SPECIAL: InfoCatólica’s Interview with Dr. Kwasniewski

A Spanish new agency asks me pointed questions as I travel through Spain

Catedral de Santa María la Real de La Almudena in Madrid (source)

Given my lecture tour to Seville, Córdoba, Toledo, Madrid, Segovia, and Oviedo, followed by the Covadonga pilgrimage (see here for more details), I will not have time to compile the usual Friday roundups this week or next. Instead, I will provide you with other (hopefully edifying!) content. Today’s post is the English original of an interview translated into Spanish, given at the request of the Madrid-based site InfoCatólica.

InfoCatólica: In the coming weeks, you will be giving several lectures in different Spanish cities. Why do you think traditionalism seems to be weaker in Spain than in, say, France or the United States?

Dr. Kwasniewski: I am not enough of an expert to say for sure, but Spanish friends of mine have told me that in Spain there is a strong mentality of obedience to leaders, even a blind obedience (thus, if Paul VI says “you must stop using the missal of Pius V and take up mine instead!,” everyone goes along with it), whereas in America and France—two revolutionary countries!—people are more likely to question authority, to ask whether it is actually seeking the common good, and to protest and resist when they believe their rights, or the rights of tradition, are being trampled.

Another point is that countries secular from their foundation forced the laity to take much of the burden of teaching and supporting Catholicism. Although the separation of Church and State is abnormal and harmful in many ways, ironically there are some side-benefits: the people are more invested in their own religion, and, for instance, they are much involved in charitable works and their donations are what sustains operations.

This means, in the USA at least, that most bishops tend to be pragmatic: they ask “what works,” in the sense of what brings people to church and where does the money come from. If the TLM brings Catholics to church and they are generous supporters, why should there be any problem with it? This is a pragmatic mentality, not an ideological one. It’s the opposite of the mentality you sometimes see among progressives, where, as their words and behavior indicate, they would prefer an empty and shuttered church to one filled with Catholics attending the Latin Mass. To me, this is a sickening betrayal of their office, but the ideologue must have absolute purity of adherence to the one and only ideal; recalcitrant realities must be burnt to the ground.

In 2016, you were one of the signers of the so-called “Letter of the 45,” in which professors and clergymen urged cardinals to request a condemnation of perceived errors contained in Amoris Laetitia from Pope Francis. Do you still think those errors should be publicly and specifically condemned? Or would it be enough if the corresponding truths were proclaimed once again?

I am absolutely of the opinion that it is not enough merely to state the truth as if it were a silent counterproposal to Amoris Laetitia chapter 8. Rather, the specific errors in that document must be identified in writing and formally condemned, much as John Paul II did in Veritatis Splendor with various theological errors (indeed, some of them repeated later by Francis). We all know there have been bad popes in the past, so why are we embarrassed to admit that we have had one of the bad popes in our own lifetime? Honorius was solemnly condemned and anathematized, multiple times, by councils and popes, for errors much less numerous and grievous than those of Pope Francis.

Several of your books have been translated into Spanish, such as Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright (Spanish here). In them, you often talk about the faithful. Is the liturgy something the faithful should passionately care about and not just a matter for priests?

Yes, of course. While the clergy are supposed to be the “experts” (and how I wish they knew their own expertise better!), the liturgy is the prayer of the entire Church, it belongs to all of us in our respective roles. As Newman said, the Church would look pretty foolish without the laity.

The trouble, it seems to me, is that the reformed liturgy of Paul VI creates both a clericalism of choice and performance on the part of the clergy and a paradoxical activism-plus-passivism on the part of the laity: either they are supposed to be busy doing clerical things, or they can sit back and be spoon-fed easy content in the vernacular. There is no sense of taking ownership of tradition through interior prayer and, for example, reading one’s missal and singing the Gregorian chants.

The old rite truly involves the faithful in a very profound way. It is more demanding and more fulfilling. There is more to know, to ponder, to wonder about, to admire, to lose oneself in. I believe that wherever the faithful discover (or rediscover) the old rite, they come alive again as Catholics: they begin to be proud of their heritage and want to understand it and defend it.

You are a composer and a choirmaster. In Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence (also in Spanish, here), you have talked about those three “gifts of God.” Do you believe sacred music should be a fundamental part of any liturgical renewal?

Yes, I agree with that, because sacred music is not just an add-on to liturgy, it is worship itself, in the mode of song. At least this is true for Gregorian chant, which is nothing but the liturgy sung. For sixty years we have had a lot of singing at Mass, but very little singing of Mass; and too often, clownish and sentimental songs have denuded the rite of any dignity, elevation, or splendor. Wherever the chant and the polyphony return, so does seriousness, decorum, noble beauty, reverence, a sense that we are stepping out of this realm into the world to come. The great sacred music is an artistic prostration before the majesty and mystery of God.

What is the role of silence in liturgy and has that role been neglected in the past sixty years?

In the old rite, whether you are looking at a low (read) Mass or a high (sung) Mass, nearly all of the silences are natural or organic ones—they happen only because the priest is busy with quiet prayers or activities at the altar. The result is a saturated, alluring silence, one that makes you want to pray.

In the new rite, which is so noisy and verbose, silences almost never happen unless a priest makes up his mind to sit there for a while and do nothing (e.g., after the homily, or after communion). This is a dead silence, where everyone’s just waiting till the priest gets up and carries on the harangue. In my opinion, there is no true silence in the new rite, regardless of how many pauses or intervals there are in between modules or exertions. The modern world, as Cardinal Sarah has said, is notoriously devoid of silence, and I regret to say that the Catholic Church was not only the greatest custodian but also the chief executioner of this precious good.

In other books, such as The Once and Future Roman Rite (again in Spanish, here), you defend that the post-Vatican II liturgy cannot properly considered the “Roman Rite.” Does that mean you reject Benedict XVI differentiation between an ordinary and an extraordinary form of the Roman Rite? If so, what do you propose instead?

Let me make a distinction. Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum found a legal solution. It created a canonical “fiction,” this unprecedented idea of two “forms” of the same “rite,” to avoid the bizarre situation of suddenly having two separate rites for the same body of clergy. He wanted, after all, to give all the Latin clergy the permission to celebrate either, and rather than grant tens of thousands of priests biritual faculties, he simply legislated that there was one rite with two expressions or forms.

However, theologically, historically, above all liturgically, there is no possible way to say that these are not two separate rites. As I show in one of that chapters of Once and Future Roman Rite, the Tridentine rite and the Byzantine Divine Liturgy have more in common than either has with the Novus Ordo. Only from a 30,000-foot altitude can you say they are the “same rite.” Those who would like to see the details of my argument should consult that work.

In that context, would your objective be just to go back to the Summorum Pontificum situation (pre-Traditionis Custodes) or rather to progress beyond it?

Given what I just said a moment ago, I think Benedict’s solution was a clever canonical makeshift or workaround for a very challenging situation—there never have been two rites competing, as it were, for exactly the same ritual space. He was trying to bring peace without excessive violence. He wanted to create an open space for clergy and faithful to do what best suited them in the freedom of the Holy Spirit and with mutual respect. His solution was, in that sense, typically modern, one could almost say libertarian, and yet made room for the recovery of tradition, which is anything but modern. He knew from personal experience that too many treasures were hastily, indeed iconoclastically, discarded in the wake of the last Council, and he sought a pragmatic, low-pressure, grassroots avenue for their recovery.

It seems to me that Pope Francis’s smashing of Summorum Pontificum—against (as we now know) the advice of a super-majority of the world’s bishops—is one of the most heinous and despicable acts of his pontificate, one that will go down in infamy in the annals of ecclesiastical history.

If Leo XVI wishes not to share in that infamy, he should at least restore the pragmatic modus vivendi of Benedict XVI.