Why did the introduction of the new liturgy not bring about the long-anticipated renewal for which we were all longing? Without the deep personal relationship with Christ that develops and grows in personal prayer, the liturgy can soon become ineffective, not in itself, but in those who are not prepared to receive it.
Many of us have not known or experienced, except perhaps for brief transitory moments, what it is like to belong to a Church founded by Jesus Christ, and to be inspired by and animated with the same love that excited, enlivened and exhilarated our first Catholic forebears. The great spiritual writers of the Church liken the relationship of Christ to his Church as that of a bride, and the Holy Spirit as the love that bonds this marriage together. As we have seen, the Fathers of the Church and many of the great mystical writers in subsequent centuries, use the beautiful love poem from the Old Testament known as the “Song of Songs”, as a spiritual paradigm with which to describe the love of Christ with his Church and our ascent into God.
Just as in any marriage, when love is taken out of a once deep and exhilarating union, everything simply descends into an unholy chaos. What was once a haven of peace and security is destroyed, reaping havoc on the physical and psychological well-being of the children. Transfer what you can picture in your imaginations when secular marriages collapse to what happens to the Church when its spiritual marriage with Christ, and the myriad millions of individual marriages with him within that Church, break down because love has been extracted from them.
If you can do this, you may begin to see for yourself what has happened to our beloved Church, when in the aftermath of Quietism, the mystical theology that teaches people how to love, was taken out of Catholic spirituality. This is not the superficial sort of love that never lasts for long, but the quality of love that led Jesus Christ to live for others throughout his life and then die for them. This is the selfless other-considering, self-sacrificial quality of love we need to learn if we wish to take up our daily cross and follow him. This is the love that can change our lives and the lives of those whom we love irrevocably for the better, and the life of the Church that is languishing without it. If you want to learn how this sort of love can be generated within you, then read on. The last part of this book is for you.
T.S. Elliot said, “I have only one thing to say, and I have spent my whole life trying to say it, in as many different ways as possible.” I can only say “Amen” to that. So, for the last time let me say again what I have spent my whole life trying to say, but this time in a story from my own life. I am in danger of falling into a literary mortal sin, which is self-indulgence, but it is worth the risk for the clarity it may bring to those still not sure of what I keep emphasizing.
In the mid-1950s I was privileged to be present in Rome for the re-introduction of the new Easter Liturgy at the Rosminian Church of St John at the Latin Gate. According to St Jerome, it was there that St John is believed to have survived being thrown into a vat of boiling oil in AD 92 before being exiled to Patmos. The liturgy began with a massive bonfire in the courtyard from which the Paschal candle was lit to symbolise Christ, then our candles were lit from the Paschal Candle to represent Christ’s life that was communicated to us. Thanks to Pope Pius XII this was the first time the ancient Easter liturgy had been celebrated in a parish church, albeit in Latin. The way the vigil was celebrated so inspired me that I decided to major in liturgy and spirituality.
Ten years later, after graduation, I spent several years introducing the new liturgy instigated by the second Vatican Council into local parishes. It was in fact the ancient Catholic liturgy inspired by Christ himself and spread by the first apostles, albeit adapted to suit our contemporary world. Then in 1969 Bishop Casey of Brentwood asked me to become the director of Walsingham House, his retreat and conference centre in Chingford, London. He asked me to put special emphasis on teaching the new liturgy to both clergy and laity alike, that was then seen as the main instrument of renewal in the Church. In order to do this effectively I also arranged for speakers in what was then called the New Biblical Theology, Scripture, and the History of the Early Church.
Halfway through my twelve-year tenure I came to realize that the hoped-for renewal simply had not happened. In fact, by 1975 not hundreds, but thousands of priests and religious men and women left their vocations on both sides of the Atlantic. Droves of laity voted with their feet and churches that were once crammed full were more than half empty. What, oh what, was wrong and what, oh what, was to be done. It was at this point that a friend, Fr Anthony Rickards, a Franciscan priest, asked me to join him for a retreat at a remote Franciscan hermitage in the Rieti Valley in Italy called Fonte Columbo. When I discovered that Fr Angelo, the hermit who was guiding me through the retreat had lectured at the Antonianum, the Franciscan University, in Rome before retiring into solitude, I put my problem to him. Why, I asked, did the introduction of the new liturgy not bring about the long-anticipated renewal for which we were all longing?
The hermit took me into the church and turned on the lights. He then drew my attention to the words of St Bernadine of Siena written in the sanctuary behind the main altar. The words were these: Si Cor non orat, in vanum lingua laborat. “If the heart does not pray then the tongue labours in vain.” It was, for me, something of a revelation. “You may have the best possible liturgy,” he said, “but if your heart has not learned to pray before you even come into the Church to celebrate the liturgy, whether it is the Mass, the divine office or the Easter mysteries, or whatever, then you will not have generated the love that can alone unite you with the love of Christ, who is at the heart and centre of every liturgical celebration.”
He then went on to say something that I have never forgotten: “I firmly believe that the Second Vatican Council was, not only good, but a blessing on the Church, but its influence could have been deeper and more effective if it had only reintroduced with the ‘new liturgy’ the spirituality that once prevailed in the early Church that underpinned and inspired it. I am referring to the God-given spirituality infused by love, that was originally introduced into the Church by Our Lord Jesus Christ himself.
When I say infused by love I do not mean by our love, but by the Spirit of God’s love which is the Holy Spirit. Then in the document that would have introduced it, the faithful should have been taught how to receive this divine love by explaining to them how to generate pure selfless loving in the deep personal prayer that was practised everywhere in the early Church. I mean the sort of daily prayer that characterized the life of Jesus and his apostles, showing how God’s love can suffuse and surcharge human love with divine love. This is not only the quality of love that gave life and vitality to the early liturgy, but which enabled God to set the first Christians afire with a quality of selfless self-sacrificial loving that transformed a pagan Roman world into a loving Christian world in such a short time.
“It is time that we came to see and understand that renewal in the Church does not primarily depend on a perfectly designed liturgy, but on the quality of the personal prayer life of those who participate in it. Let us suppose that I had a magic wand, and I could wave it to give everyone the liturgy of their choice each time they went to Mass. It may be the new liturgy as introduced by the Second Vatican Council, with a perfect translation of the text and with all the rites and rituals perfectly designed to satisfy everyone. On the other hand, it may be the old Tridentine Mass in Latin that so many of us were brought up on, or a grand sung high Mass with music by Perosi, Palestrina or Purcell, or the mediaeval Mass that was so loved by some of the greatest saints that have ever lived, or the ancient Mass known to the Fathers of the Church which was said in Greek long before the introduction of Latin. Or what about Mass according to the Chaldean rite said in Aramaic, the language that Jesus himself would have used at the Last Supper.
“The introduction of any or all of these rites in themselves would do nothing to change us personally and permanently for the better, or the Church to which we belong, unless they are animated and inspired by the same profound daily liturgy of selfless giving and sacrifice as practised by the first Christians in imitation of how Jesus prayed and served the neighbour in need throughout his life on earth.”
Fr Angelo told me that the most unforgettable Mass that he ever attended was in a prison camp during the Second World War. He said that the altar was a wooden bench, the priest had no vestments other than a homemade stole, the wine was begged from a Catholic guard contained in a thimble, and the host was made from a crust of bread. But he said they prepared for that Mass for weeks in personal prayer, sacrifice and suffering, and spent weeks after the celebration trying to assimilate and absorb slowly and ever more deeply what they had received. That Mass changed his life and convinced him that he wanted to become a priest, to do for others what that Mass did for him.
I personally have never met another priest before or since who said Mass with such devotion, as did Fr Angelo, nor have I ever experienced before or since the almost hypnotic pull to share in what he was celebrating. But what he did at the altar was already determined by his prayer before he started to say his Mass. His tongue never laboured in vain when he said Mass or chanted the divine office, because it expressed the prayer that his heart had been praying long before he began to say Mass.
My friend Fr Anthony told me that he had the same experience when he was a Chaplain in the British army, billeted for a time at the friary at San Giovanni Rotundo in Southern Italy when attending the Mass of St Padre Pio. The retreat with Fr Angelo became for me one of the major turning points in my life.
When I returned from my retreat, I gave questionnaires to the priests and religious who came to the Residential Centre and I was horrified to find how very few of them had been taught the importance of personal prayer and how to practise it, thanks to the anti-mystical ethos that still prevailed in the wake of Quietism. Hardly any of them appreciated that without the deep personal relationship with Christ that develops and grows in personal prayer, the liturgy can soon become ineffective, not in itself, but in those who are not prepared to receive it.
This essay is chapter twenty-seven of The Primacy of Loving and is published here by gracious permission of the author.
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The featured image is “Interior of a cathedral at night with a priest celebrating Mass” (1609), by Hendrick van Steenwijk II. This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.