Whose "heavy price"?

Here is a serious argument that is worth a serious response.

The Mater et Magistra dispute led to many ironic consequences. In defending National Review’s capitalist Catholicism, Buckley and Wills had provided a rationale for social liberals to ignore church teachings on sexual matters, which was especially pertinent after the Vatican released the encyclicalHumanae Vitae (1968), reiterating opposition to birth control and abortion. Wills himself moved to the left in the late 1960s, breaking with Buckley over the Vietnam War and civil rights. About the core issue of the Mater et Magistra debate, Wills argued in his 1979 bookConfessions of a Conservative that “[t]here is something about laissez-faire individualism that is historically at odds with Catholic tradition—but this is a matter not reachable by papal fiat or by those who challenge the sincerity of their fellow believer’s religion.” 

By the late 1960s, as Wills also noted, the two sides had flipped, with “‘liberals’ now denouncing encyclicals rather than using encyclicals to denounce others, ‘conservatives’ sticking with the Pope even when he had issued his disastrous encyclical on contraceptives.” One lesson from theMater et Magistra contretemps is that almost all Catholics are cafeteria Catholics. 

For National Review, the sophisticated arguments they used to wiggle out from having to grapple with church teaching in Mater et Magistra came at a heavy price. The magazine became disengaged from Catholicism as a living intellectual tradition and lost much of its Catholic ambience.

That's from a piece by Jeet Heer called "The Last Time Conservatives Dismissed a Major Encyclical, It Ended Terribly for Them". Headlines in political advocacy publications have a tendency to undermine the article below and that one is no exception. Mater et Magistra was promulgated in 1961; to call the subsequent decades a disaster for conservative Catholics is a little odd. The next two decades saw conservatism go from being a fringe movement that was historically at odds with American tradition to the Reagan White House. It was also a period when Catholic conservative intellectuals rose to a level of influence that would have been unimaginable before. A more accurate headline would be "The Last Time Conservatives Dismissed a Major Encyclical, It Exposed Inconsistencies in their Views", which, while accurate, is not terribly compelling.

Those caveats aside, there is a lot that is right about the argument:

• A Catholic conservative cannot dismiss Catholic social teaching and then take umbrage at those who disregard Catholic teaching on sex and sexuality.
• Laissez-faire individualism really is at odds with Catholic tradition.
• If you denounce Encyclicals, you cannot reasonably reverse direction and start using Encyclicals to to denounce others.

All of these are reversible:

• Catholic liberals who describe Humanae Vitae as disastrous can't tell Catholic conservatives who question Catholic social teaching to shut up.
• For a long, long time, monarchy fit right in with Catholic tradition.
• If you use encyclicals to denounce others, you cannot reasonably reverse direction and begin denouncing encyclicals.

The simple conclusion to draw from this is that Jeet Heer is far too wrapped up in the liberal-conservative ping pong game to see that it is just ping pong and, therefore, ridiculous. A deeper point is that too many popes have written too many encyclicals that fit right into these ping pong games. The moment encyclicals become useful paddles for anyone on any side of a political argument, not only that encyclical but encyclicals generally lose a lot of their luster. The big losers in Laudato Si, no matter how you spin it, will be the Catholic church and the office of the papacy. 

When someone accidentally blurts out the truth in passing

I remain unconvinced on Pope Francis. My hope is that I'll have to eat my words, that, several years from now, I'll be writing a post where I say that I'm sorry I ever doubted him.

But I keep reading things that discourage me. Notice, here, for example, how John Allen, seeking to praise the Pope makes a staggering admission in passing:

In Rome the pendulum is swinging from public theater to behind-the-scenes substance this week, as two closed-door meetings tackle two of the most serious challenges facing Pope Francis: Vatican reform and the child sexual abuse scandals.

A more direct, and more honest, way to make the same point would be to say, "He hasn't actually done anything yet."

And that is a little troubling, don't you think, after a barrage of articles about how wonderful he is. John Allen is probably the best English-speaking Vatican journalist in the world and here he is allowing that Francis hasn't actually done anything. Pope Francis was made Time magazine person of the year in 2013 and here is the best-informed journalist we have on the subject casually allowing that the Pope's achievements are just street theatre!

And then there is this from the same article:

As is his custom, Francis is sitting in on the meetings but generally not saying much, preferring to listen to the discussion without injecting himself into it.

I'm sorry, but that isn't encouraging. As I say, I hope and pray that I am as wrong as wrong can be on this but what if this man is just a clever PR master who isn't up to the job? What if he is getting all this good press while sleepwalking into disaster?

Taking Francis seriously (pargraphs 11-13): Whose renewal?

I was talking to two liberal I know Catholics about Envangelii Gaudium and both surprised me. The first, an old-schood "new lefty" from the 1960s did so by saying he thought it a very badly written and poorly thought out piece of work.

Well, he's right. I was taken aback at first because I had found lots to like in it myself. But now that I read it more carefully, I can see his point. As an example of what he and I mean, consider the following quotes from paragraphs #10 and #11.

1. When the Church summons Christians to take up the task of evangelization, she is simply pointing to the source of authentic personal fulfillment.
2. Consequently, an evangelizer must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral!
3. A renewal of preaching can offer believers, as well as the lukewarm and the non-practising, new joy in the faith and fruitfulness in the work of evangelization.

If this was a term paper submitted by an undergraduate, I'd mark it F. In the margin beside these paragraphs, I'd write, "You don't really believe what you have written here." Back in the days before I left the academic world and had to mark undergraduate papers, I'd write that a lot.

To grasp the problem compare these phrases from quotes 1 and 3.

• "... the source of authentic personal fulfillment."
• "A renewal of preaching can offer believers ...new joy in the faith"

If evangelizing is THE source of authentic personal fulfillment then it WILL offer believers new joy in the faith.

Part of the problem, as I indicated in an earlier post, is that Francis is making a psychological rather than a moral or a factual argument. But there is a more fundamental issue and that is that he doesn't really believe it himself.

But maybe that is okay. He's a pastoral pope not a groundbreaker like John Paul or a deep and perceptive thinker like Benedict. His task may be to be a bit of a cheerleader who exhorts us to do better while he does his real job of fixing church governance away from the spotlight, a task suited to a tough man like him. The church is full of parish priests who are mediocre preachers but really good administrators who can pay down the debts and clean out the deadwood and thank God for them; perhaps we need a pope who can do what they do for individual parishes for the whole church.

Which brings me to my second liberal Catholic friend, a gay man who hopes the church will one day stop condemning homosexual acts. We were talking about just this aspect and he said he thinks the liberalizing Francis is getting credit for is really the work of John Paul and Benedict.

For me, that was one of those moments when we suddenly realize we've missed something really important. Because my friend is right. Read John Paul and Benedict correctly and you can see a path for renewing not so much the church as the faith. Liberal Catholics see nothing but roadblocks because they are rigidly committed to only one kind of renewal but there is another, and better path, open to those who are willing to see it.

Is Francis one of these? Well, in a sense it doesn't matter because, quite frankly, he doesn't have the intellectual or the moral stature to do anything else but follow what they have set out. He can do the job really well, really badly or just muddle through doing the best he can but nothing he does is going to fundamentally alter the course his predecessors have set.

As we will see next week, he makes a real muddle of "new evangelization". Such a muddle, in fact, that this particular exhortation is, for all intents and purposes, stillborn. But, so what? We can survive this and, at the very least, accomplishing little means we can be certain of accomplishing little harm; boldly launching the church in a new direction doesn't necessarily guarantee that direction will be a good way to go.

Taking Francis seriously, paragraph 10: Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini.

As Christmas approaches, pageviews drop. It happened last year. It's happening again. That said, I suspect the subject matter I've taken up with this series is probably driving people away. Oh well.

When the Church summons Christians to take up the task of evangelization, she is simply pointing to the source of authentic personal fulfillment.

I'll respond to that with quotes from two friends of mine, neither of whom are famous.

1. The first quote is from a therapist who now works with the military. Back when we were in university, he once said, "Self-help books can do people good but only if they read them very quickly." What Tom meant by that was that these books consist of exhortations that are good at motivating some people provided they don't look into the philosophical foundations they are built on. Analogy: telling a stage-four cancer patient to cheer up just might work provided they don't ask you to provide reasons why they should be cheerful.

For example, we could paraphrase the above quote from Francis by saying:

Get out there and evangelize and you'll find personal fulfillment!

Well, maybe. It depends what you mean by "evangelize". You could, for example, learn to speak Arabic, fly to Saudi Arabia, set up on a street corner and start to proclaim the gospel. Most likely scenario is that an angry mob would form and assault you on the spot. If your lucky, you'll survive and an appeal to Saudi authorities would cause them to waive the death penalty in your case and your badly damaged body will be flown back home.  You probably wouldn't survive.

You may think I'm being facetious, but Saint Dominic wanted to do the equivalent of that. Fortunately, for everyone, he was denied permission by his superiors and went on to found the Order of Preachers.

Where am I going with this? I don't know. What I do know is that the one of two huge questions as we read through this is how Francis defines "evangelization". Any pope could get away with saying, "Evangelize it's your duty", but a pope who writes a long letter asking us to do so also, by this very action, puts the onus on himself to come up with a very good definition of evangelization and very good reasons why we should do it.

For now, he quotes the Fifth General Conference of the Latin American and Caribbean Bishops:

“Life grows by being given away, and it weakens in isolation and comfort. Indeed, those who enjoy life most are those who leave security on the shore and become excited by the mission of communicating life to others”

That strikes me as the sort of thing you find in a typical self-help book or even on an inspirational poster. You could accept it as true in a fuzzy sort of way but it would not stand a lot of scrutiny.

2. Which brings me to the second quote. My friend John, an economist, once said to me, "One of the things you learn when you study behavioural economics is that people who go after something in a  single-minded way succeed more often than people who are merely gifted; the ugly, five-foot nothing bald guy who makes seducing a whole lot of women the centre of his life will usually do better than the tall, good-looking guy." His point was that when the rest of us sometimes sit around and bemoan the fact that we didn't have as much sex, money, fame or adventure in our lives we are forgetting that we didn't really want these things in the first place.

To stick with the guy who wishes he could have more sex partners, we could think about this in two ways. One possibility is that something, usually the fear of rejection, held us back from actually pursuing these things. Another possibility is that we didn't pursue sex because, whether we admitted it to ourselves or not, we actually value other things more.

Thomas Cardinal Collins, as quoted by my Bishop, likes to say,

Don’t show me your mission statement. Show me your budget, and I will know what your mission is.

And that's a good way to think about it. We often say we value certain things but our real mission is better revealed by how we spend our money. If "money" seems to dirty for you, it also works with the way you spend you time and energy*: you say you love your mother but how often do you visit her? (Values", by the way, is an absolutely useless concept in morality; that's why we like it so much.)

And here is the rub: You probably don't love your mother; or, if this makes it easier to swallow this bitter pill, you don't love her as much as you think you should. I know, what a scandalous thing to say. But, be honest, you know what she did for you and you know how much you mean to her but the truth is that you've been through a lot with your mother and there are lots of things you'd rather be doing than visiting her. Evangelization is something of a similar problem. No mother, no you; no evangelization, no church. And the point is not that there are other things we'd rather do but that month after month, year after year, we keep choosing to do other things.

In part one, I suggested that Francis has set himself a logical hurdle to get over. In this second part, I suggest that he has also set himself an inspirational hurdle that makes that logical hurdle look tiny by comparison. I don't mean to be uncharitable when I say that logical hurdles are not this pope's strong point. He follows two exceptionally intelligent popes. That said, I don't think he is up to the logical challenge and that means that everything, the entire success of his papacy, depends on his ability to inspire.

And, sorry to be a downer, I think he is going to fail. Actually, it's worse than that, I think he has already failed. I think he has succeeded in becoming a celebrity but we didn't need a celebrity. We needed someone who was going to inspire people in the church and not someone the media would love. We should all pray I'm wrong pope but, even if I am right, it won't be so bad. One of the consequences of having a really great pope is that we tend to focus too much attention and hope on the pope when our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.


* OTOH, the way you spend your money will almost certainly match the way you spend the way you spend your time and energy, which is the Cardinal's point.

Taking Francis seriously, paragraph #9: The dangers of sentimentality

I'm going to quote this one in full. Pope Francis makes a claim and then quotes Saint Paul to back up that claim. The question I want to ask is, "Does Paul actually backs up Francis here?"

Goodness always tends to spread. Every authentic experience of truth and goodness seeks by its very nature to grow within us, and any person who has experienced a profound liberation becomes more sensitive to the needs of others. As it expands, goodness takes root and develops. If we wish to lead a dignified and fulfilling life, we have to reach out to others and seek their good. In this regard, several sayings of Saint Paul will not surprise us: “The love of Christ urges us on” (2 Cor 5:14); “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel” (1 Cor 9:16). 

If we want to help Francis—and why not?—we should say that "every authentic experience of truth and goodness"and that any experience of "profound liberation" is really an experience of Christ's love for us. And that, no doubt, is what he does mean.

On the other hand, it is easy to see, when we read stuff like this, why Francis is so consistently "misunderstood" by the press. I put "misunderstood" in scare quotes here not because I think that the press actually does understand him. My concern is that if you are Francis and the press keeps misunderstanding you, there is point where you should ask yourself whether it might not be a good idea to start expressing yourself more carefully.

And that should worry us because the press is in the business of selling us cheap sentiment and Popes should not be. So, I ask myself why any sane person with even a modicum of life experience should accept the claim that "Goodness always tend to spread"? Really?

Here is a quote from Paul that really shook me the first time I read it:

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the church, of which I became a minister according to the divine office which was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now made manifest to his saints. (Colossians 1: 24)

It never shocked me to read that in Paul. I must have always let it slide by. But it really shook me when someone took it and turned it into a prayer. This is the Psalm prayer that follows  Psalm 116 (verses 10-19) in Evening prayer 1 from last Saturday night (Week III of the Psalter).

Father, precious in your sight is the death of the saints, but precious above all is the love with which Christ suffered to redeem us. In this life we fill up in our own flesh what is still lacking in the sufferings of Christ; accept this as our sacrifice of praise, and we shall even now taste the joy of the new Jerusalem.

To fill up or complete what is still lacking in the sufferings of Christ???? However we explain that to ourselves, we shouldn't try to explain it away.

Here is how the excepted section from Psalm 116 that precedes that prayer begins:

I trusted, even when I said:
"I am sorely afflicted,"
and when I said in my alarm:
"No man can be trusted."

There is a lot of ocean between that and "Goodness always tends to spread."

I don't where to go from here—other than to keep reading.

Taking Francis seriously: Santa Lucia!

This is a commentary on paragraph 8 of Evangelii Gaudium.

When last we  heard from Francis, he was quoting Benedict to the effect that the basis of Christianity is an encounter with a person.

Thanks solely to this encounter – or renewed encounter – with God’s love, which blossoms into an enriching friendship, we are liberated from our narrowness and self-absorption. We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being. Here we find the source and inspiration of all our efforts at evangelization. For if we have received the love which restores meaning to our lives, how can we fail to share that love with others?

I quote the whole paragraph this time because there isn't a single original thought in that paragraph. I mean that as praise. Francis is a very back-to-basics guy and you can really see it here. You can trace this teaching all the way back to the first letters of Paul, and Paul is the very first Christian writer. The message is: Christ will do something wonderful for us by coming to us and we can and should change as a result.

And the key point is that we prepare for this by being receptive.

Though he was in the form of God,
Jesus did not deem equality with God
something to be grasped at.

And so Francis says that, "we let God bring us beyond ourselves". In other words, don't try to make it happen. Be receptive and open. Or, to put it in valley talk, "Try being, you know, ready to actually experience this stuff for real".

Think about how much of what the common culture means by "inner life" is the exact opposite of what Francis talks about here. So often we hear of an inner life as a place to retreat to, to get away from the world. How different it is if we think of looking side not to find ourselves but find someone else, Jesus.

It is Santa Lucia today. Think of the light in the darkness but don't try to be the light. If the light is real, it will come to you.

Taking Francis seriously: Gaudete in Domino semper

This post deals with paragraphs 4, 5, 6 and 7 of Evangelii Gaudium. I don't think I have done anything better than expand on Francis's very good work here so you'd be better off reading the relevant sections of the exhortation again rather than my commentary below.

There are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter.

A friend recent told me of the travails of a couple of traditionalist Catholics and their fight against the post-Vatican 2 reforms. As a result of two decades struggle, their marriage foundered, one of them lost their faith and the other became a supporter of the SSPX, their children are bitter and unhappy and they have no friends left. After describing this, my friend says, "They paid a tremendous price for fighting for their values."

Well, I suppose they did but if fighting for you "values" (whatever that is supposed to mean) leaves you miserable, then they either weren't worth fighting for or you went about it the wrong way.

As I said in response to a comment yesterday, my mother taught my sisters and I that we were morally obligated to strive to be happy. She never read a word of Aquinas in her life but she understood.

It's a lot like being in love. Our culture treats this as a feeling that comes as a product of other things. But love (along with hope and faith) is something you have to pray for and then work for. So is happiness or, to use a better word, blessedness. You have to believe that God can do this for you. And I can't make it conditional on other stuff—I'll be happy if church politics goes my way or I meet someone to marry or I get a good job or whatever.

I never tire of repeating those words of Benedict XVI which take us to the very heart of the Gospel: “Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction”

Taking Francis seriously: "I invite all Christians"

This is a commentary on paragraph three of Evangelii Gaudium.

I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them; I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day.

The temptation is to dismiss that as boilerplate, and rather Protestant-sounding boilerplate at that. In fact, this is Pope Francis doing what he does best. This paragraph is a back-to-basics message and it is a message that those of us on the traditionalist end of the Catholic spectrum especially need to listen to.

I've spent a fair amount of time talking to Catholics and those considering entering the church about what the Church teaches. Sometimes, when people just aren't getting it, I find it useful to bluntly say, "You know, I really believe this stuff."

I say that because it is easy, when discussing the details, to forget that the base of our belief is that God exists; we do not believe that "a god" exists but that the real God, with a real identity, who has made real promises and he will keep them because he really is a loving God.

One of the places that we more traditionalist Catholics tend to go wrong is that we get too focused on the rules. For a traditionalist Catholic. where you stand in relation to God is a matter of rules. You use the rules to calculate your status and you follow other rules to fix that status. Ask a traditionalist Catholic whether you can receive communion on a given day and they will cite a series of rules you can use for self-examination and, if you don't pass muster according to these rules, they will tell you about other rules whereby you can examine your conscience, repent, go to confession and make penance so you can receive. And there is nothing wrong with that. Traditionalist Catholics will point out, with justice, that they at least know and respect the rules.

But there is something else that is more fundamental and much, much more important here and that is that God is a forgiving God.

Now is the time to say to Jesus: “Lord, I have let myself be deceived; in a thousand ways I have shunned your love, yet here I am once more, to renew my covenant with you. I need you. Save me once again, Lord, take me once more into your redeeming embrace”. How good it feels to come back to him whenever we are lost!

That is the message of evangelization. Christ came to save sinners and I'm a sinner. He will save you too.

Too often we tell people who are considering joining the church what they can't do. "Lesson one: Contraception and why you have to stop using it and stop having sex with your boyfriend right now!!! Welcome to the Catholic Church.

I think I've mentioned this before but the Lemon Girl and I found ourselves talking to some young women who were considering joining the church last year. They were probably all sexually active. We didn't, of course, ask them. But they were very resistant to any church teachings on sexuality. One of the most fruitful discussions came about when we asked them, "Never mind what you imagine that the church does or doesn't teach, is there anything sexual you can imagine yourself doing that would constitute a sin?" It turns out that there was. There was a quite a lot.

Christ came to save sinners and the first step is recognizing that I am a sinner in need of redemption. And everyone who isn't a psychopath will recognize this if you give them a chance.

Saint Ambrose and the inner life

Today is the feast of Saint Ambrose. One of the most famous stories about Ambrose, recounted in the Augustine's Confessions, is that he read without moving his lips. If you are unfamiliar with the story, check out this post of Father Z's where he talks about it.

There are two kinds of questions to consider here. The first is what is it that made this experience unusual? Had nobody figured out how to read without moving their lips before Ambrose?  That seems unlikely. It is more likely, given the context, that most people simply did not read without moving their lips. Why not?

The passage quoted by Father Z (with his added emphasis) is telling:

Now, as he read, his eyes glanced over the pages and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. Often when we came to his room—for no one was forbidden to enter, nor was it his custom that the arrival of visitors should be announced to him—we would see him thus reading to himself. After we had sat for a long time in silence—for who would dare interrupt one so intent?—we would then depart, realizing that he was unwilling to be distracted in the little time he could gain for the recruiting of his mind, free from the clamor of other men’s business. Perhaps he was fearful lest, if the author he was studying should express himself vaguely, some doubtful and attentive hearer would ask him to expound it or discuss some of the more abstruse questions, so that he could not get over as much material as he wished, if his time was occupied with others. And even a truer reason for his reading to himself might have been the care for preserving his voice, which was very easily weakened. Whatever his motive was in so doing, it was doubtless, in such a man, a good one. 

Reading was a public act. Ambrose stood out for Augustine not because he could do this but because he flouted a social convention by reading silently. Even if you were all alone, you read aloud such that, should someone come into the room, they could hear what you read.

It's not hard to think of reasons why that might be. Books were expensive and rare and so were the people who could read them.  That's one possibility. And there is also a related moral possibility that you shouldn't be locking your reading away.

Saint Augustine, as Father Z notes, is determined to be charitable. Based on his other experiences of Ambrose, he assumes that the goodness he has seen in his outer life must also be true of his inner life. What Augustine doesn't say, but is unintentionally implied by what he does, is that there are reasons why someone might be reading silently that are not admirable. Most obviously, I could be reading porn. Less obviously, I might be keeping something really good solely to myself intending to later whip it out as if it was the product of my own thinking.

I could keep on meandering along these byways but the question I want to ask is this: Suppose the "inner life" were nothing more than what we do when we read without moving our lips? I mean, suppose that there were nothing I could do in my inner life that I could not, in principle, do outwardly? In that case, it becomes very easy to think of the "inner life" as a possible cesspool of corruption and evil.

I mention this because there is a tendency to talk about an inner life as if it was something only morally cultivated people were capable of; as if, as it were, we lived in a  society where most people could barely read and where, therefore, being able to read read without moving lips would be an indicator of superiority. We, therefore, talk as if developing your inner life will make you better.

Suppose a woman approaches me and asks if if I have ever read Hans Urs von Balthasar. I answer her question, confessing to my relative ignorance of the guy, tell her what little I do know, confess that I've always wanted to read more and then suggest that we might both read a particular work of his and discuss it together. That's my outer life. My inner life could match it more or less. Then again, I might be thinking, "Boy it would be great to see and handle those magnificent __s! If we meet regularly to discuss Balthasar and she starts to like me, then maybe ... ."

The point here is not that that is uniquely evil. Every woman knows that men think about them that way and there would be something wrong with a woman who did not hope for and even deliberately provoke such reactions at least some of the time. Our entire civilization, especially the parts having to do with courtship, relies on our knowing how and being willing to play a double game. The point rather is that there is nothing necessarily good or terribly mystical about an inner life.

The Latin Mass: What is modern?

I had a pleasant tea with Eliot Girl last week. Part of the discussion revolved around modernism. It really did revolve around; despite our best efforts we never got near to anything that might be called the heart of the matter, or, to be modern about it, we never got anywhere near the still point of the turning modern world.

That isn't surprising. I've watched all sorts of people, including hundreds of academics, try to define "modern" and "modernism" over the last thirty-five years of my life and I can't think of a single one of these definitions that didn't end up feeling random. The problem is not figuring out where to go but rather where to start. You need a fact or, more likely, a solid set of facts to build your definition of modernism on. This for the simple reason that you have to be able to describe what the world was in order to say that the world has changed or must change (and modernists never seemed able to make up their minds about which of those two options would be the launching pad for their revolution). And that is just as true for the person coming along today with the goal of explaining "what modernism was" as it was for the young rebels in the early twentieth century who were trying to say "what modernism is".

There are two huge obstacles in the way. The first is that it has gotten much harder to simply lie about the past. That was what the Enlightenment figures did. They made up a straw man of a past and beat it up but good. Every movement that has sought a deliberate break with the past since then, including modernism, has attempted to do likewise. But the trick is far harder to pull off now; there are just too many people with access to media who know you are lying and will call you on it. Galileo was not a hapless victim of superstitious clerics who refused to look into his telescope, there never was a Copernican revolution, the Victorians did not cover the legs of their furniture nor were they particularly prudish about sex. Most importantly of all: there never was a period in history (ever!) when everyone shared a common and comforting understanding of the world and their place in it that was later shattered by any of the following, either singularly or in combination, science, Enlightenment, political revolution, social change, economic change, technological change, Darwin, Marx, Wagner, world wars or any of the other "revolutionary new stuff" we might want to conjure up.

The second obstacle is that there is something ridiculous about the notion of artists as self-appointed leaders of the culture. In military use, it makes sense to speak of an advance force or avant-garde because there is a commanding officer who sends the soldiers who will make up the avant-garde out. He sends them out into an area where he later means to send his main force. The artist who claims to be leading is just making their best guess about where the world either is or should be going. And the rest of us think, "Who appointed you?" Even today, a time when modernism is about a century old, you could not honestly argue that the leading figures of modernist art and literature guessed where the world was going better than the leading figures of politics or plumbing did.

And before you get all excited and start citing examples, consider just this example of non-modernist art:

That's the work of my buddy Leonetto Cappiello. Beautiful isn't it? It's also very modern. It shows a modern subject, doing a modern thing, using modern techniques. On top of which, it is absolutely brilliant. It isn't and wasn't modernist however.

Behind this work is the fascinating coincidence that two very different words, meaning very different things, that look and sound similar. The two words are "espresso", which means coffee made by forcing hot water under pressure through coffee grounds and "express", which means something for an express purpose and, more specifically, a train or bus that will expressly take you to a particular place without stopping anywhere in between. That poster sells you not only coffee but also a wonderful new world in which steam power, which drives both the water that makes the coffee and the train, makes a wonderful new life full of convenience, pleasure (espresso tastes batter!), speed and comfort.

And colour!

All this in 1922! You don't exactly get the sense that the artist was haunted by the memory of the carnage and disillusionment of the first world war do you? This poster was produced the very same year that Eliot's The Waste Land was published. Both are very modern but they portray two very different visions of "modern". And it wasn't just him, that poster had to convince millions of people who saw it that Cappiello's vision of the modern world was their world. And it succeeded.

Now we could get into a very long, and tedious argument about which vision was "better", I put the word in scare quotes because no one with their wits about them would willing choose Eliot's world over Capiello's. A huge part of Eliot's claim is that we don't really have any such choice and there he was clearly wrong.

And it's not just that. Cappiello needed  to make a living so we can't say that he made a philosophical choice in favour of capitalism and mass production. Regardless, however, of how much he did or didn't think the choice through, there is no denying that he made the better choice than did the modernist artists in those areas.

And this has what to do with the Latin Mass? Well, I think we are in a good place to look at the choices that were made and think seriously about what their real impact was and wasn't. It was ffty years ago yesterday that Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Vatican 2 document that set out the objectives for liturgical reform was promulgated. The reformers didn't pay an awful lot of attention to what that document actually said. They, like avant-garde artists, had their own ideas about where the world was going and the inexcapable fact is that they were wrong.

I don't, as some may think, advocate returning to the Latin Mass. But I do think we should revisit it as a starting point and rethink the changes. The "modern" world that  the liturgists foresaw when they started their reforms never came to be.

The Latin Mass: Modern vs. modernism

One of the themes I keep circling around here is what is really modern.

You might tell a story like this. Once upon a time, some people decided that they lived in a "modern" world because they lived in a world that had broken radically with the past. To live in this new world, they decided to make everything new, to create a new art and culture that was better suited to this new way of life than the old ways were.

Now comes the punchline: If you are interested in this new, modern culture they created, you can learn more about it by visiting a museum.

Something went deeply wrong. And the problem at every turn is, what is the measure of "modern" art?

It's weird that this even is a problem. Some modern but not "modern" art is incredibly popular. The Impressionists, for example. Also the Pre-Raphaelites. But if you pay close attention to people who argue about what should or should be considered "modern", they have serious misgiving about both groups. They are perfectly willing to admit the Impressionists but only as a phase that was passed through on the way to modernism. The millions of people who buy Impressionist calendars, placemats and other knick-knacks or who visit the Impressionist shrine at Giverny don't see it as the first step to something else. They see it as an end in itself. The Pre-Raphaelites, OTOH, the modernists don't even want to admit are modern. That art is seen as some weird throwback that, while pretty enough, has nothing to do with what it means to be really modern. Except for the millions upon millions of modern people who love this art.

Why this need to exclude so much of what is modern from "modernism"? What is really at work here?

I found an interesting example yesterday in The New Republic by a guy named Jed Perl who has the about as impeccable modernist credentials as you can imagine. He teaches at The New School and they write him up as follows:

Jed Perl, visiting professor of liberal studies, is the art critic for The New Republic. A former contributing editor at Vogue, Perl has written on contemporary art for a variety of publications, including Salmagundi, The New Criterion, The Partisan Review, The Threepenny Review, The New York Times Book Review, Elle, and Modern Painters, where he serves on the board of directors. Specializing in the history and development of post-1945 American art, he is also the author of Eyewitness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis (2000), Gallery Going: Four Seasons in the Art World (1991), Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I (1988), and the forthcoming New Art City: The Painters and Sculptors of Manhattan, 1950-1965. In addition, he teaches art history at Pratt Institute, the Philadelphia College of Art, and Parsons School of Design.

Now Mr. Perl is angry. He is angry that a pop artist like Art Spiegelman wants recognition from the art world and he is even angrier that he has gotten it. [Link fixed] But notice this, the paragraph below opens with "nobody is more obsessed with their high culture cred than pop culture mavens". Think about that and go read the above again. Wouldn't you say that Mr. Perl has amassed a fair amount of "high culture cred"? Too much, perhaps, for us to believe that this happened by accident?

Nobody is more obsessed with their high culture cred than the pop culture mavens. Art Spiegelman would seem to have achieved everything a media guy dreams of: a Pulitzer Prize; a show at the Museum of Modern Art; a retrospective that has traveled to the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne; a more-or-less open invitation at The New Yorker. And yet in the catalogue of “Art Spiegelman’s Co-Mix,” the retrospective now at the Jewish Museum in New York, Robert Storr, who used to be a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, is quite cranky about curators who won’t embrace comics with sufficient enthusiasm, and predicts that “someday soon the citadels of culture will be forced to open their gates and let ‘the barbarians’ in.”

You might think, reading that, that modernists like Perl want to keep the barbarians out but modernism has been all too keen to let the barbarians in.  They are just particular about which barbarians they want.

Perl gives us a powerful hint of who the good barbarians are:

The very first wall text at the Jewish Museum informs you that Spiegelman “has torn down the barriers that until recently separated high culture from low.” What on earth is a legitimate museum doing promoting such a ridiculous claim? Hasn’t anybody at the Jewish Museum noticed that those barriers were shaken if not torn down more or less a century ago, by Picasso, Braque, Léger, Schwitters, Picabia, and Duchamp?

We can see that Perl himself is the one being ridiculous if we ask what "low culture" is supposed to mean here? Have you seen any graffiti homages to Braques? How many Leger posters do you see on university dorm-room walls? Leaving aside Picasso, where, outside of high culture, and very high high culture at that, do you hear of anyone else on that list?

The answer is that what he means by "low" is Picasso painting his mistress with a penis imprinted on her head, or Duchamp painting a mustache on The Mona Lisa and making a crude pun as the title of this "new work". Which is to say, Perl is willing to admit what is crass, vulgar and ugly into Art, provided, of course, that this crass, vulgar and ugly is the work of the right sort of people. What he isn't willing to admit is anything that is trying to be genuinely popular.

That is an extreme example, but it is something that characterizes all "modernism". The way the new liturgy was introduced is a good example of this. One option for introducing it would have been to simply make the Novus Ordo available alongside the existing Latin Mass. If proponents had been correct in their assertion that the new liturgy better served the real needs of the modern world better than the old, then people would have experimented with the new stuff, decided they liked it better and switched. But it didn't happen that way.

Which isn't to say that it might not have worked out that way if people had been given the chance. But they were never given the chance. The efforts that were made to suppress not just the old mass but a whole lot of "old Catholicism" were staggering. And I don't say this to condemn the rather vulgar way the people who did this behaved, although that condemnation is richly deserved, but rather to point out something else. The problem is that they weren't sure the Novus Ordo would sell. They didn't trust the people to make the right choice, so they forced it on them. They mistrusted popular opinion every bit as much Jed Perl doesn't trust it.

The Latin Mass: and the latest modern crisis!

We get news this morning that former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey warns that the Church of England faces extinction withing a generation. Well, no, probably not. What the Church of England is facing—along with the liberal wing of Catholicism, Church of Christ, United Church of Canada, and the Mainline Protestant churches—is the possibility of being one generation away from becoming utterly irrelevant to the larger culture.

By way of analogy, think of unicyclists. There aren't many but there are some and every generation sees new unicyclists. The unicycle is not in danger of extinction. That said, the cultural significance of the bicycle is an important issue, the unicycle not so much. The Church of England is one generation away from having the same cultural stature as a club for unicyclists.

That is the source of the crisis that spurred Rev. Carey to speak out.

That is also why the demographic problem that so many others have worried about for decades now never concerned Rev. Carey in the past. He's never really cared about issues of survival; what matters to him is cultural status. If anything, Church leaders like Carey used to argue that concerns about demographics of the C of E were driven by scaremongers.

Okay, it would be easy to cynically suggest that Carey is only scared now because he thinks journalists are going to erase his name and number from their list of contacts. But that's not fair. Carey is far from stupid and neither is he any more vain than the rest of us. In any case, he is not going to survive even one more generation so he can hardly be said to have a personal material interest in the matter.

Let me suggest another explanation. And it begins with an often forgotten aspect of modernism and that is that modernism was always an elitist and anti-populist movement. Modernists were people who rejected huge swaths of modern culture. They hated what they regarded as sentimental art and religion. They could see that one of the unexpected legacies of Romanticism was to establish a giant market for sentimental art and religion but they hated that stuff.

That is why, despite the obvious popularity of sentimental art and religion, they went to war against it. They argued that the modern world had no place for sentiment. In their view, the thing that made "modern" really modern was that it was cut off from the past. They emphasized a discontinuity. They screamed of a crisis that called for immediate action.

And it is important to grasp that. Too often, the debate is seen as one between reformers and the the status quo but there are really no people in the status quo camp. Anyone who has followed the Latin Mass movement within the Catholic Church, for example, will know that there has been far more reform there than in the larger church. These reforms were all made in the interest of restoring the Latin mass to what was hoped to be a "purer" form but they were reforms nevertheless,.

In fact, if you look to people in the Carey camp, they will cheerfully admit bore you to death with their tales of having been unable to make any reforms in recent decades.

The Most Reverend John Sentamu told the Synod – where leaders will debate how to persuade traditionalists to accept women bishops – that they spent too long 'arguing over words and phrases, while the people of England are left floundering amid meaninglessness, anxiety and despair'. 

The lie here is in the second part. The people are not floundering. They are singularly unaware of any crisis. In fact, if there is one thing that characterizes modern life it is the rather stunning lack of crisis. Stunning because they are constantly being told that really bad things are happening out there and yet ... yawn.

Rev. Carey is actually playing the same tune he has always played here. He is a charter member of the Church of the Modernist Crisis. Crisis is the card he always plays. He's never particularly cared about poverty unless it's part of a poverty crisis. He's never cared about female clergy or feminism unless that too can be linked to a crisis. He never cared about declining population of the Church of England until he could make a crisis out of it.

Whatever it is going to take to get people back into churches, assuming such a thing is desirable, for there are bad churches as well as good ones, it isn't yet another retired church leader hectoring a numb and bored population about the latest crisis.

The Latin Mass: versus the sometimes painful weeniness of the new liturgy

Like the mass, the Liturgy of the Hours is part of the liturgical prayer of the church. It is both less important and less well known but it matters. A lot of people, including priests and those in the consecrated life, make a vow to say it every day. A lot of others, including me, simply choose to say it.
Like the mass, the Liturgy of the Hours (LOH) was substantially revised under Pope Paul VI. As with the mass, most of what was done is justifiable. I would argue even that the revisions were required and are an improvement, although I know a lot of people who disagree with me.

That said, however good the general sweep of the thing, the devil is in the details. And yesterday (Wednesday of week IV) had one of those details. There are intercessionary prayers included with morning and evening prayer. These were written by God-knows-who and, Deo Gratias, are optional. Yesterday evening featured this gem:

Remember, Lord, that you sent your Son into the world to be its savior, not its judge,
— let his glorious death bring us salvation.

I'm sure that can be finessed if we could somehow compel the editors to appear before some sort of tribunal. Perhaps, something along the lines of, "We meant the first time!" But you can see the problem I hope. If not, let me remind you of something that appears in both creeds. First the Nicene Creed:

He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

Now the Apostle's Creed:

From there he will come to judge
the living and the dead.

Now, as I say, maybe this can all be finessed by saying that Jesus came to save the first time and will judge after his second coming. But it shouldn't have to be finessed. It's especially galling that the intercession begins by reminding God of his intentions. Yes, I know, the real point is to remind us and not God of his purposes but that just makes it worse for what could be more important than to remind us that Jesus will come again to judge. This weenie intention doesn't just forget to convey that crucial truth, it actively works to suppress it.

I read stuff like this and I wonder, do the people who make these things up really believe the creed? Do they, in fact, really believe anything at all?

A few weeks ago, I heard a homily following the gospel in which Jesus says that he who is trustworthy with small things will be trusted with great things. Do you know what Father gave as an example of a small thing we can do? That we should recycle instead of throwing things in the garbage, thereby, "showing our respect for Mother Earth". Again, if you had to, you could finesse the point but we shouldn't have to finesse the point. This is was a homily!

It's not the core of the new liturgy, which remains redeemable by good execution and some judicious pruning but it is a major problem. Contrary to what some reformers seem to believe, it is a blessing that we might have to explain things in the liturgy because they are obscure or because they are hard teachings. If, however, we have to stop and justify stuff that is just plain weenie, that is a giant problem.

The Latin Mass: Teaching the heart to love

This is part of something I wrote in the comments this morning that I wanted to repeat (with some additions and corrections) here:

As to the participation issue, it seems to me that the big question is not whether the people should feel that our participation is somehow required (which is pretty vain) but what special efforts can and should we make when participating? Should we prepare ourselves by, just for example, 

• reading the collect of the day, which the priest still says for us, ahead of time and making sure that we believe and want what that prayer asks for so it really is our prayer,
• reading the antiphons and readings and thinking deeply about what they mean ahead of time,
• thinking about and making a specific intention for this mass,
• fasting.

One thing about the TLM is that it has specific rules for that sort of thing. Nowadays we tend to argue that what comes from the heart is better than following rules by rote. The problem is that, while that sounds good, it tends to become a matter of doing nothing. We think that our heart wants to love but it has to be trained to love.

ADDED: That is one  thing we do when we go to mass; we train our heart to love. It is also, we hope and pray, being granted grace by God and that grace is, by far, the more important part. But there is a tendency to forget that we should act differently because of that grace because I don't really believe in that grace if I don't act differently. One of the specific functions of the liturgy is to train our hearts to love. On that measure the Novus Ordo, at least the way it is celebrated in most churches, is seriously lacking. The restored TLM, because it requires more effort, does that job better.

ALSO ADDED: Yes, I know all about the pious lady who said her rosary right through the mass, stopping only to bow her head when a bell rang and to shuffle forward to receive communion. But my point here is to discuss the restored Latin Mass. Whether they meant to or not, and this is going to be my argument going forward, the fans of the TLM have made it into something modern and even modernist (in the cultural sense of modernism and not the religious heresy). Thinking this over in the shower just now, I've decided that is a bad way to put it. Words mean what they mean in conventional use and I can't over-rule the use of "modernist" by insisting on some special meaning of my own. A better way to put it is that the TLM enthusiasts have, without meaning to, created something that is modern without being modernist.

STILL ADDING: Think of it this way, a Catholic going to the TLM or returning to it, has to make a huge effort just to participate and that makes us actually earn our participation rather than treat it like a right; we have far more in common, when going to the Novus Ordo,  with that pious woman of yesteryear than we do with the seriously devoted fans of the TLM of today. It also forces us to think about the past and our relationship with the dead than the new mass does, really being modern means basing ourselves in the past rather than obliterating it.

I should add that I am not necessarily advocating a return to the TLM, although I think it should always be available where numbers wanting it warrant it. I do think, however, that we would celebrate the Novus Ordo in a way that was much more genuine and meaningful if we emphasized its continuity with the TLM rather than its discontinuity.

Is the Latin Mass beautiful?

UPDATE: I've made some changes to the last paragraph of this post.

Believe or not, this really is related to this morning's post about whether the Traditional Latin Mass is Romantic or Modern.

To answer this afternoon's question is a lot easier than this morning's. We simply use the classic cop out: that depends on what you think is beautiful. (Which, if you're keeping score, is a point for the modern side of this morning's question.)

But it doesn't get us very far because it is a cop out.

Here is the problem. Imagine someone who converts to Catholicism from Anglicanism. Now, not all Anglican services are beautiful (most these days are ugly and plain) but some are beautiful. When the Anglicans decide to do it right, they have some really, really beautiful liturgy. Okay, so what happens when someone whose idea of beautiful liturgy has been conditioned by years of The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) goes to a Traditional Latin Mass (TLM)? The answer is that confusion happens.

The effect is a little like what it would be like for a hard core fan of American football to go to a game that was described as being like football only to find that, while players dressed, huddled and lined up like the football they knew, there was no actual ball. So the payers would line up, then break and huddle again and line up but never anything that our poor football fan would recognize as action.

To go back to the BCP service. What makes it beautiful? What plays the part of the ball in football and makes the action progress? The answer to that is, the language makes it beautiful. Appreciating the beauty of a BCP service is mostly a matter of appreciating the language. There may well be music and vestments and incense too, but the language is what makes it special.

There is some beautiful language in the TLM but it's in Latin! And you can't hear most of it.

If you ask any fan of the TLM about that, they won't even have to think about their answer. They will say: "It doesn't matter that you can't understand or hear the language because ...

... it's not being prayed to you!"

The priest says, or, even better, sings, the mass to God for you and not to you for God. Your role in the thing is supportive.

If you're not familiar with the TLM, let me tell you about something that shakes most people: you're not allowed to say the words of the Our Father, or Pater Noster, because this is Latin after all, along with the priest. We're only allowed to say the last line, "Sed libera nos a malo", which is said as a response to the priest having said the rest of the prayer first. Even fans of the TLM sometimes bristle at that. I was at a mass last week where the priest turned to the congregation after the mass was over and chastised "the faithful" because some had joined in with him.

Why can't we? Because, as Lady Marchmain would say, it's not in the logic of the thing.

Here is a fascinating quote about Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (love that name) from a book I've been rereading:

The commission essentially made Viollet-le-Duc's reputation as one of the most important, even infamous, architects of the nineteenth century. Almost solely responsible for creating a new field of restoration architecture, he challenged the neoclassicism of the Académie des beaux-arts, whose traditionally conservative architects tended to dismiss Gothic buildings as ornamental, or at best superfluous. Viollet-le-Duc set out to prove them wrong, by insisting not on the beauty but on the extremely rational basis of Gothic architecture—the structural significance of every buttress and gargoyle. (Decadent Enchantments P7)

And, if you are going to get the Traditional Latin Mass, that is way to approach it. Don't look for beauty, look for the rational basis of the thing. There is a carefully reasoned significance to almost every detail of the TLM. Appreciating it means understanding those signifiers and how they fit into the underlying logic of the thing.

And getting to the point where you can do that is hard work.  You have to go at least 20 times before you start to get the sense of thing. And you have to start at home and prepare for the experience by reading the missal and figuring out, studying and, yes, memorizing the mass so that you can participate in it by not just following along but letting your heart leap along with it. You get to the point where you don't need to say the words of the Pater Noster because your heart feels every word the priest says and you affirm those words by responding "Sed libera nos a malo" at the end.

And that only gets you to the point where the mystery begins ...

More on this next week, but the the direction I'm going is to affirm that the TLM shows the way to be really modern. In a good way.

The Traditional Latin Mass: Romantic or Modern?

I know, talk about questions that no one is asking. And why would anyone ask such a bizarre question?

I think it's a question we should ask.

Humour me and start by considering that the TLM is a revival, a restoration. That, in itself, may seem crazy. Surely, you may think, it was continuously celebrated. The "spirit of Vatican 2" fabulists may have done all sorts of crazy things but they didn't succeed in entirely eradicating the TLM! Well, it's complicated.

For starters, the TLM was changed over the years and it was especially changed in the years leading up to Vatican 2. You can find comments from before the time of John 23 where people deplore how the once-great liturgy has been debased beyond recognition. They didn't mean the order of the mass but the ways in which it was celebrated. And that is the problem: there is no shortage of missals, but how do you interpret them?

I don't know what was going on world-wide but I do know that the people who fought to "preserve" the mass that I knew in the 1970s and the 1980s were often uncertain about what exactly they were preserving.

At first, the project was a matter not of re-establishing the Latin mass but of finding places where it was still said. I remember my father driving us to a little white clapboard church in a little community on the edge of the city when I was a kid. But this mass, even though it seemed interminable to my sister and I, was a low mass, not sung, and not elaborate. The little church had neither the resources nor the knowledge to celebrate a solemn mass. Already, a lot had been lost.

 And the Latin Mass had been modified a lot. When the reformers set about imposing the newer Liturgy (and that "imposing" is not a value judgment but simple fact) they ended up dividing the few remaining Latin Mass churches into isolated communities. There were "convents" here and there where the community was able to resist the pressures of the local bishop and continue to celebrate in the old form. These communities had to be careful, however, that they didn't achieve too high a profile for if large numbers of the outside community started attending, their internal matter could become a diocese matter and, therefore, subject to the authority of the bishop. Why does that matter? Because these communities had a local practice and no way of comparing with what was going on elsewhere.

There had also been a lot of experimentation with the Latin Mass in the 1940s and 1950s, most notably with the dialogue mass. This mass allowed the congregation, rather than just the server, to make some of the responses. But which ones and how much? Again, local practice varied.

This is not a scholarly examination of what happened and I'm not the person to do it. My anecdotal evidence, for what it is worth, is that the return of the Latin Mass was very much a restoration. It might seem that it was simply a mass of pulling out the old hymnals, of which there are thousands upon thousands still floating around (I own a least a half dozen myself) and following the directions. But that is never true because any ritual involves hundreds of interpretative decisions (compare various attempts to do authentic recreations of what the music of Haydn and Mozart "originally" sounded like). I remember listening in to many long, and often heated arguments, about what should and should not be done.

It's not quite like creating an authentic performance of Gregorian chant or even of Bartok, but there are very real questions. I mention Bartok because there are recording of Bartok playing his own piano music and, when these were studied, scholars quickly determined that he played his own music in a  style that differed significantly from current practice. Bartok died in 1945!

And I'll stop there for now. More this afternoon.

From the comments

Gaius writes:

Maybe my least favorite part of the TLM is the fact that the scripture readings are sung in Latin. I know the Sanctus, the Credo, and the Gloria but there's no way I'm going to understand the Gospel reading sung in Latin.

That's a very good point. Even most people who have studied Latin could not follow the sung epistle and Gospel readings. Which defeats the point of having scripture readings in the Mass in the first place. We do this so that people can have the Word (capitalization intentional) fed to them through their ears. That is not achieved if everyone simply turns to the place in their missal where the translation is provided and reads along.

Now, critics of the current mass will rush in here to say that the reading at many Novus Ordo masses is so bad that it may as well be in Latin and that is true (no one should be reading along with the lector at Mass). But that is an issue of execution whereas it doesn't matter how well delivered the singing (or reading at a Low Mass) is at a Latin Mass.

The first in a series of posts on the Traditional Latin Mass

I went to a Latin mass for All Saints Day. The reasons for my doing so, as they say on FaceBook, are "complicated" so I won't go into them here.

Unlike most people, however, I have a long history with the traditional Latin mass (TLM). My father was a huge fan of it so I went often as  child and continued to do so long after it had disappeared from most parishes. I was still occasionally going to the TLM well into my twenties. I went quite often in university for the not terribly profound reasons that there was a church offering it right down the hill from my campus and I found the women that went more attractive than most of the women I would see at the regular mass available on campus.

Anyway, I eventually gravitated towards the Novus Ordo (that's the official name for the mass most Catholic churches use). I hadn't been in more than a decade until last Friday.

Before going back, I dug out one of my old missals and reviewed what was in it. There is surprisingly little difference between the two masses when you consider them on paper. If you'd never been to the TLM and looked at the missals, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Novus Ordo was just a streamlined version of the TLM. You'd quickly realize that was an illusion very quickly if you actually went to one. The main difference between the two masses is one of execution.

On the other hand, there is an argument that says, actually, there is very little difference between them and the seeming differences of execution are a consequence of the TLM usually being well-executed and the Novus Ordo being badly executed. This argument goes on to say that if the Novus Ordo was said as it should be said, it would come to resemble the TLM much more than it currently does.

So, what's it like

The first thing that hit me was the start. The thing about the TLM is that it just starts. No MC comes out to say good morning and tell you how welcome you are. Similarly, no cantor comes out to tell you what this morning's hymns are or to make you practice the refrain to the psalm. No one says, "Please stand and join us in our opening hymn." No, the music just begins and the altar boys, deacon, subdeacon and priest just begin processing (this was a solemn mass).

That may seem like a small thing but it really hammers home an important truth and that is that the mass (any mass TLM or Novus Ordo) is an event that happens independent of your presence. It doesn't require you.

In modern parlance, this sort of attitude, and there is lots of it in the  TLM, is treated as a barrier to full participation. That's not crazy, there are hurdles you have to clear to fully participate in the TLM—not the least of which is figuring out what is going on—but these aren't necessarily barriers.(Although any hurdle will be a barrier to the person who can't clear it.)

By way of analogy, is courtship a barrier to love? From the point of view of the lonely person it can often seem to be. Why do I have to go through all this ritual when I just need a little love? Of course, the person who just wants sex and isn't particularly interested in love will say the same thing. But is it just trust issues that make us go through courtship? Do we do all this just to get to know one another? Or is there something about going through all those steps, and facing the fear of rejection,

I wonder if the traditional rites of the mass don't serve a function like that. The TLM makes you work for certain but that work could be the making of a deeper bond. That is to say, far from being a barrier to full participation, these hurdles actually make for a more profound participation in the long run.

I don't know the answer to that. There will be more posts on the subject here on an irregular basis.

A little heavy culture: beauty, truth and goodness

I was having tea with Eliot Girl the other day and we briefly discussed Brideshead Revisited. She disagrees with my interpretation of the book but has not said what she thinks I get wrong, probably out of a desire to avoid a long argument when she'd rather be enjoying her tea. She did say, however, that she thinks I am projecting my own views onto Brideshead.

I don't doubt that a bit. I think it is one of the marks of a truly great novel, and I think Brideshead is the truly great novel of the twentieth century, is that it inspires you to project your deepest beliefs onto it. That is what great novels do—they are a place for us to exercise our moral imagination. The best ones allow us to return to them again and again, learning a bit more from each visit.

Here is someone else doing just that, projecting things onto the novel, and more power to him. That said, he gets a couple of crucial points wrong and he gets them wrong, I think, because he misunderstands the role of beauty in Brideshead.



Let's start with facts as they are clear. Father Barron, a brilliant man, makes what may seem a small mistake but is actually huge. Here is how he describes the chapel at Brideshead (beginning about 1:25 of the video):

At the centre of it is a chapel that is a riot of Baroque decoration the presence of the Eucharist in the chapel meant nothing to Charles when he first came in, he was an agnostic, but he loved the beauty of the place.

Well, actually, no*. One of the big problems for Charles right from the beginning is that he finds the chapel quite ugly and cheap compared to Brideshead. And one of the big reasons he finds it ugly is that it was done over in an arts and crafts style that came off poorly compared to the Baroque splendour of the rest of the house. Here is how it is described in the novel.

The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts and crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give the peculiar quality of being moulded in Plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pock-marked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies.

The line where Charles attacks the artist responsible for taking a noble material like oak and carving it, "so as to give the peculiar quality of being moulded in Plasticine,"  shows us how much he disdains what he sees.

By the way, note that the last decade of the 19th century is as close to the figures of the novel as the 1970s is to us. To get an idea of how Charles felt, imagine you are visiting a beautiful Victorian home and find that the living room has been done over in 1970s style.

And it doesn't stop there. Everywhere Charles looks at Catholicism he sees drab ugliness. Nowhere is this more the case than in the morality of the Catholics he encounters. Again, Father Barron gets this backwards.

He meets Sebastian's mother, Lady Marchmain, who is a very devout Catholic, a very morally serious person, and from her he picks up, for the very first time, the moral demand of Catholicism, especially as it pertains to Sebastian's drinking.

Actually, he meets Lady Marchmain and discovers that she is a very manipulative woman. And he meets Bridey and discovers that he is a stiff prig incapable of human connection and Cordelia and discovers that she is a child who prays Novenas for her pet pig. None of these people, despite a whole lot of trying, manage to show Charles the logic behind the moral demand of Catholicism. It is Julia who shows him that in the last third of the novel just as Sebastian shows him the beauty in the first third.

Let's talk Evangelization

Now all this matters because Father Barron has a point to make about Evangelization

The best way to evangelize is to move to the beautiful, then to the good and then to the true.

And he goes on to say that the Catholic church is particularly well placed to do this.

The Catholic church, our genius is that we have embraced the beautiful.

That is well-meaning nonsense from a man who wants to see the good..If only it were true and wouldn't it be nice to think so. Waugh, with his gimlet eye, knew full well that the Catholic church of the 20th century had, in fact, embraced ugliness. She has been responsible for building some of the ugliest churches on the planet. The whole point of evoking the baroque was to recall a past in which the church had been very much invested in beauty.

Waugh also knew that if there was any church that was well placed to evangelize through beauty it was the Anglican church, whose buildings and liturgy were models of restraint and good taste. Waugh's central point was to ask what beauty really is and he found a remnant of it in Catholicism that was so beautiful, so true and so good that it couldn't be trampled by the ugliness of the well-intentioned fools in whose hands the church was left. The light would shine no matter how ugly the actual fixture the light is placed in and no matter how dowdy the people who worship beneath it. A point that is made on the last page of the novel.

"Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame—a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been built but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning new among the old stones."

The starting point is not just beauty for lots of things can seem beautiful. Violence is beautiful from certain perspectives.

Beauty, goodness and truth (to put them in the order they are usually presented) play a really important role in Catholic theology. They are the transcendentals; they are the things that we all desire and it is the pursuit of these desires that we can become perfect, "as your Father in heaven is perfect". Ultimately they are a unit (to pursue one is always to pursue the others as well whether we think we intend to or not) but which is the best starting point? What is the best way to draw people into the church?

I think Father Barron is absolutely right that beauty is the place to begin in our age. We live in an ugly age and, as a consequence, we all crave beauty. Despite its many ugly buildings and the appallingly slipshod way the liturgy is presented in many places, the Catholic church is, or could be with a little effort of the right sort, well-placed to evangelize through beauty. But only by turning back and rediscovering the beauties of its past. Father Barron instinctively understands this as all the examples he cites of beauty from within Catholicism are from centuries ago.

Where I think he makes his mistake is with the second move to goodness. In the novel, beauty goes not to goodness but to truth first and that is the way we should go in evangelization. The triumvirate of Lady Marchmain, Bridey and young Cordelia are well chosen for they well-represent the worst traits of modern Catholic moralizing: not a moral but a moralistic approach to life presented through manipulation, smug triumphalism and infantilism.

The last of these is the most dangerous as you can, as an older and wiser Cordelia notes, hate Lady Marchmain. You can also laugh at Bridey but the earnest, seemingly well-meaning but narcissistic morality we see in young Cordelia is much harder to see for the evil it is.

The right way to go is well presented in an old saw: Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. That is to say the law of prayer, then the law of belief and only then the law of living. The three transcendentals are all bound together but we can approach them individually for that very reason. Beauty begins with worship or prayer.

This, by the way, is one of Saint Paul's big points. You can't earn your way into heaven by good conduct. Attempts to become holy by becoming good will always result in evil. Only God's grace can redeem you. And where do you find God's grace? By observing the beauty that surrounds you. Once you become aware of that, you can become aware of the truth about God. The truth of God is not his existence. That's the easy part. Even the most hardened atheist grasps the existence, much as they deny it. They believe he exists and they hate him. The truth of God that is so hard to grasp is that he loves you and he wants you. He wants you more than you want anything. Only once you know that can you work at becoming good because how else could you possible respond to God who loves you so?


* Part of the reason he gets it wrong is clear right from the video itself. As Father Barron is speaking, we see images from Castle Howard. These are the same images used in the TV series and it misrepresents the chapel. The actual chapel that Waugh had in mind was the one at Madresfield Court and it is something else altogether, as you can see at the this site.

Moral privacy and Catholicism

With the Pope resigning and speculation about his successor rife, a lot of talk about sexuality and Catholicism is floating about.

And that ties to the issue of moral privacy in an interesting way, in a sexual way because sex is often a matter of moral privacy for practical reasons.

One of our more naive assumptions is that an adversarial system, whatever its other strengths and weaknesses, will always expose lies. We assume that both sides have an interest in exposing the lies of their opponents; even if I have a tendency to exaggerate my own claims, you can count on my opponent to cut me down to size.

But that only works most of the time. Sometimes both sides of an adversarial system have a share interest in maintaining the same lie. For example, we had a government here in Canada some thirty years ago now that promised to cut the size of the public sector. The government, once elected, duly made (false) claims about jobs cut. But the opposition didn't expose these lies because they knew that their most vocal supporters wanted to hate the government for making "deep, unconscionable cuts". The opposition, in fact, argued that the government was actually making even deeper cuts than the ones it was only lying about making in the first place.

A similar phenomenon obtains when it comes to debates about sexual morality and the teachings of the Catholic church.

Liberal Catholics have long argued that traditional Catholic sexual teaching needs to change because you can no longer expect people to follow Catholic sexual teachings in the modern world and that, therefore, traditional teachings are driving people out. They argue that allowing some slack, allowing for a region of moral privacy where people can allow their consciences to over-ride the teachings of the church, will put more bums on pews every Sunday.

Conservative Catholics counter not by denying that things are, in their terms, "getting worse" but by arguing that the situation is even more extreme than liberals believe. They argue that not just the church but the entire world is at risk because of changing moral standards regarding sexuality.

The lie that both sides endorse is that things have changed significantly from what they used to be. For the most part they haven't. There never was a time when large numbers of Christians did not privately practice a sexual morality of their own devising. Never. (Paul complains about it when writing to the Corinthians written within a couple of decades after the crucifixion of Jesus.)

As Philip Larkin slyly observes, oral sex was not invented sometime in 1963. And the same is true of all sorts of other ways of privately circumventing the public consequences of private sexual activity. Feminists would argue, and argue correctly, that the available methods or circumvention were heavily loaded in men's favour and that they were especially heavily loaded against any woman who wanted to have social status. It's also true that literacy played a factor—the more literate you were, the more likely you were to disregard Catholic sexual teaching. (Casanova was a devout Catholic all his life!) To pretend that people suddenly started disregarding Catholic sexual teachings in the last few decades is pure nonsense.

Large numbers of Catholics have always ignored Catholic sexual teachings. You can take that as cause for shame or you can take it as proof that there is something unreasonable about these teachings as you will. What you cannot do is claim that we live in a time of crisis where we must act one way or another or else the walls will fall in on us. It's always been this way.