?When Clergy Ostracize Tradition

Two opposing interpretations of the Second Vatican Council divide the Catholic Church. This divide is more complex than the casual observer tends to appreciate. Within the complex divide is a simple divide, the familiar quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. Each of the two parties is marked by a definite taste in liturgy, music, architecture, and art.

The Eucharist being “the source and summit of the Christian life,” it should come as no surprise that the central object of disagreement between the Catholic Ancients and the Catholic Moderns is the Mass. In the Roman rite, it can be celebrated according to the old missal or the new missal, and each one elicits from each camp an equal but opposite reaction. Here the quarrel reaches high heat. It then radiates across the full spectrum of Catholic culture.

Architectural design, for example, is often felt to signal an Ancient or a Modern bias in both doctrine and praxis. So is artistic style. The shape of the church interior (cruciform? or in the round?), the position of the tabernacle (at the center of the altar? or to one side of the sanctuary?), the amount and the style of statuary (abundant and rich? or spare and elegant?) — all these and more are scrutinized for some sign that one of the two rival factions has marked its territory.

The clear clashes between them tend to overshadow the remarkable agreement among the hardcore on both sides. They accept the radical proposition that the break between the preconciliar Church and the postconciliar Church is so sharp that the two are distinct entities, the latter being an attempt to sweep the former into the dustbin of history — for better, in the Moderns’ view, or for worse, in the view of the Ancients.

This is the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” as Pope Benedict XVI styled it in his Christmas address to the Roman Curia in 2005. For the council’s most partisan detractors and cheerleaders alike, the postconciliar Church is less a thing made new than a new thing that was bodied forth in the 1960s to replace an old, Counter-Reformation Church that was being pulled off the market.

Opposing the hermeneutic of rupture is the “‘hermeneutic of reform,’ of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us,” Benedict went on to elaborate. The council, properly understood, called for tradition to be neither merely curated nor blithely abandoned but developed. To that end Benedict supported use of the Vetus Ordo alongside the Novus Ordo, that the faith of those attached to the one might be informed and enriched by the other.

Contrary to an earlier common misunderstanding even at the highest reaches of the hierarchy, the traditional Latin Mass was never juridically abrogated, as Benedict explained. “Let us generously open our hearts and make room for everything that the faith itself allows,” he urged. He was concerned to correct those who regard the older, extraordinary form of the Roman rite as harmful. Pope Francis in some of his impromptu remarks has shown alertness to error from the opposite direction, and some commentators have been quick to suppose that in this he contradicts his predecessor.

Or is it less a matter of contradiction than of complement? Francis has written that he considers “the best interpreter of the Second Vatican Council” to be Agostino Marchetto, who refutes the premise that Vatican II was “a Copernican revolution”; Marchetto’s argument for what Benedict later christened the “hermeneutic of reform” rests primarily on the council documents themselves. Those who hold to a hermeneutic of rupture with respect to the council may be inclined to see Francis’s pontificate as a rupture from Benedict’s, but it isn’t, at least on the crucial question of whether Vatican II amounts to a supersession of the preconciliar Church.

All this is the doctrine, anyway, or theory. Practice does not always conform to it. Where it doesn’t, bishops have a duty to correct it. A local example here in Manhattan illustrates the problem.

On August 22, fourteen icons, 4 feet wide and ranging in height from 5 to 7 feet, were removed from pilasters in the sanctuary of the Church of Our Saviour. They had been commissioned by Fr. George W. Rutler, the pastor from September 2001 through July 2013, and were funded in part by the Vatican. Neither the current pastor nor any spokesperson for the parish has offered a public explanation for their disappearance. No notice has been placed in the parish bulletin or in the church vestibule. The pastor has not responded to my request for an interview. Conflicting reports abound.

Ken Woo, the artist, tells me that his lawyer contacted the pastor, who replied by email that the absence of the icons from the sanctuary is permanent and that they will be displayed in the church basement. Noting that “the sanctuary was designed with all the icons in mind at the concept stage,” Woo contends that “removing some icons . . . destroys the sacred geometry of the whole sanctuary and the integrity of the work of art.” The effect of the densely packed, deeply pigmented Byzantine-style icons was indeed remarkable. Tastes vary, but many found the design of the whole to be gorgeous. It won awards.

Wondering whether the new pastor might have thought the church interior too “busy,” a local priest suggested to me that the reason for pruning it of some its icons could have been to make it easier for worshipers to keep their eyes on the altar and the tabernacle behind it. Mary Durkan, a longtime parishioner, shares his concern to minimize distractions from Our Lord’s presence in the sanctuary but has in mind instead the “Benedictine arrangement,” the placement of a crucifix at the center of the altar so that Jesus on the cross is reinforced as the visual focus at Mass when it is celebrated facing the people. Rutler used the Benedictine arrangement at Our Saviour, and Durkan is disappointed that the new pastor doesn’t.

“I suspect this is ideological,” Catholic blogger Fr. John Zuhlsdorf writes in his post about the icons’ removal (his emphasis). The incident does fit a pattern at Our Saviour during the past year. In a rebuke sent by email to a volunteer in August 2013, less than a month after his arrival, the new pastor expressed his upset over some Mass cards, what the priest at the traditional Latin Mass reads his prayers from at the altar. “If I choose to clean the sacristy of paraphernalia and place it in a closet, that is my prerogative,” he wrote. “Placing laminated cards which were superseded more than 45 years ago all over the sacristy is part of the schizophrenia under which OS has been allowed to operate. That is no longer the case.”

The key word is “superseded.” That is what the 1962 missal was once thought to be, and now we know better. What has been superseded is the pastor’s misrepresentation of the Church’s teaching on this point. The old misunderstanding about the status of the traditional Latin Mass persists in some quarters, and in some instances the misunderstanding may be willful. Younger priests are less prone to insist on the error.

A month later, in September of last year, Mass in the extraordinary form at Our Saviour was discontinued. Rutler had reestablished it there shortly after its use was liberalized by Benedict in 2007. That it was discontinued without notice had the effect of preempting any effort by congregants to gather one another’s contact information and organize themselves as “a stable group” of worshipers who, per the apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum, could approach their pastor to request Mass in the extraordinary form. By itself, the abruptness of its removal from the church’s Mass schedule was not dispositive proof that the pastor harbored hostility toward this treasure of the Church’s liturgical patrimony, but it raised the question.

For those who might have been still wondering, he spoke up on the Facebook page “The Extraordinary Form in the Albany Diocese” on July 24 of this year. To a status update about Bishop Ed Scharfenberger’s performing the rite of confirmation in the Vetus Ordo, the pastor commented, “Ridiculous for Albany.” The equivalent sentiment expressed about the Novus Ordo would be readily understood as derogatory and expressive of schismatic sympathies. If it is shrugged off as no big deal when expressed about the Vetus Ordo, the double standard reinforces the disunity that church leaders rightly admonish the faithful to avoid.

As for the recent dismissal of those Byzantine icons, to what degree, if any, it is intended as a statement against a preconcliar style of worship remains unknown. The Catholic faith contains many mysteries; this should not be one of them. The pastor’s failure to publicly explain or even acknowledge the disappearance of church art on his watch invites speculation and exemplifies a kind of clericalism often in play where “anyone who . . . advocates the continuing existence of this liturgy [the Vetus Ordo] or takes part in it is treated like a leper,” as Cardinal Ratzinger observed nearly twenty years ago. “I must say, quite openly, that I don’t understand why so many of my episcopal brethren have to a great extent submitted to this rule of intolerance, which for no apparent reason is opposed to making the necessary inner reconciliations within the Church.” Nota bene.

Nicholas Frankovich is an editor at National Review.