Was Dom
Gueranger right after all? Father Hugh S. Thwaites, S.J.
There
is no question, of course, about the validity of our daily Masses. They are the
same holy Sacrifice that has been offered on the altars of the Church since the
day of Pentecost. The fact that it was Rome that gave it to us is sufficient
guarantee of that.
by
Father Hugh S. Thwaites, S.J.
Could
it be that Dom Gueranger was right when he said that to change people’s
religion you need do no more than change their books of worship?
Note:
The following was sent to us by Gary Morella from the Homiletic &
Pastoral Review for November 2001 . Father Hugh S. Thwaites, S.J., though he had
been planning to enter the Anglican ministry, joined the army in 1939 when war
broke out and was sent to France. He left Paris in June 1940, two days before
the Germans entered the city. In December 1941, on a troopship in the Indian
Ocean, he was received into the Church. Taken prisoner in the fall of
Singapore, he spent 3 years in Japanese prison camps. After the war he became a
Jesuit. Since his ordination in 1954 he has worked with students and young
people of ethnic minorities in London.
Recently,
while discussing the declining numbers at Mass with a Catholic friend, I ventured
the opinion that the change from the old Latin rite to the new rite of Mass was
partly responsible. He stoutly defended the superiority of the new Mass.
“In that old Mass,” he asserted, “you couldn’t
understand what the priest was saying. It was all in Latin. And anyhow, he had
his back to us, so we couldn’t see what was happening. We were left out
of it. He was just praying away, doing his own thing. There was nothing for us
to do.” This
set me thinking. What my good Catholic friend had just said was exactly what my
good Anglican friends used to say to me fifty years ago. My friend seemed to be
thinking now like an Anglican. Was it possible. . . ?
Dom Gueranger started the liturgical revival in the nineteenth century, and,
perhaps with an eye on what had happened during the Reformation, said that to change
people’s religion you need do no more than change their books of worship. As we know, our books of
worship were changed in 1968. The reason Pope Paul VI initiated the change was
his hope that a new liturgy would somehow attract Protestants back into the
Church. He accordingly invited Protestant observers, and they later claimed
that they had been allowed to make positive contributions to the new text.
Certainly, in the new Mass there is nothing that could offend Protestants in
any way.
But is the
text of the Mass now so ecumenical that it is no longer Catholic? There is no question, of
course, about the validity of our daily Masses. They are the same holy
Sacrifice that has been offered on the altars of the Church since the day of
Pentecost. The fact that it was Rome that gave it to us is sufficient guarantee
of that. However doubtful or ambiguous the theology of the text, the validity
of the sacrament can never be called into question. The question here is: Is the text of the new
Mass now so ecumenical that it sometimes no longer expresses our traditional
Catholic faith?
When I suggest that this is so, people rally to its defense. “But
that’s just the ICEL translation. The Mass itself is still completely
Catholic. It’s just the way they’ve translated it.” However,
a closer look shows that the compilers of the new missal left nothing to
chance. They
gave a decidedly Protestant slant to the original texts. Take, for example, the
prayers in both rites for the feast of St. Albert the Great, November 15th.
The prayer in the old rite went: “O God, you made Blessed Albert, your
bishop and doctor, great in subordinating human wisdom to divine faith, grant
us, we pray you, to follow the footsteps of his doctrine, that in heaven we may
enjoy perfect light.” (Deus, qui Albertum, Pontificem tuum atque
Doctorem, in humana sapientia divinae fidei subjicienda magnum effecisti: da
nobis quaesumus, ita ejus magisterii inhaerere vestigiis, ut luce perfecta
fruamur in caelis.)
That was the traditional prayer. Now here is the prayer in its ICEL translation
for the new Mass. “God our Father, you endowed Saint Albert with the
talent of combining human wisdom with divine faith. Keep us true to his
teachings that the advance of human knowledge may deepen our knowledge and love
of you.” (Deus, qui beatum Albertum episcopum in humana sapientia cum
divina fide componenda magnum effecisti, da nobis quaesumus, ita eius
magisterii inhaerere doctrinis ut per scientiarum progressus ad profundiorem
tui cognitionem et amorem perveniamus.)
The ICEL translation of “componenda” is “combining.” An
earlier translation had “reconciling,” which perhaps fits better
here. But
anyhow, combining or reconciling human wisdom with divine faith—is it
possible? How, to take just one mystery of our faith, could you possibly
reconcile what human wisdom tells us about the Holy Eucharist and what we know
is there by divine faith? Many indeed have tried. People who have lost the faith always try
to rationalize their position. Some, for instance, have said that
transfinalization is sufficient explanation of what Our Lord did at the Last
Supper and of what happens now at Mass. What happens, they say, is that the
purpose or finality of the bread and wine has been changed by the words of
consecration. The bread remains bread and the wine remains wine, and should not
be adored. But they now serve a new function, and are meant to arouse our faith
in the mystery of Christ’s redemptive love.
Others have thought up the idea of transignification. They tell us that it is
simply the meaning or signification of the bread and wine that has been changed
by the words of consecration. Nothing else has been changed. The bread stays bread,
but the consecrated elements (yes, they use the traditional words) now signify
all that we associate with the Last Supper; they are still bread and wine, but
they have a higher value now than merely food for the body. Paul VI condemned
both transfinalization and transignification in his encyclical Mysterium Fidei.
But our
Missal, on the feast of St. Albert, still commends to us the combining or
reconciling of faith and human wisdom.
In fact, you could even perhaps say that the difference between subordinating
(subjicienda) human wisdom to divine faith and combining (componenda) human
wisdom with divine faith pinpoints the difference between Catholicism and
Modernism. And Modernism, according to St. Pius X, is the “sum of all
heresies.” It is much, much further from the truth than the charming
Anglicanism in which I was reared and which brought me to the threshold of the
faith.
Modernists
seek to water down the faith and somehow adapt it, so that it fits into their
unbelief Ignoring the fact that some of the world’s top scientists are
Catholics who have no problems with their faith, they say that there is no
future for the Church unless we move away from our definitions and dogmas and
adopt a more liberal attitude to the sciences and to the modern world.
But it was precisely
this that St. Pius X condemned in his Syllabus of Errors. He condemned the idea
that: “Modern Catholicism cannot be reconciled with true science unless
it is transformed into a non-dogmatic Christianity, that is, into a broad and
liberal Protestantism”. (Catholicismus hodiernus cum vera scientia
componi nequit nisi transformetur in quemdam christianismum non dogmaticum, id
est in quemdam protestantismum latum et liberalem.) That was what St. Pius X
condemned.
So Catholics, following the new Missal, for thirty years now have been admiring
what they are told was St. Albert’s gift for doing precisely what St.
Pius X condemned: reconciling human wisdom with our Catholic and divine faith.
Is it
possible that their understanding of the faith has thereby now changed? Could
it be that Fulton Sheen was right when he said that if we do not behave the way we
believe we’ll come to believe the way we behave? Could it be that Dom
Gueranger was right when he said that to change people’s religion you
need do no more than change their books of worship? Could it be that some
Catholics are now Protestant in all but name?
We are living through what in some parts of the Church is a mass apostasy. And
maybe the new Mass, which came from Paul VI’s desire to bring Protestants
back to the faith of their ancestors, has, for some Catholics, done just the
opposite:
it has brought them to think and believe and behave like Protestants.
In all that concerns the faith, we have to keep fiercely to what has been
handed down in the Church. It was only this intense love of the faith that
brought St. Edmund Campion and the English martyrs back to England and to
martyrdom. Like them, in that earlier age of apostasy, we too need to have a
huge horror and dread of heresy.
Is this being paranoid? Possibly. But if so, it is only the paranoia that is an
essential correlative of true love. A husband who truly loves his wife has a horror
and dread of the very thought of adultery. And our love for the faith should be
so intense that we should shrink from accepting any doctrine that is not truly
Catholic. Without that love, there would have been no English martyrs.
So my conclusions are twofold. First, that between the Catholic position, which
subordinates human wisdom to divine faith, between this traditional Catholic
position and atheism there is only a long and slippery slope. And many unhappy
souls are sliding down it.
And secondly, that while there are many who attend Mass only in the new rite
and still have a good strong faith, they may well have lost something of that
paranoia I spoke of. They may no longer have that horror and dread of heresy which
the first Christians learned from the letters of St. Paul and St. John, and
which I think Catholics living in today’s pagan environment need if they
are to maintain the purity of their faith.