On English in the Liturgy

I have for some time been work­ing on an essay that has become some­thing of an obses­sion in minu­tiæ and detail. I have been work­ing on a thor­oughly doc­u­mented and what I believe to be an osten­si­bly com­plete the­sis on the use of the Latin lan­guage in the Roman rite, both forma ordi­naria and forma extra­or­di­naria. The the­sis main­tains a spe­cial per­ti­nence with regard to the usus antiquior and employs two pri­mary argu­ments, which then delin­eate into sev­eral secondary arguments.

The first is an elu­ci­da­tion of the clas­si­cal case for its reten­tion – as expressed by Blessed Anto­nio Rosmini-​Serbati in the Delle cinque piaghe della Santa Chiesa and Romano Ame­rio in Iota Unum.

The sec­ond argu­ment that I men­tion is some­thing of a nov­elty. I do not mean that in a neg­a­tive way, but intend it to be a new expres­sion of a known truth. I do not wish to elab­o­rate fur­ther, lest I reveal too much.

Now, with that dis­posed of, allow us to tackle the topic of this entry, which as indi­cated in the title intends to pre­pare the way for the afore­men­tioned the­sis. It would be best to estab­lish some para­me­tres within which to operate.

FIRSTLY, I am a tra­di­tion­al­ist – in the loos­est sense. I can­not, how­ever, be strictly asso­ci­ated with the fringe tra­di­tion­al­ist move­ment. It might be bet­ter to asso­ciate me with the Priestly Fra­ter­nity of Saint Peter and Insti­tute of Christ the King Sov­er­eign Priest, though even such asso­ci­a­tions as these are incom­plete. Though I feel uncom­fort­able with the ‘tra­di­tion­al­ist’ label, nei­ther am I a neo-​conservative in the sense in which Fr. Chad Rip­perger, F.S.S.P. expresses it, i.e. a pro­po­nent of Ortho­dox doc­trine with­out an empha­sis on eccle­si­as­ti­cal tra­di­tion as means of express­ing those doctrines.

I am a tra­di­tion­al­ist in that I empha­sise the impor­tance and neces­sity of reëstab­lish­ing our eccle­si­as­ti­cal inher­i­tance. This means that I am a pro­po­nent of clas­si­cal modes of wor­ship, such as those employed in the Missale Romanum of 1962 and the Bre­viarum Romanum of one year earlier.

I am not, how­ever, either an exclu­sivist or a sta­ti­cist, i.e. I nei­ther believe in the exclu­siv­ity of this Missal — even though I myself would con­ceiv­ably attend it exclu­sively — nor do I accept the propo­si­tion implied by some tra­di­tion­al­ists that Catholic wor­ship is some­how made sta­tic by the papal bull Quo Pri­mum.

This lat­ter propo­si­tion, though absurd, is typ­i­cally asso­ci­ated with the unin­formed laity who delv­ing into mat­ters nor­mally for­eign to them (ironic that I should say this, isn’t it?) mis­in­ter­pret the authen­tic mean­ing of the doc­u­ment, read­ing into it a vir­tu­ally fixed form, inca­pable of organic growth and devel­op­ment. A notion that any self-​respecting tra­di­tion­al­ist rejects as well.

Liturgy grows organ­i­cally and devel­ops nat­u­rally. Yes, one can care­fully graft other organic mat­ter of sim­i­lar kind into the very trunk of the liturgy — thus allow­ing for a hor­ti­cul­tur­ally main­tained and reg­u­lated expe­ri­ence — but this should be kept to a min­i­mum and mea­sured with prudence.

There­fore, I am not opposed to the work of schol­ars and litur­gists, but I main­tain that they must work within the bound­aries of authen­tic graft­ing. Within these bound­aries there are orna­men­tal and func­tional rea­sons for said graft­ing – be they aes­thetic, lin­guis­tic, issues of doc­tri­nal clar­ity, and/​or the means for prop­a­gat­ing spir­i­tual fruit.

The liturgy is a gar­den and a true gar­dener eas­ily rec­og­nizes which orna­ments are last­ing embell­ish­ments to the nat­ural growth and those which are in fel­low­ship with plas­tic flamin­gos and their ilk. He notes that which is tested against the wis­dom of his fore­bears and the most recent genet­i­cally altered tomato-​tree. The litur­gist must judge care­fully when intro­duc­ing nov­elty and when sup­press­ing that which is received.

Keep­ing with the ana­log­i­cal gardener/​liturgist model, one must realise that the litur­gist can­not and must not force mono­cotic plant mat­ter into a cleft graft with dicotic plant mat­ter. While the knowl­edge of the one can inform the under­stand­ing of the other, they are exclu­sive and can­not be nat­u­rally spliced together.

In an unnat­ural attempt to merge East­ern and West­ern modes of wor­ship the Bugnini reform­ers suc­ceeded only in cre­at­ing a morass of Latin aus­ter­ity and Greek emo­tion­al­ism which banally offend both. They took apples and oranges and frankly failed to pro­duce an improved fruit, only pro­vid­ing a litur­gi­cal Frankenstein’s monster.

The reform­ers also fre­quently con­structed syn­thetic mat­ter which per­vades and poi­sons the very root, it was dev­as­tat­ing to the plant and its nat­ural growth, in cases inhibit­ing and stunt­ing growth or killing it out­right. Then-​Cardinal Ratzinger wrote strongly against such practise, expressing shock and dis­may at some of the lab­o­ra­tory con­struc­tions of the post-​Conciliar years.

To bring this weary anal­ogy to an end, the litur­gist is the care­taker of an organic being, he does not act as an engi­neer con­struct­ing out of air – with Euclid­ean geom­e­try and New­ton­ian physics – the rit­u­als of wor­ship, but rather prunes and nour­ishes an exist­ing nat­ural entity. The divine wor­ship ren­dered unto God must be nour­ished and main­tained by dili­gence, that it may sprout, bud, bloom and then cast the seeds of sanc­ti­fy­ing grace into our mor­tal clay, our earth, our ash and dust – that through us it may rise again.

The idea of litur­gi­cal hus­bandry – gen­tly and respect­fully coax­ing and guid­ing the liturgy to its ulti­mate end has been espoused quite nicely by that same then-​Cardinal in his sem­i­nal works on the liturgy and this fel­low warmly recommends them.

SECONDLY, I should also main­tain that I am not opposed – and here we begin to pre­pare the way – to the use of ver­nac­u­lar lan­guages in the liturgy, but I do insist that for a true pen­e­tra­tion of the sacral char­ac­ter of the mass be present in the trans­la­tions – this in accor­dance with Litur­giam authen­ti­cam–non-​literary ver­nac­u­lar Eng­lish must be dis­carded and replaced with a more per­ma­nent ’lit­er­ary’ English.

It is said that when a lan­guage becomes fit for use in lit­er­a­ture the momen­tum of ver­nac­u­lar progress begins to slow and a semi-​static lan­guage begins to develop. I would also argue that in the same way lan­guages develop a semi-​static means for reli­gious expres­sion that par­al­lels the sec­u­lar lan­guage of lit­er­a­ture, adopt­ing and influ­enc­ing vocab­u­lary and usage.

In this way the reli­gious sen­ti­ment of a peo­ple is sys­tem­atized – bring­ing the peo­ple to a gen­eral unity of expres­sion. But allow me a brief devi­a­tion, before I con­tinue with this argument.

Now, I must make clear some of my more igno­ble opin­ions. Frankly my opin­ion is that the only valid lit­er­ary Eng­lish is indis­tin­guish­able with the King’s Eng­lish. If you can­not fol­low the clear, sim­ple, and sen­si­ble rules laid out by Fowler, you don’t deserve to employ our noble tongue. In the word’s of Henry Higgin’s – who with some poetic license – such men should be taken out and hung, for the cold-​blooded mur­der of the English tongue.

These sanc­ti­mo­nious atti­tudes should not directly affect the argue­ments that fol­low and the author notes his own inad­e­quen­cies in apply­ing the rules he professes. It is an ideal, which — as with most ideals — one is ever find­ing him­self inca­pable of liv­ing up to. It is dif­fi­cult for me, for I have been indoc­tri­nated with the rub­bish of Strunk & White and Noah Web­ster, all three black­guards at best. I am the fore­most abuser of the Tongue, and admit that though the quill is yielded by a goose, it is an ass that weilds it. As my good friend, Jason Wood, has said,

…the pen is sharper than any sword, but most never take the nec­es­sary time to learn to wield it prop­erly, often only cutting themselves.

Short of Divine inter­ven­tion my nor­mal han­dling of a pen would lead to a drain­ing of all the major arter­ies in my per­son were the metaphor less metaphor­i­cal. I am the first offender and the last and I do not con­sider it hypocrisy to be so. I con­sider it human.

But I digress from my digres­sion. I am a first and fore­most a purist in my enshrine­ment of Johnson’s Eng­lish, for I — like John­son — believe that the eigh­teenth cen­tury saw the apex of the Eng­lish lan­guage, of which the nine­teenth cen­tury is con­ser­v­a­tively deriv­a­tive. John­son himself said,

I believe that who­ever knows the Eng­lish tongue, in its present extent, will be able to express his thoughts with­out fur­ther help from other nations.

But why does all this talk of Eng­lish mat­ter? Well, my read­ers fair, I mean to pre­pare you for some­thing that may shock a sen­si­ble Catholic borne of the pre­dom­i­nantly Irish cut that char­ac­terises the Catholi­cism of the Anglo-​phonic world. I am going to give cre­dence to the reli­gion of the lob­ster­backs, some­thing which no respectable Catholic could conceivably do.

For some rea­son mod­ern Catholics in Britain – espe­cially among the cler­i­cal hier­ar­chy and lesser church­men – hold that the decon­struc­tion of the Anglo-​Saxon race is a noble pur­suit, for is it not the Anglo-​Saxon and his man­nered ways that per­se­cuted God’s faith­ful for cen­turies? (In fact, the Scot­tish Labour Party which essen­tially con­trols the hyper-​liberal par­lia­ment is pre­dom­i­nantly Catholic and anti-​Monarchist, go fig­ure.) You see Eng­lish Catholi­cism is so per­fectly per­me­ated with a spirit hos­tile to Eng­lish­ness that it can­not see that the Angli­can com­mu­nion has been a fine (even if not per­fect) care­taker of Eng­lish Catholic tra­di­tion harken­ing back to the days of the rit­ual pomp of Salisbury.

A.W.N. Pugin’s obser­vance con­cern­ing chan­cel screens and archi­tec­ture could be repeated in broader sense to many Eng­lish ecclesiastical traditions:

We must cer­tainly admit that the Angli­cans have been good ten­ants of the old fab­ricks; we must not test them by the works of pre­ced­ing cen­turies, but by the cor­re­spond­ing period; and when we reflect on the debased state of design and art that pre­vailed, even in those coun­tries which were nom­i­nally exclu­sively Catholic, we may be thank­ful that our great reli­gious edi­fices have been so well handed down to our times, when the recog­ni­tion of their beauty and grandeur is daily increasing.

To admit this would be to admit that the Angli­can com­mu­nion – which has been a bas­tion of anti-​Romanism – might have done a thing so noble that it is wor­thy of some mod­icum of praise. It has pre­served our tra­di­tions for all these cen­turies, tra­di­tions which are right­fully ours and must be reclaimed and reju­ve­nated. I believe Fr. Aidan Nichols has writ­ten on this sub­ject quite thoroughly.

But again I digress, the liturgy of many Anglo-Catholic’s is with­out a doubt – that I can say this is dis­turb­ing – more amply endowed with aes­thetic and lin­guis­tic virtue than are the banal trans­la­tions and prac­tices of the ordi­nary form as it is cur­rently employed through-​out the Anglo-​phonic Church.

It is with this thought and with an authen­ti­cally œcumeni­cal sol­i­dar­ity with Anglo-​Catholics that I find myself ever return­ing to read the eru­dite and com­pelling litur­gi­cal notes of the Rev. Fr. John Hun­wicke, S.S.C.

This admirable priest, though still a mem­ber of the Angli­can com­mu­nion, speaks with praise of ‘Our Holy Father’ Bene­dict and has exclaimed when among mem­bers of the Church of Rome, that though, ‘an Angli­can, find­ing myself in this hotbed of Pop­ery, I can only say I feel entirely at home’. He lauds the noble and exalt­ing Eng­lish of Cranmer’s col­lects – ‘heretic though he was!’ – and at every turn shows us that ‘offi­cially’ or not, he is with us.

This cler­i­cal gen­tle­man who was a dis­tin­guished pro­fes­sor of the­ol­ogy at Lanc­ing Col­lege, a senior research fel­low at the admirable Pusey House, and the present rec­tor of St. Thomas the Mar­tyr, Oxford; has more than mer­ited our respect. He is a man not afraid to say hard things and yet he is kind and benign, schol­arly and eru­dite, ‘catholic’ and yet absolutely English.

Okay, that is my ‘favourable men­tion’ of Fr. Hun­wicke and I only exploit the space, because I truly admire him and not only do I admire him, but I think his ideas regard­ing what con­sti­tutes an Eng­lish liturgy wor­thy of God Almighty are ‘wicked cool’.

In any case, it is with Fr. Hun­wicke that I would like to pro­ceed. If ver­nac­u­lar wor­ship is to per­sist in the Catholic Church – which it cer­tainly will, though I am will­ing to bet that the future holds a more equal par­al­lel between Latin and Ver­nac­u­lar wor­ship – then it must begin to reac­quaint itself with its bequest of a uniquely cul­tic and sacred language.

Sev­eral months ago Fr. Hun­wicke wrote a piece enti­tled, How to pray in Eng­lish. I was impressed by this piece because it artic­u­lated a con­cept that I had toyed with in the past, but had never practically engaged.

To begin, the Rev­erend Vicar applauds the ‘mar­vel­lous Roman doc­u­ment of 2001, Litur­giam authen­ti­cam’ which pro­vides a hope that ‘mod­ern Euro­pean ver­nac­u­lars might develop sacral, liturgical dialects’.

The doc­u­ment itself clearly advo­cates ‘the grad­ual cre­ation in every vul­gar tongue of a sacred style, to be recog­nised as the cor­rect way of talk­ing litur­gi­cally (sermo pro­prie litur­gi­cus; ¶ 27)’ and then the con­struc­tion of a ‘sacred ver­nac­u­lar lan­guage the vocab­u­lary, syn­tax, and gram­mar of which are to be proper to divine wor­ship’ (¶ 47).

He then draws the reader’s atten­tion to a poignant fact:

Angli­can read­ers, of course, will reflect that the litur­gi­cal tra­di­tion ini­ti­ated by Dr Cranmer’s Prayer Books did just that. Roman Catholic read­ers, I hope, will recall that not long ago the Holy See autho­rised The Book of Divine Wor­ship for use by for­mer Angli­cans in full com­mu­nion with Rome. So Cranmer’s sacral dialect — although not his het­ero­dox the­ol­ogy — is now a litur­gi­cal usage in good stand­ing within the litur­gi­cal com­mu­nity of the Roman Catholic Church.

That some­one is offer­ing a prac­ti­cal model for future Eng­lish trans­la­tion pred­i­cates what is and will con­tinue to be a devel­op­ing sense of liturgical authenticity.

He then goes on to describe some of the genius of Cranmer’s col­lects and the what he explains as the Archbishop’s ‘char­ac­ter­is­tic habit of expand­ing the Latin orig­i­nals, so that – to put it bluntly – the col­lect was not over before the con­gre­ga­tion had started attend­ing to what it said.’

I am not propos­ing that we adopt a Tudor con­struc­tion strictly fol­low­ing Cranmer’s – though I should cer­tainly like to see a wider exer­cise of the Angli­can Use – but with Fr. Hun­wicke I believe that in the future trans­la­tors might ben­e­fit much from ‘these ele­gant pro­duc­tions [Cranmer’s col­lects], deeply embed­ded in Eng­lish litur­gi­cal cul­ture’. They ‘are wor­thy to be con­sid­ered along­side the dread­ful old ICEL trans­la­tions and … lit­eral ren­der­ings and (when pub­lished) the new ICEL versions’.

Too long has Eng­land been a sore in the Church’s Roman­tic pos­te­rior, it is about time that the Teu­tonic genius be allowed to fully blos­som, bring­ing with it a dis­tinc­tive spir­i­tual and aes­thetic charism. It is about time that Benedict’s ‘legit­i­mate diver­sity’ be put into practice.

The counter-​reformation is over! and we must begin to reëstab­lish the roots of an authen­ti­cally plu­ral­is­tic Catholi­cism, which in its var­i­ous rites and uses, national and eth­nic tra­di­tions, and dif­fer­ing pos­tures; can unite Chris­ten­dom under the ban­ner of Jesus Christ, our Saviour King!