New Missal brings reminders of a bitter trial

Just in time for the new English translation of the Mass, Ignatius Press has released an expanded edition of Alcuin Reid’s A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes. This slender volume provides a fascinating look into the dismay that greeted the sweeping changes to the Roman rite between the start of the Second Vatican Council and 1971. It is also a postcard from a Catholic world where obedience to authority — of laypeople to priests, of priests to bishops, of bishops (suddenly) to experts — trumped almost every other consideration.

It was this new episcopal submission to liturgical experts that caused England’s leading Catholic novelist and England’s leading Catholic prelate such unease. The body of the book begins with Waugh’s 1962 essay in the (non-Catholic) Spectator; in it he outlines his fears and hopes for the Second Vatican Council and mentions “an uneasy feeling that there is a powerful body of the laity urging the (Council Fathers) to decisions which are, in fact, far from the hopes of the larger but less vocal body of the faithful.” He stresses that the average layperson had no wish to usurp the place of the priest at the altar, and that he himself did not wish to lose the Mass for which “the Elizabethan martyrs had died at the scaffold.”

The essay is followed by a private letter by John Heenan, then the archbishop of Liverpool, expressing his delight in it. Heenan candidly tells Waugh of the disagreements among the Council Fathers and says, “What a pity the voice of the laity was not heard sooner.” With a frankness notably absent from his pastoral letters, Heenan says that the difficulty “is that Continentals are twisting themselves inside out to make us look as like as possible to the Protestants. How I wish we could persuade them (a large majority I fear) that to be at home with our Mass and ceremonies is far more important than being right according to the books of liturgical antiquities.”     

This statement will make little sense to most people born too late to have formed an attachment to the Latin rite as it was before the Second Vatican Council. To stumble into the revived Tridentine Mass, now called the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, is to find oneself in a bewildering strangeness. Perhaps it is only by attending the Extraordinary Form that the average Catholic today can understand how alien Waugh and Heenan found the Novus Ordo.

The “Continentals” prevailed, of course, and most Catholics accepted that the Mass was changing — there were several experimental versions before 1971 — and professed themselves happy. How happy they really were is an interesting question given the spirit of submission to authority that was such a hallmark of Catholicism before the death of Paul VI. (Since then I have heard priests poke sly fun at, or contradict, bishops in their homilies and Catholic theologians describe John Paul II and Benedict XVI in terms that would have awed and heartened Osama bin Laden.) Still, the average person is happy to go with the flow and, as Waugh himself admitted,  only “cranks” seemed to care very much, one way or the other, about liturgical issues.

As a layman, Waugh felt helpless before the Council. As an archbishop, John Heenan felt helpless before the ascendant class of ordained intellectuals. By 1964, he was Cardinal John Heenan, archbishop of Westminster, and therefore the leader of the Church in England and Wales; nevertheless he felt regarded as a “mitred peasant.”

“The hierarchy is in a difficult position,” he confided to Waugh. “We have not yet lost the respect of ordinary Catholics but the constant nagging of the intellectuals and their tireless (tiresome?) letters to the press and articles in the Catholic papers may eventually disturb the ordinary faithful. Most of us would be content to delay changes but the mood of the Council compels us to act.”

The contradictions are fascinating. Heenan privately complains to Waugh and, amongst bishops, fights the more extreme liturgical changes, but openly — pastorally — he praises the innovations. Waugh is at first pleased by Heenan’s confidences and writes to him humbly, but ultimately feels betrayed and writes bitterly to his diary and his friends. As he slides into utter desolation, Waugh begs merely that the Tridentine Mass not be utterly banned. How and why it wasn’t (hint: Agatha Christie) is one of the oddest and most heart-warming tales in contemporary ecumenism.   

The Second Vatican Council is given more prominence in Catholic discourse today than any other Council, including that of Jerusalem circa AD 50. Until recently we were told  that the liturgical innovations that followed it were practically perfect in every way.

This makes the advent of the new translation all the more intriguing and such loyal opposition as Waugh’s all the less suspect.