With Liturgy... and Justice for All

by Unknown

We’d venture that when it comes to liturgy, Gabe Huck would get the Most Despised Man in America Award from traditional Catholics. Huck was head of Liturgy Training Publication (LTP), one of the most far-out of liturgical renewal outfits. Huck is a big proponent of so-called inclusive language, and his publications disdained using B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini, in the Year of the Lord) in favor of the secularist, Messiah-omitting B.C.E. (Before Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era).

If you’ve ever seen a picture of Huck, he looks like an old bummed-out hippie roaming Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. The photo of him in the National Catholic Reporter (Aug. 10, 2001) shows him with pouffy, shoulder-length hair thinning a bit at the top, rimless glasses, a bushy moustache, and a flower adorning his jacket. Even without the love beads, he’s a walking stereotype.

Still, appearances can be deceiving. Huck was head of LTP from 1997 to 2001. He grew its yearly sales from $100,000 to $7,000,000, and increased its staff from two to more than 50. Like hippie-capitalist Jerry Rubin, he did very well.

LTP is owned by the Archdiocese of Chicago, and Huck was protected by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin. But then along came Francis Cardinal George, and in spite of Huck’s managerial skills, he was fired.

If you thought you’d heard the last of Gabe Huck, you’re wrong. He has a lengthy essay in the National Catholic Reporter (Jan. 16, 2004) on the state of liturgical renewal. What he says is revealing about his understanding of what liturgical renewal is all about. But he also says some provocative things about Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC), the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.

Huck posits a sharp — seemingly unbridgeable — chasm between the "pre-Vatican II" Church and the "post-Vatican II" Church. Huck admits that "We [liturgical reformers] made a lot of mistakes…. But how could we not make mistakes? There was so little experience to draw on." In other words, the previous 1900 or so years of liturgical tradition counted for nothing, or nothing much.

On the other hand, give Huck some credit. He does not appeal to the "spirit" of Vatican II; he appeals to its letter. He quotes SC: "The church earnestly desires that all the faithful be led to that full, conscious and active participation in the liturgical celebrations called for by the very nature of the liturgy…. This full and active participation by all the faithful…is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit…" (#14; italics added by the NOR).

Huck comments: "The all and ‘full, conscious and active participation’…. aren’t summoned from…ancient history…. Without all taking part fully and consciously and actively, you don’t have liturgy." In other words, the Tridentine Latin Mass (TLM) was not liturgy in any meaningful sense. Moreover, says Huck, without "the all and ‘full, conscious and active participation’" there "isn’t going to be any true Christian spirit." So the TLM did not really produce anyone with "any true Christian spirit," never mind all the saints and martyrs that were (supposedly) produced by it.

Does Huck really believe this? Apparently so: "The [liturgical] situation has been askew for ages and we are often quite comfortable to leave it so. A bird in the hand…. Better the evil you know…" (ellipses in the original).

Is Huck saying the TLM was evil? Sounds like it.

Huck is extremely upset that the TLM is once again legitimate: "Nothing has so eroded our all [of SC] in these four decades as the allowance of the Tridentine rite. That took the oomph out of all. It made liturgical renewal optional…. The ground seemed gone from under us. One’s as good as another."

Huck is a stickler for the letter of Vatican II’s SC (at least the passages he cites). Yes, SC does say all. Huck asks rhetorically: "The quiet anonymity of the old rite, being left alone to pursue your own prayerful thoughts — what’s wrong with that?" He gives his answer: "Would all be so interpreted in ‘all are to abstain from fornication and murder’?" Huck decries the literal in liturgical translations, but here he’s the literalist par excellence. Yes, Vatican II did indeed say all. Says Huck: "All is scary, but there it stands. Opting in or out was not intended."

Huck is no dummy, and he does have a point. SC says all. So how can the TLM be allowed to make a comeback? If Huck is to be believed — and we don’t see why he shouldn’t be — Pope John Paul II himself has violated the letter of Vatican II. Most interesting! Or is it that "full, conscious and active participation" are likewise found in the TLM? If so, why was there a radical overhaul of the liturgy in the first place?

Huck says Rome and the U.S. bishops "are reversing the council’s direction, doing all they can while they can to establish a pre-Vatican II mentality if not a pre-Vatican II liturgy." We do doubt if the U.S. bishops are in cahoots with Rome, though perhaps Huck was thinking of Cardinal George, the man who fired him and who is Chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy. Ah, but notice that Huck says "while they can." Obviously, Huck expects to make his own comeback.

And there’s more: Of the "renewed" liturgy, Huck says that it sees "liturgy and justice…as inseparable." For Huck, liturgy is about social justice: "Without…justice…the liturgy will at its best make us feel good (an awful betrayal)…." So give Huck some more credit: He doesn’t want the liturgy to be about feel-good bubblies, which is pandemic these days. No, it’s about social justice. Now, there’s nothing wrong with social justice, but is this really what the liturgy is about?

Huck speaks of himself as one of "those who love the world dearly," and so, not surprisingly, he says that "the goal" of liturgical renewal is "the remaking of the world…into the reign of God."

But the world cannot be remade into the Kingdom of God — oops, the reign of God. The Catechism says: "Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh. The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom…" (#675-76).

No, Gabe Huck is not the Antichrist, but he appears to be misusing the liturgy to offer Catholics a false messianic hope, which the Catechism calls "the supreme religious deception."

Does the liturgy have anything to do with the Kingdom of God? It does, but in an opposite way of that championed by Huck. It has to do with the Kingdom "beyond history" (as the Catechism says), which we are free to accept or reject. Also, as Pope John Paul II says in his apostolic letter on "The 40th Anniversary of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy ‘Sacrosanctum Concilium’": "It [the liturgy] opens a glimpse of Heaven on earth…" (#16). Yes, you will see that in the TLM, in the Eastern Catholic Churches, but only occasionally in the new Mass, thanks to the deconstruction of the liturgical reformers.

Huck approvingly quotes Roger Cardinal Mahony’s 1997 pastoral letter "Gather Faithfully Together": "It is not individuals who are coming forward to the table, but the church. It is not even individuals who are going forth to live the Word…. It is the church going forth…." The problem with this quote is that the Eucharist is a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins and to advance our salvation. We will not be judged as a community, but as individuals. But for Huck, the liturgy is about social justice. Salvation is not even hinted at in Huck’s essay.

Huck states that "Liturgy has become a battleground…." Indeed it has, because the essence of Catholic orthodoxy is at stake, as Huck makes quite clear.

Another fascinating thing about Huck’s essay is this: While many liberal Catholics claim that the Pope is reversing the "spirit" of Vatican II, Huck accuses him of violating the letter of Vatican II. And if the letter of Vatican II can be negated in one area, it can be in other areas as well.

What does this say about the status of Vatican II? And what does it portend for the future?

This item 6146 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org