. . . for the potentially long and boring service that turned out rather good, and second at my neighborhood RC church, cathedral-like and all Gothic, where I had the same experience.
It helped that I came late to the latter, missing the foot-washing and sermon, but catching the guts of it — offertory to end of mass — in church with six or seven hundred people.
The culmination was the parade of the Host back and forth up and down aisles, people genuflecting as the main priest carried it past them in their pews. I had the feeling of that drama that comes when the great man passes the crowd massed at the curbs, waving, little kids held up to see, etc.
This was a good solid boost to faith. Music fit the situation, etc. We were all with it, a churchful of attentive, even (quietly) enthusiastic people. It didn’t hurt any that the priest on parade is a Jesuit I have known since we were novices together in 1950 and, more important, that he is a transparent guy without apparent agenda except to do the work of the moment.
Walked out of there with a sense of having been at worship that works, to use a largely Unitarian expression with wide usage elsewhere, as in a Lutheran publication with the essay fascinatingly titled, “’Blended Worship That Works’ or Cuisinart Worship That Sucks,” a helpful, witty diatribe vs. popularized liturgy.
The fundamental “worship issue” of our day is the loss of a distinctive Lutheran ethos.
Writer spoke of (and for?) Lutherans. Ask yourself, for Romans too? Is something threatening our ethos?
The laity . . . is largely uninstructed in either biblical theology or liturgics. Relevance thus easily becomes more important than reverence, innovation trumps fidelity, catering to individual tastes is superior to the care of the whole communion of the saints.
Or it sometimes seems so?
Instead of liturgical practices transforming us and our culture, culture is transforming our Sunday mornings. [!] When one is naive about the power of modernity, and simultaneously arrogant in thinking that [his or her] Synod [liturgy?] alone can sanctify modern cultural forms spawned by secularism, trouble is a’ brewin’.
So the Lutheran observer speculated in 2003. And so might a Roman speculate about his or her Roman liturgy in 2026.
I attribute my reaction on this Holy Thursday long ago in part to my few-hours-earlier experience in the severe, near puritanical atmosphere of the Tridentine-mass service, with its overriding sense of the importance of doing things right in matters large and small.
This Tridentine service was serious worship. No fooling around, improvising, or indulging in casual manner. The sermon went with it.
Not a scolding word in it, but matter-of-fact discussion of how worshipers are to respond to the mysteries. The preacher-pastor said he had been in all this instructed by “holy mother the church” not only in rubrics for this mass but also in the content of his sermon.
He talked about the priesthood and only tangentially noted the current bad situation, making a point that had been made countless times, that one of the original 12 turned out bad.
He also noted that the current situation provides an opening for critics of the pope who don’t like the way he does things anyway.
(It’s occurred to me not that the current situation does not cry out to heaven — under John Paul II a toe-the-line leader — but that a John XXIII, lovable and permissive, would not be the same target for media around the Western world.)
In any case, the Tridentine service supplies something that’s missing in the Novus Ordo (new liturgy), and not just in the organized nature of foot-washing on Holy Thursday, done with dispatch and strictly by the celebrant of a dozen men who are parishioners, and not a dragged-out, chaotic affair such as extends the service too long. It supplies a seriousness and an objectivity about what’s happening.
Current liturgy, on the other hand, is therapeutic. Our neighborhood mainstream preacher on Good Friday night, for instance, was at pains to say the day was “not a downer,” that we die daily (implying that we should not fear death, I think: it was metaphor city in an obfuscatory sermon), that we have crosses enough to bear in daily life. I agree with much of it that I could understand, but the good-natured morale-boosting of it all is thin gruel.
Nonetheless, it was good on this long-ago Thursday to experience the two kinds of Catholic worship back to back, with good results at least on one day of the holy triduum.
As to noting liturgical changes from the above-mentioned Lutheran viewpoint, if we see our worship life minimizing the influence of historic traditions and their liturgical expression, we risk treating worship as thinly disguised self-improvement.
We may ask how does our congregation’s worship reflect tradition? How has it innovated practice unique to our congregation and the current time?
