A Counter-Renovation?

Time for a Truly Catholic Renovation

By Anthony Esolen

O magnum mysterium,

et admirabile sacramentum,

ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,

iacentem in praesepio:

Beata Virgo, cuius viscera

meruerunt portare Dominum Christum.

What a great mystery,

what a wonderful sign,

that animals should see the Lord, new-born,

lying in a manger!

Blessed is the Virgin, whose womb

was privileged to carry Christ the Lord.

∼ From the Roman Breviary, the Matins of Christmas

We’re in Rome, in the year 1572. The great Pope Pius V has passed to glory. Just one year before, the naval forces of the Holy League had crushed the superior fleets of the ever-marauding Turks at Lepanto, giving maritime Europe a chance to breathe free at last. Thereafter Pius designated the first Sunday of October to be the Feast of the Holy Rosary, after the prayers which he had bidden the soldiers to pray.

What else was there to be found in Rome? When the priests prayed, they did so from the revised Breviary that Pius had promulgated in 1570, following the recommendations of the Council of Trent. Theirs was the Mass we know as the “extraordinary rite,” that is, the ordinary rite in the Church for nearly four hundred years. What else? A young poet named Torquato Tasso, a tremendous admirer of that saintly soldier of Christ, was in the midst of conceiving and executing his epic romance of Catholic unity,Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered). It will be second only to Dante’sCommedia in the illustrious history of Italian poetry.

We’re not yet in the Baroque era, but we are close. Artists have long been pushing beyond the bounds of the Roman and Greek classics they had loved so well. Michelangelo had died eight years before, and Caravaggio was yet but a small boy, but Titian, a hale ninety and over, was painting with the strokes of a French expressionist, three hundred years before their time. Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina, the greatest composer of choral music who ever lived, was the recently appointed master of the choir at Saint Peter’s. Saint Philip Neri was there in the city too, and men and boys flocked to his “oratories,” private meditations upon Scripture, complete with musical arrangements of scriptural and devotional texts. Thus was born the musical genre we call the oratorio, and from the oratorio, the opera.

With Palestrina at that time was a young Spaniard, a deacon on his way to the priesthood. His name was Tomas Luis de Victoria. No doubt he was learning from the master; he would attend Palestrina’s funeral in Rome in 1594. From that year, 1572, comes his beloved motet O Magnum Mysterium, on the breviary text above. It is a haunting piece, beginning in a minor key with long-held notes, as if in the darkness of the night when Christ was born and laid in the manger. Its mood is one of awe in the presence of grandeur, finally spilling forth into a solemn and joyful run of alleluias. Who would sing it? Boys and men, from treble to bass. Imagine the clear voices of children ringing out within the great vast spaces under the arches and dome of Saint Mary Major, or the Sistine Chapel. It was a truly popular art, performed for the people’s feasts, and impossible to make real without the talents of ordinary lads with good voices, an ear for melody, and enough devotion to the mysteries of faith to bear them up through the long sessions of practice.

That was a phenomenal burst of Catholic creativity, artistic, musical, literary, and ecclesiastical. John of the Cross was in Avila with Teresa and the reformed Carmelites. Lope de Vega was a small boy in Madrid; Shakespeare was a mischievous young fellow in Stratford. Cervantes was already a grown man, fighting at Lepanto. Corneille, Racine, and Calderon were soon to come. Charles Borromeo was in Rome reforming the seminaries. His cousin Federigo would be the cardinal archbishop of Milan, funding the great Ambrosian library, the first truly public library in Europe. Both men were tireless servants of the poor, often putting their own lives in danger to be so. But then, Catholic missionaries were at work all over the world, in the far East, in India, in the jungles of South America, on the American plains, around the Great Lakes; learning the native languages, often defending the natives against other tribes or rapacious Europeans, teaching them to farm, to read, and to worship the living God.

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