Why All Christians Should Care about the Fate of the Latin Mass

I n the last few weeks, acting on orders from Pope Francis, some leaders of the Catholic Church in America have begun shutting down or limiting the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). In the past month, the bishops and cardinals in Savannah, Ga., Chicago, and Washington, D.C., have all severely restricted or promised to end the celebration of this form of Catholic liturgy. It’s a stunning reversal of the policy set forward by Pope Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who had specifically authorized priests to celebrate the TLM wherever Catholics were requesting it.

A few non-Catholic Christians have reached out to me and asked: Why do Catholic leaders hate the Latin Mass? Others have posed the opposite question: “Why do you like it?” (I’ve been attending a TLM for 20 years.)

There are superficial answers to these questions that would be easy for most other Christians to understand. There is generational conflict in every church. Pope Francis and many of his peers were formed in a Church they desperately believed needed to modernize to appeal to modern people. Often for understandable reasons, they associated the TLM and other traditional practices with spiritual aridness and rigidity. They felt that the Second Vatican Council and the reformed liturgy that emerged in the 1970s liberated them and the Church. Younger generations were bound to question this, wishing to reconnect with the vast artistic and devotional treasury that was built around and upon the TLM, from Gregorian chant to the polyphony of Thomas Tallis and the compositions of Claudio Monteverdi and Mozart.

That generational conflict matters, but it is built upon a much deeper conflict, which is theological. The modern Catholic liturgy and the TLM are not just two styles of the same thing. The modern liturgy is not a direct translation of the old. It changes the vast majority of the TLM’s prayers and readings, as well as much of the TLM’s ritual. And these changes implicate the most basic truths of Catholicism and Christianity itself. We often say in the church, “Lex orandi, lex credendi”: The law of prayer is the law of belief. How we worship determines what we believe.

Broadly, there were two lines of thinking that informed the creation of the New Mass. One was motivated by ecumenism. Reformers had genuine hopes that “our separated brethren” in other Christian denominations would reunite with the Catholic Church once the New Mass was implemented. Critics of the reformed liturgy such as Cardinal Ottaviani noticed that it systematically suppressed Catholic belief in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. In this Ottaviani was guarding peculiarly Catholic doctrines from revision and change, most important among them the idea that the Holy Mass is the same one-for-all sacrifice Christ made on Calvary. As Ottaviani himself wrote, the New Mass “does not, in a word, imply any of the essential dogmatic values of the Mass which together provide its true definition. Here the deliberate omission of these dogmatic values amounts to their having been superseded and therefore, at least in practice, to their denial.”

That said, even after the institution of the New Mass, the Catholic Church did not — and in my view, it never could — officially repudiate its doctrine on the sacraments and the Mass. And so there has been little doctrinal basis for a reunification of churches. Ecumenical hopes for the new liturgy have faded even in the Church. The Catholic Church has carried on with a liturgy that admits its traditional doctrine, but also accommodates new theologies.

This has led a second reforming impulse — the desire for a root-and-branch reinterpretation of Catholic and Christian faith — to flourish alongside the reformed liturgy. The theology underlying this impulse is much more radical than the ecumenism underlying the New Mass, and touches not only Catholic doctrines but basic Christian ones.

In a recent article for OnePeterFive, Peter Kwasniewski surveyed the work of Karl Rahner, a chief architect of this theology, which took the “transcendental experience” of all men as its chief subject. Rahner saw fit to completely reinterpret the doctrines of Original Sin, the Incarnation, and redemption itself. Taken to their logical conclusions, his ideas recast all the aspirations of men as attempts to approximate the good, and therefore as in some way implicitly Christian.

We have seen the fruits of this modernist theology in the pontificate of Pope Francis. In order to facilitate the Church’s admitting remarried persons to Communion, Pope Francis elevated Cardinal Walter Kasper, whose theology held that people in stable second marriages weren’t committing adultery, but were in a state “not fully the objective ideal.” By recasting the commandments that one must obey into ideals that one more or less, but never fully, approximates, Kasper turns all sins into semi-virtues, just as Rahner turned adherence to non-Christian religions or to any other ideals into implicit attempts to be Christian. Effectively, both end up denying the sufficiency of God’s grace as the sole means of helping us follow His commands.

Modernist Catholic theology might seem like only a curiosity to Protestants on the outside, just as the Openness Theology controversy in Evangelicalism seemed like a curiosity to many Catholics. But I would argue that all Christians should be concerned that the other communions continue to affirm basic Christian orthodoxy. And Protestants should also keep an eye on Catholic modernism because it provides a theological model for those who wish to accommodate Christianity to the secular and universalist ideologies held by the powerful. It ultimately presents a case for Christian indifference to evangelization, mission work, and orthodox belief. Taken seriously, it also legitimates defection from the Church.

Pope Benedict XVI liberated the celebration of the old Mass because he held that there must be continuity of the faith from one age to the next, that there are no obligations that can be foisted on faithful Christians by their church leaders other than those given to the Apostles in the deposit of faith. Benedict’s view of liturgy and theology constrained the modern vernacular liturgy, by saying that the only thing it could express was the old faith once delivered to the saints.

So, then, the questions posed above have the same answer: The reason that so many Catholic leaders hate the traditional Latin Mass, and the reason that I like it, is that it presents an obstacle toward realizing their new religious vision, which is not just questionably Catholic but effectively post-Christian.