Renewal is a word of my childhood; it is not heard so much today. Renewal was what Vatican II was supposed to bring about, and every time there was some positive development, people would point to it and say it was a sign of renewal. It was generally supposed to be something that would happen when the People of God and the Holy Spirit were unleashed. Because we were often told that up until some moment in the past, or perhaps some moment still in the future, they had been prevented from doing their work by outmoded structures, practices, policies or beliefs.
Candidates for the barriers included the Latin liturgy, the discipline of fasting on Fridays and the Church’s condemnation of artificial contraception. This way of thinking may seem like common sense: if you make the Church less mysterious and demanding, you lower the cost of adherence and more people will join, or stay. However, if renewal is really led by the Holy Spirit, then it cannot be brought about by pandering to consumerism, but on the contrary by higher standards of spiritual discipline.
Another way of understanding the old discourse on renewal draws on the parallel with the language of revolutionaries down the ages. If the tyrant is toppled, if capitalism is overthrown or if the colonisers are ejected, then a new era will dawn in which everything will be wonderful. It follows that if everything is not wonderful after the revolution has taken place, some remnants of the old tyranny must remain and more concerted efforts must be made to root them out. We will be able to tell when we have done enough because everything will be wonderful. As a matter of fact, the Soviet Union was never able to declare that communism had been established, precisely because things were not yet wonderful. It was officially stuck in an intermediate state they called socialism, in which the revolution was not quite complete.
There is no need to assume that anyone in the Church was directly influenced by Marxism; these ideas were in the air throughout the 20th century. The circular logic of the revolution was very much to be seen among Catholic progressives: all evidence of failure became evidence that we needed to go further and faster.
The world has lived through enough revolutions by now, one would hope, to see through these arguments. Catholics should have been inoculated against them, not only because of our historical experience as victims of various revolutions, but precisely because of this word, ‘renewal’. Conservative Catholics may shudder at it today, because of what has been done in its name, but it really means the opposite of revolution. To renew something is to make it as good as new again, as it was before some period of decay. It was the slogan of Charlemagne, who had it stamped on his coins: what he was doing was ‘Renovatio Imperii Romani’, the making new, which is to say the restoration, of the Roman Empire.
As Vatican II expressed it, renewal of the liturgy meant, among other things, that “elements which have suffered injury through accidents of history are now to be restored to the vigour which they had in the days of the holy Fathers, as may seem useful or necessary” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 50). Renewal of religious orders meant that they should “let their founders’ spirit and the special aims they set before them, as well as their sound traditions, all of which make up the patrimony of each institute, be faithfully held in honour” (Perfectae Caritatis 2). Renewal of the Eastern Churches meant that “if in their regard they have fallen short owing to contingencies of times and persons, they should take steps to return to their ancestral traditions” (Orientalium Ecclesiarum 6). In the first of these documents, the Decree on the Liturgy, renovatio is used four times, but the verb instaurare and the cognate noun instauratio, meaning ‘to restore’ and ‘restoration’, appear ten times; restituere, to restore, five times; and recognoscere, to check for accuracy, 19 times.
In a number of places these words are commonly rendered into English as ‘reform’, perhaps under the influence of the Italian riforma. The latter is a fair translation, because the primary meaning of the Italian word is the restoration of something to its original form, as opposed to giving it a new form. The English term ‘reform’, on the other hand, has been the watchword of political radicals in the English-speaking world since the 18th century.
The Council proposed that inaccuracies be eliminated and sound tradition be restored, but what this means is open to debate. Restoring the vision of the founder of a religious order might mean going back fifty years, or 1,500 years. The vigour of the liturgy in ‘the time of the holy Fathers’ might mean the High Middle Ages, if St Bernard of Clairvaux was ‘the last of the Fathers’, or the impressionistic account of the liturgy given by St Justin Martyr, who died in AD 165.
There are some clues, however. For example, should Gregorian chant be fostered, as a feature of ‘sound tradition’, or banished, as impeding liturgical participation? Sacrosanctum Concilium is clear: “it should be given pride of place in liturgical services” (Art. 116).
We are all given the perennial task of renewal, not just by Vatican II but by the whole tradition of the Church. In taking this up we must remember that to make the liturgy, and the rest of the Church, like new is to make it like it was of old.
This certainly admits of interpretation, but I would like to end by encouraging readers to do something clearly called for by the Council Fathers and to support Gregorian chant. This year the Latin Mass Society has teamed up with the Schola Gregoriana to organise a programme of chant training days with super-low fees for participants.
If we cannot restore something described by Vatican II as a form of music “specially suited to the Roman liturgy”, then it would appear that we are not ready for renewal.
