North and South

Why is the Traditional Movement stronger in some places than in others, asks Joseph Shaw

The six founding members of the Una Voce Federation (FIUV) represented Norway, France, England and Wales, Scotland, Germany, and Austria. Countries under Communist rule could not take part in these historic events, and nor could less affluent counties far from Europe such as those of Africa and South East Asia. But why was there no association from Spain, Italy, Ireland, or Latin America, areas of deep Catholic culture?

This pattern has persisted as the movement for the Traditional Mass has developed: the founding associations, though without Norway, have been joined by the USA and Canada, and by Poland, as the countries with the greatest provision of the Traditional Mass, by contrast with the often deeply Catholic nations to their South. We might summarise this as a contrast between ‘North’ and ‘South’.

Why might this be so? As we will see, there are numerous possible explanations: no fewer than four suggested by Annibale Bugnini, the architect of the liturgical reform, who clearly found the whole phenomenon frustrating.

1. The Liturgical Movement

Pope Benedict connects the movement for the preservation of the ancient Mass to countries where the liturgical movement had provided many people with a notable liturgical formation and a deep, personal familiarity with the earlier Form of the liturgical celebration. 1

The liturgical movement was strongest in France and Germany, and also had a considerable impact in the English-speaking world.

And yet, while some members of the Liturgical Movement came to regret the final form it took, in many ways the Movement prepared the way for it, rather than impeded it. Again, it primarily affected the most educated Catholics, and not those it dismissed derisively as ‘dumb spectators’, who formed the popular backbone of the Traditional Movement.

2. Popular Devotions

Perhaps it was in places where the focus of piety was on the Mass that Catholics rose up to defend it, not where the focus was more on popular devotions.

The difficulty with this idea is twofold. First, popular devotions were also under attack in the reform. Bugnini noted of the reform of the Sanctoral calendar: ‘Those of the clergy and faithful whose view of worship and religion generally had been devotionoriented were disconcerted. ’2 The Liturgical Movement, and above all its more zealous heirs following Vatican II, was hostile to popular Catholic devotional life: processions, festivals, relics, pilgrimages, saints, and the Rosary.

Second, this kind of popular Catholicism, while important in Ireland, Latin America, and Southern Europe, is equally so in Bavaria, Austria, and Poland, and to an extent in France, where the Traditional Movement was strong.

3. Language

The Romance languages, I have heard it said, are so close to Latin that translators could not get away with bad translations, and were perhaps not tempted to try, in contrast to the truly dreadful English translation used from 1974 to 2011.

This is a complex argument to assess: how bad are translations in French and German? In any case it does not seem to get to the heart of the issue. The badness of the English translation was not an unintended consequence of our linguistic inheritance: it was ideologically driven. The ‘old ICEL’ 3 translators systematically removed adjectives and poetic imagery, and preferred inaccurate and simplistic words, because of their attachment to a childish ideology of ‘simplicity’. One might blame this, again, on the ‘Liturgical Movement gone berserk’.

4. Consumer Capitalism

In the Anglosphere, the argument goes, and in the wealthy countries of Northern Europe, the consumer is king. If consumers want something, the presumption is that they will get it. In this culture, bishops were more open to giving Traditional Catholics what they asked for, than their counterparts in countries with more sun but a less developed economic system.

It is certainly true that in some of the places most hostile to the Traditional Mass bishops seem disinclined to accede to requests of any kind from the Faithful, but this phenomenon can be found all over the world. Some of the older generation of English bishops, for example, were equally unfriendly to the Traditional Mass, the Neo-Catechumenate, and to convert Anglican clergymen. It is not clear that this attitude was less pronounced in the North.

5. Protestant Majority Countries

Bugnini made the following suggestion. ‘The point needs to be made that in the United States and especially in England, and more generally in countries with a strong Protestant majority, the introduction of the vernacular into the liturgy meant to many the loss of one distinction between Catholics and Protestants and of a sign of their attachment to Rome in the face of Protestantism. For these people, the psychological effects of the reform were quite serious. For some, the reform meant the collapse of a world and the practical acceptance of views until then regarded as heretical.’ 4

There may be some truth is this, but it certainly does not explain the overall pattern. The Catholics of France, Bavaria and Austria, and Poland, do not instinctively compare their liturgy with that of Protestant neighbours.

6. Zealous Catholic Leadership

Bugnini described Cardinal Heenan’s appeal to Pope Paul VI as focusing on ‘the discomfort of groups of converts and of elderly people’. 5 Certainly, converts were prominent in the early days of the Traditional Movement in England, with the importance of Evelyn Waugh, Sir Arnold Lunn, Hugh Ross-Williamson, David Jones, Grahame Greene, Michael T. Davies, and among clergy, Fr Bryan Houghton.

This phenomenon goes beyond England. The first FIUV President, Erich de Savanthem, was a convert, as was his fellow-German, by then based in the United States, the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand.

All these converts lacked the exaggerated understanding of obedience found in some cradle Catholics of their generation, and combined the zeal of the convert with an understanding of the Protestant milieu where much of the febrile 1960s thinking in the Church about liturgy and theology had its origin.

A different explanation of zealous lay and clerical leadership in the Traditional Movement can be given for France. There the possibility of orthodox Catholics taking up a stance of opposition to official papal policy had a special resonance, because it had happened twice before: with the ‘Petite Église’ which refused to accept bishops tainted by collaboration with the Revolutionary government, and with opponents of the Third Republic after 1870, who supported Action Française in defiance of papal policy, particularly under Pius XI.

These movements represent precedents of a zealous Catholicism trying to distinguish the Faith from the current opinions of popes and bishops. Indeed, one of the early lay leaders of the Traditional Movement in France, Jean Madiran, was former secretary of the leader of Action Française, Charles Maurass. 6

However, exceptions remain. Italy, too, was home to combative Catholic intellectuals. Tito Casini, with his book Tunico Stracciata, 7 and Cristina Campo, co-author of the A Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass 8 presented to Pope Paul VI by Cardinals Alfredo Ottaviani and Antonio Bacci, are among the key figures of the early Traditional Movement. Those two Cardinals, again, provided clerical leadership. And yet this did not translate into the wider availability of the Traditional Mass in Italy, compared with France, Germany and England.

Traditional Catholic pilgrims outside Notre Dame, Paris, before it was damaged by fire. The Chartres Pilgrimage, which attracts more than 10,000 people, is the biggest Traditional Catholic event in the world.

7. Conclusion

There may be some truth in several of the forgoing explanations, with the overall pattern complicated by country-specific factors. This is suggested by a fourth remark of Bugnini, this time from his Memoirs, where he attributes Cardinal Heenan’s success to ‘a subjective relationship between the pope and Cardinal Heenan, rather than in any rational causes of the matter’. 9 In other words, it was just chance.

One chance factor worth noting in the case of England is the significance of the ancient Mass, as being what the English Martyrs died for between 1525 and 1681: 285 of these have been beatified, and they were very much in the minds of English Catholics at the time of the liturgical reform, as 40 of these beati were canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970.

My tentative conclusion would be that what looks like a pattern on the map, can only be explained by reference to the particular circumstances of each country. How did Catholics react to the reforms? Was there a vigorous Catholic leadership? Were they driven to object to the reforms by a particularly bad implementation of the reform? How sympathetic were the local bishops to concerned traditional laity?

This is, however, an extraordinarily complex issue, and I would welcome further reflections on the experience of particular countries, as well as on the attempts to provide an overarching principle.

1. Letter to Bishops accompanying the Apostolic Letter

Summorum Pontificum 2. Bugnini Reform p315 3. For ‘International Commission on English in the

Liturgy’ 4. Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy, p. 280 5. The Reform of the Liturgy p297 6. Madiran died in 2013; Maurass in 1952 7. Published in 1967 8. Often known as ‘The Ottaviani Intervention’, the Short Critical Study published in 1969 was anonymous but co-authored by Campo and Fr

Michel Guerard des Lauriers OP. See Yves Chiron

Annibale Bugnini p142 9. Quoted in Chiron p151