Neuhaus on the Nationals Park Mass: "For Benedict, aesthetics is never mere aesthetics"

Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus caused quite a ruckus with his "somewhat critical" remarks about the way Mass was celebrated at Washington National's Park on EWTN. In "Benedict and Beauty" (First Things' "On the Square" April 25, 2008) he responds to his critics:

Where to begin? The matter of taste—or, if you will, aesthetics—enters into it, no doubt. But the problem with the way the liturgy and music was handled is that it focused attention on the gathered people and the performers rather than on what Christ is doing in the Eucharist. It was a display of preening multiculturalism that proclaimed, “Look at us wonderfully diverse people exhibiting our wonderfully diverse talents!” I should add that this was the impression more powerfully conveyed on television, which was what I saw from the broadcast studio. Some people who were in the stadium and participating in the Mass tell me they hardly noticed the sundry musical performances, except as a vague background noise. They were the fortunate ones.

No doubt there are many parishes where people regularly suffer worse than what was perpetrated at Nationals Park. For the most part it was bad music competently performed. But one expects better, one expects much better, at a papal Mass. Especially when the pope is one who has been so very explicit in his views on liturgical and musical practices. ...

To those who dismiss his remarks as a merely aesthetic dispute, Neuhaus cites a strikingly applicable excerpt from Ratzinger's Feast of Faith. He concludes:

I do not wish to be too hard on those who planned the celebration at Nationals Park. It was, sad to say, not unrepresentative of much Catholic worship in our time. The planners and the performers no doubt meant well, but it is worthy of remark that at a papal Mass there was so much that reflected an ignorance of, or defiance of, the very considered views of the pope.

Fr. Neuhaus on the National's Park Mass

Fr. John Neuhaus remarks on the liturgical music performances during the Washington National Mass:

In the response to our EWTN coverage, we received hundreds of complaints about the over-the-top stretch to be multicultural, along with some complaints by those were offended by our mentioning it. It’s hard to win on this score. And I have to remind myself that even mild criticisms of the way the Holy Father’s visit is being handled are taken amiss by people for whom even the chance to see the pope from a distance is one of the great moments of their lives. When over the years one has been present at papal events beyond numbering, one inevitably develops a measure of critical distance in which even mildly critical comments can clash with the intense piety of many of the Catholic faithful. Anything short of all-Wow!-all-the-time is taken as a sign of insufficient enthusiasm. Raymond Arroyo and I have multiple opportunities to remind one another of this dynamic. . . .

Of course nothing can diminish, never mind negate, the astonishment of the Real Presence of Christ in the Mass, but it must be admitted that the mish-mash of music and liturgical practices putatively representing the “other” of multiculturalism did vigorously compete with the central reality. I offered an observation or two on this in the course of our EWTN coverage, provoking the response that the people in the stadium were obviously enjoying themselves and we mustn’t try to impose our elitist musical and liturgical criteria. Ouch. The point I was making is that Benedict has written very specifically over the years about the distortion of the dynamics of worship when attention is focused on “our wonderful selves” rather than on the glory of God. He has also stressed the importance of renewing commitment to and continuity in the tradition of sacred music, including Gregorian chant, a tradition almost entirely absent from the stadium Mass. So the point of the commentary on that Mass is that it is remarkable that, on matters about which Benedict has been so emphatic, his views were so egregiously ignored or defied.

Admittedly, in his frequent writings on matters liturgical, Benedict has often offered a caveat on the difficulty of doing it right on occasions with huge crowds such as is the case here and will be Sunday at Yankee Stadium, so I expect he is resigned to things getting out of hand and his pastoral disposition is to go along with the more or less inevitable. It is also the case that some of those in Nationals Park said they did not notice the music and other multicultural indulgences that were so prominent in what was televised. Which is probably just as well.

Of course Fr. Neuhaus also addressed Benedict's homily in his post, along with subsequent visitation to CUA and the interfaith service at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center. (Read More).

Fr. Neuhaus on Benedict XVI and the "Human Face of God"

During the papal visit, Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus will be joining Raymond Arroyo cohosting the live coverage of all the events on EWTN. In between appearances he will also be blogging at First Things' "On the Square". Today's post, "Listening to Benedict" is largely the text of a talk he gave at a panel discussion this past week, sponsored by The Crossroads' New York Cultural Center (with Dr. David Schindler, Carl Anderson, H.E. Celestino Migliore, and Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete). Here's a snippet:

A few weeks before he was elected pope, Joseph Ratzinger said at the funeral of Luigi Giussani, founder of the renewal movement known as Communion and Liberation, “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story, an event.” Of course Christianity is also a rich intellectual tradition, some of us would say the richest in the history of the world, and Benedict is a master teacher of that tradition. And Christianity also entails dogmas and doctrines, vigorously defended and articulated by Benedict. It is also and very importantly a way of living in the truth, including the moral truth. But all of that is ancillary to and dependent on the fact that Christianity is a love story, an encounter with “the human face of God,” Jesus Christ.

The phrase the human face of God is much favored by Benedict. In my homily at Columbia University last Sunday, I told the students to watch for the appearance of the phrase during this visit. And, sure enough, there it is already in his preparatory statement setting out the theme of "Christ Our Hope." This is closely related to an important fact about Ratzinger/Benedict: He is an Augustinian.

In the Church’s theological and philosophical tradition, there are two great luminaries around whom most schools of thought gravitate: the fifth-century St. Augustine and the thirteenth-century St. Thomas Aquinas. Some say Benedict is an Augustinian Thomist and others say he is a Thomist Augustinian. I would say he is an Augustinian who is in sympathetic conversation with Thomas. The great guide in this connection is Aidan Nichols’ The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger, even though that study is now twenty years old. Just out from Oxford is Tracey Rowland’s Ratzinger’s Faith, which is a remarkably insightful study, even if she does let herself be distracted by the mainly Anglican project known as Radical Orthodoxy and is rather too insistent that Benedict is, after all, a Thomist, albeit a very Augustinian Thomist.

As a Platonist, or Neoplatonist if you will, Augustine during his wayward years was persuaded of the inherent human aspiration toward the Absolute. Thus what are probably his best-known words: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” But, no matter the intensity and inescapability of that aspiration, how do human beings achieve union with the Absolute? The great breakthrough for Augustine, and the pivot on which his conversion turned, was the Incarnation. In short, the human face of God in Jesus Christ.

While Benedict is well known for his sympathetic engagement with the theology of Martin Luther, his Augustinianism is very different from Luther’s denigration of human nature and of reason in particular. And it is even more distant from Calvin’s version of Augustine that, with relentless logic devoid of the humility induced by grace, leads to catastrophes such as the doctrine of double predestination. In Calvinism, Benedict sees a Protestant rendition of the neoscholastic Thomism—with its rigorously logical extrapolations from presumably unchanging truths—against which he so strongly protested as a young theologian. Benedict’s Augustine is the champion of an authentically Christian humanism. With Augustine, his life is driven by the discovery “How late I knew you, Beauty ever ancient, ever new.” This is the truth he proposes to the Church and the world with the theme "Christ Our Hope."