#laszlo dobszay

Every honest observer of the present state of Holy Church will find it difficult to gainsay the signs of confusion and “disintegration” (Card. Ratzinger) which are so often evident today. The counterpart of disintegration in theology, in discipline and in morals is the disintegration in liturgy, which perhaps is where the entire process began. Nonetheless, we delude ourselves if we imagine that what we see is simply the consequence of disobedience towards the Church’s rules. There are cases in which provisions made by Church authorities are themselves, at least in part, responsible for the situation.

To sum up: the “Tridentine” liturgy belongs to the family of the Roman liturgy. All its essential features are identical with that liturgy. In other words, it is one of the many variants of the Roman liturgy – the ‘Tridentine” liturgy is Roman liturgy! In this sense, the “Tridentine” liturgy exists not only since the 16th , but since the 8th or 9th, or in some sense since the 4th century. But the Roman liturgy is not identical with the “Tridentine” liturgy: it is more than that. Those who follow the “Tridentine” liturgy, celebrate the Roman liturgy. But the Roman liturgy also lived in other, and in certain respects perhaps more perfect, forms.   Is the confusion of terminology in contemporary discourse the outcome of neglect or lack of knowledge? Instead, I think it is a conscious and malevolent deception.   When the choice is described in terms of the dichotomy: “conciliar liturgy — ‘Tridentine’ liturgy,” an impression is created that the matter concerns the opposition of two liturgical forms which are equally “zeitbedingt” or time-bound. The logic of this mentality is that the “Tridentine” rite is the liturgy of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, which perhaps worked well for the past 300 years, but today the needs of a new age and of modern man must be met with the new Vatican II liturgy. Accordingly, he who favors the “Tridentine” liturgy over the “conciliar” one desires to perpetuate the formalities of bygone times, and thus endangers the renewal of the Church. But if, on the contrary, the “Tridentine” liturgy in its essence is nothing other than the ancient Roman liturgy itself, it cannot be written off as Renaissance or Baroque or “zeitbedingt.” And then, the truth is that the recent innovations overrode not some 300-year-old custom, but in fact broke with the entire tradition of the Roman Church insofar as it is recognizable for us.

Finally, it behooves us to recall that the Proper chants of the Mass are linked to the liturgical seasons and times, not just in a general fashion, but quite specifically, by virtue of their content. The oldest choir-books of the Roman liturgy eloquently testify that the overwhelming majority of these chants belonged to fixed days, and these assignments remained untouched up until 1968. The same texts were written in the Missals, and if they were not sung, then the priest prayed them. In doing so, the Church clearly expressed her desire that each chant stand in a fixed position, which simply means that on this day, at this liturgical position, this is the chant, and not any other...[I]n the minds, hearts and memories of faithful Catholics there gradually emerged, over a period of 1200 years or more, a network of associations between the experience of a particular liturgical day and the chants "proper" to that day. Such associations were truly "catholic," in other words universal within the Latin liturgy. All felt a part of it, anyone at will referred to it: the Sundays were named after their Introits (e.g. Laetare, Gaudete, Quasimodo); people dated their private letters by referring to the same chant; composers created music not to texts, but to the Offertory or the Introit of a given day.   For a Christian who lived in and with the liturgy of the praying Church, this order of chants coalesced with the full liturgy of the day, and it contributed to the high degree of constancy in the Mass Propers (as opposed to the frequent variations in the Divine Office). So it is by no means an accident that certain chant forms were excluded from this uniformity. In spite of the unchanging stability of Introits, Graduals, Offertories and Communions, the Alleluja and the Sequence presented a wide field of opportunity for the creative forces of various geographic regions (tropes, sacred polyphony). This universality and continuity in space and time bore rich fruit, and brought great blessings. Over and above the psychological associations, such universality nurtured a feeling of stability and promoted the reverence of which a long tradition is worthy. It radiated, and thus taught, discipline; it made palpable a kind of "impersonal anonymity" which cannot be achieved simply by concealing the authors' names.   My university students were always shocked to open Dom Hesbert's Antiphonarium Missarum Sextuplex or the 11th-century Gradual of the Roman basilica of St. Cecilia, only to find there, on the same days, the same Proper chants than the ones printed in the Liber Usualis of 1950. And without any coaching from me, their first question after the initial surprise was, "Then why should we sing different ones instead of these?"   Why, indeed...?

The liturgy was traditionally understood as the permanent priestly activity of holy Church: she conducts the highest matters of salvation before God's throne and at the same time, it is her intimate communication with her divine Bridegroom. The greatest honor for the faithful is to join this divine work (opus Dei) as a member of the Mystical Body, and while the believer strives to live his life hidden in Christ and the Church, while he thus "loses" his life, he in fact finds it,   The liturgy is not something we create but an objective reality we share in, a precious patrimony we inherit. What happens in the Mass is relatively true for all parts of the liturgy: it is not we but God Who is doing His work in it, and we ourselves become divine when we receive Holy Communion. So the reality we celebrate becomes our own. With respect to the prayers and chants, this truth is expressed by St. Benedict's classic saying: "mens concordet voci': the mind should be concordant with the voice. It is not the soul who speaks in the voice, but it is the Church and the Holy Spirit. The harmony between soul and voice comes not from expressing the soul by the voice but from adapting the soul to the sounds that the Church and the Holy Spirit put upon our lips.   The Liturgical Constitution of the Council says nothing contradictory to this traditional view. And yet, according to the post-conciliar approach it was precisely the modern man, man hic et nunc, who became the focus of interest and the norm of the liturgy. Consequently the liturgy and its chant are supposed to express the religious experience of the individuals and communities. The result is: "vox concordat menti" i.e. the voice is concordant to the state of the mind. The regrettable outcome of this approach is that the liturgy is unable to elevate and raise up heavenwards the individual and communities: they express themselves and so they remain where they are.

How can the Church ask to be accepted in her teaching if she makes her liturgical action relativistic? How can she avoid creating the impression that if the liturgy and church music can be adapted to different tastes, then also matters of faith and morals could now be submitted to the opinion of individuals or to the different social and psychological requirements of our age?

The simple fact of translation has not made the liturgy better understood. It was not the language that hindered people's understanding, but the intricate thoughts of the liturgy. The key to liturgical understanding is liturgical catechesis, which is not just a presentation of thoughts loosely related to the liturgy, but a pathway to the thoughts and ideas of the liturgy itself through fixed words, sentences, texts and signs. In this respect, too, the liturgy follows the order of Incarnation: to arrive through the visible at the invisible, through the body (here: the body of the language) to the spirit

In my opinion, one great failure of the reform was the shift of the solemnity of Epiphany and Ascension to Sunday (ad libitum). It was with good reason that the dates of these two feasts were fixed: the first was decided by a very old and universal (also ecumenical) tradition, the second by the decision and deed of the Lord himself. By being moved, they became simply the "theme" of two Sundays, and caused confusions in the calendar.    Was it not too big a concession to secularism to allow the date of two great solemnities to be set according to the position of civil holidays? Is it too much to expect from the faithful, from those "initiated in the Paschale Mysterium," from those "living in Christ," those "devoted to God," to attend Mass twice in a year after their day's work (knowing that if they are unable to do so, they are automatically exempted from this obligation anyway)? Is it right that Catholics in different countries celebrate these great festivals on different days?