DIALOGOS INSTITVTE

Disputation on the 1970 Missal (Part 2) – Dr Robert Fastiggi

The Missal of Paul VI is both valid and licit: a response to Dr John Lamont

In his essay entitled “Is the Mass of Paul VI licit?” Dr John Lamont argues that the Mass of Paul VI – which for the sake of simplicity we can call the Novus Ordo – is valid but illicit. I am happy that Lamont affirms the validity of the Novus Ordo “and the other sacramental rites promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II.” Later in his essay, though, he claims that, because the Novus Ordo is illicit, “[t]he fruits produced by the worship of God have as a result largely been lost to the Church” and “the grace and mercy that God provides in response to such worship are lost.”

Lamont’s position strikes me as theologically incoherent. If the Novus Ordo is valid, then the one sacrifice of Christ is re-presented in an unbloody manner (cf. Council of Trent on the Sacrifice of the Mass, Denzinger-Hünermann [hereafter: DH] 1743). Moreover the bread and wine become the body, blood, soul, and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ (cf. Trent on the Eucharist, DH 1640 and 1651). If those attending the Novus Ordo are properly disposed, they receive the grace and mercy of God. Dr Lamont cannot speak for God and claim that divine grace and mercy are not received by those who worthily receive the body, blood, soul, and divinity of our Lord at the Novus Ordo Mass.

Dr Lamont cites the argument of Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize SSPX that the law of the Church has the object of the common good of the Church. Because the Novus Ordo is destructive of the common good – in the opinion of Fr. Gleize – “it is not only bad but illegitimate (“elle est non seulement mauvaise mais illégitime.”) This argument, though, depends on the unproven premise that that Novus Ordo is destructive of the common good. But even if this premise were true, it doesn’t prove that the Novus Ordo is illegitimate. A law might not achieve its intended purpose, but that does not mean it is not a law (i.e. legitimate). The 1704 decision of Clement XI to ban the Chinese Rites – reinforced in 1715 – had the intention of purifying and strengthening Catholic missionary efforts in China. Many historians, though, believe the ban on the civic veneration of Confucius and other ancestors actually hurt missionary efforts in China.[1] The law might not have contributed to the common good of missionary efforts in China, but it was still the law (i.e. legitimate).

Dr Lamont discusses the extent of papal authority over the liturgy, and he cites principles articulated by Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium that he says are not in dispute. He then argues that “only those portions of the liturgy that can be shown beyond a reasonable doubt to be of human origin can be changed by any authority in the Church.”  He then manifests his intention to show that “the Novus Ordo did in fact remove aspects of the liturgy that are of divine origin and that it is illicit for that reason.”

 In laying out this principle, it’s not clear what specific law of the Church Lamont has in mind. The Council of Trent, in its “Doctrine and Canons on Communion under both Species and by Children,” declared that “in the administration of the sacraments – provided their substance is preserved – there has always been in the Church that power to determine or modify what she judged more expedient for the benefit of those receiving the sacraments or for the reverence due to the sacraments themselves – according to the diversity of circumstances, times and places” (DH 1728).

According to the Council of Trent, the Church must preserve the substance of the sacraments (salva illorum substantia). As long as the substance of the sacraments is preserved, the Church possesses that power (hanc postestatem) to make modifications in the administration or disposition of the sacraments (in sacramentorum dispensatione). Dr Lamont does not cite this teaching of Trent. Instead, he argues that the changes made to the Mass in the Novus Ordo – as well as the Roman Breviary, the Pontificale Romanum, the Rituale Romanum, and the Caeremoniale Episcoporum – are so great that they are illicit.

Dr Lamont does cite, as noted above, various principles articulated by Sacrosanctum Concilium of Vatican II, and he also cites Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s preface to Alcuin Reid’s book, The Organic Development of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005). What Cardinal Ratzinger says in his preface about the pope not being an absolute monarch with respect to the liturgy is true. The pope, following the teaching of Trent, cannot change the substance of the sacraments. The question, though, is whether the changes made in the Novus Ordo affect the substance of the sacrament. Because Lamont himself accepts the validity of the Novus Ordo, then the substance of the Sacrament of the Eucharist has been preserved and no law of the Church has been violated. Therefore, the Novus Ordo is legitimate. Moreover, Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI never questioned the validity and the liceity of the Novus Ordo. In his apostolic exhortation of February 22nd 2007, Sacramentum Caritatis, he writes:

If we consider the bimillenary history of God’s Church, guided by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, we can gratefully admire the orderly development of the ritual forms in which we commemorate the event of our salvation. From the varied forms of the early centuries, still resplendent in the rites of the Ancient Churches of the East, up to the spread of the Roman rite; from the clear indications of the Council of Trent and the Missal of Saint Pius V to the liturgical renewal called for by the Second Vatican Council: in every age of the Church’s history the eucharistic celebration, as the source and summit of her life and mission, shines forth in the liturgical rite in all its richness and variety. The Eleventh Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, held from 2-23 October 2005 in the Vatican, gratefully acknowledged the guidance of the Holy Spirit in this rich history. In a particular way, the Synod Fathers acknowledged and reaffirmed the beneficial influence on the Church’s life of the liturgical renewal which began with the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. The Synod of Bishops was able to evaluate the reception of the renewal in the years following the Council. There were many expressions of appreciation. The difficulties and even the occasional abuses which were noted, it was affirmed, cannot overshadow the benefits and the validity of the liturgical renewal, whose riches are yet to be fully explored. Concretely, the changes which the Council called for need to be understood within the overall unity of the historical development of the rite itself, without the introduction of artificial discontinuities. (no. 3; emphasis added).

Cardinal Ratzinger’s preface to Dom Alcuin Reid’s book was written as a private theologian, As pope, though, Benedict XVI not only saw the liturgical renewal called for by Vatican II in continuity “within the overall unity … of the rite itself,” but he also affirmed the “dignity and harmony” of the liturgical books of Paul VI and John Paul II with the “liturgical edifice” of the Latin Church. This is clear from his apostolic letter, Summorum Pontificum of July 7th 2007 in which he says:

In more recent times, the Second Vatican Council expressed the desire that the respect and reverence due to divine worship should be renewed and adapted to the needs of our time. In response to this desire, our predecessor Pope Paul VI in 1970 approved for the Latin Church revised and partly renewed liturgical books; translated into various languages throughout the world, these were willingly received by the bishops as well as by priests and the lay faithful.  Pope John Paul II approved the third typical edition of the Roman Missal. In this way the Popes sought to ensure that “this liturgical edifice, so to speak … reappears in new splendour in its dignity and harmony.”

In article 1 of Summorum Pontificum, Benedict XVI leaves no room for doubt that the Missal of Paul VI is a valid and licit expression of the Roman Rite:

Art 1.  The Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI is the ordinary expression of the lex orandi (rule of prayer) of the Catholic Church of the Latin rite.  The Roman Missal promulgated by Saint Pius V and revised by Blessed John XXIII is nonetheless to be considered an extraordinary expression of the same lex orandi of the Church and duly honoured for its venerable and ancient usage. These two expressions of the Church’s lex orandi will in no way lead to a division in the Church’s lex credendi (rule of faith); for they are two usages of the one Roman rite (emphasis added).

Dr Lamont ultimately concludes that “the Novus Ordo is not a form of the Roman Rite.” This conclusion, though, is directly contradicted by the words of Benedict XVI who states that the Missal of John XXIII – the traditional Latin rite -and the Missal of Paul VI – the Novus Ordo – “are two usages of the one Roman rite.”

There are some other points of Dr Lamont’s essay that deserve consideration. He notes that Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium “clearly rejected the idea of replacing the Roman Rite (in paras. 38 and 50).” Benedict XVI, though, sees the older Latin Missal and the Novus Ordo “as two usages of the one Roman rite.” Therefore, the Roman Rite was not replaced but revised.

Lamont believes that the intent of Sacrosanctum Concilium is obscured by the translation of “instauare” as “reform” rather than “restore.” He is correct that instauare can mean “restore.”  The 1907 edition of the Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary, however, gives the following translations of instauro: “to renew, repeat, to celebrate anew, to repair, to restore, to erect, to make.”[2] In Summorum Pontificum, Benedict XVI writes:

In the course of the centuries, many other Roman Pontiffs took particular care that the sacred liturgy should accomplish this task more effectively. Outstanding among them was Saint Pius V, who in response to the desire expressed by the Council of Trent, renewed (innovavit) with great pastoral zeal the Church’s entire worship, saw to the publication of liturgical books corrected and “restored in accordance with the norm of the Fathers” (ad normam Patrum instauratorum) and provided them for the use of the Latin Church.

Benedict XVI here notes that Saint Pius V renewed (innovavit) the liturgical books in accordance with the norm of the Fathers of restoration (ad normam Patrum instauratorum).  Renewal, therefore, must not be seen in opposition to the norm of restoration (ad normam … instauratorum). Renewal can also be understood as a type of reform. In his Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin, Leo F. Stelton defines “reformare” as “renew, reform, remake.”[3]

Lamont’s point, though, seems to be that the “reform” of the Roman Rite in the Novus Ordo was illegal because it changes aspects of the Roman Rite that are of divine origin. As a result it undermines the main purpose of the liturgy which is sanctification. He then lays out a central core of his argument: “If the Roman Rite itself is of divine origin, it is clear that not only does the pope not have the legal power to abolish it, he also does not have the legal power to permit the use of a ritual of human origin in its place.”

The basic principle that Lamont articulates seems sound. The liturgy is “an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 7). Therefore, the divine character of the liturgy cannot be obscured by replacing it with a ritual of purely human origin. The question, though, is whether the Novus Ordo is a rite of purely human origin. Lamont further argues that “in objective terms, there is not really any case to be made for the Novus Ordo being a form of the Roman Rite.”

I don’t believe Lamont provides a strong case for the Novus Ordo being of purely human origin. He provides standard arguments of Catholic traditionalists that the changes made in the Novus Ordo were too radical. He admits that Roman Canon was retained, but the introduction of new Eucharistic prayers made it “a (seldom used) option rather than the centre of the Roman Rite.” But if the Roman Canon is retained in the Novus Ordo – and Lamont certainly believes the Roman Canon contains elements of divine origin – then it’s impossible to claim that the Novus Ordo is entirely of human origin. Lamont also does not demonstrate that the other Eucharistic prayers of the Novus Ordo are devoid of divine elements. All of them contain the words of consecration that are derived from sacred Scripture. There is also the Agnus Dei, which comes from John 1:29. It would not be difficult to go through all of the Eucharistic prayers of the Novus Ordo and indicate words and expressions rooted in sacred Scripture, which is of divine origin.

The other argument of Lamont is that the Novus Ordo departs from the Roman Rite so radically than it is no longer the Roman Rite, and, therefore, it was illegally introduced. If you’re going to argue that the Novus Ordo is illicit, you need to cite a clear law of the Church that has been violated.  This Lamont does not do. Instead, he articulates laws of his own making to determine what constitutes the essential elements of the Roman Rite. He also does not deal adequately with the question of who has the authority to decide whether even his own criteria have been adequately followed.

Dr Lamont notes that the pope is bound by the natural law. This is true, but St. Thomas Aquinas describes the natural law as the “participation of the eternal law in the rational creature” (participatio legis aeternae in rationali creatura) whereby the rational creature “has a natural inclination to its proper act and end (naturalem inclinationem ad debitum actum, et finem) [Summa theologiae I-II, 91, 2].  The question, of course, is who decides whether decisions of the pope violate the natural law. Dr Lamont only mentions that papal power is limited by the natural law, and he does not pursue this line of argument with regard to the liturgy. This is wise on his part because it’s not clear how the papal approval of the Novus Ordo violates the natural law, which is the law of right reason (ratio recta).[4] Lamont’s argument instead is based on the assumption that “only the divinely instituted aspects of the liturgy are beyond the scope of papal authority.”

Dr Lamont states that the Roman Rite “essentially reached its mature form under St. Gregory the Great,” who was pope from 590 to 604. He goes on to offer some observations about the development of the different rites within the Catholic Church. He notes that these rites – descended from the great apostolic sees of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch – have the apostolic tradition as their foundation. He then points out that these rites are of divine origin because “the Holy Spirit was active in the Church during the post-apostolic centuries to produce results that were divinely established and immutable.” Dr Lamont then notes that the divine origin of the liturgy was a view that was “universally held by the Fathers of the Church.” He then cites Pope St. Clement I’s First Letter to the Corinthians who states that Christ “commanded us to celebrate sacrifices and services … at fixed times and hours.” Lamont sees in Clement’s letter evidence that “the general structure and basic features of the liturgy are not human constructions, but are the work of divine authority.”

Certainly, Clement I is correct that Christ commanded us to celebrate sacrifices and services and that these “offerings and acts of worship” are not to be done “in an empty and disorderly manner, but at set times and hours.”[5] Clement I does not, however, specify how the liturgy was celebrated towards the end of the first century (ca. 96 AD) when his letter was written. It’s not clear how this passage from Clement I argues against the liceity of the Novus Ordo. Certainly the form of the liturgy during the time of Clement I was grounded in apostolic tradition, and the Holy Spirit was certainly active in the Church during this time. This, though, does not lead to the conclusion that the Novus Ordo is illicit and that its main elements are not of divine origin. Was the Holy Spirit active during the time of Pope Clement I but not during the time of Pope Paul VI?

Dr Lamont further argues that the goal of the liturgy is not aimed at a merely natural good but a supernatural purpose. This is certainly true, but how does this lead to the conclusion that the Novus Ordo is illicit? Such a conclusion seems to be a clear case of petitio principii or begging the question. Dr Lamont would need to prove that the Novus Ordo does not have a supernatural purpose. If, though, the Novus Ordo is valid – as he himself admits – then it is a valid re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice, which certainly has a supernatural purpose.

Lamont then goes on to claim that “the pope does not have the legal authority to establish an alternate form of worship that is of purely human origin.” He then states: “If the Novus Ordo is not a form of the Roman Rite, it follows that the pope does not have the authority to permit it as a form of Catholic worship, and hence it is not licit, regardless of the fact that it was promulgated using the correct legal forms.” This seems to be the core of his argument.

A major weakness to this argument is the fact that the Novus Ordo retains the Roman Canon, which Lamont certainly accepts as an expression of the Roman Rite. If the Roman Canon is a form of the Roman Rite, then Lamont’s argument that the Novus Ordo “is not a form of the Roman Rite” cannot be sustained because it contains the historical Roman Canon. The question, then, is whether the inclusion of additional Eucharistic prayers within the Roman Canon renders it illicit. As support for his position, Lamont claims that “the new prayers and the changes to the old prayers that survived were motivated by a radically different theologically outlook that was designed to be acceptable to Protestants and to the modern world,” and for support he cites a statement of John F. Baldovin, S.J. that “the reformed liturgy does represent a radical shift in Catholic theology and piety.”

Lamont’s claim about “the radically different theological outlook” of the Novus Ordo and Baldovin’s claim about the “radical shift in Catholic theology and piety” are opinions of two theologians. These opinions are open to challenge, and they have no probative force to demonstrate that the Novus Ordo is illicit. What makes the Novus Ordo licit is the fact that it was licitly approved by the Roman Pontiff.

As mentioned above, to claim an action is illicit you must cite a law that has been violated. Lamont does not cite any Church law that has been violated by the Novus Ordo. Instead, he provides his own laws. He complains about how many orations of the prior Roman Rite were removed by the Novus Ordo. But where is there a Church law that says you cannot remove and replace these orations? He complains about the introduction of new Eucharistic prayers that can be used as options along with the Roman Canon. Where, though, is there a Church law that forbids the introduction of new Eucharistic prayers to the Roman Missal?

When we look at actual Church laws regarding the authority of the Roman Pontiff over the liturgy, then the weakness of Lamont’s arguments becomes clear. Canon 1257 of the 1917 Code reads: “It belongs to the Apostolic See alone to order the sacred liturgy and to approve liturgical books” (Unius Apostolicae Sedis est tum sacrum ordinare liturgiam, tum approbare libros). Canon 838 §1 of the 1983 Code states:  “The ordering and guidance of the sacred liturgy depends solely upon the authority of the Church, namely, that of the Apostolic See and, as provided by law, that of the diocesan Bishop.”

The ecumenical council Vatican I teaches that the authority of the Roman Pontiff extends not only over faith and morals but also to matters pertaining to the discipline and government of the Church:

And so, if anyone says that the Roman Pontiff has only the office of inspection and direction, but not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, not only in matters that pertain to faith and morals, but also in matters that pertain to the discipline and government of the Church throughout the whole world (ad disciplinam et regimen Ecclesiae per totum orbem diffusae pertinent); or if anyone says that he has only a more important part and not the complete fullness of this supreme power; or if anyone says that this power is not ordinary and immediate either over each and every Church or over each and every shepherd and member of the faithful, anathema sit (Vatican I, Pastor aeternus, chapter III; DH 3064).

The approval of a Roman Missal certainly pertains to the discipline and government of the Church.  The claim that the Roman Pontiff lacks such disciplinary authority over the liturgy falls under the anathema of an ecumenical council.

            Vatican II reaffirms the full, ordinary authority of the Roman Pontiff over the whole Church in Lumen Gentium, 22:

In virtue of his office, that is as Vicar of Christ and pastor of the whole Church the Roman Pontiff has full, supreme and universal power over the Church. And he is always free to exercise this power” (Romanus enim Pontifiex habet in Ecclesiam, vi muneris sui, Vicarii scilicet Christi et totius Ecclesiae Pastoris, plenam, supremam et universalem potestatem, quam semper libere exercere valet.)

Pope Pius XII affirms the authority of the Roman Pontiff over liturgical matters in explicit terms in his 1947 encyclical, Mediator Dei, no. 58:

It follows from this that the Supreme Pontiff alone enjoys the right to recognize and establish any practice touching the worship of God, to introduce and approve new rites, as also to modify those he judges to require modification.

As can be seen, Pius XII specifically affirms the authority of the Roman Pontiff to introduce and approve new rites and also to modify those he judges in need of modification. We’ve already seen that Benedict XVI does not regard the Missal of Paul VI as a new rite but a form of the one Roman Rite. The introduction of new Eucharistic prayers into the Novus Ordo Missal, therefore, must be seen as a modification of the Roman Rite. The Roman Pontiff has the authority to make such modifications in spite of what Lamont claims.

Dr Lamont, however, might respond that the pope does not have the authority to make modifications that are so radical that they introduce a radical shift in Catholic theology. According to Lamont, “references to sacrifice, sin, guilt, penance, punishment, hell, the necessity of grace, and divine anger have been almost entirely removed from the Novus Ordo, and the subordination of this world to the next is no longer emphasised or clearly presented in it.”

Lamont’s accusations against the Novus Ordo are not accurate.  With regard to sin and penance, the Novus Ordo has several penitential rites. With regard to sacrifice, it’s clear that the sacrificial character of the Mass is expressed in each of the four main Eucharistic prayers. Eucharistic Prayer I (the Roman Canon) speaks of “this pure victim, this holy victim, this spotless victim.” Eucharistic Prayer II refers to “the memorial of his Death and Resurrection.” Since Christ’s death was sacrificial, the “memorial” makes present Christ’s sacrifice. Eucharistic Prayer III uses very strong sacrificial language, asking God, the Father, to recognize “the sacrificial Victim by whose death you willed to reconcile us to yourself” (hostiam cujus voluisti immolatione placari). Finally, Eucharistic Prayer IV makes this petition: “Look, O Lord, upon the Sacrifice which you yourself have provided for your Church.”

It is not difficult to show how the other accusations of Lamont are refuted by the actual texts of the Novus Ordo. In Eucharistic Prayer I of the Novus Ordo there is an appeal “that we be delivered from eternal damnation.” In Eucharistic Prayer II, there is a plea to God “to have mercy on us all” so “we may merit to be coheirs to eternal life.” In Eucharistic Prayer III, the merciful Father is asked to give to the deceased “kind admittance” to the Kingdom where “we hope to enjoy forever the fullness of your glory.” Likewise, Eucharistic Prayer IV appeals to the “merciful Father” that we may “enter into a heavenly inheritance” where “freed from the corruption of sin and death” we may “glorify you through Christ our Lord.” It is simply false to claim that the Novus Ordo does not clearly present the subordination of this world to the next” or that it lacks a sense of sin and sacrifice. Why are there so many appeals to the “merciful Father” if there is no sense of sin?

In the final part of his essay, Dr Lamont lapses into rhetorical excess, claiming that the Novus Ordo is a “human fabrication” that does “damage to souls”. He calls the Novus Ordo “an illicit form of worship” that is “unfit to be used to celebrate the Eucharist”. Dr Lamont is entitled to his opinion, but we have shown that many of his claims are based on false accusations and questionable assertions.  The issue, though, is not whether Dr John Lamont likes the Novus Ordo but whether or not it is a licit expression of the Roman Rite.  The Novus Ordo Missal was approved by St Paul VI and revised at the direction of St John Paul II. It has been accepted as valid and licit by Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. Who has the lawful authority to approve a Missal for the Roman Rite? It is the Roman Pontiff not Dr Lamont. The Novus Ordo includes the Roman Canon, which Lamont himself sees as of apostolic and divine origin. There is no law that says the pope cannot authorize new Eucharistic prayers. In spite of what Dr Lamont claims, these new Eucharistic prayers have been licitly approved by the Roman Pontiff and they express the same faith and the same sacrifice of Christ as the various forms of the Roman Rite going back to apostolic times.

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Robert Fastiggi (A.B. Dartmouth; M.A. Ph.D. Fordham) holds the Bishop M. Kevin Britt Chair of Dogmatic Theology and Christology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit, MI where he has taught since 1999. He previously taught at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX (1985–1999). He was the co-editor of the English translation of the 43rd edition of Denzinger-Hünermann, Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals (Ignatius Press, 2012) and the executive editor of the 2009–2013 supplements to the New Catholic Encyclopedia. He also revised and updated the English translation of Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma for Baronius Press (2018). He is a council member of the Mariological Society of America and a corresponding member of PAMI (Pontificia Academia Mariana Internationalis)

[1] See Paul A. Rule, “The Chinese Rites Controversy: A Long-Lasting Controversy in Sino-Western Cultural History” Pacific Rim Report Number 32 (February, 2004): 2–8.

[2] Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A New Latin Dictionary (New York: American Book Company, 1907), 968.

[3] Leo F. Stelton, Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995), 226.

[4] See the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997) no. 1956.

[5] This is how the English translation of the passage reads in the 2012 Ignatius Press edition of Denzinger-Hünermann, no. 101.


Disputation on the 1970 Missal (Part 1) – Dr John Lamont

Is the Mass of Paul VI licit?

This paper will address an important but somewhat neglected question; that of the liceity of the new order of the Mass promulgated by Paul VI in 1969 to replace the former Roman Missal, and commonly referred to as the Novus Ordo. This is of course a different question from that of the validity of the Novus Ordo. There is no doubt about the possibility of validly confecting the sacraments using the Novus Ordo and the other revised sacramental rites promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II, and the validity of sacraments properly celebrated with these rites will be taken as a given. But of course it is not the case that a valid ritual must be a licit ritual; and it is the question of liceity that will be considered here. The term ‘licit’ will be understood as meaning ‘legally established and legally permitted’. There is no doubt that the Novus Ordo was established using the proper legal forms, in the apostolic constitution ‘Missale Romanum’ of 1969 promulgated in due order by Paul VI. The question is whether or not the act of establishing the Novus Ordo using this form was an act that fell within the legal powers of the Pope, and hence of whether or not the legal form that established the Novus Ordo actually had its intended effect of making the Novus Ordo licit.

Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize SSPX has argued that it did not, on the grounds that the law of the Church has the object of upholding the common good of the Church, and that the theological flaws of the Novus Ordo make it intrinsically destructive to that common good.[1] I want to look at a different reason for denying the liceity of the Novus Ordo. This reason will emerge from a consideration of these two questions:

1. Does the Pope have the authority to establish a ritual that is not a form of the Roman Rite or of any other traditional rite of the Church?

2. Is the Novus Ordo of Paul VI a form of the Roman Rite?

It will be argued that the answer to both these questions is ‘no’, and hence that the Novus Ordo is not licit. The undoubted fact that the Novus Ordo is not a form of some traditional rite of the Church that is not the Roman Rite will be assumed; if it is a form of a traditional rite, it can only be a form of the Roman Rite, and that is what it is claimed by its defenders to be. The Roman Rite is of course not identical with the Latin Rite, but a particular form of it. The arguments for the non-identity of the Novus Ordo with the Roman Rite given below work equally well as arguments for the non-identity of the Novus Ordo with any form of the Latin Rite, so for purposes of ease of exposition we will only discuss the question of the non-identity of the Novus Ordo with the Roman Rite.

It will be helpful to clarify the difference between this argument and that of Fr. Gleize. He argues that the Novus Ordo is illicit because its theological purpose and content is objectionable. While not disagreeing with the truth of his premises or the validity of his inferences, I do not make use of these premises; instead, I argue for the illicitness of the Novus Ordo purely from its non-identity with the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.

The question of the liceity of the Novus Ordo should be put in the context of the liceity of the liturgical changes of Paul VI and John Paul II as a whole. These changes extended to the entire Roman Rite, which is not limited to the Roman Missal, but also includes the Pontificale Romanum, the Rituale Romanum, the Caeremoniale Episcoporum – all of which contain various rites and blessings – the Roman Martyrology, the Roman Breviary, and the Graduale Romanum (which contains the music for the rite). The Roman Missal has a certain centrality in the Roman Rite, as being the component that is devoted to the highest liturgical action. If the Novus Ordo is in fact a form of the Roman Missal, it could be claimed that the Roman Rite as a whole has survived the changes of Paul VI and John Paul II, despite any changes to the other elements of the Rite; whereas if it is not a form of the Roman Missal, it cannot be maintained that the Roman Rite as a whole has survived these changes, even if the other elements of the Rite preserved their identity through the changes. The conclusion of this paper will thus mean that the promulgation of the Novus Ordo was an attempt to do away with the Roman Rite, as well as being illicit.

The question of the liceity of the other rituals promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II deserves separate examination even after the illicitness of the Novus Ordo has been determined, since such an examination will determine whether or not it is licit to use those rituals. There is no space for such an examination here, but I will remark that the differences between the Roman Breviary, the Pontificale Romanum, the Rituale Romanum, and the Caeremoniale Episcoporum on the one hand, and the revised books that replaced them on the other hand, are on the whole as great as – or greater than – the differences between the Roman Missal and the Novus Ordo.[2] I do not know that the extent of these differences has ever been seriously disputed, or that the intention of abandoning the old liturgical forms and replacing them with new ones was ever really disguised in the case of these books; whereas the greater sensitivity of the issue of changes to the ritual of the Mass meant that this intention has sometimes been denied in the case of the Novus Ordo. This feature of the changes to the other elements of the Roman Rite casts light on the intentions behind the Novus Ordo itself.


The extent of papal authority over the liturgy

We can start our consideration of this question by setting forth some basic principles. The fundamental one is expressed in Sacrosanctum Concilium, the document on the liturgy produced by the Second Vatican Council:

In order that the Christian people may more certainly derive an abundance of graces from the sacred liturgy, holy Mother Church desires to undertake with great care a general restoration of the liturgy itself. For the liturgy is made up of immutable elements divinely instituted, and of elements subject to change. These not only may but ought to be changed with the passage of time if they have suffered from the intrusion of anything out of harmony with the inner nature of the liturgy or have become unsuited to it.

The fact that the liturgy contains divinely instituted elements explains the limitations of papal power over it that are described in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The Church’s faith precedes the faith of the believer who is invited to adhere to it. When the Church celebrates the sacraments, she confesses the faith received from the apostles – whence the ancient saying: lex orandi, lex credendi (or: legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi, according to Prosper of Aquitaine [5th cent.]). The law of prayer is the law of faith: the Church believes as she prays. Liturgy is a constitutive element of the holy and living Tradition.

For this reason no sacramental rite may be modified or manipulated at the will of the minister or the community. Even the supreme authority in the Church may not change the liturgy arbitrarily, but only in the obedience of faith and with religious respect for the mystery of the liturgy.

The catechism does not as such have any teaching authority, but these statements are accurate expressions of the authoritative teaching of Catholic tradition. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger describes Catholic tradition on the liturgy as follows:

The pope is not an absolute monarch whose will is law; rather, he is the guardian of the authentic Tradition and, thereby, the premier guarantor of obedience. He cannot do as he likes, and he is thereby able to oppose those people who, for their part, want to do whatever comes into their head. His rule is not that of arbitrary power, but that of obedience in faith. That is why, with respect to the Liturgy, he has the task of a gardener, not that of a technician who builds new machines and throws the old ones on the junk-pile [Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, preface to Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), p. 10.]

These principles are not in dispute among those who accept Catholic teaching, and they are not the object of our inquiry. What we seek to determine is a specific aspect of the nature of the distinction between the divine and the human in the liturgy.

There is no known general principle for determining the difference between the divine and the human in the liturgy. This in itself furnishes an argument for rejecting any major liturgical change: since we do not have a general rule for judging whether a section of the liturgy is of divine origin or not, the presumption must be against changing any part of the liturgy. Only those portions of the liturgy that can be shown beyond a reasonable doubt to be of human origin can be changed by any authority in the Church. This argument is the reason why only modest changes to the liturgy were undertaken before Paul VI.

This argument could be extended as follows. We could say that when it is not known whether or not a part of the liturgy is of divine origin, it is wrong and illicit for the Church to alter or remove that part of the liturgy. Since the alterations to the liturgy made by the Novus Ordo were so substantial that they included changing or removing parts of the liturgy that are not known to be of human rather than divine origin, these alterations are wrong and illicit, and the Novus Ordo itself is illicit.

This argument is sound. However, it is not the argument that will be advanced here. Instead, a stronger argument will be advanced. It will be argued that we can know that the Novus Ordo did in fact remove aspects of the liturgy that are of divine origin, and that it is illicit for that reason.

The basis for this stronger argument is the fact that despite the lack of any general principle for precisely identifying the divine and human elements in the liturgy, it is possible to arrive at an answer to a narrower question about the divine element in the liturgy. This is the question of whether the divine elements in the liturgy are merely components of the Roman Rite (and of the other traditional rites of the Church), or whether the rites themselves are of divine institution. We can attempt to settle the question of whether or not the Roman rite itself is of divine institution, because although we have no general test that can determine whether every component of the liturgy is of human or divine origin, it is nonetheless sometimes possible to identify the divine origin of particular aspects of the liturgy. If the pope were to attempt to abolish the liturgical celebration of Easter, for example, it is clear that he would not have the legal power to do so; this celebration is undoubtedly a component of the liturgy that is of divine origin.

If the divine elements of the liturgy are merely components of the Roman Rite, we will assume that the replacement of that rite by a different ritual is within the legal power of the pope, provided that the divinely established elements of the Roman rite are preserved in the new ritual. If on the other hand the rite itself is of divine origin, the pope does not have the legal power to replace it with something else. It will be argued that the Roman Rite itself, not just some of its components, is of divine origin; that the Novus Ordo is not the Roman Rite; and hence that the Novus Ordo is illicit.

It would be possible to contest this assumption, and to deny that the pope has the legal power to change any and all human elements of the liturgy or of Catholic tradition generally. The basis for this contestation would be the claim that even human elements of Catholic liturgy and tradition can become permanent components of the well-being – the bene esse – of the Church, and that the pope’s authority is given to him to uphold this bene esse, and to preserve rather than to replace the human as well as the divine patrimony of the Church. This claim has been admitted by theologians. Fr. J. Steiger asserts that ‘the power of the pope is not unlimited; not only is he unable to change anything of divine origin, as, for example, by suppressing episcopal jurisdiction, but, placed as he is to build up and not to destroy, he is bound by the natural law to not throw confusion into the flock of Christ.’[3] Since the natural law is ultimately of divine origin, the natural law must also limit papal authority that is established by divine positive law. But this line of argument will not be pursued here; it will be assumed that only the divinely instituted aspects of the liturgy are beyond the scope of papal authority. Making this assumption produces a stronger argument against the liceity of the Novus Ordo, since fewer premises have to be advanced and proven to establish the soundness of the argument.


The divine origin of the Roman Rite

It is desirable to address at the outset of our discussion the most significant arguments against the divine origin of the traditional liturgies of the Church. We may not reject the position that the traditional rites themselves are of divine origin on the grounds that all the rites contain changeable elements that are admitted to be of human origin. These elements can be accounted for by saying that God designed into the rites a certain number of options or areas for enlargement that could be provided for and altered by human initiative. This idea of the rites containing options for variation and addition in conjunction with an invariable core that has been received and that cannot be altered is the one that has always been held within the Church.

Nor can we claim that the right to replace the Roman Rite is claimed by an ecumenical council in Sacrosanctum Concilium, the constitution on the liturgy of the Second Vatican Council, and hence that this rite cannot be said to be of divine origin itself. For one thing, even an ecumenical council does not have the power to alter divine tradition. For another, the council clearly rejected the idea of replacing the Roman Rite. The constitution on the liturgy twice states that any liturgical changes must preserve the substance of the Roman Rite (in paras. 38 and 50). The intent of this document is obscured by the English translation that is found on the Vatican website. This translation refers in many places to the ‘reform’ of the liturgy. However, the Latin original nowhere refers to ‘reform’; the Latin word that is given in English as ‘reform’ is ‘instaurare’, which means not ‘to reform’ but ‘to restore’ – a fact that is recognised in some places in the English translation, where ‘instaurare’ is correctly translated by ‘restore’. Obviously a conciliar directive to restore the Roman rite cannot justify the replacement of this rite by something else.

Nor can the existence of changes in the Roman Rite over time be used as an argument for the rite being of human origin. This argument would only work against the claim that every component of the Roman Rite is of divine origin, a claim which no-one has ever made. The claim that the rite as a whole, and some but not all of its elements, are of divine origin, is obviously compatible with the fact of some change in the rite over time. The changes in the Roman Rite that have occurred in the past would have had to have been so drastic as to have ruled out the preservation of the substance of the rite, in order to serve as an argument for the human origins of the rite. Liturgical historians all agree that no such changes occurred prior to the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, and a simple inspection of the texts shows that this is so.

Nor can we argue that the legitimacy of organic development in the liturgy permits the replacement of the Roman Rite by a new development. The term ‘organic development’ suffers from an ambiguity that is not usually clarified in discussions of the organic development of the liturgy. It can refer to the development of a single organism from youth to maturity, or it can refer to the development of one kind of organism from another, of the kind postulated by evolutionary theory. The latter kind of development permits a fundamental change in kind from one sort of organism to another, but the former does not. It is only the former change that is permitted by Catholic tradition on the liturgy, as the above discussion makes clear. The latter form of development permits radical transformation, a form of transformation which excludes the possibility of divinely established and immutable elements.

The idea of the development of a single organism from youth to maturity – the idea applied by St. Vincent of Lérins to the development of doctrine – is indeed a useful analogy for the development of Catholic liturgy. It explains the changes that can be observed over time in the Roman rite and the various Eastern rites. These rites took some time to reach the forms that they possess today. The development of a single biological organism involves the emergence and increase of its capacities, and is completed when these capacities reach their mature state. The development of a single organism is not indefinite, but works towards maturity, after which it ends.  Something like this increase and eventual maturity is to be seen in the history of all the rites of the Catholic Church; there is an early period of development, which largely stops once the full form of the rite has been reached. The Roman rite, for example, essentially reached its mature form under St. Gregory the Great. With biological organisms, the mature form exists in potency from the beginning, and its realisation occurs through the actualisation under the right circumstances of the already existing powers and tendencies of the organism. One may speculate that something analogous is the case with the traditional rites of the Church, and that the divine establishment of the liturgy involves the creation of these initial potencies at the beginning of the Church, together with their actualisation by the action of the Holy Spirit on the Church; but the theology of this area is still too undeveloped for these speculations to be anything but very tentative and general. The realisation of these potencies would of course not involve any addition to the deposit of faith, since such an addition could not occur after the death of the last apostle; it would instead involve a growth in the means of communicating and acting upon this deposit.

The difference between the two kinds of development can however serve to make an important point about the liturgy. Evolutionary development of one form of life from another is supposed to occur as an adaptive reaction to the external environment; the change from the old to the new form occurs and succeeds because the new form has an advantage in coping with its environment. This evolutionary goal was explicitly upheld by the designers of the Novus Ordo, who stated that the liturgy needed to adapt to modern circumstances. But the idea that a liturgical rite should be developed to fit people’s needs, understanding, and circumstances involves a fundamentally mistaken assumption about the purpose of the liturgy. With respect to its purely human participants, the purpose of the liturgy is to bring about their sanctification. This sanctification operates precisely through changing people’s understandings, desires, and actions. Adapting the liturgy to the people is a negation of its purpose of sanctification. The whole point of the liturgy is that it should adapt people to itself, not vice versa. The organic development of a single organism, on the other hand, has the function of fully developing the powers of that organism to act on its environment. This latter form of development is in harmony with the fact that the liturgy is intended to act upon Christians, not to be acted upon by them.

It cannot be asserted that the existence of several traditional rites of the Church shows that these rites as such are not of divine origin. The assumption behind this assertion would be that different rites were developed by human initiative in order to adjust the worship of the Church to different circumstances; it might also be assumed that the divine elements in the liturgy are only those common to the different rites.

The fact that there is more than one traditional rite in the Church is not a reason for saying that these rites are of human and not divine origin, any more than the fact that there are several gospels is a reason for saying that the gospels are of human and not of divine origin. It is true that the Fathers claim that an element of the liturgy that is found universally in all the rites of the Church must be of divine origin. But this is not the same as the claim that only those elements of the liturgy that are found in all the rites of the Church are of divine origin. The differentiation between the rites did not arise from the purpose of adaptation to particular circumstances, and there is not in fact a fit between the different rites and the varied circumstances of the Church. Every Catholic rite has existed in a great variety of circumstances. One can think for example of the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, originally celebrated in the cathedral of the imperial Roman capital, and now being celebrated in Australia and rural Ukraine.

One can identify a role played by external circumstances in the development of the rites of the Catholic Church. The abandonment of the persecution of Christianity by the Roman Empire, for example, was a necessary condition for the mature development of these rites, because it permitted their secure public celebration. The difficulties of such celebration prior to the Edict of Milan are indicated by the dearth of written evidence for Catholic liturgy prior to that date. The conversion of the Latin-speaking nobility to Christianity in the West from the late 4th century onwards made available the cultural resources necessary for the development of a mature liturgy in the Latin language. But these circumstances made available preconditions for the development of the Latin liturgy rather than producing it directly. Such circumstances could be preconditions brought about by divine providence in order to permit the development of the divinely established aspects of the liturgy, just as, for example, the development of the Greek and Hebrew languages was a human process brought about by divine providence as a necessary precondition for the production of the Scriptures. They thus cannot serve as reasons for taking elements of the liturgy to be of human rather than divine origin.

The explanation of the differences between Catholic rites are rather to be sought in their origin and in the purpose of the liturgy. The rites are all ultimately descended from three basic rites, which are the liturgies of the great apostolic sees of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. Their foundation is in the apostolic tradition of those sees, and their goal is to preserve and pass on that tradition. The reason for having a diversity of rites in the Catholic Church is no doubt because such a diversity permits a fuller presentation of this tradition. This is in a way linked to the different circumstances of Catholics, but the link does not consist in an adaptation to those circumstances.

We can see an analogous process in the composition of the Scriptures. The cultural, linguistic and literary resources belonging to particular peoples in particular circumstances – the Hebrew culture and language of the Jews at various times, and the Greek culture and language of both Jews and Gentiles – were made use of for the expression of divine revelation. But this did not exemplify a universal principle of adapting divine revelation to cultural circumstances by expressing it in the terms of every culture in which it is made known. It was instead a process of selecting a few elements from a few cultural environments because of their suitability for the expression of divine revelation, and thus making these elements permanently normative for all Christians until the end of time. The same process operated in the formation of the liturgy; certain cultural elements were selected and made use of for the purpose of the worship of God and the sanctification of Christians. In the case of the divine elements of the liturgy, the selection was done by God, but even when the selection was made by men, the cultural elements chosen were judged by the standard of worship and sanctification, not vice versa. As with the Scriptures, so with the liturgy. The process of selection entirely ignored many cultures and cultural forms, even ones that by purely natural standards were superior to the elements that were chosen. They were not even necessarily selected from the highest forms of the culture in which they originated; the Greek of the New Testament, for example, was inferior in natural terms to the highest forms of ancient Greek. The elements selected could be strange, initially incomprehensible, or off-putting to people outside the context from which they came. This is not however at all incompatible with the purpose for which they were selected, and indeed to some extent was necessary for that purpose. A liturgy whose components were all familiar and appealing to people would be one from which they could never learn anything significantly new.

The most strongly felt objection to the claim that the traditional liturgies of the Church are of divine origin is likely to be based on the fact that these liturgies were produced over many centuries, largely after the times of the Apostles, and were the fruit of human efforts of many different kinds, that originated in many different sources. It will be claimed that nothing produced in this way can be a permanent divine institution.

The first point to be made about this objection is that although some components of the liturgy were originally the personal productions of individuals, the liturgy as such is the work of the Church, and anything that is included in it thereby becomes part of the worship of the Church and not simply an individual creation. If the liturgy cannot be of divine institution simply because it is a largely post-apostolic construction that developed over hundreds of years, then nothing that is done by the Church over a period of centuries after the time of the apostles can be of divine institution. But this is obviously false. It implies that, for example, the conciliar definitions of doctrine about Christ are not divinely established and immutable. Of course the content of these definitions is not post-apostolic, but the definitions themselves are. And these definitions themselves are of divine institution. They do not require the assent of faith only because they happen to coincide with divine revelation – as if they might have done otherwise – but because they are the work of the Holy Spirit, which guarantees that they teach this revelation. The fact of their divine origin is implied by their infallibility, since infallibility about divine truth is an attribute that cannot belong to created things as such, and can only be produced by God (asserting their divine origin is of course not the same as asserting that their production is itself a direct act of divine revelation.) The traditional liturgies of the Church are of course different in kind from her conciliar definitions. The comparison between them does not deny this; it simply establishes that it is false to deny that the Holy Spirit was active in the Church during the post-apostolic centuries to produce results that are divinely established and immutable.

When this point has been established, we can see that it is not only possible but suitable for the liturgy as such to be of divine institution. The Church inherits and exercises the threefold office of Christ as prophet, priest, and king. His kingship is exercised by her through the divinely established hierarchical structure of the Church established by Him, and his prophetic office is exercised through her divinely established infallible magisterium proclaiming the revealed truth taught by Him; it is thus quite proper for his priestly office to be exercised through a divinely established form of worship. And the matter and form of the sacraments, things which every Catholic admits to be divinely established, do not suffice for the worship of God. The matter and form of the Eucharist, for instance, can be present in a blasphemous and sacrilegious (but valid) celebration that is the opposite of an act of worship, and hence is not a liturgical event. The things that the Church adds to the matter and form of the sacraments in order to make their celebration an act of worship of God just are her liturgy.

In addition to the point about the office that the liturgy carries out, we can add a point about the effect that it has on its human participants. This effect is their sanctification. But sanctification is something that is done only by God. It is thus fitting that the liturgy by which this effect is produced be a divine rather than a merely human work. This point was grasped by the disciple in Luke 11:1 who asked Christ to teach his disciples how to pray.

After these possible misapprehensions about the divine institution of the liturgy have been cleared away, it is not difficult to see that the Roman Rite itself, and not simply some of its parts, is of divine origin. We can give three arguments which suffice to establish this conclusion, without wanting to imply that these are the only arguments that can be advanced for it.


A.

The view that the liturgy is of divine origin is universally held by the Fathers of the Church, and is taught very extensively by them. A good example of this is the following passage from the letter of Pope St. Clement I to the Corinthians, composed around 92 A.D.:

Since then these things are manifest to us, and we have looked into the depths of the divine knowledge, we ought to do in order all things which the Master commanded us to perform at appropriate times. He commanded us to celebrate sacrifices and services, and that it should not be done thoughtlessly or disorderly, but at fixed times and hours. He has himself fixed by his supreme will the places and persons whom he desires for these celebrations, in order that all things may be done piously according to his good pleasure, and be acceptable to his will. So then those who offer their oblations at the appointed seasons are acceptable and blessed, for they follow the laws of the Master and do no sin. For to the High Priest his proper ministrations are allotted, and to the priests the proper place has been appointed, and on Levites their proper services have been imposed. The layman is bound by the ordinances for the laity.[4]

St. Clement’s assertions ought not to be read as a purely historical claim about Christ’s having settled all the details of the liturgy prior to his Ascension; such a claim would not have been compatible with the existence of variations in the liturgies of the Church, which would have been well known to Pope Clement, as to the other Fathers. His point is that the general structure and basic features of the liturgy are not human constructions, but are the work of divine authority, and this is the point made by the Fathers as a whole. Since the universal consensus of the Fathers is a sufficient indication that the subject of their consensus is a part of the Catholic faith, their view on this question must be accepted.

B.

Since it is accepted that some elements of the liturgy are of divine origin, if the Roman Rite as a whole is not of divine origin it must be the case that some parts of it, but not the whole, are of divine origin. But it is primarily the rite as a whole that carries out the function of worshipping God and sanctifying the Christian faithful. The components of the rite are subordinate to the rite as a whole, and exist to contribute to its carrying out this function. But it is absurd to suppose that components of divine origin should be subordinate parts contributing to the end of a whole of human origin.

C.

Under the Old Covenant, the Jews had a liturgy that was of divine origin. This is shown by the fact that this liturgy was prescribed in detail in the divinely inspired Scriptures. The importance of this liturgy is shown by its place in the book of Exodus. After the first occasion when God calls Moses up to the top of Mt. Sinai, Moses returns to the people of Israel and the covenant with God is made. Moses is then called up to Mt. Sinai for the second time along with Joshua, and God devotes all of this second meeting to a detailed exposition of the form of worship that he prescribes for his people. (see Exodus, chapters 24 – 31). Of course this liturgy used elements of human origin that had existed prior to its divine institution, but that does not mean that these elements did not become of divine institution once they were incorporated into the liturgy of the children of Israel. But it is absurd to suppose that the worshippers under the Old Covenant would enjoy a form of worship and sanctification that was of divine origin, whereas Christians under the New Covenant would have to content themselves with a form of worship that was a mere human development, albeit one that incorporated divine elements.

One cannot rebut this argument by saying that as the Jews under the Old Covenant had a divinely revealed civil law but Christians under the New Covenant do not, so the Jews under the Old Covenant had a divinely revealed form of worship but Christians under the New Covenant do not. A civil law is designed for the natural situation and character of a single civil polity and its circumstances. For this reason it was suitable for the Jews, a single people and civil polity, to have a divinely revealed civil law, and it was not suitable for Christians, who extend to the whole human race and belong to different civil polities in different circumstances, to have a divinely revealed civil law. Moreover, the work of worship and sanctification that is the goal of the liturgy is not aimed at the natural good of one or more civil polities. Its purpose is a supernatural one. The supernatural gifts that it is intended to communicate are the same for the whole human race. The divine sacrifice that it contains is one and the same in every Mass. The Body of Christ that it creates and builds up is a single body.

We can therefore conclude that the Roman Rite itself, not just some of its components, is of divine institution. If the Roman Rite itself is of divine origin, it is clear that not only does the pope not have the legal power to abolish it, he also does not have the legal power to permit the use of a ritual of human origin in its place. If God has gone to the trouble of providing a liturgy of divine origin for the Church, it is because he intends that this liturgy should be used for his worship, and no-one, including the pope, has the right to attempt to frustrate this intention by replacing it with a ritual that is a human invention.


The non-identity between the Novus Ordo and the Roman Rite

We have thus established that the Roman Rite as such is of divine origin, and that the pope does not have the legal authority to establish an alternative form of worship that is of purely human origin. If the Novus Ordo is not a form of the Roman Rite, it follows that the pope does not have the authority to permit it as a form of Catholic worship, and hence that it is not licit, regardless of the fact that it was promulgated using the correct legal forms. It remains then to be determined whether or not the Novus Ordo is a form of the Roman Rite. In objective terms there is not really any case to be made for the Novus Ordo’s being a form of the Roman Rite, but because of the sensitivity of the issue this fact is often vehemently denied; hence it is worth while setting out some of the reasons that demonstrate it to be the case. The discussion below deals of course with the Latin original of the Novus Ordo, not with any of its translations into the vernacular.

Before embarking on this discussion, it is helpful to address a common misconception about the nature of the Catholic liturgy. This misconception has been described and criticised by Cardinal Ratzinger:

The author [Alcuin Reid] expressly warns us against the wrong path up which we might be led by a Neo-scholastic sacramental theology that is disconnected from the living form of the Liturgy. On that basis, people might reduce the “substance” to the matter and form of the sacrament and say: Bread and wine are the matter of the sacrament; the words of institution are its form. Only these two things are really necessary; everything else is changeable. … Many priests today, unfortunately, act in accordance with this motto … They want to overcome the limits of the rite, as being something fixed and immovable, and construct the products of their fantasy, which are supposedly “pastoral”, around this remnant, this core that has been spared and that is thus either relegated to the realm of magic or loses any meaning whatever. The Liturgical Movement had in fact been attempting to overcome this reductionism … and to teach us to understand the Liturgy as a living network of Tradition that had taken concrete form, that cannot be torn apart into little pieces but that has to be seen and experienced as a concrete whole. Anyone who, like me, was moved by this perception at the time of the Liturgical Movement on the eve of the Second Vatican Council can only stand, deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were concerned for.[5]

Cardinal Ratzinger’s reference to ‘magic’ helps us to understand his point. A magical view of the sacraments sees them as producing their effects independently of the nature and dispositions of their subjects. Such a view is of course contrary to Catholic teaching; the dispositions and actions of the subjects that receive the sacraments must satisfy certain necessary conditions in order for them to exist and operate, and the graces received by those who receive the sacraments will vary once these conditions have been satisfied. The degree of grace received in the sacraments will vary according to the individual dispositions and actions of the recipient, and will be absent if some necessary dispositions and actions are absent.

But the state of the individual recipient is not the only thing that determines the degree of grace granted in the sacrament. The sacraments are brought into being in an action of the Church. Christ acts in this action of the Church, and the individual faithful act in it as well according to their respective roles, but the sacraments do not come into existence without the action of the Church, and this action is the means by which they are brought into being. This action of the Church includes prayer and worship; the liturgy is the prayer and worship of the Church. The prayer of the Church asks for graces to be given through the sacraments, and the worship of the Church is an external sign that is among other things an action manifesting belief by the Church in the graces to be given, belief in the glory and mercy of God that is involved in giving these graces, and the commitment of the will to God that is required for reception of these graces. These actions can be done dishonestly, without the belief and commitment of the will that they express, but the converse is not true. We cannot, in normal circumstances, possess the belief and the commitment of the will necessary to receive graces from God unless we voluntarily act in a way that manifests this belief and commitment. That is why a liturgical celebration of the sacraments is necessary, and why the matter and form of the sacraments are not the substance of the liturgy, with everything else being dispensable or subject to change.

This point having been made, we can set forth two arguments for the non-identity of the Novus Ordo with the Roman Rite.

A.

Most of the content of the Roman Rite was removed from the Novus Ordo, and replaced with new content that was radically different in its message and intent. 760 of the 1182 orations contained in the Roman Rite were dropped entirely from the Novus Ordo; that is 64%. Of the remaining 422 orations, over half were significantly changed, leaving only 17% of the original orations.[6] These originals exist in a greatly expanded whole in the Novus Ordo, which contains several hundred more orations than its predecessor. The lectionary of the old missal was abolished and a new, three-year cycle of readings was introduced that had no resemblance to the previous lectionary. The calendar of saints was completely altered, and the temporal cycle was changed in important ways; the Octave of Pentecost was abolished, and the two seasons following Advent and Pentecost were replaced by a single ‘ordinary time’ that is not related to any feast. The private prayers of the priest and almost all of the offertory prayers were removed from the Mass. Three new eucharistic prayers were added to the Roman Canon, which thereby became a (seldom used) option rather than the centre of the Roman Rite. Eucharistic Prayer II, the most commonly used one, was fabricated by Fr. Louis Bouyer and Dom Bernard Botte from some fragments of ancient texts in a farcical episode over the course of an afternoon in a bistro in Trastevere (as Fr. Bouyer himself testified in his memoirs). Fr. Joseph Gelineau S.J. and a small team wrote Eucharistic Prayer IV over a night or two.

The new prayers and the changes to the old prayers that survived were motivated by a radically different theological outlook that was designed to be acceptable to Protestants and to the modern world (as the modern world was understood by the architects of the new missal); hence, their content differs from that of the original prayers in essential respects. In his defence of the liturgical changes instituted by Paul VI, John F. Baldovin S.J. accepts that there are deep theological differences between the missal of Paul VI and its predecessors. Commenting on The Problem of the Liturgical Reform,[7] a study by theologians of the Society of St. Pius X, he says:

The Problem of the Liturgical Reform is an extremely useful book, not because its authors are correct, but because nowhere else have I seen what is at stake with the post-Vatican II reform of the liturgy so clearly outlined and so well understood. … Nothing seems to escape their attention: the concept of mystery, the role of the Trinity in the sacraments, the nature of grace, the meaning of representation (repraesentare), the biblical and patristic notion of memorial, the analogical meaning of the word ‘sacrament’, the nature of Scripture vis-à-vis the magisterium. … In all of this, they are completely on target. That is, these are the issues that are at stake in the reform of the liturgy. The reformed liturgy does represent a radical shift in Catholic theology and piety.[8]

Fr. Baldovin continues; ‘But their charge is that it also departs from orthodox Roman Catholic doctrine, and here I must disagree.’

We need to distinguish three different questions here: 1) whether the central theological principles of the traditional Latin liturgy are not contained in the Novus Ordo, 2) whether the central theological principles of the traditional Latin liturgy are contradicted by the Novus Ordo, and 3) whether the central theological principles introduced into the Novus Ordo depart from the Catholic faith. An affirmative answer to any of these three questions will imply that the Novus Ordo is not a form of the traditional Latin liturgy, since the theological principles of the latter liturgy are essential to it. We are not here considering the theological content of the Novus Ordo from the point of view of its truth, so we will restrict ourselves to question 1). On Fr. Baldovin’s own showing, this question should be given an affirmative answer; the reformed liturgy is a radical shift in Catholic theology. Since the theology of the traditional Latin liturgy is not contained in the Novus Ordo, the latter cannot be a form of the traditional Latin rite. This conclusion can be rejected only if it is maintained that the theological content of the traditional Latin liturgy is not an essential attribute of that liturgy. But this claim is absurd.

Although Fr. Baldovin’s observations suffice in themselves to show that the theology of the Novus Ordo is not that of the traditional Latin liturgy, neither he nor the traditionalist authors he criticises do full justice to the degree to which the Novus Ordo rejects the theology of the traditional rite. In addition to the theological topics that he mentions – which are central enough in all conscience – references to sacrifice, sin, guilt, penance, punishment, hell, the necessity of grace, and divine anger have been almost entirely removed from the Novus Ordo, and the subordination of this world to the next is no longer emphasised or clearly presented in it. Frs. Antoine Dumas and Mathias Augé, who were both involved in the production of the prayers of the Novus Ordo, have described this new theological outlook, and scholars such as Prof. Lauren Pristas have documented its existence by careful analysis and comparison of the old and new prayers.[9]  This amounts to a complete removal of the theology of the traditional rite, since the expressions of this theology that are preserved in the Novus Ordo have their meanings fundamentally changed by the new context in which they are inserted. The meaning of God’s love, for example, is entirely different in a context where sin, guilt, divine punishment, expiation, and hell are present, as opposed to a context in which they are absent. There is thus no doubt at all that the theology of the traditional liturgy is not present in the Novus Ordo, and hence that the Novus Ordo cannot be a form of the traditional Latin rite.

B.

The claim that the Novus Ordo is not the Roman Rite has been made by eminent liturgists who were actually involved in the construction of the Novus Ordo. Joseph Gelineau S.J., the principal compositor of Eucharistic Prayer IV, stated: ‘Let them compare it with the Mass we now have. Not only the words, the melodies and some of the gestures are different. To tell the truth, it is a different liturgy of the Mass. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed.’[10] Fr. Louis Bouyer described the missal of Paul VI as a misshapen runt (‘un avorton’), and excused his participation in its drafting on the grounds that he had only taken part in order to avoid worse evils. Fr. Bouyer’s testimony on this topic is particularly significant, as in addition to his close involvement in the production of the Novus Ordo he was the most important progressive liturgist prior to the Second Vatican Council. Fr. Annibale Bugnini, the main architect of the Novus Ordo under Paul VI, stated his goals in this way: ‘It is not simply a question of restoring a valuable masterpiece but in some cases it will be necessary to provide new structures for entire rites … it will be a truly new creation.’[11]

There is thus not the remotest doubt that the Novus Ordo is not a form of the Roman Rite. It could only be claimed to be a form of the Roman Rite if it is assumed that the Roman Rite is simply anything that the pope chooses to call the Roman Rite, and that the content of what is given this name by the pope is irrelevant to its identity. But we have already seen that this is not the case. This conclusion is made certain by the drastic differences between the Novus Ordo and the previous Roman missals, and by the intent of destroying the Roman Rite expressed by the drafters of the Novus Ordo. One can imagine a case where a liturgical revision would have been far-reaching, but not extensive enough to make it certain that the result was no longer the Roman missal; such a result would exist in a grey area, where neither its identity nor its non-identity with the Mass of the Roman rite was clear. Some of the transitional liturgical forms that were introduced between the 1962 missal and the 1970 missal may have fallen into this category, but it is worth underlining that because of the extent of the differences between the Novus Ordo and the Roman missals of 1962 and earlier, the Novus Ordo is not a borderline case of this sort. It is not in a grey area, but is a wholly new production – as its designers intended it to be, and said that they intended it to be. We can therefore conclude that the promulgation of the Novus Ordo by Missale Romanum has no legal force, and that the Novus Ordo is illicit. It is not permitted for any Catholic priest to say it, and it is not permitted for any Catholic to attend it, except perhaps under the most exceptional circumstances (as perhaps at a funeral, where it is clear that attendance at it is not intended to be an act of worship but is simply an act of respect for the dead). Nor, according to the current Code of Canon Law, can attendance at the Novus Ordo satisfy the Sunday obligation; that obligation requires attendance at a Mass of a Catholic rite, and the Novus Ordo does not belong to a Catholic rite.

Since the Novus Ordo is celebrated by the overwhelming majority of Latin-rite Catholics, this is an alarming conclusion. It is likely that a wish to avoid drawing any such conclusion explains the general failure to examine the question of the liceity of the missal of Paul VI. But although this conclusion is unwelcome, it is also illuminating. In his address to the Plenary Meeting of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in January 2012, Benedict XVI observed accurately that ‘in vast areas of the earth faith risks being extinguished, like a flame that is no longer fed. We are facing a profound crisis of faith.’[12] The mysteriousness of this crisis has rarely been sufficiently emphasised. It is not as if the Church is confronted with enemies that have a real although twisted spiritual appeal and a powerful message, as was the case with the first Protestants; or an enemy supported by brilliant minds and literary talents, like the Enlightenment; or an enemy with slogans and goals that appeal to serious and self-sacrificing persons, like the French Revolution with its ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’. The Church is being defeated by a secularist hedonism whose aims and slogans are consumerist greed, abortion, contraception, fornication, euthanasia, the legitimation and celebration of sexual perversion, atheism, and the rejection of any difference between man and brute animals. These are all pure diseases of human society, rather than twisted forms of the pursuit of legitimate objectives such as justice and knowledge – twisted forms that did exist in such anti-Catholic movements as the French Revolution and Communism, and that gave these movements their strength. They do no more than cripple and destroy their adherents. They are a source of weakness to the enemies of the Church, rather than a basis of real strength. It is thus strange that these enemies, advancing these positions, have been triumphing over the Church all across the board. Such weak, corrupt, and decadent opponents should not present a serious challenge to the Church.

The fact that the Novus Ordo is illicit, however, largely explains this triumph. If the divinely established form of worship of God has been suppressed in by far the larger part of the Catholic Church, that means that the duty of worshipping God is not being fulfilled in this part of the Church. The fruits produced by the worship of God have as a result largely been lost to the Church; her members are not sanctified by their participation in worship that is pleasing to God, and the grace and mercy that God provides in response to such worship are lost. This explains the current internal decline of the Church – a decline without parallel in history – and her defeat by intrinsically weak enemies. The preponderance of unnatural vice over fornication in the sexual sins of the Catholic clergy, and the important role of sexual perversion in the ideology of the enemies of the Church – themselves also things without a parallel in history – may also be linked to the abandonment of the proper worship of God. Such perversion is identified by St. Paul as a consequence of failing to give God the honour and praise that is due to him (Romans 1:21, 24-27), and this honour and praise is given primarily by the celebration of the liturgy.

There is a final point to be made in this discussion, that will address problems that Catholics may have with the assertions that have been made about the Novus Ordo. Although we are not directly concerned here with the theological content of the Novus Ordo as such, there is an important connection between the claim of this paper and the claim that the Novus Ordo is radically theologically defective. Fr. Baldovin’s statement above, about the radical theological differences between the Novus Ordo and the traditional liturgy, casts doubt on his assertion that nothing in the Novus Ordo is at odds with Catholic doctrine. If we assume, as we must, that nothing in the traditional liturgy was at odds with Catholic doctrine, how can it be the case that the changes to the theology that Fr. Baldovin himself admits to have taken place did not involve a rejection of Catholic doctrine? How can radical changes to ‘the concept of mystery, the role of the Trinity in the sacraments, the nature of grace, the meaning of representation (repraesentare), the biblical and patristic notion of memorial, the analogical meaning of the word ‘sacrament’, the nature of Scripture vis-à-vis the magisterium’ not involve rejection of Catholic doctrine, if the previous views were themselves in agreement with Catholic doctrine? This question becomes more pointed when we take into account the further theological changes documented by Prof. Pristas. If ‘Catholic doctrine’ is respected by both the old and the new, then this doctrine must be almost void of content; or it must be governed by historical relativism, with its content being a function of changing historical circumstances rather than a realist account of how things are. But neither of these alternatives is acceptable. It thus seems very plausible to claim that the theology of the Novus Ordo is incompatible with Catholic doctrine. It is not sufficient to respond to this claim by saying that the theological elements of the old liturgy that are rejected by the Novus Ordo are simply excised, rather than explicitly contradicted. For the liturgy has as one of its functions the teaching of the whole faith. For an important theological position to be absent from the liturgy is thus for it to be implicitly presented as not part of the Catholic faith. The excision of the theological teachings of the old liturgy by the Novus Ordo is thus an implicit assertion that they are not part of the faith.

But this raises a severe problem. It has been held as theologically certain that the infallibility of the Church extends to her general discipline, and that this means that she ‘can never sanction a universal law which would be at odds with faith or morality or would be by its very nature conducive to the injury of souls’.[13] The bull Auctorem Fidei taught that the proposition that ‘the Church which is ruled by the Spirit of God could have established discipline which is not only useless and burdensome for Christian liberty to endure, but which is even dangerous and harmful and leading to superstition and materialism’ is ‘false, rash, scandalous, dangerous, offensive to pious ears, injurious to the Church and to the Spirit of God by whom it is guided, at least erroneous’. A similar assertion was made by Gregory XVI in Quo Graviora. The theological content of the Novus Ordo, especially its deliberate and almost complete removal of the concepts of sin, guilt, punishment, and the necessity of grace, is by its very nature conducive to the injury of souls. Why then is not the promulgation of the Novus Ordo a disproof of the Church’s claim to infallibility? Fr. Gleize’s assertion that the Novus Ordo is illicit because of the harm it does to the common good is not helpful in answering this question. His position risks making the assertion of the Church’s disciplinary infallibility a circular and therefore vacuous one; the Church is infallible in her discipline because she cannot sanction a universal law that would by its very nature conduce to the injury of souls – and we can be certain that this is true, because a law’s being of its nature conducive to the injury of souls makes it illicit, and therefore not sanctioned by the Church.

The claim of the present paper offers a solution to this problem, because it provides a reason for holding that the Novus Ordo is illicit that is independent of the theological problems of its content. The Novus Ordo is illicit simply because it is a human fabrication and not a form of a traditional liturgy of the Church. It is to be expected that such a fabrication would be severely problematic theologically, but the theological problems with the Novus Ordo are not the reason for its being illicit. A humanly fabricated liturgy could be theologically unobjectionable, but would still be illicit. The illicit status of the Novus Ordo follows from its prior character as a human fabrication, so that the questions of the implications of its theological contents for its liceity as a liturgy of the Church, and for the Church’s infallibility, do not even arise.

It might be objected that this is a poor defence of the infallibility of the Church in disciplinary matters, because the liceity of the Novus Ordo has in fact been almost universally accepted, and the damage to souls resulting from the Novus Ordo has consequently taken place just as if this infallibility did not exist. What is the use of the disciplinary infallibility provided by God to the Church, when neither the hierarchy who determine and enforce discipline nor the rest of the Church that is governed by it can tell the difference between a law that is protected by this infallibility, and an illegal measure bearing on the most important activity of the Church that is not so protected?

To answer this objection we must distinguish the senses in which neither the hierarchy nor the laity can tell the difference between a legitimate rite of the Church and an illicit form of worship. In one sense, they can do this; that is, if they make a faithful and responsible inquiry into the nature of the Novus Ordo, they will discover that it is at least unfit to be used to celebrate the Eucharist. Many Catholics in fact did this, as witness the works of Michael Davies and the Ottaviani Intervention. In another sense, they are not able to do this. They have not made such an inquiry into the Novus Ordo, and are often not willing to do so.  The divine guarantee of infallibility to the discipline of the Church does not extend to protection from culpable error about what this discipline actually consists in.

Unlike many catastrophes, the problem of the Novus Ordo is susceptible of a clear and simple solution; it is for priests of the Latin rite to stop saying it and start exclusively using the legitimate Latin rite instead. The ostensible reason for the introduction of the Novus Ordo and the de facto, illegal suppression of the traditional Latin rite was the promise that the Novus Ordo would bring about a deepening in faith, an increase in Mass attendance, a flood of new Catholics hastening into the Church, and a great renewal generally. What in fact occurred was a collapse in faith, Mass attendance, and Church membership that is absolutely unprecedented in the history of the Church. This collapse was not shared by the small communities that persisted in using the traditional Latin rite, despite severe difficulty and discouragement. This result, which is what one would expect from the adoption of an illicit form of worship, makes the abandonment of the Novus Ordo obviously desirable and urgent.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. John R.T. Lamont is a Canadian Catholic philosopher and theologian. He has taught philosophy and theology in Catholic universities and seminaries. He is the author of Divine Faith (Routledge, 2004) and, with Claudio Pierantoni, of Defending the Faith against Present Heresies (Arouca, 2021). He has published widely on theological questions, in journals that include New Blackfriars, Nova et Vetera, Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales, and The Thomist.

[1]          “Elle ne saurait faire l’objet d’une loi obligeant comme telle toute l’Eglise. En effet, la loi liturgique a pour objet de proposer avec autorité le bien commun de l’Eglise et tout ce qui est requis. La nouvelle messe de Paul VI représentant la privation de ce bien ne saurait faire l’objet d’une loi: elle est non seulement mauvaise mais illégitime, en dépit de toutes les apparences de légalité dont on a pu l’entourer et dont on l’entoure encore.” Abbé Jean-Michel Gleize, Vatican II en débat (Versailles: Courrier de Rome, 2012), p. 63.

[2]          The profound differences between the theology and content of the Rituale Romanum and the revised blessings are helpfully discussed in Fr. Uwe Michael Lang’s paper ‘Theologies of Blessing: Origins and Characteristics of De Benedictionibus’, Antiphon 2011, 15 (1); it is available online at http://liturgysociety.org/JOURNAL/Volume15/Antiphon15.1Lang.pdf.

[3]          Fr. J. Steiger, ‘Causes majeures’, Dictionnaire de théologie catholique vol. II, cols. 2039-40. Fr. Steiger goes on to assert that ‘rather than consider whether an arbitrary papal measure that would throw the Church into confusion would be invalid, theologians have preferred to consider that Christ would never permit such a disaster; history has shown their position to be correct.’ He does not name these theologians, whose position would hardly be compatible with the rebuke of Pope Gregory XI by St. Catherine of Siena, or that of St. Peter by St. Paul for that matter (Galatians 2:11; ‘when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned’). These episodes sufficiently disprove Fr. Steiger’s claims about history; they could be multiplied.

[4]          1 Clement 40, tr, Kirsopp Lake, in The Apostolic Fathers, vol. I (London: Heinemann, 1919), pp. 77-79.

[5]          Ratzinger, in Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy (Ignatius Press, 2005), p. 11.

[6]          See Fr. Anthony Cekada, Work of Human Hands: A Theological Critique of the Mass of Paul VI (Philothea Press: West Chester, Ohio, 2010). Abp. Arthur Roche claims that the Novus Ordo retains 90% of the texts of the missal of Pius V (‘The Roman Missal of Saint Paul VI: A witness to unchanging faith and uninterrupted tradition’, Notitiae 597 (2020)). This claim is a pure fabrication.

[7]          The Problem of the Liturgical Reform: A Theological and Liturgical Study (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2002); the authors are not identified.

[8]          John F. Baldovin S.J., Reforming the Liturgy: A Response to the Critics (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008), pp. 138-139.

[9]          See Lauren Pristas, ‘The Orations of the Vatican II Missal: Policies for Revision,’ Communio 30 (Winter, 2003), and “Theological Principles that Guided the Redaction of the Roman Missal (1970),” The Thomist 67 (2003). Some of these papers are available at Dr. Pristas’s webpage at http://faculty.caldwell.edu/lpristas. Her book The Collects of the Roman Missals: A Comparative Study of the Sundays in Proper Seasons before and after the Second Vatican Council (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013) expands on her previous work. She discusses the theological outlook of Frs. Dumas and Augé on the basis of their own statements.

[10]         Joseph Gelineau S.J., Demain la liturgie: essai sur l’évolution des assemblées chrétiennes (Paris: Cerf, 1977). pp. 9-10.

[11]        La Documentation Catholique, no. 1493, 7 May 1967.

[12]        https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2012/january/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20120127_dottrina-fede.html.

[13]         Van Noort, Castelot, and Murphy, Dogmatic Theology vol II: Christ’s Church (Cork: The Mercier Press, 1958), p. 115.


An Integralist Reading of Apocalypse XI:1-10

by Fr Thomas Crean O.P.

I will give unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred sixty days, clothed in sackcloth.  These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks, that stand before the Lord of the earth.

Who are these two witnesses?  Many Catholics down the centuries have assumed them to be Enoch and Elias.  We find this identification already in St Hippolytus, who was born around AD 170, in his work Antichrist.  St Andrew of Caesarea, writing in AD 611, says that “many of the doctors” have understood them in this way.  A thousand years later, Cornelius à Lapide reports that this was the dominant opinion in his time.

That Elias will indeed appear again, whether to be seen by many or by few, is suggested by Ecclesiasticus 48:10, and seems certain from our Lord’s words in St Matthew 17: Elias shall come and restore all things.  That Enoch will appear is suggested at least by the Vulgate rendering of Ecclesiasticus 44:16, and supported by the belief of many saints.  St Robert Bellarmine even held that it was either heretical or close to heresy to deny that these two would appear again one day in their own persons (Controversy on the Roman Pontiff, book 3, ch. 6).  But this does not mean that the two witnesses mentioned in Apocalypse 11 must be exclusively so identified.

In the third century, St Victorinus thought that one of these two witnesses might be Eliseus, or else Jeremiah.  St Hilary and St Ambrose mention Moses.  St Bede, in his commentary on the Apocalypse, takes them as typical figures, suggesting that they are the two races, that is the Jews and Gentiles, or else the two testaments.  Joachim of Fiore took them to be priests and monks.  Cornelius, as well as recording the common belief of his time, recounts a large number of other opinions that have been held by Catholics: that they are teachers and preachers; or the great wisdom and holiness of the early Church; or Christ and St John the Baptist; or Pope St Silverius and St Mennas of Constantinople, twin opponents of Monophysism; or saints Dominic and Francis; or even the Dominicans and the Jesuits!

Probably, like other symbols in the Apocalypse, this one is intended by its divine author to be polyvalent, that is, realised in many ways.  But it may still have a primary sense; and what it evokes above all is a vision of Zacharias in the Old Testament.  An angel showed this prophet two olive trees, one on either side of a seven-branched golden candlestick: And I answered and said to him: What are these two olive trees upon the right side of the candlestick, and upon the left side thereof?  [And he said: These are the two sons of oil who stand before the Lord of the whole earth (Zach. 4:11, 14).

In Zachariah’s time, the two ‘sons of oil’, or anointed ones, were the high priest Joshua and the prince Zorobabel.  They were the two olive trees that stood before the Lord of the whole earth.  Given the unity of Holy Scripture, as a single utterance of God, it is natural to suppose that the two olive trees that stand before the Lord of the earth in St John’s vision continue this symbolical meaning, and hence that the high priest and prince of the old covenant foreshadow a high priest and prince of the new.  Not, in this case, our Lord Himself: Apoc. 11:8 explicitly distinguishes these two witnesses from their crucified Lord.  Shall we say, with the Ignatius Study Bible, that “they represent the twofold mission of the Church to be a royal and priestly witness to the gospel”?  That is not quite satisfying.  As Newman remarks in his Letter to Pusey, Scripture does not love abstractions.  These two figures surely represent something more concrete than “a mission to be a witness”. 

At the very least, they represent some definite offices manned by identifiable persons; or, which comes to much the same thing, they represent the persons by whom these offices are successively filled.  They are, therefore, the series of anointed persons who bear spiritual and temporal power in the new covenant: Catholic bishops and Catholic princes, and at the apex of the symbolism, the pope and the Christian emperor in their conjoined witness to the word of God.  The pope corresponds to the type of Joshua, highest of the priests of the earth, while the Roman emperor corresponds to Zorobabel, since from the time of Constantine’s conversion the emperor was the highest temporal prince within God’s people.

This identification is confirmed by the contrast of these two witnesses with the two beasts of Apocalypse 13.  These latter evoke the perversion of temporal and spiritual power.  The seven-headed beast from the sea represents seven successive empires that use temporal power to persecute God’s people, culminating in the person and empire of antichrist.  The sea in Scripture is a common image for the nations.  The beast that rises up out of the earth represents those who use the spiritual power in service of this first beast, and probably one such ‘false prophet’ above all others.  The land in Scripture is a common image for the Church.

The supposition that the two witnesses are Enoch and Elias has led some commentators to mistake what St John says of their work.  He does not say that their task is to confront the antichrist come in person; they do their ‘prophesying’ freely, before the beast arrives on the scene:

If any man will hurt them, fire shall come out of their mouths, and shall devour their enemies. And if any man will hurt them, in this manner must he be slain.  These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and they have power over waters to turn them into blood, and to strike the earth with all plagues as often as they will.

Why are the pope and the emperor said to prophesy?  To prophesy is to declare and uphold the word of God.  In the divine plan, the pope, where possible united with his brother bishops, declares the contents of revelation, and the emperor, where possible united with his brother rulers, expels false Christians from the temporal community.  The edicts by which they do this, guaranteed by the Holy Ghost, are the fire that comes from their mouths to destroy their enemies.  St John repeats himself here, saying that this must be: Scripture thus insists on the Church’s need of a coercive power, since this is something that men have been repeatedly tempted to deny.

Not only can the two witnesses bring destructive fire from heaven, but they can also prevent life-giving water from falling to the earth.  Water, in Scripture, is often an image for the grace of the Holy Spirit, as we are told in the gospel of St John: The water that I give him shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting (Jn. 4:14); Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.  Now this he said of the Spirit (Jn. 7:38-39).  The apostolic hierarchy can impose excommunications, suspensions and interdicts upon unworthy Christians, so that they lose the right to receive the sacraments, and the temporal power can enforce this verdict.  What if these sinners attempt to receive sacramental grace nonetheless?  They will find that the waters turn into blood, since by their presumption they call down judgement upon themselves.  And since neither of the two witnesses has an earthly superior in his own sphere, who might limit his exercise of power or choice of means, they are said to strike with all plagues as often as they will.

They do their work for twelve hundred and sixty days, which is paradoxically equivalent to the period for which the woman is in exile in the desert: a time, times, and half a time (Apoc. 12:14).  The first way of speaking suggests continuance in activity, the second, endurance.  The Church exercises the plenitude of her powers whilst also being a suffering exile on earth.

When they shall have finished their testimony, the beast, that ascendeth out of the abyss, shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. And their bodies shall lie in the streets of the great city, which is called spiritually, Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord also was crucified.  And they of the tribes, and peoples, and tongues, and nations, shall see their bodies for three days and a half: and they shall not suffer their bodies to be laid in sepulchres. 

This passage might seem to refute my interpretation.  Granted that the Roman emperor is no more, whether we see the final one as passing away in 1453 or 1806 or even 1922 with the death of Blessed Charles of Austria, the papacy continues to the end: “Jesus Christ appointed Peter to be that head of the Church; and He also determined that the authority instituted in perpetuity for the salvation of all should be inherited by His successors” (Leo XIII, Satis cognitum).  But we need to look closely at what St John wrote.  The Vulgate, and most modern versions, speak of the bodies of the two witnesses lying in the great city.  St John, however, uses a singular noun in verse 8: πτῶμα (ptōma), meaning ‘that which has fallen, a (dead) body, corpse, ruin’.  The body of the two witnesses will be in the street.  He does the same in the first half of verse 9: people from the various tribes and nations will see their body for three days and a half.  Only in the second half of this verse does he use the plural: they shall not allow their bodies to be buried.

One commentator notes this use of the singular, and writes that “the two fallen in one cause are considered as one.”  But this is not quite enough to explain it.  We do not talk of two bodies as one simply because they are the bodies of two friends or allies.  Rather, what has been destroyed is precisely the unity of the spiritual and temporal power, and supremely, of the pope and emperor.  It is not just that they had one cause, defending the same principles, but that their power to devour their enemies lay in this union.  The teaching of the pope was effective to repress heresy when it was upheld by the emperor and other Catholic rulers; and these rulers in turn acted as prophets, bearers of the word of God, only insofar as they kept themselves and their realms united to the see of Rome.  But the beast has waged a lengthy war against this unity, and now the corpse of Christendom lies plainly on the street.

This great city, I presume, is none other than the city of man, formed inevitably in every age by the con-spiratio of all who love themselves even to the point of contempt of God, thus crucifying Him.  The street, singular, again, in the Greek, comes from a word meaning ‘broad’ and perhaps suggests the world’s broad-mindedness and tolerance for everything but the word of God.  This city is spiritually Sodom and Egypt, because when Christendom is no more, sexual deviance and injustice multiply, and God’s people are oppressed. 

In what sense do they of the tribes and peoples and tongues and nations not allow these bodies to be put into a tomb?  This signifies dishonour; those made powerful by the overthrow of Christendom wish its corpse to remain visible for their own greater glory.  Hence the elaboration and maintenance of a black legend from the Reformation and the Enlightenment to our own day, of which one small but telling part is the use of ‘mediaeval’ to mean simply ‘bad’.  And since it is the papacy and Catholic rulers not only in their union but also separately whom this legend execrates, while the body has fallen, it is the bodies that are left on display.

Why for three days and a half?  This evokes a prophecy of Daniel: in the half of the week, the victim and the sacrifice shall fail: and there shall be in the temple the abomination of desolation.  When the last echo of the voice of the two witness shall have fallen silent, the suppression of the Church’s sacrifice and the time of the antichrist will be at hand.   Meanwhile, an apparently fraternal world order of ‘united nations’ comes into being:

And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry: and shall send gifts one to another, because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt upon the earth.

Yet it is not to last:

And after three days and a half, the spirit of life from God entered into them. And they stood upon their feet, and great fear fell upon them that saw them.


The laity used to help choose bishops. It’s a tradition worth resurrecting

Detail of canons electing a bishop by giving him a mitre, from James le Palmer Omne Bonum (c.1360-1375)

by 

But for such a system to work, the bishops also need to take up their duties

“The Church is not a democracy,” we are often told. That’s sort of true, but it isn’t meant to be a vast centrally-controlled bureaucracy either. As it happens, the Church used to have a much stronger democratic element: and given the failures of governance exposed by the abuse crisis, perhaps that element should be brought back.

If you were to attend an ordination in the Byzantine Rite, you might be struck by a moment in the liturgy in which the people are called upon to express their view of their future pastor. They cry out, “Axios!” (worthy) or “Anaxios!” (unworthy). This procedure is a shadow and a reminder of the Church’s ancient system of appointment.

Episcopal election in the early Church was usually conducted by a “college” consisting of the archbishop and/or suffragan bishops, parish priests and deacons. Once they had chosen the candidate, they would need the laity to approve. Sometimes it worked the other way round: St Ambrose became Bishop of Milan at the request of the laity. As even the anti-clerical historian Gibbon admitted, “the subjects of Rome enjoyed in the church the privilege which they had lost in the republic, of choosing the magistrates whom they were bound to obey.”

As late as 1054, Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida – a most implacable defender of papal authority – expressed the rights of the laity as follows: “According to the decrees of the holy fathers, anyone who is consecrated as a bishop is first to be elected by the clergy, then requested by the people and finally consecrated by the bishops of the province with the approval of the metropolitan … Anyone who has been consecrated without conforming to all these three rules is not to be regarded as a true, undoubted, established bishop nor counted among the bishops canonically created and appointed. [my italics]”

The laity lost their power in two stages. First, popes began to appoint bishops directly, to stop lay rulers from hijacking elections. Then, from the late thirteenth century, kings exploited the weakness of the papacy to nominate all the bishops in their kingdoms – with the Pope’s formal provision a rubber stamp. Today, following the secularisation of European states, lay rulers no longer claim such powers, so almost all bishops are appointed directly by the Pope.

In one sense, this is perfectly legitimate. The Holy See has always maintained what is now called its “universal ordinary jurisdiction”: the right to intervene at will in any church as if the pope were the bishop of that place himself. But in the first millennium the Pope exercised this jurisdiction as if it were extraordinary. In the second millennium, however, the popes have to a greater and greater extent, especially since the end of the nineteenth century, appointed all the bishops in the world, a hitherto unknown phenomenon.

In the last 150 years, Church documents have gestured towards a less centralised model. The First Vatican Council taught: “This power of the Supreme Pontiff by no means detracts from that ordinary and immediate power of episcopal jurisdiction, by which bishops, who have succeeded to the place of the apostles by appointment of the Holy Spirit, tend and govern individually the particular flocks which have been assigned to them. On the contrary, this power of theirs is asserted, supported and defended by the Supreme and Universal Pastor; for St. Gregory the Great says: ‘My honour is the honour of the whole Church. My honour is the steadfast strength of my brethren. Then do I receive true honour, when it is denied to none of those to whom honour is due.’”

In the encyclical Ut Unum Sint, St John Paul II suggested that the future of the Church might lie in a return to the structure of ecclesiastical government in the first millennium. One of the principal differences between the first and second millennia is the elimination in the course of the second of the laity from the election of bishops.

If you suggest to lay Catholics that they might help to elect their bishop, they are often appalled at the idea. Why? Because they don’t trust their fellow laypeople: they know that many Mass-goers neither believe nor observe the articles of the Catholic faith.

However, this is only half the problem. There is, in truth, a kind of Faustian pact between clergy and laity: “You do not look into our faith and morals and we will not look into yours.” The bishops no longer routinely excommunicate notorious public sinners and heretics. The laity turn a blind eye to the irresponsibility of the clergy. Conflict is avoided – but meanwhile, the problem gets worse. The Church cannot survive much more of this, but the Church will never perish, so either the end of this pact is near or the end of all things.

So we need both laity and clergy to take up their duties simultaneously. The function of a bishop is to teach, to sanctify and to govern. A holy bishop ought to preach the Gospel without fear or favour, root out error and conformity with the world among the priests and people of his diocese, proclaim to those inside and outside his flock the unmerited salvation won for us on the Cross by Our Lord and Saviour, and demand orthodox belief and true repentance of sins. He ought to offer the sacrifice of the Mass for the living and the dead with fear and trembling, meek and obedient before the laws and traditions of the Church and see that his clergy do likewise. He ought to ensure that all the people make frequent Confessions and Communions – and that they do so worthily. He ought to lead his flock in the living law of the Gospel, provide for the weak and suffering among them in body and soul, show by his example that heroic sanctity is possible for every Christian, and strengthen the lay faithful in their struggle to conform temporal realities to the demands of Christ’s kingdom.

Some might suppose that greater lay involvement would weaken the papacy, but it is not so. Paradoxically, absolute monarchy is a very weak form of government. In a more republican structure, or rather a “mixed monarchy”, political arguments have to be made in the open and whatever powers the ruler holds he may exercise securely and in an informed manner. He has to state his beliefs and allegiances openly, those who disagree need to make their case in return. In an absolute monarchy he is only as powerful as the reliability of his last circle of advisors. Such a structure encourages concealment, flattery, duplicity and betrayal.

The terrible consequences of abolishing traditional episcopal elections were predicted long ago by Pope Leo I “the Great” (440-461). St Leo predicted that depriving the faithful of their right to approve or reject an episcopal nominee would lead them to despise their shepherds and lose the faith, “let no one be ordained against the express wishes of the place: lest a city should either despise or hate a bishop whom they did not choose, and lamentably fall away from religion because they have not been allowed to have whom they wished.” We always ignore the fathers at our peril.

This is a drastic proposal, but the present crisis calls for it. As a younger and more reckless Joseph Ratzinger famously predicted in 1969:

From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge – a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so she will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members … But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her centre: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world.

Link to original article:
https://catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2019/01/17/the-laity-used-to-help-choose-bishops-its-a-tradition-worth-resurrecting/



On a book review in ‘Commonweal’

the-castle-of-the-pyrenees

The American journal Commonweal has recently published a book review of Thomas Crean’s and Alan Fimister’s Integralism: a manual of political philosophy.  The book review misrepresents the book in certain ways and criticises it in others.  The present article will explain some of the misrepresentations and analyse the criticisms.

The most serious misrepresentation lies in the reviewer’s statement that “Integralism clearly breaks with Vatican II’s teaching on religious liberty”.  The last ecumenical council’s document on religious liberty, Dignitatis humanae, meets the criteria for an infallible definition in its central teaching.  More precisely, it seems to contain a definition of a ‘secondary object’ of the magisterium, that is, something which may not be directly divinely revealed, but which can be taught infallibly insofar as it has a necessary connection with divine revelation.  But according to the ‘Doctrinal Commentary on the Professio Fidei’ produced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1998, anyone who denies a secondary object of the magisterium which has thus been taught infallibly, is no longer in full communion with the Catholic Church.  Crean and Fimister, however, not only do not deny the central teaching of Dignitatis humanae; they take pains to explain what this teaching means, and how it is compatible with what Dignitatis humanae calls elsewhere “the duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ”.  In accusing Crean and Fimister of upholding a position which would deprive them of communion with the Catholic Church, the editors of Commonweal have fallen into an error which they need to retract, lest they be liable to prosecution under canon 220 of the Code of Canon Law, which guarantees the right of the faithful to their good name.

Another serious, not to say libellous, misrepresentation in Commonweal’s book review is its claim that the authors are “driven more by nostalgia for the ancien régime than loyalty either to theological authorities or the Church’s magisterium”.  The phrase ancien régime, used without qualification, refers to those royal houses that lost their pre-eminence as a result of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, especially the house of Bourbon.  The reviewer offers no evidence for his claim that the authors of Integralism are motivated even partly, let alone principally, by affection for these royal dynasties, an affection which in fact is not particularly common among Englishmen.  The reason why no evidence is offered is that there is none to offer: nothing in their manual suggests that its authors believe that the return of these royal houses is a necessary or natural prelude to the building of Christendom.  The reviewer is writing at random.

Connected to this error is his claim that the authors’ ideal is hereditary monarchy.  In fact, they examine the arguments for and against hereditary monarchy, without coming down on either side, concluding rather to the desirability of a variety of forms of polity.  The reviewer has perhaps misunderstood their statement that it seems desirable to include some element of hereditary power within a polity: but this need not mean hereditary monarchy, as the example of the House of Lords in Great Britain shows and, as they point out, citizenship is hereditary in almost all polities. They quote at length Leo XIII’s praise of the U.S. Constitution as a “well-ordered republic”. Equally astray is his claim that Crean and Fimister are followers of the 17th century author, Robert Filmer, for whom patriarchal monarchy was the only lawful form of government; they expressly state that Filmer’s account would apply only to unfallen man.

The reviewer errs, again, in claiming that Crean and Fimister recommend that women not have a right to vote except when they are at the head of a household.  They say, on the contrary, that it is fitting that all citizens enjoy a basic equality of suffrage, and women are explicitly included in this.  They go on to say that nothing prevents certain citizens from enjoying further titles to suffrage, such as education, military service or the headship of a family.  Integralism rejects not women’s suffrage but the dogmatic insistence on the principle ‘one person one vote’.  Likewise, there is nothing in the book to suggest that women should not occupy public office, whether legislative, judicial or executive.  So much for the reviewer’s claim that women are “written out of its narrative”.

He is also incorrect to claim that Integralism holds that all non-Catholics in a restored Christendom must be denied voting rights.  It states, rather that the higher public offices would be restricted to Catholics, while at the same time allowing for representatives of non-Catholic bodies, whose task would be to protect the rights and interests of such bodies, including the right of monotheists to freedom of worship within the due limits laid down by Dignitatis humanae.  Such representatives could be chosen by those whom they represent.

Still under the general heading of misrepresentations we may include the reviewer’s statement that the book has an “odd libertarian streak”.  He offers no examples of libertarian doctrines to be found in the book.  It defines and dismisses libertarianism in a footnote, condemns usury and upholds the living wage.

We may now turn to those criticisms which are not due simply to misrepresentations.  Some are classic examples of the suppressio veri and suggestio falsi.  Thus, Commonweal’s reviewer quotes the authors’ statement that slavery can be a “valid legal relationship”, something which anyone who believes in the divine origin of the Hebrew scriptures must accept, omitting to mention that the term ‘slavery’ in their analysis extends to most forms of paid employment and without quoting their further statement that it is wise for other forms of slavery to be forbidden in modern conditions, given the immense scope which they afford for abuse. Nor does he mention that they describe slavery as “the most extreme of all evils” and declare chattel slavery (what most mean by the term) null and void. He also paraphrases the authors, crudely enough, as saying that women “must offer sex” to their husbands whenever requested, offensively insinuating thereby that a passing assertion of the fact that both spouses owe each other the marriage debt (an uncontroversial repetition of the doctrine of St Paul) is some sort of license for marital rape. The reviewer can offer his apologies to the Apostle to the Gentiles when he meets him.

Next, the reviewer finds fault with the book’s sub-title, ‘A manual of political philosophy’.  Writing a ‘manual’ is, he warns, “an attempt to channel authority” – which apparently means laying claim to an authority to which one is not entitled.  Worse, it is “a subtle power play”, implying that one’s statements may not be questioned.  However, nemesis is in store for our two authors: they fall unsuspecting into a “deep irony”, since manuals are “a thoroughly modern notion”.  Things were done quite differently in the Middle Ages, you see; St Thomas Aquinas would have had no truck with manuals, since “in his greatest works” he avoided “a timeless, completed system”; he was interested in “genuinely responding to objections and frankly grappling with conflicting authorities”.  Not for him the “distinctly modern anxiety” about disagreements among Catholic authors from which Crean and Fimister suffer.

What a pother.  A manual is a book written in a concise style about a well-defined subject where the clarity and logical development of ideas are particularly aimed at.  As such, it is an obvious pedagogical device for every age.  The Summa theologiae is a 13th century manual of theology, albeit immeasurably superior to those of the 19th and 20th centuries, useful as these also are.  In the patristic period we may mention St John Damascene’s Exposition of the Orthodox Faith and St Augustine’s Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Charity as examples of the same genre: ‘enchiridion’ is simply the Greek for ‘manual’, since both words mean hand-book.  Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias is a manual of logic.  And so on.  Writing a manual on political philosophy yields no ‘irony’, whether deep or shallow.

In accusing the authors of Integralism of attempting, unlike St Thomas Aquinas, to write a ‘timeless, completed system’, the Commonweal reviewer is again writing at random, and, so to speak, thinking in clichés.  No one but a megalomaniac could suppose himself to have said the last word on any subject; but anyone who attempts to write philosophy or theology seeks to express timeless truths.  What is the Summa theologiae if not a vast ocean of such truths?

The authors are accused of ignoring “the messiness of Catholic tradition”.  Yet they mention many influential Catholic writers who have upheld positions with which they disagree, from Marsilius of Padua to Henry de Lubac, from William Barclay to Luigi Taparelli.   They note disagreements between important Catholic authorities, for example Suarez and Vitoria on the justification for an offensive war.  Even in the case of a doctor of the Church to whom they attribute a high authority, St Robert Bellarmine, they note that his account of the people as the subject of civil power was importantly qualified by Cardinal Ottaviani, and they consider that the 20th century cardinal hit the target more precisely than his 16th century predecessor.  The authors understand, with the angelic doctor, that in philosophy it takes time to reach the truth: the reviewer appears to confuse this proposition with the claim that there are no timeless truths to reach.

Integralism quotes from and harmonises a large number of fathers, saints and doctors of the Church, and many weighty magisterial teachings: for example, among others, St Gregory Nazianzen, St John Chrysostom, St Celestine I, St Leo I, St Gelasius I, St Augustine, St Gregory I, St John Damascene, St Gregory VII, St Peter Damian, St Bernard of Clairvaux, St Thomas Becket, St Thomas Aquinas, St Bonaventure, St Thomas More, St Robert Bellarmine, St Francis de Sales, Unam sanctam, Trent’s Decree on Baptism, Quanta cura, Libertas, Immortale Dei, Quas Primas, and Dignitatis humanae.  The reviewer nevertheless informs his readers that “the integralists’ problem is not too much tradition, but not enough – that they are depriving their followers of the richness and depth of Catholic political thought”.  Very good: we may now reasonably expect him to tell us about some of the riches and depths that Crean and Fimister overlooked, and then either to explain how these riches and depths complement the teachings which the authors have expounded, or, if the riches and depths are not compatible with these, why the teachings which Crean and Fimister overlooked should be given preference.  But he does nothing of the kind.  He simply tells us that Joseph Ratzinger once said that the teaching of Dignitatis humanae is in harmony with the patristic period – as if the authors had not said the same thing themselves, and explained why in great detail!

The reviewer is in fact ill at ease with the tradition of the fathers and doctors of the Church.  Referring to Crean and Fimister’s reference to the two swords in Luke 22 as standing for temporal and spiritual power, he accuses them of “exegetical perversities”, of twisting and abusing Scripture, and of serving the libido dominandi.  Strong words: but he omits to tell the reader what he must know at least from reading Integralism, namely, that this exegesis of the two swords is part of the patrimony of the Church, taught by many saints and doctors, and defined by Boniface VIII.  It is not Crean and Fimister whom he should be accusing of abusing Holy Scripture and serving the lust for power; it is St Peter Damian or St Bernard.  Let him do so if he dares.  Again, he would like to claim St Augustine for himself, but he will not find this easy when he reflects that the City of God gives as a model Christian ruler, Theodosius I, who made continuation in the right faith concerning the Blessed Trinity a requirement of Roman citizenship.

Commonweal’s reviewer objects not so much to Crean and Fimister as to Christendom itself.  For, despite the rhetorical dust kicked up by phrases such as “the messiness of Catholic tradition”, “debates that were precisely that: debates”, “the dialectical nature of tradition”, what he is opposing is the constitutional order that obtained from the time of Theodosius in the 4th century to the French Revolution.  In this constitutional order, the temporal community was a community of the baptised, and temporal rulers understood that their highest duty and honour was to assist the spiritual power in bringing souls to heaven by laws which would foster sacramental life and the observance of the law of God while restraining the heresies by which all supernatural life is destroyed.  This was Christendom.  In addition to its citations from the saints and the magisterium, Integralism provides various further justifications of such an arrangement, including the need of sanctifying grace so that a society of fallen men may reach even its natural end; the rights of God and of Christ; the subordination of powers as flowing from the subordination of ends; and the desire to make it less hard for human beings to be saved.

The reviewer ignores these arguments, as he ignores the citations from the saints and the magisterium.  Instead, he provides, or rather gestures towards, a counter-argument drawn from Holy Scripture.  Integralists, that is, people who think that Christendom is a good thing, “forget that his [Christ’s] Lordship is manifest in service, and that his victory is accomplished in the powerless of the Cross.”  They need to have their “imaginations […] remolded by Christ’s crucified body”, since otherwise they “disfigure his ecclesial body”. This appears to mean that just as our Lord suffered death for our salvation, so Christian rulers, whether spiritual or temporal, ought to allow His Church to be attacked by evil forces and not to use any temporal power to repel them.

One could point out in reply, as St Thomas pointed out in reply to the suggestion that Jewish children be baptised against their parents’ wishes, that this is not how the Christian rulers whom the Church venerates ever behaved, and that this answer should be enough for a Catholic.   One might also point out that Blessed Pius IX infallibly condemned the opinion that rulers have no general duty to restrain violators of the Catholic religion, except as public order may require.  But we may also answer the argument on its own terms.  Our Saviour knew by His prophetic knowledge that it was the Father’s will that He should die for the world’s salvation on a certain day, at a certain time and place, and in a certain manner.  Until His hour arrived, Christ preached the word, and He made use of supernatural power to restrain those who sought to harm or silence Him (Lk. 4:30; Jn. 8:59).  Christian rulers do not generally have prophetic knowledge, and hence they cannot know that God in His wisdom requires them to imitate Christ’s ‘weakness’ on the Cross unless circumstances show them that providence has so decreed – as when Blessed Charles of Austria went his way into exile.  Unless such circumstances arise, therefore, they do well to imitate their Lord by having the gospel preached, and restraining by the power that God has given them those who would silence or corrupt the word.

 




NO ABIDING CITY – THE CHALLENGE OF ST AUGUSTINE

AmbroseTheodosius

Dr Alan Fimister

The following paper was given on 17 May 2019 at the Rome Life Forum

On the City of God Against the Pagans was written in response to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. It is hard to grasp the scale of the catastrophe represented by this event. A century earlier Constantine the Great saw the vision in the sky of a cross of light that led to his conversion to Christianity.[1] Eusebius Bishop of Caesarea applied to the new Christian Emperor the words of the prophet Daniel “the saints of the Most High shall inherit the kingdom”.[2] He considered this their literal sense i.e. that Christians would inherit the Roman Empire. The sovereignty of Constantine and his successors would be different in kind, Eusebius insisted, from that of his predecessors: “For how should he whose soul is impressed with a thousand absurd images of false deities, be able to exhibit a counterpart of the true and heavenly sovereignty?”[3] But for Constantine the conversion of the Emperor was not the repudiation but the climax of Roman history. The emperor himself perceived a prophecy of the birth of Christ in the writings of Virgil – Rome’s greatest poet – transferring, by implication, the ecstatic hope invested by the pagans of the first century in the person and line of Augustus, the first emperor, to the true Son of God and universal ruler, Christ.[4]

The history of Rome and its universal claims harmonised perfectly – so it seemed – with the triumph of Christ and His Church.

The two last bastions of ancient paganism were the Roman Senate and the Academy of Athens. The latter would endure for another century after Augustine’s time but the crucial fight for the soul of the Senate came four years before his conversion in 382 when the Altar of the goddess Victory was removed from the Senate House. Shortly after this trial of strength between the new religion and the pagan aristocracy the last ruler of the undivided Empire Theodosius (who formally adopted Catholicism as the religion of the empire in 380) extinguished the vestal fire, hearth of the city. The dying of this flame had long been thought to portend disaster. The vestal priestesses were also the guardians of the Palladium traditionally brought by Aeneas himself from Troy. Constantine had already removed this totemic object from Rome some sixty years earlier and taken it to Constantinople. The morning of the One True God had dawned upon the Roman Empire and from their last refuges the shadows of superstition were driven and exposed.

The remote causes of Rome’s fall from greatness are rooted deep in military and political developments stretching back many centuries. Even before Theodosius’s campaign against idolatry the empire had barely survived a mass armed migration of Goths across the Danube in 376. Order had never entirely been restored, nor, in fact, would it ever be. As Christopher Dawson observed “the storm was only beginning. It was to last, not for decades, but for generations, until the very memory of peace was gone. It was no ordinary political catastrophe, but ‘a day of the Lord’ such as the Hebrew prophets describe, a judgement of the nations in which a whole civilisation and social order which had failed to justify their existence were rooted up and thrown into the fire.”[5] The fatal blow would be a natural disaster. On 31 December 406 the other great European frontier of the Empire, the Rhine, froze solid and Vandals, Alans and Suebi swarmed across. It was a blow from which the people of the ancient world would never recover. Centuries of anarchy stretched before them.

Civilisation itself would in time be raised upon new foundations and, in large part, these would be the foundations to which Augustine pointed in the City of God but first he must turn the sword of blame from the Church for the temporal ruin which engulfed his flock.

The actual words of the pagan reproaches have not survived but we can well imagine what they said. Immortal Rome had flourished for more than a thousand years tending the altars of her gods. Even in her darkest hours the capitol itself had never fallen. Now eighty years after the Palladium was removed, fewer than thirty after the altar of victory was destroyed and a mere twelve years from the extinction of the Vestal fire the greatest city on earth had been put to the sword. Already the pagans charged that the virtues admired by Christians were inimical to the qualities that sustained the civic culture of antiquity. Now the consequences of that conflict and the vanity of the Judean superstition were plain for all to see.

How would the bishop of Hippo in North Africa respond to these charges? Celebrated convert from Paganism, baptised by St Ambrose himself the man who secured the removal of the Altar of Victory, Augustine had turned from a career as a statesman to the cloister and then (under protest) the cathedra. He was precisely the sort of person whose talents had been wasted by this new Christian age and might have prevented the fall of Rome.

Augustine’s response came in the form of the twenty-two books of the City of God. His defence of the Church against her critics was so profound and radical that it defined the Christian vision of history and society in the Latin West for a thousand years. Augustine completely rejected the priorities and assumptions of his pagan critics. He put their ideals on trial and cast them aside. As Das Kapital was to the Soviet Union so was the City of God to Mediaeval Christendom with dramatically different results. Charlemagne considered it his favourite book and St Thomas More lectured on it to the Carthusians of London (with whom he would later give his life for Christ) while he discerned his vocation as young man. At the beginning and the end of the ages of Faith Augustine was there guiding the thoughts and actions of the Church’s children.

About ten years ago a public debate was held in England between some Catholics and some opponents of the Church. The Catholics were generally not considered to have had the best of it (to put it mildly). The event triggered some trauma. An organisation was even founded to ensure that in any similar contest the Catholics would hold their own. What no one seemed to notice was the erroneous nature of the proposition the Catholic speakers were defending: that The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. This is the error into which too many of the faithful had fallen in the century of their triumph from 310 to 410. It is the assumption the pagans thought had been refuted by the sack of Rome. It is the presupposition Augustine ignored and rejected in the City of God.

There are two senses of “the world” in the New Testament. There is the sense used in John 3:16: “God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting.” In this sense the world is good. God loves it and has saved it. Then there is the sense of the world used in John 17:9: “I pray for them. I pray not for the world, but for them whom thou hast given me: because they are thine.” In this sense the world is not good. Not at all. The Catholic Church is either the only force for good in the world or she is the world’s implacable enemy. She is never a force for good in this world. As Bl. John Henry Newman put it:

“Is not the world in itself evil? Is it an accident, is it an occasion, is it but an excess, or a crisis, or a complication of circumstances, which constitutes its sinfulness? or, rather, is it not one of our three great spiritual enemies, at all times, and under all circumstances and all changes, ungodly, unbelieving, seducing, and anti-christian? Surely we must grant it to be so. Why else in Baptism do we vow to wage war against it? Why else does Scripture speak of it in the terms which we know so well, if we will but attend to them? St James says, that ‘the friendship of the world is enmity with God,’ (James 4:4) so that ‘whosoever will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.’ And St Paul speaks of ‘walking according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience’; (Eph. 2:2) and exhorts us not to be ‘conformed to this world’, but to be ‘transformed by the renewing of our mind’; (Rom. 12:2) and he says that Christ ‘gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world.’ (Gal. 1:4) In like manner St John says, ‘Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.’ (1 John 2:15) Let us be quite sure, then, that that confederacy of evil which Scripture calls the world, that conspiracy against Almighty God of which Satan is the secret instigator, is something wider, and more subtle, and more ordinary, than mere cruelty, or craft, or profligacy; it is that very world in which we are; it is not a certain body or party of men, but it is human society itself. This it is which is our greatest enemy.”[6]

This is a fundamental insight of the City of God. Christ’s Church is first and foremost the Church Triumphant in Heaven with which we are associated through baptism. The faithful of the Church Militant here below have no abiding City. Happiness cannot be found in this life. Those who seek it here below share in the rebellion of Lucifer who imagined he could make himself like the Most High (Is. 14:14). There is no common project to which the Catholic Church might contribute. No neutral space in which the brethren of Christ and the slaves of the evil one might labour in common. No end sought by humanity as a whole in this fallen state. There is indeed a natural unity to man but all who sin put themselves at enmity with this unity and all sin. We are reincorporated into it in so far as we are redeemed and the minority who accept and seek to live by the grace of redemption may form the true human city but insofar as they do they also put themselves at odds with the rest, with the vast bulk of mankind.

First of all Augustine refutes the pagans’ arguments. If the Roman gods would have preserved the city why did they not preserve Troy? The Palladium was only in Rome in the first place because it had to be rescued from Troy and taken to Italy by Aeneus. Virgil himself even helpfully refers to the Trojan’s “vanquished gods”. What use are deities who need to be guarded by their own worshipers? The claim that the Roman dominions would never decrease was refuted long ago in 117 when Hadrian abandoned many of the conquests of Trajan.

What is the temporal happiness for which the pagans claim they impetrate their pantheon, Augustine asks? According to respectable authors it is the life of virtue but the pagan gods showed precious little interest in this. The myths of the gods imbedded in the images and rites of pagan worship are a catalogue of crimes and abominations. If the Romans of the early Republic were virtuous it was despite and not because of their “religion”. Even this was no true virtue but custom animated by pride or a thirst for glory and honour that is: human praise. But Christ is as good as His word. Three times in the Sermon on the Mount He declares of those who simulate virtue for human respect: “Amen I say to you, they have received their reward.” Accordingly, the ancient Romans receive human glory, wide dominion, and the wonder of the ages. But such glory is transitory and as the splendid vices of the Romans faded so did the conquests dry up and the qualified reality of their commonwealth dissipated. Even their own authors treat the Republic as a vanished age by the time of the Incarnation. The pagan philosophers purport to seek happiness in the next life by the worship of their gods but the fables they defend expose these beings for the noxious demons they are while the philosophy itself purged of these fables would lead an honest man to the Church not the heathen temple.

In fact, the republican nostalgists are too generous. Truth be told the republic didn’t perish in the vices of the first century BC – it never existed. Taking the unimpeachable Roman authority Marcus Tullius Cicero, Augustine defines the people of a republic as “a multitude united in association by a community of interest and a common sense of right (or ius)”. But there can be no ius without iustitia no right without righteousness. Unless it is animated by the perpetual resolve to render unto each that which is his due there can be no republic and to whom is more due than God the creator and sustainer and perfecter of all things? By refusing to worship the one true God in the manner He has appointed the Romans evacuated their city of justice. But there is only one way of approaching the Living One: through the Cross – the one acceptable sacrifice foreshadowed by Abel and made present daily on the Catholic altar. And so, Augustine concludes: “there is no justice save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ”. As the first of all deceivers rebelled against God by claiming a right to the godhead; so his followers, in denying the due of the Almighty, usurp the right to all other things. As the Catholic Church is constituted by Christ’s sacrifice so the rebellion of Satan stands behind every alliance of men and angels separate from her. The acceptable worship of Abel manifested the Heavenly City and the rejected offering of Cain the earthly.

“Jerusalem received beginning through Abel, Babylon through Cain”.[7]

“[T]his is the characteristic of the earthly city, that it worships God or gods who may aid it in reigning victoriously and peacefully on earth not through love of doing good, but through lust of rule. The good use the world that they may enjoy God: the wicked, on the contrary, that they may enjoy the world would fain use God — those of them, at least, who have attained to the belief that He is and takes an interest in human affairs.”[8]

“Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride: ‘What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor.’”[9]

One of the great instruments in clouding Augustine’s doctrine from later ages is the modern concept of “the state”. Augustine has no place for “the state” in his vision. There is, in the first place, the Republic or City which Cicero correctly defined but which nowhere exists outside the Catholic Church. Secondly there are the multitude of brigandages the earthly confederacies that have no true right to exist but prey upon mankind. Finally, there is the grand confederacy of all those implicated in the rebellion against God. It is in this sense that there are two cities, two multitudes united in association by a common agreement on the object of their love. “Two loves formed two cities: the love of self, reaching even to contempt of God, an earthly city; and the love of God, reaching to contempt of self, a heavenly one.”[10]

Newman breathes the true doctrine of the great African when he considers the true nature of the so-called state:

“Earthly kingdoms are founded, not in justice, but in injustice. They are created by the sword, by robbery, cruelty, perjury, craft, and fraud. There never was a kingdom, except Christ’s, which was not conceived and born, nurtured and educated, in sin. There never was a state but was committed to acts and maxims which it is its crime to maintain, and its ruin to abandon. What monarchy is there but began in invasion or usurpation? What revolution has been effected without self-will, violence, or hypocrisy? What popular government but is blown about by every wind, as if it had no conscience and no responsibilities? What dominion of the few but is selfish and unscrupulous? Where is military strength without the passion for war? Where is trade without the love of filthy lucre, which is the root of all evil?”[11]

The idea of a neutral city has no place in Augustine’s analysis nor should it in ours. It is a mirage – worse than that – a lie designed to win us away from our true loyalty to the city which is above.

Where then does the temporal polity that submits to Christ’s kingship fall in Augustine’s taxonomy? There seems no place for it.

A few years before the calamity of 410 Augustine became involved in another much more local conflict between Christian and pagan in the city of Calama near to his own see of Hippo. The local pagans were outraged by a recent Imperial law forbidding idolatrous festivals. The pagans celebrated their festival anyway, rioted, killed a number of Christians, destroyed the cathedral and drove the Christians out of the City. A local pagan magistrate, Nectarius, appealed to Augustine to dissuade the authorities from severe reprisals. As it happened Augustine was willing to try to prevent the use of lethal force or torture (of which he disapproved) by the authorities but he would not seek a general clemency that might encourage future outrages of this kind, nor plead on behalf of the property of the offending pagans. More fundamentally Augustine rejects Nectarius’s argument (taken from Cicero) that “there is no limit either in measure or in time to the claims which their country has upon the care and service of right-hearted men”. For Augustine there is no value to the service of any temporal city unless and until it is incorporated into the heavenly one. Or rather, the only true service one can do the temporal city outside the Church is that which furthers this incorporation. Nectarius, imagining that nature has concrete value apart from the question of true worship, falsely supposes Augustine and he could share some perspective on the good for his city.

“These things I have said, [Augustine corrects him] because of your having written that the nearer you come to the end of life, the greater is your desire to leave your country in a safe and flourishing condition. Away with all these vanities and follies, and let men be converted to the true worship of God, and to chaste and pious manners: then will you see your country flourishing, not in the vain opinion of fools, but in the sound judgment of the wise; when your fatherland here on earth shall have become a portion of that Fatherland into which we are born not by the flesh, but by faith, and in which all the holy and faithful servants of God shall bloom in the eternal summer, when their labours in the winter of time are done.”[12]

This is the logic from which the institutions of Christendom would grow. The concept of “Church and State” with which we are so familiar in the modern age had no place in the Augustinian centuries. As Pope Boniface VIII defined in 1302 in the “Church and in its power are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal.” There is no salvation for the temporal community other than, as Augustine puts it, “a portion of that Fatherland into which we are born not by the flesh, but by faith”. This is why mediaeval kings and emperors were deemed deposed by the ban of excommunication. Outside the Church they were mere brigands once again. But there is another side to this truth. Just as there is no state, no neutral polity for which Christian and pagan can toil together, so too the concept of the Church which identifies her with the clergy is a distortion that obscures her true nature and the role of the lay faithful. As the last Council observed, “the effort to infuse a Christian spirit into the mentality, customs, laws, and structures of the community in which one lives, is so much the duty and responsibility of the laity that it can never be performed properly by others.”[13] But that community, once it has been so transformed, is not external to the Church but merely a temporal province of Christ’s kingdom on earth. Newman again:

“…it is only in proportion as things that be are brought into this kingdom, and made subservient to it; it is only as kings and princes, nobles and rulers, men of business and men of letters, the craftsman, and the trader, and the labourer, humble themselves to Christ’s Church, and (in the language of the prophet Isaiah) ‘bow down to her with their faces toward the earth, and lick up the dust of her feet’, that the world becomes living and spiritual, and a fit object of love and a resting-place to the Christian.”[14]

If man’s end in this world were merely proportionate to his nature then the aptitudes and qualities that fit a man to be a statesman would be virtue simply speaking and the very fact that one man exercised civil authority over another would establish a strong presumption that he was fit to do so and exceeded his subjects in goodness. But the gift of God far exceeds the goods of nature and since the fall there has been a tension between the pursuit of temporal and spiritual goods. The temporal polity is not the visible manifestation of the damned city as the Church is of the elect but it forever tends in this direction. As Pope Gelasius I explained:

“Christ, mindful of human frailty, regulated with an excellent disposition what pertained to the salvation of his people. Thus he distinguished between the offices of both powers according to their own proper activities and separate dignities, wanting his people to be saved by healthful humility and not carried away again by human pride, so that Christian emperors would need priests for attaining eternal life, and priests would avail themselves of imperial regulations in the conduct of temporal affairs.”[15]

In this order of providence the aptitudes necessary for the government of temporal affairs are skills not virtues. It is no more impossible for a man to be a good statesman and a bad man as it is for him to be a good chemist and a bad man. Only in the heavenly city do rank and virtue coincide. In fact, it is worse than that. The temporal commonwealth is precisely the community constituted by the end proportionate to man’s nature and Satan’s rebellion consisted precisely in the claim that the absolutely final end is proportionate to the nature of every intellectual creature, that created persons are owed beatitude by God, and should not have to receive it as a gift on God’s terms.[16]For all those united by the love of self to the point of contempt for God the very existence of the Church is an affront to the dignity of man, of the intellectual creature. The temporal commonwealth is the object of their hopes and aspirations or their worship indeed. As the Catechism explains:

“Every institution is inspired, at least implicitly, by a vision of man and his destiny, from which it derives the point of reference for its judgment, its hierarchy of values, its line of conduct. Most societies have formed their institutions in the recognition of a certain preeminence of man over things. Only the divinely revealed religion has clearly recognised man’s origin and destiny in God, the Creator and Redeemer. The Church invites political authorities to measure their judgments and decisions against this inspired truth about God and man: societies not recognising this vision or rejecting it in the name of their independence from God are brought to seek their criteria and goal in themselves or to borrow them from some ideology. Since they do not admit that one can defend an objective criterion of good and evil, they arrogate to themselves an explicit or implicit totalitarian power over man and his destiny, as history shows.”[17]

Contingent factors undoubtedly played a decisive role in the rise of the hereditary principle and the concept of representative democracy in mediaeval Christendom but they both have a fitting place there. For a healthy and natural (or rather supernatural) suspicion must always attend those drawn to temporal statesmanship. It is a worthy and honourable task but, as with the episcopate, just because a man who desires the office of a statesman, desires a noble task does not mean the one who desires it or the desire itself is always or even often noble. It was natural that Christian man during the Augustinian centuries should, while desiring competence in the ministers of temporal power, have placed checks upon these men from those who either did not seek or did not hold such power.

The City of God is the Catholic Church.[18] Many among the baptised (all those in mortal sin) are not citizens of that city but no one who is wholly outside her pale belongs to it. Many who lack a living faith will one day enter her gates and some who possess such faith will depart from her before they die. But the Church is a city built upon a hilltop that cannot be hidden. There are not many ways to heaven. As the Doctor of Grace warned Nectarius:

“[y]ou said that all religions by diverse roads and pathways aspire to that one dwelling-place, I fear lest, perchance, while supposing that the way in which you are now found tends there, you should be somewhat reluctant to embrace the way which alone leads men to heaven. Observing, however, more carefully the word which you used, I think that it is not presumptuous for me to expound its meaning somewhat differently; for you did not say that all religions by diverse roads and pathways reach heaven, or reveal, or find, or enter, or secure that blessed land, but by saying in a phrase deliberately weighed and chosen that all religions aspire to it, you have indicated, not the fruition, but the desire of heaven as common to all religions. You have in these words neither shut out the one religion which is true, nor admitted other religions which are false; for certainly the way which brings us to the goal aspires thitherward, but not every way which aspires thitherward brings us to the place wherein all who are brought there are unquestionably blessed. Now we all wish, that is, we aspire, to be blessed; but we cannot all achieve what we wish, that is, we do not all obtain what we aspire to. That man, therefore, obtains heaven who walks in the way which not only aspires thitherward, but actually brings him there, separating himself from others who keep to the ways which aspire heavenward without finally reaching heaven. For there would be no wandering if men were content to aspire to nothing, or if the truth which men aspire to were obtained … Christ has said, I am the way, [John 14:6] it is in Him that mercy and truth are to be sought: if we seek these in any other way, we must go astray, following a path which aspires to the true goal, but does not lead men there.”[19]

If there is so stark a gulf between the one and only human community – God’s City – how can we give any loyalty to the latrocinium in which we are born especially in an age when scarcely a temporal polity on earth submits to the Kingship of Christ? Did not St Paul say in the days of Nero “the powers that be are ordained of God”? Nero was no Christian how then could he command obedience as St Paul assures us he could. A useful analogy can be found here, I believe, with the authority of parents. Failure to baptise one’s children, though a grave fault in parents, does not (because a failure to meet a positive rather than a negative precept) take away obedience still less the loyalty and love owed by children to those who begot them and licences a stranger to baptise an infant only in the imminent danger of death. So long as our temporal homeland does not require of us any violation of natural or divine law (even while it permits such violations to others) we owe it our obedience. But our estimation of all that true loyalty and love demand of us in its regard cannot but diverge from that of its rulers so long as they remain in the service of the enemy. There will be some overlap, as Our Lord Himself observes: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”[20] but the fundamental motivations and intentions remain utterly opposed. If we forget this we do our God, our temporal homeland and ourselves no good service. Indeed, we depart entirely from the service of God. Permit me to close with another, shocking, observation by Bl. John Henry Newman. Shocking especially for those seduced by the siren voices who insist that the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.

“Nature is one with nature, grace with grace; the world then witnesses against you by being good friends with you; you could not have got on with the world so well, without surrendering something which was precious and sacred. The world likes you, all but your professed creed; distinguishes you from your creed in its judgment of you, and would fain separate you from it in fact. Men say: ‘These persons are better than their Church; we have not a word to say for their Church; but Catholics are not what they were, they are very much like other men now. Their Creed certainly is bigoted and cruel, but what would you have of them? You cannot expect them to confess this; let them change quietly, no one changes in public,—be satisfied that they are changed. They are as fond of the world as we are; they take up political objects as warmly; they like their own way just as well; they do not like strictness a whit better; they hate spiritual thraldom, and they are half ashamed of the Pope and his Councils. They hardly believe any miracles now, and are annoyed when their own brethren confess that there are such; they never speak of purgatory; they are sore about images; they avoid the subject of Indulgences; and they will not commit themselves to the doctrine of exclusive salvation. The Catholic doctrines are now mere badges of party. Catholics think for themselves and judge for themselves, just as we do; they are kept in their Church by a point of honour, and a reluctance at seeming to abandon a fallen cause.’ Such is the judgment of the world, and you, my brethren, are shocked to hear it;—but may it not be, that the world knows more about you than you know about yourselves? ‘If ye had been of the world,’ says Christ, ‘the world would love its own; but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.’ So speaks Christ of His Apostles. How run His words when applied to you? ‘If ye be of the world, the world will love its own; therefore ye are of the world, and I have not chosen you out of the world, because the world doth love you.’ Do not complain of the world’s imputing to you more than is true; those who live as the world lives give countenance to those who think them of the world, and seem to form but one party with them. In proportion as you put off the yoke of Christ, so does the world by a sort of instinct recognise you, and think well of you accordingly. Its highest compliment is to tell you that you disbelieve. O my brethren, there is an eternal enmity between the world and the Church. The Church declares by the mouth of an Apostle” ‘Whoso will be a friend of the world, becomes an enemy of God;’ and the world retorts, and calls the Church apostate, sorceress, Beelzebub, and Antichrist. She is the image and the mother of the predestinate, and, if you would be found among her children when you die, you must have part in her reproach while you live.”[21]


Endnotes:

[1] Probably in 310. The impression is given by Lactantius and Eusebius that the vision of the cross occurred soon before the dream of Christ that Constantine had the night before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in October 312 but they never actually say this. On the other hand, we have a pagan account of what seems to be the cross vision (seen by the army as well as Constantine) shortly after Constantine’s final conflict with his father-in-law Maximian in 310. R.A.B. Mynors (trans.), XII Pangyrici Latini (Oxford: OUP, 1964) 201-202.

[2] Eusebius of Caesarea, Oration in Praise of Constantine, 3.2. in (E.C. Richardson trans.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 1 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890). PG 20.

[3] Eusebius, Oration, 5.3.

[4] Constantine I, Oration to the Assembly of the Saints, 20 in (E.C. Richardson trans.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 1 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890). PG 20.

[5] M.C. D’Arcy et al., A Monument to Saint Augustine (London: Sheed & Ward, 1930) 37-38.

[6] John Henry Newman, Sermons on Subjects of the Day (Longmans, Green & Co.: London, 1902) 79-80.

[7] St AugustineExposition on Psalm 65, 2 in (J.E. Tweed trans.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 8 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1888).

[8] St AugustineOn the City of God, 15.7 in (M. Dods trans.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 2 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887).

[9] St AugustineOn the City of God, 4.4 in (M. Dods trans.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 2 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887).

[10] “fecerunt civitates duas amores duo: terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei: caelestem vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui” De civitate Dei, 14, 28 (PL 41, 436). See: Leo XIII, Humanum genus (Rome, 1884) no. 1.

[11] John Henry Newman, Sermons on Subjects of the Day (Longmans, Green & Co.: London, 1902) 242.

[12] St AugustineLetter 91, 6.in J.G. Cunningham (trans.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 1 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887).

[13] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Decree on The Apostolate of The Laity Apostolicam Actuositatem (Rome, 1965) no. 13.

[14] John Henry Newman, Sermons on Subjects of the Day (Longmans, Green & Co.: London, 1902) 106.

[15] St Gelasius I, Tractate IV in B. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300 (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1988) 15. Even our contemporaries dimly sense this need for a non-political higher and universal tribunal capable of striking down temporal laws and executive measures when these diverge from the moral law as witnessed by their futile enthusiasm for judicial supremacy and “human rights” tribunals.

[16] See: Pius X, Pascendi (Rome, 1907) no. 37 and Pius XII, Humani generis (Rome, 1950) no. 26.

[17] St John Paul II, Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997) no. 2244.

[18] De civitate Dei, 13, 16.

[19] St AugustineLetter 104, 4.12 in J.G. Cunningham (trans.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 1 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887).

[20] Matthew 7:11 (ESV).

[21] John Henry Newman, Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (Longmans, Green & Co.: London, 1906) 165-167.


Integralism and the Infallibility of Quanta cura:

Pope-Pius-IX

 

A Reply to Lawrence King and Robert T. Miller

By John P. Joy

In a recent article at Public Discourse, Lawrence King and Robert T. Miller offered a cordial critique of some arguments I had made here at the Dialogos Institute, in which I defended the infallibility of the condemnations of modern errors contained in the encyclical letter Quanta cura of Pope Pius IX.

The context of the question is the renewed interest in Catholic integralism that has been growing among some theologians. The question is also of special interest in light of the apparent conflict between the teaching of Quanta cura and the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious liberty. For the present, however, I will leave such larger questions aside and focus only on the doctrinal status of Quanta cura. Does it contain infallible teaching?

There are, as King and Miller agree, three conditions that have to be met in order for the pope to be “speaking ex cathedra” (i.e., infallibly) in the sense defined by Vatican I. These have to do with the subject, the object, and the act of the teaching, respectively. King and Miller grant that Quanta cura satisfies the condition regarding the subject, which is that the pope must be teaching as head of the universal Church (and not, for example, as a private person). And they grant, at least for the sake of argument, that it also satisfies the condition regarding the object, which is that it must be a matter of faith or morals (and not, for example, a matter of discipline or governance). But they deny that it fulfills the condition regarding the act itself, which is that the teaching in question must be proposed definitively, i.e. conclusively, in a way that clearly indicates the intention of the pope to put an end to all legitimate debate on the topic.

The logic of their argument appears to involve two basic premises. The first is that condemnations utilizing some of the lesser theological censures, such as ‘rash’ or ‘offensive to pious ears’, are unable to be infallibly defined. From this they conclude that any condemnation that does not specify precise theological censures for individual propositions cannot be regarded as infallible, because in such cases we cannot know whether a particular proposition was meant to be condemned as anything more than rash or offensive to pious ears, etc. Their second premise is the claim that in Quanta cura the pope does not in fact apply any precise theological censures to the condemned propositions.

I will reply to these two points in turn and then close with some remarks on two ancillary arguments with which King and Miller conclude their essay.

Infallibility and the Minor Theological Censures

From the middle ages until the middle of the twentieth century, theological censures were often used both by theologians and in magisterial documents in order to indicate precisely in what ways various propositions were theologically objectionable. The gravest censure is ‘heresy’, then ‘error’, and so forth, all the way down to minor censures such as ‘evil sounding’ or ‘offensive to pious ears’, etc. Bishop Gasser’s official explanation at Vatican I of the intended sense of the definition of papal infallibility made it clear that the infallibility of the pope extends beyond the censure of heresy (Mansi 52:1316), but he did not say whether it extends to all of the lesser theological censures. And so there is some question especially about the minor censures which do not directly address the truth or falsity of a proposition. For example, an ‘evil sounding’ proposition may express something true but in an improper way.

Now some theologians hold that these minor censures which do not involve a definite judgment of falsity should be understood merely as proscribing a proposition as somehow dangerous in the concrete circumstances of that time, while allowing for the possibility that they could be held and taught without danger at some future time. On this view, such condemnations are essentially reformable, and therefore cannot be infallible. This seems to be the view of King and Miller, as well as other weighty theologians such as Christian Pesch, Adolphe Tanquerey, John Henry Newman, Francis A. Sullivan, and Brian W. Harrison. Tanquerey, for example, as King says in his excellent dissertation, “considers it a common and true opinion that the censures ‘proximate to heresy,’ ‘erroneous in faith,’ and ‘false’ can be issued infallibly, but argues that ‘temerarious,’ ‘offensive to pious ears,’ and ‘improbable’ cannot be, because these notes ‘do not seem to define a doctrine’” (pp. 85-86).

Many other eminent theologians, however, including St. Alphonsus Ligouri, Johann Franzelin, Joseph Kleutgen, Matthias Scheeben, Louis Billot, and Charles Journet, hold that even though such censures might not involve a definite judgment of the falsity of the doctrine, there is still an infallible judgment at least as to the objectionable quality specified by the censure. On this view, a proposition condemned, for example, as ‘offensive to pious ears’ is infallibly condemned, not necessarily as false, but precisely as offensive to pious ears.

To me at least, this latter position seems more in agreement with the solemn and definitive mode of expression typically used by the supreme pontiffs in condemnations of this kind. It strains credulity to say that Pope Clement XI, for example, was intending to speak only provisionally or tentatively—and not definitively and irrevocably—when he says in Unigenitus (1713):

“By this our perpetually valid (perpetuo valitura) Constitution, we declare, condemn, and reject each and every one of the propositions listed above as respectively false, captious, evil-sounding, offensive to pious ears, scandalous, pernicious, rash, injurious to the Church and her practice, insulting not only to the Church but also to the secular powers, seditious, impious, blasphemous, suspected of heresy and smacking of the same heresy, as well as favoring heretics and heresies and also schisms, erroneous, proximate to heresy, many times condemned, and finally heretical; clearly renewing many heresies and most especially those which are contained in the infamous propositions of Jansen, and indeed taken in that sense in which these have been condemned.”

Moreover, as Scheeben points out:

“The Council of Embrun, which was ratified ‘plenissime’ [most fully] by Benedict XIV [sic], says about the Bull Unigenitus: ‘The Constitution Unigenitus is a dogmatic, definitive, and irrevocable judgment of that Church about which it was said by the mouth of the Lord: the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Therefore if anyone does not agree heart and mind with this same Constitution, or does not give it true and sincere obedience, let him be considered among those who have made shipwreck of their faith’” (p. 369).

Indeed, in the Bull Pastoralis officii (1718), Pope Clement XI passed sentence of excommunication on those who would not accept Unigenitus, which would seem rather extreme if he had intended this constitution merely as a non-definitive exercise of his magisterium. Since, therefore, the case built by King and Miller against Quanta cura tells equally against Unigenitus, it seems to me that Quanta cura stands on firm ground.

No doubt there is much more that could and should be said about how to interpret all the various theological censures, but with respect to the question of infallibility, I would suggest that we ought to be asking more simply and directly whether a doctrine is being proposed as ‘to be believed as divinely revealed’ or as ‘to be held definitively’. These are the ‘notes’ specified by Vatican I and Vatican II as the criteria for infallible teaching. Moreover, these two notes are (relatively) easily understood and generally known; whereas the complex history of the terminology of theological censures (of which there are many, and many of whose precise meanings have been understood in different ways by different theologians), is familiar only to theologians. And as King and Miller themselves point out: “Any theory that implies that only professional scholars can figure out what has been taught infallibly has to be wrong.” Therefore, when a proposition is condemned in absolute terms as ‘to be rejected and condemned’, even without further specification, I submit that this should be understood as proposing the contradictory proposition as ‘definitively to be held’. For ‘to reject’ is the opposite of ‘to hold’ and to reject a doctrine ‘absolutely’ is the opposite of holding it ‘definitively’.

Theological Censures Used in Quanta cura

We come now to the second premise of the argument, which is the claim that Quanta cura does not specify any precise theological censures. But in fact it does. Although one has to read the whole document—and not only the final formula of condemnation—in order to see this. And this is most evident in precisely that proposition which is at the heart of the present debate about the theological note of integralism. For the condemned proposition which states (D 1689): “That the best condition of civil society is one in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require” is condemned specifically as being “against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers” (contra sacrarum Litterarum Ecclesiæ sanctorumque Patrum doctrinam). That is no minor theological censure. In fact, it is hard to see how it could equate to anything less than a censure of heresy. The integralist doctrine expressed in this condemnation is therefore securely established as being at least definitive Catholic doctrine (de fide tenenda), if not even Catholic dogma (de fide credenda).

Another one of the condemned propositions is this (D 1698): “That one can, without sin and with no loss of Catholic profession, withhold assent and obedience to those judgments and decrees of the Apostolic See whose object is declared to relate to the general good of the Church and its rights and discipline, provided it does not touch dogmas of faith or morals.” This proposition is condemned specifically as being “opposed to the Catholic dogma of the full power given from God by Christ our Lord Himself to the Roman Pontiff of feeding, ruling and guiding the Universal Church” (adversetur catholico dogmati plenae potestatis Romano Pontifici). Once again, it is very hard to see how this can equate to anything other than a censure of heresy.

Another proposition states (D 1690): “That liberty of conscience and of worship is the proper right of every man, and should be proclaimed and asserted by law in every correctly established society; and that the right to all manner of liberty rests in the citizens, not to be restrained by either ecclesiastical or civil authority; and that by this right they can manifest openly and declare publicly their own concepts, whatever they be, by voice, by print, or in any other way.” This is condemned as “erroneous” and “maximally destructive to the Catholic Church and to the salvation of souls” (erroneam opinionem Catholicae Ecclesiae, animarumque saluti maxime exitialem). That doesn’t sound like an opinion that is merely ‘rash’ or ‘offensive to pious ears’. In fact, ‘erroneous’ is specifically mentioned by Bishop Gasser as one of the censures falling within the scope of papal infallibility (Mansi 52:1316).

Finally, in addition to the particular censures applied to some of the individual propositions, Pope Pius IX expressly describes all the propositions condemned in this encyclical as (D 1688): “false and perverse opinions” (falsae ac perversae opiniones). The term ‘false’ is especially important here because falsehood is absolutely and unambiguously opposed to truth. King and Miller sum up their argument by saying that Pius IX “could have used traditional language to definitively pronounce on the truth of these propositions, and yet chose not to do so.” But the plain fact of the matter is that by declaring them false, he did pronounce on their truth (in the negative); and he did so in a definitive way, by commanding all Catholics, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, to hold them as wholly and entirely (omnino) rejected, proscribed, and condemned.

Therefore, even if the minor theological censures cannot be defined infallibly; and even if papal condemnations were required to utilize specific theological censures in order to be infallible; nevertheless, Quanta cura would still meet the criteria for infallible ex cathedra teaching.

St. John Paul II and the Authority of the Magisterium

King and Miller close their essay with two further arguments which they say they regard as “conclusive” against the infallibility of Quanta cura. The first is based on their claim that Pope St. John Paul II “expressly rejected integralism” in an address to the European Parliament (1988) and implied such a rejection in his encyclical Centesimus annus (1991) by equating the right to religious freedom proclaimed by the Second Vatican Council with that found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This, they say, would make the pope a material heretic (if the integralist thesis is a dogma), or at least materially in error about something proximate to heresy (if the integralist thesis is definitive Catholic doctrine), and what is worse it would mean that he officially “taught error as Catholic doctrine.”

Now I for one would not want to rashly accuse the saintly pontiff of any such thing, and so I would want to make a much more thorough study of his teaching on this subject than I have space for here before coming to such a conclusion, but it cannot simply be ruled out a priori that any pope could officially teach error when he is not speaking ex cathedra. Indeed, that is why we call such teaching ‘non-definitive’ or ‘non-infallible’. It seems to me quite ironic that King and Miller describe me as advocating a “maximalist view of infallibility” while at the same time apparently regarding it as unthinkable that Pope John Paul II could have taught error as Catholic doctrine in a speech to the European Parliament or implied something erroneous in an encyclical letter. But in any case, the very same problem faces King and Miller with respect to Pope Pius IX. For if any of the propositions condemned in Quanta cura are actually true, then that blessed pontiff would have been guilty of officially teaching error as Catholic doctrine when he described them all as false.

The final argument put forward by King and Miller consists in the claim that defending the infallibility of Quanta cura (as I do) undermines the authority of the magisterium, whereas holding that it teaches error (as Miller does) or at least thinking that it might (as King does) better safeguards the authority of the magisterium. Such a paradoxical claim only makes sense in light of their prior claim that there is a real contradiction between the teaching of Pope Pius IX (and other pre-Vatican II popes) and that of Vatican II (and post-conciliar popes). This claim necessarily implies that at least some magisterial teaching is in error. But if we are to judge between competing claims based on which view best safeguards the authority of the magisterium, then Thomas Pink’s position has the best claim, for he argues (convincingly, as I think), that there is no real contradiction on this point between Vatican II and prior magisterial teaching.

In any case, however, this argument simply begs the question with regard to the infallibility of Quanta cura. For if Quanta cura is infallible, then defending it even against some hypothetically contradictory teaching of the non-definitive magisterium would not be undermining the magisterium of the Church at all, but actually safeguarding it against the most dangerous kind of threat. Whereas, if Quanta cura is not infallible—indeed, only if it has lesser authority than some hypothetically contradictory non-definitive teaching—only then would its defense be undermining of the magisterium. But since the infallibility of Quanta cura is precisely the point under dispute, its fallibility cannot be presupposed in the premise of an argument without begging the question.