Category Archives: 2-Experienced

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 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 personal worthiness.

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 too often gotten flaccid and informal compared to 50 years ago. It features priest as performer, even showman, vs. priest as follower of ritual prescribed by the church as divinely founded institution.

Better if he’s good at it, but good even if he isn’t.

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 learning. Or reflexive response. Or . . . ?

The second of these two changes — his name to God’s name — is to reduce the number of masculine pronouns, apparently to lessen the masculinity (!) of the worship experience.

The first — your hands to our hands — is more pernicious, because it ignores the sacramental minister, makes him one of the pew-sitters, which he isn’t.

Huge doctrinal change here, by which worshipers became officers, as it were, of the sacrament, not the priest, which is to carry priesthood of the faithful to new levels indeed.

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 it and at times work up some blue-ribbon indignation.

Point is, why not expand social-justice discussion to troubles behind the obvious —  poverty and the like — into political corruption, which is pretty obvious at that and does poor people no good and like everything else that’s bad affects them most of all. Vast idea there.

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, stuff happens, and all that. Bear with me.

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, don’t get mad.

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 a few 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.

It happens. We get carried away with our communality.

Something missing? Sense of the sacred, anyone? 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 to another’s attention, 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, wondering what gives with this fellow.

I ask you.

Is something missing that used to be there at Mass? What was missing from the Mass of old, a certain on-site 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.

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, 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.

Our friends  at the Vatican paid 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.”

They said this in a disciplinary document, “Redemptionis Sacramentum,” issuing a must-cease order in the matter because such freelancing with the liturgy makes its celebration “unstable” and distorts its meaning.

I think so.

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 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 orandi 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. 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 save-the-women project.

As for the Lord’s Prayer, I am waiting for “Our Parent, who art in heaven,” etc.

. . . 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 each other as with God. The priest would face the people, look at them, saying the sacred words, making them more pew-sitter-friendly.

Mass today has the arguably good thing, in our celebration of community with each other. As for the mystical and mysterious, that’s a memory fast fading from Catholic consciousness.

. . . Nah. Penetrating. To the heart of the matter.

. . . Which is yet more on the “Shake, rattle” controversy — handshake as kiss of peace before communion.

Summarizing, offering selective observations by readers of ten-plus years ago.

* Bob O. suggests kiss and non-kiss (-shake) sections of church, the ushers asking your preference.

* Bob K. considers church ideal for meeting, greeting, and otherwise being nice to people.

* Margaret tells us that church is for God, not us: Ask not what God can do for you but what you can do for God.

* D. says timing is all 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” — and 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 asks, “Can a New Mass that so obscures its own meaning be from God?”

Some good stuff here.

* Bob O’s consumer-preference model reminds me that the new mass was stuffed down our throats in the ’70s, to the extent that Latin mass-sayers were made to stop, because they were drawing too many away from what experts thought was good for us.

* Bob K’s meeting and greeting is a great idea — outside of mass. Attempts at prayer go with socializing? Don’t buy it.

* Margaret’s bringing us up short with her revolutionary idea that we are not the center of the known universe is refreshing. So is her (unpublished) reference to accounting for herself “on judgment day” for steering anyone away from mass.

Who now is concerned about judgment day? Is it a legitimate concern, or has it gone the way of the Latin mass? We don’t hear about, that’s evident. Maybe some expert can tell us.

* D. addresses the way kiss-handshaking is done, raising her small voice of reason as maybe a stopper or slowing-downer of ENTHUSIASM in the pews.

(Ronald Knox wrote a book about it, bringing scholarly restraint to our impulses and compulsions.)

* If Jennifer is going to spot psychobabble in public utterances by church people, however, she will have time for nothing else. My advice is to pick out 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 (incorrectly) in his New World column.

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.

Meanwhile, the kissing for peace continues as strong as ever, in its handshaking incarnation.

It happened to me on a weekday morning long ago, in a two-hands-on-shoulder from the parish deacon in vestments, who had left the altar and sought me out as I sat in a back row off to the side, sitting with ONE HAND OVER MY EYES TRYING TO BE AND LOOK PIOUSLY ABSORBED.

Talk about ENTHUSIASM. He climbed into the pew in front of me and scared the bejesus out of me with the clap-on-the-shoulder bit. I had not seen him coming!

Next time I will have to keep my eyes fixed on him so I can be ready.

Some years earlier, going up for communion at a Sunday “family mass” in the school hall of another parish, I failed to give my name as had been prescribed by the organizers, and the big guy holding the host refused me communion until I did.

Oh I tell you, there have been some fun times in church in these glorious years of the mass since the council. Of which more later.

. . . in March of ’06. . .

The divide is in terms of religion as therapy vs. as sacrifice, people-centered vs. God-centered, that separates Catholics.

From Reader Margaret, reacting to Bob K’s enthusiastic endorsement of the kiss of peace as widely practiced:

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. . .

But 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?

Reader Jennifer finds Margaret’s comment that we have “slipped from the meaning of Mass as sacrifice,” etc. “so very true” but finds Bob K’s use of “power,” as in “our 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?” Jennifer agrees, adding pregnantly, “God does not do transactional analysis.”

Bob K., responding, does not think we have slipped in our grasp of the mass. Based on what he learned in high school in 1955, he considers the mass a distillation of centuries’ practice.

“There have been changes in many aspects of our faith 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 [“we”?]; 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.”

Bob captured the spirit of our dominant form of worship.

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