A Theological Disaster

The differences between the TLM and Novus Ordo liturgies are not insignificant. As has been said many times, the Latin language is not really the issue. The fundamental problem lies with the spiritual and theological defects inherent in the Novus Ordo Missae – defects which are not removed by praying in Latin, restoring the ad orientem posture, or eliminating the usual liturgical abuses. The new collects, for example, present such a radical shift in theological emphasis that essential Catholic teachings are completely obscured. The disaster is exposed in a 2005 paper titled “The Collects at Sunday Mass: An Examination of the Revisions of Vatican II”:

“The picture painted by the verbs in the 1970 [Advent] collects are quite different. It is not simply that the imperatives are far fewer (three) and weaker (grant and pour out); but that the human subjects, however they are named (variously the faithful, we, your people), are far more active; indeed they are the subject of the five active infinitives. In one collect God is described as seeing their activity (they are faithfully awaiting), and in others he is asked to make their activity fruitful: to grant that they may inherit the kingdom, be made partakers of Christ through training in heavenly wisdom, to attain the joys of salvation, to celebrate these joys with solemn prayers and ready rejoicing. Moreover, the motion verbs of the two sets describe exactly opposite movements: in the 1962 collect Christ comes to meet us; in the 1970 collect we go to meet Christ, arrive, are brought to, and so forth. In the 1970 set, Christ is described as coming only in the collect of the first Sunday.

A second difference is that the 1970 collects name no overwhelming obstacles. In contrast to the 1962 collect in which we ask God to rouse our hearts in order that we may prepare for the coming of the Son, in the 1970 collects we are twice described as already hastening to meet him and once as faithfully awaiting the feast of his birth. The only suggestion in the 1970 collects that there are things that could cause us to stumble is the prayer that God let no works of earthly deed impede us as we hasten, where the works can be understood as either our own or those of others. In other words, the collect does not insist upon the existence of interior impediments.

In fact the 1970 prayers contain no reference to sin or its dangers; to darkness or impurity of mind; to human weakness or need for mercy, forgiveness, protection, deliverance, purification; nor to the fact that any or all of us require a divine jump start to begin preparations for Christ’s coming. Also, the idea that we must undergo a transformation in order to enter heaven is intimated only by the word eruditio, instruction or training, in the collect of the second Sunday.

A third difference is that those who pray the 1970 collects do not seek divine assistance to survive perils or to begin to do good things. Indeed they express no need for such helps. Rather they ask to enter heaven at the last. In contrast, those who pray the 1962 collects do not explicitly seek heaven, but demand (the imperative verbs) immediate and personal daily help on the way.

In these three differences we come to something very delicate. Put simply the Catholic faith holds that every good deed which advances us toward salvation depends upon divine grace. This doctrine is formally defined and is not susceptible to modification that would reverse its import. Every nuance of the 1962 Advent collects expresses this Catholic doctrine of grace unambiguously in the somewhat subtle, non-expository manner proper to orations. While the 1970 collects do not explicitly contradict the Catholic teaching on grace, they neither articulate it nor, more worrisomely, seem to assume it. The delicate bit is how to sum this up fairly for while the 1970 collects may not legitimately be understood or interpreted in a way that is inconsistent with Catholic truth, they are susceptible to being misunderstood by those who are inadequately schooled in Catholic truth.”

The Loretto Chapel’s Miraculous Staircase

Many of you are aware of the famous staircase at the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As the story goes, a group of nuns discovered a serious flaw in their newly constructed chapel: there was no means of access to the choir loft! Various carpenters had been asked to solve the problem, but there wasn’t sufficient room to build a stairway. So the nuns prayed a novena to St. Joseph, and on the last day of the novena, their prayers were answered. A man showed up and built a beautiful circular staircase. He left before the sisters could pay him. They did not even know his name. The staircase, it turns out, has no visible means of support that is readily understood by engineers. The origin of the wood is uncertain: the only thing known for sure is that the wood isn’t native to the region. Only wooden pegs were used: no nails. There are exactly 33 steps – one for each year of Our Lord’s earthly life. The nuns believed that St. Joseph himself showed up and built the staircase.

Now the miraculous staircase has some interesting detractors. As to the identity of the carpenter, there is an interesting theory here:

“But wait a minute, says historian Mary J. Straw Cook in the newly revised edition of her 1984 book, ‘Loretto: The Sisters and Their Santa Fe Chapel.’ The carpenter, she says, was Francois-Jean Rochas, a member of ‘les compagnon,’ a French guild of celibate and secretive craftsmen. And he was far from saintly. Reclusive and irascible, he ended up dead in his Dog Canyon cabin, a victim of either suicide or assassination. Cook reached her conclusion after seven years of research and seven trips to France, combing through archives, chancing upon relatives and piecing together scattered bits of history. ‘You try to document everything,’ she said. ‘I have proved this to most historians. They’re convinced this was, in fact, the man.’

Her evidence includes an 1895 article in The New Mexican, in which the chapel’s contractor, Quintus Monier, names Rochas as the staircase’s builder. And a 1881 entry in the sisters’ daybook indicates that a Mr. Rochas was paid $150 ‘for wood.’ Cook has found a freight slip for wood delivered by ship from France and speculates that Rochas brought it over himself. Upon his mysterious death in southern New Mexico, Rochas left three unmailed letters that mention Lamy, later the title character in Willa Cather’s book, ‘Death Comes for the Archbishop,’ and another craftsman who worked on the chapel. The book containing Cook’s evidence was released last month to glowing reviews in various newspapers. The word was out. The legend was solved!”

Solved? Maybe her book is more persuasive, but this article certainly isn’t. If Rochas was in fact employed by the nuns at one time, for who-knows-what kind of work, and if he did – as seems probable – claim to have built the staircase himself, this still does not solve the mystery. What are the chances that a virtually unknown 19th century hermit from Dog Canyon chose to use such extraordinary talent for an obscure chapel in the New Mexico desert? Did he construct other similar marvels anywhere else in New Mexico? In France? Has anyone else been able to reproduce this design, or come close to it? And how does this square with the theories of other skeptics, who propose that the staircase was built in France, shipped to the United States, and merely installed by Rochas? It is not uncommon for men – especially those who are “far from saintly”, as Rochas is described – to take credit for things they didn’t do.

But let us suppose that it was indeed Rochas who built the staircase. That really doesn’t take much of the mystery out of it. So he wasn’t exactly Saint Joseph himself – but one is certainly left wondering what sort of a man he really was, what kind of a hidden life he may have lived, and how he may have been used by Divine Providence.

The real mysteries have to do with the construction of the staircase. This site tries to debunk those mysteries, but does a very poor job of it. “No support? Just look at this iron bracket!”

Right. That ought to do it. In any case, if the staircase is nothing special, the skeptics ought to be able to reproduce it somewhere. Or point to where something similar has been built. I have a feeling it’ll be awhile before that happens.

The Great Chasm

The vast chasm between the modern world and the Catholic Faith is striking. There are three things which underpin Catholic culture but which the modern world finds intolerable:

1. Religious authority. Modern man likes to imagine himself a totally independent and autonomous being. What he calls his “conscience” is absolutely supreme, and if he is “spiritual”, he recognizes no religious authority higher than himself. “I’m spiritual, not religious”. “I don’t believe in organized religion.” Although he may go to church, he does so because he happens to agree with his church, not because his church has authority to teach him anything. And when he ceases to agree with his church, he simply takes up with another. (He treats marriage in much the same way.) Catholicism’s reliance upon the teaching authority instituted by Christ is therefore repugnant to him.

2. Absolute truth. The modern world is essentially relativist. It does not accept the idea of a thing being objectively true to the exclusion of other “truths” – especially when it comes to moral or spiritual things. It does not understand that an act can be morally good or evil in itself, without regard to circumstances. The Church’s absolute ban on contraception, for example, is hard for moderns to take. The same goes for divorce. What about this situation? And that? And the other one? Shouldn’t contraception then be justified? Isn’t divorce the lesser of evils?

I know of a young couple who have two children, each born with a fatal genetic disorder. If they have another child, it is likely that the next one will also have this same disease. What are they to do? They cannot divorce and find a better genetic match for themselves. They cannot practice contraception. The answer is nothing short of heroic virtue, a taking up of the Cross. They are called to stay married, no matter the hardships. They might be called to have more children with the same kinds of problems. Alternatively, they may be called – and this is what is really intolerable to moderns – to a lifetime of marital celibacy, or at least sexual restraint. There is no soft and comfortable answer. It is all the Cross … or so it seems to a world blind to the joys of obedience, ignorant of the freedom that comes only with living the Truth.

3. Miracles and supernaturalism. I’m not a Spirit Daily kind of Catholic, but there can be no doubt that the Catholic faith is both rational and mystical. The world sees a contradiction here. How can a religion which is so intractable in its insistence on earthly authority, and so relentlessly consistent in its theological and moral teaching, be the same religion that embraces miracles and signs and wonders which seem so … wild and personal and individualistic? Isn’t it afraid of the supernatural undermining the natural? Ah, but it is all of a piece! This dichotomy of the natural and the supernatural is rooted in a proper distinction, but the modern world takes it too far, compartmentalizing each, so that one may have nothing to do with the other. Yet the fact is that each depends upon the other. There would be no “nature” without the supernatural events that brought it into existence and keep it going. And there would be no miracles apart from the backdrop of nature.

Rather than being a threat to Catholic dogma, authentic mysticism is instead a threat to modern ideas of individualism and autonomy. If such things are real, then God might be real too – and much too close for comfort. As a Protestant, it was once explained to me that Protestants shy away from the Blessed Virgin Mary because she makes God too intimate. I had to admit this was true. If God could be as close to any human as He was (and is) to the Blessed Mother, then I had some explaining to do. Funny how Protestant immanentism results in a too-distant God, whereas Catholic transcendence results in the highest degree of personal intimacy with the divine. To the Protestant, God is certainly real and “close”, but He is thought of in strictly spiritual terms. He doesn’t reach out into our dirty, earthy, material world through miracles and merely human oracles.

Moderns, whose skepticism is rooted in the dichotomies of Protestantism, are therefore contemptuous and dismissive of things like the Holy House of Loreto, in which the original home of the Holy Family in Nazareth was transported by angels to the hills of the Italian countryside; the Miracle of Lanciano, a consecrated Host which has been bleeding for more than a thousand years; the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, in which the sun was observed to hurl towards the earth by more than 70,000 witnesses; the mystical stigmata of St. Francis, St. Clare, St. Pio of Pietrelcina, and many others; Etc..

I don’t think there has ever been a time when the Church and the world were so fundamentally at odds about everything. The pagan world, though violently hostile in many ways, proved to be a fertile soil for Christianity. The ground had been prepared for receiving the Gospel. The modern world, by contrast, has rejected not only the Faith but the necessary underpinnings of Christian belief. It was a diabolical masterstroke. To paraphrase Dr. Peter Kreeft: Paganism was like a virgin, ripe for the Gospel. Modernity is like a divorcee, whose heart is hardened against her first love.