In his Motu Proprio of 22nd November, 1903, Tra le sollecitudini, the recently elected Pope Pius X intended to tackle long-standing abuses in the area of church music. From this initiative, a line can be traced to the Second Vatican Council and the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. The promulgation in 1963 of this Apostolic Constitution soon led to the abandonment of Latin as the primary liturgical language of the Roman Rite and the replacement of the old Rite of the Mass with a new ritual construct adjusted to the alleged needs of the modern believer.
Pope Saint Pius X
Now labelled ‘The Extraordinary Rite’, the Old Latin Mass ekes out a shadow existence in non-parish churches, seemingly no more than an embarrassment to a modernised Vatican. At the time of writing, legislation by the reigning Pope, Francis, seems to want to hasten its demise.
The error of Pope Pius, if error it was, can be found in his concept of ‘active participation’ in the Liturgy. This vigilant pope, who was deeply concerned to keep Catholic theology free of heresy, seems to have been remarkably lacking in vigilance when it came to the Liturgy. He was certainly blind to the prospect that ‘active participation’ combined with nascent new approaches in liturgical theology might facilitate those heretical lines of thought he was combating under the umbrella term Modernism.
In the original formulation of the pope and his Italian drafters, the key phrase of Tra le sollecitudini (TLS) reads partecipazione attiva. It is given correctly in the English translation as “active participation.” The official Latin version, however, as given in Acta Sanctae Sedis, which must be considered the more authoritative for questions of interpretation, contents itself with one word ‘participatio’, omitting a qualifying adjective. Textually, the Italian phrase partecipazione attiva and the Latin concept ‘participatio’ both serve in the same way to connect the reform of church music with the primary purpose of the reform idea, which is the re-invigoration of true Christian spirit among the faithful. Partecipazione attiva, active participation, in the sacred mysteries and in the solemn public prayer of the Church is declared to be the “first and indispensable source” of that true Christian spirit (TLS, p.1).
The teaching intention of Pope Pius does not seem in any way obscure. The addition of the qualifier ‘active’ to the substantive ‘participation’ must be read as clarificatory rather than definitional. However, the Vernacular phrase ‘active participation’ allows for a wider meaning than the official Latin. Though there is no compelling need for it, active participation in the Liturgy can be set against arguably more passive forms of participation, such as prayerful listening or reverent silence. Indeed, participation in the Mass according to the Missal of John XXIII, the standard form of the ‘Extraordinary Rite’, seems to be a largely interior matter. In the Missal of Paul VI, the ‘Ordinary Rite’, a greater variety of liturgical parts, some of which were formerly reserved for the priest, are filled from the congregation. The ritual gestures and the use of language of the congregation are more diverse and closer to everyday life.
What were the details of the pope’s proposal for reform? Pius bewailed the irreverence that had crept into church music, the dubious relevance of much of it to the rituals for which it was performed, and its deleterious effect on the piety of the people. In this, his target was not primarily music of poor quality, though this, too, was a concern. First and foremost, he aimed to exclude from churches the concert-like performance of music for merely aesthetic enjoyment and the performance of popular songs which had no clear reference to the sacred. He wished these to be replaced by Gregorian Chant and, with lesser emphasis, by the Sacred Polyphony of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. He affirmed the ancient plainchant melodies as the model for church music during solemn public worship throughout the Roman Catholic Church. The sung Mass in the parish church he declared the norm for Sundays and Feast Days. The prayers of the priest and the responses and congregational prayers were to be sung to the Gregorian melodies. The parts allotted to the congregation were to be sung by the people themselves, rather than delegated to cantors and choirs.
Though it may seem unrealistic, if not fantastic, to modern minds, this Papal reform was quite sensible for its time. Based on the historical research available to him, Pius believed that he was reviving the practice of the early Christians. Convinced that the parish Sunday liturgy should be the central event in the prayer life of a Catholic Christian, and drawing on his previous pastoral experience as a bishop, Pius expected even the poorest dioceses in the Church to provide for appropriately trained priests and musicians, and he expected even a congregation of poorly educated Catholics to be able to acquire the simpler Gregorian melodies in a reasonable time period.
Much of what Pope Pius believed to be true is open to challenge today. Congregational singing in Latin using Gregorian modes may not have been the common practice of the early Christians in the Roman Church. Even if it was, Pius set aside without justification the more ancient practices of the Patriarchal Sees of the Eastern Church, perhaps because knowledge of them was not available to him. Moreover, it is not made clear why the musical style of the latter part of the First Millennium, which had long ago fallen into disuse, should have so high a sacred value. Even if it had been in customary use among the great saints and martyrs of early Rome, further argument is required if one is to be persuaded of a primary sacred quality proper to the musical style itself.
While the liturgical activists of the twentieth century pounced on the Vernacular phrase ‘active participation’ to help to shape their efforts for change, Papal and Curial documents up to the Second Vatican Council took care to avoid it. With the coming of Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) and the adoption by its drafters of a Latin translation of ‘active participation’, ‘actuosa participatio’, the Vernacular phrase finally gained official approval and began to guide official Catholic discourse. In the usage of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the traditional mode of participation in the Liturgy, which was contemplative, and therefore largely interior, individual and silent, was forced to accommodate what was incompatible with it: the self-expression of the people. A participation that is no longer centred on contemplation but becomes “full and active” is declared most appropriate to the nature of Liturgy and becomes the guiding principle for future reforming efforts (SC, Art. 14), including the reform of the Mass Rite (SC, Art. 50). Though active participation in the Liturgy must refer to both interior and exterior, expressive, forms of participation (SC, Art. 18) it is expected to do so with an opening to the life world of the faithful (SC, Art. 70), which is essentially non-liturgical. Exterior and expressive active participation in the Liturgy, because it corresponds better to a properly instructed, full and conscious participation in a manner befitting a community (SC, Art. 21) is given a clear precedence over interior, individual participation (SC, Art. 27).
To be fair to Pope Pius, one must differentiate between the meaning he had intended ‘active participation’ to have and the meaning given to it by the activist theologians who took it up. Pius had not intended to introduce a new guiding concept for the Liturgy. He had intended to spell out what was meant by the traditional concept in order to justify a reform of church music. By his use of the phrase, he had hoped merely to clarify the importance to the Mass event of the cultivation of congregational singing in Latin to the melodies of Gregorian Chant.
With the adoption of a different meaning of ‘active participation’ by the Second Vatican Council, a fundamental change was imposed on the Catholic liturgy. In the perhaps absurd struggle among Catholic leaders to maintain a hermeneutic continuity between the earliest days of the Church and today, the transformative nature of this change is easily overlooked.
Update:
It is worth noting that two Latin translations of partecipazione attiva exist which can claim some official status: ‘participatio’, from Acta Sancta Sedis 36 (1903-4), as used above, and ‘actuosa communicatio’, which was used in the version of the Pope’s Motu Proprio published in Ephemerides Liturgicae 18 (1904). See Daniel G. Van Slyke, ‘Actuosa Participatio from Pius X to Benedict XVI: Grace and Gregorian Chant’, Antiphon 23.2 (2019) pp. 101–144. Van Slyke seems to consider the later term ‘actuosa participatio’ as a happy marriage of both translations and as a felicitous example of the ‘hermenutic of continuity’. He does not convince me.
