Elena Curti?s article last week on the old rite of Mass impelled an American priest and church historian to set down his recollections of the past
THE American convert Cardinal Avery Dulles SJ writes of the pre-Vatican II Mass: ?If there be anyone who contends that in order to be converted to the Catholic faith one must be first attracted by the beauty of the liturgy, he will have me to explain away. Filled as I was with a Puritan antipathy toward splendour in religious ritual, I found myself actually repulsed by the elaborate symbolism in which the Holy Sacrifice is clothed.? Accustomed to Presbyterian worship, Dulles says that in the Masses he attended as an undergraduate ?there was little external unity to be discerned. The priest, so far from telling the congregation when to sit or stand or kneel, carried out his tasks almost as though he were alone. The congregation, for their part, were not watching with scrupulous exactitude the movements of the celebrant. Some, on the contrary, were reciting prayers on mysterious strings of beads which Catholics call rosaries. Others were thumbing through pages of prayer-books and missals, which, for all I knew, might have been totally unrelated to the Mass. Not even a hymn was sung to bring unity into this apparently dull and unconnected service.?
Dulles?s experience was also mine ? with the important exception that, as a High Church Anglican, I found Puritanism as off-putting as the old silent Latin Mass was for Dulles. For the first 32 years of my life I was nourished in the Anglican Communion by a liturgy which fulfilled all the postulates of the nascent Catholic liturgical movement (then still suspect in the English-speaking world). Moreover, for six years I had the high privilege, like my father and grandfather before me, of leading the celebration of that liturgy as an Anglican priest. The Elizabethan language we used strikes me now as precious and stilted. But the Eucharist we celebrated was deeply reverent. There was full congregational participation (Catholic references, pre-Vatican II, to ?the dialogue Mass? amused us: we knew no other). There was fervent singing of hymns which I shall miss until the day I die. I heard powerful preaching which moved me then, and moves me still.
With my fellow convert and valued friend, Richard Rutt, one-time Anglican Bishop of Leicester and now a married Catholic priest of the Plymouth diocese, I can say: ?A half century ago, holy men and women in the Anglican Communion taught me orthodox Catholic doctrine, penitential discipline, the classic paths of prayer and meditation, love for the Holy Mass, affection for Our Lady, lively consciousness of the communion of saints, deep reverence for Scripture and the joy of almsgiving.?
As an undergraduate, seminarian, and Anglican priest I often attended Mass in Roman Catholic churches on both sides of the Atlantic. It was not remotely like the ?Rolls-Royce Mass? described last week by Elena Curti in her excellent article. Mostly silent, the few Latin parts which could be heard were so gabbled and garbled that they might have as well have been in Mandarin Chinese. The vernacular prayers at the end, ?For the conversion of Russia?, were so rushed that the priest was often well into them before one realised he had switched to English.
The Mass itself was often taken at breakneck speed. A local lawyer with six years of Latin in the St Louis secondary school founded by Ampleforth Benedictines recalls being scolded by priests for not saying the Latin responses fast enough. His experience was not unusual. The man at the ?Rolls-Royce Mass? who professed himself scandalised (as he should have been) at 10-minute new-rite Masses is too young to recall members of his grandfather?s generation boasting about priests who could get through the considerably longer Tridentine rite in a quarter of an hour or less. And as for the woman interviewed by your reporter who found a new-rite Mass ?a shambles?, that is exactly what I witnessed many times over in Catholic parish churches five decades ago. ?Such little reverence?, she said, ?I was scandalised and distressed.? My sentiments exactly. Only at the conventual Mass in Benedictine and Trappist monasteries did I find the dignity, reverence, and beauty I craved. And such liturgies were available, of course, to few.
As a newly ordained curate in an inner-city Anglo-Catholic parish I had an experience which I recognise, in retrospect, as a milestone in my spiritual journey. Most of my afternoons were spent visiting members of the parish in suburbs so distant that few of them still attended the church I served. Calling one day on an elderly lady, I heard, for the umpteenth time, ?I don?t go to Grace Church any more, Father. It?s too far away.? Then came the shocker: ?I go to Sacred Heart across the street. It?s just about the same.? I gasped. I knew only too well what went on in Sacred Heart Church. To call the hurried, slapdash, mostly silent Masses there ?just about the same? as the stately liturgy we celebrated ? with beautiful music (three-manual organ, a choir of boys and men), gorgeous vestments, flowers and incense ? took my breath away.
It also set me thinking. I realised that the liturgy I loved required for its appreciation a level of culture and education which was available to few. For every one like me, there were easily a thousand like that good soul who found the silent Latin Masses at Sacred Heart ?just about the same? as the reverent and beautiful liturgies at Grace Church. Anglican worship of my sort, I had to acknowledge, was for the few, not for the many.
I entered the Catholic Church in 1960. After a year-long period of agonising reappraisal, I had come to believe that my Anglican faith was not so much false as incomplete; and that the claims and teaching of the Catholic Church were true. My decision to enter that Church, like that of Cardinal Dulles, was an affair of the head, not the heart. It was, for me, an enormous step backward liturgically. Within months I fled to the German-speaking world, where I remained for a decade. There, in part because of the decades-old liturgical movement, in part because Germans have sung hymns at Mass ever since the Reformation ? but also because Germans take everything, especially their religion, in deadly earnest ? I found a spiritual home where I could worship as I had been trained to do since childhood. When I returned to my own country in 1970 it was as a priest of a German diocese. I became a St Louis priest only in 1983.
The ?Rolls-Royce Mass? witnessed by your correspondent is beautiful. But it is a show piece. It also fosters an elitist mentality which undermines the unity of those who, ?though many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf? (1 Cor. 10:17). I encountered this elitism myself when I preached some years ago in the local Catholic parish which celebrates the Tridentine Mass once every Sunday. In the sacristy I found an army of men and boys making snide remarks about their fellow Catholics (easily 99 per cent) who used the new rite; a kind of gnosticism (possession of special knowledge available only to the initiated) which I thought I had abandoned for ever when I left the Anglican Church. The triumphalistic tone in some reports of the recent internationally publicised Tridentine Mass in Rome suggests that Pope Paul VI was prescient to foresee the damage to Catholic unity which could arise from the simultaneous use of two different rites in the Church, and right to forbid this.
How many parishes, anywhere in the world, are capable of putting on the elaborate show of the ?Rolls-Royce Mass? so well described by your correspondent ? even occasionally, let alone every Sunday? The comparison of such worship to opera is apt. An avid opera fan myself, I recognised long ago that it is an acquired taste, even for those who enjoy classical music (as most people do not). I learned to enjoy Puccini in my twenties, and Verdi in my thirties. But I was past middle age before I could appreciate Wagner. Is liturgy at that rarefied height the best way of fulfilling the Lord?s parting command (Mt. 28:19): ?Go, make disciples of all nations??
The solution to the lack of reverence in worship of which many complain today (with justice) is not to be found in nostalgia for a past which most of those afflicted with this nostalgia cannot remember ? and which the dwindling number of those with actual experience of the old rite remember very selectively, or not at all. The German parish priest whose assistant I was in the late Sixties commented one day on his experience of the then recently abandoned old Mass: ?The Latin went in here? (pointing to his head), ?but not here? (indicating his heart). His assessment was generous. A 75-year-old Jesuit university professor recently conceded: ?Few of us ever really understood the prayers we were reciting.?
Urgently needed today is truly reverent, prayerful celebration of the rite used daily by the Pope, and by Catholics of the Latin rite throughout the world. We need also to repair the devastation wrought by the musical iconoclasm of recent decades. And we need doctrinally sound preaching, inspired and permeated by the Bible, which joyfully and enthusiastically proclaims the good news of the Gospel: that God loves sinners. These are the elements of what I learned, half a century ago, constitutes ?the beauty of holiness, and the holiness of beauty?.
Fr John Jay Hughes is a priest of the St Louis archdiocese.