VATICAN CITY — As a young Dominican priest, Father Augustine Di Noia “participated gleefully” in the implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), the landmark Second Vatican Council document that radically changed the sacred liturgy.

“I can't believe it's been 40 years,” said Father Di Noia, a former executive director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Doctrine and Pastoral Practices who now serves in Rome as undersecretary at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. On Dec. 4, 1963, Sacrosanctum Concilium was one of the first two Second Vatican Council documents to be released.

But much has changed since Sacrosanctum Concilium was promulgated as the “first fruit” of the council. It “shaped the reception of the rest of the documents that came out of the Second Vatican Council,” Father Di Noia recalled. “It's a beautiful document. … In itself it is innocent, but it signified a break from tradition.”

A major departure was to offer the possibility of celebrating the Mass in a country's mother tongue as opposed to Latin, a reform widely anticipated and welcomed.

Father Di Noia remembers that even his mother, who was in her 90s when the changes came into effect, had no nostalgia for the Latin Mass.

“It was too difficult to understand, too distant for her,” he recalled. “The principal value of Sacrosanctum Concilium was that it engaged the congregation more.”

However, he believes its even-greater contribution to the Church was that it “placed the Eucharistic Celebration as central to the Church's life.”

Father Di Noia disagrees that this has led directly to the loss of traditional devotions, although he admits placing the Eucharistic Celebration at the center of Church life initially triggered a reduction in Eucharistic devotion.

“There was a feeling that people practiced devotions because they couldn't get anything out of the [Latin] Mass,” he said. But, he added, for the last 30 years a revival in Eucharistic devotion has occurred due to the Holy Spirit and the powerful influence of Pope John Paul II.

“[Its growth] is a good example of the Holy Spirit going against the trend,” Father Di Noia said.

Bad Music

One area that has yet to experience a correction is the music at many contemporary Masses, Father Di Noia said. He laments that there has been a widespread loss in the singing of Gregorian chant, and he's not a fan of much of the liturgical music performed today.

“Music has become oriented to the congregation,” Father Di Noia said. “Often it has nothing to do with God but more oriented to enjoying oneself — it's more sensuous or even erotic.”

Indeed, an oft-made criticism is that Mass today has become less “vertical” in its orientation, with too little emphasis on the sacred, transcendent, eschatological dimension. Does Father Di Noia agree with this assessment and that Sacrosanctum Concilium is to blame?

He does not specifically single out the document for blame, but he wholeheartedly agrees with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, that having the celebrant facing the people — one of the most notable changes that came from the document — is a “radical alteration in the interpretation of the Mass.”

For Father Di Noia, it has fostered a view of the Mass as “an action between the celebrant and the congregation” rather than as the “celebrant meeting and leading the congregation in prayer toward God.”

“I think it has been made worse by personalities who forget they are leading prayer to God, in which the celebrant becomes like a talk-show host where it's all about him,” Father Di Noia said.

“Cardinal Ratzinger has touched upon something of incredible significance here,” he continued, “not just because of the need to emphasize the transcendent, the sacred, but because the congregation should simply be oriented toward God.”

Despite this observation, Father Di Noia speaks in very positive terms about Sacrosanctum Concilium. “On its own, [it] is a beautiful document and cannot explain the changes that have occurred,” he insisted. “It has to be read in the cultural setting in which we live.”

Modernism

If blame has to be assigned to anyone or anything for post-Vatican II problems, Father Di Noia singles out modernism — the emphasis on individual and communal experience that, he said, “lost in terms of theology [during the council] but won on the street.”

He explained that when the council committed the Church to embracing culture, it was largely uncritical of the culture of modernism. It has turned out, he said, “that culture has not been as harmless or as friendly as hoped but tended to deconstruct Christian tradition from within.”

And, Father Di Noia concluded, if Sacrosanctum Concilium has been misread or misinterpreted, it has been distorted “within the cultural setting of the times.”

Edward Pentin writes from Rome.