Chairman’s Message – Joseph Shaw on preventing chaos

Where will it all end?

Joseph Shaw on preventing chaos

My column in this issue is illustrated as usual with one of Dom Hubert van Zeller’s cartoons. A priest is vesting, and handing his maniple back to the server: maniples were not listed as vestments in the reformed liturgical books published shortly before the cartoon. He makes a gesture of despair. Once you get rid of maniples, he seems to say, what next? What will prevent chaos consuming the Church?

Put like that it sounds a bit silly. But as with the best jokes, Van Zeller, who was also a profound spiritual writer, is saying something absurd, and yet somehow true. In 1972, when this collection of cartoons was published, it wasn’t clear where it would end. Prophecies of doom were easy to mock: are maniples really so important? And yet, people were nervous, disoriented, disturbed. If something as apparently solid as the liturgy could change, then what could not? Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger, before his election as Pope, noted in 1997:

‘A community is calling its very being into question when it suddenly declares that what until now was its holiest and highest possession is strictly forbidden and when it makes the longing for it seem downright indecent.’

It is not that liturgical traditionalists in 1972 were unable to distinguish liturgy and doctrine. They simply recognised that the two things are closely entwined, as did the radicals who were driving the changes. Between the traditionalists and the radicals stood the establishment types who would spend the next half a century fervently pretending that the liturgy could be changed indefinitely without any danger that doctrine would lose its moorings.

Today we have a clearer idea of how things will end. Recently a priest in the diocese of Detroit in the USA discovered that his own baptism had been invalid, meaning that he was not a priest after all, and all the Masses he had celebrated, and all the absolutions he had given in Confession, were invalid. At the time of writing, Catholic media is alight with the arrest of a priest in the Archdiocese of New Orleans, who had been found recording a pornographic film with two women, on the altar of his church. He is being charged with indecency, because this was all visible through a window.

These particular examples of the chaos consuming the Church demonstrate in an unexpected way the connection between the liturgy, doctrine, and morality. We might like to think of the deacon who carried out the invalid baptism as a simple-minded nincompoop, but for the mind-boggling consequences of his action. The second story is downright demonic. But they both speak of a collapse of respect for the supernatural reality of what happens in the liturgy.

In these cases, the local Ordinaries took the issues seriously, for which we should thank God. We know, however, that not all bishops would have done so. The clerical abuse scandal has already indicated that what is happening under the surface of the institutional Church can be worse than we are inclined to imagine.

Of course, mandating maniples once more for the celebration of Mass is not going to solve all our problems. Stronger medicine is required. What we can say, however, is that the increasingly widespread celebration of the Church’s ancient liturgy will be part of the solution, for the simple reason that it emphasises the very supernatural reality which is being forgotten with such terrible consequences. To be specific, it reinforces liturgical discipline to preserve the validity of the sacraments; it treats holy things with heightened respect to ward off sacrilege; and it feeds the spiritual lives of priests and laity in a unique way.

Its supporters do not propose the Extraordinary Form as an alternative to decent seminary formation or the prosecution of clerical criminals. What we say is what we know, that it supports the growth of all aspects of the Christian life: intellectual and emotional, imaginative and artistic, spiritual and moral. Formal education and the enforcement of rules are necessary, but they are not enough; in any case, there is very little most of us can do about them. What we can all do is to play our part in the restoration of the liturgy which will renew the Church’s inner life. Venite, adoremus.