From The Catholic Thing:
I do not attend the Latin Mass. I believe that the Novus Ordo Mass can be filled with beauty, but that the surroundings, the habits that have grown into prescriptive laws, the ancillary people and their actions, and the problems with the lectionary, especially in its English rendering, make that beauty difficult to attain.
The problem is not that the Mass, as it is in fact celebrated almost everywhere in the English world, fails to be overpowering, like a Beethoven symphony. We cannot live on grandeur alone. We must have ordinary bread. But there’s a beauty to ordinary bread, too, the beauty of what is simple, wholesome, unpretentious.
The old low Mass had that simplicity. You could say it was not grand, but it did not pretend to be. What you could never say was that it was ugly, silly, or sentimental. It was reliable, like a rock.
Cardinals Cupich and Gregory, Bishop Burbidge of Arlington, and others insist that we Catholics shall not be united unless we cause everyone to give up the beauty and power they find in the Latin Mass – for it is there to be found, and even at a low Mass, the quiet power is as solid and confident and firm.
But that is like demanding that we shall find beauty where it is not, because it has been shorn away, or where we are battered by banality or silliness or ugliness or politically motivated trimming of Scripture.
It’s like saying, “You shall get rid of your altar rail, and you shall at the same time be just as profoundly touched by the excellence of the Sacrament as you were before, and by the unity of the people of God, humbly submitting to be fed by Christ.”
It’s like saying, “You shall whitewash most of the paintings in your church, and you shall at the same time feel embedded in a family and all its family stories that extend over thousands of years.”
It’s like saying, “You shall replace the chants with these songs here, by these authors who can’t write a lick of poetry and who have not studied Christian hymns since Saint Ambrose, songs that are at best sentimental and inoffensive, at worst stupid and heretical, and you shall sing, and you shall be lifted up in the soul, whether you like it or not.”
It’s like saying, “You shall be content with Scriptural readings riddled with holes, and translated by people whose literary achievements make for adequate office memoranda, and you shall be stirred by their eloquence, nor shall you notice what is missing.”
It’s like saying, “You shall be content with prayers that ignore great fields of the spiritual life. You shall be content with prayers painted in orange, yellow, and white. You shall never long for the deep red of suffering and the somber blue of falling night. You shall want what is pretty and pleasant – never the dread of eternal loss, never a frank acknowledgment of how wretched you are, always a smile and a pat on the back. You shall buy what good feelings the huckster has for sale. You shall be happy with that, or else.” (Read more.)
Also from The Catholic Thing:
Here are some other remarkable traits about the crucifix.
First, on the crucifix, the body of the Lord is lifted off the ground and placed in “the air.” We – with our scaffolding, elevators, and skyscrapers – don’t even notice that this is unusual. Yet the Fathers of the Church were so taken with this aspect – that a crucifixion implied a suspension in air – that they held that the element of “air” (traditionally also a dwelling place of daemons) was thereby purified and sanctified, just as Our Lord’s baptism affected all waters.
Second, on the crucifix, Our Lord assumes a posture not seen in ordinary life, namely, standing upright, legs together, with arms outstretched. The posture is so unusual that Leonardo’s drawing of it, “Vitruvian Man,” has become iconic. Leonardo was not drawing Christ on the cross but intending to illustrate the proportions of the human body: a man standing upright with outstretched arms is inscribed perfectly by a square (that is, a man’s “wingspan” is generally equal to his height).
For Leonardo, the proportions internal to the human body, a “microcosm,” testified to man’s ordered place within a universe of law and proportion, the “macrocosm.” But the crucifix, through the same bodily form, teaches this very truth at its deepest, spiritual level: “He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross.” (Phil. 2:8) More than this: because the hands of the Vitruvian man face downward, while Our Lord’s face outward, this display of humility on the cross is clearly, at the same time, a priestly embrace.
Third, the standard crucifix depicts Our Lord as still alive, even though salvation is fully accomplished only at his death (“It is finished”, Jn 19:30). But this too is remarkable: everyone who has ever kept vigil at a deathbed knows how precious those last hours are; but it seems improper to try to capture them, and we don’t do so – perhaps because we recognize intuitively that death for us is a penalty for sin. For Our Lord it is different: since his death was unwarranted but freely accepted, we can depict his “death bed” always, and are invited to keep vigil always.
The crucifix and the cross: the former is found almost solely in churches in which Our Lord is Really Present, which suggests a last recommendation – the crucifix with its substantial corpus is simply a better sign that, indeed, “This is my body” and “This is my blood.” (Read more.)
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