TLM and Womenpriests

We were in Windsor for Mass last Sunday at the historic Our Lady of the Assumption Church, where the Tridentine Mass was transportingly sublime, as always -- when a question occurred to me. As I watched the drama of Redemption unfold in this weekly extraordinary form of the traditional Roman Rite, I found myself trying to distance myself from my own active participation momentarily to grasp something.

What I was looking at was the priest and servers at that early point in the Mass called the Confiteor. Facing ad orientem, and with deep bows, they made their acts of confession, striking their breast: "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa ..." Their attention was clearly not on who was in the pews at that moment. That thought probably did not even cross their minds. Their attention, their outward demeanor, the direction they were facing (toward God) -- everything, in other words -- was focused on a sort of "dialogue" being carried on between themselves and God.

And the thought came to me: I wonder whether any activist members of Catholic Womenpriests or the Women's Ordination Conference seeking ordination for themselves have ever desired to become priests serving in this classical form of the liturgy. It's hard to imagine.

The following video clip, features the Confiteor from a Tridentine Missa Contata at Assumption Church in Windsor celebrated on Feb 9, 2008 for the cause of Vn. John Henry Cardinal Newman. The priest, the team of servers, and the choir were virtually identical to those I witnessed last Sunday. I know these guys. The chief male voice you hear singing the propers is the great cantor, Wassim Sarweh. But my point is this: would those dissident women seeking ordination want to be priests if this is what was expected of them? Take a look:



You don't see the priest's face hardly at all; and when you do, he doesn't make eye contact with the congregation, at least if he knows his rubrics. He's not there to have a conversation with you. He's not there to share his personality with you. He's not there, like Leisure Suit Larry, to do a one man comic act: "Hey there, where y'all from? What's your name?" He's there to do his job, to perform the Sacrifice. Evelyn Waugh's observation, shortly after his conversion around 1930, comes to mind:

Of the extraneous attractions of the Church which most drew me was the spectacle of the priest and his server at a low Mass, stumping up to the altar without a glance to discover how many or how few he had in his congregation; a craftsman and his apprentice; a man with a job which he alone was qualified to do.

Indeed, Waugh loathed all that came to replace such standards of liturgical craftsmanship -- the dumbing down of the liturgy and a false bonhomie that characterized even the revisions of the 1960s that preceded the new Mass (Waugh, who died in 1966, did not live to see the Novus Ordo, which was promulgated in 1969). Concerning the pre-Vatican II revisions and innovations, Waugh was already saying things like: "The Mass is no longer the Holy Sacrifice but the Meal at which the priest is the waiter. The bishop, I suppose, is the head waiter."

Not one word here is said out of irreverence or disrespect for the Mass as it is meant to be celebrated. Indeed, it is precisely a devotion and deep respect and adoration for the surpassing holiness of those Sacred Mysteries that animated Waugh's concern as well as our own here.

What can go wrong is perhaps easiest to see, as Plato would say, where things are "writ large" -- where things have gone awry in extreme and aberrant ways. An example of such, in a French Mass gone terribly wrong, was called to our attention by a reader in a recent comment box discussion. The concelebrating priests at a Mass following the pilgrimage of young Catholics (ages 14-17) from Strasbourg to the church of Notre Dame du Chêne, in Plobsheim (France) doubtless thought they were assisting their youthful 'audience' in their 'active participation' in their liturgy. The effect, however, is obviously the opposite. ["The horror ... the horror ..."]



The immediate effect of this embarrassing spectacle is to throw up an obstacle precisely against the authentic active participation of the faithful in the Mass, which -- as Popes from Pius X to Benedict XVI have maintained -- is not a matter of outward enthusiasm or clericalizing the role of the laity by bringing them up into the sanctuary, but an inward spiritual disposition of the worshiping heart. The result of this spectacle, by contrast, is the creation of a diversion from the proper focus of any liturgy: the self-oblation of our Savior as Sacrificial Victim on our behalf. Instead we are served up the ghastly sight of clerically-vested middle-aged men making a miserable run at trying to look hip. Is our mind drawn to God amidst this disaster? If so, it can only be in a bowel-wrenching prayer for deliverance.

This does not mean that our worship cannot be suffused with profound joy, but it must be a joy that takes seriously what the Mass is. Our Savior is not the Buddy Christ, but the Pierced One, the Crucified One.

So, I wonder, do any Womenpriest activists exist who want to be ordained so that they can serve in the traditional Tridentine form of the Roman Rite? It would be interesting to know.

[Hat tip to S.V.]