A Wound Which Speaks
The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals: Petitions to Save the Ancient Mass from 1966 to 2007 Edited by Joseph Shaw: Arouca Press (2023)
I am very honoured to have a guest post today from John Fitzgerald who writes the newsletter Secret Fire.
This book tells the story of a series of petitions sent to Rome between 1966 and 2007 to preserve the ancient Latin liturgy. Who were the signatories? Why did they sign? Why were so many artists, such as Vladimir Ashkenazy and W.H. Auden, involved? Why were non-Catholics, like Iris Murdoch and Agatha Christie, so heavily represented? Why could they see such value in the Church's time-honoured rites when the Pope and his prelates could not?
The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals engages with these questions in an impeccably researched and beautifully presented manner. Joseph Shaw, the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society, has performed a significant historical service here in editing and compiling numerous first-hand testimonies. The penetrating essays (several written by Shaw himself) exploring the wider spiritual and cultural ferment surrounding the reforms are a huge and bitingly relevant bonus.
The reductionist mindset which powered the changes never fully went away despite the greater openness to tradition shown by John Paul II and particularly Benedict XVI. That mentality is back in power today, and we see the same marginalisation of the sacred as we did half a century ago. The Mass, we are told, must be accessible and easily understood, with 'active participation' the leading metric by which good liturgy is measured. We have to stand, sit and kneel at appropriate moments and verbally respond en masse when prompted. The priest faces the people, transferring the emphasis from the vertical dimension – the transcendent God in the Tabernacle – to the horizontal, i.e. ourselves. The supernatural is minimised and scant space afforded to silent prayer and contemplation. It is a human-sized Mass for a human-sized age, reflecting and in turn reinforcing modernity's inherent disbelief in anything or anyone outside its materialist paradigm.
This shallow, condescending strategy might have been partially excusable given the cultural hubbub of the 1960s. But to double down on it in the 2020s betrays a tone deafness to the temper of our times and a betrayal of the Church's mission to sanctify and rejuvenate the world in Christ. We no longer live in a bright, shiny, post-World War II set-up. On the contrary, a grand dissolution is unfolding all around us. The frame of reference established by modernity has lost its power to motivate and inspire. It is failing on the level of its own premises and expectations. Modernity has never been able to provide the spiritual sustenance that came so naturally to the Ages of Faith. But this lack of spiritual heft was masked for decades by rising living standards and a perceived release – both individual and collective – from restrictive tradition.
Prosperity and freedom walk hand in hand, therefore. Until they don't. And this is where we are. Dissatisfaction with the current order, whether consciously expressed or not, is metastasizing everywhere. What the psychologist John Vervaeke calls the 'meaning crisis' is exploding into an existential emergency. What we need, what we long for and are actually made for, deep down in the innermost core of our being, no longer has visible, tangible representation. There is no outlet, no symbolic connection, no golden ladder linking Earth to Heaven. 'Europe is haunted by the shadow of the Emperor,' wrote Valentin Tomberg in Meditations on the Tarot. 'One senses his absence just as vividly as in former times one sensed his presence. Because the emptiness of the wound speaks, that which we miss knows how to make sense of it.'
The philosopher Sebastian Morello is one of the few Catholic intellectuals who instinctively understands this. In 2023 he published a trilogy of ground-breaking essays in The European Conservative – 'Can Hermetic Magic Restore the Church?'. What we are witnessing in the West he warns us:
'... is the frustration of natural religion, unfulfilled by supernatural religion, haemorrhaging within the physicalist paradigm of modernity. The spirit of modern Western man is like a faulty pressure cooker that's going to explode, and every attempt to fix the problem pushes him further into the false and malignant solutions of individualism, statism, transhumanism, and all the deceitful promises of the technological age that drive an ever-greater wedge between our condition and any reconciliation with God's creation – and ultimately of meeting with him.'
The once unquestionable axioms of post-Enlightenment rationality no longer hold water. But a new frame of reference has yet to emerge. We are still beholden – mentally and imaginatively – to the conceptual apparatus set up by modernity. There is no release valve for our natural religious impulses. So we flail around in a vain quest for significance, grasping at floating detritus – extreme ideologies, pseudo-spirituality, immersion in technology, etc.
But there is opportunity here as well as danger. The Perennialist metaphysician René Guénon long ago predicted the crumbling of modernity's empiricist edifice. In The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (1945) he spoke of 'fissures in the Great Wall' – cracks in the scientific, philosophical superstructure we have built around us to keep both Heaven and Hell at bay. The traffic flows both ways, as it were. So despite the widespread sense of anomie and decay, there is a greater chance for religiously informed conceptions of reality gaining a hearing today than in the heyday of modernity – around the time of Vatican II, for example.
The problem for Catholics is that the institutional Church seems poorly placed to recognise and embrace the growing numbers who feel the absence of what and who is holy – namely, the Lord – and long to touch and see and have their lives transfigured by Him. It appears to me that Orthodoxy is making a better fist at connecting and engaging with these outcasts from modernity. Look at Jonathan Pageau's Symbolic World podcast, for instance. Or the Substack sites of two recent English Orthodox converts – the novelist Paul Kingsnorth and the mythologist Martin Shaw. These are two deep and serious seekers of the Real – the type of high calibre artist who might have signed a petition in former times to save the Latin Mass.
There is a real energy and buzz at the moment about what Pageau, Kingsnorth, Shaw and others are doing in and around the Orthosphere. Right now, it has to be said, there is no comparable sparkle surrounding Catholicism. There are individual Catholics, such as Morello, who perceive what is at stake, but this tends not to be reflected at the level of the parish. We are often steered away in church from the live and dangerous coal of a hands-on encounter with the living God. We are ushered instead towards a bland, soft-focus, fuzzy expression of faith – 'dialogue', 'listening', 'accompanying', 'welcoming' – all the buzzwords, all the platitudes. But these are the catchphrases of secular modernity, a padded cell devoid of height and depth, the spiritual vacuity of which is now becoming shockingly clear to many.
Will the Catholic Church be there for these exiles or in any way relevant to them? Would it make any difference to potential Catholic converts à la Kingsnorth and Shaw if the Old Mass was not just preserved but fully restored? It is useful to note here that the Tridentine Mass is not a silver bullet in and of itself. It can, at times, be said too quickly and sometimes comes across as somewhat cold and clinical. Conversely, the Novus Ordo is often celebrated with tremendous prayerfulness and dignity. Yet it is the presence of the Old Mass that guarantees the quality of the New. Pope Benedict knew this when he liberalised restrictions on the Old Rite in 2007. Without the Vetus Ordo running alongside the Novus Ordo, the newer Mass is liable to slide into banality and chatter and lose sight of the sacred altogether. As is Western Christendom as a whole, for the Catholic Mass in its truest, deepest form props that up as well. Its absence, to paraphrase Tomberg, is indeed a wound which speaks.
The ancient liturgy of the Church, in its silence, depth and mystery, speaks directly to the desperate needs of our desperate times. It should be front and centre in the life of every parish and it is an absolute crime that it is not. But it will not be this way forever. Every human need has a corresponding satisfaction that will shine forth in due course. That is the way God works. It might also require just the lightest of touches. In the words of the poet Cristina Campo, the driving force behind the 1966 petition:
‘Many conversions have been due to preaching, but the spark can be ignited by a single, perfect liturgical gesture; there are those who have been converted by seeing two monks bowing deeply together, first to the altar, then to each other, then retreating into the depth of the cloister stall.’
The Emperor will return. The wound will be healed. The bells will ring again.
Great work! I had no idea Agatha Christie was involved! What was her contribution or motivation like?
As far as the Orthodox vs Catholic question goes, I think the people attracted by the Orthodox Church would surely turn back if the Roman Catholic Church got its act together.
If the reasons for choosing Orthodoxy were about it really having sounder theology or better tradition, I think people like Cardinal Newman would never have become Catholics. Why would a highly educated Englishman have ever converted to Catholicism if Orthodoxy is a better alternative, and comes without the baggage and opprobrium that Catholics suffered from in England?