Belloc on the Mass

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm reading Belloc's The Path to Rome, which is full of wonderful purple passages. Here, for example, is what he has to say about "a day one has opened by Mass ... [which is] a source of continual comfort to me".

"This comfort I ascribe to four causes ... and these causes are:

1. That for half-an-hour just at the opening of the day you are silent

and recollected, and have to put off cares, interests, and passions in

the repetition of a familiar action. This must certainly be a great

benefit to the body and give it tone.

2. That the Mass is a careful and rapid ritual. Now it is the function

of all ritual (as we see in games, social arrangements and so forth)

to relieve the mind by so much of responsibility and initiative and to

catch you up (as it were) into itself, leading your life for you

during the time it lasts. In this way you experience a singular

repose, after which fallowness I am sure one is fitter for action and

judgement.

3. That the surroundings incline you to good and reasonable thoughts,

and for the moment deaden the rasp and jar of that busy wickedness

which both working in one's self and received from others is the true

source of all human miseries. Thus the time spent at Mass is like a

short repose in a deep and well-built library, into which no sounds

come and where you feel yourself secure against the outer world.

4. And the most important cause of this feeling of satisfaction is

that you are doing what the human race has done for thousands upon

thousands upon thousands of years. This is a matter of such moment

that I am astonished people hear of it so little. Whatever is buried

right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to

do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can

really be very happy for long--but I mean reasonably happy), and, what

is more important, decent and secure of our souls. Thus one should

from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark;

one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's

food--and especially deeply upon great feast-days; one should go on

the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and

one should sing in chorus. For all these things man has done since God

put him into a garden and his eyes first became troubled with a soul.

Similarly some teacher or ranter or other, whose name I forget, said

lately one very wise thing at least, which was that every man should

do a little work with his hands.

Oh! what good philosophy this is, and how much better it would be if

rich people, instead of raining the influence of their rank and

spending their money on leagues for this or that exceptional thing,

were to spend it in converting the middle-class to ordinary living and

to the tradition of the race. Indeed, if I had power for some thirty

years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their

inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing,

dance, sail, and dig; and those that would not should be compelled by

force.

Now in the morning Mass you do all that the race needs to do and has

done for all these ages where religion was concerned; there you have

the sacred and separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his

Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierarchic tongue, and all

that your nature cries out for in the matter of worship."


Later on, he describes going to Mass on the feast of Corpus Christi and comments approvingly that "the Mass was low and short - they are a Christian people". 


I don't want to draw any facile conclusions but it seems that, for Belloc, "the sacred and separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierarchic tongue" were not incompatible with the "low and short". For him the Mass could be both "careful" and "rapid".


But all this is to see Belloc with early 21st Century eyes. What really mattered then, as it matters now, was the Mass itself and its "continual comfort".