Von Hildebrand: The Devastated Vineyard

By the time Dietrich von Hildebrand published The Devastated Vineyard in 1973, he had already lived several lifetimes of moral courage. A philosopher of the first rank, a convert to Catholicism in 1914, he had been among the earliest and most relentless intellectual opponents of National Socialism — denouncing it from the early 1920s, fleeing Germany the moment Hitler took power in 1933, and editing an anti-Nazi journal in Vienna until the Anschluss forced him to flee again, escaping at last to New York by way of Portugal and Brazil on forged papers. This was not a man easily frightened, and not a man given to exaggeration. When such a figure devoted the closing years of his life to a cry of anguish over the state of Catholic worship, it deserved to be heard.

The Man Pius XII Honored

Von Hildebrand’s standing in the Church was extraordinary. He had formed a deep friendship in the 1920s with Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, and he is widely reported to have been called by that pope “the twentieth-century Doctor of the Church.” (The phrase is famous and often repeated, though no documentary record of Pius XII actually saying it has been produced; it is best treated as a cherished tradition rather than a verifiable quotation.) Pope Benedict XVI, himself no stranger to liturgical questions, professed a particular admiration for von Hildebrand’s work. The point is not the honorific itself but what it signals: this was a thinker the Church’s own shepherds esteemed, not a fringe agitator.

Why This Voice Matters

Von Hildebrand’s critique cannot be dismissed as the grumbling of a malcontent or the bitterness of a man outside the Church. He was a celebrated Catholic philosopher, a friend of one pope and an inspiration to another, who had risked his life for the faith. When such a man wept over the reform, he did so as a son of the Church grieving in his Father’s house — not as a stranger throwing stones from outside it.

The Screwtape Line

The book’s most quoted sentence has become almost a watchword for the faithful critics of the reform. Reaching for the imaginative theology of his friend C. S. Lewis, von Hildebrand gave the destruction of the liturgy’s beauty an arresting, diabolical frame:

The Devastated Vineyard, 1973

Truly, if one of the devils in C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters had been entrusted with the ruin of the liturgy, he could not have done it better.

— Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Devastated Vineyard (1973), trans. John Crosby & Fred Teichert

It is a hard sentence, and an honest reader must weigh it carefully. Von Hildebrand was not accusing any churchman of being a devil, nor was he denying the validity of the reformed Mass — a point made clearer below. He was making a philosopher’s observation about effects: that the stripping away of beauty, mystery, reverence, and the sense of the sacred had produced, whatever anyone intended, exactly the disorientation a tempter would have wished. His target was the manner and the fruit of the reform, not its legitimacy.

Grief, Not Schism

This distinction is the heart of the matter, and it is where von Hildebrand parts ways with those who would later take his words further than he ever did. He never left the Catholic Church. He never embraced sedevacantism. He never declared the new Mass invalid or denied that it was the Church’s rite. His complaint was about prudence, beauty, and reverence — about a reform he judged to have flattened transcendence and traded the inheritance of centuries for a banal, horizontal style of worship. He lamented, in his phrase, the loss of reverence as the very atmosphere in which man meets God.

A Critique From Within

Von Hildebrand’s anguish was the anguish of a faithful son, not a rebel. He distinguished sharply between the Church herself — which he loved and to which he submitted — and what he saw as imprudent decisions in carrying out a reform. The validity and liceity of the reformed rite are not in question here; what von Hildebrand mourned was its manner, its impoverished aesthetic, and its effects on the souls of the faithful. To read him as anything but a Catholic grieving inside his own household is to misread him badly.

A Book Out of Its Time

Strictly speaking, 1973 sits a few years past the period this section of the timeline frames as “Reform & Rupture” (1965–1970). That is no accident, and worth naming honestly: The Devastated Vineyard belongs to the immediate aftermath of the rupture. The new Order of Mass had been promulgated in 1969 and became obligatory for most of the Latin Church; by 1973 the lived experience of the changes — the emptied sanctuaries, the discarded chant, the vernacular improvisations — had had time to register. Von Hildebrand was not theorizing about a reform on paper. He was describing what he and countless others had now seen with their own eyes. His book is the rupture’s reckoning, written once the dust had begun to settle.

Von Hildebrand died in 1977, four years after the book appeared. He had spent his last years not in agitation but in mourning — a philosopher who had once risked everything to defy a tyrant now spending his remaining strength to defend the beauty of Catholic worship. Whether one shares the intensity of his verdict or not, his voice remains among the most formidable in the company of those who loved the Church too much to keep silent about what they believed she was losing. He stands in this timeline beside the Ottaviani Intervention and the petition that won the Agatha Christie Indult — not as a rebel, but as a witness.