Our Liturgical Amnesia

I have been very quiet lately, especially since the promulgation of Traditionis Custodes, both out of sorrow and out of meditation, as we have seen across the Catholic world the return of what Cardinal Newman famously called the “spirit of liberalism in religion”. Those remarks are worth citing in full:

Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true.

Cardinal Newman, the Biglietto Speech.

A similar sentiment was echoed by Pope Benedict XVI, who once wrote, “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.” What is true, good and beautiful is always true, good and beautiful. These qualities which we know as transcendentals are eternal, and their manifestations in time, and especially in liturgy, rightly correspond to the timeless reality of what heaven is, as being in the intimate presence of the divine in heaven. Whenever we experience the Liturgy of the Church, in whatever form, or in whatever era, we encounter Christ in his mysteries, and therefore, all legitimate liturgy should call us to heaven and to our true home. Liturgy lifts our minds and hearts to things above, which as St. Paul reminds us in his Epistle to the Colossians, is where our minds ought to dwell. Liturgy is profoundly sacred as the mediative ground between heaven and earth, and we meddle and abuse the liturgy to our own peril. Returning to the quote by Cardinal Newman, to say one liturgy is as good as another is to evacuate all Liturgy of its transcendental qualities and replace it with mere preferences, which I called the “triumph of prejudice.” Prejudice and taste belong to the realm of opinion and whimsy, and are unsuitable when dealing with the ultimate questions of life, including how one ought to approach the worship of God.

One of the liberal leitmotifs of the past few decades, which has had a resurgence in the present Pontificate, is this idea, which they claim is based on the words of Christ, that liturgy is made for man, not man for liturgy. They make this statement and claim it is analogous to the claim of Christ that the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. This analogy is mistaken, and profoundly dangerous. In this conception, liturgy is primarily made by man for man, in order to be led to God. But that conception is simply not correct. When Our Lord spoke of the Sabbath being meant for men, he primarily meant that in the sense of the commandment to rest from servile labor. The context of the Gospel passages on that matter is when the disciples were accused of ‘working’ on the Sabbath by doing necessary human tasks like eating and drinking. Our Lord corrected the Pharisees who accused the first disciples, reminding them of the examples of the Old Testament, wherein it is made clear that the Sabbath is a day made by God for man, a day meant to sanctify time and human labor, by presenting it all to God, in a sort of cosmic Eucharistic gesture. The capstone of such a spirituality is of course the Christian’s participation in the Eucharistic Liturgy on a Sunday.

It is true to say that God does not need our worship in the strict sense; we need to worship, because God is our final end, and the goal toward which all nature strives. “He made us, we belong to him,” as the Psalm proclaims. God mandates worship because we are made to do so. It is in our nature. But at the same time, to borrow from Saint Augustine’s insight, when God wanted to teach us to praise him, he praised himself; this is why the Psalter from time immemorial is the prayer book of the Church, just as it was and is for the Jews. So too, when God made covenants with the human race, that covenant was always ratified by sacrifice. God is a ‘stickler’ for such things for many reasons; but one of those reasons why he is so jealous for legitimate and reverent divine worship is not necessarily because he suffers from a sort of vainglorious lese–majeste, but because he knows, in his infinite benevolence for humanity, that deficiencies in divine worship deform us, and wound our own humanity. When we abuse the liturgy or denigrate it, we become frighteningly close to abusing our own humanity. How many times in the Old Testament was God’s wrath poured out upon the Israelites when they offered God unfitting sacrifice. Although God may not be ‘wounded’ by bad worship in the strict sense, we do render an injustice to God by not giving him proper worship. We remember from the Prophet Malachi the promise that God would establish, once and for all, a true and living sacrifice which would be offered from the rising of the sun to its setting. We are living already in the fulfillment of that prophecy, and until all things are consummated in Christ’s Second Coming, the Liturgy of the Church is that most precious trust, wherein Christ reigns among his people, to sanctify and prepare us via visible things to be “apt” for the invisible world. This is not an easy task for fallen humanity. Hence, the liturgy is repeated, day after day, year after year, with the cycle of her feasts and fasts forming a true nourishment for the whole person. Wherever the liturgy is reverently celebrated, we truly proclaim the death of the Lord, until he comes.

The spirit of liberalism, as John Henry Newman famously defined it, was that idea that no dogmatic truth was immutably true. Although Newman may not have said it explicitly, I think he would agree that those who spurn ‘liturgical truth’ is a product of the same mentality. Just as liberal scholars of Scripture hyper-focused on the human aspects of Scripture to the point of denigrating the very concept of Divine Inspiration, liberal scholars of liturgy have done the same. It is for this reason that I believe most present-day liberals simply cannot understand attachment to ancient forms of worship, because they perceive them primarily as human artifacts. The Holy Spirit on Pentecost may not have handed St. Peter a Roman Missal, nor did St. Paul emerge from the deserts of Arabia with a full fledged liturgicon, but the Acts of the Apostles nevertheless present us with a Church very much attentive to the “breaking of the bread and to the prayers” (Acts 2:42). The presence of the Greek definite article tois ought to give us pause. The worship of the Early Church was not just oriented to indeterminate “prayer”. They were dedicated assiduously to “the prayers”, which strongly points to a certain cultic formalism, if we want to call it that, which is unequivocally apostolic.

Speaking of the Church as apostolic, it is important to understand that that mark is not to be understood solely as pertaining to Apostolic Succession, but also to the practice of divine worship. As we gather from the Acts of the Apostles, it is only with difficulty and after much discernment that the Church saw herself as distinct, but not separate from, the cultic forms then prevalent in first century Judaism. To quote Benedict XVI again, the Apostles knew that what was sacred for the Jews could not somehow be considered profane by the Gentiles. Insofar as God had already revealed himself by Moses and the other prophets, he revealed his will that religion and worship should have cultic and communal aspects. As Our Lord revealed to St. Peter, what was once called clean, man must not call unclean; and while that applied first to the Gentiles who were “grafted onto” the vine of Israel, it must also apply to all legitimate worship which has apostolic origins. What was holy for our ancestors, as Pope Benedict XVI rightly said, cannot cogently be called unholy for us.

The development of liturgy throughout history is intimately tied with development of dogma. All liturgies are a reflection of the dogmatic and historical circumstances most outstanding in the mind of the Church of the time. This is as true for the liturgical reforms of Pius V as it was for Gregory the Great. The same is true today, and while people may legitimately argue on that subject regarding the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council, and I truly believe such criticism may be done with good faith, and without denying the authority of the Holy Father to reform the liturgy, there was a genuine and Christian liberality in St. John Paul II and in Benedict XVI in their benign and permissive approach to the Usus Antiquior. It was based on a wisdom as least as old as Gamaliel: if this movement is of God, no power on earth can stop it. If it is of man, it will ultimately meet its demise.

As we are seeing around the world with the increasing encroachments against our legal rights to free speech and thought, our elites have little interest in engaging with reason or argument, and so they must silence. A similar and troubling phenomenon has now arisen in the Church. A tragic irony exists in the Latin Church, where options and ‘holy freedom’ are extolled in the liturgy, unless it’s a traditional option. We have to wonder why our ecclesiastical elites seem so eager to consign our past, dogmatic and liturgical, to a damnatio memoriae so complete and contemptuous. The justifications for Traditionis Custodes have been as uneven and deceitful as they are disingenuous, which makes the impartial observer wonder: what truth is so powerful, that it requires so many lies to conceal it?