Pope Francis’ July 16th motu proprio, Traditionis Custodes, reverses Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s older 2007 executive order Summorum Pontificum by restricting the Traditional Latin Mass in honor of the Novus Ordo as the “unique” expression of the Roman Rite. In general, this was a good move on Francis’ part. Benedict’s vision, for a ritually pluralistic Latin Church that would experience mutual enrichment from parallel use of the 1962 and 1969 Missals of Pope Sts. John XXIII and Paul VI, did not come true: traditionalist enclaves, overwhelmingly small, white, and based in the United States, have been drifting from Catholic orthodoxy for years into a kind of unofficial Sedevacantist mentality, and the outsized influence they have in Catholic media and hierarchical positions has meant drastic disunity in vision on the ground and in centers of ecclesial power. Logically, what Francis is after here is that by enforcing the Novus Ordo as the Latin Mass is that the trads will either get in line or get out of the way, and that liturgical unity will bring about the genuine renewal desired by the Second Vatican Council and almost constantly spoken about by Catholic hierarchs for the last sixty years.
What has been fairly pointed out, though, is that if this is what Francis wants, he is going to need to consider that the Novus Ordo itself is not prepared to function as a means of true liturgical unity in its present state. That is to say, it is difficult to imagine how Novus Ordo Catholics are going to be able to function as the heirs of a real liturgical culture in the Anglophone world, or at least in America. In its present form, it is not just the typical celebration of the 1969 Missal that is lacking, but the extreme diversity of the rubrics themselves that contribute to a sense of liturgical whiplash. The NO Mass is not a liturgy that most Catholics are able to imbibe, memorize, and join in the way that Orthodox Christians can jump into a Divine Liturgy nearly anywhere in the world or the way that Prayer Book Anglicans are able to participate in Holy Eucharist by heart. Additionally, and this is really crucial for the formation of a real liturgical culture, the Roman Divinum Officium or Liturgia Horarum does not have a consistent enough skeleton to enable seamless home use. In the Orthodox world, it is common enough to find prayer books that are printed with the changeless forms of the Hours and perhaps one or two of the changeable hymns for private use. Pray Byzantine Vespers often enough, for example, and one will eventually memorize LXX Psalms 103, 140, 141, 129, and 116 which form the backbone of the service, and memorizing the hymns and prayers that intersect with these is easy enough. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer is the gold standard of democratization of the Divine Office into a format that is accessible for laypeople and parish clerics (i.e., not monks) and that can truly sink into one’s bones through the beauty of language and daily repetition. If one looks at strong liturgical cultures beyond the Christian fold, it is clear that the same dynamic—accessibility, consistency, and repetition—is what creates strong liturgical culture. Jews praying the Siddur are, in general, walking through the same cursus of the service, with the same prayers, benedictions, and so forth, at evening (Ma’ariv), morning (Shacharit), and early afternoon (Mincha). An observant Jew need not know mountains of Talmud if she simply attends to the prayer book. In Islam, salah five times daily has shared elements in each service that both enable routine and educate pious Muslims in the fundametal tenets of Islam. The point is simple: manageable, unchanging daily, weekly, and monthly cycles of prayer are easier to absorb and adapt to than is a constantly changing set of prayers.
What, then, can be done to realize Francis’ vision for the Latin Church, in terms of the formation of the Novus Ordo into a genuine liturgical culture? Just a few suggestions:
Simplify the Mass. In theory, the text of the 1969 Missal is fairly simple and accessible. In actual practice, there is a bewildering amount of musical options for different portions of the NO Mass, such that any English-speaking Catholic is going to have a wildly different experience from parish to parish. One of the advantages of the Byzantine Liturgy is that, wherever one encounters it, there are typically a consistent set of introductory antiphons, drawn either from Scripture (in the Russian tradition) or from traditional prayers (in the Greek). I do not want to suggest that the Romans have to give up their hymns and collects, which can be quite lovely, but prescribing a more set number of them that the faithful can easily learn, memorize, and identify on the calendar would do wonders. Moreover, the Roman Rite boasts four different anaphorae. Francis should consider enjoining the Church to pray exclusively either the Roman Canon or Eucharistic Prayer IV at the Liturgy on the vast majority of Sundays in the Church’s year, perhaps permitting an alternative liturgical anaphora for special feast days, but the liturgy in use in the Latin Church should be the same everywhere for every Sunday. Oh, and at least for English-speaking Catholics, do a better translation if English is to be used, but use Latin liberally for some things as well.
Encourage Plainchant and Congregational Singing. The use of a choir or a schola at Mass can be wonderful for a congregation’s aesthetic experience of the Mass, but the truth of the matter is that a liturgy is best learned by singing it on a weekly basis. If the fundamental canon of Christianity is lex orandi, lex credendi, then the key to Christian renewal is certainly that ordinary lay Catholics, who statistically are leaving Mass in droves and do not understand or adhere to the Church’s theology about what happens at Mass, feel as though they are empowered to participate and pray at the liturgy, as was the intention of Sacrosanctum Concilium. It is inarguable that plainchant of the text of the Mass and of hymns better enables congregational participation through singing than does complex hymnography that requires musical training to be sung correctly. In the Orthodox and Anglican Churches, one still finds choirs, but they are almost always assisted by the singing of the people, even if it is something as simple as the repeated Kyrie eleison of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.
Restored Order of the Sacraments. One of the quickest ways to activate greater lay participation in the Mass is to restore the proper order of the sacraments of initiation away from their late medieval and early modern corruption in the Western Church, such that Catholics are baptized, then confirmed, then communed. Ideally, the Western Church should restore the practice of performing all three sacraments for infants at the same time, just as is still done at the Paschal Vigil for adult converts. If not, minimally, young Catholics should be trained to see admission to communion as the proper fruit of the training they undergo for confirmation: the process of initiation as it currently exists is disjointed and does not properly highlight the significance of full Christian liturgical participation in the Mass.
Simplify the Lectionary and the Calendar. The Roman Lectionary is ridiculously large: it has moving parts that change from year to year and week to week and which have no opportunity to create a real sense of continuity and rhythmic movement from week to week, month to month, and year to year for ordinary lay Catholics. Priests and bishops may enjoy the diversity of not reading the same thing with every cyclical renewal, but—this is key—liturgy and liturgical culture are not really about them: they are about the formation of the laity in the fundamental orientation toward God and the world that is Christianity through the schoolhouse of prayer. The lectionary in Orthodox Christianity does not change from year to year; the Jewish system of parshayot for Torah readings for every week of the year does not change, and as a result, an observant, attentive Jew is likely to know the whole of the Torah after years of practice. Francis should consider revising the lectionary to enable this same kind of inculcation of scriptural familiarity with the Gospels, which are the heart of scriptural recitation at Mass. He should also strongly consider revising the Roman calendar back towards fixed observances, feasts, and continual seasons through the year. For example, Epiphany or Theophany, the singular celebration of the life of Christ from the visit of the magi to, more importantly (and still as it is in the East), his baptism by John in the Jordan, is on January 6: it is not on “the Sunday between January 2 and January 8.” Francis should make good on the teased promise to change Catholic paschal calculations to conform to the Orthodox ones, despite the fact that the Julian calendar and its lunation tables are hopelessly outdated, again for the sake of broader Christian unity and shared liturgical culture. Ascension should always be forty days after Pascha, and “Ordinary Time” should be abolished in favor of counting Sundays after Pentecost.
Smells, Bells, and Wells. The Catholic Church should consider a mass project of standardization for the aesthetics of liturgical elements, including but not limited to vestments, incense, icons, statuary, and church buildings themselves. There was no single style of Church architecture in antiquity or the middle ages, and I would not want to try to impose an artificial uniformity on the Roman Church in this regard. But it is the case that contemporary Catholic Churches, especially in America, would benefit tremendously from some degree of aesthetic standardization to norms of beauty and iconographic significance. Here, again, Orthodoxy and Anglicanism can provide helpful models for comparison. Nearly any Orthodox Church one enters is going to have most of the same elements, and Churches of the same tradition are likely to have common iconography and significant structures.
Simplify the Liturgy of the Hours. Unless you know Latin, have a lot of time on your hands, and potentially have an encyclopedically photographic memory, it is impossible to remember the Hours of Prayer in a way so as to be able to really do them in the course of domestic life in the Latin Church. Francis should simplify the Liturgy of the Hours, at least for lay usage and that of local priests. Actually, I’ll do one better: the Roman Church should just adopt the Book of Common Prayer approved for the Ordinariates, Divine Worship: Daily Office as the ordinary lay and parochial cleric form of the Liturgy of the Hours. There are several advantages to doing so. First, DW: DO retains the ethos of lay empowerment that defines the BCP; second, its English is beautiful, traditional, and reverent, which is more than can be said for most English translations of Catholic worship or prayer; third, it has fixed texts for Vespers, Compline, Matins/Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, and None, meaning that these can be prayed and memorized by ordinary Catholics through repetition; and fourth, it has a fixed, monthly cycle of the Psalter and a fixed annual cycle of readings, meaning that lay Catholics making use of it will also come to learn the Psalter and to have wider exposure to Scripture than they receive at Mass (yet another reason the Lectionary need not try to cover the whole Bible at public worship). If the point of this whole “Catholic” thing is that different rites enrich one another and make contributions to the Catholicity, then the Anglican gift of the BCP to the whole Christian world can surely be acknowledged by the Roman Church officializing lay use of DW: DO.
Pray the Hours at Church and at Home. Piggy-backing here: Roman Churches should have a regular schedule of Hours prayed at Church. This also might not be so cumbersome if the Latin Church made a habit of emphasizing weekly, Sunday Mass over the celebration of Daily Mass, but I get that Latins like their daily Eucharist. And yet, there’s a reason that despite declining religious interest and attendance in Britain over the last half-century, Anglican Evensong remains highly regarded as one of the most significant cultural treasures of England, and why Orthodox Vespers has influenced non-Orthodox evening prayer services with hymns like the Phos Hilaron. It is because sanctifying time with prayer is a fundamental human activity that ritually constructs our psychic experience of time.
Restore Allhallowtide. Admittedly I’m making a bit of a niche request, Romans, but I promise it has a broader point. The triduum of Allhallowmas, All Hallow’s Eve/Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls Days is under-observed in the Catholic world. There, I said it. Catholics should be doing more than just going to Mass on All Saints: there should be vesperal vigils in graveyards that give way to trick-or-treating or parochial Halloween festivals; there should be ghost stories and festivities and what have you. And really, the entire Western liturgical calendar is filled with these kinds of minor observances that once animated the Catholic experience and now do not. Roland Hutton is a good resource for rediscovering some of those practices, as is Michael Martin’s blog. I’m talking Allhallowtide, I’m talking the Twelve Days of Christmas (sadly disregarded in contemporary observance), I’m talking real Lenten and Eucharistic fasting, I’m talking a Pascha to shake the ages. If you want people to care, you have to give them something to do more of the time.
Married Priests, Deaconesses, and Domestic Church. Level with me, Latins: a fair portion of why Catholic liturgical culture has fallen on hard times is in part that many of your clerics simply have no idea what it is like to be an ordinary person, married or single, living in the contemporary world. Exclusively male and almost exclusively celibate, there exist in the Catholic hierarchy relatively few people who understand what it would really mean to have the home as a “domestic Church” beyond a kind of stereotyped image of a traditionalist Catholic marriage, and even fewer who understand what it would take to make the parish feel like a home away from home for the people who come for Liturgy. I’ll simply and quietly say that such is often not the case in Orthodoxy and Anglicanism. In both cases, married priests serve to create a real atmosphere of domestic liturgy in the parish itself: Father Barsanuphius and Matushka Irene are fixtures of parish life who seek to motivate men and women to common causes within the community, related both to liturgical celebration and paraliturgical fellowship. In the Anglican world, male and female clerics are able to serve the needs of men and women, separately and together. The wives of married Catholic priests, deaconesses, and greater participation of local female monastics in local parish life would go a long way, from my experience, to the formation of the parish as a real home. There is something unique and irreplacable about moving from liturgy to a mess hall to dine with priests, their wives, leading women, and monastics of different sorts alongside the laity at Church. (Not to mention the fact that empowering women in the Catholic Church is a necessary step in fixing the abuse crisis.) Speaking of:
Restore the Agape Feast. Okay, so I don’t mean literally go back to celebrating eucharistic agape feasts (unless you’re looking to get really wild, Latins). Instead, Catholics en masse should consider adopting the model of Church that is quite common to the Orthodox and Anglican worlds, in which reception of the Eucharist is followed by a shared meal held together for several hours and catered by potluck contributions of families. This is more than a “coffee hour” or a “donut breakfast”: it is an institution of shared life that, I can testify from personal experience, binds people together by more than simply common attendance for the sacraments. If the goal is liturgical culture, people have to know one another, because culture is a communal thing. Sure, it takes up more time on Sunday: the point is to ensure that Sunday is sanctified in the minds of ordinary Christians as time for gathering with the Body of Christ, first in the larger group of the eucharistic sacrifice and the meal that, for all of human history, would logically follow any sacrifice, and only then, later in the day, in the home with family and friends. This is exactly the sort of thing that happens weekly in synagogue, binding communities of Jews together even when individuals suffer crises of faith or are lax in their practice, as a communal institution defined by liturgical and personal bonds. Latin Catholic parishes should adopt these practices as well.
Of course, I offer these thoughts as a well-meaning and, I am sure, short-sighted Easterner. I am unapologetic in thinking that much of the path forward for Catholicism towards a thriving liturgical culture is to reform itself toward the best practices of the East (the same goes, by the by, for Catholic theology). But I speak as someone who, having come out of the liturgical cultures of Anglicanism and Orthodoxy, and who operates regularly within the Jewish community, sees quite clearly what those traditions enjoy, what keeps them alive, while Catholicism entropies. Traditionis Custodes should be seen as the clarion call for the renewal of the Latin liturgy, not as the summons to something that is allegedly complete in itself.
10 Suggestions for Reforming the Novus Ordo
A question from the Orthodox side, which I know you’ve inhabited in the past: the Hours in the East are notoriously, well, Byzantine, but there have been some efforts to make them more accessible. Noteworthy here is the recently published Anthologion, put out by Saint Ignatius Press, which has reader’s services for the full daily cycle as well as variables from the Octoechos, Menaion, Tridion, etc. The Hours have never been particularly accessible to the laity, but now an Orthodox lay tradition of their private recitation seems increasingly possible.
With that said, as someone who has studied Eastern traditions in depth but who (IIRC from one of your interviews) doesn’t have a consistent practice of contemplative prayer, what would you say is the advantage for Christians of prioritizing the Hours over, say, the Jesus Prayer? Orthodox spiritual writing seems to present the latter as the summit of the spiritual life; I’m wondering whether you have a developed rationale for prioritizing discursive prayer over some form of japa yoga? One might think, from reading works like the Philokalia or writers like Theophan the Recluse, that the Jesus Prayer *is* Orthodox spirituality, such that the busy layman might be best served making that the foundation of their prayer life. Do you think there’s an imbalance in Orthodox lay practice/understanding on this point? Do you think the discipline of reciting the daily/seasonal/festal cycle of Psalms and hymns—sanctifying time—represents a legitimate path toward theosis? Perhaps it’s not an either/or, but in practice, something must give.