This is the fifth and final part of my series in response to a video by Dr Brant Pitre of the Augustine Institute about active participation in the liturgy. The previous installments may be read at the following links. (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4)
Having substantially and systematically mispresented the history of the liturgy, and of the laity’s participation in it, for almost 38 minutes, the remainder of his presentation is devoted to extolling the virtues of the post-Conciliar reform specifically vis-à-vis active participation.It hardly needs saying that he builds his case by repeating some of his earlier errors. He twice repeats (38:10 and 46:22) the erroneous English translation of Sacrosanctum Concilium which he had cited earlier, “In the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy, this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else.” (my emphasis). As I noted in the first part of this series, what it really says is that “active participation … is to be given the greatest attention.” And of course, no hint is given of the myriad ways in which, by hook and by crook, the inventors of the post-Conciliar Rite trampled on the letter of Sacrosanctum Concilium in executing the reform.
He also repeatedly claims that this goal has been achieved by “restoring” to the faithful things which were never really taken away from them. He does, however, deserve credit for acknowledging that this has also been done by giving them things to do which were never previously theirs. The assertion that this is a perfectly fine and reasonable procedure, in no way problematic despite the ghastly results, falls neatly under the rubric, “Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.”
As I noted in the first part of this series, Dr Pitre does not fall into the fatuous excesses that so many others have fallen into when writing or speaking about this topic, by claiming that “active participation”, however defined, is incompatible with the historical Roman Rite. He acknowledges that active participation of the lay faithful was part of the traditional rite in its earlier history, although he grossly misrepresents that earlier history. Indeed, he builds his historical case, such as it is, on this very claim.
Likewise, he fully acknowledges (45:50, “I have no doubt in my mind”) that active participation was certainly to be found among many of the faithful interiorly (in silent prayer and adoration, etc.) even after the changes which took place “in the second millennium”, changes which he describes incorrectly and incompletely, and to which he wrongly attributes the subsequent lack of such participation, both real and imagined. This essential distinction between exterior and interior participation, introduced so late in his presentation, is required by the many historical falsehoods which he has previously brought forth, which amount to the claim that the faithful were deprived of all exterior participation, i.e., that they did not make any of the responses, did not sing any of the chants, heard no sermons, read no hand missal, etc.
This is why, as he says (46:15), “an ecumenical council of the Church … called for the missal to be revised precisely on this point (i.e. active participation) above all (his emphasis)”. Although, as noted above, he is wrong on this point about Sacrosanctum Concilium, he is right about the liturgy of Paul VI. The men who invented it were indeed guided in their work by the principle that they must give the people more to do exteriorly, and that this consideration must trump all others. From this principle, they arrogated to themselves carte blanche to do anything to the Roman Rite: to mutilate or suppress any text; to change or remove any custom, no matter how ancient or widespread, no matter why it was instituted in the first place; to violate any dictum of the very constitution on which they claimed to base their work, as long as doing so created exterior participation.
The past fifty-six years and counting have made it painfully clear that this principle is a foundation of sand. In theory, it was supposed to be applied to redress an imbalance between the role of the priest in the liturgy and that of the laity. In practice, it has been applied in such a way that it lays all the emphasis on “active” and none on “participation”, and by so doing, mistakes activity for achievement. In practice, the reformed liturgy takes it for granted that as long as the laity are doing something, they are actively participating, and it doesn’t really matter what exactly they are doing or how they are doing it. Indeed, it does not even consider whether what they are doing might adversely affect interior participation, even though it is the sine qua non of actual participation.
 |
| On the left, a page full of mute spectatorship; on the right, a page full of active participation. |
In the previous article of this series, I noted that several of Dr Pitre’s historical mistakes seem to derive from the inexplicably naïve and totally erroneous assumption that if something wasn’t officially mentioned in a liturgical book, it didn’t exist. He bases his claim that there was no full, conscious and active exterior participation of the laity in the liturgy in the Tridentine period precisely on this fact, that there is barely any mention of the laity at all in the rubrics of the Missal of St Pius V.
Conversely, in his telling, it is a great achievement of the Missal of Paul VI that it has a great many explicit rubrical directives as to what the faithful are supposed to do during the liturgy, because this has supposedly “restored” the full conscious and active participation desired by Vatican II. This is no less naïve and erroneous an assumption. Active participation was not created in the ancient world by non-existent directives in liturgical books, it was not ended by their supposed disappearance, and it has not been restored by their putative return.
Participation literally means “taking a part” in something. It hardly needs saying that Dr Pitre does not give the slightest hint of the catastrophic pastoral failure of the post-Conciliar reform. I repeat that I most certainly do not attribute to him any conscious dishonesty. Nevertheless, anyone who claims that the reform restored full, conscious and active participation in the liturgy will at some point have to ask himself WHY in its wake countless millions simply stopped exercising the baptismal priesthood of the faithful altogether, because they stopped taking part in Mass altogether.
I therefore conclude with some of the final words of an article that he should have read and studied on the topic of participation, “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200-1700”, by the British historian John Bossy. (Past and Present; Aug. 1983, no. 100) They were written about the early protestant reformers, but mutatis mutandis, they apply just as well to Paul VI, to the members of the Consilium ad exsequendam, and to the rite they invented.
“Without disparaging their ambitions, one may feel that the object they had in view was more remote when they had finished their work than it had been in the fifteenth [read ‘nineteenth’] century. Speaking for the more traditional Reformers, Hooker put his finger on one flaw in the more advanced (i.e. reformed) eucharistic rites, a lack of otherness: ‘No nation under heaven either doth or ever did suffer public actions which are of weight … to pass without some visible solemnity, the very strangeness whereof and difference from that which is common, doth cause popular eyes to observe and to mark the same.’
A sense of fatality, of results achieved which were the opposite of those intended, hangs over their efforts: as if the current of social and cultural evolution which was carrying them forward was at the same time pushing them aside into shallow waters. … At least one success may be set against them. In the practice of the vernacular hymn [read ‘vernacular liturgy’] the Reformers did surely achieve something of the immediate and unproblematic unity at which they aimed: a congregational homophony which for Luther himself, and for European civilization in general, did not entirely exorcize nostalgia for the polyphonic mysteries of the Mass.”
