Was Vatican II Our Equivalent of the Black Death and the Rite of St. Gregory the Great?

Amici,

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all of you. For the occasion, a couple of religious thoughts.

The Great Pestilence ('Black Death' is a 19th century title for it)

Look at the last 70+ years in the following way...

The 1950s were as the decades between the death of Aquinas (1274) and the year 1346, when "the great pestilence" appeared in Europe. Vatican II and the grim "Spirit of Vatican II" were the Black Death sweeping through the Church, and we are shell-shocked survivors, walking among the unburied corpses, the untended fields, the abandoned churches, the desolate monastic houses (as then, so now: entire monasteries emptied: during the Black Death by physical plague, during this last 70 years, by spiritual plague). We wander about, stunned, trying to make sense of the utter tragedy of it all.

During the Great Plague of the 1340s, that's when the second half of the Hail Mary was added, remember. We need to pray both halves now as we wander about among the ruins, thankful for both surviving the pandemic and for God allowing us to keep the Faith.

The TLM

Modernist like to say the change from the TLM to the Novus Ordo was no big deal, that something like it happened when Greek was dropped from the Roman rite at some point after Constantine. And of course some argue the TLM should be called the rite of St. Gregory the Great, famous for issuing decrees and rules for it, but it predates St. Gregory the Great (d. 604).

Whatever the form of the very earliest liturgies, the major population centers soon generated early liturgies that "took hold" over entire regions. Antioch is a prime example, with "the Queen of the East" influencing liturgies toward the East and down into Syria proper, and Westward as far away as Milan and Gaul. The Egyptian liturgy of Alexandria soon influenced liturgies throughout Egypt and down into Ethiopia, etc. Later, the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom from Constantinople would inspire all the Slavic Orthodox liturgies. But Rome, at that early date still the actual imperial capital of the united empire and its major population center, would have developed its own liturgy, and the TLM has and austerity about it, an "Old Roman" reserve and seriousness not found in the other major liturgies, such as the Antiochan, which was in the Greek language, for certain, from the git-go. So Rome's liturgically must have went its own way for a while, its character colored by the old Roman spirit of duty and stoicism. After all, for a couple of hundred years after Peter and Paul, Roman Christians basked in martyrdom of the two great saints, and in the prestige of Rome's bishops (such as the first Clement), with all those early popes being martyred or exiled.

But that unique Roman character of the TLM must have been there from the first, and that in turns strongly suggests the Latin language was intimately involved. Language is essential to culture, and a bulwark against foreign influences. Heidegger said language was "the house of being". If the Roman liturgy had been entirely or even mostly in Greek for a couple of hundred years, as is usually alleged, why then the old Roman gravitas in the Roman liturgy? Rome's liturgy exhibits an inherent sobriety and austerity when compared to the lavishness of the others. And if you think about it, although Imperial Rome had a large Greek-speaking population, and although "Magna Graecia" was just to the south of it (Naples, etc.), the Eternal City also was home to hordes of people from Gaul (by Sts. Paul and Peter's time, as it had been conquered by Caesar not so long before) and Hispania, not to mention the Latin (or Berger-speaking) North African coast! Note how St. Augustine, born in 354 A.D., was both (probably) a Berber speaker from youth, and the greatest prose stylist Latin ever produced – yet he knew no Greek. And in that mix, as Christianity spread from Baptized Jews (like Peter and Paul) into the non-Jewish population, it attracted folks of all ranks, but probably mostly the lower classes, who either spoke Greek because they were Greek slaves and/or hailed from Southern Italy, or Latin, because they were from everywhere else. Latin was the lingua franca of the Western Empire, a land of many tongues.

So, in short, I have little patience with the idea that Greek was the language of the liturgy in Rome until Constantine. Of course after Constantine, the Eternal City steadily became less important, and soon began to lose its large population. The grain-bearing fleets setting sail from Egypt were redirected to Constantinople, remember, after Constantine the Great. And yet, fascinatingly, Rome's liturgy at that time began to spread everywhere in the Western Empire. Eventually it replaced the Antiochan-derived liturgies (the Gallic Rite, the Mozarabic Rite, and (sadly for me) the Celtic Rite.

So, know it predates St. Gregory the Great. By a lot. FWIW

An Préachán