This is the fourth part of my response to a video by Dr Brant Pitre of the Augustine Institute about popular participation in the liturgy. (part 1; part 2) At the conclusion of the third part, I stated that in any defense of the post-Conciliar reform, it is necessary to mispresent the history of the liturgy in the Tridentine period, and Dr Pitre begins to do this at the 31:00 mark. In matters of history, precision matters, and this part of the presentation is very lacking in precision.
His essential contention is that because the liturgical books of the Tridentine period contain no clear directives for lay participation (31:12), there was no lay participation. As I have explained in the previous articles of this series, the liturgical books never had any directives for lay participation, either before or after the Tridentine reform. This lack “in the five-hundred years after the Council of Trent” is unfavorably contrasted with the active lay participation that supposedly predominated “in the first thousand years of the Latin Rite.” (Five hundred years have not passed since the beginning of the Council of Trent in 1545; indeed, its four-hundredth anniversary, Dec. 4, 1963, was the day the first documents of Vatican II were formally promulgated, including, most ironically, Sacrosanctum Concilium.)His chosen example (31:20) of this lack of participation is taken from a letter written by an English bishop named Stephen Gardiner which “describes what the liturgy was like in the wake (n.b.) of the Council of Trent and the promulgation of the Tridentine Missal (n.b.).” Dr Pitre quotes this letter from the book Roman Catholic Worship: Trent to Today by James F White, who in turn quotes it from an edition of Gardiner’s letters published in 1933. “The people in the church took small heed what the priest and clerks did in the chancel, but only to stand up at the gospel and kneel at the sacring [bell], or else every man was occupied himself severally [individually] in several prayers. And therefore it was never meant that the people should indeed hear… the Mass but be present there and pray themselves in silence.”
But this letter was written in 1547. By the end of that year, only ten of Trent’s eventual twenty-five sessions had been held; of these ten, the last three were concerned solely, and very briefly, with administrative matters. The Missal imprecisely known as “the Tridentine Missal” would not be promulgated for another 23 years. What then does the liturgical situation which Bp Gardiner describes have to do with the so-called Tridentine Missal? Nothing. 1547 is also the year in which Henry VIII died, which means that at the time that Gardiner wrote, the vast majority of the faithful in England were still used to the Sarum liturgy, not the liturgy of the papal court and the Franciscans, which Dr Pitre accuses earlier of removing the participation of the laity.
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| The frontispiece of a Sarum Missal printed at Paris in 1555. |
This would have been the perfect place to mention at least one example of the better scholarship which has corrected these tendentious and overly simplistic claims about lay participation in the liturgy before the modern era. The most obvious example, because it is concerned directly with Gardiner’s place and period, would be Eamon Duffy’s famous book The Stripping of the Altars. Another would be Fr Augustine Thompson’s Cities of God, which deals with the religious life of the medieval Italy from which emerged the villains of Dr Pitre’s presentation, the Franciscans. Another still would be John Bossy’s very interesting article The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200-1700 (Past and Present; Aug. 1983, no. 100), or the Italian scholar Gian Luigi Beccaria’s Sicut Erat, a study of the influence of the Latin Bible and liturgy on the Italian language, which shows that ordinary Italians in post-Counter Reformation Italy absorbed a great deal more from the liturgy than modern liturgists know.
Ignoring all such scholarship, Dr Pitre declares this state of affairs to be normative for the entire period after Trent until the 20th century, although he does acknowledge that “in solemn High Masses and other forms of liturgy you might have more participation of the faithful.” And the next witness he adduces to this effect is the Belgian liturgist Dom Bernard Botte OSB (1883-1980).
With all due respect, it is unpardonably sloppy to treat the entire post-Tridentine period as if it were all of one piece. No mention is made of the massive social upheavals which began in the mid-18th century with the so-called Enlightenment, leading to the French revolution, and a crescendo of further revolutions and wars, and culminating in two horrifically destructive world wars. No mention is made of the damage which these wars and revolutions did to the Church in Europe and South America by closing down or destroying an incalculably large number of its institutions. And no mention is made of the impact which the destruction of so many churches had on the Church’s liturgical life.
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| The cathedral of St Donatianus in Bruges (now part of the modern state of Belgium) in 1641; destroyed in 1799 by the occupying French Revolutionary Army. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) |
We therefore get a long quote from Dom Botte’s book Silence and Participation (34:15), the usual dreary litany of complaints from the early cancerous phase of the liturgical movement, that the laity recite private devotions while the priest says Mass, and usually receive communion outside of Mass, etc. But in Dr Pitre’s telling, this has nothing to do with the social and cultural conditions of early 20th central Belgium specifically, or post-revolutionary Europe generally. It is due solely to an absence of rubrics in the Tridentine Missal ordering the faithful to actively participate.
This would have been a good place to at least give a nod to the fact that the later leaders of the liturgical movement, especially between the world wars, were often highly tendentious in their presentation of the then-current state of the liturgy, exaggerating the most negative aspects, while downplaying or ignoring the more positive ones. This tendentiousness, in turn, comes from a shift in attitude which marks them off from the first among them, Dom Prosper Guéranger, a shift which I have described elsewhere.
In brief, Dom Guéranger believed that the Church possessed in its liturgy a treasure of inestimable value, but one which had come to be widely neglected in many ways. The goal of the liturgical movement, as he saw it, was primarily educational, to reacquaint the clergy and the laity with that very treasure. In the interwar period, the attitude of many liturgists changed towards the belief that the liturgy was in many ways flawed, and that the laity cannot be educated up to its level. Therefore, in this view, the liturgy needed to be purged of its flaws and reformed down to the presumed level of the laity, which is why I referred above to this period as “the early cancerous phase.”
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| Dom Guéranger |
The first part of the quote from Dom Botte begins with a reference to the sung Masses in his hometown as “a dialogue between the clergy and the cleric organist.” Dr Pitre interrupts (34:25) to give us another historical error: “In our own day, the choir will often consist of lay people, for many centuries after Trent, the choir often consisted of clerics.” This is an error per suppressionem veri; the choir very often consisted of clerics for centuries before Trent as well. This is consistently attested by the very same class of documents, the Ordines, which he had previously cited as witnesses to popular participation. The Ordo Romanus Primus, which he had brought in earlier as a witness to lay participation, refers to the clerical schola more often than to the people.
He then mentions the famous (or infamous) restriction of St Pius X’s motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini on women singing in the liturgy, specifically, as part of the liturgical schola. There has been a lot of debate, and legitimately so, about the application of this motu proprio; personally, I agree with the joke that “tra le sollecitudini” is Italian for “too much of a good thing.” Dr Pitre, however, makes it sound as if in practice, women were systematically excluded from singing at Mass for centuries, and as if Tra le sollecitudini were an expression of long-standing and post-Tridentine policy, which is categorically false on both counts. In reality, Pius X issued it thinking of the places where the same professional singers, including women, who performed at the opera house on Friday and Saturday also performed in church on Sunday, and in much the same style. This was especially common in Italy, which is why the document is named by its opening words in Italian, not Latin. It should be noted as well that in other writings, Pius X made exceptions for congregations of female religious; and, in any case, his successor Pius XII made it clear that women were permitted to sing if they were not part of a clerical schola that sang near or in the sanctuary.
A recording of the Regina Caeli by the Italian composer Paolo Giorza (1832-1914), made at the “Anglo-Catholic” church of St Magnus the Martyr in London. The video helpfully includes a quotation from a document issued by the Society of St Gregory of America, following a convention which the society held in May of 1922, a blacklist of music held to be not in accordance with the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini. “All compositions by P(aolo) Giorza should be eliminated from the repertoire of the Catholic choirs. The composer ... did not change his style one iota when he put sacred words to these utterly secular melodies. The worst example of the ‘Ballet’ style in church is the setting of the Regina Coeli, which, sad to relate, is still sung in many of our churches.”
Under all this, there seems to lie an assumption which would be charming in its naiveté, did it not lead to such a betrayal of historical facts; namely, that the Church’s life is described wholly and solely by whatever the Holy See puts into its documents. If the Missal makes no mention of what the people are supposed to do at Mass, they must not be doing anything at Mass. If a motu proprio says that women are not to be part of the liturgical schola, this means that “for centuries” women did not sing at Mass at all.
I make bold to say this because at 36:35, Dr Pitre introduces yet another historical error, the claim that because vernacular missals, with or without the Latin, were forbidden by the Holy See, they did not exist. “There was no missal to read.” (To this effect, he cites the book Liturgy: An Illustrated History, by Fr Keith Pecklers SJ.)
Here again, some very pertinent information is omitted. Before the Industrial Revolution, paper was far more expensive to produce than it is now, and therefore books were as well. Moreover, a much larger percentage of humanity’s collective energy had to be devoted to satisfying what anthropologists call primary needs: food, clothing, shelter, and the arms necessary to keep your neighbors from taking your food, clothing and shelter. As a result, relatively speaking, far fewer people were educated to such a degree that they could make any use of a hand missal, and far fewer people could afford one.
Nevertheless, for those who could read, and could afford them, they did in fact exist. I am greatly indebted to Mr Nico Fassino, the creator of The Hand Missal History Project, for the following summary.
“What we think of as a modern hand missal was not put into the hands of a majority of the laity until rather late, but there were an astonishing number of books which were very close to modern hand missals which were published in large numbers, already in the 1600s in France, and even in English. There was a huge variety of books which contained the Ordinary (including the Canon), the Sunday readings, collects and other parts, and these were published in all sorts of editions and binding options, from cheap paper copies to luxurious leather. In short, there were many more such books in circulation than is commonly assumed, even accounting for literacy rates and cost, and stretching back to the 1600s.
There are obvious cases of Church authorities being wary of vernacular liturgical translations, and these are cited by the existing scholarship over and over. But they do not seem to align with or explain the facts on the ground when compared with the number of titles, the number of copies, the number of editions, and the continuous printing history of such books across so many different geographical areas.” (Images following courtesy of Mr Fassino.)
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| The beginning of the Canon in a hand missal for the laity, translated into German; this book was published within a decade of the end of the Council of Trent. |
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| Another in English, from roughly 1660. |
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| A French example from the first decade of the 17th century. |
