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Where truth and beauty meet

Understanding Benedict - 7

Joseph Ratzinger believes the changes to the Mass that followed the Second Vatican Council signalled a rupture from what had gone before. As Pope, he has taken active steps to bring back elements that were lost and to restore a sense of continuity

In July 2007, Pope Benedict issued the motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum, authorising the free celebration of Mass using the unreformed pre-conciliar missal, without need for the permission of local bishops.
This controversial measure delighted “traditionalists”, but seemed to many other Catholics to call into question the Second Vatican Council’s decision that the pre-conciliar liturgy needed urgent and extensive reform. It seemed also to undermine the authority of bishops over the celebration of the liturgy in their dioceses. Accordingly, the motu proprio was accompanied by an open letter to the bishops seeking to reassure them on both scores.
But a perception remains that the Pope has somehow weakened the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, and that he has perhaps more sympathy for the “Tridentinist” lobby than for the views of the majority of Catholics, and their bishops. To understand Pope Benedict’s views on the liturgy we need to remember, first, that he is a man profoundly influenced by his upbringing in small-town Bavaria, and, second, that his theology is deeply shaped by the interwar German Liturgical Movement. The pious son of a pious family, he has left a vivid account of his own awakening to the beauty and immemorial antiquity of the Mass in the churches of his childhood.
“A reality that no one had simply thought up … no official authority or great individual had created,” Pope Benedict has written. “This mysterious fabric of texts and actions had grown from the faith of the Church over the centuries. It bore the whole weight of history within itself, and yet, at the same time, it was much more than the product of human history.”
Very much at ease with the religion that formed him, whether the musical glory of a Haydn Mass in the gold-and-white splendour of a Baroque church, or the folk customs of the Bavarian countryside, he is suspicious of academic critique of such inherited religious forms. If the ancient ways of doing things don’t quite square with what the theologians think correct, so much the worse for theology.
“When we walk our streets with the Lord on Corpus Christi, we do not need to look anxiously over our shoulders at out theological theories to see if everything is in order and can be accounted for, but we can open ourselves wide to the joy of the redeemed,” Pope Benedict has written.
But theology as well as nostalgia shapes the Pope’s convictions. The young Ratzinger was profoundly influenced by the Liturgical Movement, and especially by the writings of the Munich-based theologian Romano Guardini, whose influential classic, The Spirit of the Liturgy, argued that the liturgy was the heart of what it meant to be a Catholic. It was a school of wisdom and understanding, in which all the resources of human culture were deployed into “the supreme example of an objectively established rule of spiritual life”.
Guardini stressed the communal aspects of the liturgy – “the liturgy does not say ‘I’, but ‘we’ – and its transcendence of the merely local. In the liturgy, the Christian “sees himself face to face with God not as an entity, but as a member of the unity” of the Church. The liturgy was never frigid – “emotion flows in its depths … like the fiery heart of the volcano”, but it is “emotion under the strictest control”.
This universalising restraint, the “style of the liturgy”, trained and liberated Christians into wider and deeper feelings than their own limited experience, and drew them into the universal aspirations of the whole of redeemed humanity, identifying them with the Christ whose prayer the liturgy is.
Guardini’s Spirit of the Liturgy was a milestone in Joseph Ratzinger’s intellectual and religious development. To begin with, it made him a reformer. Guardini believed that the glory of the liturgy had become cluttered by the accumulated rubbish of centuries, and needed far-reaching reform. So as a student chaplain he pioneered avant-garde “dialogue masses” at an altar facing the people, using vernacular hymns.
The young Ratzinger shared this desire for change, stressed the problems of a Latin liturgy, and deplored the communal dynamic of the old Mass as that of “a lonely hierarchy facing a group of laymen, each one of whom is shut off in his own missal or devotional book”. During the Second Vatican Council he would describe the Latin Mass of his youth as “archaeological”, and “a closed book to the faithful”. In the years after the council, however, Ratzinger became disillusioned with the actual outcome of liturgical reform. He had hoped for a reform that would reveal the beauty of the ancient liturgy through careful conservation and restoration, not fundamental change. What he thought Vatican II unleashed was a crass and faddish liturgical revolution, which did violence both to the Mass and the Divine Office, not least by jettisoning Latin, and with it 1,000 years of liturgical music.
For Ratzinger, this represented a disastrous break in the Church’s tradition, the “magnificent work” of Guardini and others “thrown into the wastepaper basket”. In place of the ancient “giveness” of the liturgy, he detected a restless modern obsession with change and innovation, and a preoccupation with human community that excluded or hindered true openness to God. All this came to a head for him in the imposition of the Missal of Paul VI as the sole legitimate form of the Eucharist. This he saw as the substitution of the concoction of liturgical experts in place of an organically evolved liturgy.
As Ratzinger wrote in his memoir, Milestones: “ … I was dismayed by the prohibition of the old Missal, since nothing of the sort had ever happened in the entire history of the liturgy. … [this] introduced a breach into the history of the liturgy whose consequences could only be tragic … [and] thereby makes the liturgy appear to be no longer a living development, but the product of erudite work and juridical authority…”
For Ratzinger the theologian, the liturgy is of its nature an inheritance, a space we inhabit as others have inhabited it before us. It is never an instrument we design or manipulate. Self-made liturgy is for him a contradiction in terms, and he distrusts liturgies that emphasise spontaneity, self-expression and extreme forms of local inculturation.
In his own 2000 book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Ratzinger scathingly compared such liturgies to the worship of the Golden Calf, “a feast that the community gives itself, a festival of self-affirmation. Instead of being worship of God, it becomes a circle closed in on itself: eating, drinking and making merry. It is a kind of banal self-gratification … no longer concerned with God but with giving oneself a nice little alternative world, manufactured from one’s own resources.”
Benedict therefore believes that behind many celebrations of the new liturgy lie a raft of disastrous theological, cultural, sociological and aesthetic assumptions, linked to the unsettled time in which the liturgical reforms were carried out. In particular, he believes that twentieth-century theologies of the Eucharist place far too much emphasis on the notion that the fundamental form of the Eucharist is that of a meal, at the cost of underplaying the cosmic, redemptive, and sacrificial character of the Mass.
The Pope, of course, himself calls the Mass the “Feast of Faith”, “the Banquet of the reconciled”. Nevertheless Calvary and the empty tomb, rather than the Upper Room, are for him the proper symbolic locations of Christian liturgy. The sacrificial character of the Eucharist has to be evident in the manner of its celebration, and the failure to embody this adequately in the actual performance of the new liturgy seems to him one of the central problems of the post-conciliar reforms.
Clearly, these opinions place the Pope as a theologian at right angles to a good deal that is most characteristic of the post-conciliar liturgy. We now have a Pope profoundly unhappy about much of what goes on in our parish churches Sunday by Sunday. In his view, the liturgy is meant to still and calm human activity, to allow God to be God, to quiet our chatter in favour of attention to the Word of God and in adoration and communion with the self-gift of the Word incarnate.
The call for active participation and instant accessibility seem to him to have dumbed down the mystery we celebrate, and left us with a banal inadequate language (and music) of prayer. The “active participation” in the liturgy for which Vatican II called, he argues, emphatically does not mean participation in many acts. Rather, it means a deeper entry by everyone present into the one great action of the liturgy, its only real action, which is Christ’s self-giving on the Cross. For Ratzinger we can best enter into the action of the Mass by a recollected silence, and by traditional gestures of self-offering and adoration – the Sign of the Cross, folded hands, reverent kneeling.
Pope Benedict’s views on the position of the priest at the altar are in line with all this. He believes that the spread of the celebration of Mass versus populum, facing the people, is a calamitous error. Based on the meal paradigm, in which the altar is the family table, it was not in fact ordered by the Council, and rests, he thinks, on bad historical scholarship, bad theology, and bad social anthropology.
“The turning of the priest to the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle. In its outward form it no longer opens out towards what is ahead and above, but is closed in on itself… [Whereas in the past, by facing East at Mass, Catholics] “did not close themselves into a circle; they did not gaze at one another; but as the pilgrim people of God they set off for the Oriens, for the Christ who comes to meet us,” Pope Benedict has written.
For the Pope, therefore, liturgical practice since the Council has taken a wrong turn, aesthetically impoverished, creating a rupture in the continuity of Catholic worship, and reflecting and even fostering a defective understanding of the Divine and our relationship to it. His decision to permit the free celebration of the Tridentine liturgy was intended both to repair that rupture and to issue a call to the recovery of the theological, spiritual and cultural values that he sees as underlying the old Mass. In his letter to the bishops of July 2007, he expressed the hope that the two forms of the one Roman liturgy might cross-fertilise each other, the old Missal being enriched by the use of the many beautiful collects and prefaces of Paul VI’s reformed Missal, and the celebration of the Novus Ordo recovering by example some of the “sacrality” that characterised the older form.
Given the depth of Joseph Ratzinger’s aversion to what he sees as the theological and cultural poverty of much post-conciliar liturgy, it is no surprise that as Pope he should act to “correct” this situation, though he knew well that the motu proprio would be viewed with dismay by many episcopal conferences. The Pope knows, too, that support for the old liturgy is often part of a package of social, political and ecclesial attitudes not easily reconciled with either the spirit or the express teaching of Vatican II.
In the July 2007 episcopal letter, Pope Benedict stressed the need for charity and pastoral prudence in handling what he called the “exaggerations and at times social aspects unduly linked to the attitude of the faithful attached to the ancient Latin liturgical tradition”. The public-relations fiasco over the lifting of the excommunication of the holocaust-denying Lefebvrist Bishop Richard Williamson, however, suggests that the Vatican’s antennae for the wider implications of these liturgical issues are not as good as they ought to be.
It is Pope Benedict’s hope that the free celebration of the old Mass will help reconcile to the wider Church many of those who view Vatican II with deep suspicion. It is possible, however, to sympathise with many of the Pope’s liturgical instincts and preferences, while fearing that his gesture, and the manner of its making, will be read by many as a sign of his own reservations about the work of the Council, and thereby help entrench such reservations at the heart of the Church’s worship.

n Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity, and Fellow and Director of Studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge.