Posted on 04/21/2006 6:08:48 PM PDT by tridentine
THIS week marked the first anniversary of Benedict XVI's election to the papacy. In the first year of his reign, the Pope has bided his time, making very few changes to the curia appointed by his predecessor, John PaulII, and the overall governance of the church. So far the emphasis has been on continuity, but there are emerging signs of significant change. A fortnight ago I noted that the Catholic world was convulsed with reports that the Pope was about to grant a universal indult, or general permission, for priests to use the Tridentine rite of mass in Latin without needing the prior approval of their bishops. Many expected an announcement either immediately after the second meeting of curial cardinals to debate the issue on April7 or just before Easter. In fact Catholic blog-dom has talked of little else for the past month and most of the mainstream news services have also entered the fray.
But Rome hastens slowly and, not surprisingly, Benedict wasn't going to spring a significant and in some quarters controversial change during the solemnities of Holy Week, the high point of the Christian year.
The timing of the announcement remains a mystery, because the Pope's inner circle of advisers is unusually discreet. However, there are good objective grounds for expecting that there will be an announcement sooner rather than later.
Apart from the two special meetings with the curia explicitly convened by the Pope to canvas the matter, the French Bishops Conference met at Lourdes and issued a press release on April 7. It recognised that the Pope "has a concern" regarding the old rite and anticipated that "in the weeks and months ahead he shall lay down the directions to facilitate the way to a possible return to full communion" with disaffected traditionalists. One of the chief preconditions of that reconciliation, which the Lefebvrists have always insisted on, is a universal indult.
It is inconceivable that the French hierarchy, which includes some of the bitterest and most implacable opponents of the old rite, would have issued such a statement unless, as the saying goes, the writing was already on the wall. They were well aware of the meeting taking place on the same day in Rome and they had spent some hours considering a newly released demographic study of French Catholics which helps put the ongoing culture war over the old and new rite into perspective.
In a nutshell, Catholicism in France is in a state of collapse. Its numbers are in free fall and the only signs of vitality are among those who attend the old rite. The majority of those who go to the new mass, the post-VaticanII liturgy in the vernacular, are over 55. Traditionalists comprise about 5 per cent (and growing rapidly) of the French church but 13per cent of practising Catholics under 55. More than 70 per cent of traditionalist families have four or more children. Nearly 90 per cent are under 55 and their average age is 26 and falling steadily.
France, along with Belgium and The Netherlands, is a special case. There the post-conciliar changes of the late 1960s have proved more catastrophic in their consequences than for the rest of the church, for a host of reasons. The only place to rival them is Australia where, as the Pope remarked just before World Youth Day, Catholicism is in uniquely dire straits.
The lesson that France, the Low Countries and Australia have to teach their local hierarchies and the church as a whole is plain. The choice is between tolerating liturgical diversity and keeping the fastest-growing part of the church on the outer or in schism.
As a cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger was one of the few who saw these issues very clearly. He never stopped saying the old rite, albeit occasionally, and made it clear, when asked, that although it had ceased to be the norm, he did not think it had been abolished when the new rite was handed down. Paul VI had purported to suppress the old mass, but had done so using a weak legislative instrument called an allocution.
There was always grave doubt among theologians as to whether any pope had the power to rule out a form of mass that had been in use, essentially unchanged, for more than a thousand years.
There was also an inconvenient papal bull, Quo Primum, explicitly forbidding it. Even so, most of the bishops toed the Vatican line and, stifling any reservations, behaved as though the old rite had been disallowed. Dissent was stifled under the usual catchcry: "Roma locuta, causa finita" (Rome has spoken, the case is closed).
What we are now witnessing is an example of people power triumphing over hierarchical authority. It's rather like the spectacle of the Queen Mary reversing course in stormy waters. As U-turns go, it's comparable with the Renaissance backdown in which the church, which had long condemned usury as a mortal sin, decided that lending money and charging interest was permissible. Thousands of bishops and priests who until now have been telling their flocks that their only option was the new rite will have to change their tune. It will be immensely embarrassing for them, though nowhere near as painful as was the loss of the old liturgy to all who loved it and were suddenly, unreasonably, denied it in the late '60s. In 2000, while still a cardinal, Ratzinger had this to say about the demonising of the old rite: "Anyone who nowadays advocates the continuing existence of this liturgy or takes part in it is treated like a leper; all tolerance ends here. There has never been anything like this in history; in doing this we are despising and proscribing the church's whole past. How can one trust her present if things are that way?"
As this summary from the book God and the World suggests, what the Vatican was attempting was a '70s ecclesiastical version of Pol Pot's Year Zero, annihilating the past. What one week was prescribed as normal became proscribed the next. Well might one wonder about trusting what seemed fixed and certain about the present, if it was liable to the same arbitrary interventions.
Benedict XVI was one of a small minority of cardinals who saw the need to accommodate the traditionalists, but his views on the matter were well known and didn't prevent him being elected pope. Since then he has encountered a good deal of institutional resistance and shrugged it off.
His prefect in the Congregation for Divine Worship, Cardinal Francis Arinze, volunteered the view at a conference on the eucharist that the old rite wasn't really an issue on anyone's agenda, although in recent weeks he's been advocating the restoration of traditional devotions, notably in a speech in Westminster Cathedral in London.
The secretary of Arinze's congregation, Archbishop Domenico Sorrentino, had been asked for an advisory opinion on the status of the old mass and was rash enough to sign a memorandum to the effect that it had been abolished. For his pains he was the one and only secretary of a dicastery to be summarily dismissed during the past year. In practice, neither Sorrentino's memorandum nor Paul VI's allocution present a serious obstacle to the restoration of the old rite as an independent entity coequal with the new mass. As the church's ultimate source of legislative authority, the pope has the power to interpret texts and in doing so to change the law.
For non-Catholics, arguments about old and new rite may well seem on a par with Jonathn Swift's Lilliput and the Big-Enders going to war with the Little-Enders over the proper way to eat hard-boiled eggs. Apart from the theological niceties, what else, you may be wondering, will change if the old Latin mass once more becomes a widespread form of worship?
One thing that can be confidently predicted is a surge of interest in plainchant, polyphony and church music generally. There will be more and better choirs, some of them professional, and many more accomplished organists. Taped music at weddings and funerals will become a thing of the past. Rock masses have just been banned.
Latin is already enjoying an unexpected vogue at university level, with introductory courses for beginners collapsing five years' worth of secondary tuition into one. I can easily imagine its return to the secondary syllabus, to the vast benefit of kids who want to understand the fundamentals of grammar and the way their own language works.
If the French experience is anything to go by, there will also be a quiet revolution in Catholic schools. The more traditionally minded of them will be turning out a cohort of unusually polite, well-adjusted kids, matter-of-factly pious in a way we've scarcely seen since the '50s. Like their home-schooled older brothers and sisters, many of them will be keen as mustard when it comes to studying history and literature, underwhelmed by drugs, popular culture and sex before marriage and inclined to volunteer for the cadet corps, St John's Ambulance Brigade and Meals on Wheels.
How do you say Good News for modern man in Latin?
Today's Responsorial Psalm!
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