. This is not to ignore the Franciscan school’s rejection of Thomism and the attempts to set up an alternative school. However, it seems clear that while the Scotian school certainly influenced thinking, and not all for the good when one considers his student’s, William of Ockham, insidious distortion of Western thought with his Voluntarist Nominalism. Nevertheless, even this theology took Thomas as its point of departure. Years later, when Thomism was eventually embraced by a majority of Catholic theologians, later approaches (so called neo-scholasticism) did not place as high a premium on mastering the sources as Thomas had.

This began to change at the end of the 19th century in Tubingen, and even more so, in the early part of the 20th century leading up to the Second Vatican Council. Among an influential group of Catholic theologians, there grew an emphasis on a return to the sources, the so-called Ressourcement, that so many theologians had set aside. The fruit this bore, was its influence of the conciliar documents and it came of age in the years following the council, primarily in the school now called Communio. Those associated with this school are certainly not monolithic in their approach or their models. However, there is a prevailing theme that, I would argue, one might now identify as the dominant approach to modern Catholic theology at the turn of the millennium that is bearing fruit.

Hence, I must say that I agree with Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Chenu to Ratzinger, who identifies this approach to be the aforementioned “Nuptial Mystery.” In his book, Kerr attributes this theology primarily to Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II. So what is the nuptial mystery? You can read the About this Blog page to get a little better sense of it, but in a nut shell it is the recognition that the Trinity is a Communio Personarum, a Community of Persons. One of the most fruitful insights has come from recent insights in personalism. These insights begin with the fact that man is made in the image of this Communio and that the human person can in deed be understood in analogy to the Divine Persons. This has led to stunning implications of this image for anthropology, the Sacraments, ecclesiology, indeed, the whole of theological inquiry. In a word, the nuptial mystery looks at the analogy of the Trinitarian Communio with human nuptial communion as the “model” par excellence to draw together and provide the integrating theme for the various theological traditions describing Trinitarian life, creation, the Incarnation, soteriology and indeed, all of salvation history.

In the end, the beatific vision is described in terms of marriage; it is marriage with God for which man was created. This is because human marriage arises from and is possible only because of the divine Communio Personarum. Thus, marriage with God is understood as an insertion of individual persons into Trinitarian communion, not as individuals, but corporately. This corporate incorporation comes about again through marital communion. This marital communion is the marriage of the Church, the Bride to the Incarnate Son, the Bridegroom. It is this marital communion that integrates the corporate Bride into the Hypostatic order. In other words, humanity is restored to its communion with God in the Person of Jesus Christ. Fallen human beings share in this restored communion, by union with Jesus Christ, and thereby enter into the Trinitarian Communio–which is integration into the eternal marital communion of the Trinity. Everything that the Church teaches, then, can be understood in terms of this marital end for which we were created.

This nuptial mystery has its foundations in the the exitus–reditus schema which permeates many civilizations’ cosmologies and was taken up in Christianity, especially in the East. This idea of creation coming out of God and returning to God can only be maintained in coherence in the Christian distinction (i.e. the infinite difference between Uncreated Being (God’s nature) and created being). Thus, the going forth and returning cannot be maintained in a substantive sense but rather, must recogized to be in the category of real relations (on the part of creation, not of God of course). Not surprisingly, St. Thomas’ magnum opus his Summa Theologiae, is arguably organized according to this schema and his presentation of what is called today, the Immanent Trinity (the Trinity in Itself) and the Divine Processions, reflect this.

St. Thomas presents all of the features necessary for this Nuptial Mystery in his theological work. In fact, he presents a little recognized foundational insight for it in his treatise on the Angels in the prima pars of the Summa. Here he says that while the Angels in their nature more perfectly reflect God in His nature, human beings because of their begetting more perfectly reflect God relationally.

It seems to me that St. Thomas has the metaphysical tools necessary for expounding the depth and breadth of the Nuptial Mystery but primarily in metaphysical terms. He did not yet have the philosophical tools for further developing the theological analogy of human personhood to divine Personhood. Indeed, philosophical personalism would not begin to flourish until the early-mid 20th century and the theological implications of this would not come about until Balthasar and Wojtyla especially. Today we still do not have a vocabulary for describing the quasi-substantiality of real created relations, much less the quasi-substantiality of real, I would argue, volitional relationships.

Baltahasar and Wojtyla are themselves synthesizers of the fruits that have arisen from biblical scholarship and the return to the sources that began in the years prior to their entry onto the scene. Between the two, I would say that Balthasar, in some ways, has been the most creative. However, I would argue that Wojtyla/JPII has been the greater and more complete synthesizer. One of the reasons for this is the latter’s better understanding and complete acceptance of Thomist metaphysics which stands at the foundation of his theology. Fused with this is Wojtyla/JPII’s mastery of a relatively new philosophical tool, phenomenology, which has enhanced developments in philosophical personalism. Wojtyla/JPII uses phenomenology to extract universal insights from subjective experiences by bracketing the subject’s unique conditioning of the way he interprets his experiences.

Balthasar, on the other hand, leaves too many cracks in his theology, it seems to me. Specifically, he has abandoned a consistent metaphysics (read Thomism) in favor of embellishing his theo-dramatic model. For example, he dismisses the metaphysical structure for discourse about God and His immutability because he cannot reconcile this with God’s suffering in His divinity. Suffering in God is important for the symmetry of his Theodrama. However, in doing this Balthasar leaves a contradiction between suffering and immutability because suffering per se means privation of being. Thus, he is left with a contradiction that he has to hide with appeals to mystery.  I cannot see how this avoids abusing the meaning of mystery and thus leaves him open to charges of fideism.

The Nuptial Mystery is an integrating thread that demonstrates the consistency and coherence of myriad traditional theologies such as those found for creation, the Incarnation and salvation, the Church, anthropology, the Sacraments, the liturgy, and eschatology. It also explains the human person and makes sense of interior dynamic experience. However, not everyone is happy with this approach. Not surprisingly, it appears to be those who are not especially attached to Catholic teaching or traditional Catholic theology.

R. R. Reno of Creighton University gives some insight into this disapproval in a follow up to his review of Kerr’s book cited above, both in First Things and both of which are more interesting reads than this post I must admit. Any way, Reno discusses the fact that Kerr is lambasted by the seventies crowd for many things in his book, but especially for not criticizing the Nuptial Mystery. Reno points out that Kerr defends himself in response, obviously hurt by the rejection of his contemporaries, that he was misunderstood, and that his “sardonic style” was missed. Those who reject this new synthetic theology are the usual suspects. They are radical feminists, sexual libertines, and others who wish to promote lifestyles that reject the truth that sexual intercourse can only be expressed legitimately within the marital covenant, and then only in openness to life.

Background in the Nuptial Mystery brings with it new and deeper meaning to reading Wojytla/JPII’s writings, especially his Theology of the Body. It will make deeper sense of Ratzinger/B16′s works such as the Spirit of the Liturgy. A good book on this that I would recommend is by Angelo Cardinal Scola entitled nothing other than, The Nuptial Mystery.  If you needed any other motivation to learn more about it, read Reno’s On the Square post about those who reject it…this should be sufficient evidence that there is something compelling there.

I was surprised the other day when some students asked me about Friday abstinence. I was not surprised that one of them did not realize that every Friday of the year was supposed to be observed but that another student had read an article in This Rock magazine (from a couple of years back) saying that Friday penance outside of Lent was optional.

The article was by James Akin whom I usually, but not always, agree with. He is a fairly logical thinker and as usual, in his article he presents a reasonable case. He cites both Canon Law (CIC 1251 and 1253) and the NCCB/USCCB Pastoral Statement on Penance and Absitnence from 1966 which removed the obligation for abstaining from meat outside of Lent. The canons read as follows:

Can. 1251 Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

Can. 1253 The conference of bishops can determine more precisely the observance of fast and abstinence as well as substitute other forms of penance, especially works of charity and exercises of piety, in whole or in part, for abstinence and fast.

Akin understands the 1966 Pastoral to be still in force, which is correct. Further, he reads the Pastoral in the context of his understanding of the first clause of Canon 1253, giving the conference of bishops the authority to more precisely determine the observance of fast and abstinence. The Pastoral unmistakeably says that abstinence from meat on Fridays outside of Lent is no longer mandatory under the pain of sin.

However, the language he finds in the Patoral with regard to substituting other acts of penance, Akin interprets as recommended. This is not an unreasonable reading of the Pastoral itself, I will admit. Thus, he concludes that the bishops removed the obligation from abstaining from meat but put no obligation back in its place. Therefore, one is not obliged to observe Fridays outside of Lent. Please read his article for more precision on this.

This, it seems to me, is where Akin errs in his analysis. What he seems to be doing is to read the first clause of Canon 1253 as having given the national bishops conference carte blanche authority over the practice of fasting and abstinence. This is not the case and to see why we must look back at the relevant canons.

Canon 1251 clearly makes Fridays of the whole year days of abstience from meat, or some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, oblagatory. Canon 1253 further says that the Episcopal Conferences can determine the observance of fast and abstience more precisely. The question is what is meant by determining the observance more precisely. Do the national conference of bishops have the authority to abrogate the Friday observance for parts of the year (or for all of the year for that matter)? That authority is certainly not explicitly given and, as I will argue, therefore, cannot be implicitly given either.

Between Canons 1251 and 1253 the national conference of bishops is given the authority to substitute another meat or to substitute some other penance. It is not given the authority to abrogate the observance for any part of (or all of) the year. If the relevant portion of 1253 means what Akin assumes then canon 1251 has no meaning at all. 1251 becomes irrelevant. If the content is to remain at all, then 1251 should read as a suggestion and perhaps even be incorporated into 1253.

I admit I am not a canonist (phrases such as this always seem to prepare the reader expect to hear “but” or “however”… so I will try something else). Nevertheless, I am able to read the canons for interpreting Canon Law, specifically Canons 17, 20, & 21. These indicate that text and context must be understood, parallel texts must be consulted, that abrogation of a previous law must be explicit, and that in cases of doubt, abrogation cannot be presumed. Thus, I think that Akin went wrong in his assumption that the Pastoral needed to impose a new obligation. The obligation already exists (with three options: abstain from meat, some other food, or some other penance) in Canon Law and the NCCB was never given the authority to abrogate the requirement explicitly and so it cannot exist implicitly. Thus, the authority the bishops received in 1253 must be interpreted in light of the obligation instituted in 1251.

So what did Canon 1253 mean with regard the bishops’ conferences more precisely determing the observance of fast and abstinence? Following the interpretive canons, it would seem that first it is referring to their authority to substitute some other food and also it refers to the subsequent statement that in addition, they are able to substitute some other form penance.

I do not know the intention of the Pastoral in not making it clear that their recommendation for substituting some form of penance was another obligatory option, according to Canon Law. Though, perhaps one could surmise that it had to do with the hope that more fruit from abstinence/penance would come from encouragement rather than feeding into the prevailing legalist outlook that most Americans suffer from.

Unfortunately, whatever the reason, the approach did not seem to have a salutary effect. There is little understanding about the meaning and need for Friday observance. Neither do I wish to appear to be legalistic (which almost always happens when the term obligatory is heard).

What is important is knowing why fasting and abstinence are so fundamental that the Church obligates the faithful to some minimum observances (which as we mature spiritually, we should willingly desire and strive to exceed). It is also important to understand the liturgical year and why Fridays are significant days for fasting and abstinence. If we recognize the liturgy as our incorporation into the Paschal Mystery and the source of our salvation and sanctification that comes from putting on Christ. If we recognize that each week is a mini liturgical year, thus a Good Friday, then we will understand why we ought to make it a mini-Lent. We will desire to seek to join ourselves more closely to Christ on His Cross. If we understand these sufficiently, then the concern over whether it is mandatory or not recedes into the background. If we are not yet sufficiently spiritually mature, then we might still need to hear that it is mandatory.

Fasting and abstinence are fundamental to Christian life and to God’s plan of salvation for us. That is why the observance of the minimum requirements are considered precepts of the Church. This makes them grave matter. They are grave, not because they are some arbitrary discipline, but because we need them for our sanctification. There has to be some way of presenting the truth that there are minimums for being Christian and that as Christians we need to at least meet the minimums. So far, the term obligatory is about the best we can do.

Patrick McGrath, representing Joyful Catholics, sends along a news release describing their on-line petition to Cardinal Egan for the Extraordinary form of the Latin Rite to be used for this Christmas’ televised midnight Mass. Here is the news release:

27 September 2007

WITH JOY AND HOPE, CATHOLICS FROM ACROSS THE U.S. AND BEYOND RESPECTFULLY REQUEST CARDINAL EGAN: ‘MAKE THIS YEAR’S CHRISTMAS MIDNIGHT MASS A TRADITIONAL LATIN MASS!”

URGE OTHERS TO ADD THEIR NAMES TO THE GROWING LIST

TO: Catholic news agencies, media outlets, and bloggers

FROM: Patrick McGrath, Stony Point, NY

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT: patrick.anteyka@gmail.com

STONY POINT, NY, USA (26 September 2006) – With three months to go before celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior this Christmas, hundreds of Catholics have signed an on-line petition to Edward, Cardinal Egan, Archbishop of New York. Their simple, respectful request: Please celebrate Christmas Midnight Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral this year in the Traditional Latin form – what’s now called the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite.

The petition, which is on-line only, can be reached at this URL:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/latin-midnight-mass-stpats

Said petition organizer Patrick McGrath: “What pleases and surprises me is that not only native New Yorkers support the petition, but so do transplanted New Yorkers, visitors to New York, and overseas friends—even if they’ve never been to New York. They understand the importance of our great Cathedral, particularly in this bicentennial year of our Diocese.”

“My hope is that many many others will join us in this prayerful request to our Cardinal-Archbishop,” McGrath continued. “Again, here’s why such an event will have world-class impact: First, it will be on television in the media capital of the world. That means it will not only shape souls, it will change minds. Second, St. Patrick’s is architecturally suited for the Traditional Latin Mass: a Gothic-style edifice with a high altar, a baldachino, and a communion rail–’good to go for the motu proprio,’ as I like to say. Third, our eminent Cardinal-Archbishop speaks Latin fluently, and has told his flock that there is “room for all” in our Church’s liturgical life, both the ordinary and extraordinary forms of the Holy Mass..”

“Cardinal Egan knows that the Extraordinary Rite holds ‘a very special place in the heart’ of many New Yorkers — and others beyond our city who ‘feel a strong attachment to the Mass before the Council.’ McGrath said. “All of us who signed the petition heartily agree with the Cardinal’s thoughts, and prayerfully request that he bring back the Traditional Latin version of one of New York’s Great Events—Christmas Midnight Mass at St. Patrick’s.”

Here is a sample of some of the comments left by our petition signers (home town of the signers for identification only):

Nashua NH: “Your Excellency, I would drive 4 hours from [here} to attend the traditional Mass in the most beautiful Church in NYC. Please grant this petition.”

Virginia Beach, VA: “This is a wonderful opportunity to re-introduce the Latin Mass to modern America. I love the reverence and solemnity of the Latin Mass. This is the Mass that I assisted at with my grandfather as a child. It was his Mass and his father’s Mass and his father’s all the way back to who knows when..”

New Haven, CT: “It’s hard to think of a better gesture of support for the Holy Father’s latest initiative to rehabilitate an essential part of our liturgical heritage. Thank you, Cardinal Egan, for your openness to this sincere petition!”

Oregonia, OH: “Having visited you city for the first time last year, I can’t think of a better place to have our Latin Mass offered than at St. Patrick’s. It would be a fine example to the whole of the United States.”

Lewis Center, OH: “My grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-granparents all attended Holy Mass at St. Patrick’s according to the Tridentine Rite. I pray for its return to America’s Cathedral.”

Littleton, CO: “As I Knight of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem I enthusiastically and respectfully add my name to this petition.”

Las Vegas, NV: “The very first Mass I ever attended was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1983. It is such a beautiful church, and to see the Mass of all time celebrated there once again on Christmas Eve would be glorious indeed. Since the beginning of this year I have assisted at the Traditional Latin Mass exclusively and the graces that flow from it so freely and naturally are truly transforming.”

New York, NY: “Your Excellency, may infinite graces pour into Your Heart and to the entire church when you publically celebrate this awsome and extra-ordinary ritual: The Sacrifice of the Mass according to the Tridentine Rite on the Night that the Logos becomes Flesh.”

Lititz, PA: “For years I lectored at the Thursday noon Mass at St. Patrick’s. My wife is from NY. We now attend the Extraordinary Form exclusively. Were it celebrated at Christmas, either for Midnight Mass or Christmas Eve, I and my family would be there.”

In his explanatory letter accompanying his decree Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “… it has clearly been demonstrated that young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist, particularly suited to them. Let us generously open our hearts and make room for everything that the faith itself allows. … There is no contradiction between the two editions of the Roman Missal. In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.”

Summorum pontificum fans are also quite creative. Travis, over at Catholic Tube, has collected a few Youtube videos celebrating B16′s motu proprio allowing wider usage of the 1962 Missal.  But first let me interrupt this post with some personal commentary: It will take time but I pray that the wider availability of this form (well celebrated of course) creates a thirst for a return to the ordinary expression of the Mass, of some important elements too quickly jettisoned with the 1970 Missal.  Now on to the celebration:

Keep an eye on Travis’ new site. It really is a very good compilation of the latest in Catholic on-line video.