The following article which the Tablet has made accessible to non-subscribers is labelled 'Understanding Benedict -7', and I would dearly love to know what were contaiend in the first six articles of what is presumably a series preparatory to the Holy Father's visit. It is not entirely without bias, but we could not perhaps ask for more, considering the Tablet's almost contemptuous attitude for Summorum Pontificum and what it considers to be Benedict XVI's 'conservatism'.
Understanding Benedict XVI:
Liturgy - where truth and beauty meet
by Eamon Duffy
August 14, 2010
Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity, and Fellow and Director of Studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
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 “given-ness” 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,
Introduction to 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.
A Catholic writer comments on the Duffy article:
Liturgical reform and Pope Benedict
From the blog of
Michael Sean Winters
August 20, 2010
...Duffy illustrates one of the difficulties faced by Pope Benedict. He considered the post-conciliar reforms, especially the ban on the Tridentine Mass, a mistake in part, because they were ordered from above and the liturgy by its very nature must emerge organically from the life and prayer of the Church.
As a peritus at the Council, Ratzinger was aware of, and vocal about, some of the problems with the old Mass, and he supported the need for reform, even though he came to entertain objections about how those reforms were carried out.
The difficult is this: If your problem is that changes in the liturgy must develop organically, then
even when you are Pope, you cannot simply make new and different commands effective.*
Liturgy is so important. It is not just something we do. As Christians, it defines who we are. In this hustle-bustle world where we are constantly being invited to reduce ourselves to the status of homo economicus, Catholics must regain the sense of wonder, and the orientation towards Christ, that will come from seeing ourselves as homo liturgicus.
Whatever you think of Benedict’s decisions or attitudes about the liturgy, he is absolutely right to put the liturgy at the center of Catholic concern.
*
[This statement fails to see that Summorum Pontificum was, in fact, the simple but brilliant tool for Benedict XVI's most important 'reform of the reform' so far: By simply 'legitimizing' the traditional Mass again, he has allowed an ongoing gold standard for liturgy against which the 'reformed liturgy' must measure itself in terms of being an authentic expression of the faith.
Precisely because Benedict XVI is aware that liturgy cannot simply be imposed (or 'un-imposed') overnight, he wants the priests and the faithful to realize that execution of the new liturgy in accordance with what Vatican II decreed in Sacrosanctum concilium, which has been virtually ignored by the 'new liturgists', will express the faith as fully and as authentically as the traditional Mass, and the new Mass can threby start acquiring its own organic development.]
Here's a somewhat equivocal essay by a diligent commentator on Church matters who writes a weekly column for L'Unita, the official organ of the left-of-center Partita Democrata (though it was founded in the 1920s by Antonio Gramsci as the official organ of the Italian Communist party). I first took note of Di Giacomo when he wrote a highly-biased and in many ways erroneous account of Benedict XVi's apostolic trip to Brazil in May 2007
freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=355107&p=9
calling it a 'flop' in terms of numbers and message, and marshalling dubious numbers to show that Benedict XVI was no match for John Paul II in his capacity to attract crowds demonstrated during three trips to Brazil. It was a very offensive and gratuitous attack, so I was shocked to discover upon googling the autthor's name afterwards that he is a Carmelite priest, trained in canon law and theology, who, in 2007, sat on the Church tribunal for the Lazio region.
In the following article, Di Giacomo is clearly on the Novus Ordo side, and displays yet again a tendency to mobilize elements which are not exactly correct but which he deliberately frames to support the argument he is making. He does end on a positive note.
Three years since 'Summorum Pontificum':
A different Mass is possible
by Filippo di Giacomo
Translated from
August 19, 2010
On June 16, 1007, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, publicly anticipated the imminent publication of Benedict XVI's Motu Proprio,
Summorum Pontificum - the papal decree through which the Pope liberalized the celebration of the traditional Mass according to its latest revision under John XXIII in 1962.
He said, "The pre-Conciliar form of the liturgy is a great treasure for the whole Church" - a sentiment that has not found much heed among many bishops and priests.
In fact, as we approach the third anniversary of the decree's formally taking effect (September 14, Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross],
one gathers from much of the discussion about SP is the widespread impression that Joseph Ratzinger's decision had taken shape completely within an 'aristocratic' theology nurtured in a particular aesthetic-cultural context.
[Clearly, Di Giacomo has only frequented people hostile to the traditional Mass, for no other reason than that it 'offends' their liberal secularist ideology!]
Moreover, on April 15, 1997, during a presentation of two of his books, the then Prefect of the Congrgation for the Doctrine of the Faith appeared have assumed the lead in such a theological tendency by saying that the liturgy that was introduced after the Second Vatican Council "constituted a rupture in the history of liturgy, whose consequences can only be tragic. They have dismantled the old edifice and erected a new one".
That was enough for the entire media world to conclude when he became Pope that Benedict XVI (who had been made a cardinal by the Pope who imposed the new Mass) intended to drastically re-examine the liturgical reform as it was executed after Vatican II, which, in the words of Paul VI, was carried out in order to connect the entire People of God "to a most fecund spring of civilization and above all, of beauty".
[In hindsight, the Novus Ordo as it became 'vulgarized' in the literal sense, i.e., brought down to the level of the people, became a parody of Paul VI's intention, and a continuing defiance of Sacrosanctum concilium!]
The future decisions in following the traditional norms now protected by
Summorum Pontificum risk showing the Pope once again as 'the great misunderstood (one)' among his fellow bishops. Even if, paradoxically, it should not be strange at all.
Most bishops, like the rest of the world, started to know Joseph Ratzinger only a few days before he ws elected to Pope. [
But this statement contradicts the record of 23 years during which, as CDF Prefect, he met each and every bishop who came to Rome for their ad-limina visits, and learned about their respective dioceses, even as they came to have a measure of him!]
When he finally emerged from the shadow of John Paul II, he was seen as a kind pastor capable of giving sense to the immense self-convocation of Catholics who had come to pay their final respects to John Paul II.
Speaking for everyone, Cardinal Ratzinger, raising his eyes to indicate his predecessor 'looking down from the Father's house', was a much-appreciated image then, but, as the controversy over Regensburg and other perceived 'blunders' of his Pontificate would show, the approval was superficial.
Perhaps because as soon as he became Benedict XVI, all his books and articles on theology - which were often misread and worse interpreted - sort of weighed down on him.
The post-Conciliar liturgy had allowed us to see, on John Paul II's papal altars, the whole kaleidoscope of languages and cultures in the Catholic world.
[One can see that kaliedoscope just as well without incorporating syncretic elements into the liturgy!]
About Benedict XVI's liturgical celebrations,
we are told that they contain something more profound even than the unrepeatable gestures of the Polish Pope.
[But who has said this? Certainly not the Pope nor any of those around him in the Vatican. Di Giacomo's statement implies that somehow Benedict XVI considers himself in a 'competition' with his predecessor!]
That 'something' to which Karol Wojtyla generously bore witness (for the less attentive, that 'something' is Jesus Christ) must be experienced, acknowledged and witnessed.
To learn how to use the Missal and the liturgy
as Vatican II handed them to the Church is a serious matter - and
if successful, even more serious - for contemporary Catholicism because it will have an evident fallout in her way of being present in the world.
[Is Di Giacomo thereby acknowledging the lack of success in this respect of the Novus Ordo? Its apparent fallout so far has been laxity - a lack, precisely, of enough seriousness - about the liturgy which has become a social event rather than a celebration of Christ's redemptive sacrifice in the spirit of lex orandi, lex credendi(we pray as we believe). Creating the mpression among the Orthodox, for instance, and even among so-called 'high Anglicans', that the Catholic liturgy has been bastardized and 'protestantized' to the point of losing its sense of the sacred.]
However, after three years, one may acknowledge two benefits that
Summorum Pontificum has brought about. The first is that it has allowed many Catholics to understand that the true Ratzinger is that 'image' of the serene pastor during the interregnum between the death of John Paul II and his election as Pope.
[May it be so!]
And after the first five years
[the Italian term for 'five years' - lustro - is very appropriate here], the conviction has grown, among those who have followed all of his public events, that
the Ratzingerian reform is already at work in the Church, if only because of his ars celebrandi, the songs and music he is reintroducing into the liturgy, the homilies through which he seeks to reclaim for the Catholic faith its inherent character as the 'counterculture'.
And this is expressed through his liturgy which is rich with antitheses and juxtapositions that speak of life and death, of water in the desert, of identity and alienation, of a future prey to the paroxystic appetites of the modern world.
The second consideration has to do with the 'People of God', a reality that Benedict XVI does not consider a done thing, but something that must always be 'a work in progress' built by the pastoral activity of persons and structures that share a clear and common religious perspective.
Today, perhaps, this may seem like an ingenuous idea. In the future, it will likely be called prophecy.
The following article is not about liturgy but I'm posting it here anyway...
Liturgical aide explains papal wear
for non-liturgical events
By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY, August 20 (CNS) -- When a Pope attends a public event like a general audience in St. Peter's Square or meets a head of state in the papal apartment, he's not exactly free to "wing it" with his wardrobe. His choice of outfit is dictated by a precise protocol.
Recently a Vatican official published two extensive articles in the Vatican newspaper,
L'Osservatore Romano, in an effort to help observers decipher the papal dress code.
[Unfortunately, the Vatican did not post these articles online, so I was not even aware they had been published! If they had been posted online, I would obviously have translated.]]
In what can seem like a page of dos and don'ts from Emily Post, Msgr. Stefano Sanchirico, an assistant for papal ceremonies, spelled out current norms on how Popes should dress for a nonliturgical event.
First, a peek at what's in the papal closet: a white cassock; a white zucchetto or skullcap; a white sash; a short white surplice-like garment called a rochet that is worn over the cassock; an elbow-length red cape called a mozzetta; a red velvet mozzetta trimmed with ermine fur; a white damask mozzetta with or without the white fur trim; a selection of red stoles with gold embroidery; white stoles with gold embroidery; red shoes; and a pair of white loafers.
Even though the items are few, they are worn in particular combinations for specific occasions.
The basic outfit is the white cassock, white sash with gold fringe and the white zucchetto. This is what the Pope wears for almost all public events: the weekly general audience, the Sunday Angelus, an audience with a government official and during most meetings on papal trips abroad.
When the Pope holds an official audience with a head of state or ambassador at the Vatican, the rochet and mozzetta are added on top of the basic papal attire. If the visiting head of state is Catholic, then a stole is added to the mix.
According to Msgr. Sanchirico, the stole and the shoes should always match the color of the mozzetta. However, papal tastes trump sartorial standards in the shoe department: Pope Benedict XVI always wears red shoes in public, even when protocol dictates otherwise.
[But does anyone recall seeing any photographs of the Popes of the 20th century wearing white shoes at all! Benedict XVI is such a stickler for papal protocol I do not think he would violate it out of personal preference - it's more likely that matching shoe color with that of the mozzetta has become optional. After all, it used to be that the shoes had to match the color of the chasuble whenever the Pope was celebrating a liturgy.]
Whether red or white accessories are worn depends on the time of year.
Msgr. Sanchirico wrote that the white mozzetta -- with or without the ermine trim -- is worn after the Easter Vigil until the second Sunday of Easter. However, Pope Benedict prefers to wear the white mozzetta until Pentecost.
The red mozzetta is worn the rest of the year. Whether it is trimmed with ermine fur or not depends on the season. A red mozzetta with trim is worn from the feast of St. Catherine of Alexandria on Nov. 25 through to the Ascension in the spring; the red mozzetta without trim is worn from the Ascension to Nov. 25, wrote Msgr. Sanchirico.
Pope Benedict has reintroduced to the papal wardrobe a wide-brimmed red straw hat that Pope John XXIII often wore and a red velvet cap trimmed with ermine called a "camauro," which Pope John was the last to wear.
The one thing all the Pope's nonliturgical garments and accessories have in common is that they are either red or white. The colors, the Italian monsignor wrote, "are distinctive of papal dignity" with white symbolizing "innocence and charity" and the red symbolizing the blood and sacrifice of Christ.
But the colors are also rooted in the historical process of the early Roman pontiffs taking on the customs and clothing of the Roman emperor, as outlined in the so-called Donation of Constantine, he wrote.
He said the document, which was probably written around the eighth or ninth century, claims that Emperor Constantine handed sovereign authority over to Rome and the western part of the empire to Pope Sylvester I.
To reinforce the legitimacy of the Pope's role as a sovereign ruler, the document established that the Pope could wear imperial garments and use the scepter, "which already from the ninth century began to play a role in the rite of installation of the new Pontiff," wrote Msgr. Sanchirico.
The first systematic description of what the Pope was to wear upon his election was written out for Pope Gregory X sometime between 1272 and 1273 by the papal master of ceremonies. Earlier norms specified only the importance of the red cloak, wrote the monsignor.
From the time of Pope Gregory, both white and red were to be visible to show that the Pope represented "the person of Christ and his mystical body, the Church," Msgr. Sanchirico wrote.
Further codifications of papal dress stipulated that, upon his election, the Pope was to put on a white cassock made of linen or other material appropriate for the weather and that a high-ranking cardinal would then place the red papal capelet over his shoulders.
Msgr. Sanchirico said that the installation outfits eventually became the Pope's everyday attire for public events and formal meetings.
Even with a few modern modifications, the traditional papal outfit has never gone out of style. Sticking with the same look for centuries offers continuity and "makes visible the uniqueness and singularity of the ministry of the successor of Peter," Msgr. Sanchirico said.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/08/2010 13:27]