Once again we find that Cardinal Newman foresaw another
serious attack upon the Christian Faith. This time he warned Christians
against innovators who would relax Christian forms and usher into the
Church liturgical frenzy. Such devotees of change question every Christian
form of prayer, every posture of devotion, every devotion itself and the
very personal or traditional symbols of the faith. Their lust for
innovation is used as a battering ram against the stability of long-established,
time-tested sacred rites, which have been witnesses and types of precious
Gospel truths for Christian communities. Hurriedly, even violently, they
replace divine forms with new diluted Masses, new prayers, new sacraments,
new churches, new terminologies - all of which confuse the faithful.
Newman writes: "No one can really respect religion and insult its forms.
Granted that forms are not immediately from God, still long use has made
them divine to us for the spirit of religion has so penetrated and
quickened them, that to destroy them is, in respect to the multitude of
men, to unsettle and dislodge the religious principle itself. In most
minds usage has so identified them with the notion of religion, that one
cannot be extirpated without the other. Their faith will not bear trans
planting . . . . Precious doctrines are strung like jewels upon slender
threads." [John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain
Sermons, Vol. II, Christian Classics Inc., Westminster, Md., 1966, pp.
75, 76]
Liturgical détente has led to the loss of the sense of
the sacred. To realize this tragic event we must reflect on what the sense
of the sacred really comprises. The sacred is a mystery. It heralds the
presence here and now of the world above, the world of the divine, and it
fills man with incomparable reverence. The sacred reveals that the
religious sphere is set apart, wonderfully superior and distinct from the
rest of man's existence. But this apartness, far from precluding contact
between the religious and natural spheres of man's existence, is actually
a precondition for their fruitful intercommunion.
Sacredness is one of
those ultimate data perceived in and by itself, unexplainable,
indivisible, mysterious. Sacredness is a reality which does not exist
solely outside man as a knower, but it invades and involves the whole man
as a free person.
The sacred seizes each man in his ontological,
intellectual, psychological and historical developments. [Alice
von Hildebrand, Introduction to a Philosophy of Religion, Chicago,
Franciscan Herald Press, 1970, Chap. IV, pp. 32-39] Thus the sacred must be approached, not with curiosity the
way we approach an objective problem, but with awe and trembling, the way
we approach mysteries. For the sacred represents the divine call from
above, forcing the man of good will, like Moses before the burning bush,
like the three Apostles before the transfiguration of Christ, to his knees
in a prostration of adoration. The challenge emanating from the sacred is
so powerful that man cannot remain indifferent to it. In the presence of
God, the Source of Sacredness, man either adores with the prayer, "Thy
Will be done," or rebels with the cry, "I will not serve!" Thus God is the
ineffable Someone at the summit of every experience of the sacred. This
Summit of the Sacred claims the first place in every intelligent being's
life, angels and men. Religion is man's response to the sacred, to God,
the Supreme Ruler, Prior, Independent yet ever-present Other. The sence of
the sacred presents man with these paradoxical experiences. God is
presented as totally Other, transcending man, yet He is simultaneously
experienced as being intimately present, nearer to man than man is to
himself, filling man with awe and yet desiring to give Himself to man in
intimate communication and communion. St. Paul reminds us that "in Him we
live and have our being."
The sacred also brings man the experience of God's
brilliance and luminosity. Thus man's response to God is his response to
the numen or the numinous, that is, to the wholly illuminating,
fascinating and ravishing Reality who is God. The experience of the
Mysterium Tremendum suffuses the being of man with awe, a mixed feeling of
reverence, fear and wonder accompanied by an acute, grateful consciousness
of one's creatureliness in the presence of an infinitely good Creator. In
the experience of the sacred a "shudder" moves the whole person which,
speechless, trembles to the deepest core of its being. The sacred presents
God as the
Mysterium Fascinans before whom the posture of prayer
and adoration is the only adequate response called for by the whole of man's
being. Thus religion and the sacred always go together. Indeed, religion
vanishes with the loss of the sacred, and vice versa. Religion flourishes
with growth in the consciousness and love of the sacred. The moment the
sense of the sacred diminishes in a people, it is a sure sign that the
faithful are becoming secularized, materialized, paganized. For them they
have lost an awareness of the presence of God and of His Kingdom that
descends from above.
[Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy,
Oxford University Press, N.Y., p. 6]
The sacred applies not only to God but to all beings and
things that have a special connection with Him- angels, saints, miracles,
churches, sacraments, etc. Moreover, there are sacred places and times.
The Holy Land where Christ lived, died and redeemed man is a sacred place.
Then too, sacred times reenacts, relives historically events, e.g. the
daily Mass liturgy and especially, Holy Week which relives the events of
man's salvation. But in all sacred instances, eternity is not pulled down
to the level of time, rather time soars into eternity. For the sacred is
above time, though inserted in time and capable of ransoming time. Thus,
the sacred, as essentially related to religion can redeem and blot our man's
faults committed in time. By transcending and transforming time through a
life and liturgy of faith in the true religion, the sacred does not
obliterate time, but saves and sanctifies it. The Source of the Sacred
embraced man and his history when the Son of God forever embraced in His
divinity the sacred humanity he received from Mary, His Mother.
Man, therefore, is capable of transforming his domain of
the non-sacred, of the profane, with the sense of the sacred or of
degrading that domain and himself by obliterating in himself his love for
the sacred. Man attacks the sacred when he rejects God and the true
religion. The Antichrist will be the hater and destroyer of the sacred par
excellence. For he will promote himself and his affairs on this earth
as his only and ultimate concerns- and those will be the destruction of
the image of Christ in the souls of men and the branding of those same
souls with his own and Satan's seal. Thus the Antichrist would find modern
times much to his liking. For in our generation a social climate charged
with hatred of God has produced what even the atheist men of culture have
sardonically referred to as the "Savage Sixties" and the "Sick Seventies."
For once man rejects God, man becomes what Kierkegaard calls "the eternal
zero." This is logical and necessary for, since his awareness of himself
is founded on his awareness of God, the godless man, rootless and
directionless, is at sea in an absurd world. Of course, he has an identity
crisis. And with his animus against God and the sacred, he becomes a
menace and a plague to the faith and holiness of his fellowmen. For when
he breaks the sacred chains of love that bind him to God, he ends up
breaking even the chains of civility and decency that should bind him to
his fellowmen. Moreover, it is not surprising that the man who has
rejected God and the sacred continues to talk about God, religion, liturgy
and the Church. Now, however, he speaks of man from infancy to maturity.
Now he experiments with these sacred realities as if he were tinkering
with toys or automobiles. Now this "uncommitted interest," this neutrality
toward divine, sacred realities is a typical game of ridicule played by
the spiritually defeated and exhausted "playboys," choosing to be smart
and clever rather than sacred and serious. These atheistic, intellectual
snobs refuse to realize that God, religion, the liturgy and the Church can
never be merely interesting or amusing myths. The sphere of the sacred is
really uninteresting in the shallow, cute sense of that term. For the
sacred sector demands one's total self-donation to God, one's eternal
salvation being jeopardized if one refuses to say "yes" to God. Trivial
things and affairs can be the subject of interest and cleverness. But
adherence to the sacred realm is a tremendously serious, ultimate, tragic
affair. It is the awful, shuddering one thing necessary for which all else
must eventually be put aside, even temporal life itself. When one jokes
about the sacred, one is well on the way to participating in the
sacrilegious.
For the rejection of the sacred as revealed in the
dynamics of ridicule or in the cult of the clever always degenerates into
the dynamics of hate and the cult of self, both of which lead to hatred of
God, of the Church, of others and finally of oneself. Thus, in our times a
social climate charged with hatred of God, poisoned with irreducible
religious-moral-political tensions and with hourly seditious preachments
bereft of all truth, of all objectivity, of all love is the logical,
violent result of the loss of the sense of the sacred. A society sickened
from its rejection of God and the sacred necessarily produces a sick
culture. In a modern play,
Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus, the
Titan who stole fire from Zeus, the god of the gods, is confronted by the
foul furies and asks them wonderingly:
"Can anyone exult in his own
deformity?" Dostoevsky's Underground Man answers with a soul-searing
affirmation:
"I am a sick man . . . , I am a spiteful man. I am an
unpleasant man." Underground Man then adds that he finds his only
enjoyment
"in the hyper-consciousness of his own degradation." [Duncan
Williams, op. cit. p. 57] Today the Christian and post-Christian
savage is idealized in philosophical, political, ethical, literary and
theological works as the authentic man-come-of-age- the Rebel Hero of
Paradise Lost, the Promethean Savior of a Cosmos Regained. From the heights of
this hateful, overweening pride such a man has created a culture in which
he defines his fellowman as
"that most precious capital," "that useless
passion," "that walking bag of sea water." This is the spirit of the
Antichrist who will hate everyone made in the image and likeness of God.
For as sacrilegious man he will hurl these slogans against his fellow man
from a rhetoric of hatred that takes satanic joy in destroying the
dignity, sacredness and divinity with which God has endowed men created
and redeemed by His Son. Much of the new liturgy has been drained of the
numinous
and the sacred. The new forms are without splendor, flattened,
undifferentiated. Why was kneeling replaced by standing? Jesus himself
fell on his knees and on his face as he prayed to his heavenly Father.
Satan too knows the meaning of worship and man's need for it. He tried to
get Jesus to fall down and worship him. Why has the liturgical year and
the Mass been so unfortunately mutilated against the wishes of the
faithful? In fact, the faithful are now confused about the Mass, the
feasts of the saints, the holy seasons.
Why was the Gloria, that
prayer of total concentration on God's Majesty and Goodness, restricted
practically to Sundays alone, and only to those Sundays outside of Lent?
Moreover, is the faith really renewed and vivified by obscuring our sense
of community with the Christians of apostolic and ancient times?
The new
liturgy no longer draws us into the true experience of reliving the Life
of Christ. We are deprived of this experience through the elimination of
the hierarchy of feasts and the at random changing of the dates of famous
feasts.
[Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Devastated Vineyard, Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago, 1973, pp. 70ff]
Then too, the new forms are the result of experimentation. But one
experiments with things, with objects that one wants to analyze.
Experimentation is the method of science. The wretched idolatry and
vulgarity of tinkering with sacred realities has, unfortunately,
penetrated the Church and produced a mediocrity-ridden liturgy, a show for
spectators that distracts from the holy, frustrates intimate communion
with God and trivializes, where it does not suppress, sacred actions,
symbols, music and words. In reality such diminished liturgies have
renewed nothing. Rather these innovations have emptied churches, dried up
vocations to the priesthood and sisterhood, driven off converts and opened
the doors wide to a flood of renegades. Even though valid in its essence,
such a new liturgy cannot inspire for it is colorless, artificial, banal,
without the odor and flavor of sanctity. A humanized and popularized, man-oriented
liturgy will never produce saints. Only a divinized, God-oriented liturgy
can accomplish that miracle. One suspects that many priests realize the
banality of the new liturgy. That is why they often become, during the
Mass and other ceremonies, actors and entertainers. They put on a show in
order to gain the attention of the congregation. These comedians in
chasubles preach a utopian Christianity rather than the true Christianity.
Their treasure is man rather than God; their emphasis this-worldly rather
than other-worldly; their goal progress rather than sanctity; their
apostolate is immanent rather than transcendent; their means to their goal
is the way of revolution rather than the way of the cross; they preach a
secular Church instead of the Sacred Church founded by Christ; the essence
of their morality is self-assertion rather than self-denial; the Christ
they present to the congregation is the Humanist Christ rather than the
God-Man crucified Christ; they speak in tongues of protest rather than in
tongues of fire, the fire of love flaming forth from the Holy Spirit; they
genuflect before the world and stand before Christ; they work for a
democratic Church instead of a hierarchic Church; they are moved by
resentment and envy instead of radiating the joy of Christ. In our times, then, it is not any longer a secret that the
enemies within and outside the Church want to destroy belief in the
divinity of Christ. Once the liturgy is humanized, Christ the center and
Object of it becomes the humanist,
par excellence, the liberator,
the revolutionary, the Marxist ushering in the millennium; he ceases to be
the Divine Redeemer. We must be alerted to these shadows of the Antichrist
who plan, by convincing us to abandon our sacred forms, at length to
seduce us into denying the Christian faith altogether. The Church is
attacked by these children of Satan in and outside her fold, because she
is a living form,
"the sacrament- the sign and instrument- of communion
with God and of unity among all men"; because she is the visible body of
religion.
We must never forget, then, that forms
apparently indifferent in themselves become most important to us when we
are used to using them to nurture our lives in holiness.
Places consecrated to God's honor, clergy carefully set
apart for His service, the Lord's Day piously observed, the public forms
of prayer, the decencies of worship, these things, viewed as a whole, are
sacred relatively to the whole body of the faithful and they are divinely
sanctioned. Rites sanctified by the Church through ages of holy
experience, cannot be disused without harm to souls. Moreover, in the
words of Newman, "Liturgical reformists must ever be aware of the
following truth; Even in the least binding of sacred forms, it continually
happens that a speculative improvement becomes a practical folly, and the
wise are tripped up by their own illusions." [Newman, op.
cit. pp. 78] Bishops would be wise to follow Newman's
conclusions in this war on the sacred liturgy:
Therefore, when profane persons scoff at our forms,
let us argue with ourselves thus - and it is an argument which all
men, learned and unlearned, can enter into: "These forms, even were
they of mere human origin (which learned men say is not the
case, but even if they were), are at least of a spiritual and edifying
character as the rites of Judaism. And yet Christ and his Apostles did
not even suffer these latter to be irreverently treated or suddenly
discarded. Much less may we suffer it in the case of our own; lest
stripping off from us the badges of our profession, we forget that
there is a faith to maintain and a world of sinners to be eschewed." [Newman,
op. ct. pp. 78,79]
The Fathers of the Church emphasize the corruption of the
liturgy that will prevail at the last days. As the end draws near, the
Church will be subjected to a fiercer, more diabolical persecution than
any previously suffered. There will be a cessation of all religious
worship.
"They shall take away the daily sacrifice." Some Fathers
interpret these words to mean that the Antichrist will suppress for three
and a half years all public religious worship. Others remind us that the
Antichrist will set up his throne within the Temple of God and demand
worship of himself from his depraved followers. We are living in times so
wicked that many nations will not allow innocent, defenseless human beings
natural birth much less the opportunity to receive the grace of
supernatural birth. St. Augustine wondered whether in the days of the
Antichrist Baptism would be administered to infants of Christian parents.
The reign of the Antichrist will be effected before Moses and
Simon the Sorcerer displayed before Peter and John. St. Cyril writes:
"I fear the
wars of the nations; I fear divisions among Christians; I fear hatred
among brethren But enough! God forbid that it should be fulfilled in our
day! However, let us be prepared." [John Henry Newman, Discussions
and Arguments on Various Subjects, p. 102. Newman quotes St. Cyril's
Catechism, xv, 16, 17] Unfortunately, it has happened in our day;
the liturgy is a sign of contradiction among Christians today;
the Holy
Mass that once united Christians now, with the new liturgy, fiercely
divides Christians. Many Catholics, because of the dilution of the sacred
in the new liturgy, and the breezy manner in which many radical priests
celebrate it, cannot attend such liturgies; they find it morally
impossible to have to endure the desacralized antics allowed by the
liturgical storm troopers. Hence they stay away. Thus we see that, over
and above the persecution of blood and death, there is even today a
persecution of craftiness and subversion.
The precursors of the Man of Sin
are very effective in splitting up and dividing Christians. They are
successful in dislodging many from the rock of salvation, in driving many
into heresy and schism, depriving them of their Christian liberty,
strength, peace and their household in Christ. How do we recall a sacrilegiously sick society that
functions on the fashionable fallacy that murder is the best therapy for
the world's problems to the sanity and sanctity of the sublime? We,
especially all true followers of Christ, must help man return to the
nature and deep significance of the sacred. Only when men grasp and
appreciate the nature, meaning and value of the sacred will they be
equipped and willing to understand and courageously confront the moral
disvalues of their dying society. Truly an awareness of the sense of the
sacred is a barometer that accurately indicates the vitality of the
religion, morals and culture of a people. A blindness to the nature of the
sacred is a sure preparation of society and mankind for the coming of the
Antichrist. On the other hand, a clear vision and love of the sacred will
enable mankind to see the unearthly beauty of the holy and to fall in love
with God who is Holiness itself.
Link (here) to Mary's Touch to more of Fr. Vincent P Miceli, S.J. work
Vincent Peter Miceli was born into an Italian immigrant
family in New York City in 1915. One of ten children, Vincent manifested a
scholarly propensity from the earliest age. He also developed a staunch
work ethic which he exhibited throughout the 77 years of his life. While
still in school he would leave school and begin work at 3 p.m. until 10
p.m. delivering books six days a week. When he was 21, he became interested in the Society of
Jesus and received his degree from Spring Hill College in Alabama in 1942.
Following major seminary, he was ordained in St. Mary's Kansas which was
then still a Jesuit school. He acquired his S.T.L. from the Jesuits' St. Louis
University in 1950 and was privileged to be in Dietrich
von Hildebrand's last class in 1960 before receiving his Ph.D.
from Fordham University in 1961.
