Still Running Off at the Keyboard

VON SPEYER, MOZART, AND CATHOLIC DOCTRINE

Let me begin with von Speyer's vision which I've taken from concert pianist, music teacher and church musician for the traditional Latin rite Masses in Adelaide, Mark Freer's article "Von Balthasar, Mozart and the Quest of Beauty":

The first of these [von Speyer's] posthumous works, The Book of All Saints, contains hundreds of mystical “prayer portraits”, mainly of canonised saints, but of some artists and philosophers also. Mozart is there. Whilst in prayer together Adrienne’s confessor and spiritual director gently questions her:

(Can you see Mozart?) Yes, I see him. (She smiles).

(Does he have a prayer?) Yes, I see him praying. I see him praying something, maybe an Our Father. Simple words, which he learned in his childhood, and which he prays in awareness that he is speaking with God. And then he stands before God like a child, bringing his father everything: pebbles from the street and special twigs and little blades of grass, and once a ladybird as well, and with him all these are melodies, melodies which he brings the dear Lord, melodies which he suddenly knows in prayer. And when he has stopped praying, no longer kneels and no longer folds his hands, then he sits at the piano or sings in an incredible childlikeness, and no longer knows exactly: is he playing the dear Lord something, or is it the dear Lord who is making use of him to play something to himself and to him at the same time? There is a great dialogue between Mozart and the dear Lord which is like the purest prayer, and this whole dialogue is solely music.

That is a romantic depiction of a humble Mozart in relationship with a loving God, childlike in its depiction. Not surprisingly, Freer indicates in this article that von Balthasar was a romantic. Perhaps that is what drew him to von Speyer. Freer writes:

His was no purely theoretical preoccupation with beauty. The award in 1987 of the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Prize in Innsbruck was, according to nephew Peter Henrici SJ:

"the rounding off of a life whose secret passion had been music. In his speech of thanks he reminisced: My youth was defined by music. My piano teacher was an old lady who had been a pupil of Clara Schumann. She introduced me to Romanticism. As a student in Vienna I delighted in the last of the Romantics Wagner, Strauss, and especially Mahler. That all came to an end once I had Mozart in my ears."

According to Freer, Balthasar said that "Nothing will be able to separate me from Mozart and from the highest creations of Haydn, from the ever-new and terrible experience that there are things too beautiful for our world."

Mozart was a Freemason, according to Ian F. McNeely, Department of History, University of Oregon, who writes in his course description:

From the capital cities of Europe to the smallest American towns, and in places as far apart as China and Africa, freemasonry aimed to “build” a better society, taking its inspiration from masonry, the craft of bricklaying. Freemasons have been credited with helping to spread the progressive ideals of the Enlightenment. They have also been charged with conspiring to undermine religion and plot revolution. They formed private clubs, met in lodges, used arcane symbols, and conducted secret rituals behind closed doors. Yet their members made an enormous impact outside, in public life: Wolfgang Mozart, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and the inventor of the guillotine were all freemasons.

In an article in "Enghteenth-Century Life" (a publication of John Hopkins University Press) titled "Initiating the Enlightenment?: Recent Scholarship on European Freemasonry", David Stevenson cites the book THE ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF FREEMASONRY: AN INTRODUCTORY STUDY, by James Stevens Curl, stating:

The heart of the book, however, lies in an argument that Masonry inspired and came to embody (Curl blurs the distinction) the period's neoclassicism. Besides suggesting that the fraternity played an important role in music and literature (citing Mozart and Goethe as well as English and French Encyclopedists), Curl considers two developments particularly Masonic, the rise of Egyptian themes in design and attempts to shape the landscape to point an explicit moral lesson.

Curl, the author of an earlier book on Egyptian themes in art and architecture, 8 builds his discussion here around Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (1791). After looking at Mozart's Masonic career and the libretto's literary predecessors in Egyptian romances, he then notes some Masonic connections in The Magic Flute itself. 9 A look at some of the stage sets built for the opera over the next generation reveals stunning Egyptian scenes, including Karl Friedrich Schinkel's extraordinary 1815 Berlin production. Curl connects this Egyptian theme not only with Isis and Osiris but with Hermes Trismegistus, according to legend a learned Egyptian.

I happen to have the book, and Curl has more to say. He presents a picture of Mozart, in relation to his concept of death, that is not Christian:

Rousseau's tomb at Ermenonville was a visible statement of ideas about death that encapsulated notions from Antiquity: death was eternal rest, or sleep, and the ghoulish and macarbe images fostered in Baroque and Christian art were to be expunged. Thus the garden-cemetery, with its Masonic connotations, was also anti-Clerical, and offered gentler, more humane and beautiful images than those provided by the Church. Mozart's feelings about death as a true and best friend, whose image 'is not only no longer terrifying..., but rather something very soothing and comforting" were evolved after he became a Freemason, and are in marked contrast with the dark gloom and terror evoked by the Church, not only with Purgatory and Hell, but with unsavory vaults, churchyards, and imagery... (James Stevens Curl, THE ART & ARCHITECTURE OF FREEMASONRY, p. 196)

Curl writes further:

In its essence, Masonic Style is summed up in the opening chorus of Mozart's Requiem in D Minor (k 626)....

So a Masonic Style is an amalgam of many things, but it has a distinctive flavour that is instantly recognizable once the subject has been studied and understood. It is a style that pervades the second half of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth; it is, in fact, the essence of Neoclassicism, the kernel of a movement that changed the world, and might have gone on changing it, had not reaction, retrogression, and bigotry replaced what seemed to be a genuine dawning of true Enlightenment. (Curl, p. 229)

It is the Enlightenment that is attributed to Freemasonry which made war on the Church.

The Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon claims Mozart for one of its own.

Francis Carr names the lodges where Mozart attended meetings, including the English Lodge in Prague and Haydn's lodge in Vienna.

Membership in Freemasonry excommunicates a Catholic. At the time when Mozart walked the earth, wrote his music, and joined the lodges (1756-1791), the Papal Bull of Pope Clement XII was already in force. Issued April 28, 1738, it makes the excommunication clear:

Wherefore We command most strictly and in virtue of holy obedience, all the faithful of whatever state, grade, condition, order, dignity or pre-eminence, whether clerical or lay, secular or regular, even those who are entitled to specific and individual mention, that none, under any pretext or for any reason, shall dare or presume to enter, propagate or support these aforesaid societies of Liberi Muratori or Francs Massons, or however else they are called, or to receive them in their houses or dwellings or to hide them, be enrolled among them, joined to them, be present with them, give power or permission for them to meet elsewhere, to help them in any way, to give them in any way advice, encouragement or support either openly or in secret, directly or indirectly, on their own or through others; nor are they to urge others or tell them, incite or persuade them to be enrolled in such societies or to be counted among their number, or to be present or to assist them in any way; but they must stay completely clear of such Societies, Companies, Assemblies, Meetings, Congregations or Conventicles, under pain of excommunication for all the above mentioned people, which is incurred by the very deed without any declaration being required, and from which no one can obtain the benefit of absolution, other than at the hour of death, except through Ourselves or the Roman Pontiff of the time. [emphasis mine]

Yet in spite of this Adrienne von Speyer sees Mozart talking with God and standing before God, handing him things. Which presumably would mean that Mozart was in heaven, unless she is suggesting that Jesus personally appeared to him. This scene was drawn from her visionary experience; and Balthasar, acting as her secretary, recorded the description.

Some questions arise:

If Mozart was excommunicated due to his Masonic membership, how is it that von Speyer sees him in heaven?

Is it that excommunication has no bearing on our eternal destiny? If excommunication has no bearing on our eternal destiny, then membership in Christ's Church has no bearing, because excommunication tosses a person out of the Church.

Was Mozart absolved by a pope, and if so why was there no mention of it in the entry for Mozart in the Catholic Encyclopedia?

Or is it that the Papal Bull promulgating excommunication for membership in a masonic lodge was not valid? In which case the old Code of Canon Law which did the same thing was not valid either. Nor is Cardinal Ratzinger's claim that the excommunication still holds valid.

Given Mozart's Masonic connections, could von Speyr have been mistaken in claiming that she saw Mozart? And could Balthasar have been ignorant of Mozart's masonic involvements and thus willing to champion him?

Should we be expecting yet another apology, this time for the Church's objection to the lodge? If this were to be done, it would overrule the teaching of many popes.

Was the spirit von Speyer accessed truly from God and the heavenly realm, or was it a spirit of deception?

One thing is clear, all of the ideas presented by the facts laid out above cannot be believed at the same time without developing some sort of schizophrenic split in thinking.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!