St. John Henry Newman: Father of Vatican II—or Godfather of the Traditionalist Movement? (Part 3: Conclusion)

Our three-part exploration of Newman the Traditionalist concludes today with further liturgical topics, absolutely relevant to our current situation. He is, in short, the Doctor of the Church for our times.

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Continuing now with our regular Monday feature . . .

A Church is Like Heaven—or Should Be

We are frequently told by well-meaning modern liturgists that the Mass is a foretaste of heaven and a participation in the worship of the saints and angels. I’m sorry to break it to them, but the experience of most Catholics most of the time seems more like a foretaste of purgatory, and, in any case, suggests nothing of the kingly majesty, lavish beauty, hierarchical order, angelic songs, and aweful silence that the visions of heaven in the Bible or in the great works of Christian art suggest.

A sad parish in the UK named in honor of Newman. He would shudder upon seeing it and ask where a Catholic church was? (source)

Newman’s vision of what heaven will be like is all the more challenging to read in the postconciliar period, when his comparison of it to services in church seems to apply to nearly no Catholic parish except those that have resolutely returned to the traditional Latin liturgy:

Heaven then is not like this world; I will say what it is much more like,—a church. For in a place of public worship no language of this world is heard; there are no schemes brought forward for temporal objects, great or small; no information how to strengthen our worldly interests, extend our influence, or establish our credit. These things indeed may be right in their way, so that we do not set our hearts upon them; still (I repeat), it is certain that we hear nothing of them in a church. Here we hear solely and entirely of God. We praise Him, worship Him, sing to Him, thank Him, confess to Him, give ourselves up to Him, and ask His blessing. And therefore, a church is like heaven; viz. because both in the one and the other, there is one single sovereign subject—religion—brought before us.¹

Such views about the afterlife and the way in which a church service should emulate the state of beatitude would probably be written off today by many as “romantic” or “romanticized,” as much as would be Dom Guéranger’s reconstruction of medieval monasticism, Dom Mocquereau’s reinterpretation of plainchant, or Pugin’s and Viollet-le-Duc’s reclamation of Gothic architecture. Yet what all of these 19th-century geniuses had in common is their strong artistic intuition and lively religious imagination. In short, they were not rationalists and antiquarians, but believers and emulators. This is why they admired the Middle Ages and found inspiration in it to oppose the secularizing spirit of the Enlightenment.

Newman was concerned about the worldliness that ever threatened to creep into the Church, as he complains on one occasion about “the American Church” (i.e., the Episcopalians):