Cardinal Müller on the liberal agenda

These astonishing but perceptive words of Gerhard, Cardinal Müller, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, from an interview with Catholic World Report, deserve as wide an audience as possible.

They consider the secularization and de-Christianization of Europe as an irreversible development. For this reason the New Evangelization—the program of John Paul II and Benedict XVI—is in their view a battle against the objective course of history, resembling Don Quixote’s battle against the windmills. They are seeking for the Church a niche where it can survive in peace. Therefore all the doctrines of the faith that are opposed to the “mainstream,” the societal consensus, must be reformed.

Letter in The Tablet: Liturgical pluralism

The Dominican Rite celebrated in Oxford, alongside the Traditional Roman Rite, and, of course,
the Novus Ordo. The Carthusian Rite is also regularly celebrated in England; before the Council, the
Norbertine and Carmelite Rites were also found here. Before the Reformation, the Roman Rite was
celebrated by the Franciscans, and secular clergy would have celebrated the Sarum Rite.

The current Tablet carries a letter by me, in response to an article by a Jesuit priest, John Baldovin. The Tablet descibes him as a 'professor of historical and liturgical theology at Boston College, and author of Reforming the Liturgy: A Response to the Critics.' What is astonishing, then, is his assertion (in his article): 'A number of legitimate rites have always coexisted in the Catholic Church: the Byzantine, Coptic and Armenian Rites, for example, but these are rites of independent churches in union with Rome: there not two “forms” of the Armenian Rite running in parallel.' Is he really so ignorant of the history of the Latin Church as to imagine that the Roman Rite was and is the only Latin Rite? 

And here's the funny thing. He doesn't actually assert that there were and are no non-Roman Latin Rites or Usages. He just leaves his expression of indignation hanging in the air, with that implication. To me this suggests that he knows that the bald assertion would be a lie, so he holds back. But maybe I'm wrong, and he's an ignorant ass.

Anyway, here's my letter.

Guest post on The Tablet blog: and factionalism

The day that Damian Thompson decries 'factionalism' is the day irony dies. Nevertheless, he has a point: the temperature of internal debate had gone up in recent years to levels not seen since the 1970s, the immediate post-conciliar period of ecclesial introspection and the ferocious persecution of those thought to be innsufficiently in tune with the 'spirit of Vatican II'.

The reception of Amoris laetitia has similarly stirred up a hornet's nest. I feel in fact that the frayed tempers on social media reflect something really worrying. A lot of Catholic commentators, from across the spectrum of opinon, feel as though they are in a pressure-cooker. Careers and livlihoods are on the line, along with fundamental issues of the Faith.

Here is something I wrote about factionalism back in the innocent days of November 2012. I've reposted the linked piece which had been on The Tablet blog on my philosophy blog, since it is no longer available on The Tablet website.

-------------------------------------------------------

Today The Tablet has published a guest post mine on their own blog: see it here. It is a response to George Weigel's article in last weekend's Tablet, which itself was a response to John Haldane's article calling for married clergy.

See if you can spot the pattern here. In introducing his remarks, Haldane takes a moment to describe the two dominant traditions in the Church, conventionally called the 'conservative' and 'progressive' (or 'liberal') approaches, as, respectively, 'nostalgic and slavish' or 'faithless and craven'. Having thus established his bona fides as a non-partisan, independent thinker, he proposed the most predictable and re-heated item on the liberal menu, the ordination of married men, as the solution to the Church's difficulties.

Can non-Latinists pray the Latin Mass?

Reposted from Feb 2016

----------------------------------------------

Eloquent gestures and expressive ceremonies in the Traditional Requiem Mass.

Dr Robert Kinney (his doctorate is in Pharmacy, interestingly) has argued over at the Homiletic and Pastoral Review that is it impossible actually to pray in a language one does not understand, or with a celebrant who is using a language one does not understand.

[A]s Catholics, we believe that the Mass is the most powerful prayer on earth. If the Mass is said in an unfamiliar or entirely unknown language, though, can it properly be labeled as a “prayer”? Or, are the words uttered merely beautiful-sounding syllables without willed meaning?

This would have some pretty radical implications for Catholics visiting foreign countries and Masses celebrated for international congregations: in Lourdes, for example, it is common to find Masses celebrated in several languages, one lection in German, one in English, a prayer in French, another in Italian, and so on. The thought 'they'd be better off using Latin' is one which Dr Kinney presumably shares, since praying just a snatch of the Mass, or hearing just one lection meaningfully, must count as almost pointless.

It also implies that the silent prayers (the 'priestly prayers', such as the Lavabo) of the Novus Ordo are so much mumbo jumbo, even when Mass is celebrated in the congregation's mother tongue. If you can't hear the prayer, you can't understand it, right? As so often, attacks on the Traditional Mass rebound on the 1970 Missal. That Bugnini and Pope Paul VI: they got it all wrong, eh, Dr Kinney?

Why I'm not going to lambast Traditional Catholics

Self-cricism. They were executed anyway.

I've been taken to task for defending Catholics attached to the Traditional Mass from various exagerated criticisms, and for pointing out that other identifiable groups in the Church have the same characteristics, if not worse ones, rather than engaging in Maoist-style self-criticism. Today I'm going to say a bit more about this.

We are all sinners, and if anyone reading this has a story about a sinful Traditional Catholic, I'm not going to claim that such a thing could not be true. There are a number of dangers, however, with Maoist self-criticism, which really should be obvious.

1. It is narcissistic and inward-looking. Frankly, the personal qualities of Traditional Catholics are not very important for the Church as a whole. Let's just get over ourselves, shall we?

2. It implies the truth of generalisations about Traditional Catholics, which is itself uncharitable. For me to say 'I've heard these criticisms and there is truth in them - yes, [taking out an onion] I'm a Traditional Catholic, and I'm a bitter, hate-filled, Pharisee' implies something not just about me personally but about the group as a whole: it is an accusation against my fellow trads, and one I have no right to make.

Are traditionalists paranoid?

Over on Unam Sanctam blog, the old canard of the 'obnoxious trad' is wheeled out. Apparently the author has met a couple of priests don't like the people who come to the Traditional Mass; one has stopped celebrating it. Hmm. Maybe these Catholics were sinners, in need of the sacraments. It seems they won't be receiving them with much good will from these priests.

It has been well answered by Brian Williams at the Liturgy Guy here. Catholics attached to the ancient liturgy are accused of 'chasing' the traditional Mass from parish to parish, and not coming to other parish events. Williams points out that this is simply a consequence of the fact that they are not having their legitimate aspirations for the sacraments in the traditional forms met in any one parish, and very often have to travel long distances to attend services and events. A priest who declines to go beyond what he describes as a 'semi-regular' provision of the EF can hardly complain about that. I don't necessarily blame the priests for not doing more: I don't know what their other committments are. But by the same token no one is in a position to criticise laity for not making multiple two-hour round trips each week for extra events at a parish which has not given them a liturgical home.

A smaller, weaker, impurer Church

Reposted from December 2015, since that Ratzinger passage is once more doing the rounds on Facebook.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An international pilgrimage: the traditional pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres.

From time to time people like to quote something Joseph Ratzinger wrote in 1969. Here's the key passage (source):

The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.

She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members….

It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek . . . The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain . . . But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

I always like to oppose signs of false optimism, so I'll say something about this.

Fr Rosica: are liberal and conservative blogs cesspools of venom, hatred, and vitriol?

Conflict is inevitable. Here is the Oxford Pro-life Witness last Saturday, with attendant
counter-demonstration, who try to stop us praying by playing music.

Never one to ignore the mote in someone else's eye, Fr Dwight Longenecker has used comments by Fr Thomas Rosica about how horrid the internet can be to attack 'traditionalists', and lists his least favourite blogs as examples.

It is interesting to note, however, that Fr Rosica does not single out traditionalists, and I think it is extremely unlikely that he has ever sampled the wares of little-read, marginal figures like Mundabor, 'Novus Ordo Watch', and 'TradCathKnight', mentioned by Longenecker. The Crux article reporting his remarks noted, instead, his conflict with 'conservative and pro-life' sites. This is Fr Rosica's description of what he doesn't like:

the obsessed, scrupulous, self-appointed, nostalgia-hankering virtual guardians of faith or of liturgical practices are very disturbed, broken and angry individuals, who never found a platform or pulpit in real life and so resort to the Internet and become trolling pontiffs and holy executioners!

Obviously, that can apply across the spectrum of opinion. Fr Rosica's personal conflicts aside, the interesting question is where we find this kind of 'venom, hatred, and vitriol' among those who are widely read, who are taken seriously, who are respected as mainstream voices among their ideological fellow-travellors: as opposed to those who are not.

Fr Ratzinger, von Balthasar, and demolishing the bastions

Veneration of the relic of St Edmund: from
St Edmund's College, Ware.

Considering the reactions (mostly on Twitter) to my post about Fr Ratzinger's 1969 remarks about how once all the 'edifices' and 'privileges' of the Church had been completely wrecked, 'a great power will flow' from the Church, it strikes me how difficult many people find recognising liberalism when they see it. Even after all this time, many people with conservative, even traditional, instincts, don't really grasp what liberals are all about.

It should be obvious that the 1969 passage is an expression of liberal views; it is a perfectly clear, indeed a classical exposition of them. In his (much criticised) early book, Principles of Catholic Theology, Fr Ratzinger wrote:

The fact is, as Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed out as early as 1952, that … she [the Church] must relinquish many of the things that have hitherto spelled security for her and that she has taken for granted. She must demolish longstanding bastions and trust solely the shield of faith.

This is, clearly, the same thought as that expressed in the passage I quoted in the earlier post. Far from him regretting the loss of the Church's institutional baggage, as one might call it, Fr Ratzinger thought it was necessary and good.

This is simply the application to the Church of what political liberals have been saying since Rousseau, and are saying today more loudly than ever. Destroy the institutions, destroy the structures, customs, traditions and expectations of traditional society, of morality, of the family, and of the state, and a great awakening, a great liberation, a great flowering of humanity will take place. Haven't we all heard this? And isn't its absurdity sufficiently evident?

Mr Bornhoft on the Latin Mass and evangelisation

Traditional Requiem for Michael Davies in St Mary Moorfields, London

Over on Rorate Caeli I've dissected a blog post or column by William Bornhoft claiming that the criticisms of the liturgical reform made by Traditional Catholics means that they are rejecting the teaching of the Church. Here I want to tackle another claim he makes. It relates to the title of his post, but he says very little about it; it comes down simply to this.

The liturgical renewal came about after the Church—no longer a primarily European institution existing in the age of medieval Christendom—realized that the Tridentine form made it hard to evangelize and communicate with the modern world. For TLM Millennials [ie Traditional Catholics], their personal preference for an older form of the mass is overriding the Church’s essential outreach efforts. It shouldn’t come to a surprise to Guzman, given his claimed expertise in this area, that most men may not be interested in attending an hour-long mass in a language they don’t understand.

This is what a lot of Catholics who don't know much about the Traditional Mass think, so it is worth explaining why it is wrong.

More uninformed bile from Paul Inwood

Training in High Mass at the LMS Training Conference at Belmot Abbey this year.

Paul Inwood's comments on the Pray Tell blog are as un-euphonious as his hymns. Here's the latest.

I am completely in agreement with Jack Wayne when he says that priestly training should prepare ordinands to minister to the entirety of their flock, but that is surely not the end of the story.

The proportion of the flock represented by adherents of the EF is a tiny fraction of 1%, and yet we find that some seminaries are devoting a disproportionate amount of time to celebrating in this form, and a hugely-disproportionate amount of time to training ordinands to celebrate in this form.

It may be revealing that a number of seminarians and young priests exposed to the EF in England and Wales in recent times have rejected training in this form of the rite because of the ecclesiology that goes along with it. The “bishop-bashing” that is prevalent in the course of some training sessions, especially those run by bodies such as the Latin Mass Society, is unseemly as well as unhelpful to their cause.

Talking of undermining one's own cause, Inwood would have more credibility in his attacks on the Latin Mass Society if his factual claims bore any relationship with reality.

Michael Sean Winters on Jansenism

How to annoy a Jansenist. 1 Have lots of processions.

The days roll by, and Michael Sean Winters doesn't get round to correct the spelling of 'Damien Thompson' in his post about Jansenists and Jesuits. By the time you read this, it may have happened, but it is taking a mighty long time, even after Damian himself pointed out the error in the comments box.

Winters' substantive point has a similar level of accuracy. He thinks that the key to Pope Francis' critique of 'moralism', 'legalism', 'ideology' and so on is a rejection of Jansenism. (For my own interpretation, see here.)

Thompson fails to see that the Holy Father, above all, is engaged in an old struggle for the Society of Jesus: He is confronting the Jansenists of our day, the very same conservative Catholics in the English-speaking world whom Thompson thinks have the fire of the Gospel in their bellies. It is not the Gospel, but a hyper-moralistic concern against spiritual contagion that animates the conservatives Thompson champions. And, quite clearly, this is not what animates Pope Francis.

Has Winters even looked up Jansenism in a reference book? He doesn't appear to have a clue about it. They were not 'conservative Catholics': they were crypto-Calvinist heretics.

Leaving the matter at the level of the cartoon history of the Church, the Jansenists were an 18th century group of Catholics, eventually condemned by the Pope, and who eventually formed a schismatic Church in the Netherlands, characterised by a kind of crypto-Calvinism. This manifested itself in the rejection of free will and the notion of cooperation with grace, on which subject they quickly became locked in a ferocious pamphlet war with the Jesuits. The Jansenists included some brilliant polemicists, notably recruiting Blaise Pascal to their cause. The notion of unscrupulous Jesuits working out how to avoid the moral law owes more to these guys than to English or German Protestant polemicists of the 16th and 17th century.

Is the EF dangerous to souls?

A number of people have commented on the Fisher More College situation, saying that the Bishop's banning of the Traditional Mass on campus is a response to various Bad Things happening in the college. Exactly the same thing has been said about the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate.

The people who say this often add that banning the EF seems an odd way to address the problems, and I agree. But while I don't know if the claims about the motivations involved in either case are true, I would like to address the idea that frequent attendance at the Traditional Mass can be a danger to your soul. This argument was often hinted at before Summorum Pontificum, and if it is making a comeback that is a little worrying.

A brief autobiographical note. As I've mentioned before, for a number of years I attended the Novus Ordo in Latin. I bought myself a little booklet with the Latin and the English side by side. After a while I noticed something rather strange. Here is the booklet I used to use, open at the bit in Eucharistic Prayer I (the Roman Canon) immediately after the Eucharistic Acclamation. The Latin is on the left, the English, the official 1974 ICEL translation, on the right.

The weird thing is that the Latin text is a lot longer than the English translation. It is exaggerated by the fact that the Latin is divided into more paragraphs than the English, and uses shorter lines, but closer examination reveals that a large number of words and indeed whole phrases were not being translated.

Now this is the scandal of the 'old ICEL' translation which has now been addressed by the new translation. At what cost of effort and conflict, we all know, and we must be grateful to Bl John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for persisting with it. Because what 'old ICEL' said was this: there had been a concerted effort, accepted if not instigated by the very highest authority in the Church - let's not say, 'conspiracy' - to present a systematically one-sided - let's not say, 'falsified' - version of the Church's liturgical tradition. If you get into this, if you start reading about it, you realise it neither began nor ended with ICEL. And I don't mean reading books written by tin-foil hatted trads; the strongest dosage of conspiracy theory-stuff can often be found in the books of triumphalist liberals.

Once you become aware of all this, one can become a bit distracted while attending the Novus Ordo, by being reminded of all the things which are missing, added, or changed, for highly controversial reasons, and also by liturgical abuses. (At one point I started counting liturgical abuses at the Masses I attended. Not a good was to participate in the Holy Sacrifice.) Furthermore, every celebration of the Novus Ordo, one realises, can be read in terms of the views and preferences of the celebrant, and the battles he may have had with members of the congregation. Bidding Prayers are often the scene of conflicts, and what they are like can tell you a lot about the parish. The use of Extraordinary Ministers, and exactly what they do, is also fascinating, in a deeply unhelpful way. (Do they receive Communion at the same time as the Priest? Do they cleanse the Sacred Vessels? Do they put things in and out of the Tabernacle? Do they genuflect?)

In this frame of mind, it can be a huge relief to go to the Old Mass, the Vetus Ordo. It can feel as if, for the first time for a long while, one is able to stop worrying about the political meaning of every detail, and just pray. What happens in Mass is, essentially, what the Church has done for centuries. It happens simply because the Church has done it for centuries. I don't mean it has no meaning, I just mean that the priest hasn't decided that because of his personal views this meaning is good and let's do it today. He is doing it in accordance with Tradition. Those attending can stop campaigning for more Latin, for fewer Marxist bidding prayers, or to stop the Extraordinary Ministers wearing skirts which make genuflection either impossible or indecent. They can just participate in Mass and develop their spiritual lives.

We used to hear a lot about our desire for the Traditional Mass being a 'personal preference', with the implication that this was a bad thing. I can't help being amused by this. Have those who use this phrase not noticed the role of personal preferences in celebrations of the Ordinary Form?

I am by no means saying that everyone who attends the Traditional Mass has gone through this mental process. I do think, however, that the ones which people - perhaps including Bishop Olsen of Fort Worth, Texas, or Fr Volpi, the Commissioner of the Franciscans of the Immaculate - are most worried about, may well have. The ones who those people worry might end up with the SSPX or as sede vacantists; the ones who get a bit worked up about these things.

What I want to say is this: those people, the ones who get worked up, are not going to be helped by being deprived of the the Vetus Ordo  and forced to go to the Novus Ordo. If they are really worked up, it is more likely to drive them even more nuts. For them, Pope Benedict's liberalisation of the Extraordinary Form was truly pastoral: it made it possible for them to remain in the Church in a serene fashion, and to make spiritual progress. To calm down, in fact.

Attending the Traditional Mass may make people realise that the Mass has changed rather radically, and this may start the train of thought I described above. But any contact with reality can do that: looking at the religious art in an art gallery, reading about the history of the Church, looking at old church buildings. You can't hope that people will never realise that the Mass used to be said in Latin and ad orientem. What you can do is to make the point, as Pope Benedict did, that however much has changed, the Church has not repudiated the past. What was sacred in the past is sacred now; what was doctrine in the past is still doctrine now. This relieves us of the necessity of double-think, which actually drives you mad after a while.

Suppose the wretched Franciscans of the Immaculate are as bad as their critics claim; suppose the wretched Michael King, President of Fisher More College, is as bad as his critics claim. For heaven's sake don't deprive them of this spiritual solace, of the Traditional Mass. It is cruel, it is unjust, and it will make whatever theological or political problems there may be much, much worse.



Photos of Low Masses celebrated during the LMS Priest Training Conference in Leicester in 2013.

Is the theology of the Vetus Ordo wrong?

Bishop Egan kneels before the Altar at the Consecration, in his Cathedral in Portsmouth

Following on from my last post, here's another suggestion: insofar as there is a contrast between the two forms of the Mass, do all sound people need to stick with the the ecclesiology, sacramental theology, etc. etc. of the Novus Ordo? The claim that they do doesn't work, and here's why.

It is possible to have different legitimate theological schools of thought within the Church: Augustinians and Thomists and what have you. There are also, of course, illegitimate schools of thought, or schools with illegitimate aspects. One possibility, at first glance, is that the contrast between the theological emphases of the two forms of the Mass amounts to the kind of difference which implies that only one can be orthodox: they can't both be right. The point is that the supporter of the Novus Ordo has better hope this is not the case.

There are two reasons why. First, the theological emphases of the Traditional Mass are simply those of the Ordinary Magisterium of the Church since, let us say, at least the 12th century. On specific issues we can take it much further back, but the 12th century will do just fine. Everyone in the debate about the liturgy recognises that the way things are in the EF is the result of theological attitudes and ideas of the 12th century and before, in all important respects. Since that date, these have become fixed in the liturgy of Rome which spread throughout the whole of Europe and much of the world. The Church's endorsement of these liturgical forms is an extended act (or series of acts) of the Ordinary Magisterium.

Is it conceivable that the Ordinary Magisterium should be seriously mistaken on an interconnected set of issues fundamental to the Christian life over the course of 8 centuries? Of course not. If you disagree, you are simply rejecting the concept of the Ordinary Magisterium. What this means is that there is not and and there cannot be a real theological problem with anything in the EF.

The second reason is to do with the Second Vatican Council. Opponents of the EF always take their start from the Council. But the Council did not know the Novus Ordo, the Novus Ordo didn't exist at the time of the Council. The 'Mass of the Council', as Pope Benedict called it, was the EF, the Missal of 1962, and a bit the revisions of 1964. What the Council said about the liturgy has to be seen in this light. It is simply historically impossible to see the Council as supporting the theology of the OF over the theology of the EF. Yes, there are specific reforms which the Council suggests. But it never does so because of any theological problems with the old books. It is explicit and repeated in its insistence that pastoral considerations are the only ones at issue, and that after all was what the Council was all about. All the beautiful things the Council said about the liturgy, as being for example the 'source' and 'summit' of the 'Christian life', were said in the context of the Traditional Mass.

On the other hand, the actual reform which followed the Council did not have the Council's approval. It couldn't, the Council was over. It may, or may not, have followed the lines laid out by the Council. But - to spell this out - while the Council endorsed the theological exactitude of the 1962 Missal, we can only speculate what the Council would have made of the 1970 Missal. From the point of view of magisterial authority, such speculations are neither here nor there: they have no weight.

The Gospel, proclaimed towards the pagan North, Our Lady of Willesden

Insofar as the Council's proposed reforms of the Mass constitute a comment on the 1962 Missal, to repeat, this is about the pastoral efficacy of the Mass, not about its doctrinal implications. What is more, the efficacy of pastoral strategies is a matter of prudence and susceptible, at least to a degree, of empirical assessment. In light of the experiments carried out since 1964 and their results, we are only bound to the Council's suggestions insofar as we think they are pastorally fruitful.

For these reasons, the supporter of the Novus Ordo, if he has any sense, must say that there is no theological dissonance between the two Missals. If there is a dissonance, the Novus Ordo is in trouble: unlike the EF it is neither endorsed by the Ordinary Magisterium over 8 centuries, nor by the Extraordinary Magisterium of a General Council. It is endorsed by the Ordinary Magisterium of a few decades - a bit like the Breviary of Quignonez. The one which was promulgated in 1536 and abolished in 1568. Yup, liturgical reforms carried out by the highest authority of the Church are not guaranteed to be successful.

Supporters of the Novus Ordo should stop trying to claim that people who like the Traditional Mass are heretics: that really isn't the language of the Church of Today, is it? They should be working to make it a pastoral success. And there is really no reason why they should be jealous of the pastoral successes of the Vetus Ordo, when they happen. We are all working for the same Kingdom, aren't we?

I am reminded of a passage in that forgotten document, the Ratio fundamentatlis about Seminary education produced by the Congregation for Catholic Education in 1980.

The extinguishing of the candles at Tenebrae, St Mary Moorfields.

'It has been abundantly proved that the general orientations of the Council, if they are faithfully observed, do not irritate the People of God. They rebel only against novelties and excesses. For instance, the Council is far from having banned the use of the Latin language. Indeed, it did the contrary. Thus the systematic exclusion of Latin is an abuse no less to be condemned than the systematic desire of some people to use it exclusively. Its sudden and total disappearance will not be without serious pastoral consequences.'

Are supporters of the Traditional Mass dangerous?

Fr Michael Brown saying the EF Mass at a side Altar in St Peter's.

Should we be suspicious of those who say or attend the Traditional Mass? Are they skating on thin ice, in danger of picking up dodgy theological ideas, in danger of getting involved with groups with schismatic attitudes, which reject the Second Vatican Council? Such suspicion has long been the lot of priests and laity who get involved with the Extraordinary Form. It has become harder to maintain in recent years for three reasons: first, the shortage of priests has forced bishops and superiors to make use of the talents of priests who like the Tradition; second, a new generation of theologians and liturgical scholars are breaking down the negative assumptions about the Vetus Ordo; thirdly, Summorum Pontificum gave these priests and laity rights which are difficult to deny.

There are now just too many priests who say the EF to keep this suspicion up. In England and Wales there are seven bishops who have said the Traditional Mass, three of these, plus three other bishops, have conferred the sacrament of Confirmation according to the 1962 books; two bishops who haven't said the EF have presided at it.

Five priests who have said it (since 1970, I mean) have regular slots in our national Catholic newspapers. (One of these is Mgr Basil Loftus. It takes all sorts.)

Such priests can be found working for the Bishops' Conference in positions of trust; there are seven University Chaplains who say the EF, and there are also chaplains of some of our leading Catholic schools.

The suspicion of those who like the Vetus Ordo is connected, of course, with the existence of groups with genuinely extreme views, which use the same Form of the Roman Rite, which lack canonical status. Never mind the SSPX: there are cranks out there who think the SSPX is dangerously liberal. What I have never been able to understand, however, is why this lunatic fringe can be used to tar the mainstream Trads while the liberal lunatic fringe, which is far more densely populated and dangerous, doesn't being suspicion down on what we might call mainstream liberals. Why seminarians used to ask to receive their copies of Mass of Ages in a plain brown envelope, but could flaunt copies of The Tablet as much as they liked. There is zero common cause between the Latin Mass Society and the Sede Vacantists. The same can't be said about The Tablet and the excommunicants and schismatics who take part in mock ordinations of women.

Part of the explanation is the way that the texts of the Second Vatican Council have been used and interpreted. As has been said frequently in recent months, however, the liberals have more sore points with these texts than the trads do. As a service to readers I reproduce a list of texts which you can try out on your local liberal, which I included in one of my Chairman's Message columns in the Mass of Ages. Ask him, or her, if he is happy to accept this teaching. For best results don't tell them it was in Vatican II until after they've choked on their tea.

Dei Verbum 19: ‘The four Gospels just named, whose historical character the Church unhesitatingly asserts, faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while living among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation until the day He was taken up into heaven.’

Lumen gentium 14: ‘Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, it teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation. Christ, present to us in His Body, which is the Church, is the one Mediator and the unique way of salvation. In explicit terms He Himself affirmed the necessity of faith and baptism and thereby affirmed also the necessity of the Church, for through baptism as through a door men enter the Church.’

Lumen gentium 22: ‘The pope’s power of primacy over all, both pastors and faithful, remains whole and intact. In virtue of his office, that is as Vicar of Christ and pastor of the whole Church, the Roman Pontiff has full, supreme and universal power over the Church. And he is always free to exercise this power.’

Gaudium et spes 37: ‘A monumental struggle against the powers of darkness pervades the whole history of man. The battle was joined from the very origins of the world and will continue until the last day, as the Lord has attested.’

Gaudium et spes 48: ‘By their very nature, the institution of matrimony itself and conjugal love are ordained for the procreation and education of children, and find in them their ultimate crown.’

Gaudium et spes 51: ‘Therefore from the moment of its conception life must be guarded with the greatest care while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes.’

Orientalium Ecclesiarum 26: ‘Common participation in worship [with non-Catholics] which harms the unity of the Church or involves formal acceptance of error or the danger of aberration in the faith, of scandal and indifferentism, is forbidden by divine law.’

Sacrosanctum Concilium 4: ‘in faithful obedience to tradition, the sacred Council declares that holy Mother Church holds all lawfully acknowledged rites to be of equal right and dignity; that she wishes to preserve them in the future and to foster them in every way.’

Sacrosanctum Concilium 23: ‘Finally, there must be no innovations [in the liturgy] unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.’

Sacrosanctum Concilium 36. 1. ‘Particular law remaining in force, the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites.’

Optatam totius 13: ‘Moreover they [seminarians] are to acquire a knowledge of Latin which will enable them to understand and make use of the sources of so many sciences and of the documents of the Church.’

Unitatis Redintegratio 4: ‘All in the Church must preserve unity in essentials. But let all, according to the gifts they have received enjoy a proper freedom, in their various forms of spiritual life and discipline, in their different liturgical rites, and even in their theological elaborations of revealed truth. In all things let charity prevail. If they are true to this course of action, they will be giving ever better expression to the authentic catholicity and apostolicity of the Church.’

Orientale Lumen 8: ‘Today we often feel ourselves prisoners of the present. It is as though man had lost his perception of belonging to a history which precedes and follows him. This effort to situate oneself between the past and the future, with a grateful heart for the benefits received and for those expected, is offered by the Eastern Churches in particular, with a clear-cut sense of continuity which takes the name of Tradition and of eschatological expectation.’

Bishop John Arnold saying the EF in Westminster Cathedral.

Paul Inwood up to his old tricks

For only about the hundredth time, Paul Inwood claims that Summorum Pontificum was a concession  only to those previously attached to the traditional liturgy.

As I have pointed out on this blog before, the claim is fatally undermined not only by the complete lack of support in the text, but the reference in the Letter to Bishops which came with it to 'young people' who appreciate it. This implies a process of spreading and discovery of the traditional Mass - 'proseletyzation' - with which Pope Benedict was completely comfortable.

#22 by Paul Inwood on September 20, 2013 - 4:17 am

I think Francis is right to be worried by the ideologization and exploitation of the Vetus Ordo.
This was never Benedict’s intention — he wanted to make room for those (he described them as a very small group) who still hankered after a particular way of worshipping. In other words the original intent was a pastoral one.
SP allowed those who had previously continued with an older form — existing members of a group — to become “normative” rather than continuing to be subject to indult. It did not give them permission to proselytize, to attempt to draw in new members (that only came later on with Ecclesia Dei), and I think Benedict quite naïvely believed that proselytization would not happen. Allowing them to worship in their own way would be enough. The bishops of France and of England and Wales, who had first-hand experience of the sort of people Benedict was reaching out to, urged him not to promulgate SP because they knew he was wrong about that and foresaw that proselytization and ideologization would follow, as indeed they immediately did.
Francis recognizes Benedict’s pastoral desire for inclusion of the EF folk, and describes it as prudent. From that point of view it was rather like lancing a boil. In the fullness of time, it would die down and heal and disappear. But in expressing concern that the EF is now the subject of ideologization and exploitation he also acknowledges that the boil has instead become a running sore. And the problem he faces is that it is going to be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to turn it back into a boil.

Report Comment

But what's this reference to 'Ecclesia Dei'? This encyclical was promulgated by Bl. Pope John Paul II in 1988 - not 'later' than SP in 2007. It does, of course, give the green light to 'proseletyzation' because it proposes religious orders committed to the ancient liturgy, and therefore a permanent presence of the EF in Catholic life promoted by them.

Or does Mr Inwood mean Universae Ecclesiae, the Instruction issued in 2011? What does that say about proseletiyzation?

The fact is, we need no permission to promote a liturgy in full conformity with the laws of the Church, which Pope Benedict described as a 'treasure' which should be made available to future generations.

Understanding a liturgy in Latin: exchange in the Catholic Herald

You can't hear what they are saying, but you can see what they mean.

My letter to the Catholic Herald criticising Mark Shea has itself elicited a response. Despite the fact that I wrote in general terms about 'liturgical restoration', Mr A.K. Whitehead has launched a frontal assault on the Extraordinary Form, on the basis of his childhood experiences, and on the new translation of the Ordinary Form.

'Joseph Shaw (Letters, August 23) provides something of a conundrum. On the one hand he knows what other people can't possibly know, such that "liturgical meddlers have done incalculable damage to the spiritual lives of Catholics", and yet, as chairman of the Latin Mass Society, he says we must "allow the liturgy to speak to us" and "be sensitive to its symbolism" and "nuances."

A dramatic presentation of Something very special

I don't think Mr Whitehead knows what a 'conundrum' is. But I do know that liturgical meddlers have done terrible damage, for both Bl Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict said so. John Paul II:  (Dominicae caenae 12): 'I would like to ask forgiveness--in my own name and in the name of all of you, venerable and dear brothers in the episcopate--for everything which, for whatever reason, through whatever human weakness, impatience or negligence, and also through the at times partial, one-sided and erroneous application of the directives of the Second Vatican Council, may have caused scandal and disturbance concerning the interpretation of the doctrine and the veneration due to this great sacrament [the Eucharist].'

Pope Benedict, Letter to Bishops accompanying the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum: 'I have seen how arbitrary deformations of the liturgy caused deep pain to individuals totally rooted in the faith of the Church.' 

A visible way of honouring the congregation: no words, but incense.

But back to Mr Whitehead.

But speaking as an "ordinary Catholic", for us to be sensitive to any text, and if that text is to have any "nuances" for us, we must first be able to understand it. Yet I know (with the same degree of perception as Dr Shaw) that at least 99 per cent of English congregations today do not understant Latin. Indeed, in the actual days of the Latin Mass, I was an altar boy and could recite every response both without difficulty and without understanding a word. For me, it had nothing recognisable as a "nuance" and there neither did it "speak" to me, nor have any "symbolism."

Mr Whitehead has forgotten that the liturgy is not just a text. Can you not see the symbolism of, say, the priest washing his hands at the Lavabo, without hearing the text he is reciting, in English? It is a problem if not: the text is to be said silently even in the Ordinary Form. Silly old Paul VI and Bugnini: wrong again!

... So unless Dr Shaw has devised a means of mass (sic) teaching of Latin to almost the whole of English-speaking Catholic congregations, his impressive-sounding references to "nuance", the "liturgy speaking to us" and to its "symbolism", members of the Latin Mass Society would be better to resign and form an English Mass Society, ...to eradicate just the latest work of "meddlers", eg "sending your Holy Spirit on them like the dewfall" (which belongs to and should have been left in the Old Testament), because for 99 per cent of Catholics the previous version was fine, did speak and did have nuance and symbolism.

Yours sincerely,
AK Whitehead, Pontefract, Yorkshire.

'The man who learns to believe, learns also to kneel': Pope Benedict

Now it is the Holy Ghost who is under attack, for using obscure imagery in Sacred Scripture. He should have known better: 99% of people are unmoved by poetry and don't know what 'dewfall' is anyway. Or so Mr Whitehead appears to think.

This is one of those letters which seems to teeter on the brink of coherence. One has to be selective, in any case, in choosing what points to respond to; I wrote, and have been published this weekend, as follows.

The Lavabo: another silent symbol.

I am sorry to read that Mr A.K. Whitehead (Letters, August 30th) learnt the responses to the old Latin Mass as a child ‘without understanding a word’. To do so he must have consistently resisted the temptation to look at a translation; these were ubiquitous on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, so I suppose this is an achievement of sorts, though not one he should be congratulating himself upon half a century later.

But there is more to engaging with the Latin liturgy than looking at a translation. Bl John Paul II wrote (Dominicae Caenae 1980, 10), speaking of those educated in this liturgy, that ‘through its dignified character [it] elicited a profound sense of the Eucharistic Mystery.’ The fact that it is in a beautiful, ancient, and universal liturgical language, and not our cradle tongue, communicates something to us which, as the late Holy Father worried, is difficult to communicate in any other way.
In a recent survey in America, the respected Centre for Applied Research in the Apostolate found that not only do only half of self-identified Catholics believe in the Real Presence, 37% were not aware that this was the teaching of the Church. They attend Mass in their native language: do they understand it? It seems not.

The Asperges on Sunday: a poetic image, of sprinkling and washing, acted out.

Inwood vs. Ostrowski on chant propers in the OF

I came across by chance this critique, by Jeff Ostrowski, of one of Paul Inwood's attacks on the idea that we should sing the chants given in the Graduale Romanum for the Ordinary Form. It's an interesting post but it gets terribly complicated and technical. I'm not going into the complications, but I want to comment on why it is so complicated.

(I also recommend the Corpus Christi Watershed blog it derives from, which has a lot of interesting stuff on it.)

A thumbnail's worth of background: the Graduale Romanum has for centuries been the Church's book of liturgical music. The Liber Usualis, which is the more common volume for chant singers in the EF, is derived from it (with the addition of some handy material from the Missal and the Breviary). The chants of the Graduale are, in the Extraordinary Form, liturgical texts: as well as being sung by the choir, they are said by the priest. There is an 'entrance antiphon' (Introit), chants to go between the Reading and the Gospel (usually Gradual and Alleluia), a chant for the Offertory and a Communion antiphon, for every Mass for every occasion in the year.

When the Novus Ordo came out, a vast number of these texts had been changed. Bugnini had gone through with his trusty blue pencil and re-written some, deleted others, composed still more afresh. The very idea of singing complex chants before the Gospel was replaced with the notion of the 'Responsorial Psalm'. Hymns were sung at the Offertory and at the Communion.

But then, in 1974, a new edition of the Graduale Romanum was published, with a preface by Bugnini himself. (In Latin.) The texts were the same as the ancient texts - you can't really change them, after all, if you respect the ancient melodies, since words and music are very closely bound up in chant. They were rearranged, however, to fit in, more or less, with the 1970 Missal, in terms of appropriateness, theme, and so on. And the rubrics said that singing these chants on the (newly) appointed days was an option: option number one, in fact, in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal.

But no-one actually did this. Ok, that's an exaggeration. Very, very, very few people did it. The groups of skilled singers able to do it had been disbanded. All sorts of ghastly musical experiments took their place. The 1974 Graduale Romanum remained in existence as a sort of rebuke to the new musical order of things. But it was only an option. And the texts were, mostly, no longer the liturgical texts, the texts of the Mass being said. They were just appropriate - just like 'In bread we bring You, Lord' is supposedly appropriate to the Offertory.

Yes, you can use the argument that these chants have been an integral part of the liturgy since about the 5th century. But that argument may end up proving too much. Why not just go the whole hog and go to the Traditional Mass?

One of the things the Reform of the Reform crowd want to do is to encourage the singing of these chants again. It is great, of course, to revive the tradition of chant singing, it is great that Catholics will hear these chants, at least in a few places. But they don't have the same relationship with the liturgy that they do in the Extraordinary Form. And since they replace the kinds of things composed by Paul Inwood and his chums, the musical establishment has a vested interest in opposing this development.

Well, as usual in seeing this debate within the Ordinary Form, I support what the Reform of the Reform people want to do, but I have to concede that the legal, liturgical and historical situation has been turned into quagmire of confusion by developments which seem to run counter to each other. I mean, Paul Inwood has a point: these aren't the liturgical texts for the OF, they are just an option. Even with his most annoying claim:

"we know from those who worked on the 1970 Missal that they never intended those actual texts to be sung. The texts are there to remind us that we should be singing something at those points, but not those texts. They are only there for recitation if there is no singing."

Yes, that statement sounds quite mad, but I fear he has a point all the same. What did Pope Paul VI say about it?

In 1963, he promulgated Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council's document on the liturgy, which says that chant should have 'pride of place'. But it made a crucial concession: 'other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations, so long as they accord with the spirit of the liturgical action'. Only time would tell what these would turn out to be.

In 1969 he said that, as a result of vernacularisation: 'We will lose a great part of that stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant' (General Audience, 1969). He makes it clear that this is a sacrifice he thinks must be made, for a greater good.

In 1974, he sent around the world a booklet, Jubilate Deo, designed as a minimum chant repertoire for parishes, whose preface says: 'those who are trying to improve the quality of congregational singing cannot refuse to Gregorian chant the place which is due to it'. This is about congregational singing of the Ordinary of the Mass, but this is also the year of the publication of the new Graduale Romanum, with all the propers.

What attitude was taken to these conflicting statements by the Congregation of Divine Worship, the Vatican department with direct responsibility for these issues? In 1987, under Pope John Paul II, The Congregation for Divine Worship noted that 'Any performance of sacred music which takes place during a celebration, should be fully in harmony with that celebration. This often means that musical compositions which date from a period when the active participation of the faithful was not emphasized as the source of the authentic Christian spirit are no longer to be considered suitable for inclusion within liturgical celebrations.' (Concerts in Churches, 1987).

What did Pope Benedict XVI say about Chant? After some indications that he would write an encyclical on chant, he never did. His personal views on the artistic and spiritual importance of chant are well known, but we had almost no official encouragement of chant from the Chair of Peter. It is almost as if there was a ban on the word 'chant' in official documents. He did say this in an 'address' in 2012, which is important, and seems to turn over completely what the CDW had said in 1987:

'And, here dear friends, you have an important role: work to improve the quality of liturgical song with being afraid to recover and value the great musical tradition of the Church, which has in Gregorian Chant and polyphony 2 of its highest expressions, as Vatican II itself states (cf. “Sacrosanctum Concilium,” 116). And I would like to stress that the active participation of the whole people of God in the liturgy does not consist only in speaking, but in listening, in welcoming the Word with the senses and the spirit, and this holds also for sacred music. You, who have the gift of song can make the heart of many people sing in liturgical celebrations.'


If you're not confused, then you haven't been paying attention.

Clifford Longley defends The Tablet

The Church overcoming hideous, hermaphroditic, heresy

Fresh from his triumph over Pret-a-Manger and their blasphemous crisps (which earned him the accolade of a mention in the Financial Times), the excellent Deacon Nick Donnelly of Protect the Pope has turned his sights on The Big One: the Tablet. There is a Facebook petition calling for its privilege of being distributed through Catholic churches and cathedrals to be withdrawn. I didn't think much of this when I first saw it, as a FB petition is as likely to dislodge The Tablet from its place among the dusty flyers for the next liturgical dance class at the back of Catholic churches as a rubber battering ram. But it got a rise out of Clifford Longley, of all people. In response to comments making the obvious point - that The Tablet is not exactly a bastion of orthodoxy - he wrote:

Clifford Longley February 20, 2013 at 4:11 pm ·
Patrick tells us – “On the contrary, the Tablet is a disgrace, and lacks journalistic integrity. The occasional critical article in a supposedly Catholic journal is one thing, but week in, week out, to oppose the teaching of the Magisterium in general and just about every initiative of Pope Benedict’s in particular, is another.”

Where is your evidence? Do you even read The Tablet week by week? The charge that it lacks journalistic integrity is a grave calumny – can you prove it? It is a plain lie to say The Tablet opposes the teaching of the magisterium week in week out or “just about every initiative of Pope Benedict”. 

Those who read the Tablet know this is completely absurd and grossly dishonest; but those who don’t, have no yard stick with which to assess your seriously defamatory allegations, and may even be stupid enough to believe them. I really think you should consult your conscience, and you are very lucky you are not subject to a writ for libel or malicious falsehood. So what lies behind this extraordinary hatred of The Tablet, given that it strives to be orthodox in matters of faith and is accepted as such by the English hierarchy, as well as being widely read in Rome? I am baffled. But I will pray for you.

Longley could do with a refresher course in journalism if he thinks that the kind of criticisms of The Tablet voiced on Protect the Pope could be libellous, but never mind. Since I am someone who does try to engage with 'The Tablet, International Catholic Weekly', I'm in a position to answer his questions. (I posted a critique of some of his own Tablet journalism here.)

What is journalistic integrity? Isn't that an oxymoron? When, a few years ago, a Tablet journalist was looking for a comment from the Latin Mass Society about something, this journalist rang me to say that an LMS colleague had suggested the journalist ask me. In fact, it later transpired that my colleague had simply said 'no comment'. To ordinary mortals this might look like a bare-faced lie, on the journalist's part, but it is what one can expect from a journalist. I'm not too bothered about that kind of thing. Anyone dealing with the press should be on his guard against tricks like that, and worse ones too.

One can expect, also, a certain editorial position: there's nothing dishonest about that, in itself. Do they give a 'right of reply'? Well, they publish my letters. They used to cut out the good bits and print the rest, but I always blogged about it and on one famous occasion (with a letter not from me, this time) the bit they cut out found its way into a Gloria TV report, and they seem to have learnt their lesson. I don't mind my letters being cut for reasons of space, but these were attempts to make strong arguments they didn't like look weaker.

On one occasion we supplied them--at considerable cost of time and effort--with statistics about the progress of the EF following the Motu Proprio. They only printed the ones they liked, and the article's tone and conclusion was incompatible with the ones they didn't print. Fine, you don't have to print all the information we give you, but you can't claim, in print, what that information shows to be false. That isn't presenting your side of the story, it is falsehood.

Most seriously, they offered us an article-length reply, on the subject of Altar Girls. Within an impossibly tight deadline, we got an article of exactly the right length from a theologian of international reputation delivered to them. It never appeared in print. After acknowledging receipt, they just stopped answering our emails. The article appears to have been too good: they didn't want to print something effective which was at odds with their agenda.

By contrast, more recently they printed a rather bad article by George Weigel which responded in a 'conservative' way to something they'd printed. Since the article was vacuous and attacked traditionalists, I imagine it was more acceptable.

This kind of attitude runs through the whole magazine. A extreme example was an article in 2011 by Elena Curti on the ordination of women (here, for subscribers). She'd done a fair amount of research, talking to a number of different people whom she quoted in the article. Not one of them, however, was against the ordination of women. It was as if intellectual opponents didn't exist. Her conclusion was couched in careful language, it wasn't an explicit call for the ordination of women, but the reader was simply left with no reason to object to it.

These are examples which go beyond ordinary journalistic practice; they take 'The Tablet, International Catholic Weekly', from the realm of the partisan broadsheet in the direction of a propaganda rag. It is not about getting a good story, it is not even about spinning things in a particular way, it is about presenting a systematically distorted picture of reality. Serbian dissidents during the war in the Balkans used to talk about the state-run media as 'the alternative universe': that's what we have in The Tablet. This is a place where conservatives and traditionalists have no good arguments; where there is no widespread support for the Extraordinary Form, the new Missal translation, the Ordinariate, for the re-sacralisation of the liturgy, or for any of the Holy Father's initiatives. It is a place where everyone, baring the odd eccentric, agrees that that priests should be allowed to marry, where it is just obvious that everything was bad before Vatican II, where Humanae Vitae is a dead letter, and where the attempt to stifle debate on female ordination is clearly unhealthy. And above all, where child-abuse is perpetrated by horrible old conservatives. The picture they like to present is one in which 'the Curia', relying on naked power alone, are always ignoring the overwhelming arguments and pastoral experiences presented by a united front of thinking Catholics: theologians, academics, clergy, journalists. The cartoon, right, which accompanied Curti's article expresses it well.

This in fact is not so much a distortion of reality as its mirror-image. For in fact, no one from their side of the argument has presented new thinking or new research for getting on for twenty years, by contrast with the stream of conservative scholarly publications. It is the liberals who are relying on naked power, and positions of privilege and prestige which they certainly didn't achieve on merit, to suppress dissent, to close down debate, to maintain the tottering status quo against a groundswell of opposition. The Tablet maintains an ever-narrowing spiral of denial, supported by a dwindling band of aging fire-brands like Hans Kung, and younger thinkers ever more reliant on post-modern bilge rather than argument, inhabiting institutions ever more remotely connected with the Church.

I'm not surprised that Clifford Longley doesn't see it that way. For him and his Tablet colleagues, their version of reality just is reality. They simply try to stop facts and arguments from appearing which will confuse people, and distract them from the big picture. I don't doubt they are sincere. But their views are not Catholic, their efforts undermine not only the Vatican but the efforts of our own bishops. It is time we stopped giving them power over us by allowing them to present themselves as Catholics, and by selling the mag in churches. What gave them the right to use the Church as a host for their parasitical life? What gives them the right to call themselves an International Catholic Weekly?

Traditionalist 'cafeteria Catholics', again

My correspondence in the Universe continues: after my last letter about Martin Elsworth's accusation of 'Cafeteria Catholicism' against the SSPX, he leveled the charge against me. Last weekend his letter said, in part:

'In rejecting [Vatican II]'s teaching on the need for reform in the liturgy, religious freedom and relations with other Churches [sic] and faiths, among other things, the Lefebvrists show themselves to be at odds with the magisterium.
...
Could Mr Shaw too really be a cafeteria Catholic, just picking and choosing what it is he wants to believe?

So, the 'need for reform in the liturgy' is a dogma of the Faith now, is it? An interesting idea. My reply:

Mr Elsworth (Letter, 17th Feb) claims, among other things, that the Second Vatican Council taught ‘the need for a reform in the liturgy’, and that since ‘traditionalists like Dr Shaw’ reject this, we are ‘dissenters’. There is a nest of confusions in this assertion. 

Whether there is a need for liturgical reform is something which is going to vary from age to age, and it depends not simply on the truths of Faith entrusted to the Church by Our Lord, but on empirical observations. Vatican II’s treatment of the liturgy, in Sacrosantum Concilium (SC), outlines a limited programme of possible changes. If Mr Elsworth thinks this is a set of dogmatic truths, he presumably thinks Pope Paul VI committed heresy by permitting Mass entirely in the vernacular, when SC 32 said ‘the use of the Latin language is to be preserved’. But exactly what form the reform, if any, should take, is a matter of prudential judgement and free discussion.

By contrast, the Council of Trent solemnly anathematised condemnations of the ‘ceremonies, vestments, and outward signs’ of the (Traditional) Mass, and of the silent Canon (Session XXII, Canons 7 and 9). I hope Mr Elsworth has not chosen arbitrarily to reject this infallible teaching.

Catholics are free to believe that there was no need for liturgical reform in 1962. Again, they are free to believe that reform was implemented unwisely: Pope Benedict himself famously wrote, before his election, that the 1970 Missal was ‘a banal on-the-spot product’. Finally, they are free to believe that the reform was good, but that the Traditional Mass is still worthy of preservation. It is this range of views that the Holy Father had in mind when he urged us, when he issued Summorum Pontificum in 2007, to ‘make room for everything which the Faith itself allows’.

I would encourage Mr Elsworth to take that admonition to heart.

As I have argued before, liberal Catholics tends to share with Ultramontanist conservatives an inability to distinguish dogma (and 'dogmatic facts') from non-dogmatic statements in Church documents. These include, most obviously, prudential judgements and policies. Thus, when Bl. Pope John Paul II said (Evangelium Vitae 27), about the Death Penalty, that 'Modern society in fact has the means of effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless without definitively denying them the chance to reform', he was making a judgment about empirical conditions and the likely consequences of practical policies. It appears, for example, from the context of his remarks that he had Western democracies in mind. What about societies where highly dangerous prisoners can reliably bribe or fight their way to freedom? These are serious questions. The views of a Pope deserve a hearing, but they don't demand the assent of dogma.

The elision of dogmatic and prudential statements by conservative and liberal Catholics serve opposite ends, however: the conservatives want us to accept them all without distinction, the liberals want us to hold them all with equal contempt. Mr Elsworth wants to urge the charge of 'cafeteria Catholicism' against trads not because he is an ultramontanist himself, but because he thinks it a paradox that trads don't come up to the self-imposed standards of conservatives.

His own views are, in fact, rather interesting. Over the past year he has written six letters to the Catholic Herald which criticise or deny a series of practices or teachings.

In June 2012 he attacked clerical celibacy.

In August 2012 he attacked the (then, new) Bishop Gilbert of Aberdeen for the latter's critique of same-sex marriage.

In November 2012 he attacked clerical dress, and in a separate letter opposed Daphne McLeod's defence of traditional catechesis.

In January 2013 he declared that the Church as Mystical Body is 'obscured' by the 'institutional Church'.

Also in January this year, he attacked Humanae Vitae. He began his letter:

Is there not something essentially absurd about the cult of personality with which some Catholics invest the papacy, as if the Pope were a Soviet dictator whose every pronouncement has to be greeted with uncritical adulation?

Hmm...