The Gamber Preface: Paragraph 3

I have nothing to add to what Cardinal Ratzinger says in his second paragraph, but I must cover paragraph 3, since that is where one of the famous "money quotes" is found, a quote which is heard over and over again. Here is the relevant passage:

What has happened after the Council signifies a whole other thing: in place of a liturgy which is the fruit of a continual development, they have given us fabricated liturgy ("une liturgie fabriquée"). They have gone outside the living process of growth and development so as to delve into fabrication. They have no longer wanted to continue the organic development and maturation of the living thing ("du vivant") down through the centuries, and they have replaced them -- as if it were a technical production -- with a fabrication, a banal product of the moment.

In my original post I mentioned that one "Antiquarian" had objected to using this Preface as a "proof text" to demonstrate that even Cardinal Ratzinger despised the "new rite". "Antiquarian" held that such interpretations misrepresented the point of the Cardinal's words. I agree with him.

The key phrase is "they have gone outside the living process of growth and development", and the pronoun "they" needs to be concretized. As the prior article attests, "they" refers not to the Council, not to Paul VI, not even to the post-Conciliar liturgical Concilium per se, but rather to what I have translated as the "liturgical guild", in French, "le groupe des fabricants liturgiques".

The error consists in their no longer wanting "to continue the organic development and maturation of the living thing down through the centuries". This fault is made manifest by the substitution for that grasp on the authentic Origin of the liturgy, with the fruit of their own hands, "a banal product of the moment". What the "liturgical guild" has been pushing is artificial, not because the words and actions are human -- the words and actions authorized by the Church authentically are also human -- but because the "concrete" expressions that they have generated are not tapped into the Living Origin of the liturgy, the necessary link is not there, the Sacramental signs have been eviscerated.

Cardinal Ratzinger situates the work of Msgr. Gamber in opposition to this "guild" approach, both because of his devotion to the historical sources of the liturgy of the Roman Rite (history implies development, something familiar to the Western tradition), and because he shared the Eastern Churches' sense of the liturgy as "the glint of the eternal liturgy, the light of which, in the sacred action, enlightens our changing time with its immutable beauty and grandeur". In addition, he asserts that these two ways of viewing the liturgy are completely compatible, because they are both true, and non-exclusive.

Thus, Catholics should not be shaken by the abuses of the "Liturgical Guild", and the latter should cease and desist. Above all, Catholics should not engage in the kind of thinking that holds up one Form of the Roman Rite above the other (or any other Catholic Rites). The means are not the End; the means are not the Origin. God is both the Origin and the End of the liturgy, and His will for us is to be simple, faith-filled, charitable, courageous Christians, following the Holy Spirit in accordance with the teachings of His Church.

The Holy Spirit is the Source of the Church's Unity, and liturgy should foster unity and reconciliation, not reinforce divisions.

The Gamber Preface: Paragraph 1

In a previous post, I mentioned that I might have more to say about the Preface by Cardinal Ratzinger to Msgr. Klaus Gamber's "Reform of the Roman Liturgy". There are a number of interesting points for a recursive Christian, and the first one is that of "origin".

"Origin" of the Liturgy

In any recursive data structure, the main thing one has to keep track of is the origin or root of the data structure. That is because by design if one knows the origin one can access any of the other nodes.

The liturgy is not itself a "data structure" but it does have a structure, which is comprised of words (prayers and Scrpture readings) and rubrics (instructions to the priest how to act), which can be regarded as its "data". For those new to the terminology, "rubric" comes from a Latin word meaning "red", because typically the rubrics are printed in red ink in Missals intended for the priests to use in the liturgy.

Ratzinger speaks of the words of the young priest he has just mentioned as a yearning to find, and hold on to, the origin of the liturgy:

He felt that we need a new beginning emanating from the intimacy of the liturgy, just as the liturgical movement had desired when it was at the apogee of its true nature, when it was not a matter of fabricating texts, of inventing actions and forms, but of rediscovering the living center, of penetrating into the very tissue, properly speaking, of the liturgy, so that its realization have issued from its very substance.

Hence, the liturgy has a living tissue, a substance, which it is necessary that we humans tap into if we are to understand and celebrate the liturgy the way it was meant to be used. It is important to realize that the liturgy is intended to be used. It is not an end in itself, anymore than the Church is an end in herself.

The end or purpose, of course, is the Trinitarian Godhead -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- who has created all things, and keeps them in existence. Jesus Christ, the Son of God Incarnate, has founded the Church and given it all its sacraments -- there are Seven -- establishing with His foundational act the very essence of each and every one of them. The liturgy comprises all the rites and ritual surrounding the administration of those seven Sacraments (or Mysteries as they are called in the Christian East) as well as the sanctification of time, known variously down through the ages and places, but commonly called the Liturgy of the Hours. The "Church" is not the "source" of the liturgy, but its servant; the Source of the liturgy is the Triune God.

Thus, God is both the source and the end of the liturgy, and tapping into the "origin" is tapping into God, into the Holy Spirit. Only He can enliven, or quicken, the liturgy; as we say in the Creed "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life". Moreover, unless it is He who does so for us, we Christians have wandered from the path of legitimate liturgy. He is Mystery; and that connecting to Him by us is the mystery of the Christian life, and that connection is not formed exclusively by authentic liturgy, but certainly it is nourished and energized by that liturgy. Without Him, we wander about like "strangers in a strange land".

The Effect of Wandering Away from the Origin of the Liturgy: Division

What happens when we do not tap into the true origin of the Liturgy? Cardinal Ratzinger presents 3 scenarios which were apparent then, and remain so today. First, he mentions what happens when we contemplate the work of the "liturgical guild":

On one side, we have a liturgy that has degenerated into a show, where one attempts to make religion interesting helped by fashionable nonsense and catchy moral platitudes, with short-lived successes amongst the liturgical guild, and a rather pronounced shrinking from it on the part of those who seek in the liturgy not a spiritual show-master, but an encounter with the living God before Whom all «doing» becomes meaningless, that encounter alone being capable of making us draw near to the true riches of being.

Next, he characterizes the effect of rejecting not just the "fabricating" being foisted on the Church by the liturgical guild, but also the very Rite, approved by the Church herself, and now known as the Ordinary Form of the one Roman Rite:

On the other side, there is a conservation of ritual forms whose grandeur is always moving, but which, pushed to the extreme, manifests a dogged isolation and, in the end, allows only sadness.

One can only think that those Ratzinger has in mind here are not simply Catholics who attend the Extraordinary Form of the one Roman Rite, but those who, as he puts it, "pushing to the extreme", actually take more solace in the positive aspect of celebrating according to the usus antiquior, then it tapping into the Origin of the liturgy, the Holy Spirit. Why? Because the Holy Spirit is the guarantor, the Pledge, of the Church's unity, or communion, and He is the source of Christian joy. Affirming one aspect of Catholic belief or practice by denying the validity of other aspects thereof is not the work of the Holy Spirit, nor is it authentically joyful.

Next, he mentions the situation of the "non-radicalized" members of the Church:

Surely, between those two sides, there remain all the priests and their parishioners who celebrate the new liturgy with respect and solemnity; but they are left wondering by the contradiction between the two extremes and, in the end, the lack of internal unity in the Church, makes their fidelity appear to be, wrongly for many of them, a merely idiosyncratic neoconservatism. Because that is what it has come to, a new spiritual impulse is needed so that the liturgy be for us once more a community activity of the Church, taking it back from the arbitrary grasp of curates and their liturgy teams.

In summary of this first paragraph, for us to be able to celebrate the Sacraments as Christ wanted us to do, it is essential that we always be striving to connect via the Origin of the liturgy. Those who have wandered from that Origin by striving to perfect some human techniques in place of focusing ever anew on that Origin, wind up appearing as "show-masters". The excuse often given is that there is a "need" to "enculturate the liturgy". Even were that true, enculturation cannot be "made up" or "produced", it must occur in the gradual way that all life unfolds.

Those who, sensing the inanity of that consciously manipulative approach, fall back into an extreme rejection, not just of the abuses, but also of the very Rite approved in text and rubric by the Church, create a problem themselves. By rejecting, root and branch, the Church's authority to authorize a new formulation of the liturgy, they also disconnect themselves from the Origin of the spirit of the liturgy.

For the liturgy is not intended to be a "red badge of courage" obtained in so-called "liturgy wars", but, as Ratzinger puts it toward the end of this paragraph as "une activité communautaire de l’Église", which I have translated as "a community activity of the Church", but the French goes deeper than that expression connotes. Really, it is "a common act performed in communion with our fellow Catholics in the whole Church", an expression of our being sons in the Son, co-heirs of the kingdom of God, where the "liturgy" is (right now) being celebrated continuously.

Nothing less than that is at stake.

Ratzinger's Preface to Gamber's "Reform of the Roman Liturgy: Its Problems and Background"

Because we continue to see people who make the argument that the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite shows the impoverishment of the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, in spite of the words of Pope Benedict XVI in his letter to the Bishops which accompanied the promulgation of the Motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, some anonymous person, with the avatar "Antiquarian" suggested in a recent blog combox at WDTPRS that people were opposing to the Pope's words his thoughts written in the preface to the French edition of Msgr. Klaus Gamber's well-known book on the Roman Rite, and that the translation most often quoted by them was actually a mis-translation of his words. This led me, who studied French in high school and college, to read the original three paragraphs, and make my own English translation, without the benefit of the presumed faulty translation before me (I don't own the book, nor have I read it, but I have seen this preface quoted in various places over the last several years). My French is now, forty years later, rusty, but I think I get the gist of what "Antiquarian" was driving at, and it is this. Those making the above-mentioned comparison take Ratzinger's words to apply to the texts and rubrics of the New Mass as they have come from the Vatican; what seems apparent to me in reading the original French is that this is not correct. What he opposes to the traditional Mass, the usus antiquior, is actually more the "enculturation" with which those texts have been used, especially in the parishes of those countries often understood to be the components of Western Civilization. Perhaps I will say more about this in future, but for now here is a) my English translation, followed below it by b) the original French, taken from a PDF document offered by "Antiquarian".

My translation

Recently, a young priest told me, What we need today is a new liturgical movement. His words were an expression of a hope which, in our day, only a willfully superficial spirit could discard. What was important for this priest was not the conquest of new and daring liberties: who hadn't already taken to himself such liberties? He felt that we need a new beginning emanating from the intimacy of the liturgy, just as the liturgical movement had desired when it was at the apogee of its true nature, when it was not a matter of fabricating texts, of inventing actions and forms, but of rediscovering the living center, of penetrating into the very tissue, properly speaking, of the liturgy, so that its realization have issued from its very substance. The concrete instance of liturgical reform that we have now has strayed ever farther from this origin. The upshot has not been re-quickening but havoc. On one side, we have a liturgy that has degenerated into a show, where one attempts to make religion interesting helped by fashionable nonsense and catchy moral platitudes, with short-lived successes amongst the liturgical guild, and a rather pronounced shrinking from it on the part of those who seek in the liturgy not a spiritual show-master, but an encounter with the living God before Whom all «doing» becomes meaningless, that encounter alone being capable of making us draw near to the true riches of being. On the other side, there is a conservation of ritual forms whose grandeur is always moving, but which, pushed to the extreme, manifests a dogged isolation and, in the end, allows only sadness. Surely, between those two sides, there remain all the priests and their parishioners who celebrate the new liturgy with respect and solemnity; but they are left wondering by the contradiction between the two extremes and, in the end, the lack of internal unity in the Church, makes their fidelity appear to be, wrongly for many of them, a merely idiosyncratic neoconservatism. Because that is what it has come to, a new spiritual impulse is needed so that the liturgy be for us once more a community activity of the Church, taking it back from the arbitrary grasp of curates and their liturgy teams.

One cannot «make up» a liturgical movement of that sort -- any more than one can «make up» something that is alive; but one can contribute to its development by making the effort to assimilate anew the spirit of the liturgy, and by defending publicly what one has thus received. This new beginning is in need of «fathers» who are models, and who are not happy merely to point out the way to be followed. Anyone looking for such «fathers» today will inevitably encounter the person of Msgr. Klaus Gamber, who was taken from us too soon, unfortunately, but who perhaps, precisely by leaving us, has become truly present to us in all the forcefulness of the perspectives he has opened up for us. By his very leaving us he escapes from the partisan quarrel. Thus he may be able, in this hour of distress, to become the «father» of a new beginning. Gamber bore wholeheartedly the hope of the old liturgical movement. Without any doubt, because he came from a foreign school, he remained an outsider on the German scene, where no one really wanted to give him entree; even recently, one thesis encountered significant opposition because the young researcher had dared to cite Gamber too abundantly and with too much approval. But perhaps that shunning was providential, because it forced Gamber to follow his own path, which allowed him to avoid the dead-weight of conformity.

In the midst of the quarrel of the liturgists, it is hard to express in a few words what is truly essential, and what is not. Perhaps the following pointer may prove helpful. J. A. Jungmann, one of the truly great liturgists of our century, had defined the liturgy of his time, just as it was understood in the West especially, by representing it by means of historical research, as a «liturgy fruit of a development»; probably also by contrast with the eastern notion which in the liturgy does not see the historical growth and development, but only the glint of the eternal liturgy, the light of which, in the sacred action, enlightens our changing time with its immutable beauty and grandeur. These two ways of seeing the liturgy are legitimate and definitely not irreconcilable. What has happened after the Council signifies a whole other thing: in place of a liturgy which is the fruit of a continual development, they have given us fabricated liturgy. They have gone outside the living process of growth and development so as to delve into fabrication. They have no longer wanted to continue the organic development and maturation of the living thing down through the centuries, and they have replaced them -- as if it were a technical production -- with a fabrication, a banal product of the moment. Gamber, with the vigilance of an authentic seer and the courage of a true witness, opposed this falsification and taught us tirelessly the living fullness of a true liturgy, thanks to his incredibly rich acquaintance with the sources. As a man who knew and loved history, he has shown us the many forms of development and the way of the liturgy; as a man who saw history from within it, he has seen in this development and the fruit of this development the intangible glint of the eternal liturgy, which is not the object of our making, but which can continue marvelously to ripen and blossom, if we unite ourselves intimately to its mystery. The death of this man and eminent priest ought to stimulate us; his work may help us to take up new momentum.

Because my French is a bit rusty, if any French/English speaker would like to suggest improvements to my expression, please feel free to make suggestions to the comments.

French original

TEXTE du cardinal Ratzinger paru en tête de l’édition française de La Réforme liturgique en question (Die Reform der Römischen Liturgie) par Mgr Klaus Gamber Éditions Sainte-Madeleine F-84330 LE BARROUX
Original here: Preface

Un jeune prêtre me disait récemment : Il nous faudrait aujourd’hui un nouveau mouvement liturgique. C’était là l’expression d’un souci que, de nos jours, seuls des esprits volontairement superficiels pourraient écarter. Ce qui importait à ce prêtre, ce n’était pas de conquérir de nouvelles et audacieuses libertés : quelle liberté ne s’est-on pas déjà arrogée? Il sentait que nous avions besoin d’un nouveau commencement issu de l’intime de la liturgie, comme l’avait voulu le mouvement liturgique lorsqu’il était à l’apogée de sa véritable nature, lorsqu’il ne s’agissait pas de fabriquer des textes, d’inventer des actions et des formes, mais de redécouvrir le centre vivant, de pénétrer dans le tissu proprement dit de la liturgie, pour que l’accomplissement de celle-ci soit issu de sa substance même. La réforme liturgique, dans sa réalisation concrète, s’est éloignée toujours davantage de cette origine. Le résultat n’a pas été une réanimation mais une dévastation. D’un côté, on a une liturgie dégénérée en show, où l’on essaie de rendre la religion intéressante à l’aide de bêtises à la mode et de maximes morales aguichantes, avec des succès momentanés dans le groupe des fabricants liturgiques, et une attitude de recul d’autant plus prononcée chez ceux qui cherchent dans la liturgie non pas le showmaster spirituel, mais la rencontre avec le Dieu vivant devant qui tout «faire» devient insignifiant, seule cette rencontre étant capable de nous faire accéder aux vraies richesses de l’être. De l’autre côté, il y a conservation des formes rituelles dont la grandeur émeut toujours, mais qui, poussée à l’extrême, manifeste un isolement opiniâtre et ne laisse finalement que tristesse. Certes, il reste entre les deux tous les prêtres et leurs paroissiens qui célèbrent la nouvelle liturgie avec respect et solennité; mais ils sont remis en question par la contradiction entre les deux extrêmes, et le manque d’unité interne dans l’Église fait finalement paraître leur fidélité, à tort pour beaucoup d’entre eux, comme une simple variété personnelle de néoconservatisme. Parce qu’il en est ainsi, une nouvelle impulsion spirituelle est nécessaire pour que la liturgie soit à nouveau pour nous une activité communautaire de l’Église et qu’elle soit arrachée à l’arbitraire des curés et de leurs équipes liturgiques.

On ne peut pas « fabriquer » un mouvement liturgique de cette sorte — pas plus qu’on ne peut « fabriquer » quelque chose de vivant —, mais on peut contribuer à son développement en s’efforçant d’assimiler à nouveau l’esprit de la liturgie et en défendant publiquement ce qu’on a ainsi reçu. Ce nouveau départ a besoin de «pères» qui soient des modèles, et qui ne se contentent pas d’indiquer la voie à suivre. Qui cherche aujourd’hui de tels « pères » rencontrera immanquablement la personne de Mgr Klaus Gamber, qui nous a malheureusement été enlevé trop tôt, mais qui peut-être, précisément en nous quittant, nous est devenu véritablement présent dans toute la force des perspectives qu’il nous a ouvertes. Justement parce qu’en nous quittant il échappe à la querelle des partis, il pourrait, en cette heure de détresse, devenir le « père » d’un nouveau départ. Gamber a porté de tout son coeur l’espoir de l’ancien mouvement liturgique. Sans doute, parce qu’il venait d’une école étrangère, est-il resté un outsider sur la scène allemande, où on ne voulait pas vraiment l’admettre; encore récemment une thèse a rencontré des difficultés importantes parce que le jeune chercheur avait osé citer Gamber trop abondamment et avec trop de bienveillance. Mais peut-être que cette mise à l’écart a été providentielle, parce qu’elle a forcé Gamber à suivre sa propre voie et qu’elle lui a évité le poids du conformisme.

Il est difficile d’exprimer en peu de mots ce qui, dans la querelle des liturgistes, est vraiment essentiel et ce qui ne l’est pas. Peut-être que l’indication suivante pourrait être utile. J. A. Jungmann, l’un des vraiment grands liturgistes de notre siècle, avait défini en son temps la liturgie, telle qu’on l’entendait en Occident en se la représentant surtout à travers la recherche historique, comme une «liturgie fruit d’un développement»; probablement aussi par contraste avec la notion orientale qui ne voit pas dans la liturgie le devenir et la croissance historiques, mais seulement le reflet de la liturgie éternelle, dont la lumière, à travers le déroulement sacré, éclaire notre temps changeant de sa beauté et de sa grandeur immuables. Les deux conceptions sont légitimes et ne sont en définitive pas inconciliables. Ce qui s’est passé après le Concile signifie tout autre chose: à la place de la liturgie fruit d’un développement continu, on a mis une liturgie fabriquée. On est sorti du processus vivant de croissance et de devenir pour entrer dans la fabrication. On n’a plus voulu continuer le devenir et la maturation organiques du vivant à travers les siècles, et on les a remplacés — à la manière de la production technique — par une fabrication, produit banal de l’instant. Gamber, avec la vigilance d’un authentique voyant et avec l’intrépidité d’un vrai témoin, s’est opposé à cette falsification et nous a enseigné inlassablement la vivante plénitude d’une liturgie véritable, grâce à sa connaissance incroyablement riche des sources. En homme qui connaissait et aimait l’histoire, il nous a montré les formes multiples du devenir et du chemin de la liturgie; en homme qui voyait l’histoire de l’intérieur, il a vu dans ce développement et le fruit de ce développement le reflet intangible de la liturgie éternelle, laquelle n’est pas objet de notre faire, mais qui peut continuer merveilleusement à mûrir et à s’épanouir, si nous nous unissons intimement à son mystère. La mort de cet homme et prêtre éminent devrait nous stimuler; son oeuvre pourrait nous aider à prendre un nouvel élan.

"Sola Scriptura": Essence of fundamentalism?

While reading of late the 1995 interview with Cardinal Ratzinger by Peter Seewald, published under the English title, Salt of the Earth (Ignatius Press, 1997), I came across an interesting turn of phrase of our current Pope.

Peter Seewald had asked: "How does it stand with those tendencies within the Church that some label as reactionary, as Catholic fundamentalism?" (p. 135)

While Ratzinger's full answer extends beyond this one question, and is well worth reading in full, I was particularly struck by his analysis of the source of the fundamentalist phenomenon:

In view of everything that is happening and of the massive undertainties that are now rising to the surface to threaten man, who suddenly feels bereft of his spiritual homeland, his foundation, there is a reaction of self-defense against, and refusal of, modernity, which as such is conceived of as hostile to religion or, at any rate, hostile to belief. I would, however, add that the catchword "fundamentalism", as it is used today, covers very different realities, and this calls for a bit more precision. The term first arose in nineteenth-century American Protestantism. The historical-critical exegesis of the Bible that had developed in the wake of the Enlightenment took away the univocal meaning that the Bible had had until then and that had been the presupposition of the Protestant scriptural principle. The principle "Scripture alone" suddenly ceased to furnish clear foundations. In the absence of a Magisterium, this was a deadly threat to communion in faith. In addition, there was the theory of evolution, which not only called into question the creation account and belief in creation but rendered God superfluous. The "fundament" was gone. A strictly literal biblical exegesis was set in opposition to this. The literal sense is unshakably valid. This thesis is directed against both the historico-critical method and the Catholic Magisterium, which does not admit this kind of verbalism. This is "fundamentalism" in the original sense. The Protestant fundamentalist "sects" are scoring great missionary successes today in South America and in the Philippines. They give people the feeling of certain, simple faith. Among us, however, fundamentalism has become a household word, a catchword that covers every imaginable foe. (pp. 135-6, emphases added)

What does that phrase "univocal meaning" mean? It refers to what many Protestants mean by "literal meaning", but it has its roots in logic rather than linguistics.

In one dictionary at hand, "univocal" is defined as "having only one meaning; unambiguous". Blogger's "spell-checking dictionary" had no idea that the word existed, but had heard of its contrary "equivocal", which means "subject to two or more interpretations [and usually used to mislead or confuse]".

On the other hand, "literal" has a number of definitions: "(1) a : according with the letter of the scriptures b : adhering to fact or to the ordinary construction or primary meaning of a term or expression c : free from exaggeration or embellishment d : characterized by a concern mainly with facts (2) : of, relating to, or expressed in letters (3) : reproduced word for word : exact, verbatim.