Modernist liturgist lays out Rome's vindictive campaign against the Latin Mass
Desiderio Desideravi Colloquium: Bishop Viola's contribution to the new liturgy.
Paix Liturgique continues to report on the Desiderio Desideravi
Colloquium in Paris and in particular on the speech by Bishop Viola, Secretary
of the Dicastery for Divine Worship.
This was what the participants in the colloquium, who were locked in the
crypt of the church of Saint-Honoré d'Eylau, did not want their faithful to
know... besides.
"In our Letter 937 published on 22 May 2023, we gave an overview of
this important liturgical colloquium organised by the Service national de la
pastorale liturgique et sacramentelle (SNPLS) and held in the crypt of
Saint-Honoré d'Eylau. We report today on
the outline of the lecture - meditation, pardon - by Archbishop Viola, Secretary
of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, who had stepped in at short notice for
Cardinal Arthur Roche, who had cited health reasons for his absence from the
colloquium. Entrusting Viola with this
task was all the more natural as he was the principal author of the Apostolic
letter - in the form of a mediation.. - Desiderio desideravi, which is to be a
hymn to the Bugnini reform and a final death certificate for the earlier
liturgy. A typical closed-circuit
exercise, that is, in perfect accord with the self-celebration of an assembly
of the convinced that is the new liturgy.
Pope Francis wants ... liturgical peace.
"Pope Francis' intention is certainly not to spark a war by
interrupting a liturgical peace, which, by the way, is highly suspected."
These words of Archbishop Vittorio Viola show that the Dicastery for Divine
Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments is aware not only of the
opposition that the Motu Proprio, Traditionis custodes has provoked, but also
of the vocabulary and arguments of that opposition - "liturgical
peace" in the first place!
The Cardinal Prefect of the Dicastery, Arthur Roche, would probably have
presented a less thorough, less profound account. His Archdiocesan secretary, Vittorio Francesco
Viola, OFM, obviously had a twofold aim in his long speech (in Italian) to an
audience generally inclined towards the Reformed liturgy: he wanted to denounce
the continuing adherence to the traditional Mass and to justify theologically
that it should be forcibly replaced by the Mass that emerged from the Second
Vatican Council.
He wanted to show that this choice must be based on the application of
the Council, in the name of ecclesiology and theological principles, which,
however, remained in a certain ambiguity, as if Viola did not want to be open
about the exact points of rupture or change.
The ambiguity was facilitated by the fact that he stated that he wanted
to present a "meditation" rather than a "treatise". He already confirmed this in the introduction
to his lecture when he announced that he wanted to deal with "the
theological significance of the liturgy".
He did so, but mainly in one direction: God's love for people and what
the liturgy does for them was nicely affirmed, but the aspect of God's worship
through the liturgy that he gives us was far less present, and the sacrificial
and reconciliatory character of the Mass was, so to speak, ignored.
To this end, indeed, there is nothing better than to focus on Pope
Francis' letter Desiderio Desideravi (DD), which aims to present to all,
"the whole people of God", "in a positive and convincing way the
arguments that Traditionis custodes seeks to establish, so that it does not
remain a simple legal text".
Archbishop Viola had just rejoiced that the distinction between the
"ordinary form" and the "extraordinary form" of the
"one Roman rite" had been abolished by the return to "ritual
unity", which was "an unprecedented process in the Roman
tradition". "In fact, in the
bull Quo Primum (14 July 1570) by which the Missale Romanum was promulgated,
Saint Pius V declares that "just as in the Church of God there is only one
way of chanting, so it is supremely fitting that there should be only one rite
for celebrating the Mass". One that
is no longer the Tridentine rite...
It was a daring move. On the
unity in diversity reinforced by the work of Saint Pius V, see the article by
Abbé Gabriel Diaz Patri, "L'unicité du missel romain au regard de
l'histoire", in the latest issue of Sedes Sapientiae (no. 163, March
2023), the journal of the Fraternité Saint-Vincent Ferrier. For in Quo Primum, from the very next
paragraph, we read that no indult, privilege or apostolic confirmation can
permit a departure from the rule of using the Tridentine Missal, "unless
since the first institution approved by the Apostolic See or in virtue of
custom, the latter or the institution itself has been observed in these same
churches for at least two hundred years, in a continuous manner, for the
celebration of Masses. In this case, We do not in any way deprive these
churches of their institution or custom of celebrating Mass; but if this Missal
which We have caused to be published is more to their liking, in the opinion of
the Bishop or Prelate, or of the Chapter as a whole, We allow that, without any
obstacle whatsoever, they may celebrate Mass according to it".
As for the rest, which Archbishop Viola is certainly aware of, it
contains St Pius V's warnings about the validity "in perpetuity" of
his codification of the Mass, and his command: "that nothing be added,
subtracted or modified to Our missal, which we have just edited". Admittedly, the popes who immediately
followed Saint Pius V, and then other Popes, up to Pius XI, Pius XII and John
XXIII, made a few modifications, which are recorded in the successive typical
editions up to that of 1962, but they fully preserved the edifice handed down
by the Tridentine missal, which was brought down by the reform - or rather
revolution - of Paul VI.
All this having been passed over in silence, Quo Primum having been
redacted without any qualms, Archbishop Viola assured us: "DD wants to
ensure that the people of God feel it is a necessity, and not just an imposed
obligation, to rediscover the unity of the Roman rite in the form desired by
the Council, the highest expression of the synodality of the Church".
There is no need to point out that the liturgical reform was completed
(we dare not say "successfully") several years after the close of the
Council, but the idea will recur several times, not only in Monsignor Viola's
lecture, but throughout the symposium: in order to understand the liturgy, it
is necessary to go back and forth between Sacrosanctum Concilium, which ensured
"the rediscovery of the theological understanding of the liturgy",
and Lumen Gentium and the reformed liturgy. As for the people, it is
undoubtedly up to them to imitate Winston in the last pages of 1984: "And
they loved Big Brother".
Picking up on the idea that the "tolerance" offered by
Benedict XVI to "people who were trained in the previous liturgy (...) was
then understood as a promotion of this ritual form", and the
"rejection" of the reform and the Second Vatican Council denounced in
Francis' letter accompanying Traditionis custodes, Archbishop Viola commented:
"The often bitterly polemical tenor of reflection on the liturgical question
unfortunately confirms this assertion". And it was at this point that he
evoked the "liturgical peace", the very existence of which he denies. Yes, there is a war going on, but its
perpetrators are on the side of those who have rejected the uniqueness of the
Roman rite, we understand.
Continuing the march forward
Archbishop Viola insisted: "Desiderio Desideravi [DD] wants to resume and relaunch the path of liturgical reform which, in some respects, despite the new liturgical books, remains unfinished. It is not a question of reforming the reform, but of living it to the full. This means always asking ourselves "what our vision of the Church is” and checking "how it corresponds to what the Council teaches us in Lumen Gentium".
Desiderio Desideravi is in line with this logic, and responds, according
to Archbishop Viola, to a wish expressed by Cardinal Bergoglio in March 2005 at
the plenary assembly of the Congregation for Divine Worship, of which he was a
member: "I would like a document that is limpid and clear from an
expressive point of view, with a biblical character and liturgical texts; a
text for meditation, rather than a theological treatise; exhortative or, better
still, capable of offering motivations, rather than juridical or
rubricist."
It is fair to say that the future Pope Francis has had a head start, and
that Traditionis custodes and the texts linked to it are marked by a real
coherence. It is said that Archbishop
Viola explains: "The intention is to offer a 'different' word on the
liturgy, a beating of the wings to try to get the liturgical question out of
the quagmire of polemics that are often exploited by ideological visions of the
Church and the world, and of a superficiality that has nothing to do with the
noble simplicity of the celebratory action".
A little further on: "In almost narrative language, DD first
reminds us of what the Liturgy is from a theological point of view. The liturgy is the present day of salvation
history, the place of encounter with Christ; its subject is the Church, the
Body of Christ; it is the antidote to the spiritual worldliness fuelled by
Gnosticism and neo-Pelagianism; it cannot be reduced to aestheticism, rubricism
or superficial functionalism; it arouses genuine wonder in the face of the
paschal mystery."
That is a lot of words and a lot of indictments, which we are beginning
to get used to. But on the subject of
the liturgy as seen by Archbishop Viola, there was no mention of the
actualisation, the bloodless renewal of Christ's sacrifice.
By stating that "it is precisely on the theological understanding
of what the Liturgy is that our idea of liturgical pastoral care depends",
Monsignor Viola certainly showed the importance of the subject. But the response was centred on a single
phrase from Christ: "I have longed to eat this Passover with you before I
suffer". The result is a vision
that seems amputated, because while it is true that every Christian can find
"in this verse an infinite space for growing in the knowledge of Him, a
knowledge that will have no end", by seeing "inside the heart of
Jesus", by grasping "the possibility of looking at the Last Supper
through his eyes", the focus is on what the liturgy brings to man (and
this is nothing less than the infinite love of Christ) but without mentioning
its primary end: "the worship and homage due to the one true God", as
Pius XII affirmed in Mediator Dei.
Archbishop Viola's meditation on the Mass lacked neither grandeur nor
poetry: "Since the day of our sin, we have not been capable of a gesture
of obedience". Or again: "It
was necessary for the eternal Word to become flesh so that His eternal
obedience could heal us of our disobedience", Viola continued, marvelling
at the love of the Trinity for mankind: "To offer us a new chance to love
Him, God has done everything"... Christ's desire for this Easter "is
the desire to be able to love us in this way, as the Persons of the Holy
Trinity love each other, in the perfect altruism of the gift that each makes of
himself to others. This extreme measure of love is poured into our hearts like
a waterfall into a thimble, so that by loving us as He has loved us, our whole
life may enter into the communion of Trinitarian love". Here Archbishop Viola wiped away a tear.
But nothing in his words, or in the paragraphs that followed, said or
sought to demonstrate the superiority of the Reformed rite or the inability of
the traditional Mass to communicate and convey the reality of this love. Unless an answer is sketched out here:
"I cannot risk my prayer being the inconstant feeling of a supposed
dialogue with an image of Him, often too similar to a projection of myself, of
my own thoughts. We need an objectivity
in our encounter with him, like that of his body. It is a very serious matter, the fullness of
our life depends on it, eternal life is at stake".
In any case, if it is only in the Reformed liturgy that we can escape a
lack of objectivity in the encounter, then the old, traditional Mass must be an
obstacle to this objectivity in Viola's eyes.
But how did the saints before 1965 and 1969 manage it?
Sacrosanctum Concilium and Lumen
Gentium, a liturgical and ecclesiological reform
It was at this point that Vittorio Viola tackled the question of
"liturgical pastoral care", "capable of helping us grow in an authentic,
serious and vital participation in the Paschal Mystery": it was a question
of ensuring "formation" in the liturgy, a formation that the new rite
had certainly not been able to achieve, given the terrifying decline in faith
and the desertion of practice that accompanied its implementation.
But Viola is not interested in such a retrospective: "I will avoid
dwelling on the evaluation of the road travelled, which too often runs the risk
of being prejudiced by ideological approaches of different kinds, or even
opposed to each other".
Instead, he has a plan for the future: "The area in which we need
to relaunch solid formative action with conviction is that of the entire people
of God, that of our Sunday assemblies. In
their concreteness, not in their idealisation, our liturgical assemblies are
the first nucleus of the ecclesial community... they must be taken by the
hand... and made to enter into the paschal mystery that they celebrate so that,
from Easter to the Lord, they come to life".
This insistence - in amphigoric language - on the paschal mystery is
indeed that of the New Ordo, which claims to respond to an alleged neglect of
the Resurrection in the traditional rite, and to always match the desolation of
Golgotha with the exultant reality of the Resurrection.
The reason why the Reformed liturgy cannot be avoided is discreetly
given here by Monsignor Viola. He says:
"When we say 'liturgy', do we all mean the same reality? Without this clarification, we will end up
calling liturgical pastoral care an infinite number of attempts - more or less
successful, and normally all ineffective - to resuscitate a reality which, if
we think of it differently from what it is, cannot be resuscitated. It is a kind of therapeutic relentlessness. On the contrary, what is needed is "a
docile openness to the presence and action of the Spirit manifested in the
ritual dimension".
"The link between liturgy and ecclesiology is very close: the
celebration is par excellence an epiphany of the Church": we need
"the same understanding of what the Church is". "Sacrosanctum Concilium and Lumen
Gentium are mutually illuminating, and the liturgical reform called for by the
Council shows how closely they are linked", stated Archbishop Viola. It is clear that there is a
"before" and an "after" to ecclesiology, even if he does
not explicitly detail the differences between before and after. And yet, listening to him, this is the crux
of the matter.
Archbishop Viola then gave a long reflection on the "Word of
God", of which he said: "Let's not delude ourselves: without
appreciation (valorizzazione is the word used by the Archbishop in Italian) of
the Word, there can be no celebration".
There can be no sacrifice at Mass if the faithful are not there to hear
the Word, to see it valued? "The
pairing of Word and Sacrament is inseparable.
Without the Word, the rite becomes empty, running the risk of drifting
into magic. Without the Sacrament, the
Word remains ineffective, running the risk of drifting into gnosis." What
horrible dangers the reform of Paul VI has delivered us from!
Monsignor Viola goes on to assure us that "the Word of God has a
primacy in itself that the rituality of its celebration expresses and fulfils
well". Word of God in the sense of
readings from the Bible - Old Testament, Epistle, Gospel - while primacy
obviously belongs to Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word, so that the Offertory
and Canon of the Mass are truly the liturgy of the Word, the liturgy of the
Word.
A new liturgy, a new aesthetic
Archbishop Viola identified a "third area of pastoral
liturgy", that of "aesthetic experience" and its
"incomparable formative action", with sacred art "expressly at
the service of the celebration". For
him, "the ecclesiastical edifice is a figurative metonymy of the Church as
the People of God" (and not, as you may have noticed, as the Mystical Body
of Christ).
It is not unimportant that Monsignor Viola wanted to reflect here on
contemporary art, which was very present during the two days of the colloquium:
"Among the most worrying symptoms of impotent patronage, I believe there
is a widespread inability to engage in dialogue with contemporary art, but also
an imprudent use of it. Investing in
this dialogue, not only in a strong patronage of the truths revealed and
celebrated, but also in knowledge of and respect for the autonomy of the
language of art, is a high-level liturgical pastoral action that can bear
precious fruit".
The new liturgy does indeed correspond to a new "aesthetic",
often rejected by parishioners, as we heard during the "sacred art
workshops" that took place at various times during the colloquium: their
love of old things was readily denounced and ridiculed. That is all there is to it.
Monsignor Viola's talk ended with a brief reflection on the
"presidency" of the assembly and its possible shortcomings, but here
the role of the celebrant, acting in persona Christi, was not highlighted.
In the end, the last lines of his talk were very revealing: "This
is the aim of pastoral liturgy: to ensure that the Church becomes more and more
a communion of men and women who, having recognised Christ in the breaking of
the bread, go out into the world to tell everyone that He is alive". This is the "Church on the run". Running away from the sacrifice of Golgotha?
In fact, it is a Liturgy - and a Church - of EXCLUSION that is slowly
moving towards death...
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