Pope Benedict’s Time-Bomb

By Joseph Pearce

The Spirit of the Liturgy: The Next 25 Years

If there’s one thing worth celebrating this year, it’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger’s great gift to the Church. Published five years before he became pope, Ratzinger’s seminal work of liturgical scholarship might yet prove to be his greatest and most enduring legacy. Its publication heralded the beginning of the restoration of the splendor of the liturgy and stemmed the tide of the liturgical vandalism of the post-conciliar period, which had seen the dumbing-down of the liturgy to the lowest common denominator of crass vulgarity. “It is strange,” Ratzinger observed, “that the post-conciliar pluralism has created uniformity in one respect at least: it will not tolerate a high standard of expression.”¹ One is reminded of Chesterton’s prophecy more than fifty years earlier that the “coming peril” was “standardization by a low standard.”²

The reference to Chesterton is appropriate because there are parallels between Chesterton’s approach to the beauty of orthodoxy and Ratzinger’s.

Dorothy L. Sayers described Chesterton as “a kind of Christian liberator” whose impact was explosive: “Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the Church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in gusts of fresh air.”³ The same could be said of the impact of the beneficent bomb that Ratzinger had planted with the publication of The Spirit of the Liturgy. Its reverberations are still being felt and there’s no doubt that the explosion of interest in liturgical tradition is due, in large part, to its publication. It has blown out of the Church a quantity of liturgical quirkiness which can already be seen to be of a very poor period.

At its worst, the post-conciliar liturgy had become little more than second-rate religious entertainment, dependent on the personality of the priest who had replaced the Lord as the center of attention. But the liturgy was not merely entertainment, Ratzinger insisted, nor was it dependent on “brilliant producers and talented actors.” Its power “does not come from what we do” but from what “is taking place,” something which “all of us together cannot ‘make’”: “In the liturgy there is a power, an energy at work which not even the Church as a whole can generate: what it manifests is the Wholly Other, coming to us through the community (which is hence not sovereign but servant, purely instrumental).”⁴ The anarchic way in which self-styled liturgists had tampered with the rubrics of the Mass had transformed the majesty and mystery of the liturgy into what Ratzinger described as “a do-it-yourself patchwork” which had “trivialized it, adapting it to our mediocrity.”⁵

Part of the problem was a selective and defective understanding of the Council’s teaching that the faithful should have an actuosa participatio, an active participation, in the liturgy. This was taken to mean that the liturgy should be full of physical actions, the shaking of hands, the holding of hands, the raising of hands, a dust storm in a desert. “It was forgotten that the Council also included silence under actuoso participatio, for silence facilitates a really deep, personal participation, allowing us to listen inwardly to the Lord’s word. Many liturgies now lack all trace of this silence.”⁶ They also lacked any trace of beauty, especially in the way in which traditional sacred music, such as Gregorian chant or polyphony, had been abandoned and banished in deference to what Ratzinger termed “utility music” and “catchy tunes,” new ditties to the Deity which rarely ascended above the level of the inane and the banal. Against this faddish ugliness, Ratzinger pointed to “the splendor of holiness and art” as the way that the Church witnessed the truth through goodness and beauty: “If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection?” The Church needed to be “a place where beauty – and hence truth – is at home”. The absence of such beauty, and its eclipse by the shadow of ugliness, would be disastrous. Without such beauty “the world will become the first circle of hell.”⁷

Referring to one of the most famous of the modernist theologians who had confessed himself brazenly to be a “barbarian,” Ratzinger insisted on the inextricable connection between blindness to beauty and blindness to truth. “A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily are reflected in theology.”⁸ One can hardly hear the future pope’s admonishment without Lorenzo’s words in The Merchant of Venice coming to mind:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.⁹

One might add to Lorenzo’s words, within the present context, that no such man should be entrusted with the reform of the liturgy.

A healthy liturgy, Ratzinger wrote, was necessary for a healthy society: “It is only … when man’s relationship with God is right that all of his other relationships – his relationships with his fellowmen, his dealings with the rest of creation – can be in good order.”¹⁰ We might also say that this is true of man’s relationship with himself, as well as his relationship with others. Without a life properly ordered and oriented towards God in worship, man becomes disordered and disoriented in himself, flailing and fumbling his way in the darkness and unfathomable depths of the unknowable ego. If man will not find himself in God, he will lose himself in his self. There is no third course.

Worship, wrote Ratzinger, “the right kind of … relationship with God, is essential for the right kind of human existence in the world.” It allows heavenly light to fall into our world. “It lays hold in advance of a more perfect life and, in so doing, gives our present life its proper measure. A life without such anticipation, a life no longer opened up to heaven, would be empty, a leaden life.”¹¹ In thus allowing heavenly light to alight on our world it simultaneously allows our fallen world to rise with the Resurrected Christ, who is Himself the Temple of worship, the living Body which stands in the presence of God.

Into this body he incorporates men. It is the tabernacle that no human hands have made, the place of true worship of God, which casts out the shadow and replaces it with reality…. The body of Christ is sacrificed and precisely as sacrificed is living. This is the mystery made known in the Mass. Christ communicates himself to us and thus brings us into a real bond with the living God.¹²

This Christocentric understanding of the Mass necessitated both priest and people turning toward the Lord. Reminding us that the Second Vatican Council had said nothing about the priest “turning toward the people,”¹³ Ratzinger insisted that priest and people needed to be oriented toward Christ: “Looking at the priest has no importance. What matters is looking together at the Lord.”¹⁴

Another disturbing feature of the modernist deformation of the Mass is the evident disdain for kneeling, a sure sign of the underlying pride of the “reformers.” Ratzinger insisted that kneeling is “the intrinsically necessary gesture” in the Real Presence of Christ:

The man who learns to believe learns also to kneel, and a faith or a liturgy no longer familiar with kneeling would be sick at the core. Where it has been lost, kneeling must be rediscovered, so that, in our prayer, we remain in fellowship with the apostles and martyrs, indeed in union with Jesus Christ Himself.¹⁵

The impact of Ratzinger’s teaching on the liturgy was revolutionary in the Chestertonian sense of the word. “Revolution, like repentance, is a return,” said Chesterton.The Spirit of the Liturgy was certainly revolutionary in this sense, calling for repentance for the mistakes of modernist “reform” and a return to the timeless truths of tradition.

There are further parallels between Ratzinger and Chesterton with respect to their response to those who consider conformity to the form of the Mass to be “too rigid.” “Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls,” Chesterton wrote, “but they are the walls of a playground.”¹⁶ Nobody suggests that the rules of a game are not necessary to the playing of the game. Unless everyone agrees to play by the rules of football, or baseball, or any other sports, the game can’t be played at all. We might argue that the referee or umpire is being “too rigid” to the form of the game but the lack of such rigidity makes the game itself impossible. Taking another metaphor, nobody suggests that the members of an orchestra are being “too rigid” when they stick to the score of a symphony. As long as they are all disciplined enough to play by the rules of the composer, we hear something sublime, something that edifies the mind and heart; as soon as they become less “rigid,” improvising as the “spirit” takes them, a hideous cacophony replaces the heavenly harmony. What is true of a classical symphony is infinitely and eternally more true of the form of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Those modern liturgists who believe that the only Latin permitted in the Mass should be the use of ad-lib are literally the destroyers of heavenly harmony. They are like the false witness of Scripture “who breathes out lies, and sows discord among brothers” (Proverbs 6:19). Such sowers of discord should not be trusted nor entrusted with the liturgy.

As for one who can be trusted and entrusted with the liturgy, there is none worthier than Benedict XVI. With the publication of The Spirit of the Liturgy twenty-five years ago, he planted a beneficent bomb which is also a time-bomb. It’s ticking as time is ticking. What we need is for a future pope to mandate that it be taught in every seminary in the world and the liturgy will be renewed globally within a generation. It might not be the next pope. It doesn’t really matter. Benedict’s explosive blessing is primed. It’s ready. At any time, it will, like “a beneficent bomb,” blow out of the Church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in gusts of fresh air.

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Joseph Pearce is the author of Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith (TAN Books).

1. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger with Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), p. 125.

2. G. K. Chesterton, Culture and the Coming Peril (London: University of London Press, 1927), p. 17.

3. Dorothy L. Sayers, Preface to Chesterton’s play The Surprise (London: Sheed & Ward, 1952), p. 5.

4. Ratzinger with Messori, The Ratzinger Report, p. 126.

5. Ibid., p. 127.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. 130.

8. Ibid.

9. Act V, Scene 1.

10. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), p. 21.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 43.

13. Ibid., p. 77.

14. Ibid., p. 81.

15. Ibid., p. 194.

16. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), p. 152.