Excellence? How about Tradition!

We're just tired of being gaslit

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, in The National Catholic Register, says “It’s Time for a Renaissance of Excellence in Catholic Liturgy.”

Adverting to the many problems facing Catholics today, including what he delicately calls “the demographic crisis” and “the scandal caused by prominent Catholics who stridently oppose foundational moral truths,” he says,

These are all important. But if you ask me, the problem underlying them all is the loss of the sense of the sacred — and most especially in how Catholics worship.

The article is a bit of a promotion for an upcoming “liturgical summit” featuring some prominent members of the hierarchy, revealing one of its flaws: it represents a faction. When a faction in an institution urges “excellence” in that institution’s primary function, so to speak, you may consider yourself warned.

Like the bishops’ flaccid “Eucharistic Revival™️” effort, it’s a bone to disaffected refugees from the Novus Ordo abuses, but without any of the same corporate consensus. Though, of course, even that effort (and expense) was belied by their own most prominent members’ inattention, to put it mildly.

Let’s start with the title.

Do we want excellence, in fact?

I’m not against excellence, but it’s a relative term. It’s also a term used in management. Consultants urge corporations to seek excellence and they don’t really care what’s produced, but rather the focus is on the process.

I suppose I would ask, Your Eminence, what we are trying to make excellent?

Back in the day we had worship that checked all the archbishop’s boxes here, while perhaps needing reviving, revitalizing, a renewal. Instead we got a ruthlessly imposed, committee-style composite, the Novus Ordo, that satisfies no one in its fundamental vulnerability to tinkering. In this context, “excellence” sounds like… more tinkering.

Of course, Traditiones Custodes, Pope Francis’s rejection of the primacy of tradition, stands athwart the archbishop’s hope to offer ad orientem worship and the preference or choice of receiving Holy Communion kneeling.

To me, it is heartening how many young people are drawn to classic Catholic practices that so effectively express transcendent realities. What is classically Catholic works.

Classic? Classically? What is the word… the word that actually comes to mind… begins with a T…

This feels like gaslighting, given Pope Francis’s decisive repudiation of precisely those gestures he specifies.

After all, a decade ago I was arguing for the same thing (Three Liturgical Changes We Need Now), before I fully understood that help is not on the way. But, I am not an archbishop — I have no authority.

The responses I got, and anyone expressing the same thoughts gets, were all too familiar — priests who refuse, point-blank, to communicate the kneeling worshiper, berating and abusing him (or more usually her), refusing to put the Host on the tongue at all; priests exiled for celebrating ad orientem; and of course the whole gamut of liturgical abuses continuing to be heaped on our heads, regardless of our protests, culminating in the outright refusal of our hierarchy to offer Mass at all, in the name of fear. Things are not different now. In many cases they are worse.

What the archbishop is describing seems to be a sort of mutual enrichment. How ironic. The germ of such a process, of course, had begun to be implemented under its actual inventor, Pope Benedict XVI, twenty years ago when he ascended the papal throne.

Though the hierarchy in the main dug in their heels, and only reluctantly in certain cases allowed a few timid attempts (completely ignoring the express statement that priests don’t have to ask permission to use the ancient form), Archbishop Cordileone makes no reference to that roadblock. He certainly doesn’t seem to want to bring up old memories of denials, although I can understand why.

He even repeats some of the tired tropes. “We noticed that more and more people were kneeling for Communion, which created logistical difficulties” — as if kneeling for Holy Communion is disruptive in a church where the sanctuary teems with laypeople, a band plays there, and aggressive ushers herd the faithful towards Extraordinary [sic] Ministers of Holy Communion with or without their consent.

He says,

When the option to kneel to receive is offered, many people naturally do so. It is a helpful example of organic development: provide the opportunity for people to experience a liturgical practice deep within our tradition, without mandating that all comply with it but leaving a legitimate room for diversity where the Church allows it.

My emphasis.

I think this is the phrase that bothers me the most in this article: “a helpful example of organic development.”

The truth is that receiving Holy Communion in the hand is something the faithful did not want. It was imposed in a probably deceitful way (no one really knows) by a degenerate prelate, enabled by an emasculated body of bishops — who, by all accounts, did not want it.

Thus, it was the most inorganic of changes inflicted on a trusting, compliant church. Subsequently, kneeling, much less receiving on the tongue, has become a de facto forbidden act. Pretending that offering the possibility of cushions for the most intransigent among us is an organic development makes a mockery of and compounds the very real mental 88 manipulation endured at the hands of those who proceed according to the opposite of whatever organic development is. I remember as a new Catholic listening to a “conservative” pastor instruct his congregation that we process to receive standing because we are pilgrims on a journey. Even then, with very little context, this seemed to me… not honest.

Certainly, the vast majority of Catholics are forced to comply with the norm of standing to receive in the hand — often by edict, sometimes by the pressure of censure. Yet, we all know that in the Roman Rite, kneeling was normative for more than a thousand years. So how can anyone describe returning to it as an organic development? And why the hasty assurance that it wouldn’t be mandated? Believe me, Your Eminence, no one suspects you of that intention, though when we come to think of it, why not? Why do you imply that the current practice is a legitimate expression of diversity, not to be touched? Why was the one thing, a universal norm, cruelly wrested away, but the other, a notably inorganic innovation, sacrosanct?

In other words, why have we arrived at a point where authority works only in one direction?

Pope Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, has repudiated mutual enrichment. That much is clear and it’s wrong for Archbishop Cordileone to ignore it. Why doesn’t he acknowledge that reality? Is it because he knows he can count on pious, devoted Catholics meekly to submit to more of the “hopes raised/hopes dashed” cycle?

Look, if a bishop wants quietly to encourage a return to traditional worship, recognizing the powers that be are against him and simply doing what he can, I’m for it.

What troubles me is proclaiming these things as if they aren’t already on the faithful Catholic’s wish list and have been for decades, and aren’t opposed by the Pope himself.

What troubles me is acting as if no repentance is due.

The archbishop seems to imply that the faithful are the problem here. In many cases, of course, they are, because those thoroughly indoctrinated in the spirit of Vatican II, like liturgical Stockholm Syndrome sufferers, side with their captors. That is a failure of authority, not of some endemic trait in the non-ordained. However, the rest of us don’t need convincing. In fact, we’ve spent our whole lives begging for these things, to deaf ears.

No, the real problem is a system of authority that has repeatedly opposed anything like restoration and rewards every prelate who encourages liturgical chaos. In a world with Cardinals McElroy and Cupich enshrined, it’s a little rich to act as if all we need to do is put some cushions in the sanctuary (another bright idea, as if we haven’t been begging for the return of the altar rail!). That might work in Cordileone’s cathedral, because, as I always say, the priest gets the Mass he wants. But it doesn’t work for us, the laity, because we get the Mass Fr. Gladhand decides on when he wakes up in the morning.

“Shhhh, Leila! They are trying to present all the ideas as if they are newly conceived, in hopes that they will fly (and that Pope Francis is too ill to do anything about them)! It’s a sort of ploy to get what you want without confrontation!”

Do you think so?

Maybe.

But it’s unjust to pretend that the situation is otherwise than what it is, or that under this regime of preference, some — most — of us won’t be left with mediocrity, not excellence.

Our bishops — yes, the good ones — need to understand two things: First, they have lost trust. Second, with authority comes responsibility. There are some things authority must require and not leave up to consensus or a vague hope of convincing the majority. If a bishop senses a loss of authority, he must take steps to rectify that situation, and it won’t be easy.

And after so long a fight, I have come to realize that what we really need a renaissance of is Tradition.

Thanks for reading along with me! I welcome your comments!

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