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For by the image of my cause I see
The portraiture of his.
– Shakespeare, Hamlet
Earlier this month, largely by coincidence, two articles of mine came out in different places, exploring the connection between the cause for the Traditional Mass and the Jews.
In an article for the Pastoral and Homiletic Review (and see here) I examine a document produced by the American Jewish Committee in 1961, intended to influence the liturgical reform. Sixteen years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps there was understandably a sensitivity to anything connected with historical antisemitism, and the authors express concerns about some passages of the liturgy.[1]
The main interest of this to us today is that this document appears to have had zero effect on the work of the reformers. The two main things the American Jewish Committee didn’t like, St John’s Passion narrative and the Improperia (Reproaches), both found on Good Friday, were neither removed nor redacted.
What about the Good Friday prayer for the Conversion of the Jews? They raised no objection to it. The prayer was toned down anyway, but Archbishop Bugnini and his reformers clearly had no problem with prayers for the conversion of the Jews as such, since they composed a whole lot of them for the Liturgy of the Hours. Priests and pious lay folk who use this pray for the Jews to accept Christ as Messiah over and over again every year. (See the FIUV Position Paper on the Good Friday prayers.)
The reason this is important is because of the argument, which has been wheeled out again and again, that there is a problem with the Traditional Mass connected with antisemitism. Our opponents within the Church have been feeding this narrative to the media, including Jewish publications, but there is a simple way for us to deal with it: by pointing out that the reform made none of the concessions requested by Jews in 1961, and the reformed liturgical books contain a whole lot of explicit prayers for their conversion.
By all means go on to say that members of many religions pray for people outside them to find the truth, and that this is not a hostile act but an act of charity, but no-one will be listening. The only purpose of this argument was to show that the reformed Mass is good and the old Mass is bad. If it doesn’t show that, our opponents, and their media allies, will lose interest in it extremely quickly.
The other article I have published this month is in the print edition of the European Conservative. This is not available online, but it concerns the use of Jewishness as an idea in the course of the history of Western thought. Over the centuries we find people saying that something, usually something they regard as bad, is ‘Jewish’, when they mean it is superstitious or hyper-intellectual, individualist or collectivist, or whatever: there are rival traditions of associating the idea of Jewishness with various incompatible things. For much of the history of the West this way of talking has been a strange half-way house between a serious attempt at grouping ideas or movements into coherent categories (individualistic theories, for example, have certain things in common), and an attempt to imply guilt by association (‘that’s the kind of thing a Jew would say!’).
Since the 18th century, the movement to modernise the Church has latched on to the following version of this trope. First, they say, the Old Testament is all about slavery to irrational rituals and cruel rules; second, Jesus came to free us from all that; and third, despite this the Church has backslid into irrational rituals and cruel rules all over again. There is much that could be said about the historical and theological nonsense this is, which I can’t explore here, but it is relevant to note how it was turbo-charged by the antisemitism of key figures such as Voltaire and Ernest Renan, with a backward glance to the grotesque antisemitism of Martin Luther.
Some want to accept the premise of the argument – a horror at supposedly irrational and barbaric religious traditions – and claim that, rightly understood, Catholicism is not like that. Renan tried this in one way; Vatican II in another. Not only do an awful lot of babies get tossed out with the bathwater with this approach, but in any competition of noble simplicity and rationalist clarity we are always going to lose to the liberal protestants. We need to defend complexity and mystery, and indeed that has been the task taken up by Traditional Catholic writers since Vatican II. It should be obvious that once the rationalists have finished with the Jews, or indeed the Muslims, they’ll be coming for us next. We don’t disagree with other religions because we are Enlightenment Rationalists and claim that they are even more obscurantist than we are, but because we have received what we regard as a definitive divine revelation.
It is possible for reference to Judaism to disappear from versions of this argument: it could be taken for granted that Enlightenment standards are correct, without referring to Judaism as representing the opposite extreme. Since the Shoah, when people are rightly sensitive to antisemitism, this is how it generally goes. Astonishingly, however, there are exceptions, in the bosom of the Catholic Church.
I give two examples in my aforementioned article: Professor Mary Healy saying that the Traditional Mass evokes an Old Testament conception of God, and Pope Francis saying that Catholics he doesn’t like are ‘rigid’ like the pharisees depicted in the Gospels. This particular sermon of Pope Francis attracted criticism from Jews involved with the Vatican’s interfaith dialogue.
The problem here is not simply that Healy and Pope Francis were being undiplomatic. The problem is rather that they have adopted an Enlightenment critique of Christianity, which like Renan they think they can use against their opponents within the Church. Healy doesn’t really want to turn Mass into a Quaker meeting; Pope Francis has never quite suggested that all moral rules be abolished: the suggestion seems to be that we should opt for the most Enlightenment-friendly option possible. The irony is that the intellectual fashion for the stripped-down and the light and airy has passed, and westerners who have never heard of the glories of their own traditions stand in awe at the traditions of other times and places. This includes Pope Francis himself: back in 2013 he praised the liturgy of the East for precisely the features that the reform removed from the liturgy of the West:
In the Orthodox Churches, they have retained that pristine liturgy, which is so beautiful. We have lost some of the sense of adoration. The Orthodox preserved it; they praise God, they adore God, they sing, time does not matter.
When it comes to the hostility of liberal Catholics to ritual, clutter, dusty tomes, arbitrary rules, and all the rest of it, Traditional Catholics (and Eastern Catholics as well), find themselves occupying the same position, today as for three centuries, as that of Orthodox Jews. The fact that our opponents have been even more hostile to Jewish traditions than they are to Catholic traditions may seem to be of only theoretical importance when the topic of discussion is the Traditional Mass, but it should help us to orient ourselves on the battlefield.
[1] The sin of antisemetism was defined and condemned by the Holy Office more than a generation before Vatican II, in 1928. “Moved by this charity, the Apostlic See has protected the same people [the Jews] against unjust vexations, and just as it reproves all ill-will and animosity among peoples, so also does it condemn, in the strongest possible terms, hatred against the people that was once chosen by God, namely that hatred that is now usually termed ‘Antisemitism’.” Sacra Congregatio Sancti Officii, Decretum de consociatione vulgo “Amici Israël” abolenda, March 25, 1928, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 20 (1928): 104.