Reflections

The Consecration of St. Elias

It will surprise no one when we say that we tend to be more interested in matters—both liturgical and ecclesiastical—touching upon the Latin Rite. And like many Latin Rite Catholics, we simply do not have a lot of experience with the Eastern Churches. Nevertheless, we are acquainted with many sharp young Catholics who feel very much at home in the Eastern Churches. It is easy to understand why they do when one sees the videos of the consecration of the Church of St. Elias the Prophet in Brampton, Ontario, Canada. The Ukrainian Catholic community there is very vibrant (as Eastern Catholic communities always seem to be), led by its longtime pastor, Fr. Roman Galadza. Some people we respect very much—including good and holy priests—think the world of Fr. Galadza and St. Elias. As you may know, St. Elias has had to rebuild its church after a fire. After two and a half years of work and prayer, the new church was consecrated last month. Patriarch Sviatoslav of Kiev presided over the ceremonies.

We urge you watch the videos—even the condensed, “highlights” version—to get a taste of the extraordinary event. Obviously, the dedication of any church is a special event, but the dedication of St. Elias seemed to us to be particularly special. We were told by someone with knowledge that Fr. Galadza made a conscious decision many years ago to require the congregation as a whole to be responsible for music, not merely a choir. And the fruits of that decision are amply on display in even the shorter video. But the musical competence was only one part of the overall impression of the liturgy there. On the whole, it reminds us of Thomas Merton’s description of the Mass he attended at the church of Corpus Christi in New York: “There was nothing new or revolutionary about it; only that everything was well done, not out of aestheticism or rubrical obsessiveness, but out of love for God and His truth. It would certainly be ingratitude of me if I did not remember the atmosphere of joy, light, and at least relative openness and spontaneity that filled Corpus Christi at solemn High Mass.” (Emphasis supplied.)

If you do nothing else, watch Patriarch Sviatoslav’s homily, delivered (nearly simultaneously) in both English and Ukrainian—without notes. It is easy to understand, having seen him in action, why he is so hated by the partisans of the Moscow Patriarchate. As a friend of ours said about him: as he talks, one begins to want to follow him. He has the charisma of a true pastor. And, having read some interviews and other writings with him, it is clear that he takes seriously the apostolic duty of preserving and handing on the deposit of faith, to say nothing of his duty of preserving the liturgy and traditions of the Ukrainian Catholics, who have suffered much for the sake of the Faith. Even if one is a Latin-rite Catholic to one’s core, it is hard not to feel a little envious of the Ukrainian Catholics, having a patriarch like Sviatoslav at the head of their Church.

At any rate, do take some time and watch the consecration videos. They’re something special.

Bugnini and Benedict

Recently, Peter Kwasniewski had a piece at New Liturgical Movement about St. Josemaría Escrivá’s attachment to the traditional Latin Mass. It’s an interesting piece, but it highlights a question about what form of the Mass St. Josemaría celebrated. The suggestion is that he continued celebrating the Mass of St. Pius V—one imagines in the form set forth in St. John XXIII’s books—even after the liturgical reforms of the 1960s. Prof. Kwasniewski links to a piece at Corpus Christi Watershed by Jeff Ostrowski. (You may know Corpus Christi Watershed from its indefatigable work publishing PDFs of wonderful liturgical resources, like the New Westminster Hymnal.) Ostrowski links to another piece, though the link appears to be broken. This piece reports a conversation its author had with “Giuseppe Soria,” Josemaría’s doctor. (We suspect that this is a translation error: Fr. Jose Luis Soria was, indeed, Josemaría’s doctor and present at the saint’s final moments on earth.) The upshot of all of it is that apparently, St. Josemaría had great difficulty reading the new Missal, try as he might. (We have heard other versions of this story, as has Prof. Kwasniewski, apparently. You probably have, too, dear reader.) So, his secretary, Álvaro del Portillo—now himself a beatus—called none other than Annibale Bugnini to obtain an indult for Josemaría. Bugnini’s response: “You don’t need permission from me. Just continue to celebrate the Mass of St. Pius V.”

This is an interesting anecdote for many reasons, but we were particularly struck by the resonance between Bugnini’s alleged comment and the fundamental realization in Summorum Pontificum that the Missal of 1962 was lawfully promulgated by St. John XXIII and “never abrogated.”  Indeed, the insight that the older form of the Mass was never abrogated is in some ways the crucial insight of Summorum Pontificum. Fr. John Hunwicke observes that there was a key distinction on this point between Missale Romanum, Paul VI’s apostolic constitution promulgating the new Missal, and Laudis canticum, his constitution promulgating the Liturgia Horarum. That is, Pope Paul clearly abrogated the old Breviary (except under rather limited circumstances), but he did not quite so clearly abrogate the old Missal. In a later post, Hunwicke suggests, building upon writings of then-Cardinal Ratzinger, that the Church does not suppress or abolish liturgical forms. At any rate, Benedict’s insight also echoes the much-discussed report of the commission of cardinal canonists in the 1980s who came to the same conclusion: no one ever actually bothered to suppress the old Mass. One could even go so far as to say that even the Quattuor abhinc annos and Ecclesia Dei adflicta indults assumed that the Mass of Pius V was not abrogated, even though one may also say that the Roman authorities sure acted like it was.

It is extremely interesting, therefore, to read the alleged remark by Bugnini that no permission from him was needed for St. Josemaría to continue celebrating the traditional Mass. Of course, who better than Bugnini to know whether or not the old Mass was suppressed, abrogated, or otherwise disfavored in the law? Something about kidding a kidder?

Thomas Merton, Paul VI, and reform—liturgical and otherwise

It is no surprise when a traditionally minded Catholic criticizes the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council. The reformers, particularly those in Annibale Bugnini’s circle, seemed to view the immemorial tradition of the Roman Rite as a burden to be lightened and an obstacle to be overcome, not a precious part of the faith of the Church to be protected and preserved. One expects to see defenders of the pure, apostolic faith—such as the great Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, the tragic hero of the Second Vatican Council—express reservations of the gravest sort about liturgical reform. It is, however, a surprise when someone not ordinarily considered a traditionally minded Catholic does so.

We were, therefore, surprised when we read Bellarmine University theologian Greg Hillis’s lengthy article about Thomas Merton’s reaction to the breakneck liturgical reforms of the 1960s. Indeed, Hillis’s piece has gotten some coverage from sources that probably do not follow him—or matters Merton—all that closely. He begins:

Alone in his hermitage on 22 September 1967 – a little over one year before his untimely death – Thomas Merton decided to make a recording. Because severe dermatitis in his hands hampered his ability to write, Merton used a tape recorder to dictate various things for a monk down at the monastery to type.

On occasion, however, he used the recorder for his own purposes, and on this day Merton recorded himself chanting in Latin the entirety of the Cistercian mass for the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost.

His journal entry for the day gives no clue as to why he did this, nor does he explain himself on the tape. But as one listens to Merton chant a liturgy with which he was deeply familiar after more than 25 years as a monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, one hears his love for the traditional liturgy, both in the brief explanations he provides about certain parts of the liturgy as well as in the passion with which he sings it.

(Emphasis supplied.) This is, of course, hugely interesting on its own. Merton is known primarily as a hermit, mystic, and writer. (That’s how we know him, at any rate.) His spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, is a classic of its kind. One is surprised, therefore, to hear that Merton took an opportunity to sing the traditional Cistercian Mass apparently simply for posterity’s sake. However, as Hillis explains, Merton’s attitudes on the liturgy and liturgical reform were complicated. While a supporter of some reform, Merton had reservations about the way the reform was carried out and what the reform entailed. In this regard, as we’ll see in a minute, he reminds us of Pope Paul himself. And we think—we’ll come back to this—that there is a lesson here for this moment in the life of the Church.

Hillis goes on to tell us that Merton was enthusiastic, in some regards, about Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Council’s decree on the liturgy, and the liturgical reforms that followed the Council. Merton died in 1968, so he would have known the reforms of Inter Oecumenici best. Tres abhinc annos was issued in May 1967, coming into effect about a month later. Thus, one may say that Merton was spared the most radical revisions to the Roman Rite and knew primarily the modest-in-comparison (though not particularly modest in objective terms) reforms of Inter Oecumenici. At any rate, Merton plainly was in sympathy with some of the motivating intentions of the reforms. Indeed,

According to Merton, the laity have become in some cases little more than spectators, detached from the liturgy and detached from one another, and because of this, the Eucharist as a sacrament of unity rooted in communion is lost. Hence Merton’s enthusiasm for the emphasis in Sacrosanctum Concilium on greater participation of laity in the liturgy: “The nature of the liturgy is such that if you don’t have everyone fully participating in it, you don’t have fully liturgical worship.”

Reform of the liturgy necessitates the full, conscious and active participation of the laity, for it is only through this that the true nature of the church is manifested in and through the liturgy. Whereas the Council of Trent emphasized Christ’s presence in the Eucharist and in the priest, Sacrosanctum Concilium completes the picture by emphasizing Christ’s presence in the communion of the faithful, a communion manifested in the union of all in the work of prayer and worship.

(Emphasis supplied.) Nevertheless, Merton understood that the problem—if it was a problem, and that itself remains a debatable and debated proposition—with the liturgy was not a problem with the Roman Rite itself, but a problem with the spirit in which the liturgy was performed. It is true, as Hillis demonstrates, Merton thought a spirit of openness and participation was needed. However, according to Hillis, Merton’s example of a liturgy motivated by a spirit of openness and full participation was a 1938 Mass he heard at Corpus Christi in New York City:

Interestingly, when Merton describes concretely what this kind of liturgy could look like, he appeals not to the new but to the old, pointing specifically to his experience of the liturgy at Corpus Christi parish in New York City in 1938. In this essay, he writes that it was in no small part because of the liturgy at Corpus Christi that he became a Catholic, a monk and a priest. What was it about the liturgy at Corpus Christi that set it apart?

“Corpus Christi had the same Roman liturgy as everyone else in 1938. It was just the familiar Mass that is now being radically reformed. There was nothing new or revolutionary about it; only that everything was well done, not out of aestheticism or rubrical obsessiveness, but out of love for God and His truth. It would certainly be ingratitude of me if I did not remember the atmosphere of joy, light, and at least relative openness and spontaneity that filled Corpus Christi at solemn High Mass.”

Merton tries here to steer a middle course between those calling for total reform with little regard for the tradition and those refusing to countenance reform of the old. There was, Merton writes, nothing of the new in the traditional Latin High Mass Merton experienced at Corpus Christi, but neither was the liturgy celebrated in order to be beautiful or out of slavish adherence to the rubrics. It was open, spontaneous, and beautiful because it was performed out of love.

(Emphasis supplied and slightly reformatted.) Of course, the tension between liturgy celebrated well to honor God and mere adherence to the rubrics is nothing new to traditionally minded Catholics. Indeed, Fr. Adrian Fortescue expressed—in very sharp terms—nothing but contempt for liturgists whose lives were consumed with minute study of rubrics and responsa ad dubia from Rome. Of course, we might quibble and suggest that the arid, legalistic, technically correct Mass—a frequent caricature of the 1950s and 1960s—was not nearly so widespread as portrayed by supporters of the reform, not least since these spiritually unprofitable Masses were fantastically well attended. People don’t tend to go to Masses that do not provide some spiritual sustenance; just ask the finance councils of all the hip parishes known for their hip liturgies. (Provided they haven’t been “reorganized” out of existence. Yet.)

But, throughout all this, Merton deplored the unseemly haste with which supporters of the reform discarded the ancient forms of the Roman Rite—especially Latin and Gregorian chant. He wrote once, “The monks cannot understand the treasure they possess, and they throw it out to look for something else, when seculars, who for the most part are not even Christians, are able to love this incomparable art.” (Emphasis supplied.) And Merton understood that imprudent reforms would produce a terrible result. To a Carthusian, Merton wrote, in a spirit that seems not far removed from true prophecy, “I am very much afraid that when all the dust clears we will be left with no better than we deserve, a rather silly, flashy, seemingly up-to-date series of liturgical forms that have lost the dignity and the meaning of the old ones.” (Emphasis supplied.) In other words, Merton, despite his enthusiasm for “openness” and authentic participation, understood that the liturgical patrimony of the Church was, so far from a burden and an obstacle, “a treasure” of tremendous spiritual value.

However, Merton was far from alone in expressing both enthusiasm for reform and a sense that something irreplaceable was being lost in the process of the reform. We are particularly reminded of Paul VI’s famous comments in his general audience of November 26, 1969, in which he expressed, with seemingly great regret, just what ditching Latin would mean for the Roman Rite:

 The other reason for the reform is this renewal of prayer. It is aimed at associating the assembly of the faithful more closely and more effectively with the official rite, that of the Word and that of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, that constitutes the Mass. For the faithful are also invested with the “royal priesthood”; that is, they are qualified to have supernatural conversation with God.

It is here that the greatest newness is going to be noticed, the newness of language. No longer Latin, but the spoken language will be the principal language of the Mass. The introduction of the vernacular will certainly be a great sacrifice for those who know the beauty, the power and the expressive sacrality of Latin. We are parting with the speech of the Christian centuries; we are becoming like profane intruders in the literary preserve of sacred utterance. We will lose a great part of that stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant.

We have reason indeed for regret, reason almost for bewilderment. What can we put in the place of that language of the angels? We are giving up something of priceless worth. But why? What is more precious than these loftiest of our Church’s values? 

The answer will seem banal, prosaic. Yet it is a good answer, because it is human, because it is apostolic.

(Emphasis supplied.) We are also reminded of Paul’s 1966 Apostolic Letter to religious bound to the choral recitation of the Divine Office, Sacrificium laudis:

Yet, from letters which some of you have sent, and from many other sources, We learn that discordant practices have been introduced into the sacred liturgy by your communities or provinces (We speak of those only that belong to the Latin Rite.) For while some are very faithful to the Latin language, others wish to use the vernacular within the choral office. Others, in various places, wish to exchange that chant which is called ‘Gregorian’, for newly-minted melodies. Indeed, some even insist that Latin should be wholly suppressed.

We must acknowledge that We have been somewhat disturbed and saddened by these requests. One may well wonder what the origin is of this new way of thinking and this sudden dislike for the past; one may well wonder why these things have been fostered.

[…]

Yet those things that We have mentioned are occurring even though the Second Ecumenical Vatican Council has after due deliberation declared its mind in solemn fashion (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 101,1), and after the publication of clear norms in subsequent Instructions. In the first Instruction (ad exsecutionem Constitutionis de sacra Liturgia recte ordinandam), published on 26th September, 1964, it was decreed as follows: In celebrating the divine office in choir, clerics are bound to preserve the Latin language (n. 85). In the second Instruction (de lingua in celebrandis Officio divino et Missa “conventuali” aut “communitatis” apud Religiosos adhibenda), published on the 23rd November, 1965, that law was reinforced, and at the same time due consideration was shown for the spiritual advantage of the faithful and for the special conditions which prevail in missionary territories. Therefore, for as long as no other lawful provision is made, these laws are in force and require the obedience in which religious must excel, as dear sons of holy Church.

(Emphasis supplied and hyperlink added.) It is extraordinary to read Paul’s statements, knowing that the root-and-branch destruction of the Roman Rite was carried out in his name. We are, of course, well aware of the story that Bugnini told him that Consilium wanted all these changes and the Consilium that Paul wanted the changes. We are also aware of the story about the Octave of Pentecost. But we are no less aware that, as archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Montini gave an intervention at the Council on October 22, 1962 on the schema De Sacra Liturgia, which would become Sacrosanctum Concilium. (The intervention may be found in the Acta Synodalia I.313–16.) His whole intervention is worth reading, not least because it seems to reflect a certain enthusiasm on his part for liturgical reform. Thus, we are not always sure that he was an unwilling participant in Bugnini’s schemes, but we will leave that for his biographers.

We bring it up only to note that Merton was far from alone in this ambivalence about liturgical reform. No less a reformer than Paul VI had reservations about not only the way the reforms were being carried out but also what was being lost in the reforms. One doubts very much whether Father Merton and Papa Montini, so to speak, were alone in their sentiments. Yet, the reforms occurred all the same. And this is perhaps a salubrious lesson for this moment in the life of the Church. It may even be the essential lesson for this moment in the life of the Church. A sense that something is not quite right or that the price for something is too high to pay—even if it is shared by figures as different as the Supreme Pontiff and a Kentucky hermit—is not enough to stop reform if the experts have determined that reform is necessary. More, it seems, is needed. Otherwise, the experts will implement the reform they want and leave the faithful to catch up.

You’ll find out when you reach the top

Elliot Milco, no stranger to our readers, has a piece at First Things about the Argentine bishops’ protocol and the Holy Father’s endorsement of it. He makes this point:

The Church teaches and has always taught, from St. Paul to the Council of Trent and beyond, that grace strengthens and liberates us from the bonds of sin, and that while we may never, in the present life, be perfectly free from the inclination to do wrong, it is possible through grace to keep the commandments. This doctrine was given force of law in Trent’s decree on justification: “If anyone says that the commandments of God are, even for one that is justified and constituted in grace, impossible to observe, let him be anathema.” The same decree explains that “God does not command impossibilities, but by commanding admonishes you to do what you can and to pray for what you cannot, and aids you that you may be able.”

The real problem with the Argentine norms is their deviation from this larger and more fundamental principle: that grace truly sanctifies and liberates, and that baptized Christians are always free to fulfill the moral law, even when they fail to do so. Jesus Christ holds us to this standard in the Gospel. It is presumptuous of Francis—however benign his intentions—to decide that his version of “mercy” trumps that given by God himself.

(Emphasis supplied.) In addition to the Decree on Justification, one is reminded of St. Matthew’s Gospel, when Our Lord says “Take my yoke upon yourselves, and learn from me; I am gentle and humble of heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (ch. 11, vv. 29–30.)

We are not qualified to say whether the Tridentine anathema applies to the Argentine bishops’ protocol or Amoris laetitia or whatever, so we will prescind from a serious doctrinal analysis. (We are sure that Pope Boniface X or Pope Clement XV will clear things up for us one day in the dim and distant future, and we, of course, look forward to getting things sorted out.) But we will remark briefly on the pessimism of such a view, which is desperately gloomy. What else can we say of an attitude that says that one simply cannot do something that is by no means impossible, merely a little difficult? What a negative judgment! Yes, yes, the Amoris laetitia defender says, everyone knows what the rule is, but, well, you can’t live up to it. Even if you want to, you’ll just fail. Why fail? Why try? We’ll just change the rules. Of course, such a bleak view of the world is hardly sustainable; who would want to live in a world without possible escape, in which everyone is doomed to failure? Perhaps such a view is compatible with Christianity, but it seems compatible only with great difficulty with the confident, joyful Christianity that the Church has proclaimed to the world since, oh, Pentecost.

(We will leave to your imagination, dear reader, what one might do to take a little bit of the chill off such a view, to try to make it fit with the Church’s traditional teaching—what one might, for example, call this approach to get some warm feelings back into it.)

Not only is this view pessimistic, it’s also infantilizing. Throughout one’s childhood—our childhood, at any rate, if you can believe that we had one, dear reader—one wants to do more than one is “supposed to.” It’s not impossible; others do it, why can’t we? One wants to take the training wheels off one’s bicycle. One wants to sit at the grownups’ table at Christmas dinner. One wants to play basketball with the older kids. One wants to hang out with the seniors when one is only a sophomore. It is infantilizing to be told you’re not strong enough, clever enough, or whatever enough to keep up. It is infantilizing in the moral context, too. One is told that one is so morally weak that one is categorized with children—that their sins aren’t really sins. They don’t know any better. They’re not strong enough, clever enough, or whatever enough to do what Christ commands them to do, even though Christ promises them his help in doing it. Better to sit at the children’s table, to get a bigger set of training wheels, and let the grownups lower the hoop so that you can shoot 3-pointers like Steph Curry.

Perhaps we’re a little off the mark with the infantilization bit, but the problem of infantilization in the faith has been on our mind today, given this insightful essay by Jesuit Fr. Robert McTeigue. He observes:

In other words, the illusion that Christianity is actually a “play-date” with religious decorations attached, while temporarily stimulating to young people, is affecting the rest of the Christian community. Excitement and novelty become the hallmarks of “authentic” faith and worship. This leads to a threefold problem.

First, it exalts the adolescent and trivializes the sacred. Second, it distracts the folks who should know better from handing on the fullness of the faith. Third, perhaps worst of all, it leaves our young ill prepared for the next stage of their lives. We are promising them a perpetual playground when they should be preparing for a spiritual battleground. Giving children what the world tells them they want rather than what the Church knows they need does not serve them well and does not glorify God.

(Emphasis supplied.) While Fr. McTeigue is criticizing specifically the usually embarrassing outreach to teenagers, his insights have a broader applicability. The idea that Christianity is some sort of religious play-date is by no means limited to children, and excitement and novelty have indeed become hallmarks of “authentic” faith and worship. The threefold problem Fr. McTeigue identifies is a problem undergirding most—not all, but most—of the problems confronting the universal Church today.

One can check Fr. McTeigue’s boxes in this context. Just think about the Amoris laetitia solution. Do we exalt the adolescent and trivialize the sacred? And how! Are the teachers of the faith distracted? You could say that. Are Catholics being left unprepared for the next stage of their lives? Oh my, yes. Thus, we think that, in addition to reflecting a pessimistic view of the capacity of the average Christian, who has, after all, been promised grace by Our Lord to discharge his duties, the view of the Amoris laetitia defenders infantilizes the Christian. The Christian can’t do what’s required of him because he’s a moral child. Perhaps he could be taught, challenged, and helped to do better. Certainly that’s what one does with children, as a rule. But what does it say that a large number of the world’s bishops, including, apparently, the Bishop of Rome, don’t think that that’s a viable option?

And this brings us back to pessimism. One is inclined to ask them what they know that the rest of us don’t. Certainly the German bishops, politically powerful in this pontificate, want their Kirchensteuer back. (As though the doctrine on bigamy was the reason for Germany’s slide into irreligion.) But is that all? Or is there something more serious that the hierarchy sees that leaves it unable or unwilling to help Christians conform their lives to Christ’s call? One can dress up the idea in any number of ways, but, at bottom, there is an implication is that we are simply incapable of doing that which Christ tells us we can do because Christ will help us do it. And there is an implication that, for whatever reason, it’s not feasible to help us do better. This is not a comforting thought.

Milco urges us not to worry about the Pope or his program—instead we should deepen our understanding of the traditional teaching of the Church and pray for the Holy Father, good advice to be sure—but confronted by such a deep pessimism, can one help it if one does worry? Confronted by such an infantilizing view, can one help it if one even gets a little upset?

Vietnam and Christian intellectuals

A while back we commented on Alan Jacobs’s piece decrying the absence of Christian intellectuals in American public discourse. You may recall that Jacobs’s discussed Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and Neuhaus’s magazine, First Things, at some length in his essay. R.R. Reno, the current editor of First Things, has commented himself on Jacobs’s essay, and he makes a couple of interesting points. First, he brings out in greater detail something we merely alluded to:

There’s something to this analysis, but I’d add another factor, unmentioned by Jacobs. The biggest shift in American religious culture in my lifetime has been the extraordinary decline of mainline Protestantism as a vital force in public life. The mainline Protestant tradition had inherited the establishmentarian mentality of New England Puritanism, along with Puritanism’s urgent moralism. As a consequence, the leaders of mainline Protestantism saw themselves as the “conscience of the nation.” In mid-twentieth-century America, as men of letters, social reformers, and political rhetoricians were transformed into “intellectuals” (itself a fascinating story), mainline Protestants came to play that role as well, and did so in theological as well as sociological and philosophical terms.

(Emphasis supplied.) He goes on to say:

The decline of mainline Protestantism was part of a larger dissolution of centrist American institutions. Universities today are far less likely to produce intellectuals. The reason for this failure is not just specialization (although that is a factor) but ideological homogeneity. To a degree that I could not foresee when I was a college student nearly forty years ago, the world of ideas has become almost entirely colonized by the political urgencies of the moment.

(Emphasis supplied.) As Matthew Sitman has noted, Jacobs is only really interested in the output of liberal protestant intellectuals from about 1945 to 1970. Of the examples Jacobs cites, Auden lived the longest, and he died in 1973. And, while we are not a sociologist of American religion, this seems to jive with Reno’s point. We certainly have the impression that mainline protestantism fell off a cliff in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Certainly we have a hard time recalling any time since then that mainline protestants have been a force to be reckoned with.

We also wonder, perhaps with a comic-book understanding of American history, whether a broader trend of antiestablishment sentiment should be considered when examining this phenomenon. Reno makes the point that liberal protestants had a strong investment in the American establishment, going back, no doubt, to colonial times. But by the end of the 1960s, the establishment was not looking so hot. If you draw bright brackets around 1945 and 1970, you include an active phase of the civil rights struggle and most of the United States’ escalation in the Vietnam War. Indeed, we wonder whether the Vietnam War didn’t have much to do with the rise of antiestablishment sentiment in the United States. For example, Operation Rolling Thunder commenced on March 2, 1965 and Operation Arc Light sometime before the middle of 1965. The Tet Offensive began at the end of January 1968. The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago turned into a general melee as a result of clashes between protesters and Mayor Richard Daley’s police. And more generally at about this time, radical leftist factions—especially student groups—were involved in high profile actions. Obviously, we don’t mean to set up a montage of late-1960s strife set to the strains of “Fortunate Son,” but we think it is worth considering that at about the same time Christian intellectuals—and, indeed, mainline protestantism—are disappearing, antiestablishment sentiment in the United States is reaching a fever pitch over the Vietnam War.

However, if there is a relationship between the rise of antiestablishment sentiment caused by the Vietnam War and the decline of protestant intellectuals, it is a complicated one. But perhaps there’s a link. Jacobs mentioned Fr. Neuhaus as a Lutheran, active in the civil rights movement and in opposing the Vietnam War. Reno observes:

Richard John Neuhaus was a good example. Although formed in the more isolated atmosphere of Missouri Synod Lutheranism, Neuhaus came of age politically and intellectually as a participant in mainline Protestant–dominated organizations supporting civil rights and then opposing the Vietnam War. He possessed an inborn confidence, but that confidence was reinforced by the mainline Protestant sense of ownership over the moral future of America.

(Emphasis supplied.) Perhaps it was the failure of these organizations to, well, do anything to stop the war that drove their decline. While the civil rights movement resulted in actual achievements, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the antiwar movement did not produce many (any?) similar achievements. Again, we do not want to suggest that Vietnam was the defining moment for American mainline protestants and their intellectual vanguard; however, it is difficult to maintain a sense of ownership over a country’s moral future when the country manifestly does not listen to you. To put it another way, it is passing hard “to transcend the ideological conflicts of the moment in order to speak to the nation as a whole” when the nation clearly isn’t listening.

Or maybe not. It’s an interesting question, and it would be fascinating to see an author explore the question at length.

Reno makes another point, very self-aware, and we wanted to mention it, too:

By the time Neuhaus founded First Things, it was already obvious that mainline Protestantism was finished. It had become a chaplaincy for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Neuhaus thought Evangelical and Catholic intellectuals could fill the void, providing America with a religiously informed public philosophy suited to our times. (I’m so thoroughly catechized by the First Things project that those words flow out of me effortlessly.) As Jacobs laments, however, this vision has not come to pass. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Alan were to say that folks like me have become a chaplaincy for the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

(Emphasis supplied.) We might, in an uncharitable moment, be inclined to agree that, in many ways, the First Things project has been largely Catholics, evangelicals, and others united to give the Republican Party some intellectual cover. But First Things is not alone, nor is it the worst offender. Groups like the Acton Institute seem altogether more interested in providing a theological and philosophical framework for conventional Republican ideology than First Things. And the shifting landscape of the Republican Party seems apt to draw First Things out of a cozy relationship. By this, of course, we mean: Donald Trump is mixing up the established order. Reno himself was a major contributor to National Review‘s Against Trump issue, for example. And we have heard reports that some Trump supporters have been highly critical of First Things for what they perceive as regular anti-Trump coverage.

Something else to think about, at any rate.

The multiverse of possibilities

Sam Kriss, who has written before on the joylessness of the pop-scientism so much vogue on the internet and in the media, has written a piece at The Atlantic about the multiverse theory. Indeed, Kriss has made himself a winning critic of scientism, pop vel non, by pointing out the absurdities it forces on its adherents. Now, we wouldn’t confuse Kriss for a religious writer—we have the impression that he’s an unbeliever, though we couldn’t swear as to why we believe that—but Kriss has little use for secularism as it has come to exist popularly. You know the type of secularist we—and he—mean, full of answers like “because science” and “it’s 2016.” Given Kriss’s evident suspicion of people like that, he has some insights, especially on the question of scientism, that we think are profitable for Christians to consider. And his skewering of multiverse theory is one such insight.

Now, as we understand it, the concept of the multiverse is that there is a some number of parallel universes, perhaps an infinite number. The question is, as you might imagine, mathematically dense and contentious even among physicists. But Kriss makes an interesting point that sounds ultimately in common sense:

Heim’s work has been enormously influential in the field of theology, but for some reason it’s generally rejected by the scientific community. Instead, thousands of physicists—big names like Stephen Hawking (who called it ‘trivially true’), Brian Greene, and Neil deGrasse Tyson included—pay lip service to the many-worlds interpretation: the particle still passed through both slits; one here, and one in another universe, created especially for the occasion. It certainly sounds more scientific than Heim’s theory, which tries to shoehorn a Bronze Age concept into an increasingly inhospitable reality. The only snag is that there’s actually very little difference. There’s no way we could ever carry out any experiment to test for the multiverse’s existence in the world, because it’s not in our world. It’s an article of faith, and not a very secure one. What’s more likely: a potentially infinite number of useless parallel universes, or one perfectly ordinary God?

(Emphasis supplied.) He goes on to note that multiverse theory is itself “an organized assault” on imagination:

The Mandela Effect is silly, but is has its roots in the philosophical precursors to multiverse theory. What looks at first glance like an opening up of possibilities is actually an organized assault on the unreal: the delicate networks of falsehood, the boundlessness of counterfactuals, the imagination as such. It goes back to Leibniz, who got analytical philosophers talking about contingency in terms of ‘possible worlds’ for tedious centuries—actually, it goes back to Democritus, twenty-five centuries ago—but there’s no purer instance than the ‘modal realism’ of David Lewis. In a series of books, the Princeton philosopher argued that counterfactual statements (‘There is a possible world in which ‘chartreuse’ describes a shade of red,’ ‘If the author-electrocuting button existed, I’d be dead now’) could not be intelligible unless they refer to an actually existing state of affairs. If the author-murdering button doesn’t exist here, it must necessarily exist in another universe. What this means is that the human capacity to imagine a different world is really nothing of the sort. It’s all just the same washed-out reality, and your hopes and dreams are as drearily physical as a sack of potatoes. Want to write fiction? Want to build a better life? Don’t bother. Everything that could happen has already happened, and nothing can ever change.

(Emphasis supplied.) This, of course, goes back to Kriss’s piece on Dr. Tyson. The sort of materialism that delights in “science,” including the idea of an infinite number of universes where an infinite number of possibilities plays out separately, ultimately seeks to create a world without possible escape. Endlessly, rigorously “correct.” What you see is what you get, if you’re lucky. More likely, what you see is what you see and what you get is nothing. Eventually one does not even need the tweets and blog posts and talking-head programs saying “actually…,” one simply internalizes the “actually…” The goal, to nick the title of that book of Sagan’s, may have started out as to free us from “a demon-haunted world,” but it seems to have wound up being to free us from a human-inhabited world.

One may say, too, that the multiverse idea is an organized assault on faith. We know that God took flesh, dwelt among men, died on the cross, and was raised from the dead on the third day. But if there are an infinite number of universes, then it is entirely possible (probable, even?) that there is a universe in which that did not happen. Right? (We’re not experts in this stuff, so maybe it isn’t right, but we certainly have the sense that this is the thrust of the theory.) There may, in fact, be several universes in which that did not happen. And you see it goes on and on. And for every single thing Christians know to be true. If struck by a perverse mood, one can posit ever more ridiculous hypotheses: let’s say that everything that we know to be true is true for n-1 universes, including ours, but in the n-th, the 27th condemned proposition of the Laxists wasn’t condemned by the Holy Office, or something like that. That’s the only difference. Such a hypothesis is unfalsifiable, obviously, but it’s no more or less so that the more serious hypotheses discussed. (We could gussy it up with some calculations, but we were never that good with figures.) At some point one has to come back to Kriss’s earlier point: “What’s more likely: a potentially infinite number of useless parallel universes, or one perfectly ordinary God?” 

We wouldn’t put it like that, exactly, but that’s a devastating answer to the adherents of scientism who tell us increasingly improbable things and expect us to swallow them whole.

Now, perhaps Kriss means to say that the multiverse and God are equally improbable, but we’ll set that possibility to one side. Perhaps in another universe, we take it up. Levity aside, there is, as a function of scientism and our indefatigable faith in scientific progress notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, too much piety about science. The scientists say. The experiment shows. And all too often Christians—who know better; who know the truth about God, the world, and our place in it, in point of fact—are stuck either sketching some complicated modus vivendi for faith and science or demonstrating how the scientific explanation fits into our understanding of things. Perhaps the better approach would be to call up “up” and down “down,” as Kriss does, and to say that a given “explanation” is so wildly, hysterically improbable as to be essentially an alternative faith. Thus dialogue between a Christian and an adherent of these theories ought to be in the nature of interfaith dialogue—not some grand disputation between faith and reason—acknowledging always that, while there might be points of agreement, there are points of dogma that cannot be transgressed by the respective believers.

We’re by no means an expert on the intersection of faith and science. We know what we know. And that may not be all that much. But we think there’s good reason to ponder Kriss’s point and its implications.

Shea, Fisher, politics, and the Catholic Media

We note at the outset that we did not follow either Mark Shea or Simcha Fisher all that closely. This will surprise no one, but we probably were not the target audience or the ideal reader for either of them. However, from time to time, something they wrote at the National Catholic Register (or elsewhere) would bubble into our sphere. Sometimes we agreed, sometimes we disagreed, but never especially vehemently and never often. The fact of the matter is that neither of them wrote regularly on topics in which we ourselves were interested. Over the last few days, it appears that the National Catholic Register (or its parent company, EWTN) has fired both Shea and Fisher. This has provoked a lot of reaction, both cheering the firings and lamenting them. It seems to us that the firings, which may or may not have been just considered on their own terms, say something important about the state of American Catholic media.

Shea’s firing was very strange. The Register, in a statement issued concerning the firing, stated that Shea never violated their editorial standards. However, it appears that statements he made on other websites were sufficient to cause them to terminate his employment. (It does not appear that Shea broke those other websites’ rules.) In other words, the Register admits that Shea’s work for them was at least minimally satisfactory. Strange, then, that he would be let go. Fisher’s firing was stranger still, since it remains hugely unclear to us what she was let go for. Some people have suggested that it was due to some vulgar language in a political context, others that she expressed too much support for Shea. It seems that one explanation that has been given is that Shea and Fisher can be pointed in different ways in their interactions on Facebook, but that hardly seems like a justification for firing someone, not least since a platform like Facebook encourages pointed interactions.

And we have spoken with some folks who have had less than charming interactions with Mark Shea in particular, and they believe that he could be very pointed and very dismissive of his opponents. Though we have yet to see a debate on matters of faith conducted on the internet that does not involve someone being very pointed and very dismissive of one’s opponents. Perhaps Shea exceeded the limits imposed by charity, perhaps he didn’t. That’s a matter for him and his confessor. We mention it only to say that sharp elbows seem to be a known hazard among those of us who discuss these matters on the internet. One may celebrate Shea getting at long last his comeuppance, but one shouldn’t whistle past the graveyard quite so cheerfully. We wouldn’t want to be judged on our worst interactions. Likewise, people feel that Fisher could be pointed. However, it seems to us that Fisher does not quite have the same reputation for nastiness that Shea does.

It is also, we will say only briefly, something else to see traditionally minded Catholics, who have been tone-policed and concern-trolled, to say the least, by everyone from high prelates in the Church on down at various times, engaging in exactly the same sort of behavior that was intolerable when applied to them. Error has no rights, it is true, but let us be humane about these things, even if our opponents are not.

At any rate, we have seen some gloating among traditionally minded Catholics, many of whom never had a lot of use for EWTN or the National Catholic Register to begin with, over Shea and Fisher’s firings. The thrust of it is that Shea and Fisher weren’t traditionally minded Catholics and maybe even weren’t all that conservative, and, thus, they deserved what they got. Some folks might even be able to point to specific issues on which Shea and Fisher were insufficiently orthodox or whatever, but even that may presuppose a traditional mindset. (Certainly, we have questions about NFP as it is currently understood popularly, to take one example at semi-random, but we strive to avoid discussing the matter at any length for a variety of reasons.) But it is unclear to us that EWTN or the Register is especially known for the sort of precise, clear-eyed orthodoxy that other outlets are. They seem to be, instead, the voice of a center-right, middle-of-the-road American Catholicism.

This seems to us to be the crucial problem. It seems to us that Shea and Fisher were not heterodox in a relevant way (at least from the corporation’s perspective), so much as they were inconvenient to the specific coalition that EWTN and the Register serve. A traditionally minded Catholic might call the coalition “neo-Caths on the American political right.” (The Reporter is, of course, their left counterpart. More on that in a second.) This is, of course, insider jargon, but what it means is, essentially, a Catholic for whom the doctrine of the Church begins and ends with the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the platform of the Republican Party. Shea and Fisher often pitched to the left, speaking in American political terms, of this alliance, though I don’t think either of them is a leftist in conventional terms. Shea perhaps is more explicitly to the left, insofar as part of his project was rejecting the implication that Catholics have to be on the American political right. But, notwithstanding their precise personal categorization, neither of them spends a lot of time making nice with Catholics on the American political right.  And that seems to be a big part of the problem for us with the Shea and Fisher situation. Perhaps Shea is uncharitable in online interactions; perhaps Fisher uses vulgar language when she oughtn’t; but both of those things seem to be convenient pretexts for the Register getting rid of some contributors who don’t fit in with the broader political tendencies of the Register‘s constituency.

Just as EWTN and the Register is the house organ of the neo-Cath/GOP coalition, so too is the Reporter the house organ of Catholics on the American political left. And both sides have essentially guaranteed that their readers will never be challenged by a contrary view. Name one politically conservative writer for the Reporter. Try to name one politically liberal, or relatively politically liberal, writer for the Register (after Shea and Fisher got canned). There is, then, no contradiction to either publication’s contention that they represent the correct expression of Catholicism in the United States, which involves fusion with one or the other major political party, when anyone with eyes to see can identify the serious problems with either. Moreover, the ideological purification of the publications only furthers this toxic, erroneous notion that Catholics ought to engage wholeheartedly with the categories of the American political spectrum.

We have said and said, both here and elsewhere, that the alliance between Catholics and the American political right, forged largely on the basis of the Republican Party’s laudable opposition to legalized infanticide, is one of the most damaging relationships that the Church has entered. It seemingly locks Catholics into a set of policies that in many ways deviate seriously from the traditional teaching of the Church, especially on issues central to the Church’s social teaching. Consider Republican nominee Donald J. Trump’s immigration platform. Are a border wall and aggressive background investigations for some immigrants consistent with the natural right of migration that Pius XII articulated in his radio address on the 50th anniversary of Rerum novarum or in his Apostolic Constitution Exsul Familia Nazarethana? (We leave it to you to decide, though we suspect you know what we think.) And other issues could be mentioned, if you think immigration too hot button an issue. A Catholic who wants to be a good Republican is, therefore, in a bind. And Shea and Fisher, each in their way, did little to make that situation more comfortable for those Catholics.

We note in passing that Catholics who want to be good Democrats have been in a very serious bind for a very long time, and we will not rehearse all the problems with that approach, since they are all too obvious and all too well known. We don’t want to minimize this difficult, but we don’t want to bore you (or ourselves) by repeating the all the allegations of the libellus. Suffice it to say that no Catholic can wholeheartedly support—or, indeed, even support in the slightest way without the gravest reservations and for a grave cause—a political party that makes a “right” to infanticide and contraception a cornerstone of its platform.

Indeed, it goes beyond mere discomfort: Trump is causing strain within this traditional coalition. George Weigel and Robert George came out strong against Trump in March, when the Trump candidacy was still a contingent thing. (We probably criticized it here then, as little more than an objection that Trump was outside the neo-Cath/GOP consensus, which still seems a just critique to us.) And even sources that aren’t hugely in touch with Catholic thought realize, especially in the light of Steve Bannon’s comments, among other things, that Trump has a hard time connecting with Catholics. In other words, not only is the dual loyalty of this neo-Cath/GOP coalition a difficulty philosophically, but also the concrete problem of Donald Trump is a tremendous difficulty. A Catholic who wants to be a good Republican is in a very serious bind in the age of Donald Trump.

Catholics—at least Catholics who are serious about the Church’s teachings—know that all this is exactly backwards. The American political spectrum ought to engage wholeheartedly with the teachings of the Church. Catholics should not run to figure out how they can combine their political beliefs and their faith comfortably. Indeed, the only way the sickness in American culture gets better is by submitting to Christ the King and His Church, not by demanding that Christ get out of public life and that the Church accommodate whatever novelty, however wretched, people come up with.

 

The Assumption and Our Lady’s death

Yesterday was the Feast of the Assumption, and we saw in a couple of places some questions about what, exactly, the Dogma of the Assumption requires Catholics to believe. A certain question arises in the context of the comparison of the Assumption with the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Feast of the Dormition: did Our Lady die before she was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory? Eastern Catholics and the Orthodox say that she did, in fact, suffer death, and was resurrected and assumed into heaven. (There are various accounts of her death and resurrection.) But what does the Latin Church say? It turns out that that’s an open question. Indeed, we’ll see here in a minute that Pius XII’s definition of the Assumption, in fact, leaves the question open. But, we’ll also see that the tradition of the Church provides a possible—probable?—answer.

First a quick reminder what Pius declared. In the Latin text of Munificentissimus Deus, the Dogma of the Assumption is defined thus:

Quapropter, postquam supplices etiam atque etiam ad Deum admovimus preces, ac Veritatis Spiritus lumen invocavimus, ad Omnipotentis Dei gloriam, qui peculiarem benevolentiam suam Mariae Virgini dilargitus est, ad sui Filii honorem, immortalis saeculorum Regis ac peccati mortisque victoris, ad eiusdem augustae Matris augendam gloriam et ad totius Ecclesiae gaudium exsultationemque, auctoritate Domini Nostri Iesu Christi, Beatorum Apostolorum Petri et Pauli ac Nostra pronuntiamus, declaramus et definimus divinitus revelatum dogma esse : Immaculatam Deiparam semper Virginem Mariam, expleto terrestris vitae cursu, fuisse corpore et anima ad caelestem gloriam assumptam.

(Emphasis supplied.) Which is rendered in the Vatican’s English translation as:

For which reason, after we have poured forth prayers of supplication again and again to God, and have invoked the light of the Spirit of Truth, for the glory of Almighty God who has lavished his special affection upon the Virgin Mary, for the honor of her Son, the immortal King of the Ages and the Victor over sin and death, for the increase of the glory of that same august Mother, and for the joy and exultation of the entire Church; by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.

(Emphasis supplied.) She “completed the course of her earthly life.” In other words, Pius XII never says whether Our Lady died prior to being assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.

Father John Hunwicke makes precisely that observation, and goes on to observe that Pius’s definition actually omits a considerable part of the tradition:

The first millennium texts common to Rome and Canterbury expressed a belief common also to the East: that Mary ‘underwent temporal death’; that nevertheless she ‘could not be held down by the bonds of death’ and that the precise reason why God ‘translated her from this age’ was that ‘she might faithfully intercede for our sins’. This is the Ancient Common Tradition of East and West. It is, in fact, expressed clearly in much of the liturgical and patristic evidence which Pius XII cited as evidence for the dogma in Munificentissimus Deus; one suspects that this is because the Pope would have been much shorter of evidence if he had omitted this material. But it is left out of the definition. Which means that it has de facto disappeared from the consciousness of Latin Christendom.

[…]

Yet this is not what Pius XII defined. His 1950 definition, as the ARCIC document on Mary accurately reminds us, does not ‘use about her the language of death and resurrection, but celebrates the action of God in her.’ [A very strange ‘but’!] In other words, Pius XII took a machete and slashed ruthlessly at the Common Ancient Tradition about our Lady’s end, not simply by ignoring the apocryphal stories about how the Apostles gathered and what they found in the tomb and how S Thomas arrived late and all the rest of it; but also by pruning away even the bare structural bones of what Christians Eastern and Western had harmoniously thought they knew: that she died and was resurrected.

(Emphasis supplied.) But Father Hunwicke is not alone in this observation.

No less a churchman than St. John Paul made the same observation in a June 1997 general audience, noting that the opinion that Our Lady did not die was “unknown until the 17th century”:

Concerning the end of Mary’s earthly life, the Council uses the terms of the Bull defining the dogma of the Assumption and states: “The Immaculate Virgin, preserved free from all stain of original sin, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, when her earthly life was over” (Lumen gentium, n. 59). With this formula, the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, following my Venerable Predecessor Pius XII, made no pronouncement on the question of Mary’s death. Nevertheless, Pius XII did not intend to deny the fact of her death, but merely did not judge it opportune to affirm solemnly the death of the Mother of God as a truth to be accepted by all believers. 

Some theologians have in fact maintained that the Blessed Virgin did not die and and was immediately raised from earthly life to heavenly glory. However, this opinion was unknown until the 17th century, whereas a common tradition actually exists which sees Mary’s death as her entry into heavenly glory. 

Could Mary of Nazareth have experienced the drama of death in her own flesh? Reflecting on Mary’s destiny and her relationship with her divine Son, it seems legitimate to answer in the affirmative: since Christ died, it would be difficult to maintain the contrary for his Mother. 

The Fathers of the Church, who had no doubts in this regard, reasoned along these lines. One need only quote St Jacob of Sarug (†521), who wrote that when the time came for Mary “to walk on the way of all generations”, the way, that is, of death, “the group of the Twelve Apostles” gathered to bury “the virginal body of the Blessed One” (Discourse on the burial of the Holy Mother of God, 87-99 in C. Vona, Lateranum 19 [1953], 188). St Modestus of Jerusalem (†634), after a lengthy discussion of “the most blessed dormition of the most glorious Mother of God”, ends his eulogy by exalting the miraculous intervention of Christ who “raised her from the tomb”, to take her up with him in glory (Enc. in dormitionem Deiparae semperque Virginis Mariae, nn. 7 and 14: PG 86 bis, 3293; 3311). St John Damascene (†704) for his part asks: “Why is it that she who in giving birth surpassed all the limits of nature should now bend to its laws, and her immaculate body be subjected to death?”. And he answers: “To be clothed in immortality, it is of course necessary that the mortal part be shed, since even the master of nature did not refuse the experience of death. Indeed, he died according to the flesh and by dying destroyed death; on corruption he bestowed incorruption and made death the source of resurrection” (Panegyric on the Dormition of the Mother of God, n. 10: SC 80, 107).

(Emphasis supplied and one hyperlink omitted.) Unknown until the 17th century! A common, patristic tradition says Our Lady died! What on earth could explain the more recent opinion—an opinion that is, in the life of the Church, no older than the day before yesterday—that Our Lady did not die?

John Paul has an idea, and it’s confusion—though confusion might be too strong a word—resulting from the Immaculate Conception. We die because of original sin. But for Adam and Eve’s first sin in Eden, we would live forever. (This is, of course, why a New Adam was necessary to restore us to immortality.) But! the objection goes, Our Lady was in her conception preserved free from the stain of original sin. Indeed, Pius IX infallibly declared the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception in Ineffabilis Deus in 1854. So, the argument goes, if we die because of original sin (true!), and Our Lady was preserved free from the stain of original sin (true!), then Our Lady was not subject to death. How, then, can one hold that Our Lady died before being assumed bodily into heavenly glory? John Paul answers:

It is true that in Revelation death is presented as a punishment for sin. However, the fact that the Church proclaims Mary free from original sin by a unique divine privilege does not lead to the conclusion that she also received physical immortality. The Mother is not superior to the Son who underwent death, giving it a new meaning and changing it into a means of salvation. 

Involved in Christ’s redemptive work and associated in his saving sacrifice, Mary was able to share in his suffering and death for the sake of humanity’s Redemption. What Severus of Antioch says about Christ also applies to her: “Without a preliminary death, how could the Resurrection have taken place?” (Antijulianistica, Beirut 1931, 194f.). To share in Christ’s Resurrection, Mary had first to share in his death.

(Emphasis supplied.) Recall briefly the witness of St. John Damascene in the passage quoted above:

“Why is it that she who in giving birth surpassed all the limits of nature should now bend to its laws, and her immaculate body be subjected to death?”. And he answers: “To be clothed in immortality, it is of course necessary that the mortal part be shed, since even the master of nature did not refuse the experience of death. Indeed, he died according to the flesh and by dying destroyed death; on corruption he bestowed incorruption and made death the source of resurrection”

(Emphasis supplied.) And this makes sense, and, for our part, it answers the objection nicely. Others may have deeper, more penetrating questions remaining, but our limited, limited theological training leaves us happy with what we have here.

We add, as a brief aside, that it also seems to us that this would be an excellent point to include in official dialogue between Catholic, both Latin and Eastern, theologians and Orthodox theologians, since it is a point where there could be much fruitful enrichment of the Latin tradition by the Eastern and Orthodox traditions.

Returning to our main point, it seems to us that Pius XII may well have had Ineffabilis Deus and the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception in mind when he defined the Assumption. Certainly, the common tradition of the Church—capital-T Tradition, most likely—held that Our Lady died, was raised from the dead, and was assumed bodily into heaven. Pius cites sources from this tradition in Munificentissimus Deus. Yet, when it comes time to actually define the Dogma of the Assumption, Pius leaves this significant component of the tradition out, making instead a very general statement about Our Lady completing the course of her earthly life. (And it seems to us, if she was assumed body and soul into heaven, perforce she completed the course of her earthly life.) Is it possible, then, that Pius wanted to avoid the merest whiff of difficulty with his dogmatic definition? The faintest hint of trickiness between the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption? One way to do that would be to adopt a minimalistic definition of the Assumption that permits Catholics to adopt, really, either view about the exact circumstances of Our Lady’s assumption into heaven.

In one of our comments elsewhere about this question, we observed that it would be a worthwhile project to write a study about the circumstances, beginning in 1946 with the Encyclical Deiparae Virginis Mariae, polling the world’s bishops about whether it was opportune to define as a dogma the Assumption, and continuing through the glorious fall day in 1950 when Pius declared the dogma. It would be an interesting story, full of colorful characters. (One of Pius’s advisers was the eminent Dominican theologian, Guérard des Lauriers, who was later consecrated a bishop by Archbishop Thuc, for example.) And it may well clear up some of the perplexities surrounding the definition, including why, precisely, Pius chose not to include an important aspect of the tradition in the definition. Perhaps such a study exists, and if it does and you’re feeling charitable, do feel free to drop us an email.

 

Pope Paul’s “Sacrificium laudis”

At New Liturgical Movement, Peter Kwasniewski has a brief piece commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Sacrificium laudis, Paul VI’s 1966 apostolic letter to religious exhorting them to retain the choral office in Latin. Kwasniewski’s essay includes a translation by the eminent English Dominican, Fr. Thomas Crean, of Paul’s letter. Echoing a point we have made here before, Kwasniewski observes:

But in many ways the greatest tragedy of the postconciliar period was the sudden, dramatic, worldwide collapse of religious life, especially in its contemplative branches, and the disappearance, as if overnight, of the chanting of the Divine Office in Gregorian chant. It was an anti-miracle, so to speak — a feat of Satan who, appearing as an angel of light, lured the religious to their doom. The praises of God, which had been sung day and night for well over a millennium with melodies more beautiful than any the world has ever birthed before or since, fell silent, with the silence of the tomb.

And yet, Pope Paul VI, in words no less clear, stalwart, principled, and prophetic than those he uttered about birth control in Humanae Vitae, urged religious in 1966 to uphold their traditional choral office at all costs, for it was their special contribution to the life, health, and growth of the Mystical Body. While it is true that Paul VI, with his self-admitted Hamlet syndrome, walked a zigzag path in contrary directions, seeming to be trapped in the torments and doubts of his age, he nevertheless rose above the churning waters now and again to speak a clear word that, had it only been followed, would have been a blessing for the Church.

(Emphasis supplied.) For example, consider this passage from Pope Paul:

What is in question here is not only the retention within the choral office of the Latin language, though it is of course right that this should be eagerly guarded and should certainly not be lightly esteemed. For this language is, within the Latin Church, an abundant well-spring of Christian civilisation and a very rich treasure-trove of devotion. But it is also the seemliness, the beauty and the native strength of these prayers and canticles which is at stake: the choral office itself, ‘the lovely voice of the Church in song’ (Cf. St Augustine’s Confessions, Bk 9, 6). Your founders and teachers, the holy ones who are as it were so many lights within your religious families, have transmitted this to you. The traditions of the elders, your glory throughout long ages, must not be belittled. Indeed, your manner of celebrating the choral office has been one of the chief reasons why these families of yours have lasted so long, and happily increased. It is thus most surprising that under the influence of a sudden agitation, some now think that it should be given up.

In present conditions, what words or melodies could replace the forms of Catholic devotion which you have used until now? You should reflect and carefully consider whether things would not be worse, should this fine inheritance be discarded. It is to be feared that the choral office would turn into a mere bland recitation, suffering from poverty and begetting weariness, as you yourselves would perhaps be the first to experience. One can also wonder whether men would come in such numbers to your churches in quest of the sacred prayer, if its ancient and native tongue, joined to a chant full of grave beauty, resounded no more within your walls. We therefore ask all those to whom it pertains, to ponder what they wish to give up, and not to let that spring run dry from which, until the present, they have themselves drunk deep.

(Emphasis supplied.) Read the whole thing there.

Cardinal Sarah’s Sacra Liturgia speech

Robert Cardinal Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, has released a text of his speech at the Sacra Liturgia conference. You may recall this speech encouraged priests to celebrate Mass ad Orientem (or versus apsidem, depending on how persnickety you want to be) and informed the crowd that the Holy Father encouraged him to continue studying the so-called Reform of the Reform. These remarks drew an unusual rebuke from Father Lombardi, departing head of the Press Office, who emphasized that Cardinal Sarah wasn’t issuing juridical norms (as though a speech in London were the way to do that), that the GIRM presupposes versus populum worship (it does not), and that the Reform of the Reform is not how the Pope likes to talk about the liturgy (okay, we suppose). However, according to Edward Pentin, Cardinal Sarah has, so far from retreating, chastened, from the field, strengthened some of the controversial sections of his talk and encouraged wide distribution.