Bring back “negative spirituality”

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 13, 2025

Since medieval times, the Mass for All Souls’ Day, and every Requiem Mass, included the pre-Gospel sequence called Dies Irae. The lengthy hymn includes alarming verses such as the following:

The day of wrath, that awful day, shall reduce the world to ashes, as David and the Sibyl prophesied.	...I groan as one guilty, while my countenance blushes for my fault: O spare thy supplicant, O God!
How great will be the terror, when the Judge shall come to examine all things rigorously!	Thou who didst absolve Mary [Magdalene], and didst hear the prayer of the thief, to me also thou hast given hope.
...What then shall I, unhappy man, allege? Whom shall I invoke as protector? When even the just shall hardly be secure.	…When the reprobate, covered with confusion, shall have been sentenced to the cruel flames, call me with the blessed.
O King of awful majesty, who of thy free gift savest them that are to be saved, save me, O fount of mercy!	...A mournful day that day shall be, when from the dust shall arise the guilty man, that he may be judged; therefore, spare him, O God! O tender Lord Jesus, grant them eternal rest.

The Dies Irae’s opening notes are still the go-to sound of doom in countless movie scores, but it is missing from the post-1970 liturgy (except as an optional hymn in the Liturgy of the Hours). The Consilium which oversaw the liturgical reform removed this hymn, for reasons described by one of its leading figures, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini:

They got rid of texts that smacked of a negative spirituality inherited from the Middle Ages. Thus they removed such familiar and even beloved texts as “Libera me, Domine“, “Dies irae“, and others that overemphasized judgment, fear, and despair. These they replaced with texts urging Christian hope and arguably giving more effective expression to faith in the resurrection.

I think that the Consilium could not have been more wrong in removing the Dies Irae, and that a significant factor in the loss of Catholic faith after the Council is the censorship of this so-called “negative spirituality”.

That “negative spirituality” is, of course, not only a part of the spirituality of the Middle Ages, but of the Psalms and of the Church Fathers. It is a spirituality commanded by Christ: “Fear him who, after he has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I tell you, fear him!” (Luke 12:5)

But what has its implied contrary, an ostensibly positive spirituality, brought us?

• Funerals that canonize the deceased and do not sober us into amending our lives
• Loss of the beginning of wisdom: the fear of the Lord—awe before almighty God
• Loss of the sense of sin as an outrage to God, not just to human dignity
• The corresponding loss of the sense of justice, penance, and reparation
• Lack of missionary zeal because we fail to contemplate the real loss of souls
• Replacement of authentic Catholic spirituality with a therapeutic mindset
• Bloodless and forgettable preaching

When I think of positive spirituality, I think of the modern “sex-positive” movement. To be sex-positive means to think of sex as an entirely healthy part of the human experience, to be freely explored without any, well, negative attitudes “inherited from the Middle Ages”. A positive sex education that did not warn against the danger of sexual sin teaches children that sex is something to be trifled with, not something weighty. A purely positive spirituality teaches us the same about our immortal souls.

Even many of the best priests today, who believe in the reality of sin and judgment, fall into the error of thinking that we don’t need to talk about these things much, because we can inspire people better by focusing on the positive. This might seem metaphysically sound because after all, good is a more fundamental reality than evil. And indeed, we should be more focused on attaining good than avoiding evil; our avoidance of evil should be based on love more than fear. In that sense, a positive spirituality would be correct.

However, it was never theologically sound to propose that we would do better without the regular contemplation of our death, the evil of sin, and the reality of divine wrath. These need sustained attention, not just momentary acknowledgment. Even psychologically, fallen human beings need to see the negative to appreciate the positive. This is not a matter of hindsight; even in the 1960s anyone with spiritual common sense would have understood what St. John Henry Newman preached a century before:

Till you know the weight of your sins, and that not in mere imagination, but in practice, not so as merely to confess it in a formal phrase of lamentation, but daily and in your heart in secret, you cannot embrace the offer of mercy held out to you in the Gospel, through the death of Christ. Till you know what it is to fear with the terrified sailors or the Apostles, you cannot sleep with Christ at your Heavenly Father’s feet. (“The Religion of the Day”)

What’s missing in modern preaching

When Jordan Peterson came on the scene, many wondered what young men saw in his message that they weren’t getting from the Church. For me, the most powerful part of Peterson’s original message was that he brought people to acknowledge and confront their own capacity for evil, which in turn awakened a sense of the stakes of life, along with a responsibility to cultivate one’s capacity for good. In a word, Jordan Peterson convicted his hearers.

Modern Catholic preaching is almost never convicting. I don’t mean that priests fail to talk about some particular sin they ought to prioritize condemning, true as that may be, but that preaching rarely inspires a horror of sin as such, in its precise nature as sin, an offense against God. Neither does it instill a sense of the awful majesty of God, as do the sermons of the Fathers or Newman. This need not be the entire focus of preaching, but “every meal needs its salt,” and this lack of salt has resulted in unsavory and forgettable homilies.

It is surely no coincidence that modern preachers are formed by a breviary marked by the absence of the imprecatory Psalms, which speak of God’s wrath against the wicked. In one of the most outrageous decisions in liturgical history—and we ought not pretend otherwise, even while we affirm that its author is now among the blessed in heaven—Pope Paul VI (this time against the wishes of the Consilium) removed three entire Psalms and parts of nineteen others from the Liturgy of the Hours, for reason of “certain psychological difficulties”. This self-fulfilling prophecy only made modern Catholics even more modern, for we are more psychologically troubled by what we are unaccustomed to, as a small child cries when startled by a loud noise.

Our newest Doctor of the Church, St. John Henry Newman, had no reputation as a fire-and-brimstone preacher or as a gloomy personality, yet in numerous and memorable sermons he was an outstanding Doctor of Holy Fear. In “Reverence, A Belief in God’s Presence” and “Christian Reverence” (both listenable on Catholic Culture Audiobooks), he explains something important about devotion to God: “In heaven, love will absorb fear; but in this world, fear and love must go together.”

In “The Religion of the Day”, Newman preached against modern “positive” spirituality:

What is the world’s religion now? It has taken the brighter side of the Gospel,—its tidings of comfort, its precepts of love; all darker, deeper views of man’s condition and prospects being comparatively forgotten. This is the religion natural to a civilized age, and well has Satan dressed and completed it into an idol of the Truth.

In “Jewish Zeal a Pattern for Christians”, Newman becomes even more pointed on the topic of the Psalms, virtually rebuking in advance the decision of St. Paul VI:

…the Jewish Psalter has been the standard book of Christian devotion from the first down to this day. I wish we thought more of this circumstance. Can any one doubt that, supposing that blessed manual of faith and love had never been in use among us, great numbers of the present generation would have clamoured against it as unsuitable to express Christian feelings, as deficient in charity and kindness?

Nay, do we not know, though I dare say it may surprise many a sober Christian to hear that it is so, that there are men at this moment who (I hardly like to mention it) wish parts of the Psalms left out of the Service as ungentle and harsh? Alas! that men of this day should rashly put their own judgment in competition with that of all the Saints of every age hitherto since Christ came—should virtually say, “Either they have been wrong or we are,” thus forcing us to decide between the two. Alas! that they should dare to criticise the words of inspiration! Alas! that they should follow the steps of the backsliding Israelites, and shrink from siding with the Truth in its struggle with the world, instead of saying with Deborah, “So let all Thine enemies perish, O Lord!”

While in charity and piety we must assume that Paul VI did not himself think the Psalms “deficient in charity and kindness”, we must deplore his concession to the “psychological difficulties” of the spirit of the age. No doubt from his heavenly vantage point, St. Paul VI now sees the cost of that mistake more clearly than anyone.

Let Newman’s words stand likewise as a rebuke of the Consilium’s removal of the Dies Irae. However, I will end with something positive, offering a little liturgy hack for all lovers of medieval gloom (courtesy of the Sacra Doctrina Project’s podcast on this hymn). Aside from the option of having one’s funeral according to the 1962 Missal where permitted, there is still a lawful way to include the Dies Irae in a Novus Ordo funeral Mass—you can simply incorporate it as a hymn rather than a sequence.