Liturgical Warfare

I’ve been following the liturgy wars with some interest since swimming the Tiber and I’m finding it difficult to formulate a position on the whole mess.

My own liturgical tastes certainly gravitate towards a more traditional Mass. While I would much rather hear the organ, Palestrina and chant than banal praise choruses, I find it hard to denounce the latter on any sort of firm theological footing. I can criticize them for being campy, overly emotional and saccharine, but I certainly don’t think they rise to the realm of heretical. The venom with which I’ve seen both sides inject this issue of liturgical purity is disturbing and seemingly genocidal. It would seem that both sides wish to win this war by means of magisterial fiat, wiping away the opposition with one firm papal proclamation. While certainly effective, this tactic would seemingly do little to heal the fractures experienced in the wake of Vatican II.

I have, however, been pleasantly surprised at the tact and pastoral care applied to this issue by Benedict XVI. With Summorum Pontificum the Pope succeeded in bringing the Tridentine Mass back from the Gulag, placing it firmly in the Novus Ordo universe as the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. I hope that Novus Ordo devotees will realize the reverence and dignity of the Tridentine Mass and that Tridentine devotees will realize that a mass need not be in Latin to be reverent, beautiful, and spiritually fulfilling (not to mention valid!). What I hope both sides discover concurrently is that there is not a liturgical war to be won, decisively, with the utter defeat of their brothers and sisters on the other side of the liturgical chasm.

In the current state of affairs, the world can ill afford to be burdened by a Church increasingly burdened largely by its own internal struggles, divisions, and fractures. I pray for the formation and training of our young priests, that the leadership they display in this generation would restore the mass as a reverent and beautiful sign of our solidarity. Mass is our window into heaven, not the window into the boisterously divided Catholic kitchen table.