"Making it real" - Part I: the words of the liturgy

A recent thread in one of the comment boxes of this blog was on the question whether the audibility of the Eucharistic prayers read by the priest in the new Mass are a genuine aid to worship compared to the inaudibility of the prayers of the old Mass.

This raises a larger interesting question bearing on one of the guiding principles of the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, namely that "the Christian people, as far as possible should be able to understand [the Mass] with ease and to take part in [it] fully, actively, and as befits a community" (21). To that end, of course, the Constitution proposed a number of dramatic alterations, simplifications, additional biblical readings, some use of the vernacular, etc. Yet as Michael P. Foley notes in his article, "The Erosion of Comprehension in the Roman Rite" (Latin Mass magazine, Winter 2007), "forty years later, Francis Cardinal Arinze would say that the central concern of the 2005 Eucharistic Synod was that the few Catholics who come to Mass 'don't understand' it" (30). The question, then, is whether such changes as have been proposed and implemented with the purpose of deepening our understanding and participation in the liturgy have in fact succeeded or perhaps, in some cases, had the opposite effect.

The basic assumption animating the Council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy is not a new one. It is that Catholics should know what is going on at Mass, that they should be spiritually involved. It was Saint Pope Pius X, I believe, who first proposed the expression "active participation" in this regard. It was he, moreover, who declared: "Don't pray at Holy Mass, but pray the Holy Mass." Yes, that was Pius X -- not John Paul II, but Pius X.

But by the 1960s the strategy for "active participation" had changed into something radically different. The strategy involved not so much elevating those assisting at Mass up into the heavenlies as much as drawing the Mass down into the shallow puddle of their own experience in the public square. Liturgy was to be made "accessible," "engaging," "demystified," "brought home," made "real." I remember visiting a coffee shop one night in Albuquerque, NM, in the 1970s where innovative efforts toward the New Evangelization were apparently underway. A long-haired 'Jesus Freak' sat smoking a joint outside the door. "What's happenin'?" I asked him, as I walked in with a friend. "Christ," he replied, in all earnestness, holding his roach. (Christ was "happening"??? "Right on, man! Keep it real, dude"! Was there anyone in the 70's, including liturgists, who was not a pothead or trippin' on somethin'?)

One way of making it "real" was to turn the priest around, who had been liturgically "facing God," and have him face the people. The difference is noticeable immediately if you ever compare the gaze of a priest saying the old Mass when he turns to the congregation and says "Dominus vobiscum" with the eyes of a priest who says "The Lord be with you" in a contemporary Novus Ordo Mass. The priest of the old rite never makes eye contact with the congregation. He's never quite 'present' to the congregation in the warm, personal, engaging manner of the priest of the new rite. Rather, he is caught up in something otherworldly -- a solemn cosmic ritual beyond anything mundane or ordinary that might occur in a Rotary Club or piano lounge. But since the sixties the goal has been to overcome this austere, vertically-directed otherworldliness of the old Mass, which was allegedly experienced as off-putting by so many, and do everything possible to underscore the indulgent, horizontally-directed this-worldly experience of the self-absorbed congregation (Ortega y Gassett, Revolt of the Masses -- redivivus)!

Another way of doing this was to have the priest speak audibly to the congregation and in its own language, to add electrical amplification, and to encourage him to speak engagingly ex tempore. Some complain, of course, about crackling PA systems that are often cranked up too loud, priests becoming performers, competing with Johnny Carson (in the old days) or Joe Leno (more recently) in entertainment, walking the aisle, microphone in hand, telling jokes, etc. ("Hello there, where y'all from?") In fact, I remember a priest at Penn State who led his student congregation in singing, crooning into an overheated microphone as he sat and played at a piano, atop which I once seriously wondered whether I saw -- piano bar style -- a tip jar.

But the issue goes a bit deeper than these extraneous (if entertaining) horror stories. The question, really, is what does it mean that anyone should want to make the Mass "more real"? We already know by virtue of the principle of ex opere operato that the miracle of Transubstantiation objectively occurs and the sacrifice is rendered present for us on the Altar, regardless of what anyone perceives or feels. What more could we want? If the sixties, which gave birth to these strategies for "making it real" are any indication, I suppose what we want is some intensification of feeling generated by external means: the spiritual acid trip. We do not want to rely upon our own disciplined active effort in entering into the cosmic rite unfolding before us so much as to be passively swept up in the event, the 'happening', the warmth of the engaging priest's voice and words, his stories and jokes, the personal experience of the communal shared moment. In short, whether or not we thought there really was anything to this medieval mumbo jumbo about Transubstantiation, what we finally want is the piano bar, Jay Leno, and the acid trip.

Another way in which liturgical engineers have sought to make the Mass more accessible is by simplifying its language. In the aforementioned article by Michael Foley, he asks whether liturgical reforms geared towards deepening our understanding could have had the opposite effect. While acknowledging that blame must be assigned to several different factors, he singles out four ways in which Sacrosanctum Concilium may have sabotaged its own laudable goal. I will not review all four of these here, although Foley notes that his premise is shared by the likes of Aidan Nichols and Jonathan Robinson. Rather, I wish to focus on merely the first of his four points. He writes:

Sacrosanctum Concilium stresses that the faithful should be able to understand the Mass -- and all sacraments and sacramentals 00 with ease.¹ The document regrets that "there have crept into the rites . . . certain features which have rendered their nature and purpose less clear to the people of today" (62) and thus calls for a restoration to place the liturgy "within the people's powers of comprehension," with rituals that would "not require much explanation" (34).

Ironically, the difficulty with this aim is its desire to eliminate difficulty. Making the liturgy readily comprehensible seems a noble objective, but it overlooks the paradoxical role that difficulty, at least in moderate amounts, plays in facilitating human understanding. It is when things are somewhat out of reach that we are more eager to reach for them. Veiling the bride heightens the groom's desire, wrapping the gift increases the recipient's curiosity, and shrouding with metaphor renders the poet's meaning more vivid. As Saint Augustine notes, "what is sought with some difficulty is found with much more pleasure."² And what is found with much more pleasure, we might add, is grasped much more firmly.

When something is made too easily obtainable, on the other hand, there is a tendency to hold it cheap. I have learned that when I spoon-feed my students instead of piquing their interest and making them think through the matter themselves, they become parrots with good memories instead of the keen learners I want them to be. Conundrums are good for us, Augustine declares, for they conquer our pride with work and combat disdain in our minds. By contrast, "things that are easily tracked down usually become worthless" in our eyes.³

Like a shrewd teacher, the Tridentine rite, along with all other ancient apostolic liturgies, is attuned to this pedagogy of beguilement, proclaiming its faith in the true God openly (lest mystery degenerate into obscurantism) while also conveying its sacred realities circumspectly. This is true of all its ceremonies and prayers, and it is buttressed by the use of Latin, which heightens the sense of mystery and arouses greater curiosity. And thanks to the original liturgical movement's bilingual missals, Latin is able to maintain its function as a muslin veil rather than a brick wall, for the missals ensure that the Mass's meaning is never fully beyond the reach of the faithful.

Sacrosanctum Concilium's preference for an easy, "instant-access" understanding, however, remains strong in contemporary liturgical thinking. Last year the U.S. bishops were reported to have rejected the word "consubstantial" for the new translation of the Nicene Creed because it "is a theological expression requiring explanation,"⁴ as if the Mass should be self-explanatory. Absent, it would seem, is the insight into human psychology so beautifully expressed by the poet Richard Wilbur: "What's lightly hid is deepest understood."⁵

One final dimension to this simplification of language that occurs to me is the comparative banality of the new Eucharistic prayers. All you need to see this for yourself is to read and compare the prayers from the old and new missals. I won't spend any more time here on a detailed comparison in this post, but some of the passages from the new missal are simply frightful. In Eucharistic Prayer III, "... advance the peace and salvation of all the world" is simple enough, but sounds like text lifted from the United Nations charter. In Prayer IV, "... he took bread, said the blessing ..." sounds like a philistine allusion to Brutha Jerry Fallwell "sayin' th' blessin'" before Sunday dinner. Maybe they'll come up with somethin' in jive next so our brutha's in the 'hood can relate.

The question before us open for discussion, then, is whether these liturgical changes geared toward making Mass more accessible, more real, facilitating our better understanding and active participation as befits a community, have in fact succeeded in furnishing aids to worship. If so, how? If not, why not? What works and why? What doesn't and why not?

Notes:

1. Cf. 21, 48, 50, 59, 79, 90, 92. [back]


2. On Christian Doctrine, 2.6.8. [back]


3. Ibid., 2.6.7. [back]


4. Laurie Goodstein and Cindy Chang, "A Changing Mass for U.S. Catholics," New York Times, June 16, 2006. [back]


5. "Ceremony," 1. 15. [back]

Of related interest

"The Classical Roman Rite and the Renewal of the Liturgy," Conference by Monsignor R. Michael Schmitz, February 19, 2007 (Msgr. Schmitz, born and educated in Germany and ordained by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in 1982, now serves as U.S. Provincial Superior of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest.) [Hat tip to Al Kimel]