When it comes to liturgical matters, I lean pretty traditionalist. I attend a weekly Novus Ordo Latin Mass, and remain fond of the extraordinary form. I have a preference for formal, solemn, liturgies. When speaking to others who share my liturgical tastes, most – but by no means all – diverge sharply when it comes to politics. In the United States context, they identify with the movement associated with the Republican party, misnamed conservatism. I believe that this sits oddly with liturgical traditionalism.
As Catholics, we are defined by our liturgy. As the Church teaches, “the liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows”. The liturgy links us to God, as the earthly liturgy is a foretaste of the heavenly liturgy. It also links us to each other, as the liturgy is the ultimate communal event that underpins communal salvation. In the liturgy, the infinite God enters time, and we step outside of time, united with the entire mystical body of Christ – past, present, future, the living, the dead, and those not yet born. If there are major liturgical discontinuities, these bonds can be ruptured.
Let me turn to the secular world. Moreso than on the modern American right, the political left emphasizes a sense of solidarity between people – not only in the current generation, but between generations – between past and present (e.g., social security), and between present and future (e.g., taxing carbon emissions to safeguard the planet). Of course, the left is not immune to misguided utopianism, and a whole strand of leftist thought has strayed down this destructive path. But the achievements of the left cannot be defined by misguided and oppressive socialist experiments. As historian Tony Judt points out, the rise of social democracy was less about building a brave new world, and more about restoring the moral rules of economic life that were trampled underfoot by industrial capitalism. It was about prudence, justice, and a sense of loss. It was about collective action for the collective good. It was about restoring the links between the present generation with the past and the future. It was about solidarity. And on both sides of the Atlantic, its achievements were remarkable – a singular period of peace and prosperity that was broadly shared. And as with every man-made endeavor, there were faults and mistakes made along the way. But to respond by dismantling the entire experiment and return to the mindset of pure liberalism is akin to reacting to the flaws inherent in democracy by abandoning democracy itself.
In short, the left has much to conserve. And over the past half century, it is the political right that has insisted that change is good. It is the political right that sought to sacrifice prudence and moderation on the altar of the greater good. It is the political right that promised a brave new world of free market capitalism and individual freedom. It is the political right that seeks to tear down the edifices of the past, on the ground that government must be purged from economic life. As as the theology of individualism gained greater prominence, the economic system lost all sense of collective purpose, of prudence, of morality, of justice. We lose the sense of common purpose and the mutual dependence that is the linchpin of community.
In all of this, the tenets of social democracy mirror the teachings of Catholic social teaching as applied to economic life. Pope Benedict is on record as saying as much, calling it a “counterweight to the radical liberal positions”. Liberalism, of course, denies that the state has any duties toward God. The individual is paramount, virtue is underpinned by individual liverty, and the state is a purely human creation designed to enforce a social contract. This notion has always been condemned by the Church, which has always seen society as an organic whole where the public authority serves the common good – not only by providing law and order, but by protecting the poor and supporting economic justice. To give just one of many examples, Pope Paul VI in Octogesima Adveniens warns about the attraction of liberalism as a counterweight to totalitarianism: “the very root of philosophical liberalism is an erroneous affirmation of the autonomy of the individual in his activity, his motivation and the exercise of his liberty”. Of course, meeting the requirements of justice will differ by time and place, and modern Catholic social teaching provides the roadmap for our industrial era.
Let me get back to my main point. Let me do so by talking about a period of great violence and disruption to the liturgy – the “reforms” of 16th century England under Henry VIII and Edward VI. As Eamon Duffy noted a while back, the pre-Reformation liturgical culture was vibrant and sophisticated. Life revolved around the liturgy, and the liturgy was a communal event, defined by ties to the parish. Supporting one’s parish, in life and death, was extremely important. Once a year, the priest would read out the entire “bede-roll” of all those who had ever donated to the Church, to pray for them – sometimes this was hundreds of pages long and went back centuries. The dead were seen as utterly dependent on the good will of others, and praying for the dead was the duty of every Christian. Thus there was a clear connection between all members of the mystical body of Christ, living and dead.
This came to an end with the rupture of the reformation. The reformers especially attacked the idea of praying for the dead and the intercession of saints. Faith became more privatized, and less communal. It is no accident that the crimes against the liturgy were often also crimes against economic justice. Before the reformation, there were about 50 feast days every year, when no work was supposed to be done. This was always a bone of contention with the landowners in particular, and one of the first things to go was the keeping of these feasts. Indeed, the loss of the feast days was one of the major factors behind the northern uprising dubbed the “pilgrimage of grace”. It doesn’t end there. We all know about the dissolution and plundering of the monasteries, and of course, the monasteries were the “welfare systems” of the day, and the damage done by the Henrican reforms increased poverty dramatically. There are plenty of other examples. In pre-reformation times, it was customary for the wealthy to leave bequests for almshouses after their deaths, and to issue the “common dole” to the poor people in the parish at their funeral – so the poor could pray for their souls, as the poor were seen as especially close to God. Again, these bonds were broken.
In many respects, the damage done by latter-day liberalism – with the attendant rise in inequality and associated social and political pathologies – is very similar to the damage done by the religious-inspired reforms in England.
I will conclude by merely repeating my main point. I am a liturgical traditionalist and a political progressive for the same reason – I believe in solidarity, community, and the bonds between past, present, and future.
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