I jotted these points down sometime last year. While I am now in a different space, I have been very conscious in the last few years of needing to understand the deeper roots of the current Catholic crisis. I don’t intend to get into polemical discussions on Catholicism, and the points mentioned here are by no means exhaustive and could be further developed. But, especially in the light of some of the rather interesting discussion that has been going in response to me earlier muddled thoughts (which I’m afraid that I haven’t been keeping up with all that well – I think that this is the first time that there has been so much discussion on my blog, some of it very insightful), I offer them for what they’re worth.
In an article published in 1965, the late Augustine scholar Frits van der Meer expressed some of his concerns about what was happening on the Dutch liturgical scene. Now I have in recent years become more aware of the extreme nature of Dutch liturgical disintegration, but despite this I was shocked on reading this article to discover that it happened so early on. One moment one had uniform Tridentine Masses everywhere and only six months later priests were making up their own Eucharistic canons comprised of “part Hippolytus, part Taizé, part sucked out of their own thumbs”. Had this been happening in 1975, I could, if not exactly have understood it, then at least have half expected it, for the practices that are apparently widespread today must have started sometime and the late 1960s seem a likely time for such disintegration to begin. But I find it shocking that it could have happened so suddenly and this raises questions for me about the state of the Church before this time. If the foundations crumbled so rapidly then there must have been something seriously wrong long before this.
Van der Meer blames this disintegration on what he terms “the unconscious betrayal of the clergy” who succumbed to the tyranny of “a powerful invisible demon: the fashion of the day”. Pastors who had once faithfully followed the fashions of the First Friday or Fatima, now panicked at the thought of being zealous for something that was no longer fashionable. He may very well be right, but that simply begs the question of how such superficiality could have been so widespread among the clergy.
This brings me to the second article, an interview with Père Michel van Parys, the former abbot of Chevetogne, in which he discusses the social and ecclesial background that accompanied the liturgical renewal and that made the failure of the liturgical movement almost inevitable. He speaks about the discontinuity and break in the transmission of tradition and argues that “the tradition is disrupted when it is only learnt in an intellectual manner and no longer celebrated … if there is no repetition in the liturgy and no memory and no beauty, which are fundamental human dimensions, then the liturgy is reduced to banality. It achieves a certain success but that success does not last long.”[1]
The third was an article on spiritual paternity by Dom Silouane, a French Benedictine of the Abbey of St Wandrille.[2] In it he made the point that the patristic renewal has resulted better access to the works of the Fathers, but that this has largely remained an academic phenomenon and has not really been accompanied in a renewal in patristic spirituality.
[1] Michel van Parys. Verzegelde Bronnen Borrelen Weer. Over monastieke spiritualiteit en oecumene. Bonheiden, Abdij Bethlehem, 1996. 23-26.
[2] Buisson Ardent. Cahiers Saint-Silouane l’Athonite, 7. 101-114.
July 27, 2010 at 8:55 am
Sister Macrina,
The real break and discontinuity in transmission of tradition happened very long time ago when the “West” began to innovate in matters of faith, liturgy, ecclesiology. The Schism only “officialized” the break of Rome from the Tradition of the Apostles and the Fathers. In fact it broke the Apostolic succession and the Holy Spirit departed from it. The “liturgical renewal” was more of a continuation of the innovations.
A real renewal could not happen without a reattachment to the living Tradition preserved only in the Orthodox Churches. But that is very unlikely to happen. It entails precisely what all proponents of “union” refuse from start: repentance and renunciation of errors.
July 27, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Seraphim,
I am allowing your comment because it does represnet an Orthodox view. But I really don’t intend to get into debates on such matters. If I had the books with me I would quote from Metropolitan Hilarion (Alveyev) or Father Boris Bobrinskoy on remnants of ecclesiality. But seeing I don’t, the most I can do is to point readers to Father Georges Florovsky’s essay on The Limits of the Church. However critical one may be of ecclesial climates, it seems to me to be the height of arrogance to presume to say where the Holy Spirit is not.
July 28, 2010 at 8:11 am
Sister Macrina,
In all humility I presume that the Holy Spirit is not in the books of professors of theology.
He is there where people testify for the Christ as the Paraclete, whom the Christ sent from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, has testified for Him, teaching the Apostles everything and reminding them all that the Christ told them. In other words where people keep His commandments and words, those are the ones who love Him and the Spirit is forever with them, because he abides in them and is in them. And “whoever does not love Me, does not keep my words, and the word that you hear is not mine, but from the Father who sent Me”. Therefore the Spirit is not with those ones.
July 28, 2010 at 4:22 pm
Seraphim,
Prefacing your remarks by “In all humility…” does not make them humble, especially if you proceed to judge the work of respected theologians and claim that the Holy Spirit is absent from their work.
I have already said that I don’t intend getting into such debates, and if you persist in submitting comments in this vein I will simply delete them. (I give my rationale for doing so here).
August 6, 2010 at 6:50 pm
As for what was going on in the mid-60’s:
I attended a Catholic women’s college in Washington DC during that time. As a Freshman in ’63 (and up till Spring of ’66) we had a Liturgist from Catholic U saying Mass daily. This priest introduced ALL the changes he expected to be approved (which they were) BEFORE they were actually approved! And that was a Liturgy Professor. Lots of experimentation was going on – likely more than I knew about. Our last two years we had a moral theology professor, who was later forced to leave Catholic U due to teaching and preaching things which were later disapproved of by the Vatican. We were exposed to his preaching… but the crackdown on theologians (like him) only came later.
I agree with you that for things to disintegrate as quickly as they did, there had to have been very serious underlying problems already present. It was like the council opened the door. And once things began to change and CHANGE was in the air, it seemed that everything was up for grabs – and no one was waiting for the “word” from the Vatican! And that happened in lots of ways – not just liturgical. Theology courses, for example. I honestly think many from my generation ended up being educated “out” of the church – as things were taught which “dismantled” but little was provided for what to build in place of what was dismantled. It took me a very long time, and living near a Benedictine Monastery (founded by a monk from Maria Lach in the 50’s) to reconnect and feel grounded, both liturgically and especially in terms of spirituality. (I used to blame myself for my difficulties tolerating parish liturgies … but no longer!)
I hope this doesn’t sound like a debate. I’m just trying to provide some context which might help you understand that time frame. In case it helps you to get some further perspective.
August 8, 2010 at 5:57 pm
TheraP, Thanks for your perspective. Yes, your comment reminded me that I had heard of liturgical experimentation, even during the 1940s in the context of the liturgical movement. And I don’t think that I’d necessarily have a problem with all of that – what I find difficult to understand is easily one could just drop central things.
I have been thinking that I should perhaps write something to clarify my perspective sometime, especially since I’ve been speaking of the current Catholic crisis. I don’t mean to imply that Vatican II was itself bad, or that I am sympathetic with those who seek to turn the clock back. I could no more be an ultramontane Catholic than I could be a full-blown relativist. I see the patristic, biblical, and liturgical renewals of the twentieth century as fundamentally positive. But it is their disintegration that I find tragic, although the extent of this clearly differs from place to place.