Latest / The Catholic Current / Should We Study the Older Rites? (Fr. Michael Rennier) 4/14/26

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Should We Study the Older Rites? (Fr. Michael Rennier) 4/14/26 · The Catholic Current

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This is The Catholic Current, with Father Robert McTague.
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She's like, I'm a Christian, but I'm not a nut like Matt.
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You wouldn't know it from the way I act.
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And I was just like, oh, that is the worst thing.
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And I was actually worried about her.
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Like, don't even say that, because I just feared that'll play on the movie screen of your life.
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When the judgment comes, yeah.
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Wow.
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As always, let's start with prayer.
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In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
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Almighty God, through the intercession of St. Ignatius the Elder, we ask that you pour forth your Holy Spirit upon us,
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a spirit of discernment, that you might hear your voice and obey your command.
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In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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Well, friends, here we are with a timely Tuesday.
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If you were with us on Friday, you know that I was continuing my ongoing series on tyranny.
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And I had suggested that one of the ways that tyrants work is to destroy libraries,
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so that people are rootless, don't have an access to their heritage, their identity,
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and that makes manipulation easier.
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And I said just as a people should not be rootless, should not be unaware of their heritage,
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I think the same thing is true liturgically.
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That even if you have accepted that since 1969 we have only been progressing from glory to glory
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in the new Pentecost and the new springtime,
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even so, it might be beneficial to study the older rites anyway,
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if for no other reason than to see how much progress we have made.
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And my returning guest, I think, would agree with me on that,
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and I say that because he has written a fascinating article about whether Catholics, all Catholics,
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should study the older rites.
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He is the vice rector of the Oratory of Sts. Gregory and Augustine in St. Louis, Missouri.
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Father Michael Renier, welcome back to The Catholic Current.
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Thanks for having me back.
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Father, I want to tell you a story about my late great mentor, Dr. Paul Weiss,
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who began to study philosophy at the doctoral level in Harvard in the early 1920s.
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He was a non-observant Jewish agnostic who had already made a name for himself in symbolic logic
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and was writing his dissertation under Alfred North Whitehead,
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renowned as a logician himself.
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And he said, here's the way philosophy was taught at Harvard in the 20s.
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In the beginning, there was Plato and Aristotle,
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and then absolutely nothing happened for centuries and centuries and centuries.
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And then absolutely out of nowhere, in a form of philosophical spontaneous combustion,
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there emerged René Descartes.
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But then he met the great lay scholar Étienne Jolson,
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and he read the medievals with Étienne Jolson.
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And in particular, he said it was reading St. Bonaventure with Jolson
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that convinced him of the reality of the transcendent.
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He gave up his study of symbolic logic and became a metaphysician.
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So by analogy, my proposal to you is this,
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was that in the beginning, there was the Last Supper,
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and then nothing happened.
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If anything happened, it was bad.
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Because the Middle Ages, which we know was bad,
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because it's not modern, and it was dark, and so therefore it was bad.
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So from Pentecost until 1969, there was the Middle Ages, that was bad.
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And then, ta-da, the glorious restoration.
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Now I'm sure you've heard that history too.
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What happens if we believe that history, and what happens if we don't?
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Yeah, that history sounds very familiar to me,
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even from my experience outside of the Catholic Church.
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So I converted to the faith in 2010,
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and I was raised as a Pentecostal,
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a sort of a, broadly speaking, an evangelical Christian.
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And we were horribly anti-Catholic.
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And so we rejected all of the developments of the Church.
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We had no doctrine of development.
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The Church history, as I was taught,
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was very much along the lines of what you just described, Father,
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which is that we had this glorious early Church.
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There were the charisms flowing out over everybody,
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miracles were happening, tongues were being spoken,
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the Holy Spirit was vibrant and alive.
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And then the evil Catholic priests showed up on the scene
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and quashed the work of the Spirit.
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And the Church essentially was dead for about 1800 years
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until the Azusa Street Revival and the emergence of the Pentecostals.
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And I was always taught this perspective as a Protestant
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that the way to recover authentic Christianity
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was to go all the way back to the beginning,
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to the primitive era of the Church, first century or earlier.
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And after I became Catholic and started learning more about my faith
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and enculturating and taking on a Catholic perspective,
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I came to understand that this primitivist view
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was completely counter to the doctrine of development.
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So as a Catholic, I'm not meant to look back to the purity,
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the alleged purity of the first century as a complete, right, a completed work.
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Like the Church was all there in those first centuries,
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and any development after that is wrong and evil.
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But as a Catholic, I came to understand we have authentic and good
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and holy and Spirit-inspired development in our theology,
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in our liturgy, in our culture, and everything.
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And so now, fast forward to the scenario you're outlining,
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which is in 1970, we're taught this missile appeared, right,
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and this missile is good because it harkens back to the purity of the earlier Church.
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We have this Eucharistic prayer in there that's very, very early
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and these sorts of things, and it's been stripped of all the developments
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and the accretions of the dark ages.
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And I began to think about that, and I thought,
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this is not a Catholic perspective, right?
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We can make an argument for the goodness and the beauty of the 1970 missile,
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the Novus Ordo, but that's not the way we should make that argument.
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Right. You know, Pius XII, I think it was in the 1940s, 1950s,
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was warning against what he called kind of an antiquarianism.
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And for people who get misty-eyed for going back to a more apostolic Church,
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they never talk about the penitential practices during the Church of that time, do they?
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Right. We're very selective about what we recover.
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And I can't help but notice we haven't recovered the year-long penitential programs of the early Church
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and the fact that if I had mortally sinned,
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I would have had to stand in front of the entire Church and announce it.
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And then after a year of, oh, I don't know, I'm exaggerating now,
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but crawling over glass, you know, on bare feet,
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and they might let me back into full communion, right?
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So they were much, much stricter in terms of their spiritual disciplines,
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much stricter with their fasting.
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The early Church demanded a lot of the faithful that we don't necessarily observe today.
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But of course, we've developed on that.
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So we're not going back to those things.
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Right. Yeah, it's funny. You know, we do tend to be rather selective.
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And, you know, when we talk about the more apostolic Church,
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you know, no one ever talks about what the apostles said about the sin of Sodom, for example.
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So we do tend to be really selective in the reading of our past.
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And, you know, so on the one hand, new is always better.
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But Eucharistic prayer number two is bestest, bestest, because it is the oldest.
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And I said, no, that's kind of like a 1960s Edsel with some older chrome
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and, you know, maybe some taillights from the 1950s,
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but the idea that somehow this is the oldest, oldest is a bit of scholarly sleight of hand.
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But that's another topic for another time.
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And certainly neither one of us are suggesting that there was a golden era
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and a good old days where people didn't sin and didn't do anything wrong.
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And if only we flick the switch, we can go back to that more innocent times.
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I mean, as soon as you've got human beings involved, you've got sin, you're going to have a mess.
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But, for example, as we're coming up against a break here,
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I mean, I was told as a young teen in the 70s that I was so blessed
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to not have had any exposure to that old mass
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because it was just a completely random collection of unrelated medieval accretions
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like barnacles stuck to a boat.
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So I'm 14 years old.
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What do I know?
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And then many, many years later, I'm reading Thomas Aquinas,
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who walks you through the Roman canon,
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and it turns out every word and every gesture had a really significant meaning.
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And I said, God, if we knew this in the 13th century,
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why didn't we know it in the 1970s?
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Somebody must have known it in the 1970s.
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As I look over my shoulder, I can find the little book I got from my parish
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when I received my first Holy Communion in 1968, 1969.
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The book is called Celebrate God's Mighty Deeds,
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and on the cover is a bare table with a cloth over it
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and a loaf of bread on a plate and a pitcher of wine.
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And that was 1968, 1969 at the latest.
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I think the church actually has more to say,
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and I want to rush to add that when you talk about development of doctrine,
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we have to add what St. John Henry Newman said,
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development of doctrine doesn't mean that birds become fish.
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I'm looking at you, Synodalists.
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Father, I want to make clear that I offer the usus antiquiar, as they say,
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as often as I can.
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And I'm in a very happy position that when I do offer the usus recensior,
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the more familiar novus erdo mass,
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it is akin to what Taylor Marshall called the unicorn mass.
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So there's chant, there's Latin, there's ad orientum.
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So I don't want anyone to say,
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I have to stop listening to these two guys because they're haters
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and they think everyone who prays in English is going to hell.
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Now, please don't dismiss us with that caricature.
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I think what we're both saying is that it can only be beneficial
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for priests and laity to study the older rites.
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Let's begin to make a case from that.
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Can you give some indications what the benefits have been in your own life,
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your own priesthood?
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Sure, yeah.
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So my experience when I started out my priesthood,
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I did not know any of the old rites.
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I became familiar with the 1970 missile,
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which we would call the novus ordo,
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but I knew nothing of the 62 missile, the traditional Latin mass,
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or any of the previous missiles.
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I didn't know Latin.
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I was a convert, a Protestant convert,
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so I didn't know any Latin or anything like that.
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So for me it's never been a question of Latin good, English bad,
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or anything along those lines.
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But when I first started in the early years of my priesthood,
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what I realized was there's a lot of options in the 1970 missile.
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It says the priest can do this or say that or he can do this,
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and they're all good, they're all fine.
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But I thought there has to be some that are preferable than others
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because I didn't want to be always choosing every day a different thing
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and keeping people off balance.
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It seemed important to me that we had a very steady, very faithful,
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predictable manner of praying in my parish
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so that people could not worry about the originality of it
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but settle into the ritual devotion of it.
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And so I thought I want to make sure I make the best possible choices.
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And I was seeing other priests doing different things at Holy Mass,
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and I thought, well, is it just because they like it
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or where are these different choices coming from?
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And I quickly realized that I needed a lot more information,
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and that information was in the older masses,
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in those older missiles that have more specific instructions
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for how a priest can devoutly and reverently offer Holy Mass.
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And so for me that is why it was so important
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because understanding the history and the development of the Novus Ordo
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then gave me more tools and more information
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by which to offer the best possible version of that Mass
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that I was trying to offer in accordance with the mind of the Church.
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So I wanted to do what the Church has always done,
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not just the Mise de Fr. Renier.
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This is the one that Fr. Renier likes, right?
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These are his choices that he just happens to like.
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And I wanted to get my personality out of it.
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Yes.
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And allow the personality of the Church,
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the prayerfulness of the Church and our Lord to come to the forefront.
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And so for me the key to that was learning the older Mass.
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Okay.
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I was ordained in 1997.
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So this is years before a Samorin Pontificum.
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I never grew up with the Old Rite.
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I never saw it.
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I just didn't have an opinion about it.
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It didn't impinge upon me in any way.
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Now I was trained as a metaphysician academically.
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So I took symbol very seriously.
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I took form and matter very seriously.
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I knew that ritual and words were very, very important.
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And so the exhortation to say the black and do the red was very important to me
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and very vivid to me.
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And so when I was first ordained and I went into the sacristy at the university
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where I was teaching and I was cheerfully told by the sacristy,
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well, you know, every priest offers Mass differently,
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I cringed because that's not okay.
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Right.
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That makes the public prayer of the church my personal prayer.
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Exactly.
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And the people of God have the right to access to the identifiable public prayer of the church,
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and I have an absolute obligation to offer it that way.
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As a matter of fact, when I was applying for holy orders and I had a right at my petition,
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I couldn't even type it up and then sign it.
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I had to write it all out by hand,
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and I swore an oath that I would only enact the public rights of the church
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according to the directives of the competent authorities.
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So it was not up to me to add my own personal ruffles and flourishes to the Mass.
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And that was before I had any encounter with the older rights at all.
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Now let's fast forward.
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It's 2007.
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I'd just come back from the missions in Southeast Asia.
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I'm at Ave Maria University.
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Samoan Pontificum has just been announced.
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The kids are very excited about that, and I meet with all the priests there.
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And the older father said, well, we grew up with it.
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We were ordained with it.
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We'll take care of it.
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And my thought was, okay, less work for me.
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Seven years later, one of the older priests took ill,
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and I got a phone call that said, you've got two weeks to learn it.
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So I spent hours and hours and hours every day with a DVD from the fraternity
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taking notes and so on.
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I immersed myself in it and my first Mass in the old right.
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You know, when you're offering Mass for the very first time,
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you just want to say the right words and not knock anything over,
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and you hope to never go through that trauma again, God and His providence,
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so fit to have me do it a second time.
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But I said, wait a minute.
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I have an opportunity to lose myself in the ritual
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and also to really think about what I'm doing and why,
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and not just by rote.
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And I found that was good for me, that was good for my prayer,
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and it was good for my preaching.
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Did you have a similar experience?
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Yeah, absolutely, because I think I had an unexamined idea of what I was doing
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before I understood the old Mass,
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and I had this idea that I needed to bring some personality
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and some energy to the liturgy, and it was for the people, right?
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I needed to do something to get them engaged.
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But when I started studying the old Mass and offering the holy sacrifice,
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according to the older Missal, I realized how much I did not know.
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And I was trying to cover over all my ignorance with personality,
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and people who know me know I don't have a whole lot of personality.
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I'm not particularly extroverted.
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I'm not like father-friendly and father-inspiring in the pulpit.
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I just kind of quietly do my thing.
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But when I started to discipline myself to those older rubrics,
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I realized how I had understood all of it incorrectly,
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and I didn't need to be the one who was bringing the energy
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and who was bringing the quote-unquote sort of specialness to holy Mass,
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but it was all about joining ourselves with humility to the prayers of the Church.
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And suddenly I felt my ministry in a much more poignant way.
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I understood I am a priest of holy Church, and I am serving Our Lady,
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and I am subsuming my identity under this aspect of Our Lords.
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And all that I am here for is to become an image of Christ.
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And the way to do that is to faithfully serve the holy Mass
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and to keep my personality out of it.
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And it's that discipline of learning the older missile that really brought me into that.
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And it's a shift almost of expression.
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I love the way you said it, which was that it's a symbolic language.
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And that was what was missing previously from the way I had been offering Mass.
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I was thinking this needs to be relevant.
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It needs to inspire people.
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It needs to give them some practical things.
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Not necessarily bad things, but they're not the most important thing.
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The most important thing, and that's very clear once you become familiar with the old Mass,
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is that this is a dense, symbolic language that is connecting us in this transcendent manner with God Himself.
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We're actually participating in His grace.
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We're participating in His love.
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And that's an overwhelming thing, right?
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I still get choked up sometimes that I am allowed to be at the altar,
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that I am allowed to pray in this beautiful Catholic church with all the faithful gathered around.
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And it's such a humbling experience, and it almost brings a tear to my eye sometimes.
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Yes, indeed.
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I remember two weeks before my first vows in the Society of Jesus
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and having lunch with my beloved mentor.
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And with characteristic understatement and bluntness, he said,
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So who the hell are you? How come you got chosen?
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And looking back 35 years, I can say I wouldn't have chosen me,
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and I certainly wouldn't have put up with me.
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God in His providence has decided to do both.
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I think I should not ignore that and then begin to act accordingly.
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But one of the things I always knew, even before I studied the older rites,
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is that the liturgy isn't mine.
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I once was asked to offer a Mass to a student group,
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and before Mass, this young lady came up to me with a piece of paper in her hand
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and said, I wrote the opening prayer for Mass.
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When do I say it?
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And I said, Never.
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Well, Father, so-and-so at a famous Catholic school said,
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The laity are meant to take ownership of the liturgy.
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And I said, Well, he lied to you.
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I said, The liturgy of the church is the heritage of the church,
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and it is entrusted to us to guard and steward and hand on.
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It's not improv, and it's not our pet project,
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because that makes our private prayer and makes it public.
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And I swore an oath in my own hand to do precisely not that.
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So I can't violate my conscience and my oath for what Father misled you to believe.
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And I'm sorry that you have been misled that way,
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because I'm sure that what my words are doing to you is upsetting you,
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and that's not my intent.
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So we're not owners of the liturgies, of the rites of the church.
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We are the stewards.
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Father, I had some formative experiences as I was getting ready for ordination,
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and I think my study of the older rites magnified them.
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As I said, I had a doctorate in philosophy before I entered religious life.
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I studied metaphysics.
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Sign and symbol were very real to me.
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And so when I was studying theology in London, I had a seminar on the sacraments,
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and I talked about performative utterance, the power of words,
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and relating that to gesture.
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And for reasons I didn't know at the time, still don't know,
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there was a large group of Anglican bishops and archbishops there at the seminar.
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And after my presentation, I sat down, and this Anglican archbishop turned to me
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in bewilderment and wonder and said,
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You mean the sacraments actually do something?
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Now, I was polite enough not to say to him, Well, not when you do it.
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But I think part of his problem was not only the invalidity of his orders,
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and he was a man, but also that they saw the sacraments as primarily sociological.
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Every group has initiation rites.
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We do too.
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We have baptism.
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Every community has a rite of purification.
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We have confession.
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But it was all at the social and the sociological.
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So for the sacraments to really work, you invoke God's grace by making use of the matter
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and form that our Lord entrusted to the church that he founded.
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And I saw that as my absolute obligation.
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And then when I started studying the older rite, and it said,
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Be so faithful to the ritual that after Mass, no one will remember which priest offered Mass.
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And I found that losing myself in the ritual made me more obedient to the ritual.
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It also made me less self-conscious and took away from me the burden
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and the illusion that I had to perform, or it was my job to keep the people engaged.
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I could just be the Lord's instrument, and the rest was up to God.
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Did you find something similar?
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I did, yeah.
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I am very self-conscious by temperament.
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So if you were to ask me to spontaneously pray a prayer out loud,
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I would go white in the face because I start to think about it,
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and I think, what am I going to say next?
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And will it be good enough?
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And will they be impressed with my words?
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And I hope I make this prayer a good prayer.
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And so coming into the form of Holy Mass and structured prayer was a godsend for me
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because I was, like you said, I was able to lose myself in it,
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and I realized I'm not so important here.
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They can switch me out with any priest.
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It doesn't really matter.
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If I sing this prayer really badly, that's just the way it's going to be.
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They're going to hear me sing a prayer really badly, and I'll do better next time.
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But that's okay, right, because it's not up to me to make Sunday worth it.
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Sunday's worth it because that's our obligation to God,
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and our Lord promises that He is there.
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And so He's there.
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As long as I do my best, as imperfect as that is, our Lord makes perfect where I fall short
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and where other priests fall short.
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And that's so important that our liturgy expresses that,
27:32
that it has that sense of the depth of language and the appeal to the senses,
27:40
the aesthetic qualities that show us this is about the beauty of our Lord,
27:47
that we are being connected to Him through this.
27:50
And when we're talking about the sacrament, it's a real thing.
27:54
We are really actually participating in the life of Christ through the adoption of grace.
28:01
And if that is the reality, it's far more than a sociological thing.
28:06
It's far more than a community getting together,
28:10
and we pat each other's backs and say we're such good Christians.
28:14
But actually something is changing in us.
28:17
And that change requires of us, I think, reverence and humility and chastity, right?
28:27
That we draw back and discipline.
28:30
All of our disordered sensibilities are being ordered to Christ through Holy Mass.
28:38
And the Old Mass really reveals that through living it, right,
28:43
through the practice of praying this Mass repeatedly.
28:46
And those repetitions drive home this point.
28:49
Even if we don't know how to express it, I think the faithful feel it.
28:54
They naturally become more reverent.
28:56
They naturally become more quiet and contemplative
28:59
because sacred knowledge is being delivered to them in a way that is not just a lecture.
29:06
Right, right.
29:07
There's silence.
29:08
There's gesture.
29:10
There's a litany.
29:13
There's a richness and denseness there that you don't get from,
29:17
hi, how's everybody doing today?
29:19
Right, right.
29:20
When I was first ordained, I read a book by a Jesuit mathematician,
29:24
Dennis Smolarski, called How Not to Say Mass, which is in its third edition.
29:28
So, in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen.
29:31
The Lord be with you, with your spirit.
29:32
Hi, how's everybody doing today?
29:34
He said, look, I've just greeted you liturgically, but liturgical language doesn't work.
29:38
So I'm going to rescue you from the liturgy by interjecting secular language in greeting.
29:45
Well, that's a monstrosity.
29:46
And so I said, all right.
29:47
That reminds me of a beautiful quote from C.S. Lewis that I just,
29:51
I would be remiss if I didn't read this on the air.
29:54
And then I'll ask you to comment on it.
29:56
C.S. Lewis says, above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea,
30:00
fruit of a widespread inferiority complex,
30:03
that pomp, on the proper occasion, has any connection with vanity or self-conceit.
30:09
A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess let out by a king to dance a minuet,
30:14
a general officer on a ceremonial parade,
30:17
a major domo preceding the boar's head at a Christmas feast,
30:21
all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity.
30:25
This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient.
30:29
They are obeying the age which presides over every solemnity.
30:35
The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility.
30:42
Rather, it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the right,
30:48
and here's the key, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual.
30:58
Could you talk about that, please, the proper pleasure of ritual?
31:02
That's so providential you bring up that quote,
31:05
because someone literally just today posted that quote into my sub-stack.
31:11
I wrote a long rant about why we all need to dress better,
31:16
and that quote, someone commented on that, and I think it's so insightful.
31:26
Chesterton says something similar about Thomas Beckett.
31:30
He says, the fancy robes were for God and for the faithful.
31:35
The hair shirt underneath it was for him, right?
31:38
So we get this idea that if I dress up, that's so proud and vainglorious,
31:44
but we are completely missing the purpose of why we are doing those things.
31:48
We're doing it for God, and we're doing it to minimize ourselves, right?
31:54
So a priest at Holy Mass has to be humble.
31:58
He's not just wearing his favorite outfit.
32:01
He puts on the clothing the way the church says, this is how you dress for Holy Mass.
32:07
So a priest is supposed to look like this,
32:10
and I don't care if you want to wear your favorite St. Louis Cardinals t-shirt today
32:14
because they're in the World Series.
32:15
It's not about you, right?
32:17
Put on your black shoes and your white alb and your chasuble,
32:21
and pray the vesting prayers that mean something.
32:24
I don't understand how an educated Catholic, for example,
32:28
could have objections to the vesting prayers of the priest before Mass.
32:32
They're beautiful, aren't they?
32:34
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and they drive that point home.
32:37
This is not about me.
32:38
I'm putting on clothing of theological significance, right,
32:44
because it teaches us something through an unspoken language.
32:48
And I think the reason, the motivation that some priests get a little communicative or over-talkative,
32:55
they want to explain everything,
32:57
is because they're seeing that there's not a whole lot of density
33:02
to the way that Holy Mass is often offered these days.
33:06
It's kind of bland. It's kind of boring.
33:09
So they want to punch it up, right?
33:11
But what I would argue is that if we go back and learn the Old Mass,
33:16
we will see that we actually have the option and the ability to have,
33:21
as you called it, that unicorn, Novus Ordo.
33:24
We can have a beautiful, dignified, transcendent Holy Mass in the Novus Ordo.
33:32
It's definitely possible, but you can't do it unless you know how.
33:38
And the instructions are in our history,
33:41
so we have to go back and understand our history so that we understand how to pray today.
33:46
Right, and just as I would tell new parents,
33:50
you've got to communicate to your child, you are worth my time.
33:55
So when God Almighty comes to us with the broken, bloodied body of His Son, the Christ,
34:03
and says, you are worth my son,
34:06
our response shouldn't be, is this going to take long?
34:10
Am I missing something here?
34:13
Right, yeah, I remember very early in my ministry on a Sunday Mass,
34:18
I think I went for an hour and ten minutes,
34:20
because I was introducing incense to the principal Sunday Mass.
34:24
And I immediately got complaints, because people said, this needs to be an hour, Father,
34:28
an hour at most.
34:30
And my response was, I think we can spare the ten minutes,
34:34
because this is the Almighty God of the universe.
34:37
And the way we are treating this time together reveals what we think of God
34:43
and how important He is to us, or not.
34:46
Right, is this just something we're doing out of duty,
34:49
or because my wife drug me along, or it's a habit?
34:53
Or is this liturgy really breathing life into me?
34:58
And this is what's so important.
35:00
I think people misunderstand this.
35:02
They think that people like me and you, we're curmudgeons,
35:07
and we just have this rule-based sort of, you know, we're very picky and fussy.
35:12
And that might be the case, but that's not really the main point.
35:15
The point is we're safeguarding something precious.
35:20
Yes.
35:21
And the liturgy is this dynamic, beautiful, participatory reality.
35:27
It is life.
35:28
It is the life of a Christian.
35:30
And so we have to treat it with the utmost importance.
35:34
So it's not just going back to old things because we think that it's superior
35:38
and we can be arrogant about it,
35:40
or following every single rule because we think we'll be saved by rule following.
35:45
But no, we're recovering these things, the sensible beauty and obedience and chastity
35:54
in terms of the way we're praying because that's how life is communicated to us.
36:00
We are making ourselves less so that God can be more.
36:04
Amen.
36:05
And see, that's always the litmus test for me is the John the Baptist's munition.
36:09
He must increase and I must decrease.
36:11
Father Michael Renier of Oratory of Saints Gregory and Augustine,
36:15
God bless your very good work.
36:17
Thank you for a fascinating conversation.
36:20
And please, let's have a conversation again before long.
36:23
Yeah, thank you.
36:24
I'd like that.
36:25
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36:28
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36:30
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36:33
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36:34
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36:40
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36:43
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36:47
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36:50
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36:54
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36:57
Here we are, the last segment of a timely Tuesday.
36:59
You know what that means?
37:00
You and me sharing timely thoughts reflecting what we heard today.
37:03
My guest was Father Michael Renier,
37:05
and we're talking about whether it will be beneficial for all Catholics
37:09
to study the older rites.
37:11
And the short answer is yes.
37:14
And even if we take at face value and without question
37:19
that by golly, we were in such absolutely desperate need of liturgical reform
37:25
and we are living in the new Pentecost, the second Genesis,
37:30
progressing from glory to glory.
37:34
Even if you take all of that at face value,
37:39
without hesitation, without reservation,
37:43
I would suggest that it is still desirable
37:48
for all Catholics to study the older rites.
37:52
Now, if you don't think we're progressing from glory to glory,
37:58
if you don't think we're living in the second Pentecost,
38:01
well, then maybe even more so,
38:04
because the study of the past can give us some alternatives.
38:09
Here's my take on it.
38:11
When our Lord walked the earth,
38:14
when he was in Nazareth, he was in Nazareth,
38:17
and he wasn't in Galilee.
38:19
He wasn't in Jerusalem, and who was in Jerusalem?
38:23
He wasn't in Bethany.
38:25
He was limited by time and space,
38:29
and it was right for him to ascend to the Father
38:33
so that redeemed human nature can be in the presence of the Godhead for eternity.
38:39
And he wanted to continue his priestly ministry
38:43
in the life of the church, in the life of the church militant.
38:48
And he continues that, his ministry of word and sacrament and governance,
38:53
through his clergy.
38:56
And so what a gift it is that the priesthood of Christ
39:00
can be found in different here's and now,
39:04
across the miles and the years and the centuries.
39:08
And I want to know how the good guys did it.
39:13
I want to know how the church faced up to emperors and pagans
39:19
and persecution and first contact with alien cultures.
39:25
I want to know that.
39:27
I want to know how the wisdom and understanding of the church
39:33
grew and deepened over time.
39:36
I know that recently John Henry Newman was named a doctor of the church,
39:42
and there are reasons for that.
39:44
I confess I don't know Newman's writings very well.
39:48
And I know there are some people who were very giddy and excited
39:53
because, on this account, Cardinal Newman, who was a saint
39:59
and now a doctor of the church,
40:02
he said nice things about development of doctrine.
40:05
And so therefore, all change is good
40:12
because, you know, development of doctrine,
40:14
you can't argue with a doctor of the church, am I right?
40:17
Yeah, they don't say that about Peter Damian, though,
40:20
and the sin of Sodom.
40:21
Yeah, funny how that works.
40:23
We tend to be very selective about whom we quote.
40:27
But let's be clear.
40:29
Newman said that development of doctrine is not a bird becomes a fish.
40:37
Development of doctrine is we believe A.
40:41
A has been taught and believed always and everywhere.
40:45
And because we believe A, we can say in faith that we can rightly believe B.
40:53
Development of doctrine is not, is not, is not.
40:59
Well, we used to believe A.
41:02
But because reasons, among them lived experience,
41:07
we no longer believe A.
41:11
That is not development of doctrine.
41:17
It isn't.
41:19
Also, there are things that people say
41:22
regarding worship and liturgy and prayer and so on
41:26
that seem to be magic words, word spells,
41:32
that you can justify anything and everything
41:37
as long as you say the word participation.
41:41
Because Vatican II, best council ever,
41:45
said something about participation,
41:48
or somebody after Vatican II said something about participation.
41:52
And apparently participation can only, only, only mean
41:57
putting albs on as many people as possible
42:00
and have them running around in the sanctuary.
42:02
Because, you know, participation.
42:05
Turns out that's absolutely positively not what liturgical participation means.
42:15
I think we should know those things.
42:19
I think one of the reasons we should study the older rites
42:24
is because they give us a lot of the what and the how,
42:27
and also they give us the why.
42:32
And I think that a lot of current liturgical formation doesn't do that.
42:39
It gives excuses.
42:41
Participation! Enculturation!
42:44
Or, shut up, he explained, because I said so.
42:49
Or because of the new something something.
42:53
Here's what I know for sure.
42:56
The study of the older rites
42:59
and the prayer of the older rites
43:03
resulted in saints, and mystics, and martyrs,
43:11
and glorious music, and sublime cathedrals,
43:18
and vocations, and families.
43:24
And I want to know why.
43:30
Why did doing things that way
43:34
bear such very good, powerful, enduring fruit?
43:42
And then, we might even dare to ask,
43:47
why is it that doing other things
43:52
have brought about other results?
43:57
And why is it that some people,
44:01
including, dare I say it, senior Catholic cadres,
44:04
of the People Who Should Really Know Better Club,
44:07
why do they insist on doing the other things
44:12
that brings about the other fruit
44:15
and doesn't talk about the fruit that it brings about?
44:19
That's a puzzle to me.
44:22
It's a mystery.
44:24
I don't have a ready explanation.
44:28
It's not true that everything older is better.
44:32
I really like indoor plumbing.
44:34
I like antibiotics.
44:35
I like relatively painless dentistry.
44:38
But there is a perennial wisdom
44:42
that I believe firmly, firmly, firmly
44:46
that we ignore at our peril.
44:49
And I'm not inclined to trust the people
44:52
who urge us to ignore our Catholic heritage.
44:57
I'm Jesuit Father Robert McCaig,
44:59
your host here every day of The Catholic Current.
45:01
Join us tomorrow for another episode of The Catholic Current,
45:04
a hot topic, great guest, lively conversation.
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45:09
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45:11
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45:15
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45:37
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45:39
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
45:41
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45:43
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45:48
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