Latin Will Always Be the Ideal Liturgical Language

Peter Kwasniewski

Many convincing arguments can be and have been given in favor of preserving the Latin language in the rites of the Roman Catholic Church—as even the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963) stated that it should be, following close on the heels of John XXIII’s remarkable Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientiae of 1962.¹ As we all know, Pope John XXIII’s and the Council’s reaffirmations of Latin in the liturgy were more or less cancelled out completely by the ill-considered decisions of Pope Paul VI, who once more demonstrated to the world that if the pope enjoys the charism of infallibility when teaching the truths of faith and morals, he enjoys no such gift in regard to particular prudential judgments, including the dispositions of the liturgy in its changeable elements.² In any case, my purpose in this article is not to catalog and review the many arguments in favor of Latin, a task that has already been well explored by traditionalist authors, but merely to speak of some of my own personal experiences of where and when the impressive unity of Latin would have made so much more sense in real life than the Babel of vernacular languages.

My wife and I lived in Austria for seven and a half years. Being in Europe convinced me past all doubt, if I had any doubts, that the switch after the Council to an exclusive use of the vernacular for the Mass was the dumbest change that could have been made. Not to mince words: the switch to vernacular is the utmost example of postconciliar near-sightedness. Instead of making the Mass more deeply accessible, it localizes, particularizes, and relativizes it, shutting off everyone who does not speak the local tongue; traveling or immigrant Catholics are thrust into a foreign environment that alienates them far more than the solemn Latin liturgy ever alienated the simplest peasant. In fact, due to its pervasive aura of sacredness and its perceptible focus on the mystery of the Eucharist, the traditional liturgy, even when the words are not fully understood, shapes the soul better than the new liturgy when cerebrally understood.

The irony can be seen on many levels.

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Latin is universal and is not the daily language of any modern nation or people. There is no cultural imperialism in the use of Latin, but rather a visible sign of the Church of Christ reaching out to all nations, leading them back to unity in one faith, one communion, one worship of God.

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First, Latin is universal and is not the daily language of any modern nation or people. There is no cultural imperialism in the use of Latin, but rather a visible sign of the Church of Christ reaching out to all nations, leading them back to unity in one faith, one communion, one worship of God. If the use of Latin were argued to be a form of cultural imperialism, we would have to go further and say that proclaiming and preaching the Trinity or the Incarnation is a form of theological imperialism destructive of pagan African, Asian, and European cultures and religions, or that the very use of the same Mass, the same missal (in however many vernacular tongues), is a form of liturgical imperialism destructive of the peculiar ways that an Aborigine might choose to worship Christ. There is no escaping this logic: if you deny the fittingness of a universal presence of Latin, a universality insisted on by none other than Blessed John XXIII, you are on the road to denying the universality of Christian doctrine and worship.

Second, modern Europeans in general are strongly multilingual,³ which makes Latin easy enough for them to get used to, as indeed they once were, not many decades ago. There has never been an age where Latin would be more accessible than now, precisely on account of the “globalization” taking place. If men of Switzerland or Denmark can and often must speak several languages, what would be the difficulty of liturgy in Latin? It would be a source of international unity among believers, far more than idiosyncratic local liturgies could ever be. In those years in Europe, I participated in many liturgies that would have gone far more smoothly had they simply been in Latin. On my sole visit to Lourdes, I attended a Mass in which the languages were being shifted constantly to accommodate the international congregation, a kind of elaborate show of linguistic gymnastics that I found highly distracting, almost impossible to pray with. The already overly verbal and self-involved character of the new liturgy was heightened all the more by this preoccupation with proportional coverage of language groups.

Third, and building on the last point, because literacy has spread everywhere, large numbers of people are in a position to follow along with a hand missal or a booklet that reproduces the Ordinary of the Mass. Even the illiterate, who often enjoy (in compensation, as it were) a rich oral culture and a high level of intuitive understanding, will benefit from sermons in their own tongue that explain the Mass, as Romano Guardini explained it to his German congregations. Moreover, as Jacques Maritain says in Peasant of the Garonne, the believer who, by simply kneeling at Mass and letting his mind be drawn to heavenly things, is caught up in silent worship of God, does not need words, missals, long readings and sermons; it is enough for him to be there. As the peasant of Ars put it: “He looks at me and I look at Him.” When the liturgy breaks this immediate spiritual contact in favor of the specious immediacy of verbal didacticism, it does the ultimate disservice to the spiritual lives of believers.

Fourth, the longed-for fraternity of nations and peace on earth — what could serve this aspiration better than a liturgy everywhere the same? An American traveling in France, a German traveling in Spain, an Italian traveling in Denmark, indeed an Asian in Africa or an Indian in Australia, all of them would find themselves “back home” in the local parish church. And given the importance G. K. Chesterton and Gabriel Marcel rightly place on this deep and inexpressibly consoling feeling of “being at home,” should not the Church do everything in her power to make the liturgy the very place where one can always be “at home,” no matter where one is? Not, of course, by making the liturgy chummy and casual, but by ensuring that it remains deeply familiar in its identity, coherence, consistency, and stability.

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The believer who, by simply kneeling at Mass and letting his mind be drawn to heavenly things, is caught up in silent worship of God, does not need words, missals, long readings and sermons; it is enough for him to be there. As the peasant of Ars put it: “He looks at me and I look at Him.”

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We are living in the age of travel, the age of the “global village.” At least in the Western world, almost everyone travels now at some point or another; there has never been a time in the entire history of the world when so vast a number of people take trips within their country as well as to foreign countries. How foolish it was to break down the universal mode of worship just when it has become more pertinent than ever! The ancient Roman rite emphatically illustrates and admirably furthers the purpose of human brotherhood — and, as Henri de Lubac observes, there is definitive brotherhood only in a common adoration of God. In the realm of the Novus Ordo, however, the liturgical celebrations illustrate a diversity or plurality that is not traced back to unity and universality, as is painfully evident to a traveler who speaks few or no other languages than his own. Once upon a time, parishes and chapels across the entire globe testified to the profound inner unity of the Catholic (that is, universal) Church; now there is only the tired Protestant phenomenon of localization.

This last point deserves a bit of development. The era of the old liturgy in fact left much room for inculturation or local adaptation, whether in the design of churches, in the style of vestments, in the layout and decoration of sanctuaries, or in popular hymns, carols, and processions. Nevertheless, the one constant axis was the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which remained the same from the rising of the sun to its setting, and testified in its very language to an unbroken unity with Rome, the mystical-historical seat of the Church founded by Christ. The incarnational scandal of the particular was never sacrificed in view of temporary and superficial gains; Christ was never declared to be an African or an Asian, a female or a hermaphrodite, in order to win converts from paganism, feminism, gnosticism, etc. The Faith is founded on the rock of Peter, by providence Bishop of Rome, and this utmost particularity will remain until the end of time, as an image of the even greater scandal of the particularity of Christ, a Jewish man born in Nazareth during the heyday of the Roman Empire. The Chinese Catholic, as a man and as Chinese, worships God in communion with Rome. This is what the old liturgy proclaimed, in blissful and holy ignorance of the shallow charge of “cultural imperialism,” which of course the proclamation of truth can never be, even though the Gospel was given to mankind through the most particular of all particular circumstances.


The Baptism of Christ by the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altar
Some years ago, I was taken aback when a friend forwarded me a discussion by a conservative Catholic apologist who had come out in full arms and armor to defend the vernacularization of the Mass after the Council. My first impression was that his panoply of arguments, though reasonable-sounding, had already been rehearsed by the promoters of the Consilium’s “reform” back in the 1960s, and had not gained in truth or persuasiveness with the intervening decades. My second impression was that I was looking at a case of old-fashioned dissent. Pope John XXIII in his Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientiae, solemnly signed in St. Peter’s Basilica on the very eve of the Second Vatican Council, declares Latin to be the language of the Church’s worship, explains why it is the superior language for liturgy, and resolutely concludes that no other language could serve as well. This Constitution has been contradicted a million times over since its promulgation, but it has never been rescinded nor its contents abrogated. It may be that a future pope will be able to take it up again with praise when the full effects of Summorum Pontificum have permeated the Church.

In any case, the apologist argued that Latin was the common language of ancient Rome, and so we ought to be using the common language of our day and age. Well, Latin certainly was the common language of many members of the Catholic Church once upon a time, in the declining Roman Empire, but already in the early Middle Ages, with the invasions of barbarian tribes speaking a plethora of languages, Latin became more and more a monastic and academic tongue, and at the popular level morphed into early forms of the Romance languages, such as the Italian dialect in which Dante wrote his Divine Comedy, or the Neapolitan dialect St. Thomas Aquinas used when preaching in his native territory. Thus, we may safely say that for over a thousand years the Catholic Church was worshiping in a language that had become a fixed, formal, sacred language, just as Hindus use Sanskrit, Jews Hebrew, Moslems Arabic, and so on.

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I was looking at a case of old-fashioned dissent. Pope John XXIII in his Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientiae, solemnly signed in St. Peter’s Basilica on the very eve of the Second Vatican Council, declares Latin to be the language of the Church’s worship, explains why it is the superior language for liturgy, and resolutely concludes that no other language could serve as well. This Constitution has been contradicted a million times over since its promulgation, but it has never been rescinded nor its contents abrogated.

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It was also plain silly for this apologist to assert that most people in the old days didn’t understand what was going on at Mass. From what I can tell, it seems fair to say that far more people in the old days knew what was going on at Mass — essentially — and why it was important, than people know nowadays, even though the Mass is in their own language! Now, I don’t blame the language for this, I blame the clergy, as well as the mendacious translation that was foisted by the original ICEL on the English-speaking world. Still, the tectonic shift in language signified in the popular mind a shift in the very meaning of what was taking place in church, and hence, over time, a further deviation in the faith of the people regarding the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Will it ever be possible to calculate the damage done to the Church by the banishment of Latin from her public worship? I think not. We have little conception of the true extent of the harm, just as we have trouble imagining the size of the earth, the solar system, or the galaxy we are in. By the sudden cessation and replacement of the solemn sacred language that for nearly 2,000 years had been the tongue, the voice, part of the inmost character, of the Western Church, the false attitude and opinion already circulating at the time of the Council that the past is utterly meaningless to the present and the present must be liberated from the past, must ignore the past, was confirmed and, as it were, forever institutionalized. In the very fact of vernacular worship is embodied the hermeneutic of discontinuity, a feeling of superior enlightenment and superior mission, as though now we finally understand, now we finally know what we are to do in the modern world. “Fools, for they have not far-reaching minds,” as Empedocles once said. What we ought to do in the modern world is nothing other than precisely what we have always been doing in every age. The mistake was made in thinking that we could do better. For our punishment, we have been permitted not only to do much worse, but to burn many of the bridges that lead back to doing better.

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Will it ever be possible to calculate the damage done to the Church by the banishment of Latin from her public worship? I think not. We have little conception of the true extent of the harm, just as we have trouble imagining the size of the earth, the solar system,
or the galaxy we are in.

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Although he hated many features of the Catholic liturgy after his break from Rome, Martin Luther retained respect for the Latin tongue that he was compelled to use when addressing intellectuals. Actually, the case is even more embarrassing for today’s Latin-loathing Catholics, inasmuch as Luther had the basic psychological insight to realize that Latin adds something to the liturgy and that it should not simply be thrown out, as can be seen in his preservation of the Latin language in Lutheran worship—a custom that lasted well into the time of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose more compact settings of the Gloria and Sanctus are not crypto-Catholic oddities but perfectly useful Lutheran church music. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are pockets of conservative Lutherans out there who still sing in Latin, when their Catholic neighbors have long since forgotten even how to pronounce, let alone sing, “Agnus Dei.” Is it not long past the time when the Pope and the appropriate dicasteries at the Vatican should do something about this travesty, this amnesia of our own identity, history, culture, and mother tongue of worship?

Maybe someday historians will be able to look back and see that Summorum Pontificum marked a decisive shift in the “language wars” — a phrase by which I advert not to the more pedestrian, albeit still important, question of whether the ordinary form is well translated, but rather, to the more intriguing and more consequential question of whether a liturgy that has been cut off from its age-old roots in the Latin language and the piety of the Latin rite can survive in the long run. Maybe the motu proprio marks the beginning of a movement that will culminate, decades or centuries later, in the rightful triumph of the Roman liturgy, the Mass of our forefathers, the Mass of the ages. For this quixotic but, with God’s power, manifestly achievable goal, we should certainly not fail to get on our knees to pray: Miserere nobis, Domine.

Notes

1. Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, states: “Particular law remaining in force, the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites” (36.1); “steps should be taken so that the faithful may also be able to say or to sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them” (54); “In accordance with the centuries-old tradition of the Latin rite, the Latin language is to be retained by clerics in the divine office” (101.1). Even Annibale Bugnini writes in his memoirs: “The conclusion reached in this debate [between partisans of Latin and partisans of the vernacular] was ultimately set forth in Chapter I of the Constitution on the Liturgy, where the question is answered in a way that reconciles the rights of Latin and the need of the vernaculars in celebrations with the people” (The Reform of the Liturgy [Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1990], 25). Would that the rights of Latin had been respected by Paul VI. [back]


2. Although I sympathize with many arguments given by the “reform of the reform” people, I cannot agree with their contention that Latin has always remained the language of the liturgy. It is, of course, the language of the editio typica on which translations are based, but the Vatican has done next to nothing in the past forty years to ensure that Latin remain the language of the Novus Ordo Mass anywhere. Already when Paul VI introduced the new missal, he lamented the loss of Latin it would bring, and said it was a valid sacrifice because of how greatly the vernacular would serve the contemporary needs of the Church. Whenever John Paul II mentioned Latin, he reserved for it a small place, not the dominant place given it by John XXIII and Vatican II. It is not clear to me that Pope Benedict XVI has made great efforts yet to see that the Ordinary Form be celebrated far and wide using the Latin typical edition; rather, he has encouraged the use of the Extraordinary Form, which, Deo gratias, remains in the Church’s mother tongue. [back]


3. The time is not far distant when Americans will have to get used to being bilingual, so the points I make in this paragraph will be relevant to our English-Spanish situation. [back]

[Dr. Peter A. Kwasniewski is Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College. The present article, "Latin Will Always Be the Ideal Liturgical Language," was originally published in The Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring 2011), pp. 6-9, and is reprinted here by kind permission of Latin Mass Magazine, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060, and the author.]

The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism

Christopher Oleson reviews Thaddeus Kozinski, The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can't Solve It

To the typical inhabitant of a modern liberal democracy, the title of Thaddeus Kozinski's intriguing new book will probably sound a little puzzling, inasmuch as, within contemporary democractic culture, religious pluralism is not generally understood to be a "political problem." On the contrary, for the democratic soul, religious pluralism seems to be more a positive good, something to be protected and celebrated, rather than "solved" or overcome. One's religious commitments would have to be "extreme" and thus "anti-democratic" to take issue with liberalism's positive affirmation of religious diversity, for it is one of democratic modernity's greatest achievements to have crafted institutional arrangements that allow for the easy co-existence of various religious groups both with one another and with the overarching liberal political order.

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Secular democratic modernity can only claim not to have a religious pluralism problem because it has already implicitly solved this problem by subtly emasculating traditional religious identity

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One of the many insights of Thaddeus Kozinski's valuable contribution to the on-going conversation about the relationship between Faith and politics is to articulate with precision how secular democratic modernity can only claim not to have a religious pluralism problem because it has already implicitly solved this problem by subtly emasculating traditional religious identity and establishing, under the false veil of political neutrality, institutional arrangements charged with theological and metaphysical significance.

Thus, only by becoming enculturated to re-interpret religious belief in such a way that it can have no substantive implications for the social and political order, and correspondingly, by becoming miseducated to not notice the tacit establishment of a quite partisan sense of the good, freedom, and selfhood, do the citizens of secular democracies think that they have a neutral social order that need not view religious pluralism as politically problematic. For those whose religious creed is not merely an emotional accoutrement, this situation is obviously deeply troublesome, for the logic of secular liberalism, as Kozinski makes clear, would force the believer to treat his Faith commitments as merely therapeutic preferences of an autonomous self.

Clarifying this situation and working towards articulating a solution to it which is at once both honest about its principles, coherent in working them out, and politically expressive of the truth and ultimate happiness of man is the task that Kozinski sets himself in his book. He does this by successively engaging the thought of three influential and progressively illuminating political philosophers. John Rawls, Jacques Maritain, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Rawls serves as the quintessential philosophical voice of secular democratic liberalism, Maritain as the exponent of a Catholic hybridization of Thomistic political philosophy and modern democratic ideals, and MacIntyre as the most penetrating philosophical critic of liberal modernity and advocate of a local Thomistic politics of the common good against the bureaucratic nation-state.

Of the three, Kozinski is by far the most sympathetic to MacIntyre. Nevertheless, even his proposal falls short in Kozinski's eyes, for MacIntyre's vision of small communities of virtue does not quite attain to the level of truly political existence, remaining as it does, Kozinski claims, too local in its aspirations. More importantly for Kozinski, MacIntyre's thought problematically remains at the level of mere philosophy. Studiously avoiding the role of theologian, MacIntyre deprives himself of the resources of political theology, and thereby fails to affirm the necessity of a public recognition of divine revelation and Magisterial teaching as the most propitious conditions for a stable and morally healthy political state. As Kozinski's subtitle indicates, philosophy as such can offer little or no light on how to move a community of seriously diverse worldviews to a unified political order of virtue and human happiness. Only the eventual achievement of a confessionally Catholic state, Kozinski concludes, can overcome the limitations of political philosophy in general, and liberal modernity in particular.

Kozinski begins his argument by unpacking the hidden premises of John Rawls' mature work, Political Liberalism. Rawls' primary aim in this book is to articulate how, given the "fact of a reasonable pluralism," citizens with rival "comprehensive views" can equally affirm a unified democratic political order. Paradoxically, Rawls attempts to accomplish this by self-consciously not providing an account of the truth or goodness of his liberal conception of justice. Consequently, he invites each private citizen to affirm and justify it from within their own particular comprehensive view.

One might reasonably ask: what precisely is the "it" that such citizens are being asked to affirm, and where does the recognition of "it" come from? Rawls' answer is the purely political conception of justice implicitly embedded in the public political culture animating contemporary liberal democracies and giving us our sense of what is "free," "equal," and "fair." In other words, there simply is a customary way we democratic liberals politically order our lives that does not, and need not, have any intrinsic theoretical foundation or justification. In this way, Rawls does not defend this conception as "true" and indeed, he does not even think it can be defended as true in some universal, philosophical sense. It is simply the way "we," who inhabit the democracies of the modern west, publicly regard it as good to associate together as a political community. Hence, each citizen can accept and justify "our" liberal sense of justice in whatever way he wants to, so long as he does, in fact, accept it.

This prescinding altogether from the truth of political liberalism is what Kozinski calls Rawls' "postmodern turn." It is a pragmatic attempt to articulate a "politics for the post-enlightened" democratic societies whose political assumptions, Rawls believes, already functionally exist in good working order within the political culture. While these assumptions are not philosophically "true" for Rawls, they are nevertheless "reasonable," at least "for us." Kozinski quotes Richard Rorty's formulation of Rawls' position: "given our history and the traditions embedded in our public life, it is the most reasonable doctrine for us."

In this way Rawls claims to be making room for the comprehensive views of the religiously diverse members of a democracy, and thus not to be imposing anything unreasonable on others. However, this self-image of toleration is thoroughly dispelled by Kozinski, who points out that, for Rawls, the "public political culture" exists as an exclusive and unimpeachable authority beyond which there is no appeal. Accordingly, any comprehensive view that does not correspond to the public political culture, or which regards political cultures as subject to dialectical scrutiny or some higher authority, are ipso facto deemed "unreasonable" and thus unacceptable within a liberal order. Not surprisingly, any traditional Christian "comprehensive view" falls under this category.

Even more objectionable, as Kozinski points out, is the fact that the very idea of the public political culture functioning in this totalizing and exclusivist way is not even a real aspect of our actual political culture, and so, as Kozinski points out, it is "a private belief of Rawls' own comprehensive doctrine, and thus inadmissible, according to Rawls' own criteria, as a public political authority." In other words, Rawls' position, if honestly and consistently viewed, is self-refuting. At the end of the day, Kozinski concludes, Rawls' project involves smuggling controversially foundatinalist and theologically charged principles into the political order under the guise of a purely "reasonable" and "non-theological pragmatism."

It is perhaps worth mentioning here another line of criticism which Kozinski later in the book levels against Maritain, but which perhaps applies even more to Rawls. It involves challenging the very idea that we have a coherent and commonly understood "public political culture" at all. Such an idea entails the existence within our culture of one, conceptually unified and commonly accepted set of political ideas. Yet, one of MacIntyre's most consistent and trenchant criticisms of liberal modernity is that no such thing exists. We may all use the words "freedom," "equality," "rights," "dignity," "law," "responsibility," "justice," but when pushed to be clear about the meaning of such terms, our culture has not common meaning for them.

What contemporary secular democracies actually have is an inconsistent and ultimately incommensurable mélange of fragmentary moral and political concepts derived from diverse and incompatible traditions (e.g., Biblical, Lockean, Puritan, Thomistic, Utilitarian, Marxist, Weberian, Feminist). What we do have in common is what MacIntyre calls a "common moral rhetoric," but this only serves to disguise our deep and interminable disagreements and confusions. If this is, in fact, the case, then Rawls cannot invoke the "public political culture" supposedly operative within modern democracies, as though there were actually such a thing providing us with a common understanding of liberal justice. What we really get from Rawls is not a formulation of our common political culture, but Rawls' own tendentious Ivy League brand of secular democratic socialism.

Far superior in Kozinski's eyes, and yet still inadequate to meet the challenges of authentic political order, is Jacques Maritain's call for a New Christendom that is both democratic and pluralistic. It is superior in that, whereas Rawls sought to craft a political philosophy that supposedly remained agnostic about the human good, Maritain maintained that "exact knowledge of the ends of human life" is essential for a sound understanding of the right order of the state. And since man is ordered to a Good which transcends the political, the political common good must recognize and integrate this truth into its actuality. Thus, for Maritain, political philosophy must become "subalternated" (i.e., dependent for some of its principles) to theology.

Nevertheless, this does not entail a return to the sacral order of Medieval Christendom in Maritain's mind. As Kozinski makes clear, this is because " there is a convergence, for Maritain, of the accepted core of values of today's liberal democracies with the temporal prescriptions of the Gospel." In other words, the democratic notions of human rights, equality, and religious freedom are exactly what the Gospel demands, so there can exist a happy co-existence of a Christian social order with constitutionally pluralistic democratic politics. While a Thomistic political philosophy is thus the de facto justification, and indeed the only coherent grounding, for such a political order, citizens of other religious and philosophical perspectives are free to provide their own understanding of its truth and goodness, no matter how false or incoherent, for Maritain's democratic charter does not prescribe the expression of alternative political self-understandings.

Kozinski argues that this hybridization of Thomistic political philosophy and democratic pluralism is ultimately unsuccessful for a number of reasons, not all of which can be discussed here, but all of which are worth listening to. To begin with, Kozinski claims that Maritain simply misjudged and seriously overestimated the lasting Christian content of modern democratic sensibilities. He mistook the emergent moral sobriety and spiritual openness of devastated, post-war Europe for the settled convictions and habits of Western democracies. In this way he underestimated the past and present countervailing, anti-Christian currents operative in modern culture and politics.

As a result, Maritain was far too sanguine about the desacralization of the modern state and far too unwary about the consequent subjugation of the Church to a purely private (and hence irrelevant) sphere once the secular state came to possess a complete monopoly of temporal power. As a result, Maritain's formulation does not have the resources to recognize the gradual subversion and transposition of operative moral and political priniciples that has taken place within Western democracies during the modern period.

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The consequence of Maritain's vision, Kozinski reasons, is to create a "morally obligatory divorce" between a citizen's religious truth claims and his social and political life

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More problematically, Kozinski asks, "would not active participation in a political order that a priori precludes the political implementation of religiously particularistic political theologies tend to habituate the citizen into privatizing his politically relevant religious truth claims, at least in his political habits, but even in his private thoughts?" The consequence of Maritain's vision, Kozinski reasons, is to create a "morally obligatory divorce" between a citizen's religious truth claims and his social and political life. The consequence will be the unwitting establishment of a liberal political theology, a "democratic faith," Kozinski argues, that is unreconcilable with a fully Catholic understanding of political life. Kozinski sites William Cavanaugh: "Although Maritain wishes to purge rights language of its basis in liberalism and locate its inspiration in the Gospel, it is the Gospel which ends up being supplanted, precisely because it is banished in effect from explicit insertion into public discourse."

While I am sympathetic to Kozinski's concerns and agree that any democratic order that categorically forbids its citizens from advocating and working toward the realization, within political society, of their moral and religious commitments, will harmfully tend to compartmentalize and privatize those beliefs, I wonder whether this criticism of Maritain might not be stating things a bit too categorically. Perhaps it's not, but I wonder if, at least on this specific issue, Kozinski and Maritain are really more divided in cultural and historical judgment rather than in philosophical and theological principle. For the latter to be the case, it would have to be true that Maritain would not want every citizen to embrace the Gospel and then to publicly reason morally and politically from its principles. I am not entirely persuaded that this is true.

The difference, at least as it seems to me, lies in their contrasting assessment of the practical insurmountability of the modern condition of religious pluralism. Maritain thinks that it is not going to be overcome in any foreseeable future, and so he reasons accordingly. Kozinski, on the other hand, envisions and proposes a path to its eventual transcendence. I could be wrong, but were the latter to actually happen within a political community, I doubt that Maritain would have a problem with such a society giving political recognition to its common Catholic Life, especially because such a political recognition would ipso facto recognize the right and duty of every human being to seek the truth about God free from political coercion. If Kozinski himself regards it as imprudent to force a Catholic establishment upon a predominantly non-Catholic society, then perhaps their ositions on this issue are less starkly opposed than might otherwise appear to be the case. This is not to say that there are not other problems with Maritain's position, and it needs to be said that Kozinski's treatment of all this is much fuller and more nuanced than I can here do credit to. I would only caution that Maritain might apply his political principles differently if his cultural and historical assessment were different.

The final thinker Kozinski analyzes is, as we have mentioned, Alasdair MacIntyre. I will not begin to pretend that I can adequately do justice to Kozinski's wide-ranging and provocative treatment of this eminent philosopher. Suffice it to say that Kozinski provides a nice background to the development of MacIntyre's critique of liberal modernity and lays out the principal reasons why MacIntyre regards it as conceptually bankrupt. Kozinski then explains the nature of MacIntyre's understanding of rationality as "tradition constituted." This conception of rational enquiry sees the human intellect as capable of grasping objective truth, but of always doing so only within a particular community characterized by a particular and developing history. There are many profound issues and pertinent questions to be raised about MacIntyre's tradition-constituted rationality, but they cannot be adequately treated here. Suffice it to say that there is much insight in MacIntyre's formulation of the matter, although there are places in his writings where his formulation appears, at least to me, to be in danger of reducing philosophy to dialectic.

As MacIntyre is at pains to show, the fullest and most perfect expression of tradition-constituted rationality is to be found in the tradition of Aristotelian-Thomism, for not only has it been able to continually confront and overcome the questions and problems that have internally arisen within it, but it is also only in light of the principles and explanatory power of this particular tradition that the problems and failures of the philosophical traditions that have subsequently emerged in Western intellectual life are adequately explained and resolved. In other words, in the internal and external dialectical engagements that have characterized the history of the Thomistic tradition, Thomism has shown itself again and again as singularly successful.

Applying this to politics, MacIntyre uses the resources of this tradition to mount a fierce critique of modern liberalism and from it to lay down the outlines of a healthy political philosophy rooted in an authentic understanding of the common good. Such a politics is, for MacIntyre, localist, virtue-based, and rooted in the natural law. Moreover, it can only be truly lived within a community that shares a common tradition of rational enquiry, which is to say, that accepts a common understanding of what is virtuous and what is according to nature. If such communities are to survive under the conditions of the modern nation state, they will always have to maintain an uneasy and merely pragmatic modus vivendi with the large-scale bureaucracies and powerful financial interests that presently exercise a disintegrating monopoly over contemporary nation-states and the market.

While Kozinski is deeply sympathetic to MacIntyre's critique and to the broad contours of his positive proposal, he nevertheless has some very substantive criticisms of his overall project. I will only mention two. First, MacIntyre has "a defective notion of the state" inasmuch as he unreasonably rejects large-scale instantiations of it as legitimate vehicles of political life. His local, tradition-constituted communities are "insufficiently political" because they are, according to Kozinski, simply too small to embody the "law, authority, and citizenship" necessary for real political life in the face of the liberal state. "if MacIntyre's practical model could be adjusted for a larger-scale application, it could acquire a genuinely political character." As it is, "MacIntyre is left with no possible site for overarching political community compatible with the basic condition of modernity -- he offers Aristotelianism without a polis."

This criticism appears to me to be rooted in an ambiguity. Its cogency, it seems to me, depends upon not recognizing a distinction in MacIntyre's writings, which I have always (although perhaps mistakenly) presumed to be operative in them. This distinction is one Aristotle himself makes between the best constitution simply speaking, and the best constitution for a particular people existing within particular circumstances here and now. Thus, there is a difference between what would be the best form of tradition-constituted political community all other things being equal, and what would be the best form of tradition-constituted political community forced to exist under the omnipresent hegemony of secular, emotivist, bureaucratic nation-states. I take "the communities of moral and intellectual virtue" whose formation MacIntyre regards as necessary in this "new Dark Ages" ruled by managerial barbarians to be the latter variety. Given that there is not immediate, realistic prospect of forming truly independent, tradition-constituted and small-scale political communities on the order of the fifth century Athenian polis or the Republic of Venice as it existed from the seventh to the end of the eighteenth century, it is inevitable that MacIntyre's communities will not be able to embody a fully political existence. But of course, one could make the same criticism of Benedictine monasteries during the first Dark Ages. They too were not fully political inasmuch as they existed under intolerable external conditions which prevented the full actualization of political life around them by those of its members striving to keep civilization alive as best they could under such hostile circumstances.

Nevertheless, even if a MacIntyrean tradition-constituted community could come into existence without having to worry about external factors like the surrounding Nanny State or the threat of being swallowed by China, MacIntyre would still affirm that such a community still needs to be small-scale in order to be authentically political. Here MacIntyre is simply being a true Aristotelian, for in Book VII of the Politics Aristotle asks the question of the proper size of a polis' population and geographical boundaries. He writes, "certainly experience shows that it is difficult and perhaps impossible for a polis with too large a population to be well-governed." This is because real political order requires mutual recognition and common deliberation. When a state gets too large it cannot be inhabited by citizens jointly sharing in political life, but only subjects of a distant and relatively anonymous power. I think this, at least in part, is what MacIntyre is getting at in the text quoted by Kozinski: "The second condition for an acceptable political order is its size, 'a relatively small scale society whose relationships are not deformed by compartmentalization'" (166).

It seems to be that the United States had something like this authentically local politics back in the 1830s when Tocqueville visited our shores. Speaking of New England townships, Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, "In that part of the Union, political life was born in the very heart of the townships; one might almost say that in origin each of them was a little independent nation... In all that concerns themselves alone the townships remain independent bodies, and I do not think one could find a single inhabitant of New England who would recognize the right of the government of the state to control matters of purely municipal interest."

These are truly remarkable words for a twenty-first century American ear. What citizen of New Haven, for example, would now think it preposterous for the state of Connecticut or the federal government to try to regulate his city's internal affairs in significant matters relating to education, public health, standards of public decency, or economic policy? What citizen of Hartford, Concord, or Providence still thinks of their political life and identity as primarily bound up in their township? And who would now regard their town or city as a kind of independent political community whose right to govern its internatl affairs in these matters is both substantive and protected? The answer, of course, is "no one today," and yet Tocqueville could write that, in America, where the instinct for independence was especially pronounced, "every village is a sort of republic accustomed to rule itself."

Further highlighting the political distance separating our modern, centralized nation-state from earlier American political existence is the way in which Tocqueville describes the nature and role of the individual states. Summing up their political status, Tocqueville says succinctly: "In a word, there are twenty0four little sovereign nations who together form the United States." Tocqueville could make this astounding statement because, for our earlier American brothers and sisters, "interest, custom, and feelings are united in concentrating real political life in the state, and not in the Union," for the latter "is in the peculiar position that it only forms one people in relation to certain aims; for all other purposes it is no such thing."It is this kind of political life which I think MacIntyre is calling us to attempt to recover. The fact that we cannot fully do so in any way "compatible with the basic condition of modernity" is not a flaw in MacIntyre's proposal, but a lamentable reality of the unpolitical condition which is modernity. If MacIntyre is offering us "Aristotelianism without a polis," it is not by choice.

The second criticism that I will mention touches on the central thesis of Kozinski's book. It pertains to the inability of philosophy by itself to solve the problem of political order. Kozinski writes, "MacIntyre the philosopher is unable to argue effectively against any anti-Thomistic or anti-Catholic prescription for an ideal political order because such a prescription would inevitably involve theological judgments and commitments... The methodological avoidance of theological judgments and commitments is the primary weakness in MacIntyre's project, for it attenuates the effectiveness of both the vindication of his own theologically based and informed Thomistic tradition, and its dialectical challenge to rival traditions. Any intellectual tradition articulating an ideal political order must necessarily include a judgment as to whether God has communicated His will to man regarding the political order." Accordingly, as MacIntyre himself recognizes, "a purely secular, purely philosophical understanding of the moral life of man is inevitably insufficient." There can be no political wisdom that is not ultimately theological in its scope and political in its aspirations.

Rooted as it is in perennial Catholic teaching on the nature of the political community and its right relation to God, there is a great deal of truth in Kosinzski's conclusion. Surely the most stable, healthy, and politically wise society is one where its people are both publicly and personally united in the true Faith, illumined by Divine Revelation, and able to be sanctified by Sacramental Grace. My only concern here is a potentially misleading sense of philosophy that one might take away from Kozinski's book. As a final reflection, I would only urge a greater caution, or at least more explicit qualification, in how Kozinski formulates the limitations of philosophy. Limitations there certainly are, but a "purely philosophical" understanding of the moral life of man is not a "purely secular" understanding.

It is Saint Thomas' correct understanding that the natural light of the intellect is able to see that the perfection of human nature, and the only thing that can ultimately fulfill human nature's desire for happiness, is to see the essence of God. Accordingly, it is, for Saint Thomas, a prudential dictate of moral philosophy and a precept of the natural law that one should seek to contemplate God as best one can if one is to be as happy as possible and move toward one's end. Indeed, prayer, devotion, and sacrifice are all, for Saint Thomas, dictates of the natural law, for unaided human reason can come to see philosophically that God exists, is the creator and governor of the universe, the giver of all good things, and the ultimate source from whom we derive our being, to whom we owe our obedience, and in whom we find our joy. Because of this, Saint Thomas annexes the virtue of religion under the cardinal virtue of justice. In other words, it is a natural virtue, before it is, like the other virtues, taken up and perfected by grace.

What all of this means is that philosophy, understood properly, is not a secular activity, if "secular" means having no theoretical or practical reference to God as the beginning and end of all things. As Saint Thomas sees it, the deliverances of both the theoretical and practical activity of natural reason, which is to say, the conclusions of metaphysics and moral philosophy, are ultimately theological and religious in nature. Indeed, the very name Aristotle gives to first philosophy is "theology," for the end of the speculative intellect is the contemplation of God. Similarly, the virtue of "religion" is the perfection of reason's moral activity. Saint Thomas argues that religion is the greatest of the moral virtues because it directs all of the other virtues to be done for the sake of adoring, obeying, and giving thanks to God. That these natural activities of the intellect are hindered by our sinful condition and made dramatically easier by the infusion of grace and the light of revelation does not change their being properly philosophical conclusions of the natural intellect. If Saint Thomas is right about all this, and I believe that he is, then I think philosophy might have more to say about the right ordering of a political community than Kozinski's argument seems to allow.

I do not mean to claim that Kozinski is denying philosophy's legitimate role in the dialectical conversation between rival traditions. Indeed, he explicitly criticizes the "Radical Orthodox" theologian, John Milbank, for his fideistic assertion that philosophy can play no role in the adjudication between competing narratives. Kozinski clearly does not think, as Milbank does, that the Christian story can only "out-narrate" the liberal-nihilistic story, as thought it were only a more attractive mythos. Nevertheless, it is sometimes hard to avoid the impression that, for Kozinski, natural reason can accomplish noticeably less than what Saint Thomas, for instance, thought it could. Whether, and in what way, this might be the case remains to be further developed in Kozinski's future contributions to this conversation.

Even with this caveat in mind, Thaddeus Kozinski's book remains a gold mine of rich reflection on the dilemma of articulating a just political order in the condition of secular, pluralistic modernity. As such, it has been a difficult struggle to limit my reactions to this book, for there is so much in it to provoke and challenge one to think more deeply and fruitfully about the issues it treats. There are few thinkers out there astute enough to call into question the regnant assumptions of liberal modernity and open enough to avail themselves of the Church's perennial teaching on these matters. For anyone seeking insight into the deeper philosophical issues of our present political conundrum, The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can't Solve It is a worthy book that deserves a careful reading. +

Christopher Oleson is a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America. He lives with his wife, Rachel, and their six children in Santa Paula, CA. The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism is published by Lexington Books, 2010. Dr. Oleson's review, originally published in Latin Mass: The Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring 2011), is reproduced here by kind permission of Latin Mass, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.

Septuagesima: The Time that Land Forgot

By Michael P. Foley

When we go to Mass, be it in the new form or the old, we generally react to what is immediately transpiring before us, be it for the better or for the worse. We respond to the reverence or irreverence, piety or impiety, beauty or ugliness of the words and deeds we see and hear. These reactions are what remain fixed in our memories and go on to inform our liturgical opinions.

Harder to discern is the effect that a calendar has on our souls, since not every feast or Sunday comes with vivid memories in the making. A case in point is the liturgical season of pre-Lent or Septuagesima, an easily overlooked interlude between the Time after Epiphany and Lent. While the liturgies of Septuagesima are fairly low key, the impact that this small season has had on individuals and even on Western civilization is entirely disproportionate to its size. Septuagesima consists of three of some of the most interesting and influential weeks of the liturgical year.

Pre-Lent

Septuagesimatide, or pre-Lent, is the name given to the three consecutive Sundays preceding Ash Wednesday. It is named after the first of these, Septuagesima Sunday, which occurs roughly seventy days before Easter (septuagesima is Latin for “seventieth”). Sexagesima (“sixtieth”) Sunday comes next, followed by Quinquagesima (“fiftieth”) Sunday on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. In order to effect a gradual transition between the joy of Christmastide and the stringency of Lent, the season of Septuagesima takes on some of the sobriety of the latter but without its harshness. In the Roman Breviary, the penitential circuit of psalms is used (“Lauds II”), and at Mass the Gloria in excelsis is suppressed and the Gradual replaced with a Tract. Flowers on the altar are forbidden, and violet is the liturgical color of the vestments.

Each Sunday of Septuagesimatide also focuses on a different Old Testament figure as a way of leading us up to the Paschal mystery of Good Friday and Easter. Septuagesima Sunday—and this is particularly obvious in the Breviary—recalls Adam, Sexagesima Sunday Noah, and Quinquagesima Sunday Abraham. (This pattern is continued into Lent: the Second Sunday of Lent recalls Jacob, the Third Sunday Joseph, and the Fourth Sunday Moses.) The purpose of this instruction is to help the faithful see the reasons for the scandal of the Cross, the culmination of Lent. The Matin readings on Adam give us the doctrine of original sin, the passages on the Flood highlight the wickedness of mankind, and the sacrifices of Abraham and Melchisedech foreshadow the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.

The Sundays of Septuagesima were also shaped by a series of calamities besieging the city of Rome in the sixth century. The theme of misery and desolation in the Introit of Septuagesima Sunday, for instance, comes from these troubled times. Such historical influences on the liturgical year are an excellent example of what Pope Benedict XVI meant when he referred to the Extraordinary Form as bearing “the whole weight of history within itself, and yet, at the same time, [being] much more than the product of human history.”¹ In any event, Septuagesima was a well-established liturgical season in the Roman rite by 541 A.D.

Laying to Rest the Alleluia

Perhaps the most peculiar mark of Septuagesima’s liturgies is the suppression of the word “Alleluia,” which in the Novus Ordo does not occur until Ash Wednesday. Why deprive ourselves of this glorious word for an extra two and a half weeks, especially when it is so powerful? St. Paul of the Cross, for instance, advised members of his order to cry out “Alleluia” when assaulted by the devil, for “the devil is afraid of the Alleluia; it is a word that comes from Paradise.”²

St. Paul’s reasoning about Paradise gives us a clue into the answer we seek. “Alleluia,” which in Hebrew means “Praise be to the Lord,” is traditionally known as the “song of the Lord.” It is what St. John heard in Heaven during his vision of the Apocalypse. It is the joyous cry of those who are truly home.

But Septuagesima and Lent are periods not of homecoming but of pilgrimage and exile. Indeed, just as the forty days of Lent commemorate the forty years of the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness and the forty days of Jesus fasting in the desert, Septuagesima recalls the roughly seventy years of the Babylonian Exile (605-538 BC), that period, second in importance only to the Exodus out of Egypt, when the people of Judah were deported to Babylon.³ As the haunting Psalm 136(137) attests, God’s Chosen People did not deem it fit to sing their joyous songs on foreign soil:

Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept, when we remembered Sion.
On the willows in the midst thereof we hung up our [musical] instruments.
For there, they that led us into captivity required of us the words of songs. And they that carried us away, said: “Sing ye to us a hymn of the songs of Sion.”
How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten.
Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee (verses 1-6).

The Jews would not sing their native song of joy during their exile, and neither do Catholics during theirs. As Bishop William Durandus (1237-1296) puts it: “We part from the Alleluia as from a beloved friend, whom we embrace many times and kiss on mouth, head, and hand, before we leave him.”⁴ The jubilant “Alleluia” is thus laid to rest for seventy days in the traditional Roman rite until it rises again in the Easter Vigil, and in so doing Catholics recapitulate for their spiritual benefit a cardinal moment in sacred history.

And when I say “laid to rest,” I mean that literally. Perhaps the most charming para-liturgical custom to come from Septuagesima is the depositio, or setting aside, of the Alleluia. On the Saturday afternoon before Septuagesima Sunday, medieval communities would stage an elaborate procession with a plaque or banner, often in the shape of a coffin, bearing the word “Alleluia.” The coffin would then be solemnly buried somewhere on church grounds. In parts of France, a straw man inscribed with the word “Alleluia” in gold letters was burned in effigy in the churchyard! Thanks to the liturgical movement of the 20th century, several of these customs were revived by some American parishes prior to the Second Vatican Council.

A standard part of these sacred send-offs was the singing of a song entitled Alleluia, Dulce Carmen, which artfully links the suppression of the Alleluia with the Babylonian Exile and Psalm 136. Here is J.M. Neale’s translation of the tenth-century hymn:

Alleluia! song of gladness,
Voice of joy that cannot die;
Alleluia is the anthem
Ever dear to choirs on high;
In the house of God abiding
Thus they sing eternally.

Alleluia thou resoundest,
True Jerusalem and free;
Alleluia joyful mother,
All thy children sing with thee;
But by Babylon’s sad waters
Mourning exiles now are we.

Alleluia cannot always
Be our song while here below;
Alleluia our transgressions
Make us for a while forego;
For the solemn time is coming
When our tears for sin must flow.

Therefore in our hymns we pray Thee,
Grant us blessed Trinity,
At the last to keep Thine Easter
In our home beyond the sky;
There to Thee for ever singing
Alleluia joyfully.

As the lyrics make clear, Septuagesima can teach us many valuable lessons: that Lent should not be begun abruptly or thoughtlessly but preceded by a period of adjustment; that uttering sacred words is a privilege which should not be taken for granted; that sin puts us in exile from our True Home; and that the Old Testament, with its many significant events, is perpetually relevant to the lives of Christians. Lastly, suppressing the Alleluia seventy days before Easter, and singling this fact out in a special way, heightens our joy when Alleluia triumphantly returns to our lips with the Risen Lord on Easter Sunday.

Sexagesima and Quinquagesima

The second Sunday of Septuagesimatide, Sexagesima, continues to sound the exilic note of Babylon, but with a touch of joy. Both the Collect and the Epistle commemorate the apostolate of St. Paul, the feast of whose conversion on January 25 occurs around this time.⁵ Quinquagesima, on the other hand, is preoccupied with the impending Great Fast of Lent. Its Epistle from 1 Corinthians 13 on charity is the perfect preface to a season of mortification and almsgiving, for without charity, these noble acts profit us nothing (1 Cor. 13:3). Indeed, all of Septuagesimatide is an ideal primer on how to approach the purgative period of Lent in the right spirit.

Ciao to Chow

Septuagesima season also marks the time when the faithful begin to fast voluntarily, in anticipation of the mandatory fast of Lent. As early as 465 A.D., St. Maximus, Bishop of Turin, was recommending a fast of devotion before Lent. In the Byzantine rite, the faithful would begin abstaining from meat on the penultimate Sunday before Lent and from dairy products on the Sunday immediately before Lent: hence the Byzantine name for Sexagesima is “Meatfare” Sunday and their name for Quinquagesima “Cheesefare” Sunday.⁶ In the Roman rite, the Sunday to begin abstaining from meat was Quinquagesima, and so it also came to be known as Dominica Carnevala, carnevala coming from the Latin for “removal” (levare) of “meat” (caro/carnis). It is from this name that our word “carnival” originates.

And Septuagesimatide is not just behind the word carnival: it is also behind the activity. Prior to the age of refrigeration, Christians needed to get rid of all the foods they would not be allowed to consume during Lent, which centuries ago was quite a long list; as we mentioned above, not only flesh meat but all dairy products were forbidden. And the closer Lent approached, the more urgently they needed to be consumed. Ironically, the pre-Lenten excesses and glittering pageantry we associate with Mardi Gras in New Orleans or the carnevales in Brazil and Venice, Italy can be traced to the voluntary increase of pious asceticism.

These sybaritic celebrations, in turn, have had a notable impact on Western culture. “Carnival music,” which is a colorful combination of Spanish, Portuguese, Native American, African, and even Chinese musical strains, is generally associated with Trinidad and Barbados, as well as other parts of the Caribbean and Brazil. Though it varies from country to country, Carnival music has a common origin in bidding a fond farewell to fun before the forty-day fast of Lent. And it has gone on to shape other genres of music, such as Latin jazz, the Conga and Conjunto, and the Samba.⁷

Septuagesima Foods

Pre-Lenten observances also led to the invention or promotion of several food dishes. There are many culinary candidates worthy of mention. Where would Cajun cooking be without Mardi Gras, or “Fat Tuesday”? Northern England traditionally observes Collop Monday two days before Ash Wednesday (a collop is made of sliced meat and eggs fried in butter), while the rest of the country enjoys Shrove Tuesday pancakes the day before Ash Wednesday. In the U.S. before Vatican II, pancake breakfasts sponsored by American parishes on Quinquagesima Sunday were not uncommon.

Thanks to its Polish immigrants, America is also able to hear its arteries harden each year with pączki, a rich pastry similar to a jelly donut that is traditionally eaten during Septuagesimatide. Pączki (pronounced paunch-key) is a particularly interesting food because it has a vocal and zealous group of devotees, including its own lobby, the National Pączki Promotional Board.⁸

Regardless of their country of origin, all of these foods are the product of the same basic logic, to make good use of all perishable comestibles in one’s home before the beginning of Lent.

Shrovetide

Not all Christian customs of Septuagesima, however, revel in merriment and feasting. While the Latin countries had Carnival, the countries of northern Europe had Shrovetide. The verb “to shrive” is old English for a priest’s hearing confession; hence, Shrovetide was a time for the faithful to go to confession and be “shriven” in preparation for Lent. While this period originally encompassed the entire week preceding Lent, it is more common to hear reference to Shrove Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, the three days prior to Ash Wednesday. Needless to say, this remains an excellent way to prepare for Lent.

Of course, not even the sternest of northern believers could resist every impulse to blow off a little steam. While “to shrive” might refer to sacramental absolution, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “to shrove” as “to keep Shrove-tide; to make merry.”⁹ Large sporting events were popular during Shrovetide (according to legend, the world’s first soccer match took place on a Shrove Tuesday between the Britons and the Romans), and in Ireland getting married during Shrovetide was considered good luck, perhaps because weddings during Lent were forbidden.

As for the southern countries, not everyone was pleased with the rising tide of carnival celebrations that began in the fourteenth century. In 1747 Pope Benedict XIV issued the aptly named Super Bacchanalibus in which a plenary indulgence was granted to those who participated in the “Forty Hours of Carnival.” This devotion, which was held in those areas prone to indulgence of a different kind, consisted of Exposition and Benediction on Shrove Monday and Tuesday. The purpose of the devotion was to draw the faithful away from “dangerous occasions of sin” and to atone for excesses committed.¹⁰

Modern Times

Septuagesima was dropped from the calendar in 1970, replaced by “Ordinary Time.” According to Fr. Pierre Jounel, a professor of liturgy at the Catholic Institute of Paris and one of the architects of the new calendar, it was excised because “Nobody knew what it meant or where it came from.”¹¹

That’s funny: the literal meaning of septuagesima is as close as the nearest Latin dictionary, and most Catholics, because of the greater cultural impact of Septuagesima we have just described, had a passable idea of what the season meant. There are beautiful explanations of it in the St. Andrew’s Missal and in Fr. Francis X. Weiser’s popular Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs, both of which were available ten years before Fr. Jounel’s pronouncement. The Von Trapp family describes Septuagesima as a “most necessary time for the individual as well as for families and communities”:¹² their chapter on the season the meaning of which they weren’t supposed to know is entitled, “A Time to Dance.”

Millions of Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic believers also understand it, as they have a similar season based on the same principles. (Having dropped Septuagesima, we Catholics now have one less thing in common with what Pope John Paul II called the other lung of Christendom.) Even some Anglicans and Lutherans continue to keep Septuagesima. More importantly, with the loss of Septuagesima we have no liturgical preparation for the holy season of Lent, no transition between the glow of Epiphany and the gloom of Ash Wednesday. In the meantime, the cultural observances of Mardi Gras and so forth continue unabated, loosed from their religious moorings.

Conclusion

In his magnificent Confessions, St. Augustine allegorically interprets the creation of the dry land in Genesis 1 as the gathering of the redeemed souls that thirst for God and are plucked from the bitter sea of the infidels.¹³ The “land” that Augustine espied was a Church zealous for the nourishment of grace so “that they might bring forth works of mercy unto You, distributing their earthly goods to the poor to acquire heavenly.”¹⁴ How fitting, then, that the terra firma that is the Church should not only use Lent as a preparation for Easter, but that she should prepare herself for Lent as well, the season in which she increases her corporal works of mercy.¹⁵ Because of the 1970 calendar, Septuagesima is a time that the Land has lamentably forgotten, but let us who keep to the calendar of our ancestors wisely use this season to remember and attune ourselves to the awesome trial that is Lent.

And maybe to shrove it up a bit while we still can.

Notes

1. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977,trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), p. 20. [back]


2. Quoted by Gueranger in The Liturgical Year, vol. 8, p. 366. [back]


3. See Jeremiah 25:9-12; 29:10. Some Biblical historians calculate the Babylonian Exile or Captivity to be exactly seventy years by beginning with the defeat of the Assyrian Empire in 609 BC and ending with the defeat of the Babylonian Empire in 539 BC; others set the dates at 586 and 516, the destruction of Jerusalem and the dedication of the rebuilt Temple, respectively. [back]


4. Rationale Divinorum Officiorum 6.24.18, translated by Francis X. Weiser. [back]


5. One of the charms of the traditional calendar is that it allows its Temporal Cycle, its rotation of seasons, to be colored by its Sanctoral Cycle, its saints’ feast days. [back]


6. Similarly, in Russia and other Slavic countries the week before Lent is called “Butter Week”; in Poland it is called “Fat Days.” [back]


7. See Michael P. Foley, Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 59. [back]


8. Bryan Gruley, “Who Put the Paunch In Paczki and Droves In Shrove Tuesday?” Wall Street Journal - Eastern Edition, 3/01/2000, vol. 235, issue 43, p. A1. [back]


9. “Shrove, v.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989. [back]


10. Herbert Thurston, “Shrovetide,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 13 (Robert Appleton Company, 1912). [back]


11. Alfred Friendly, Jr., “200 Catholic Saints Lose Their Feast Days,” NYT, May 10, 1969, p. 10. [back]


12. Maria Augusta Trapp, Around the Year with the Trapp Family (NY: Pantheon Books, 1955), p. 86. [back]


13. Confessions 13.17.20. [back]


14. Confessions 13.34.49, translated by F.J. Sheed. [back]


15. See the Collect for the First Sunday of Lent: “O God, who by the yearly Lenten observance dost purify Thy Church, grant to Thy household that what they strive to obtain from Thee by abstinence, they may achieve by good works.” [back]

Michael P. Foley, an associate professor of Patristics at Baylor University, is author of Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday?: The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Wedding Rites: A Complete Guide to Traditional Vows, Music, Ceremonies, Blessings, and Interfaith Services(Eerdmans, 2008). Dr. Foley's article, "Septuagesima: The Time that Land Forgot," Latin Mass: The Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition Vol. 19, No. 3 (Winter 2011), is reproduced here by kind permission of Latin Mass, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060, and the author.

Of related interest

I highly recommend Dr. Michael P. Foley's annotated edition of the Confessions of Augustine, in the surpassingly elegant translation by Frank J. Sheed (Hackett Publishing Co., 2007). The notes by Dr. Foley shed light on all sorts of delightful details of Augustine's Confessions that quite often pass unnoticed by readers in any translation, and at the price of $6.25 (brand new) with free shipping from Amazon Prime, it's a steal! I use this edition with my students at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, and it is consistently one of their favorite texts in the historical sequence of courses.

Fish on Friday: The One That God Away

Still Life with Fish by Edouard Manet

By Michael P. Foley

One of the most recognizable markers of Catholic identity used to be the practice of abstaining from meat on Friday. A Protestant colleague of mine speaks admiringly of how in his youth he would hang out, Happy Days style, at a burger joint on Friday night. When the clock struck twelve, the Catholic teens who were there would let loose a cry that echoed through the parking lot: “Ham-burger!”

What those teenagers didn’t know was that they were honoring a discipline probably as old as Christianity itself. Abstaining on Friday from “flesh meat,” the meat of a warm-blooded animal, is potentially older than some books of the New Testament.¹ Be it with fasting (having little or no food) or abstaining (refraining from food of a particular kind), the Church has always observed Friday with some sort of restriction on comestibles.

Broader Impact

Friday abstinence has also had a ripple effect going far beyond its primary aim of personal sanctification. Contrary to wild theories about medieval fishermen lobbying the Church to create Friday abstinence, it was Friday abstinence that helped create the medieval fishing industry.² Professor Brian Fagan claims that the Church’s Friday discipline may have even led to the discovery of the New World, spurring Atlantic fishermen to push further westward in search of better waters and providing navigational precedents for Christopher Columbus.³ By pushing the borders of the known world, Friday abstinence not only put fishing on the map, it helped make the map itself. Friday and Lenten abstinence prompted medieval monasteries to pioneer new techniques in pisciculture, including artificial fish ponds and artificial fertilization.⁴ It was a Catholic nun who wrote the first fishing manual in English and a Catholic priest who invented the first spinning reel.⁵

Nor has only distant history been affected by this ancient custom. Restaurants typically have a Friday seafood special of the day or a soup du jour such as clam chowder because of the power that Catholics once wielded as a united front. Even titans of global uniformity like McDonald’s were forced to take notice. The Filet-o-Fish sandwich was added to its menus in 1962 after Louis Groen, owner of the chain’s Cincinnati franchises, noticed that his restaurants experienced a sharp drop in sales every Friday. Even today, of the 300 million Filets-o-Fish sold annually, 25% of those sales come from the forty days of Lent.



* * * * * * *

So strong was the American association of Catholics with fish on Friday that “mackerel snapper” was once a common
epithet for papists.

* * * * * * *

Everyday language has been affected as well. So strong was the American association of Catholics with fish on Friday that “mackerel snapper” was once a common epithet for papists. “Meager” refers to something that has little flesh, and so the word came to be applied to days of total or partial abstinence in the Church calendar. A soup-maigre or “meager soup” was one that was not made from flesh meat or meat broth and was consequently suitable for “meager days,” while to “make meager” meant eating food appropriate for meager days.⁶

Of course, one of the curious things about all of these effects is that Catholics don’t have to eat fish on Fridays. This is a point impishly brought home in an essay by Fr. Leonard Feeney.⁷ “I am one of those moderately good Catholics,” Feeney writes, “in whom the persuasive power of Canon Law has not developed a taste for fish either on Friday or any other day, and stands no chance of doing so.”⁸ For Feeney, the reputation of Catholics as a queer sort of “Sixth Day Adventists” is a badge of honor to be worn in cheerful defiance of Protestant America.

Another mackerel snapper, renowned anthropologist Mary Douglas, agrees. Douglas sees in the rule of Friday abstinence “allegiance to a humble home in Ireland and to a glorious tradition in Rome.”⁹ These allegiances, she continues, are particularly important for a humiliated class. “At its lowest,” Douglas writes, Friday abstinence for a “bog Irishman” meant “what haggis and the pipes mean to Scots,” and at its most, “it means what abstaining from pork meant to the venerable Eleazar as narrated in 2 Maccabees.”¹⁰ One wonders if the Church in Ireland and America today, which in both countries is being humiliated by the savagery of the press and the corruption of some of its clergy, is not in need of a similar morale-boosting sign of allegiance.

Exceptions Curious and Quaint

Fr. Feeney also remarks: “if we dared tell non-Catholics the number of reasons which will legitimately permit us to eat meat on Friday, they would be scandalized.”¹¹ There were numerous variations of the Friday rule based on local usage and the judgment of “intelligent and conscientious Christians.”¹² Holy days such as Christmas trumped Friday abstinence, and Pope Pius XII, in order to relieve their overburdened refrigerators, allowed U.S. Catholics to eat meat the day after Thanksgiving. Special groups, such as travelers and soldiers, were occasionally exempted, and so were areas that either already had a seafood-rich diet or were smitten by epidemic or famine.

And sometimes whole peoples got a free pass. In 1089 Spanish counts were granted a dispensation from the Friday rule by Pope Urban II for their role in the Crusades; after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, Pope St. Pius V extended the dispensation to the entire Spanish dominion, including her colonies in the New World. Mexico, for example, was not instructed by the Holy See to observe Friday abstinence until 1950, and the following year bishops in New Mexico and Texas informed their flock that this applied to them as well.¹³

And then there are the curious local substitutes. During Lent the people of Venezuela can eat capybaras, the world’s largest rodent, a fact that has inspired the following doggerel:

You’ll enjoy capybaras to eat;
Venezuelans proclaim them a treat.
Those of Catholic bent
May consume them for Lent
If a fine rodent burger’s their meat.

Writing about the year 1188, Giraldus Cambrensis remarks that in “Germany and the arctic regions,” beavers’ tails are eaten during times of fast by “great and religious persons” because of their resemblance to fish meat.¹⁴ This practice was carried to parts of the New World, especially Canada. Jesuit missionaries wrote to Rome to verify that the custom was permissible. Rome replied that not only were beavers allowable but so were most amphibious animals and even some species of wild duck.¹⁵

* * * * * * *

... some Michiganders have the dubious privilege of dining on muskrat for their Friday and Lenten observances. ... the bishop added: “Anyone who could eat muskrat was doing penance worthy of the greatest of the saints.”

* * * * * * *
In the United States, some Michiganders have the dubious privilege of dining on muskrat for their Friday and Lenten observances. Several Catholic communities in the Wolverine State have claimed a dispensation to eat the aquatic rodent since the days of the French trappers. In 1987, Bishop Kenneth Povish of Lansing wrote that although such a permission could not be found in the Church’s records, the practice had been around for so long that it could continue as an “immemorial custom.” And there was another reason to allow it, the bishop added: “Anyone who could eat muskrat was doing penance worthy of the greatest of the saints.”¹⁶

The Law No One Knows

After Vatican II Pope Paul VI took up the question of Friday abstinence in his 1966 Apostolic Constitution Paenitimini. The document masterfully reaffirms the traditional theology of penance and abstinence, and it resolves a longstanding inconsistency about which feast days should supersede Friday abstinence.¹⁷ But Paenitimini also announces the Pope’s goal of reorganizing “penitential discipline with practices more suited to our times.”¹⁸ Even so, Friday abstinence was explicitly reaffirmed.¹⁹

In November of the same year, the U.S. bishops responded to the call for reorganization with a “Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence.”²⁰ Whereas American Catholics were hereby released from a strict obligation under pain of sin to keep Friday abstinence, the bishops emphasized that Friday was still a mandatory day of penance: indeed, they wrote eloquently of Friday as a mini-Lent in the same way that Sunday is a “weekly Easter.”²¹ And they made it clear: “We give first place to abstinence from flesh meat. We do so in the hope that the Catholic community will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by free choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law.”²² The 1983 Code of Canon Law would later codify this teaching by stating that: Friday is an obligatory day of penance and abstinence is the standard form of Friday penance, although other forms may be done instead.²³



Clam Chowder Bread Bowl

* * * * * * *

Restaurants typically have a Friday seafood special of the day or a soupdu jour such as clam chowder because of the power that Catholics once wielded as a united front.

* * * * * * *
If this is the position of the Magisterium, then why has it failed so miserably, with the majority of the world’s Catholics ignorant of any obligation to do anything special on Friday? Certainly, the media’s mishandling of the 1966 news (which made glib remarks like “you won’t go to hell anymore for eating a hamburger on Friday” instead of reporting all the facts), the minimalist mindset of the faithful who were happy to be free of one less duty, and the failure of the clergy to catechize on the subject all played a part in the overnight disappearance of Friday abstinence.

But there may also be a more fundamental reason. The removal of a symbol, or in this case the removal of a law protecting a symbol, can give the impression that the reality to which the symbol points is likewise being rejected. “To take away one symbol that meant something,” notes Mary Douglas,

is no guarantee that the spirit of charity will flow in its place….We have seen that those who are responsible for ecclesiastical decisions are only too likely to have been made, by the manner of their education, insensitive to non-verbal signals and dull to their meaning. This is central to the difficulties of Christianity today. It is as if the liturgical signal boxes were manned by colour-blind signalmen.²⁴

And there are other complications. Paenitimini and Canon 1253, which allow an episcopal conference to designate other forms of penance such as works of charity for Friday, divorce for the first time in Church history Friday penance from food abstinence. Yet even this latitude is honored more in the breach than in the observance, for few episcopal conferences have made any decision about what form of Friday penance its flock may follow. The signalmen, it appears, have fallen asleep at the switch.

Confusion reigns even in the capitol of Christendom. When my father-in-law, who is a member of a pontifical academy, was invited to dine at the Vatican’s Casina Pio IV on a Friday night several years ago, he and the other guests were served horse meat!



* * * * * * *

Pope Pius XII, in order to relieve their overburdened refrigerators, allowed U.S. Catholics to eat meat the day after Thanksgiving.

* * * * * * *
Abstaining from the Alternatives

Regardless of the available options, there are at least seven reasons to keep the traditional sixth-day penance:

1. It is corporate. Having everyone do his own form of penance lacks the marvelous unity of almost the entire Catholic world performing the same act on the same day. This is not only spiritually constructive, it is socially edifying, building up solidarity and deepening our awareness of joint membership in the mystical Body of Christ.
   
   
2. It is ancient. A single practice unites all the living, but when it is ancient it also unites them to their forebears. If tradition is, as Chesterton put it, the democracy of the dead, then Friday abstinence is the veritable apple pie of Catholic life. In the words of the American bishops in 1966: We show “out of love for Christ Crucified…our solidarity with the generations of believers to whom this practice frequently became, especially in times of persecution and of great poverty, no mean evidence of fidelity to Christ and His Church.”²⁵
   
   
3. It is testimonial. Friday abstinence bears powerful witness to the distinctiveness of the Church. My Protestant friend whom I mentioned earlier knew little about Catholics when he was young, but he knew they stood for something when he watched his papist peers exercise self-discipline even away from the watchful eyes of their parents.
   
   
4. Abstinence is efficacious. Ancient authors taught that abstinence from food and drink was useful in dampening “the ardor of lust.”²⁶ Bodily passions are not bad per se, but left untrained they can become the occasion of sin. Trimming the body’s food intake, as modern studies have confirmed, can lower lustful proclivities.²⁷
   
   
5. Abstinence is appropriate. The Church still teaches that every human being is required to do penance by virtue of divine law (Can. 1249), and Friday abstinence is an especially appropriate way to do this. It was on a Friday in Eden that Adam and Eve transgressed the first law of abstinence.²⁸ And, of course, it was on a Friday that our Lord was crucified in order to undo the effects of that transgression. It is therefore appropriate to make abstinence our Friday penance, in sober memory of the Fall and “in prayerful remembrance of the passion of Jesus Christ.”²⁹
   
   
6. Abstinence from meat is particularly appropriate. Catholicism ingeniously teaches both through presence and through absence. Usually, the Church employs physical signs to convey invisible realities; but sometimes, she temporarily withdraws something as a way of arresting our attention and heightening our awareness of what is missing.
   
   Hence, the suppression of the Alleluia during Septuagesima and Lent effectively demonstrates that we are in exile from our true Home, where the angels sing Alleluia without ceasing. Veiling sacred images in church during Passiontide — when we would most expect to gaze upon a crucifix — paradoxically heightens our awe of Christ’s Passion. And prohibiting the sacrifice of the altar on Good Friday draws us in an inverted way to the sacrifice of the cross made that day.
   
   Similarly, when we “make meager,” we withdraw from our table the flesh of an animal whose blood was shed for us on the day in which the Blood of the God-man was shed for us.³⁰ The absence of the former paradoxically reminds us of the latter; not having a bloody victual backhandedly alerts us to the Bloody Victim.
   
   
7. It is Christ-like. Jesus Christ consumed nothing on Good Friday except the gall He tasted shortly before His death. With fasting or abstinence on the day of the Crucifixion, Catholics in some small way “suffer with Christ that they may one day be glorified with Him. This is the heart of the tradition of abstinence from meat on Friday.”³¹

Conclusion

How the Church can best recover its former Friday integrity remains an open question.³² In the meantime, there is ample reason to fulfill Paul VI’s and the American bishops’ 1966 wish that what was once done in obedience be now done by free choice. The weekly abstinence from flesh meat is rich in history and meaning, bringing us closer to God and to each other. Living the Catholic tradition, even on days of deprivation, is anything but a meager existence.

Postscript: Since Ireland has been a leitmotif in this article, it is fitting to add that in response to the horrific abuse scandals decimating the Catholic Church in that country, Pope Benedict XVI has asked its faithful to offer their Friday penance from now until Good Friday 2011 for God’s mercy.³³ Those of us who owe our blood or our faith to the sons and daughters of St. Patrick might wish to do the same.

Notes

1. The custom of fasting on Friday is mentioned in Didache 9, a book believed to have been written around A.D. 75. [back]


2. Brian Fagan, Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World (Basic Books, 2007), pp. 25ff. [back]


3. Ibid. [back]


4. Michael P. Foley, Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 111. [back]


5. See Foley, pp. 46, 69, and 109, resp. [back]


6. Meagre/Meager, adj. and n.," Oxford English Dictionary, A.3. and B.2. [back]


7. Leonard Feeney, S.J. "Fish on Friday," in Fish on Friday and Other Sketches (Sheed & Ward, 1934), pp. 3-16. [back]


8. Ibid., p. 3. [back]


9. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (Routledge, 1996), p. 37. [back]


10. Ibid., pp. 37-38. [back]


11. Feeney, p. 6. [back]


12. J.D. O'Neill, "Abstinence," Catholic Encyclopedia, 1907. [back]


13. See "Friday Abstinence," in the Religion section of Time Magazine, June 18, 1951. [back]


14. The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin through Wales, 2.3. [back]


15. Daniel Wilson, "Early Notices of the Beaver in Europe and North America," in the Canadian Journal of Industry, Science, and Art (1849-1914), Vol. 4, p. 386. The scoter, for example, was consumed on Friday in parts of France (see Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucian Bonaparte, American Ornithology, Vol. 3 [Constable and Col, 1831], pp. 212-13). [back]


16. Kristin Lukowski, "Muskrat love: A Lenten Friday delight for some Michiganders," CNS News, March 8, 2007. [back]


17. Prior to Vatican II, only holy days of obligation suspended abstinence from flesh meat on Friday. The problem with this arrangement was that different nations had different days of obligation. The difficulty was resolved by giving all [first class] solemnities in the universal calendar priority over Friday penance. [back]


18. III.C. [back]


19. Chapter 3, II.2. [back]


20. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, "Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence," November 18, 1966. This is an outstanding document. [back]


21. Ibid., 23. [back]


22. Ibid., 24. [back]


23. See Canons 1251-1253. [back]


24. Douglas, p. 42. [back]


25. "Pastoral Statement," 24a. [back]


26. See Saint Jerome, Against Jovinian 2.6; Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II.147.1. [back]


27. Flesh meat, for instance, is high in zinc, which raises testosterone levels. For a summary of modern dietary research, see Theresa M. Shaw, Burden of the Flesh (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1998), pp. 126-27. [back]


28. Adam and Eve sinned on the same day they were created when they ate the fruit from which they were commanded to abstain. Dante gives the First Couple about six hours in Paradise before they were expelled. [back]


29. "Pastoral Statement," 23. [back]


30. Cold-blooded animals such as fish and amphibians also "shed their blood for us" when we use them as food, but because of the similarity of our physiology to that of other warm-blooded animals, our symbolic association with the latter is greater. [back]


31. "Pastoral Statement," 18. [back]


32. For an interesting discussion on this, see Father John Zuhlsdorf's blog for April 23, 2009, at http://wdtprs.com/blog/2009/04/kicking-it-up-a-notch-our-catholic-identity-fr-z-rants/. [back]


33. Pope Benedict XVI, "Pastoral Letter of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI to the Catholics of Ireland," no. 14, March 19, 2010. [back]

Michael P. Foley, an associate professor of Patristics at Baylor University, is author of Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday?: The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Wedding Rites: A Complete Guide to Traditional Vows, Music, Ceremonies, Blessings, and Interfaith Services(Eerdmans, 2008). Dr. Foley's article, "Fish on Friday: The One That Got Away," Latin Mass: The Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition Vol. 19, No. 3 (Summer/Fall 2010), pp. 42-46, is reproduced here by kind permission of Latin Mass, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060, and the author.