Chairman’s Message

Advocating tradition

Joseph Shaw on some of Pope Francis’ more puzzling remarks

I write close to the first anniversary of the Apostolic Letter Traditionis custodes, which dominated the autumn Mass of Ages last year. The anniversary was anticipated by another Apostolic Letter, Desiderio desideravi, on liturgical formation, which refers to Traditionis custodes more than once.

Many of Pope Francis’ official documents—to say nothing of his interviews and off-the-cuff remarks—are puzzling, and Desiderio desideravi is no exception. A great deal of it strongly advocates a traditional attitude to the liturgy. “The liturgical celebration frees us from the prison of a self-referencing nourished by one’s own reasoning and one’s own feeling” (19); “every rubric must be observed” (23); liturgy is characterised by symbol (24), by wonder (25), and by art (50). The rejection of this traditional approach by a post-modern attitude (28), and by a creative, personal, liturgical attitude (19), is fiercely condemned: the first “contradicts human nature itself”, the second is “demonic”.

The Press Release tells us that this document was based on “the Propositions that resulted from the Plenary Session of the Congregation for Divine Worship (12-15 February 2019)”: Cardinal Robert Sarah’s influence, perhaps, is detectable. Pope Francis has done nothing to make the document friendly to liturgical progressives, but appears to be suggesting that what is wrong with traditional Catholics is that they have gone to the opposite extreme: “a ritual aesthetic which is content by only a careful exterior observance of a rite or is satisfied by a scrupulous observance of the rubrics” (22). He calls this tendency “Neo-Pelagianism” (the opposite error is “Gnosticism”), and apparently links it—the links are not very clear, it must be said—with the suppression of the Traditional Mass by Traditionis custodes.

It is perhaps inevitable that those unfamiliar with and unfriendly to the Traditional movement should assume that we must be rubrical obsessives, but a little experience should be enough to put that idea to rest. The range of people who attend the ancient liturgy, and the spiritual consolation they derive from it, are simply incompatible with such a one dimensional dismissal of it. That being as it may, this document demonstrates something else, of considerable interest: that progressive liturgical thinking has gained absolutely no foothold in the Papal Magisterium.

This column is accompanied by a cartoon which reminds us of how much has stayed the same in the Church: the hostess begs her children not to engage in discussion at dinner about married priests, Vatican finances, or Bernadette Devlin. The first of these is kept alive, as a topic of conversation, in the grimly predictable Letters Page of The Tablet. The second is very current today, with the recent humiliating loss of £120 million on the sale by the Vatican of a property in London, the purchase of which is the subject of the ongoing trial of Cardinal Angelo Becciu, once a close collaborator with Pope Francis.

The third is a bit more obscure. Devlin was a Republican Member of Parliament from Northern Ireland. Not knowing the exact date of this cartoon, I don’t know if the latest talk about her would have regarded her having a baby outside wedlock (in 1971), or slapping the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudlin, in the House of Commons, the day after Bloody Sunday (in 1972), or something else. If the Church seems to have been going round in circles since 1970, British politics, at any rate, seems less colourful.

'Remember, if the subject comes up at dinner about either married priests, Vatican finances or Bernadette Devlin we keep our mouths shut.'

From Cracks in the Clouds by Dom Hubert Van Zeller OSB (aka Brother Choleric) (1976)