A Rite Histrionic and Disoriented

By Nicholas Postgate


The title of this article highlights two aspects of the new rite of Mass. The word “histrionic” refers to the Novus Ordo’s inherent tendency to place emphasis on the priest as a talker and performer, with ample room allowed for extemporaneous words and free-form bodily posture, in contrast to the Tridentine rite’s insistence on the priest as an “animate instrument”¹ who fulfills a definite hieratic function at the altar through his recitation of ecclesiastically determined sacred speech and his careful observance of detailed rubrics fraught with inherited meaning.

The word “disoriented” refers specifically to a Mass turned away from the East and towards the people, thus towards the West. Since, for all the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, the East represents Christ the Daystar who rises into our world and receives our worship,² while the West represents the darkness and those who love the dark by fleeing from God’s light, this turning of the priest’s back to the cosmic symbol of Christ and his second coming and towards the people is code language for anthropocentrism, the worship of man’s inner potentiality, and the subordination of the immutable divine source of perfection to the ever-changing human “experiment”³ Saint Thomas quotes Saint Augustine: “The East (that is, Christ) calleth thee, and thou turnest to the West (namely, mortal and fallible man).”⁴ In the words of Diderot, encyclopedist of the Enlightenment: “Man is the single term from which one must begin, and to which all must be brought back.”⁵

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According to Cardinal Ratzinger, the feminist clamor for women’s ordination could only have occurred after the lowering and lessening of the priestly office to a vehicle of community power.

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Research on the new liturgy by such mainstream theologians as Aidan Nichols, Lauren Pristas, and Jonathan Robinson, building on the work of earlier critics like Klaus Gamber, has established the deep and pervasive influence of Enlightenment theory upon the members and fellow-travelers of the Consilium, the team that produced the new liturgical books.⁶ It is no surprise that a liturgy set within this Enlightenment context, which at once accentuates the people and invites the priest to become a “presider” over this people’s republic, cultivates a distinctive celebrity ethos, the aura of the politician who, in modernity, is not so much a moral agent as an amoral actor. The presider or president is the center of attention and must act and react accordingly; he is, more than ever, the man in charge, the holy politico. According to Cardinal Ratzinger, the feminist clamor for women’s ordination could only have occurred after the lowering and lessening of the priestly office to a vehicle of community power. If it is a matter of lording it over the congregation, the vain, power-hungry extrovert should stay as far as possible away from the old rite, with its sober beauty, classical restraint, and ascetical attention to details unseen and unheard, and throw himself with gusto into Bugnini’s talent show, where the great I Am (Me) has almost untrammeled opportunity for exhibition.

The old rite stresses the unworthiness of the priest himself, and continually asks that he, and the rest of us, be made worthy by a divine initiative of mercy. The priest may well be vain or egoistic himself and that may affect his entire ministry, especially outside of liturgical functions; yet the classical order of Mass goes constantly against the grain of fallen nature, it constantly asks of the priest a self-abnegation out of obedience to the aw of the liturgy, it almost forces him to enter its rhythm and the lilt of its language, so dominating is the ceremonial aura. It would take a fairly corrupt priest to ignore, trifle with, or undermine the old ordo Missae. Think about it: in the traditional rite, the priest himself, all gloriously attired and set apart as a consecrated mediator, of whose superior status there never was the slightest doubt, nevertheless beats his breast, bows low, asks for the grace to offer the sacrifice worthily, purifies and prepares himself throughout the liturgy until the act of consecration, when Jesus speaks in propria persona – as though the liturgy were saying: “You, O human priest, in spite of all your prayers, are still unworthy; I, the Incarnate Word, the Eternal High Priest, must step in and act for you, offering myself to the Father.” When this liturgy formed the minds and hearts of the faithful, there was hardly a whimper about the “need” for women priests. Could one have then coveted the priesthood as though it were a position of merely human authority, a matter of facilitating a simple ritual action, as it now appears to be on account of the new liturgy? The old rite in its solemn silence almost shouts that the priest bears the burden on his own shoulders, as Christ bore the weight of the rood. What lay person would stand up and say, “Give that burden to me, it is my right, it is unjust for you to hold it to yourself”?

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The new liturgy almost cannot help drawing attention to the personality of the celebrant because the vernacular is his comfort zone, the realm of his daily speech, and if there is one thing he has been encouraged to do from day one in the seminary, it is to “connect with the people,” to “speak to them where they’re at,” ... So he must also offer Mass in that same spirit.

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In the new rite it is altogether different. First, for all intents and purposes, it is taken for granted that everyone is completely worthy, “on top of it,” since, apart from a couple of fleeting references (agnoscamus peccata nostra, ut apti sius ad sacra mysteria celebranda...; Domine, non sum dignus – said once only), mention is hardly made of sin and repentance. The pride and presumption at work in the new missal is the direct fruit of secular humanism, which refashions God after man’s image; Feuerbach and Schleieracher reposing in the sanctuary, where the tabernacle used to be. The dumbed—down missal could be (and sometimes is ) read by anyone; the rubrics, said to be “simplified,” are in reality inadequate and unstable, allowing opportunities for the celebrant to show his stuff, to pepper the Mass with personal messages, to add the Hallmark touch; the vestments, liturgical furnishings, and architecture follow suit, in a crescendo of self-satisfaction, banality, and secularism.

Victims of the Vernacular

The use of the vernacular for the Mass, which entered into the Latin Church at about the same time as the anemic “praise music,” helps ensure that sacramental ceremonies will be the opposite of what the Second Vatican Council asked for: superficial, chatty, smug, and lacking in spiritual savor. Given the prevailing absence of spiritual discipline – an absence sadly epitomized in the new Missal’s glaring rubrical minimalism, which, in turn, forms a lackadaisical clergy – the vernacular cannot but encourage emotionalism by taking one into the realm of the subjective. The more a celebrant “gets into” the texts, glossing, doctoring, riffing on them, the more artificial and staged and self-conscious the whole thing seems. It becomes like a one-man show or a stage act, not a sharing in the “past perfect” of Calvary or the “future perfect” of the Kingdom made present here and now. A priest who simply reverently reads the Missale Romanum and makes those prayers his own, subordinating himself utterly to the ritual of Holy Mother Church, becomes the mouth-piece of a living Tradition emanating from the living Lord. This requires asceticism for the priest, yes, but it requires the same from the congregation: they too must deny themselves, take up their missal (as it were), and follow the priest, in order to enter the mystery of the cross reenacted on the altar of sacrifice. No one gets to shine or warble; everyone has to kneel and adore.

The new liturgy almost cannot help drawing attention to the personality of the celebrant because the vernacular is his comfort zone, the realm of his daily speech, and if there is one thing he has been encouraged to do from day one in the seminary, it is to “connect with the people,” to “speak to them where they’re at,” to “be one of them.” So he must also offer Mass in that same spirit, filling it with familiarities, colloquialisms, witticisms, anecdotes, holiday greetings, bits of news – and from there the infection takes hold of fixed parts of Mass, too, whose formulations begin subtly to reflect whatever pastoral-theological-gastronomical perspective the priest happens to have developed. The problem has obvious roots: in the West, for over a thousand years, no systematic attempt was made to employ a noble vernacular in our rituals⁷; hence we did not develop the Eastern custom of total reverence towards liturgical texts in the mother tongue.⁸ In fact, one of the colossal mistakes of the failed reform was thinking that just because vernacular worship with lots of congregational singing works in the East or among Protestants, it would therefore work fine among Catholics, which ignores the towering fact that for centuries the Catholic soul had been formed by silence, reverence, kneeling, gazing, and, in a way that was far more profound than any of the reformers realized or cared to admit, by the Latin language itself, and to a lesser extent, by Gregorian chant, its connatural companion. To make a sudden shift away from these habits of soul was to ensure not only discontinuity with the past but also a death by starvation of those spiritual virtues specific to the Western Church. She went from having some virtues to having none.

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in the Latin rite church we have witnessed the reduction of the divine sacrifice, the sacred banquet, to a human meal – and, what is worse, not the traditional meal that creates brotherhood, but the fast food and chatter of modernity that leaves our souls alone and untouched, however energetically we shake hands and “stay connected.”

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Speaking broadly, the Novus Ordo has established a kind of laziness among priests and laity. Many older people, whether cleric or lay, would prefer not to go back to the Tridentine Mass because it is more spiritually and physically demanding. It is, as Robert Hugh Benson once wrote, a sacred dance that requires utmost concentration in its execution, and begs for careful preparations beforehand, not to mention years of preparation for the major ministers. The Novus Ordo is a perfunctory social event that can be performed with comparatively minimal preparation. One sees the same difference between traditional acolytes and contemporary “altar servers.” The former had to be well trained, even drilled, in their elegant, synchronized motions, particularly for solemn Masses (though not all the little boys could pull it off), whereas the latter can be shown the ropes of the Novus Ordo in a matter of minutes, since it amounts to little more than hoisting a book or holding a cruet. In both the priest’s and the server’s case, there is a difference too in habiliments. The traditional priest wears any layers of often rich and beautiful materials that have to be worn in a special way, and the server has at least his old-fashioned cassock and surplice, but the modern priest dons a few items topped off by polyester drapery, an his modern male or female assistant wears a robe of some sort that never manages to hide his or her gym shoes.⁹

In the old rite, the priests are clearly working: their role is a difficult one, they are about serious business – “the Father’s business.” They almost always sweat profusely at a High Mass. In the new rite, whether he sweats or not, the priests appears to be going through motions that are not serious work, motions that are really aimed at catching and keeping the people’s attention and carrying on a sort of dialogue with them. The manner in which ministers at the altar work, pray, bow, etc., reflects and represents the reality of what is taking place. I am reminded of an observation of Monsignor Benson again: at an old Mass, the priest hobbles out, climbs up the steps and goes to work. He has got a serious job to do, and he does it – not primarily for the people, not with a view to them, but with a view to the work to be done, the opus operatum.¹⁰ This is why he faces eastward, toward the Christ who has come and who will come. Christ is his master, his “employer,” if you will. The priest answers to Hi. Is the priest at the new Mass answering, literally or metaphorically, to Christ, or to the people? The priest’s physical disorientation, his turning his back to the Orient and towards Man, inverting the priority of the Mass and the masses, symbolizes with a poetic justice worthy of Dante the state of the Western soul and the essential crisis of the Roman Church in this Dark Age.

Meals and Mysteries

A feast or a banquet is a real event of human togetherness, of fraternizing at leisure, and, if we are blessed with faith, of truly celebrating life as a gift from God. In traditional societies there was always time for a feast, just as there was a place for fasting. Providence would have it so. For its part, the Last Supper was a meal. Yet Christ decided to institute the sacrament of His love in the context of a Jewish feast that was already richly sacramental and formal in its practice, not at all what modern meals are like; and he transformed the elements of the meal into a mystical supper¹¹ that made present, in anticipation his death on the cross the following day, thereby fundamentally altering the event from commemorative feast into a true and proper sacrifice, the sacrifice of Calvary. This was no “ordinary” meal to begin with; it had become absolutely extraordinary by the time it is finished. Christ’s command gave the Church power to elevate the human banquet into an instrument for making present, and furthering, the Kingdom of God. This consecration of the ordinary had, in turn, a notable effect upon ordinary life, illuminating it with a ray of the Church’s holiness, invigorating nature as a basis for grace. For it was the same people who found the meaning of their life at Mass and broke bread at table in the family circle.

The modern meal – a rushed affair of prepackaged microwavable foods and, on the off chance people are eating together, trivial chitchat – has nothing mysterious or even dignified about it. Do we think that our shift away from the family, the home and hearth, and the rhythms of country life have had no effect on our perception and practice of the liturgy: It is improbable that we can still appreciate a sacred banquet (O sacrum convivium, Saint Thomas sang), if even a worldly banquet is rarely spread. The “desacralization” of ordinary Christian life, the “demystification” of the Mass: which one comes first and brings about the other – or are they simultaneous and co-causative? This much, at any rate, is clear: in the Latin rite church we have witnessed the reduction of the divine sacrifice, the sacred banquet, to a human meal – and, what is worse, not the traditional meal that creates brotherhood, but the fast food and chatter of modernity that leaves our souls alone and untouched, however energetically we shake hands and “stay connected.”

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Man’s highest activity is the silent contemplation of divine reality through the power of his mind elevated by grace, and this the activity towards which the liturgy should be leading all of us.


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A Novus Ordo liturgy celebrated in dis-oriented churches where the altar has been replaced by a mere table and the priest, breaking with nearly 2000 years of tradition, faces the people and talks to them instead of facing East and speaking softly to the Beloved, is nothing less than a visible betrayal of the invisible essence of the Mass.¹² All oriental and occidental liturgies are absolutely one in regard to the irreducible priestliness of the priest and the “altarity” of the altar. The priest at the altar clearly has a special priestly task to perform that demands all his attention; he is focused entirely upon it, and thus sets the right example for all. He is doing something that no one else can do, yet paradoxically in doing it properly he opens up the mystery to everyone who participates in the liturgy, and enables them, through him, to approach the altar and offer the sacrifice. But when texts conspire to emphasize the mundane at the expense of the transcendent, the horizontal to the detriment of the vertical, the ceremony becomes a Protestant exercise in commemoration padded with “moving” or “relevant” sermons.¹³ What follows is not that everyone finally worships equally, but that no one effectively does so; the single sacrifice that unites heaven to earth gets lost on the table, in the meal, in the neighborly chatter. A high altar or an altar behind an iconostasis, surrounded by sacred ministers dedicating themselves unstintingly to the giving of thanks to the Most Holy Trinity,¹⁴ visibly and vividly expresses what the entire church building, the entire liturgy and by extension, the entire Church, are for, and that from which they originate; a table and a platform frequented by a motley assortment of people does not do this and cannot do this.¹⁵

At a Novus Ordo liturgy, with its ever-ending verbiage, from the improvised greeting of Father to the often poorly coordinated set of Scripture readings to the meandering homily to the “prayers of the faithful” and so on, we are battered and bored with words, words, words, not captivated by the quiet condescension of Christ. We are surrounded by human words that, more often than not, distract us from the One who becomes really, truly, substantially present among us as the ultimate Mysterium Fidei to which our silent, wonder-filled gaze of worship is the only suitable response. As a consequence, the medieval ritual of elevating the consecrated host and chalice – a drawing or photograph of which was once able to function as the universal symbol or synopsis of the entire rite of Mass – has become, if one may judge from appearances, an irrelevancy, perhaps an embarrassment, for any celebrants. It is inconsistent with the “supper” idea: when you are having supper, you generally don’t elevate the food in front of your table mates. Jews during the Passover Seder lift up the matzo, but no one needs reminding that early one hundred percent of the Church is Gentile, and that our Lord, the prince of His own people, inaugurated a new form of worship that both fulfilled and abolished the Jewish ceremonies. For us Gentiles, the symbolism of offering a gift in sacrifice to God by raising it up high over the head, towards the heavens, makes good sense. When the priest is versus populum, the rationale for such a gesture is much harder to see. As we know, many priests fail to elevate the consecrated host and chalice at all; a slight lift of each, and then one speeds into the “acclamation.” There is no ceremonial slowness, the catch-your-breath-and-cross-yourself interval during which the heart is lifted up in adoration of the crucified Savior hidden beneath the veil of bread and wine.¹⁶ We have an hour for verbiage, platitudes, and folk songs, but we have not thirty seconds for silent adoration.

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Whenever and wherever the faithful are able to be touched in their soul by chant, by candlelit morning Mass, by the stillness of the priest praying the Roman Canon, by the simple but poignant gestures of the sacred ministers, by the fervor of the collects and other prayers printed in well-thumbed handheld missals – when things like this are firmly in place and appreciated for what they are, there is neither need nor desire for any “reform.”

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One reason the liturgy has become so banal is that the “ordinary mysticism” of Western liturgical life was gradually lost. This was something that was slipping away long before the Council, although not everywhere and certainly not for everyone. Whenever and wherever the faithful are able to be touched in their soul by chant, by candlelit morning Mass, by the stillness of the priest praying the Roman Canon, by the simple but poignant gestures of the sacred ministers, by the fervor of the collects and other prayers printed in well-thumbed handheld missals – when things like this are firmly in place and appreciated for what they are, there is neither need nor desire for any “reform,” excepting the most obvious, and the most miniscule, adaptations for time and place, new saints or new feasts. Making allowance fro differences of temperament, state of mind, and degree of devotion, it is plain that the predominantly quiet participation of the faithful is, in healthy circumstances, as deeply active as it will ever be. One only makes it superficially active (that is, one actually makes it spiritually more passive) by forcing people to stand up and talk, shake hands, lift hands, wave hands, and so on. Man’s highest activity is the silent contemplation of divine reality through the power of his mind elevated by grace, and this the activity towards which the liturgy should be leading all of us.¹⁷ The most community-building activity is the inward contemplation of divine love, which have power to transform their bearers into icons of Christ.¹⁸ When men have no longer tasted something of the sweetness of contemplation – how revitalizing it can be just to gaze at a crucifix with trust in one’s heart, or to make a visit to a church and be at peace before the tabernacle, half-noticing its red lamp flicker – they will throw away or put into a museum anything that relates to it, like people going through very old family heirlooms who can’t figure out their importance and toss them aside with a shrug of the shoulders.

In this period of history, when God has permitted that Catholics be driven by their very shepherds into an arid spiritual desert, a secular wilderness of jackals and thorns, it is our task to preserve – in the sanctuary of our hearts, if we cannot preserve the sanctuaries of our churches – the treasures that have been handed down to us in better days by better servants, and to keep them safe for a generation that will taste the fruits of a watered garden once more.

Notes

1. St. Thomas, Summa theologiae III, q. 64, a. 8, ad 1. [back]


2. Summa theologiae II-II, q. 84, a. 3, ad 3: “There is a fittingness in adoring eastwards – first, because the divine majesty is indicated in the movement of the heavens which is from the east; second, because paradise was situated in the east according to Gen. 2:8 (Septuagint), and so we signify our desire to return to paradise; third, on account of Christ, who is ‘the light of the world’ (Jn 8:12, 9:5) and is called ‘the Orient’ (Zach. 6:12), who mounts above the heaven of heavens to the east (Ps. 67:34) and is expected to come from the east, according to Mt. 24:27, ‘As lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.’” [back]


3. It may be objected that moderns are so “cosmologically challenged” that they no longer register any of the significance of these things; Ratzinger, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, observes that city-dwellers are hardly aware of the rhythms of sun and moon, stars and seasons. True indeed; but actions are symbolic, and liturgical actions doubly so. We cannot effect a 180˚ change in priestly position (not to mention every other aspect of liturgy) without profoundly altering the subliminal and conscious messages transmitted thereby. In reality what occurs is the substitution of a new worldview to replace the old, cosmically rooted one; it is an essentially anthropocentric, technocratic, rationalist worldview, where man ignores not only nature but the God who is the author and redeemer of nature. [back]


4. Summa theologiae II-II, q. 189, a. 10, corp. Elsewhere, in Contra retrahentes, Saint Thomas cites the passage again: “Saint Augustine, in his book De verbis Domini, has this passage: ‘The Orient calls thee; wilt thou wait for the West?’ Now by the Orient is meant Christ, as we know from the words in Zach. 6:12, ‘Behold a man, the Orient is his name.’ By the West is signified man, declining to the grave, and liable to fall into the darkness of sin and ignorance.” [back]


5. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 26. [back]


6. One need only read the masterful article by L. Pristas, “Theological Principles that Guided the Redaction of the Roman Missal (1970),” The Thomist 67 (2003): 157-95, to see how deep was the influence of modern(ist) thinking on the composition of the missal’s prayers. [back]


7. I am not implying that the West was mistaken in not having employed the vernacular in her rites; quite the contrary, as Pope John XXIII argues in his apostolic constitution Verterum Sapientiae of February 22, 1962. My only point is that we were never accustomed to a fixed and solemn vernacular, unlike, for example, the Anglicans with their Elizabethan translation of the Tridentine rite. [back]


8. So profound is the respect of the Byzantine priest towards the text of the Mass books that even when he is celebrating the liturgy in his mother tongue he will never alter the wording or the rubrics (nor is any opportunity allowed him for doing so; such things are fixed in minute detail, as they used to be in the West). The only thing that will ever be “added” are the names of the sick, the deceased, or others who request prayers – and, of course, the homily in his own words. [back]


9. As older Catholics know, tastes in vestments, not to mention styles of church architecture and sanctuary design, had been infected by a utilitarian superficiality even before Vatican II. And there have been other eras in the history of the Church where artistic/liturgical styles and tastes had grown decadent. Still, it would be difficult to imagine a more wholesale banalization, a more ruthless sacrifice of substance to ephemeral fashion, than we see around us today. [back]


10. While it is true that preconciliar times saw a fair share of desacralization in the Roman Rite – when, for example, a celebrant would zip through the Mass at breakneck speed, making the requisite signs of the cross over the oblate so quickly that they were no longer intelligible as signs of the cross – nevertheless there was not a “culture” of banality that choked the church. Generally people were still able to experience the Mass, consistently, as a visible source of invisible grace and peace. [back]


11. I take this phrase from the beautiful Byzantine prayer before communion: “Accept me as a partaker of your mystical supper, O Son of God, for I will not reveal the mysteries to your enemies nor give you a kiss as did Judas, but like the thief I confess to you: Remember me, O Lord, when you shall come into your kingdom; remember me, O Master, when you shall come into your kingdom; remember me, O Holy One, when you shall come into your kingdom.” [back]


12. Ratzinger and now Father U. Michael Lang, not to mention other authors, have refuted the old argument that saw in the configuration of certain Roman churches, especially Saint Peter’s, evidence for a celebration versus populum. For in these churches, due to historical accidents, the priest, in order to stand ad orientem, had to stand also “towards the people” because the church was built upside-down, with the altar not up against the east end but all the way back at the west end. The key point was always to face ad orientem, to Christ the Orient. [back]


13. Protestantism has historically tended to see or set up an opposition between form, order, and law on the one hand, and freedom and spontaneity (“in the Spirit”) on the other. We have seen this opposition revived in elements of the Catholic charismatic movement. [back]


14. Gratiarum actio ad Trinitatem – the title of a prayer by Saint Catherine of Siena, but also an apt description of the essence of the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice in which the Son of God, in virtue of His human nature, offers perfect praise, thanksgiving, honor, and worship to the Holy Trinity on behalf of the Church ad all creation, thus pleasing to God perfectly and communicating that divine delight to all souls in a state of grace. [back]


15. If it is objected that I am criticizing not the Novus Ordo but the way it is currently practiced, my response is that of Martin Mosebach: the very fact that the rite, with its innumerable options and “inculturations,” permits all this to occur, and that the Church leaders have seen fit to allow every sort of “adaptation” (including, in rare cases, Latin chant liturgies) precisely in accord with the “genius” of the Missal of Paul VI, proves my case. No authentic liturgy exults in formlessness. [back]


16. Historically, the priest began to elevate the host and the chalice in response to a desire on the part of the faithful to see them and worship the true God hidden under the species of bread of wine. Naturally, the elevation of the species resonated with biblical/theological overtones: “Sicut Moyses exaltavit serpentem in deserto, ita exaltari oportet Filium hominis”; “Et ego si exaltatus fuero a terra, omnia traham ad me ipsum.” Of course, the strictly theological meaning of elevating the species remains regardless of whether the priest faces ad orientem or versus populum, but gone, in the latter case, is the supporting context that made the gesture so obviously appropriate. [back]


17. In his hard-hitting ad limina address on October 9, 1998 to the bishops of the northwestern United States, John Paul II spoke about true and false notions of participatio actuosa and of the need to regard meditation and listening (to Gregorian chant, for example) as profoundly active. The call for the laity to “participate” arose because of the deleterious influence that the devotio moderna had on liturgical life, coupled with an approach to liturgy that emphasized the juridical over the artistic, the utilitarian over the aesthetic. If genuine participation was often lousy prior to Vatican II, the post-Vatican II liturgical reformers erred grievously by seeking to achieve participation through the deconstruction and minimalization of the liturgy. Many of the appeared to understand active participation to mean doing something: singing, reading, helping out with the distribution of Holy Communion. A premium was placed on the doing, even when it meant making the liturgy banal and simplistic to assure that such participation could be actually realized. They seemed to forget that people who go to the opera or the symphony, for example, not need to be involved with the production of the music in order to be actively participating in the event. [back]


18. This description may seem to apply only to the Low Mass, but it does not. Even in a Solemn High Mass with a lot of plainchant and participation in the singing of the Ordinary – the kind of celebration, in other words, that is the norm and the ideal for the Roman Rite – there is plenty of time for meditation, for listening, for quiet prayer; and there is a spirit of stillness, too, that goes far deepen than mere absence of sound. In that respect, I do not think that a low Mass, however simple, and a high Mass, however elaborate, differ all that much in spirit, great though their external differences may be. [back]

Photo credits

• Dancers performing during Mass celebrated by Cardinal Roger Mahoney, seated, during Youth Day at Religious Education Congress in Los Angeles, February 17, 2005. (from Archdiocese of Los Angeles website via TIA)
• Kinabayo 2006, Concelebrating priests lead benediction for citizens of Dapitan City from all over the U.S. and Canada, gathered for 2006 "Kinabayo" festival in honor of their patron Saint James the Greater.
• First weekly Tridentine Mass celebrated at St. Lawrence Church in Alexandria, after permission granted by Arlington Bishop Paul S. Loverde in the Spring of 2006 (www.CatholicHerald.com).
• The Immemorial Tridentine Mass, narrated by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen -- a magnificent live 1940 recording of a sung High Mass remastered for DVD (black and white).

[Dr. Nicholas Postgate (not to be confused with the eminent Assyriologist of the same name at Trinity College, Cambridge) is a professor of philosophy and theology at a small liberal arts college in the American West. The present article, "A Rite Histrionic and Disoriented," was originally published in Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition (Winter 2007), pp. 34-39, and is reprinted here by permission of Latin Mass Magazine, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.]

Does Anyone Believe in Purgatory Anymore?

By Ralph Roiter-Doister
Does anyone believe in purgatory anymore? In this age where prayer life is regarded as a remnant of an obsolete monasticism, does anyone believe that prayer for the suffering souls in their place of expiation on the border of hell is a worthy activity? Is Fr. F.X. Shouppe's book, Purgatory Explained By the Lives and Legends of the Saints, likely to be looked upon in Catholic circles as more than just a horselaugh? Let's see. Here's an excerpt:

Faith does not teach us the precise duration of the pains of Purgatory. We know in general that they are measured by Divine Justice, and that for each one they are proportioned to the number and gravity of the faults which he has not yet expiated. God may, however, without prejudice to His justice, abridge these sufferings by augmenting their intensity; the Church Militant also may obtain their remission by the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and other sufferages of the departed.

Regarding which, can anyone remember hearing a prayer offered, say during the General Intercessions, for the poor souls in purgatory? I haven't heard many. Oh, I've heard remembrances for a particular dead parishioner in whose behalf the current Mass is being offered, and I've heard general good wishes offered for "the dead", but that's not really what I'm talking about. "The dead" is a generic, even a misleading term: our prayer should be for souls, specifically, those souls suffering the pains of purification in Purgatory. Why the eschewal of clarity in the name of – what? -- delicacy?

Fr. Shouppe continues,

According to the common opinion of the doctors, the expiatory pains are of long duration. "There is no doubt, " says Bellarmine (De Gemitu, lib. 2, c. 9), "that the pains of Purgatory are not limited to ten and twenty years, and that they last in some cases entire centuries. But allowing it to be true that their duration did not exceed ten or twenty years, can we account it as nothing to have to endure for ten or twenty years the most excruciating sufferings without the least alleviation? . . . . Shall we then find any difficulty in embracing labor and penance to free ourselves from the sufferings of Purgatory? Shall we fear to practice the most painful exercises: vigils, fasts, almsgiving, long prayers, and especially contrition, accompanied with sighs and tears?

Fr. Shouppe then describes the "calculus of probability" of a Fr. Mumford, who mentions in his Treatise on Charity towards the Departed, that "according to the words of the Holy Ghost, The just man falls seven times a day (Prov. 24-16)". Thus, "even those who apply themselves most perfectly to the service of God, notwithstanding their good will, commit a great number of faults to the infinitely pure eyes of God." Pertinacious Papist, in a recent lenten blog topic, lists the seven deadly sins, and suggests the ease with which even good people fall prey to them. Fr. Shouppe does the same here:

Let us take a moderate estimate, and suppose that you commit about ten faults a day; at the end of 365 days you will have the sum of 3,650 faults. Let us . . . facilitate the calculation [by reducing the number to] 3,000 per year. At the end of ten years this will amount to 30,000, and at the end of twenty years to 60,000.

Let us continue our hypothesis: You die after these twenty years of virtuous life, and appear before God with a debt of 30,000 faults [presumably having worked off the other half], which you must discharge in Purgatory. How much time will you need to accomplish this expiation? Suppose, on the average, each fault requires one hour of Purgatory. This measure is very moderate, if we judge by the revelations of the saints; but at any rate this will give you a Purgatory of 30,000 hours. . . . Thus, a good Christian who watches over himself, who applies himself to penance and good works, finds himself liable to three years, three months, and fifteen days of Purgatory.

Suppose each fault requires a day of Purgatory? Good thing all of this is just an outmoded parlor game.

Fr. Shouppe has no problem with clarity, and no need for relativistic accomodation of various "readings" of purgatorial metaphors. He is just a simpleminded priest of the old school, using the mind God gave him to illuminate His truth in the clearest way possible. Find a place for his book in your busy schedule of lenten reading, along with the Enchiridion of Indulgences, or perhaps the Raccolta.

The Old Mass and the Great Thaw: Forbidden Opinions Suddenly Mainstream

By Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
News reports of an impending papal document freeing the traditional Latin Mass from the restrictions of the 1988 indult were all over the media throughout 2006, the first time in many years that the old liturgy had been so newsworthy. In October I got a call from Relevant Radio, a Catholic radio network whose programming appears on several dozen stations across the country as well as through a live feed on the Internet, asking me to discuss these reports and explain their significance on the air.

A couple of weeks after a friendly appearance on the network’s morning show, Morning Air, I was scheduled to appear on Relevant Radio’s hour-long call-in program called “Searching the Word.” Of the 200 or so radio appearances I’ve made over the past couple of years, this was far and away the most satisfying, and the one to which I turn my attention here.

The long and the short of it is this: it’s suddenly become all right to say things that for years have been played down or suppressed in the Catholic media.

In the first segment, before we took calls, I discussed the old Mass with host Chuck Neff, and explained why the Pope’s rumored initiative – which I said had to be more than just a rumor at that point – was a wonderful step forward for the whole Church. It would restore the sacred to our parishes, increase vocations, and bring back some of those souls who had been so disillusioned by the liturgical changes that they had stayed away from the Church for good. I talked about the sacrifices that many families make to attend the relatively few traditional Masses available now – driving hours each way, even relocating across the country in order to sanctify their souls at this copious font of grace. And I quoted the passage from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s 1997 book, Salt of the Earth that by now I’ve committed to memory: “I am of the opinion, to be sure, that the old rite should be granted to those who desire it. It’s impossible to see what could be dangerous or unacceptable about that. A community is calling its very being into question when it suddenly declares that what until now was its holiest and highest possession is strictly forbidden, and makes the longing for it seem downright indecent.”

Neff was receptive and friendly, but the calls began inauspiciously. The first came from a woman in Texas who managed, in two minutes, to repeat just about every major misconception and fallacy I’d ever heard about the traditional liturgy – it was like listening to the entire community of liturgical vandals from the 1970s, rolled into a single person. I was told that “no one understood” the old Mass thanks to the use of Latin and the priest’s having his “back to the people,” that there was nothing special about Latin anyway, that I was wrong to say the traditional Mass was older than the Council of Trent (1545-1563) – you get the idea.

It was hard to know where to begin, but with the host’s indulgence I took my time with a response that went like this. The complaint that the priest had his “back to the people” in the old rite is emblematic of a modern mentality in which “the people,” rather than God, are the center of the Mass. For weighty theological reasons, priest and people face East together as the Holy Sacrifice is offered. Mass facing the people, scholars are now coming to acknowledge, was not the primitive practice, and Mass said ad Orientem is the historic norm – Roman basilicas in which the priest might appear to have traditionally “faced the people” can be accounted for simply by their peculiar construction, which forced him to face that way in order to fix his gaze eastward. (During the consecration, moreover, the people turned to face East along with the priest.) In the 1990s, Cardinal Ratzinger, persuaded by Monsignor Klaus Gamber’s arguments on this point, spoke of the desirability of returning to ad Orientem celebrations, and later wrote the preface to Uwe Michael Lang’s book Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer, which takes the same position.

To the caller’s claim that the fathers of Vatican II had all but demanded the Novus Ordo, I replied with the research of Father Brian Harrison of the Pontifical University of Puerto Rico – research that appeared in these pages, I might add – to the effect that most bishops at Vatican II envisioned only minor changes to the Mass, and added that Monsignor Klaus Gamber, whose book The Reform of the Roman Liturgy features a preface by the man who is now our Pope, insisted that the vast majority of the Council fathers would not have approved of the rite of Mass imposed on the Catholic world in the name of Vatican II. As for Trent, it merely codified an already-existing liturgy; it didn’t create the traditional Latin Mass out of whole cloth.

With regard to liturgical language, I said, the use of a non-vernacular tongue is not an uncommon religious phenomenon. Islam uses Arabic even in non-Arabic-speaking parts of the world, and synagogue services are largely in Hebrew – a tongue that has only recently begun to be used once again as a vernacular language. (In the name of fostering “active participation,” Reform Judaism once tried, unsuccessfully, to displace Hebrew, which has since returned to the Reform liturgy.) The Latin language plays an especially important role for the Catholic Church, as pope after pope tried to explain to us. In Veterum Sapientia (1962), Pope John XXIII reiterated that because the Catholic Church was greater than any merely human society, it was perfectly fitting and right that she should employ an international, non-vernacular language as a sign of the unity of her members. The Church defended the use of Latin long after it had ceased to be a vernacular language, and the twentieth century saw popes drawing particular attention to the merits of Latin. When did all those arguments suddenly lose their persuasive force?

(Incidentally, what can it mean when a Catholic tells us that “no one understood” the Mass in the old days? Anyone suggesting such a thing expects me to believe the following: 1) literate human beings could not follow a simple Latin-English missal; 2) for years on end, no one possessed even the modest level of ambition it would have taken to ask a priest, or even an informed fellow parishioner, to explain to him the meaning of the ceremony his religion required him to attend at least once a week throughout his entire life; and 3) no one could be bothered to leaf through even one of the many books, including Maria Montessori’s The Mass Explained to Children, that explained the basic contours of the Mass in simple language. What kind of lifeless automatons would we have to be dealing with for all this to be true?)

Sticking to the theme of Latin and the universality it both represents and fosters, I gave as an example the experience of Douglas Hyde, the British Communist who became a Catholic in the mid-twentieth century. Hyde began to inquire into Catholicism for a variety of reasons, including his interest in the medieval world. Then something impressed itself upon him ( I had this quotation on my computer screen during the program and read it over the air):

At 11:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve I was twiddling the knob of my radio. Unable to get out to Midnight Mass I wanted at least to bring it to my fireside. And as I switched from one European station to the next I tuned in to one Midnight Mass after the other. Belgium, France, Germany, Eire, yes, even behind the Iron Curtain, Prague. It seemed as though the whole of what was once Christendom was celebrating what is potentially the most unifying event in man’s history. And the important thing was that it was the same Mass. I am a newcomer to the Mass but I was able to recognized its continuity as I went from station to station for it was in one common language. This aspect of Catholicism is but a single one, and maybe not the most important. But I have a strong feeling that it is precisely the Catholicism of the Catholic Church which may prove the greatest attraction, and will meet the greatest need, for my disillusioned generation.

I added that Father C. John McCloskey, who is not a traditionalist per se, nevertheless estimated that hundreds of thousands of people were driven away by the imposition of the new rite. Well, I said, those people matter. Those people have souls just as much as you or I have. And if making this traditional Latin Mass available once again could bring them back, how could we be so petty as not to do it?

The very fact that I was able to say these things – none of which is particularly “extreme,” but little of which has (for some reason) been able to get a hearing in much of the Catholic media until very recently – was, I thought at the time, significant in itself. Little did I know that at least as important as anything I had to offer were the comments that would come from the rest of the callers, who joined me in saying things that any loyal Catholic is of course perfectly at liberty to say, but that for years have been portrayed as vaguely subversive. (Someday, I am sure, we will look back stupefied at a time when some Catholics actually felt funny about praising their own Church’s traditional liturgy.)

Everyone else who called, in fact, was thrilled at the news that the old rite could be coming back to us on a larger scale. One gentleman wondered about the practical issue involved in training priests in the use of the old Missal; I pointed to the instructional videos that are available, the Low Mass guide for priests available at the website of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales (see http://www.latin-mass-society.org/lowmass.htm), and the possibility (perhaps) of instructional retreats put on by priests of the traditional orders. He also had a more serious concern about whether the bishops might still obstruct the celebration of the Mass, but a commercial break prevented me from answering. (Without knowing the terms of the Pope’s motu proprio I could not have answered him perfectly in any event, but my sense is that some bishops will welcome the old rite out of loyalty to the Pope and , in a few cases, perhaps even out of genuine affection for it, while others will be indifferent and some fraction will be hostile. It is no less a dramatic papal move for all that.)

Another gentleman called to recount his own experience with returning to the traditional Mass, which he had known in his youth. A customer of his told him that the old rite was being offered about 40 miles away, so he went. “I was just awestruck at the reverence of it,” he said. “And I picked up the ’62 missal and I began to read it. It’s in English and it’s in Latin. It explains the Mass entirely. I never understood the Mass before I went to the Latin Mass and got the ’62 missal.” How’s that for turning the usual claim upside down – he never understood the Mass until he attended the traditional Latin Mass and read the old missal! He then mentioned some of the literature he found and read there, including Michael Davies’ A Short History of the Roman Mass. And now, with the old Mass poised to make a comeback? “If my Mom – my saintly Mom – could be alive to see this, she would break down in tears.”

Before hanging up he asked to add one more thing: “ I see whole pews of families – families with nine children. Young people go there, and they have these large families. It’s just the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”

Then we took a call from a woman in Wisconsin. “I grew up in the old Church,” she began. “I had 13 years of education in the Catholic school system, and it seemed in the mid-60s where I was living, where I was form on the East Coast, overnight we lost our Church. Everything that we’d grown up with, been taught, revered, thought was holy, just walked out the door….It seems to be there’s been nothing but mass confusion all along the way since that time.

“The one thing that kept me on track throughout,” she went on, “was the holiness that I remembered and the reverence for the Holy Eucharist. The one thing that kept me in the Church.”

This caller then joined the previous gentleman in finding it impossible to believe that people before the Council really didn’t follow the Mass. “As far as the Latin goes, that was never a problem. We had wonderful missals with English right alongside, things were very simply put, anyone could understand it…. I think it was more geared to the person in the street than it is today.”

The last call came from New Jersey. “When I was a kid,” this gentleman recalled, “the churches were packed, and you could walk up to any Catholic and he could explain to you what the Church was all about. Try to do that now….The new Mass – and where I go it’s celebrated reverently, it’s wonderful – but you go other places, and people have their own agendas that they’ve put in, and it’s opened the door for things that are not part of the Church to enter the Church.” I added, as time was running out, that in the traditional Mass the Latin language and the priest’s eastward posture both served to prevent such things from happening. (Are our liturgical vandals talented enough to improvise Latin prayers?)

News reports alone, in advance of Pope Benedict’s initiative, have thus initiated a most welcome thaw in the Catholic world, such that the previously marginalized can at last begin to be heard. Of course, self-styled “progressives” do not want to hear the laity saying such things. It is those who congratulate themselves the loudest on their eagerness to cater to the needs of the laity, to listen to their concerns, and to open the windows in the Church, who are most contemptuous of popularly expressed support for the traditional Latin Mass. But it is both coming out and picking up momentum all the time. With separate statements on behalf of the Pope and the old Mass issued in recent months by French, Italian and Polish intellectuals, the lid has perhaps been ripped off the issue for good – how, after all this, can the old Mass become a forbidden subject once again? It is this kind of thaw, we may confidently hope, that will at last foster a true springtime in the Church.

[Dr. Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (a free chapter of which is available at ThomasEWoods.com), as well as The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, a New York Times best-seller. His book The Church Confronts Modernity has just been released in paperback from Columbia University Press. The present article, "The Old Mass and the Great Thaw: Forbidden Opinions Suddenly Mainstream," was originally published in Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition (Winter 2007), pp. 16-18, and is reprinted here by permission of Latin Mass Magazine, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.]

The Preaching of St. John Fisher

By Michael Davies


John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester [pictured right], was the greatest theologian and the greatest preacher of sixteenth-century England,¹ and certainly her greatest preacher until the advent of Newman. He was almost certainly Europe’s greatest Catholic theologian of that century, whose influence upon the Council of Trent was greater than that of any other individual. It must be borne in mind that the majority of English bishops never preached. They were civil servants, servants of the King, and rarely visited their dioceses. A contemporary writer pays this tribute to the Bishop of Rochester:

He was also a very diligent preacher and the most notable in all this realm, both in his time or before or since, as well for his excellent learning as also for edifying audiences, and moving the affections of his hearers to cleave to God and goodness, to embrace virtue and to flee sin. So highly and profoundly was he learned in divinity that he was, and is at this day, well known, esteemed, and reputed and allowed (and no less worthy) not only for one of the chiefest flowers of divinity that lived in his time throughout all Christendom. Which hath appeared right and well by his works that he wrote in his maternal tongue, but much more by his learned and famous books written in the Latin tongue.

His English sermons, although erudite, were intended to be understood by a lay audience. There are frequent Latin citations, but he always provides an English paraphrase. The vast majority of his references come from the New Testament, and he is especially found of St. Paul. Augustine is the Church Father most frequently cited. Fisher followed Augustine’s dictum that the aims of preaching were to instruct, to divert, and to move. Other patristic writers quoted by Fisher include Chrysotom, Origen, Jerome, Ignatius, Ambrose, Gregory, Cyprian and Eusebius.

Seventeen of Fisher’s sermons have survived, the most notable being the ten on the seven Penitential Psalms, which have recently been republished in modern English.² The cycle was preached soon after Fisher had become Bishop of Rochester, and was first published in 1508 and reprinted seven times before 1529. It is not known for certain to whom they were addressed, but in all probability it was to the household of his patron, Lady Margaret Beaufort [pictured left], mother of King Henry VII. The length of the sermons indicates that they would have been preached outside Mass. Father Edward Surtz, S.J., considers Fisher’s sermons on the Penitential Psalms to be “his most popular and brilliant, undoubtedly his literary masterpiece.”³

A strong sense of structure manifests itself in every sermon. Brendan Bradshaw writes: “Formally they belong to a scholastic tradition, highly structured and analytical. But they achieve and often powerful rhetorical effect by means of an imaginative manipulation of imagery, deployed by was of simile or allegory to illuminate and develop the argument.”⁴ J.W. Blench, in his book Preaching in England in the late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, describes “the most felicitous aspect of Fisher’s ornamentation” as “his frequent use of similes.”⁵ The sinner who produces contrition and confession, but not satisfaction, is compared to a tree which brings forth buds and flowers but no fruit.⁶ The soul needs grace or it will wither, just as an herb withers without moisture.⁷ God can no more withhold his grace from a soul prepared to receive it than the sun can fail to shine through an open window.⁸ The hungry lion waiting for its prey resembles sinners waiting for the occasions of sin.⁹ Rubbing makes rusty iron bright; thus do tears of penitence wash the soul.¹⁰ Confession is compared to the lancing of a wound.¹¹

Some of his imagery might appear somewhat crude to present-day ears. In his commentary on Psalm 31 Fisher speaks of those who continue in sin without availing themselves of the healing remedy of confession:

In reality, true bliss is in heaven, where all goodness and pleasure can be found without end, while the utmost wretchedness is in hell, where all evil and no pleasure can be found. We are brought to this misery by our sin and on the contrary, to bliss by the purging of our sins. Once the filthiness of sin is conceived in the soul and continues there a long time by unfortunate habit, the soul becomes foul and more and more infected. We see that the longer urine or any other stinking liquid is kept in a vessel, the more that vessel becomes foul and corrupt. And in another example, we see that the more and the longer a boil or a swelling full of matter and filth is hidden, the more its corruption and venomous infection grows, until it finally pierces to the bones and corrupts them. Likewise, the longer sins are kept confined in souls, the more feeble and contagiously corrupt the souls become.¹²

This can hardly be said to get the message across beautifully, but it certainly does so effectively.

In Fisher’s preaching there are quotations from the Bible, the apocryphal acts of the Apostles, the Fathers, the great medieval theologians, classical allusions, and historical references. Thus Fisher:

In the beginning of the world, almighty God made paradise a place of honest pleasure. And from out of that place issued a flood divided into four parts, signifying the four capital virtues, justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude, with which the whole soul could be washed and made pleasant as with so many waters. But contrariwise, the devil has conceived and made another paradise of bodily and sensual pleasure, and from out of that come four other floods, far contrary to the others: the flood of covetousness contrary to justice, the flood of gluttony against temperance, the flood of pride against prudence, and the flood of lechery against fortitude. Whoever is drowned in any of these floods finds it hard to be turned to God by true contrition, for the raging of them is so great and overflowing. For this reason, the prophet says, verurntamen in diluvio aquarum multarum, ad eum non approximabunt, those who have all the pleasures of this world and are, in a sense, drowned in them shall not draw near almighty God for their salvation. But what is the remedy for us who are in the midst of all these floods? Where shall we fly? Truly, God is the only remedy and refuge, for without his help none can escape without being drowned.¹³

Among my favorites are the saint’s frequent similes and allegories derived from nature. His half-sister, Elizabeth, became a Dominican nun, and it was for her, while a prisoner in the Tower of London, that he wrote A Spiritual Consolation and The Ways to Perfect Religion. Elizabeth refused to take the Oath of Supremacy in the reign of her royal namesake, Elizabeth I, and went to live out the remainder of her life in a poor monastery on what was then the Island of Zeeland in the Netherlands. Of her life there and her death nothing is known.

In The Ways to Perfect Religion, the saint is almost ecstatic in describing the beauty of God’s creation: “Behold the Rose, the Lily, the Violet, behold the Peacocks, the Pheasant, the Popinjay: behold all the other creatures of this world: All these were of his making, all their beauty and goodliness of him they received it.”¹⁴ The closeness of his observation of God’s creatures is made clear in his sermon on Psalm 101, where he comments on verse 8: Vigilavi, et factus sum sicut passer solitarius in tecto – I have watched, and am become as a sparrow all alone on the housetop:

When the sparrow suspects that snares or traps are laid for her on the ground, she quickly flies up to the covering of the house or the eaves, and if at any time hunger forces her to come down again, yet out of fear she quickly goes back up, fleeing there for shelter and safety in her danger and peril. There she wipes and sharpens her beak; there she preens and sets her feather in order; there she also brings forth birds; and there she rests and makes merry as she can, after her manner. Likewise, those who desire and go about to make satisfaction for their offenses must be wary and wise to keep themselves from the devil’s snares and must fly to heaven, set their felicity not in worldly pleasures but in heavenly things, which are a defense and a covering over all the world.¹⁵

In his famous sermon against Luther at St. Paul’s Cross in May, 1521, the saint seems almost to have taken inspiration from the May day on which he was preaching. The first third of the sermon is filled with allusions to nature in the English spring: the sun, the clouds, the light, the stronger sunbeams, the burning glass using sunbeams to set fire to tinder or clothe, the greater warmth, the difference between the tree in winter and in spring, the stock of a dead tree, the live tree with its buds and leaves, the tree and its shadow, and so forth.

St. John Fisher liked to spend his day in the company of Our Lady. He would say: “Therefore let us go into this mild morning, our Blessed Lady Virgin Mary.” Throughout his life he had a very great devotion to the Blessed Virgin, whom he would compare to a morning:

The blessed lady, Mother of our Savior, may well be called a morning, since before her there was none without sin. After her, the most clear sun Christ Jesus showed his light to the world, expelling utterly by his innumerable beams this darkness in which all the world was wrapped and covered before. We see by experience that the morning rises out of darkness, as the wise man says, Deus qui dixit de tenebris lucem splendescere. Almighty God commands light to shine out of darkness. (2 Cor 4:6). The clerk Orpheus marveled at it greatly, saying O nox, que lucem Amadeus, O dark night, I marvel greatly that you bring forth light.¹⁶ And of a truth it is a marvel to man’s reason that light should spring out of darkness.

So in like manner, we may marvel at this blessed Virgin, she being clean, without a spot of any manner of sin, and shining, even though she came forth originally from sinners who were covered and wrapped in darkness and the night of sin. Likewise, after the morning the sun rises, as if it were brought forth and had its beginning from the morning. In the same way our Savior Christ was born and brought forth from this blessed Virgin and spread his light over all the world. We also perceive that when the sun rises from the dawn, he makes the morning grow clearer by the effusion of his light. So Christ Jesus, born of this Virgin, defiled her not with any spot of sin, but endowed and filled her with much more light and grace than she had before.

Lastly, although it seems as if the morning is the cause of the sun, it is the sun that is undoubtedly the cause of the morning. And likewise, although the blessed Virgin brought forth our Saviour Jesus, yet he made her and was the cause of her being brought froth in to this world. Thus, you can perceive by nature that this Blessed Virgin may well be compared to a morning…. Every generation of mankind since the creation of Adam was wrapped and covered with the darkness of sin, and although the spirit of God was ever aloft, ready to give grace, yet for all that none was found able to receive it until the time this blessed Virgin was ordained by the holy Trinity to spring and to be brought forth in to the world. By the providence of almighty God, she was safely kept and defended from every spot and blemish of sin, so that we may well say to her:

Tota pulchra es, amica mea, et macula non est in te, O blessed Lady, you are all fair and without spot or blemish of sin (Canticles 4:7). The angel at her Annunciation said, Ave, plena gratia, Hail, full of grace (Lk. 1:38). This blessed Virgin, full of the beams of grace, was ordained by God as a light of the morning and she afterward brought forth the bright shining sun with his manifold beams, our Savior Christ, Qui illuminant omnem hominem, venientem in hunc mundum, who gives light to every creature coming into this world (Jn. 1:9).¹⁷

In John Fisher’s sermons far more attention is given to the joys of haven than the pains of purgatory or hell. The most striking feature of his sermons on the psalms is their strong emphasis on God’s mercy, and on the efficacy of penance: “Our most gracious Lord, almighty God, is merciful to them that be penitent.” His message was dominated by the concepts of God, sin penitence, and mercy. These four words and their many synonyms run through the sermons and put other themes into the shade. Where hell and damnation are mentioned about a hundred times (about as frequently as heaven), mercy and forgiveness are mentioned more than five hundred times, God and sin more frequently still. Sin (rather than hell) is presented as the enemy; and devils, when they are mentioned, are agents of temptation in this world rather than of torture in the next.¹⁸

A consoling evocation of the boundless nature of God’s mercy can be found in the sermon on Psalm 50:

It is written, nemo bonus nisi solus Deus, no man is good but only almighty God (Lk 18:19). Only He is of so great a meekness and pity that no pint of malice or falseness can be in him. Therefore, since he is so meek and merciful, and since he is above his laws, or in no way subject to them, he can forgive and be merciful to whom he will. And so shall he do, for he cannot have little mercy but always great and plentiful mercy. Truly, the mercy of our most might and best Lord God is great, that it has all measures of greatness. Trees are sometimes called great for their excellent height; pits are called great for their depth; far journeys are called great for their length; and streets and highways are called great for their breadth and width. But the mercy of God contains and is measured by all these measures of greatness, not just by one of them. Of its greatness in height it is written, Domine, usque ad celos misericordia tua. Lord, your mercy extends and reaches up to the heavens (Ps. 56:11). It is also great in depth, for it reach down to the lowest hell. The prophet says, misericordia tua magna est super me, et eruisti animam meam ex inferno inferiori, Lord, your mercy is great over me, and you have delivered me form the lowest and deepest hell (Ps. 85:13). It is broad, for it occupies and spans all the world, the same prophet saying, misericordia Domini plena est terra, the earth is full of the mercy of our Lord (Ps. 32:5). It lacks no length, for also by the same prophet it is spoken: misericordia eius ab eterno, et usque in eternum supertimentes eum, the mercy of God is without end on those who fear him (Ps. 102:127). Therefore since the mercy of God is so high, so deep, so broad, and so long, who can say or think it is little? Who will not call it great by all measures of greatness? Then everyone who want to acquaint himself with this mercy can say, Miserere mei, Deus, secunum magnam misericordiam tuam, Lord, have mercy on me according to Thy great mercy.¹⁹

If, as the saint assures us, God cannot have little mercy but always great and plentiful mercy, how are we to explain that His wrath is directed against sinners? If God can be wrathful then He cannot be consistently merciful. Fisher explains that God is immutable, unchanging.

Although almighty God in himself and of his eternal being and nature is without mutability or change, yet diverse human affections are attributed to him, as if it might be thought he is sometimes angry, sometimes merciful, or changed from wrath into meekness. But St. James says, apud Deum nulla transmutatio est neque vicissitudinis obumbratio, God is without mutability or change, he is always one (James 11:17). For just as we see that the sunbeam is always one in itself and without any change in its operation, yet hurts and grieves the eye that is not clean and perfect while it comforts the eye that is pure, so almighty God, without any mutability in himself, is called grievous to a sinner who is infected with the malice of sin but meek and gentle to the righteous man who is purged from sin. Truly as long as a creature continues in the wretchedness of sin he shall think that God is angry with him, just as the eye, as long as it is sore, shall find the sunbeam grievous, offensive, and never comfortable till the sickness and disease be done away.²⁰

The saint stresses the fact that satisfaction is an essential element in the Sacrament of Penance:

By the virtue of contrition our sins be forgiven, by confession they be forgotten, but by satisfaction they be so done away that no sin or token remains in any condition of them, but as clean as ever we were. We are shown and warned that it is not enough just to be contrite and confess our offences, but we must also be active in doing good works to make satisfaction for them. For if we are negligent in this third part of penance, which is satisfaction, it is to be feared that some sort secret guile or fault is left in us by which we are deceived. When we see a tree bringing forth buds and flowers but afterward no fruit, we think that there must really be some fault in that tree; even so, in a man’s soul that has first brought forth the bud of contrition and afterwards the flower of confession, if at last it douse not bring forth the good works of satisfaction, it is to be dreaded that some secret guile or deceit still remains. That is to say, the soul is not really contrite and truly confessed.²¹

Fisher illustrates this point with an analogy that might require some explanation, the scraping of words from paper. By paper he is referring to parchment, and in his day writing could be scraped off and the parchment reused.

Only those who are penitent are blessed, for they alone take their journey into the heavenly country of real blessedness, now in this life by true faith and hope and after it in reality. But since penance has three different parts, that is to say, contrition, confession, and satisfaction, the more diligently anyone exercises himself in each of them, the nearer he is to eternal bliss, for by those three, as by so many instruments, we erase and cleanse our soul perfectly from sins. When we are about to erase and remove any sort of writing, we first scrape the paper and, by that erasing or scraping, remove something of the letters, like a defacing of true, perfect knowledge. And if we do so the third time, then shall nothing of the least letter be seen, but the paper shall be as clean as ever it was. In this way the three parts of penance achieve in our souls the removal of sins. By the virtue of contrition, our sins are forgiven; by confession, they are forgotten; but by satisfaction, they are s full removed that no sign or token remains of them of any sort, but we are as clan as ever we were.

Even if sin is removed after contrition and confession, a duty remains in the soul that needs to be paid and performed by suffering pain. For although the eternal pain that we would have suffered is removed by contrition and confession, yet there abides in the soul a certain tax or duty that must surely and undoubtedly be paid and satisfied, either here in this life by temporal pain or else after this life in purgatory. But when a person has made due satisfaction in this life, he shall never after suffer more pain; he is completely out of debt, and nothing after that shall ever be claimed of him. Therefore, the prophet says, beati quorum remisse sunt iniquitates, blessed are they whose sins are forgiven.²²

That Fisher was a close observer of human nature is made clear by many of the allusions he makes to it in his preaching. He urged women to put their souls before their shoes:

Ye women, when there is any black spot upon your faces, or any mool in your kerchiefs or any mire upon your clothes, be ye not ashamed? Yes, forsooth, sir. But I shall tell you whereof you ought to be ashamed. Surely, if your souls have any spots of deadly sin in them, for when our Savior so dearly with His most precious blood and with all these grievous pains did wash and wipe and cleanse our souls from every spot of deadly sin, ye should be much ashamed to defile them again, If you he ashamed for a foul, miry she, and not of a foul stinking soul, ye make more dearer your shoes than your souls.²³

The year 1509 was a significant one in the life of the saint. Both Henry VII and his mother, Lady Margaret, died, and John Fisher, acknowledged as the greatest preacher of his day, preached the funeral sermon for the king and the sermon for her month’s mind (that is, the Requiem Mass celebrated on the 30th day after death) for his mother. In his funeral sermon for Kind Henry VII, Fisher employed classical devices used by secular orators in their funeral orations: 1) the commendation of the dead, 2) the stirring of the hearers to have compassion on him, 3) the comforting of them again.²⁴ In the presence of the greatest in the realm, the saint had no hesitation in reminding them of the ephemeral nature of material possessions of political power:

First, as touching his laud and commendation, let no man think that my intention is to praise him for any vain transitory things of this life, which by the example of him all kings and princes may learn how fleeting, how slippery, how failing they be. Albeit he had as much of them as was possible in manner for any king to have…his treasure and riches were incomparable, his buildings most goodly and after the newest cast all of pleasure. But what is all this now, as unto him all is but fumus et umbra, a smoke that soon vanisheth and a shadow that soon passeth away. Shall I praise him then for them? Nay forsooth.²⁵

If the king’s great wealth and power gave him no hope for the attainment of eternal life, then the saint spoke of where that hope could be found: “The cause of this hope was the true belief he had in God, in his Church, and in the Sacraments thereof, which he received all with marvelous devotion, namely in the sacrament of penance, the sacrament of the altar, and the Sacrament of anointing.”²⁶

King Henry VIII would have done well to have taken careful heed of a passage from the saint’s commentary on Psalm 101, one of the most striking passages of Fisher’s eloquence:²⁷

The life of man here is only for a while; it will shortly perish and be at an end. No space, no void of time, no leisure can be had, but always it draws to an end. It cannot be at a point; it is never truly at rest for one minute of an hour. Whether we eat or drink, wake or sleep, laugh or weep, our life here is always drawing to an end.

Where are now the kings and princes that once reigned over all the world, whose glory and triumph were lifted up above the earth? Where are now the innumerable company and power of Xerxes and Caesar? Where are the great victories of Alexander and Pompey? Where are now the great riches of Croesus and Crassus? But what shall we say of those who once were kings and governors of this realm? Where are they now whom we have known and seen in our days in such great wealth and glory that it was thought by many they would never have died, never have been forgotten? They had all their pleasures at the full, both of delicious and good fare, of hawking, hunting, also of excellent horses and stallions, greyhounds and hounds for their entertainment, their palaces well and richly furnished, strongholds and towns without number. They had a great plenty of gold and silver, many servants, fine apparel for themselves and their lodgings. They had the power of the law to proscribe, to punish, to exalt and set forward their friends and loved ones, to put down and make low their enemies, and also to punish by temporal death rebels and traitors. Every man held with them, all were at their command. Every man was obedient to them, feared them, also honored and praised them, everywhere now? Are they not gone and wasted like smoke? Of them it is written in another place, mox ut honorificati fuerint et exaltati, dificientes quemadmodum fumus deficient, when they were in their utmost prosperity and fame, they soon failed and came to nothing, even as smoke does (Ps. 36:2). St. James compares the vanity of this life to a vapor, and he says it shall perish and wither away as a flower in the hay season. (James 4:15).²⁸

The saint’s most celebrated sermon is, without doubt, the one that he preached at the Month’s Mind of Lady Margaret Beaufort [right], the mother of King Henry VII [below left], who had a great respect for her. She had a deep devotion to the Church and a great love of learning. She was a patron of the relatively new printing press. Caxton had produced the first book printed in England when John Fisher was eight years old. She very soon came to appreciate the exceptional worth of the young priest, and asked him to be her confessor. He was able to say in all sincerity in a letter written in 1527: “Though she chose me as her director to hear her confessions and to guide her life, yet I gladly confess that I learned more from her great virtue than ever I could teach her.”

Under John Fisher’s guidance Lady Margaret was to do a great deal for religion and scholarship. The depth of her religious devotion can be gauged from Fisher’s references to it in his oration for her Month’s Mind. “This sermon,” one scholar explains, “like the funeral oration for Henry VII, shows evident classical characteristics. Fisher followed the classical scheme for the praise of a great personage; before life, and after death. The orator was expected to praise the ancestors, the gifts of body, fortune and mind, of the subject of his discourse, together with his noble deeds and glorious death. Thus Fisher speaks of Lady Margaret’s noble family, her exemplary manners, her gifts and virtues, her ascetical practices and good works, her painful but holy death, and the hope of her salvation.” ²⁹

In prayer every day at her uprising, which commonly was not long after five of the clock, she began certain devotions, and after them, with one of her gentlewomen, the matins of Our Lady, then she came into her closet, where, with her chaplain, she said also matins of the day, and after that daily heard four masses on her knees, so continuing in prayer until the hour of dinner, which on the eating day was ten o’clock, and on the fasting day eleven.

After dinner full truly she would go to her stations to three altars daily, and daily her dirges and commendations she would say, and her Evensong before supper, both of the days of Our Lady, besides many other prayers and Psalter of David through the year, and at night before she went to bed she failed not to resort unto her chapel, and a large quarter of an hour to engage in her devotions. No marvel all this long time her kneeling was to her painful, that many times it caused in her back pain and disease, nonetheless when she was in health she failed not to say the Crown of Our Lady, which containeth sixty and three Aves, and at every Ave a kneeling, and as for meditation she had divers books in French wherewith she occupied herself when weary in prayer, wherefore divers she did translate into English.

In his final surviving sermon, “A sermon very fruitful, Godly and learned,” the saint presents the crucifix as a book, a book that will “suffice for the study of a true Christian man all the days of his life.” He urged the faithful to imitate St. Francis did, to see or remember the image of the crucifix as often as possible, and say to themselves while doing so: “Who art Thou, Lord, and who am I?”

Is it not a wonderful thing, that he that is the Lord and author of all liberty, would thus be bound with ropes and nailed hand and foot unto the Cross? Thus whoever with a meek heart and a true faith muses and marvels over this most wonderful book (I speak of the Crucifix), he shall come to more fruitful knowledge than many others who each day study their common books. This book may suffice for the study of the true Christian man all the days of his life. In this book he may find all things that are necessary for the health of his soul. St. Francis could pass his time with this book, and was never weary thereof, and his great study was within the compass of a few words. Quis tu, et quis ego Domine? That is to say, who are thou Lord, and who am I? ... This holy St. Francis so profited in this lesson, that it caused in his heart such a fervent love, such a devotion, such an affection for Christ, that the capital wounds which he beheld in the hands and feet and side of Christ were, by a miracle, imprinted in his own hands and feet....A man may easily say and think with himself (beholding in his heart the Image of the Crucifix), who are Thou and who am I. thus every person, both rich and poor, may think, not only in the church here, but in every other place, and in his business where about he goeth. Thus the poor laborer may think, when he is at plough carrying his ground, and when he goeth to his pastures to see his cattle, or when he lies in his bed waking and cannot sleep.³⁰

The saint explained the spiritual fruits that we would derive from this devotion:

Contemplation of the crucifix should therefore cause Christians to fear the punishment of sin which Christ bore for them on the cross; to be ashamed of their own sins against Christ, who had done so much for them, and for breaching their baptismal promises; to feel sorrow at his sufferings; and to hate their own sins which had brought such suffering upon him.³¹

No matter how great his sins, the sinner should never despair of Christ’s forgiveness, and Fisher quotes St. Bernard, who considered the very posture of the corpus on the crucifix to be one of welcome:

But peradventure thou thinkest that our Savior because thou hast been so unkind to Him, will not receive thee unto His mercy? I say, therefore forsake thy sin and accuse thy unkindness, receive thee again unto his great mercy….Behold earnestly the manner how thy Savior hanged on the cross, and thou shalt see great cause of hope of his mercy if thou thus return. St. Bernard sayeth: Who may not be ravished to hope and confidence if he considers the order of His body, His head bowing down to offer a kiss, His arms spread to embrace us, His hands bored through to make liberal gifts, his side open to show unto us the love of His heart, His feet fastened with nails, that he shall not start away but abide with us. And all His body stretched forcing himself to give it wholly unto us.³²

The saint concludes this, his final surviving sermon, preached upon Good Friday, with words that have lost none of their relevance today. He urges the sinner to have this wonderful book constantly before his eyes, and warns him that his response to its lesson will decide his eternal destiny. If he sincerely laments his sins then their debt shall be thoroughly paid and he will escape everlasting woe:

But if thou dost refuse this remedy, and follow the desires of this world and of the flesh, be thou well assured that then thou shalt pay thine own debts amongst the devils in hell with everlasting woe. From the which may he defend us, that for our love as this day suffered on the Cross, his most painful and sorrowful death, our Savior Christ Jesus. Amen.

The essential teaching here is “if thou dost refuse.” Throughout his sermons the saint is adamant that God does not condemn us to hell; we condemn ourselves. Until the very last moment of our lives we have the chance to repent:

What about these obstinate sinners who would never be converted by the great benefits of God? It had been far better for them to have suffered the greatest punishment that might be in this life. For they shall be drawn down by the cruel tormentors, the devils, into the deep pit of hell, there to be crucified eternally, where the worm of their conscience shall never die….But whoever in this life will do penance, no matter how great a sinner he was before (if he does not despair of forgiveness) almighty God shall be merciful and forgive him. St. Augustine says, if all the sins of the world were compared to the mercy of God, they would be in comparison to it no more than a spark of fire in the great sea. And I dare well say to the sinner, no matter how wicked he is in his living, if at any time in this life he will be penitent for it and desire forgiveness and mercy, almighty God of his great goodness will forgive him as quickly the water in the sea can quench a spark of fire that is cast upon it. For when the sinner is very penitent, nothing remains in the soul that can withstand the infinite mercy of almighty God, which stands round about, ready on every side. The prophet makes this point in the following words: Sperantem autem in Domine misericordia circumdabit. The mercy of God shall be ready round about on every side to defend the sinner who trust in him and will do penance for his sins. ³³

Notes

1. HRR, p.4. [back]


2. St. John Fisher, Exposition of the Seven Penitential Psalms (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998). [back]


3. E. Surtz, The Works and Days of John Fisher (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 238. In his Chapter XIII, “A Method and Style of the Preacher,” Surtz provides the most scholarly and detailed analysis yet written of Fisher’s style and literary accomplishment in these sermons and orations for Henry VII and Lady Margaret. [back]


4. HRR, p. 4. [back]


5. J.W. Blench, Preaching in England in the late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964), p. 131. [back]


6. EW, p. 26. [back]


7. Ibid., p. 112. [back]


8. Ibid., p. 82. [back]


9. Ibid., p. 67. [back]


10. Ibid., p. 17. [back]


11. Ibid., p.127. [back]


12. Fisher, Exposition, p. 29. [back]


13. Ibid., p. 36. [back]


14. EW, p. 376. [back]


15. EW, p. 154, Gardiner, pp. 159-160. [back]


16. An allusion to Greek mythology. [back]


17. Sermon on Psalm 37, EW, pp. 47-49. [back]


18. Rex, p.35. [back]


19. EW, pp. 95-96. [back]


20. Fisher, Exposition, pp. 8-9. [back]


21. Ibid., pp. 26-28; EW, pp. 24-26. [back]


22. Fisher, Exposition, p. 26 (Psalm 31). [back]


23. EW, p. 402. [back]


24. Blench, Preaching in England, p. 86. [back]


25. EW, pp. 269-70. [back]


26. EW, p. 273. [back]


27. Blench, Preaching in England, p. 229. [back]


28. EW, pp. 146-46; Fisher, Exposition, pp. 151-52. [back]


29. Blench, Preaching in England, p. 86. [back]


30. EW, pp. 390-91. [back]


31. Rex, p. 47. [back]


32. EW, pp. 410-11. [back]


33. EW, pp. 41-42; Fisher, , pp. 42-43. [back]

Art credits:

(1) Top: West Window from the Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs in Cambridge (detail) by Juan de Jaunes;
(2) Bishop John Fisher (about 1532–4) by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543), Tate Gallery, London -- Lent by Her Majesty The Queen; Coloured chalks, watercolour, brush, pen and ink on pink primed paper;
(3) St. Paul’s Cross, in St. Paul's Cathedral Churchyard, London (sketch by unknown artist);
(4) The Annunciation by El Greco;
(5) Lady Margaret Beaufort, c1500, by Rowland Lockey (Cambridge University);
(6) King Henry VII, by unknown artist (early 16th century);
(7) Portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort (after 1510), dressed in habit of a widow of vowess (woman vowed to chastity), holding a devotional book, probably based on posthumous image by Maynard Vewick, a Netherlandish painter who worked for both Henry VII and Henry VIII;
(8) Bishop John Fisher, by Hans Holbein, digitally remastered by the Giclee printing process.

[Michael Davies was president of Una Voce International and the author of many books on Catholic history and liturgy. His biography of St. John Fisher and the Exposition of the Seven Penitential Psalms in modern English can both be obtained from the St. John Fisher Forum. 1546 Concord Road, Jacksonville, IL 62650; Ph: (217) 245-0023; www.stjohnfisherforum.org. The present article, "The Preaching of St. John Fisher," was originally published in Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition (Summer 2003), pp. 10-17, and is reprinted here by permission of Latin Mass Magazine, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.]