I recently attended vespers performed by the School of Sacred Music in New York City . It was part of their current series “Midwinter Light” (through March 3). Like several of their other performances, the evening was cosponsored by another organization active in the arts, in this case, an art gallery/Catholic arts collective:

Arthouse 2B

“Arthouse2B is a multidisciplinary group of artists cultivating Catholic arts renewal in NYC. Our aim is to restore culture through restoring the heart of the artist.”

The music was beautifully sung in the acoustically and architecturally fitting surroundings of St George’s chapel (Episcopal). The vespers followed in general the Novus Ordo, but most of the texts were sung in Latin.  The English translation of the texts provided in the handout, however, was not the Novus Ordo texts, but a much more poetic version.  The vespers proceeded in a quasi-liturgical manner: lit candles were on the altar,  the singers were vested in cassock and surplice,  and singers and “congregation” followed rubrics of standing and sitting.  As far as I could ascertain no ordained minister of any denomination was present. 

I confess that the School of Sacred Music is in some respects still mysterious to me. They describe themselves as being “in the Catholic Tradition” and have sung in, for example, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Notre Dame Church (near Columbia University) and St. Joseph in the Village. Yet up till recently their main venue was the General Theological Seminary (Episcopal) in Chelsea. Indeed, last year they came close to leasing part of the seminary, but the deal was quashed when seven Anglican bishops objected. It seemed to them that such a “Roman Catholic” organization as the School of Sacred Music might be insufficiently attentive to LGBT inclusion.

Bishops oppose General Seminary’s long-term lease with choral music school over LGBTQ+ inclusion concerns

But now the School has resumed its performances – but in an Episcopal chapel. I would have thought their use of the Novus Ordo would have opened the doors of one of the parishes of the New York Archdiocese. But perhaps in the current environment of the Roman Catholic Church the mere use of Latin raises too many issues.

Yesterday afternoon, an audience was treated to a delightful concert given by talented young musicians from the Julliard School. This concert featured baroque string music of Italian and British composers in the British Isles. The musicians were Lydia Becker on baroque violin, Amanda Barenek on triple harp, and Nathan Frisco on baroque cello.

In talking with these musicians afterwards at the reception we found out about a new chamber ensemble in New York called The Higher Word Orchestra to which some of them are connected. From their website “We are a 30-member Catholic and Christian Orchestra that showcases the beauty of Catholicism through music, revealing the deep connection between faith and melody.” We hope to hear more about this promising young group soon.

St. Mary’s Youth Schola Registration is open for Spring 2025
First meeting: Thursday, February 6, 2025 (4:00–5:30 p.m.)

A program of musical and faith formation based on Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony, with weekly classes on Thursday afternoons from 4:00–5:30 p.m., plus singing opportunities at parish Masses (2–4 per semester). Open to ages 8–18; young men with changed or changing voices are welcome!

Fee: $125/semester (multiple-child discounts available)
Faculty: Charles Weaver, Nicholas Botkins, Elizabeth Weaver

Find out more and register at: stmarynorwalk.net/youth-schola-program

By Marie Cabaud Meaney

(Marie Meaney has summarized for us the presentation she gave on November 9, 2024 for the St. Hugh of Cluny Society. SC)

Biographical Introduction

Simone Weil is not someone one might expect to hear about at a society centering on the liturgy. For this French philosopher was not a Catholic; she came from an agnostic, Jewish French family. Only in the aftermath of several mystical experiences did she come close to the Catholic Church (though she had already felt attracted to the liturgy earlier on). But she had
always had a great sense for beauty and its significance; and after encountering Christ, the supernatural became the focus of her thought. Hence, I believe she can teach us something about these matters.

In hindsight, she thought that she had always been Catholic de facto, if not de iure. For she shared the Catholic worldview, always sought the truth and the good, lived charity to a heroic degree, chose poverty, and embraced chastity. As she would come to see later on, she had loved God implicitly and obeyed His commands without knowing Him – thus proving Christ’s prediction that at the Last Judgment some who did not know Him will be surprised to sit at His right hand for having served Him.

For a long time, she had embraced agnosticism, believing that the human mind could not reach God. That God would descend to man came as a complete surprise to her in November 1938. It was when she was reciting George Herbert’s poem “Love” that “Christ came down and took her,” as she writes in her famous autobiographical 4th letter to Father Perrin (to be found in Waiting for God).

Though astonishing, this mystical encounter had been prepared in various ways. There were three “contacts” with Catholicism that truly mattered. During the academic year of 1934-5, she had taken time off from teaching to be employed among factory-assembly line workers to understand from the inside their working conditions. Attracted to Communism, she hadn’t kept
her concern for the oppressed on a purely theoretical plane but wanted to gain insights based on experience in order to find workable solutions (she would later criticize Communism scathingly). Given her bad health and natural clumsiness, the work on the assembly line was particularly
grueling for her. She came out of this experience, broken in body and soul. As she writes: “There I received forever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves.” To recover, she went with her parents on a holiday
to Portugal in September 1935 where she witnessed a religious procession in a poor fishing-village, perhaps on the feast-day of Our Lady of Sorrows. The people were singing hymns of such “heart-rending sadness” that “there the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others,” as she explains. This was not a Nietzschean position about the weak resenting the strong and trying to control them through a restrictive morality, but rather the realization that Christianity recognizes suffering by showing affliction’s true face as Christ’s Passion.

In the Spring of 1937, she travelled to Italy, where, in Assisi, “alone in the little twelfth-century Romanesque chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, an incomparable marvel of beauty where Saint Francis often used to pray, something stronger than [her]self compelled [her] for the first time in [her] life to go down on [her] knees.” Though her kneeling-down was not yet prayer, it was a definite step in that direction, i.e. the implicit acknowledgement of someone infinitely holy and good calling for this posture of reverence.

A year later, in 1938, she spent Holy Week at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes, which is famous for its wonderful liturgy and Gregorian chant. Non-believers were known to go there for the beauty of the liturgy. She writes: “I was suffering from splitting headaches; each sound hurt me like a blow; by an extreme effort of concentration, I was able to rise above this
wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words. This experience enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of
affliction. It goes without saying that in the course of these services the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all.” That Christ’s Passion left its mark on her came through the liturgy and implies already a kind of union with Christ through the Cross.

There too, she was introduced to the Metaphysical Poets, and in particular to George Herbert’s poem “Love III” depicting a dialogue between the soul and God, ending on a Eucharistic note. She would recite it during her violent headaches, thinking it was merely a beautiful poem without realizing that it “had the virtue of a prayer.” As she succinctly states: “It
was during one of these recitations that… Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”

After this, everything changed and nothing changed. Everything changed in that she now knew that God existed; hence, the supernatural was going to become the main focus of her philosophy. Nothing changed in that she’d already led a highly moral life – so there was no moral turnaround. Nothing changed in that it didn’t lead her to engage in any steps towards the Catholic Church, nor did she start to pray. A mystic who doesn’t pray is a surprising combination, nay even seems like a contradiction in terms. But she was fearful of auto-suggestion and therefore resisted giving her intellectual assent to her experience for the sake of the truth, knowing that “if one turns away from him [Christ] in order to go towards the truth, it will not be long before one falls into his arms.”

But this changed, when she decided with Gustave Thibon in September 1941 to learn the “Our Father” by heart in Greek. Thibon was a thinker and gentleman farmer whom she met during her exile in the South of France, where she had fled from the Nazis with her parents to the unoccupied zone. Remembering her promise a few weeks later, she did so, reciting the prayer
from then on with the utmost attention at least once a day. Each time, she would have another mystical experience, where her spirit was transported beyond time and space, where she experienced a silence “which is more real than a sound,” and where “Christ is sometimes present in person.” And after having met the Dominican priest Joseph Marie Perrin in June 1941, who raised the question of baptism with her, she went to mass every Sunday, and often daily. Weil also frequently spent hours in Eucharistic Adoration.

The question of baptism haunted her for the rest of her short life. She left France with her parents for the US in May 1942, though she would have preferred to stay in France, to continue helping in the Resistance and suffering with the oppressed and persecuted. She applied for and
obtained a position in the Free French Government of General de Gaulle in London. She arrived in the UK at the end of 1942, but died on August 24th, 1943 from tuberculosis, overwork, exhaustion, and malnutrition. 1)

I will now turn to Weil’s reflections on beauty that are significant in and of themselves, but also in terms of their importance in the liturgy, even if she didn’t reflect much on the latter.

Beauty

Every time we experience authentic beauty, “there is a real presence of God,” Weil writes in her notebooks, for “it is like a kind of incarnation of God in the world of which beauty is the mark.” “Beauty is therefore nothing else but God who comes to seek man,” as she states in “God in Plato.” More precisely, the beauty of the world is that of God Himself, rendered graspable to the senses, while all other beauties are reflections.

When you ask people to define beauty, they have a very hard time doing so and will often say that it’s in the eye of the beholder and therefore purely subjective. Or they will state that the experience of beauty is due to a chemical reaction, such as hormones set in motion. But even
without a reductionist approach, one can find it difficult to capture it in words. It is not surprising therefore that “when one reflects on the beautiful, one is stopped as by a wall.” Weil therefore sternly states in her notebooks that “Everything that has been written on this is miserably and obviously insufficient, for this study needs to start with God,” for the simple reason that beauty is God. By taking Him out of the equation, one ends up doing injustice to it.

Beauty is “a reflection of the supernatural in the natural,” which doesn’t mean it exists disassociated from us (Prechristian Intuitions). For it occurs as a relationship between our senses and this world. It is meant to be enjoyed by human beings and even by all rational beings in the universe to whose sensory perception it is geared, is Weil’s claim. But beauty is real and of its own kind (sui generis). It cannot be explained by anything else but itself and is its own criterion.

Beauty as Sacrament

Yet beauty has an incomparable role to play. Weil even compares it to a sacrament, since it unites God and human beings. Without beauty, therefore, human beings would be lost. Those who have never experienced beauty “could perhaps reach God by no other means.”

Though there are a number of openings to the supernatural, “the beauty of the world is almost the only way through which one can let God penetrate” people’s lives in the West, as she writes in “Implicit Forms of the Love of God.” Yet, “the white race has almost lost its sensitivity towards the beauty of the world.” If it was bad in Weil’s day, one wonders what she would say
today.

But this sense of beauty, “even if mutilated, deformed, and sullied, remains indestructibly in the heart of man as a powerful motive.” If rendered “authentic and pure, it would transport in one fell swoop secular life at the feet of God” and make a “complete incarnation of faith” possible.

However, this isn’t easy, for it means abstaining from using beauty for one’s own gratification. Therefore, “only those can be saved,” she states in her notebooks, “that something compels to stop when they would like to approach that which they love, those in whom the sense of beauty has put contemplation.” This detachment is motivated by beauty itself, by the
realization that beauty is fragile, at least in this world, and can be destroyed and debauched. It implies a renunciation of one’s selfishness or a “decreation,” as Weil calls it, that comes down to a painful death to self.

Beauty and the Liturgy as Metaxu

Beauty is one of the metaxu, the bridges or “holes” in the fabric of our artificially secularized world, that lead to the supernatural. The supernatural is obviously not the demonic, but is “that other reality,” namely the absolute good which turns out to be the triune God, Love
itself.

It has its own laws that can be drawn up and are just as certain, if not more, than scientific laws. If someone directs all his attention and love towards the absolute good, then he will eventually perceive it; it will “descend upon him” and shine “through him upon all that surrounds him.” However, this will not happen primarily through perception or reason (though these can confirm it) but through the heart, of which Pascal already said that it “has its reasons which reason does not know.”

Another manner to get to “touch the supernatural,” another metaxu, is through the liturgy. In a time where people have lost their roots, the liturgy is key to give them back these roots, as Weil states in “Le christianisme et la vie des champs.” In “Human Personality,” she compares the human person to a tree that has roots both in the sky (the supernatural) and in the earth (their culture, traditions, and history) that have so often been lost through industrialization and secularization. The supernatural is often accessed through those cultural roots: through customs, art, literature, architecture. But when these have disappeared, been disfigured, or remain
inaccessible, then the supernatural in the form of the liturgy becomes even more essential in helping people grow these roots again (though Weil mainly thinks of farmers in “Le christianisme,” it is applicable to all).

Conclusion

The cult of ugliness seems to reign everywhere. Unfortunately, beauty has often even been removed from our churches and our liturgy. But the beauty in the liturgy is essential, as Weil is implicitly saying, in drawing people back from the secularized and uglified universe they live in, giving them roots to grow and the capacity to understand what life is truly about – not a comfort-zone that tends to our desires and need for distraction, but a heroic choice between good and evil, for God or against Him.

 © Marie Cabaud Meaney

1. All quotes in this section were from Weil’s fourth letter to Perrin that is to be found in Waiting for God.

For more elements regarding Simone Weil’s thoughts on the supernatural, see my analysis in: https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/spaziofilosofico/article/view/9964

For Weil’s thoughts on beauty, see my chapter in the forthcoming volume: Amazon.com: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Simone Weil (Bloomsbury Handbooks): 9781350341623: McCullough, Lissa (Editor)

Registration for the annual Women’s Retreat, which is scheduled for March 21-23, 2025 at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, L.I.,  is now open.  The Retreat Master is Fr. John Perricone and is sponsored by Agnus Dei Knights of Columbus Council.  130 women were in attendance last year. If you intend on coming, it is recommended that you reserve a spot sooner rather than later. Please contact Dan Marengo for more information and instructions on how to register. danmarengo@aol.com. Register by March 3.

Solemn vespers as celebrated yesterday at the “Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral.” (Fr. Enrique Salvo, Rector). Fr. Armando G. Alejandro, Jr. of the Ordinariate was the officiant. There were some very familiar names among the ministers and servers….

The music was an extraordinary selection of what might have been heard on a Marian feast in Mexico City in the 18th century. Mr. Jared Lamenzo led the schola and orchestra.

Join us for solemn Vespers with chamber orchestra at Old St. Patrick’s in New York City, celebrating the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe with music composed for the great cathedrals of Mexico, including works by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, Manuel de Sumaya, Ignacio de Jerusalem, and Santiago Billoni. The event also features Fr. David Michael Moses as guest preacher, and concludes with Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

Please note the Society of St. Hugh of Cluny is co-sponsoring these Vespers.

Once again last October, the Coetus Internationalis Summorum Pontificum assembled in Rome for its annual pilgrimage to Saint Peter’s Basilica. I want to add a few observations to what has already been reported. Our own photographic record can be found on this site. 1) The number of participants, primarily of the laity, happily continues to increase. Furthermore, a considerable number of clergy participate.  In this respect, it is nothing like the American “National Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage” in Washington on October 8 of this year, where no clergy were present. This year the Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage proceeded with relatively few glitches (aside from the unanticipated closure for restoration of the church of Santi Celso and Giuliano in front of which the pilgrims assemble on Saturday before setting out for St Peter’s.) 

As far as I could tell, the serving clerical bureaucracy of the Catholic Church in Rome remained totally absent  – except for one scowling ecclesiastic who stared at the procession as it passed him the street. In this very week, of course, the Synod on Synodality, the face of the official Catholic Church,  was reaching its (preliminary) end. Its recommendations would open the door to a whole world of potential further change.

 Paix Liturgique organized its customary conference prior to the start of the pilgrimage. Despite all the distressing developments,  the atmosphere was positive and enthusiastic, free from polemics and apocalyptic emotions,  Speakers from Spain, the UK and Nigeria told of their encounters with Catholic tradition. Indeed, in the first  two cases their acquaintanceship dates only from the last several years! In contrast,  John Rao,  well known to us here in New York,  took us back to the 1970s and the first stirrings of the traditionalist movement in the United States. Cardinal Gerhard Müller gave a most moving and impressive presentation. In conclusion, Christian Marquant, President of Paix Liturgique, spoke enthusiastically and eloquently of the present dramatic situation of traditionalists in the Church: “They have lost, but we have not yet won.”  Traditionalism remains alive and well, yet it remains the target of continuing official disdain and relentless persecution.

At the Paix Liturgique conference: Cardinal Gerhard Müller (above); Prof. John Rao (below).

As always, the Saturday procession to Saint Peter’s attracts great interest from bystanders  – some of whom even give signs of approval. Like last year, at the direction of Pope Francis,  the final act of the pilgrimage has been limited to a solemn procession to the main altar followed by benediction before the altar of St. Peter’s chair.  The ceremony and music were splendid; Cardinal Müller preached eloquently on the significance of the city of Rome, of the Christianized Greco-Roman culture it exemplifies and of the historic role of Saints Peter and Paul who are buried in this city:

If ancient Rome was the idea of peace among peoples under the rule of law, Christian Rome embodies the hope of universal unity of all peoples in the love of Christ

…

Do not, therefore, build the house of your life upon ideologies devised by men. But upon the rock of personal friendship with Christ in the divine virtues – faith hope and love – so that you may then be able to say with St. Paul: I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and delivered himself for me.” (Gal 2:2))

The concluding service of the pilgrimage – a Solemn Mass for the Feast of Christ the KIng – was held in the FSSP church of Santa Trinità. Its dimensions are grossly inadequate for a congregation of this magnitude – to secure a seat one has to arrive an hour or more earlier. That’s a trial especially for families with young children. Of course, at the same time in Rome other, far larger, churches stand virtually empty. That one of these could be made available to this pilgrimage – as opposed to the Anglicans or Copts –  is, at this moment, perhaps a fantasy under the current papal regime.  Despite the discomfort, the solemn mass, celebrated by bishop Eleganti, was exemplary.

So this year’s Roman pilgrimage makes one very clear statement to traditionalists: you are not alone. An increasing number of individuals and countries are joining this pilgrimage. And the pilgrims’ attitude is not embittered, but relaxed, confident, enthusiastic – and also composed and prayerful. Inspired by this commitment, I am “cautiously optimistic” for the fututre.

1. “Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage, Solemn Procession to St. Peter’s,” The Society of St. Hugh of Cluny (10/31/2024); “Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage in Rome: Solemn Vespers in the Pantheon,” The Society of St. Hugh of Cluny (10/29/2024)

On Saturday October 26, pilgrims to the Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage in Rome processed to St. Peter’s Basilica led by his Excellency Marian Eleganti, bishop emeritus of Chur, Switzerland.