“What if Rome no longer wants to be Roman?”: Interview with Martin Mosebach

The following interview appeared in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag in its December 26, 2021 issue. It has been translated for Rorate Caeli.—PAK

Since Pope Francis issued a decree in July consistently scaling back the celebration of the old Latin Mass, all hell has broken loose on the international scene of Catholic traditionalists (or “trads”). The writer Martin Mosebach is an icon of the movement, not least thanks to his trad pamphlet Heresy of Formlessness (2002). He receives us for a talk in his Frankfurt apartment, less than a ten-minute walk from the old Opera.

When was the last time you were at Mass?

MARTIN MOSEBACH: Last Sunday, on the third [Sunday] of Advent. Here in Frankfurt there is the Deutschordenskirche, where the so-called Tridentine—or better, Gregorian—Mass is regularly celebrated according to the preconciliar liturgical books. Sundays, feast days, and also on some weekdays.

"Tradition stands above the pope. The old Mass is as a matter of principle beyond the pope’s authority to prohibit." (Martin Mosebach)

Martin Mosebach

First Things (Excerpts)

 

In Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis has given a command. He does this at a time when papal authority is unraveling as never before. The Church has long since advanced to an ungovernable stage. But the pope battles on. He abandons his dearest principles—“listening,” “tenderness,” “mercy”—that refuse to judge or give orders. Pope Francis is roused by something that troubles him: the tradition of the Church. ...

Der Spiegel interviews Mosebach: "What's concerning about Francis is this atmosphere of an Entirely New Church"

“This Pope is creating a certain atmosphere”

[" Whatever breaks from continuity is not good for the Church"]

Romain Leick and Walter Mayr

Der Spiegel

May 23, 2015

Author Martin Mosebach thinks it dangerous that Pope Francis serves emotions above all else and is making his mark through his appearances at the cost of the Church.

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The Georg Büchner Award winner Mosebach, 63, is a conservative, sometimes even reactionary, Catholic. Mosebach has spent many years looking at the role of the Church in the modern world. In his 2007 book “The Heresy of Formlessness”, he criticised the effects of the Second Vatican Council which ended in 1965 and brought about a new orientation to the Catholic Church. In 2014 he published his novel “Das Blutbuchenfest”.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Mosebach, you have spent the last year in Rome. Have you been able to connect with the general enthusiasm for this Pope?

Mosebach: I remember the moment in March 2013 when a cardinal informed the waiting crowds that a new Pope had been elected who called himself Francis. At that moment I knew what problem would face the Church.

Martin Mosebach: The Liturgy as a Window to Another World

Our friends at the Society of St. Hugh of Cluny recently sponsored a Solemn Mass at the Church of the Holy Innocents in New York City which was followed by a talk on the liturgy by the celebrated German novelist and advocate for the Traditional Mass, Martin Mosebach.  This is a translation of a talk that Mosebach was asked to give by the Bishop of Limburg/Lahn on Ash Wednesday 2013.   

I know it will give great delight to our readers, not only because of its trenchant analysis of the liturgical situation in which we find ourselves, but also because of the beauty of his style, which, mirabile dictu, comes across in the excellent translation.

The Liturgy as a Window to another World (1)

Martin Mosebach

(Address Given at Holy Innocents Parish, New York, May 12, 2015)

When it became apparent in the early 1950s that television sets would soon be in many households, German bishops deliberated about whether it would be wise to allow or even promote television broadcasts of the Holy Mass. Indeed, people thought about such questions sixty years ago and they asked the great philosopher Josef Pieper for an expert opinion. In his opinion, Pieper rejected such television broadcasts on principle, saying they were irreconcilable with the nature of the Holy Mass. In its origins, the Holy Mass is a discipline of the arcane, a sacred celebration of mysteries by the christened. He mentioned the lowest level in the order of priests – done away with following the Second Vatican Council – the ostiary, or doorkeeper, who once had to ensure that the non-baptized and those temporarily excluded leave the church and move to the narthex following the liturgy of the Word. The Orthodox still do so in some places; the call of the deacon, “Guard the doors” is heard in every Orthodox liturgy before the Eucharist. While in Georgia I once experienced this demand, often merely a ceremony of a recollected past, being taken literally. A monk approached me, fell to his knees and apologetically asked me to leave the church since I, as a Roman Catholic, was not in full agreement with the Orthodox Church. I gladly acquiesced as I think not everyone has to be permitted everywhere all the time. Sacred places and holy acts are first declared quite plainly by the drawing of boundaries and such boundaries must somehow be visible and palpable. Still, anyone who has not given any thought to the dubiousness of filming the Mass has perhaps on occasion felt uncomfortably moved when they saw believers receiving communion on television or as the camera rested on the face of a celebrant chewing the host. Are such feelings truly only atavistic, produced by ancient magical fears? Other cultures are also acquainted with an aversion to photography. It is as if it would disturb a spiritual sphere.

Martin Mosebach on the Liturgy and the Moral Life

Giuseppe Crespi, Communion

In many dioceses in Germany it is customary for the bishop to invite artists to a meeting on Ash Wednesday, an Aschermittwoch der Künstler, an idea taken from Paul Claudel, who had organized something similar in Paris. On Ash Wednesday 2013, the novelist Martin Mosebach was invited to speak to assembled artists in Frankfurt (diocese of Limburg), on the theme of the traditional liturgy of the Roman rite. It need scarcely be said that is highly unusual for a traditionalist thinker to be invited to a regular diocesan setting to speak on that subject.

Toward the end of his speech Mosebach made the following point:

One difficulty that arose from the Church's abandonment of her traditional liturgy was surely quite unexpected. Many who observe the Church from a distance, and this includes many nominal Catholics, now see the Church as embodied principally in the moral teachings that she requires her faithful to follow. These teachings include many prescriptions and proscriptions that contradict the customs of the secular world. In the days when the Church was above all oriented toward the immediate encounter with God in the Liturgy however, these commandments were not seen merely in relation to the living of daily life, but were concrete means of preparation for complete participation in the liturgy.

The liturgy  gave morality its goal. The question was: What must I do in order to attain to perfect Communion with the Eucharistic Christ? What actions will result in my only being able to look on Him from afar? Moral evil then appeared not merely as the that which is bad in the abstract, but as that which is to be avoided in order to attain to a concrete goal. And when someone broke a commandment, and thus excluded himself from Holy Communion, Confession was ready as the means to repair the damage and prepare him to receive Communion again. A surprising result of the reform is that while the Church of the past, which was really oriented toward the liturgy, appeared to many outside observers as being scandalously lax in moral matters, the current Church appears to contemporaries (and not only to those outside) as unbearably moralistic, unmerciful, and meanly puritanical. (From: "Das Paradies auf Erden: Liturgie als Fester zum Jenseits," Una Voce Korrespondenz 43 (2013), pp. 213-214; translation by Sacerdos Romanus).

"The old rite is the Church’s greatest treasure, her emergency kit, her Noah’s ark"

This is "old news" but still worth reading.

The blog of the Society of St. Hugh of Cluny has published a translation of yet another interview with Martin Mosebach, the renowned novelist and author of The Heresy of Formlessness. (An excerpt of this excellent book can be found here.) This particular interview was published in May of this year in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, and is entitled "It would be a Catastrophe if the Church would throw her Principles Overboard." in the translation.

Other recently-translated interviews and articles of Mr. Mosebach are "The Body of the Church" (on the lifting of the excommunication of the SSPX bishops), "After all, he is only the Pope" (a defense of Pope Benedict XVI vis-a-vis the sex scandals) and "The Reform of the Liturgy and the Catholic Church".

The following is an excerpt from the translation of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung interview:

You are an adherent of the Tridentine mass. Do you remember your first old mass?

It was with a priest in Hattenheim, an ugly suburb of Frankfurt, in a musty and desolate location. The priest was pastor Hans Milch, a powerful thunderer from the pulpit, a wild, boisterous and eccentric man. He had been discharged by the bishop and had built for himself a missionary hut in this dreadful Hattenheim. Now defenders of the old rite are readily suspected of “aestheticism.” But it was in these surroundings, so remote from all beauty, that I learned that the liturgy builds its own cathedral.

Do you mean that Pastor Milch who sympathized with the FSSPX?

Milch had the characteristics of a genius, but he was too expressionistic for my taste. His sermons ruptured the liturgy.

The content didn’t matter to you?

The cult is always more important than any sermon, however clever. The objectivity of cult is the greatest and most important thing our age needs. The old rite is the Church’s greatest treasure, her emergency kit, her Noah’s ark.

This weekend the ecumenical church convention it taking place in Munich. Are you going to be there?

Certainly not. I don’t have to run into cheerful people with a sect-member’s smile. This is the Reichsparteitag of organized Christianity – dreadful!

What’s so dreadful about it?

The idea itself - like a military review. The sentimental ecumenism. The “we” feeling. What counts in religion is the individual and his personal relationship with God. I find terrible this getting carried away by the crowd. Liturgical tradition breathes a sober, almost reserved spirit. It doesn’t serve as a massage for the soul.

What do you mean by “massage for the soul?”

I mean the Church must be nothing like a health outing. Christianity is not easily consumable. On the contrary, religion encounters man as something foreign, as the “totally other.” She challenges him to leave his place and set out to explore her strangeness and profundity. Religion has to act upon man first as foreign and difficult. Terrible simplification leads to great illusions and finally to a hangover.

She always has to have a plan contrary to the spirit of the times?

That is her most precious possession. The Church is always a counter – society. She is always a crack in the wall of the total present. That binds me to the Church and makes her necessary for me until my death.

What happens to you when you can’t attend mass for two or three weeks?

Then I know that I am living wrong.

What is the matter with you then?

What’s the matter with me? That I have not joined myself to this objective icon. That I have not, for once, disregarded myself and entered into the spell of reality, into a world that doesn’t run according to my laws.

The Reform of the Liturgy and the Catholic Church

The blog of the Society of St. Hugh of Cluny has published a translation of a recent interview with Martin Mosebach on the Reform of the Liturgy and the Catholic Church.

Part 1

Part 2

Martin Mosebach at the Brompton Oratory

At the request of Father U.M.Lang, we announce that the presentation of the English version of Martin Mosebach's book "The Heresy of Formlessness" will take place on December 7, in St Wilfrid's Hall at the London Oratory.

"The Heresy of Formlessness", for those who do not know it yet, is a collection of essays on the liturgy and its recent reform not from the perspective of a theologian, but from the perspective of a literary writer (excerpt here). The book helped to bring the debate on the liturgy to a wider public in Germany.

Martin Mosebach, who will be present at the event, is a well-known and award-winning German author who has published novels, stories, and collections of poems; he has also written scripts for several films, opera libretti, theater, and radio plays. He is a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and also writes on art and literature for other newspapers and journals. Most recently, Mosebach has been awarded the Großer Literaturpreis der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste.

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