Bernard Law On Liturgy

Since it deals with "the collapse of Boston's Catholic culture" in recent decades, Philip Lawler's The Faithful Departed has quite a bit to say about Cardinal Law. In fact, Law hired Lawler, a fellow Harvard alum, to edit the archdiocesan newspaper, the Pilot, although he fired him fairly quickly. (Thanks to a visitor for recommending this book.)

Lawler doesn't seem to have had too many personal encounters with Law when he worked for the archdiocese, but he discusses one that gives insight into Law's approach to liturgy, which is important from our perspective, since liturgy has been a key concern in implementing Anglicanorum coetibus, and Anglicanorum coetibus was one of Law's pet initiatives.

According to Lawler,

a visiting priest at my local parish had introduced dozens of his own novel prayers and gestures into the Sunday liturgy, altering the form of the ritual so profoundly that I wondered whether the result was a valid Mass. (p 123)

This went beyond esthetics, it went to the duty of a bishop to ensure that valid sacraments are celebrated for his faithful. So Lawler raised the problem with Law at his next opportunity.

I would not have been surprised if Cardinal Law had told me that my concerns were absurd and scolded me for being an alarmist. Or if he took my charge seriously, he might have dropped everything, ordered an aide to bring around his car, and headed off immediately to investigate matters for himself -- and, if necessary, to replace the pastor immediately with a priest who could be relied upon to provide valid sacraments for the faithful. But I was not prepared for the reaction that my report actually received. The cardinal acknowledged my concerns, sighed, and said, "What can I do?" After a moment's reflection he added: "There are never problems when I'm there."

On one level the cardinal was absolutely right. Priests were always on their best behavior when he visited a parish, so he never witnessed serious liturgical abuses at first hand. When complaints reached his desk, he could only weigh the worries of the laity against the reassurances he received from their pastors, who would invariably deny any infringement of Church norms. There was never enough evidence to warrant decisive action. So the complaints piled up and the liturgical abuses continued.

A few weeks after my conversation with the cardinal, my family attended a Mass that he celebrated at Holy Cross cathedral. As we were leaving he pulled us aside. "Was that liturgy more to your taste?" he asked. Cardinal Law had apparently downgraded my concerns, at least in his own mind, so that he was responding not to a question about the validity of the Mass, nor even about the observance of concrete liturgical norms, but simply to a question of personal preference. My complaint was no longer a matter of pastoral urgency, on which he was morally obligated to act. It was a question of taste, on which reasonable people might differ. (pp 123-4)

I raised this with the visitor who's shared his personal insights into Law here, and he replied,

I was at a liturgy Law was celebrating at the Springfield cathedral where he barked out during post-communion organ meditation "that's enough of that" to the organist playing a saccharine poorly composed piece. He definitely had his preferences. Once I was with him for quick visit to a Trappist monastery where we attended liturgy of the hours. Law's comment on their spare simple style was that it was an abomination.

This raises the question of whether liturgy for Law was ever more than a question of personal preference, and if someone more powerful -- not necessarily in the hierarchy, of course, but perhaps via powerful secular friends or media contacts -- wanted things otherwise, then what could Law do? He could bully an organist to stop playing, or he could mutter something to an associate, but to make a concrete policy move would be something else entirely.

The Anglican business in this context strikes me as something of a hobby, but not something in the end that was very important. But dilettantism has always been an integral feature of Anglo-Catholicism, and I suppose Law was actually faithful to that aspect of it.

It reminds me, actually, of Fr Ian, the rector of the Anglo-Catholic St Thomas Episcopal Hollywood. His observance of liturgical specifics was punctilious. On the other hand, if the spirit moved him, he'd insert passages into the text of the liturgy that seemed right to him, although by that point, the pew missal was only loosely based on the Book of Common Prayer anyhow.

Anglo-Catholicism has a lot of flexibility built into it. This may have been part of its appeal to Law.