Traditionis Custodes and the Triumph of Prejudice

It seems almost surreal that the motu propio Traditonis Custodes was issued on July 17, 2021, exactly a month ago. There has been an explosion of commentary surrounding the action of Pope Francis to restrict and delimit the so-called Traditional Latin Mass and its associated rites. The usual partisans have taken their predictable sides, especially among the theological modernists and liberals, who have lauded the motu propio as “prophetic” while others identified it as “cruel”. Canon Lawyers, who tend to be more dispassionate, almost uniformly believe that the Motu Proprio is an absolute disaster as a piece of legistlation.

The Pope is, as Catholics believe, the Supreme Legislator on earth in regard to Ecclesiastical Law. However, Ecclesiastical Law is always meant to be based in Divine Law, which is higher and immutable. Liturgical Law, we must remember, is also a form of law, in that it constitutes necessary norms to be followed so that the Rites of the Church may be offered for the praise of the Almighty Trinity and the sanctification of the faithful. Liturgy and Liturgical Law, however, occupy a strange place in the mind of the Church, because Liturgy is a locus theologicus, a place which is not only a place where we learn how to worship God, but also, in so far as it expresses elements of Apostolic Tradition, it is a source of what we ought to believe about God. In other words, there are elements of liturgy which may rightly be said to belong to Divine Revelation, because they belong to the Apostolic Tradition. Now, the discernment of the Church and good scholarship is needed to be able to understand what is and isn’t of Apostolic provenance, but the fact remains that ancient rites cannot, and should not, be changed, without extreme caution.

This caution is very evident among the Orthodox, who in my opinion, have the most conservative approach to liturgy, because they understand that liturgy is what makes a believer, par excellence. The Christian is never more what he is than when he is at Mass, because Mass is the prefigurement of heaven and heavenly realities. We are never more human, and Christian, than when we pray, and especially, when we pray in the forms handed down to us from time immemorial as part of the Deposit of Faith. They also form an institutional memory which enables us to say, with a high degree of assurance, that we are worshipping our God in the same way our fathers have for centuries. There is great comfort, and formative identity, to be found in participation of heart, mind and soul in the immemorial rites of the Church, East and West.

Like many other commentators out there, I have to confess that I do not consider myself a ‘traditionalist’. I adhere with all my mind and heart to the Sacred Tradition of the Church, but I do not limit that to simply the Mass as expressed in the 1962 Missal, or even the Mass of Pius V in 1570. There are several reasons for this. First, I believe it is insulting to the other, legitimate manifestations of Apostolic Tradition in the liturgy of the Church. Second, I strongly object to the ahistoricity present when most people discuss the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. We forget that its strong emphasis on the Priesthood of the Ordained and the sacrificial dimension of the Mass, for example, arose precisely because those were theological points in contest due to the Reformation. The Mass promulgated in 1570 by Pius V was, in some measure, a reflection of the times in which it was created, just like Byzantine Liturgy is reflective of the courtly culture of the Near East in the first millennium. The prayers of the Byzantine Rite, and even its calendar, largely are focused on theological emphases of the first eight centuries of Christianity: hence, the gorgeous and expressive Hymn to the Theotokos, (Council of Ephesus) the proliferation of icons (2 Nicaea), and the prayer of Justinian (Chalcedon), which strongly proclaim dogmas such as the Incarnation and the Trinity. Liturgy may be understood in its revelatory elements to be analogous to Scripture, in that liturgy expresses divine truth in human forms. Just as Scripture utilizes human language, imagery and cultural idioms to express Divine Revelation, so too does liturgy. This is precisely why I dislike the appellation “Mass of the Ages” given to the Mass of John XXIII: why is that Mass “of the Ages”, when there are Rites that exist in the Church Universal that have existed for centuries more, with even fewer alterations?

My third objection to traditionalism is drawn from an aphorism of the late Orthodox theologian Jaroslav Pelikan: “Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition of the living faith of the dead.” The adherence to external form to the detriment of the internal dynamism and logic inherent in our sacred rites is often a sign of spiritual fragility and superficiality. A rich understanding of Sacred Tradition makes the faith of the Christian truly antifragile, to borrow from a term now in fashion. This is one reason I think that if the reforms of Vatican II were executed faithfully and with greater reverence for Sacred Tradition as such, rather than a love of novelty, we would not have had nearly the amount of disruption we did in fact experience. All Priests who lived the times before Vatican II could talk about all sorts of liturgical abuse: mannequin subdeacons, irreverent music, hurried Masses, and incomprehensible Latin. The lack of respect for the Liturgical Tradition of the Church was present before the Council was convened. Just as theological modernism diluted our commitments to the truths revealed by Christ and his Apostles, liturgical modernism greatly weakened the appreciation of clergy and faithful alike for the Sacred Liturgy. Yet at the same time, the scholarship and liturgical piety of many of the founders of the 20th century Liturgical Movement are unquestionable. Their words and works still inspire today. Their love of the Roman Rite, let alone all the Rites of the Church, was derived from their love of Christ and their belief that he desires even now to sanctify and be near to his people by means of those rites. Somewhere, at some point in our history as Latin Rite Catholics, a critical and highly motivated minority came to the conclusion that their rites were no longer worth preserving. And just like the debacle we are currently witnessing in Afghanistan, if a people or a cause loses its sense of identity and purpose, its collapse can be sudden and devastating.

All this having been said, I will strongly defend the Old Latin Rite, for the simple reason that it is a legitimate Rite of the Church, and a manifestation of Apostolic Tradition. If devout Catholics wanted to worship according to other Western Rites, like the Mozarabic or the Ambrosian Rites, I would support them as well. Although there are exceptions, the average Catholic who attends the Traditional Latin Mass does not deny the validity of the Novus Ordo any more than a person exclusively attending the Byzantine Divine Liturgy necessarily denies the legitimacy of the Syro-Malabar Divine Liturgy. Even if I were an atheist, I would defend the Old Latin Rite, because it is the vehicle of so much of the culture of the Western Civilization, precisely at a time when that same civilization is under threat. Proponents of the Vetus Ordo are correct when they say that the Old Rite supported the spiritual lives of millions of people for centuries, all across the world. Any legitimate rite, no matter how old or new, widespread or localized, should be treated with reverence and respect, because they are the places and times where Christ Our Lord walks among his people even today.

It is important to recognize, at the same time, that there are cases where adherence to external form, as I mentioned earlier, can be very dangerous if they are divorced from the interior meaning of the rite. Probably most famous are the “Old Believers” of Russia. They roundly rejected the liturgical reforms of the Patriarch Nikon, who changed aspects of the Byzantine Rite which to people today would seem to be trivial when compared to what changed between the Novus and Vetus Ordo, such as saying the “Alleluia” three times instead of two, and making the sign of the cross in a slightly different fashion. The disorder that this caused within Russian Orthodoxy, however, was widespread and threatened not only ecclesiastical unity, but even civil unity. Patriarch Nikon did not consult broadly before he implemented the reforms, and the net result was a bitter and lasting feud between those who practiced the rite as found in the older liturgical books, and those who followed the reform. Interestingly, the Moscow Patriarchate revoked its excommunication of the Old Believers in 1971, even permitting the printing of the old liturgical books, but those same Old Believers have never returned to full communion with the Church of Moscow. This, I believe, should be a cautionary tale to all Latin Christians, but most especially, to the Roman Pontiff.

As has been mentioned by specialists such as Dom Alcuin Reid, even the reforms of Quo Primum in 1570 were not heavy handed and were quite moderate, especially considering the disorders prevalent in the Latin Church at the time. St. Pius V had great respect for the other Western Rites of the Church, and as a result, did not suppress those of proven antiquity. In this respect Pius’ decision was Solomonic, in that he achieved the desired end of reforming the Roman Liturgy in the face of the threat of the Reformation, while also respecting other usages and rites which had a proven lineage. Roman Catholics have a distinct advantage over the world of Orthodoxy in that we do acknowledge a central authority. No one denies among us that the Roman Pontiff has the ability to reform the liturgy. But even the theologians would remind the Pope that insofar as the Liturgy is a vehicle for the handing on of authentic Apostolic Tradition, the Pope cannot alter the core of the Liturgy. To do so, in fact, is recognized by several eminent theologians (such as Bellarmine) to be an act of apostasy. As the Second Vatican Council declared, the Pope is the servant of the Sacred Deposit of Faith, not its master. So even with liturgical reform, the Pope must tread reverentially, and carefully.

This fact leads us to consider the facts of the current moment. Pope Benedict XVI was a world class intellect and theologian, not to mention his extensive experience in assisting the Church as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He was intimately involved with those issues confronting the Church’s faith, and so wrote beautifully and with consummate erudition on the subject of the Church’s liturgy. Summorum Pontificum is a motu proprio which is clear and in many ways, quite ingenious. Some may disagree about whether the idea of an Extraordinary and Ordinary Form is workable, but most commentators acknowledge it was a clever solution to a decades-old problem. Traditionis Custodes, in contrast, is an absolute mess. It is tone deaf in almost every respect, and especially so when we consider what the average Catholic has had to endure during this Pontificate. The German Church is at the brink of complete schism, and all sorts of disorders proliferate within the Roman Church, yet these matters are at best gingerly handled by the Holy Father. The scandalous idolatry of the Pachamama debacle in 2019 confounded not only Catholics, but indeed all Christians. The Holy Father and his associates not only did not act to stop the idolatry which took place over the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles, but the zealous young man who threw the idols into the Tiber was rebuked! O Tempora, O Mores! The Successor of St. Peter, whose seat has been decorated with the blood of countless martyrs who would rather die than sacrifice and burn incense to foreign gods, allowed such an infamous act to take place in the heart of Christendom. And now he punishes people for no other crime than that they desire, with righteous and holy purpose, to worship the Blessed Trinity in spirit and in truth. The true Christian, as opposed to the merely nominal Christian, rightly desires to give God honor and worship. The Old Rite can be celebrated in such a way that is irreverent and superficial. Liturgical abuse is a perennial problem in Church affairs. But the popularity of the Old Rite, especially among the young, ought to give Church leaders cause for meditation and critical thought, rather than outright condemnation.

I want to emphasize one more aspect of Traditionis Custodes which confounds me, and that is the nonchalance of the Holy See in regard to decades of liturgical abuse within the New Rite, while they wish to punish the quality celebrations of the Old Rite which exist in several places. ‘TC’ rings hollow and sounds hypocritical in the extreme, when the Holy See and most of the world’s bishops have treated liturgical abuse with near-complete disinterest. As Benedict XVI observed, the breakdown in Church discipline in moral matters was accelerated and abetted by the collapse of discipline in the liturgical and theological fields. Why is it that Catholics who prefer the Old Rite are somehow more dangerous to the unity of the Church Universal than entire episcopates and nations which are only a few steps away from total apostasy? At the very least, the proponents of the Old Rite desire in large measure to preserve and adhere to the teachings and traditions of Christ and the Church. The proponents of modernism have no respect for either, and seek to subvert and supplant them.

The shaky foundations on which TC is based reveal that the true reason for the document has very little to do with principle or order in the Church, but is near totally the result of prejudice and a caricature of a certain group of Catholics. We all know about the sedevacantists and the other problematic groups among those who attend and promote the Traditional Latin Mass. But they are not the majority, and they are far from being a clear and present threat to the integrity of the Church in our contemporary world. Why is wanting to attend Mass celebrated ad orientem, as the vast majority of the rites of the Church do, in a liturgical tongue, with venerable and long standing rituals, more of a problem, than whole swaths of the Church consumed by Marxism, Liberalism and Modernism? TC is like trying to take out a one-man army with the equivalent of Tsar Bomba. Yet it also reads like there was somebody, somewhere in the Pope’s counsel who knew that if this document were rigidly enforced, it would be even more destructive than the ‘disorder’ it seeks to remove. Hence, it seems that the wide berth given to individual Bishops in the motu proprio’s application protects a decent amount of the faithful from the severity of the document.

There is a reason why, historically, the Pope does not suddenly or unilaterally change ‘liturgical course’. The potential for disruption and division is always very real. Good law and order in the Church, like anywhere else, can only exist where principles are applied impartially and justly across the board. Hence, to punish traditionalists for the sake of ‘unity’ and not modernists for the same is not a manifestation of principle, but of prejudice. And that is a common theme of this Pontificate, and the Holy Father’s perplexing tendency to belittle and sideline people who, on the balance, are faithful and observant of Catholic faith and morals, all the while enfranchising and encouraging those who would undermine our principles. As we know from modernity in general, when first principles and objective truth are discarded, all that is left is the power of the will. All that is left is the realm of opinion and preference, which is inherently unstable and arbitrary. Traditionis Custodes ought to worry all fair-minded Catholics who give a care for the maintenance of good order within the Church, and the authority of the Roman Pontiff as Supreme Legislator. When the Holy Father appears to be a partisan administering diktats based on hearsay and prejudice rather than the Father of souls, the honor of the Chair of Peter is besmirched, and his position will be weakened for the foreseeable future. Tragically and ironically, there is no faster way for the Holy Father to dissolve his own influence and relevance than to utilize it brutally and without respect for nuance and legitimate tradition. We must pray that the Papacy, which is far more than the identity of one occupant, will be able to restore its moral and spiritual leadership, already so badly injured these past eight years. And those hurt by Traditionis Custodes must practice the spiritual work of mercy of bearing this wrong patiently, as they are largely doing. If the Holy Father will not exercise his office without prejudice, we must adhere to principle all to more: the principles and virtues, namely, of charity, true faith, and longsuffering.