An extraordinary letter appeared in yesterday’s Sydney Catholic Weekly from a priest of the Archdiocese of Sydney. It is a timely reminder that as long as priests like this maintain their stranglehold on the liturgy the ‘reform of the reform’ is doomed to fail. This rambling and internally incoherent letter is not available online yet so I have transcribed it and reproduced it here in full:
‘Vulgar language’ [the letter’s headline]
As a young parishioner, I was aware that we had another Catholic church in the parish. It was the Maronite church. As a seminarian we had some bi ritual candidates studying with us which included a Ukrainian student.
When I was appointed as deacon to Golden Grove parish, the Melkites were transforming the church into the present day structure. As parish priest of Punchbowl once again I had regular contact with Melkites and Maronites.
Hence to hear a silly comment that Latin is part of the DNA of the church during the wonderful event called WYD, really surprised and disappointed me.
Yes I know it is the official language of the Latin Church and I may be confused that while we must have “the Lord be with your Spirit” as the proper translation, Dei Verbum is still translated as “the Gospel of the Lord”, I do not consider it as part of the DNA of the whole Church.
I think of St Jerome translating the Scriptures into that “vulgar language” as it was the language of the people. Now we give it some magical powers that I think is a form of language snobbery.
You know “Bella Casa’ sounds nicer than ‘Beautiful House’ especially if said with a nice Italian accent than the broader Australian one but of course would be more acceptable if said with the proper Queen’s accent.
The rush with which most priests and communities around the world embraced the Mass in their own vulgar languages shows that the insights of the council were correct. A few rejected the authority of the council and wanted their own way. The Pope has said “Well look, if this will bring you back into the fold, ok if say it [sic] your way! But leave the majority alone”.
I have not felt the presence of God in any celebration where the majority of the singing was not in the language of the majority of the people. It is exclusive and divisive. It becomes a concert; a performance. A recent comment about facing each other meaning, we have turned into ourselves is so far of the mark it is laughable. When we are gathered around the altar, facing the same way as in a circle, the focus is not on each other but the tables of word and sacrifice. The welcoming of the chaplain of the Samoan community at Parramatta community was one especially where the presence of Christ in each other, the Word and the Eucharist was so powerful, it beats any experience where being on the sanctuary one feels one is in an enclosed cage. Especially if six or seven candles with a large crucifix prevents the people from seeing the presider.
The liturgy of the Mass as a public act of worship is meant to be that public [sic]. The days of the priest saying Mass with the choir should be long gone. I for one will be avoiding any celebration where Latin so dominates that the people are reduced to mere observers. It may have a small part to play sometimes but that is it as-an [sic] exception not the rule. Anything else is just intellectual superiority.
Fr Robert M Fuller
Parish priest
Liverpool, NSW
So Fr. Fuller spends his first three paragraphs erecting a straw man which he acknowledges in the fourth paragraph to be, indeed, nothing but a straw man. He links the use of Latin in the liturgy to ‘language snobbery’, but of course the use of a sacred language is more about protection of Eucharistic doctrine than euphony. (Later he makes a different connection, which I will examine in a moment.)
Then he offers the following non sequitur:
The rush with which most priests and communities around the world embraced the Mass in their own vulgar languages shows that the insights of the council were correct.
Firstly, the council never called for the extirpation of Latin from the liturgy, and secondly, the ‘rush’ to which he refers was offset subsequently by an exodus of some 50 000 priests from the priestly state and the collapse in Mass attendance to the present-day levels of around 10%. The illogic of this statement is implicit in his next sentence: “A few rejected the authority of the council and wanted their own way.” Similarly, the “rush with which most priests and communities” abandoned the Traditional Mass was because they got their own way, not because of what the Council (or more accurately, Paul VI) mandated.
Father’s subsequent statement is simply stunning:
I have not felt the presence of God in any celebration where the majority of the singing was not in the language of the majority of the people.
Implicit in this is the post-Conciliar notion that a religious experience’s subjective ‘authenticity’ is the chief criterion for its validity. And the Traditional Mass is certainly ‘exclusive’ of heresy and ‘divisive’ for heretics but it is curious for him to speak of non-vernacular Masses as ‘concerts’ or ‘performances’ since this is all too often what the New Mass had degenerated into, with numerous Masses billed explicitly as ‘rock Masses’ or ‘folk Masses’. (Until recently the Catholic Weekly itself was selling C.D.s of Sr. Janet Mead’s A Rock Mass!)
Also surprising is Fr. Fuller’s opinion that
A recent comment about facing each other meaning, we have turned into ourselves is so far of the mark it is laughable
Now I am an avid reader of the Catholic Weekly, particularly the letters page, and can recall no such recent remark; perhaps he is thinking of the thoughts expressed in The Spirit of the Liturgy by the then-Cardinal Ratzinger, now gloriously reigning as Pope? His defence that “When we are gathered around the altar, facing the same way as in a circle, the focus is not on each other but the tables of word and sacrifice”, is highly debatable, since the natural tendency is to look into a person’s face, and with so many Churches designed ‘in the round’ there are certainly a lot of faces to look into.
Father then offers the following irrelevant anecdote:
The welcoming of the chaplain of the Samoan community at Parramatta community was one especially where the presence of Christ in each other, the Word and the Eucharist was so powerful
Now one usually doesn’t speak of Christ’s presence being more or less ‘powerful’ in a liturgical context since He is either present or not, so presumably what is ‘powerful’ is really, once again, Fr. Fuller’s feelings—once again, the notion of ‘authenticity’. And reference to a minority community is a technique that one sees from time to time by which one can deflect attention from the weakness of one’s central argument by making an opponent of the argument seem heartless or even ‘racist’; this is basically how people go about defending the failed policy of ‘multiculturalism’. The futility of providing such an anecdote is evident from the fact that one could just as easily cite any number of Traditional Mass communities as a counterpoint. (Not to mention that the mind recoils at the thought of the liturgical horrors that must have abounded at that welcoming!) Furthermore, the fact that he would ‘feel’ (that word again) like being in a ‘cage’ suggests that he resents a fine distinction being drawn between priest and congregation, when a clear distinction is entirely proper. Then he contradicts his assertion that “the focus is not on each other but the tables of word and sacrifice” by criticising “[prevention of] the people from seeing the presider”! And what a strange choice of word, ‘presider’, since the man ‘behind the candles’ is the celebrant, the one offering the Mass, and not necessarily the presider.
Fr. Fuller’s assertion that “The liturgy of the Mass as a public act of worship is meant to be that public [sic]” is disturbingly sweeping. He imposes no conditions on this alleged public character of the Mass; he does not confine himself to Sunday Mass, in connection with which one might excuse such a sweeping assertion, but the entire “liturgy of the Mass”. His allusion to Traditional Mass congregations as ‘mere observers’ is certainly unoriginal, and seems to neglect the primarily sacrificial character of the Mass as the same Sacrifice as the Sacrifice of Calvary. Were Our Lady and St. John ‘mere observers’ at Golgotha? But thanks to our baptism we are never ‘mere observers’ but always have the capacity to participate actively by offering up our own spiritual sacrifices in association with the Sacrifice of the Altar. And Fr. Fuller’s opinion that Latin “may have a small part to play sometimes but that is it as-an [sic] exception not the rule” is simply not supported by Vatican II’s Constitution on the Liturgy.
Fr. Fuller’s Parthian shot, that “[a]nything else is just intellectual superiority” (presumably he means ‘intellectual élitism’ or some such, unless he is conceding that the T.L.M. is indeed intellectually superior to the New Mass!), seems to contradict his notion of Latin as representative of “language snobbery”—he has changed his argument from a preference for Latin being based on a superficial preference concerned with euphony, to an intellectual argument based, presumably, on the relative merits of either rite. What this statement confirms, though, is that he sets up an opposition between heart and intellect—between feelings of a Divine presence versus ‘intellectual superiority’. This is a contrived opposition.
Looking back over the letter, it is clear that Fr. Fuller approaches the liturgy from the angle of public accessibility rather than Sacrificial integrity—the word ‘sacrifice’ is only mentioned once, and in the lower case, compared to numerous references to the community gathered. One might object that this is a contrived opposition of my own; I do not mean to oppose the two against each other, only to point out that this letter provides no evidence of a zeal for protecting the Mass’s sacrificial identity, and an overriding concern for a superficial notion of lay participation.
As for Fr. Fuller’s Ordinary, His Eminence Cardinal Pell, his ambivalence on these matters is evident in the last lines of his Sunday Telegraph column on last year’s Solemn Pontifical Mass at the Throne:
In the old Mass I find the many particular actions required of the celebrant to be distracting; I miss too the regular responses of the congregation and the lively sense of community this can engender. The English is easier for everyone also.
But the old Mass calls us to worship in a way that is rarely equalled today.
(http://www.sydney.catholic.org.au/Archbishop/STC/2007/20071118_366.shtml)
H.H. The Pope’s ‘Marshall Plan’ certainly has its work cut out for it.
Reginaldvs Cantvar
