Recovering Liturgical Sanity

By Christopher Carstens, Editor

It wasn’t until my sophomore year in college that I began to take my Catholic faith seriously. I was quick to quit the Sunday observance as soon as I left home. But thanks to the prayers of parents and relatives, and to the faithful example of influential peers, I was steered back to the Church through the doors of the Newman Center at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

Not long after I became more active at the Newman Center, the pastor handed me a book called Theology and Sanity by Frank Sheed. Sheed was an Australianborn writer, apologist, and street-corner evangelist and, together with his wife Maisie Ward, he founded Sheed and Ward Publishing. But beyond his example of a faithfilled, orthodox layman, Sheed’s Theology and Sanity was just what a young Catholic in my situation needed.

The thesis of Theology and Sanity is that the truths of faith, if true, are as fundamental to a sound mind—a sane mind—as the truths of biology, chemistry, or physics. Each newly conceived human life has its own, unique genetic code at conception; water is comprised of two parts Hydrogen and one part Oxygen; objects fall at a rate of around 9.8 meters per second, squared; God created all things out of nothing. Each of these aforementioned facts are true, regardless of whether or not one is a biologist, chemist, physicist, or religious believer. Whatever one wishes to do with such truths, however one wishes to respond (or not) to them, is a secondary matter. But to be unaware of them is to be ignorant; to think these truths are other than they are is to be in error—the sign of an unhealthy mind—mens insana

Liturgical truths are equally necessary for a healthy—and holy—mind. It is essential that we see the liturgy correctly if we wish to “equate the mind and the thing” (to paraphrase St. Thomas Aquinas’s definition of truth).

What, then, stands before your mind’s eye at Mass? Do you see the Paschal Sacrifice of Christ offered to the Father? Do you hear the angels sing? Do you feel the grace of the Holy Spirit pulsate through your veins (that is, the veins of the Mystical Body) as we become men of full stature? If not, then your mind may not be as healthy as it ought.

In the United States, much has been made about the 2019 Pew Study that purports to find that a mere 30 percent of Catholics see Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Or, to put it another way, nearly 70 percent are not seeing what’s really there before their praying eyes. To regain a degree of liturgical sanity, it is imperative that Catholics are “led toward a new kind of seeing, in which their eyes are gradually opened from within to the point where they recognize him afresh and cry out ‘It is the Lord!’” (Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 120).

Two practical tasks demand our attention if we wish to acquire liturgical health: first, the priest and his ministers must celebrate the liturgy beautifully, faithfully, and authentically; second, the faithful must learn to see beneath the surface of the ritual’s sacramental signs and symbols to the reality—Christ— they contain.

To begin with, the priest-celebrant is tasked with celebrating the Church’s liturgy according to the Church’s mind. At his ordination, he is asked by the bishop: “Do you resolve to celebrate the mysteries of Christ reverently and faithfully according to the tradition of the Church, especially in the Sacrifice of the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Reconciliation, for the praise of God and the sanctification of the Christian people?” The Church, after all, is the Bride of Christ, born from his opened side upon the cross. She knows who he is, what he looks like, how he acts—she knows the truth about the Truth. And for centuries she has been cultivating sacramental rites that reveal and communicate her Bridegroom to the world.

To be sure, this Church has its human members and, consequently, human limitations: as long as human beings are involved in the advancement or restoration of the liturgy, their efforts will be marked with fallenness and finitude that struggle to express the inexpressible God. The common critique of the preconciliar liturgies, for example, claims that the rites obscured more than they revealed (“overlaid with whitewash” was how Pope Benedict XVI put it). The Second Vatican Council desired to restore ritual elements that had fallen by the wayside over the year, to eliminate unnecessary duplications, and to simplify needlessly complex components. Yet the restored missal, too, is not without its critics: the loss of liturgical symbolism has oftentimes left a liturgy cold, didactic, and lacking in mystery. But these larger matters of reform are for the most part out of the control of most priests. What is in the priest’s power is his ability—indeed, his obligation—to celebrate the rites as given, for through these sacred celebrations, Christ will appear in our midst.

The faithful play the second key part in recovering liturgical sanity, for even when the priest does celebrate the rite as flawlessly as is humanly possible, the ritual demands that those at prayer see clearly and insightfully the Christ made present in sacred signs. That is, the liturgical disease may not be with the priest and the ritual, but with me. How can I come to see the Paschal Mystery in the Mass? Or discern the Body of Christ under the signs of bread? Or hear the Word of the Trinity in the words of the liturgy?

The prescription for the faithful’s shortcomings on this score is “mystagogical catechesis,” which “initiate[s] people into the mystery of Christ by proceeding from the visible to the invisible, from the sign to the thing signified, from the ‘sacraments’ to the ‘mysteries’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1075). A central component of mystagogy uncovers a sacramental sign’s meaning (which is ultimately Christ) by examining its sources. For example, a mystagogical look at something as simple as a church’s front door would consider the cherubim who guarded the door to the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24), the door marked with the blood of the lamb at that first Passover in Egypt (Exodus 12:7), the doors of pearl through which the saved pass into heaven (Revelation 21:21)—and how each of these shows that the building’s door is none other than Christ himself, “the door” (John 10:9). Ah, yes—now I see!

Regaining one’s liturgical sanity, then, is within our grasp. It requires that our priests “celebrate the mysteries of Christ faithfully and reverently according to the tradition of the Church,” as they promised at their ordination. It also requires that the faithful do the “spiritual therapy” necessary to bring their sacramental senses back to health and be “led toward that new kind of seeing.” Let us not misdiagnose the causes of today’s liturgical insanity. It does not lie— or at least does not principally lie—with Councils, Consiliums, or Commissions, nor with clerics high and low. Rather, it lies with—and within—each of us at the liturgy.

What stands before your mind’s eye at Mass? Do you see the Paschal Sacrifice of Christ offered to the Father? Do you hear the angels sing? Do you feel the grace of the Holy Spirit pulsate through your veins (that is, the veins of the Mystical Body) as we become men of full stature? If not, then your mind may not be as healthy as it ought.

In one of the opening paragraphs of Theology and Sanity, Sheed understands that true sanity is found in looking with the eyes of the Church. While it’s true that he was speaking about more than the liturgy, his words still apply here: “Seeing what [the Church] sees means seeing what is there. And just as loving what is good is sanctity, or the health of the will, so seeing what is there is sanity, or the health of the intellect.”

While consuming too much cantankerous commentary can make one lose one’s mind, a healthy diet of authentic liturgy, celebrated after the mind of the Church, and engaged with intelligence and docility will always be a prescription for not only, as Sheed says, intellectual health, but also and ultimately, for spiritual health.

Pop Quiz: Are You Smarter Than a Liturgist?

How would you answer these liturgy-related questions? (All of them are typically posed to liturgists.)

1. Can the dead receive the sacrament of anointing?

2. When bringing holy communion to the sick, does the extraordinary minister of Holy Communion purify the pix?

3. Can soap go into the sacrarium?

4. When is Holy Communion under both kinds allowed?

5. Can Catholic chapels (at hospitals and universities, for instance) share its resources, such as the building or altar, with non-Catholic groups?

6. When do extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion leave Mass to distribute communion to the homebound?

7. Does the Universal Prayer have to be prayed at every Mass?

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Continued from HYMNAL, page 1 liturgical poetry. However, in the second edition of the Liturgy of the Hours, these beautiful hymns have been restored to their proper place in the English liturgical books. Many of these hymns have been a part of the Church’s liturgy for centuries, complemented by newer additions for the more recent additions to the feasts on the calendar, as noted in the foreword to the hymnal. The U.S. Bishops voted to approve the translation of the hymn texts at their plenary session in November 2019. The Holy See confirmed this translation in May 2020. With the inclusion of these hymn texts, when the second edition of the Liturgy of the Hours is released, it will be the first time the whole of the proper of the Divine Office is available in English.

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The Divine Office Hymnal contains 128 distinct plainsong melodies, along with 52 simple and familiar metrical tunes for ease of use by the faithful. The text of the hymn “Receive, O Mary, Virgin Pure,” for example, appears with a modern, metrical tune (Winchester neW) as well as a traditional plainsong melody.

These liturgical texts are also made available by ICEL to the other English-speaking episcopal conferences who may take up this project (e.g., England and Wales, Australia). These will be the first updated books for the Divine Office available in the English-speaking world. The U.S. edition of the Divine Office does differ in some ways from the liturgical books of other English-speaking conferences. For instance, scriptural readings will vary from conference to conference. In the dioceses of the United States, the scriptural readings are taken from the New American Bible Revised Edition, and the psalms from The Abbey Psalms and Canticles—the newest Revised Grail Psalms with the approved translation of the Old and New Testament canticles. According to the translation principles of Magnum Principium, each conference may produce its own translation of these liturgical books, but the core of the texts could be common throughout all of the English-speaking editions.

The hymn is a unique element of the Liturgy of the Hours as a non-biblical poetic composition that assists the faithful in entering more deeply into this eternal song of Christ. In these hymns, we hear “the voice of the Church responding to the Word of God” (Foreword). The GILH describes the significance of the hymn: “A very ancient tradition gives hymns the place in the office that they still retain. By their mystical and poetic character they are specifically designed for God’s praise. But they also are an element for the people; in fact, more often than the other parts of the office, the hymns bring out the proper theme of individual hours or feasts and incline and draw the spirit to a devout celebration. The beauty of their language often adds to this power. Furthermore, in the office, hymns are the main poetic element created by the Church” (173).

AB/UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS Te Deum 683                       - - - - O God we praise you; O Lord we ac claim you E ter nal Fa ther Ï                   - - - all the earth re veres you All the an gels, the heav ens and the Pow’rs                    - - - - - -

                        - - - praise:

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Notably, the hymn translations use non-rhyming texts, a decision made in order to maintain the metrical pattern as well as the accent patterns of the

“ When the second edition of the Liturgy of the Hours is released, it will be the first time the whole of the proper of the Divine Office is available in English.” original Latin texts. The committee recognized that emphasizing rhyme could sacrifice content and meter, and pose a challenge in maintaining the theological integrity of the texts. Another unique aspect to these texts is the elevated linguistic register of this liturgical poetry, fitting the dignity of the ancient melodies, and yet also readable even when not sung. r y                      - - - - - - e glo rious choir of A pos tles sings to you, the no ble com pa                         - - - - - ny of proph ets prais es you the white robed ar my of mar tyrs                      - - - - - glo ri �es you, Ho ly Church through out the earth pro claims you,                      - - - - - Fa ther of bound less maj es ty with your true and on ly S on Ï                      - - - - - - - - wor thy of ad o ra tion, and the Ho ly Spir it, Par a clete                   - - - - You, O Christ, are the King of glo r y, you are the Fa ther’s ev er                    - - - last ing S on; when you re solved to save the hu man race you did not   Divine Office Hymnal.indd 724 3/24/23 9:25 AM AB/UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS

An international music committee was formed by ICEL and the USCCB. The committee considered the meter and accent placement of the Latin hymn texts with their melodies, worked with the translations, and studied and adapted the melodies for the chant. The book contains 128 distinct plainsong melodies. Additionally, the committee proposed metrical hymn tunes suitable for each of these hymn texts. The music committee selected some 52 simple and familiar metrical tunes for ease of use by the faithful. Some of these tunes may be more familiar to Catholics in Britain than to Catholics in American or Canadian communities, as this was an international effort with chant experts from multiple countries. The result is a beautiful liturgical book of music, with two options for each hymn text: one set to the chant melody and one setting to a metrical hymn on facing pages.

Plainsong Melodies

The ancient and yet ever new Gregorian melodies of the hymns are taken from the Liber Hymnarius, the Latin book of hymns for the Liturgy of the Hours. Some of the Gregorian melodies have been slightly altered with the goal of accommodating the English accent patterns of the hymn texts as they differ from Latin accent placement. In the foreword, we are introduced to the new term “eased plainsong,” describing this light alteration of the chant melody. In fact, 76 of the melodies are “eased,” while the rest of the chant melodies remain unaltered. Notably, the most recognizable chants are intact: the Veni Creator Spiritus and the Vexilla Regis, among others. Tunes that are eased are marked with an asterisk in the index to the hymnal.

One of the beautiful features of this book is the repetition of melodies within a liturgical season or on a particular liturgical day, which provides an aural reminder of the natural rhythm to the cycles of days and seasons of the liturgical year. The foreword to the Liber Hymnarius notes that the hymns highlight the Gregorian chant in the union of word and melody. As the foreword to the Divine Office Hymnal notes, “the natural accentuation of the text itself expresses the reproducing the same melodic/textual combinations, the permissions are more limited. After the second edition of the Liturgy of the Hours has been available for a year, the permissions open more broadly. After five years, the permissions become even more available. The current projection for a release date of the new Liturgy of the Hours is in 2026. It is estimated that more than half of those who pray the Liturgy of the Hours currently receive it in an electronic format. The USCCB is exploring the possibility of app development so that the faithful can have free access to the prayer of the Church, a substantial step in responding to that encouragement for the faithful to take up this prayer as their own. rhythmic character of the chant, a cantillation arising from the text.”

The melodies contained in the Divine Office Hymnal are not definitive settings, but represent a significant start to a recovery of these beautiful melodies of the Church’s continuous musical tradition. These chants are in a certain sense a link connecting Catholics with their own musical patrimony, says ICEL’s Msgr. Wadsworth.

Approved for Liturgical Use

Renewal of Musical Prayer

a theme or mood for the liturgical day, drawing the faithful into the mystery or season being celebrated. Adam Bartlett, founder of the music publisher Source and Summit, emphasizes that this hymnal is truly an “opportunity for people of the English-speaking world to understand more deeply hymnody in the liturgy.” The chant notation is presented with stemless round modern notation on the 5-line staff, which provides the greatest accessibility to a wider audience, and in a range suited to congregational singing.

For communities already familiar with the Gregorian melodies of the Liturgy of the Hours, they may note these differences in the resetting in English. For those who are interested in the nuances involved in the adaptation of Gregorian chant to the vernacular, one criticism of the new hymnal is that the musicalmetrical accent appears to be the priority, rather than the “melodic-verbal synthesis,” a term borrowed from Dom Eugène Cardine. He argues that the melodic accent and the verbal accent should reach their zenith together (see his work, Beginning Studies in Gregorian Chant). One such example in this collection is the hymn Ave Maris Stella—a shift of one note from the first syllable onto the second would have preserved the traditional placement of the word-accents in the Latin and retained its same feel in English. Of course, this is more a matter of differences in approach by chant experts than a criticism of the work as a whole. For, this is the great difficulty in adapting chant into other languages: preserving the melodic-textual integrity of

The Task of Liturgical Formation

By Father Romano Guardini

Editor’s note: Romano Guardini’s first contribution to the liturgical movement was his 1918 work, The Spirit of the Liturgy. In 1923, he moved beyond and deepened, often rather philosophically, what The Spirit of the Liturgy had begun with his short book Liturgical Formation (Liturgische Bildung). References to this 1923 book would appear throughout his subsequent writings. This short text would even be republished by Guardini in 1965 along with additional essays, and republished once again in 1992 under the title of Liturgy and Liturgical Formation (Liturgie und Liturgische Bildung). Pope Francis’s 2022

Apostolic Letter Desiderio Desideravi cites Guardini’s text regularly. Despite the significance of Guardini’s 1923 book, it had only existed in German and Italian until Liturgy Training Publications, the Adoremus Bulletin, and Adoremus contributor and translator Jan Bentz provided the text to the English-speaking world in 2022. A short excerpt from the book follows here. To order the complete work, see www.ltp.org.

Liturgy does not deal with knowledge, but with reality. There is knowledge of the liturgical action, which precedes it and could be called liturgical knowledge [Liturgik in the original German].1 And there

The Divine Office Hymnal contains hymn texts for each of the hours of the liturgical day. Following the General Roman Calendar with celebrations proper to the United States, all of the hymn texts are included for the Proper of Time, followed by the Proper of the Saints, the Commons, the Office of the Dead, and the Te Deum in English. The indices are searchable by composers, authors, and sources, plainsong melodies, metrical tunes, Latin titles, English titles, celebrations, and the Proper of Time. The index of plainsong melodies also indicates the sources of these melodies, almost entirely taken from the Liber Hymnarius

The study of the hymnody of the Divine Office will also result in a significant scholarly contribution: a forthcoming five-volume commentary on the hymns (both on their Latin texts and the significance highlighted by the English translations) will be published by Catholic University of America Press. This academic commentary will represent the rich research undertaken by ICEL, a work of tremendous value for the promotion and study of the liturgical texts under the guidance of Msgr. Wadsworth.

The hymn texts in the Divine Office Hymnal are approved for liturgical use. As in previous editions of the liturgical chant books, only the texts are given an imprimatur as the songs are not official melodies, meaning the texts could be reset to other hymn tunes. In terms of the copyright permissions, the USCCB has granted limited exclusivity to GIA Publications of Chicago to print the Divine Office Hymnal ICEL owns the copyright to the liturgical texts in English, and allows printing as directed by the USCCB. For composers eager to set these texts to original melodies, new hymn tunes and compositions can be approved (up to 10 per collection) and published until the new Liturgy of the Hours is printed. For collections is knowledge within it; the liturgical event allows an insight into itself. To speak about this today is not easy because it has escaped our religious consciousness at large. The liturgy itself is not merely knowledge but a full reality, which embraces much more than knowledge alone: a doing, an order, and the being of itself.

Thus, when we ask ourselves which tasks are assigned to the liturgy, we are not dealing with a scientific endeavor, which would be liturgy (Liturgik). We are not dealing with spiritual counseling and magisterium, but mainly with formation, the word taken in its essential meaning. In this way, it wants to lead the individual in his entirety to the religious-cultic behavior, which makes up the essence of the liturgical life.

This task does not impose itself. Liturgy is not a hobby of an elect group of kindred spirits, but it is the center core of the unbroken Catholic ecclesiastical life itself, neither artificially made by the liturgical movement nor simply sprung forth from the awakening will of the fully Catholic-Christian way of life. This fact is unquestionable. Rather, we are dealing with how a truly liturgical life was able to develop. Not just in places where it could flourish due to favorable circumstances, with people who had a

This new liturgical book, published by the U.S. bishops and confirmed by the Holy See, is a liturgical book entirely comprised of music. What an incredible gift to the Church in this day and age! The beautiful hymn texts and the musical inheritance of the Roman Rite will be even more widely available to encourage and enrich liturgical prayer. This hymnal is a significant contribution to the whole of the Church, whether for individual priests praying the Divine Office on their own, those in religious communities and seminaries praying in common, or the faithful in their parishes and the domestic Church.

The foreword to the Divine Office Hymnal, which was written by Bishop Steven J. Lopes, Chairman of the USCCB Committee on Divine Worship, concludes with this hopeful outlook: “Almost sixty years ago, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council expressed an earnest desire that the entire Church—clergy, religious, and laity—join in offering praise to God in the Divine Office. The Council encouraged prayer in common whenever possible, and prayer that is carried out with understanding as well as devotion. We hope that this volume will contribute to a renewal in this most beautiful and powerful prayer of the Church.” special disposition for it, or in the spiritual environment of a Benedictine abbey, but in the everyday life of a parish community. Yet exactly here lies a danger. Whosoever lives the liturgy will be happy about an attempt to unlock its treasures. However, faced with some texts on the liturgy, one will have to admit that only what comes out of its core and essence can truly serve the liturgy in the end.

See giamusic.com/store/the-divine-office-hymnal to order.

Alexis Kazimira Kutarna is a PhD candidate in Liturgical Studies with a concentration in Church Music at the University of Vienna, and recipient of the Ratzinger Foundation Grant for doctoral studies. She earned a Master of Arts in Liturgy at The Liturgical Institute at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary. She holds a master’s and bachelor’s degree in music, as well as a Performer’s Certificate. Alexis teaches courses on the liturgy and liturgical music at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, and directs the St. Basil School of Gregorian Chant. She was the founding director of sacred music at Cathedral High School in Houston, and now serves as the school principal. Most important is her vocation as wife and mother to two daughters.

If richer knowledge about liturgical things is to be taught and joy awakened regarding liturgical actions, and if liturgical concepts are to become religious exercises even to those who had been strangers to them previously, the result will be a partial success, even if there will always be room for improvement. The central question remains: What is the essence of a liturgical attitude?2 What would be required of man and the community to be rooted in the liturgy? Which forces and sensitivities need to be activated—even, yes, the core of every person—[that is, his or her being]? We are dealing with a very special skill, a becoming, and a growing; indeed, we are dealing with a kind of being. That means we are dealing with a problem of “formation” in the truest sense of the word.

The forces that presuppose such a skill, the sensitivities from which these forces arise, the whole being that carries these sensitivities—these all have withered since the beginning of modernity. Certainly, one will bring up the objection that this kind of approach ties liturgical action to a specific time and cultural-psychological predispositions. Such an approach is not permitted when dealing with Catholic religious practices—that is,