As many have heard, the former papal Master of Ceremonies (the man who organizes and runs the masses at which the pope presides) Archbishop Piero Marini has just published a book, in English, called A Challenging Reform: Realizing the Vision of the Liturgical Renewal, 1963-1975. The book recounts Marini’s time and service on the committees dealing with the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. While First Things hopes to review Marini’s book in a future issue, I found an interview he did with John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter on the occasion of the book’s publication worthy of comment. Allen asks the Archbishop about his book’s concern “about the current liturgical direction of the church, warning of a return to a ‘pre-conciliar mindset.’” Marini says that we should always be concerned about upholding the faith of the Bible and the Fathers in every age. Then the interview begins to address this “nostalgia:”That said, I have to add that today I’m a bit more concerned than in the past, because I see a certain nostalgia for the past. What concerns me in particular is that this nostalgia seems especially strong among some young priests. How is it possible to be nostalgic for an era they didn’t experience? I actually remember this period. From the age of six until I was 23, in other words for 18 years, I lived with the Mass of Pius V. I grew up in this rite, and I was formed by it. I saw the necessity of the changes of Vatican II, and personally I don’t have any nostalgia for this older rite, because it was the same rite that had to be adapted to changing times. I don’t see any step backward, any loss. I’m always surprised to see young people who feel this nostalgia for something they never lived with. ‘Nostalgia for what?’ I find myself asking.
John Allen: How do you explain this nostalgia?
In part, I suppose, because implementation of the liturgy of the council has been difficult. It’s true that many times there were exaggerations, which happened for the most part in a time when we could say there was disorder in the church. This was the period of great debates over new Eucharistic prayers, private adaptations, and so on. The danger today, on the other hand, is a ‘neo-ritualism,’ meaning a sort of exhaustion that one sees in many priests who celebrate the rite almost as if it’s a magical formula rather than a real participation of life. I see, therefore, a certain separation between celebration and life. Obviously, this separation can induce nostalgia for the past, for a time when everything was easier . . . when we used a language that no one understood, the rites were often incomprehensible, there were signs of the Cross everywhere, and so on. There wasn’t the same expectation that liturgy should speak to life. If one doesn’t insist on the link, it’s easy to see the liturgy more in terms of theatre. I believe this, to some extent, is the basis of the nostalgia we see today.
Archbishop Marini wonders why so many, especially so many young people, have nostalgia for an era that many of them never saw. I’ve heard his arguments before too. Young people today didn’t live in the fifties. We didn’t hear Masses mumbled by a priest in a language we never understood. We never saw how the church of that decade was driving people away from the faith and how the reforms of Vatican II brought the liturgy back to relevance for the changing times.
All this is true, of course. Those of us with more traditional liturgical tastes never did live in the fifties, and certainly there were reforms that needed to be made; I am grateful to have more Scripture read and to hear the Eucharistic prayer when it is said.
The problem, as many have noted, is that changes made in the name of reform have turned the beauty of the Church into spiritual drivel. The language of the Mass is debased. It’s as if the powers that be did not believe that the laity could handle the full beauty of the Roman Rite and the full power of its theological messages, and so brought the mass down to their level the way one condescends to a child. The architecture, the vestments, the rituals, the whole Mass became more banal and mundane. The plenitude of Scripture and Tradition was not truly passed down, and relevance replaced reverence with unfortunate consequences.
Peters has this exactly right and Archbishop Marini has it exactly wrong. The "nostalgia" is not for a rite that people my age or younger have never experienced, but for a liturgy that holds the real promise of transcendence as something vital and sacred. All too often the modern rite has equated "speaking to life" with being almost entirely mundane. Too many Catholics today have grown up with no sense that anything special is supposed to be going on in the liturgy. In its worst excesses the modern service is almost entirely devoid of transcendence. In such a view a church becomes merely a building, an altar becomes a table, and the liturgy itself becomes a script.
This was brought forcefully into focus for me many years ago when I attended mass at a new Catholic Church in Maryland with some friends I was visiting. It was a completely depressing experience. The recently built church looked like a barn. If you didn't know already what it was supposed to be you would have never guessed it had a religious purpose. There was even a pamphlet that explained how the folks in the parish didn't wish to be "intrusive" by having things like steeples or a visible cross. The entire church was meant, in effect, to be an apology for its own existence. I couldn't help but think back to the churches in my home town of St. Louis. When I was in high school we went on a church tour and learned about the communities that built these beautiful structures: how the Irish in one neighborhood would try to outdo the Italians a few blocks away (and vice versa) by having a taller steeple or a larger church bell. Sure, taken to an extreme it could lead to a false sense of pride, but their confident religious expression was infinitely superior to the cringing I saw in Maryland.
Inside the barn/church things were little better. It was a church "in the round." (Which in itself tells the lie about the older liturgical forms being the only ones prone to "theater.") As I looked around there was no tabernacle visible, or even an alcove chapel where I could assume the consecrated host was being kept. So, I went in and sat down in a pew. I noticed that everyone else was genuflecting towards the altar as they entered the pew, and I asked my friend why they were doing this. There was nothing there to be venerated. Catholic are supposed to believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but it seems clear that these folks didn't know exactly why one should genuflect in the first place. It had become an empty formalism not because the act of genuflecting is of necessity empty but because the modern liturgy has removed the very thing that gives it meaning.
This lack of meaning infuses the worst aspects of the modern liturgy. Symbols have been decried as not being "real" and have been systematically removed, but this impulse is completely wrong-headed. The meaning of symbols is that they point to something outside of themselves. The truth of the matter is that we live our lives completely in the mundane world, so we need and use symbols that direct us to something beyond our earthly experience. So the desire to "get real" in the liturgy has the effect of making the Eucharistic service just another mundane thing.
We all deserve better than that, and some are clamoring for it. Folks of the old guard like Archbishop Marini would be better served by listening to the spiritual needs of today's congregations rather than decrying their "nostalgia." Since when is a desire to experience things sacred and holy a bad thing?
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