Two English Converts Writing on Active Participation

Despite its obvious flaws, social media also has many advantages, and today it has done me good service by bringing to my attention two interesting observations on the subject of active participation, both made by Englishmen who converted to Catholicism.

The first, via the blog of Joseph Shaw, chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, is from a letter published exactly 60 years ago today in the Catholic Herald by the great novelist Evelyn Waugh, who was himself 60 at the time, and had converted to Catholicism 30 years earlier. By August of 1964, only two of Vatican II’s eventual sixteen documents had been promulgated, Sacrosanctum Concilium and Inter mirifica, and that, barely eight months earlier. (Three more would arrive in November). Nonetheless, as Waugh notes, people were already ecstatically (and, as it would turn out, fatuously) acclaiming not just the arrival of a season of “exploding renewal” and “manifest dynamism of the Holy Spirit”, but the victory of a self-proclaimed “progressivism” over “conservatism”. (Optime ridet qui ultimus ridet...) Few others, and perhaps none since Chesterton, could see through the shallowness of the cant of their age like Waugh, who was quick to realize that Vatican II’s call for “active participation” was already being distorted into a fatal confusion between activity and achievement, in the form of the dialogue Mass.

“ ‘Participation’ in the Mass does not mean hearing our own voices. It means God hearing our voices. Only he knows who is ‘participating’ at Mass. I believe, to compare small things with great, that I ‘participate’ in a work of art when I study it and love it silently. No need to shout.

Anyone who has taken part in a play knows that he can rant on the stage with his mind elsewhere. ... I am now old but I was young when I was received into the Church. I was not at all attracted by the splendour of her great ceremonies — which the Protestants could well counterfeit. Of the extraneous attractions of the Church which most drew me was the spectacle of the priest and his server at low Mass, stumping up to the altar without a glance to discover how many or how few he had in his congregation; a craftsman and his apprentice; a man with a job which he alone was qualified to do.

That is the Mass I have grown to know and love. By all means let the rowdy have their ‘dialogues’, but let us who value silence not be completely forgotten.”

Alas, the wisdom of this observation was not heeded in the rush to dissolve the Church and remake it in the likeness of Modern Man™. To think that if it had been, we might have been spared the silly insistence which still somehow plagues us that active participation is incompatible with the traditional Roman Rite, and the equally silly insistence that this in turn makes the traditional Rite incompatible with the post-Conciliar Church.

The dangers of this confusion were identified well over a century earlier by an Anglican cleric named Edward Caswall, as he observed the comparative degree of participation in the Anglican and Catholic services. (Thanks to the Rev. Robin Ward, principal of St Stephen’s House, Oxford, in foro privato.)

“The Anglican view of common prayer is that the clergyman is to go through a certain order of prayers aloud, and that every person present must simultaneously go through the same mentally, completing the prayer with an Amen. Thus all intellects are expected in attending our church service to go through the same process and the same mental transitions and course of ideas. No room is left for ex tempore prayer, nor for an adaptation on the part of the individual, and if his thoughts wander for a moment he cannot recover since the prayers have been going on with the regularity of a railroad or of some engine. This often causes persons… to feel disheartened…

now I have observed that the Roman Catholic view of common prayer is quite different. They lay down certain broad demarcations for public service distinguished by ringing of little bells and the actions of the priest, then it is left to everyone according to his capacity and earnestness, and according as he chooses to supply himself with little books learn a few prayers of his own, to join in what is going on. Hence … the use of Latin really does in many respects tend to give the great majority of the congregation comfort, freedom, ease and spontaneousness in public prayer. And it is most certain that a Roman Catholic congregation does enter into the public service with a more complete identification and then English one does, certain I mean to say so far as I can possibly judge from what I see. Wonderful to say, we with an English service are listless and disheartened. They with a Latin service show every token of understanding what each is doing so far as he goes, and betray no listlessness.”

Born in 1814, Caswall studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1839. Very much under the influence of the Oxford Movement and John Henry Newman, he converted to Catholicism in 1847, and it is fair to ask whether his observation above is not conditioned by some disillusionment with the Anglican Church, a sentiment shared by many at the time. After the sudden death of his wife in 1849, he entered the Birmingham Oratory in 1850; he was ordained priest two years later, and died in 1878.

Fr Caswall was extremely skilled at rendering Latin into good poetic English, and I have often used his translations in articles about hymns. Many of them are also incorporated into the Marquess of Bute’s monumental translation of the Roman Breviary.