How the Novus Ordo Mass Became An Ego-Tripping Arms Race
Thomas Day Diagnoses the Problem, But His Solutions Don't Go Far Enough
(This is Version 2.0 of an article originally published in January 2025. Output will continue to be low and scattershot for the next few weeks as I begin my new job.)
Some books, upon a read, merely seem to add new historical or scientific details to one’s preexisting model of the world. Yet others, by presenting a new interpretative model, giving a novel explanation of how other things one already knows about fit together, transform how you see. After such a book you don’t just no more about something you already knew a little about, but you removed and replaced false understandings, with entirely new, deeper, and better ones. You then can’t help but see the implications of that new interpretative layer of understanding everywhere. Rene Girard was one of those thinkers. After reading his I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, I began to see Girardian mimesis everywhere, even in things as mundane as where people sit in church:
or as consequential as if they go up to receive Holy Communion even when they know they aren’t prepared.
Thomas Day’s Why Catholics Can’t Sing, surprisingly to me, and at least in the realm of liturgy, was also such a book. Once I understood the problems he writes about, I see them everywhere.
I picked it up from the library on a whim, expecting it to be a liberal screed about how Catholics weren’t enough into the Spirit of Vatican II, and if only we all tried harder it would finally work, this time.
And the beginning of Day’s book, an argument that American Catholics can’t sing at least partially because they’ve inherited an Irish Catholic custom of preferring silence during Mass, seemed to agree with my presumptive stereotype of what it would be about. Thomas Day, a musician who became interested in this titular question “Why Catholics Can’t Sing” during the 1980s, however, comes to a far deeper, and ultimately more traditionally minded conclusion about the Catholic liturgy post-Vatican II.
For Day, as I’ve argued myself in the past, Vatican II was like a Catholic version of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China, an attempt at instantaneous cultural revolution, which promised that freedom from the chains of tradition would allow a supposedly long-suppressed spirituality of spontaneity and the Spirit to rise from the faithful within the liturgy.
But just like how Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” ended up in glorification of him personally, Day argues that Liturgical Renewal and the Novus Ordo ended up in practice becoming “Ego Renewal.” The nature of the Mass ought to be ritual for the glory of God, something objective that just “is” within itself, something that remains apart from and above all who participate, but into which all are drawn. Yet, Day argues, the reform of the liturgy, set up by those who perceived this objectivity merely as aloofness and a lack of “active participation” by the people, instead decided to create a simple, “uncluttered” liturgy optimized for “relevance” and subjectivity.
But this liturgy never ended up being as clean and “optimized” as the liturgical “experts” would have it.1 The Novus Ordo, by trying to bring about involvement and participation, turns the mass into a performance by priests, musicians, and congregation, who, with more “freedom” have both more leeway and more responsibility, and much more that have they no choice but to figure out for themselves. But what is a performance, Day reminds us, but something where people are performing and there is a distinction between priest (and musician) and congregation. Freedom in the liturgy, becomes, he tells us, winds up by necessity in the Novus Ordo becoming a constant competition of all against all, everyone being judged and judging each other as distinct individuals: I or us, versus he or them.
The reformed liturgy, he concludes, leaves little room for the ritual aspect which the Mass properly is, and instead is left only a new mimetic race of everyone against everyone in terms of who can be better at grabbing attention. Music, the people, the Priest’s personality (charm, personality, “Gooooooood Morning”, “Wasn’t that nice?”, “Fr. Bob”) all compete in a cringy arms race that pleases nobody. The Mass itself feels like a distraction from the popularity contest for warmness and good feelings that no one can win, and the objective element, the ritual aspect, winds up sidelined. The focus becomes the priest for the congregation and how well he has “entertained” and “performed” not the Sacred Mysteries.
Worse, the priest most of the time now faces the congregation and has his voice amplified, making him for good or for ill, but mostly, again in an egotistical way, all about the priest, rather than the Mass itself. And so, for Day, the people wind up not particularly ultimately enthused or excited about the Mass, and forced participation, like being asked to sing along to a hymn, is mostly ignored. And why should anyone not be confused, Day questions? If the measuring metric is now entertainment and performance, the football game or Netflix are far more exciting and attractive. Catholics, can’t sing, he concludes, because the Mass has been turned into a show that they “have” to come to, but don’t want to come to, and don’t pay much attention to, because it’s not a particularly well-run “show.”
That for Day, was the real root of all of Catholicism’s problems in 1990, the Mass being reduced to a mere show because of the conciliar reform backfiring. And I agree. Even problems as divergent as the liberal clamor for “ordaining” women or lack of donations all come from the fact that the transcendent nature of the Mass has been de-emphasized in practice and the atmosphere of a show put forth to replace it. Everyone wants to be the center of attention but no one, in their heart of hearts, likes the show.
Yet Thomas Day’s solutions in the book, trying to find ways to bring back a participative unity in the Mass that evades the mimetic ego conflict it has descended into, mostly by encouraging the people to participate in simple music that is integrated into the liturgy (i.e. Psalms, penitential rite, Gloria, Sanctus, etc.), feel way to shallow from the perspective of 2025. The problems he complains about, at least in many U.S. parishes,2 feel worse. Merely adopting a different hymnal or getting a better Music director isn’t going to solve the problem. At least the distraction of “performance pieces” with questionable theology is reduced. Maybe in 1990, Day’s suggestion to use the Gather hymnal wasn’t a bad one.3 Maybe it was better than some other options around at that time that were worse, and even more distracting to the Mass. But that particular suggestion is hilarious today.
Yes, it’s also a positive step to encourage priests, as Day also suggests often throughout his book, avoid embellishments and ad-lib additions throughout the Mass. But the real solution has to involve not putting them through the wringer which they are in now in the Novus Ordo, which makes them feel like they have to ad-lib and show personality in the Mass to keep people’s attention on the “performance.” The real solution would require reversing the whole conception of Mass as a “performance” and avoiding putting priests and the people under this pressure in the first place. Ad-orientem celebration of the Mass are one small step toward this, but the problem is larger and inherent in the whole 1960s mentality that the Novus Ordo was “master-planned” under.
Thomas Day’s book helps reveal the mimetic and egoist root of the problems inherent in the celebration of today’s Novus Ordo Masses, but one small anecdote that he relates, hilarious today because of how off-base it was, shows how Day was too timid to present us with the only real solution: more liturgical renewal (but this time mostly truly organic) to undo the now provenly failed liturgical renewal of the past century. A bishop in the 1980s, he comments near the end of the book, predicted that all liturgical problems would be set aright by the 2000s because no one would remember the “old ways” of the pre-conciliar Tridentine Rite because they “all would have died off.”
In 2025, however, the reverse is true about which side is dying off, the anecdote hilarious, and the solution also a hilarious inversion of that bishop’s prediction. The “old ways” of the pre-Conciliar liturgy that Day for some reason never sees as a possibility for “coming back” just might be the real solution to the very real problems he’s uncovered.
And once you realize that Archbishop Bugnini, much maligned as he is, and probably should be, was also engaged in a competitive struggle with another prelate who was running a parallel “liturgical reform” effort,4 and you realize that the Second Vatican Council and the Novus Ordo didn’t just come to produce crazy things because of the Jesuits and their LSD.5 It was produced by the same sort of bad incentives Day notices, but doesn’t push to their ultimate conclusion. People (some who were drug addled) were competing with each other to out do the other in how much they could change and “master plan” the performance of the Mass.
Now is it starting to make sense why things got crazy in 70s (and thereafter)?
Lots more to come…
Nor did Mao’s Cultural Revolution for that matter stay very “clean” either. It ended up having a lot of blood and death. Huh? Surprise?
Regardless of what I said once upon a time about those Novus Ordo ones who are putting in “some” effort”:
Suggesting Gather sounds hilariously out of touch today. Today the minimum standard has to be at least the St. Michael Hymnal… At least, I’m saying…
From Yves Chiron’s Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy, which I’m currently in the process of reading.
The Church cannot give us a snake when we ask for a fish. If you are implying that the Novus Ordo is intrinsically harmful or defective, you commit blasphemy against the Holy Spirit by calling evil what the Church has authoritatively and magisterially judged Good. How it is celebrated is another thing. Defects there are due to bad priests and bad laity and bad culture.
Excellent work. Thanks.