Why the Traditional Rite Is Beautiful and Why Beauty Matters
Dr. Peter A. Kwasniewski
October 25, 2025
Abbotsford, BC, Canada
A warm thanks for Fred Pecson of Fiat Lux Catholic Photography for recording and photographing this event!
Transcript
When as a young man I first came across the famous quotation of Fr. Frederick Faber—“the Mass is the most beautiful thing this side of heaven”—I remember thinking it was over-the-top Victorian sentimentality. It did not seem to fit my experience growing up in suburban New Jersey or even in college. The Mass as I had encountered it did not seem to have the celestial and transcendent character that would naturally call forth Fr. Faber’s superlative judgment.
But then came the unexpected discovery of the traditional Latin Mass—the one about which Fr. Faber was writing, after all—and, with years of experience, I have come to see that he was, and is, absolutely right. No exaggerations involved. It was the same rite of Mass that his contemporary St. John Henry Newman praised in such lofty terms in his thinly-disguised autobiographical novel Loss and Gain:
I declare…to me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Mass forever and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words—it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and is the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity.
The contrast drawn by Newman is illuminating. A Protestant or Protestantized liturgy “invokes” the Eternal—it names it, calls upon it, perhaps (in a best-case scenario) exalts it in fine language—but it does not “evoke” it, that is, bring it forth, summon us into its presence, immerse us in it. Invocation is more active: it is something we do, looking for results. Evocation is more passive: it is something done that we fall into; a certain presence of the Eternal is the present result. And this “greatest action that can be on earth” is clothed in majesty and beauty—that is its native language.
But what is beauty? St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that beauty arises from three properties when they are present together: integrity or wholeness, due proportion or harmony, and brightness or clarity. For example, the Pietà of Michelangelo is a complete scene, with the full figures of the Lord and His holy Mother; these figures are related to each other according to well-judged proportions; the ensemble shines with luminous intelligibility, conveying a message of most profound grief yet also unshakable faith, surrender, and adoration.
The Latin Mass has these properties of integrity, harmoy, and clarity in abundance and in a way that occurs differently in its various forms: Low, High, Solemn, and Pontifical. The liturgy’s elements and their subtle interplay developed over the course of three millennia (if we include the Hebrew antecedents, as we should) and this is why we experience such a sense of depth, sacredness, seriousness, and timelessness when we encounter the venerable Roman Rite or any historic apostolic rite. The use of Gregorian chant contributes in a particularly powerful way to the overall beauty of the rite. Beauty most of all “happens,” so to speak, where there is great clarity about what the thing itself is. When someone is attracted to the traditional liturgy for its sights and sounds, it is not because he is fixated on such things for their own sake, but because they coalesce around the reality of the Sacrifice of the Cross and make it stand forth with a satisfying clarity. To use a different metaphor, there isn’t a lot of static to interfere with the transmission of the broadcast, and the script is well-written and well-delivered. The surface qualities (or “accidents”) so harmonize with the nature of the mystery that the result is the splendor of the truth.
A great Benedictine monk of the twentieth century, Dom Gerard Calvet, the founder of the flourishing traditional monastery of Le Barroux in France, offers the perfect commentary on this concept. He says:
One enters the Church by two doors: the door of the intelligence and the door of beauty. The narrow door…is that of intelligence; it is open to intellectuals and scholars. The wider door is that of beauty. The Church in her impenetrable mystery…has need of an earthly epiphany accessible to all: this is the majesty of her temples, the splendour of her liturgy and the sweetness of her chants.
Take a group of Japanese tourists visiting Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. They look at the height of the stained-glass windows, the harmony of the proportions. Suppose that at that moment, sacred ministers dressed in orphried velvet copes enter in procession for solemn Vespers. The visitors watch in silence; they are entranced: beauty has opened its doors to them. Now the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas and Notre Dame in Paris are products of the same era. They say the same thing. But who among the visitors has read the Summa of St. Thomas? The same phenomenon is found at all levels. The tourists who visit the Acropolis in Athens are confronted with a civilisation of beauty. But who among them can understand Aristotle?
And so it is with the beauty of the liturgy. More than anything else it deserves to be called the splendour of the truth. It opens to the small and the great alike the treasures of its magnificence: the beauty of psalmody, sacred chants and texts, candles, harmony of movement and dignity of bearing. With sovereign art the liturgy exercises a truly seductive influence on souls, whom it touches directly, even before the spirit perceives its influence.i
For men as body-soul composites, for Christians as disciples of the Word-made-flesh, there must be both elements: the truth and the splendor. It’s not enough merely to know that certain things are true, or to be told that they are true; we need somehow to see and hear convincing presentations of them, born out of a dialogue between the Lord and His Church across the ages, and capable of initiating us into the same dialogue. The splendid truth stimulates the response of a whole person to the wholeness of truth that embraces mind, heart, soul, strength—the totality with which we are called to love God.
Nothing less is worthy of the God we adore. Confessio et pulchritudo in conspectu ejus; sanctimonia et magnificentia in sanctificatione ejus. “Praise and beauty are before Him: holiness and majesty in His sanctuary” (Ps 95:6). The Benedictines have many mottoes; one of them is Ora et labora, pray and work; another is Deo optimo maximo, “To God the greatest and best.” The one who is the greatest and best deserves the greatest and best. Every traditional apostolic rite, if done well, is “most beautiful” for its own adherents—the Byzantine rite for the Byzantines, the Armenian rite for the Armenians, the Coptic rite for the Copts, and so forth—and that is because each ancient Christian tradition developed continuously for centuries, during which the faithful who prayed with it expended their best energies of prayer and work to make it the most fit dwelling for the King of Kings. When we expend time, effort, money, artistry, on cultivating the beautiful, we show that we are ready to give our best to God, and in doing so, we are also doing the best thing for ourselves, made in His image. He deserves beauty; we hunger for beauty and are nourished by it.
When I was living in Austria for seven and a half years, one of the things that struck me the most was how effectively the Church in Europe had harnessed the power of the fine arts as tools of catechesis, devotion, and mysticism. She preached through the music, the paintings, the sculptures, the majestic churches, the sanctuaries with their towering altars. So much of the Faith was “encoded” in the artworks, it made verbose and tedious explanations unnecessary. After the Second Vatican Council a new wave of rationalism swept through the Church, a belief that the most important way to transmit the Faith was to talk about it, and to make people talk back. Proponents of this view thought the faithful would become more serious and mature Christians if only what they regarded as the distracting “clutter” of the visual and musical heritage of the Church could be cleared away. Instead of breathtaking architecture and elaborate sanctuaries, sublime polyphony and otherworldly chant, the 1960s reformers advocated clean, empty spaces and songs written in a popular style that had nothing transcendent about it. The result was an enormous vacuum of beauty—a kind of “real absence” instead of real presence. I think the loss of faith in the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist was partly precipitated by this catastrophic loss of beauty in churches and in the liturgy. The outward signs were no longer pointing to this mystery and crying out (or whispering), “Behold, the Lamb of God! Bow down before Him, before the one who is worthy of everything we can possibly give Him.”
Throughout history, the Church has never ceased to pursue beautiful music, art, and architecture of the finest craftsmanship. The reason is simple: made by God as creatures of flesh and blood, we learn through our senses, and it cannot be otherwise. Leafing through the Bible we come across so many examples of “theophanies,” that is, manifestations of God in various signs and figures. When God revealed the Law to Moses, He made use of a lofty mountain, lightning, thunder, dark clouds, blood, and stone tablets. When He commanded the building of the tabernacle, He showed the pattern of it in fine detail, demanding the most expensive materials. When God spoke to Elijah, He first made a lot of noise to attract the attention, and then revealed Himself in a “soft, small voice” to capture the heart. When Our Lord wished to give Himself most intimately to His disciples, He used bread and wine, in the midst of a highly structured religious ritual conducted in a well-furnished upper room. The Jewish liturgy in temple and synagogue always followed the same plan and so did its fulfillment, Christian liturgy, animated by the miracle of the Son of God Himself taking on flesh and blood. After the Edict of Milan freed the Christians from their cramped catacombs, the first thing they did was to build magnificent basilicas for majestic worship, as if their desire for an appropriate external form had been like a catapult cocked and ready to be sprung. The Catholic Faith, with the power of the Incarnation behind it, developed the richest culture of beauty the world has ever known—all in the service of pointing beyond itself, to God.
Beautiful Catholic churches, art forms, and liturgies invite believers to deeper conversion, and influence those who are non-Catholics or fallen away Catholics to be potential converts. David Clayton, a major proponent of Catholic sacred art, traces his conversion to the Faith to his first experience of a solemn Mass at the London Oratory, in which the massiveness of the architecture, the glory of the polyphony sung by the choir, the splendor of the liturgical ceremonies, the devout bearing of the ministers and congregation, all conspired to haunt his soul with the message: “There is something more, infinitely more, than you have yet made room for in your life. Open yourself to it. Become greater by becoming less.” I have met so many people over the years who were drawn to the Catholic Church by attending a solemn Mass or hearing the Gregorian chant—the same things Clayton experienced that day. How could we be surprised at this? Divine Providence was obviously not uninvolved in the slow development of the beauty of the liturgy. The Lord endowed it with a magnetic power to attract souls—to elevate and comfort souls who already believe, and to awaken and convict souls who do not yet believe.
All this has serious implications for home life, too. The first thing a baby notices in the world is his mother’s face, which establishes a first and permanent vision of beauty—not necessarily as the world sees it, but because love discloses truth. An infant who is not given this vision of the beauty of maternal love is permanently deprived of something more essential to its humanity than an infant deprived of food or sleep, and I have to wonder how much of our societal breakdown is caused by a lack of mothers really present to their small children, together with a lack of fathers who by their hands-on involvement in their children’s lives image forth the provident Father of all. I don’t say this to distribute blame—as far as I can tell, the only perfect parents who have ever lived are Joseph and Mary—but to underline the humble beginnings of our apprehension of beauty and to encourage all parents to recognize the role they play in acting as channels of it. As a child grows in the family, his parents have the serious obligation to train him or her in a love of the beautiful by reading good stories, playing good music, putting up good artwork, making art and music together, assigning poetry to be memorized, and, as the crown jewel, attending liturgy that is outwardly beautiful. All these things are part of a subtle and pervasive education of taste, sensibility, instinct, and intuition. When we are brought up with beauty, we have a sense of propriety, respect, nobility, dignity. These things are proto-religious or para-religious attitudes that heavily influence the course of one’s life. Without them, we are much more vulnerable to the winds of false ideas and to the lure of bad morals. As Roy Peachey says: “The derogation of beauty is not…simply an aesthetic mistake: it creates a deep wound in civilization, a wound that could not readily be healed. When society ignores, dismisses, or disparages beauty, it cuts itself off from reality itself.”ii In a similar vein, Nicholas Rao states, in words that could be taken as a sort of manifesto for church life, family life, and society as a whole:
A Catholic environment is a deliberately constructed place where sacred and profane beauty, liturgy and art, work, leisure, study, and communal fellowship are all modeled after the Heavenly Jerusalem. This should not be an act of vanity, a pharisaical wish to pray loudly. It should arise, first, from the desire to glorify God, and, second, from the sense of our own need to be influenced, of our abiding dependence upon form and structure….iii
I would emphasize that last phrase: “our own need to be influenced, our abiding dependence upon form and structure.” You see, contrary to the myths of the 1960s, Christians cannot come into the fullness of their identity, their vocation, their mission, until and unless they are thoroughly formed by an objective tradition that precedes and guides them.
Beauty’s two dimensions
Beauty has two dimensions: the outward (“on the surface”) and the inward (“in the depths”). A great work of art, like Chartres cathedral, has both dimensions: an immediate “wow” of resplendent appearances, but also a sophisticated geometrical, cosmological, and theological plan that becomes apparent only to the patient, attentive contemplator.
These two dimensions are found in human persons, too: there is the beauty of the face or the body that’s easy to notice, and the inner beauty of moral uprightness and sanctity that shows itself over time in a relationship. It takes years to discover and appreciate the beauty there is in a person—or, for that matter, in a great work of art that emerges from a deep soul. Indeed, the greatest works of art can school us in this appreciation: as we gaze at the immediate contours and colors of a portrait by Vermeer or Rembrandt, our consciousness is borne beyond it to a reality greater than anything an artist could ever paint: the intensity of life, the light of the soul, the spark of the divine, the mystery of infinite interiority.
The traditional Latin Mass has both of these dimensions: the outer beauty for the five senses, the inner beauty for the mind and heart. For example, it offers to our sight the vision of a priest oriented to the East, caught up in prayer, wearing a glistening chasuble adorned with symbols, and the orderly motions of ministers serving the Lord like angels around His throne. It offers to our hearing the comforting rise and fall of unvarying Latin phrases, impressively ancient like words etched on a Roman monument, familiar as the sound of a favorite poem, and, at chosen moments, given wings to soar by the incomparable melodies of Gregorian chant; even the silences call out to the ear of the heart and bid it listen well to the Word as He leaps down from His heavenly throne to dwell amongst us. It offers to our smell the perfume of incense, billowing up in the sanctuary like prayers carried by the hands of angels, floating outward to permeate our hair and clothes. With so much more kneeling, it offers to our touch the solid humility of knees on kneelers and arms on pews, culminating in the supremely fitting gesture of falling to our knees for Communion, with our hands folded helplessly, with head tilted back, and with our tongue privileged to receive the bread of angels. Women, who are privileged to represent the whole of creation in its stance of receptivity to the Creator, have in addition the multisensory experience of wearing a veil that reminds them of their sacred status as receivers of life—as when a chalice destined to hold the Blood of God is veiled, or as a tabernacle that imitates the Virgin Mary’s womb houses the ciborium containing the fairest of the sons of men.
In an autobiographical sketch, a Catholic named David Bissonnette tells us about the aspects of his faith that either revived again after years of desuetude or came alive for the first time thanks to his collision with the traditional Mass, which teaches profound mysteries by a deft use of the full panoply of the means of communication. For example:
Kneeling before the high altar, I understood something of the majesty and kingship of Jesus Christ, as the priest, wearing the old vestments, moved towards the high altar, interceding on our behalf to God, begging for mercy… I understood for the first time the intercessory role of the priest.
More to the point, he says, quite simply:
Beauty is what came to strike my heart at the first TLM; “where has beauty been all of these years?”… It was particularly the melismatic chants that immersed me in the ethereal… I could only conclude that I was in the proximity of Beauty Himself. This was something that I intuitively understood by experiencing God in the Latin Mass. It was only later that I began to read and study and understand more of what was happening.
I’m sure many of us can relate to Bissonnette’s account. Though I was immediately smitten with the old rite on first encountering it, it’s taken me decades to plumb its depths, and I’m still learning more, practically every day, drawing buckets of the purest and most refreshing water from a fathomless, never-drying well.iv The brilliant Italian poet and founder of Una Voce in Italy, Cristina Campo, observes:
The immutability of the true rite and all traditions was willed by God precisely so that in that cosmic, infallible return of figures we might proceed each day a little further into the unfathomable complexity of their meanings: that which will never allow itself to be expressed in rational concepts, but only to be indicated, alluded to in divinely ordained gestures, sounds, symbols…. [These include] the flames, the incense, the tragic vestments, the majesty of the gestures and faces, the rubato of the songs, the steps, the words, the silences—the whole vivid, luminous, rhythmic symbolic cosmos that never stops pointing, alluding, referring to a celestial double whose mere shadow on earth it is.v
The traditional Mass—especially in the full splendor of the Solemn Mass and the Pontifical Mass—is truly, no doubt about it, “the most beautiful thing this side of heaven,” this side of the “celestial double whose mere shadow on earth it is.” You have to see this bright shadow to fall in love; and you have to love it to see it fully, and to begin to see through it and beyond it. Sight gives rise to love, and love feeds upon further sight, in an endless upward spiral that culminates in a vision we call beatific. I am therefore not at all surprised about two notable facts. First, the internet is overflowing with images of the TLM—its obvious beauty is lost on no one, to the extent that even the publicity generated for the USCCB’s Eucharistic Revival decided to employ imagery that is much more often associated with the old rite than with the new. Second, there has been—particularly, I would say, over the past ten years—a veritable flood of new publications on the TLM, digging into its history, form, theology, and symbolism. “Only the lover sings,” said St. Augustine—and apparently, at least in our times, the lover photographs and writes a lot too!
The icon of Christ
But where does this tremendous beauty come from? What is it all about?
The deepest source of the beauty of the TLM is its simultaneously outward and inward reflection of Christ Himself. Every prayer, every reading, every antiphon, every gesture and ceremony, is about Him, is directed to His veneration. For over a thousand years, the liturgical allegorists of the West lovingly pondered the Mass as the “moving image of eternity”vi; as a moving image of salvation history, which shows the eternal and the divine intersecting with and impregnating the temporal and the human. In short: the Mass is the most beautiful thing this side of heaven because it is the principal icon of Christ. As Fr. Claude Barthe explains in his book Forest of Symbols (which I highly recommend), our ancestors of every century perceived
a link between the unfolding of the Mass and the history of salvation: the Mass represents the mission of Jesus Christ, from the proclamation of his arrival on earth—to which the Introit corresponds, sung by the choir, who in their turn represent the choir of prophets who foretold Christ’s arrival—up to his Ascension, to which corresponds the Ite missa est, the dismissal of the faithful…with which those assisting at the Mass are dismissed just as Christ dismissed his apostles on the Mount of Olives.vii
Let me offer a couple of examples of how this so-called “allegorical explanation” of the Mass, which has its roots primarily in three books of the Bible—the Gospel of John, the Apocalypse of John, and the Epistle to the Hebrews—illuminates the meaning of what we see unfolding before us with our bodily senses. First, in regard to why there are three major ministers in the solemn Mass (which I hope you will find opportunity to attend if you have never done so before), Fr. Barthe says:
The special characteristic of a solemn Mass is that it revolves around the actions of three sacred ministers: the priest, the deacon, and the subdeacon, who all belong to the major orders. And the three of them, from one point of view, are simply one; and when a single bench without a back (called the sedilia) is available, they all sit on it together. This is because the three ministers of the solemn Mass all represent the same Jesus Christ in three different states: yesterday, today, and world without end.
The subdeacon represents the Old Testament, Jesus Christ yesterday, who was proclaimed partly in the sayings of the prophets, and partly in figures by the saintly individuals who preceded his coming. As is appropriate, the subdeacon always occupies the lowest rank, that of incompleteness….
The deacon represents the New Testament, Jesus Christ today, proclaimed in his fullness by the apostles and their successors, the bishops, who are the propagators of the Gospel….
The celebrant himself is most fully identified with Jesus Christ today and world without end, as he presently is and always will be, in glory in heaven. The celebrant is the instrument and the representative of Christ glorious and victorious, the Christ who makes himself really present on the altar in the elements of bread and wine in order to accomplish there his sacrifice for the remission of sins and to the glory of his Father. The priest who celebrates at the altar is the image of Jesus Christ priest and victim, but an unbloody victim in his heavenly state.viii
Thus, the ancient Roman Mass shows itself to be a magnificent icon of the Christ who was promised of old to Israel, the Christ who came among us on earth and founded the Church, and the Christ who lives eternally to make intercession for us at the right hand of the Father. And, as a matter of fact, every action, every gesture, every word of the traditional rite has lessons like this to teach us! For example, its elaborate Offertory perfectly reflects one of the pivotal aspects of the life of Christ, namely, the sacrificial mode in which he lived and moved and had his being, so that he was always already preparing to offer Himself and beginning to offer Himself as a prelude to the supreme offering in which he obtained the full redemption of the human race and opened the gates of heaven. Here, again, is how Fr. Barthe explains it:
[T]he Offertory…[is] a term that must be understood in the strong sense of a “sacrifice.” The oblations that will shortly be consecrated are brought to the altar and unveiled. All the Christian liturgies, in a spiritual pedagogy married to the very rhythm of the Incarnation, proceed to a sort of pre-consecration. “When he cometh into the world, he saith: Sacrifice and oblation thou wouldest not: but a body thou hast fitted to me . . . . Then said I: Behold I come: in the head of the book it is written of me: that I should do thy will, O God” (Heb 10:5–7). At once, the liturgical sequence is upset: the Offertory anticipates the act that is going to reproduce the sacrifice of the Cross, just as Christ anticipated the offering of the Passion.
Allegorically, this moment of the Mass therefore recalls those moments in Christ’s life in which more than elsewhere he offers himself in an anticipation of his Passion: the offering of Christ to the Father…when he came into the world and entered the womb of Mary; the offering of Christ in the Temple, at the Presentation; and the offering during the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, which is recalled particularly when the priest invites those around him to pray (Orate fratres…), an invitation like that of Gethsemane (Lk 22:40), and when the priest prays in silence, recalling the solitary prayer of Christ on the Mount of Olives.
At this point we must emphasize the traditional comparison of the Offertory of the Mass with the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple. Surely that Presentation was above all a liturgical action? This rite applied to firstborn males, forty days after their birth. It was when parents really repurchased their male firstborn, for whom in substitution they gave the animals offered in sacrifice. The rite reflected the preservation of the firstborn of the Hebrews during the tenth of the plagues of Egypt, and the sacrifice of Isaac demanded of Abraham his father. Firstborn male children and Abraham’s firstborn son are both figures of Christ, the sacrificed Son of God: figures that were not yet fully realized, since the firstborn of the Hebrews had been spared, as had Abraham’s only son.
By this act Jesus showed what he had come into the world to accomplish: his self-offering on the Cross and for eternity. He did this first on the altar and in the temple formed by the womb of his mother. He next demonstrated it on the day of the Presentation in the Temple at Jerusalem. He finally repeated it in the Garden of Gethsemane…. At the Presentation Mary offered her Son in advance as a sacrifice | as she would one day have to offer him to God on Calvary, in the manner of a priest who, at the Mass, offers in advance the oblations that he is again going to offer (in the [fullest] sacrificial sense of the word) at the consecration. Mary also lifted up Jesus in her hands to put him in the hands of Simeon, who represents the eternal Father, in the same way that the priest lifts up a little above the altar the host and the chalice that he offers. By this offering in the Temple, Jesus Christ was made ready to be offered in his entirety, in the same way that the oblations are prepared for the perfect offering that takes place at the consecration.ix
When certain liturgists of the last century objected to the “anticipation” of sacrifice in the traditional Offertory, they showed that they had entirely failed to “read” the rite against the backdrop of salvation history and the life of Christ; in other words, they had stopped using the key of symbolism to unlock the door of liturgy. If we would understand the liturgical heritage of the Church, we must take up this key once again, and use it well, on every lock we find, even as our ancestors did—not only the intellectuals among them, but illiterate peasant farmers who had been instructed by stained glass, by homilies, by popular songs, by private devotions, to recognize the constant interplay between symbol and truth. We might say: Christians throughout history, until the Protestant revolt, lived in a world saturated with icons or images constantly pointing to the mysteries of the Christian faith.
This is why any attack on a traditional liturgy of the Church is a form of iconoclasm no less than the ancient Byzantine emperors’ attack on religious images in the eighth and ninth centuries, or the sixteenth-century Protestants’ attack on statues, windows, choir stalls, vestments, and vessels. Both were born of clumsy scriptural exegesis that identified the honoring of images that bring to mind their originals with the idolatrous worship of wood and stone objects. All three waves of iconoclasm or image-destruction—imperial, Protestant, and modern—are based on a misconception of the relationships between the external and the internal, the sensible and the spiritual. Ultimately, such an attack on the image is an attack on God Incarnate, supreme Beauty made flesh, whose attributes are reflected in church buildings, in icons, in the liturgical rites themselves. Even as the veneration given to an icon passes on to its archetype (thus avoiding any hint of idolatry), the one who defaces God’s image defaces—or, at least, tries to deface—God. This is true of the human person, the primordial icon presupposed to the Incarnation; it is true of the icons fashioned to make present to us persons transfigured by grace and glory; and it is true of the most beautiful thing this side of heaven: the liturgy handed down by tradition.
It is a failure to grasp this essential point—that the liturgy is iconic—that makes it possible for some superficial commentators nowadays to compare to idolaters traditionalists who are passionately attached to a given form of liturgy. That objection is as foolish as saying that the ancient Eastern Christians were idolaters because they were so attached to their painted or carved images of Christ, His Holy Mother, and the saints that they were willing to defend them in polemics, hide them in attics, remake them when destroyed, and even die under torture for them. The icon images forth the person depicted, and the homage is given to the person. The liturgy is Christ communicated to and communicating with us—and the homage we give to it is given to the One it communicates. This view is based on the belief, once common among Catholics, that the liturgy is itself a divine gift: yes, given through men as secondary causes, but above all the work of Divine Providence as first cause—a view that I defend at length in my book The Once and Future Roman Rite.
Liturgical iconoclasm as repudiation and desecration
No modern writer has perceived more clearly the iconoclastic drive of modernity than the British political philosopher Roger Scruton (1944-2020). In words that eerily lend themselves to the avalanche of “reforms” undertaken by the Catholic Church in the latter half of the twentieth century, he writes:
Sacred things are intolerable to those who no longer believe in them: an urge to desecrate replaces the desire to worship and—just as in periods of religious iconoclasm, such as that which destroyed the interiors of our English churches—the finest and most beautiful symbols are torn down and trampled on, lest they retain their power over the human soul…. The “culture of repudiation” [is] the culture of Mephistopheles, which finds its meaning in denial…. Their philosophy stems from a nihilism born of distrust, from a desire to “ruin the sacred truths” that ask for their credence. It seems to me that they are in the business of destroying consolation, not because they have anything to put in the place of it, but because the consolations of other people are a reproach to their own moral emptiness.x
A liturgical iconoclast like former archbishop of Milwaukee Rembert Weakland, whose personal immorality and wanton destruction of tradition seemed to go hand-in-hand, earning him the moniker “proud vandal,” serves as a perfect illustration of Scruton’s argument.xi In his 2010 Gifford Lectures, Scruton further develops the idea:
Sacred places are the first places to be destroyed by invaders and iconoclasts, for whom nothing is more offensive than the enemy’s gods. And we should recognize that much of the destruction of our environment today is deliberate, the result of a willed assault on old and despised forms of tranquillity. For there are two broad approaches to building: the way of settlement, and the way of disruption. Often when we settle we fit our lives into an existing and already consecrated pattern, strive to inherit the order established by those who have come before us, and to honour the spirit of the place… But the iconoclast seeks to replace old gods with new, to disenchant the landscape and to mark the place with signs of his defiance.xii
The ancient Office of Prime—suppressed by Sacrosanctum Concilium but continuing to be prayed by individuals and communities around the world—calls for the daily reading of the Roman Martyrology. One who reads each day’s inspiring register of heroes of the Faith is in for many surprises. One of the surprises I encountered in my own reading of it over the years was the discovery of just how many saints suffered torture or exile or death rather than betray icons by tolerating their suppression. For instance, in the month of April alone, one reads about them on four days: April 1, 3, 4, and 19.
The award-winning German novelist Martin Mosebach often appeals, in his writings, to the consolation of knowing that even the horrible persecution of Byzantine iconophiles (i.e., icon-lovers) lasted only for a time, and then disappeared from the East forever. Today, Eastern Catholics happily chant anathemas against their long-dead foes. May we dare to hope that the same will be true of this Western liturgical iconoclasm that targets the most beautiful thing this side of heaven? Mosebach writes:
As the example of Byzantine iconoclasm shows us, a hundred years is a relatively short time to overcome this kind of sickness. Until this happens, what we need, as was shown in the resistance offered by the Byzantine Church, is utterly resolute priests and monks to keep the tradition alive, so that it will not have to be reconstructed from books in some future time.… In Byzantium, after vast destruction, the holy images were victorious. Resolute monks had taken some of the icons and hidden them. We, too, need many resolute priests who will guard and keep for us the sacred rite of the Incarnation.xiii
In his Foreword to my book The Once and Future Roman Rite, Mosebach returns to this theme, obviously dear to his heart:
The Roman liturgy, which we may call “divine” with the same right as the Orthodox—perhaps we should get used to doing so—connects the natural and the supernatural. Its cause will not endure if it does not experience supernatural confirmation. Saints are such a confirmation. The movement for preserving the traditional rite will succeed only if it produces saints. As I write this, I am terrified, but it’s of no use; this insight is nothing other than a spiritual law. In the past, we can absolutely name saintly protectors of the Roman liturgy. At their head is certainly Pope Saint Gregory the Great, who did not at all invent these rites but reverently organized them. His heirs are all those who celebrate the traditional Mass today. We should next remember Saint John Damascene, who fought against the iconoclasm of Constantinople. The twentieth-century reforms not only were accompanied by a new wave of iconoclasm but dared to damage the greatest icon of all: the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Saint John Damascene is, in addition, connected with the “Feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy” celebrated in the Orthodox world on every first Sunday of Lent; this feast can be a model for the Catholic hope for the “restoration of the orthodox liturgy.”xiv
At this particular moment, when the enemies of the icon are so intoxicated with ideology that they do not hesitate to contradict even their cherished Second Vatican Council whenever it stands in the way of their objectives,xv it may often seem to us that we will never reach this goal of “returning to tradition.” It is nonetheless consoling to point out that bodily writhing is strongest right before death, and the air is coldest at dawn—in other words, the modern iconoclasts are at their worst right now but they are quickly running out of time. Love is a positive, fruitful force, while hatred is a negative and self-sabotaging one. Love abides and expands, while hatred consumes itself. This is why I am confident that the iconophiles, the lovers of divine beauty, will prevail over the iconoclasts, the purveyors of plainness, emptiness, and ugliness.
Beauty is God’s first, last, and most effective messenger. We learn that the world is good and orderly because of the beauty of nature that we experience sensually and that we come to understand, only later, intellectually. And just as we come to know the personal God through His divine artistry, we see the inner beauty of the human person most of all in the great works of human art. A painter like Rembrandt helps us to see the immense, almost heartbreaking beauty of an old man or old woman’s face, which we might otherwise rush past or even find unsightly. Christ Himself is “the fairest of the sons of men,” as Scripture says, but He allowed Himself to become “a man of sorrows,” marred beyond belief, to tell us something unforgettable about the invisible Beauty of love, of sacrifice for love. The Church therefore cannot and must not flee from her role of introducing mankind to this immortal Lover, both in the beauties that appeal to our senses, and in the deeper mystery that no sense can reach.
