One thing is certain so far under the new pontificate of Leo XIV: the canons of liturgical warfare haven’t fallen silent. The rubrical battles, no doubt, will continue until our new pope issues a decree entirely lifting (or greatly liberalizing) the restrictions imposed by Pope Francis. It’s somewhat of a sad commentary on the state of Catholic life that so few Catholics even know what the stakes are. The current form of liturgy in the Latin Rite of the Church has more or less been what it is for 60 years. To follow the threads—in this case, severed threads—of this story takes patience and a reading of a number of books on the history of the liturgy and even on the Second Vatican Council and its implementation.
So, this ignorance is understandable. But that’s not to say it’s okay to be oblivious as to how, exactly, we worship Almighty God. Instead of plowing through a number of books (I’ve read about 30-40 titles on this subject in the last 15 years; it takes a serious commitment), perhaps a peek at how a canonized saint saw the liturgy might help us see what is at issue.
St. John Henry Newman was canonized by Pope Francis in 2019. Newman was born in London in 1801 and led a storied life of sanctity and scholarship. He entered the Church in 1845, and he was made a cardinal in 1879. His works on education, development of doctrine, and Church history are masterpieces written in a prose style equal to the best writers of his century. His Apologia Pro Vita Sua is often considered the greatest spiritual autobiography since St. Augustine.
I’d like to focus on how Newman presented the liturgy in one of his two novels. While Newman’s novelistic talents were among his lesser ones (he’s no Charles Dickens when it comes to fiction), his pen still evokes a powerful prose well worth reading.
Loss and Gain, published in 1848, was his first book written after his conversion. Very much a novel of ideas, the story is set in the Oxford of the 1820s during the rise of the Oxford Movement and its attempts to center the Anglican Church in a position stemming from apostolic origins in theology, discipline, and worship.
Charles Reding is the protagonist, a man sensitive to beauty in the world and in the worship of God. He’s something of a stand-in for Newman, though he is a much younger man upon his conversion than the future cardinal. There’s lots of talk in this novel, some of it very witty with its whispers of “concealed Jesuits” and other charges of Romanist subterfuge that Newman had to fend off after his conversion.
A little more than midway through Loss and Gain, we get to listen to Willis, a Roman Catholic, describing the Mass to Reding—who is leaning more than ever toward Catholicism—and to Bateman, a dedicated Anglican who sees Romanism as religion gone wrong, beclouded with medieval superstitions. Bateman even slams the Mass as it is heard “abroad,” meaning in Europe, where “all parties gabble it over as if it mattered not a jot who attended it, or even understood it…”
Bateman is echoing the 24th of the 39 Articles of the Anglican Church, which might make sense if the main purposes of the Mass were didactic—a teaching more than a doing. But Newman knows this is an incorrect understanding of the Roman liturgy, and so he sets Bateman up for a powerful counterpoint.
The passage is a tour de force, with Newman employing all his rhetorical skills to express and adorn what he surely saw as the greatest thing: the redemptive act of Christ renewed throughout history in this quiet ritual that rose out of Jewish synagogues and damp Roman catacombs.
Willis tells his friends what the Mass means:
It is not a mere form of words,—it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and is the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity.
The still point, T.S. Eliot might say, of the liturgy is not made by human hands, not summoned by human desire. If you make it to the Extraordinary Form, in the Last Gospel (John 1:13), a reminder is there every Sunday of the absolute preeminence of grace.
Willis continues:
Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on as if impatient to fulfil their mission.
As a friend of Josef Pieper’s used to say, “I go to Mass not to hear something, but because something happens there.”
As a friend of Josef Pieper’s used to say, “I go to Mass not to hear something, but because something happens there.”Tweet ThisNow Willis finds his groove, so to speak:
Quickly they go, the whole is quick; for they are all parts of one integral action. Quickly they go; for they are awful words of sacrifice, they are a work too great to delay upon; as when it was said in the beginning, “What thou doest, do quickly.” Quickly they pass; for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as He passed along the lake in the days of His flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. Quickly they pass; because as the lightning which shineth from one part of the heaven unto the other, so is the coming of the Son of Man. Quickly they pass; for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in the cloud, calling on the Name of the Lord as He passed by, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.” And as Moses on the mountain, so we too “make haste and bow our heads to the earth, and adore.”
Of the four traditional ends of Mass—petition, thanksgiving, atonement, and adoration—Newman certainly saw adoration as the key enveloping principle, the thing that should color every element, action, and syllable. He was a man acutely sensitive to language, to music, to the rightness of tone in all we do and say and write. He knew we are addressing God at the Mass and, in fact, that the principal work of the Mass is God’s work not ours.
Newman’s knowledge of Church history is partly what makes his description of the Mass in Loss and Gain so powerful. He realized in book after book, sermon after sermon, the complexities and perilous twists of the long centuries the Mass has had to journey through to be what it is, to be prized rightly for what it is.
Where does this leave us in the midst of the consternation so many feel in the wake of Traditionis Custodes and the subsequent restricting of a Rite in its elements over a thousand years old?
I think we should remember Newman’s deep humility toward the Church’s authorities, his innate distrust of self, tempered by a child-like, serene trust in God’s providence for His Church. He certainly lived this humility in his own day: Newman kept to himself and his close friends his concerns leading up to the formulation of the doctrine of papal infallibility. Yet, after 1870, the final year of Vatican I, his acceptance of the published doctrine never veered into making the papacy equivalent to the entire Faith. The pope, as he put it, “comes of revelation, but has no jurisdiction over nature” (“Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,” Section 5).
The pope, for Newman, certainly had universal jurisdiction over the Church—yet in a way that showed him a servant of this reality, the vicar, certainly not the Master who sent seeds of grace into world history and watered them with His blood.
Likewise, liturgy for Newman is not some merely disciplinary accretion of the Church, subject to pruning to the roots now and then. Liturgy is a constituent part of Tradition because it is the Risen One, in the borrowed robes of centuries, fulfilling every noble human aspiration to worship the Almighty. Here, God forms the hearts of His believers so that they may be transformed into souls modeled on the heart of Christ, who is master of the Rite because of what He accomplished on Calvary. The repetition of that Rite still brings time to a holy pause in which eternity speaks and acts for the redemption of the world.
St. John Henry Newman’s liturgical compass pointed faithfully in one direction: adoration of the Lord. He couldn’t see any other higher way of addressing God, even as he petitioned, thanked, and asked for atonement for his sins and the sins of everyone. If your local parish doesn’t worship the Lord in such a spirit of adoration, I suggest you pray to Newman for his intercession.
While, liturgically speaking, the Church has done much to right her course since the horrid 1970s, there is still work to be done. We laity should help our priests in this, chiefly by prayer but also by objecting to celebrants making jokes right after the last “Amen,” or children dancing in the sanctuary, or a hundred other idiotic remnants of the turbulent years after the rushed implementation of the Council’s teachings on liturgy.
In the words of the famous liturgist Lambert Beauduin, O.S.B. (1873-1960), all of us will do well to remember that the catechism is the “grammar” of our Faith, but in the liturgy, we encounter the “language” of the Church’s teaching. Whatever the outcome of this current pontificate’s decisions, may we all learn fluency in such an ancient language, marked as it is by notes of reverence, awe, and adoration of the Lord in our midst.
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