Andrew Preslar @AndrewPreslar - Twitter Profile

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To understand the liturgical situation in the Church, one must understand the gradual hypertrophism of papal power. Let’s consider three important dates: 1264: the first time a pope ever created a feast for the universal Church 1570: the first time a pope ever promulgated a missal (and, in due course, other liturgical books) 1969: the first time a pope ever created a new liturgical rite. For the first 12 centuries of the Church, Catholics followed their local liturgical rite and calendar, inherited from their forefathers. The pope had little to do with it *directly,* although the actual practice of Rome was very influential in the history of liturgical books. Corpus Christi was obviously a grand idea, from heaven itself, and there's no one other than a pope who could universalize it; but what’s striking to note is the (relative) liturgical independence of local churches for well over a millennium, something that continued well into the second millennium. Then, due to upheavals in the Reformation period, the Church had to clean up shop. This meant, among other things, doubling down on authentic, traditional liturgy. Not surprisingly, an already-over-a-thousand-years-old rite in continuous use in Rome was chosen as the "gold standard." Pius V put his weight behind this not because it was *his* idea, much less his product, but precisely because it was venerable, immemorial, integrally preserved. It was an utterly reliable lex orandi. And yet… prior to this, every altar in Christendom had had its own missal—often a hand-copied one, lovingly handed down, with occasional amendments in the margins to keep it useful. Prior to 1570, there was no missal in the world that had been personally approved by the pope. (Just let that sink in: for three-quarters of Church history, the pope was not involved in directing your liturgy; he was mentioned reverently in the Roman Canon and that's about it.) The shift from seeing liturgy as something you inherit from your forefathers—good because “it’s what we’ve always done”—to something given from the pope in Rome, as understandable as it was in the 16th-century turmoil, was an enormous legal, psychological, institutional shift. And yet, even with this shift, another 400 years (just let that sink in) would pass in which the Church did nothing more than hand down this Roman heritage—even while other non-Roman rites and uses, such as the Ambrosian, the Dominican, the Carthusian, the Norbertine, continued on their merry way in various places, as per Pius V's exception clause. Fast forward to 1969: now we have a pope, Paul VI, who, clean contrary to Pius V, is not giving us the venerable rite of tradition, but a new rite designed by committee, which he believes will be best for “modern man.” So powerful by now was the juggernaut of ultramontanism that many of the non-Roman rites and uses, after centuries of jealous preservation, simply caved in. In one of his many ironic statements, the same Paul VI observed, in 1975, when the failure of the Council's new springtime was already apparent to him: “It is often said nowadays that the present century [the 20th] thirsts for authenticity. Especially in regard to young people it is said that they have a horror of the artificial or false and that they are searching above all for truth and honesty” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, no. 76). Well, yes, that’s true, and even more true in the 21st century. As people search for (and discover) truth and honesty about divine worship, their horror of the artificial or false—of the “banal, on-the-spot fabrication”—only grows. And with it grows a healthy skepticism toward hyperpapalism. Thus, we should rejoice in the hard-won reflourishing of the old Roman rite. We should rejoice at the gradual return of the Dominican and Norbertine uses. We should rejoice that a healthy traditionalism combined with a traditional pluralism has returned, for this is how the Church thought and behaved from apostolic and patristic times into the glorious Middle Ages and throughout the Counter-Reformation era. It is well that we should abide in this broader and deeper Catholicism. Thus we will escape the complaint voiced by none other than Thomas Merton in 1967: “Our great danger is to throw away things that are excellent, which we do not understand, and replace them with mediocre forms which seem to us to be more meaningful and which in fact are only trite. I am very much afraid that when all the dust clears we will be left with no better than we deserve: a rather silly, flashy, seemingly up-to-date series of liturgical forms that have lost the dignity and the meaning of the old ones.”

DrKwasniewski's tweet photo. To understand the liturgical situation in the Church, one must understand the gradual hypertrophism of papal power. Let’s consider three important dates:

1264: the first time a pope ever created a feast for the universal Church

1570: the first time a pope ever promulgated a missal (and, in due course, other liturgical books)

1969: the first time a pope ever created a new liturgical rite.

For the first 12 centuries of the Church, Catholics followed their local liturgical rite and calendar, inherited from their forefathers. The pope had little to do with it *directly,* although the actual practice of Rome was very influential in the history of liturgical books. Corpus Christi was obviously a grand idea, from heaven itself, and there's no one other than a pope who could universalize it; but what’s striking to note is the (relative) liturgical independence of local churches for well over a millennium, something that continued well into the second millennium.

Then, due to upheavals in the Reformation period, the Church had to clean up shop. This meant, among other things, doubling down on authentic, traditional liturgy. Not surprisingly, an already-over-a-thousand-years-old rite in continuous use in Rome was chosen as the "gold standard." Pius V put his weight behind this not because it was *his* idea, much less his product, but precisely because it was venerable, immemorial, integrally preserved. It was an utterly reliable lex orandi.

And yet… prior to this, every altar in Christendom had had its own missal—often a hand-copied one, lovingly handed down, with occasional amendments in the margins to keep it useful. Prior to 1570, there was no missal in the world that had been personally approved by the pope. (Just let that sink in: for three-quarters of Church history, the pope was not involved in directing your liturgy; he was mentioned reverently in the Roman Canon and that's about it.) The shift from seeing liturgy as something you inherit from your forefathers—good because “it’s what we’ve always done”—to something given from the pope in Rome, as understandable as it was in the 16th-century turmoil, was an enormous legal, psychological, institutional shift.

And yet, even with this shift, another 400 years (just let that sink in) would pass in which the Church did nothing more than hand down this Roman heritage—even while other non-Roman rites and uses, such as the Ambrosian, the Dominican, the Carthusian, the Norbertine, continued on their merry way in various places, as per Pius V's exception clause.

Fast forward to 1969: now we have a pope, Paul VI, who, clean contrary to Pius V, is not giving us the venerable rite of tradition, but a new rite designed by committee, which he believes will be best for “modern man.” So powerful by now was the juggernaut of ultramontanism that many of the non-Roman rites and uses, after centuries of jealous preservation, simply caved in.

In one of his many ironic statements, the same Paul VI observed, in 1975, when the failure of the Council's new springtime was already apparent to him: “It is often said nowadays that the present century [the 20th] thirsts for authenticity. Especially in regard to young people it is said that they have a horror of the artificial or false and that they are searching above all for truth and honesty” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, no. 76).

Well, yes, that’s true, and even more true in the 21st century. As people search for (and discover) truth and honesty about divine worship, their horror of the artificial or false—of the “banal, on-the-spot fabrication”—only grows. And with it grows a healthy skepticism toward hyperpapalism.

Thus, we should rejoice in the hard-won reflourishing of the old Roman rite. We should rejoice at the gradual return of the Dominican and Norbertine uses. We should rejoice that a healthy traditionalism combined with a traditional pluralism has returned, for this is how the Church thought and behaved from apostolic and patristic times into the glorious Middle Ages and throughout the Counter-Reformation era. It is well that we should abide in this broader and deeper Catholicism.

Thus we will escape the complaint voiced by none other than Thomas Merton in 1967:

“Our great danger is to throw away things that are excellent, which we do not understand, and replace them with mediocre forms which seem to us to be more meaningful and which in fact are only trite. I am very much afraid that when all the dust clears we will be left with no better than we deserve: a rather silly, flashy, seemingly up-to-date series of liturgical forms that have lost the dignity and the meaning of the old ones.”

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Andrew Preslar

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