Flirting with Apostasy on Park Avenue

Icons have been removed from the Church of Our Saviour here in Manhattan, without explanation from the pastor, Fr. Robert Robbins. They were funded in part by the Vatican, according to this report. The artist, Ken Woo, is highly regarded. On its face, the stripping of the pillars that the pastor’s predecessor, Fr. George Rutler, had adorned with Woo’s art is, to put it tactfully, a serious error. Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, better known as “Fr. Z,” describes it as “effacement.” A charitable commenter to his blog advises that we not jump to conclusions: Maybe the icons are being professionally cleaned and the pastor decided to go about this business in silence because he didn’t want to alert prospective thiefs who might try to locate their whereabouts.

The background to this scandal involves, you’ll be sorry to hear, liturgical politics. The Eastern flavor of the Woo icons expressed something of Fr. Rutler’s liturgical philosophy, with which, evidently, Fr. Robbins disagrees.

In a message to his parishioners last year, Fr. Rutler wrote: “C. S. Lewis’ view was that true worship should be like a good old shoe, so comfortable that you don’t have to break it in: ‘The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.’ That is a sensibility I have long admired in the Byzantine liturgies. While some speak of the High Mass of the Western Church as the ‘most beautiful thing this side of Heaven,’ I know of nothing so formally transcendent and still so informally natural as the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.” It happens that John Chrysostom is the saint whose icon was, fittingly, the one closest to the pulpit now occupied by Fr. Robbins, who has symbolically dismissed him.

Fr. Rutler’s appreciation for Catholic liturgy extends to Mass in the extraordinary form, which he offered at 9 a.m. on Sunday mornings at Our Saviour. A few weeks into his term as the new pastor, Fr. Robbins discontinued it. That he did so without notice—do you detect a pattern?—had the effect of preempting any effort by congregants to gather one another’s contact information and organize themselves as “a stable community” who, per the apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum, could approach their pastor to request Mass in the extraordinary form.

I wrote about that unpleasant piece of business here. In fairness, I considered the possibility that it was due mostly to the priest shortage, or at any rate to a shortage of priests trained up to say Mass in the extraordinary form. Still, a sympathetic pastor might have worked harder to recruit such priests from out of town, or he might have offered to work with interested congregants who would have been willing to reach out to them. In any case, the absence of advance notice did raise the possibility that what Fr. Robbins was trying to accomplish was to make the extraordinary form at his new parish go away and go quietly.

Of course, we can’t prove that in this particular matter he was motivated by hostility to the Vetus Ordo, as Pope Emeritus Benedict has called it. Fr. Robbins is on record, however, as being hostile to it in general. “Ridiculous for Albany,” he commented on Facebook, on July 24, in response to a status update in support of Bishop Edward Scharfenberger’s performing the confirmation rite in the extraordinary form. Thanks to the reader who, on Fr. Z’s blog, directed us to that.

It’s true that the distaste that Fr. Robbins has publicly expressed for the extraordinary form is shared by many Catholics of his generation, and in that regard it can be said to have a place in the mainstream of liberal Catholic opinion, but it is contrary to the teaching of the Church. “There is no contradiction between the two editions of the Roman Missal,” as Benedict explains in his letter accompanying Summorum Pontificum. “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place” (my emphasis).

Imagine that a priest called the ordinary form of the Roman rite “ridiculous.” He would appear to be either on the road to schism or to have already arrived there and planted his flag in the ground. Obviously, this double standard cannot be justified, and its application by pastors of the Church cries out for correction.

Nicholas Frankovich is an editor at National Review.