AS I NOTED in the opening pages of Work of Human Hands, one factor that led me to begin working on the book once again in November 2008 was the increasing interest that the younger generation of post-Vatican II clergy was beginning to take in traditional Catholic liturgical practices.
This enthusiasm for the old was especially evident on one internet site that I began to follow regularly, New Liturgical Movement.
NLM regularly posts spectacular photos of traditional liturgical ceremonies in the old rite, offered in accord with the provisions of Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, as well as photos of the Novus Ordo celebrated with various traditional trimmings (old-style vestments, priests with birettas, the Eucharistic Prayer “facing East,” etc.) These are accompanied by articles on traditional church architecture, sacred music, sacred art, and the liturgical year, not to mention striking ads from purveyors of old fashioned liturgical fittings.
The June 5, 2010 NLM featured an article by Fr. Thomas Kocik, The Reform of the Reform? Not Yet. The reform in question is the one discussed in Fr. Kocik’s The Reform of the Reform? A Liturgical Debate, a 2003 book that floated various suggestions for “improving” the New Mass along more traditional lines.
In his recent article, Fr. Kocik offered a two-fold distinction for these proposals, both of which, he says, aim to improve “the deficiencies of the earlier reform.”
(1) “Reform of the reform,” which advocates reformulating the Mass of Paul VI more along the lines of the 1962 Missal of John XXIII, the last version of the old Mass in force before the introduction of the post-Vatican II changes.
(2) “Re-catholicization of the reform,” which is not interested so much in rewriting the liturgical books for the Mass of Paul VI in a traditional direction, but rather
in celebrating the revised liturgy in a manner which makes it more expressive of liturgical tradition and which highlights the transcendent character and sacred ethos of Catholic worship.
The latter term I found particularly striking: “re-catholicization.” The implication, obviously, is that the Mass of Paul VI is DE-catholicized.
By this Fr. Kocik seems to mean only that the new rite lacks a certain “atmosphere” that the old rite possessed, and that for the time being, this can be regained by tweaking some of the externals of the Novus Ordo.
The atmospheric shortcomings of the New Mass that clergy like Fr. Kocik lament, however, are merely symptoms of the underlying doctrinal problem behind the new rite.
The shift to Mass facing the people, for instance, represents more than just doing away with “transcendent character and sacred ethos.” It replaced what one of the creators of the New Order of Mass, Fr. Martin Patino, called the theocentric (God-centered) theology of the Mass with a new anthropocentric (man-centered) theological emphasis. (See Work of Human Hands, 168-9)
Such a shift was quite deliberate. And turning the theological underpinnings of a rite from God to man, of course, is bound to affect transcendence.
One hopes that younger clergy such as Fr. Kocik who are put off by so many aspects of the new rite will one day discover the true cause for their discomfort — the ecumenical and modernist theology that affected countless features of the new rite, both large and small.
5 Comments
This is the most powerful statement yet on the problem of reformers remforming reforms of reforms. I, too, have followed–but only rarely–the NLM site. It seems to me to advocate a kind of materialism in which externals take priority over doctrine. But isn’t the NLM site really just another symptom of the liberal disease of Vatican II by which the faith is altogether divorced from the liturgy, so the rest is just talking about how pretty things can be if we just tweek the blashpemies?
Definition of a conservative Catholic: Someone who likes to hear a bit of Gregorian chant with his Anglican liturgy.
It’s a good point. I have opened New Liturgical Movement (NML) only once, out of a kind of curiosity which can only be described as morbid. For, it does not appear that one really needs to look at the NLM twice. The first word of its title is “New,” the buzz word of all the innovators who ever lived.
It simply doesn’t matter how many articles multiply on fresco painting or architecture. If the authors had spent any time at all in Ravenna, they would know that the Arian heretics produced splendid frescoes, mosaics, and architecture.
As an analogy, imagine someone uploading, say, a New Thomistic Philosophy site, but filled the site with articles about the merits and virtues of Karl Marx. Then, imagine if the authors of the site referred to St. Thomas as the “extraordinary” philosopher of the Church, and to Marx as the “ordinary” philosopher of the Church. Would the reader give any credence to anything said authors had to say about 13th-century Scholasticism?
Don’t think the analogy is so far off. Since Shawn Tribe and his NLM followers accept the teachings of Benedict XVI, they consequently believe, with Ratzinger, that the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX has been overturned by Vatican II.
No credibility whatsoever can be assigned to a group which revolves around the 1962 Missal, which is a mockery of the Mass of Pius X, a transition to the Novus Ordo which contains in germ everything the Novus Ordo stands for.
Remember: Anglicans are just as obsessed with Catholic architecture as Shawn Tribe. Except that even an Anglican would find the likes of Dino Marcantonio uninspired. (Yes, the pastiche can be uninspired—especially when it is based on lack of mastery of the forms.)
The worst thing about Shawn Tribe’s Anglican materialism—and those who follow him—is that materialism is intellectually blinding. It is the very opposite of illumination. What I have just said here is maximally Thomistic, something a Thomist would be able to expand upon immediately.
St. Thomas only knew one Mass, and he would not have understood the idea of an “ordinary” Mass which contradicts divine and Catholic faith irreverently, and an “extraordinary” Mass which contradicts divine and Catholic faith “reverently”—if a flagrant violation of Quo Primum can be said to be “reverent,” whatever the few crumbs of the true Mass the 1962 mockery of it happens to retain.
And there is nothing any of us can do about the blindness of materialism. Either one is dazzled by Truth, because one has a mind for it, or because the virtue of faith remains operative, or…
…because one is dazzled by vestments.
Exacerbating Mr. Tribe’s materialist blindness is a slightly inflated sense of his own sophistication—one of the supreme dangers of being the head of a “movement” which already boasts a chorus of fellow Anglicans behind it.
And that, it seems to me, is the New Liturgical Movement in a nutshell.
Poor people!
Can we say, then, that the title, Work of Human Hands, applies to the New Liturgical Movement site, because art replaces God as an object of worship and obsession?
It’s even worse than that, although what you say is right on the money.
Those who make art the object of their religion, understand neither art nor religion.
Shawn Tribe’s New Liturgical Movement is identical to Theophile Gautier’s art-for-art movement. Both are a byproduct of Romanticism.
Except that Gautier’s ars gratia artis was animated by a profound intelligence, as opposed to an anodyne notion of liturgical prettiness.
The NLM might focus more on beauty (aesthetics), and this site seems to focus more on truth (esp. in how the liturgy truthfully reflects dogma), but truth and beauty are united, to the fullest, in God, and sanctity involves knowing the verum, bonum, et pulchrum.
What people are saying here reminds me of those who say that one should worship God, not the sacrament. But the Mass is the only sacrament in which God is the Sacrament; all the others are signs revealing an invisible reality, e.g., the water in Baptism and the chrism in Confirmation.
From the Trent Catechism: