OK--What Is The Agenda Behind Cardinal Sarah and the "Ad Orientatem" Movement? VI

The Iconostasis at the Russicum
in Rome.  

The Roman Rite has a very unique genius.  The various Eastern Rites and the Rites of Northern Europe were highly influenced by the Court ceremonial of the Emperor or Kings, but Rome was ruled by the Pope and although the papal court developed its own ceremonial it was mainly liturgical and not imperial at least up to the Renaissance papacies.  And while the papal liturgies were more elaborate than the liturgy in a parish or monastic church—due to the presence of the pope—the rite, as practiced in the local churches maintained the Spartan dignity of its ancient character.  However, even the papal liturgies were more austere than the elaborate Gallican Rites practiced north of the Alps.  The vestments in Rome remained the simple dignified vesture of roman magistrates—the alb, the chasuble, the maniple and the stole. The deacon wore a dalmatic in place of the chasuble, though there were rituals in which the deacon too wore a chasuble. The vestments were almost invariably of white wool—the wearing of white being a sign of one’s Roman citizenship.  (Red came to be used, as it was in civil life, for the color of mourning.  It also was used for commemoration of martyrs—perhaps originally due to its connection with death—and for the Passion of the Lord.)  The basic structure of the liturgy: three processions (entrance, gifts, and communion) each followed by a collect remained clearly evident with the Readings placed between the first two and the Eucharistic prayer placed between the second and the third. The congregation stood through the entire liturgy, though there was seating for the clergy during the readings and homilies.  (In the east there were frequent prostrations in imitation of the courtly etiquette.)  A Byzantine priest who has taught liturgy in the seminary pointed out to me that the biblical model for the Roman liturgy is the gathering around the throne of the Lamb in the Book of Revelation singing the Thrice Holy Hymn while the liturgical model for the Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite is Christ the Priest entering into the heavenly sanctuary in the Letter to the Hebrews.  This makes some sense when one familiarizes oneself with the appropriate scriptural texts and the very different geist of each of the two rites. 

My chief objection to the ad apsidem position of the priest in the Roman Rite is that it bespeaks an ecclesiology in which the priest “says Mass” for the people rather than celebrating the Eucharist with them.  The ad apsidem position privatizes the Mass as the action of the priest when in fact it is the action of the entire assembly, priest and people together.  The East, with its very different geist, manages to include the faithful in the key actions of the liturgy despite the ad orientem position and even the presence of icon screens or sanctuary curtains.

The Byzantine—and other Eastern Rites—have developed a very different geist, one that is highly dialogical, than the Roman Rite.  The Byzantine Rite is a series of litanies sung among the (con)celebrant(s) at the altar, the deacon(s) standing at the Holy Doors, and the faithful.  There is a constant exchange of sung dialogue between the altar and the faithful. Even the Eucharistic Prayer contains one of these dialogical litanies.  And don’t forget the priest is not only standing with his back to the people, but the iconostasis blocks most views of the altar entirely.  (In fact, in the more strictly observant churches the Holy Doors are often closed, at least during penitential seasons, and the curtain behind them is drawn blocking any view whatsoever.)  Yet the sung interchange keeps the faithful aware that they are an integral part of the celebration. 

In the West, however the prayers are usually said by the priest alone.  Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei are sung together in a high Mass, but usually by a choir, and high Masses were rare: perhaps one a Sunday in most parishes with the remaining five or six Sunday Masses being a simple low or “read Mass” with only the priest and altar servers responding. 

So the issue for me really is this: is the Eucharist something the priest does on behalf of the people or is it something that the entire Body of Christ—the Church assembled—does together with the priest, as a sacramental presence of Christ in the assembly, does in unity.  The Tradition of the Church, as found in the Fathers of the Church, make it clear that the Liturgy is the work of the entire People of God albeit in their different functions. The versus populum position of the priest at the altar, which is the authentic heritage of the Roman Rite, preserves this in the face of a rite that would otherwise reduce the People of God from exercising their baptismal royal and priestly dignity to mere recipients of grace through the mediatorship of the ordained priest.  There is no way that I want to go back to that faulty ecclesiology, nor do I believe the vast majority of the faithful want to revert to being strangers at the Table of the Lord.  My experience of those seminarians and clergy who wish to go back is that they have a need to dominate and control others that stems from an underdeveloped psycho-sexual self-identity and want to use the Liturgy for their own aggrandizement.  They become, at least in their own minds, the indispensible mediators of grace through whom alone we can approach the Throne of Grace and without whom we would be bereft of the Love of God.  Pray for them for the judgment will be severe.

The Problem With The "Old Mass" --or, The Lazy Krazies

Medieval Bas Relief at Lucca
Cathedral showing Mass celebrated
facing the people.

Well, Holy Week has come and gone another year, but I noticed something in the Krazy response to Pope Francis and his manner of performing the washing of feet on Holy Thursday that I had previously missed and which gave me a clue to the problem, not only of why the Krazies go sooooooo kraaaazy about Francis washing the feet of women, but why so many have issues with the current Liturgical Rites in the “Ordinary Form.” 

What I noticed this year and had somehow missed in previous years, is the complaint that “because the Rite of Washing the feet reenacts Christ’s washing the feet of his apostles at the Last Supper…”  Wait a minute.  The Rite does not reenact anything.  The Rite fulfills the command of Christ that as he washed the feet of his disciples, so too should the greater among us wash the feet of the lesser.  This Rite has from ancient times been referred to as the mandatum, the commandment.  It is not a sacred play in which an actor—the pope, a bishop, a priest—is Jesus and 12 other guys are the apostles.  It is the leader of the community washing the feet of 12 (or six or thirty-two or whatever) members of the community because Jesus has told us that whoever is the greater among us is to become servant to the rest. 

But the problem is not simply the foot washing; the problem is seeing the Liturgy as some sort of a piece of sacred theater in which things are “acted out.”  When one sees the Liturgy this way, it makes all the sense that the sanctuary becomes a stage, vestments become costumes, choirs are the chorus, the sacred ministers become actors, and the rest of us sit back and enjoy the show.  This describes the “Extradordinary Form” perfectly.  I have always noted the similarities of that final scene of Tosca to the traditional Liturgy, that scene in the Church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle with the magnificent procession with the “Blessed Sacrament,” which is no more than a cardboard cut-out placed in an antique monstrance but which makes the pious swoon in faux-ecstasy as they recall the “good old days” of the Latin Mass.  Now I realize why that scene always has impressed me as it has.  It is the “Old Church”—where faith is reduced to theatre—good theatre, great theatre, but theatre. The Mass as performance can be great, it can be moving, it certainly can be beautiful when it is done well, but it is not what Christ gave us.  In the Liturgy we are all called to be “actors.”  There are no spectators.  I don’t mean simply that we are not to sit back and watch, but I mean that in the Liturgy we are all called to be directly and intrinsically involved in the sacred action.  We are all “actors” as it were.  In the Reforms of Vatican II, the “stage” is not the sanctuary—it is the entire worship space.  In the “old Mass” we were to sit there (or kneel or stand as the rite dictated) while the “sacred ministers” performed the Rite on our behalf.  Oh, sure, we were to “spiritually join” ourselves to them in the rite—but in the way that members of a high-school musical audience are swept up into Oklahoma or The Mikado.  We certainly weren’t to go up on the stage and interact with the players. But in the liturgy we are to do precisely that.  The word liturgy comes from the Greek and is derived from the word λαος—(the people) and the word εργο—a work or project. (“Laity” also comes from the word, λαος, the people.)  In our modern churches where we are comfortably seated facing the “stage” sanctuary, it is all to easy for us to fall into that audience mode but in the ancient and medieval churches where people stood throughout the liturgy and where much of the liturgy happened in the middle of the assembly—the processions for the gospel and the offertory, for example—there was a stronger sense of the people being participants and not merely spectators.  This can still be experienced in the Eastern Rites, especially in the old churches of Eastern Europe where there are still no seats and where the clergy move easily among the congregation for the various incensations and processions.  In fact in the Byzantine Rite, with which I am very familiar and which I much admire, the entire liturgy is a sung dialogue between the priest at the altar and the people gathered in the Body of the Church. But what some nostalgia freaks want is the old days where you could sit at Mass and engage in some sort of pious reverie that made you feel “spiritual” but was more a quasi-devotional fantasy than genuine prayer. 

The Liturgy is not a play or a historical re-enactment.  It is profoundly mystical but not in an esoteric way.  It is a living engagement with God in Word and Sacrament, an encounter with Grace.  Gone is the railing that once marked stage from audience and for a reason.  Gone is the arcane language that kept the people at a distance from what was taking place.  Gone are the separations and distinctions that urged us into passivity.  “full, conscious, and active” participation is now required so that we too can both make our sacrifice and emerge changed to the heart from this encounter.   

Of Blankees and Bumwiggle Masses

When I was a child (and thought like a child and talked like a child and reasoned like a child) I had my “blankee.”  It was a wonderfully warm and reassuring large square of tan wool bonded in tan silk.  Unfortunately, I was somewhat like Linus and slow to let go of this childhood security even as it became somewhat disgustingly ragged—to me it was always still that veil of security that let me escape back into a better time and place without the complexity of growing into adulthood. 

I also as a child loved the Mass.  It was probably about the time that my grandmother decided that the “blankee” had to go, that I became an altar boy.  I always wanted to be an altar boy.  I was itchy to get inside the railing—be one of the inner club that could tread the sacred space the other side of the communion rail.  And so I learned a unreasoned chain of nonsense syllables  ad De-um qui lae-ti-fi-cat juv-en-tu-tem me-um and su-scip-i-at Dom-i-nus sac-ri-fi-ci-um de man-i-bus tu-is….    Do you have any idea how hard it is to memorize hundreds of nonsense syllables in a specific sequence?  But I did it.  I got my cassock and cotta and my career as an altar server took off.  I was an altar boy’s altar boy.  By High School I was MC for Solemn Masses and I knew where everyone was supposed to be standing or kneeling and what elaborate range of things had to be on the credence table.  I mean, I was ready to step in if the Pope dropped dead: I could do the part of any sacred minister no matter how complex the liturgy was.  I had an innate gift for understanding the ritual and I loved it.  Admittedly I was a bit of a peacock strutting around, pushing the subdeacon six inches to the left, holding back the cope for the archpriest as he stood next to the celebrant, making sure everyone had their birettas.  In retrospect I was a weird kid. 

But there was another side to my love for this liturgy.  Once a year, every year—the last Sunday of July—our parish invited the local Ukrainian Parish to celebrate the Divine Liturgy in our Church.  Father Peter came and Father Michael and their Deacon. Along came a slew of altar servers wearing red silk tunics (not cassocks and surplices).  There were cantors and a choir.  And there were about two-hundred parishioners from the Ukrainian Church.  And my eyes were open to a whole different style of Worship.  Icons were set up and there were clouds of incense.  But everything was in English.  Everything.  Even the Words of Consecration were in English and out loud.  (This was about 1960.)  and the Church shook from the singing as the parishioners (from the St Mary Theotokos, not from our Saint Martin of Tours)  joined the choir and cantors in singing the entire liturgy.  I had never heard a congregation sing before.  And of course at communion time we received Christ as he came to us under the forms of both bread and wine: the Eucharistic bread soaked in the consecrated wine and delivered into our mouths on a golden spoon.   I liked it.  Above all I liked receiving the Precious Blood. I have always had a devotion to the Precious Blood.  But I loved a liturgy where everyone sang with one heart and once voice.  And a liturgy I could understand. My eyes were open to possibilities. 
It was about that time that slowly changes were introduced into our Roman Mass.  Still in high school, I was among the first to become a “lector” and read the epistle at Mass.  We started singing hymns at Mass.  I must admit that even today I hate “Praise to the Lord.” It too soon became an old chestnut.   Was there any other hymn to sing?  We sang it Mass after Mass.  In 1964 parts of the Mass were first done in English.  It was a bit of a hodge-podge—but I could see where this was going and as much as I had loved my old “blankee” of the Mass, it was time to move forward and I was ready. 
Yes there were things that I wonder what we had been thinking of.  “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” at the offertory.  And Ray Repp.  God, did he write terrible music.  “Here we are, all together…”  Even then I wanted to vomit.  I must admit that I was more fortunate than most, however, as through my college years I had access to Mass (and the Divine Office) with a religious community near the college I attended and the music was usually good and the liturgy prayer-filled.  There were some bizarre things, granted—it was the late 60’s—but overall the evolution from the Old Mass to the New was fairly tranquil.
And then when the revisions of Paul VI came out, I was delighted.  Eucharistic Prayers II, III, and IV had a flow to them that the Roman Canon lacked—plus a much more explicit epiclesis.  That has always troubled me about the Roman Canon.  Lucien Deiss and Joseph Gelineau were producing some lovely music and we were borrowing some of the better Protestant hymns: good things from Charles Wesley and with tunes by Hayden.    It has been a long journey since then—and an uneven one.  But the “Old Mass,” like my old “blankee” lay in my past.  They had their day and I am grateful for it but I have found new and deeper securities and new and deeper forms of prayer. 
Of course I have never been one to take Liturgy for granted.  Wherever I have lived, I have searched out worshipping communities that make a priority of prayer filled and reverent liturgies.    I have looked for communities that work at full, active, and conscious participation with good music and readings well proclaimed.  I look for a church which is well maintained and where they have a sense of the sacred in organizing their liturgical space.  Above all, I look for communities in which their worship is first and foremost prayer—and communities that understand the intrinsic relationship between prayer, community, and justice.   When travelling, I do my homework to make sure that I will worship with a community that takes God and his Word seriously and worships him with joyful faith.  I don’t attend the “Traditional Mass.”
I did go, once, several years ago to the Tridentine Mass at the Church of Saint Mary, Mother of God, in Washington DC.  The presider was Monsignor Bruce Harbert, at the time executive director of ICEL (International Commission on English in the Liturgy).  It was a low Mass.  Monsignor came out of the sacristy with his two altar servers and proceeded to do his thing at the altar while we in the pews did a variety of our things—pray from our Missals, say the rosary, read novena booklets, or stare into space.  I never quite saw the point of it. Monsignor gave a good sermon (not a homily) though curiously declared that the Mass is not a propitiatory sacrifice.  I was struck by that as I am quite sure that it is and has been so defined, but I think the context in which Monsignor placed it was again to do away with this idea that Christ is slain again and again, Mass after Mass.  In the end I did not feel comfortable receiving Holy Communion.  Whatever we had done was not expressive of my faith—nor, to my understanding, the faith of the Church.  O perhaps on an objective level it was, but our faith is more than the apprehension of objective truths—it also requires the subjective apprehension of those truths.  And this Mass did not do it.  No, there is no way back for me.  Yes, it was the Mass but it was the Peanut Butter and Jelly Mass and I have long been used to a healthy and nutritious banquet of the Word of God and Body and Blood of his Christ.  No way back.
An aside.  Some friends of mine attended a Memorial Requiem Mass in the old rite for a family friend.  Joe and Sally brought their five children to the Mass—and none of them—adults or children had seen the Tridentine Rite before.  They told me it was a splendid occasion with Deacon and sub-Deacon as well as celebrant.  There was a catafalque surrounded by the six wax candles.  The vestments were black.  The cantor sung the Dies Irae—always one of my favorite pieces of music—bone-chilling.  
Two days later, they caught their six-year old daughter playing Mass.  She always liked to do this—not a good sign for her future happiness in a Church that does not ordain women.  But this time, she was not a card-table facing out, but at the credenza in the dining room, facing the wall.  She had arranged the candles and crucifix and found a black cape to wear.  And she kept bending over and wiggling her rear end.   When asked what she was doing, she said she was playing “Bumwiggle Mass.”  “Your know, Mom,” she said, “like at the Mass for Uncle Dave.  The Priest kept wiggling his bum at us.”  What Mary Catherine had noticed at Mass was how Father kept bending over—at the Confiteor and at the altar—and sort of wiggled a bit as he said his prayers.  Ah well, for some the Tridentine Mass might be the most beautiful thing this side of heaven, but beauty is always in the eye of the beholder. 

The Foundational Problem of the Contemporary Liturgy

Sorry for the break--an unexpected hiccup in schedule came along and i didn't have access to the internet to make the posting. 

I observed in my last posting that my experience is that the Liturgy, at least in the Western Church (this would include Anglican/Episcopalians and Lutherans who follow a “Mass Model” for the Eucharistic celebration as well as Catholics), leaves me somewhat spiritually unengaged.  In the better parishes the music might be quite good and the preaching well-prepared and delivered, but even there I am finding that the Liturgy is not much more than a ritual through which I and others must go (at best) out of a sense of responsibility to a particular community or (at worst) sheer duty imposed by Church Law.  I don’t think the vapidity of our worship is a fault of the Liturgy itself.  I have, as I pointed out, found it at times and in very particular circumstances, to be a deeply prayerful experience.  I am even finding that—by and large—I am liking the “new missal” with its rather elegantly idiosyncratic syntax.  (The vocabulary, however, can be over the top, even for a lexophile.)  Some people blame the insipid quality of the liturgy on the architectural setting found in most churches and while I do find much of the contemporary church architecture—both for new buildings and renovated ones—lifeless, even spiritless—I don’t think that is the problem but rather a symptom of a much deeper lack in our Catholic life. I think it comes down to that most of us—including (especially) our priests—just don’t know how to pray and so can’t lead public prayer.   I think we confuse prayer with bothering God by our incessant babbling and the offering of spiritual or material trinkets in bargain for hoped for and needed favors.  I go to some churches and all I can think of is the scene in 1 Kings where the priests of Baal are hopping around their altar chanting and screeching in a frenetic ritual.   While I think today’s priests, especially the younger ones, are much given to piety, I am not sure that know the difference between piety and spirituality.  They consider their devotional life, which is often quite elaborate, even intense, to be their “spirituality” but I don’t see in them the marks of a genuine spiritual depth.

I just finished correcting a Master’s thesis which speaks of this subject—not in terms of clerical piety but in terms of a mature and authentic spirituality as distinguished from a personal piety.  Of course, piety can serve as the introduction to the spiritual life—Teresa of Avila makes that very clear—but piety can also short-circuit and then it only reinforces our prejudices and confirms us in our spiritual and psychological immaturity.   The student thesis I am correcting measures spirituality by its ability to open us beyond our own universe and its ego-specific constructs and even beyond our group-consciousness and collective prejudices to an appreciation of how all creation stands in its relationship to the Creator—or rather, how God stands in relationship to all his creation.  Perhaps this inclusive vision is what I find satisfying in the Byzantine Liturgy—it bespeaks an earth in profound communion with heaven—a harmony of the cosmos in which all creation is brought into union with its Creator whereas in the West I find that we tend to divide the Creator and creation.  We divide the sacred and the secular instead of seeing the sacred as the flowering of the secular.  We distinguish clergy from laity instead of seeing the unity of the Body of Christ.  We include the righteous and exclude those whose lives don’t “measure up” to our standards instead of seeing that we all stand as sinners and we all stand beneath the shower of grace.  It’s curious that I find the Byzantine Liturgy more prayerful than the Roman because in general I am somewhat “Low Church.”  I don’t like incense and elaborate church buildings and a lot of what appears to be no more than a self-conscious fussiness.   I will not attend a Mass where the priest has his back to the people or determines to use Latin for the audible parts of the Mass.  (On the other hand, I do like much of the Latin Music and am happy enough when we sing it, but I also like good traditional (Protestant) hymnody and most of the contemporary Church music as well.)  Yet I found when I have lived in Rome, many Sundays I would head off to the Russicum for the Divine Liturgy in Old Slavonic  (of which I understand not a word), with the priest(s) not only facing away from me but hidden by the iconostasis, and with enough incense to put an asthmatic on a respirator.  What is it that makes me transcend all my principles about a Liturgy in which one can participate fully and with understanding (those old principles of Vatican II)?  I doubt that the average Byzantine or Orthodox priest is any more deeply spiritual than his Roman counterpart, it may just be that the western emphasis on the human person as an embodied intellect has deprived us in the west of a more integrated spiritual development and that consequently our Liturgy—our communal prayer—lacks the depth and richness that a holistic approach to spirituality might produce.  And it may be—which is to say I think that it is—time for us in the west to grow beyond the narrow visions of reality that religion and religious people permit us and let God open for us the vistas he enjoys.  To embrace the world as God knows it rather than as we have been taught to see it is a significant step towards the “Kingdom of God.”  The great mystics of our Catholic tradition show us that—that we are called to a transformation of our human natures to the Divine Nature; that we are to be so united to God as to see the world through his eyes and love the world with the love that fills his heart.  Unfortunately while this doctrine can be found from Iranaeus and Athanasius up through John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila to Merton and contemporary authors, we never hear it in Church.  Moreover, our Sunday morning experience concentrates on turning bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood whereas God’s purpose is that we ourselves should be transformed into the Image of the One who himself is the Image of the Divine Father.   It is you and I who are to be transformed in the Eucharist but the mediocrity of our celebrations makes that task all the more difficult even for an omnipotent God. 

More Than One Way to be Catholic

The Byzantne Chapel in the National
Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
in Washington DC

Well, last night some of my colleagues and I were going to go out after work for some Mardi Gras festivities—nothing out of control, just a nice Cajun dinner and music but Christos from our finance office said he couldn’t—it was—for him—already Lent. Already Lent on Mardi Gras?  Christos is Byzantine Catholic and Lent for him had begun last Sunday.  It is a reminder that not all Catholics are Roman Catholic and that we should not refer to our Church as “Roman” but simply as Catholic for the Church does indeed include Ruthenian, Coptic, Chaldean, Syro-Malabar, Ukrainian, Russian, Greek, Syro-Malankar, Syriac, Maronite, Armenian, Melkite, and I don’t know how many other Catholics—all of whom stand in communion with (not under) the See of Rome and its Pope as full members of the Catholic Church.        I have always been surprised how few Catholics know about the Eastern Rites.  (the Western Rites—of which there are more than the Roman—is another question and somewhat more complex).  I was always aware of the multiple ways of being Catholic given that just a few blocks away from my hope parish in New York State is a Byzantine Rite Catholic Church.  Father Peter had fled what was then the Soviet Union after World War II with his young wife.  Their four children were in our parish school and we never thought anything of a married priest.  Back in those pre-Vatican II days Father Peter and his parish would come to our parish one Sunday a year—just before lent—and sing the Divine Liturgy.  We all knew that Divine Liturgy was another word for Mass and we all went to communion. Our pastor wanted us to know that there were many different ways Mass could be celebrated.  By 1960 their liturgy was already in English and we could follow along very easily, though the music—and the entire liturgy was sung—was beyond our (at the time unused) Catholic vocal range. Nevertheless, his parishioners raised the roof with their singing.  And communion was in both kinds—with small cubes of real bread soaked in the Precious Blood and given into our mouths on a spoon.  (In those days none of us received in the hand, so communion on the tongue was nothing unusual or archaic, though this wasn’t so much on the tongue as dropped into our mouths.)  All this was a great help when Vatican II came along because we had no illusions about “The Mass of Antiquity” or ridiculous stories about how the Mass had been given in the form we knew it by Christ to his Apostles.  We saw for ourselves that Mass could be radically different in form and yet the same Mass. We saw that priests can be married and be no less holy than unmarried ones.  We saw that the Liturgy can be celebrated in various languages.  We knew that the unity of the Church did not depend on uniformity but rather on the bonds of charity that united us in diversity.  
      As I have gotten older and studied a bit I have found that there are even doctrinal differences among the various rites.  Purgatory, for example, is not a universally held doctrine among the rites for there are different eschatologies in the East than in the West.  The Doctrine of the Assumption (or what we Catholics call the Assumption) is formulated differently in the Byzantine Rites, stressing Mary’s “Falling Asleep” or death.  And my friends among the clergy in the various Eastern Rites keep telling me that it is fine with them if I keep original sin where it belongs—in the Western Church—as they want nothing to do with it.  Yet united in charity and mutual respect and around the See of Peter we are one Church—unified in our diversity.