from the Catholic perspective, no event in the history of the Church has been as damaging to the unity of the mystical body of Christ than the Protestant Reformation. There are now as many non-Catholics who consider themselves Christian as there are Christians who are Catholic. This is an astounding loss to the Church, having her members of the body sparring among themselves and splintered by heterodoxy. Christ prayed sincerely and at length that this would not be the case. His prayers for unity can be seen in the 17th Chapter of the Gospel of John, verses 20-23:
“And not for them only do I pray, but for them also who through their word shall believe in me. That they all may be one, as thou, Father, in me, and I in thee; that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou hast given me, I have given to them: that, they may be one, as we also are one. I in them, and thou in me: that they may be made perfect in one: and the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them, as thou hast also loved me.”
Marks of the Church • To be “one” was not only Christ’s intention for His Church, it is the central claim of every non-Catholic denomination who competes for the attention of souls, and has been the first of four marks of the true church since the First Council of Constantinople in 381 AD. The next claim most often made is that of universality, and many non-Catholic believers have actually taken on the name “catholic” (katholikós in Greek, meaning universal) to arrogate to themselves another mark of the true church, even though the soteriology they espouse is highly idiosyncratic, held among only a small subset of the whole, while in truth they have nothing to do with the Catholic Church in union with the Roman Pontiff, and no apostolic succession among their clergy.
The characteristics of being one and catholic can be distilled down into a single mutual quality: antiquity. To be the oldest church most likely means that yours is the original faith that spread universally, was held by the Apostles, and was received from Christ Himself. On the surface, antiquity seems to grant the highest amount of purity, authenticity, credibility and legitimacy, but in reality, this misleading fallacy is a trap, and void of truth.
Development, Not Stagnation • According to the Gospel of Saint John, Chapter 16 verses 12-15, Jesus had already explained to the Apostles that the faith, and thus His Church, was not going to remain stagnant in antiquity:
“I have yet many things to say to you: but you cannot bear them now. But when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will teach you all truth. For he shall not speak of himself; but what things soever he shall hear, he shall speak; and the things that are to come, he shall show you. He shall glorify me; because he shall receive of mine, and shall show it to you. All things whatsoever the Father hath, are mine. Therefore I said, that he shall receive of mine, and show it to you.”
The truth thus far revealed was necessarily incomplete at the time Jesus shared these plans with the disciples, therefore it is the will of Almighty God that His Church would grow in knowledge, and understanding. Saint Vincent of Lerins, a fifth-century theologian had already recognized this fact and wrote about it in his work Commonitorium (ca 434 AD):
54. But some one will say, perhaps, Shall there, then, be no progress in Christ’s Church? Certainly; all possible progress. For what being is there, so envious of men, so full of hatred to God, who would seek to forbid it? Yet on condition that it be real progress, not alteration of the faith. For progress requires that the subject be enlarged in itself, alteration, that it be transformed into something else. The intelligence, then, the knowledge, the wisdom, as well of individuals as of all, as well of one man as of the whole Church, ought, in the course of ages and centuries, to increase and make much and vigorous progress; but yet only in its own kind; that is to say, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning.
The next five substantial paragraphs in this work have not been included here for the sake of brevity, but I encourage all to read the rest of this section, because of the great beauty.
John Henry Cardinal Newman also treats the development of the Church over time in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1878), thus refuting the superiority of antiquity:
Chapter 2, Section 1. If Christianity is a fact, and impresses an idea of itself on our minds and is a subject-matter of exercises of the reason, that idea will in course of time expand into a multitude of ideas, and aspects of ideas, connected and harmonious with one another, and in themselves determinate and immutable, as is the objective fact itself which is thus represented. It is a characteristic of our minds, that they cannot take an object in, which is submitted to them simply and integrally. We conceive by means of definition or description; whole objects do not create in the intellect whole ideas, but are, to use a mathematical phrase, thrown into series, into a number of statements, strengthening, interpreting, correcting each other, and with more or less exactness approximating, as they accumulate, to a perfect image. There is no other way of learning or of teaching. We cannot teach except by aspects or views, which are not identical with the thing itself which we are teaching. Two persons may each convey the same truth to a third, yet by methods and through representations altogether different. The same person will treat the same argument differently in an essay or speech, according to the accident of the day of writing, or of the audience, yet it will be substantially the same.
And the more claim an idea has to be considered living, the more various will be its aspects; and the more social and political is its nature, the more complicated and subtle will be its issues, and the longer and more eventful will be its course. And in the number of these special ideas, which from their very depth and richness cannot be fully understood at once, but are more and more clearly expressed and taught the longer they last,—having aspects many and bearings many, mutually connected and growing one out of another, and all parts of a whole, with a sympathy and correspondence keeping pace with the ever-changing necessities of the world, multiform, prolific, and ever resourceful,—among these great doctrines surely we Christians shall not refuse a foremost place to Christianity. Such previously to the determination of the fact, must be our anticipation concerning it from a contemplation of its initial achievements.
Mental Illness • Protestantism is on one hand based on antiquity, and in certain ways tries to emulate the most primitive Biblical testimonies of what the Church looked like during Apostolic times, but on the other hand, they utilize a modern academic reinterpretation of scripture that omits all of the oral tradition possessed by the Fathers of the Catholic Church that began forming our doctrine even before the Bible was canonized, as well as all pronouncements of the Roman curia. This schizophrenic combination of being simultaneously old and yet brand new yields a confused religion of man that is truthfully neither Apostolic nor ancient. This failed combination of going back and creating something new that has never been tried has been seen most recently at the Second Vatican Council.
Recognize and Resist • Here to represent the circumstances as an eye witness of the liturgical chaos that ensued is J. R. R. Tolkien. Few realize that this world renowned author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy did more meaningful things than just write fantasy novels. He was also a devout Catholic man who attended the traditional Mass, had a devotion to the blessed sacrament, and resisted the changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council. According to his grandson Simon, Tolkien was not ashamed of it either:
I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My Grandfather obviously didn’t agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but My Grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right.1
Tolkien saw straight through the errors of Protestantism and the liturgical reform, which were both glaring examples of antiquarianism:
An excerpt from a letter written by J. R. R. Tolkien after August 25, 1967, addressed to Michael Tolkien:
‘Trends’ in the Church are …. serious, especially to those accustomed to find in it a solace and a ‘pax’ in times of temporal trouble, and not just another arena of strife and change. But imagine the experience of those born (as I) between the Golden and the Diamond Jubilee of Victoria. Both senses or imaginations of security have been progressively stripped away from us. Now we find ourselves nakedly confronting the will of God, as concerns ourselves and our position in Time (Vide Gandalf I 70 and III 155).
‘Back to normal’ – political and Christian predicaments – as a Catholic professor once said to me, when I bemoaned the collapse of all my world that began just after I achieved 21. I know quite well that, to you as to me, the Church which once felt like a refuge, now often feels like a trap. There is nowhere else to go! (I wonder if this desperate feeling, the last state of loyalty hanging on, was not, even more often than is actually recorded in the Gospels, felt by Our Lord’s followers in His earthly life-time?) I think there is nothing to do but to pray, for the Church, the Vicar of Christ, and for ourselves; and meanwhile to exercise the virtue of loyalty, which indeed only becomes a virtue when one is under pressure to desert it. There are, of course, various elements in the present situation, which are confused, though in fact distinct (as indeed in the behaviour of modern youth, part of which is inspired by admirable motives such as anti-regimentation, and anti-drabness, a sort of lurking romantic longing for ‘cavaliers’, and is not necessarily allied to the drugs or the cults of fainéance and filth).
The ‘protestant’ search backwards for ‘simplicity’ and directness – which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motives, is mistaken and indeed vain. Because ‘primitive Christianity’ is now and in spite of all ‘research’ will ever remain largely unknown; because ‘primitiveness’ is no guarantee of value, and is and was in great part a reflection of ignorance. Grave abuses were as much an element in Christian ‘liturgical’ behaviour from the beginning as now. (St Paul’s strictures on eucharistic behaviour are sufficient to show this!)
Still more because ‘my church’ was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history – the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the ‘mustard-seed’ and the full-grown tree. For those living in the days of its branching growth the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is pan of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred. The wise may know that it began with a seed, but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now reside in the Tree. Very good: but in husbandry the authorities, the keepers of the Tree, must look after it, according to such wisdom as they possess, prune it, remove cankers, rid it of parasites, and so forth. (With trepidation, knowing how little their knowledge of growth is!) But they will certainly do harm, if they are obsessed with the desire of going back to the seed or even to the first youth of the plant when it was (as they imagine) pretty and unafflicted by evils. The other motive (now so confused with the primitivist one, even in the mind of any one of the reformers): aggiornamento: bringing up to date: that has its own grave dangers, as has been apparent throughout history.
Tradition Extinguished • These sentiments capture so perfectly the essence of what has happened to the Church in every area where she used to dominate the world and subdue the passions of mankind. Her doctrines are no longer taught and have become all but forgotten, her liturgy has been suppressed, and her art and music have been buried well beneath the frost line. Any time a sprout of tradition tries to break through the crusted earth into the sunlight, it is quickly snuffed out. When the traditional Mass and the melodies of Gregorian Chant were abruptly removed from parishes throughout the world, after having provided solace and refuge to the faithful for well over 1,500 years, it was truly, as stated by Tolkien, a collapse of the entire Catholic world. Her children were left without shelter, as orphans searching for food.
The brilliant monastic liturgist Dom Guéranger wrote extensively on the false antiquarianism of Protestantism2, and little did he know, he was giving also us a glimpse of what was to befall the Church almost 100 years later:
Thus, all sectarians, without exception, begin by claiming the rights of antiquity; they want to free Christianity from all that the error and passions of men have mixed with it that is false and unworthy of God; they want nothing than that which is primitive, and claim to take the Christian institution back to the cradle.
To this end, they prune, they erase, they cut off; everything falls under their blows, and when we expect to see divine worship reappear in its first purity, it turns out that we are cluttered with new formulas that date only beyond the night, which are undoubtedly human, since the one who wrote them is still alive.
Every sect undergoes this necessity; we have seen it in the monophysites, among the Nestorians; we find the same thing in all the branches of Protestants. Their affectation of preaching antiquity only resulted in putting them in a position to undermine the whole past, and then they stood in front of the seduced peoples, and swore to them that everything was good, that the papist superfetations had disappeared, and that divine worship had gone back to its primitive holiness.
Let us note another characteristic thing in the change of the liturgicy of heretics. It is that, in their rage of innovation, they are not content with pruning the formulas of ecclesiastical style which they blemish with the name of human utterance, but they extend their reprobation to the very readings and prayers that the Church has borrowed from Scripture; they change, they substitute, not wanting to pray with the Church, thus excommunicating themselves, and also fearing even the smallest particle of the orthodoxy which governed the choice of these passages.
Institutions Liturgiques (1878)
Dom Prosper Guéranger
Here, Guéranger sums up the errors of antiquarianism. First comes the seduction of the mind by the fantasy of a higher purity, perfection, and idealism. Then everything mature and tested by time is purged by the polar opposites of infantilization and new interpretations simultaneously, and the hypnosis previously induced prevents us from detecting the contradiction. This paves the way for further tinkering.
Recognize, Resist, Restore • Needless to say, Dom Guéranger was not an antiquarianist. He understood the value of organic development of the liturgy, and he was also the founder of the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes in France that restored Gregorian Chant to the point at which organic development of the art of singing the Mass had essentially been suspended. This happened around the same time as the Council of Trent. Eventually, the work of Dom Guéranger led to the development of the Vatican Edition of Gregorian Chant that was completed by Dom Joseph Pothier, and promulgated by Pope Saint Pius X. It remains, to this day, the official edition of the Chant in the Roman Rite.
The Melody and Rhythm Wars • Unfortunately, the liturgical antiquarianists have already had their way with the liturgy, but there is also another antiquarianist movement among practitioners of Gregorian Chant who aim to replace the work of Solesmes and the Vatican Edition with what they believe to be the earliest melodies and rhythm found in a small handful of the earliest extant manuscripts. The similarity of their reasoning with that of the Protestant reformers, and even the Catholic liturgical reformers of the 1960’s is uncanny, and the errors therein also correspond with striking uniformity. The most prominent congruence is the fallacious pursuit of an imagined purity and superiority of old manuscripts by virtue of their antiquity alone, while discarding hundreds of years of organic development as if all change is just unacceptable errors. They also do not want to pray in song with the rest of the Church, but to chart their own path, with their own unique, modern manuscript that is ever changing.
Was Pius X an Antiquarianist? • To promote their cause, they even attempt to prove that antiquarianism was sanctioned even by the Holy Father himself, Pope Saint Pius X, by taking his quotes out of context, even on this blog. One of his quotes being loosely cited is: “It is important that these melodies should be performed in the manner that they were originally conceived as works of art.” If the Holy Father said this, what did he mean by it? What he an antiquarianist? Here is the same statement, in context, in a letter written to Cardinal Louis Dubois in gratitude for his strong pastoral letter written to his archdiocese of Bourges while he was bishop of Verdun, France:
Venerable Brother,
Your letter of June 21 last, as well as those which We have received from a large number of pious and distinguished French Catholics, has shown Us to Our great satisfaction that since the promulgation of Our motu proprio of November 22, 1903, on Sacred Music, great zeal has been displayed in the different Dioceses of France to make the pronunciation of the Latin language approximate more closely to that used in Rome, and that, in consequence, it is sought to perfect, according to the best rules of art, the execution of the Gregorian melodies, brought back to Us to their ancient traditional form. You yourself, when occupying the Episcopal See of Verdun, entered upon this reform and made some useful and important regulations to ensure its success.
We learn at the same time with real pleasure that this reform has already spread to a number of places and been successfully introduced into many cathedral churches, seminaries and colleges, and even into simple country churches. The question of the pronunciation of Latin is closely bound up with that of the restoration of the Gregorian chant, the constant subject of Our thoughts and recommendations from the very beginning of Our pontificate. The accent and pronunciation of Latin had great influence on the melodic and rhythmic formation of the Gregorian phrase, and consequently it is important that these melodies should be rendered in the same manner in which they were artistically conceived at their first beginning. Finally the spread of the Roman pronunciation will have the further advantage, as you have already so pertinently said, of consolidating more and more the work of liturgical union in France, a unity to be accomplished by the happy return to Roman liturgy and Gregorian chant.
This is why We desire that the movement of return to the Roman pronunciation of Latin should continue with the same zeal and consoling success which has marked its progress hitherto; and for the reasons given above We hope that under your direction and that of the other members of the Episcopate, this reform may be propagated in all the Dioceses of France. As a pledge of heavenly favours to you, Venerable Brother, to your diocesans, and to all those who had addressed petitions to Us in the same tenor as your own, We grant the Apostolic Benediction.
From the Vatican, July 10, 1912
Caught Red-handed! • From the full letter, it is unmistakable how the Holy Father intended for Gregorian Chant to be sung. The Holy Father was not referring to reverting back the oldest extant manuscripts, nor was he prescribing the use of archaic melodies or rhythmic patterns based on theories and comparison tables. The Holy Father said at least five times in his letter that it was Latin pronunciation that should dominate the accent and rhythm of Gregorian Chant, and not just any Latin pronunciation, the Roman pronunciation. The purpose, according to the Holy Father, was liturgical unity, and consolidation of the communal worship of the Catholic Church into one practice common to all the faithful. As I recall Christ’s prayers for unity at the end of his earthly ministry, the unity of worship seems appropriate and fitting for the Church to be One and Catholic.
Vatican Edition Preface • To seal this particular interpretation of what the Holy Father had in mind, it is worth including here the full segment of the Preface to the Vatican Edition of Gregorian Chant applicable to how his Cento was assembled, because as shown earlier, quotes that are taken out of context can acquire an entirely new meaning which is not what the original author intended. The consistency of how the Holy Father was thinking about the Chant should be resounding loud and clear:
Nevertheless it remained for the Roman Church and the other Churches which follow her Rite, to provide themselves with books containing the true melodies of the Gregorian Chant. His Holiness, Pius X, had this in view when, in his Motu Proprio, promulgated on April 25th, 1904, he declared: the Gregorian melodies were to be restored in their integrity and identity, after the authority of the earliest manuscripts, taking account of the legitimate tradition of past ages, as well as of the actual use of the Liturgy of today.
Guided by these rules and standards, those who had taken the task in hand at the bidding of the Pope set to work to revise the books then in use. The first thing they had to do was to undertake a thorough and well considered examination of the primitive manuscripts. This procedure was clearly a wise one; for documents of this kind are not merely to be esteemed on account of their antiquity, which unites them so closely to the beginnings of the Gregorian Chant, but chiefly because they were written in the very ages in which the Chant was most flourishing. For although the more remote the origin of the melodies and the longer they have been in use amongst the ancients, the more worthy they might be of finding a place in the new edition which was in hand, nevertheless, what gives them the right of being included is their religious and artistic flavour, and their power of giving suitable expression to liturgical prayer.
Therefore, in studying the manuscripts, this was the primary object which was kept in view:not indeed to admit off-hand, on the sole ground of antiquity, whatever happened to be most ancient, but, since the restoration of the ecclesiastical Chant had to depend not only on paleographical considerations, but also was to draw upon history, musical and Gregorian art, and even upon experience and upon the rules of the sacred liturgy, it was necessary to have regard to all of these things at the same time; lest a piece, composed perhaps with the learning of antiquity, should fall short in some of the other conditions, and do injury to Catholic tradition by depriving many centuries of the right of contributing something good, or even better than itself, to the patrimony of the Church. For it is by no means to be admitted that what we call the Gregorian tradition may be confined within the space of a few years; but it embraces all those centuries which cultivated the art of the Gregorian Chant with more or less zeal and proficiency. The Church, says the Holy Father in the Motu Proprio already mentioned, has cultivated and fostered the progress of the arts unceasingly, allowing for the use of religion all things good and beautiful discovered by man in the course of the ages, provided that liturgical rules be observed.
The work of the present edition has been carried out in accordance with these wise directions delivered by Our Most Holy Lord Pope Pius X.
The Church certainly gives freedom to all the learned to settle the age and condition of the Gregorian melodies, and to pass judgment upon their artistic skill. She only reserves to herself one right, to wit, that of supplying and prescribing to the Bishops and the faithful such a text of the sacred Chant as may contribute to the fitting splendour of divine worship and to the edification of souls, after being restored according to the traditional records.
This Preface reveals that the Holy Father was very aware of the tug-of-war between antiquarianism and the genuine approach to progress and development used by the Catholic Church, and that the choice had been made to firmly resist promoting the content of manuscripts “merely … on account of their antiquity.”
Based on these foregoing testimonies of Christ, the Saints, our beloved monastic and liturgical authorities such as Dom Guéranger, and the faithful Catholic men such as Mr. Tolkien, I hope that you, dear reader, will agree that antiquity alone is a highly deficient and even crippling metric to use when trying to identify what should be believed and practiced as a Catholic. The best of what Holy Mother Church has to offer us is the doctrine, the liturgy and the music that has been organically developed, has aged, progressed and matured over time, without being substantially changed, or transformed into a different thing entirely.
Pius X was a Traditionalist • In summary, the Holy Father Pope Saint Pius X was not an antiquarianist! The primary rhythm of Gregorian Chant is governed by the Roman pronunciation of Latin. The Church does not need to revert back to more ancient editions of Chant, or apply archaic rhythm or melodic idiosyncracies, because resisting organic development of the arts or any other aspect of Catholicism would be the non-Catholic practice of returning to the seed, when we may instead behold the full grown tree.
1 Excerpt from an article first published by The Mail On Sunday 2003, Copyright Simon Tolkien
2 This text only exists in French, and I have translated the original work using a combination of translation software and a dictionary. Any errors are unintentional. If you know French and would like to improve the translation, please share your knowledge with us!
