I glanced through a copy of Martin Mosebach's "Heresy of Formlessness" before I had really started to think about what "traditionalism", for want of a better word, was really about. I thought that the book was an apologia for the SSPX and didn't really take all that much notice of it.
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Moretben, and Daniel Mitsui, kept mentioning it, but I took it to be a something that appealed to "extreme trads": it is always amazing how well I can rationalise my ignorance.
Moretben, and Daniel Mitsui, kept mentioning it, but I took it to be a something that appealed to "extreme trads": it is always amazing how well I can rationalise my ignorance.
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"Perhaps the greatest damage done by Pope Paul VI's reform of the Mass (and by the ongoing process that has outstripped it), the greatest spiritual deficit, is this: we are now positively obliged to talk about the liturgy. Even those who want to preserve the liturgy or pray in the spirit of the liturgy, and even those who make great sacrifices to remain faithful to it - all have lost something priceless, namely, the innocence that accepts it as something God-given, something that comes down to man as gift from heaven.
"Perhaps the greatest damage done by Pope Paul VI's reform of the Mass (and by the ongoing process that has outstripped it), the greatest spiritual deficit, is this: we are now positively obliged to talk about the liturgy. Even those who want to preserve the liturgy or pray in the spirit of the liturgy, and even those who make great sacrifices to remain faithful to it - all have lost something priceless, namely, the innocence that accepts it as something God-given, something that comes down to man as gift from heaven.
.
Those of us who are defenders of the great and sacred liturgy, the classical Roman liturgy, have all become - whether in a small way or in a big way - liturgical experts. In order to counter the arguments of the reform, which was padded with technical, archæological, and historical scholarship, we had to delve into questions of worship and liturgy - something that is utterly foreign to the religious man. We have let ourselves be led into a kind of scholastic and juridical way of considering the liturgy. What is absolutely indispensable for genuine liturgy? When are the celebrant's whims tolerable, and when do they become unacceptable? We have got used to accepting liturgy on the basis of the minimum requirements, whereas the criteria ought to be maximal. And finally, we have started to evaluate liturgy - a monstrous act! We sit in the pews and ask ourselves, was that Holy Mass, or wasn't it? I go to church to see God and come away like a theatre critic. "
Those of us who are defenders of the great and sacred liturgy, the classical Roman liturgy, have all become - whether in a small way or in a big way - liturgical experts. In order to counter the arguments of the reform, which was padded with technical, archæological, and historical scholarship, we had to delve into questions of worship and liturgy - something that is utterly foreign to the religious man. We have let ourselves be led into a kind of scholastic and juridical way of considering the liturgy. What is absolutely indispensable for genuine liturgy? When are the celebrant's whims tolerable, and when do they become unacceptable? We have got used to accepting liturgy on the basis of the minimum requirements, whereas the criteria ought to be maximal. And finally, we have started to evaluate liturgy - a monstrous act! We sit in the pews and ask ourselves, was that Holy Mass, or wasn't it? I go to church to see God and come away like a theatre critic. "
.
and I decided to reread the book. In a way, I wish I hadn't, because I have no answers to any of the points Mosebach makes so eloquently, and I am left wondering if I ever will.
.
"Now it was quiet. Everyone was kneeling, and Professor Gessner was whispering, turning pages in the Missal, and Hermann in his soutane was kneeling beside him, the bell in one hand while, with the other, he held the chasuble up a little. Professor Gessner bent forward and whispered a little more distinctly, then genuflected; the little bell was rung, and he lifted a little, white, round wafer high in the air while the bell rang three times, and Ludwig forgot that Hermann had taken the wafer from the wooden box and put it on the little golden plate on top of the chalice. This white disc in a cloud of incense - he did not see it as something material at all, or rather, he saw it, for one moment, as something very fine and delicate, like solidified light. Then the hands came down and Professor Gessner started reading in a whisper again."
.
Will we ever see the day when this is so much the norm that it will be unremarkable?
.
"It belongs to the Catholic faith to endeavour to express the truth in irreducible paradoxes; and it is one of these paradoxes that, while Catholicism is not a book religion, it cannot find a better and more meaningful way of expressing this fact than in a book - the Missal. Holy Scripture is present in this Missal - in the selection of pericopes, translated into Latin, and in virtue of the context in which they are set (for instance, the way in which Old and New Testaments reciprocally explain one another); but tradition is also present, it too understood as revelation; and finally there is the revelation of the sacraments - Christ's healing and blessing presence, mediated through the Church."
.
Which edition of the Missal could that possibly be?
and I decided to reread the book. In a way, I wish I hadn't, because I have no answers to any of the points Mosebach makes so eloquently, and I am left wondering if I ever will.
.
"Now it was quiet. Everyone was kneeling, and Professor Gessner was whispering, turning pages in the Missal, and Hermann in his soutane was kneeling beside him, the bell in one hand while, with the other, he held the chasuble up a little. Professor Gessner bent forward and whispered a little more distinctly, then genuflected; the little bell was rung, and he lifted a little, white, round wafer high in the air while the bell rang three times, and Ludwig forgot that Hermann had taken the wafer from the wooden box and put it on the little golden plate on top of the chalice. This white disc in a cloud of incense - he did not see it as something material at all, or rather, he saw it, for one moment, as something very fine and delicate, like solidified light. Then the hands came down and Professor Gessner started reading in a whisper again."
.
Will we ever see the day when this is so much the norm that it will be unremarkable?
.
"It belongs to the Catholic faith to endeavour to express the truth in irreducible paradoxes; and it is one of these paradoxes that, while Catholicism is not a book religion, it cannot find a better and more meaningful way of expressing this fact than in a book - the Missal. Holy Scripture is present in this Missal - in the selection of pericopes, translated into Latin, and in virtue of the context in which they are set (for instance, the way in which Old and New Testaments reciprocally explain one another); but tradition is also present, it too understood as revelation; and finally there is the revelation of the sacraments - Christ's healing and blessing presence, mediated through the Church."
.
Which edition of the Missal could that possibly be?
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