Happy Birthday To You, And To Your Spirit

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the coming into effect of Blessed Paul VI’s Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum, which mandated the celebration of the New Rite of Mass from the First Sunday of Advent, 30th November 1969. Although the Vatican is tellingly not marking this anniversary in any way at all, here, by way of a shameless plug, is a passage from my next book:

Although they might have been dramatic at the time, there was nothing remarkable about the Latin Church’s restoration of vernacular liturgy, of Communion in both kinds, of concelebration, or of the Permanent Diaconate in general and that of married men in particular.

Although it is probably too late to do anything about it now, the first would have been better gone about by reference to those Protestants who were in the 1960s maintaining in the vernacular something approaching the classical liturgical life of the Western Tradition.

The same attentiveness would have made possible the second on certain occasions even in what is now called the Extraordinary Form, one of several reforms that the Council really does mandate.

Instead, it was the decision of Catholics to render the Sacred Liturgy into the language of the public house and the betting shop that moved Anglicans and Lutherans to do likewise, not without bitter resistance and significant loss of attendance. 

Eastern Catholics have always had concelebration, with no more concelebrants than can be accommodated in the sanctuary, all in full vestments, and all reciting the Eucharistic Prayer inaudibly along with the principal celebrant; they are rightly horrified at our “mob concelebrations”, our parcelling out of the Eucharistic Prayer, our distracting cacophony as if that Prayer were addressed to the congregation rather than to God, and so forth.

There is nothing new about the celebration of Mass facing the congregation, which was done routinely for educational and other purposes before the Council. But nor is there any denying that, in the intellectual and cultural context of the period, its near-universal adoption has had the effect of turning the congregation in on itself, and of expressing a certain solidarity of the bourgeoisie with itself, easily collapsing into smugness and disengagement. Such trends need to be checked. 

The utterly non-theological non-argument that “the Latin Mass was the same everywhere” would have no force even if had any factual basis, which it does not.

The historically late and even aberrant Low Mass, never designed for congregational use, has been made the model when in fact the normative form, historically and ecclesiologically, is the Solemn Pontifical Mass celebrated, at least on Sundays and other great festivals, by the Bishop in his Cathedral Church. It is to this that all other celebrations, at least on those days, should approximate as closely as possible. 

Children are brought to Mass, and it is vitally important that they be so. But even in a school context, still less anywhere else, it is never about them. That way lies mass lapsation in the secondary school years.

The normative music of the Western Rite is Gregorian Chant and the Sacred Polyphony based on it, to which all other music should likewise approximate as closely as possible. Alongside the Mass settings, the art of good hymnody urgently needs to be revived. We must never forget that the use of secular music is explicitly banned, just as we must never forget that certain modifications of the Immemorial Roman Rite as celebrated in the 1960s are explicitly required by the Council.

Useful though the Jerusalem Bible’s footnotes are, the text itself is frightful. The Revised Standard Version is preferred by all sensible people, and certainly not the New Revised Standard Version with the masculine pronouns taken out to the ruination of the sense; if the Bible is that bad, then why use it at all? 

At least until such time as anyone has the wit to reissue the RSV Edition of the Missal, authorisation of which has never been withdrawn, those reading at Mass (or, of course, on other liturgical occasions) should read out the appointed passage from the superlative Ignatius Bible, which no English-speaking Catholic should be without.

Nothing could better accompany the move to a more accurate translation of the Mass, suitable for properly educated people. Above all, away with the atrocity that is the Happytudes instead of the Beatitudes.