The Catholic Church lives or dies on the basis of liturgy. Only a return to tradition can revive the Church’s worship and faith life.
No one with any knowledge of Roman universities would be the least surprised to hear that Sant’Anselmo, a pontifical university with a reputation for liturgical studies, harbors a professor with liberal views such as Andrea Grillo. No one familiar with liberal Catholic theologians would be the least surprised to hear two further facts. First, that such a professor might supply theological justifications for the pet projects of senior prelates. Second, that these prelates would nevertheless not want to be publicly associated with the professor’s views.
Nearly twenty years ago, thanks to my involvement with Una Voce International, I found myself in a surreal correspondence with an episcopal conference about their objections to Pope Benedict XVI’s Traditional Mass version of the Good Friday Prayer for the Jews. The officials I was in touch with sent me a text by an anonymous theological advisor, but our exchange came to a halt after this person informed me that the “Consensus of the Fathers,” traditionally regarded as a source of infallible teaching, should be ignored because the Fathers of the Church were anti-Semites.
Such a claim would never be made by any of the bishops who had publicly objected to Pope Benedict’s prayer, but then they didn’t need to make it. They had a reasoned objection to the prayer from an “expert,” and that was enough to give them confidence to run with their instinctive dislike of it. The fact that their advisor relied on principles at right angles to the whole tradition of Catholic theology was not a public fact, and need not disturb them.
Pope Francis made frequent use of this approach. To speed up the annulment of marriages in 2015 he got an old canonist friend to draw up a motu proprio, Mitis Iudex. This relied on the principle (among others) that factors in a marriage that might be flags for further investigation, such as the couple being young or the bride being pregnant, were ipso facto signs of invalidity, so cases with these features could go on a fast track to annulment. Canonists pointed out the fallacy: Youthful couples and pregnant women are not actually impeded from contracting valid marriages. These objections made no difference: The motu proprio was a legal document, and the canons governing the procedure to be followed in annulment cases were duly changed; the cogency of the theological justification of the change simply disappeared in the rear-view mirror. There was very little defense of the document. The dogs barked and the caravan moved on.
Pope Francis followed the same procedure with the more puzzling aspects of Amoris Laetitia in 2016, and on the blessing of same-sex couples (Fiducia Supplicans, 2023). He wanted to change pastoral practice, and needed a theological justification for doing so. He found theologians who apparently supplied this, and stray phrases and other hints of their arguments found their way into the official documents. The more detailed version of the argument, whether reconstructed by critics or given by the theologian himself, was not part of the official text, however, so Pope Francis and his defenders could qualify or repudiate it as they wished. If the document was left without a real justification, it remained an official document of the Church, promulgated to the whole world, and it recommended a change in pastoral practice. The job, apparently, was done.
When Pope Francis wanted a justification for restricting what he called the Vetus Ordo, the Traditional Latin Mass, the theological explanation given in his 2021 motu proprio Traditionis Custodes seemed to be that liturgical pluralism was itself a threat to the unity of the Church, and, furthermore, the Church’s “law of belief” had to be based on the “law of prayer” set by the reformed, post-Vatican II liturgy.
It was quickly pointed out that these ideas, and even the verbal formulae used to express them, echoed the published work of Andrea Grillo of Sant’Anselmo. The theological implications of Grillo’s arguments, however, were giddying. Did the Church’s doctrinal fundamentals shift when Pope Paul VI published the new Missal? How do the liturgical traditions of Eastern Catholics fit in? What happens with new Western liturgies, like the use of the Ordinariate or the Congolese Rite? What are we to do with the millennium and more of theological work, including swathes of the Papal Magisterium, that was inspired or justified by reference to now-obsolete liturgical forms? Isn’t there a blatant contradiction between Grillo’s position and that of Pope Benedict XVI in his own 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too”?
Of course, the fact that the document employed bits of Grillo’s argumentation didn’t imbue the professor’s positions with authority, or force Pope Francis’s supporters to defend them. The motu proprio was a legal document, they pointed out, which made legal changes. It behooves the Holy See to furnish such documents with some theological scene-setting, but the validity of the legal changes does not depend on the cogency of the theology. Catholic readers of the document are bound by the law, and they can like the theological justification for it or they can lump it.
Prof. Grillo, however, has continued to attract negative attention. He has criticizedthe newly canonized Carlo Acutis for an “infantile” eucharistic piety, and demanded the ordination of women for good measure. Mike Lewis, the most vocal defender of Pope Francis on X, called Grillo a “jerk,” and Sant’Anselmo distanced itself from his views with a public statement.
Grillo’s embarrassing opinions underline the wider problem. The use of theological arguments as non-load-bearing decoration for arbitrary legal impositions is not a sustainable way for the Church to operate. The emptiness of the theological justification for restrictions on the Traditional Mass reminds us that real pastoral harm can be done when the rules diverge from the Church’s own principles. The Church’s laws, practices, and liturgy should reflect her faith. Pope Leo needs to re-establish the correspondence of theory with practice.
Editor’s note: The following article is a critical analysis of developments in the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council by Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus Marian Eleganti.
(LifeSiteNews) — I was born in 1955 and was an enthusiastic altar boy in my childhood. At first I served in the old rite, always a little nervous not to mess up the Latin responses, then I was retrained in the middle of the action for the so-called New Mass.
As a child, I witnessed the iconoclasm in the venerable Church of the Holy Cross in my hometown. The Gothic carved altars were torn down before my child eyes. What remained was a people’s altar, an empty choir room, the cross in the choir arch, Mary and St. John on the left and right on white bare walls. New stained glass windows flooded with the rising sun in the east. Nothing more: it was an unprecedented clear-cutting. We children found everything normal and appropriate, and diligently saved for the new stone floor in order to make our contribution to the reform or renovation of the church.
The euphoria of the council was carried everywhere by the priests, synods were convened, in which I myself participated as a teenager. I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
As a 20-year-old novice, I experienced firsthand – and painfully – the liturgical tensions between the traditionalists and progressives among the reformers. New ecclesiastical professions were introduced, such as that of the (mostly married) pastoral assistant. I remember my critical comments on this, because the slowly dawning tensions and problems between the ordained and the non-ordained were foreseeable from the outset. The decline in the number of candidates for the priesthood was predictable and soon became apparent.
As a young man, I was unreservedly supportive of the council, and later I studied its documents with faithful confidence. Nevertheless, since the age of 20, I have noticed a number of things: the desacralization of the choir room, the priesthood, and the Holy Eucharist, as well as the reception of Communion, and the ambiguity of some passages in the council documents. As a young layman who was still uneducated in theology, I noticed all of this very early on.
Even though the priesthood had been the strongest option in my heart since childhood, I was not ordained a priest until I was 40. I grew up with the council, came of age, and was able to observe its effects since it took place. Today I am 70 years old and a bishop.
Looking back, I have to say that the springtime of the Church never came; what came instead was an indescribable decline in the practice and knowledge of the faith, widespread liturgical formlessness and arbitrariness (to which I myself contributed in part without realizing it).
From today’s perspective, I view everything with increasing criticism, including the council, whose texts most people have already left behind, always invoking its spirit. What has not been confused with the Holy Spirit and attributed to Him in the past 60 years? What has been called “life” that did not bring life, but rather dissolved it?
The so-called reformers wanted to rethink the Church’s relationship to the world, reorganize the liturgy, and reevaluate moral positions. They are still doing so. The characteristic feature of their reform is fluidity in doctrine, morality, and liturgy, alignment with secular standards, and post-conciliar, ruthless disruption with everything that has gone before.
For them, the Church is primarily what it has been since 1969 (Editio Typica Ordo Missae. Cardinal Benno Gut). What came before can be neglected or has already been revised. There is no going back. The most revolutionary among the reformers were always aware of their revolutionary acts. But their post-conciliar reform, their processes, have failed – across the board. They were not inspired. The people’s altar is not an invention of the Council Fathers.
I myself celebrate Holy Mass in the New Rite, even privately. However, due to my apostolic activity, I have relearned the old liturgy of my childhood and see the difference, especially in the prayers and postures, and of course in the orientation.
In retrospect, the post-conciliar intervention in the almost 2,000-year-old, very consistent form of the liturgy seems to me to be a rather violent, provisional reconstruction of the Holy Mass in the years following the conclusion of the council, which was associated with great losses that need to be addressed. This was also done for ecumenical reasons. Many forces, including from the Protestant side, were directly involved in this effort to align the traditional liturgy with the Protestant Eucharist and perhaps also with the Jewish Sabbath liturgy. This was done in an elitist, disruptive, and reckless manner by the Roman Liturgical Commission and was imposed on the entire Church by Paul VI, not without causing major fractures and rifts in the mystical body of Christ, which remain to this day.
One thing is certain for me: if you can tell a tree by its fruit, a ruthless and truthful reassessment of the post-conciliar liturgical reform is urgently needed: historically honest and meticulous, non-ideological and open, like the new generation of young believers who neither know nor read the council texts. They also have no problem with nostalgia because they only know the Church in its present form. They are simply too young to be traditionalists. However, they have experienced how parishes function today, how they celebrate liturgy, and what remains of their own religious socialization through the parish: very little! For this reason, they are not progressives either.
From today’s perspective, liberal Catholicism or progressivism since the 1970s, most recently in the guise of the Synodal Way, has had its day and has driven the Church into a dead end. The frustration is correspondingly great. We can see it everywhere. Sunday and weekday services are attended mainly by old people. Young people are missing, except in a few church hotspots, which are few and far between. The reform is taking care of itself because no one goes there anymore or reads the results, an iron law.
How can the post-conciliar reform still be viewed so uncritically and narrow-mindedly at this point in time, measured by its fruits? Why is an honest examination of tradition and our own (Church) history still not possible? Why do people not want to see that we are at a crossroads and should take stock, especially liturgically?
To be or not to be in terms of faith and Church life is decided on the basis of liturgy. This is where the church lives or dies. Traditionalists and progressives have correctly assessed this since 1965. So why is tradition on the rise among young people? What makes it so attractive to young people? Think about it! Feet vote, not councils. Maybe we should just change direction! Do you understand?
Source: https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/bishop-eleganti-vatican-ii-reforms-were-a-reckless-failed-experiment/