Traditional Reverence

Dear Editor: I would like to point out, in response to your recent article “Traditionalists in Rome Find Calm in Tridentine Rite,” that it’s probably not so much a love of Latin which is sending flocks to churches such as San Gregorio in Rome and St. Agnes in Manhattan – with the possible exception of a handful of disgruntled classicists, that is – but a hunger for the very things you mentioned in your excellent treatment of the subject: reverence, great calm, stillness, dignity and beauty. Can anyone claim these qualities for what’s been dished out to us over the past 30 some odd years? But please don’t blame the English language for that!

The story has often been told how Russia was converted back to the Orthodox Church after envoys of Prince Vladimir of Kiev reported back on the glories of the rituals celebrated in the great patriarchal Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople: “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth for surely there is no such splendor or beauty anywhere else on earth.” A passing hostile comment by the second-century pagan critic Celsus shows that the chants used in the ancient Christian worship were not only unusual to his pagan ears, but so beautiful that he actually resented their emotive effect on his critical faculty. Does anyone honestly believe that the above parties would have the same reaction today if they could witness us shuffling and stumbling in our little missal stand; instead the celebrant (excuse me, the presider, the president, the motivational speaker) flings the book down in front of him as if he were reading a novel at lunch. The sacred element takes second place. You want to blame English for this?

Forgive me, but, with all due respect to Virgil and Seneca, I’m no great lover of the Latin language and see no reason why it has to be considered superior to English in its more elegant flights; they would have to drag me kicking and screaming back to the 1950s. I think it’s absurd to expect people to worship intelligently using a language they’re not fluent in, especially when the Canon is reaching; and further it is nothing less than an abuse to recite in silence. (The practice apparently originated in Syria in the fifth century and was outlawed by the Emperor Justinian – good for him.)

But is it conceivable that the Catholic community in America does not possess the talent, learning and love of poetry and ritual to come up with something that could rival the reverence, calm, stillness, dignity and beauty of the old rites – in elegant English and with an audible Canon? Well we had better act quickly before everyone rushes either out the door or into San Gregorio. I do believe that the best way of understanding the life and faith of a Christian community is to take part in its worship; indeed, Christianity is a liturgical religion. The worshiping community adores the divine glory by ritual actions that are the highest expression of its insights, art and love – anything less than blasphemous. Worship comes first, much of doctrine and discipline emerge from this.

A new organization, with Vatican approval, was created three years ago called The Anglican Use Society. Its original purpose was to adopt the usage and rituals of the Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican hymnal to the needs of the many Anglican and Episcopalian clergy that had come over in recent years, along with their parishioners. However, the movement is growing, again as a result of the wide dissatisfaction with our present liturgical situation in the American Church. The organization has a website of course, and anyone interested might want to view it.

Ronald Ciavolino
Brooklyn 

Reinterpreting Tablet History

Dear Editor: Ordinarily I would not work up nerve enough to challenge so eminent a scholar as Dr. Alan Wallach whose use of Marxist paradigms as analytic tools for interpreting art history has helped win him recognition and regard well beyond the cultural and political left. So has his inclusion of religious perspectives in scrutinizing the contexts of American art.

But memories of my own disagreements with certain Patrick Scanlan Tablet stands embolden me to take issue with Dr. Wallach’s Readers’ Forum (April 7) letter. It called upon current management to confess that Scanlan’s Tablet fostered “bigotry and fascism” and to express “regret” for the newspaper’s participation in that “clerical fascism.”

Prof. Wallach argues that the Irish Catholics whom he encountered as a Jew growing up in Brooklyn would probably have been “more tolerant, more open” had Scanlan’s Tablet disavowed Father Charles Coughlin, Gen. Franco, and Sen. McCarthy. But this is a non sequitur.

Most, if not all the priests, brothers and nuns who taught me and others of my generation to respect the followers of the religious tradition of Jesus, who taught us to honor that faith as part of our own spiritual heritage, who taught us to stand against the bigotry and hate practiced by the KKK and the Nazis, were also pro-McCarthy. They probably also favored Franco over his perceived anti-Catholic enemies.

Such Catholic educators did not see their personal support for McCarthy or Franco as inconsistent with teaching humankind’s brotherhood under the Fatherhood of God. Rather they more likely saw the anti-McCarthy and anti-Franco forces as fostering, whether knowingly or not, a Communist cause that, among other things, hated all religion across the board.

In my own very small way, I was involved during the ’50s and ’60s with issues of racial justice, interfaith brotherhood, and the anti-nuclear peace movement. In the Scanlan Tablet, the Readers’ Forum and in the columns of my Catholic college newspaper, I voiced un-Tablet-like views on such questions as the U.S. massive thermonuclear retaliation policy and Sen. McCarthy’s scatter-gun tactics.

As for alleged Tablet anti-Semitism, what I seem to recall is that, if a Jewish leader or organization spoke out for positions that Scanlan also happened to be promoting, then that story would get prominent play in the Tablet. His Tablet was hardly ecumenical, but stories and photos of hierarchy-approved interfaith and joint civic action of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy occasionally appeared.

Scanlan’s combative anti-communism undoubtedly involved his aligning with controversial figures whose flaws, if detected by him, he likely judged lesser evils than those against which he and they fought.

Father Coughlin was before my time but I considered the Scanlan Tablet’s 110% endorsement of McCarthy a monumental misjudgment of the senator’s character, his tactics and his adverse impact on legitimate anti-communism. It was an horrendous political misjudgment by The Tablet, but I think not ethnic or religious prejudice.

As for Franco, only those willing to explain away, justify or deny the Second Spanish Republic’s anti-Catholic Church agenda, its banning public religious processions, its suppression of particular religious orders, its widely believed acquiescence in the burning of churches and convents, would condemn Scanlan for not rallying to the side of the International Brigade.

The Scanlan personality seemingly did not permit provisional or partial commitments. In the political sphere, as in the religious, he apparently committed totally. He did not seem to draw the lines or make the distinctions in his political alliances that I, for my part, might have thought appropriate given his religious and spiritual identity. His strident militancy, perhaps merging those alliances with that identity, may well have both been a reaction to – and added to – the political divisiveness of the era. But to characterize his zealousness as anti-Semitic bigotry is, as I remember his Tablet, wrong factually and wrong as an analytic paradigm.

That kind of analysis is but the opposite twin to the thinking of the Scanlans and other McCarthyites who attributed “pinko sympathies” to those critical of the senator’s excesses and his disregard of due process.

The temptation to attribute bad motives to those who disagree with us is all too human, afflicting left and right, liberal and conservative alike, as well as those of us who regularly or on occasion find themselves somewhere in-between.

Demands that the current Tablet Editor’s predecessor’s predecessor be found guilty of anti-Semitism, fascism and bigotry for his political stands of a half-century or so ago, and that current management apologize, hardly advance the proffered goals of openness and tolerance.

Perhaps a call for exploring the all too common tendency to impute evil sentiments to political opponents would be a more fruitful approach, one to which I am sure Dr. Wallach could make a valuable contribution.

 Thomas McCarthy
Flushing