Evelyn Waugh on the liturgical reform: on this day, 1964

The liturgical reform ushered in by the Second Vatican Council was not a matter of replacing the 1962 Missale Romanum with the 1969 edition. Between the two there was a veritable blizzard of documents and liturgical changes, starting with Vatican II's own Sacrosanctum Concilium in 1962 and the Instruction Inter Oecumenici. The concrete changes began with the latter, which was promulgated 26th September 1964, but plenty of experiments and abuses were taking place in the meantime.

This period saw an intense debate about the liturgy in the Catholic press, and on this very day 60 years ago, a letter by the Catholic convert novelist Evelyn Waugh was published by the Catholic Herald. This letter is often quoted, but as a matter of historical interest I am publishing it in full on its anniversary.

Catholic Herald, 7^th August 1964

Questions for the 'Progressives'

SIR.— Like all editors you justly claim that you are not responsible for the opinions of your correspondents and claim credit for establishing an open "forum".

On the other hand you write of "exploding renewal" and "manifest dynamism of the Holy Spirit", thus seeming to sympathise with the Northern innovators who wish to change the outward aspect of the Church.

I think you injure your cause when week by week you publish (to me) fatuous and outrageous proposals by irresponsible people.

Father John Sheerin is neither fatuous nor outrageous but find him a little smug. If I read him correctly he is pleading for magnanimity towards defeated opponents.

The old (and young) buffers should not be reprobated. They have been imperfectly "instructed". The "progressive" should ask the "conservative with consummate courtesy" to re-examine his position.

I cannot claim consummate courtesy but may I, with round politeness, suggest that the progressives should re-examine their own? Were they perfectly instructed? Did they find the discipline of their seminaries rather irksome? Did they think they were wasting time on the Latin which they found uncongenial?

Do they want to marry and beget other little progressives? Do they, like the present Pope, think Italian literature a more enjoyable pursuit than apologetics?

The distinction between Catholicism and Romanita has already been stressed in the American journal Commonweal. Of course it is possible to have the Faith without Romanita and to have Romanita without the Faith, but as a matter of recorded history the two have kept very close. "Peter has spoken" remains the guarantee of orthodoxy.

It is surely (?), a journalistic trick to write of "the Johannine era". Pope John was a pious and attractive man. Many of the innovations, which many of us find so obnoxious, were introduced by Pius XII.

Pope John's life at Bergamo, Rome, in the Levant, at Paris and Venice was lived with very meagre association with Protestants until, in his extreme old age, he found himself visited by polite clergymen of various sects whom he greeted, as he did with the Russian atheists, with "consummate courtesy".

I do not believe he had any conception of the true character of modern Protestantism. I quote from an article in Time magazine of 10th July: "The one persuasive way of referring to Jesus today is as a 'remarkably free man'. After the Resurrection the disciples suddenly possessed some of the unique and 'contagious' freedom that Jesus had. In telling the story of Jesus of Nazareth, therefore, they told it as the story of the free man who had set them free… He who says 'Jesus is love' says that Jesus' freedom has been contagious… Van Buren concludes that Christianity will have to strip itself of its supernatural elements … just as alchemy had to abandon its mystical overtones to become the useful science of Chemistry."

These words are not those of a Californian crank but of a clergyman of the "Episcopal Church" of America, who derive what Orders they have from the Archbishop of Canterbury. I am sure that such questions were not raised on the much publicised meeting of the Archbishop and Pope John.

Father Sheerin suggests that Catholic Conservatism is the product of the defensive policy necessary in the last century against the nationalistic-masonic-secularism of the time. I would ask him to consider that the function of the Church in every age has been conservative — to transmit undiminished and uncontaminated the creed inherited from its predecessors.

Not "is this fashionable notion one that we should accept?" but "is this dogma (a subject on which we agree) the Faith as we received it?" has been the question (as far as I know) at all General Councils. I have seen no evidence that Pope Paul [sic] had anything else in mind when he summoned the present Council.

Conservatism is not a new influence in the Church. It is not the heresies of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the agnosticism of the eighteenth century, the atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that have been the foes of the Faith turning her from serene supremacy to sharp controversy.

Throughout her entire life the Church has been at active war with enemies from without and traitors from within. The war against Communism in our own age is acute but it is mild compared with those fought and often won by our predecessors.

Finally, a word about liturgy. It is natural to the Germans to make a row. The torchlit, vociferous assemblies of the Hitler Youth expressed a national passion. It is well that this should be canalised into the life of the Church. But it is essentially un-English.

We seek no "Sieg Heils". We pray in silence. "Participation" in the Mass does not mean hearing our own voices. It means God hearing our voices. Only he knows who is "participating" at Mass. I believe, to compare small things with great, that I "participate" in a work of art when I study it and love it silently. No need to shout.

Anyone who has taken part in a play knows that he can rant on the stage with his mind elsewhere. If the Germans want to be noisy, let them, But why should they disturb our devotions?

"Diversity" is deemed by the Progressives as one of their aims against the stifling Romanita. May they allow it to English Catholics.

I am now old but I was young when I was received into the Church. I was not at all attracted by the splendour of her great ceremonies — which the Protestants could well counterfeit. Of the extraneous attractions of the Church which most drew me was the spectacle of the priest and his server at low Mass, stumping up to the altar without a glance to discover how many or how few he had in his congregation; a craftsman and his apprentice; a man with a job which he alone was qualified to do.

That is the Mass I have grown to know and love. By all means let the rowdy have their "dialogues", but let us who value silence not be completely forgotten.

 

Your obedient servant,

Evelyn Waugh

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