The Landscape of Traditionalism: Part Three

What part of the living Christ is the Mass? As each Sacrament is a point at which divine grace flows into human life, the Mass is the juxtaposition wherein the Eternal meets the external, where Divinity meets ordinary matter. “The Bread I give you is life for the world” – here Our Lord was talking about the inimitable role of the Eucharist. The Mass is like a spring, life flowing up and spreading throughout the whole Body. Its importance and centrality to the Church cannot be overestimated. As the great Jewish scholar Levinas once described the Sanhedrin as the the navel of the universe, so Christ fulfills and supersedes the Sanhedrin, Himself becoming and remaining the Divine and human navel of the universe. It is the renewal of Christ’s life-giving sacrifice on Calvary; and I use the word renewal, or remembrance, as the Hebrews used it in relation to the Passover: that participation in this mystery places the participant within the eternal now, so that we are all present at Christ’s sacrifice; and not only that, He Himself nourishes us, body and soul, with Himself: as He promised His disciples. The sacrifice on Calvary is thus historically, mystically and truly, the center point of creation.

Protestants and protestantized Catholics have an inherent distaste for the particular-ness of the Sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist. “Christ, Body and Soul, in a piece of bread? How-how primitive!” they will think. This is the same reaction many of Christ’s followers among the Jews had when He gave his sermon on the Bread of Life. Yet He didn’t explain their “confusion” away: instead, He repeated Himself more explicitly: “My flesh is flesh indeed”. Yet the particular-ness of an Incarnate God, the particular-ness of the Holy Eucharist made present at the Holy Mass are one and the same. Our Lord does not become a piece of bread: rather, the piece of bread, its substance, is changed into Christ Himself, only under the appearance of bread and wine. For sure, this scandal of particularity is a stumbling block for many, as Christ said He would be; but think, for a minute, how great a God would have to be to be so particular, so close to every detail of every life, close enough to know how many hairs are on your head at a given moment, to know each joy and sorrow of each soul, and yet be over and above everything: a Creator who is constantly creative, so large that He can be so small as to tickle a baby’s feet in the womb. The scandal of particularity is not really a scandal when one realizes how great and large one must be to be truly small for each person.

Such is Christ: and such is He most visibly, most especially, in the Eucharist. There He is at His most humble and vulnerable: and so there we must give Him the most honor, reverence, attention and tenderness. And yet, in God’s kingdom, there is He the greatest and most powerful: for He enters into each of us who partake of Him in a very real physical way, miraculously juxtaposed perfectly with the eternal. All of us: our soul, body, mind, heart: all are involved intimately with the Lord at the moment of communion. In this moment everything should help us in the endeavor to see the Lord: the liturgy, music, the symbolism present in each action of the Mass.

How then, can the method and mode, the music and appearance, all the symbolism imbibed almost subconsciously, surrounding this spring of life for God’s Church-how can all these be undervalued or thought as mere accoutrements to be changed like the changing of an outfit?

No. Like all Tradition, the parts of Christ’s continued presence on earth grew organically, carefully, beautifully, as a pearl is covered carefully in layers of oyster’s riches. These growths, from the Holy Scriptures to the Sacraments, to the lives of the saints, the martyrdoms and the marriages, the vestments, the music of Pope St. Gregory, and most importantly, the liturgy of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass- were carefully tended and pruned, fertilized with the blood of martyrs and the life work of the priests.

Until Henry the VII wanted a divorce. This was the first real stone rolling from the battlements surrounding the Traditions of the Church. Mr. Davies writes eloquently of the process of a Novus Ordo “mass” promulgated not by the Pope, but by Cranmer, the man who was dressing up in the Archbishop of Canterbury's clothes at the time of Henry VII and Elizabeth I. Cranmer formulated a “new order of service” that would “divest the English people of their errors and papistry”- in other words, would change their beliefs. He crafted a series of changes in the service which was once the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, changes like making the altar “The Lord’s Table” and emphasizing the meal aspect of the service. It was crafted to break the people away from Rome and the Pope, and whether inadvertently or not, it began to destroy the people’s belief in the Real Presence. In Mr. Davies’ book, Cranmer’s Godly Order: The Destruction of Catholicism Through Liturgical Change, the author shows how the liturgy of England’s Anglican faith (pretending to be Catholic) was used as a weapon to destroy the faith of the people. The most important victory for these revolutionaries was won in the destruction of the mass by the destruction of its liturgy. Effectively then, the destruction flowed outward, and the Catholic England that St. Edmund of Canterbury knew was dead.

But Catholic England did not die quietly. Yesterday, October 25, is the commemoration of the English Martyrs: St. Edmund Campion, St. Margaret Clitherow, among many others, died in the defense of Catholic orthopraxis and orthodoxy: but they did not die for dry “ortho” words. They would not have died for the right vestments or an altar, but that these were the vestments worn by Christ’s priests, and for Christ’s altar, those small but eternally significant proofs of His living Presence among us still. They died for Christ in the Eucharist, which is only made possible in the Mass of the Church.

For the Church, England was lost in the wake of the Protestants out in the Channel; hope lied buried there until the flowering of the Oxford Movement at the turn of the 19^th-20^th centuries- that which gave us Chesterton and Knox, Belloc and Sayers. But in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, the Counter-Reformation burst out in Europe and the Church, wounded but still strong, rallied to Her Traditions- and the Jesuits were but an example of what was born out of that time. The next time Our Lord’s Church would be seriously wounded, it would be from within the very conclaves of Her citadel.

In 1962, Cardinals, bishops, priests, peritti and even some Protestants marched eagerly into the Vatican for the Second Vatican Council. It was a council called like never before in the history of the Church: not as a council called as a necessary response to a specific threat to faith and morals, but a progressive movement from within the Church Herself, a movement outward to make Herself more understandable to the modern world. But was it a missionary movement? To this question, the answer seems vague. And this is the first sign of danger. However, the traditional schemata were drawn up, documents of clarity and good explanation of the Tradition. As Mr. Davies relates, there was a strange movement among some of the bishops to simply scrap these schemata (which had taken many months to write), and to, in my words, “Go with the flow”. I use this slang because it comes from that time, the optimistic and dreamy early sixties, when the girdles guarding tradition in every sphere were being loosened everywhere and in every institution.

For the Council, then, everything was suddenly out of the traditional ways of handling such a large undertaking, and there was a lot of room for creative action and writing. All of this sounds kind of refreshing and even good to my modern ears, my ears trained in the seventies and eighties in open classrooms. However, within a Tradition: when that which is handed down is part of Christ Himself in the world, creative action and “go with the flow” sounds akin to remaking Christ in one’s own image.

What would happen? Would the Council Fathers work together to protect Tradition whilst becoming missionaries to the world? Would there be a “new springtime”? What would happen if ambiguities and as Mr. Davies puts it “liturgical time bombs” were allowed into the documents approved by the Council Fathers? Was the “smoke of Satan” entering the Church? What would this mean, especially for the jewel in the crown of Tradition, the Holy Mass?

..to be continued

The Landscape of Traditionalism: Part Two

Imagine the Roman Catholic Church not as a building, not as a group of people, but as one of those fancy dessert and sandwich plates one finds only in the Ritz or Plaza Hotels during teatime. Imagine it: a beautiful bone-china plate, delicate, suspended by a decorative metal stand, a rod, bored through the middle of the fine plate. The rod holds the plate aloft, and straight, and the little cucumber sandwiches and miniature pastries are artfully arranged on the surface of the plate. If the rod is defective, the plate will be slanted and defective as an upper-crust tea service: all the cakes and sandwiches will slide off, into the oblivion of the waiter’s table scraper and napkin.

Imagine, though, the rod cannot be, will not be, defective. It is the axis built by God to hold the plate, the visible Church, aloft as a foundation of faith for the members, but also by example, for the world. Now the paint and gilt on the plate may become faded, there may be chips and cracks, but the rod holds it straight and level at the essentials.

What is this rod? It is the Deposit of Faith, it is the Tradition of the Church founded by Our Lord, centered in the person of Peter, or the Papacy. “Where Peter is, there is the Church”. The Papacy is the lodestone of Tradition- it does not encompass it, but rather is its head. As Christ is Head of the Church, His Vicar is Head of Tradition.

So I see that rod, holding that plate, as visibly the purview of the Papacy: not the individual man alone, but that man as holding the Office and with the graces that Office gives him. The farther one is out on that plate, the farther is one from Tradition, from the Papacy as Holder of that Tradition. Thus, there may be people, even the Pope himself (in his private actions, his non-ex-cathedra, non-infallible teaching), who are right at the edge of the plate, leaning toward this or that excess or error, yet still within the confines of still being Catholic and not heretical or apostate. To fall off the plate is to forsake the Papacy and the Tradition the Office guards: and to forsake the Vicar of Christ is to forsake Christ.

But why? It sounds all so medieval, so crafted, so un-abstract, so, so- carnal! How can an office that is necessarily held by a man, how can a bunch of writings and practices and art and whatnot carry the sublime truths of Almighty God? Surely because God is Spirit, He would just go to each individual spiritually, enlightening them, letting the visibilities and practices: the art, the hierarchies of churchmen, the archaic sacraments and sacramentals- be more about the needs of the surrounding culture- that is, a matter of choice?

These questions hit right at the nature of Tradition as it is understood in the Catholic sense- and indeed, hit at the Incarnation of God Himself: for one can level the same criticisms that one levels at a particular-bound Church, to the Person of Christ as He appeared in history.

What is Tradition? It is this question that those who would answer to the (mis) nomer “Traditionalist” are really fighting about: and it is this same question that those who would call themselves “Progressive Catholics” are fighting about. Those ‘middlemen’ who are called now, “Neo-Con Catholic”- I think these find the point of least struggle and go about trying to run the show. But it is interesting that these, the "Neos", who I think believe themselves the most moderate, in the plate image, the closest to the rod of the Papacy in the center, are perhaps closer to the edge because they are focused not on the Papacy, nor Tradition, but rather on the individual man’s idiosyncrasies who holds the office, or perhaps on the political and material advantages in their own nation-states. A hard judgement but I wonder if it is accurate nonetheless.

What is Tradition? What is this rod, this essential foundation? I borrow here from Mr. Davies, and from Father Ripperger’s articles on Tradition in The Latin Mass magazine.

Tradition comes from a Latin word meaning, "what is handed down". This is a general meaning of the word, and can mean anything from family tradition to company policy. These human forms of tradition are what form us in varying ways, they help us to form habits of action and thinking, informing and strengthening the will, which in turn grow the character and virtues (or vices) of a person. A person is not separate completely from the traditions he has been formed within: the concept of radical individuality is really a lie. The differing modes of tradition have different impacts upon a person: that is, familial traditions will be much more powerful than company policy (depending on the company, I suppose). However, it is hubris on our part to think that we are self-made men and women: we are, like candles, formed by the structures and people around us: we always retain our free will, but everything else about us: our temperaments, character, personality, intellect: are unique products of the traditions we have received from others.

Nearly two thousand years ago, Our Lord brought a new entity into existence. It was the extension of His Body, the physical reality of “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”. It was the birth of Our Lady’s Son renewed, with the sending of God’s Spirit to Mary and the Apostles on Pentecost. Our Lord gave to this new entity Himself, it was meant to spread the reality of God’s Incarnation across all time and space. One has to let this shocking reality set in. God came in a physical Body, and left a physical Body, imbued with the Holy Spirit, in the reality of the Eucharist, but also just as real, in the reality of a Church.

Thus, His Church is not a religious community, nor is it a culture: although it encompasses those characteristics by its nature of having many people within it. The Church is like no other organization in the world, past, present or future: it is the Creator Himself, growing and forming His Incarnation through His children, children of the Church, children of His Mother (“Behold, here is thy Mother”). When we Catholics talk blithely about “The Body of Christ”, we forget that this is a living reality, and not just a symbolic term.

Therefore, anything a part of this Body becomes charged with organic and living meaning: Sacrament, sacramental, liturgy, art and architecture: each is an extension of Christ Himself, as we baptized are. This lays great meaning on each person, each act sanctioned by the Church. God chose these means, able to be grasped by both the senses, the soul and the intellect, because that is how we are made; and as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, it is through these means that the will is moved and the person is formed.

We are again talking about tradition, what Christ handed down and wished the Apostles to hand down: namely, Himself as a living reality in Scripture, the Magisterial teachings of the Church: the Sacraments, sacramentals; the art, architecture and liturgy; the music and the martyrs and saints- that is, the riches and deposit of Faith as expressed in what has been handed down: Tradition, with a capital “T’. It has a capital “T” because it is part of the living Body of Christ.

Our Lord, therefore, forms us through this extension of His Incarnation. To be a Catholic in the living Tradition of the Church is to be with Christ as Our Lady, St. Joseph and the Apostles were with Christ. This Tradition is the means by which He forms us: as was stated before, none of us becomes what we are with an absence of traditions given us by others. The “nature state” of Hobbes and Locke is pure nonsense. We are born into society, culture, and traditions that form us. The Catholic Church is the culture and tradition of Christ, and is Christ Himself extended over space and time, and encompassing the members of His Body- and founded on another person, the person of Peter and his successors. It is as if Christ handed Himself to Peter, but as an Infant, for Peter to hold- and the Successors of Peter are charged still to guard and care for this Church, these Traditions.

How can anyone, then, take that Tradition into his own hands, even attempt it, in order to remake Christ’s Body into his own image? It is sacrilege. Christ’s Tradition is a beautiful organism flowering and winding its way through the tragedies of human history, using them as stakes on which to grow; changing those very tragedies into triumphs for the salvation of the world. It is the vine to which we must remain attached; for Tradition is the knowable and visible witness for Christ in the world.

Thus is the majestic music, the lives and relics of the saints and martyrs, the soaring testimonials of architecture, the erudite teaching, the missions and missionaries throughout the history of the Church; the billions of Confessions, millions of Holy Orders, Vows and Marriages, and the liturgy as a setting for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: thus are these witnesses and realities making present the ineffable Person of Our Savior to the world that needs Him.

Here we must grasp the serious fact that what we do as Catholics, what the hierarchy does, with this Deposit of Faith, this Tradition in its varying and living forms, what the Pope does or does not do- we are in a very real sense, doing to Christ Himself. The rod in the plate on which the very souls and bodies of the faithful rest is a living rod, and we must strive to look to the rod for our reality, our stability: it is the foundation of Faith, reaching through our plane of existence to the beyond.

The next part will discuss the jewel in the crown of Tradition: the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

The Landscape of Traditionalism: Part One

I base my definition of “traditionalist” on Michael Davies. I would guess that he would like simply to be called “Roman Catholic” –I think, to him, “Traditional Roman Catholic” would be an oxymoronic term- or just moronic, for short. Nonetheless, in these days, with so much deep pluralism amongst people calling themselves Catholic, it has become necessary to differentiate with nomers, even if they are missing something of the truth.

After the aggiornomento, or opening up to the world, of the Second Vatican Council, when Mr. Davies was a young man, the winds came into the Church and blew all the furniture about. He came into a Church that was rife with confusion and the rapidity of change, a Church ill equipped to deal with the half-life meltdown that was the Seventies. I saw a video recently of Mr. Davies from this time, on a talk show with the chameleon-like Malachi Martin as host, opposite a high-ranking American prelate. Pope John Paul II had just been elected Pope, and Mr. Davies was arguing in hope and defense of the Pope, who was considered at the least, an unknown, at the best, a ‘traditionalist’. Mr. Davies was arguing also with the American prelate about the promulgation of the Novus Ordae Missae and the perennial nature of the traditional Masses, most notably the Mass which was in use just prior to the Novus Ordae, the Tridentine Mass.

There was great hope in Mr. Davies, his young face serious yet detached, somehow, from the fray. He was unfailingly charitable in his statements, but tough- tough because he argued about present events not from his own light, but in the light of Tradition. That is, he was immersed in the Magisterial teachings, and the history of the Church he loved. It was as if he breathed in the air of Catholic culture and life, from ages past, on many different levels. He had the sensuum Catholicus, the “Catholic Sense”- it is better translated as “ a nose for things truly Catholic”- Mr. Davies was a Catholic Beagle, and I mean that seriously. How many people he alerted to the crisis in the Faith! Even then, in the late seventies, he saw the directions things would take- and I believe he was driven to study history and the Traditions to make sense of it all, and to keep his Faith. In the wake of that drive, he pulled many others to safer waters.

When I met Mr. Davies, in July 1998, he was in his late fifties, and writing his passionate book on the rising of the Vendee in revolutionary France. He was giving lectures to us, and he was in full form, great jokes, the largesse of joy one gets only from real faith in Our Lord; he was likening the rising of the Vendee, against the blasphemous proclamations of the Revolution, to those who would hold to the doctrines and traditions of the Faith in the present darkness. It was my first experience of the war taking place inside the walls of the Church, but I’d sensed it before. Mr. Davies simply cleared it up for me.

I also heard lots of discussions from his corner on a group called SSPX- I thought it sounded like some weird military term from the WWII lessons I’d not paid any attention to in high school. Then I heard the term “Sede Vacantist”- I thought they were talking about some hotel in Italian. Finally, I got curious when I noticed that there was a young seminarian who seemed anxious to talk to Mr. Davies about where to pursue his journey into the priesthood. I sensed that Mr. Davies was like a lighthouse, who not only shed light on things, but also knew the terrain like an old sea captain. Yet he was not conspiratorial or critical of the Pope, the Vatican or anyone else, in a self-serving way. He was not skeptical or critical by nature, but only in necessity, and never out of fear- rather it seemed out of genuine love for the Church. He held to the Church like a beagle to a fox, even if She were hard to find- and encouraged others to do the same.

I began to read his books, starting with I Am With You Always, an explanation of how and in what ways the Lord stays with His Church, how She remains indefectible. It was a lesson from a master teacher in the Traditional Magisterial teachings of the Church: no more, no less. It was not polemic nor a Whiner’s Handbook. It was Catholic teaching, pure and simple.

As a new Catholic, I was-and am- determined that I not become Catholic to become Protestant again, which I feared many so-called “Traditionalists” and “Liberals” had become. So I set myself, in the footsteps of Dr. William Marra, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and mainly Mr. Davies, to understand both the history and teachings of the perennial Church, and the landscape of Her present domain, from end to end. I decided that I loved the Church, like a mother (I love the term “Holy Mother Church”): for She is the ark wherein our souls are formed, where we “work out our salvation in fear and trembling”; and that to love Her is to know Her children, all of them, and then to ask the Lord to show us where He wants us to be His agents.

As a convert of only eight years, I am still a relative outsider, still learning the inexhaustible history and richness of the Church, still learning the depths in the deceptively simple term “Where is Peter, there is the Church”. Yet we must seek, in these days, to know who are those who have submitted to Christ in His Church, and those who have not; and as Michael Davies knew, as a student of history, specifically the history of the Church he loved, we shall know them by their fruits. And we shall only be able to recognize the fruits “in the light of Tradition”.

To be continued-

The Landscape of Traditionalism: Introduction

Michael Davies was-and is- one of my heroes. A great Catholic thinker, writer, and activist- all in the package of a humble Welsh schoolteacher. He was full of jokes, good-natured sarcasm and a love of Holy Mother Church and Our Lord.

I have the distinctly odd but happy memory of my husband and I having Mr. Davies with us on our honeymoon- along with many other fine Catholics at the Dietrich von Hildebrand Institute in Italy. Unfortunately, many people have not heard of Mr. Davies, nor read his books on the Faith and the crisis in the Church.

He was a master, and his books are honest, interesting, and humble explanations of both the glories and the modern failures of the institutional Church. He had obviously drunk deeply of the magical British waters, nectar which has produced such great writers; yet he was a real person, he was alive, not like the loads of wax-like figures who are interested primarily in the Church and Her traditions as aesthetic museum pieces. He was a teacher of little children who loved young people; like Our Lord, he surrounded himself with the young and the questioning. He was full of hope and optimism-in God's providence for the Church-not in churchmen. Pope Benedict XVI, as Cardinal Ratzinger, knew Mr. Davies and respected his thought and work in service of the Church.

Yet, again, not many have heard of Michael Davies outside the rather small group included in the larger Catholic world, a group whose focus is the great traditions of the Church with the Latin Mass as a centerpiece. I would like to introduce the landscape of traditional Catholics, but not through my eyes. I hope to do it through the better eyes of Michael Davies- from such sources as my own experiences listening to him, his books, and some of the people who knew him.

The story of traditionalism is fraught with misconceptions, bitterness, and joy.

I hope I can shed light on it in honor of one of my heroes, Mr. Davies.