From Phil Lawler’s recent book
January 12, 2019
I have now read Philip Lawler’s recent book. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 6: 'A Patrimony Squandered'. Lawler seems from afar to be channeling my own thinking. This chapter deals a great deal with liturgical practice, church architecture, music, etc. He is dead on right.
One of the points he makes at the beginning of the chapter comes from an experience he had of entering St. Peter’s Basilica. As he gazed at the amazing space, he had the reaction, “This is all mine!”. EXACTLY.
- Our tradition is our patrimony.
- Stories of the saints are our family history.
- Our liturgy is our very flesh and bone: we are our rites.
- When we squander our inheritance, we do terrible damage to our identity.
- Recovering our patrimony is an urgent task pressing on us all.
- We all have a role in this mission.
Anyway, here is the excerpt from the end of Chapter 6. My emphases and comments.
Parish closings are commonplace in America today, and prelates are praised for their smooth handling of what is seen as an “inevitable” contraction of the Church. A question for the bishops who subscribe to such a defeatist view. Why is it inevitable?
The closing of a parish is an admission of defeat.
- If the faithful could support a parish on this site at one time, why can they not support a parish today?
- American cities are dotted with magnificent church structures, built with the nickels and dimes that hard-pressed immigrant families could barely afford to donate.
- Today the affluent grandchildren of those immigrants are unwilling to keep current with the parish fuel bills and, more to the point, to encourage their sons to consider a life of priestly ministry. [See the connection? That’s why the vocation prayer I have promoted is so important.]
There are times, admittedly, when parishes are doomed by demographic shifts. There are city neighborhoods in which two Catholic churches were built, literally across the street from one another: one for the benefit of French-speaking families, the other for their German-speaking neighbors. Such cases, however, account for only a small proportion of the parish closings that we see in the US today.
More typically, the parish slated for closing is located in a comfortable, populous neighborhood, with no other Catholic church particularly close at hand and no special reason why the community that supported a thriving parish in 1960 cannot maintain the same parish now, fifty years later. No reason, that is, except the decline of the Catholic faith. Parishes close because Catholic families don’t care enough about the Faith to keep them open.
- Why don’t families care enough?
- Why is there such a widespread indifference to the treasures of the Catholic faith?
- At least one powerful factor is surely the attitude that lay Catholics have observed in their priests and their bishops.
- If the clergy, the stewards of the patrimony, are content to act as bystanders as the Catholic patrimony is degraded, their indifference becomes infectious.
In other instances, the parishes close because although the neighborhood is still populous, the Catholic families have moved out and the new residents come from different religious backgrounds or come without religious beliefs. In such cases, we are told, the Church must accept the new reality and realize that the neighborhood cannot support a parish. B
- But why make such a concession?
- Why should we admit that it is impossible to convert the new residents to our faith?
- A Catholic fired with apostolic zeal, discovering a neighborhood in which the population is mostly non-Catholic, should set out to convert the people, not to close the church.
In at least a few cases with which I am personally familiar, parishioners have asked their bishop to leave the parish open for a few years to give them an opportunity to build up a new model of evangelical outreach, to bring new converts into the parish and make it financially viable once again. When those appeals have been rejected, the parishioners have concluded, not illogically, that their bishop does not share their trust in the winning power of the Gospel.
When St. Patrick, having escaped slavery in Ireland, arrived again as a missionary, the country was pagan. By the time he died, the country was Catholic.
- He came into a “neighborhood” — an entire nation — that could not support a parish.
- But he did not accept what lesser souls might have considered inevitable.
- Instead, he changed the conditions of the neighborhood, and soon a parish was created. And another and another and another.
- During his years of ministry in the once-pagan country, he is said to have consecrated over three hundred bishops.
- In Ireland today there are seven dioceses — not parishes, dioceses — that trace their foundation to St. Patrick’s missionary work.
If as a bishop and missionary St. Patrick could convert an entire nation, why can’t his successors at least strive to match his success?
- We have material advantages that would have left St. Patrick gasping: the ability to travel hundreds of miles in a day, the capacity for instant communication across the globe.
- Is the content of the Catholic faith less viable today than it was in the fifth century?
- Is the guidance of the Holy Spirit less valuable?
I know how St. Patrick would answer those questions.
In another section, Lawler makes an excellent point that I had not thought of: that the Church’s pastors started squandering and destroying our patrimony right around the time that the birth rate began to drop with the rise of the sexual revolution, contraception and abortion. Here’s how he puts it.
Incidentally, the general appreciation of our Catholic heritage began to lag at roughly the same time that the American birth rate went into a steep decline, eventually dipping below the “replacement rate” at which population would hold steady without immigration.
Is it surprising that we, as a people, stopped thinking so much about what we would pass along to our children, during the same years that we stopped having so many children — that we turned our attention away from our heritage, as we chose not to have so many heirs?
Speaking of tradition and heritage, here is an unusual reflection on the use of the veil in Catholic practice:
Veil, vernacular, and culture
by Dan Millette
January 10, 2019
You will often hear from people who lived through the “great” post-Vatican II reform of the Mass that, despite the loss of reverence and sharp drop in attendance, it was good to have the Mass in the vernacular. Surely, understanding what goes on in the Mass is important.
Yet, surprisingly to some, understanding every prayer uttered is not the actual purpose of the Mass. Sacrificial worship is directed to God, not man. Why has the vernacular been seen as monumentally important to the Mass, even when the Church undergoes a veritable dumpster fire? The answer can, in large part, be explained by the loss of culture in our society.
We do not have a true culture. We have worship of sports and celebrities, horrendous “music,” scandalous movies, illiteracy in all things classic, smartphones for porn and games, and overall insanity. The loss of culture was gradual.
- In the United States, John Dewey’s educational theory, one greatly pushed in my teacher’s college experience, was perhaps the beginning of the end of education.
- Communism was a destroyer of the
polis.
- Patriarchal “do what I say, not what I do” parenting was perhaps a key igniter of the sexual revolution.
- And vague Vatican II and post-conciliar documents induced the beginning of the end of worship.
That Latin was totally replaced with the vernacular in the New Mass [even if the Vatican II constitution of the liturgy authorized it only for some readings] - in a form of speech reduced to Grade-4 level, was a perversion in the actual purpose of the Mass.
Culture was not always this way. Once upon a time, William Shakespeare wrote plays on Julius Caesar and the philosopher Timon because his culture reveled in his wit and the depth of these stories. Truth be told, I went to a production of
The Tempest in my undergraduate years, without pre-reading the play, and subsequently left the drama house with great frustration.
- I had no idea what was going on.
- The language was too difficult.
- references to ancient themes were far beyond my comprehension. - Surely, I could justly expect Shakespeare’s works to be simplified to fit my needs and abilities!
It took many years for me to rediscover that the problem was not with Shakespeare, but rather with me.
- Undergraduate that I was, I could not keep up with those seventeenth-century viewers deemed illiterate by today’s standards. - Sophocles, Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, etc - they produced great works because they worked within a true culture.
- The masses of “illiterates” they created their works for were steeped in centuries of human achievements.
- The cultus, or tending of the garden, was alive and well.
- The dramas, paintings, music, buildings, and thoughts of the day were recognized as profound and worthy of immersing oneself in.
- It was not simple, but it was worth it. It still is worth it.
Fast-forwarding to today, there is perhaps less knowledge and wisdom now than at any other age of modern human history.
- Ease and instant understanding are the current crowning achievement of life.
- Evidently, depth and beauty are their casualties.
What is missing is the veil – the veil of mystery.
- The curtain separating instant results and laborious enlightenments.
- The sacred mystically withheld from the profane.
- If what we undertake must be instantly understood, then by definition, this undertaking will be utterly void of depth and profundity.
- The grade four vernacular Mass translation is what we are left with.
I suppose it fits well with our “liturgical” “Sing a Church into Being” ditties, which in turn provide great opportunities to daydream at Mass on how much money to place on the Bears for the Monday-Nighter.
And the non-cultural wheel of misfortune repeats itself.
What is a veil? A veil is a covering. Its use is a rich occurrence seen throughout Scripture.
- The Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant are hidden.
- A veiling essentially is a revealing.
- To veil something is to reveal it as altogether important, sacred, and worthy.
Consider some veils that still exist in the Tridentine Latin Mass and Divine Liturgy, or to a far lesser degree in the Novus Ordo – the chalice veil, the tabernacle veil, the tabernacle itself, incense, the humeral veil, the iconostasis in Orthodox churches, narthex doors, and ad orientem worship.
- These postures and components reveal a sacred mystery.
- They demonstrate that the Mass touches the Divine.
- It is not human and earthly. It leads us to heaven.
- If there is no veil, there is nothing to say. There is nothing to be revealed.
To retranslate Shakespeare into grade four speech for the sake of a lazy undergraduate student, and remove all references to antiquity or virtue, is to make Shakespeare inconsequential. The same danger applies to the Mass.
Latin is a veil. Yes, it is much more than this, such as a foretaste of heavenly praise, but it still is a veil.
- Latin is not our mater lingua.
- You will not understand Latin at first listen. Nor fiftieth listen.
- It takes long and laborious work to understand Latin fluently.
- One can follow along with a pocket missal, but even that is too much work for some.
No, what is lost on today’s Church is the truth that Latin is a veil, too – a veil that reveals heavenly mysteries. The profound German writer Martin Mosebach explains one such instance: [qote]
“How amazed I was the first time I heard a Latin Te Deum. It was a lengthy piece, hovering to and fro, with its feather-light questioning and answering, a mixture of psalm, litany, and profession of faith… The Latin Te Deum takes both listener and singer gently by the hand and leads them to a high mountain, where an unlimited vista opens out before them.” (Heresy of Formlessness, p. 24)