Posted on 03/10/2022 4:36:10 PM PST by ebb tide
The English archbishop at the centre of the storm over the suppression of the old rite says that the Church must return to liturgical unity
Nothing is able to stir up a disagreement in the Church like the liturgy. The recent decision by Pope Francis to re-impose restrictions on the use of the pre-Second Vatican Council liturgy, the “Tridentine Mass”, has sparked a storm of criticism from traditionalists. One commentator recently accused the Pope of espousing “liberal illiberalism”, while even some progressive voices have questioned whether Francis’ tough measures run counter to the dialogue and mercy that are the leitmotifs of this papacy.
The man playing a critical role in charting a steady course through the turbulence of the so-called “liturgy wars” is Archbishop Arthur Roche, the Holy See’s top liturgy official. The 71-year-old Yorkshire-born prelate was last May appointed Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. It’s one of the most sensitive and demanding jobs in the Church, requiring him to work closely with the Pope and with the world’s bishops.
I met the Archbishop in his offices in the Vatican where, from the window, you look directly onto the Bernini colonnades that wrap around St Peter’s Square. The aim of his department, he tells me, is to continue the implementation of the Second Vatican Council’s document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. This, he says, is its “Magna Carta”.
Although of course Archbishop Roche is well aware of the fury aroused in some quarters by the restrictions being imposed on the use of the old rite, he says bishops in touch with his congregation have expressed “relief” at the Pope’s decision to return the oversight of the liturgy to them – as Vatican II intended.
Long before Francis limited the use of the pre-Vatican Council liturgical books, small traditionalist communities had become centres of resistance to this pontificate. The combination of opposition to the Pope, the calling into question of an ecumenical council, and the promotion of the old rite as an alternative liturgical way of life – sometimes even presented as the only truly Catholic form of the liturgy – represented a serious challenge. Roche stressed that the Pope’s intention was to “bring unity” to the Church, and to end the suggestion that there are two different Churches with two different liturgies.
As we talk, I notice that at one end of the room is a portrait of Pope Francis; at the other, a portrait of Pope Pius XII. Their presence is a reminder that changes to the liturgy are nothing new. It was Pius XII who reformed the celebrations of Holy Week in the 1950s, while Roche points out that Pius X – a figure lionised by traditionalists – wrote in 1903 about the “active participation” of the faithful in the liturgy, something that was to be strongly emphasised by Vatican II. Its liturgical reforms did not come out of a vacuum, he reminds me; they were all prepared for by a liturgical movement that dates back to the nineteenth century.
Roche has all the diplomatic skills needed for the leader of a major department in the Roman Curia. His remit includes bringing about unity among bishops, which sometimes involves gentle cajoling as well as patient listening. Yet he also comes across as decisive and determined. You could describe him as the opening batsman of the liturgy team: able to defend his wicket in the face of a furious fast-bowling attack, while steadily accumulating runs and striking the odd boundary.
It was just two months after Roche took over the top liturgy role, following the departure of Cardinal Robert Sarah, that Pope Francis released his restrictions on the celebration of the Tridentine Mass with Traditionis Custodes. Then, last December, Roche’s office released further clarifications in response to questions from bishops about the implementation of the Pope’s motu proprio. These made clear that confirmations and ordinations according to the pre-Vatican Council liturgies are now banned, and recommended parishes not to advertise Tridentine Masses in their bulletins. Many of those who belong to the small, yet devoted, groups who are attached to the Missal of 1962 are devastated. They complain that the Pope is “cancelling” the form of Mass they love.
Is it the Pope’s aim, I ask the archbishop, to see the pre-Vatican II liturgy disappear? “It’s clear that Pope Francis, along with his predecessors, has great care for those who are finding this difficult and therefore it is still possible to use the Missal of 1962,” he says. “But it is not the norm. It is a pastoral concession.” Roche explains that, “it’s not within my ability to see” whether the old form of the Mass will eventually fall out of use, but points out that the aim of Traditionis Custodes is to bring people “closer to an understanding of what the Council required”.
There is a deep theological foundation to the Pope’s recent rulings, he stresses. It is not about some Catholics having a personal preference for Latin. It goes to the heart of how the Church sees itself and its mission. It is about the old saying, Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi: how we pray, is how we believe. Roche points out that Vatican II’s dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, shifted away from a model of the Church as a “perfect society” to the biblical notion of the Church as the pilgrim People of God. In the former, he says, it was the priest who “represented the intentions of the people” and took that to God in the liturgy. Vatican II changed that. “With the understanding of the priesthood of all the baptised it’s not simply the priest alone who celebrates the Eucharist, but all the baptised who celebrate with him,” Roche explains. “That surely has to be the most profound understanding of what ‘participation’ means. That we’re not just reading, we’re not just singing, we’re not just moving things around in the sanctuary or coping with children or whatever it is, but we’re actually entering deeply into the divine life, which has been made manifest to us in the Paschal mystery.”
The liturgy which emerged from the Council, the archbishop explains, is also much “richer” than it had been in 1570 (when the Tridentine Mass was promulgated by Pope Pius V). All of the Scriptures are now available, along with a greater variety of prayers, which allows a “greater sensitivity” to people’s situations. “The liturgy is not incidental to our identity,” Roche stresses. “The liturgy is the womb of the Church, which gives birth to Christians and which nourishes the Christian life.”
Archbishop Roche also takes on the claim made by critics that the liturgical reforms were pushed through by a committee that didn’t respect the Council fathers’ wishes. He dismisses this as “ridiculous”, telling me that his congregation’s archives show that Paul VI was going through the new liturgical texts “page by page” from 9 pm to 11 pm at night week after week. While the liturgical and ecclesiological shifts at Vatican II were approved overwhelmingly by the bishops that took part, Roche believes the reasoning behind the reforms is still not “fully understood”. Formation, he says, has been “very lacking” in certain areas of Catholic life, and nowhere is this more true than in seminaries, where there are strong currents pushing for a return to pre-Vatican II styles of dress and liturgy.
It’s not uncommon for newly-ordained priests coming out of seminaries in the Western world to almost immediately start celebrating the Tridentine Mass. Roche’s congregation is calling on seminaries to teach the “richness of the liturgical reform called for by the Second Vatican Council”, and any newly-ordained priest wishing to celebrate the Mass using the pre-Vatican II liturgical books will need permission to do so from the Holy See. “The Holy Father is concerned about formation,” Roche says, and two years ago he asked the members of his congregation, who include bishops and cardinals from across the world, to discuss the issue. “All of them thought that formation was pretty inadequate within seminaries in general as well as within the life of the Church,” and as a result a document is being prepared that Roche says will address the issue.
How does the archbishop respond to claims that the Holy See is not doing enough to dialogue with those attached to the 1962 Missal? “I don’t think that’s true,” he says. He has met traditionalist groups, and the matters they raise are likely to continue to be discussed. (Several days after our interview takes place, it’s announced that the Pope met with a traditionalist fraternity of priests and gave them a concession to continue celebrating the sacraments in the old rite.) Furthermore, the Responsa ad dubia the archbishop issued in December, which some have said are unduly restrictive, were a response to specific questions he had been asked by bishops. He took the document directly to the Pope last November, who signed it off. It can’t all be about responding to the liturgical preferences of one group, he says. “The Church gives us the liturgy. We pray as a Church community and never simply as individuals, nor as a matter of personal preference.”
John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the archbishop explains, made pastoral concessions to those unable to accept the liturgical reforms of the Council, and with Summorum Pontificum in 2007 Benedict lifted many of the restrictions on the use of the older form. But Roche says that the survey of the world’s bishops had shown that what had been a concession had turned into a “promotion to return to what existed before the Second Vatican Council”. This “couldn’t be tolerated because the Council had changed the way in which we’re going forward. That’s just a simple matter.” It had never been Benedict’s intention to encourage these divisions in the Church. Benedict had also hoped that his concessions would bring back those “operating beyond the curtilage of the Church”, but, as Roche points out, there’s not much evidence that this has happened (he’s talking about the Society of Saint Pius X established by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre).
Archbishop Roche is now the highest-ranking English-born priest to serve in the Curia since Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val served as the Holy See’s Secretary of State from 1903 to 1914. Roche’s great-grandfather came from Ireland to Yorkshire to work on the railways, while his mother’s family came from an English Catholic and Protestant background. He was born on 6 March 1950 in Batley Carr, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. One of his childhood memories is of his maternal grandfather, who was sick in bed at the time, being received into the Church by John Heenan, who was then Bishop of Leeds and was later to be Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. At the age of 19, Roche entered the seminary in Valladolid, Spain. His time in Spain means he can speak to Francis in Spanish, although he says it sometimes gets mixed up with the Italian, to become “Italian-olo”.
Ordained in 1975 as a priest for the Diocese of Leeds, he later served as spiritual director of the English College, Rome, which he described as one of the most “privileged” roles he’s held, before being “pulled back” by Cardinal Basil Hume to serve as General Secretary of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales in 1996. He was appointed auxiliary bishop in Westminster in 2001 and became Bishop of Leeds in 2004. In July 2002, Roche had been elected chairman of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, where he was to oversee the translation of the Roman Missal into English. There remains intense debate over the quality of the texts introduced in September 2011. The following year he was asked by Benedict XVI to serve as secretary, or number two, in the congregation he now leads.
“I wasn’t expecting to be appointed prefect,” he says, but as a priest, “you put your life into somebody else’s hands.” He enjoys working for Francis, whom he describes as “a great inspiration,” and is to him “both the Holy Father and a brother bishop”. He dismisses the idea that the next pope will take the Church in a different direction. “To stand against Peter is an astonishing act, full of hubris,” he writes to a follow-up question I send by email. The belief “that things will change under a new pontificate is not only misplaced but reveals an enormous ignorance about the mandate given to the entire Church by the Second Vatican Council”.
Archbishop Roche says his department is already implementing the synodal style of Church that Francis is trying to bring about. In 2017, the Pope issued a ruling, Magnum Principium, which gave bishops more authority over liturgical translations, and Roche says he works with them in a collegial manner. “We’ve changed the way in which we work with bishops to when I first came to the congregation.”
Is there a tension between this new approach and how the English translation of the Roman Missal in 2011 came about? Many felt that Rome took over the translation process. “I think it was a moment in time,” he says. I pressed him: would a new translation be done differently today? “I don’t know,” he replies. “You’d have to ask the bishops. That’s the import of Magnum Principium.”
Roche’s office is also in charge of overseeing adaptations, or usages, of the Roman rite for different countries. It follows Vatican II’s call for “legitimate variations and adaptations” within the one rite. At the 2019 synod on the Amazon, the bishops made the request to adapt the liturgy to include the traditions and symbols of that region, which has happened with the Zaire Use of the Roman rite, used in sub-Saharan Africa. “We’ve spent the last 50 years translating, the next phase will be facing adaptation,” Roche explains. He describes it as a “delicate matter”.
Towards the end of our discussion, I ask Roche whether he misses England. “Home is always home,” he says. “But this is where I am, this is where I live, and this where I get on with it.”
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