Is Pope Francis 'restoring tradition' in the Mandatum?

Taking the Blessed Sacrament to the Altar of Repose
on Maundy Thursday. 

Reposted from January 2016.
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Austen Ivereigh claims that in opening the Mandatum to women, Pope Francis is 'restoring an older Tradition'. Claiming the change has 'infuritated traditionalists' (sorry, Austen, I'm not infuriated), he explains:

Yet Francis has been restoring what once was tradition. The custom in the seventeenth century, for example, was for bishops to wash, dry and kiss the feet of 13 poor people after having dressed them and fed them. Nor is there any obligation for the foot-washing to be part of the Mass of the Lord’s Supper.

This is a bit thin as an explanation, so let me fill it in a bit. Because Ivereigh has a point.

The Mandatum: let's not be hard on Pope Francis

I see from my stats a small spike of interest in this post: someone must have linked to it somewhere. So I thought I'd repost it. I'll repost a follow-up post on the same subject tomorrow. They both first appeared in January 2016.

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It is tempting to see the decree allowing women's feet to be washed on Maundy Thursday as an indication of an acceleration of liturgical decay underway with Pope Francis, following his breaking of the rule up to now. However, what has happened is no different from what happened under his predecessors.

Bl Pope Paul VI gave in to the pressure of endemic abuse when he allowed the reception of Communion in the hand. But there are other examples too from his troubled reign. One of the most peculiar documents of the Papal Magisterium is his Sacrificium laudis, an Apostolic Letter directed to religious superiors, begging, cajoling, and ordering them to preserve Latin in the Office. You won't find this document in the Acta Apostolicis Sedis, and only in Italian on the Vatican website. The speed of its transformation into waste-paper gives new meaning to the phrase 'dead on arrival'. (You'll find an English translation on the LMS website.)

Statement on allowing the washing of the feet of women at the OF mandatum

The Stripping of the Altars on Maundy Thursday, with the FSSP in Reading.
Until 1955, the Mandatum took place after this, final ceremony of the Mass of Maundy Thursday.

I've been asked for a statement on the decree of the Congregation for Divine Worship allowing the washing of the feet of women as well as men in the 'mandatum' of Maundy Thursday.

I feel very sorry for priests who have been trying to obey liturgical law on this issue, as on other issues in the Ordinary Form. They may well feel betrayed. Equally, I can see that from the Roman perspective, the rule has become meaningless - and did so even before the Holy Father broke it himself. This has happened again and again since Vatican II. The traditions of the Roman liturgy, as preserved in the Ordinary Form, are being stripped away one by one.

An important aspect, which is generally neglected is the question of the etiquette of men washing the feet of women. This would have been considered inappropriate only a few decades ago in the West, and such a view persists in many cultures. In many developing countries there is serious conflict between people trying to be as progressive as possible on such matters, and others reasserting traditional sexual constraints and gender roles. This decree is not going to help priests in those places.

Here's the statement.

Position Paper on Holy Week: Part II

I had intended to publish this some time ago; Part I is here. The Conclave, and the Holy Week itself, intervened, however, so it has gone up today on Rorate Caeli: go there to read it.


This isn't a bad time to publish a discussion of the Holy Week ceremonies, when they are still fresh in our minds. While the pre-1955 ceremonies have their peculiarities, the 1955 Reform has its difficulties also. One of these is the way it relates to the later reforms of the liturgy.

The first paper, on the motivation of the 1955 reform, placed it in the context of the Liturgical Movement, and this is certainly part of the picture. The Liturgical Movement was itself evolving, of course, so to say the reform grew out of the movement is not to make it completely clear what was going on. But the classical attitude of the movement was one with a high degree of reverence for the liturgy, and a great interest in the history of the liturgy. The movement inspired all sorts of ambition projects to get the Faithful to take a fuller part in the liturgy, some of which we might think a little Quixotic, or even wrong-headed, some, though, we may want to carry forward today: getting everyone to have a good hand missal, to sing chant at Mass, to attend public celebrations of Vespers, and hey why not Matins on Sunday mornings? While we're about it how about getting them to say the responses, read a multi-volume commentary on the liturgy, say the whole Office at home, and heaven knows what else. But the excitement about the liturgy led to some very wrong-headed notions about reviving a past which was not only utterly unlike today in its social and educational conditions, but was also actually mythical, being based on very scanty evidence and a lot of overheated imagination.


Then, I get the impression, some people in the movement became impatient. They realised how difficult it is to get people into church for non-obligatory services. How stubbornly attached to paraliturgical devotions like Stations of the Cross when they should be going to the Good Friday Liturgy. How hard it is to teach Latin to all those children. The temptation to make things easier began to be overwhelming. Why not have things in the vernacular? Why not make the services shorter? Why not make the services easier to understand?

Why not? Because by doing those things you are taking away what there is to understand: the complex ceremonies, the mysterious prayers, the Latin. You are undermining the liturgical experience of Faithful, which is the whole object of the exercise. You are sawing off the branch you are sitting on.

It seems to me that the 1955 Holy Week reform took place at just the tipping point in the history of the movement. There is still a huge interest in the history of the liturgy, still a Quixotic desire to bring back the glories of the 6th century Roman Church, but equally a nagging feeling that things must be made simpler, abbreviated, clarified. The move from the earlier to the later attitude was facilitated by the lazy notion that the liturgy of the distant past was simple, so simplifying was also getting back to how things were. Actually, we just know less about it. Have a look at the Book of Leviticus if you want to know where the Catholic liturgy came from, and ask yourself: Is there the smallest reason to suppose that people coming from this atmosphere would have wanted a liturgy of coffee tables and bean bags?


The unique historical moment represented by the 1955 Holy Week Reform means that it occupies a paradoxical place in the history of the liturgy. On the one hand, all their quaint ideas about how the ceremonies should be done went out of the window in 1970, just 15 years later. As far as the Ordinary Form Holy Week is concerned, the 1955 reformers needn't have bothered. On the other hand, a lot of their more small-scale snipping and trimming was applied to the rest of the liturgical year in the course of the 1960s, and we can see here the beginning of the infinitely depressing stripping down of the Roman liturgy which has left us with... what we are left with. The attitude seemed to be: we can do without the Last Gospel - let's think of excuses to suppress on some occasions, then we'll get rid of it altogether. The same goes for the Preparatory Prayers (Prayers at the Foot of the Altar), duplications of texts (sung by the choir and said at the Altar by the priest), the maniple, the second Confiteor, the kissing of liturgical items, and a lot of other things. The other thing which is striking about the 1955 ceremonies is the mixture of said and sung texts, and Latin and the Vernacular, a situation very reminiscent of the Ordinary Form in this respect. Why is the Pater Noster said rather than sung on Good Friday? Why does the congregation break into the vernacular at the Easter Vigil? (Couldn't they master the response 'Abrenuntio!'?)


What we should actually do about the situation we have today is a difficult question. I don't propose we even attempt to come up with a final and definitive answer. The use and spread and development of the Extraordinary Form is led completely by pastoral considerations: it happens because priests and people want it. Let's just see what that organic process leads us to to in fifty years time. Until then, for heaven's sake let's not jettison anything of real value. You never know when we might need it.

The images from the FSSP celebration of the Solemn Afternoon Liturgy of Good Friday. Fr Matthew Goddard was celebrant, Fr Armand de Malleray deacon and the Rev. James Mawdsley subdeacon. Mass was accompanied by the Newman Consort.

Notice the lack of maniples.

Postscript

One victim of the 1955 reform was the uniqueness of Good Friday as a day when Holy Communion is not given to the people. In Behold the Pierced One (pp.97-98), Joseph Ratzinger wrote:

The ancient Church had a highly expressive practice of this kind. Since apostolic times, no doubt, the fast from the Eucharist on Good Friday was a part of the Church’s spirituality of communion. This renunciation of communion on one of the most sacred days of the Church’s year was a particularly profound way of sharing in the Lord’s Passion; it was the Bride’s mourning for the lost Bridegroom (cf. Mk 2:20). Today too, I think, fasting from the Eucharist, really taken seriously and entered into, could be most meaningful on carefully considered occasions, such as days of penance—and why not reintroduce the practice on Good Friday?

The 1955 Holy Week: a can of worms

Today I am publishing on Rorate Caeli another FIUV Position Paper. These papers have been very successful in drawing attention to the issues in the 1962 Missa, in the context of a brief but careful consideration drawing on the Magisterium and scholarship.

We have had a bit of a break in the series; the first thirteen are now available from Lulu as a short book.

You can also download them as pdfs from the FIUV website.

So today I return to the fray, as the person editing and publishing these things on behalf of the Una Voce Federation, with a real can of worms: the 1955 Reform of Holy Week. Go over the Rorate Caeli to read it. It is in fact only Part I of what will be two parts; Part II is about individual services, this one is about general issues.

It is rare to meet a Catholic attached to the Extraordinary Form who has a good word to say about the 1955 Reform. They swept away a number of much-loved aspects of Holy Week: the banging of the church door with the foot of the processional cross on Palm Sunday, the evening celebration of Tenebrae, where the candles were extinguished one by one in the deepening gloom, popular devotions such as the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday afternoon, the Seven Altars and the Easter Sepulchre. They completely changed the rite of blessing the Paschal candle, on the basis of an over-enthusiastic attempt to capture some supposed ritual of the 8th century, which they failed, in fact, to do.

For myself I recall the rather shattering effect of reading the account of Holy Week in Guéranger's great work, 'The Liturgical Year', during Holy Week a number of years ago. This is a massive, edifying, and very informative commentary on the liturgy of the whole year, and it is one of the joys of the Traditional Mass that something written by a French monk in the 19th century is still applicable to what one is experiencing, liturgically, today. But this isn't true of Holy Week: large parts of it are scarcely recognisable, and Guéranger's commentary is highly confusing, if not useless. There is a discontinuity of the the liturgical tradition.

Tenebrae in St Mary Moorfields last year, organised by the Latin Mass Society

The most popular argument in favour of the reform, apart from practicality (the reformed services are shorter, despite adding some peculiar, extraneous, bits and pieces), is that it is just illogical to have the Easter Vigil on Saturday morning, which is what used to happen. To which one might answer: what has logic got to do with it? What sort of reductionist, functionalist, attitude says that the way of celebrating the vigil adopted by the Church for perhaps eight centuries must be stopped because the service is called a 'vigil', and was in the distant past celebrated at night? The liturgy is not governed by a literal-minded analogy with the events it celebrates, or an assumption that everything which developed in the Middle Ages is necessarily bad. Once we escape from those two ideas, which once made explicit must be seen as absurd, it becomes very much an open question.

Festa Paschalia

Philip Goddard at the London Colney Priest Training Conference

A new book, available on the LMS website, on the complex history of the Holy Week rites, by Philip Goddard, a long-term friend of the LMS.


BUY IT HERE!

Here is some blurb.

Festa Paschalia (Philip J Goddard)

This book provides the first comprehensive history in English for eighty years of the origins and development of the Holy Week liturgy in the Roman Rite. Describing how the first apostles and disciples, and their immediate successors, came during the years following AD33 to celebrate an annual feast of the Resurrection, and the form which this first-century celebration took, it goes on to explain in detail how the ceremonies with which we are familiar today began in fourth-century Jerusalem. These ceremonies were then elaborated and developed during the early and late Middle Ages in Western Europe, particularly in the Frankish Kingdom, and at Rome itself, down to the tridentine reform of the sixteenth century, a reform which endured for some four hundred years with very little change.

Looking at the two significant twentieth-century reforms of the rites, that of 1955 and that of 1970, Philip J Goddard then explains the various changes which were made, the sources from which innovations were introduced, and the reasons for the introduction of those changes and innovations, as given (so far as possible) by those involved in making them.

While accessible to the ordinary reader with no particular knowledge of liturgical history, this study will be of great interest to liturgical specialists and scholars, to those in seminaries and religious orders or to clergy interested in the history of the Roman liturgy. Comprehensive notes give full references to both primary and secondary sources.