Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

We left only part way through this inspired rant by a distinguished scholar and analyst of all things Catholic, George Weigel, with this about how Father Freelance makes it up and he goes along while saying mass, “. . .  whether indulged by old, middle-aged, or young, it’s obnoxious and it’s an obstacle to prayer.”

George W. continued in that vein:

Especially now, I might note, given the restoration of the more formal rhythms of liturgical language in the English translations we’ve used since Advent 2011. Those translations are not faultless. But they’re a massive improvement on what we used to have . . .

How so?

. . .  by restoring sacral language that was peremptorily discarded in the previous translation, the current translation reminds us that Mass is far more than a social gathering; it’s an act of worship, the majesty of which should be reflected in the language of the liturgy-which is not the language of the shopping mall or the Super Bowl party.

True, omitting for the moment, the yet more solemn, special, uncommon language replaced by hook and by crook by the post-Vatican  2 fixers — you guessed it, the mother tongue of the West, Latin.

In one sense, though, the new translation has made things worse. For when Father Freelance scratches his itch to show just how congregation-friendly he is by making what he imagines are nifty changes to the Mass text, he instantly sets up sonic dissonance for anyone with a reasonably well-tuned ear. And sonic dissonance makes it hard to pray.

Perfect description of the problem — worst kind of distraction, like a radio jingle. Think the diabolical “kars for kids” or the number to call, repeated thrice, when you have to counter it with your own number, 1-2–3-4 will do, so you don’t remember it.

So with a civil new year upon us, [it was that time of year] may I suggest to our fathers in Christ that they cease and desist from making it up, juicing it up, or otherwise tinkering with the Missal? As an old liturgical saw has it, referring to the difference in color that distinguishes prayers from instructions in the Missal, “Read the black and do the red.” Just that, Father. Read the black and do the red. Or, better, pray the black and do the red.

A golden rule of thumb.

Such self-discipline on the part of celebrants would also help eliminate the clericalism (and worse) involved when Father Freelance, well, free-lances. For in metaphorically thumbing his nose at the Council’s clear injunction (not to mention the rubrics in the Missal), Father Freelance is de facto asserting his own superiority over the liturgy. And in doing so, he is, whether he intends it or not, downgrading the congregation’s role in offering right worship to the Thrice-Holy God.

A Daniel come to judgment!

In a properly celebrated Mass, the vocalized dialogue of prayer between celebrant and congregation takes place in a linguistic rhythm established by the shared text of the Mass. And that rhythm is broken when, to take one example that’s grated on me recently, the celebrant announces the Gospel reading by saying, “The Good News of the Lord as proclaimed by Luke.” To which the expected response, “Glory to you, O Lord,” sounds clunky, whereas it neatly answers the prescribed announcement, “A reading from the holy Gospel according to –.”

Getting into the slightly high weeds here, but what he flags would be jarring indeed.

It may come as a surprise to Father Freelance, but after more than four decades of priest-celebrants trying to be Johnny Carson, Bob Barker, Alex Trebek, or whomever, this act is getting very old. Father, you’re just not very good at it. Your freelancing is often banal, even silly. Moreover, you demean us by suggesting that we, the congregation, can’t handle the sacral language of the liturgy, and that we have to be jollied into participation. In fact, if you listen carefully, you’ll discover that congregational responses drop off when you invite a response in your terms, not the liturgy’s.

Ouch, ouch, double ouch. Let us not read Father out of the human race, but having said that though not so — ah — eloquently, I must agree.

So please, fathers in Christ, spare us these attempts at creativity, or user-friendliness, or whatever it is you think you’re doing. They just don’t work. Please just pray the black and do the red. And the worship Vatican II intended will be much enhanced thereby.

Amen, and I shrink from saying that word, having heard a parish priest in the ’70s use it for a brutally supposed common-man opener to the canon, singing, Sidney Poitier’s song in “Lilies of the Field,” —

Amen. Amen. Amen, amen, amen.
Sing it over!
Amen. Amen. Amen, amen, amen

Woe!

And last but least . . .

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

And much, much more . . .

A fellow does some noodling. What to do?

1. Overhaul sermon training. Make preaching an overriding emphasis. It’s a matter of getting people to know Jesus. If they do not get the preaching, how will they know Jesus?

2. 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 together toward God.

3. Restore Latin — for its own sake, a few of us feel, but 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.

4. Eliminate the handshake of peace as disruptive of this like-no-other experience.

5. Eliminate communion in the hand standing as distracting from and even disparaging the like-no-otherness of the ceremony, specifically the reality of transubstantiation. Eliminate wine communion.

6. Restore altar rails.

Priests who make it up as they go along.

If you’re a daily Mass attendant, the odds are that you’ve heard General Norm 22.3 of “Sacrosanctum concilium” violated on a weekly basis.

In all the sixteen documents of the Second Vatican Council, is there any prescription more regularly violated than General Norm 22.3 of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy? Which, in case you’ve forgotten, teaches that “no . . . person, not even a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority”?

The Spirit works in mysterious ways. This isn’t one of them.

If you’re a daily Mass attendant, the odds are that you hear that norm violated a dozen times a week. Sunday Mass people typically hear it violated two or three times a week, at least.

Auto-editing or flat-out rewriting the prescribed text of the Mass is virtually epidemic among priests who attended seminary in the late Sixties, Seventies, or early Eighties; it’s less obvious among the younger clergy.

But whether indulged by old, middle-aged, or young, it’s obnoxious and it’s an obstacle to prayer.

I’m with this writer, though less so since like Dr. Strangelove and the bomb, I have learned to stop worrying and love — the free-lancer.

Thing is, I can’t afford to be censorious in the matter. Talk about your obstacles to prayer. Been there, done that. No thanks.

Better to take it as part of the human comedy. Besides, currently I encounter far less of that lately: change of venue and all that, you know.

But I still encourage the writer, the eminent George Weigel, and applaud him for this.

===========================

Just in from loyal reader:

This morning during the live-streaming Mass from Green Bay’s cathedral, a retired priest filled in for the rector.

In a number of places he put in his pronoun of choice. Why would he change “he” to “Jesus” for instance?

It must gall him to say “Our Father.” This kind of stuff doesn’t usually happen at this mass.

It bugs me when a priest imposes his political/social views on me with no authority.

Or no more qualification than the guy on the next bar stool.

I feel this reader’s pain.

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.

My position is, in addition to the almost guaranteed mediocrity as above — substituting such marvels as “Amazing Grace” and “An Irish Lullaby” (what Barry Fitzgerald sang to his mother in “Going My Way”) for church music that survived the ages — you have performers, clerical and otherwise, who are too often not up to the challenge.

Big problem here. The stone-for-bread business is Scriptural, I must add: “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” from Matthew 7.9.

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.