Guardini's Ghost

In a recent post about so-called liturgical professionalism, I wrote a great deal about why we need to reorient ourselves toward a deeper knowledge of the beauty of the liturgy. As such, I’ve decided that in keeping with the liturgy that I ought to start with, well, The Spirit of the Liturgy. So this brief essay, with no clear direction, will examine some critical points written by the late Romano Guardini. Guardini, an inspiration to the great Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (the late Pope Benedict XVI), makes a very astute claim about the liturgy when he rightly observes: “The liturgy is and will be the ‘lex orandi.’ Non-liturgical prayer must take the liturgy for its model, and must renew itself in the liturgy, if it is to retain its vitality.” This insight forms the backbone of a broader reflection on the contemporary liturgical landscape, especially in light of the growing, indeed, booming, popularity of the Tridentine Mass according to the 1962 Missal, whose resurgence remains both intriguing and controversial.

Our law of prayer, our lex orandi, is inextricably tied to the way we worship–obviously. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council themselves affirmed this when they called the Eucharistic celebration “the source and summit of all Christian life.” Rightly so. For the liturgy not only shapes our devotional life within the sacred walls of our churches on Sunday, but it also forms the very lens through which we navigate the world beyond them. It stands to reason, then, that our private and communal prayer is profoundly shaped by our worship—and this, I think, explains the draw so many feel toward the older form of the Mass. It is an invitation to more, both in the physical and metaphysical.

The Tridentine liturgy demands more from us. It captivates the senses. It's ancient Gregorian chant that drones on like a river of prayer, its billowing clouds of Roman incense, its somber silence and ritual precision, draw us into a profound awareness of the sacred. It is not a spectacle, but a school of interiority. This is not, I hasten to add, a dismissal of the Novus Ordo, which has borne abundant fruit and continues to yield canonized saints whose lives are household testimonies of holiness. I will contend, however, that it does not shape the interior life with the same intensity, the same subtle and sustained pull toward contemplation, that the older form seems to achieve almost effortlessly.

Guardini, for better or worse, gestures toward this reality in his writings. The popularity of the old liturgy today is not, I would argue, merely nostalgia for a bygone age, though if you have attended a Latin Mass, you may indeed feel as though you have stepped into another time. Rather, it is something deeper: a movement of the Holy Spirit, who, in every age, stirs up new vitality. In our age, it seems that vitality relies less on rational comprehension and more on sensory immersion, less on control and more on a holy unawareness that draws us deeper into love of God. This might sound contrary to my most recent essay, though I contend otherwise. It is, in fact, an opportunity to recognize the “sacred mysteries” that are at play. We are not meant to be able to fully comprehend the mass itself–transubstantiation is, in itself, incomprehensible to man because it seems some kind of divine magic trick. This invitation to grapple with the liturgical experience is one that is undoubtedly rooted in the spirit of the age to some degree, which is to say that our unawareness and unlearnedness point us to something higher.

Again, Guardini notes, “The changing demands of time, place, and special circumstance can express themselves in popular devotion; facing the latter stands the liturgy, from which clearly issue the fundamental laws—eternally and universally unchanging—which govern all genuine and healthy piety.” That is to say, popular piety—often taking shape today around the Tridentine liturgy—is not antithetical to the needs of our time but perhaps arises because of them. At the time of the Second Vatican Council, the Church discerned a need to adapt or to breathe anew into her liturgical life. But now, over half a century later, we may be in need of yet another renewal instead of a rejection of the Council, but a deepening of its call.

Too often, this position is caricatured as a veiled rejection of the Council documents or of the Spirit that guided them. I propose something different. Our time calls not for a backward glance, but for a forward fidelity. It begs of us an attentiveness to the kind of worship that forms ordinary people to live extraordinary lives in quiet faithfulness. What is needed is not nostalgia, but a sober re-evaluation of what actually sanctifies, what truly evangelizes, and what most authentically reflects the mystery we claim to celebrate. There is a growing desire to rediscover the depths of Catholicism, not as a comfortable majority faith, but as the demanding, minority tradition it has often been: a faith rooted in Scripture and the tradition of the Fathers, with all its insistence on suffering, its call to asceticism, and its unflinching command to pick up the cross laid lovingly upon our shoulders.

In the end, as Guardini so beautifully puts it, “The prayers of the liturgy are entirely governed by and interwoven with dogma. Those who are unfamiliar with liturgical prayer often regard them as theological formulae, artistic and didactic, until on closer acquaintance they suddenly perceive and admit that the clear-cut, lucidly constructed phrases are full of interior enlightenment.” That is precisely the point: the liturgy does not merely instruct, it illuminates. It opens the soul not only to the truths of the faith but to the subtlety with which those truths shape our very way of seeing the world. And perhaps in this moment, the return to the old forms is less about resistance than it is about rediscovery—a rediscovery of light, of beauty, and of the God who is encountered in both, and whose presence, though veiled, is no less real.

—In Corde Mariæ—