Traditional Liturgy as a Liberation from Egoism
The figure of the priest as it has been known in the West for nearly two thousand years—a figure everywhere present in the life of the Church from the Apostolic age onwards—has been gradually scaled down in the past three decades to something that can hardly be recognized as official, much less as sacred. The present-day priest, more often than not, cuts the figure of an administrator who handles public relations, luncheons, fundraising, and the like, handing over liturgical planning, religious education, parochial schools, or other seemingly peripheral matters to a panel of "expert laity." What ever happened to the priest, that mysterious and majestic representative of God?
Consider for a moment how anti-traditional tendencies, whose bitter fruits we are still reaping, affect the priest's role in the parish and his perception of the duties belonging to his office. There can be no doubt that priests ought to be shepherds, teachers, and rulers in imitation of their divine model; for there is no doubt that people in all ages need to be shepherded, taught, and ruled. The most important channels for the exercise of this threefold office are the confessional, where the priest can listen to sinners and lead them to holiness, and the sacred liturgy, through which he can guide the people to a deeper understanding of their faith and a deeper love of Christ. The false conception of liturgy as a gathering for song and socializing, however, devalues everything the priest is meant to be, turning him into a mere "facilitator" of parish activities scheduled for a Sunday morning. There is no reason why any other person could not "facilitate" those same simple tasks: all it takes is one who can read whatever is printed on a page stuck into a binder. When mysteries of faith and the adoration of God recede into the background, when the doctrine of Christ and his Church receives scarcely a moment's attention, when the confessional is empty, the priest loses his reason for being. If men are not really sinners, how could they stand in need of sacramental absolution? If men are not really called to work out their salvation in fear and trembling, how could they need, much less hunger for, the Bread of Life? No wonder Reverend Father feels that his days are humdrum. He is no longer governing and healing souls.
After attending a low Mass one morning— in fact, a very low Mass (the jingle "How low can you go?" occurred to me at one point)— it dawned on me why, in some parts of the world, the priesthood is verging towards irrelevance: the priest is no longer a ruler, teacher, and sanctifier. His chief reason for existing, to offer sacrifice on behalf of the people, is slipping away. To the extent that Catholics adopt a Protestant view of "ministry," the sole grounds for a sacerdotal hierarchy and ordained priesthood are destroyed. If the congregation is the real principal celebrant and the priest only a representative of this community, he becomes no more than a glorified layman who has the enviable chance to wear a technicolor dreamcoat and sit upon a wooden throne; and obviously there is little attraction to being a celibate layman, however glorified, in an age where good things are measured by carnal comforts. In the absence of genuine spiritual aspirations, the sense appetites reassert themselves—and not surprisingly, we hear incessant clamoring for a married clergy. Let us not be mistaken about the deeper reason that Protestants immediately rejected celibacy in the sixteenth century. If the priesthood has not been instituted by Christ in order that the world may be filled with "other Christs," men set apart to carry on the sacred work of the High Priest, then there is no basis for a distinction between layman and priest. The Protestants knew from the start that a congregationalist understanding of the Church nullifies hierarchy as well as sacrifice; in an egalitarian society of believers, each member rules and sanctifies himself by personal communication with the Holy Spirit.
Catholic bishops and priests, having abused the privileges of their offices [in the declining Middle Ages], had provoked the opposite error of Protestantism, which not only sought a reform of manners, but denied altogether the necessity of an official priesthood distinct from the universal priesthood of all believers. . . . Protestantism denied that ministers possess any real authority over the laity. The individual Christian, so it went, lives in direct communion with God and has no need for the "externalities" of priesthood, sacrament, or visible Church. Individuals, having already been saved, proceed to establish churches by convention, for the common utility of believers; the laity band together by a sort of compact, in order to protect, as it were, the grace they already possess. Ministers are representatives of the congregational will, hired by the congregation to preach what the congregation already believes. Needless to say, this view of things was wholly opposed to the Catholic faith, which has always held that the visible Church is the fount of ordinary grace, that men attain salvation only as members of the Mystical Body of Christ on earth, and that the priestly hierarchy was instituted by Christ to form men's souls and is, always and everywhere, objective, legitimate, and ruling. One can endow a Protestant preacher with all the ceremonial trappings of a Catholic priest, but he remains no more than a publicly exalted member of the congregation: he is not alter Christus, ordained by God and empowered by the divine authority of the Church.[1]
The way many Catholics today conceive of the Holy Mass has been gradually tainted by the same congregationalist view, reducible to a philosophy of humanism where man is made the center and measure of all things. In contemporary liturgy, the focus has shifted from the atoning sacrifice of Christ on Calvary to the "community gathered together to celebrate." These two elements need not be in conflict, but given the current tendency to emphasize the social or "horizontal" side of Christian worship, the transcendent mysteries we re-enact are in danger of being downplayed and even forgotten. The moment a liturgy ceases to be focused upon the Cross of Christ, the unbloody renewal of his Sacrifice on Calvary and the commemoration of his resurrection and ascension, it also ceases to minister to the true spiritual needs of Christians: adoration, thanksgiving, penitence, and supplication. A Protestant or humanist notion of the object and purpose of worship brings about a false sense of what congregational participation means. According to the widespread attitude that man is at the center of everything, the purpose of liturgy would be primarily to glorify and praise man, or to make man feel good about himself. Perhaps God would be invoked as an afterthought, as a vindication of our instinct to self-worship; but there is no room for God when men think so highly of their own innate goodness. One often notices this strain of thinking in sermons preached at weddings and funerals. Judging from what is said, one would think that every marriage begins in the bloom of virtue, and every life ends in the odor of sanctity.
The creed of a humanist has two articles: human beings are naturally good; as a result, they need no Savior to rescue them, no authoritative voice to guide them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Men are weak sinners, and without Jesus Christ and his Church, there is no hope of their improvement and salvation. The Catholic, who stands at the pole opposite to the humanist, knows that unless he eats the Body and drinks the Blood of Christ, he shall have no life in him. In his excellent book on the philosophy of religion, H. J. Paton observes that religion as such aims at "a whole in which our intellectual ideals, our moral aspirations, our emotional needs, and even our sense of beauty, may all alike find their satisfaction."[2] All the more is this remark true of the Catholic faith, in which man's intellect and will, passion and hunger for beauty, are seamlessly merged into one humble offering lifted up, in union with the sacrifice of Christ, to the altar of God in heaven. Thus, if we consider what the liturgy truly is, we shall see that the gathering of the community is obviously a condition for, but in no way the purpose of, our worship. God is the object, not man; the Eucharist, through which we share in the life of Christ, is "the source and summit of the Christian life." Worshipping God by participating in the perfect sacrifice of Calvary is therefore both the highest form of community action and the best form of personal prayer. When offered in the self-giving spirit of Christ the High Priest, the Mass is our most intimate union with God and with one another. And the reason for this is clear: whatever conduces to prayer focused entirely on the divine Majesty and his angels and saints brings about by its very nature the fullest union of one Christian with another in their common goal of knowing, loving, and serving God.
The worship of self
The spiritual disease of modernity is the worship of ego. The winding path of egolatry can be followed throughout modern intellectual history, beginning with Luther's cry that the individual soul (the Christian ego) must stand alone before the infinite God, with no "earthly mediators." It continues with Descartes's insistence that the individual thinker (the cogitating ego) stands alone before the God of pure reason, who validates his concepts for him. It is carried in wild directions by Spinoza who equates God, world, and self, by Hobbes who asserts that each man is naturally at war to the death with every other man because each desires his own infinite exaltation, by Montaigne who devotes his entire intellectual career to diagramming his subjective states of mind, and so on, up through Rousseau for whom the egoistic savage is the ideal man, or Goethe, for whom the fallible Faust may be pardoned all his crimes because he never swerved from the pursuit of self-fulfillment, or Fichte, who theorizes that a "transcendental ego" unfolds reality out of itself. Such examples could be easily multiplied. In all these thinkers there is an incredible transvaluation of values, whereby the Ego is set on the throne of reality, is made the hinge of all controversy, the axis of all revolutions. So far is this from any traditional social order and psychological condition that it merits to be considered the primordial revolution of modernity, just as Adam's sin was the primordial revolution of mankind.
An artificial situation quickly breeds problems. The self is a poor object for worship; it is not fit, it was not made, to sustain such a burden. The self instinctively turns away from itself, even though it is of the essence of sin to subordinate what is good to the domination of the ego. Deep within human nature is a desire to seek perfection outside of the self by locating one's own perfection in something greater than oneself. The self, when thrown upon itself, finds this a very uncomfortable posture and tries to find a project, a joint effort, to which it can be devoted. If, however, the links between man and God, and more basic still, man and nature, have been severed, the self has no other object left but other egos, whether as individuals or aggregates. Inner impoverishment causes the necessity to worship horizontally, or even infernally. From this degenerate adoration, numerous and monumental evils come into being: the worship of the State, the worship of military might, the worship of the dollar, the worship of the isolated sexual moment, the worship of secular heroes. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini succeeded because they were venerated as mundane gods, filling the vacuum left by bourgeois Christianity. The West is now obsessed with sex because it is the only temporarily self-forgetful experience it can find, the only thing approximating to the worship of a god.
In short, whether one considers the phenomenon of statism or militarism or hedonism, one will always find operative a perverted religious instinct, a need to worship coupled with a lack of the transcendent object required by this divinely-bestowed instinct. And by a strange rebounding of misdirected love, the ego, after wandering in a wilderness of idols, ends up back at itself, the only reliable and ever-present idol. From this vantage, the only religion it can find is a despairing self-assertion, a futile labor of self-glorification. Thus the "logic" of sin makes a large loop from ego to a multitude of surrogate egos, until one returns to roost uneasily within oneself. Bereft of the grace which alone can rescue and restore him, fallen man is driven into a desperate cult of self. The resulting inner emptiness is a comfortable residence for demons, to whom it is nothing less than an open invitation. Indeed, it is just this state of soul that our Lord ominously speaks of: "When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest, but he finds none. Then he says, 'I will return to my house from which I came.' And when he comes he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first" (Matt. 12:43-45).
The ill-conceived "reform"
It is not my purpose in this section to present anything like a thorough critique of what went wrong with the reforms implemented nearly thirty years ago, or why the very idea of a "reform" calling for extensive changes to a long-standing sacred tradition was ill-conceived from the start.[3] I intend simply to apply to the reform, at least as it fell out in practice, some insights gained from the contrast of our fallen condition, egoism or egolatry, with its exact antithesis, the public worship of God in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Over the course of nearly two thousand years the Church, guided by the promptings of the Holy Spirit, had developed the most effective remedies to heal man of his sinful attachment to self. She had prayerfully compiled forms of worship, building always and only on the full tradition bequeathed to her from the past, making needful changes with restraint and good judgment. She had made continual efforts to ensure that these forms were preserved and cultivated with exquisite care, and had spelled out in the clearest possible terms that her organically developed tradition was not to be compromised by ephemeral concerns.
Ponder, in contrast, the legacy of the recent reformers. From their words and actions, it would appear that they aimed at deconstructing most of the traditional ritual of the Western liturgy and replacing it with something "simplified," something supposedly "adapted to the needs of modern Christians," under the assumption that various controversial fragments regarded as ancient liturgies could be lifted quite out of context to serve as the platform for a novus ordo Missae-in spite of Pius XII's explicit warning against a false antiquarianism. By means of an unprecedented and idiosyncratic reshuffling of centuries of organic tradition, adding significant amounts of material drawn up ex nihilo, the reformers produced what they touted as a public ritual more in accord with the evolving sensus fidelium. These boldly executed reforms have now been in place for close to three decades. When nearly everything traditional was rounded up and taken away, what was left?
The thrice-unholy ego. The ego dressed in polyester and sitting on a throne where the tabernacle should be. The ego singing songs like "I am the Bread of Life," led by a Wagnerian ego at center stage. The ego chatting at the sign of peace and waving to his brother ego up at the supper table. The ego nodding in self-approval as it reads a banner proclaiming "We are the People of God" or "God loves me just as I am." The ego feeling a warm fuzzy as the celebrant ad libs the penitential rite and never mentions the word "sin." The ego filing out of his row, sauntering up to the stage, taking a wafer in his hands, and consuming it without the slightest idea as to what it might be. The ego walking into church as the guitars begin strumming the entrance song; the ego walking right out after hearing the dismissal, without so much as a genuflection. (Where's the tabernacle? What is a tabernacle?) The ego resting its eyes upon an empty corner or abstract window of a church designed like a gymnasium, a ski lodge, or an airplane hanger. Such a list could go on for pages, but there is no need; every item would indicate the same travesty from a slightly different angle. Ego-worship has developed into a regular cottage industry (or should we say chancery industry?), every effort being made to redesign Christian doctrine and practice in order to accommodate our besetting vice of self-absorption. Such abuses, or rather sacrileges, could only happen where the reality and significance of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass had been forgotten or suppressed. The elimination of the elaborate ceremonial connected with the liturgy, coupled with numerous questionable changes to the Missal, was a fateful step towards breaking down the distinction between the worship of God and the free play of egoism.
Liturgy as a cure for self-worship
As we have seen, fallen man—and all the more, modern man—is tempted to elevate himself in any act of religion; he is overtaken by the old Adam who wants to get knowledge and power into his own hands, rather than confess their divine origin. In the words of Eliezer Shore, man's fallen state produces "an upside-down world, in which even the Creator becomes subsidiary to our will and desires."[4] It may well be said that the purpose of religion is no less psychological than salvific: by restraining man's rebellion against the sovereign King and transforming it into loving obedience, true worship frees man from the illusory liberation of sin, from the excessive attachment to self which can bring only misery in its wake. As George Florovsky observes: "The human fall consists precisely in the fact that man limits himself to himself, that man falls, as it were, in love with himself. And through this concentration on himself man separated himself from God and broke the spiritual and free contact with God. It was a kind of delirium, a self-erotic obsession, a spiritual narcissism."[5] The ego, as we said earlier, makes a poor god; it makes an even poorer object of liturgical worship. When, on the contrary, we worship Almighty God in spirit and truth, adoring him in a divine liturgy conformed to the fullness of Catholic tradition, we can attain a far different state of life, where our barren love of self is transformed into the self-giving love of God.
How easy it is to forget the whole reason we go to Mass! How easy it was for the Pharisee described in the Gospel to walk proudly into the Temple, raise his self-esteeming eyes to a self-projected God, and go about his little ritual of self-glorification. No wonder Christ speaks hard words about this Pharisee, who forgot that he is as dust before the Almighty, that he, like any human being, is an unfaithful servant in great need of God's mercy. The humble penitent who beat his breast and said "O God, have mercy on me, a sinner," walked out of the Temple justified, says our Lord. In that moment of abasement and contrition he knew himself, he saw himself as God saw him, and felt both the guilt of sin and the consolation of forgiveness. In losing his attachment to self, in dying to himself, he gained that very gift back, renewed, from the Lord who first gave it. Gabriel Marcel expresses this well: "It is up to freedom, come to the point where it accedes to the greatest self-awareness, to liberate itself in some way from itself, I mean by this, from its perverse disposition to affirm its own self-sufficiency. And this liberation is none other than the act of humility by which it immolates itself before grace."[6]
The parable of the Pharisee and the publican sheds light on another teaching of Our Lord: that when we are invited to a banquet, we should take the last seat regardless of our status, lest having wrongly taken the first we be humiliated when the master commands us to get up and go to the foot of the table. Since the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is also a banquet—indeed the most solemn and joyful of all banquets, for in it the master, the meal, and the offering are none other than Jesus Christ —a profound liturgical lesson is here revealed. The layman attending Mass, much more the priest offering sacrifice in the name of Christ and the Church, must make sure his ego takes the last place before God, so that in humbling himself he might be exalted, and in losing his life he might gain it back, infused with heavenly blessings. As Fr. Ignacio Barreiro explains:
The reverence fostered in the liturgy helps man to break the enclosing shell of his egocentrism. It leads us to adore God because He is infinitely glorious, inconceivably holy and great and because the experience of the liturgy brings us to see God as the King of Eternal Glory. It is a totally self-giving response to the value that is shown to us in images and figures in the earthly liturgy. It is done not for the benefits that this adoration brings to us but because it is the only possible response to the manifestation of the Glory of God.[7]
This self-giving response of adoration is made first and foremost by the Church in her public worship of God for the sake of his glory (propter magnam gloriam tuam). Adrienne von Speyr describes how man is borne to God within the bosom of the Church:
The Church understands the needs of man in her prayer: but she also recognizes the glory of God. She has charge of adoration, something which belongs to the whole Church in her unity. This adoration unites the prayers of the Old Covenant with the words of the Son and also with those of the saints and of the entire Church. Such a unity towers above the individual person at prayer and could never be reached by him, even in the most intense and ardent prayer, its ultimate purpose is to draw man along the path to eternal life.[8]
When man is drawn along the path to eternal life, he leaves the old Adam, with his vain attachment to self, behind. Eternal life is an ecstasy (ekstasis, standing outside) in which the soul is borne out of itself into the Heart of God, where love is echoed everlastingly by love. There is no room for the ego in heaven; there is room only for the child of God, reborn in the mystery of salvation. All of the fussy energy of the ego is transformed into the living and life-giving repose of the divine glory, which makes a man finally himself, that is, the person he was created to be when the Word of God first spoke him into existence.
The entire system of worship which developed in the Catholic Church over the course of prayerful centuries perfectly channeled the energy of the ego into the service of God, and, removing any opportunity to proclaim oneself the center of attention, bent the mind and will upon the same solemn mysteries, spoken in a sacred tongue whispered in the awesome stillness of a vaulted church. Even a bad or lukewarm priest was to some extent rendered harmless, because the forms themselves, the rich liturgical symbolism and the carefully specified duties pertaining to his office as celebrant, kept him firmly within the bounds of external reverence. A formally beautiful lex orandi, coupled with the consoling truth that sacramenta operantur ex opere operato,[9] safeguarded the faithful from most abuses that might stem from indifference, vanity, or heterodoxy on the part of the celebrant. To understand why this remedy succeeded, we should examine for a moment the meaning of ritual.
Paton defines ritual as "the bodily expression of an inward attitude and at the same time the means of its evocation."[10] That is, in ritual we externalize, we make formal and public, our inner acts of adoration, thanksgiving, penance, and petition; and by continually performing the ritual and letting it inform our minds and hearts, we continually evoke or call forth these same inner acts. The ritual springs from interior worship and further strengthens it. There is a mutual relation between the inward and the outward: as we act, we form ourselves by these actions, and as we are formed by them in turn, thus we will continue to act. If we are praying beautiful and theologically nourishing prayers, for example, a more profound habit of prayer will be developed; and as it develops, our very ability to pray and our acts of prayer will be improved. The words of von Speyr are quite relevant here:
If man is ever able, in faith, to forget his human condition, his sins, his cares about existence, it happens when he is at prayer. While he prays he converses with the triune God in eternal life. Prayer possesses a breadth beyond the awareness of the one praying. This much he knows, that he is sharing in something mysterious and that his faith urges him to it and shows him the way—a way of his spirit's obedience to the Holy Spirit, of self-forgetfulness, of a nakedness which is equivalent to perfect poverty before God.
When we humble ourselves in prayer, we are caught up in the object of our devotion, and for a blessed moment we may forget ourselves and stand before our Creator with nothing to hide, like Adam before he fell into himself and lost his ecstatic friendship with God.
Consider how tightly linked are the object of our spiritual acts and the inner character formed by them. If we are praying to the true God, our character will be formed according to truth; if we bow before idols, our character will be deformed because it is being torn away from truth. Thus the intimate connection between ritual and orthodox teaching quickly becomes apparent. When ritual gives expression to true doctrine, the character formed by this ritual will absorb and reflect true doctrine; good ritual nurtures adherence to the orthodox faith. The formula lex orandi, lex credendi indicates this link, for it teaches that the subjective appropriation of the saving truth of our faith is inextricably bound up with our objective ritual actions and the habits they engender. If the truth of the faith is definitive and timeless, the corresponding ritual must possess those qualities which will indelibly impress this truth upon Christian souls. Giambattista Vico makes an interesting point: "But what could be more foolish and inept than to prescribe absolutely fixed ceremonies for the vague, shifting deities of Paganism? Christianity, instead, advocates unassailable dogmas bearing on the nature of God and on the mysteries of religion; hence the exactness of its rituals is fully justified."[11] Not only must the rituals be exact, as Vico says; they must be suitable expressions of the "unassailable dogmas" to which he refers. And to be a suitable expression means that the form of worship must itself produce the habits of serious prayer and true belief.
In light of everything said above, we can understand why one of the chief purposes of the sacred liturgy is to "re-member" Christians to God, re-connect us to him again and again, so that having been joined to our Lord in this life we may never be separated from him in the life to come. By our baptism we become members of the body of Christ. Our whole life, as a member, is a striving to become ever more closely united to the body, or rather, the Head of the body, who endows each member with being and vitality. This is the meaning of the Mass as a "memorial": we are to make the remembrance of Christ the central feature of our life, we are to reunite ourselves with the sacred events of his life not in a hazy memory but in the fullness of the divine Now, in which all truth, all reality, is perpetually present. The remembrance of Christ does not have an event from the distant past as its object; it is, on the contrary, the very reality, the re-presentation, of his Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension. The remembrance in which the essence of liturgy consists is nothing other than his true and real presence, which we approach through the mysteries as through a gateway. In receiving the Eucharist we commune with the Body of Christ, in whom the splendor of eternal life is present as the life by which he himself lives. Thus, the more closely we conform ourselves to the spirit of the liturgy, "a conversation of one who surrenders to the One who receives him,"[12] the more Christ-like we become—the more we live the very life of Christ.
In his conversation with the woman of Samaria, our Lord says: "The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him" (John 4:23). Every human being has a duty to adore God, his creator; life is breathed into man for the sake of knowing, loving, and serving God. But how do I know that I am truly serving God and that my service is pleasing to him? Am I worshipping the Father in spirit and truth? The only answer can be that they who worship cum ecclesia, with the Church who is the bride of Christ, are worshipping in spirit and truth, for she is the perfect servant, the immaculate wife, of her divine Lord and Spouse. In her true inward nature as Mystical Body of Christ, she is plenum gratiae et veritatis, since the grace and truth of Christ are coursing through her veins. If we would please God, we must identify our prayers with the priestly prayer of the Church, with her continual Trinitarian offering of love to the Father who chose her, to the Son who betrothed her to himself, and to the Holy Spirit who quickens and purifies her as the vessel of election. The solemn prayer offered by the Church in her liturgy is the most perfect, most fruitful, and most intimate prayer before God: indeed, all human prayers are caught up in this, which rises as the one spiritual cry of mankind to heaven. If we wish to serve Jesus Christ, if we truly desire to be bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, we must make every effort to enter into the life, the liturgy, the worship of our Holy Mother the Church, and in so doing we shall cleave to our divine Lord now and in eternity.
Endnotes
1 The Political Art, the American Regime, and the Magisterium of Rome (Washington, D.C.: Stormcrow Press, 1997), p. 49.
2 The Modern Predicament: A Study in the Philosophy of Religion (London: George Alien & Unwin, 1955), p. 64.
3 Many powerful critiques have been written, of which the best are the famous intervention of Cardinal Ottaviani and the works of Michael Davies and Klaus Gamber. The recent writings of Cardinal Ratzinger and Cardinal Stickler, among other high officials in the Church, also display a similar awareness of what Davies has aptly called the "liturgical shipwreck."
4 "At the Center," in Parabola 22:1 (Spring 1997), p. 60.
5 Collected Works (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1976), III, p. 85.
6 Problematic Man, trans. Brian Thompson (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), pp. 62-3.
7 "The Spirit of Reverence and the Liturgy," in A Letter from the Romans 2 (Dec. 1997), p. 11.
8 The Gates of Eternal Life, trans. Sister Corona Sharp (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983), pp. 139-140.
9 Meaning that sacraments are effective by the very performance of the prescribed ritual. See Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, trans. Patrick Lynch (Rockford, III.: TAN Books and Publishers, 1974), pp. 329-30 and p. 342.
10 Modern Predicament, p. 64.
11 On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 45.
12 Gates of Eternal Life, p. 139.
Mr. Peter A. Kwasniewski directs the Gregorian Schola Cantorum at an indult Latin Mass in Silver Spring, Md., and teaches private voice lessons. He received his M.A. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America, where he is currently working on a doctoral dissertation in Thomistic ethics under the direction of Professor David Gallagher. His last article in HPR appeared in March 1998.
This item 884 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
