What Remains?

The Latin Mass has never been central to my own experience of the Church, though I respect those for whom it is, including many of our students. The point seems to me that our effort should be to seek the presence of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit and to keep intact both word and sacrament.

In 1948, the French theologian Henri de Lubac wrote that “Nothing remains intact without effort. Repetition of formulas does not assure the transmission of thought.” Thinking about the tradition of the church, he says essentially the same thing as T.S. Eliot in his famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—that literary tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.” Anything truly worth preserving, in other words, must be earned anew: it cannot be received passively. “It is not safe to trust a doctrinal treasure to the passivity of memory,” de Lubac writes. “Intelligence must play a part in its conservation, rediscovering it, so to speak, in the process.”

In teaching literature, the effort is to keep crucial texts from the past imaginatively intact. For great poems like the Iliad or the Divine Comedy, the labor of obtaining them goes first through translations and then, for the more dedicated, through the laborious mastery of Homeric Greek or medieval Italian. As with the Bible, the translation matters. The effort of the translator must be to reimagine and reproduce the savor of the work in a language foreign to its conception, to make it accessible and fresh without losing its tone or diluting its meanings. Even great poets have difficulty. The 18^th-century Homeric scholar Richard Bentley, pressed to comment upon Alexander Pope’s popular translation of the Iliad, famously said, “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”

In the Church today, of course, the question is what we understand ourselves to be keeping intact. Is there a “continuity” of the Church before Vatican II and after, as Pope Benedict emphasized, or do the practices of the Church need to be reconceived along increasingly vernacular lines? The question is who we understand Jesus Christ to be. Do we think of him primarily as one of us, a brother in a generously equal relationship with his disciples, a friend of outcasts, the poor, and the sick, a holy man preaching an inspiring message of non-violence and paradoxical self-realization through the renunciation of self? Or do we understand Him to be a man whose startling authority shines through every word and deed—the Son of God, the Lord of History who transforms the earth, the supreme Judge? It is not clear that the first needs to be worshiped, but perhaps imitated. As for the second—the Jesus a reader actually encounters in the Gospels—the question is how best to carry out the purposes of this astonishing intervention in time and history.

On the one hand, you can search the gospels in vain for Jesus’ jealous criticism of the details of liturgical practice among the Jews. Most noteworthy everywhere is his mockery of the use of religion for self-aggrandizement, for example the Pharisees widening their phylacteries, lengthening their tassels, and praying to be witnessed by others. On the other hand, He establishes the sacraments. How are they to be observed? I grew up in a Methodist Church in Middle Georgia where church on Sunday was singing hymns, praying, putting money in the collection plate, listening to the preacher, and once a month or so having communion—a tiny cracker and grape juice. I never heard the word “Eucharist” as a child, but fascination with the Eucharist drew me into the Catholic Church in 1978. Ever since, quarrels about the liturgy have ebbed and flowed but never ceased. My experiences are probably common. I have seen a priest as casual about the host as if it were a slice of Wonder Bread (which it might actually have been at that Mass). I have also seen a person so righteous about the Traditional Latin Mass that he treated with undisguised contempt a priest who was not familiar enough with the rubrics. In neither case was I moved by the spirit of charity.

Until Pope Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum in 2007, the usus antiquior (the “old use,” variously called the Extraordinary Form, the Tridentine Mass, the Traditional Latin Mass, or the 1962 Missal) was more or less verboten; then it was allowed and flourished in a number of communities; and then in 2021 Pope Francis’s Traditiones Custodes left it to the bishops to allow, limit, or ban, with the clear understanding among the faithful that it was more or less verboten again. The Latin Mass has never been central to my own experience of the Church, though I respect those for whom it is, including many of our students. For some in our time, it expresses the essence of what it means to be Catholic; for others, adherence to it is a major hindrance and stumbling block for the propagation of the faith; and for still others like me, it appears as a traditional form, long practiced, to be honored but not understood as exclusively valid.

Everyone I know in the Catholic Church has an opinion about these matters, one way or another, and saying anything at all can evoke angry responses. The point seems to me that our effort should be to seek the presence of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit and to keep intact both word and sacrament. As de Lubac says, “Repetition of formulas does not assure the transmission of thought.” Some will take that sentence as barbed and offensive, but de Lubac means that we need to rediscover the deep intelligence of tradition and labor to obtain it for ourselves in this moment given to us. “So that the river of tradition may come down to us,” de Lubac also writes, “we must continually dredge its bed.”

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College’s weekly newsletter.

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