It’s here.

Yes, it’s true that the actual publication date of the motu
proprio Summorum Pontificum is not until
Saturday, but Rocco Palmo at Whispers in the Loggia has obtained an advance copy and has all the details for your
reading pleasure.

As expected, the document will make it easier for priests to
celebrate the Roman Rite according to the 1962 Missale Romanum. That form of the rite—which the document states was
“never abrogated,” is to be understood as an “extraordinary form” of the Roman
Rite. No permission is required for a
priest to celebrate the extraordinary form privately and the faithful may be
admitted to such celebrations. In
parishes where desire for the extraordinary form “exists stably” pastors are
exhorted to allow formal celebrations of it.
For more details, I’m going to force you to click over to Rocco. He’s done the reporting; he deserves the
traffic.

Much has been written (this is an understatement!) on
the topic of how removing barriers to the celebration of the 1962 rite would
help reconnect the Church with its liturgical tradition. Fr. Joseph Fesso, S.J., for example, recently
stated that the document would be “a major step toward the genuine renewal of the
Mass, and therefore the genuine renewal of the Church, which the Council so
ardently desired.” Similar themes are
struck by Pope Benedict in his letter of transmittal.

It will be interesting to see if this happens, but I’ll
admit that I remain a bit skeptical. It’s
not as if I don’t have concerns about how the liturgy is currently
celebrated. Sometimes I think that if I
have to sing the hymn “Sing a New
Church” one more time, I
will slam my head into the pew ahead of me in an effort to knock myself
unconscious. In recent years, I’ve endured
Pentecosts where the church was decorated like it was a children’s birthday
party, Halloween masses where the celebrant wore a clown wig, and various other
exercises in liturgical creativity that ended badly. The more I study what those involved in the
liturgical movement of the 20^th century were trying to accomplish,
the more that significant gaps between our current practice and that vision
emerge.

I’m still not clear, however, on how liberalizing access to
the 1962 rite is going to help solve these problems. Much of the mainstream criticism of
contemporary liturgy focuses more on how the Roman Rite is celebrated
than the rite itself. If one peruses
many of the books, weblogs and internet sites that critique contemporary
liturgy, one finds that most of the arguments focus on the following issues: 1)
music; 2) posture; 3) architecture; 4) language; and 5) vestments. Pope Benedict’s book The Spirit of the Liturgy (written while he was still Cardinal
Ratzinger) focused on many of these issues, but did not—as far as I can recall—spend
much time comparing the 1962 rite to the current one.

One can certainly grant the substance of many of the
criticisms of contemporary liturgy. But
the current rite can, believe it or not, be celebrated in Latin, using
Gregorian Chant, with the celebrant wearing a fiddleback chasuble if he so
chooses! What has never been clear to me
is what aspects of the 1962 rite—as rite—those who favor it would like to see
reintroduced into the new. The prayers
of Leo XIII at the end of Mass? The
final Gospel? The pre-conciliar
lectionary? Do they want to do away with the communal penitential rite and have
the Confiteor said exclusively by the celebrant? Do they want to eliminate the three additional
Eucharistic prayers?

Pope Benedict, for his part, seems to see the traffic moving
in the other direction. He specifically
suggests incorporating some of the new prefaces—and even the revised
lectionary—into the celebration of the “extraordinary form,” a suggestion that
will probably not be well received by some traditionalists. As to what the “extraordinary form” can give
to the “ordinary form,” it seems that its primary contribution will be
“sacrality” rather than specific ritual forms.

It’s hard not to see this as confirmation of the thesis that
the core of contemporary liturgical criticism—up to and including the criticism
presently issuing from the Holy See—is not about the reformed rite per se. The issues are things that are
harder to quantify: the loss of a sense
of mystery and reverence, an emphasis on the horizontal aspect of the mass to
the neglect of the vertical, and a sense that the Mass has become simply one
more thing to be subject to modern techniques of manipulation and control.

There are times when I think what many critics of contemporary
liturgy want is not so much the 1962 rite but the 1962 rubrics. They want an end to
what Cardinal Arinze once termed the “do-it-yourself Mass.”
They want a liturgy that their parish community receives as gift rather than
as a vehicle for their collective self-expression. Fr. Aidan Kavanagh once suggested that the
pre-conciliar liturgy was often less a system of worship than a system of discipline. Whatever the problems of that discipline, however,
it at least bound the CEO and the charwoman together in a common experience of
worship that is much less common today.

When he wrote The
Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict indicated a hope that it might spark a
“new liturgical movement.” I’m not sure
whether we need a new liturgical movement or merely a recovery of some of the
insights of the old one. We need an adequate
understanding of “active participation” that does not reduce it to mere
activity and that sees the goal of such participation as enhanced openness to
what Pius X called the “true Christian spirit.”
We need an understanding of the history of the liturgy that does not
fall into the trap of seeing the developments of the second millennium as a
narrative of relentless liturgical decline.
We need a serious conversation about liturgical aesthetics, particular
in the area of music. Finally, we need
to figure out how the insights from these various conversations can be
implemented in ordinary parishes with small staffs and competing demands on
their resources.

While the promulgation of Summorum Pontificum is not keeping me up nights, I remain
convinced that the Mass we are called to celebrate can be found within
the rite as it exists today. We have
what we need there to worship God in a way that is “right and just.” If we have
failed to do that, it is not primarily because the rite is deficient but
because we have been deficient in excavating and bringing forth its
riches. Whatever the impact of Summorum Pontificum, that task remains.