In this chapter, Peter Kwasniewski looks at the liturgical emphasis made by the Jesuits and the Benedictines. It developed in the early twentieth century that the Benedictines placed a heavy emphasis on the centrality of the liturgy in the spiritual growth and theology of the Church's life. The Jesuits, on the other hand, placed more of an emphasis on the intellectual growth with the liturgy being merely just a tool useful for spiritual growth. In the last section, I talked about this unfortunate side effect of scholasticism. The Benedictines insisted on the primacy of the liturgy in the life of the Church while the Jesuits insisted on a re-envisioning of the liturgy to a mode of private devotion. These two came into fusion at the Vatican II Council "as if new Jesuit wine had been poured into old Benedictine wineskins" (Noble Beauty, 118). It is in this chapter that Kwasniewski also seems to depart from any mask of sympathy he may hold toward Vatican II.
The Benedictines certainly hold a more fundamentally correct view, however, like the Jesuits, they also abandoned the liturgy of the ancient rite. They favored the concept of the private character of the Novus Ordo. Some people may think in reading this that I attack the Novus Ordo too much but when fully considered, there is a very limited sense in which the Novus Ordo can accurately be deemed a Catholic Mass. Certainly, if emphasis is placed on reverence and these formats are not made optional, it may be able to be deemed a Catholic Mass and a vernacular translation of the Old Mass, but if these are left optional, the Novus Ordo fails to merit anything of Catholic value. The centrality of the liturgy in Catholic life though is not optional. Lex credendi lex orandi! is the old dogma and the old dogma will remain. Liturgy is not distinct from our theology and prayer is not distinct from our belief. This disconnect between the two brought upon by the Jesuit strain of theology in the Church's life was a blunder. How could the two have been so blatantly disconnected and the liturgy allowed to become objectified like this?
There is a desire among proponents of the Novus Ordo to retrace back to "antiquity" and claim the tradition in antiquity once again. But this leads them to a selective mode of antiquarianism. They want their cake and eat it too. Kwasniewski notes how the great liturgical theologian, Dom Prosper Guéranger saw in these heretical and schismatic movements always a burning desire to retrace their own claims to antiquity. (124) Of course, there was no validity in it and what was always neglected was the organic nature of certain developments and growths. St. Vincent of Lérins comments much on how doctrine appropriately develops. But what we often see instead of a love for antiquity is a rejection and a repudiation of orthodoxy that leads to a selection of what we want to believe about antiquity and what we do not want to believe about antiquity. How many Novus Ordo proponents view the mandate for women to wear headcoverings as effective? How many Novus Ordo proponents would wash their hands before receiving the Eucharist? How many Novus Ordo proponents would actually go back to practicing baptisms by full immersion with the catechumen in the nude? The fact of the matter is not many of them.
Was Protestantism not started by a man who desired to bring Catholicism all the way back to the Scriptural era? Yes! We see that antiquarianism does not actually have roots in Catholicism but rather has its roots in the spirit of Martin Luther. The arch-heretic desired to find what the original Christians taught and found himself inside his Bible. Not coming to the conclusions even of the Bible, Martin Luther sought that Christians root themselves in the authority of Scripture alone. This of course led to a problem soon as more Protestant denominations began to spring up which Luther himself never intended but it was too late for Luther. The damage to the Western Christian tradition was already done, there was no way to end it. Eventually, Luther's doctrine found proponents in the Anabaptists who took it to the most literal level of all of the Protestant Christians at the time. They believed that all men could accurately understand the Scriptures and could effectively be their own authoritative pastors. But it was the antiquarian approach of Luther's that still retains dominance among Protestantism and liberal Christianity today. Even the ones claiming the most progressive standing are backwards and behind.
And here, Kwasniewski notes that the liturgy does undergo organic development in terms of its pruning. Like a tree when it grows in your yard needs its branches clipped on a regular basis. The garden needs to be weeded. The liturgy is growing like a tree. The Church has planted the seed of its faith in the liturgy and the necessary actions are to ascertain it grows properly by pruning the plant, making certain weeds are not growing, keeping the plant centered. If this does not occur, the plant will not grow properly. The garden will not flourish well. Overgrowth will occur. This pruning of the plant is not to show that there is an artificiality in the plant or even an artificial growth in the liturgy, but rather it shows that the liturgy is guided by the Church throughout the years, it undergoes no mutations turning it into a new plant like the Novus Ordo, and it shows that the Church has a spiritual garden in its liturgy. The liturgy is the life of the Church, it is the spiritual garden of the Church, and it is the prayer of the Church. The Church is all about the liturgy, and its theology is in the liturgy. Many proponents of the Novus Ordo deny this and they subsequently anathematize the Church in the process.
Kwasniewski states, "we retain the Roman liturgical tradition out of humility and not out of pride" (133) which could not be better well put. Too often, the Traditionalist Catholics are accused of acting in a spirit of pride by the false Novus Ordo Catholics. That they ought to accept the new liturgical changes, the private devotion in the "Mass" and the mutations done to tradition or they are not acting in obedience. But the Church is more than just obedience to a particular Pope at a given time. If we were to play that game, we could pit Popes against each other. The Church, instead, is the whole of the liturgical tradition and the liturgical garden that it has been planted in. No one can be acting in a spirit of pride by giving up their own selves in the liturgy as the Traditionalists who attend the ancient liturgies of the East and West do. Who can be acting in a spirit of pride are the ones who attend the liturgies because it's their preference, it's their way to connect with God, it's their private devotion. And these people are typically found in the Novus Ordo, not with the Tridentines.
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