Part II

It is evident that the isolation of Matthew 16:20 from the entire biblical and ecclesiastical tradition of the Church’s common prayer has far-reaching consequences: the Lord’s promise to those praying anywhere is transformed into the dogma of the autonomous group. The joint action of praying has been intensified to an egalitarianism which regards the development of spiritual offices as the beginning of a different Church. From this point of view, any guiding postulates derived from the Church as a whole are restraints which must be resisted for the sake of the originality and freedom of the liturgical celebration. It is not obedience to a totality but rather the creativity of the moment which becomes determinative.

Plainly, with the acceptance of sociological terminology, certain evaluations have also been accepted here: the value system formed by sociological language builds a new view of past and present, negative and positive. And so, conventional (indeed, even conciliar!) terms like the “treasury of sacred music,” the “organ as queen of instruments” or the “universality of Gregorian chant” now appear as “mystifications” whose purpose is “to preserve a particular form of power.” A certain administration of power (so we are told) feels threatened by the processes of cultural change. It (allegedly) reacts by masking its effort at self-preservation in the guise of love for tradition. Gregorian chant and Palestrina are said to be the tutelary deities of a mythicized ancient repertory, ingredients of a Catholic counter-culture supported by re-mythicized and super-sacralized archetypes. In fact, the entire historical liturgy of the Church is claimed to be more concerned with the representation of a cultic bureaucracy than with the singing activity of the congregation. And finally, the content of Pope St. Pius X’s motu proprio on church music is called a “culturally shortsighted and theologically worthless ideology of sacred music.”

Now, of course, it is not only sociologism which is at work here, but also a complete separation of the New Testament from the Church’s history, linked to a theory of decadence which is quite typical of many an Enlightenment situation: real purity can only be found in the “Jesuistic” origins, and all the rest of history seems to be a “musical adventure with false and disoriented experiences.” This history must now “be brought to an end” in order to begin again with what is right.

But just what does the new and better look like? The basic ideas have already been hinted at earlier, and we must now try to render them more concrete. Two fundamental values are stated quite clearly. The “primary value” of a renewed liturgy, so we are told, is “the activity of all persons in fullness and in authenticity.”

Accordingly, church music primarily means that the “People of God” depicts its own identity by singing. And with this, we arrive at the second value decision which is operative here: music proves to be a force which causes the group to cohere. The familiar songs are, so to speak, the hallmarks of a community. From these two principles there follow the main categories of music at worship: project, program, animation, management. The “how,” so we are told, is much more important than the “what.” The ability to celebrate is claimed to be primarily “the ability to produce”: music must above all be “produced” or “made”. In order to be fair, I must add that the article shows complete appreciation for different cultural situations and leaves room for the acceptance of historical materials as well. And above all, the article stresses the paschal character of Christian liturgy, whose song not only depicts the identity of the People of God, but should also render an account of its hope and proclaim to all the countenance of the Father of Jesus Christ.

In spite of the great rupture, there thus remain elements which make dialogue feasible and offer the hope that unity in our basic understanding of the liturgy can once again be achieved. Because the liturgy is derived from the group instead of from the Church, this unity threatens to disappear, and that not merely in theory, but in actual liturgical practice.

I would not speak at such length about all of this if I believed that such ideas were attributable only to a few individual theorists. Although it is beyond all dispute that they are not supported by the texts of Vatican II, many a liturgical office and its organs firmly believes that the “spirit” of the council points in this direction. In the sense of what has been described above, an all too widespread opinion today holds that the real categories of the conciliar understanding of liturgy are a so-called creativity, the activity of all those present, and the reference to a group whose members know and are drawn to each other. Not only assistant pastors, but sometimes even bishops have the feeling that they are not loyal to the council if they celebrate Holy Mass exactly as it is printed in the Missale: at least one “creative” formula must be slipped in, no matter how banal it might be. Of course, the bourgeois greeting of the audience and if possible also the friendly greetings at leave taking have already become an obligatory element of the sacred action which scarcely anyone dare omit.

Part V

I shall forego any further discussion of this question, for we must concentrate upon finding a point of departure and a standard for the correct relationship between liturgy and music. As a matter of fact, even from this point of view far-reaching consequences flow from establishing the fact that the Church is the real subject of the liturgy—the Church as the communio sanctorum of all places and of all times. From this there follows (as Guardini exhaustively showed in his early work Liturgical Formation) not merely the withdrawal of the liturgy from the arbitrariness of the group and of the individual (even though he be cleric or specialist) which Guardini termed the objectivity and the positive nature of the liturgy. Above all, there follow the three ontological dimensions in which the liturgy lives: the cosmos, history and the mysterium. The connection with history includes development, meaning that liturgy is part of something living, something which has a beginning, which continues to exert its influence and which, remains present without being completed, but rather lives only by being further developed. Some elements die off, others are forgotten and return later on in a different way, but development always implies partaking of an open-ended beginning.

And this brings us to a second category which is especially important because it is related to the cosmos: liturgy so conceived exists basically as partaking. No one is the first and only creator of liturgy. For everyone, liturgy is participation in something larger, which goes beyond the mere individual. And in this way each individual is also an agent, active precisely because he is a recipient.

Finally, relationship to the mystery means that the beginning of the liturgical event never lies within ourselves. It is rather response to an initiative from above, to a call and an act of love, which is mystery. There are problems here which need to be explained, but the mystery does not open itself to explanation. It becomes accessible only by being accepted, in the “yes” which even today we can safely call obedience, in a biblical sense.

And this brings us to a point which is very important for the onset of art. Group liturgy is not cosmic, since it lives from the autonomy of the group. Group liturgy has no history, for it is characterized precisely by emancipation from history and by a “do-it-yourself” attitude, even when a group uses moveable scenery borrowed from history. And group liturgy knows nothing of the mystery, for in group liturgy everything is explained and must be explained. That is why development and partaking are just as foreign to group liturgy as is obedience, which perceives a meaning greater than that which can be explained.

Adam:

Why are you a heretic?

Benedict went on to explain that many have continued to long for the older liturgy (which is one reason for making it more widely available, the other being to try to reconcile those who have fallen out of full communion with the Church over it), but he also explained what the real problem was:

Many people who clearly accepted the binding character of the Second Vatican Council, and were faithful to the Pope and the Bishops, nonetheless also desired to recover the form of the sacred liturgy that was dear to them. This occurred above all because in many places celebrations were not faithful to the prescriptions of the new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as authorizing or even requiring creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear. [emphasis added]

Finally, the Pope ended his discussion of the Novus Ordo by stating that the key to its use in unifying the Church is a reverent fidelity to the actual rubrics of the missal itself, and he closed by expressing his fundamental judgment of the value of this normal form of the rite:

The most sure guarantee that the Missal of Paul VI can unite parish communities and be loved by them consists in its being celebrated with great reverence in harmony with the liturgical directives. This will bring out the spiritual richness and the theological depth of this Missal.
My advice to those who seriously dislike the Novus Ordo is this: Admit your personal preference for the Extraordinary Form if you like; true Catholics should not criticize you for it, even if they prefer the Ordinary Form. Combat abuses of the Novus Ordo where you can; the Church will thank you for that. But do not denigrate the rite itself, as if it is something unworthy or profane, and never imply that the billion Catholics who use and have come to love it are somehow inferior in their Faith.

It is possible to debate the merits and demerits of any liturgy, but it is not possible to cite either Pope Benedict XVI or the mind of the Church as being anything less than in favor of the prescribed use of the ordinary form of the Roman Rite. Finally, no approved liturgy of the Church should ever be treated with disrespect, nor its adherents stigmatized if they are not disobedient, for it is a sacred thing.

At the same time, however, within the context of the theological debates which followed the Council, there have developed certain interpretations of Christian morality which are not consistent with "sound teaching" (2 Tim 4:3). Certainly the Church's Magisterium does not intend to impose upon the faithful any particular theological system, still less a philosophical one. Nevertheless, in order to "reverently preserve and faithfully expound" the word of God, the Magisterium has the duty to state that some trends of theological thinking and certain philosophical affirmations are incompatible with revealed truth.

he Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others. The underlying reason for this reluctance is that, even when it engages theology, philosophy must remain faithful to its own principles and methods. Otherwise there would be no guarantee that it would remain oriented to truth and that it was moving towards truth by way of a process governed by reason. A philosophy which did not proceed in the light of reason according to its own principles and methods would serve little purpose. At the deepest level, the autonomy which philosophy enjoys is rooted in the fact that reason is by its nature oriented to truth and is equipped moreover with the means necessary to arrive at truth. A philosophy conscious of this as its “constitutive status” cannot but respect the demands and the data of revealed truth.

Certainly the Church's Magisterium does not intend to impose upon the faithful any particular theological system