by Fred Moleck
Living Tradition
Most of you probably know that one of the greatest minds and teachers of liturgy in the world died this past July. That person is Aidan Kavanagh, a Benedictine of St. Meinrad’s Abbey in Indiana.His books, his teaching at the seminary at St. Meinrad’s, at Notre Dame, and Yale affected hundreds of students, disciples, and the worshiping Christian community.
He accomplished this feat not only by lectures and books, but with pithy asides and commentaries that demanded you sit up and listen.
In my mind, some of his greatest were recorded when he retired from Yale Divinity School in 1994.
He offered twenty-five rules to live by. Here are a few:
Religiosity is a form of immaturity that is rarely innocent.
Well-bred people do not stick things on their bumpers.
What diplomats call “semantic infiltration,” by which you get your opponent to talk with your own terms, is a form of mugging.
(Not included in this list is a terse phrase that appeared on hundreds of GIA buttons: Carpet bedrooms, not churches.)
And my favorite: Tradition and language don’t mean much unless you master them.
That gem came to mind last spring when I was in deep conversation with a university music student who was convinced that the cathedral should have a boys’ choir.
I agreed, but it would have to be a girls’ and boys’ choir.
He said no, because it was not part of our tradition.
I said no and, besides, he wasn’t on earth long enough to know anything about choral traditions in the Roman church.
So much has been wrought in the name of “our Catholic tradition” in the past ten years I can’t help but think that tradition is like Scripture—it can be quoted to suit any cause.
Deep understanding of any tradition happens only after years of daily living in the tradition. Bilingual discourse happens only after and years of speaking and reading and listening and dreaming in that second language.
A three-day organist/chorister junket to three Engish cathedrals and hearing three Anglican evensongs hardly constitutes “living the tradition.”
Another force at play is that tradition continues to grow as it is practiced. It is our tradition to have choirs.
After Pius X issued his Tra le sollecitudini, a.k.a. his motu proprio of 1903, women were removed from church choirs because the choir singer executed a liturgical office and, as everybody knows, women could not do anything liturgical.
In spite of the motu proprio’s prohibition against female singers, most central and eastern European churches had women singing the alto and soprano lines of the masses of Mozart, Schubert, and their generation—so did the immigrant churches in the United States.
In their way, they continued the tradition of “not only, but also.” Today, mixed choirs are cultivated and the whole church is all the better for it.
There have been occasions in the past couple of decades when a zealot traditionalist tries to express his or her understanding of what the tradition is.
I was amused a few years ago when one of the junior priests at the parish I was serving appeared before Benediction in a biretta, a cope that dragged on the floor, a cassock with the buttons not properly lined up, and a jumbo-size stole wrapped twice around his midsection.
He saw his vesture as part of a universal tradition. For me, it looked like he was playing “dress up.”
Quaint, but not the major part of the church’s whole tradition.
A linguist friend makes another observation. He found it interesting that when some traditionalists launch yet one more polemic about the tradition of Latin liturgy, they frequently mispronounced the Latin names of the documents they are quoting.
Once again, Aidan is right. Traditio linguaque nil significant nisi comprehensi sint!
You can reach Fred Moleck via email at fmoleck@earthlink.net