The Once and Future Roman Rite: Returning to the Traditional Latin Liturgy after Seventy Years of Exile by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski

Author:Dr. Peter Kwasniewski [Kwasniewski, Dr. Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TAN Books
Published: 2022-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

Given the foregoing, I think we can say why the concluding premise of SC 23 (“there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing”), although well-intentioned or, at any rate, designed to reassure nervous bishops that they were not being asked to vote away Catholic tradition, is thoroughly implausible, considering the larger context. When a council asks for many simultaneous revisions (recall the frequent refrain “a new rite is to be drawn up” for this and that and the other10), and then the body entrusted with the realization of the desiderata makes a thousand more changes in the course of just a few years—all on a scale, quantitatively and qualitatively, never seen in any natural process except perhaps for volcanic eruptions and atomic explosions, to which the human analogy would be times of great political upheaval such as the French Revolution (to which indeed Cardinal Suenens compared the Second Vatican Council)— it is perfectly obvious that such an affair could never have the appearance of “growing organically from forms already existing”! At that point one has entirely left behind the remotest resemblance to change over time “as if” by a natural process; by no stretch of imagination can the Consilium’s work be called “organic,” even allowing for the most elastic metaphors. Rather, it looks decidedly violent, which, as Aristotle shows, is the opposite of natural.11 And that is why Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger could famously write in his foreword to Dom Alcuin Reid’s book on our subject:

Growth is not possible unless the Liturgy’s identity is preserved. . . . Proper development is possible only if careful attention is paid to the inner structural logic of this “organism”: just as a gardener cares for a living plant as it develops, with due attention to the power of growth and life within the plant and the rules it obeys, so the Church ought to give reverent care to the Liturgy through the ages, distinguishing actions that are helpful and healing from those that are violent and destructive… . With respect to the Liturgy, he [the pope] has the task of a gardener, not that of a technician who builds new machines and throws the old ones on the junk-pile.12

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