Fr. Rutler vs. the Spirit of Vatican II

Few people know how to turn a phrase as well as Fr. George Rutler. Whether in skewering modernists or celebrating unsung heroes, he has cultivated and used his gift in the service of Church. Indeed, Fr. Rutler's column is one of those I have missed the most since the recent demise of Crisis magazine.

The latest issue of First Things carries a review by Fr. Rutler of Piero Marini's book, A Challenging Reform: Realizing the Visiton of the Liturgical Renewal, 1963-1975 (Liturgical Press), a book to which we devoted a post back before Christmas, "Defiant Marini kicks off his ¡Viva la revolución litúrgica! book tour" (Musings, December 14, 2007).

I have selected just the juiciest exerpts from this very meaty review in order to showcase Fr. Rutler's literary acumen, theological insight, and liturgical instincts, which, I think, you will come to enjoy if you do not already:

To young people today, Vatican II reposes in a haze with Nicaea II and Lateran II. Their guileless ignorance at least frees them from the animus of some aging liturgists who thought that the Second Vatican Countil defined a whole new anthropological stage in the history of man. The prolix optimism of many interpreters of that council has now taken on a patina -- not that of a fine bronze but more like a discoloration of a Bauhaus building.

...the author shows a genuine innocence in his assumption that readers will share his preference for theory over practice. His polemical tone will agitate those whom Marini calls "reactionaries" to think that their misgivings about the events of 1963 to 1975 were not totally hallucinatory.

... this thin, even epistemologically anorexic, book will long be of interest to ecclesiologists as they study its awkward ballet of resentments and vindications of the wort commonly found in youthful diaries that were not burned in maturity. There are no greys in the book: Champtions like Leraco, Giobbe, and Larraone were "brilliant" and "charismatic" and "progressive<' while anonymous members of the Congregation for Rites were "anchores in the past" and often "overplayed their hand."

... Marini is not a slave to the principle of noncontradiction. The Consilium was "to reflect the hopes and needs of local churches throughout the world," but two sentences later Holy Mother Church becomes something of a nanny: "In order to renew the liturgy, ti was not enought to issue new directives; it was also necessary to change the attitudes of both the clergy and the lay faithful to enable them to grasp the purpose of the reform." In case the people thought something was being done to them instead of for them, various means of social communication would be required "in preparing the faithful to welcome the reform."

... Considerable erudition was at work in those years, but too often its populism overruled the people. It was like Le Corbusier sketching a new metallic Paris. Marini complains about "a certain nostalgia for the old rites." In doing so, he contradicts Pope Benedict's distinction between rites and uses, and he also fails to explain why nostalgia for the 1560s is inferior to nostalgia for the 1960s, except for the dentistry.

The editors of Marini's A Challenging Reform explain that their aim is to "keep alive" the "vision" of the Cnsilium, but their diction is a voice in a bunker, embittered by the failure of people to be grateful. If an organism is truly healthy, it does not need a life-support system. Before he became pope, Cardinal Ratzinger said plainly: "We abandoned the organic living process of growth and development over the centuries, and replaced it, as in a manufacturing process, with a process, with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product." In consequence, the fragile construction must be pumped up by multiple Gnostic-Docetic innovations such as dancing (referred to in a presecriptive text as "pious undulations")> Hula dancers at the batification of Father Damien in 1995 hardly gave a sense of verisimilitude in Brussels. The papal flabella dn burning flax having been eliminated as the detritus of imperial Rome, it was even more anachronistic to trumpet the Great Jubilee in modern Rome with costumed men affecting familiarity with the art of blowing elephant tusks.

For all its proponents' goodness of intention, this kind of thing confuses universality with internationalism, treats the awesome as picturesque, suburbanizes the City of God, and patronizes nations and races....

Acts deracinated from the Divine risk becoming the sort of baroque theatre Louis Bouyer disdained in the operatics of an earlier century. As Ratzinger said, "It is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replacd by a kind of relgious entertainment." Cult becomes cabaret and applause usurps amen.

...The blight obliviousness of many experts to damage all around them is, nonetheless, breathtaking. At times in various lands it is like watching a venerable procession of Alcuin, Ivo of Chartres, Gueranger, Fortescue, and Jungmann and finding, at the end Inspector Clouseau.

[Rev. George W. Rutler is pastor of Church of Our Saviour in New York City and the author of
Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections.]