by D. Q. McInerny, PhD, Professor of Philosophy, Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary, Elmhurst, Pennsylvania. In the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter Newsletter, August, 1999.
Writing in the fifth century, Prosper of Aquitaine made an observation which has since become something of a truism: "the way we pray determines the way we believe." What he meant by that remark is that the manner of our prayer not only reflects what we believe, it shapes our belief as well. In other words, there is a reciprocal, mutually dependent relationship between prayer and belief.
We know that the essence of prayer is the rasing of our hearts and minds to God. It is just the condition of those hearts and minds (the degree of the purity of the one and the degree of the clarity of the other) which will determine the quality of our affective and cognitive approach to God. The Pharisee and the publican who prayed together in the temple prayed radically different prayers, and that is because they had radically different understandings of who God is and who they were in relation to Him. The publican was a realist, in the deepest and fullest sense. The pharisee was completely caught up in egoistical fantasies.
If private prayer both reflects and shapes our belief, this is also true with respect to the public prayer of the Church, the liturgy. The liturgy is the principal means by which tradition, embodying the deposit of faith, is kept vibrantly present in the lives of the faithful.
Because of the close association between tradition and liturgy (from one point of view they are actually identical), the condition of the liturgy will determine the effectiveness with which the tradition, specifically in the form of the deposit of faith, will be clearly communicated. Should the liturgy become unstable and disoriented, showing signs of discontinuity, then the tradition of the Church will accordingly be negatively affected, and with that the safety and well-being of the Church herself will be put in harm's way.
The liturgy provides us with an immediate and continuing contact with the living tradition of the Church. The liturgy is the chief means by which the Church establishes and sustains communion among her members, a communion which rests upon communication. If the liturgy is in a healthy state, then the communication will be vigorously clear and unambiguous. And as a result, the faithful will be truly the faithful, for they will know who they are and what they believe. Besides communicating the doctrinal truths of the faith, the liturgy brings us into the sacramental embrace of that faith, confirming us as living members of Christ's Mystical Body.
But if the liturgy is not in a healthy state, it does not speak clearly, and instead of providing for a genuine mystical communion among the faithful, the best it can manage is a vapid "togetherness." When the liturgy is not in a healthy state, disharmony and disunity are always lurking in the shadows, even within the sacred precincts themselves. There is no precedence, in the entire 2000 year history of the Church, for what has happened to the liturgy over the past thirty-five years. The changes which have been effected in the liturgy have been both broad and deep. Moreover, they were brought about in a manner which was diametrically opposed to the whole spirit and nature of liturgy, in a manner which, without exaggeration, can be called anti-liturgical. Liturgy is part of tradition, and, as tradition, it will be severely damaged unless any changes applied to it (which in any event must always remain strictly limited) are dictated from within, by the intrinsic genius of the liturgy itself. But what we saw was the liturgy being changed by massive impositions from without. Liturgical engineering replaced liturgical horticulture, and the ad hoc and even the slap-dash became the order of the day. Change became a shibboleth, and Heraclitean flux would seem to have been elevated to the status of an ideal.
As Msgr. Klaus Gamber has tellingly demonstrated, the Church's liturgical structure has been shaken to its very foundations. As an inevitable result of this, the Church's tradition has been significantly traumatized. The tradition in its essential purity is still there, of course, but it has been obscured; it has been distanced from us because of the uncertain state of the liturgy.
There seems to be near universal agreement that the liturgy is in a seriously unsatisfactory state, that the reform of the liturgy simply did not, as a matter of fact, bring about the happy results that were predicted for it. What is to be done? There is talk about a reform of the reform. This is a possibility, but if we are in general agreement that the reform failed to reform, in what will its reformation consist? There is the danger that this approach will only serve to institutionalize the kind of engineering mind-set which created the problem in the first place.
Is there room for a proposal of an entirely different kind? It is a radical proposal, but only in the sense that any dramatic change of direction is radical. Let us put it in terms of plain common sense. What would you do if while making a trip you discover you have made an egregiously wrong turn and you are roaring along the feeway heading west, whereas it is your intention to be heading east? It won't remedy the situation simply to reduce your speed, or to turn on the radio or the air-conditioning, or even to pull into a garage and have an oil change and a new set of tires put on. The basic problem would remain. You continue to head in the wrong direction. The only really intelligent thing to do in such a circumstance is to reverse yourself and to become properly oriented once again.
In the spiritual life we all know that such radical changes of direction are sometimes demanded of us. We either make them or we end up where we very much do not want to be. Is it conceivable that this might be preciesely what is now demanded of the Church as a whole, with regard to the liturgy?