Fr. Z's Blog

Today at Le Crock… sorry… Le Croix… there is a piece by one Gregory Solari.  Who?  I asked the same question.  I found this link.  Involvement with McGill in Montreal.  French, I think, maybe Swiss. Interested in Newman.  Seems to be instrumentalizing Newman in support of “synodality” (“walking together”).  Hence, he is on that side of the spectrum.  There is not much of a reason to know about him.

He penned a brutally vicious piece for Le Crock, as is consistent with those who work for Le Crock, and one that is especially insulting to Benedict XVI (see previous observation) and all those who desire traditional liturgical worship.

As I have been moving through Desideedee, with its changing voices, changing quality of thought, I had gotten down to a section on the “Paschal Mystery” which, properly understood is fascinating and which, inadequately understood is disaster for anything and everything liturgical.

Skipping that part for now, I use this following translation from French of the piece by Solari, to clue you in to what I suppose is the thought of Desideedee 27-29, about post-modernism.  NB: He also cites the DD paragraphs about “Paschal Mystery”.  This is the hook, I think, that they are hanging everything on.

What follows is pretty nasty.

It effectively says that if the Church doesn’t back a rite, then you wind up in nothingness, nihilism.  Hence, all the people who are strongly attached to the TLM are incapable of true prayer (according the the ancient Jewish Kabbalistic notions of prayer Solari tweaks at the end), and their efforts have resulted in nothingness.

But, as he asserts, “it is not a question of ‘banning the Mass in Latin'”.  Rather, it is a question of “arranging the conditions which will make possible what was the authentic intention of Summorum Pontificum.”   Note the whiff of Gnosticism.

Solari, therefore, compares Summorum Pontificum – and this piece was published today, on the anniversary of Summorum – and its misdirection to a “avortement pastoral… pastoral abortion”.

You might find that this smacks of word salad in some places, and you would be right.   One theologian I shared it with, someone serious and of international repute, called it “utter gibberish”.    It is not, however, gibberish in its intent.  It may be that we are getting to the core of Desideedee and its ghostwriters intentions.

As you begin, keep this is mind.

Reject the premise: Out in the real world of those who desire the TLM, apart from certain fringes, there is not an “exclusive attachment to the ‘Tridentine Rite.  Instead, what there is on the part of those in power is a proclaimed and in fact brutally imposed “attachment” to the modern rite absurdly defined as the sole expression of the Roman rite.  Absurdly because, there is no Roman rite outside tradition and continuity.   If they hit you with this, dare them to show you how the Novus Ordo is truly reflective of the text of Sacrosanctum Concilium.  Dare them to show you how often any given NO mass is celebrated according to its own rubrics.  It is they who have an exclusive attachment, that is, to destroying the Roman liturgy in the name of an ever elusive “Spirit the Council” found in the “emanations and penumbras” of the Council, and not in its letter.

“Pope Francis suggests that attachment to the Tridentine Rite is a product of nihilism”

Grégory Solari sheds light on the reading of the Pope’s Apostolic Letter on the liturgy in the light of the question of nihilism. The formalist attachment to the Tridentine Rite would be a way for some to resort to “tradition” to compensate for the symbolic deficit that characterizes postmodernity. By forgetting that the rite is nothing if there is not the Church behind it.

Could attachment to the Tridentine Rite be a product of nihilism? This is indirectly implied by the Apostolic Letter of Pope Francis on the liturgical formation Desiderio desideravi. By nihilism, we must understand a phenomenon that affects the question of value in a differentiated way. In the configuration of nihilism, the Pope further explains, “man feels lost, without references of any kind, deprived of values ??because they have become indifferent, orphaned by everything, in a fragmentation where a horizon of meaning seems impossible – (an epoch) still charged with the heavy heritage left to us by the previous epoch” (n. 28). We must not pass too quickly over this horizon of nihilism. It is this, I believe, which constitutes a posteriori the hermeneutic key of Traditionis custodes. We know that the essence of nihilism consists in the phenomenon of devaluation. After the dissolution of the link between the Name of God (revealed) and the attributes projected on him by men (“death of God”), no more criteria guarantee valorization. The dissolution of the link between God and his attributes has cracked the relationship between man and his own productions, creating a gap that nothing can fill anymore – or rather: only one thing fills: “nothing” precisely. From then on, nothing has any real value, and what is still valued is only ever valued on the basis of criteria external to the object (economic, political, aesthetic, sociological criteria, etc.), and not without being affected by an arbitrariness.

Liturgy and nihilism

The strength of Francis’ analysis resides first of all in his lucidity: the Pope, like the Council before him on which he bases his reflection, does not avoid the reality of nihilism. No. 29 explicitly inscribes the question of the liturgy and its reform in this horizon of postmodernity: “It is with this reality of the modern world that the Church, gathered in the Council, wanted to confront itself, by reaffirming its awareness of being the sacrament of Christ, (…), and it is no coincidence that this immense effort of reflection by the Ecumenical Council began with a reflection on the Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium). What the liturgy provides is the possibility of a (temporary) exit from nihilism. But not automatically, nor without the relation to a ritual form suffering the effect of the loss of any formally “absolute” criterion. As happens in the case of an exclusive attachment to the Tridentine missal.

While the “desert grows” (Nietzsche), one can indeed understand the reflex that resorts to “tradition” to compensate for the symbolic deficit that characterizes postmodernity. But what you have to see is that this reflex, because it confuses tradition with the past, does not contain the surrounding nihilism, on the contrary, it feeds it. In the absence of an authentic criteriology, all valuation rests on the “will to power” (always subjective and arbitrary). If Francis insists on the link between the lex orandi and the lex credendi, it is because there is no gap between the Church and the liturgy – there is no vacuum: Christ’s love fills everything and is therefore revealed as the only criterion of valorization. While at a distance from the Church which receives and constitutes itself in the celebration of the Paschal Mystery (cf. n. 24-26), every liturgical form tends to be transformed into formalism. Any style, in stylization. All reality, in artifice. “Neo” becomes the other name for nothingness.

The only ecclesial criterion

This does not mean that the Tridentine rite is deprived of “value”. Simply, what must be remembered from the Apostolic Letter on this point is that nothing except the reference to the life of the community guarantees that a valuation is not in one way or another arbitrary. Why ? Because among all the “institutional greatnesses” (Pascal) only the Church has always been deprived of any “constitutional” power over itself. The ecclesial institution only exists in the act by which it receives its existence from Christ. Not once, but continually, in the donation of the Body of Christ which in turn constitutes it as a “body”. In short, from beginning to end and without ceasing, it is on the desire of Christ, and on him alone, that the Church rests (as an event and as an institution). And therefore also the liturgy, whose rites must be understood as expressions of the response that the community has given and is giving to this continual “Christic donation”. This is why, especially in the time of nihilism, but not only, there is no other criterion for valuing the liturgy except the Church itself. Only the Church, as the “sacrament” of the Paschal Mystery, resists the subtle corrosion of nihilism.

The exclusive attachment to the Tridentine rite has reduced to nothing the purpose of the Motu Proprio of 2007 (“mutual enrichment” of the two missals). As Abraham Heschel already said, “it is not the rite that is sick, it is the intentionality of our heart” – what our Jewish brothers call kavana, the condition of all authentic prayer. Faced with this pastoral abortion [avortement], the pope, with Desiderio desideravi, joins and prolongs what was the initial impulse of the liturgical movement: recovering the kavana of Christian prayer. It is not a question of “banning the Mass in Latin”, but of arranging the conditions which will make possible what was the authentic intention of Summorum Pontificum. The “Ecclesia Dei” generation could have contributed to this. For now, its experience unfortunately counts as “nothing”.

So, you are sick in the heart and your all your efforts are a betrayal ending in nothing.  All of this has been a “pastoral abortion”.

Remember: it is not just the Traditional Latin Mass that they hate.  They hate the people who want it.  They hate the people.