In the mid-’90s I had no problem with the handshake of peace at mass, as in these May, 1996, musings.
Spouting expert notions on a panel at a book store, I mentioned something I like about going to church, namely watching young families interact with each other, parents with kids and kids with each other. My comment followed that of another author who had said he enjoys watching the pretty women at his largely yuppie parish. I seconded that and added my own twist.
I might have added that I also go to church to shake hands with black people and others who aren’t like me in skin color, age, and the rest. I did call the handshake of peace, at about the three-quarter mark of mass, the most important liturgical reform to come out of Vatican Council II, which among us liberal Catholics (progressive, deep-thinking, wise, loving) stood as a watershed.
To greet and meet fellow citizens of other skin colors was a great boon, I felt. Ours was a multiracial parish, as our home town Oak Park is multiracial. So at church on Sunday, we got to shake hands with each other while bathed in the Christian myth. As one who argues and disagrees a lot, often enough with blacks – or with fellow whites about blacks and blacks-related matters — I found it important. It supplied a sort of fresh start for the week to come.
However, by Ash Wednesday of 1999, I was beginning to notice flies in the ointment of the new liturgy.
On that day I got ashes on my forehead, as any good fish eater does, though I have missed a few in my day. The lady of the house and I hied ourselves to our nearby church communion service, led by a deacon who started us off with hymns, prayers, and readings for our rather large gathering.
Song was led by a loud, attractive dark-haired woman in her early 40s or so. Folks in front of us chatted — three women (sisters?) catching up. Several rows up, a madonna with two girls held one who periodically let out a cry from the heart but eventually fell asleep in her mother’s arms.
Then communion, then ashes. Sauntering up the aisle, the words ran through my mind: “Memento, homo, pulvis es et ad pulverem reverteris.” That Latin sticks. I had puzzled over various Latin phrases from when I was old enough to follow the mass in a missal. Eventually, I found out what they all meant.
“Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” Memorable indeed.
As I grew older, I found myself explaining the smudge on Ash Wednesday to heretics and infidels. I know I got the message, eventually: We’re gonna die, and don’t forget it.
Very medieval, of course, if unarguable. And for believers in the afterlife, the thought was presumed to be beneficial, a stop-&-think sort of thing, giving a bit of perspective in the hurly-burly. Hey, even the unbeliever might profitably give the matter some thought now and then.
On this day forget it. The nice woman who daubed my forehead on this day offered no such helpful reminder of our temporary status. Instead, daubing, she told me to “turn to the gospel and turn away from death”!
I may not have her exact words, but I know I have the gist. We’re not supposed to think about death, as before? A new age has dawned for the holy Roman Catholic Church and its adherents? We no longer find it salutary to think on death but are to turn away?
Three years later, spring of ’02, dropped in at Old St. Pat’s miles to the east on another Ash Wednesday for my annual reminder that I am dust and unto dust will return — only to be told by a smiling 35-ish woman-with-ashes that Jesus loves me.
Good point of course. But what about paths of glory leading to the grave and all that, in this case the time-honored “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return”? I believe in resurrection, but what about death and its brand of finality? You can overdo reminding people about it, but you can underdo it too. Not good to skip it.
Thus I had another reminder of a shift away from death as meditation material. Funeral masses have not involved black vestments for decades, having given way to white ones, which emphasize resurrection. Catholic funerals emphasize life after death. It’s the ultimate selling point. But you would think this cherished belief means we can stand being reminded of death and putrefaction in at least one small ritual.
Year later, in August, ‘03, I walked into church one morning and everyone was talking. Mass hadn’t started, it was not too big a crowd, but it was like a school board meeting before it’s called to order. And as in some board meetings, the calling to order did not entirely silence some, who took mass as chat time. It was a family group, with infants in arms, people you like to see. But couldn’t they be quiet?
Year later, in June, ‘04, it was MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY on FATHER’S Day. At church a young man ahead of me in line for Communion shuffled up in expensive white sneakers, baggy white pants, and abbreviated tank top. It was muscle beach at the old parish.
Earlier, there had been quite a handshaking of peace, with free-lancers going up and down the aisle to press flesh with sometimes-reluctant worshipers. Among them was the deacon, vigorously working the crowd as if running for office, which he should, since he’s a decent guy, very personable.
The sermon had been by a tall, dark-haired, white-suited layman who talked about what Mary would have told Jesus after he was found in the Temple at age 12 instructing some white-hairs: Don’t get a big head, etc.
He got a hand when he finished, which is more than the priests get, but then he had done it more crisply, reading from his text, which is of course a good idea for the reverend fathers too, a good discipline.
A few months later, THE MODERN CHURCH AT PRAYER, mainstream church: Warm-up for a funeral mass included an organ-played rendition of “All the Things You Are,” lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Only the music (by his collaborator Jerome Kern) was played, however.
The words go this way and presumably had application to the Christian experience, to the deceased maybe — not we prayerfully hope applicable to to Jesus, though that would be a major surprise to both Hammerstein and Kern:
You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long.
You are the breathless hush of evening
That trembles on the brink of a lovely song.
You are the angel glow – that lights a star.
The dearest things I know – are what you are.
One day my happy arms will hold you
And someday I’ll know that moment divine
When all the things you are are mine.
Ain’t liturgy grand?
Months later, the communion scrum, May, 2005: I have likened going up for communion to maneuvering for a rebound under the basket, with its bumping and shoving and pushing as one approaches the minister. There’s no more communion rail as such. Instead, there is this third rail of Catholic worship.
Next month, the duty to glad-hand, June, 2005: Reader J.: “I am most put off by glad-handing. The other day I shook hands with the same woman twice. The ushers even shake hands of those with aisle seats during the Agnus Dei.”
Indeed. They consider it their duty. You have to avoid aisle seats. With luck there’s somewhere in the church of your choice that gives you shelter. Go for it.
SHAKE, 2006, March, more on shaking: It happens at mass after the Our Father, during which you may have held hands in a kumbai moment or watched others do so. It’s SHAKE TIME, turning to another, hand out, extorting response.
My friend Jake (not his real name) intends to bring his cell phone with him and threaten to call 9-1-1 the next time he is approached while trying in his admittedly clumsy way to commune with the Almighty. I am working to dissuade him.
A Catholic New World reader put it to Question Corner priest Rev. John Dietzen: “I’ve had my arthritic fingers crushed. I’ve had parishioners blow their nose and then offer their hand to me. . . . I’m tempted to isolate myself in back [of church]. . . . [T]his . . . scenario is unnecessary and superfluous.”
Father John, calling up a longstanding line-toeing reformer’s argument, says this scenario is not new. They did it this way in the middle ages (just before they stuck poniard between ribs) and, hey, in New Testament times (when they hugged for warmth in catacombs). Late middle ages, the kiss of peace was put in the book, for priests only, now (for decades) “prescribed.”
A “sign of peace” is called for, he wrote. There are “deep roots” here. Handshake, embrace, or kiss may not be “the perfect” sign of peace, he conceded; “but it can still carry a message we need to understand if we are to celebrate the Eucharist together as Christ intended.” We weren’t doing it right for how long?
Plus: Arthritis got you down? Just look at the one next to you and, without extending your hand, say, “Peace be with you.” “No one will be offended,” adds Father John. How does he know that?
Meanwhile, and for quite a while, I’d been blogging about all this, as you may have guessed, and in this merry month of March of 2006, my readers responded to “Shake” etc., in this wise:
Bob K:
Sometimes it is good for Christians to reach out . . . and communicate with each other. The MASS is as good a time as any and better than most to do so.
It is when we GATHER TOGETHER to worship and celebrate the Transubstantiation and our gathering of power from the spirit . . . . If we can’t talk to each other (whom we see and know and who are standing right next to us), how can we talk to the Lord (Whom we . . . have not seen or cannot see) or to the world (whom we are to evangelize)?
At that time of [mass], I make it a point to talk to those near me — the wheel chair kid, the three African-Americans who always sit in the last pew, being shy [in] an all-white congregation, older women I know who are widows, and some teen-agers who rarely come — in each case to make them feel welcome.
Bob’s “gather together” deserves special comment. He has the New Mass down cold with this. “We gather,” said one priest, whom Bob probably did not know, on Sunday, after a getting-to-you time — “Who’s here from out of town?” introducing oneself to fellow worshipers. It was his way to announce the start of Mass. Both captured the essence of the new, which is that the sacred part does not start without people willing as worshipers. More later on this fascinating element, theologically and sacramentally, of the Mass since Vatican II.
Dolores M:
The logical moment to greet each other is when entering one’s favorite pew and finding another “regular” there, or if I’m there and the regular comes in after me. That’s when I greet folks, but I don’t shake their hand because it’s not a natural gesture in that spot — the person kneeling or sitting, or walking in to sit or pray.
To the regular lady in the pew in front of me, I kneel and whisper in her ear as she sits in the pew. I find out how she’s feeling because I know she has a heart problem. She tells me a few of her aches and complaints, including about her husband in the pew with her, who she says doesn’t show her any compassion.
I wave hi across a section of pews to friends as they come in. That’s normal “greeting” and wishing-well time.
Why can’t bishops realize shaking hands in the middle of mass after being cheek to jowl with everyone for 25 minutes is not natural? What do you think a survey in church would disclose about hand-shaking?
Good question. Next question?
Bob O:
My physician daughter shrugs aside the germ question, saying, “Just remember to wash your hands as soon as you get home.” But what about passing a neighbor’s germs on to another? Saying, “I’m sorry but I’ve got a bad cold.” Pointing to your throat will work once in a while, but every Sunday? How about wearing a sign that says, “UNCLEAN” or “UNSOCIABLE”?
The problem’s not too bad in parishes that haven’t been brain-washed too long by a liberal pastor. But for parishes that have been, the only solution is: Avoid them. I’ve been in some that had enough empty pews to allow enthusiasts to kiss-hug-shake everybody in reach, then scramble church-wide for more fellow enthusiasts or victims. It usually took up to five minutes before the church settled down.
The worst are churches where everybody is expected to hold hands and daisy-chain across aisles, etc., during the WHOLE Our Father. As someone who [as a newspaper reporter] had to attend one too many rallies during the sixties where we had to pretend we were all one downtrodden race, hold hands, sway in rhythm and sing “We shall overcome,” I have a strong aversion to this.
Looking straight ahead and holding on to the pew with a death grip doesn’t always work. I’ve had a bright young thing give me a sharp rap in the ribs to let me know this kind of thing isn’t tolerated.
Give me the celebrant who knows the whole greeting of peace is optional and skips it. Save me from the celebrant who, contrary to Vatican directions, leaves the altar and parades down the middle aisle, handshaking both ways.
I’m not hardline on this, though, Why don’t ushers just greet Mass-goers and ask, “Kissing or non-kissing?” and wave us to the appropriate pew?
Nancy:
I enjoyed your writing about “shake time.” In many non-Catholic churches [such as hers], “prayers and concerns of the people” is an integral part of a church service. Parishioner participation in the issuing of those concerns sometimes becomes quite senseless (and long-winded), especially when issues are brought up that are out of the realm of the purpose for prayer.
Reader Margaret reacted strongly to Bob K’s endorsement:
We’ve slipped from the meaning of Mass as sacrifice, not as gathering for celebration. The idea of “our gathering of power from the spirit” sums up the problem.
The New Mass is about what God can do for us — bless us, empower us, help us, raise us up on eagle’s wings, etc. The traditional Mass is a sacrifice, the reenactment of Calvary, where the emphasis is on God and giving Him thanks and adoration.
Can a New Mass that so obscures its own meaning be from God?
Jennifer agreed, finding Margaret’s comment that we have “slipped from the meaning of Mass as sacrifice,” etc. “so very true” and Bob K’s use of “power,” as in “gathering of power from the spirit,” misguided.
“Next to ‘love,'” she says, “‘power’ is the most seductive and misapplied word of our time.”
As for Margaret’s asking rhetorically, “Can a New Mass that so obscures its own meaning be from God?” she agrees, adding, “God does not do transactional analysis.”
Bob K, responding to Margaret, does not think we have slipped in our grasp of the mass. Based on what he learned in high school in 1955 [14 years before New Mass declaration], he considers the new mass a distillation of centuries’ practice.
“There have been changes in many aspects of our faith [practice?] over the centuries,” Bob says, citing “the elaborate garments that our cardinals wear today” as clothing “certainly Jesus never wore.”
In the mass “we commemorate and relive the sacrifice Jesus endured. . . . At different parts of the mass, we share different aspects of our mystery and our community together.”
At the start “we say hello to God.” Then “we read and listen and contemplate our readings; we transubstantiate [a shocker, but he is right about the New Mass of 1969, about which more later]; we share the body and blood, we greet and acknowledge one another, we . . . [receive] and share a blessing.
At various points we put our words into song — joyous, sad, reflective depending on the season, the occasion,etc.
At the end, we move with our beliefs out into the world to . . . try to be a force for good in the market place.”
The Mass has many aspects, including “beauty and seriousness . . . enlargement of our spirit and acknowledgement of the goodness of the others who are with us in Christ.”
Summing up the “Shake, rattle” question:
* Bob O suggests kiss and non-kiss sections of church, the ushers asking your preference.
* Bob K considers church ideal for meeting, greeting, and otherwise being friendly to people.
* Margaret reminds us that church is for God, not us: Ask not what God can do for you but what you can do for God.
* Dolores says timing is off: you greet fellow or sister worshipers (discreetly) at the start of mass, not in the middle of it.
* Jennifer has no use for “power” as used by Bob K — “our gathering of power from the spirit” — sees “psychobabble” in this.
* Bob K notes that mass has changed with the centuries, defending how we do it now as in the tradition.
* Margaret “Can a New Mass that so obscures its own meaning be from God?” she had asked. The pre-Vatican 2 mass “is still being said and is available to everyone,” she adds. [Not so, since Pope Francis severely limited it’s availibility in 2021.]
* Bob K’s meeting and greeting is a good idea — outside of mass. Attempts at prayer go with socializing? Not so much.
* Dolores addresses how handshaking is done, raising her small voice of reason as maybe a stopper or slowing-down of ENTHUSIASM in the pews.
* If Jennifer is going to spot psychobabble in public utterances by church people, however, she will have time for little else. My advice is to settle on the more egregious examples and pray hard for the perpetrators.
* Bob K’s changing-mass concept leaves us wondering why this change and not that. What we have is “prescribed,” Fr. Dietzen reminded us in his New World column. But we can question the prescription, I presume.
There’s something awry also in Bob K’s saying our “faith” has changed, citing cardinals’ fancy duds as something Jesus did not wear. “Faith”? Bob slipped, I’m sure; he does not want to say faith includes vestments.
* Reader Margaret chimes in on my reference to mass as a place to get the habit of feeling good about each other, attributed by implication to the people who led our liturgical redo of the ‘70s and since then:
Alas, Church is NOT the place to feel good about each other. All of us who remember the old Mass know that the Mass is not about sentimentalism. It is the reenactment of Calvary, Christ’s sacrifice reenacted on the altar.
The new post-Vatican II Mass has hijacked its meaning and turned it into something that is about us and our relationship with each other. The true Mass, the pre-Vatican II Mass, is about our relationship with God. It is about us adoring God, thanking Him, being sorry for our sins, and asking for His grace and mercy.
The problem is that “modern Catholics do not know the Catholic Faith. They haven’t studied it, it isn’t taught from the pulpits, and they believe that the sentimental pablum they’re being fed every Sunday IS the Faith. The post Vatican II Church is a counterfeit.”
The same goes for the mass, which she also considers “counterfeit.” On it she blames bad things that have happened — “the pedophile scandal, lack of attendance at Mass, loss of belief in the True Presence in the Eucharist, loss of vocations, etc., etc.”
If I do not go so far as to why we have our problems, I nonetheless appreciate her emphasis on mass as mystery with God at its center. Liturgical reformers decided they had a wonderful organization going to waste, preserving tradition, when it could be used to inculcate and enforce innovation.
What had grown had to be rooted out and replaced with something they presented as restoration. They were like socialists who plan the economy because they know better than what has grown or evolved. On their gigantic head trip, they knew what should be and won the day, employing arguably totalitarian methods.
For instance, Vatican 2 permitted vernacular, but they required it. Big difference. One thing led to another, and we have liturgy lite, full of sentimentalism, as Margaret says. It’s silly, contrived, distracting from what’s central. Mass became more prayer breakfast than sacred event.
A golden worship experience:
The Protestant Nancy, commenting further on the handshaking:
I’ve never been to a Catholic service, but there is no question as to where [her church] the Bethel Baptist Church stands in Schaumburg. It is a church that believes the Bible is the word of God. There is no confusion as to what the Bible says or teaches.
The church emphasizes morality and what is expected of its members. There is no mincing of words from the minister. I leave Sunday School and church every week uplifted in spirit and determined to face the new week in a way that will be pleasing to all I meet and pleasing to God.
Today’s sermon was especially meaningful for me. I was feeling down this morning over [recent disappointments]. This sermon helped me to understand that I was permitting myself to become overwrought emotionally by worldly things (politics) and my relationship with God was suffering.
She concludes: “I definitely wouldn’t react kindly to the shaking thing.”
A Man at Mass, November 2010
This morning at mass, I was miles away and completely unaware — 8:30 mass and not at all crowded — when I came to and stood and saw a hand reaching out for mine from my left, in the pew in front of me. It was Our Father time.
I took the hand with my left, holding on to the pew with my right. This matters. I don’t fall down a lot, in fact not at all lately, in part because I do not ask too much of my balance. But the guy two rows up, having grasped his friend’s hand with his left, was leaning back, looking at me and extending his right — across an entire pew.
I tried to shake him off, but he persisted, and I finally had to stage-whisper, “Too far!” He pulled back, but by then I was not saying The Lord’s Prayer very well, in fact not at all, having narrowly missed a dangerous balancing act.
pickup
The prayer was over in a few more seconds, I dropped the hand to my left and put both hands on the pew in front, breathing a sigh. In a minute, the handclasp of peace. The woman whose hand I’d held, having witnessed my shaking off the man’s hand, put hers out tentatively. I grasped it gingerly, fingers to fingers, having incipient arthritic issues and being in general not the hand-shaker I used to be.
And of course I had to do the same for the guy two rows in front, including a wink and a nod as salve to whatever feelings I had hurt (none, I decided), and that was that for my going-the-extra-mile worship procedures for the day.
Oh yes, I’m afraid I didn’t meet the searching eyes of the woman giving communion as she seemed to expect, so that our souls might if ever so briefly coincide and commune, because, I must confess, my chief interest was in Jesus, with whom I was trying desperately to make contact. (I can walk and chew gum at the same time, but some dual performances escape me.)
I know I am to see Jesus in my neighbor, but if you don’t mind, I’m going to take that as my neighbor I meet on the street or at a meeting or party or in my house when I wake up in the morning and look across the bed, rather than at communion time, when I am refueling my soul for such encounters, which are where the rubber hits the road as far as neighbor-love is concerned.
In any case, I got in my “Amen” for her, I think even before she said her piece, and she placed the host on my palm.
Back I went to my pew, hands not folded but at my sides, for balance’ sake. It’s better that way. The high-wire man does not hold his hands folded in front, and neither do I returning from communion.
Meanwhile, the kissing for peace continues as strong as ever, in its handshaking incarnation and — it happened to me one morning — in a two-hands-slapped-on-shoulder from the parish deacon who had left the altar in vestments and sought me out as I sat in a back row off to the side, kneeling with one hand over my eyes trying my best to look absorbed.
Intent on his mission, he climbed into the seat in front of me and did the shoulder attack. I will have to keep eyes open so I can a least dodge this fellow or another of his ilk, determined as he was to give me religion.
He also changed “Go, the mass is ended” to “Go, the mass is never ended.” Wow. When all is said and done, however, he is less to be blamed than the devil-may-care approach to decorum in the American church in these years of Paddy-bar-the-door approach to Mass and everything else liturgical.
He had apparently considered me a threat to public order and had to chastise me publicly, for a first in 21st-century North American Catholic ministerial thuggishness.
Along similar, if not assault, lines, was Father Quirky, who subbed out official wording for his own while saying mass. For instance, saying “friends” for “disciples,” “God’s” for “His,” raising his voice to tell worshipers this is how to talk. Mass after mass. Eventually a solid core of worshipers, barely paying attention, say it his way.
Introduces gospel according to Matthew, not Saint Matthew, etc., making points with low-information parishioners, never explaining himself or otherwise calling attention to it. Would spoil things. He had the mike, we didn’t. Again, Paddy bar the door.
Few years later, another church: At offertory, a catchy tune, number seven fifty-five, the lady said, in such and such songbook, one of two. Scrambling, I could find it in neither. I must have got the number wrong, scrambling to keep up with holy mass, which eventually becomes (degenerates into?) a prayer meeting.
Presider runs the meeting (“We gather,” Fr. Paul pickup said on Sundays, after greeting with a smile, asking who’s here from out of town, leading to applause after he welcomes them — calls the meeting to order note the come-to-meeting term, not celebrant, as of sacrifice — and helpers are miked (we aren’t), good men and women offering us our weekly head trip. Gloomy meditation here.
Meanwhile, I am grateful for the instincts, the automatic responses ingrained in me from childhood, rendering me somewhat insensitive to it all. This helps.
October, 2017, Participation by performer: Looonnnggg song and organ recital between readings at 8:30 mass, we spectators caught in a web of musicality for a good ten minutes! Participation? Or obedient listening, waiting for the spirit to move us. The perils of creativity.
Followed by 2nd reading, slow and dreamy by soft-voiced woman. 8:50 the gospel, at long last. Followed by at-first somewhat bookish account (who am I to judge?) but logically progressing to a dawning on one listener that this was a time of peace and good will owed to one’s fellow-worshipers. You never know what’s going to work in a sermon or when or quite how. But the elderly male worshiper found something new in mass this day. Along with his incurable woolgathering, of course, but that’s another story . . .
November, 2017, 3rd Ordinary Sunday (using the ordinary designation, shorn of all but a number, as dictated by an orderly bureaucrat). Armadillo mode for me at 8:30 mass as I look up and see ministerial lady waving holy book over head like a picket sign on her way to deposit it I think on the pulpit stand. (I take my eyes away from this awkward scene.
Then pregnant pause — logistical logjam: why couldn’t she be there to pick things up pronto? — while reader climbs the pulpit, begins, “A reading from . . . ” and begins her melodious rendering of something (I cannot tell what) Scriptural.
She finishes, then music lady at the floor-level lectern waves song sheet for the day, signaling us, begins her soft sweet chanting, again however I know not what. She is like a little bird — soft and sweet in her rendition. And we, led by the music master at the piano
respond verse after verse with the refrain. All very, ah, pretty.
Then another reading from yet another lady, very careful in her diction, word for word (she has a good ear, which many in her situation do not), again of I know not what. At the end a nicely stated “This is the word of the Lord.”
Now Alleluia. The congregation is up to speed for this, delivers full-throated responses. then sweetly warbled verses from song lady, after each of which the congregation comes in with its alleluia’s.
Then Father with gospel and sermon.
Meanwhile, mother with children up ahead in 3rd or 4th row, right under the pulpit plays with them, who are her first concern, giving every attention they desire, no attempt to introduce them to this sacred space such as I have seen parents do in both Latin mass and Novus Ordo congregations.
This playfulness by children is typical. Not speaking of infants bawling or making other noises, which I consider music to the ears. I have seen large families in which babies may bawl, making such music, while older kids pay attention or help corral the younger ones to get them in on the routine. The father in this 33rd Sunday family makes an effort, but it’s a lonely effort.
It’s part of how so many of us have got the message that it’s happy time at church, as elsewhere when we can get it or achieve it, not a sacred time, which I contend offers a deeper kind of happiness, good feeling if you will, but a pearl for the wearied and stressed among us. Thus have differences been blurred, place of worship as unique vs. the rest of our lives. And results muted.
The mass has been promoted as place and time that brings us together in community. Under divine auspices, it’s granted, but the less said about this the better, or if it is said, it’s without conviction, communicated by no body language or intonation or seriousness. Inner response, interiority, not on offer — or far less than it ought to be.
Father’s sermon makes reference to Protestant work ethic and Catholic social order. He’s a careful expositor and makes a good point. But Catholics’ long march to social order, change the world and all that, leads historically to increased governmental control, focus on power in the cause of good that says nothing about Divine Providence.
Protestant ethic, on the other hand, tends to individual responsibility, change coming from the people leading the charge, Catholic change beginning with its own monarchical model, finding itself more comfortable with the goal of beneficent government control.
Returning to the day’s mass, the organist cuts loose in post-communion time, when worshipers are presumably talking one-on-one with God, who is presumably more present to communicants.
2-In search of perfect mass
Good experiences
July, 2004, HEAVENLY . . . Attended illegal Latin mass today, where reverence was palpable, vs. happy-go-lucky mainstream Catholic service, starring priest as Jay Leno, full of smiles because we’re happy to be alive! This one was all business.
People came to pray not play, not to meet and greet except after mass, when there was a lot of that. Was a low mass, 7:30 Sunday, in a chapel-size ex-Presbyterian church (converted by hammer and nail), two-thirds full, families and others. There was one server, a young man, priest stood with back to us, us looking in same direction, towards God.
But our parish bulletin warns people away. It’s a “chapel,” says the bulletin/pastor, “that advertises itself as ‘Our Lady Immaculate Roman Catholic Church.'” But it’s not Roman Catholic, the bulletin said, is run by the St. Pius X society founded by Archbishop Lefebvre, who was excommunicated for making new bishops and thus perpetuating the presumed fraud, etc. etc.
The bulletin quotes the pope about the “grave offense” involved in adherence to the Society, leading to excommunication. I’m at risk, therefore, by now and then attending the Latin masses at Our Lady Immaculate. Would my parish consider now and then having a Latin mass, so as to ween me away? For pastoral reasons? I admit I did not ask, knowing it would not happen.
A recent special mass for gays and lesbians which I attended was said by a retired pastor who called himself “a reforming homophobe.” It was a one-time thing, or turned out to be. Maybe have a one-time thing for Latin mass enthusiasts, I say, who make no claims about being born that way but only say they were raised that way?
On the other hand,
October, 2004, THE MODERN CHURCH AT PRAYER . . . Back to a mainstream church, warmup for a recent funeral mass included an organ-played rendition of “All the Things You Are,” lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Only the music (by hic collaborator Jerome Kern) was played, however.
The words go this way and presumably had application to the Christian experience, to the deceased maybe — not we prayerfully hope applicable to to Jesus, though that would be a major surprise to both Hammerstein and Kern:
You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long.
You are the breathless hush of evening
That trembles on the brink of a lovely song.
You are the angel glow – that lights a star.
The dearest things I know – are what you are.
One day my happy arms will hold you
And someday I’ll know that moment divine
When all the things you are are mine.
Ain’t liturgy grand?
October, 2005, EASTER MASS IN BROOKLYN . . . At Queen of All Saints church, mass did not begin with a “good morning” from the celebrant, Msgr. John J. Brown, but with “the Lord be with you,” which was a good sign.
Accurate too, as it turned out.
The mass, 10:15, for a full house, was on the mark liturgically, and lively to boot, but never frivolous. The people, a racially mixed crowd with slight preponderance of blacks, had a quite serious demeanor — as they filed for communion, for instance. (Of course, what really told me I was in New York was hearing “one God forevah and evah” from Msgr. Brown, the church’s pastor who doubles as personnel director for the Diocese of Brooklyn.)
He also hit the pulpit running with the standard (unfrivolous) Easter welcome to people who don’t usually come but might want to register and/or talk about why they don’t come, such as having been slighted or injured by a priest. The invitation came after a full-throated rendition of the first two readings by a handsome, mature woman who interestingly did not begin her reading until some latecomers were seated. A nice touch, that. This happened in a service with no unexplained pauses or pauses explainable only as lapses in preparation.
She read from a real pulpit, raised and extending into the congregation on the gospel side, part of a cathedral-dimensioned very high-ceilinged romanesque church in excellent repair. This mostly black parish obviously has the wherewithal to do things, and taste as well. Right after her second reading was sung a lively “alleluia.” When it finished, Msgr. Brown was already positioned in the pulpit and got his “The lord be with you” in without pause.
After his reading is when he made his “come back, we are sorry if we offended you” pitch, delivered in strong, friendly, matter of fact tones. He was sure of himself and in no way maudlin about it. Then he got to his sermon, which started with a good (and tried and true, but that’s OK) story about a blind child leaping from a burning building into his father’s arms because he trusted in his father to catch him. He told the story well.
That’s when Aesop the teller of fables should have been the norm, but instead Msgr. B. decided to indulge in a plethora of explanation. Like the blind kid trusting his father, he should have trusted his story to make the point, but he chose to declaim, beating our ears with formula language –LOVE! ETERNAL LIFE! PEACE! How about a bonus for any preacher who can avoid these words in his next sermon, who instead lets a story make the point? And do it in seven minutes. Yes!
Unfortunately, one feels inevitably, he indulged in the Heresy of the Multiple Middle — in contrast to the sermon with beginning, middle, and end. Instead, like most sermons it had many middles and not really an end but a stopping.
Let that not detract, however, from the vitality and sheer organization of the place. It did not for this worshiper, who managed after mass to get the attention briefly of the head usher, a man of the islands, I’d say, to tell him what a good job he had done — with panache at that, I might have added.
April, 2003, TWO HOLY THURSDAYS
Had a good one-two punch Holy Thursday, with attendance first at my Tridentine-mass church, where some 125 or so huddled in a church that is really a chapel 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.
For instance:
The fundamental “worship issue” of our day is the loss of a distinctive Lutheran ethos. The laity (whether Wisconsin [synod], Missouri [synod], or ELCA [Missouri spinoff/merger with others, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, a liberal group]) 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. Instead of our 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 their Synod alone can sanctify modern cultural forms spawned by secularism, trouble is a’ brewin’. [Italics added]
I attribute my reaction on this Holy Thursday in good 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 is serious worship. No fooling around, improvising, or indulging in casual manner. And the sermon goes 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. It showed.
So he talked about the priesthood and only tangentially noted the current bad (abuse-related) situation, making a point that has 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 much. 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 Thursday to experience the two kinds of Catholic worship back to back, with good results at least on one day of the holy triduum.
(A note on liturgical changes from the above-mentioned Unitarian source:
. . . . “if we view our worship life
primarily through the lens of the first Source, minimizing the influence of historic traditions and
their liturgical expression, we risk treating worship as thinly disguised self-improvement. “ How
does your congregation’s worship reflect historic traditions in Unitarian Universalism and its
Protestant roots? How has it innovated new practices that are unique to your congregation and
the current time?)
(Substitute “Catholicism” and “Catholic” where appropriate, and you have a rather good statement of our worshiping conundrum.)
In search of the perfect Mass, 10/31/11: Most are happy with liturgy as they find it, I suppose; but many are not, which is why we have destination parishes throughout the archdiocese. The two destinations of longest standing are St. Sabina, on 78th Place (black, robustly musical, liturgically bold, political, home of the three-hour mass with provocative guest preachers), and Old St. Pat’s, at Adams and Des Plaines (Irish, centrally located in hot neighborhood or easily reached by its residents, richly staffed, scene of many weddings, home of “the world’s biggest block party”).
Much more recently came St. John Cantius, on Carpenter just off Chicago Avenue, saved from extinction by an entrepreneurial Resurrectionist priest, with Tridentine Mass and music and traditionalism seeping through every crevice, also centrally located, also in or near a hot neighborhood.
Ditto for the more recently revived St. Mary of the Angels, on Hermitage south of Armitage, resurrected by Opus Dei priests, a beautiful church which parish leaders are much praised for saving from wrecking ball or at least gradual decrepitude. Here Mass is reverent in a manner that eludes churches where new-church norms are easily used to casualize worship. St. Mary is also in a hot neighborhood (Bucktown).
In all of these, the faithful gather and communicate faith to each other, each in its way.
The Northlake experience: Me? I keep trying different places, most recently St. John Vianney in near north suburban Northlake (Wolf Rd. half-block north of North Ave.), which has a Tridentine Latin Mass at 10 a.m. Sunday in the basement church while the novus ordo (regular English) Mass is celebrated just above in the church proper.
Both services are distinguished for prayerfulness of priest at altar and of people in pews. They are more vertical (God-directed) than horizontal (neighbor-directed) — a handy distinction in these days of liturgical flux. At each Mass on three recent Sundays (two Latin, one English), the priest read the sermon he had composed beforehand, a practice I have urged in earlier columns.
This makes for organization and clarity. They were delivered well and thus were listenable and worth one’s time. The Latin Mass preacher actually explained actual and sanctifying grace in one sermon, analyzed anger and its makeup and ways to keep it under control in another. For the latter he called extensively on Thomas Aquinas. I’ve studied anger in Seneca, the Roman stoic. Aquinas takes the matter several steps further, as one might imagine.
Music at the Latin Mass was provided by a trio that chanted the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, etc. off to the side at a small organ. There was nothing intrusive about it. It did not call attention to itself. Rather, it was background for the altar, never at center stage. It was not performance but part of the service, integral to it as an aid to prayer.
In general, I couldn’t get over the calmness of it all. There’s something energetic, even frenetic, about the usual novus ordo Mass, with its barrage of recitation, explanation, and exhortation from up front, not to mention the sometimes downright explosive handshake of peace – all of which constitutes its appeal to many. In the Tridentine (Latin) Mass, there’s nothing like it, which is part of its appeal for others.
For that matter, the English Mass at St. John Vianney, as at St. Mary of the Angels above, also avoids the frenetic. It too is an exercise in prayerfulness, even with its horizontalism as in the prescribed handclasp of peace. In other words, it shows that there’s nothing inevitably busy-busy about the novus ordo mass.
April, 2017. Sheil Chapel family mass. “First Communion” banner 10 feet tall on wall front left behind the piano. Violinist tunes up. Lot of grandparents, kids.
NOT a stdent mass. Too early, at 9:30. Big contrast with Loyola Madonna Della Strada, where no kids, a sprinkling of students, the rest apparently U.- and non-U. adults.
Sheil is a suburban parish, not a campus chapel.
November, 2017, what another worshiper tells: A cradle Catholic, he lost his faith as an adult, somehow found it again, and wants to keep it that way. He’s a daily mass-goer and feeds off the experience hungrily. But he had to find a new church after a time, because his was too noisy. There was too much going on, knocking him off stride in his quest for food that feeds faith, the church he “grew up with,” he said. He found a nearby parish church which was more like it.
July, 2018, Un-frivolous Sunday low mass in Latin offers blessed silence. It No pre-mass shaking hands with all the neighbors. No being forced to listen or tune out with violence to one’s nerves. Here the priest is not miked, is not the performer on center stage. Sermon a lecture, so what? This church raises its own crop of priests. No fear of new pastor, forcibly installed by dictatorial cardinal archbishop. One of their own takes place of forcibly ejected founding pastor. No expectation or fear of frenzied hand-shaking just before Communion.
3-Complaints & assertions
A TIME TO PRAY . . .
In the spring of 2006, our parish collapsed the Sunday mass schedule from 8:30 and 10:30 to only 9:30, for reasons evident to anyone familiar with our shortage of priests and reduced mass attendance.
“Some of us will groan” at this, our pastor said in the bulletin, making the best of it: “Some have been going to [one or other of these masses] for years and don’t know the parishioners at the other masses!” The change provides a chance for us “to see each other and know each other.”
There’s merit to that. The change would be an exercise in habit-changing for the sake of “unity.” The one-mass celebration will be “joyful,” he predicted, and will “remind us of our oneness in Christ.” A stick drawing had a crew in rowing shell and the words “Pull together.”
Prudent parish management for logistical reasons. At the same time, exemplifying the community-building priority of the mass to which Catholic churchgoers had become accustomed, or inured as the case may be. Our pastor was operating in the main flow of Catholic thinking and practice. In that role, he was doing his duty as he saw it.
He also was substituting one aspect of Catholic worship for the whole. At least leaving it out of the equation. Nation-building was for the U.S. President for much of this century. Community-building was for the Catholic pastor. He didn’t celebrate mass, for instance, he presided. He didn’t lead people to Christ, he organized them on the premise of leading them to Him in that way. What better purpose for the mass than being crucial to that process?
It took a while for this to dawn on me. The new normal, not so new, of course, was to find God in your neighbor. The other, to find Him in prayer and meditation, though never denied — hardly, that would have given away the show — was deemphasized or reformulated as extracurricular, something auxiliary which you can also do, while the mass was turned over almost entirely to community-building. Moments of silence were dropped in here and there — the consecration, which always got its due, the brief time for adding one’s petitions in silence, and usually a smidgen of inactivity post-communion.
Otherwise, the air was filled. If radio performers can’t permit dead air, neither can today’s priests, bishops. organists, solo singers, choruses, commentators, hey, even ushers, who on their way to usher people out of the pews for joining the line for communion stop along the way to shake hands with all on-the-aisle pewsitters. It’s gangbusters, and for what? Not, surely to enhance worship as divinely directed but to build community.
Shake hands with all the neighbors, but do not kiss the colleens all unless you know them very well. You will know you’re as welcome as the flowers in May, as if you were newly returned to dear old Donegal — an Irish melody I learned from my brothers decades ago.
Whence came such a wonder, so dramatically different from a few generations ago? How happened those revolutionary changes of the 1970s and later? Who did it? Why did they do it? How did they pull it off? A little book like this can shed some light, drawing on what happened, who decreed it or opposed it, what critics said about it.
Take the all-church changeover from Latin to English after Vatican II, not just suggested or strongly urged but enforced — centralized planning to make a statist weep with envy. The world over, Catholics got used to mass in the everyday language of each. Social engineering on a world scale, change by design of a few, not by natural influences.
Vatican II celebrated freedom for the children of God — grand phrase! — but not in liturgy. Latin had to go. Latin went. Rebels were marginalized. Only recently has Latin returned with church authority’s blessings.
This novus ordo was change dictated from above for our own good by people who knew what was best. How else to put it? It was to prove no blessing at all for a Jesuit friend who complained privately that he had enough trouble believing in the mass in Latin, without putting it in English. The Latin made it a ceremony, rather than a bald statement of reality.
His problem would sound strange to today’s 30-something who learned Catholicism in a parish religious-education class where love-love-hooray-for-love was the virtual sum and substance of everything Catholic. My friend had much more to believe about the mass than she does today, when it’s a church-sponsored, Scripture-referenced celebration of unity with each other. He was expected to believe in transubstantiation — who now even uses the word? — by which the bread and wine became the body and blood of Jesus in substance, while continuing to look and taste like bread and wine. Not to mention the reenactment of Calvary and the solemnity of holy sacrifice.
The priest held the host (bread) and believed he held the body of Christ. Some few could hardly do it and would stutter at the “words of consecration,” barely able to say them. A whole new mass developed after Vatican II, vernacularized, as much communicating with fellow worshipers as with God. The priest would face the people, look at them, saying the dread words, making them more pew-sitter-friendly.
My friend saw the mystery dissolving away, and with it his belief. This has happened for many. Mass is now something else — arguably a very good thing, this celebration of unity. As for the mystical and mysterious, that’s a happy memory, fast fading from Catholic consciousness.
The main character in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh’s 1957 novel based on his own mid-life experience, is a Roman Catholic who just when church leaders were urging worship as a corporate rather than private act, had “burrowed ever deeper into the rock” and when away from his home parish sought the “least frequented mass” and remained “aloof from” church organizations formed to meet the needs of the times. Called “a leading Catholic” by media, he was not conspicuous for his leadership.
Some find that appalling, I’m sure, but — to adapt U.S. presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s distinctly witty remark of his critic Norman Vincent Peale — I found it appealing. In my view, today’s Roman Catholic worship represents capitulation to a personal, Protestant piety. Once the emphasis was on God and ceremony, now it’s on the priest. He has become the main character, as performer. We like this or that parish because the priest is a performer after our likes. It always mattered who said a mass. Some did it more lovingly, shall we say, than others. But differences were muted by sheer force of ritual. Personal, quirky additions or emendations were unheard of. Now they are everywhere. They are what give the priest-performer style. He may not intend that, but he’s under the gun to perform. So he does, improvising.
That said, the goal can still be there for the mass-sayer or celebrant. He can ditch the folksy business, or the pseudo-scholarly or the innovative. And he can be more matter-of-fact about it. You wonder sometimes about the emotional stability of some. They spill their guts and go all emotionally compassionate. They are romantics when you get down to it. But classicists have feelings too. They just don’t go all sloppy about it. Granted, the priest is in competition with a media-frenzied world, especially as on television. But even there you can sometimes find clarity without bathos. Even there the message is muted sometimes. Priests should hit the volume scale more often, even sometimes shutting up, but at least toning things down.
And for starters, they should not open mass with that “Good morning” bit. They are not running into us at the supermarket, they are leading worship. Let them can the informality.
Later, from Reader D.:
I LOVE your suggestion that priests should hit mute. Mute is Biblical: “I must decrease so He can increase.” All the chummy baloney at Mass is the Phil Donahue syndrome. That’s when it started, and that’s when this generation of pastors were newbies. They learned to take their mikes down into the audience. Spare me!!!
However . . .
I decided during the Easter Triduum at the Monastery of the Holy Cross (which I enjoyed) that Gregorian Chant is over-rated. Who the heck hums Chant in their free time besides Brother Peter? It’s mathematics as music. Give me a little melody. Watching a bit of the Easter vigil on EWTN with Pope Benedict, I discovered Latin is an equalizer. There was no German accent – just Latin.
One of my main points is: People should have the option, as much as possible.
Changing the words of Mass, February 2011 — Like the TV detective Monk, I have a gift that is also a curse: I often pay very close attention at Mass. (Not always, as above.) So when the priest veers away from the approved text, I hear it and fume. Used to fume. Now I go into my free-fly zone. (As above) Frequently.
In this zone, I woolgather, daydream, write columns (or sermons — an old habit), and otherwise retreat to the life within. This means that one minute I’m saying “Lord hear our prayer” with the other faithful, next minute that I know about, I am rising for the Our Father. Awful, I know. Can only say I’m working on it.
The paying close attention thing is a bigger problem. The priest replaces “His” with “God’s,” “disciples” with “friends,” “Almighty Father” with “Almighty God” etc. Two of these reduce masculine references — the fewer of them the better. The other is apparently meant to de-emphasize levels of authority in favor of intimacy. Irritating, if you are a listener like me, who has leaned toward close listening for years, even before becoming a reporter and having to get things straight — listen, listen, scribble, scribble, use it for thousands to read or call it in to a persnickety rewrite man.
Our friends at the Vatican are paying attention to this phenomenon. In 2004 they called it a “reprobated practice by which priests, deacons or the faithful . . . alter or vary at will the texts of the Sacred Liturgy that they are charged to pronounce.”
Yes. Unstable because worshipers who pay attention never know what they will hear from the man with the microphone up front. Distorts meaning in various ways, including (egregiously) in the matter of the centrally located doxology.
That’s when we praise God, as when the priest says in a fairly dramatic wind-up to the canon, “Through him, with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever.”
To which the people say the Great Amen, affirming trinitarianism, telling the world we are not Unitarians, not Arians, that we think Jesus is God the Son. It’s a very important case of “
lex credendi” – as we pray, so we believe.
I have heard, however, “Through him, with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, in, all glory and honor is yours, almighty God, for ever and ever.” For “Father,” God. Why? It doesn’t deny the Trinity, of course, but it undercuts the liturgical expression. Why? Apparently to cut back on masculine references.
The priest sidesteps the fatherhood of God in favor of the politically correct non-reference to gender. It’s part of the church’s (pseudo-) save-the-women project.
By the way, one has the devil’s own time in finding the official version of the Mass at the U.S. Catholic bishops’ site. Try it and instruct me in how to find it if you do find it, dear reader.
As for the Lord’s Prayer, I am waiting for “Our Parent, who art in heaven,” etc. It’s coming, trust me.
2011-08-09: Meditating at Mass (POSTED: 8/9/11) PRAYER AND MEDITATION: No paragon of these am I, even if at 18 I left home to study them full time. After two years of it (novitiate), I got my SJ degree, which I relinquished many years later but would rather not go into that right now.
Even so, much of it has stuck. At Mass, for instance, I often enter the zone of prayer and meditation, which makes me a poor participant in the standard liturgy. Doesn’t mean I think of nothing else (distractions arrive) or that I am superior to the one next to me who belts out the songs and responses. In fact, you could argue I’m not as good because I seem to reject the communal aspect that characterizes today’s liturgy.
However . . .
Do we not exceed the limits of liturgical propriety sometimes when, for instance, we extend handclasp of peace to other pew-sitters far and wide, even getting out of our pews to hug and chat? Just asking.
Communion time also. What about our meeting and greeting on way to the communion station? Ushers do it. They are the souls of geniality as if they were the host greeting you at the door of a party. And they and others seem sometimes to take it amiss if you don’t participate, like the old gent at Ascension-Oak Park some years back who stood where communion-goers passed, glad-handing one and all. I didn’t go along, and the fellow was surprised and wounded.
We get carried away with our communality.
Something missing? Sense of the sacred? The R-word, reverence?
Communion time at a Mass of burial, an arguably solemn time on an arguably solemn occasion: Worshiper who has participated lustily throughout Mass thinks of something to call the attention of one sitting next to her, does so. But the other is in a zone and working on staying there and can only nod and turn back. Later, returning from communion, same worshiper has to pass others to get to his place in the pew, puts head down and looks straight ahead. Others for whom this is a social occasion seem not sure about this, seeming to wonder what gives with this fellow.
I ask you. Is something missing that used to be there? What was missing from the Mass of old, a certain brand of communality, has replaced the prayer-and-meditation aspect. Pious chatter there is, mostly from the altar, where Father feels compelled to comment when once there was silence. Time for some sort of pendulum shift? I ask you.
The Mass belongs to the Church, not the priest March, 2012, Letter to editor: [The publisher in a recent in a recent column] is indignant about Bishop Edward Braxton’s telling a priest not to ad-lib the Mass, as if it’s the priest’s Mass and he can do with it anything he wants. But it’s not his, it’s the church’s. Braxton had no choice. Once apprised of the situation, he nixed the practice. What was he supposed to do, poll the congregation?
Dan would like the church to conform in this matter. And in how many others? It’s an institution that claims divine founding and has thousands of years of being governed pretty much as it is today. But a priest wants to remake the Mass, the center of Catholic worship? Braxton is supposed to say go ahead, suit yourself? If he has authority in any area, it’s in worship.
Books, crooks and other half-minded thoughts, April, 2013: In a column, I asked if there’s room in the church for half-baked ideas, even half-vast ones. Let’s see, I said, producing a few.
One. Praying for peace is a good idea, but for an “end to violence” or even the specific “end to violence in Chicago”? Really? Who is kidding whom?
That’s praying for the end of the world, which will be a wonderful thing, to be sure, what with Jesus returning in glory. His earliest followers prayed for that. But we might add an Augustinian “not yet.”
How about “less violence”? Or “a few fewer killings on our mean streets”? Something we can take seriously without calling for an end to life as we know it.
Another, here barely outlined of course, is whether to reform church language. For instance, we are urged to pray for the deceased who “rest(s) in the loving embrace” of God.
Which strikes me as romance-novel stuff. “May he (or she or they) rest in peace” works nicely — from the Latin “Requiescat in pace,” R.I.P. Do we need this loving-embrace talk? One cringes.
2/27/2005 KEEN ANALYSIS . . . Sacramentalism used to be the thing, but in contemporary Catholicism it’s the person. We take our cue from Evangelical Protestantism, where grace (divine help) comes from praying with partners after service, for instance, as at Calvary Memorial in Oak Park, and not from the sacrament.
Or so it seems, considering the overall makeup of the service. Potential partners wait at the end of each service, usually couples. It’s ministry up close and personal, to use last year’s hot phrase. And believe me, it’s a good thing and can achieve wonders. And there’s no reason Catholics couldn’t do the same thing.
Ritual was the medium in Catholicism, not one’s fellow worshipers. This was a major sticking point of the Reformation, as in whether the sinfulness of the minister affected a sacrament’s value. “Ex opere operato” was a key term, from or because of the thing done, vs. ex opere operantis, from or because of the one doing it.
It’s a 500-year-old or older divide. In bald terms, for the sake of argument, does it matter who administers the sacrament (who’s the minister) or does the sacrament carry its own weight? Fall on one side, you have something good anywhere, any time, any place. Fall on the other, it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing.
Lacking ritual, you have something here today, gone tomorrow or next century. Lacking the personal, you have the unsalable, the unpersuasive. You always depend on people. But with ritual, you have what lasts, what relies less on performance by the minister. Do a good formula right, you’ve got it right.
But Catholic worship has gotten flaccid and informal, compared to 50 years ago. It features priest as performer (which he is, to a degree, as are servers and all else who are part of the service, so it comes down to how he performs), even showman, vs. priest as follower of ritual prescribed by the church as millennial institution.
6/14/2016 How to fix the mass.
1. Overhaul sermon training. Make preaching an overriding emphasis for priests. It’s a matter of getting people to know Jesus. If they do not get the preaching, how will they know Jesus?
2. Make variety of changes, all to reverse novus ordo innovations, in order of importance:
1. Turn the altar around so the mass is no longer an extended sermon but a prayer in which priest and people are truly in it together, facing ceremonially, symbolically toward God.
2. Restore Latin — for its own sake, a few of us feel, but for all as a special, ministerial language to be associated with the mass as unique in worshipers’ experience, unlikely to be compared to a family dinner, for instance.
3. Eliminate the handshake of peace as disruptive of this like-no-other experience.
4. Eliminate communion in the hand and wine communion as distracting from and even disparaging this like-no-other element.
5. Restore altar rail or provide kneeling space for recipient who takes like-no-other part seriously.
6. more?
April, 2017, THE MASS OF THE ’40S VS. OF TODAY, A CATHOLIC LAMENT
1. The Latin was mysterious, signalling the (bona fide) mysteries of the Eucharist, vs. today’s liturgical populism, downgrading the mystical and downplaying the sacral.
3. The priest at mass was (presumably) a priest at prayer, absorbed in that aspect, which meant he did not look at or survey people, even when turning to them to pronounce a blessing or solicit response.
4. As functionary or performer of the sacred ritual, he was severely limited. Ritual reigned, ad libbing unheard of.
5. People looked forward and saw the priest facing in the same direction, he being a crucial element in the transaction but not the focus. (Important point here and now, when the priest has become the focus, people look at him, there being nothing else, presuming they pay attention to what’s going on.)
6. The priest never looked at the people, as already noted. It was prayer time, for him and the rest of us, moments of silence and (attempted) communing with the supernatural.
7. Mass over, church remained a place of prayer, not reverting to a social hall, as if the Sacrament did not remain, ensconced in tabernacle.
8. All in all, there was less or no socializing in church, more or only reverence or at least silence. People whispered in a church.
It’s different now. You might be praying or trying to pray and the priest passing by, say before mass, might catch your eye in greeting, intent on being sociable.
He might even (though rarely) tell you later what he noticed (or didn’t) about you during mass, as it were counting the house. (Father sees you.)
The parish director of liturgy, a good man, reflecting accepted practice, chatting with another man in a rear pew during mass. Asked if he might take his conversation into the hall steps away, he declines.
A parishioner, a very senior citizen, greets people as they approach for communion, shaking hands as a sort of greeter, and is shocked when a fellow parishioner trying to keep his mind on the sacred event ignores his outstretched hand. (The greeter is in the spirit of the event as presented on that day, the other man in the spirit of something else.)
August, 2017, What is to be changed in my revised liturgy:
1. Priest at altar to face same direction as I. (I do not want him as my focus.)
2. Place to kneel while receiving communion on the tongue. (Not having to balance, centering self before sticking tongue out.)
3. Latin for its ceremonial ambience, among other less obvious reasons.
4. Neither kiss nor handshake nor anything else of peace, but prayerful moments for everybody in the whole wide world.
5. Let preachers be licensed after serious exercising and testing in basic elocution and writing for various publics, with much reading of sermons over the ages, to give a feel of what’s been done. (Licensing those who pass the course, for Sundays and big feast days anyhow.)
September, 2018, St. Gregory the Great feast day. Reformer of liturgy, patron and promoter of the chant named after him. Alas, poor chant, we hardly knew ye, now almost never hear you. The “Danny Boy” tune is another question.
Readings for the day? 1 Cor 2.1-5, where St. Paul the Great says he began his preaching with fear and trembling and self-doubt. was nervous. He “depended on no persuasive language,” he says, in Knox translation. “God’s power was to be the foundation of your faith,” he tells Corinthians. (Italics added) Ah, there’s the rub. Preacher has to be in touch with said power, somehow.
There’s something to keep in mind as some of us, I once among them with both feet, put our trust in community organization and the like — politics by any name. Which says nothing about not engaging in such, only that organizers et al. should keep in mind what counts in the end.
September, 2003, Interruptions . . . Some thoughts I have while worshiping at the church of my choice, as when I am recalling days as a mass server long ago, various leakages and excretions — throwing up at an early week-day mass, sneezing messily without access to handkerchief which I had forgotten to bring.
The sneezing was spotted — during a sermon, we boys on one side of the sanctuary, priests on the other — by one of them celebrating the solemn high mass, at which the men-and-boys choir situated in the loft far back in the rear of the building sang out Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei, not to mention the day’s gradual, etc., and incense burned and bells rang and all heaven broke loose.
In my case it was more than that, as nasal passages poured forth their contents. A hand went up to catch the torrent and came back requiring immediate attention. There was the cassock sleeve, not a good option. Besides, there was more on hand (in my hand, actually) than a cassock sleeve could accommodate.
The denouement escapes me. All that remains is the kindly priest across the sanctuary, who knew and seemed to feel my pain but could not help smiling, finding the whole thing funny, which it was, I suppose.
The importance of not paying attention, April, 2005 . . . Some ten or 15 years ago, I realized the importance at mass of ignoring what’s up front. Various ministers and performers parade before you. They are not to be blamed. It’s the way things are. Politeness does not require looking at them, however. I decided not to look but to mind my own business, reading and meditating on the day’s Scripture, having my own private mass, as a woman said in a meeting about prayer in Oak Brook some years ago.
There’s too much going on up front. Such as the traipsing to and fro with book held high over forehead as if to ward off falling plaster, prior to reading Scripture of the day. It’s a ritual that can be not helpful but merely distracting. Then, more disconcerting, you look up and see the priest looking at you. He can’t help it. Reverentially downcast eyes have not been part of his training. But you can help it by not looking.
The importance of kissing your wife at mass, May, 2005 . . . At peace time during mass, I kiss my wife if she’s in kissing distance but sometimes give a most cursory finger clasp, eyes down, to others I can’t avoid. Then I put head down with hands on pew seat before me, and that’s the end of peace-kissing or -handshaking.
Other times, I look for someone with whom I can have a friendly head nod with smile. Firm open-palm handclasp offered to a stranger, especially a hale fellow with grip? No thanks, if only to spare the arthritic hand.
Blithe Spirit 