The new Roman Missal: A hermeneutic of continuity

The spirit of our Catholic liturgy is a spirit of music and song. To give praise to the living God, human speech alone can only take us so far. Words can never be enough. We need to pay God homage with songs of joy and instruments made for praise.

And because of the intimate relationship between sacred music, the liturgy and Catholic identity, now is an ideal time to talk about the changes planned for the Mass in the English-speaking world exactly one year from now, in Advent 2011.

Many Catholics know the background of the Servant of God Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. Dorothy was a radical in the best sense of the word, a prophet of the Church’s social teaching. She was also a traditional and saintly Catholic.

One day, while Dorothy was away, a young priest celebrated Mass at the Catholic Worker house. And he used a coffee cup as a chalice. When Dorothy later heard about it, she was scandalized at the sacrilege—that a common household item had been used to consecrate the blood of Christ. The story goes that she dug a hole in the backyard behind the house. Then she kissed the coffee cup and buried it.

Later she wrote about the incident:

“I am afraid I am a traditionalist, in that I do not like to see Mass offered with a large coffee cup as a chalice. … I feel with (Cardinal) Newman that my faith is founded on a creed … ‘I believe in God, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. And of all things visible and invisible, and in his only Son Jesus Christ, our Lord.’

“I believe too that when the priest offers Mass at the altar, and says the solemn words, ‘This is my body, this is my blood,’ that the bread and the wine truly become the body and blood of Christ, Son of God, one of the three divine persons.”

In these beautiful words, Dorothy Day here puts her finger on the basic issue. We cannot separate liturgy from creed. Our law of prayer is our law of belief. Lex orandi, lex credendi.

We believe in a God who is transcendent. Yet this same God has humbled himself to share in our humanity, so that we might share in his divinity. This is what happens in the offering of the Mass. The mission of Christ’s incarnation continues in every celebration of the sacred liturgy. In the Mass, God stoops down to lift us up to his level. He makes it possible for us, though we are but creatures, to sing and worship with the angels, in praise of our Creator.

A lot of the liturgical renewal since the council has got this dynamic exactly backwards. And that’s because too many attempts at liturgical renewal started from exactly the wrong place.

Benedict XVI has described the problem this way. He has said that too many people approached Vatican II with a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.” Now “hermeneutic” is an odd-sounding word that simply means “way of interpreting.” What the pope means is that some people interpreted Vatican II as a decisive break—a change of course from all that had gone before it in Catholic life. 

In reality, the right way to understand the council is with a “hermeneutic of continuity.” In other words, we should interpret the council’s reforms, not as a break with the past, but as a natural, organic and integral development of the tradition that has been handed down to us from the apostles.

I say all of this by way of background. Because I believe that in the new edition of the Roman Missal—which we begin using in Advent next year—the Church reasserts the continuity of the Novus Ordo (New Order) Mass with the ancient liturgy of the Church.  But more on that next week.

Bishop Conley’s thoughts on the new Roman Missal continue next week. His two-part column is adapted from the homily he delivered at the archdiocese’s St. Cecilia Mass held last month. See related story, “Bishop affirms timeline for implementation of new missal in US,” printed on page 8 of the Dec. 1 edition.

 

Most Rev. James D. Conley is auxiliary bishop of the Denver Archdiocese.