View from a Tabernacle: Style in Liturgical Arts - Part 2 | Return to Part 1

 

Reform Returns Ancient Practices?

Although zealots for reform invoked the practices of the primitive Church, appeal to ancient liturgies is romantic if not capricious. The religious culture of antiquity is extinct. The pastoral concerns of a pre-Constantinian Church, adapted to a hazardous, unstable environment, no longer apply in the West.

If authenticity were truly the object, we would return to the ritual forms of a Jewish community meal. The faithful might be permitted to take consecrated bread home with them, as was done up to the fourth century when daily Mass was impossible. Or communicants might, again, kiss the hand of the one giving them communion. Women could be obliged to cover their hands with a white cloth, in accord with ancient custom. Laity intending to receive would be expected, once again, to wash their hands. As Jungmann states, "It was customary since ancient times to wash the hands before prayer." Today's communion in the hand is a halfway measure for a liturgy adrift that can neither keep its gaze on God nor endorse a candid secularity.

Certainly, reception in the hand can be accomplished prayerfully and with reverent attention. My concern is with what the abandonment of ritual handling signifies, particularly to Catholics indifferent to the doctrine of the Real Presence. If the host is ours to take in unwashed bare hands, it loses resonance as a tremendous reality stamped with the cross. If purification is not necessary for the hands of the laity, the relevance of the ritual washing of the priest's hands is repealed. Was the traditional Lavabo, then, just another stage effect? What are we to believe about the anointing of a priest's hands at ordination? About the consecration itself? More hocus-pocus, as Protestant reformers once claimed?

Through the fine dust of disconnected particles, we glimpse the grinding down of sacramental theology.

On crowded Sundays at my parish, teams of eucharistic ministers fan out like waiters to their stations, anticipating customers. Sunday is a busy day, and lines have to be kept moving. The priest, dwindled to a presider, complies; he deals hosts with brisk, mechanical efficiency.

To expedite communion, priests will frequently walk away from the sacral center, chalice in hand, to a distribution point in the nave. Now and then, en route, one will toss a humorous pleasantry into the crowd. That one flash of laid-back, throw-away iconoclasm shatters the climate of prayer. Extinguished with it is any small stab of dread, of wonder and humility, that accompanies approach to the Holy of Holies. Communion is something consumed on the premises, like a Happening. The presider is just another genial dispenser of goods to communicants steeped in the mores of a culture of abundance. Geniality, like any idol, generates its own obligations. Pleasing the crowd is one of them. To cap success in his performance, one particular "presider" likes to personalize the ritual farewell. Still at the altar, he is apt to follow the ceremonial dismissal with "Have a nice day." Thus is the Ite missa est reduced to a banal literalism. Shorn of ancient memory, the congregation disperses into the great Right Now, secure in a late-model liturgy with low mileage.

Moments like this uncover the essential quality of clerical approach to the laity. To meet modern man on his own level, it is apparently considered necessary to stoop. A trade in small vulgarities is the price of contact.

The impulse to patronize--to reach people where "they are really at"--achieves its apotheosis in entertainment-worship. This hybrid seems to result naturally from priests facing a large crowd and feeling bound to perform for it. By heightening audience effect, the versus populum posture encourages presiders to take their cues not from the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy but from e.e. cummings: "Damn everything but the circus."

Carnival Atmosphere

Our contemporary concelebrated Mass, liberated from ancient decorums, is particularly poised for carnival. Monsignor, as master of ceremonies, stands at the altar and joshes each member of the rectory cast. Aside to the audience: "Father So-and-So has just left Christmas Eve dinner at his mother's house to join us tonight." [Applause] To Father So-and-So: "So tell us, Father, how many fish courses did Mamma serve tonight?" The luckless priest grins and bleats, "Three." [Laughter] On it goes, down the line to the deacon, who is not above visibly elbowing his way past ordained clergy to assert his place in the action. The ringing of a bell to announce pub closings, still heard and heeded by London drinkers, demonstrates greater liturgical sensitivity. Orwell had it right: "There's always room for one more custard pie."

It would be a sign of grace to hear someone hiss, say, or do something that indicates the profanities have registered for what they are. But no one even blinks. Father is a good egg. The congregation enjoys the chumminess. It chuckles, goes home, and reveals to Gallup precisely how much these cheery rituals mean. The sensus communis fidelium has been sadly blunted, it seems, by obedience to the directives of an ecclesial nomenclatura tone deaf to the demands--and rewards--of liturgical language.

Too frequently, Sunday Mass calls to mind judgments made by Jesuit Alfred Delp. Awaiting execution in a Nazi prison for choosing to remain loyal to the Church, Fr. Delp kept a diary (The Prison Meditations of Father Delp) from Advent 1944 to his death in early February 1945. One judgment above all others is lodged in my memory: "At some future date, the honest historian will have some bitter things to say about the contribution of the Churches to the mass mind, to collectivism...and so on."

The mass mind is the mind of the world. If not as thoroughly secular as commonly supposed, the mass mind is decidedly comfortable with the kind of "religionless Christianity"--to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer's influential phrase--that hovers beneath the surface of so much revised liturgy. It stumbles over mystery and divine purpose. It is superior to what it views as an implausible collection of superstitions and credulities. It refuses the contents of orthodox Catholicism--particularly those that orbit the mysteries of the incarnation, resurrection, and eucharistic transubstantiation. These are tolerated exclusively as symbols, only so long as their symbolic value serves ethical imperatives consistent with reigning sociopolitical agendas.

Jacques Maritain, in his last book, The Peasant of the Garonne, offers a description of the mass mind that bears repeating:

The world cannot make sense of the theological virtues. Theological faith the world sees as a challenge, an insult and a threat; it is by reason of their faith that it dislikes Christians.... Faith is enough to divide them from the world. Theological hope the world does not see at all. It is simply blind to it. Theological charity the world sees the wrong way; it misapprehends it, is mistaken about it. It confuses it with any kind of quixotic devotion to whatever human cause it may profit by. And thus does the world tolerate charity, even admire it--insofar as it is not charity but something else.

And thus does the world tolerate charity. Sense of the Sacred

In the heady postconciliar era, right-thinking dictated the dismantling of religious awe to encourage social participation. The faithful had to surrender naive pieties and attachment to sacral mystery to serve their moment in history. The 1970s were giddy with claims for the sociocritical role of Christians. The simple faithful were, in effect, class enemies of those who would realize the kingdom of God through temporal progress. The day belonged to the prophets of reform, clerical variants of previous ideologues of proletarian culture. A social action ecclesiology was in the air. Liturgy must point us toward the perfected future age.

They have been with us a long time, these world-improvers. They are accountable for more than the destruction of the Roman rite. What is ultimately at stake in the dissolution of our sense of transcendence--so striking at the parish level--is nothing less than Christian ability to recognize the demands of charity where they truly reside, not simply where the world points. The world is devious, fickle in its definitions of justice and mercy. Even the culture of death advances under the banner of compassion.

The foundations of worship are fragile. Reverence is not hereditary. There is no gene for it. It has to quicken anew in each generation. Consequently, its modes of transmission have to be conserved and cherished. We need to be watchful not to dislodge a certain fear of the Lord--the trembling of the ancient psalmist--without which reverence cannot endure. It matters tremendously the things we choose as evocations of the divine mysterium. So much depends on the settings we create for the life of prayer. Lex orandi, lex credendi.

 

Published originally as "Worship Gone Awry," Crisis � 2000.