Lex orandi, lex credendi

Great observations, Mr. Gibson, including Your claim that Vatican II “was needed by the Church”. It’s necessary (and easy) to point out and try to repair the many aberrations and tawdry innovations that have damaged the liturgy since Vatican II. Some extremists -”ultra-Tridentists”?- seem to think the Novus Ordo is actually invalid and should be suppressed, the only solution being to revert to the Tridentine liturgy. Personally, I’m more inspired by and drawn toward the Tridentine than the Novus Ordo Mass, but I reject claims that either is invalid. And while the Novus Ordo has been battered and debased through laziness, ignorance, and misguided meddling, I doubt that the pre-Vatican II Mass was always as pristine, reverent, and sublime as the ultra-Tridentists would have us believe.

If the pre-Vatican II decades were all holiness and refinement, how is that large numbers of the children of those raised in that culture abandoned the Church, or turned to attack and ridicule it from within? And how is it that the stage was set for the decades of liturgical inanity and experimentation which followed?

If, as You say, Vatican II was needed, it wasn’t just because the liturgy needed a new coat of paint. If liturgy ultimately is a meeting point between God and man, then one of its main purposes is to foster the sort of interior life that man needs in order to commune with God. Perhaps the Pope, perhaps the Holy Spirit, knew that the interior life of the Church was vitally in need of a restoration, or better yet a re-ignition. If the liturgy is a shambles today, perhaps that’s a reflection of the weak, disordered interior life of many of us in the pews.

We do need the liturgy badly, and we need to adorn it with all the sublimity and reverence we can muster from language, music, and the arts. Getting to that point will be both the cause and, paradoxically, the result, of a deepening of our own interior lives. For some this may involve baby steps. For example, I have to do better with keeping my appointment for daily morning prayer, and struggle not to give up even when it seems like my prayer is superficial and weak.

Hmmm. I guess that’s the same lesson I have to learn about the liturgy: not to give up even when it seems pedestrian and dry.