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Theologian and Catholic Worker Larry Chapp joins us for a discussion of Pope Francis’ Motu Proprio on the Latin Mass. Was this a missed opportunity for the pope to achieve his larger goals? Is there any better way available to reach those goals?
Cy Kellett:
Is this a self-defeating papacy? Dr. Larry Chapp is next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. I’ve been wanting to have Dr. Larry Chapp on the program. Lots of folks actually recommend him all the time as a possible great guest for Focus. He’s a retired professor of theology. He taught for 20 years at DeSales University in Pennsylvania and now, he and his wife own and manage the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harvey Lakes, Pennsylvania. You can find his writing at the Catholic World Report and on his own podcast. Just look up Dr. Larry Chapp and you’ll find his writing. He wrote a recent piece, almost all Catholic writers took a stab at it, but a response to the pope’s recent motu proprio on the use of the Latin mass. But Dr. Chapp, we thought took a little bit of a different angle and his angle is connected to promoting a vision of the church as kind of consonant with the vision that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, had.
Cy Kellett:
Dr. Chapp suggests that pursuing a vision like theirs might actually be more productive in achieving the goals that Pope Francis wants to achieve than the current path, including this motu proprio. So we thought we’d ask him. Can you explain that to us? What might be a more productive way for Pope Francis to get done what he wants to get done? Dr. Larry Chapp, thank you very much for taking the time to be with us on Catholic Answers: Focus.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Happy to be here. I’m a big fan of your videocasts. So I’m very happy to be here.
Cy Kellett:
We appreciate you doing the video too. It’s not always easy to set up the video, but we appreciate you making the effort. Okay. So the pope had a recent motu proprio, a letter on the traditional Latin mass and then as soon as it came out, seemingly every Catholic on earth with a computer posted a response to it. You posted one on your blog, Gaudium et Spes 22, and I thought it did work that none of the others seemed to do. Sometimes there’s these kind of, I don’t know, a sense of a thing that’s floating around and then somebody puts it into words. I had a sense that you put into words what’s kind of floating out there, but nobody else was quite getting into the words. Was this stuff you’d been thinking about for a while?
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Oh, yes. I did not post right away when it came out. I waited about, I guess, a week. Hang on a second. I’m going to … Okay. There we go. So I just let the thoughts gestate in my brain for a while before I put pen to paper because I did not want to be just a knee-jerk reaction and I wanted to get to some of the deeper issues that I thought were at play. I’m glad that I did. Right up front, I’ll say I’m not one of the radical traditionalists. I appreciate the traditional Latin mass. I appreciated Pope Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum. I’m happy that people are able to have that mass if that’s what they want, but I’m not a huge devotee of the Latin mass. I prefer mass in the vernacular and so on.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Nevertheless, when I read the motu proprio, my initial reaction was that it’s almost like cutting off your hand because you have a hangnail. I thought that it was a bit heavy-handed. I thought that it was a bit forensic and legal. This is the point that I made in my blog, that you can try to legislate away certain things that you don’t like in the church, but if you don’t address the underlying causes, if you’re not addressing why it is that people have left the novus ordo liturgies in favor of the Latin mass liturgies, if you don’t address that, then you’re just letting the problem sit there and fester. That’s why I said, to me, the most instructive thing about the motu proprio isn’t what it says. It’s what it doesn’t say. It’s what it doesn’t do. What it doesn’t do is in a very pastoral way identify those problems within the church that have led to this deep-
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
… gnawing spiritual hunger that people seem to have for something a little more sacred than what their typical parish is giving them. I’m not an enemy of Pope Francis at all. Nevertheless, he’s a pope of accompaniment and dialogue and smell like the sheep. As I said in my blog, I don’t see a lot of accompaniment or dialogue here.
Cy Kellett:
No. I think a lot of people were struck by that, that this didn’t feel at all like it was achieving the tone that the pope himself calls for. I just want people to know the piece is called the Hermeneutics of the Abyss: Some Thoughts on Traditionis Custodes. Maybe we could start with what did you mean by the abyss? What are you referring to when you talk about the abyss?
Dr. Larry Chapp:
I started the blog post with a quote from the then-Cardinal Ratzinger and well actually no, it was just Joseph Ratzinger. He has this sort of analysis of the little flower of St. Therese of Lisieux where he points out that despite all of the cultural support that she had from a very Catholic family and a very Catholic upbringing and she had a deep faith and a profound sort of mystical awareness of things, she nevertheless felt tempted by atheism in a way that doesn’t seem to be … And this is sort of Ratzinger’s point. This isn’t just what some saints call the dark night of the soul, that they go through a period of extreme dryness and no consolations and those sorts of things.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
This seems to have been real honest to goodness temptations towards atheism. Ratzinger’s point was he said that she felt the abyss below her. She felt that abyss, that void, the possibility of nothingness, of nihilism. He identifies it as, in some ways, a typical marker of modernity, that modernity is sort of marked by this angst, this spiritual [inaudible 00:06:25] that we have towards existence despite our Catholic faith, despite all of the ecclesial props and sacraments that we have. There is this gnawing spiritual sort of existential dread that gnaws at all of us in the depths of our soul in the modern world in a way that perhaps wasn’t true in previous eras. Our era is an era of unbelief. Our cultural moment is a moment of extreme unbelief and this is the abyss that Ratzinger’s talking about and that’s why I call my piece the hermeneutics of the abyss because what I’m saying is that the motu proprio does not identify this spiritual abyss-
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
… that is out there in the hearts and souls of so many Catholics who are feeling this fear, this dread of meaninglessness, of pointlessness, of [inaudible 00:07:22] as the sociologist, a sense of lawlessness, and that they are going to the traditional Latin mass seeking some sort of stable ground underneath their feet. Whereas the mainstream church seems to be shifting like sand dunes in a hurricane all the time, this seems like a rock in the tempest.
Cy Kellett:
So what I come away with, if I may, from reading it is with this kind of deeper analysis of the need of the church and then you put this particular letter, this motu proprio in the context of that need and you almost are slapping your forehead saying, “Why this letter when this is the need of the church?” So here’s a couple questions I was left with. I want you to tell me am I missing the point or are these reasonable questions given what you wrote. First of all, is the papacy of Pope Francis self-defeating? That is he’s adopted the wrong strategies to bring out the ends that he clearly wants, meaning he expresses all the time the want for a certain kind of church that is more or less back to the roots of Christ’s own ministry in ministering to the poor and casting out demons and healing the sick, all that. I left with a question that I had not had before about Pope Francis and I don’t think it’s a disrespectful question. The question is not about his motives, but about his strategy. Is it a self-defeating strategy if he’s going to focus on these things and call us to these other things?
Dr. Larry Chapp:
I can only say a hearty yes-
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
… to that question. I think that it is self-defeating which is why it is a head-scratcher to me the pope of accompaniment and so on came down so hard in this way. This is a pope that wants to, like you said, return us. The word I like to use, he wants to repristinate the gospel. He wants to repristinate our evangelical living of the gospel. So it seems to me that instead of a big slap down, this was a prime moment to reach out to some very devout Catholics who are deeply concerned with the church and to say to them, “Look, I have some concerns with your attitudes on some issues. Let’s talk about this. Let’s get together. Instead of having a synod on the Amazon, let’s have a synod on the liturgy and let’s have all parties come and discuss the nature of liturgy, the direction we want it to go, and let’s have a real conversation here in order to make the eucharistic liturgy as vibrant for as many people as we possibly can.”
Dr. Larry Chapp:
I think that would have been a non-self-defeating strategy. It would have been in line with all of his sort of papal sort of initiatives, but this, I do think if he is seeking unity which he said in his letter that that’s what he wants, he wants a more unified church, this is not going to do it. In fact, the dust that it has kicked up, the anger that it has kicked up is only, I think, going to further, at least in the short term, vulcanize the church even further. It could be that the pope doesn’t care about the short term. He’s thinking longterm and he wants maybe the traditional Latin mass to die a slow death of attrition if you will. That seems to be the strategy here. I’m not certain that that’s a wise move either.
Cy Kellett:
No, I want to share with you something we have here in San Diego and see if this resonates with you because we have the fraternity priests of St. Peter. They only celebrate the Latin mass. They have St. Anne’s Parish, but so you’d say this is the group that the pope is addressing, all these Latin mass people, but what they also have in their building with them is they made room for and they financially support this ministry to women who have been sexually trafficked. So they’re building houses. They’re trying to care for women who are the victims of this [pornographized 00:11:23] culture and really brutalized victims. It seems to me that these two things are of a piece that these folks are trying to do something like what you might be prescribing which is doing the Pope Francis thing of recover the Christianity of Christianity, be like Christ to other people, but also trying to recover a sense of the sacred in the liturgy. I’m not saying that they’re completely successful at this, but this does seem to me like what you’re pointing to. This is the kind of thing we need, not the kind of thing we need to shut down.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Oh, absolutely. I did not know that out there in San Diego that the [SFS 00:12:03] priests were doing this, but man, my hat’s off to them because that is exactly what I’m talking about. We need to bring together these two sides of the church, those people seeking after transcendence and verticality in the liturgy, a sacredness in the liturgy, a direct connection with the supernatural that they so desperately want and need, to combine that then with the social justice concerns of the church for the poor and the marginalized. I mean look, I run a Catholic worker farm. I’m a huge fan of Dorothy Day’s. She, unlike what a lot of people think of her, was an extremely orthodox Catholic.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
She brought those two things together as well, a deep, deep love for the Eucharist and a deep, deep concern for the poor. I think going forward, that’s what we need to do. So rather than slap this element down, this was a perfect opportunity for the pope to mend fences and to move forward because … And I’ll say this before I’ll shut up and let you talk some more. We have to talk too, I think, about the failures of Summorum Pontificum from Pope Benedict as well in this regard because I think Pope Benedict’s vision was that allowing for a wider use of the TLM, that there would be some cross-fertilizing with the novus ordo so that the reform of the novus ordo that Pope Benedict really wanted where the novus ordo is in a sense upgraded if you want to put it that way to include a more vertical element. I think that was his goal, but that’s not what happened.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
What happened in many cases was you just simply had these two parallel movements going on within the church and increasingly among many of the radical traditionalists, a very hostile sort of parallel movement towards the papacy of Francis, towards the novus ordo. You see that out there among some of the leading lights in the TLM movement. So I think the motu proprio is correct, Pope Francis is, that Summorum Pontificum was in some ways a failure pastorally because it did not achieve what it set out to do, but then I think Pope Francis should have said, “Okay. Summorum has these issues that it has created. Let’s fix them.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
“Let’s deal with them.”
Cy Kellett:
Well-
Dr. Larry Chapp:
That would be the pastoral thing to do.
Cy Kellett:
It strikes me too that there was an element of impatience in the pope here. I mean 13 years is not a very long time for a liturgical kind of coming together and healing after the Second Vatican Council. 13 years of this Summorum kind of experiment, it just seemed very abrupt, and you used the word cold in your piece.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Yeah. Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
I can’t say I disagree with that, but my deeper kind of interest in your article is not just that you pointed out, “Come on, this a kind of abrupt, cold thing that you did and you didn’t address the deeper issue.” You actually got into some of what you would like to have seen and you shared some of that with us. I want to read just a couple lines of what you said and this, I have to say, genuinely moved me. “We wait in vain for a clarion call from the church for a revolution of the soul, for a great night of collective repentance, for a great divestment of privilege, for a radical living of the Sermon on the Mount or for the lifeboats to be dispatched forthwith to collect those adrift and drowning in the abyss. There is none of that.” That, to me, summed it up. It is clear what we need and there was none of that in this.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Yeah, and I sort of ended that quote by saying that the lifeboats were not only not dispatched, but he is slapping down that part of the church, the traditionalist part of the church that, in his opinion, grabbed the wrong lifeboat. All right. Of course they grabbed the wrong lifeboat because no other lifeboats have been sent out to them. That’s kind of my deeper point there. The church should be reaching out to these disenfranchised people, not alienating them even further.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Okay. So the other thing that interests me about you is that you write this and it’s beautiful writing, very moving writing, but you’re also the founder of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm there in Pennsylvania. So this also suggests to me a practical way forward and I have to make an admission here. I’m a lifelong fan of Dorothy Day. I lived in the Boston Catholic Worker House for a while.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Wow.
Cy Kellett:
It seemed to me for a long time that there is something that Dorothy Day addresses beautifully that very few other people address in the way that she does, but that it is often mistaken for a kind of social justice-y, just another social movement. It’s not that. You do have to connect Dorothy Day to her profoundly orthodox Catholicism to make sense of it and once you do that, you’ve unleashed a power that really has something to say for it.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Yeah, as our co-founder Peter Maurin said, he wanted to set off the dynamite that the church possesses but just sort of sits on, eh wants to explode the dynamite of the church’s message, its full messages, its whole message. Dorothy was a profoundly orthodox Catholic and I know a lot of people look askance at the contemporary Catholic worker movement because I mean to be blunt, there are strong elements in the contemporary movement that have simply degenerated into leftist sort of ooey gooey politics, the latest cause de jour and so on.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
In some Catholic worker houses, even somewhat hostile to the Catholic faith. However, there are some strong movements currently afoot among younger Catholic workers out there. I know several who are trying to resurrect Dorothy’s vision. They’re trying to implement, once again, a Catholic worker movement that is very true to her vision of bringing together orthodox Catholicism and the social justice teachings of the church. I think that is dynamite and I can’t emphasize it would just explode on the scene of our culture if Catholics lived that way.
Cy Kellett:
I think her vision was that this should be done at the parish level. I mean one thing that was notable about her, she didn’t want Sunday mass celebrated in a Catholic worker house. Even though a priest would come and do it, she said, “Go to the parish. That’s what … You’re a member of the parish.” Her movement … One element that I think has been missing in people’s appreciation is she intended for it to be a parish reform movement.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Yes, she absolutely did because she was philosophically along with Peter Maurin very much what we would call today a localist and a very big believer in subsidiarity and she believed that the revolution that the church needs today, the revolution that the soul that I reference has got to be a bottom up revolution led by the laity, also with clerical leadership as well, but in the modern world, the laity have got to lead in any sort of spiritual regeneration and that’s going to take place on a grassroots level, parish by parish by parish. That absolutely was her vision. She did not want some kind of bureaucratic heavy massive top down organization loaded and larded with cash would then dispense out to various … No, she wanted it to bubble up from below.
Cy Kellett:
So if you could say something about … Because I do think that this is a fair response to the pope. This is not just an emotional response. This is a well thought out and, in your case, lived response which is liturgical reform separated from the deeper reform of Christian life so that Christian life is being lived as a profound response to this what you call [inaudible 00:20:24], this modern [lostness 00:20:25] and terror and emptiness.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
And now horrible loneliness and isolation that when we live in a way that radically responds to that as Christ would respond to it, we’re going to need great liturgy to go … This is not a separate thing from a liturgical renewal movement.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Oh, absolutely. I mean there’s the famous story where a priest showed up at the Catholic worker house to say mass and he was going to say mass without vestments and she said to him, “Think again. You are going to wear vestments.” There was a mass as well where they consecrated the wine, the precious blood, in a coffee cup and then after mass, she was seen out back burying the coffee cup in the ground. Someone asked her why she was doing that and she said, “Because this coffee cup is no longer really a coffee cup and I do not want it used in that way ever again. So I’m going to bury it here in sacred ground.” So that is certainly what Dorothy’s vision was. I wouldn’t describe her as high church-
Cy Kellett:
No.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
… liturgically, but she had a very reverent, devout orthodox understanding of liturgy and understood that only the supernatural wellspring of Christ coming to us in the Eucharist can sustain the kind of movement that she wanted to help the poor. This is exactly the same vision as Mother Theresa which is why Mother Theresa required her sisters to engage in eucharistic adoration and so on. Otherwise, it just degenerates into philanthropy and it goes off the rails very quickly.
Cy Kellett:
But the other side of that, if I may, Dr. Chapp, and I think you’ll agree with this, is it also degenerates to practice a kind of Catholicism that is only in church so to speak, that it’s all about-
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
… liturgy and adoration and it never moves out to the person lying on the steps in the front of the church who needs shoes and take off your shoes and give them the shoes. I think that’s what Dorothy Day would have done.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Oh, absolutely. Any attempt to in a sense atomize or isolate our Catholicism as just something I’d do for one hour or less on a Sunday morning after which there’s this massive disconnect with the rest of my life, that kind of Catholicism is actually dying. This is one of the reasons why we’re hemorrhaging Catholics left and right out of our parishes. It’s not … You can have the most beautiful liturgy in the world and you’re still hemorrhaging Catholics. Beautiful liturgy by itself is not the answer because unless you connect what you’re doing on Sunday with the rest of your life in very deep, profound, and meaningful ways, the beautiful liturgy is eventually going to lose its appeal to you and this is what we see in our parishes. I think one of the tremendous misconceptions that a lot of critics of the novus ordo have is that the vast majority of our parishes out there have terrible liturgy. I don’t think that’s true. I wouldn’t say that the vast majority have tremendously great liturgies, but they’re certainly not terrible. Yet, we’re still hemorrhaging Catholics despite our … I think it’s because of that great disconnect.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right. It is … Right. Just beautiful liturgy ain’t going to fix it and just having better social programs ain’t going to fix it. Christ taught a religion that is liturgical and charitable religion and we got to get them both right.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
Could you say something about how you do that at Dorothy Day Farm? What’s the plan there as far as that goes?
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Well our farm is actually … I own the farm with my wife, [Carmina 00:24:02] Chapp, she also has a doctorate in theology, and a former student of ours from DeSales University where we taught, Father John Gribowich, he’s now Father John Gribowich of the Diocese of Brooklyn, is the co-owner of our farm. For that reason, we do have the Eucharist in a small chapel on our campus and my wife and I are both Benedictine oblates. When visitors come to the farm, one of the first things we do is we pray with them. If Father John’s around, we have mass. If another priest is around, we’ll have mass. We also pray the liturgy of the hours with them and it’s central to what we do. We do the liturgy of the hours every day on our farm and so we always put prayer first absolutely. So that’s one big, big way that we try to bring these two elements together.
Cy Kellett:
I have to ask you this then. We’re getting close to the end however so I won’t keep you too much longer, but I have to ask you this just because I know how YouTube works. This video will post on YouTube and then down here underneath, somebody’s going to write in all caps, “Dorothy Day was a communist.” So I just need you to respond to that person before they write Dorothy Day was a communist.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Dorothy Day was absolutely not a communist. Period. Full stop.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Before she converted to Catholicism, she was kind of an agitator for the poor and labor movements in the 1920s and she flirted with Marxism to the extent that the people who shared most of her radical views about transforming the American economy were Marxists. So she had those associations, but once she became Catholic, she completely disavowed her relationships that she had with Marxists and she opposed socialism. She was actually what we would call an anarchist. She did not believe in the sovereign state of the leviathan. In fact, Dorothy Day thought Social Security was a bad idea because it placed too much power in the hands of the central government and took away the power of charity. Now, she may or may not have been right about that, but that goes to show she was not a big government socialist Marxist at all. In fact, she was quite the opposite of that.
Cy Kellett:
Thank you very much, Dr. Chapp. It does seem to me that you’ve proposed a way forward here. I wonder the pope maybe missed an opportunity maybe in a moment of peak, maybe just he has a particular bug in his bonnet about this. I don’t know, but I haven’t noted that many on the left or the right of the Catholic [commentariat 00:26:43] have said this makes perfect sense. It’s been a great deal of critique about it. If we say, “This is self-defeating, Holy Father. In a respectful way, this is self-defeating. You’re not getting to where you want to get with this. The people that you need to be drawing in you’re alienating with this and the people that you need to be helping to move to a more profound Christianity as we all do you’re actually just slapping them and that’s not helping,” so what would you say if he said to you, “Dr. Chapp, okay. So help me not to be self-defeating. What would make my papacy able to accomplish the ends that I so often say that I want to accomplish?”
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Well I would, for starters, revoke the motu proprio and allow the legal law of Summorum Pontificum to return and I would allow the Latin mass to continue to go on its trajectory and see what happens, but then like I said, I was serious. Call a synod on the liturgy. Liturgy right now is dividing the church deeply. It’s a huge issue. It’s the central act of our worship and why not … If we can hold a synod on the Amazon and a synod on the family and now we’re going to have a synod on synods, Holy Father, I respectfully suggest we have a synod on the liturgy in which all voices are heard. But I would like to end too by pointing out maybe something a little … I don’t want to end on the negative, but it could very well be that Pope Francis simply doesn’t want the traditional Latin mass around.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
It could very … [Sean Blanchard 00:28:15] who is a young theologian wrote a very interesting essay, I highly recommend it, in Church Life Journal at Notre Dame in which he sort of points out that what’s really going on here is the pope is grabbing hold of the reins of the hermeneutic of Vatican II and he’s saying, “I’m going to control the hermeneutic of Vatican II and I’m going to double down on Vatican II and I’m going to double down on sort of Paul VI’s understanding of Vatican II and we are going to in a sense try to move that forward and push that needle forward. The Latin mass does not fit into that vision.” So in a sense, the motu proprio says more than it says because I think what it’s really about is the reception of Vatican II. Ultimately, I think that’s what it’s about.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
I think the pope is perhaps a bit one-sided in his vision of how to properly appropriate it. It’s also ambiguous as to what his relationship therefore would be with the papacies of John Paul and Benedict and their retrieval of the council. These are great … So he’s talking about how to help his papacy move forward. It would be to clarify what is my vision of Vatican II, how does it fit in with the vision of the previous two popes to write an encyclical perhaps even on the proper hermeneutic of Vatican II so that we’re not simply guessing as to what his motives are.
Cy Kellett:
Fair enough. Dr. Larry Chapp, thank you very much. I really appreciate that you took the time with us.
Dr. Larry Chapp:
Oh, thank you for inviting me.
Cy Kellett:
I have to say one of the impressions that I share with Dr. Larry Chapp is that Dorothy Day is often caricatured this way or that way as this kind of Catholic or that kind of Catholic, but there’s a kind of unity to her life that comes from her liturgical living of the Catholic faith, being in many ways very traditional Catholic and then from that, growing out of that kind of traditional Catholic liturgical life, a really radical new life, one that really genuinely responds to the difficulties of the modern world, including the difficulties of those of us suburban folks who are constantly kind of in search of meaning and purpose and all of that. This radical way of living the Christian faith, one that is very traditional on a certain sense and very fresh and challenging in another sense, I think is a productive possibility for the future and one we should consider. I’m really glad Dr. Larry Chapp came on to discuss it with us.
Cy Kellett:
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