The contemporary controversy over Church music
is very much a controversy
over the very nature of the liturgy.

Faith in Christ and contemporary liturgy

By John-Peter Pham

    Describing the condescension with which critics of particular liturgical reforms have met from their presumably more socially enlightened brethren in the mid-1980s—long before the current widespread public debate over the revisions in the Roman Missal proposed by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy (ICEL)—English Dominican theologian Aidan Nichols wrote that those who are easily satisfied, or so it would seem, with the diet offered in their churches, “dismiss malcontents as bangers of antique drums who would be better employed in seeing to the needs of their neighbors.” In the mid-1990s, Father Nichols’s observation might merit a corollary with regard to the dismissal with which some of the same critics are met from their presumably more theologically conscious brethren: “. . . or better employed in fighting the doctrinal errors being taught.” In his Feast of Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger pronounced a pox on the houses of both sets of brethren. While the Cardinal recognized that, faced with the contemporary socio-political and religious crisis, and “the moral challenge they offer to Christians, the problems of liturgy and prayer could easily seem to be of secondary importance,” he nonetheless insisted that “the question of the moral standard and spiritual resources that we need if we are to acquit ourselves in this situation cannot be separated from the question of worship.”

    Nearly fifteen years after his first book on the liturgy, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has published a new volume containing a collection of various articles and papers he has written on the liturgy since the publication of Feast of Faith and which he has reworked for publication. Released in both German and French editions around Christmas 1995, Ein neues Lied für den Herrn. Christusglaube und Liturgie in der Gegenwart (“A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and the Liturgy Today”) comes at a propitious moment, when increasingly many in the Church have been asking the question: Has the renewal of the liturgy decreed by the Second Vatican Council been accomplished? The last year or so has seen the birth in America—once a forward bastion of liturgical innovation—of two tradition-oriented liturgical societies, the one a popular movement grouped around the newsletter Adoremus Bulletin, the other a more scholarly association called the Society for Catholic Liturgy. Even the former prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, Cardinal Antonio María Javierre Ortas, has admitted in an interview published in the December 1995 issue of 30 Giorni that “there is a need to rediscover the meaning of discipline in the liturgical-sacramental field” and that “a better and more complete knowledge of Sacrosanctum Concilium, of its spirit, which is the spirit of the Catholic liturgy” is desperately called for by the times.

    Cardinal Ratzinger’s new volume is, in part, a response to these concerns. However, good liturgical practice is only possible on the basis of sound theological faith. Thus the Cardinal is quick to point out in his preface to Ein neues Lied that “ultimately all questions of criteria for liturgical renewal return to the same question: Who do you say that the Son of Man is? (Matt. 16:13 ff.).” The entire first section of the book is devoted to an exposition of the Church’s Christological faith in its contemporary social and theological context since “the priest—indeed as does every Christian—needs to be a believer. If he is not, everything he does is empty. The most sublime and the most important thing which a priest can do for his fellow man is, before all else, to be a believer. Through faith, he allows God, the Other, to come into the world.” In particular, the Cardinal further emphasizes that the faith which today needs particular reaffirmation is that in Christ. While he notes that up to the time of the Council leading theologians—his list includes J. A. Jungmann, Karl Adam, and Karl Rahner—saw in a de facto monophysitism on the part of Catholics the principle danger to the Church’s faith, today the exact opposite is true: “it is no longer monophysitism which threatens Christianity, but a new Arianism or at least a new Nestorianism, paralleled with a new iconoclasm.” Against this, the Cardinal opposes the confession that: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8).

    So far nothing has been said about the liturgy, nonetheless all this is an essential foundation for a theology of the liturgy. Without an adequate grasp—insofar as is possible outside of the beatific vision—of the mystery of Christ, liturgy, the Church’s prayer, is per se impossible: “Only because there is already speech, Logos, in God can there be speech, logos, to God . . . . The divine Logos is the ontological foundation for prayer.” Consequently, it is the Incarnation, God’s self-emptying communication of himself in “the Christ of the Gospels, in the Christ of the witnesses, in the true Jesus who is also the historic Jesus in contrast to that artificial figure so often as ‘Jesus of history,’” alone which gives a basis for the very act of prayer.

    But it is only in the Church, that prayer finds its supreme expression as liturgy since to her, and her alone, “has been given the power, the mandate to pronounce the words of salvation and to establish the acts which convey the salvation man needs.” Without this mandate, the priest would be “nothing more than a social worker” and the “warmth of the group will be of little comfort.”

    Having laid a foundation in Christology for a theology of the liturgy, the Cardinal at last turns to one of the concrete dimensions in which his theoretical discussion finds an incarnation. Once again he turns to Church music to illustrate his point, this theme being a perennial interest of his, perhaps in part because his own brother Georg Ratzinger was for many years the Kapellmeister of the Cathedral of Regensburg. The Cardinal writes:

The liturgy and music have been “sisters” since the beginning. Whenever man seeks to praise God, words alone do not suffice. Discourse with God surpasses the limits of human language. Man has consequently, always and everywhere, called on the aid of music, of song, and of the voices of creation harmonized in instruments. The praise of God is not the affair of man alone: to praise God, man must join his voice to that which all creation bespeaks.

    However, he is quick to acknowledge that the relation of the liturgy to music has often been difficult, especially in periods of transition in history and culture. Such was the case in the period immediately after the Second Vatican Council with its controversies between “pastoral agents” on one hand and Church musicians on the other. The latter, “refusing to be pushed into subscribing to considerations of simple pastoral utility, attempted to highlight the fundamental dignity of music as a pastoral and liturgical norm in its own right.”

    This initial controversy about means to a generally agreed to end soon passed into a new controversy—one which is still ongoing—concerning the end of liturgical music itself. Thus the contemporary controversy over Church music is very much a controversy over the very nature of the liturgy, one which is often fought on the basis of an alleged “spirit” of the Council. The Cardinal sees the key to the revisionist school of thought in a misinterpretation of the Lord’s promise that “where two or three are gathered in my name, there I will be” (Matt. 18:20); the school then opposes the group of two or three to the Church as an institution: it is no longer the Church which gives birth to the liturgical assembly, but the assembly that “builds Church.” Consequently, the subject of the liturgy is neither God nor the Church, but the members of the participating group, whose aim is more to “build solidarity” or “enhance community” among themselves than to enter into the community of love with the Triune God.

    The Cardinal echoes the criticism of many churchgoers when he deplores “not only the priests, but the bishops who have the impression that they would not be ‘faithful to the Council’ if they limited themselves to the texts contained in the Missal: they have to come up with a ‘creative’ formula, regardless of how banal it might be. The welcoming of the ministers and even bidding them farewell have been elevated to the level of obligatory components of the sacred action that almost no priest dares to omit.” In contrast, the Cardinal argues that the liturgy is not so much about “gathering the people of God” as it is about the revelation and praise of “the face of the Father of Jesus Christ” in the paschal mystery, in which alone that people finds a true identity.

    Nonetheless, in the sociological vision of the Church which has predominated in many quarters since the Council, it is inevitable that the very expressions of the Council itself on “the treasure of sacred music” and the “universality of Gregorian chant” come to be rejected as “mystifications” aimed at “preserving certain forms of power.” Consequently the silent majesty of the whispered Introibo ad altare Dei is replaced by the Gather us in bellowed by an arm-waving “cantor.”

    Hand in hand with such a misunderstanding of the nature of liturgy goes the exaggerated notion of “participation” in the liturgy which has more to do with the group’s actions than with the opus Dei, the work of God. The Cardinal contrasts this with the liturgical principles of one of the early pioneers of the liturgical renewal, Romano Guardini, who saw the key to the liturgy in the Church’s primacy of being over action: the continuing presence of the Church’s Lord over any action on her part. Without an appreciation for the real presence of the Lord Jesus Christ—in the true sense of the logion from Matt. 18:20—the liturgy has no meaning, because that presence alone guarantees that the Church’s liturgical action is indeed a sharing in the dialogue and community of Father, Son, and Spirit, and not the babble of the group’s self-celebration. The Cardinal thus cites approvingly articles 1097-1098 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

In the liturgy of the New Covenant every liturgical action, especially the celebration of the Eucharist and the sacraments, is an encounter between Christ and the Church. The liturgical assembly derives its unity from the “communion of the Holy Spirit” who gathers the children of God into the one Body of Christ. This assembly transcends racial, cultural, social—indeed, all human affinities. The assembly should prepare itself to encounter its Lord and to become “a people well disposed.”

    Likewise following Guardini, Cardinal Ratzinger argues that the true subject of the liturgy is the Church insofar as she is the communio sanctorum of all times and all places into which the worshipper is inserted. This communio finds expression in three “ontological dimensions” in which the liturgy is lived: the cosmic, the historical, and the mysterious.

    With this in mind, the Cardinal offers the outlines of a truly liturgical music. He begins with the prologue to the Gospel of John and its proclamation of the Church’s faith in the Word made flesh. In the Incarnation, the Divine reveals himself by becoming man. In the perspective of the Fourth Evangelist, the Incarnation leads to the Cross where Jesus draws all things to himself, thereby bringing man—and with man, the entire order of creation—into the eternity of the Godhead. Since music exists as a human reality, the Word, as it were, also “becomes music,” drawing into himself man’s pre-rational and super-rational nature as a musical being and uncovering “the song which lies at the foundation of all things.” Thus liturgical music must respect these demands of the Incarnation.

    It necessarily follows, then, that the music of the Church cannot employ those modes of musical expression which are essentially political, erotic, or which simply seek to entertain. Looking over then the history of Western music, “from Gregorian chant to Bruckner and beyond, passing from the music of the cathedrals and the great polyphony to the music of the Renaissance and the Age of Baroque,” the Cardinal sees a unifying characteristic in its ability to draw together the spiritual and the profane in a sort of “most immediate and evident verification of the Christian vision of man and his redemption.” Of course, it goes without saying that only those who truly live within this vision are capable of creating a music worthy of it.

    Thus the Cardinal brings his theme full circle: faith in Christ bears fruit in an adequate—insofar as such is possible in this life—liturgical expression, the worthy liturgical expression points to and supports the orthodox faith in Christ. In the ordinary course of things, this reformulation of the ancient lex orandi, lex credendi, would require no further elaboration. The state of crisis in the liturgy is such, however, that the Holy Father found it necessary to lecture a group of Brazilian bishops on the very nature of the liturgical celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice during the course of their ad limina visit:

Legitimate and necessary concern for current realities in the concrete lives of people cannot make us forget the true nature of the liturgical actions. It is clear that the Mass is not the time to “celebrate” human dignity or purely terrestrial claims or hopes. It is rather the sacrifice which renders Christ really present in the sacrament.

    In context of such a state of affairs, Cardinal Ratzinger has perhaps rendered the Church a signal, valedictory service in calling it back to its roots: faith in Christ and the right worship of him. And to the extent that these are allowed to permeate the Church’s life and prayer, so too will “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6) exceed our expectations, and more profoundly so than any human construct designed to fulfill “needs.”

Reverend John-Peter Pham, a priest of the Diocese of Peoria, Ill., is assistant pastor of St. Matthew Catholic Church in Champaign. He holds degrees in dogmatic theology and canon law and is now working on his doctoral dissertation for the Gregorian University in Rome. Fr. Pham is the author of A Primer for the Catechism of the Catholic Church and The Sacrament of Penance in the Teachings of the Last Five Popes. This is his first article in HPR.

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