COMPARING GREAT THINGS WITH SMALL

From southwestern Ohio:

We are your average lay people, but my husband and I took the Pistrina Challenge. What a difference between WHH and Father Carusi’s article! It’s like comparing a rural middle school marching band with the New York Philharmonic.

The Reader replies: Somehow Anthony Cekada picked up the notion that dismissive comments are tantamount to insight. That’s understandable since he’s never seen the inside of a university classroom. Anyone who compares Fr. Cekada’s musings with Fr. Carusi’s analysis will immediately discover the bald amateurism of WHH. To test our own position, we, too, took the “Pistrina Challenge,” as our correspondent calls it. We started with the five senseless, juvenile remarks we cited on August 1 and easily found perceptive, adult analogues in Fr. Carusi. Our findings speak for themselves.

WHH, p. 73: “The fox was back in the chicken coop.”

Fr. Cekada makes this trite observation in reference to Bugnini’s appointment to the secretariat of Consilium in 1964. Compare that remark with Fr. Carusi’s summative statement about the ongoing labors of the liturgical Commission and the publication of the SRC decree in 1955:

But by now the machine of liturgical reform had been set in motion and to halt it in its course would have proven impossible and moreover inadmissible, as the events to follow would demonstrate.

It’s the difference between “cracking wise” and wisdom.

WHH, p. 85: “With pastoral liturgy, consumer is king.”

For all his faults, Fr. Cekada does have perfect pitch for hackneyed, pop-culture phraseology that falls flat. On the other hand, here’s how Fr. Carusi artfully—and devastatingly—assesses the reformers’ invocation of pastoral concerns to justify their revision of the rites:

It is clear, though, that the “pastoral” reform par excellence was not “pastoral,” because it was born of experts who had no real contact with a parish nor with the devotions and piety of the people—which they often enough disdained.

WHH, p. 97: “—whatever that means.”

That valley-girl bon mot is Anthony Cekada’s comment about some fuzzy modernist language regarding liturgical translations. When Fr. Carusi confronts an unfathomable liturgical novelty, he chooses analytic clarity over impertinence.

We admit that the liturgical significance of this innovation completely escapes us; the change seems to be a liturgical "pastiche" born of the haste of the authors rather than something related to mystical symbolism.

WHH, p. 105: “You don’t get any more ecumenical than that.”

Compare that argumentative weak tea about the intrusion of ecumenist theology with the bright brew of Fr. Carusi’s enlightened critique of the reformers’ introduction of a prayer for the Church’s social unity:

This unity is not a characteristic that is yet to be found through ecumenical dialogue; it is already metaphysically present. In effect, the words of Christ, "Ut unum sint" ["That they may be one"], is [sic]* an efficacious prayer of Our Lord, and as such is already realized. Those who are outside the Church must return to her, must return to the unity that already exists; they do not need to unite themselves to Catholics in order to bring about a unity that already exists.

WHH, p. 105: “…the theological principles on which he bases his argument…are pure poison.”

Apparently a commonplace metaphorical assertion (“are pure poison”) is enough of an argument for Fr. Cekada. That may count for theological criticism in WHH, but it doesn’t pass muster with us, at least not while we can find in Fr. Carusi elegant, almost lapidary, judgments like the following:

Though desiring a "conscious participation in the procession, with relevance to concrete, daily Christian life," they relied on arguments that were neither theological nor liturgical;

or

It is sad to note that these shifting maneuvers were employed with the liturgy in order to bring in theological novelties.

There's only one conclusion. Work of Human Hands cannot be part of any serious discussion about the modernist reform of the Roman rite. Some people have urged that the author’s frequent linguistic and factual blunders might not be enough to condemn the book outright. Surely after this post, they can no longer entertain such charitable illusions.

Work of Human Hands was marked cross from its conception and doomed in its execution. We all owe Providence a profound debt of thanks for the appearance of Fr. Carusi’s article in English translation so close to the release of WHH. We once despaired of finding a competent critic. Now we know that a trained, capable talent is writing about the subject. WHH fails as a legitimate critique; soon (we suspect) it will become useless even as a clumsy thumbnail sketch of the reforms preceding the Mass of Paul VI. Therefore, if one day you stumble upon it at a flea market or in the bargain bin of a bookshop, you may safely pass it up as mere clutter.

* The error (viz., “is” with the plural subject “words” instead of “are”) is an artifact of the translation. Both subject and verb are singular in Fr. Carusi’s Italian original: …la frase di Cristo “ut unum sint”, è una preghiera efficace…