St. Stephen’s Church, New York

Lob der Lourdes-Madonna
From Der Ultramontane (Sankt Ulrichsverlag, Augsburg 2012)

I saw the Lourdes Madonna for the first time in the house of a winemaker of the Rheingau when I was a small boy. While my parents tasted wine below in the kitchen, the daughter of the house, who was my age, showed me the rooms in the upper story. The bedroom of her parents lay there in solemn, cool stiffness. The feather-beds were amply stuffed and hard as if they were filled with cement. The pillows had a sharp crack in the middle, which divided them into two stiff huge ears. There she stood on the dresser opposite the bed like an ice princess amid the austerity of these surroundings. Nevertheless, she was oddly vivacious with her small, delicately made-up, pretty face. My mother laughed ironically as I told her about the statue which seemed so beautiful to me: she said she was a “dresser saint.”

I soon saw, however, the next Madonna of Lourdes in another location. She was somewhat bigger than the one in the rural bedroom. Then I saw another which was very small—scarcely larger than a chess piece. However, she always had the same inclination of the head and the same flowing folds of the white garment, which was neither a dress nor an ancient tunic. It certainly was not something which one could have taken off at all, but had grown together with the body. I learned that each individual Madonna of Lourdes that I encountered was an emissary of a great Marian nation that had settled all over the world. Her body had singular proportions: the legs had to be exceedingly long as if sketched by William Blake or Füssli; the upper body was flat and no feminine swelling could be seen. The face was childlike, with a polished, noble forehead and Raphaelesque symmetry—I suppose a little bit too symmetrical, because everyone knows that even the most beautiful faces are never that symmetrical. The blue sash waved lightly and the folds of the garment were pressed against the body as if by a current of air. These features gave her figure the quality of motion, with the result that she seemed to float towards the observer. Even though one indeed saw feet in little slippers under the hem of her skirt, the statue really resembled those Japanese ladies in waiting, who conceal their feet and walk on the hems of their kimonos. Even though all the statues which I saw were painted with thick oil colors like a carousel horse, it was obvious what material was used to make them: plaster. Very often they were a little bit chipped—and thus the white, dry and grainy plaster would peek out from underneath the paint.

In the ancient churches of France, which had been pillaged during the Revolution and, more often poorly than properly, restored in the 19th century, a small plaster nation could always be found placed against the walls and intended to replace the smashed gothic statues. There was St. Louis, the Curé of Ars, the Maid of Orléans, and of course the Madonna of Lourdes. Here she had company into which she could fit. But in the German Baroque churches with their preserved, splendid decorations or in the modern cement churches she was an alien. She was generally installed with a little embarrassment in a small side chapel near the entrance. The people, however, didn’t seem to notice the embarrassment—usually too many candles burned before her. Plaster was not the only material used. There was also a clay Lady of Lourdes and a glass one used as a container for water from Lourdes. In this case, the stopper was shaped into a crown.

In the hallways of monasteries half-wilted Usambara violets and a grateful cactus bloomed at her feet. Yet her real home was an artificial grotto, related to the Baroque sea-shell grotto of princely palaces. For Our Lady of Lourdes had appeared to the little shepherdess Bernadette like an ancient spring nymph in a grotto. This now has been re-erected out of pumice-stone in many locations — landscape architecture fit for an electric railway. Everywhere there were grottoes of Lourdes, not only in the Vatican next to Renaissance Palazzetti, but also in the center of wild and violent metropolises: in Cairo and New York; in Seoul and Bogotà. Usually they could be found in churchyards where the incessant honking of the stream of traffic sounded somewhat softer: a natural collage before skyscraper walls. And before these caves there always stood a few people even when the church was closed. Red carnations in cellophane bags were attached to the fence which surrounded the grotto, and candles also burned here as the people gazed into the darkness of the hollow where, high above, the white-varnished statue stood like a Catholic Queen Louise of Prussia. 1) The big, blue mantle of the classical image of Mary had shrunk to the light-blue sash. The sash was like that blue ribbon which adorned the white diapers of baby girls before the American pink ribbon replaced it. Why I asked myself, hadn’t Our Lady of Lourdes already appeared a few hundred years earlier to the greatest of all religious painters, Fra Angelico the Florentine? What would Fra Angelico have been able to make from this white flowing, blue-girded dress—can one not see it before his eyes? However, she came later, really already in our era, because her mission here was different. In any case she apparently did not intend to become a work of art.

The ironic laughter of my mother back then had told me: in our milieu, among educated, art-loving, scholarly people, the Lady of Lourdes was not taken seriously. It was kitsch. Kitsch has been a beloved word, one that is nothing short of necessary in aesthetic judgments. It is not a very old word since it first appeared around 1860—didn’t kitsch exist before then? Was there nothing in the 18th century poorly imitated, tasteless, soullessly epigonous, dishonest or untruthful? Perhaps all those things existed, but there was no kitsch. The idea of kitsch presupposes the final end of the assurance of taste in handiwork, that is to say an inherited instinct of taste, that is able to divine from a material, familiar from time immemorial, the laws of correct proportion that reside therein. Industrial production, no longer bound to any laws of the material, has become supreme. However, man himself is slower than the technological development. In his dreams and his standards he remains, really even to this day, rooted in the preindustrial millennia stretching back into gray antiquity. He lulls himself with seductive ideas: is the departure from the traditional conception of beauty, from the proportions that grew organically from the material, really so final after all? Can’t one adroitly combine the advantages of the old era with those of the new? And produce beauty in the old sense of the word or even art with the machine—does it have to be per se so inimical to beauty? And do it with much less trouble and greater perfection? And for so many more people than previously, when art, in wrongful exclusivity, was reserved only for the few? Thus began the mass-produced pressings, castings, and dieings of Lady of Lourdes statues—and by no means not just of them.

It is truly an experience to encounter for the first time such a Marian herd in one of the thousand religious-goods stores of Lourdes: a cloned nation of devout worshippers, in sizes ranging from two meters to two centimeters. My experience consisted not just of a mild case of the creeps at the sight, but also in the insight that this abundance of Madonnas does not detract from the vision of the Madonna. On the contrary, doesn’t Our Lady in the Catholic world appear to us in duplicate? Aren’t all the various black Madonnas and those of Guadeloupe, of La Salette, of Altoetting, of Kevelaer and of Pilar, and of Pompeii and of Loreto always different and always the same? In contrast, in my visit to a grand sculptural workshop in Carrara, I had the chance to see the David of Michelangelo in its original size twelve times, one standing after another. It was an order of an American Hotel chain. This destroyed Michelangelo’s David for me and he still has not yet recovered from this cruel treatment. One sees that “kitsch” is a complicated subject. It is a symptom of many things, even of societal anguish.

The bourgeois social climber—and who isn’t one—fears kitsch because he could be seen exposed in his lack of taste—our impoverished and minimalistic interiors speak also of the anxiety that through greater opulence, if possible, we could fall into the kitsch trap and find ourselves convicted by the petty bourgeoisie arbiters of taste. That of course can’t happen to someone in his empty room. But kitsch is strong and in our world survives even the strictest preventative measures. We have long since recognized austere kitsch, sour kitsch, Green kitsch, the kitsch of concern and the kitsch of authenticity. Each of these variants is much more difficult to detect and requires a considerably more polished sense of taste to order to discover than the Madonna of Lourdes in her defenseles, naïve innocence. The Madonna of Lourdes does not defend herself but she can offer protection: Cordelia Spaemann, the deceased wife of the philosopher Robert Spaemann, said that the devotional kitsch of the pilgrimage destinations, with the Madonna of Lourdes leading the way, is the bulwark, with which the blasé aesthetes (she speaks of the “riffraff of aesthetes”) can be kept far from the sanctuary.

Let us therefore push aside with due roughness the whole question of kitsch in regard to the Madonna of Lourdes and see directly the plain fact that there has not been one single artistic or handmade creation in the entire twentieth century, which was as clear, universally understood, capable of crossing national and cultural boundaries, functional in the liturgical sense and identifiably Catholic as the Madonna of Lourdes. Her anonymous creator possessed the same form-endowing genius as the creator of Mickey Mouse or the designer of the Coca-Cola logo. Wherever the Madonna of Lourdes stands there is the Catholic Church. In view of her power of self-assertion—and how sweet is this power!—every judgment of taste concerning her shrinks to mere unimportant personal opinions of beauty and ugliness.

At the beginning of the second millennium, the Latin Church disengaged from the tradition of images of the ancient Church—at first gradually but then ever faster and more emphatically. It is worth recapitulating once more the steps of this way in a few words. One has accustomed himself to see this path as a great liberation from the prison of prescriptions and limitations; one has frankly celebrated the development of religious art as the history of progress. In the beginning was the icon, and the icon was governed by strict laws. The icon fixed strictly the appearance of the saints, above all that of the Panhagia and of the Redeemer, in rigid, irreversible rules and prevented every subjective interpretation. The icon thoroughly renounced the sense of space and plasticity of representation long-since attained by Hellenistic painting and strove for two-dimensionality. The coloring of the icon was similarly rigidly established. What the colors of Christ and Mary were; what colors befit the world of the Old and New Testaments; which drapery corresponded to which representation in what situation; what attendants, props and symbols might appear or, rather, had to appear were removed from the personal decision of the painter just like the prayers he had to recite while rubbing the colors or applying the layers of paint on the wooden panel. These icons were not just the pious decoration of a church, but sure signs of the Godly presence of the same rank as the consecrated hosts in the tabernacle. This two-dimensionality was not artistic incapacity, but a sign that the represented figure no longer belonged to the sphere of the carnal world but, through the window of the borders of the icon, looked out from eternity into the earthly world.

Let us set aside the question why the Latin Church left the community of pictorial tradition with the Greek Church—it is enough to say that She did and struck out on the path of a great, exciting adventure that led painting to ever new triumphs. Whether that was also an advantage for the liturgical image is another question. Everyone knows the steps of this liberation: Giotto’s conquest of a new kind of corporeality initiated a process through which over the centuries all phases of each contemporary transformation of biblical figures and biblical themes had to quickly pass. The artists at times change into self-willed theologians, who make their personal interpretations of the Passion of Christ the foundation of their pictures. They become storytellers who also do not shy away from the anecdotal. They take the biblical material as a bare pretext for ever more brilliant painting. They become theater or even opera directors who fashionably stage the stations of the life of Jesus. They sublimate or trivialize the lives of the saints and let them take place on stages of clouds or in the pits of cellars. And after all of that had been tried and the so-called emancipation from the church lawgiver had finally and completely taken place, the official rupture finally came: Western art took leave from her hitherto most generous and most patient Maecenas and turned to other missions. An intimidated and bewildered Church remained, who, unawares, saw Herself pushed away from the aesthetic mainstream of the time and found Herself banished to the remainders of the art business, pale reflections of the changing contemporary fashions.

That the special Western path of religious art has ended, that the liberation of Church art and its deliverance to individualism and subjectivism has led over centuries of corresponding development to a fundamental separation of Church and art has still not yet been properly received by the upper levels of the hierarchy, the pontifical councils for art and similar reverend institutions. However, it has been received for a long time by the faithful. Without the need to issue catchwords and slogans, a change of the veneration of images took place which one could label as “reiconization.” The multi-national people of the Catholic Church has turned to holy pictures, which are not works of art and do not want to be such. Goethe didn’t know how right he was when he wrote in “Roman Elegies” in sneering undertones: “Miraculous paintings are mostly only bad works of art.” Idols are plainly not works of art, and when they are, like the big icons of Byzantium and Russia, they are like them only incidentally. The Orthodox would probably refrain from calling the Lourdes Madonna an icon because for them, the fact that it is a statue stands in the way. The Orthodox rely upon the Old Testament prohibition of pictures—precisely of Simulacra, the plastic representation of gods. However in the nontechnical sense, one may still call the Lourdes Madonna an icon, the icon of the West, created by an anonymous hand, establishing a new standard, a perennial vision, in her capacity as a mass-produced article, radically nonindividualistic, absolutely nonsubjective. She is as far distant from the grand old art of Europe as she is from the art of the twentieth century. For tenured art critics of the 19th century she was art for servant girls, for West European experts of liturgy of the 20th century she is only fit for Poles and Africans. That is a good sign for her ability to live on.

We have called the Lourdes Madonna an icon because of her appeal which can’t be compared to any other work of art made for a church in the twentieth century. The Lourdes Madonna has a justified claim to the honorable title of icon, however, for even more profound and important reasons. In two respects, from her very origin, she corresponds to the highest demands made on true icons. A true icon seeks the ideal of immutability, the pushing back of opportune, personal, and ingeniously inspired things. This does not represent an oriental, anti-individualistic disposition, of an almost Egyptian rigidity, but is intimately linked to the origin of Christian painting and its special requirements. Before the very beginning of Christian veneration of images and painting stands the gigantic, already-mentioned hurdle: that prohibition of pictures of the Old Testament, declared in the second commandment—not simply a prescription of worship, which pertained to the time, but a law spoken by God Himself. For the early Christians, who came from the Jews in no small part, the commandment possessed all the greater obviousness, when the religion of the heathens, in its superabundance of statues of gods, was plainly a religion of images. We know that even Christianity was bound to become a religion of pictures, but it needed an authorization thereto, that could not have been spoken by men — God Himself had to annul that prohibition of pictures, and He really had annulled it. St. Paul had first pronounced that Jesus Christ was “God’s picture.” The God who became flesh permitted that human visual perception could possess His image. That was indeed only one aspect of His multifarious self-offering to man.

And yet the fear would have been insuperable to paint the man Jesus just like the unique, beautiful mummy-portraits of Faiyum created in near-by Egypt during His lifetime, if there hadn’t been a picture of Jesus, that didn’t originate from human hand and remained as testimony to the time on earth of the redeemer. I am speaking of that canvas, which Goethe in “West-östlichen Diwan” calls “the cloth of clothes upon which the likeness of the Lord impressed itself.” This shadowy impression, this mysterious picture, which was created not by artistic methods, without a brush and colors, without a portrait-staging, stands at the beginning of all Christian painting. This cloth of cloths is the foundation for the typus (normative image – translator) of Christ, which was conserved for hundreds of years, until Michelangelo broke free from it in an act of violence. Here lies the basis for the strict form of the icon: the icon is based on a likeness established by God himself — who would dare to lay hands on it? The notion remained alive in the Christian East that a liturgical picture, a picture for the service of God, always should be one created by God Himself and received, not made, by man. Here one recognizes icons of special dignity, which, according to tradition, are not painted by the hand of man—they are known as “acheiropoetos” and they radiate out to many icons, created by nameless painters, which really also had to be “acheiropoetos” and which in every case were painted according to the example of such pictures.

Is it not amazing how closely the Lourdes Madonna corresponds to this view of the Christian image — this product of industry, that at first appears to stand in the sharpest possible contrast to the venerable pictures of early Christianity? It depends not on artistic invention but on the vision of a saint, who described how that “white Lady” (as she said) approached her in a cave, so as to introduce herself (in the dialect of the Pyrenees) as an “Immaculate Conception.” Not, it is to be noted, as the immaculately conceived one, but the abstract concept in human form, as the incarnation of the word. And following the description given by the shepherdess, a modeler in a religious-goods factory or perhaps even several such men, whose names with high probability no one any longer can discover, created this statue as the “vera icon,” as the true image of the appearance, which since has been produced hundreds of thousands of times. She is truly “acheiropoetos” with her nonindividual features, like a doll, similar to every man and no man, as befits the first human of the new creation, the perfect new Eve. Who dares to maintain that we deserve something better?

Martin Mosebach

(Translated by Stuart J. Chessman. Translation by kind permission of Martin Mosebach)

1 A queen of Prussia, born in 1776 and who died in 1810. A revered figure often depicted in neo-classical attire. (Translator’s note))

St. John Nepomocene, New York

Der Ultramontane – alle Wege führen nach Rom

(The Ultramontane – all Roads Lead to Rome)

By Martin Mosebach

Sankt Ulrich Verlag

Augsburg,  2012

 

It’s safe to say that no other work advocating the Traditional liturgy has had the worldwide impact of Martin Mosebach’s Die Häresie der Formlosigkeit of 2002. Now, after ten years, Martin Mosebach has published a second collection of his non-fiction dealing explicitly with matters Catholic. I say “explicitly” because a deep Catholic sensibility underlies all of Martin Mosebach’s work. In Die Häresie the essays all revolved around the question of the liturgy; in Der Ultramontane (“The Ultramontane”) Mosebach deals with a broader spectrum of issues agitating the Church today.

The very title is a confrontation with the Catholic Church of Germany. In no other country is the anti-Roman and anti-papal rage so widespread as in Pope Benedict’s own homeland. In the country where any other expression of patriotic feeling is taboo it is only in relation to the Roman Catholic Church that nationalistic sentiment flourishes. The list of demands by Catholic theologians, clergy and laity aired almost daily in the media will be familiar: recognition of divorce, abolition of clerical celibacy, women priests, homosexual marriage, greater ‘democracy” in the Church etc. The German hierarchy either avoids confronting the attacks or not so subtly cooperates in enabling the protests. Against this attitude Mosebach professes Ultramontanism: the notion that every Catholic by his loyalty to a specific man – the pope – is a member of two jurisdictions or communities. He cannot give absolute loyalty to the German state and its current ideology. Mosebach thus cleverly links the current battles with persecution of the Church by Bismarck’s Prussia in the 19^th century – the Kulturkampf – a struggle waged against the despised Ultramontane supporters of the pope. He points out once more that the papacy has prevented the creation of closed, totalitarian states in Europe – an observation made as early as the 18th century regarding the caesaropapism of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II.

 

In several of these essays Mosebach enters the lists in favor of Papacy and Pope Benedict. He defends the Pope on the recognition of the FSSPX, on the absence of “democracy” in the church and the sexual abuse scandals. It is clear, however, that by Ultramontanism Mosebach does not mean a return to the  pre-Conciliar regime centered on the Papacy. In He is after all just the Pope, Mosebach speaks of  the salutary limits of papal authority – that infallibility is nothing but the submission of the Pope to Tradition. Now that is a concept with which even the Orthodox can get comfortable.

 

As in Die Häresie, Der Ultramontane shows the versatility of Mosebach’s style. There is straightforward polemic such as By Their (Piddling) Fruits you will know them: Six Theses on the Reform of the Liturgy. In 2004, like a kind of Ultramontane Martin Luther, Mosebach spoke out alone for the Traditional liturgy at the Katholikentag (Catholic congress)  – Germanchurch’s progressive love fest. Or the “discussion paper” On the Value of Forbidding dealing with blasphemy – an ever increasing phenomenon in Europe, mostly directed against the Christianity – often by “artists”. Here Mosebach considers that it may well be advisable for the state to legally restrict blasphemy – and that it may not be so bad that outraged Muslims have given blasphemous artists a good scare.

Mosebach also employs a more poetic discourse, such as in the essays on Rome and Lourdes. The reader can here get an idea of Mosebach’s skill as a travel writer. In a short but marvelous evocation of the eternal city, the author focuses on the omnipresent ruins of the past. This is the true Rome – the spolia of past ages surviving into the present: not set apart in museums but aimlessly scattered about or even reused for utilitarian purposes. Mosebach even advances the thesis that the construction of  St. Peter’s in the 16^th century was, in a certain sense, a sin against  the true spirit of Rome – as embodied in the age-old Constantinian basilica it replaced.

The friend of the Traditional Liturgy will also find much that will interest him.  In addition to the Six Theses there is The Old Roman Missal between Loss and Rediscovery – a profound reflection on the liturgical history of the last 40+ years.  In On Prayer, Mosebach argues powerfully for the significance of repetition in prayer – especially in the rosary! – and of maintaining correct posture.

I particularly liked Mosebach’s essay on the Lourdes Madonna.  Mosebach starts from the time when,  as a young boy in pre-Conciliar times,  he  began to encounter the Madonna of Lourdes: first,  on a dresser in the house of a friend of his family, later,  nearly everywhere.  Mosebach then develops an entire theology of the image out of the contemplation of a mass – produced statuette often despised – especially by the artistic pundits of  the Church in Western Europe. The author links the Lourdes Madonna with certain icons of the East the originals of which were considered  as “not made by human hands.”  As an attempt to reproduce  a vision, the Lourdes Madonna falls into the same category. It is a true icon of the West.

In sum, Der Ultramontane offers a treasure trove of insights on liturgy, theology, art, Church government and contemporary spiritual issues. All is short and sweet, reflecting the concise style of a true master of prose. Der Ultramontane does not repeat platitudes or reinforce received opinions  – it will make you think.  Mosebach often returns, as a Leitmotiv of this work , to the   “dual loyalty” of the Catholic: to the country/regime in which he lives and to the Church as represented by Rome. What outraged liberals of the Bismarck era or contemporary German Catholics is nevertheless central to our identity as Catholics.  And is this not a quintessentially Catholic theme dating back to the time of Augustine?

We of course would wish that Der Ultramontane be translated into English as soon as possible. That should not be that hard – some of the ground work has already been done. One of the essays has already been translated on this website; several others on Roger McCaffrey’s The Traditionalist.  Martin Mosebach himself presented, in English,  The Old Roman Missal between Loss and Rediscovery first in 2010 in Colombo, then in 2011 in New York – it can be found on the NLM.  And one essay, on the election of Pope Benedict, appeared first in English in the New York Times/ International Herald Tribune!

(above) St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church New York

Martin Mosebach and the Madonna of Lourdes
By Dr. Alexander Kissler

How can you recognize a conservative revolutionary? What would he have to do not to be a mere historical phenomenon? He would have to stand in contradiction to the “spirit of the times” from carefully thought out reasons. He would have to love the Present so much that he wants to overthrow it with the means that the Past offers. He would have to have been saturated with that which he opposes and to yearn for that which once was – and therefore speak more or less like Martin Mosebach did on the “Artists’ Ash Wednesday” in the Munich Muffathalle.

 The Cardinal  Archbishop gave the invitation. Artists, employees of the diocese and PR-people had come and stood at bar tables in the hall which is usually used for pop and rock concerts. There were pretzels, bread, sandwiches and water. High up on the walls of both sides of the hall were TV screens which later showed a stream of dark colors with blue dominating. Up front were chairs for the invited and sometimes aged clerical VIPs. In front of them was the stage and above it a screen. It offered a film about ten minutes long which recorded how a dance troupe threw ashes on the floor of the Cathedral of Our Lady in Munich – and then danced on them.

 When the lights came back on in the hall, Mosebach presented his “In Praise of Our Lady of Lourdes”, a daring undertaking. The Madonna of Lourdes doesn’t have a good reputation among those “educated, art-loving and literate people” precisely “in our circles” which Mosebach now identified as his own background, and which was probably that of the majority in the hall.

 The “West European liturgy experts of the Twentieth Century” – criticized by Mosebach in his lecture – and the “higher levels of the hierarchy, papal councils for the arts and similar venerable institutions” – likewise criticized by Mosebach – have also passed judgment. The Madonna of Lourdes is kitsch and should be repudiated.

Mosebach did not dispute this judgment but took it seriously. Yes, that could very well be so. But how is it then – so runs the author’s cunning reflections – that the same experts and councils and hierarchs don’t have any problem with other forms of kitsch?  For example, with the “barren,” the “sour” and the “green” kitsch, with the kitsch of “concern” and that of “authenticity?”

 Hardly a single contemporary expert in art and/or ecclesiastical art flies into a rage over “concrete churches.” Rather, among them it is the “small, sweetly made up doll face” of the Madonna of Lourdes that becomes the symbol of resistance.  The “believing people” rise up with her against the imposed “individualism and subjectivism” to which modern art has been abandoned. With the Madonna of Lourdes popular piety rebels against compulsory abstraction and thus practices a powerful “re-iconification” from below. The Madonna of Lourdes is the icon of the West.

What distinguishes an icon? That it does not owe its existence to the invention of an artist, that it doesn’t even want to be art at all, but rather is of divine origin.  So it is with the icons of the East that derive from the “cloth of cloths” with the countenance of Christ. So it is with the icon of the West which originated with the visions of Bernadette Soubirous in 1858. Since then, wherever the Madonna of Lourdes stands there is the Catholic Church. In the face of such power of assertion – and how gentle is this force! – every judgment of taste regarding her shrivels away to highly petty, personal feelings of attraction or repulsion.

Moreover, in the East an icon is always made according to “strict laws;” it is “always another and yet always the same.” It banishes all that is contingent in favor of fixed forms and accordingly has a downright anti-subjective character. The Madonna of Lourdes is the same. These icons are revered by the people as a conscious renunciation of individualism, but are regarded with suspicion by the theologians and artists of the West.

In this way, according to Mosebach, Our Lady of Lourdes heals a break in cultural history. A thousand year old  “special path” (Sonderweg) of the West – the renunciation of the “Tradition of the images of the Ancient Church” –  ends with the white woman in the attitude of prayer, bearing the rosary over her folded hands.  One can therefore conclude that the so often ridiculed Madonna of Lourdes anticipates a unity which does not (yet ) exist theologically. She is the pledge of the hope for a reconciliation of the Western and Eastern Churches of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and ultimately its preemptive real presence. Spe Salvi!

But doesn’t the fact that she is the industrial product of the assembly line speak against this smiling lady, who is usually made of plaster? Mosebach concluded his talk with this utterance of crystal: Yes, she, the Madonna of Lourdes, is indeed a mass produced image, but  “who dares to assert that we deserve anything better?”

St Francis Church New York

 

Translated by Stuart Chessman. By kind Permission of Dr. Alexander Kissler. Original of 03/05/2012 HERE.

 

 

By Dr. Alexander Kissler

(We would like to bring to the attention of the English-speaking public some of the works of Dr. Alexander Kissler, a prominent German journalist and cultural critic).

Weilheim is located in the “Pfaffenwinkel” (the “Priests Corner”: a region of Bavaria where innumerable monasteries were located up to 1803 – Trans.). Not far away, Lake Starnberg whispers softly to itself; the Grosse Ostersee and the Ammersee also entice the visitor. A dip in the road follows every rise, and from every meadow the guest sees an onion-shaped tower, a bell-tower, a church tower. It smells of grass and earth – and now and then of battle. For up for discussion this evening in Weilheim, Upper Bavaria, is nothing less than “the Church between Tradition and the Future.”

The author Martin Mosebach was invited under this rubric for the conclusion of the first “ Weilheim Questions of Faith.” Did he eventually regret the long journey from Frankfurt? Two hours in the “Meeting-House” became an illuminating but not amusing blueprint for the future. A future that is in the process of becoming reality and which restores passion, conflict and drastic frankness to the ecclesiastical realm. The era of compromises and “double bind” substitutes for communication is over.

To start off, Martin Mosebach read from the first chapter of his “Heresy of Formlessness.” It is the history of a man who grew from a forced consumer of Gregorian chant to be a participating apologist of the Gregorian mass. It is the history of a liberation that in 2007 broadened in scope to a Church-wide renaissance when Benedict XVI confirmed with legislative authority the equality of the old Gregorian and the new reformed Mass.

For many of those present just the reading from the book itself was difficult to endure. There was muttering every time Mosebach contrasted the organic character of the older from of the mass, whose beginnings “are lost in the obscurity of history” with the constructed character of the 1970 work of reform. But in the discussion opinions completely split. Little groups left the hall, some quietly and some slamming the doors. At the end maybe 100 to 120 people remained. To judge from the applause, the friends of the Latin Mass obtained a narrow victory.

In his argumentation Mosebach was clear as crystal, not conciliatory. Enraged, many men and three women – “children of 1968 like all of us” (Mosebach) – contradicted him. The man who spoke up first was so agitated that he wanted to storm out of the hall after delivering his accusatory staccato. Mosebach urged him to at least listen out his answer. Wrapped up in this questioner’s chopped phrases was a statement that the prayerful gathering of the community is that which is decisively Christian in the liturgy – not its form. Mosebach, however, informed his discussion partner that precisely that view is a caricature of the 19th century. Christ becomes present in worship, not in the community.

More and more forcefully Mosebach affirmed and completed and intensified his positions. The Mass is no mere recollection of the Last Supper but “epiphany” – the passing by of God. The first mass of all took place not in the room of the Last Supper but on Golgotha. Christians know their faith and don’t need to hear it in the mass, so verbose didactics are out of place here. No more refined statements regarding God can be found than in the texts of the Old Mass – and only those of the old Mass. The devastating years after the Second Vatican Council, with the collapse of the faith, have spoken the worst possible judgment on the Council – even though there is not an iota to criticize in the texts themselves. Rather it was the German bishops, in open opposition to the council who imposed communion in the hand and celebration of the mass versus populum. Pope Paul VI, who gave his approval to the postconciliar reform of the liturgy, regretfully has to be called a tyrant in the specific Greek sense of a disruptor of tradition.

Martin Mosebach is the prototype of a committed layman, who with his scholarly rage exposes the normal colorlessness of this cheap label. Usually the “committed layman” is a half-educated critic of the institution. His involvement aims at expanding and therefore perfecting the dominion of the political in the Church. The “committed layman” as a rule desires more of himself, and the World even more so. Martin Mosebach wants the opposite. Concentration instead of diffusion, sacraments instead of politics, hierarchy instead of pluralism.
Bewildered, a lady at last declared that she wondered whether there wasn’t more to say on the occasion of the evening than this or that liturgical observation – whether Mosebach had no other theme. Martin Mosebach answered tersely: “No! – first of all, for me there is no topic other than the Mass.” For it can be said that everything, literally everything in the present world and in future generations will be decided by whether, for one last time, the Christian faith is stabilized in its worship.

May 30, 2011.
Translated by Stuart Chessman: translation by kind permission of Dr. Alexander Kissler. See the original on his website.

Freedom is restored to the Old Rite: Martin Mosebach on the recent papal letter on the Latin liturgy
By Paul Badde
(Die Welt, May 23, 2011)

Four years ago, Pope Benedict XVI, against the opposition of the great majority in the Catholic Church, restored the old Latin liturgy to equality with the new vernacular form of the celebration of the mass, which had been mandated since 1969. (The Latin liturgy substantially dates back to Gregory the Great (540-604) and was finally authoritatively fixed by the Council of Trent (1545-1563).) A week ago, the Vatican, in a papal letter, reaffirmed its determination of 2007 and clarified some disputed questions regarding its practical application. Martin Mosebach, the recipient of the Büchner prize, is one of the most fervent admirers and defenders of the old Liturgy.

Die Welt: In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI, in a special motu proprio (an apostolic letter), freed the ancient Gregorian liturgy for the Catholic Church. Why does the Vatican publish instructions four years later on how the will of the pope is to be implemented?

Martin Mosebach: The enemies of the great liturgical tradition of the Roman Church in many cases have not accepted the permission given to the Old Rite. They often tried to ignore the pope’s motu proprio and sought to maintain obstacles. They tried with bureaucratic methods to render ineffective the pope’s generosity. Therefore, the Vatican had to be clearer if it wanted to maintain the motu proprio.

Die Welt: The Instruction speaks of “two usages of the one Roman rite.” Doesn’t this open the door to a creeping new schism?

Martin Mosebach: There’s already a schism, not between supporters of the new and old rites, but between those Catholics who adhere to the old sacramental theology of the Church as was solemnly confirmed by Vatican II, and those who assert that Vatican II founded a new Church with a new theology and new sacraments. This latter doctrine has been diffused wholesale and against the better knowledge of its promoters, in the seminaries, universities and Catholic academies. This is what has fostered the danger of a schism.

Die Welt: “What was sacred for prior generations remains sacred and great also for us as well; it cannot be suddenly prohibited altogether or even judged harmful.” The Instruction cites here the pope. But wasn’t this the intention of the overwhelming majority of the Catholic bishops in the last 40 years?

Martin Mosebach: Yes, it is regrettably true that a not small part of the Catholic bishops, in a suicidal frenzy, attempted to separate from the Catholic Tradition and to cut the Church off from the source of her vitality. In the sentence you have cited, the pope has given them some tutoring in ecclesiology.

Die Welt: How can the Roman liturgy in the “usus antiquior “ be offered today “to all the faithful “ if only a fraction of the faithful understand Latin?

Martin Mosebach: At all times only a few Catholics have been able to follow the Latin Mass word for word. Europe looks back on well over a thousand years of glorious Catholic culture without the people being able to understand Latin. They understand something more important: that in the rite the Parousia – the mystic presence – of the Lord takes place. Without this understanding, a person has understood nothing of the Mass, even if he thinks he understands every word. Moreover, for a long time there have been wonderful bilingual missals with which we can pray the mass with the priest. But it is indeed correct: the Old Rite requires a certain effort, a readiness to learn.

Die Welt: And how will precisely the promotion of the “older” rite further “reconciliation within the Church” after it has led to so much conflict until now?

Martin Mosebach: The conflict essentially is due to the misunderstanding, so perilous for the Church, that Vatican II established a new Church. The struggle surrounding this misunderstanding must be endured to the end. Covering it up with peaceful phrases doesn’t help the Church.

Die Welt: Pastors are invited to show “a spirit of generous welcome” to groups of faithful who would like to celebrate the Old Mass in Latin. Isn’t this naïve after the last few decades, in which such faithful were considered hopelessly old-fashioned and retrograde?

Martin Mosebach: Indeed, the faithful, who have adhered to the Old Rite or have discovered it just recently, were reviled in manner that, I hope, is not revealing of the spiritual worth of the reform. Karl Rahner’s words have not been forgotten: the opponents of the reform of the mass are “tragicomic fringe elements, frustrated by humaneness .” Today, however, one surprisingly finds a great deal of understanding for the cause of Tradition among younger priests.

Die Welt: That the pope personally changed the old Good Friday petition for the Jews satisfied hardly a single critic or opponent. Doesn’t the new Instruction stir up the fire once more?

Martin Mosebach: The critics of the Good Friday prayer perceive the insistence of the Church that Christ is “the Truth” as creating scandal. But the Church must endure this anger. She cannot deviate from this conviction.

Die Welt: Now priests can once more celebrate mass by themselves (or with the assistance of a single server). Isn’t that a leap back into the age when the concept of “communio” had only a shadowy existence in the Catholic Church?

Martin Mosebach: The concept of “communio” never had only a shadowy existence in the Church. The “communion of Saints” is , after all, even an article of faith. The community of which the Church speaks, however, is much more than the people actually present. It is a community with the dead and with the angels – but it is especially a community with Jesus Christ. Experience teaches that this community can be intensively experienced in the old form of the mass and even especially in the low mass – in any case, for many people better than in the post-conciliar form, characterized by incessant talking and the singing of questionable songs.

Die Welt: The training of priests is supposed again to “offer the opportunity of learning the extraordinary form of the rite” to theology students. But who will teach it? There are, after all, almost no teachers left.

Martin Mosebach: There are a number of Traditional priestly societies which view as their mission the imparting of the old liturgy to young priests. One only has to turn to these priestly societies and ask. They are happy to provide information, but until now have been impeded by many bishops.

Die Welt: What surprised you the most in the new Instruction?

Martin Mosebach: What surprised me is how determined the pope is in the question of liturgy. In any case, he has created the legal prerequisites for returning the Old Rite to complete freedom. No bishop who would like to impede the Old Rite can cite legal reasons any more.

Die Welt: And what disappointed you the most?

Martin Mosebach: It was disappointing for me that the great rite of the old ordination ceremony can from now on only be celebrated in Traditional monasteries and priestly societies. It is a pity that this spiritual treasure, which defines the priesthood so exactly, is to be lost to the universal Church – at least for the time being.

Die Welt: How do you respond to the criticism that the debate over liturgy overlooks the plight of the Church and the world?

Martin Mosebach: The plight of the Church is precisely that she has forgotten where her center lies. Her mission is to proclaim the living Christ and the living Christ appears in the liturgy. If the liturgy is made subject to the fashions of the day, the living Christ becomes invisible. Then the Church is truly in a crisis.

© Paul Badde
(Translation by kind permission of Paul Badde; translated by Stuart Chessman.)

A short essay by Martin Mosebach, who will be returning to the New York area at the end of next week.  For the schedule of events: “https://sthughofcluny.org/2011/01/visit-of-martin-mosebach.html”

The reform of the liturgy did away with four characteristics of the old Confiteor prayer:

The profound bow in which he prayer was spoken;

The structure of the prayer as a dialogue between the priest and the congregation;

The invocation of various saints by name; and, finally,

The sacramental of absolution.

The profound bow is the oldest part of the prayer. In the early days of Christianity every mass began with the prostration. A person threw himself on the ground in order to approach oriental kings. The early Christians for this reason chose this most reverent form of showing devotion and subjection when they had to enter the presence of the God-man and His sacrifice. At first nothing was said. In the 8^th century the custom arose of saying at this point during the prostration (which had gradually evolved into a deep bow) the confession of sins as it had been prescribed from the beginning for the start of the sacrificial rite of the New Testament.

The dialogue form of the Confiteor derives from the divine office of the monks. It was always exchanged between two neighbors in the choir stalls; one monk confessed his sins to the other – the other monk begged God’s mercy for him. In the pontifical solemn mass of the old rite this tradition is preserved; here the Confiteor is recited by two canons. This form sprang from the insight that most sins against God are at the same time sins against one’s neighbor too, that repentance must lead to reconciliation and that every man must rely on the prayer of others. In order to really acknowledge one’s guilt a listener is necessary. In order that, after the confession, the intercessory prayer of the listener may effectively develop the confessing party is obliged to keep silence. A further element of meaning was added as the relation between neighbors on a bench became a relationship between priest and congregation. The priest, who had been called to perform the sacrifice in the person of Christ, confessed now before the entire community his imperfection and, profoundly bowing, awaited their intercession.  One could say that only this gave him the courage to ascend the altar.

The formula “indulgentiam” which follows the confession of sins and the petitions for forgiveness is an early formula for absolution. The sign of the cross which the priest makes while speaking this prayer has taken the place of imposition of hands. The relationship of this absolution to absolution in the sacrament of penance will not be examined further here. In any case it is clear that the Church regarded the “indulgentiam” as a sacramental that absolves from venial sins. That the celebration of the sacrifice began with absolution was only logical for a cult that had as its object the representation of Christ’s sacrificial death – a death for the redemption of men from the burden of their sins.

These three elements of the Confiteor united the celebrating community with early Christianity and monasticism, made concrete the general confession of sin and revealed it as the first stage of the sacrifice. In contrast to their removal, the replacement of the individual saints’ names through the formula “and all the saints” is the easiest to accept. Heaven appears in these names as a hierarchically structured royal household. At the very top is the “Queen of angels, patriarchs and apostles”, then the “prince of the heavenly hosts”, thereafter the”first of those born of woman” and finally the “princes of the apostles.”  Innumerable works of art have adopted this figurative language in perpetually new forms. Its nucleus is the insight that order is inherent in God’s creation; yes, that God Himself is order. Medieval man could still imagine that even among the saved there are different degrees of closeness to God and different kinds of relation to Him. Did the “reformers” believe at the end that they had to accommodate democratic conventions especially by emphasizing the equality of all “saints” effected by the redemption? Or did they only want to eliminate an intricate gothic frill when they banished from the Confiteor the hierarchically structured procession of saints?

The beauty of liturgical texts often lies in the fact that they disclose meanings on different levels. They move one to meditation and reveal themselves to meditation. The hierarchy of saints appears here as a metaphor for the Divine order in a prayer concerning the confession of sin, thus disorder.  It is not surprising that all representatives of this order have something special to say to the disorder of sin that is revealed to them in the prayer.

The list begins with Mary. She represents the original form of man: God intended man to be what Mary is.  Untouched by original sin and with undefiled virginity, she resembles man on the sixth day of creation: whole, the image and likeness of God, transparent for the unceasing stream of grace.  As Mary is, so must the sinner be. The restoration of the sinner bears the features of Mary in iconic personalization.

The Archangel Michael is linked to the mystery of the genesis of evil. He fought Satan and therefore the source of sin and of every individual sin, which, like its diabolical model, consists in the rebellion against the divine order. But the Archangel Michel also reminds us that the devil has been defeated. He can tempt the individual sinner but never seize dominion over God’s creation. With a glance at the archangel the sinner recognizes the origin and the impotence of his deed.

John the Baptist shows the way of redemption: conversion. It is a spiritual act but must be expressed in activity in order to communicate to the sinner the reality of his decision. Water, which washes away bodily filth, also has to wash the soiled soul. Prayer has to distract from himself the spirit trapped in self-love. Corporal privation has to free the soul from the pressure of habit. John the Baptist embodies the practical steps that the sinner can take if he wishes to free himself from sin.

Peter holds the keys of the kingdom of heaven; he represents the power of absolution of the Church.  He communicates to the sinner who wishes to convert the certainty that true forgiveness will answer his desire – even that this desire often enough will be accepted in place of the act. Christ, the forgiver of sin, is present in Peter and in the Church. Peter himself above all others had experienced His forgiving power. Peter is the sacrament, the unworthy vessel through the power of God flows.

Finally, Paul teaches the condition under which the sacrament develops: the belief of the sinner that Christ can heal him of his infirmities. This faith is a gift of grace. With this gift begins the labor of the restoration of the sinner. The objective of this restoration is man born again in grace. With this the circle is closed. The contemplative proceeded from Mary and returns to her.

In preaching her doctrines the ancient Church chose again and again the path of making them visible in the form of man. The countenance of man gave them a life lacking in theoretical formulations. The figures of the saints as understood by the ancient church are not pious decoration or mass –produced “Roman Plastic cardboard” (as Andre Gide wrote). Whoever believes he can eliminate them without diminishing the teaching of Jesus Christ misunderstands the essence of the Church – which consists above all of these very saints. In the case of the Confiteor prayer, it is these very saints who teach the worshipper to understand his confession correctly. For he will speak it differently when he knows that their eyes gaze upon him.

Martin Mosebach

The presentations by Martin Mosebach and Fr. Uwe Lang (2) given at the recent liturgical conference in Sri Lanka are now available on the website of the Archdiocese of Colombo. (The link we had provided previously to the conference proceedings on the same webiste apparently cannot access these papers.).

The Society is happy to announce that Mr Mosebach will be revisiting the New York area after more than 3 years at the end of January 2011. We hope to be able to give you further details shortly!

The third in a series of interviews this year,in which Martin Mosebach defends the Pope and the Catholic Church against the continuing, relentless attacks as well as stating a short “apologia” for Traditionalism.

An interview with Martin Mosebach by Matthias Drobinski and Tobias Haberl “Sueddeutsche Zeitung Magazin” 5/16/2010, translated for this blog by Stuart Chessman

The author Martin Mosebach is a Catholic and finds that religion has to challenge man – otherwise it becomes trivial.

SZ Magazin: Herr Mosebach, at this moment is your pleasure in being Catholic less than usual?

Martin Mosebach: Without doubt, but at the same time it has been wonderfully confirmed for me in the last few weeks that there is no alternative to the Church.

Are you suffering with or because of your Church?

I suffer with her. It is painful to see the Church, which has the mission to make Christ present, become so morally suspect.

You act almost as if an injustice had been done to an innocent institution.

I don’t understand why the Church is always limited to the men in violet socks in the Vatican, according to the motto: “There’s the Church – here is the people.” The Church is represented by every baptized person. And she is represented mainly poorly by every baptized individual.

Now you are digressing from the mistakes of the Vatican.

No! The sorrows of a Christian consist above all in the fact that he himself is a bad Christian. The failure of the institutions of the Church pales in the face of this.

Not for the victims. Do you also suffer with them?

What kind of question is that? Every feeling human being experiences compassion when he encounters the victim of a crime.

Nevertheless the institutional Church enabled sexual abuse and then concealed it.

Of course the Church didn’t make possible sexual abuse. Individual priests broke their vows and betrayed their Church. The Church itself is a victim of abuse.

What about the Canisius school and Ettal Monastery?

You are referring to the hushing up and concealing of crimes. After Vatican II the Church created an image of herself based not on sin and guilt but on forgiveness, toleration and mercy. It’s tragic that thereby a mood was generated in which such crimes were not taken seriously enough.

Klaus Mertes, the Jesuit priest and rector of the Canisius school, spoke of a “Catholic flavor of sexual abuse.”

That is a bad thing to say. Christianity, after all, introduced into the world the protection of children – against pagan customs but also against all other cultures of the world. Jesus spoke of the fact that every child has an angel who beholds God. And everyone who abuses a child should have a millstone hung around his neck and be drowned. This is the reason the cases of abuse are such a catastrophe for the church: a central concern has been flouted.

Nevertheless the church has concerned itself until now much more with the perpetrators than with the victims.

Because the victims, spiritually speaking, are in much less danger. It is the perpetrators who are in danger of losing their souls. Jesus said that he had come as a physician for the sick, not for the healthy.

This logic must sound cynical to the victims.

Not if they have understood the logic of Jesus. Dying, the twelve-year old Maria Goretti forgave her rapist and murderer. That of course does not mean that punishment may be thwarted. The Church has to always accomplish the impossible. She is always paradoxical. She must be just and merciful at the same time.

It sounds like an impossible balancing act.

But just this overextension is the greatness of the Church. Already at the start of the 19th century Friedrich Schlegel wrote that Islam is a religion that can be realized and fulfilled, while Christianity cannot be fulfilled and often enough stands in blatant contrast to the intentions of its Founder. But precisely here lies the strength of Christianity.

Isn’t it hypocritical to derive legitimacy from inevitable failure?

No – to overextend as a matter of principle prevents the trivialization of Christianity. What can be fulfilled is trivial. The human spirit flags if it does not set for itself unreachable goals.

Celibacy also seems to challenge many priests.

Before the Second Vatican Council a priest had a corset and support – both spiritual and physical – which reminded him every day that he was a homo excitatus a Deo: a man called by God. He wore a cassock with 33 buttons or a black suit with a high stiff collar. He read the Mass and prayed the breviary every day. He was never a private individual, but was tightly integrated in orders and obedience. This has largely disappeared in the modern Church. Today many priests take vacations, have days free from the liturgy and possess a modern apartment with a CD player and flat screen TV.

You grudge them that?

Not at all, they should have everything. This freedom, however, makes it much harder for them to live up to the demands of their office. The priest represents Jesus Christ. How can that succeed if he is absorbed without a trace into civil society?

Isn’t it evidence of incapacity for the faith, if a certain measure of freedom opens the way for sin?

It is evidence of incapacity but it affects us all. If there are rules that we can break, we break them: that is anthropological experience. I admire without reservation every man who wants to be a priest. For him there is no way back, in contrast to marriage which can also fail. He can be unfaithful to his vows, but that makes his situation worse. He carries in such case a heavy burden which he will never get rid of.

Sincerely pious people also advocate the relaxation of celibacy. What don’t they understand?

From a political perspective it would be a catastrophe if, out of weakness and fear, the Church would throw her principles overboard just at this moment, under media pressure. If the Church, contrary to her tradition, wanted to make celibacy optional it could only happen in a situation of strength. Otherwise all floodgates would open. Some priests and faithful would not go along with such a step and a serious schism could happen.

That has existed for a long time, just not officially. Estimates indicate that forty percent of priests do not practice celibacy.

Rules are not annulled because they are difficult to keep. Celibacy is difficult to adhere to, but behind it stands an exalted goal. Priests should rediscover the old sense of celibacy in an ascetic renewal. Not as harassment but as the precondition for a religious life that is radically non-middle class.

The Protestant church has female pastors. In the Bible, women are in the company of Jesus as a matter of course.

But even in the earliest community there were no priestesses. What kind of clericalism is it to believe that only as a priest one can be a complete Christian? The office does not make one a better Christian. The office is service to the community.

Not every bishop views things that way.

Then that bishop views things wrong and he knows that he views them wrong. The pope bears the title servus servorum Dei, “servant of the servants of God.” This Pope especially never forgets it.

Margot Kaessmann, the president of the Lutheran church, resigned because she drove a car while intoxicated. Since then the public has made of her a moral exemplar. Has it acted correctly?

I would be grateful to you if I don’t have to comment on that.

Why?

Because how Protestantism handles such moral problems does not concern me. The matter was just a farce which one can only find amusing.

In the last few weeks one often heard of “the bunch of decrepit old men in Rome.” In the executive suites of business men also are largely among themselves. Couldn’t women exercise a moderating function?

We have had women in leading positions for a long time now but I don’t find that the level of political intrigue, lust for power or brutality has diminished. Think of Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi or Angela Merkel. All of them have waged wars with many dead.

But maybe they could compensate for the conspiratorial and fraternal organization-like aspects of the Vatican.

This reproach against the old men in Rome is almost as old as the Church herself. And at times there is surely something to the accusations. The problem isn’t the men, but the institution itself. Institutions are things at the same time beneficial and terrible. That’s especially true of something as great and serious as the Church which has an eye for God and the whole man as well as a message that far exceeds all human measure. Nobody has thought of anything better than an institution to lead the Church through the millennia.

But can one direct an institution against its members?

That doesn’t happen at all. The criticism of the Pope is coming from the failed Church of the aggiornamento – in other words from the conformist, secularized Church. Let me tell you something: not all Catholics are editors of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung. The first business of the Church is precisely to hand down the gospel through the generations. Only an institution can accomplish this “handing down.”
“I have handed down to you what I have received” says Paul regarding the Eucharist. The institutional Church with St. Peter’s in Rome is the cross that the Catholic Church must bear through history. But without the cross she would no longer exist. Her way must be the way of the cross.

Everyone but you is criticizing the Pope.

No, on the contrary, I admire the Pope. He has the most difficult mission of all: to put an end to the decay within the Church, without orders or dictates, and to restore a new harmony. The media are fixated on alleged failures. These concern a news editor not the Pope. A Pope must not take an interest in such agitation. He is not concerned with the latest news, sensations or bombshells. His concern is to plant with limitless patience a tree whose fruits he himself will never see.

Many say he is nonpolitical and naïve.

John Paul had things much easier. He had a clear opponent: the communist regime. Libertarian consumer society with its trend to social totalitarianism is a much more difficult enemy. In addition, Pope Benedict has to think of all Christians in the world. In China, for example – where right now a gigantic labor of reconciliation is taking place: the elimination of the division between the Maoist controlled Church and the underground Church of the martyrs. It’s an endurance test for both sides. We always think that Germany is the center of the world – that isn’t the case.

One thing surprised us when we did our preparatory research – your father was Protestant.

That’s true. He was a very non-middle class man and always encouraged me to be independent and think for myself. Maybe that is a kind of Protestantism within me, but it is an inverted Protestantism. Luther took aim at a mighty institution; I demand the return of an institution in a formless Church.

Critics consider you a reactionary. One could also call you a radical individualist. After all you demand as an individual the return of the institution and thereby paradoxically advocate the individualization of religion.

Those dissatisfied with the formless Church aren’t all that few anymore. We shouldn’t commit the error of holding our present age to be the final valid one. The only certainty that exists is that all circumstances will radically change. That’s why only having he present in view is so dangerous for the Church. I even say that what especially displeases the present is probably the most pregnant with the future.

You are an adherent of the Tridentine mass. Do you remember your first old mass?

It was with a priest in Hattenheim, an ugly suburb of Frankfurt, in a musty and desolate location. The priest was pastor Hans Milch, a powerful thunderer from the pulpit, a wild, boisterous and eccentric man. He had been discharged by the bishop and had built for himself a missionary hut in this dreadful Hattenheim. Now defenders of the old rite are readily suspected of “aestheticism.” But it was in these surroundings, so remote from all beauty, that I learned that the liturgy builds its own cathedral.

Do you mean that Pastor Milch who sympathized with the FSSPX?

Milch had the characteristics of a genius, but he was too expressionistic for my taste. His sermons ruptured the liturgy.

The content didn’t matter to you?

The cult is always more important than any sermon, however clever. The objectivity of cult is the greatest and most important thing our age needs. The old rite is the Church’s greatest treasure, her emergency kit, her Noah’s ark.

This weekend the ecumenical church convention it taking place in Munich. Are you going to be there?

Certainly not. I don’t have to run into cheerful people with a sect-member’s smile. This is the Reichsparteitag of organized Christianity – dreadful!

What’s so dreadful about it?

The idea itself – like a military review. The sentimental ecumenism. The “we” feeling. What counts in religion is the individual and his personal relationship with God. I find terrible this getting carried away by the crowd. Liturgical tradition breathes a sober, almost reserved spirit. It doesn’t serve as a massage for the soul.

What do you mean by “massage for the soul?”

I mean the Church must be nothing like a health outing. Christianity is not easily consumable. On the contrary, religion encounters man as something foreign, as the “totally other.” She challenges him to leave his place and set out to explore her strangeness and profundity. Religion has to act upon man first as foreign and difficult. Terrible simplification leads to great illusions and finally to a hangover.

She always has to have a plan contrary to the spirit of the times?

That is her most precious possession. The Church is always a counter – society. She is always a crack in the wall of the total present. That binds me to the Church and makes her necessary for me until my death.

What happens to you when you can’t attend mass for two or three weeks?

Then I know that I am living wrong.

What is the matter with you then?

What’s the matter with me? That I have not joined myself to this objective icon. That I have not, for once, disregarded myself and entered into the spell of reality, into a world that doesn’t run according to my laws.

By kind permission of Martin Mosebach.

From “Die Welt Online”
http://www.welt.de/die-welt/kultur/literatur/article7230105/Er-ist-ja-nur-der-Papst.html
By Martin Mosebach
April 18, 2010

Five years ago Joseph Ratzinger was elected the head of the Catholic Church. The Church, rocked by the scandal of sexual abuse, is experiencing now the greatest crisis in her history. Has Benedict failed? The author Martin Mosebach maintains the opposite: The Pope, he writes, is the right man in the right place. Only Benedict’s consistent struggle against the relativism of modern society can rescue the Church from certain downfall.

Pope Benedict XVI has described the hours before the election that raised him to the throne of Peter with these words: “I saw the guillotine approaching.” Nobody knew better than he what would await the new Pope. Nobody but he had a more precise assessment of the four decades that had passed since the end of the Vatican II.

This council holds an exceptional position among the councils of Church history. In the past a council decided a theological dispute which had built up and introduced a phase of consolidation. Vatican II, however, which in its constitutions had largely confirmed the traditional teaching of the Church, initiated a period of theological controversy, of uncertainty, loss of substance and manifest rupture in Tradition.
It wanted to introduce an “opening to the world” but, after forty years, one has to admit that the Church is able to make clear less than ever before her most essential concerns. She has lost the power to advocate her own mission despite transforming herself into the secular domain with the greatest assiduity. Theological chaos had as a consequence that in many countries religious instruction worthy of the name no longer existed. In Germany, Catholic Christianity became an unknown religion also among, of all people, Catholics. Many spoke of a revolution in the Church. Her internal and external appearance had changed so radically that one could hardly speak any more of “development” and “evolution,” those favorite concepts of ecclesiology.

These negative results, however, were hardly able to discourage Benedict XVI. Although he contemplates the course of events with a marked sense for the history of the times, the Church, for him, cannot be grasped using historical sociological or political yardsticks. Benedict believes in the Church as expressed in the Creed. He believes in her direction by the Holy Ghost and in her ability to rise again from a fall. The idea that the Church has experienced a revolution is, for him, a deception even if it is an illusion grown dear to many. There can be no revolution, because the Church of Jesus Christ is committed to the Tradition that she has received. Where there can be no revolution reaction is also impossible.

Benedict as Pope treads a path between revolution and reaction because he holds this way to be that of the Church. This way becomes especially clear in his book on Jesus, which links the discoveries of modern critical readings with the conviction that the martyrs of early Christianity did not die for a philological chimera. In his search for reconciliation with Orthodoxy and among politically split Chinese Catholics he has taken risks impossible for a conservative. A change in the atmosphere means a great deal in the spiritual desiccation of the contemporary Church.

Why do none of these “critical” minds experience any unease when they demand that the Church has to submit unconditionally to the present and its transitory societal ideas? Why should it be only secular civil society that may dictate its criteria to everyone – and also to the Church? In hindsight, from the perspective of ecclesiastical history, the Church has always been in a bad state where it accommodated herself abjectly to the times. The Pope waits to preserve the Church from the continuation of this dangerous condition in the interest of her own future.

Pius X, the canonized patron of the Gregorian chant and the traditional liturgy, was once implored by some zealous pious people to insert the name of St. Joseph, the spouse of the Virgin Mary, into the canon of the Mass among the long number of saints mentioned since time immemorial. “I can’t do it,” was the answer of the Pope. “After all, I’m just the Pope.”

There is no better word to characterize Benedict’s self-understanding of his office. In his view he is “only the Pope.” Already as cardinal, he issued definitions of the dogma of infallibility which are far removed from naïve triumphalism and papal omnipotence: the infallibility assured to the papal doctrinal decisions means nothing other than the subjection of the Pope to Tradition.

When the Pope selected the name Benedict upon his election, what probably pleased him, other than the historical associations connected with the name, was the high number, so that he became the sixteenth Benedict, one in a series of many. Being Pope does not mean for him reinventing the Church and the papacy, but receiving in humility from the hand of all his predecessors that which he must hand over intact to his successor. The Pope is for him neither the accomplisher of extraordinary deeds nor a political figure classified by the categories of preservation of power and gamesmanship. The higher the goals of the papacy are set, the gentler must the Pope act. His view is directed not to the next election but towards the distant future.

What is not understood today can become a stable foundation for the future. Benedict understands his actions as those of a gardener, who does everything to produce fruits that he and his contemporaries shall not enjoy. In the present age, characterized by deep uncertainty and excess, a Pope, who does not let a press alienated from the Church dictate his priorities and doesn’t lose sight of his long-term priorities, provokes outrage that at times turns to hatred. “To be only the Pope,” inseparably bound to a law he did not create – that is an insufferable scandal for a society which wants to understand every value as fundamentally subject to revision.

The moral scandal that, after the discovery of a series of cases of child abuse in the USA, in now shaking the Church especially in Germany and Ireland, is probably the most significant event occupying the Pope on the fifth anniversary of his election.

In the passionate discussion about the phenomenon it should have become clear to everyone that sexual abuse of children in a crime that is widespread in the whole of present-day society and is by no means especially characteristic of the clergy of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the Pope probably takes these acts of individual priests as an evil symptom of the condition of the Church, which after the Second Vatican Council was caught up in the “Movement of ’68.” In so doing she in large measure threw overboard that identity that had been preserved until then through all upheavals.

The New Testament itself proclaimed the protection of children against sexual abuse in a world that had no inhibitions against erotic relationships with children. Protection of children is a genuinely Christian message. A priest who offends against it has therefore not just broken his vows but has also failed in his faith. For the Catholic Church the scandal of child abuse is the sorrowful high point of the post-Conciliar developments. It is the most shameful fruit of the ideology of “aggiornamento” which dominated the last forty years.

Although the Council confirmed once again the traditional theology of the priesthood, little of it remained in the following decades. Priests were urged to abandon clerical garb; the duty to say the mass and read the breviary daily was abolished, the sacredness of the priesthood was denied.

It was forgotten that the evangelical counsels demand, besides chastity, just as pointedly poverty and obedience. The Catholic priesthood is in its essence a profoundly non-bourgeois institution, which is drastically contrary to the civil society values of autonomy and self-realization. This contradiction was, however, perceived as intolerable not only by the society but also by the clergy – especially their higher ranks. Every counter-movement was hopeless, as long as the Church of the aggiornamento (represented in Germany by the long-term president of the Conference of Bishops, Cardinal Lehmann, and by the bureaucrats of the Central Committee of German Catholics) could still bask in the sun of societal approval. Now, after the intellectual and moral gloss of the experiment of aggiornamento has collapsed into embarrassment, it may be possible once more to recall the foundations of the image of the Catholic priest and it to return to traditional principles.

The Pope suffers from the wounds inflicted on the Church by the abusers, and certainly even more so from the venomous attacks on his person which journalistic hangers-on connect with this scandal. But he can be even more hopeful that his invitation to renew the Catholic priesthood will be heard by the upcoming generation of priests. One good sign was the declaration of loyalty which the former secretary of State, Cardinal Sodano, pronounced in an unusual setting – Easter Sunday Mass. In it, he assured the Pope of the loyalty of the clergy. For a long time Sodano, a man of the “post-Conciliar process,” had been an antagonist of Cardinal Ratzinger. Now the point in time has arrived where the old antagonisms are buried; this too gives the Pope hope for his next steps.

It is useless to accuse public opinion of a lack of understanding for the peculiarities of the Catholic Church (although that’s obvious), without admitting that it was the great lack of direction of broad segments of the Church herself which in the decades after Vatican II didn’t want to give an account of the Church’s own priorities. It is hardly fair to expect from laymen, who often enough don’t ever want to be Christians, more knowledge of the nature of the Catholic Church than she herself gave to them. Thus, the crisis of the post-Conciliar liturgy was seen as a marginal problem of merely aesthetic significance even by those who recognized the irruption into the liturgy of banality and forgetfulness of tradition.

The real significance of the liturgy for the Church had been largely forgotten even by Catholics. Moreover, it should have given the unbiased observer pause for thought that the Church had adhered to the Traditional faith of the liturgy for thousands of years until the intervention of Paul VI. The profound, often catastrophic, historical upheavals since late antiquity had been insufficient reason to change the liturgy. Its vital celebration lets one experience even today the character of the founding years of Christianity.

This loyalty to Tradition is rooted in the knowledge that in the doctrine of Christ content cannot be separated from form. The old formula “lex orandi, lex credendi” meant nothing other than that the entire plenitude of the Catholic faith in its paradoxical complexity becomes a perceptible event in the liturgical celebration laid down from her origins. In the religion of divine incarnation there can be, as a matter of principle, no externals. The physical execution of the liturgical acts is understood as pregnant with truth, as satiated with truth. Modifications, let alone new creations in the liturgical sphere will always have as a consequence interventions in the substance of doctrine shelf. That is no theoretical assertion, but has been proved a thousand times over by post-Conciliar experience. In the present-day Church the core concepts like sacrament and priesthood have been obscured often past recognition.

Pope Benedict has been conscious for a long time of this central danger for the Church. The Church is after all not a political party which can throw ideological ballast overboard when it no longer serves the purpose of preservation of power. Her goal is universality, but not at the price of giving up her truth. If this truth is no longer capable of obtaining a majority, then so much the worse for the majority. At the same time the Pope views his mission as calming the theological disorders of the last decades. Therefore he seeks to avoid a sharp change in course. Benedict’s strong historical sense recognizes in the harmful developments which he has diagnosed, not just the personal guilt and failure of the individual parties but also the powerful influence of a mentality typical of this age that cannot be overcome by commands. The wounds that the disorders within the Church have torn open can only be healed gradually. “Patience” is one of most important words of the Pope. He accepts being misunderstood by both friends and foes, and trusts in the gradual development of his thoughts in the future.

A decisive role in saving the liturgy of the Church fell to the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X, a rebellious group of priests gathered around archbishop Lefebvre of France. The bishops of this fraternity had been ordained against the will of Pope John Paul II and were in a state of excommunication. Pope Benedict now abolished the outlawing of the inherited liturgy and declared that the Church never had it in her power to prohibit it.

To the task of rescuing the Traditional liturgy also belongs reconciliation with the five hundred members of the FSSPX. They had accepted great disadvantages in their struggle for the preservation of the liturgy which the Pope now had declared justified. They had developed in the isolation of exile, it must be admitted, in theologically and politically dubious directions. Conscious of the responsibility of the Church for every one of the priests of the FSSPX, the Pope dared a decision of unique courage, provoking without hesitation the incomprehension of public opinion totally alienated from Catholic Tradition. In priestly generosity, he ended the dangerous state of excommunication and trusted in a rapprochement in the spirit of patient and respectful labor of persuasion and an open theological discussion.

The scandal connected with these events concealed for the media the historical dimension of the papal decision. One of the bishops freed from excommunication, the Englishman Williamson – feared in his own order as a vain eccentric- appeared in television as a denier of the murders of Jews in World War II. Because the Vatican press spokesman did not think it necessary to inform public opinion of the spiritual character of excommunication and its lifting, the impression arose that the Pope had wanted to rehabilitate the political madness of this bishop. As everyone knows, the opposite is true. But even if the “breakdown”- as the Pope called the failure of the spokesman- had not happened, wouldn’t one have to have reckoned with the fact that the theological lack of education also of Catholic journalists after four post-Conciliar decades would have prevented the intention of Benedict from being understood? Could Benedict have let a central concern of his pontificate be held hostage by one man whose views he abhorred? The first fruit of the papal decision what that the FSSPX finally succeeded in expelling Williamson from its governing body.

The discussion regarding union with the FSSPX is proceeding calmly and with the spiritual seriousness appropriate to the treatment of theological problems. It appears that the hope for reconciliation with the FSSPX for the future is not unjustified. At the same time we can already identify among young priests at many places in the Catholic world a new sense for the meaning of the liturgy and its connection will the great sacramental tradition of the Church. These are changes that don’t make any headlines: a gradual change of attitude at first hardly perceptible from outside. The way this is happening is dear to the heart of the Pope: as a noiseless transformation of minds, as organic development.

An ancient formula calls in official documents every Pope – regardless of whether he is in the greatest distress or if the historical hour has been favorable to him – as “feliciter regnans: happily reigning.” It could appear that this formula, as applied to Benedict XVI, might have an ironic or even bitter aftertaste.

Is a man really happy or fortunate who unleashes false interpretations with every one of his utterances? Who, as the first Pope since Peter to undertake to read the New Testament with the eyes of a Jew yet is consistently confronted by the accusation that he is an anti-Semite? He who in his Regensburg address initiated the first really profound and extremely fruitful dialogue with Islam and instead is accused of destroying the relationship with Islam? He who has condemned the abuse of children by priests with such severity , as if he had forgotten Christian sympathy with the sinner, is accused of covering up for the evil doers?

The opposite of happiness or good fortune is bad luck. Does Pope Benedict really have bad luck? Can his aides succeed in “selling” the Pope more effectively, as the expression goes, which insinuates that with the right, cunning means one can find a buyer for anything? In the individual case this impression can arise. But when one takes all circumstances into consideration, one recognizes quickly: no, bad luck is the wrong word.

Naturally the memory is present of the public relations success of his predecessor John Paul II, who had conquered all hearts. He led the Church to a presence in the world comparable only to the deeds of the medieval Popes. But it is no secret that behind the dazzling facade the internal condition of the Church for a long time had been endangered to the highest degree. The spiritual undermining had reached threatening dimensions. But is it very cynical to suppose that such a Church was not unwelcome to many of her enemies? A Church that was in the process of losing her religious significance, her otherness, her sacrality? One could get along well with such a Church – the old but still relevant slogan of Voltaire, “Ecrasez l’infame!” could well be set aside for a while.

With Benedict, one feels returning the almost forgotten claim of the Church to truth. It becomes clear that the Pope is serious in his battle against relativism. He wants most of all to win over the Catholics to be Catholic once more. An influential segment of public opinion takes that as a declaration of war and answers: this Pope may not gain one inch of ground. If he were a politician, Benedict would have to be nervous. But the strength of the gentle and cautious man, who rejects the use of the tools of power for himself, is exactly the fact that he is no politician.

He has recognized his mission, he is the only one who can fulfill it, and he is in the right position: isn’t that good fortune – happiness? Therefore, Benedict XVI is, in the full meaning of the words, a “Pope happily reigning.”

Translation by kind permission of Martin Mosebach

The Society will be sponsoring a return visit of Martin Mosebach this fall. The dates will be announced.

A conversation with Martin Mosebach

From The European

The conversation was led by Alexander Goerlich

The European: The reintroduction of the old rite allowed again the petition for the conversion of the Jews, as it was in use prior to the Council. Was that the right step?

Mosebach: When the organic liturgy was permitted again (which had been suppressed, very often violently, under Paul VI) so also was the petition for the conversion of the Jews once again admitted into the official liturgical books of the Church. It dates from early Christianity and forms part of the Good Friday petitions. This early Christian petition, based on wording of the Apostle Paul, contains the wording that God might liberate the Jews from “their blindness” and “lift the veil from their hearts.” These expressions appeared to the Pope to permit the misunderstanding of contempt for the Jews because of recent history. Therefore he intervened when the traditional rite was authorized again and ordered a new formulation in the old rite. It also asks God to lead the Jews to Jesus Christ, but excludes the interpretation of contempt for them. The Pope has been condemned because he permits praying for the conversion of the Jews to Jesus Christ at all. But can the Church of the Jews Peter and Paul be expected to renounce such an intention?

The European: How do you assess the relationship of the Pope to the Jews and Israel?

Mosebach: Benedict XVI is probably the first pope since Peter to understand Christianity so closely from out of Judaism. His book on Jesus reveals in many passages the attempt to read the New Testament with the eyes of the Old Testament. The relationship of the Pope to Jewry is not superficial, political or a mere liking derived from a trendy philosemitism but is theological and rooted in faith. One has at times the impression that if Benedict were not a Christian he would be a Jew. To accuse this Pope of anti-Semitism betrays an ignorance and incompetence that should exclude one from public discourse.

The European: The controversy surrounding the FSSPX has yielded no visible success for the Vatican up till now. In your view what does this group bring to the Catholic Church other than its love for the old liturgy?

Mosebach: Other than the old liturgy? What is there more important for the Church than the liturgy? The liturgy is the body of the Church. It is faith made visible. If the liturgy falls ill, so does the entire Church. That is not a merely a hypothesis but a description of the current situation. One can’t present it drastically enough: the crisis of the Church has made possible that her greatest treasure, her Arcanum, was swept out of the center to the periphery. The FSSPX and especially its founder, Archbishop Lefebvre, are due the historical glory to have preserved for decades and kept alive this most important gift. Therefore the Church owes the FSSPX above all gratitude. Part of this gratitude is to work to lead the FSSPX out of all kinds of confusion and radicalization.

The European: The FSSPX don’t appear to be heading towards Rome.

Mosebach: In the discussions with the FSSPX what is important is the patient labor of persuasion, as is appropriate in spiritual questions. The discussions appear to be proceeding in a very good atmosphere. If one day it is successful in integrating once again the FSSPX in the full unity of the Church, the papacy of Benedict XVI would have obtained a success whose importance exceeds by far the number of FSSPX members.

The European: Christianity is one of the foundations of Europe. In the future will it still be relevant for the continent?

Mosebach: Christianity is the foundation of Europe – I don’t see any other. All intellectual movements of modern times, even when they opposed Christianity, owe their origins to it. We have also received ancient philosophy and art from the arms of Christianity. If European society should turn away totally from Christianity, it would mean nothing less than it would deny its very self. What one doesn’t know or want to know nevertheless exists. Repression cannot be the basis for a hopeful future.

The European: You were in Turkey for a while. Would Turkey enrich the European Union as a full member or is it difficult to integrate a land dominated by Islam into the Western community of values?

Mosebach: You surely understand that I cannot give you a political or legal answer. I can only see that Turkey – especially the anti-Islamic, modernizing Turkey – has had enormous difficulties with its Christian European minorities. Until the 1950’s there was still a Greek-dominated Constantinople. But living together with Christians was intolerable for the modern Turks so they put an end to it. Now they seem to find desirable drawing near to Europe because of economic concerns without, however, rethinking in their internal politics the battle against Christians. I believe that we are very far removed from what you call “integration into the Western community of values.”

Translated by Stuart Chessman with kind permission of Martin Mosebach