Some find themselves offered not bread but a stone:

One Catholic, who did not want to trash his parish, says he finds more sustenance these days sneaking off to the old Latin Mass. This isn’t because he’s a traditionalist, but because of its quiet and almost mystical aesthetic: lots of bells, lots of incense, no “awful” hymns badly sung but gorgeous Latin chants instead.

Something not of the everyday variety. Exactly the opposite. It’s a pastoral consideration that escaped post-Vatican 2 liturgy change agents.

Bad music – and bad singers leading the singing – was a frequent young Catholic complaint. One complainer, understanding how superficial that sounds, told me that bad music for him turns what’s supposed to be a sacred time into a [cringe-producing] endurance test.

It’s downright embarrassing [for him] when the cringeworthiness takes place at a Catholic funeral and he’s surrounded by non-Catholic friends.

Sacramentalism used to be the thing, but in contemporary Catholicism it’s the person. Or so it seems.

We have taken our cue from Evangelical Protestantism, where grace (divine help) comes from praying with partners after service, for example, as at Calvary Memorial in Oak Park, and not from the sacrament.

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 a good thing.

Ritual was the prime medium in Catholicism, not one’s fellow worshipers. This was a major sticking point of the Reformation, contained in the question whether the sinfulness of the minister affected a sacrament’s grace-giving effect.

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 divide. In bald terms, for the sake…

. . . where the worship is peaceful, quiet, and fruitful:

My mother, a musician, struggled to endure the off-key singers who led hymns, unfortunately for us all, at Sunday Mass in my hometown parish.

So sometimes she’d sneak out of Mass early Sunday and during the week, take me to daily Mass instead. No off-key singing there. No singing at all, actually. There was quiet, peacefulness, intimacy among the 20 or 30 communicants.

The lights were dim, the sermons short and to the point. “The apostle picked up his cross and followed Him,” the priest began one sermon I remember, then paused, then ended it: “Would that we would do the same.”

More, at Crux, by margeryeagan:

Barely a half-hour long, daily Mass felt to me mysterious and holy and sacred in a way a very busy Sunday Mass, with its ups and downs and all arounds, could…

Strictly speaking he’s the new Prefect of Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, and if you really want to be correct and solidify your credentials in the matter, of this dicastery (!).

Where the die is cast? At least where decisions are made about how mass is said, presumably binding on all ecclesiastical underlings, including cardinals, priests, bishops, and deacons.

Posted on 24 November 2014 by the inimitable Fr. John Zuhlsdorf:

Pope Francis has appointed Robert Card. Sarah, 69, as the new Prefect . . . Hitherto, Card. Sarah, from Guinea, has been the head of the Pontifical Council “Cor Unum.”

At Cor Unum, which oversees Caritas International, Sarah had got iffy about supplying poor people with condoms and the like, the better to not clutter the already crowded earth with their babies, Cor Unum being a disaster-relief organization (another dicastery, by the way) established…

A pessimistic view of today’s Catholic liturgy:

The [post-Vatican 2] Pauline rite [Paul VI’s] is so radical a deconstruction and reconstruction of the Roman liturgy that it does not exist in the same tradition of organic development. It is a new departure, a new thing, not a revision of the old thing that had been handed down over the centuries.

As an artificial liturgical entity constructed out of pieces of the Roman heritage combined with modern scholarly inventions, any future reform of it would be no more than a variation on the new theme.

The only way forward is not to tinker any more with this “fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product” (as Ratzinger called it in 1992), but to return steadfastly and stalwartly to the Catholic and Roman liturgical tradition embodied in the preconciliar Missal.

Indeed, only in this way can the deepest aims and aspirations of the Second…

More on how the mass is reconstituted by free-lancing priest-celebrants.

Item:

May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all his holy Church. . . .

. . . is commonly changed to “our hands” and “God’s name,” which never in my hearing has been explained to the congregation. It’s been simply done, slipped in, over and over until the people do it that way too.

This has been the pattern throughout imposition of the new mass. Words, gestures, stage directions have been all changed without pointing out to people their implications in terms of belief or (hidden or at least hiding) purposes. Better to signal it, over and over, than to (have to) explain it from pulpit or lectern.

Repetition is the mother of study. Or of…

Is there room for half-baked ideas, even half-vast ones, in a discussion of worship?

Let’s see.

* Praying for peace at mass is a good idea, but for an “end to violence” or even the specific “end to violence in Chicago”? Really? Who is kidding whom?

Praying for that is 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 “fewer killings on our mean streets”? Something we can take seriously without calling for an end to life as we know it.

* Among social-justice issues, why do we never hear about vote-stealing? Never stole one myself or saw one stolen, though I was sorely tempted in the class-president election at Loyola U. in 1949. But I read about…

2011 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 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 liturgy.

Doesn’t mean I think of nothing else (distractions, you know) or that I am superior to the fellow or gal next to me who belts out the songs and other responses.

In fact, you could argue I’m not as good because I seem to reject the communal aspect that characterizes today’s liturgy.

So allow me to hang my head in shame at that, asking only for tolerance, OK? I am what I am…

In 2011 I wrote:

Like the TV detective Monk, I have a gift that is also a curse: I pay very close attention at Mass.

So when the priest veers away from the approved text, I hear it and fume. Used to. Now I go into my free-fly zone. Frequently.

In this zone, I wool-gather, daydream, write columns and imaginary sermons, etc. 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 subs out “His” for “God’s,” “disciples” for “friends,” “Almighty God” for “Almighty Father,” etc. Two of these reduce masculine references, sparing feminist sensibilities. The other is apparently meant to de-emphasize levels of authority in favor of intimacy.

Irritating…

. . . was a triumph of centralized planning, enough to make a statist weep with envy, I wrote in 2006.

The world over, Catholics got used to mass in everyday language. It became part of a worldwide social engineering victory — change by design, not by natural influences or “organically,” as you hear.

Vatican II celebrated the freedom of the children of God, but not in liturgy. Latin had to go. Latin went. Rebels were marginalized. Only recently (in 2005) had Latin returned with church authority’s blessings.

So it goes, change dictated from above for our own good by people who know what’s best for us.

A whole new mass developed after Vatican II, developed quite consciously by dedicated experts.

Young Jesuits like me debated the coming changes in the mid-50s. It was already foreshadowed.

This liturgy of the future, in the vernacular, would be as much communicating with…