A good essay

"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 Fr. Al Kimel]

"Do you also wish to go away?"

After a post like my last, the words of Jesus recorded in John 6:67-69 come to mind:

Jesus said to the twelve, 'Do you also wish to go away?' Simon Peter answered him, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God."

While I think I understand very well the reasons why some Catholic converts from evangelical Protestant backgrounds end up leaving and reverting to their Protestant communities of faith, the reason this would never occur to me is twofold. There is, first of all, that little thing about truth. Once you see the Church as the Church, there simply is nothing else. There may be many other reasons for being a Catholic than it's being true, but I can't think of many more important reasons.

But there is one other reason, which, for me is even more decisive: I couldn't ever imagine leaving Him. This is where it gets personal. I'm almost embarrassed to mention this publicly, but one little thing I do each day is visit the Blessed Sacrament, only briefly, early in the morning while it's still dark and nobody else is around. Over time, this has become for me the strongest source of strength against yielding to various crass temptations, because the matter then becomes personal: it would involve turning my back on Him. Sins become more difficult to commit when you see them in these personal terms instead of as violations of abstract precepts. (Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here: I'm no saint. That's not the issue here.) But it is precisely this same personal relationship that makes it inconceivable to consider leaving the Church. Others may not see it this way, but as I see it, I would be turning my back on Christ there in the Sanctuary in the Tabernacle, the source of my ultimate consolation in life and in death.

Protestant reverts: Catholic dishonesty in adverstising?

I am profoundly disappointed. Yet another of the souls I have seen through from an evangelical Protestant background to membership in the Catholic Church has, after some seven years' sojourn in Catholic parishes, reverted to Protestantism -- to a certain "Bible Covenant Fellowship Church" in Texas. The sad thing is that these stories are not entirely rare. Sadder still the fact that I understand very well the reason why.

Those who fall away from the Catholic Church typically fall into two classes: the (1) lapsed, who simply stop practicing their Faith in any institutional way, and (2) reverts, who return to the practice of some (usually Protestant) non-Catholic form of Christianity. (I realize I'm using the term 'revert' in an unconventional way here.)

I do not doubt that many who have allowed the practice of their faith to lapse have done so because they have lost their faith. But in my experience, the most common reason why confirmed Catholics drift away is because they have allowed some aspect of their practical life to become compromised. They may be cohabiting outside of marriage, remarried outside of the Church, practicing homosexuals, involved in recreational drugs, or simply indulging in a hedonistic lifestyle they know is incompatible with the Faith.

The situation with those who revert, however, is less transparent and perhaps even more troubling. These are almost without exception individuals of impeccable character for whom questions of "faith and morals" are of basic importance. When they become Catholics, they do not do so without expending serious effort in endeavoring to understand Catholic teaching, particularly since there is typically a personal cost and social stigma associated with the move they are making, at least in their erstwhile communities of faith.

In my own experience, I have had the privilege of serving as mentor or sponsor to some twenty Catholic converts over the past ten or twelve years. Of this number, three have lapsed, including the only two of the group who were baptized Catholics but never catechized or confirmed. Of the total number, three have reverted to Protestant forms of Christianity -- one, studying to become a Protestant pastor, the other two resettled in evangelical congregations.

So what is it that happens to Protestant reverts? While every individual's story is unique, I think some generalizations are fairly safe. These are generally souls who come from backgrounds already well-rooted in evangelical Christianity, in a life of Bible reading, prayer, and personal relationship with God. When these souls discover the truth about the Catholic Church, they fall in love with her. They are thrilled when they finally come, at least on some level, to apprehend the Catholic vision of the Church and to see and and understand her glory -- "ever ancient, ever new." They love the Church that spans the ages, the Church of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Newman, Pope John Paul, Pope Benedict XVI. They love the moral courage of the Church, which stands like an adamantine bulwark against the evils of abortion, pornography, and relativism. They love the magnificent beauty of her ancient European cathedrals, her basilicas, her paintings and sculptures, her Gregorian chant and polyphony (readily accessible in any music store). They love her theology, which they encounter in the writings of great doctors and theologians of the Church. They love her incarnational vision of life, which they encounter in the writings of numerous Catholic novelists.

But then they join a local Catholic parish ...

The process usually begins with a desert experience called RCIA (Rite for the Christian Initiation of Adults) -- a series of meetings and classes in which they are treated more like preschoolers than intelligent adults, spoon fed pathological doses of hand-holding and introspection, and treated to ample quantities of shared feelings. If they survive that, they're welcomed into an Amchurch parish, whose music is Haugan and Haas, whose homilies are psychology tips from Dr. Phil, whose art and architecture is a combination of bog Bauhaus and degenerate Art Deco, and whose members never read traditional Catholic authors but whose discussion groups can't stop talking about Richard Rohr, Thomas Groome, Anthony Tambasco, Sr. Joan Chittister, Andrew Sullivan, and John Dominic Crossan.

It would be easy enough to say their conversion to the Catholic Faith was never authentic, or that their understanding was incomplete. Lord knows there was ample collective agonizing, introspection and speculation over that question when Rod Dreher defected to Eastern Orthodoxy. But as that undertaking made plain, the issues are neither simple nor always clear (see my post, "Apostasy (αποστασία)," Musings, December 16, 2006).

Just today I received yet another email from a former student, a mature Protestant, who wishes to take more of my classes and has asked about starting RCIA classes at my church. I know I should be happy, and I suppose (trusting God) I am. Yet I cannot help feeling a bit of the ambivalence Malcolm Muggeridge's Canadian-born daughter-in-law, Anne Roche Muggeridge, expressed when, distraught over the disastrous aftermath of Vatican II, she wrote about converts she knew:

I must confess that some of us, to our shame, earnestly tried to delay them, on the grounds of the growing disorder in the Catholic Church. They forced their way past us anyway, thank God; though the priest I brought them to for instruction and I could not resist saying, when they had their first shocking confrontation with revolutionary priests and nuns over their children's education: "Well, you can't say we didn't warn you!" The point is, these converts remind one of what one asks of the Church of God, as the old baptism question went; the answer being, "Faith!" (The Desolate City: Revolution in the Catholic Church [1986; Rev. ed., San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990])

Don't worry. I never remain depressed for long. But my present state of mind is not far from that in which I offered the rant late last year, "Welcome aboard the shipwreck: what converts don't know," (December 13, 2006). I worry whether, one day, one of these students who gets fired up and converts to Catholicism will want to take me to court and sue me -- or the Church, for that matter -- for dishonesty in advertising.

Commentary

• Sherry Weddell, "Speaking of Reverts," Intentional Disciples (March 10, 2007)
• Gerald Augustinus, "A Convert's Manifesto," The Cafeteria is Closed (March 12, 2007)
• David L. Alexander, "Pertinacious Converts," Man with black hat (March 12, 2007)

"Making it Real" - Part II: The Sacrament of the Altar

I freely admit it: so much water has passed under the bridge now that much about the old liturgy would strike most Catholics today as belonging to an alien world, quixotically fastidious, excessively fussy, formal and hedged about with prescriptions, proscriptions, and taboos to the point of looking like a superstitious relic. Regarded from the point of view of most contemporary Catholics, at ease in their casual suburban AmChurch parishes where even genuflecting is sometimes an afterthought (assuming the Blessed Sacrament is still present), how could it appear otherwise?

In his book, The Heresy of Formlessness: The Roman Liturgy and Its Enemy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), in an appendix entitled "'This Is My Body': On Veneration of the Sacrament of the Altar in the Catholic Church," the award-winning German author and film-maker, Martin Mosebach, describes his experience as a diminutive altar boy under the aegis of the old Mass.

I had already observed, from a distance, that the priest, after lifting up the Host, kept his thumb and forefinger together while praying. The "master of ceremonies" turned the pages of the Missal so that the priest did not have to separate these two fingers.

The outer end of the key to the tabernacle was wide and flat, so that the priest could hold the key between forefinger and middle finger when opening the little golden chest to remove the ciborium containing the Hosts for the congregation. The chalice's nodus also enabled him to hold the chalice without parting his thumb and forefinger at the ritual elevations and when receiving Communion himself. The old sacristan told me: "the priest must not touch anything else with his fingers that have touched the sacred Host until he has washed these fingers with the water and wine over the chalice after giving Communion and drunk this mixture of water and wine that contains particles from the Host." ...

Similar attention was given to the distribution of Communion. People knelt at rails that separated the sanctuary from the nave and were covered with a white cloth. They folded their hands under the cloth; if a Host were to fall during the distribution, it would fall onto this cloth. In addition, the priest giving Communion was accompanied by a server carrying a small gold plate, the "paten," held under the chin of each communicant. The priest would carefully examine this paten for particles when rinsing the chalice and washing his fingers after the Communion.

I learned that everyone wishing to receive Communion had to prepare himself for it. So that the Lord's Body should be clearly distinct from "common food," as the Apostle Paul says, it was to be received on an empty stomach.... That custom has entered into many languages: in English "breakfast" and French "déjeuner," the word actually means "breaking the fast" and refers to the end of the eucharistic fast, that is, after Mass....

As I said, the Sacrament was hedged about with many taboos in the old days. In fact, until the Vatican decision of 1994 permitting female altar servers, no women were canonically permitted in the sanctuary, even as lectors, even though this prohibition was widely disregarded after Vatican II. (The 1917 Code of Canon Law, Canon 813, #2 stated: “A woman may not be a minister of the Mass, except when no male is available and for a just cause, and under the condition that she make the responses from a distance, not under any circumstances approaching the altar.”) That was liturgical law until just 13 years ago.

Of course, all this strikes most people today as patently absurd -- sort of like the proverbial 'blue laws' prohibiting commerce on Sunday as a day of worship or rest. Such notions simply do not compute. Hence: beyond the shameful repression of women and patriarchal chauvinism of arbitrarily keeping women out of the sanctuary, if the Sacrament of the Altar is such a good thing, why not liberate it, like a bird from a cage? Why not make it accessible to everyone? (Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses again!)

And so, in tandem with the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the taboos and hedges and walls and altar rails have come down in our churches. Tabernacles have been moved out of Sanctuaries, Altars have been pushed out into the nave (if churches still have 'naves'), people receive Communion standing at the head of a moving line, and receive the Host in their hands (although both Paul VI and John Paul II openly opposed the practice before giving in to widespread pressure) -- and there are often so many women helping the priest at the Altar-Table after the Consecration that one sometimes can't help thinking he looks a little lost and out-of-place up there. Clearly, the old taboos are gone, or nearly so.

One particularly instructive example of this trend comes from the Life Teen Masses before the authorities reigned in their excesses, at least some places. Life Teen Masses were once notorious for gathering gaggles of teenagers right up around the Altar. There they would not kneel, but stand right through the Consecration, sometimes chewing gum (although the teens to the left look relatively subdued), watching the priest as he said Mass. The idea seemed to be similar: If the Mass is a good thing, why not liberate it, like a bird from a cage? Why not bring the kids right up to the "Altar-Table," where they can see everything going on up close? Perhaps it was assumed that this would heighten the intensity of their Eucharistic experience and "active participation."

The effect, however, was almost always the very opposite. Instead of intensifying personal experience, it drained it of any sense of transcendence. Instead of elevating "active participation," it led to boredom and indifference.

What happened?

Please do not be offended, but I want to draw an analogy with another movement of cultural liberation that was concurrently underway alongside the liturgical reforms of the 1960s: the sexual revolution. The thinking was very similar in certain respects, as some of you may recall. If human sexuality is so good, then why hedge it about with so many repressive Victorian taboos? Why not liberate it, like a bird from a cage? In contrast to our ancestors and religious teachers, like St. Paul, who saw something profoundly metaphysical in the coupling act that ought to be confined to the bonds of matrimony, the sentiment of the sixties was that sex needed to be demystified, demythologized, and enjoyed for what it is: "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with."

Furthermore, in the process of increasing exposure to more and more sexual information and imagery, a process of desensitization occurred. If any of you have seen the film Kinsey, you may recall what a sensation he caused both in his classrooms and in the public when he began lecturing on the intimate sexual habits of Americans. People used to blush. Sex education classes have done much the same in our schools. Further, if you track the use of nudity and sex appeal in advertising, you can easily see the progressive desensitization that has occurred over the last decades. I don't imagine Hugh Hefner in the 1960s would have been permitted to have as a Playboy centerfold some of the Dillard department store lingerie ads hanging in shopping malls these days. What you find at the end of this trajectory is, of course, hardcore pornography. But when everything is exposed and all one is left with is the impersonal plumbing of human genitalia, a problem occurs. Something is lost: the Real Presence of the Person. This is why even those trapped by the vice of pornography find it ultimately so unsatisfying and boring. (Try reading the Marquis de Sade's 1200 page Juliette. If you don't fall asleep from boredom in ten or twenty pages, you're a sick puppy indeed.)

It was precisely to protect the Real Presence of the Person that sex was hedged about with all those traditional taboos of courtship, ritual, decorum, and bonds of matrimony to begin with. Persons were never to be treated as mere things, to be 'used' as 'means' to satisfy our own pleasure, but always to be respected as ends-in-themselves. The taboos were a sign that we cared about the Real Presence of the other Person on the altar of sexual union. The dropping of the taboos was a sign that we no longer cared about the depth dimension of sex because we no longer cared about the Presence of the interior and irreducible selfhood of the other Person in the sexual encounter. I remember a film-maker in Switzerland telling me he realized he needed help when he reached the point where he had a different girl nearly every night and was telling her, "Please, don't talk to me. I don't even want to know your name."

Now, how does this translate into our consideration of liturgy? Martin Mosebach, describing his experience assisting at the Altar as a boy, writes:

I always found it embarrassing to see the Host at such close quarters, so vulnerable, as if it were lying naked on the white cloth. It was not something for my eyes, a layman's eyes, to behold. There was something secret going on between the priest and the Host. It was a real relationship: there was a kind of conversation between the Host and priest that was hidden from the eyes of the congregation by the priest's body. I, however, as an altar server, was aware and had to be aware of it, like a nurse who unexpectedly finds herself in the position of having to undress a respected personage. The gentle cracking sound of the Host made when it broke seemed not for my ears, either: it was an intimacy to which I was not entitled.

If the Host is nothing more than a wafer, of course, then such words are no more than the pathological scrupulosities of a superstitious and ignorant little boy. There is no mystery here, but only a wafer. Nothing to inspire fear in a man. Certainly not of the kind Mosebach expresses when he says that even in those days when religion had vanished from his mind, he would never have dared to touch a consecrated Host or chalice, or listened to observations on art history in front of the Tabernacle.

On the other hand, if the Host is Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, then nothing is more appropriate than the attitude displayed here by Mosebach. How was this attitude instilled? How was Mosebach sensitized to feel and respond as he did in the passage above? Was it by being led straightaway into the presence of the naked Host? No. It was by being habituated in the gestures, postures, and attitudes of reverence by means of all the external formalities of the old Mass -- all of those fastidious outward forms that conform the inward disposition of the soul to discern the Real Presence of the Person upon the Altar of Sacrifice.

Mosebach goes on to describe how the liturgical reformers of the 1960s succeeded in convincing many of the faithful that reverence for the Host, worship of the Host as the real physical appearance of Jesus Christ, had been unknown in the Church of the apostles and their early successors, and that the veneration of the Host was medieval invention. He then delves into an excursus on his personal discovery of precisely such veneration of the Sacrament in the most ancient traditions of the Eastern Churches. There is ultimately little question that the only period in Church history with decided liturgical 'reforms' detracting from Eucharistic veneration, beside the Protestant Reformation, has been that following Vatican II.

Mosebach again:

When I think of the abolition of the worship and veneration of the Host after Vatican II -- just as in the centuries following the Reformation -- a military image always presents itself to me, perhaps because military ceremonial still retains its sign language, to some extent. What I see is the degradation of Captain Dreyfus,¹ so vividly described by a number of writers. After being [wrongfully] convicted as a German spy, he had to appear in full uniform in front of his regiment to hear his sentence. His punishment not only meant prison on the island of Cayenne: he also forfeited his military rank. The officer who pronounced the sentence next demanded that Dreyfus surrender his sword. The Captain's sword was broken over the officer's thigh; the shards were thrown at the feet of the supposed traitor. Then Dreyfus' epaulettes were torn from his shoulders and his emblems of rank from his breast.

To me, it is exactly the same when I see people still on their feet in fron of the elevated Host, when I see them entering a church without genuflecting, and receiving Communion in their outstretched hands. I myself, see it as a degradation, a pointed, symbolic refusal to give honor. Incidentally, Communion in the hand is inappropriate, not because the hands are less worthy to receive the Host than the tongue, for instance, or because they might be dirty, but because it would be impossible to rinse every participant's hands after Communion (that is, to make sure no particles of the Host are lost).

The new outlook sees all the fastidious formulas, prescriptions and proscriptions of the old Mass as representing a flight away from actuality. It wants to simplify things, demystify things, demythologize things and get to the essence of things. However, in doing so, it misses the counter-intuitive insight that the shoe is actually on the other foot: all of these external forms, in fact, facilitate our advance towards actuality and usher us into the precincts of the Real Presence of the Person of Christ Himself.

Notes

1. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a promising young French artillery officer of Jewish faith and ethnicity, was wrongfully convicted for treason in the late 19th century. The political and judicial scandal that followed ended ultimately in his full rehabilitation. He ended his career as a Lieutenant-Colonel and actively served during World War I at the end of which he was raised to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor. (See "Dreyfus Affair," Wikipedia) [back]

Art Credit

Source: Michael Camille, Gothic Art: Glorious Visions (New York: Abrams 1996) via English Dept. website at www.haverford.edu.

"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]

An Inconvenient Pic

PETA TO AL GORE: YOU CAN’T BE A MEAT-EATING ENVIRONMENTALIST (The PETA Files, Mar 05 2007 04:52PM)



Well, maybe you actually can. But a picture is worth a thousand words. Especially this picture. Especially Al Gore's words.

The Bible according to school kids

The jewels found below are said to be written by actual students and are genuine, authentic, and unretouched. Compiled by Richard Lederer. They appear in the 12/31/95 issue of National Review.

"Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree."

"Lot’s wife was a pillar of salt by day, but a ball of fire by night."

"Samson was a strongman who let himself be led astray by a Jezebel like Delilah."

"Samson slayed the Philistines with the axe of the Apostles."

"David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar."

Online source: THE BIBLE ACCORDING TO KIDS.

Professor resigns, takes entry position for more pay

What can I say? It's The Lenoir-Rhyne Onion again: "Professor resigns, takes entry position for more pay" (LRO, March 7, 2007): "A senior professor at Lenoir-Rhyne University made history today by garnering a pay hike by resigning and getting himself re-hired by the University as entry-level assistant professor."

Liccione assaulted by bog liturgy in Charlotte

In case any of you really wondered about some of my stories about liturgies in these parts, Michael Liccione has a story of his I offer as corroborration in an otherwise sensitive and thoughtful post entitled "Turning toward the Lord" (Sacramentum Vitae, March 5, 2007).

I must say that I was appalled. The music by the teenaged choir was, without interruption or mixture, the worst of the saccharine, 70s Jesuit stuff I thought I had left behind for good after abandoning the Catholic campus ministry in college three decades ago. The priest—whom nobody would mistake for an intellectual, or even for an NPR listener—practically tied himself in knots with solecisms. His five-minute homily, which relied on The Lone Ranger as an extended metaphor, preceded a long presentation by a portly, middle-aged woman about the Diocesan Support Appeal. The chief feature of that was exhaustive number-crunching done dialogically with the congregation in the format of a quiz show. (Don't ask any more, please.) That lasted fifteen minutes; they ought to give partial indulgences for having to sit through such a thing.

After describing his teeth-gritting posthaste escape to his favorite pub to nurse an oatmeal stout, Liccione concludes this way:

What can one say? In the Catholic Church, it is time to "reform the reform" of the liturgy so that Mass once again becomes a place where the eternal can be perceived as penetrating and elevating the temporal. One gets the sense that many Catholics, including clergy, don't even know what that means anymore. Yet as I've also observed, enough do to make such a reform doable.

A good place to start is to, um, turn toward the Lord physically. Let's bring back celebration of the Mass ad orientem, which means that both priest and people symbolically face the Lord together by facing east during those parts of the Mass when the priest addresses God on the people's behalf. For more on that topic, I recommend Fr. Scott Newman's recent post and the book he himself recommends.

Pope John Paul II's private chapel did Mass that way. There's no reason why it can't even be offered as an option for the mass of laity. I'd bet the bishops would be surprised at how well received the option would be.

Sungenis, again

According to Mark Shea, Robert Sungenis has been attacking Jewish convert to the Faith and author of Salvation is From the Jews, Roy Schoeman, as a 'Judaizer'. The attack goes a good bit farther even than that. See Mark Shea, "Bob Sungenis Outdoes Himself." Shea writes:

The last time Bob indulged himself in a reckless and irresponsible attack on the Jews, he simply disappeared loads of text he had downloaded from Nazi and White Supremacist sources without apology, once his sources were exposed....

However, this being Lent, I am hoping for better. I am hoping (and praying) Bob will finally emerge from the bunker, stop declaring all critics to be Judas Iscariot, stop casting himself as a persecuted prophet and applying messianic psalms to himself, admit that he is acting with gross injustice toward both Jews in general and, in particular, towards his brother Roy and repent. Anti-semitism (and slanderous manufactured quotes in support of it) is a sin like any other, not a bold prophetic stance. But like any other sin, it can be forgiven, if repented. My hope is that Bob will finally admit that he's behaving outrageously, recognize that his friends remain his friends and are not Judases, and find something to do with his time besides continue to sink further into this quagmire.

Related discussion:

Michael Forrest Apologizes and Offers a Correction (Sungenis and the Jews, March 6, 2006)

"The Morning After: What If Cameron Discovered the Other Jesus?"

. . . MARK BRUMLEY IS HAVING WAY TOO MUCH FUN AT JAMES CAMERON'S EXPENSE.

[Hat tip to Jimmy Akin]

The real scoop!

"I Totally Found the Grave of Jesus!" by Fred Sanders (Middlebrow, March 1, 2007)

[Hat tip to Al Kimel]

Apostolic Exortation set for next week

This morning's Bollettino (Vatican website) gives notice of a press conference that will present the long awaited Post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation. It will be called: "Sacramentum Caritatis" and is scheduled for March 13th, 2007.

[Hat tip to Rorate Caeli, Apostolic Exhortation, a name and a date, March 6, 2007]

Comment: Waugh to Buckley

At the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, so sure was Evelyn Waugh that the Council wouldn't dare to abrogate the Latin Mass, that he wrote, in part, to William Buckley:

The nature of the Mass is so profoundly mysterious that the most acute and holy men are continually discovering further nuances of significance. It is not a peculiarity of the Roman Church that much which happens at the altar is in varying degrees obscure to most of the worshipers. It is in fact the mark of all the historic, apostolic Churches. I think it highly doubtful whether the average churchgoer either needs or desires to have complete intellectual, verbal comprehension of all that is said. He has come to worship.

[Quoted by Chris Conlee in "The Fever of Vatican II," New Oxford Review (January 2007), p. 34.]

Comment: Buckley on Waugh

Writing about the great English writer and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote:

I somewhere opined that Evelyn Waugh's death on Easter Sunday in 1966, the Sunday before the reformers promulgated the Kiss of Peace, was evidence that the Holy Spirit was in fact behind it all, but merciful in His afflictions: no imagination is so vivid as to visualize Mr. Waugh yanked from prayerful thought to clasp the hand of the pilgrim to his right, to his left, ahead, and behind him.

[Quoted by Chris Conlee in "The Fever of Vatican II," New Oxford Review (January 2007), p. 34.]