History in the Making: More on Cardinal Burke and Mass Attendance.



A Mass at St Mary's College, Notre Dame
a community known for its vibrant liturgies
this mass was during summer break 2010

 About a month (April 4) ago I did an entry on why people are failing to attend mass in the numbers they did thirty to sixty years ago.  I mentioned that Cardinal Raymond Burke, former Archbishop of Saint Louis and currently holding offices in the Vatican, claimed that the lack of reverence in the celebration of the mass is the reason for the decline in mass attendance.  I have received several communications since the original post that I would like to share with you.
I still go to mass every Sunday, but in all honesty I bring my ipod for during the sermon and use the time to listen to religious music or an inspirational podcast because the homilies are absolutely dreadful. 
Another writer made the same point—that they are being driven to distraction, if not away from the Church by the homilies.  They wrote: We used to attend mass at Creighton University and with the Jesuits you can count on a good homily.  My husband’s work has taken our family to the Washington DC area, and we now live in northern Virginia.  Fortunately we found a parish in Burke (a town in Fairfax County) where we are happy because in parish after parish that we had gone to the priests talked down to us as if we were not only uneducated but unintelligent people.  The priest in Burke is no Newman or Lacordaire, but at least he isn’t insulting us by his theo-bable.  My husband and I each have graduate degrees, we read, we keep our professional credentials up—we are not stupid people.  Why do these priests believe that we have to think as they tell us?   Don’t talk down to us.  Give us some credit for being able to make good decisions in life.  
A third person wrote from Northern Virginia:  We belonged to a wonderful parish and when our pastor was forced into retirement, the associate took over and changed everything. We were in the middle of a building campaign and had worked hard to design and raise money—almost four million dollars—for a beautiful church.  The new pastor didn’t like it.  It was “too modern.”  He put the building campaign on hold for eight years—eight years of being crowded into a parish center not half big enough for what we needed—until he thought we had forgotten about the church building we gave our money to build.  Then he—without consultation—met with an architect and designed something that looks like it is from 1942.  We told him that he might want to be Bing Crosby and the parish to be The Bells of Saint Mary’s, but we had survived the pre-Vatican II Church and we hadn’t given our money for a relic of it.  He told us that the Catholic Church is going back to the “traditional” liturgy and architecture.  So we told him, ok—go back but you’re going back without us.  We canceled our pledge and we cross the Potomac and drive a round trip of sixty-five miles to go to mass on Sundays at a parish that is committed to moving forward not backward.  But if he is right that the Catholic Church is going back to the pre-Vatican II days, we’re getting off the Catholic Bus.      
Finally, one more story.  A gentleman stopped me at a conference recently and told me that his wife is hearing impaired.  They are quite well-to-do and their parish is one of the wealthiest parishes in the Diocese.  He and his wife had offered to pay for hearing aids and earphones to be installed in the first two rows in a section of the Church immediately in front of the pulpit.  The combination of location and hearing aids would have facilitated ten “stations” at which hearing-impaired parishioners and guests could have maximized their participation in the liturgy.  The pastor wasn’t interested.  “Don’t see the need of it for two or three people who might need it.”  The family now attends a Bible “Mega-Church” that has an extensive ministry to the hearing impaired.  “What really got me,” the husband said, “was that he didn’t care that my wife couldn’t hear the Word of God.”  
So maybe the good Cardinal has a point.  I like reverence.  But maybe the problem is more systemic. 

Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda: The Church, always reforming--always in need of reform

Yesterday a woman at church said to me “I am so at the end of my rope with the Church—this sex abuse issue, the coverup.  I resent the fact that a criminal can be a priest, but a woman can’t be.”  I had never heard it put quite that way.   We are in the midst of a mess in the Church these days.  The sex abuse and the cover-up are part of it—a huge part of it.  We are seeing hypocrisy when the “The Church” is taking such a harsh line not only on the political hot-potato of “gay marriage” but of appropriate pastoral care of gay people.  Indeed it seems that “The Church” has defined for itself the most rigid of codes of sexual morals when it is clear that many of bishops and clergy who make up “The Church” are living a double standard, sitting in the chair of Moses, as it were, but not practicing the morals they preach.  In the last few entries to this blog we have seen this is nothing new.  The blog has looked at gay popes and cardinals and bishops and we have looked at bishops and cardinals and popes with multiple illegitimate children.  We have seen prelates who have accumulated vast amounts of wealth for themselves and been interested in their own aggrandizement rather than the pastoral good of the souls entrusted to them.  We have seen abuses of power and resorting to violence to achieve one’s ambitions in the Church.   

Somewhat coincidentally I have been reading A Tale of Two Cities or, more precisely, listening to it on an audio book.  I last read it as a sophomore in High School but it has always remained among my favorite books.  Last evening, on my way home from church, I had been listening to the scene where Monsieur the Marquis’s carriage runs over and kills the child of Gaspard.  One could not help but be appalled at the Marquis’s apathetic contempt for the ordinary citizen.  Here is a man who lives in a universe where he thinks the “vulgar masses” were created solely to provide him with his indolent lifestyle.  And you know, I hate to say it, but in so many ways I see “The Church” reflected there.  In many ways it was the Church of the Renaissance and the ancien regime that Dickens was writing of—quite explicitly.  He does not leave that to your imagination when he speaks of the French ecclesiastics.    “The Church” was complicit in the evil that left so many people in dire poverty and squalor in those centuries when some think the Church was so glorious.  Those Basilicas and palaces of Renaissance Rome were built on the backs of the poor.  Not only Italy, but all Europe was being drained dry by the Medici, Della Rovere, Piccolomini, Borgia, Farnese, et al popes and their sycophant cardinals  and bishops and pezzi grossi prelates who were building their palaces and screwing their pages and poisoning their enemies while God’s poor starved.  I am not being anti-Catholic in saying any of this.  I am just reporting the facts.  And when I say that today we have prelates in Rome and prelates here parading around in silk gowns with trains longer than Kate Middleton’s upcoming dress and pontificating about sincere people who are trying to figure out how to balance their need for giving and receiving love, their same-sex attraction, and their devotion to Christ I am not sure how much has changed.  And when I hear sermons that tell me the priest is from cloud la-la land and has no idea how parents of families with four and five kids are trying to make ends meet without the mother having to work outside the home, or hear priests say that they have a life of sacrifice when a maid plops their three course dinner down before them on a table set with linen, china, and crystal I think that there is a need for change in “The Church.”  When I hear priests disparage women or hear of a Bishop who has instructed his pastors that when he visits, no woman is to be invited to dinner I cannot but think of Monsieur the Marquis and his contempt for the people who carried him with all his comfort on their backs and with the sweat of their brows.

But that is not the whole story, nor even half of it.

Also last evening I was at Tenebrae.  The Cathedral was packed.  The Liturgy was moving.  As I listened to the ancient readings and saw how the scriptures were arranged in the various antiphons and responsaries to tell the ancient story of our fall and our redemption—our fall in the disobedience of one man and our redemption in the obedience of another—I was moved to think of those countless thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of monks and nuns who through the centuries created this prayer, wove these texts together out of their meditations.   In the ever-darkening shadows of the Cathedral as the service progressed, I was reminded of faithful pastors, the holy priests, the humble men and women who, while the false shepherds were making a mockery of the Cross, were on their knees, lost in the mystery of God’s love made manifest in a naked and bloodied thorn-crowned man from Galilee whose faithful obedience set right all the sin in human history.  I looked around me at the Cathedral.  Connecticut Avenue lawyers in their three piece suits.  Mothers with strollers.  A smattering of the DC street people.  Some same-sex partners from the Dupont Circle area.  Senior citizens who live in the neighborhood.  Yuppies and DINKs (Double Income No Kids).  African Americans. Asian Americans.  White bread.  Hispanics.  That’s what it means to be Catholic.  Y’all come.  Everybody’s welcome.  And this is what The Church is.  The hierarchy is not the Church. The Pope is not the Church.  Michael Voris and his “Real Catholic TV” is not the Church (despite what he pretends).   The Church is the whole kit and kaboodle.    We all belong. Even those popes with kids and those popes with pages, even the Borgias with their special mushroom casseroles and Sixtus IV with his pretty-boy Cardinals.  Saints and sinners, wheat and tares, Christ died for all and if you or I are one of the lucky ones who remember that it is about Christ dying for us—and for all—and not about capes and swords and tall bejeweled mitres, just be thankful that your eyes have been opened and pray for those who are still so blinded by the glory of “The Church”  that they can’t see the true glory, the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ.