Fear and loathing in liturgical politics

I went to a Byzantine liturgy recently, and a number of things occurred to me. One was the blissful immunity Eastern-Rite Catholic liturgies enjoy from the acrimonious liturgical politics of other Catholics. The reason? To other Catholics, these Eastern-Rite liturgies are essentially as good as non-existent. They generally don't even appear on the radar of Western-Rite Catholics, who are usually ignorant of them; and where they are not ignorant of them, Western Catholics tend to regard them as something utterly alien -- something practically on the order of what goes on in a Syrian mosque.

When I first became a Catholic nearly twenty years ago, what is now called the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite (the Novus Ordo) is all I knew; and, despite my immediate background in the Episcopalian tradition, I loved it because it was 'Catholic'. I was, of course, a neophyte, flush with the ebullience of conversion, like a young man who has just purchased his first brand-new car. But like the fellow with the new car, I would begin to learn, after driving the vehicle for a few years, what was under the hood.

At my first Catholic Masses, it struck me as 'touching', if not quite to my personal taste, that men and women would cross the aisle to come over and hold hands with me during the Our Father, and then lift my hands together with the forest of upraised clasped hands during the doxology ("For the kingdom and the power and the glory ...") before lowering my hands and giving them a squeeze. It also seemed quaint, if not quite to my taste, that the Mass should be accompanied by a gaggle of guitar-strumming men and women in their fifties playing and singing (rather poorly) tunes that sounded vaguely reminiscent of Joan Baez or Peter, Paul and Mary. It struck me as distinctively 'folksy', if not quite to my taste, that right before Communion, a whole army of unvested pedestrian 'ministers' would mount the altar and surround the priest, as in an over-crowded kitchen, receiving the Body and Blood of our Lord together with him, before descending into the ranks of the congregation to continue the distribution. It also struck me as a bit Lutheran-esque, if not quite to my taste, that people filed up to receive Communion in their hands while standing, rather than kneeling at the rail, as we had in the Episcopal Church.

It took some time before I learned that these sorts of practices (and many others), far from being mandated by the Second Vatican Council, were novelties first introduced following the Council -- some of them in the wake of the Charismatic Renewal, but many others initially as forms of dissent and abuse (such as Communion in the hand and female lectors and altar servers) -- before being mainstreamed and institutionalized as part of the 'liturgical reform'. Some practices, like the use of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, are still proscribed, except for rare, truly "exceptional" circumstances (cf. Redemptionis Sacramentum, ##157-158), but the proscriptions are generally ignored.

My point is simple: the post-Vatican II Mass has become a lightning rod of highly polemical liturgical politics, freighted with intense feelings both on the side of those who lament the liturgical innovations as something alien, and those who embrace them as a "breath of fresh air" and dig in their heels against any hint of returning to the ways of the "old church."

To become aware of the politics of liturgy, however, is to find Mass increasingly burdensome. Instead if being a source of consolation, the source and summit of our Faith, Mass can become a source of distraction, so that weaker souls, such as I, find it and harder and harder to experience the presence of Christ in the liturgy. One becomes sensitized to the factions polarizing parish communities and the Church as a whole. One cannot help but notice the politically correct lector neutering the masculine pronouns in the lectionary, or using only the shorter option of the readings, which invariably omits the 'sensitive' texts about wives submitting to husbands, or about fornicators and homosexuals not inheriting the kingdom of God, and so forth. One cannot help noticing when a priest abruptly drops his attempt to re-introduce some Catholic traditions, such as the use of a chalice veil or the choir's performance of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus during Lent, after a prominent parishioner gives him a piece of his mind for trying to "turn back the clock."

I did not come to the Catholic Church with any liturgical baggage from the pre-Vatican II days. I am chronologically a "Vatican II Catholic." Yet the liturgy at which I have generally assisted over the past three years has been that which our Holy Father calls the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. There are many reasons for this, as anyone who has followed my blog over the past several years knows -- reasons having to do with the invariable objective beauty, richness, dignity, sublime reverence, and palpable Christ-centered and God-honoring expression of this liturgy.

But there is more. One of the reasons I prefer the usus antiquior is for its blessed lack of politicization. Nobody is posturing and trying to make a statement. Nobody is trying to "democratize" the Church or "feminize" it, or to be self-consciously politically correct. The Mass is just what it objectively is -- the Mass; and those who are there are present for one purpose only: to worship.

There is, however, one respect in which the traditional 'Tridentine' Mass is politicized, although it is entirely external to the liturgy itself. What I mean is the visceral hatred that many self-styled "Vatican II Catholics," whether clergy or laity, feel towards it. This was evident in the report by Una Voce in Rome on the second anniversary of Pope's motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum, which noted that, despite "noticeable improvement" in awareness of the motu proprio throughout the world (in the U.S., the usus antiquior is now being celebrated in 151 of the nation’s 178 dioceses), the situation remains "unchanged" in many places, with "resistance among some bishops to the old rite, and even threats against some priests who wish to celebrate it."

Back to the Byzantine liturgy. The one place where such fear and loathing seems altogether absent is in the Eastern Rite Catholic liturgies. They are not hated. Why? Because they are not even "on the map" of the Roman Rite churches. They co-exist as 'alien' parishes among those of the Roman Rite, and, as such, most Western Catholics (whether clerics or laity) remain utterly indifferent to them.

It was a pleasant experience, then, to assist at a Byzantine liturgy. Among other things, I knew that nobody could possibly hate me for it. Nobody would pigeon-hole me in one category or other in the polarized liturgical politics of the Roman Rite. At most, one's worship might be considered a mild curiosity, like an esoteric penchant for Persian rugs.

Related:

"Female altar servers" (Wikipedia) is unusually instructive in terms of illustrating how liturgical changes in recent decades have occurred.