False Antiquarianism and Liturgical Reform

Origin of Corpus Christi procession? Charles Walter Stetson’s “A Pagan Procession” (1892)

Lately my wife and I are reading aloud Ronald Knox’s masterpiece Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, first published in 1950, and not a whit less marvelous today than it was then. The parallels one can see with the Charismatic movement and (to be rigorously fair) among some traditionalists give pause, to say the least.

At one point (p. 60) Knox quotes an author named Monceaux:

It is a common trait among the heretics and schismatics of all ages; schism and heresy have almost always, for their point of departure, a regret for the past, the claim or the dream of going back to the fountain-source of a religious idea, to the discipline or faith of an apostolic age.

As all are well aware, the current leadership in Rome frequently chides tradition-loving Catholics as “backwardists” in the grip of a hopeless nostalgia, etc. The same Catholics find it very tempting to reply that their opponents are themselves quite stuck in the 1960s/70s, and show the keenest signs of nostalgia for those halcyon days after “The Council,” when the first winds of the “new Pentecost” were howling. This is a game easy enough to play; except that the charge of nostalgia really sticks where the average age is in the 80s, and sticks less easily where the average age is about 14, if you look at any typical trad congregation.

Back to Monceaux: it does indeed seem true that all wild-eyed reformers in Church history cry out that they are bringing the Church back to its original purity, to the primitive apostolic faith and practice, discarding centuries of man-made superstitious accretions. We can see this especially among the Protestants, whose entire view of and approach to liturgy is permeated with that assumption, and whose vastly different, indeed contradictory liturgical practices effectively indicate the impossibility of coherently acting on it.

In an article at NLM back in 2019, I quoted a passage from a popular Protestant homeschooling textbook, World History and Cultures in Christian Perspective, published by Abeka:

The pagans who flooded the imperial church [after the Edict of Milan] inundated it with heathen beliefs, practices, and traditions. Public worship was described by Justin Martyr in the second century as a simple meeting of believers on the Lord’s Day to hear the Scriptures read and explained along with the singing of hymns, the offering of prayers, the celebrating of the Lord’s Supper, and the receiving of gifts.
            The influence of paganism began to change the worship service into elaborate rites and ceremonies with all the trappings of heathen temple worship. The presbyters now became sacerdotes who offered up the Lord’s body and blood as a sacrifice for the living and dead. Little by little, these errors and distortions grew and developed into the false teachings and practices of the medieval church. … Some devout followers even purchased and worshipped relics.…
            The demands of their religion led the people to regard Christ as a stern and merciless Judge rather than a compassionate and loving Savior. They sought to placate the Son’s wrath against their sins by praying to His mother, the Virgin Mary, and seeking her intercession. Because even Mary sometimes seemed unapproachable, they also prayed to the long-departed apostles and other saints (deceased Christians officially recognized by the Church as holy because of martyrdom, miracles, or other merits). But the Bible clearly teaches that there is only one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 2:5).

Surely, a caricature of this magnitude will not be found in reputable Catholic authors; yet one will find passages that are too close for comfort. A book entitled Catholic Faith Handbook for Youth, published by St. Mary’s Press in 2008, is a case in point. Here is how it describes the changes in the liturgy:

The liturgy we experience today is quite different from that of fifty or sixty years ago. Over the ages, what began as a gather of friends and followers of Jesus sharing a meal and remembering his teachings became an increasingly elaborate ceremony of sacrifice. The celebrations of the Lord’s Supper, held in secret in people’s homes during the times of persecution, gave way to highly ritualized ceremonies held in beautiful churches. By the Middle Ages, the priest was saying Mass while the people watched in silence. The focus was primarily on Jesus’ sacrifice, which diminished the symbol of a shared meal. Those attending were not participants as much as watchers. In the 1960s the bishop from around the world gathered at the Second Vatican Council. They called for important reforms to renew the liturgy. The language of the liturgy changed from Latin to the vernacular, so that for the first time in hundreds of years, the people could hear and understand the prayers being said. People were also encouraged to receive Communion, in the hand, and from the cup. The idea of a shared meal around a table was reclaimed from the early years of Christianity.

This book comes equipped with nihil obstat and imprimatur.

Traditionally, a more typical line of thought: Gustave Doré, “Le triomphe de Christianisme sur le paganisme” (1868)

Self-consciously modern liturgists follow this line of thought completely. A case in point is an interview with Sr. Marie-Aimée Manchon, a professor at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, conducted by La Croix’s Clémence Houdaille (the full article may be viewed here). Sr. Manchon’s initial move is to warn again confusing beauty with aestheticism—a convenient way of signaling that one is actually not all that interested in the serious pursuit of beauty in worship. Sister then launches into her main exposition:

When coming to Mass, some people are looking for a friendly, relaxing time with Jesus. Others want a solemn moment, a break from the ordinary. Aspirations differ, and the liturgy will not be able to respond perfectly to them. In his apostolic letter Desiderio desideravi, the pope reminds us that the liturgy is there to help us enter into the great aspiration of God, which is much greater than our small aspirations of the moment. It is not just about the rite, about worship. It is about entering into a gaze, that of God upon us, says Romano Guardini, the major theologian of the Liturgical Movement, who inspired Vatican II.

(Pause: it is highly doubtful that Guardini would have been able to recognize his thought in the “plumber’s work” of the Consilium. Resuming with Sister:)

God’s great desire is to make us his sons and daughters, saints, and that all be saved. There is a filial, eschatological, and missionary dimension to the liturgy that flows from the Paschal Mystery. We do not celebrate it for ourselves. When we understand this, it does not matter if it does not correspond to our sensibility. The pope reminds us that the liturgy guarantees us the possibility of an encounter with Christ. Isn’t the key to getting out of the divide to remember that? The liturgical celebration must allow this encounter with Christ in the sacraments and in the brothers and sisters. For this, the rubrics and rituals are necessary, the pope tells us again. It is not a question of military discipline, but of allowing it to flow from the source and that we find ourselves there.... There is a good habit of the rite which allows us to inhabit the actions we make. But this habit must not become a routine, otherwise we fall into the trap denounced by Charles Péguy, that of being a “habitual Christian,” “impervious to grace.”

As before with “aestheticism,” so too with the attack on routine, habit, discipline: all this is code language for an anti-ritual mentality, the justification for changing things up to avoid “ossification.” It is not habit that is the problem, but a lack of spiritual or interior life, and this lack will not be met by liturgical experiments. On the contrary, the stability of traditional rites, their silence, their contemplative nature, is more likely to encourage higher levels of prayer. In any case, Sr. Manchon does not leave us guessing about her fundamentally anti-liturgical stance:

Some people are convinced that they are great liturgists because they know the form, whereas they do not seek the spirit. But form must be erased, and returned to the presence of Christ, because it is at the service of this encounter…. Liturgy in the Church differs from the sacred, which exists in all religions and can remain very pagan. The sacred is important for people, but it can also be a vector of separation and domination, of power, through prohibitions (do not touch, etc.). Through the Incarnation, we pass from the sacred to the holy.

This tidy formulation suggests that the history of liturgy after Constantine is a passing from the holy to the sacred, that is, from informal spontaneity and improvisation to formal rigidity and fixity, from humble homes of hospitality to grand worldly churches rife with sacerdotalism, from the post-religious breakthrough represented by Christ the New Man to the reasserted paganism of regimented rituality. And so forth. In short, “the pagans flooded the imperial church”, and the early Christian “breaking of bread” was swept away.

If you dig, dig, dig, you will always find this antiquarianism at the root of all the arguments in favor of the liturgical reform. It is the essential premise, the unquestioned axiom, the point of departure. It is not a Catholic premise and cannot yield anything worthwhile. In fact, it will yield interminable disagreements because there is no way to arrive at a definite, knowable, actionable truth; everything is lost in the mists of speculation and imagination, subject to the agenda of a given sect of antiquarians.

Károly Ferenczy, “Archeology” (1896)

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