A
fascinating window into the ecclesiastical landscape of nearly forty years ago.
It is striking that when the establishment spokesman’s claims about ad orientem are refuted by Michael
Davies Fr Champlin puts up no resistance. He knew his claims were misleading
and once exposed he sees no need to resist. The denial of any causal connection
between the post-conciliar confusion and the direction taken by the council
seems bizarre from the vantage point afforded by time.
The article below was taken from the National Review website, which can be accessed here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451484/latin-mass-william-f-buckley-jr-lamented-its-passing
************
The article below was taken from the National Review website, which can be accessed here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451484/latin-mass-william-f-buckley-jr-lamented-its-passing
*****
Reflections on the Final Solution to the Latin Mass
by William F. Buckley Jr.
William F. Buckley Jr. prayed that the new Mass would ‘yield a rich harvest
of informed Christians.’ It required from him a strenuous act of faith.
Editor’s Note: This article was
originally published in Commonweal on November 10, 1967, and is
republished here by permission of the Buckley Estate.
In January of this year my sister died, age
49, eldest of ten children, and mother of ten children, the lot of us
catapulted into a dumb grief whence we sought relief by many means, principal among
them the conviction, now reified by desire, that our separation from her is
impermanent. It was the moment to recall not merely the promises of Christ, but
their magical cogency; the moment to remind ourselves as forcefully as we knew
how of the depths of the Christian experience, of the Christian mystery, so
that when one of us communicated with her priest, we asked if he would consent
to a funeral Mass in the manner of the days gone by, which request he gladly
granted. And so on Jan. 18, in the sub-zero weather of a little town in
northwestern Connecticut, in the ugly little church we all grew up in, the
priest recited the Mass of the Dead, and the organist accompanied the soloist
who sang the Gregorian dirge in words the mourners did not clearly discern,
words which had we discerned them we would not have been able exactly to
translate, and yet we experienced, not only her family but her friends, not
alone the Catholics among us but also the Protestants and the Jews, something
akin to that synaesthesia which nowadays most spiritually restless folk find it
necessary to discover in drugs, or from a guru in Mysterious India.
Six months later
my sister’s oldest daughter — the first of the grandchildren — was married.
With some hesitation (one must not be overbearing) her father asked the same
priest (of noble mien and great heart) whether this happy ritual might also be
performed in the Latin. He replied with understanding and grace that that would
not be possible, inasmuch as he would be performing on this occasion not in a
remote corner of Connecticut, but in West Hartford, practically within the
earshot of the bishop. We felt very wicked at having attempted anything so
audacious within the walls of the episcopacy; and so the wedding took place
according to the current cant, with everybody popping up, and kneeling down,
and responding, more or less, to the stream of objurgations that issued from
the nervous and tone-deaf young commentator, all together now, Who Do We Appreciate? Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!
Je-zus — it was awful. My beloved wife — to whom I have been beholden for
17 years, and who has borne with me through countless weddings of my countless
relations, who was with me and clutched my hand during the funeral a few months
earlier, whom I had not invited to my church since the vulgarizations of 1964,
so anxious was I that, as a member of the Anglican communion, she should
continue to remember our services as she had known them, in their inscrutable
majesty — turned to me early in the ritual in utter incredulity, wondering
whether something was especially awry. Hypersensitive, I rebuked her, muttering
something to the effect that she had no right to be so ignorant of what had
been going on for three years; and she withdrew in anger. She was right, I was utterly
wrong. How could she, an innocent Protestant, begin to conceive of the
liturgical disfigurations of the past few years? My own reaction was the
protective reaction of the son whose father, the chronic drunkard, is first
espied unsteady on his feet by someone from whom one has greatly cared to
conceal the fact. Let it be objected that the essential fact of the matter is
that the sacrament of matrimony was duly conferred, and what else is it that
matters? My sensibilities, that’s what.
The Bentham Barometer
They do not
matter, of course, in any Benthamite reckoning of the success of the new
liturgy. Concerning this point, I yield completely, or rather almost
completely. It is absolutely right that the vernacular should displace the
Latin if by doing so the rituals of Catholic Christianity bring a greater
satisfaction to the laity, and a deeper comprehension of their religion. There
oughtn’t to be any argument on this point, and there certainly isn’t any from
me — though I cherish the bodkin Sir Arnold Lunn so deftly inserted in the
soft-tissues of that argument: “If it is so,” he said, arguing along with
Evelyn Waugh and others for one (1) Latin Mass each Sunday in the larger
churches, “that the Latin Mass is only for the educated few, surely Mother Church
in all her charity can find a little place even for the educated few?” Indeed
when a most learned and attractive young priest from my own parish asked me to
serve as a lector in the new Mass I acquiesced, read all the relevant
literature and, to be sure warily, hoped that something was about to unfold
before me which would vindicate the progressives.
I hung on doggedly
for three years, until a month ago when I wrote my pastor that I no longer
thought it appropriate regularly to serve as lector. During those three years I
observed the evolution of the new Mass, and the reaction to it of the
congregation (the largest, by the way, in Connecticut). The church holds 1,000
people and, at first, four hymns were prescribed. They were subsequently
reduced to three, even as, in the course of the experiment, the commentator
absorbed the duties of the lector, or vice versa, depending on whether you are
the ex-commentator or the ex-lector. At our church three years ago perhaps a
dozen people out of 1,000 sang the hymn. Now perhaps three dozen out of 1,000
sing the hymn. (It is not much different with the prayers.) That is atypical,
to be sure — the church is large, and overawing to the uncertain group singer,
i.e., to most non-Protestant Americans. In other Catholic churches, I have
noted, the congregations tend to join a little bit more firmly in the song. In
none that I have been to is there anything like the joyous unison that the
bards of the new liturgy thrummed about in the anticipatory literature, the
only exception being the highly regimented school my son attends, at which the
reverend headmaster has means to induce cooperation in whatever enterprise
strikes his fancy. (I have noticed that my son does not join in the
hymn-singing when he is home, though the reason why is not necessarily
indifference, is almost surely not recalcitrance, is most likely a realistic
appreciation of his inability to contribute to the musical story-line.)
If clarity is the
desideratum, or however you say the word in English, then the thing to do is to
jettison, just to begin with, most of St. Paul, whose epistles are in some
respects inscrutable to some of the people some of the time, and in most
respects inscrutable to most of the people most of the time.
I must, of course,
judge primarily on the basis of my own experience, but it is conclusive at my
own church, and I venture to say without fear of contradiction that the joint
singing and prayers are a fiasco, which is all right I suppose — the Christian
martyrs endured worse exasperations and profited more from them than we endure
from or are likely to benefit from the singing of the hymns at St. Mary’s
Church. What is troublesome is the difficulty one has in dogging one’s own
spiritual pursuits in the random cacophony. Really, the new liturgists should
have offered training in yogi, or whatever else Mother Church in her
resourcefulness might baptize as a distinctively Catholic means by which we
might tune off the fascistic static of the contemporary Mass, during which one
is either attempting to sing, totally neglecting the prayers at the foot of the
altar which suddenly we are told are irrelevant; or attempting to read the
missal at one’s own syncopated pace, which we must now do athwart the obtrusive
rhythm of the priest or the commentator; or attempting to meditate on this or
the other prayer or sentiment or analysis in the Ordinary or in the Proper of
the Mass, only to find that such meditation is sheer outlawry which stands in
the way of the liturgical calisthenics devised by the Central Coach who
apparently judges it an act of neglect if the churchgoer is permitted more than
two minutes and 46 seconds without being made to stand if he was kneeling, or
kneel if he was standing, or sit — or sing — or chant — or anything if
perchance he was praying, from which anarchism he must at all costs be rescued:
“LET US NOW RECITE THE INTROIT PRAYER,” says the commentator: to which
exhortation I find myself aching to reply in that “loud and clear and
reverential voice” the manual for lectors prescribes: “LET US NOT!” Must we say
the Introit Prayer together? I have been reading the Introit Prayer since I was
13-years-old, and I continue unaware that I missed something; e.g., at the
Jesuit school in England when at daily Mass we read the Introit prayers all by
our little selves beginning it perhaps as much as five seconds before, or five
seconds after, the priest who, enjoying the privacy granted him at Trent,
pursued his prayers, in his own way, at his own speed, ungoverned by the
metronomic discipline of the parishioners or of the commentator.
Ah, but now the
parish understands the Introit Prayer! But, my beloved friends, the parish does
not understand. Neither does the commentator. Neither does the lector. Neither,
if you want the truth of the matter, does the priest — in most cases. If
clarity is the purpose of the liturgical reform — the reason for going into
English, the reason for going into the vernacular — then the reforms of the
liturgy are simply incomplete. If clarity is the desideratum, or however you
say the word in English, then the thing to do is to jettison, just to begin
with, most of St. Paul, whose epistles are in some respects inscrutable to some
of the people some of the time, and in most respects inscrutable to most of the
people most of the time. The translation of them from archaic grandeur to
John-Jane-Gyp contemporese simply doesn’t do the trick, particularly if one is
expected to go in unison. Those prayers, which are not exacting or recondite,
are even then more galvanizing when spoken in unison? LET USE RECITE THE
INTROIT PRAYER. Judge me, O God, and
distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy; deliver me from the
unjust and deceitful man. Judge-me-O-God /
And-distinguish-my-cause-from-the-nation-that-is-not-holy /
Deliver-me-from-the-un just-and-deceitful-man / — Why? How come? Whose idea? —
that such words as these are better spoken, better understood, better
appreciated, when rendered metrically in forced marches with the congregation?
Who, thinking to read these holy and inspired words reverentially, would submit
to the iron rhythm of a joint reading? It is one thing to chant together a
refrain, Lord deliver us / Lord save us / Grant us peace. But the extended
prayer-in-unison is a metallic Proscrusteanism which absolutely defies the
rationale of the whole business, which is the communication of meaning. The
rote-saying of anything is the enemy of understanding. To reduce to unison
prayers whose meaning is unfamiliar is virtually to guarantee that they will
mean nothing to the sayer. “Brethren:
Everything that was written in times past was written for our instruction, that
through the patience and encouragement afforded by the scriptures we might have
hope. I say that Christ exercised his ministry to the circumcised to show God’s
fidelity in fulfilling his promises to the fathers, whereas the Gentiles
glorify God for his mercy, as it is written: ‘Therefore will I proclaim you
among the nations, and I will sing praise to your name.’” These were the
words with which I first accosted my fellow parishioners from the lector’s
pulpit. I do not even now understand them well enough to explain them with any
confidence. And yet, the instruction manual informs me, I am to communicate
their meaning “clearly” and “confidently.” And together the congregation will
repeat such sentences in the Gradual.
Our beloved Mother
Church. How sadly; how innocently; how — sometimes — strangely she is sometimes
directed by her devoted disciples. Hail
Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with you . . . The Lord is with who! Thee to you, Buster, I found myself
thinking during the retreat when first I learned that it is a part of the
current edification to strip the Lord, his Mother, and the saints, of the
honorific with which the simple Quakers even now address their children and
their servants. And the translations! Happy
the Humble — they shall inherit . . . One cannot read on without the same
sense of outrage one would feel on entering the Cathedral of Chartres and
finding that the windows had been replaced with pop-art figures of Christ
sitting-in against the slumlords of Milwaukee. One’s heart is filled with such
passions of resentment and odium as only Hilaire Belloc could adequately have
voiced. O God O God O God, why has thou forsaken us! My faith, I note on their
taking from us even the Canon of the Mass in that mysterious universal which
soothed and inspired the low and the mighty, a part of the Mass — as Evelyn
Waugh recalled — “for whose restoration the Elizabethan martyrs had gone to the
scaffold [in which] St. Augustine, St. Thomas à Becket, St. Thomas More,
Challoner and Newman would have been perfectly at their ease among us,” is
secure. I pray the sacrifice will yield a rich harvest of informed Christians.
But to suppose that it will is the most difficult act of faith I have ever been
called upon to make, because it tears against the perceptions of all my senses.
My faith is a congeries of dogmatical certitudes, one of which is that the new
liturgy is the triumph, yea the Resurrection, of the Philistines.
— William F. Buckley Jr. was the founder and longtime editor of National Review.
