Reading this book brought to mind the old joke about the terrorist and the liturgist (‘you can negotiate with a terrorist’), not because Geoffrey Hull is either – he is a philologist and a linguist – but because of the book's subject matter and its argument: the author regards the ‘reform’ of the Latin rite after Vatican II as a cultural and spiritual catastrophe, the deepest wound ever to be suffered by the Church, made even worse by the fact that it is a self-inflicted wound. Catholic sacramental theologians and liturgists of an earlier period made much use of the work of anthropologists such as Mary Douglas and Victor Turner, so it cannot be immediately claimed that Geoffrey Hull, with his particular expertise, is not qualified to speak about this. On the contrary, where the use and function of signs and rituals is concerned, a philologist and a linguist is someone with a contribution to make. (He is also a traditionalist Catholic and this gives passion to his writing.) Unlike the liturgist in the joke, Hull seems to be someone with whom an intelligent conversation would be possible (as indeed are some real-life liturgists).
Most of the book is concerned with trying to explain how it could have happened that the Roman Church should depart so radically and so drastically from its Tradition (the capital ‘T’ is important). He sees the roots of it in the rationalism, legalism, pragmatism, and imperialism that, over the centuries, came to characterize Roman Catholicism, and in particular the exercise of Papal authority. He gives a fascinating reading of the two thousand years of Christian history while making it clear that he seeks to focus just on this one problem. Some Popes are criticized for being too weak, others for being too strong. Some are criticized for intervening in the affairs of local churches when and how they ought not to have done, others for not intervening when and how they should have done.
The relationship between East and West is at the heart of his argument. The development of papal authority in the West is closely linked with the need for Rome to position itself in relation to Constantinople on one side and the Frankish empire on the other. So, great figures like Gregory VII and Innocent III emerge, powerful and authoritative within their (increasingly only western) sphere. The seemingly natural identification of unity with uniformity had serious consequences not just for relationships with the East but also for the survival of liturgical rites other than that of Rome within the Western church. It is one of the paradoxes that after Vatican II there were fewer rites in the Latin Church than there were before.
Rationalistic and legalistic tendencies are there from the beginning in Latin theology and church government, heavily influenced as it was by Roman law and philosophy. The vicissitudes of history, in particular the emergence of nominalism, the reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution – what all these things did to the Church and how the Church reacted to them – meant that at the beginning of the twentieth century loyalty and obedience to the Pope had become central to what it meant to be a Roman Catholic (and not just for the Ultramontane). This helps to explain why the vast majority of Roman Catholics went along with changes in the ‘immemorial rite’, changes which, Hull believes, their instinct of faith ought to have led them to reject. The Papacy had come to believe that it could reverse the ancient law of lex orandi, lex credendi, something Hull sees happening already before Vatican II, with the liturgical changes introduced by Pius X for example. This is also what he means by ‘heteropraxis’: allowing the law of belief to determine the law of prayer rather than the other way round. So one can maintain ‘orthodoxy’– Rome's obsession in recent times – while becoming ‘heteropractic’.
Hull does not believe that one factor alone is sufficient to explain the problem and a short review must perforce truncate his argument drastically. Theology, politics, cultural imperialism, racism, ignorance, rationalism, persecution, war weariness and guilt – all of these are strands in producing the situation in which the Church could so easily divest itself so quickly of so much of its tradition. He believes, however, that Rome's treatment not just of the Eastern Orthodox Churches but also of Byzantine-rite Catholic Churches is the most important strand in understanding the problem as well as in pointing towards a solution. There are some appalling stories related here about the ways in which Latin Catholics treated Catholics of other rites in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Ethiopia, and India. Things were even more disastrous when Catholics of those rites migrated to North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and encountered a Latin hierarchy (many of them Irish, sad to say, trying to cope with their own cultural identity crisis) incapable of understanding the Catholic Church as involving anybody other than Latin-rite Catholics.
Rome's treatment of ‘the East’ clarifies the problem since what it felt able to do to other rites it finally felt able to do to its own. The ‘heart’ that is banished is the contemplative and doxological appreciation of the liturgy as something received, into which we are invited to enter, and not something we are invited to invent or create as we go along. The East preserves a sense of this given-ness of the liturgy while the West (so Hull believes) has for the most part lost it completely. There is a familiar comparing of the worst excesses of ‘new rite’ liturgies with the best of ‘old rite’ liturgies.
Two concepts crucial to his argument are never defined clearly enough, however. One is the notion of a rite being ‘immemorial’. Its dictionary meaning is ‘ancient beyond memory or record’ (OED) but that alone is not sufficient, even for Hull, to determine whether something is or is not to be maintained in a liturgical rite. He talks about the renewal of rites which will involve removing things that have added themselves somehow: determining what is a valid and what an invalid addition is not clear simply by identifying something as ‘immemorial’ (at least on the OED's definition of the term). Vincent of Lerins, Thomas Aquinas, and John Henry Newman all speak of development (of doctrine) in terms of making explicit what has always been implicit. But how liturgical development is to be evaluated seems a more complicated question precisely because of the nature and function of rituals.
Hull speaks about ‘organic’ development: rites will change as time goes by but will do so authentically only when the change is organic. A major problem Hull sees with the ‘Montinian revolution’ is that it was contrived and artificial, the work of a committee seeking to destroy rather than to build up, and so in no way an organic development. (Cardinal Ratzinger makes a similar criticism of the post-Conciliar reform in The Spirit of the Liturgy.) But the process of such ‘organic development’ needs to be explained a bit more: we do not wake up one morning to discover that our rituals have developed overnight. Presumably any development in human rituals will involve consciousness, reflection, evaluation, and choice. The Bugnini commission can be accused of antiquarianism and immobilism in thinking that the Latin rite could be returned to some imagined primitive form, but may not traditionalists also be criticized for the same things in proposing that the Latin rite somehow reached a final ‘perfection’ four centuries ago and in trying now (once again with a certain artificiality and contrivance) to ‘restore’ that rite?
The arguments will clearly continue. Hull's book is an important, well-documented, argumentative, contribution to a question increasingly urgent for the Church. For him it is the question, and in that one can only agree. At stake is, not the preservation of a cultural museum piece, but the faith of the Church, the meaning of adoration, and the knowledge of Christ that comes through worship.
