This post has been re-edited. The first edition fell into all the infelicities of blogging: ranting, negativity, extreme statements. This time, I'll try to word it a little better.
I have often argued that the suburbs are not a natural place for Catholics. "We are a tenement people," I believe, meant for communities where we see our neighbors and where work and home are not so radically separate. Yet, my wife often points out, some of the best parishes and dioceses we know are in the suburbs.
We speak from our limited experience. We know Arlington, Virginia, in the suburbs of DC. Arlington diocese, where we lived one year and which we've often visited, is awesome. The people are orthodox, community is vibrant, the priests are great, liturgy is as good as it gets. We've also seen Boston: within the same archdiocese, the city is, for the most part, terrible, while the northern suburbs have some pretty decent parishes. Our experience suggests that the suburbs are better for Catholics.
Here are some preliminary ideas on how to reconcile our city ideals with our suburban experience.
Part of the conflict is probably socio-economic. The last hundred years of urban policy have been hard on our cities -- one of the goals of this blog is to argue for better urban policy. Urban parishes have so much more to struggle with. A solid priest in the suburbs can focus on rosary groups, men's groups, refurbishing the church, and fighting for good liturgy. A solid priest in the city, meanwhile, is often exhausted dealing with homelessness, crime, and poverty. Immigration may play into this, too. In the suburbs, immigrants have their own churches (with their own struggles); we who attend anglo churches don't see this. In the city, it often all gets mixed together, so that one priest is trying to serve not only rich anglos but also poor Hispanics, Islanders, French Africans, Eastern Europeans, etc. These are all things the church should be doing: but it certainly means that suburban parishes can do things that city parishes can't.
There are also some social issues. The suburbs, I would argue, are "voluntary" in a way the city isn't. City life is largely on foot, creating a much greater expectation that you go to your neighborhood church. Suburban life is largely in the car. You expect to drive to the things you like: drive to your favorite grocery store, your favorite restaurant, your favorite mall. Suburban car culture probably makes it seem more normal to go to the parish that fits you. So there are really orthodox suburban parishes and really unorthodox ones. They're all voluntary associations. You might say that Catholicism seems to thrive in the suburbs because it is more like Protestantism, with ideologically "sorted" churches.
In some places, this can even happen at the diocesan level. People who don't like the character of the Diocese of Arlington just cross the river and go to the Archdiocese of Washington. I've talked to plenty of people who do this. So even the dioceses get ideologically sorted.
Perhaps -- this is more of a stretch -- there is also an element of compartmentalization. One of my biggest concerns about the suburbs is that life gets so broken up: you work one place, and live in a totally different place. In the city, even if you commute, your home is surrounded by other people's work. I think there's more of a sense in the city that all of life interpenetrates.
It's possible that suburban churches "benefit" from compartmentalization. I'm pretty confident, from people I've talked to, that many of the pews in "fantastic" Arlington churches are filled with people who are not as fervent as the Church they attend. They are willing to be one thing on Sunday morning, and something else when they get home, just as they are one person at work and another person at home.
This comes out in the typical characterization of urbanites as combative. I think a big part of what people like about the suburbs is not having to fight. You go home to your fortress and what the neighbors are doing really doesn't affect you. In the city, the neighbors constantly affect you -- every conversation, every party, every time they play music -- and so you are used to struggling, speaking up, fighting. I'm not sure, but I can imagine this makes suburbia easier for priests. Possibly, urbanites, used to defending their turf, are also more inclined to fight for their parish, whereas suburbanites are more inclined to shrug their shoulders, knowing that the priest won't follow them home. Maybe.
But finally, there's probably a lot of simple chance. Most of America lives in suburbia (widely defined), and the cities are disproportionately filled with non-Catholic groups: Asians, blacks, Jews. In other words, if most Catholics live in the suburbs, you'd expect to find more good parishes -- and more bad parishes, and more of anything Catholic -- in the suburbs. And I think that's probably about right. Because the suburbs certainly have their share of bad parishes, too.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Local politics
I live in a run-down but reviving urban neighborhood, just down the block from an elementary school yard. At night, teenagers use the school yard for . . . well, you name it: at least drinking, drugs, and gambling, maybe sex, reportedly fighting. A meeting was recently held, with school officials, police, city government people, and neighbors, to discuss a proposal to refurbish the school yard. The proposal recommended a big iron fence, nice football and baseball fields, and a little water park for little kids. I didn't like the proposal. What follows is a letter I sent to my "Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner": the lowest level, most local government official.
Anne,
Thanks for clarifying the purpose of the next meeting on the school-yard. That makes good sense. You said I should send to you, asap, any "alternate ideas" for the rehabilitation. I do have quite a few thoughts, so here goes.
Matthew's presentation was really impressive and very helpful for showing the progress of the neighborhood. But when it came to rationale for his specific proposal, I think there was just one sentence, on the last page: "Almost without exception," he wrote, "urban areas and property [are] only respected if [they are] maintained and secured." I would take issue with two parts of this statement, and thus suggest an alternate course.
First, he says that areas are only respected if they are "secured," and thus suggests a "tasteful/beautiful wrought-iron fence." I respect the desire to keep bad guys out, but I think his methodology is incorrect. As [Police] Commander Groomes said, you don't make a place safe by keeping bad guys out; you make it safe by bringing good people in. If you look at Capitol Hill [the very nice neighborhood to the South of us], the most beloved, respected places are safe not because of fences but because of people: Lincoln Park, Stanton Park, Eastern Market. These places are cornerstones of the community because they invite people in. Our school yard can be the same.
I respect the need for a fence around the school yard when children are present, so they don't get away. But I think the first thing that needs to be done is to *open* the fence when the children are not present. Right now, the only way onto those grounds is through a parking lot on the alley; I lived on the same block as that parking lot for almost two months before even realizing I *could* go onto the school grounds. What the fence presently communicates is that neighbors are not welcome -- only criminals, who enter illegally, are welcome. If nothing else, the gate at the corner of K and 6th should be open as much as the school will allow, so that neighbors know they can be there. I think it would be better to install bigger, open gates on both 6th and K. The only way to keep that place safe is by bringing good people in.
Along with opening the doors, of course, we need to have things to draw people. I would recommend moving the playground equipment out of the back corner and into the front corner, right out on 6th and K. This would serve two purposes. First, it would communicate to the community that we are welcome to be there -- I don't want to walk my kids down an alley to a playground that seems intentionally set where we can't get to it, and I suspect other parents feel the same way. Second, it would take away the hide-out criminals now have. They hang out on the playground equipment because it is presently set up as a den: a place to sit where no one can see them. Put the playground out on the corner (preferably with a police camera) and they no longer have anywhere to go.
Another way to draw people in is by naming the school yard a dog park. I know that sounds dirty -- but in Stanton Park and other dog parks, people are quite responsible about cleaning up after their pets; and anyway, it's a lot nicer for the custodian to clean up the occasional dog poop than the trash left there every night by criminals. If possible, we might even invite a coffee vendor (Sidamo?) to set up a stand on Saturday mornings, or something to get people onto those grounds. We certainly should put in a big trash bin, so that people who want to use that space don't have to throw their garbage on the ground. Benches would be nice, too. And some vines on the fences would look an awful lot nicer. We should also ask the deaf community how we could make them feel welcome.
(Full disclosure: I do *not* have a dog, and do not particularly like dogs -- but living near Stanton Park for three years, I saw what a positive community experience it was to have people out every morning and night just chit-chatting. A dog park becomes a magnet for community, even for those who don't like dogs.)
Along with security, Matthew's other rationale for his project is that a space must be "maintained." I think this points to a danger in his plan: he tells us the cost to *set up* fields and swimming pools, but he doesn't mention the upkeep costs. Almost all the cost for football, baseball, and soccer fields -- and certainly for a water park -- is in keeping the grass and dirt nice, keeping the lines painted, keeping the water coming. That's a lot of maintenance.
But what good would it do? I think what Matthew was trying to get at is that people -- including criminals -- have more respect for a space that is cared for. But maintaining fields that the community can't use is a pretty ambiguous kind of care. I think the bigger concern is not upkeep -- fancy football fields and such -- but community use. In my opinion, a football field would not get a lot of use. The kind of games that people in the community play are pick-up games that need a field, to be sure, but not a professionally maintained one. Go down and watch at Lincoln Park sometime: people play baseball, football, soccer, and frisbee not because there are fancy fields but because there are spaces where they feel welcome. I think painted lines and well-maintained fields would, ironically, *discourage* community use. They would only be valuable for intramural sports -- teams from outside the neighborhood. So keep open plenty of field for sports -- but don't waste money painting lines that will scare people away. (Incidentally, what do you think elementary school kids are going to do on a big "official" football field? Not much.) The care we need is basic maintenance and lots of community involvement.
We need the school's support on all this, of course. Maybe the school will decide that they don't want the community to use their fields -- but I would warn them that where good people are missing, bad people will fill in, and I suspect they'd agree. With apologies to Sheila, I'd say that family reunions may be loud ("like King's Dominion!") but nobody wants to sell drugs or do any of the other rotten things kids are doing out there if there's a family reunion right next to them. Communities have more power to force out criminals than we realize -- just ask Commander Groomes.
Finally, let me again say that I think we need to attend to the streets outside the school yard. I know that the present project is refurbishing the school grounds -- and, as I've just detailed, I think that's very important and can do a lot of good. But let's make sure that the school, the city, the police, and the neighborhood get together again sometime to discuss things like shattered glass and trash covering the sidewalk directly outside the school yard; drug dealers running a market just outside the school fence; and a store right across the street that sells nothing but malt liquor. These are school issues, not just police issues, and the solutions to these things, in my opinion, are not police solutions but community ones. We can do better, both for our neighborhood and for our school.
Thank you for your patience and consideration. I'd be happy to write a more condensed presentation and present it at the next meeting, if you would be interested.
[signed]
Anne,
Thanks for clarifying the purpose of the next meeting on the school-yard. That makes good sense. You said I should send to you, asap, any "alternate ideas" for the rehabilitation. I do have quite a few thoughts, so here goes.
Matthew's presentation was really impressive and very helpful for showing the progress of the neighborhood. But when it came to rationale for his specific proposal, I think there was just one sentence, on the last page: "Almost without exception," he wrote, "urban areas and property [are] only respected if [they are] maintained and secured." I would take issue with two parts of this statement, and thus suggest an alternate course.
First, he says that areas are only respected if they are "secured," and thus suggests a "tasteful/beautiful wrought-iron fence." I respect the desire to keep bad guys out, but I think his methodology is incorrect. As [Police] Commander Groomes said, you don't make a place safe by keeping bad guys out; you make it safe by bringing good people in. If you look at Capitol Hill [the very nice neighborhood to the South of us], the most beloved, respected places are safe not because of fences but because of people: Lincoln Park, Stanton Park, Eastern Market. These places are cornerstones of the community because they invite people in. Our school yard can be the same.
I respect the need for a fence around the school yard when children are present, so they don't get away. But I think the first thing that needs to be done is to *open* the fence when the children are not present. Right now, the only way onto those grounds is through a parking lot on the alley; I lived on the same block as that parking lot for almost two months before even realizing I *could* go onto the school grounds. What the fence presently communicates is that neighbors are not welcome -- only criminals, who enter illegally, are welcome. If nothing else, the gate at the corner of K and 6th should be open as much as the school will allow, so that neighbors know they can be there. I think it would be better to install bigger, open gates on both 6th and K. The only way to keep that place safe is by bringing good people in.
Along with opening the doors, of course, we need to have things to draw people. I would recommend moving the playground equipment out of the back corner and into the front corner, right out on 6th and K. This would serve two purposes. First, it would communicate to the community that we are welcome to be there -- I don't want to walk my kids down an alley to a playground that seems intentionally set where we can't get to it, and I suspect other parents feel the same way. Second, it would take away the hide-out criminals now have. They hang out on the playground equipment because it is presently set up as a den: a place to sit where no one can see them. Put the playground out on the corner (preferably with a police camera) and they no longer have anywhere to go.
Another way to draw people in is by naming the school yard a dog park. I know that sounds dirty -- but in Stanton Park and other dog parks, people are quite responsible about cleaning up after their pets; and anyway, it's a lot nicer for the custodian to clean up the occasional dog poop than the trash left there every night by criminals. If possible, we might even invite a coffee vendor (Sidamo?) to set up a stand on Saturday mornings, or something to get people onto those grounds. We certainly should put in a big trash bin, so that people who want to use that space don't have to throw their garbage on the ground. Benches would be nice, too. And some vines on the fences would look an awful lot nicer. We should also ask the deaf community how we could make them feel welcome.
(Full disclosure: I do *not* have a dog, and do not particularly like dogs -- but living near Stanton Park for three years, I saw what a positive community experience it was to have people out every morning and night just chit-chatting. A dog park becomes a magnet for community, even for those who don't like dogs.)
Along with security, Matthew's other rationale for his project is that a space must be "maintained." I think this points to a danger in his plan: he tells us the cost to *set up* fields and swimming pools, but he doesn't mention the upkeep costs. Almost all the cost for football, baseball, and soccer fields -- and certainly for a water park -- is in keeping the grass and dirt nice, keeping the lines painted, keeping the water coming. That's a lot of maintenance.
But what good would it do? I think what Matthew was trying to get at is that people -- including criminals -- have more respect for a space that is cared for. But maintaining fields that the community can't use is a pretty ambiguous kind of care. I think the bigger concern is not upkeep -- fancy football fields and such -- but community use. In my opinion, a football field would not get a lot of use. The kind of games that people in the community play are pick-up games that need a field, to be sure, but not a professionally maintained one. Go down and watch at Lincoln Park sometime: people play baseball, football, soccer, and frisbee not because there are fancy fields but because there are spaces where they feel welcome. I think painted lines and well-maintained fields would, ironically, *discourage* community use. They would only be valuable for intramural sports -- teams from outside the neighborhood. So keep open plenty of field for sports -- but don't waste money painting lines that will scare people away. (Incidentally, what do you think elementary school kids are going to do on a big "official" football field? Not much.) The care we need is basic maintenance and lots of community involvement.
We need the school's support on all this, of course. Maybe the school will decide that they don't want the community to use their fields -- but I would warn them that where good people are missing, bad people will fill in, and I suspect they'd agree. With apologies to Sheila, I'd say that family reunions may be loud ("like King's Dominion!") but nobody wants to sell drugs or do any of the other rotten things kids are doing out there if there's a family reunion right next to them. Communities have more power to force out criminals than we realize -- just ask Commander Groomes.
Finally, let me again say that I think we need to attend to the streets outside the school yard. I know that the present project is refurbishing the school grounds -- and, as I've just detailed, I think that's very important and can do a lot of good. But let's make sure that the school, the city, the police, and the neighborhood get together again sometime to discuss things like shattered glass and trash covering the sidewalk directly outside the school yard; drug dealers running a market just outside the school fence; and a store right across the street that sells nothing but malt liquor. These are school issues, not just police issues, and the solutions to these things, in my opinion, are not police solutions but community ones. We can do better, both for our neighborhood and for our school.
Thank you for your patience and consideration. I'd be happy to write a more condensed presentation and present it at the next meeting, if you would be interested.
[signed]
Thursday, August 9, 2007
The Catholic Candidate?
Rudy Giuliani is pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. He is a fallen-away Catholic who frankly acknowledges that he is "interested, but not involved" in religion. I think he may be a great Catholic candidate for president.This post will be a preview of many of the themes of this blog.
Now in general, Giuliani is a good candidate because he is a good conservative. He'd be a fine commander-in-chief, he's a solid fiscal conservative, and he's great on law enforcement. He made New York healthier for commerce and small business, and safe for families. Those are big things.
But I like Giuliani for the revolution he represents. I think it's not quite the revolution people expect.
First, Giuliani could mean an end for the "Christian Right." I think Catholics should be cautiously optimistic about this -- because there is a difference between the Christian Right and social conservatism. George W. Bush is a great example of the Christian Right: government based on Evangelical intuition rather than natural law. Evangelical intuition is often right, because Evangelicals are basically decent people. But the difference between George Bush and Rudy Giuliani comes down to the difference between faith and reason.
And government is not a matter of faith. Salvation is. The two are related. Christians tend to be better people, with sounder judgment, because they are not quite such slaves to their passions. Nonetheless, government is not a "Christian" task. The president should rule according to sound principle, not according to Christian intuition. George Bush is a great example of how intuition can go right and wrong. I would like a president who can argue a coherent case, not just say, trust me, I'm a Christian.
Especially on abortion. Rudy Giuliani could be our most forceful advocate against Roe, precisely because he is not a Christian and not pro-life. Abortion is wrong not because the Bible says so and not because Christians just feel it in their hearts. Abortion is wrong because it kills children. Roe is wrong not because it thwarted the Christian Right but because it is incoherent law. We need a president who can say, "look, I support a woman's right to kill her children, but that just isn't in the Constitution. I'm personally opposed [to restrictions on abortion], but . . . ." Because that is what's at issue in Roe; that is the real dispute on the federal level. What we need is a coherent lawyer, not a believer-in-chief. Giuliani is the Catholic candidate because he is a candidate of reason, the beginning of the end of the Christian Right. Giuliani is good on this.
The second way Giuliani would revolutionize the Republican party is by being a man of the city. An exalted friend once said, "We [Catholics] are a tenement people." It is no surprise that Catholics abandoned their faith when they went to the suburbs. In fact, part of the reason Roosevelt so eagerly pushed people to the suburbs was to tear down the urban Catholic communities. (See E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing.) Catholics are a tenement people because we are a communal people. It is not natural, nor Catholic, for work to be so separate from home, or for people to live in total isolation from their neighbors. The suburbs are not a Catholic place.
The Republican party is in thrall to the suburbs. Republicans are terrified of cities -- one of the big "arguments" against Giuliani is precisely that he's from New York City: yikes! (Don't forget that Al Smith, the first great Catholic hero in national politics, was as New York as they come.) A Washington insider recently commented that blacks often use "urban" and "black" as political synonyms: urban concerns are black concerns. The same is likely true of Hispanics, Jews, and all the other ethnic groups who never vote Republican. Because Republicans know nothing of cities, care nothing for cities, hate cities.
Giuliani ran New York City (and was re-elected) as a fiscal and law-enforcement conservative. As a social conservative, too, to be fair: he fought against anti-Christian art, fought to push pornography to the margins, fought for adoptions, and lifted not a finger to promote abortion. Abortions plummeted in Giuliani's New York -- partly due to national trends, partly as a side-effect of other things he did, but I think he deserves a little credit. And all of these things were fights.
Giuliani could be the first Republican president who understands cities and who reforms federal policy to actually help. There is a great urban renewal afoot in this country, and that's something Catholics should care passionately about. We should be looking for a candidate who can fight for conservative principle in our cities. Giuliani might be our man.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Cardinal Lustiger
Cardinal Lustiger has died. George Weigel has up an "appreciation" of him on the First Things blog. It serves as a helpful counterpoint to what I have said below about the Tridentine collapse. (I admit that Weigel's view of Christian humanism has influenced me profoundly.)
Born September 17, 1926, Jean-Marie Lustiger was made archbishop of Paris in 1981 and was one of the most prominent members of the College of Cardinals for more than two decades, embodying precisely the Catholicism imagined by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council: a Church engaged with the modern world; a Church that had opened its windows to modernity; but also a Church that asked modernity to open its windows to the worlds of transcendent truth and love. Like the late Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Lustiger was completely convinced, on the basis of both faith and reason, that being a Catholic and being an engaged, compassionate, intelligent human being, dedicated to healing the world’s wounds and advancing the cause of human freedom, were two sides of the same coin.
Both of these Christian giants believed that . . . the Christian story is the human story, read in its true depth and against its most ample horizon. For Cardinal Lustiger, the "choice of God" was, at the very same time, the choice of an authentic humanism, a truly liberating humanism that could set men and women free in the deepest meaning of freedom: freedom from the fear of final oblivion that has haunted humanity for millennia, but no more so than in our time.
Because he came from a human world outside the worlds-within-worlds of French Catholicism, Jean-Marie Lustiger could see things perhaps more clearly than others. He could see, for example, that both the conventional "left" and "right" options among French Catholics were, in fact, no options, for both imagined the Church wedded to worldly power: in one case, the power of the revolution (however it might be conceived); in the other, the power of the old order. The Church, as Lustiger understood it, was not in the business of aligning itself with worldly power of any sort. The Church was in the business of evangelization, of service, of mission, of witness to the truths about the dignity of the human person on which the rights of man most securely rest. The Church’s public business was forming a culture of authentic freedom that could then form the kind of citizens who can live freedom nobly, rather than meanly or selfishly.
To meet Jean-Marie Lustiger was to meet a man of God: He was a wonderful human being--intelligent, caring, funny in a wry way--because he had been transformed by the power of God, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit. His great desire was that others might share in the gift that he had been given, the gift of faith. That gift led him to read situations in their true depth, often against the grain of the conventional wisdom. And this was another quality he shared with the late John Paul II: the quality of reading the dynamics of history in depth. Like the man who took a great risk in appointing him archbishop of Paris, Lustiger (who took no less a risk in accepting John Paul’s appointment) understood that the most dynamic force in history over time is neither politics nor economics but rather culture: what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; what men and women are willing to stake their lives on.
And at the heart of culture, Lustiger knew, is cult: the act of worship. Everyone worships; the only question is whether the object of our worship is worthy. Jean-Marie Lustiger lived, led, and died in the conviction that the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus is true worship, worship that can shape a truly liberating humanism. That is why everyone whose life he touched was the richer for the encounter.
Modernity: What Happened? (Part One)
My Ph.D. is in medieval thought and I've read a lot of modern history, but lately I've been trying to figure out what happened in between. I'll share on this blog a few of the things I've discovered. I'll do this as a series, so the pieces are of a more readable length.
I recently finished The Renaissance: A Short History, by the wonderful historian (and artist) Paul Johnson. The book itself is dazzling, more showing you how much you don't know than actually teaching you anything. But the conclusion is fantastic:
The disaster begins, I believe, when the Tridentine reformers attacked the Renaissance, destroyed the medieval, and launched the Church too quickly into the antagonism of the modern world. This was a disaster not only for the Church, but even more for the secular world -- as the Church increasingly stood against genius and creativity, genius and creativity went outside the Church, creating those horrible deformities: Hobbes, Locke, Kant . . . . I will say more. . . .
I recently finished The Renaissance: A Short History, by the wonderful historian (and artist) Paul Johnson. The book itself is dazzling, more showing you how much you don't know than actually teaching you anything. But the conclusion is fantastic:
There is a famous story, or legend, that the master of music at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the composer Giovanni Palestrina(1525-94), produced his Missa Papae Marcelli for a special performance, to show that polyphony could be combined with intelligibility, and that this had the desired effect. Whether the story is true or not, it is a fact that Trent ended without any destructive ruling on music.This passage nicely encapsulates some of the main themes in my reading of early modernity. The Renaissance is a departure from the Middle Ages in some senses (especially the elevation of individual genius over communal action), but in the grand sweep of history, it is the culmination of the medieval world, a world where faith and reason deeply interpenetrate, where the local, the mythical, and the remembered are as much a part of reality as the universal, the textual, and the authoritarian. The middle ages were a profound syntheses of all these things -- and that synthesis got difficult as the human, the natural, the ingenius came more and more alive. The Renaissance popes, for all their need of reform, were right to let the Renaissance happen, and to embrace it.
It was a different matter with painting. Here the council in its final session ruled that stories about sacred personages that were not to be found in the canonical texts, and saintly miracles that the church had not certified as probable, were not to figure in works of art to be placed in churches or other religious buildings. It was not, strictly speaking, an act of iconoclasm, since it was prospective, not retrospective. Few existing images were removed, as had already been done in countless buildings controlled by Protestant zealots. But it put a stop to any future work of that kind and thus robbed religious artists of one of their chief sources of subject matter. It was the end of the Middle Ages, abolishing at a stroke the swarming inventiveness and labyrinthine imagination that had produced so much delightful art, both in the Gothic mode and indeed in Renaissance works, where Christian and pagan mythology intertwined. It affected not only the great masters working in the big cities but also--and perhaps more--the humble artist-craftsmen of the smaller towns and villages, whose wall paintings, bench ends and shrine figurs had been encyclopedias of Christian folklore, now all forbidden.
Even more influential were the more positive doctrines of the Counter-Reformation, which the final session of Trent formalized. In response to the Protestant cult of the vernacular--of simplicity, austerity and puritanism--the Catholic Church, after its earlier defensive and guilt-ridden response, decided to embark on a much bolder policy of emphasizing the spectacular. With the Jesuits in the vanguard, churches and other religious buildings were to be ablaze with light, clouded with incense, draped in lace, smothered in gilt, with huge altars, splendid vestments, sonorous organs and vast choirs, and a liturgy purged of medieval nonsense but essentially triumphalist in its content and amplitude. The artists--painters, sculptors, architects, makers of church furniture and windows--were to fall into line, scrapping the folklore and mythology indeed, but portraying the story of Christianity, the history of the church, the faith of its martyrs and the destruction of its enemies with all the power and realism they could command. Thus Rome defied the Protestants and bade Puritans do their worst. Catholicism would reply to simplicity and primitive austerity with all the riches and color and swirling lines and glitter in its repertoire, adding new ones as artists could create them.
Whatever the spiritual merits of this policy, it was undoubtedly popular in southern Europe at least, and in the closing decades of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church began to regain some lost ground. However, the Counter-Reformation approach to art was a formula for what would later be called the Baroque. It was music in the ears of ambitious young painters like Caravaggio. But it tolled a requiem for the Renaissance, or rather the attitudes it stood for. The movement was already a spent force anyway, and by the 1560s and 1570s it was dead, as dead as Michelangelo and Titian, its last great masters. . . .
The disaster begins, I believe, when the Tridentine reformers attacked the Renaissance, destroyed the medieval, and launched the Church too quickly into the antagonism of the modern world. This was a disaster not only for the Church, but even more for the secular world -- as the Church increasingly stood against genius and creativity, genius and creativity went outside the Church, creating those horrible deformities: Hobbes, Locke, Kant . . . . I will say more. . . .
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Active Participation
Lots has been said about "active participation" at Mass, arguably one of the prime goals of the liturgical renewal of Vatican II. It is by now trite to point out that "active" does not mean activity: lectoring, ushering, extraordinary-ministering, foot washing, hand holding, etc. So what follows should be a nice restatement (or prestatement) of what is obvious to everyone.
Today I flipped open Divine Intimacy, the pre-Conciliar classic of Carmelite spirituality. The first words I read (the first I've ever read from this classic) were these on "Participating in Holy Mass":
(Incidentally, this is also maybe a corrective to the undo, almost substitutionary, passivity of St. Faustina's chaplet. "For the sake of his sorrowful passion," sure, but only to the extent that we are penetrated by it.)
Today I flipped open Divine Intimacy, the pre-Conciliar classic of Carmelite spirituality. The first words I read (the first I've ever read from this classic) were these on "Participating in Holy Mass":
The encyclical Mediator Dei [Pius XII on the liturgy, 1947] exhorts all the faithful to "participate in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, not passively, carelessly, and with distractions, but with such ardor and fervor that we shall be closely associated with the High Priest." It is not enough to be present at Mass; we must take part, "participate" in it. In Holy Mass, Jesus continues to sacrifice Himself for us, and to offer Himself to His Father, in order to obtain divine blessings for us. It is true that Jesus offers Himself through the ministry of the priest, but the priest makes the offering in the name of all the faithful, and they, in union with him . . . . This means that the faithful also are invited to offer the divine Victim with the priest. . . . On Calvary, Mary did not take a passive part in the Passion of her Son; she united herself with his intentions, and offered Him to the Father. In the same way, when we are present at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, we, too, can offer the Father the divine Victim who is ours, because He offered and immolated Himself for all of us.That is active participation: like Mary at the Cross, involved.
(Incidentally, this is also maybe a corrective to the undo, almost substitutionary, passivity of St. Faustina's chaplet. "For the sake of his sorrowful passion," sure, but only to the extent that we are penetrated by it.)
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Liturgical Reform
(a long one)
With the motu proprio and all the rest, it's worth thinking about liturgical reform. A good place to start is by thinking about the Liturgy of the Hours.
The Liturgy of the Hours is, of course, the series of offices that clerics and religious are required to pray, and laity encouraged to pray, through the day. The core of this liturgy is the Psalms, and that's important. The Psalms are the liturgy of Israel and the liturgy of the Bible. St. Athanasius (and many others) said, "The Psalms contain the whole of Scripture in the mode of praise." In other words, the Psalms are the Bible-for-prayer. There are big debates over how Catholics ought to think about revelation, but I'd put it this way: in the course of the development of the Temple liturgy, these 150 worship songs emerged as definitive and inspired. The community recognized, one way or another, that these were true, as in, big-t True, proclaiming what needed to be proclaimed. They spoke the truth about God then, and they foretold the truth of the Messiah to come. And so they were the liturgy.
Already in the New Testament the Psalms emerge as the continuing prayer of the Christian Church. (I won't do a Scripture study here to prove it, but it's true.) And this was natural enough -- I don't think it occurred to the early Church that there was any rupture with what had come before. The true rupture, they would say -- and this is the reason for all the debates that later got labeled, anachronistically, as anti-Semitism -- is the Jews who rejected the culmination of revelation in the person of Jesus the Christ. In any case, the liturgy continued, fulfilled. The Christians sang the Psalms because they still worshiped the God of the Psalms and now the Messiah of the Psalms, too, and, like any Jews, they believed the Psalms were divinely inspired. So they continued the Temple liturgy. They sang the songs.
The desert fathers are great on this. I'm no expert, but I've taken a couple classes on the desert. Basically, once Christians were no longer being executed en masse (after Constantine, so fourth century), they had the freedom to seek God unhindered, and many hit the deserts of the Levant, especially Egypt. And what did they do? They prayed the Psalms. In fact, they spent all day sitting there repeating these sacred songs, digging deeper and deeper into the God and Messiah revealed and praised therein. This had been happening in the ordinary Christian communities as well, but you really see it take off in the desert.
Then comes Benedict (sixth century), who codifies this way of "desert" monastic prayer for the West. The Rule of St. Benedict does a lot, but at the center is the opus Dei, the praying of the Psalms.
Now, this narrative is all sort of beside the point, and you could trace the lineage other ways, but the point is, the praying of the Psalms is an unhindered tradition. It's nothing made up or discovered. We pray the Psalms now because we have always prayed the Psalms. The early Church prayed them, Jesus prayed them, and Israel, the pre-Church, prayed them. They are the truth of God in praise. And that is Christian prayer.
One more intriguing point. According to the old Catholic encyclopedia (1907-1914), part of the genius of the Roman Psalter is its, well, its lack of genius. A couple psalms are selected for special significance. You've got Psalm 51 allotted to Friday, because it's a penitential day. You've got those last psalms of praise put in the morning, because it's good to praise God in the morning. And a couple more. But otherwise, the traditional Roman Psalter has a pretty boring organization. For example, vespers on Sunday is Psalms 109-113, Monday 114-120, Tuesday 121-125, etc. There's a genius here. But the genius is in austerity, because the point is, we're praying as God, through his holy Church, beginning in the Temple, has given us to pray. When you pray such a boring organization of the Psalms, you see that the liturgy of the hours is not some neat-o kean-o "order of worship;" it's just the Psalter, more or less straight through. Because nothing we can do can really add to the glory of God's Word.
Incidentally, I think this is what the Mass is really about. The Mass really comes down to one thing: reading the Scriptural narrative that says "This is my Body, this is my Blood, do this." Unfortunately, the austerity of this is sometimes lost in popular versions of in persona Christi. Pay attention to how the actual liturgy of the Mass goes. It's all in the third person, spoken to the Father. Contrary to popular belief, in persona Christi does not mean that suddenly the priest jumps in and "becomes" Christ. The words of institution are in quotation marks, surrounded by third-person narrative. In persona Christi means just that the priest is the one who gets to read this narrative in its authoritative context. (Proof of this is both a study of the phrase in persona in the middle ages, but even more, a very simple glance at the actual liturgy, what Catholics do when they pray.)
To be sure, "do this in memory of me" is Christ's promise that when the Church, duly ordered, with an ordained priest as celebrant, invokes these words, they are true: it is his body and blood. Still, we mustn't forget that what is happening at the Mass -- all that is happening -- is that we are invoking the words of the Bible. We are just repeating, over and over again, the central words of the Biblical narrative. As with the Psalms, that's just what Christians do: we worship by proclaiming the revealed words of God. We have, really, nothing to add.
Now, we do add things, and that's appropriate. What we add is solemnity. It's appropriate not to just leap into the Institution Narrative, but to indicate, as best we can, that we're taking this seriously. It's appropriate, with both the Psalms and the Mass, to add some other Biblical readings. The New Testament, in particular, is a way of connecting ourselves, standing-with, the early Church. We should appreciate the primativeness, the austerity, of reading letters -- letters -- written by St. Paul. More than anything, we are invoking the Church through the ages. By reading Paul, we try to enter into what it was like for those first Christians, who stood in awe before the words of Christ. Ditto for the Gospel reading, and the Psalm, and the Old Testament reading, if there is one.
To be sure, these readings are inspired. They speak the divine, revealed truth. But in a sense, the only point is to "pad" our reading of the Institution Narrative with things that help us enter in, that set the scene, that remind us that we belong to that same people of the early Church, that we stand before the same God, that Jesus is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.
We pad that reading, too, with prayers. That's fitting. The prayers should be sober. They should be . . . liturgical. Because it is, well, unfitting in a kind of prayer that is essential repetitive, Biblical, repeating someone else's words, to get too caught up in our own words. I always want to say this to Protestants: push too hard on the "pray with your own words" thing, the opposition between "your own words" and some dusty old written prayer, and you lose the Bible, because it is not my own words. That's just what the Bible is not. Or rather, Biblical prayer -- Catholic prayer -- means making God's words my own. To pray the Psalms is, in a sense, to forsake my own words, my own way of praying, and receive from God what prayer can be, should be. Biblical prayer is more truly our own than our own stupid words. And so liturgical prayer should be appropriately somber, appropriately liturgical, appropriately not-our-own, so that it can frame, and support, the real center of our prayer: the Psalms (in the liturgy of the hours) and the Institution Narrative (in the Mass).
Liturgical prayer should also be traditional. A very sad thing about the "new" texts of the Mass is that many of them were made up, more or less willy-nilly, by liturgist committees in the 1970s. Some of the prayers are very nice. And they are the prayer of the Church: that is fitting, because the Bible is the prayer of the Church, and we should pray with the words we receive. But in the Old Mass, the prayers came down from tradition, and the central euchology was from Sts. Gregory the Great and Leo the Great, the only two popes named doctors of the Church. That is fitting. Because it reflects that the Bible is handed down to us, that it is passed through the tradition. It is fitting, too, because these guys were great theologians, great writers, and great saints, so they wrote great prayers. But more importantly, they were popes, at the center of the Church, at the beginning of the age of the Church (the middle ages), in a sense, at the beginning of when liturgy was really congealing, putting together the Christian way of praying the Scriptures. To pray their prayers is to stand with the Bible, to receive the Bible, handed down to us through the ages.
Now for reform. Because I am not saying, let's go back. Let's just do it the way we did in 1962, and forever before. (Incidentally, as a subsequent post will somewhat argue, it was not forever before. The Council of Trent, sixteenth century, made the liturgy rigid in a way it had never been before. It was profoundly modern -- not profoundly bad, but profoundly modern.) I believe in reform. But here's what reform means.
The Bible must be first. Catholic prayer is Scriptural prayer. Vatican II called for a broader reading from the Bible. Fine. I mean, that's debatable, because the Psalms already contain the whole of Scripture. But the Psalms are better understood, and better understood to be the digest of Scripture, if you read the rest of Scripture. The modern situation, in which Catholics are ignorant of Scripture, is untraditional. In the Middle Ages, in the early ages, Christians lived and breathed Scripture. Thomas Aquinas, philosopher, theologian, whatever you wish he were, was a Bible teacher; that's what he did most of the time. And that must be restored. Indeed -- and I think this is the central thrust of Vatican II -- it must be extended, more fully, to an educated laity. We must all live Scripture as did St. Thomas -- and absolutely every one of his great contemporaries.
So Vatican II called for more Scripture in both the liturgy of the hours and the Mass. But it also called for a paring back. And this, too, I believe, is important. Because before Vatican II, and in anti-Vatican II circles now, there is a radically un-Catholic way of thinking that the liturgy is not Scriptural, that the Bible is somehow marginal to the liturgy. That is diabolical, directly contrary to the Catholic truth. Part of the reason for this mistake is that so many accretions have accumulated that it is not clear what's really going on.
So let me make a controversial case for Eucharistic Prayer II. It's the one usually used. The priest who married us -- a very holy young priest -- insisted on it because it's short, even though he thinks that's bad. Crowds just won't tolerate something longer. But the shortness, in my opinion, is its strength. Unlike the more traditional Roman Canon, Eucharistic Prayer I in the new liturgical books, Eucharistic Prayer II gets right to it. In the Roman Canon there is a danger -- a danger, not an inevitability -- of losing the Scripture in the beautiful prayers. We get so caught up with those beautiful (truly beautiful!) lists of martyrs and angels and all the rest, that we forget that the Eucharistic Prayer is about the Institution Narrative, the words of Jesus, the Bible in quotation. It is well that this central core be solemnized, but the danger of the Old Mass is that the solemnization covers up what is being solemnized. The Eucharistic Prayer -- and the whole Mass - should do one thing, and only thing only: emphasize that Institution Narrative. When it gets hidden, the liturgy is lost. We can debate, to be sure, whether the Roman Canon is successful. But we need to be clear about the single criterion of success: solemnizing the words of Jesus.
I think the most striking "advance" in the new Mass is the elimination of the prayers after Mass: the recitation of John's prologue, and the prayer to St. Michael of Leo XIII (late nineteenth century). These are nice things. Good little devotions. But, in my opinion, they do more to hide the meaning of the Mass than to reveal it. The Mass is not a catch-all of good things Catholics should pray. It is the words of Jesus, solemnized. The new Mass, in my opinion, is successful in making clear the order of the Mass: we prepare ourselves, then we read the Scriptures, with a homily to help us enter into them and a creed to summarize that the readings are about faith, then we solemnize the Institution Narrative, pray as Jesus taught us, receive his Body and Blood, and finish. That's it. It should be done solemnly, prayerfully -- much more prayerfully than it's almost ever done -- but it should be simple and austere. That is the Roman liturgy.
Another advantage -- and another controversial point -- is the use of the vernacular. I love Latin. I am a Latinist; I teach Latin, I spend much of my day reading Latin; I read the Bible in Latin, I pray in Latin. But Scripture is about words. The argument is sometimes made that Latin is good because we don't know what we're saying: that way it's more mysterious. But that argument is flat-out pagan. Christianity is founded on faith, and faith is intellectual. You need to believe something. The reason we pray the creed is because it tells us something really important about who God is, something we can't get from mystical reflection. The reason we pray all those Ave's in the rosary is to try to penetrate the words of Scripture they contain, to peer into the mysteries of grace. Nothing in mystical experience -- nothing -- no beautiful chant, no smoke and candles, no nothing, comes close to the words of Jesus: This is my Body, this is my Blood. And those words themselves are meaningless, horrific, worse than un-Christian, unless we learn who God is. And the Christian God is bigger than our imaginations. He must be articulated with words, with creeds, with the Bible. The Bible is a far deeper mysticism, because it allows us to articulate what we don't understand; ironically, the romanticism of smoke, candles, and Latin lets us rest too much in our own understanding, never challenges us to transcend the limits of our intellect. Faith requires hearing.
There should be Latin in the Mass, and there should be ancient prayers, because the Mass needs to communicate the act of tradition, of being handed down. The Mass needs to make as clear as possible that what we are doing does not begin or end with us. It is received. Scripture can be solemnized no other way. Latin is important for that reason: it expresses that the Mass is ecclesial. But we cannot let the Mass be lost in a cloud of unreason and unintelligibility. It must be Christian, and therefore it must have words, real words, words that we can understand -- or rather, that we can not understand, that challenge us. To read the Scriptures so that the congregation does not understand is not to read the Scriptures. Period.
There is a happy medium. There should be Latin, but there should be an appreciation of the vernacular, the importance of intelligibility. The accretions that distract us from the essence of the Mass (and encourage us to rush through all those bizarre prayers) should be pared back, but there should also be continuity. Reform of the liturgy should begin, of course, with saying it prayerfully, and making sure the homily is Scriptural and Christian. But next, the Pope should restore the ancient prayers of St. Gregory and St. Leo. We should beware of made-up prayers; as Vatican II said, when the prayers are reformed, they should be drawn from tradition, connecting us to the ages of tradition, of the Scriptures being handed down, not pieced together in committee. They should challenge us to think beyond the mentality of our age, because Scripture is beyond the mentality of our age.
The Scriptures and at least some of the prayers should be translated, but not dumbed down. It should be challenging language. King James could work, because it is a literal translation, a translation that adheres to what was said, instead of trying to make it sound current and easy and modern. The Bible is not current and easy and modern. The Bible should kick our butts, every time. That is Catholic liturgy.
With that, I'll close.
With the motu proprio and all the rest, it's worth thinking about liturgical reform. A good place to start is by thinking about the Liturgy of the Hours.
The Liturgy of the Hours is, of course, the series of offices that clerics and religious are required to pray, and laity encouraged to pray, through the day. The core of this liturgy is the Psalms, and that's important. The Psalms are the liturgy of Israel and the liturgy of the Bible. St. Athanasius (and many others) said, "The Psalms contain the whole of Scripture in the mode of praise." In other words, the Psalms are the Bible-for-prayer. There are big debates over how Catholics ought to think about revelation, but I'd put it this way: in the course of the development of the Temple liturgy, these 150 worship songs emerged as definitive and inspired. The community recognized, one way or another, that these were true, as in, big-t True, proclaiming what needed to be proclaimed. They spoke the truth about God then, and they foretold the truth of the Messiah to come. And so they were the liturgy.
Already in the New Testament the Psalms emerge as the continuing prayer of the Christian Church. (I won't do a Scripture study here to prove it, but it's true.) And this was natural enough -- I don't think it occurred to the early Church that there was any rupture with what had come before. The true rupture, they would say -- and this is the reason for all the debates that later got labeled, anachronistically, as anti-Semitism -- is the Jews who rejected the culmination of revelation in the person of Jesus the Christ. In any case, the liturgy continued, fulfilled. The Christians sang the Psalms because they still worshiped the God of the Psalms and now the Messiah of the Psalms, too, and, like any Jews, they believed the Psalms were divinely inspired. So they continued the Temple liturgy. They sang the songs.
The desert fathers are great on this. I'm no expert, but I've taken a couple classes on the desert. Basically, once Christians were no longer being executed en masse (after Constantine, so fourth century), they had the freedom to seek God unhindered, and many hit the deserts of the Levant, especially Egypt. And what did they do? They prayed the Psalms. In fact, they spent all day sitting there repeating these sacred songs, digging deeper and deeper into the God and Messiah revealed and praised therein. This had been happening in the ordinary Christian communities as well, but you really see it take off in the desert.
Then comes Benedict (sixth century), who codifies this way of "desert" monastic prayer for the West. The Rule of St. Benedict does a lot, but at the center is the opus Dei, the praying of the Psalms.
Now, this narrative is all sort of beside the point, and you could trace the lineage other ways, but the point is, the praying of the Psalms is an unhindered tradition. It's nothing made up or discovered. We pray the Psalms now because we have always prayed the Psalms. The early Church prayed them, Jesus prayed them, and Israel, the pre-Church, prayed them. They are the truth of God in praise. And that is Christian prayer.
One more intriguing point. According to the old Catholic encyclopedia (1907-1914), part of the genius of the Roman Psalter is its, well, its lack of genius. A couple psalms are selected for special significance. You've got Psalm 51 allotted to Friday, because it's a penitential day. You've got those last psalms of praise put in the morning, because it's good to praise God in the morning. And a couple more. But otherwise, the traditional Roman Psalter has a pretty boring organization. For example, vespers on Sunday is Psalms 109-113, Monday 114-120, Tuesday 121-125, etc. There's a genius here. But the genius is in austerity, because the point is, we're praying as God, through his holy Church, beginning in the Temple, has given us to pray. When you pray such a boring organization of the Psalms, you see that the liturgy of the hours is not some neat-o kean-o "order of worship;" it's just the Psalter, more or less straight through. Because nothing we can do can really add to the glory of God's Word.
Incidentally, I think this is what the Mass is really about. The Mass really comes down to one thing: reading the Scriptural narrative that says "This is my Body, this is my Blood, do this." Unfortunately, the austerity of this is sometimes lost in popular versions of in persona Christi. Pay attention to how the actual liturgy of the Mass goes. It's all in the third person, spoken to the Father. Contrary to popular belief, in persona Christi does not mean that suddenly the priest jumps in and "becomes" Christ. The words of institution are in quotation marks, surrounded by third-person narrative. In persona Christi means just that the priest is the one who gets to read this narrative in its authoritative context. (Proof of this is both a study of the phrase in persona in the middle ages, but even more, a very simple glance at the actual liturgy, what Catholics do when they pray.)
To be sure, "do this in memory of me" is Christ's promise that when the Church, duly ordered, with an ordained priest as celebrant, invokes these words, they are true: it is his body and blood. Still, we mustn't forget that what is happening at the Mass -- all that is happening -- is that we are invoking the words of the Bible. We are just repeating, over and over again, the central words of the Biblical narrative. As with the Psalms, that's just what Christians do: we worship by proclaiming the revealed words of God. We have, really, nothing to add.
Now, we do add things, and that's appropriate. What we add is solemnity. It's appropriate not to just leap into the Institution Narrative, but to indicate, as best we can, that we're taking this seriously. It's appropriate, with both the Psalms and the Mass, to add some other Biblical readings. The New Testament, in particular, is a way of connecting ourselves, standing-with, the early Church. We should appreciate the primativeness, the austerity, of reading letters -- letters -- written by St. Paul. More than anything, we are invoking the Church through the ages. By reading Paul, we try to enter into what it was like for those first Christians, who stood in awe before the words of Christ. Ditto for the Gospel reading, and the Psalm, and the Old Testament reading, if there is one.
To be sure, these readings are inspired. They speak the divine, revealed truth. But in a sense, the only point is to "pad" our reading of the Institution Narrative with things that help us enter in, that set the scene, that remind us that we belong to that same people of the early Church, that we stand before the same God, that Jesus is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.
We pad that reading, too, with prayers. That's fitting. The prayers should be sober. They should be . . . liturgical. Because it is, well, unfitting in a kind of prayer that is essential repetitive, Biblical, repeating someone else's words, to get too caught up in our own words. I always want to say this to Protestants: push too hard on the "pray with your own words" thing, the opposition between "your own words" and some dusty old written prayer, and you lose the Bible, because it is not my own words. That's just what the Bible is not. Or rather, Biblical prayer -- Catholic prayer -- means making God's words my own. To pray the Psalms is, in a sense, to forsake my own words, my own way of praying, and receive from God what prayer can be, should be. Biblical prayer is more truly our own than our own stupid words. And so liturgical prayer should be appropriately somber, appropriately liturgical, appropriately not-our-own, so that it can frame, and support, the real center of our prayer: the Psalms (in the liturgy of the hours) and the Institution Narrative (in the Mass).
Liturgical prayer should also be traditional. A very sad thing about the "new" texts of the Mass is that many of them were made up, more or less willy-nilly, by liturgist committees in the 1970s. Some of the prayers are very nice. And they are the prayer of the Church: that is fitting, because the Bible is the prayer of the Church, and we should pray with the words we receive. But in the Old Mass, the prayers came down from tradition, and the central euchology was from Sts. Gregory the Great and Leo the Great, the only two popes named doctors of the Church. That is fitting. Because it reflects that the Bible is handed down to us, that it is passed through the tradition. It is fitting, too, because these guys were great theologians, great writers, and great saints, so they wrote great prayers. But more importantly, they were popes, at the center of the Church, at the beginning of the age of the Church (the middle ages), in a sense, at the beginning of when liturgy was really congealing, putting together the Christian way of praying the Scriptures. To pray their prayers is to stand with the Bible, to receive the Bible, handed down to us through the ages.
Now for reform. Because I am not saying, let's go back. Let's just do it the way we did in 1962, and forever before. (Incidentally, as a subsequent post will somewhat argue, it was not forever before. The Council of Trent, sixteenth century, made the liturgy rigid in a way it had never been before. It was profoundly modern -- not profoundly bad, but profoundly modern.) I believe in reform. But here's what reform means.
The Bible must be first. Catholic prayer is Scriptural prayer. Vatican II called for a broader reading from the Bible. Fine. I mean, that's debatable, because the Psalms already contain the whole of Scripture. But the Psalms are better understood, and better understood to be the digest of Scripture, if you read the rest of Scripture. The modern situation, in which Catholics are ignorant of Scripture, is untraditional. In the Middle Ages, in the early ages, Christians lived and breathed Scripture. Thomas Aquinas, philosopher, theologian, whatever you wish he were, was a Bible teacher; that's what he did most of the time. And that must be restored. Indeed -- and I think this is the central thrust of Vatican II -- it must be extended, more fully, to an educated laity. We must all live Scripture as did St. Thomas -- and absolutely every one of his great contemporaries.
So Vatican II called for more Scripture in both the liturgy of the hours and the Mass. But it also called for a paring back. And this, too, I believe, is important. Because before Vatican II, and in anti-Vatican II circles now, there is a radically un-Catholic way of thinking that the liturgy is not Scriptural, that the Bible is somehow marginal to the liturgy. That is diabolical, directly contrary to the Catholic truth. Part of the reason for this mistake is that so many accretions have accumulated that it is not clear what's really going on.
So let me make a controversial case for Eucharistic Prayer II. It's the one usually used. The priest who married us -- a very holy young priest -- insisted on it because it's short, even though he thinks that's bad. Crowds just won't tolerate something longer. But the shortness, in my opinion, is its strength. Unlike the more traditional Roman Canon, Eucharistic Prayer I in the new liturgical books, Eucharistic Prayer II gets right to it. In the Roman Canon there is a danger -- a danger, not an inevitability -- of losing the Scripture in the beautiful prayers. We get so caught up with those beautiful (truly beautiful!) lists of martyrs and angels and all the rest, that we forget that the Eucharistic Prayer is about the Institution Narrative, the words of Jesus, the Bible in quotation. It is well that this central core be solemnized, but the danger of the Old Mass is that the solemnization covers up what is being solemnized. The Eucharistic Prayer -- and the whole Mass - should do one thing, and only thing only: emphasize that Institution Narrative. When it gets hidden, the liturgy is lost. We can debate, to be sure, whether the Roman Canon is successful. But we need to be clear about the single criterion of success: solemnizing the words of Jesus.
I think the most striking "advance" in the new Mass is the elimination of the prayers after Mass: the recitation of John's prologue, and the prayer to St. Michael of Leo XIII (late nineteenth century). These are nice things. Good little devotions. But, in my opinion, they do more to hide the meaning of the Mass than to reveal it. The Mass is not a catch-all of good things Catholics should pray. It is the words of Jesus, solemnized. The new Mass, in my opinion, is successful in making clear the order of the Mass: we prepare ourselves, then we read the Scriptures, with a homily to help us enter into them and a creed to summarize that the readings are about faith, then we solemnize the Institution Narrative, pray as Jesus taught us, receive his Body and Blood, and finish. That's it. It should be done solemnly, prayerfully -- much more prayerfully than it's almost ever done -- but it should be simple and austere. That is the Roman liturgy.
Another advantage -- and another controversial point -- is the use of the vernacular. I love Latin. I am a Latinist; I teach Latin, I spend much of my day reading Latin; I read the Bible in Latin, I pray in Latin. But Scripture is about words. The argument is sometimes made that Latin is good because we don't know what we're saying: that way it's more mysterious. But that argument is flat-out pagan. Christianity is founded on faith, and faith is intellectual. You need to believe something. The reason we pray the creed is because it tells us something really important about who God is, something we can't get from mystical reflection. The reason we pray all those Ave's in the rosary is to try to penetrate the words of Scripture they contain, to peer into the mysteries of grace. Nothing in mystical experience -- nothing -- no beautiful chant, no smoke and candles, no nothing, comes close to the words of Jesus: This is my Body, this is my Blood. And those words themselves are meaningless, horrific, worse than un-Christian, unless we learn who God is. And the Christian God is bigger than our imaginations. He must be articulated with words, with creeds, with the Bible. The Bible is a far deeper mysticism, because it allows us to articulate what we don't understand; ironically, the romanticism of smoke, candles, and Latin lets us rest too much in our own understanding, never challenges us to transcend the limits of our intellect. Faith requires hearing.
There should be Latin in the Mass, and there should be ancient prayers, because the Mass needs to communicate the act of tradition, of being handed down. The Mass needs to make as clear as possible that what we are doing does not begin or end with us. It is received. Scripture can be solemnized no other way. Latin is important for that reason: it expresses that the Mass is ecclesial. But we cannot let the Mass be lost in a cloud of unreason and unintelligibility. It must be Christian, and therefore it must have words, real words, words that we can understand -- or rather, that we can not understand, that challenge us. To read the Scriptures so that the congregation does not understand is not to read the Scriptures. Period.
There is a happy medium. There should be Latin, but there should be an appreciation of the vernacular, the importance of intelligibility. The accretions that distract us from the essence of the Mass (and encourage us to rush through all those bizarre prayers) should be pared back, but there should also be continuity. Reform of the liturgy should begin, of course, with saying it prayerfully, and making sure the homily is Scriptural and Christian. But next, the Pope should restore the ancient prayers of St. Gregory and St. Leo. We should beware of made-up prayers; as Vatican II said, when the prayers are reformed, they should be drawn from tradition, connecting us to the ages of tradition, of the Scriptures being handed down, not pieced together in committee. They should challenge us to think beyond the mentality of our age, because Scripture is beyond the mentality of our age.
The Scriptures and at least some of the prayers should be translated, but not dumbed down. It should be challenging language. King James could work, because it is a literal translation, a translation that adheres to what was said, instead of trying to make it sound current and easy and modern. The Bible is not current and easy and modern. The Bible should kick our butts, every time. That is Catholic liturgy.
With that, I'll close.
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