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Transgressive Liturgy: How the therapeutic mentality affects the culture and Catholic worship
Adoremus Bulletin ^ | September 2007 | James Hitchcock

Posted on 09/05/2007 11:10:47 AM PDT by maryz

The noted sociologist Philip Rieff died in 2006, leaving behind a series of works that offer highly original insights into the general state both of modern culture and of religion. Although he said little about liturgy as such, his theories provide an enlightening way of understanding the liturgical crisis.

. . .

The Three “Cultures”

Rieff’s theory of history broadly identified three successive cultures, each of which had some kind of moral idea at its heart. The First (primitive) Culture regarded law merely as “taboo” — fear of magical forces in the universe. The Second Culture, beginning with the ancient Israelites, made law into morality or “interdict” — sacred prohibitions — based on an authority that came from on high. The Third Culture (“Deathworks”) is the modern assault on the Second Culture in the name of human autonomy, fueled by “transgressions” against interdicts — deliberate attacks on sacred laws.

. . .

Rieff’s Second Culture was the environment in which liturgy existed prior to the Second Vatican Council — the recognition of the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans”, the awe-struck sense of the holy, the entering into a sacred place where the worshipper felt acutely unworthy and “fear of the Lord” was appropriate.

Interdicts and Guilt

Liturgy was interdictive in that, while it was fundamentally affirmative, it also required boundaries and prohibitions, both a physically enclosed sacred space and “rubrics” — specific requirements by which the necessary conditions of authentic worship were defined — in order to support a sense of reverence. Violations of rubrics or of sacred space were transgressive, thereby instilling dread in the transgressor.

Liturgy, precisely because it was the most sacred action in which human beings could take part, demanded the highest degree of self-abnegation and therefore carried the highest degree of guilt (“Lord, I am not worthy”).

. . .

Remissions and Transgressions in the “Therapeutic Culture”

In recognition of the fragility of human nature, every culture also organizes “remissions” by which men can release themselves to some degree from heavy demands, but only in order to submit to the interdicts once more, with renewed fidelity.

Traditional Catholic liturgy embodied some remissions. While worshippers were expected to maintain an attitude of reverent attention, striving to enter fully into the sacred mysteries, there were also times of relative relaxation — sitting rather than kneeling; homilies that were not ritualistic and might be emotional and related to people’s personal lives; even — although professional liturgists condemned them — private devotions during Mass.

Prior to the Second Vatican Council, the Church tended to be wary of all forms of psychotherapy, but afterward, various therapeutic techniques were uncritically embraced, especially by clergy and religious, as nothing less than new modes of salvation. Sigmund Freud, according to Rieff, promised to relieve men from anxiety, especially the anxiety of guilt:

Formerly, if men were miserable, they went to church so as to find a rationale for their misery; they did not expect to be happy — this idea is Greek, not Christian or Jewish.
Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man was born to be pleased, as “I believe” — the cry of the ascetic — lost precedence to “one feels.”

. . .
Unlike the religious culture that it superseded, the therapeutic culture has neither demons nor villains, so that the therapeutic individual opposes nothing and practices everything. “Toleration” becomes the highest virtue and “rigidity” the gravest fault.

Therapeutic culture reduces interdicts merely to taboos, that is, to essentially irrational and neurotic compulsions arising out of fear and ignorance, and in the post-conciliar Church there were increasingly shrill polemics against “legalism”, as though interdicts have no spiritual meaning. The rare disorder of scrupulosity was treated as the root of all belief, a sickness that had to be constantly fought against.

Thus properly “renewed” Catholics had to demonstrate their highly relaxed attitude toward the interdicts, a relaxation that led most notably to many thousands of priests and religious abandoning their vocations.

. . .

It scarcely occurred to earlier generations of worshippers that liturgy was in some way supposed to keep them entertained but, despite the many efforts to make it “meaningful” after the Council, complaints that it was boring were often taken as devastating criticisms.

Charismas — Gifts From On High

Rieff identified Max Weber, the nineteenth-century founder of sociology, as, along with Freud, the founder of the modern culture of transgression, because of his misunderstanding of “charisma”.

Charismas are divine inspirations —unmerited spiritual gifts from on high that concretely embody spiritual ideals and point the way toward right action. They are inherently credal and interdictory, in that they make binding claims based on undeniable truth.

The truly charismatic figure who embodies these gifts appears only at the time of the failure of a culture and its institutional forms, as Jesus did in late Judaism. In a way this figure is transgressive, in that he looks both forward to a new interdictory order and backward to the order that is being transcended.

The true reformer seeks to lay burdens on people, making life more difficult, liberating his followers from the external obedience only in order to shackle them to a higher truth to which he too is shackled. He possesses knowledge of “what not to do”, demanding that the law of love be followed by a series of “shalt nots”.

Charisms and Transgressions

But Weber assumed the Protestant opposition between priesthood and charisma, defining the “institutional church” as a break with the original charisma of Jesus: thereby Weber aligned charisma with transgression, making it available to break open the husk of institutions. He was unable to see, for example, that in the early Church bishops were chosen for their charismatic qualities — that there can in fact be organizations that embody authentic spiritual gifts.

. . .
Liturgical Crisis: Flight from Guilt

Post-conciliar Catholic “renewal” was immediately caught up in the general cultural crisis of which Rieff was the most acute diagnostician, and the ultimate root of the liturgical crisis was precisely the flight from the sense of guilt, something that required a radical redefinition of the nature of worship itself, even though the Council did not officially support such a redefinition.

Liturgical innovators avoided credal affirmations precisely in order to escape acknowledgement of human sinfulness, and with remarkable speed the central meaning of the Mass — the salvation of sinners through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross — was obscured, even denied, in favor of celebrating human goodness, bubbling up in an atmosphere of mutual affirmation.

But ultimately, the command of the therapeutic culture is not mere tolerance but “thou shalt not believe”: not the beginning of a new faith but the dissolution of all faith.

. . .

Many of the general reforms of the Council, such as easing the laws of fast and abstinence, were intended to be remissive. One of the purposes of the liturgical reforms after the Council was to reduce the effort required to make liturgy meaningful. This included simplifying rubrics, eliminating elements of ritual deemed no longer necessary or significant, above all by permitting the use of the vernacular, altogether making liturgy accessible with less strenuous effort.

But as presented in the mass media (and often by official voices as well), the Council came to seem little more than a great release from the “rigidity” of laws and doctrines. Pope John XXIII was turned into the icon of a kindly grandfather who indulged his offspring; and, building on skeptical modern biblical criticism, the figure of Jesus was often detached from the Church and used to undermine creeds and interdicts, making Him into a wholly remissive figure who merely seeks to lift burdens.

Without official warrant, the post-conciliar liturgical style tended to place yet further remissions at its very center — the persona of the celebrant, spontaneous comments and jokes scattered throughout the rite, extemporaneous prayers whose very unfamiliarity announced the omission of something required, “dialogue” between priest and congregation, a popular musical idiom — all of which culminated in a prolonged and ostentatious “kiss of peace” as the high point of the celebration, a remission that overshadowed the act of worship itself.

. . .

Leaders Collapse — Cultural Suicide
. . .

There was little popular demand for liturgical change at the time of the Council, since, even if people understood that liturgical forms could be changed, they tended to accept those forms as given, which is the normal way of regarding the sacred. Thus, ironically, the interdicts were first broken by those whose sacred duty was to protect them.

Liturgical changes were initially commanded by clergy solely by virtue of their offices, but many clergy then used those offices to undermine the very idea of hierarchical authority, claiming in its place a charismatic authority of divine inspiration, invoking the promptings of “the Spirit”. The shepherd sought to bind his flock not to laws to which he was himself obedient but solely to his own teachings, holding power over his followers by encouraging their transgressions, turning discipleship into membership in an anti-credal group.

Reverence for the interdicts was weakened in lay people above all by seeing their priests’ transgressions, both in their personal lives and in their obligatory irreverence at Mass.

The attempt to level a sacred order can only be experienced as guilt, but there can be no guilt in the absence of presiding presences against whom one can rebel, so that particular churches are rife with bitter quarrels exactly in proportion to the degree that they retain vestiges of genuine authority. “Renewed” Catholics assume Weber’s opposition between priestly office and charisma, often to the point of cynically reducing all authority to a desire for power and control.

But the post-conciliar Church has shown itself to be nervously anti-punitive. Simplistically understood, Vatican II promised to replace fear with love, obscuring even for many well-meaning people the fact that fear teaches essential and elemental lessons. Once devoid of all fear, the apparently firm moral structure of the Church began to collapse with remarkable speed.

“Creativity” Justifies Transgression

Numerous “charismatic” figures have appeared since the Council, both in the specific sense of the Charismatic Movement and the broader sense of people who claim to possess spiritual gifts. Some of these establish their authenticity by reaffirming the authority of the interdicts, but others substitute their own “gifts” for credal truth, and nowhere more than in liturgy have such “gifts” been invoked to justify transgressions. (Even the doctrinally orthodox Charismatic Movement has an uneasy relationship to official worship, seeking as much as possible to inject spontaneous elements into its liturgies.)

But the language of spontaneity embodies hostility and contempt for authority, for culture itself. Encomia like “originality” and “creativity” are freely conferred, and “breakthroughs” can be appreciated much more quickly than what has been broken through.

This “creativity” is often explicitly a denial of credal truth. Some congregations omit the Nicene Creed or replace it with self-composed “statements of faith”, and the most “advanced” liturgies incorporate completely secular elements or elements of non-Christian religions, making the ultimate claim of being open to all possibilities.

“Modern” liturgy demands to be experienced above all not as humble and awe-struck participation in a divine action but as an extension of the human, a creation of the community, with no “imposition” from the outside. The farther it moves away from official worship — the more “creative” it becomes — the more its devisers claim inspiration that negates the “official Church”. Deviant liturgies are treated as more authentic than official worship, because they well up from the “inspiration” of the participants.

. . .
Shedding the Burdensome Past

The past then becomes a burden that threatens the present and must be mastered, so that the unique modern achievement is to be sprung loose from all historical memory. But, Rieff demands, “How dare we dismiss the authority of the past as if we understood it? From the past we gain our regulating weight, to hold against the lightness of our acts.”

Some of the often rancorous debates over Catholic liturgy cannot be resolved because they are fundamentally irrational, touching deep nerves in people that they often do not understand. The use of the Latin language, Gothic architecture, traditional vestments, and other such things incite in liturgical liberals a panicky fear of being pulled back into a world in which guilt would again be appropriate.

. . .

Thus for many self-consciously “progressive” Catholics particular liturgical innovations are less important than the process of innovation itself. They have a compulsion to violate rubrics both in order to throw off the burdens of authority and from the sense that there are no meaningful realities except what they themselves construct. For such people “renewal” is solely a process of liberation from the past.
. . .

Rieff thought that neither hierarchs nor heresiarchs truly understood what was at stake in the celibacy issue, which was the fact that the transgressive sense was bound to break out first in the erotic sphere. This judgment was borne out when the post-conciliar relaxation of interdicts brought the crisis of liturgy and the crisis of sexuality together on the question of celibacy — because the priest was obligated both to renounce sexual activity and to guard the integrity of the sacred rites.

Once “reform” was defined as discarding burdens and making life easier, the relaxed style of liturgy expressed the priest’s personal sense of moral relaxation, which he tried to communicate to the people. Many priests went from seeking remission from the burdens of their calling to full-scale rebellion against its demands. In many congregations the ultimate liturgical remission was the sudden disappearance of the priest, who laid down his burden entirely.

Moral and Liturgical Transgression Linked in the Therapeutic Culture

The transgressiveness of modern Catholicism followed the larger culture especially in attacking almost all sexual interdicts, beginning with contraception and moving through divorce, fornication, homosexuality, and finally abortion, with the liturgical disorders paralleling and to some extent reinforcing sexual disorders.

. . .

After the Council some Catholics, especially those in vowed religious life, were powerfully attracted to therapies such as “encounter groups” that were in one sense sacramental, in that they promised a kind of salvation, but in a deeper sense were anti-sacramental, because they offered salvation not from sin but precisely from the sense of sin.
. . .

Meaning and “Meaninglessness”

The belief that liturgy could be explained did much to undermine the sense of the sacred, leading to a puritanical stripping away of “meaningless” rites and didactic “explanations” of rites that denied their charisma by making them seem mere human inventions that were ultimately superfluous.

. . .

Privatized Religion

Soon after the Council the “secular city” gave way to the “New Age” in which no belief can be called superstitious if it serves someone’s needs, something that was almost inconceivable at the time of the Council and demonstrating how little “reformers” really understood the culture to which they were so eager to relate. Occult neo-primitivism fills the void left by a retreating Christianity, not as an influx of genuine charisma, but merely as another form of self-expressive transgression.

On the “conservative” side of the post-conciliar Church there has occurred an almost endless multiplication of visions and private revelations that, while perhaps orthodox in intent, nonetheless carry transgressive possibilities, in that they have achieved popular credibility without regard for official ecclesiastical approval and are treated by their devotees as direct incursions of charisma, independent of established sacramental channels. Even among some orthodox people the ultimate criterion of religious practice is the subjective satisfactions it brings to its practitioners.

. . .

James Hitchcock is professor of history at St. Louis University and author of many essays and books, including The Recovery of the Sacred, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life, and most recently an intellectual biography of Christopher Dawson now awaiting publication. His regular column for the Catholic press is also on the web site of Women for Faith & Family (www.wf-f.org/J-Hitchcock-col.html).


TOPICS: Catholic; Religion & Culture; Worship
KEYWORDS: liturgy; therapeutic

1 posted on 09/05/2007 11:10:52 AM PDT by maryz
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To: Frank Sheed; sneakers; Mercat

Since the article was so long, I did my best to cut it (cuts marked by ellipsis marks), and got it to about half the original length.


2 posted on 09/05/2007 11:12:40 AM PDT by maryz
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To: maryz
It seems you forgot the ellipsis marks. I was wondering why the thing was so choppy, and now I have to read the rest!

Thanks, regardless.

3 posted on 09/05/2007 1:12:50 PM PDT by Dumb_Ox (http://kevinjjones.blogspot.com)
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To: Dumb_Ox

No, they’re there — I centered them, and I admit they didn’t show up as well as I’d hoped. Maybe I should have bolded them or used asterisks. Sorry!


4 posted on 09/05/2007 1:42:21 PM PDT by maryz
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To: maryz

Fascinating read, FRiend. Long but very instructive.


5 posted on 09/05/2007 3:02:42 PM PDT by Bigg Red (Duncan Hunter in 2008!)
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To: Bigg Red

It is — it seems to cover everything, and it shows the pattern in the chaos! Chilling in a way, though — doesn’t seem to point any way out.


6 posted on 09/05/2007 3:11:32 PM PDT by maryz
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To: maryz
Related story: Moralistic-therapeutic deism as the most influential form of American religion.
7 posted on 09/05/2007 10:00:56 PM PDT by Dumb_Ox (http://kevinjjones.blogspot.com)
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To: Dumb_Ox
Thanks for the link!

These beliefs are killing American religion. The authors call it Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. The creed is simple and, yes, conventional -- but, where the authors find that it matters, MTD is not traditional. Basically, God exists and watches over human life, which was created by God. God wants people to be nice, as it says in the bible and in most world religions. God does not have to be involved in our lives except to solve our problems and make us happy.

8 posted on 09/06/2007 2:23:39 AM PDT by maryz
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