When the post-Vatican II liturgical reform was getting underway in 1966, and again when the reformed Mass had been unveiled in 1971, petitions signed by intellectuals and cultural figures – poets, writers, artists, musicians – called for the preservation of the older liturgy, alongside the new. These voices were heard by Pope Paul VI, who tried to insist on the preservation of the sung Latin Office in Sacrificium laudis in 1966, and granted England and Wales permission for continuing celebrations of the older Mass in 1971. This was extended to the whole world by Pope John Paul II in 1984.
It is not surprising to find among the 1966 petitioners the reactionary convert novelist Evelyn Waugh, or the 1971 petitioner Agatha Christie, with her appreciation for the reassuring and nostalgic alongside the sinister and murderous. It is more surprising to find the non-Catholic, homosexual artistic modernists Benjamin Britten and WH Auden, both signatories in 1966. Auden, who by then had returned to the High Anglicanism of his upbringing, went on to criticise Anglican liturgical reform in the strongest terms. Before his death, TS Eliot also turned out to have archly traditional opinions on Anglican worship.
Other ground-breaking artists who signed one or both of the petitions include the Greek composer Giorgios Sisilianos, who developed the 12-tone technique; Carl Dreyer, the creator of surreal films; Giorgio de Chirico, who developed surrealism in painting; Jorge Luis Borges, whose short stories take the reader into mind-bending fantasy realms; and the American modernist poet Robert Lowell.
They are part of a still wider phenomenon. As the American Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, wrote to his superior in 1964, of his many non-Catholic literary friends, “for the most part not even Christians”: “They are all, without exception, scandalised and grieved when I tell them that probably this Office, this Mass will no longer be here in 10 years.”
An over-simple explanation would be that, as people of artistic sensitivity, they recognised the beauty of the old liturgy. Some might even suggest that they found the liturgy easier to penetrate, aesthetically, than ordinary Catholics did. But this is not correct: just as the diaries and public statements of some of the great and good express unease with the reform, so the contemporary letter pages of the Catholic press are full of the deeply-expressed regrets of ordinary Catholics. Yet others, of course, welcomed it. It is natural that the petition organisers should turn to prominent people to represent the movement, and that intellectuals should be given the task of articulating the concerns, not just of themselves, but of a wide range of people.
In gathering up statements made by the petitioners for my book on the subject, I found again and again an analogy between the ancient liturgy and artistic treasures, landscapes, Venice, or the Church’s great cathedrals. These beautiful things are the common heritage of the community.
The Italian philosopher and 1966 petitioner Elémire Zolla held up to ridicule the idea that we should destroy great cathedrals “because the majority could not enunciate their architectural merits” or “throw icons into the cellar because only a few were able to identify their principles of stylisation”.
Articulating the features of a work of art, as an art historian does, is distinct from appreciating it. As a 1971 petitioner, the poet Kathleen Raine, best known today for her influence on King Charles III, reminds us, great art is not only for the elite: “the imaginative world is outside time, and transcends class”.
Clearly, in the 1960s and early 1970s an appreciation for the beauty and spiritual depth of the Catholic Mass was not limited to Catholics. We find then – and since – Gregorian chant used in film scores; again, the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball opens with an evocative snippet of the funeral rite.
Those artists dedicated to a rebellion against conventional artistic forms, like the artistic modernists already mentioned, were taking aim at the bourgeois, mass-produced art of the modern age, and not the pro-modern survival of the ancient Catholic Mass. Artistic modernism, in this sense, can be a fight against modernity itself. There is less difference than might appear between the older project of Pugin and Eric Gill on the one hand, and the work of Eliot and Auden on the other. Indeed, the Catholic convert David Jones straddles both groups: deeply influenced by Gill, Auden called his Anathemata the greatest long poem of the 20th century. Jones signed the 1971 petition, and was heartbroken by the reform.
Whether the tools of the fight are medieval crafts or modernist poetic, artistic, or musical techniques, the goal is the authentic, and the enemy is the kitsch. As the Italian composer, and signatory of both petitions, Luigi Dallapiccola, remarked of the liturgical reform: “If you vulgarise everything, you commercialise everything.”
Dr Joseph Shaw is the editor of The Intellectuals and the Latin Mass: Petitions to Save the Ancient Mass from 1966-2007 (Arouca Press, 2023).
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