Kavanagh on the Traditional Mass
Earlier this week, I came across an article on Commonweal describing the late Father Aidan Kavanagh's opposition to freeing the traditional Mass. I was struck by the poetic last paragraph in which Kavanagh proposes that the Mass's purpose is "for the life of the world." From Kavanagh's perspective, the goal of the Mass is worldly: propitiation and adoration are absent from these quotations. Indeed, Kavanagh's biography at the North American Academy of Liturgy states, "It was clearly his view that ritual and worship are natural to the human person." On the contrary, the Catholic Church's worship, particularly in the Mass and the sacraments, is supernatural. It didn't emerge naturally and wouldn't exist without Christ's revealing. Now, it's worth keeping in mind that Kavanagh is considered conservative and orthodox. It just goes to show how ideas that would have been radical a hundred years ago have become assumptions which are taken for granted today. The field has changed considerably.
Here's one of Kavanagh's statements comparing the "vital" new Mass to the "less insightful reforms" of Trent: [T]he reformed liturgy that has issued from the Council is an incomparably more rich, vital and traditional liturgical settlement in the truly Catholic sense than that of Trent, given its times, ever could have been.
The word "settlement" is an odd choice to describe the promulgation of a liturgy: it implies that a liturgy comes about by means of a controversy that eventually reaches resolution. This is in keeping with the new ecclesiology which often rejects the idea of timelessness and prefers to historicize the Church's liturgy and doctrine, making them subordinate to history, as if they arise mainly from historical circumstances. "Given its times," Trent could never have been as rich, vital, or traditional. In the new theology, the assumption that Trent and Vatican I reflect an overly defensive, and therefore bygone theology frequently enters and almost always goes unchallenged.
Subscribing to this view of the Church allows Father Kavanagh to ignore the differences in the origins of the respective rites. In his view, both rites originate at particular moments in time and as a result of definitive acts. The reality, though, is that while Pius V codified the ubiquity of the traditional Mass, he didn't compose that Mass out of nothing or impose it as something new. Affirming the ancient rite, Quo Primum acknowledges the rite that "has been handed down" to the Church. By contrast, the new Mass came from an ad hoc process whose purpose was a departure, not an affirmation.
