Reason 4 For Why the "New Mass" Is Superior to the Old Rite

The Monks of Notre Dame d'Acey Gather For
the Liturgy 

 I am a faithful reader of New Liturgical Movement, a blog which is somewhat unique in the world of the Katholik Krazies in as that the articles are usually well researched and informative expositions on the history of the Liturgy. Gregory DiPippo, the managing editor, does an especially fine job in mining the arcane for information which is, while not relevant to anything in the Church’s mission of witnessing to the Kingdom of God, of considerable interest to historian and antiquarian alike.  In fact, I first discovered New Liturgical Movement when it took exception to something that Dom Anthony Ruff of Saint John’s Abbey, Collegeville—a noted liturgical scholar and one of established reputation—wrote regarding my objections to the “offertory” rite of the pre-Conciliar Mass.  Mr. DiPippo produced a series of excellent article on the various late medieval rites that support his thesis—and my objection—that scholastic and post-scholastic theology introduces the non-orthodox (i.e. contrary to the Patristic Tradition) notion of a double sacrifice in the Mass: a   sacrifice of bread and wine offered to God by the priest that is preliminary to the Sacrifice of Christ which Christ has offered on the Cross and to which we become present in the Mass.  The “offertory rites” are a particular bone of contention for those who reject the 1970 Missal which more or less replaces the “offertory” (sacrificial) with a “preparation of the gifts” which is exactly what it says it is: a preparation of the bread and wine which will then become the mysterium by which we become participants in Christ’s once and for all Sacrifice on the Cross. 

Sadly, not all of New Liturgical Movement’s entries meet Mr. DiPippo’s standards of research and theological reflection.  Peter Kasiniewski recently did an entry on ten reasons why one should choose the pre-Conciliar “Extraordinary Form” over the 1970 “Ordinary Form.”  He made some outrageously unsupported claims for the usus antiquior that, to my mind, express exactly why the old rite should not only not be preferred but be suppressed altogether.  But it has triggered this series of equally unresearched and data-free reflections on why the “New Mass” is superior to the old rite.  I have already posted reasons one through three: now we go for four. 

Reason 4 For Why the “New Mass” Is Superior to the Old Rite

True and authentic prayer is intelligible. 

Saint Teresa of Avila—whose fifth centenary of birth we celebrate this year—describes prayer as “an intimate conversation with Him whom we know loves us.”  What a great description!  Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, a spiritual daughter of Teresa of Avila, wrote in her journal about prayer: “I say very simply to God what I wish to say, without composing beautiful sentences, and he always understands me.  For me, prayer is an aspiration of the heart, it is a simple glance directed to heaven, it is something great, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites me to Jesus.” She elaborates on this in another place and says: “I say quite simply to the good God what I want to tell Him, and He always understands me.”

This makes me question why we feel the need to gild the lily beyond recognition and make our chief prayer, the Mass, into something artificial and even arcane.  It seems to me that the more prayerful the Liturgy the more nobly simple the celebration.  I am not saying that the Mass should not be beautiful—I firmly believe that it should be gorgeous in its every detail; I only believe that its beauty shines out most brilliantly when its essential nature is not buried beneath the baroque trapping that have overlaid it for the last five centuries. 

I remember seeing a production of Madama Butterfly at the Houston Opera forty some years ago.  I have seen this exquisite opera by Puccini many times in many venues: the Rome Opera House, La Fenice in Venice, The Met in New York, the Lyric in Chicago.  What makes the Houston production stand out in my memory from all the others was the utter simplicity of the production.  The story, as you probably know, takes place in Japan at the turn of the 20^th century.  The Houston production, in line with Japanese artistic tradition, was rich in quality but absolutely minimalist in the sets which allowed the music to gleam without distraction.  I don’t think I will ever be able to forget the aria Un Bel Di in Scene II where Butterfly sings of her anticipation for Pinkerton’s return. The stage was awash in blue light but otherwise bare except for the drooping pink branches of a weeping cherry.  This incredible aria totally captured one’s attention with the only competition being the brilliant pink of Butterfly’s Kimona stage left and the delicate pink branches stage right and the rich blue light making the plain background look alive in moonlight.  Reducing the beauty of the Opera to its purest essence impressed it most deeply on both the emotions and the memory. 

I had a similar experience some years later while staying at the Abbey of Notre Dame de Aiguebelle near Avignon.  That first March evening as the monks filed in for Vespers, I was reminded of Houston’s Madama Butterfly.  Cistercian architecture permits no extra ornamentation.  The slow toll of a single bass bell in the tower signaled the hour for prayer.  The abbey church is devoid of all decoration except for a statue of the Blessed Virgin in a recessed chapel to the left of the altar and a large crucifix on the northern wall of the choir.  Plain frosted glass fills the windows.  There are but two fat wax candles at the altar, both in holders made of iron and a carved wooden processional crucifix standing to the altar’s right.  The monks entered clad simply in their white cowls.  The walls are unrelieved white stone as is the pavement.  Only the wooden staff he carried distinguished the abbot from the other monks.  There was no organ, only the human voice which, once all were in their place, exploded into breathtaking prayer.  There was no ceremony save a single monk coming up and spooning incense into an iron censer at the Magnificat.  It was pure, unadorned prayer.  You could feel the spiritual energy gathered beneath the ancient vaults of the 12^th century church.  The memories of Puccini’s opera faded fast as the psalms of vespers overtook my memories of Butterfly and began to speak their pressing but plaintive message to look within the heart and surrender all to the mercy of God. 

The next morning at Mass—and subsequent mornings of my visit—the Mass spoke profoundly.  Only the cross and its Divine Burden, wooden and roughly carved, stood at the altar to remind us of what we were about.   There was an absolute economy of movement and an avoidance of any hint of ritual for ritual’s sake.  Four priests and a deacon stood alone at the altar, three in cowls and one in an enveloping but unadorned chasuble of deep purple.  On the altar stood a large silver cup and a silver bowl of rough unleavened bread. The bare bones of the liturgy, sung in a deep but somewhat wistful chant by the monks, kept us focused on the Sacrifice being offered.  There was no fuss and bother, no bowing and scraping, no brocades and jewels.  There was no booming organ.  There certainly was no corpulent Cardinal trailing yards of scarlet silk.  There were only men standing, eyes focused on the altar, deep in prayer as they sang the Church’s prayer. 

I know that the average Joe and Josie in the pews need a bit richer diet than this Spartan Trappist spiritual fare offers, but I think that there is too much a danger today of priests becoming old aunts—or let me rephrase that—I have seen too many priests today becoming old aunts who fuss over lacey petticoat-albs and copes that look like they were cut from funeral home drapes as they prance around and bob up and down and bend over wiggling their hind-quarters as they lisp the Sacred Words that should focus our attention not on them but on the Holy Spirit descending upon bread and wine and into stony hearts alike to transform all into Christ.  I don’t mean to leave the ladies out of the equation, but please give us men who are strong, loving, and wise to speak clearly and simply to God and lead us, in our hearts, to do the same.

And yes, I am aware that that it isn’t only the Tridentine Tinkerbelles that are the problem.  Equally awful are the liturgical left’s Jimmy Kimmel wanna-bees who think their job is to entertain us.  I mean, I don’t mind a few laughs during the homily as long as there is some Gospel substance, but I want someone who can lead us in prayer—who is aware that God is part of this equation and that means there needs to be some degree of gravitas.  And I may disagree with the neo-cons about what constitutes beauty in art, architecture, and music—just like there are those philistines who want their Madama Butterfly in a garish red kimono and on a flower laden hilltop with a busy harbor beneath filled with ships sailing to and fro just like it probably was at La Scala that night in 1904 when Butterfly was first sung.  But please don’t make me sing “Here I am, Lord” one more time.  And I don’t want word-strewn felt banners hanging where the statues used to stand.  And I don’t want cheap pottery any more than I want those cheap Knights of Columbus chalices on the altar.  But in all honesty, I find that sort of crap in fewer and fewer places.  I think we still have a long way to go to make the Liturgy as conducive to prayer as it can be, but we have come a long way from the days when a hung-over Monsignor stood scratching his Roman chasubled behind while he stood facing away from us reading the epistle on the right side of the altar.  We have a ways to go yet, but we have come a long way and like Moses said to the children of Israel: I ain’t goin’ back.  

Reason 3 For Why the "New Mass" Is Superior to the Old Rite.

Reason 3: True prayer comes out of the depth of our graced experience and thus is rooted in the particulars of our own culture.

One of my favorite historical quotes is from the Emperor, Charles V (1519-1556) who said

I speak Spanish to God

French to my soldiers

Italian to my women

And German to my horse.

(In those days, unlike today, the French had the reputation for being the bravest of soldiers.)  Charles prayed in Spanish because it was his primary language—his everyday language which he knew best and in which he was most comfortable.  I am always amused, wryly amused, when people claim that the Latin Mass was “universal” because Latin is a “universal language.”  A universal language that (almost) no one speaks and few know.  I am not sure that that qualifies Latin as “universal.”  It certainly doesn’t qualify as a language of prayer except for those few who have not only a rudimentary education in it (4 years secondary or 2 years college minimum) but some genuine facility with the language.  (I am a former Latin teacher and can pretty much tell how much exposure to the language it takes for one to have a sufficient level of comfort to more than read it.  I remember being at morning Mass one day some years back at a little parish church in Clifton, Virginia where I was staying with friends.  The priest—a somewhat young man—came out and began Mass in Latin.  It was painful.  I mentioned to him afterwards that no one present, including himself, other than God and I, knew what he was saying.  He took his breathes and pauses at times that made no sense, his pronunciation was way off, accents falling on syllables they didn’t belong, no awareness of the idiosyncrasies of the pronunciation of Latin letter combinations or consonants.   It was absolutely dreadful.  It was worse than dreadful.  And I wish it were the exception—but it is far from so among these junior clergy who think a year or two of seminary Latin has made them ready for their attempts to simulate a Pontifical High Mass.  But I have digressed too far.) 

Prayer is not some mindless repetition of words, much less nonsense syllables.  A recent comment addressed to this site, in an attempt to justify the Latin Mass as a normal rite, said “Latin is not mumbo-jumbo.”  I beg to disagree.  Unless one knows the language, Latin—or any other language we attempt to use whether at Church or ordering in a restaurant or watching an Art Film—is mumbo jumbo.  The nuances of Shakespeare are lost on a person who does not have a pretty deep knowledge of English.  The Divine Comedy is best read in translation if you do not know 14^th century Italian pretty well.  And so too with the Liturgy. 

Ann and Barry Ulanov wrote about prayer:

In prayer we speak to and of ourselves, of what lies heavy on our minds, of what rumbles in fear at the pit of our stomachs, of the grudges and resentments we hold behind our eyes below the surfaces of our outward being.  We speak what we have to say, whatever that is, and however we are moved to say it.  

This is not limited to liturgical prayer but extends to all prayer.  In prayer we must come truthfully and honestly into the Divine Presence.  It is precisely why the Church ordinarily begins the Liturgy with a “penitential rite” that makes us look deep inside and acknowledge the disorder into which we have fallen.  We can’t pray, truly pray, until we do so.  And then the Church confronts us with the Word of God which is meant to pierce our hearts like a two-edged sword:

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.  And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.  (Hebrews 4: 12-13). 

And we proceed on to make an intelligible affirmation of our adherence to the key doctrines of the faith in the Creed—an intelligible affirmation of what we believe and ponder in our hearts.  The gifts that represent our lives are then presented on the altar and the Great Mystery of Faith unfolds.  While in contemporary English “mystery” means something not-understood, in Latin and in the Tradition of the Church it means something that transcends understanding: something we know in our being without having to intellectualize it.  It is not meant to be something veiled by human confusion but something that in clarity reveals the Divine Essence being made manifest in it.  That is the splendor of the Eucharistic Prayer.  (Well, not the so called Roman Canon that delights in that sheer multiplicity of words that Jesus warns us against in Matthew 6:7).  The oldest of the Eucharistic Prayers, so-called Prayer II on which III and the Eucharistic Prayer for Special Needs are each modeled, has a very austere outline: epiclesis (consecratory invocation of the Holy Spirit), consecratory Last Supper narrative, anamnesis, oblatio, communio of the Church and its hierarchs,  communio of the departed,  communio of the Mother of God and the Saints, and the Doxology.  The simplicity of the prayer reveals the complexity of the Eucharist and at the same time keeps our focus on the Mysterium.  The prayer reveals the action of the Holy Spirit as the one who transforms the Bread and Wine—and by extension we who offer it and whom it represents—into the Body and Blood of Christ.  The Prayer centers in the Sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross and establishes the identity of the Bread and Wine (and us whom the bread and wine represent) with the Body sacrificially broken on the Cross and the Blood sacrificially there shed for the forgiveness of our sins.) The Prayer draws us there gathered into unity with the Church spread through the world.  The Prayer keeps us in union with those whom we have loved and cherished and who have gone before us.  The Prayer celebrates our identity in communion with the Mother of God and all the saints.  And finally the Prayer leads us to the great Doxology in which we, in gratitude for all God does for us in the Eucharist and indeed in life, sing the Praise of God.  This prayer, to which we are given access when it is in a comprehendible language, gives us direct and immediate participation in the Eucharistic Sacrifice without diminishing the unique ministry of the ordained priest celebrating the Mass.  We are not passive spectators but can join our entire person—heart and mind—into the great act of Worship.

What makes the Mass “universal” is not its language, or even its Rite.  The joke was always told that Mass should not be in a language that only some understood—the vernacular, but a language, Latin, in which no one understood.  In my travels I have often been faced with attending Mass in a language I don’t understand—Polish, Czech, Arabic, even Irish on one occasion.  It wasn’t a problem because my familiarity with the Mass in my own language keeps me very much aware where I can pray in my own language with those whose language is different.  But I am familiar with it, know it by heart at this point, only because day after day I pray it, and can pray it deeply, in my own language.   I am familiar enough with the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom that it isn’t a huge problem when I have been at the Liturgy in Greek or Old Slavonic but I must admit that I not only miss the nuances of the prayers, but much of the particularities.  While I enjoy the experience—especially the music—I can’t say that I have the same direct and conscious access to the Mysterium as when I am praying in my own language regardless of rite. 

And then there are times when I am in an unfamiliar rite and language—the Syro Malabar Rite when I was in India or the Chaldean in Iraq.  They are lovely rites—well, I found the music to the Syro-Malabar rite non-conducive to prayer but that is my subjective experience—but it does push me out of the community into private prayer while those around me are immersing themselves in the common experience.  I like private prayer.  I spend a considerable amount of time each day in silent prayer.  But that is not the Liturgy or the essence of Liturgical Prayer. 

I am not saying there is no room for Latin in our worship.  There is a treasury of great Latin Music and like the wise steward we need to bring forth both the old and the new from our storeroom.  A Pie Jesu, or an Ave Verum Corpus, can offer a respite from the vernacular in which we can give ourselves over to a moment or two of prayerful reverie, but the Mass is not meant to be prayerful reverie but our participation in the salvific Death and Resurrection of Christ.  

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. 

Piety vs Spirituality

I want to follow up on yesterday’s posting and the subject of the lack of spirituality and direction for the spiritual journey in our parishes today.  Are people even aware of our rich Catholic tradition of prayer?  A priest friend of mine told me that a “super-Catholic” parishioner of his complained that he never spoke about spirituality in his homilies.  He claimed that all he spoke of was spirituality.  The problem was two very different understandings of spirituality.  “Agnes of God” (his pet nickname for this particular lady) meant that he should talk more about saying the rosary and doing holy hours.  She arrived at church every morning at 7 am (an hour and a half before the morning Mass) to say the Stations of the Cross (“In Agnes’ religion, Jesus always ends up in the tomb, even on Easter morning,” Father noted), say her rosary, and work her way through a pile of novena pamphlets.  After Mass she would remain to lead fellow parishioners in a second rosary.  All this is well and good, he pointed out, but it constitutes “piety” rather than “spirituality.”  When the parish priest spoke to her about various other forms of prayer that wefre being offered in the parish, forms such as Lectio Divina she was uninterested, or Christian Meditation, she dismissed it as “Christian Buddhism”.  This limited understanding of prayer is not only common among the laity.  I have a cousin who is an up and coming prelate and was on the Vatican appointed team that “investigated” American seminaries about eight years ago.  He told me that when they visited a Carmelite monastery where the young friars were studying for the priesthood he and other team members were surprised to find that there were no scheduled holy hours as in diocesan seminaries, that visits to the Blessed Sacrament were not actively encouraged by the formation team, and that the rosary was never said in common.  When these and other suggestions for change were made, the formation team was adamant that there would be no such additions to the community schedule.  The friars celebrated the Liturgy of the Hours in common every day, had daily Mass together, and were required to do two hours of meditation in their “cells.”  In addition they met once a week for “lectio divina” in common.   While individuals were free to pursue other forms of prayer and encouraged in private piety, there would be no change to the common schedule.  Within a month of the visit, the team received a letter from the Carmelite headquarters in Rome informing them that the Order stood behind the formation team.  Carmelite Spirituality is, they were informed., very “bare bones” and the Order resisted innovations that would dilute their tradition by adding “foreign” elements to the spirituality that had guided Carmelites for eight centuries.  The traditional spirituality which guided Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross, is “to meditate night and day on the Law of the Lord” and “to keep vigil in prayer” in their individual cells as the Rule of their Order has called them to do for eight centuries.
      A similar story comes from a friend of mine who is a priest of the Ukrainian Rite.  A century and more ago when Eastern Rite Catholics were immigrating to America, many “Latin” customs were introduced into the Rite such as Stations of the Cross, the rosary, and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament in order to make these Eastern Rite Christians look more “Catholic,” as if Catholic meant “Roman.” . But now there is a strong effort to purge the Eastern Rites of these Western practices and restore the traditional devotions and prayer-life of the East.  
      For those whose spiritual life is comprised only of pious exercises, the abandonment or absence of these devotions makes it appear that there is no spirituality when in fact various Churches or Monastic communities are returning to the more ancient forms of prayer that are properly theirs.       Does this mean that there should be no room for piety?  By no means.  We all begin the spiritual journey with pious prayers and most of us still revert to the pieties of our youth at times of stress or distraction and we still find not only comfort but grace in traditional devotions.  But we also know that “active” prayer or “vocal prayer” is the initial steps of a spiritual journey that takes us deeper and deeper into the heart of God.  For those who are willing to let go of their attachments to active prayer forms and trust God to lead them, there is a possibility of moving into the “Prayer of Quiet” and then beyond into the deeper forms of contemplative prayer.  One does not then abandon devotional or active prayer, but one does become less dependent on it.  
       As one matures in prayer one becomes more and more conformed to the will of God and the fruits of this spiritual maturing can be recognized.  These fruits are not visions and extraordinary gifts.  While grace may sometimes be manifested in such phenomena, extraordinary occurances are no sure assurance of spiritual maturity. Indeed, as John of the Cross warns us such “gifts” can offer greater peril to the soul than grace as these gifts are not necessarily from God.  In fact, according to Teresa of Avila, speaking of such things as visions or locutions, as Father Haley was inclined to do, is one of the signs that these visions are not from God but are manifestations of a lack of humility.   The only true sign of authentic spiritual maturity is the conversion of the human heart to God and in particular the increase of charity.  As the soul journeys further and further in God, it becomes more and more like God.  The soul learns to see the world through the eyes of God and the fruits of this are most clearly a depth of wisdom and of compassion that reflects the divine attributes.      I wonder how such a soul would have handled the dilemma that Marcel Guarnizo faced when Barbara Johnson stood before him for communion at her mother’s funeral.  Somehow, neither compassion nor wisdom come to mind. 

How Religion Has Changed These Last 50 Years

Does this sort of religion "work" today?

I caught a few minutes of Fresh Air with Terry Gross Easter Monday afternoon while I was in the car and she was interviewing anthropologist T.M. (Tanya Marie) Luhrmann who was speaking about prayer and the experience of evangelical Christians of God “talking back” with them in prayer.  I should have listened to the whole show before I make a judgment but I am a little skeptical of God talking with “evangelical” Christians ever since Jesus told George Bush to invade Iraq.  Trust me, if I ever had a good reason to push saying the rosary it is what God supposedly says to politicians and preachers when you get into free style prayer.  But what caught my attention was this:

“American spirituality has shifted since the '60s toward a much more engaged, responsive, intimately experienced sense of the spiritual. Every church is different. Every person within a church has a somewhat different experience of God. But I thought this represented something really important about American spirituality."  I think this insight has a lot to say about the changed Catholicism of the last fifty years. 

        Now I grew up, or at least got a good head start on growing up, in the pre-Vatican II Church.  I was in High School when the Council met.  I had at that point been through eight years of Catholic grade school and was safely ensconced in a private Catholic Boys High School where we were expected to be in Sodality and where the entire student body went to Mass in the gym every Friday morning.  I grew up with family rosary, Mass on Sunday, Wednesday night Holy Hour, and Friday Stations during lent.  We had no meat on Friday, fasted in Lent and the Vigil of Christmas (and several other days), and had a crucifix in every room in the house (except the guest bathroom), and assorted statues and holy pictures not only in the bedrooms but the living room, family room, foyer, and dining room.  We weren’t fanatics—though it sure sounds like it now—it was what everybody we knew (‘cause everybody we knew was Catholic) did.  We didn’t have Mass in English, communion in both kinds, charismatic prayer meetings, centering prayer, bible study, Lectio Divina, or guided meditation.  Thomas Merton was Seven Story Mountain, Joan Chittester was still wearing a wimple (and not yet writing books), and Richard Rohr and Ronald Rohlheiser were both in Little League. It seems strange in retrospect, but this sort of religion worked.

     Mass was something Father did for us.  He said Mass.  We went to Mass and, if we were in the “State of Grace” and hadn’t eaten, we went to Holy Communion.  God to us was “mediated” by the priest. Those gates in the communion rail were a powerful symbol—they kept us at our respectful distance but they swung open and closed to admit the priest who went from us to God and from God to us.  In the same way, the priest standing at the altar with his back towards us and “facing God” was a clear sign of his role as our designated mediator. 

       And if there was anything that the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council did, it was to give us direct access to God in which the priest may have remained a facilitator but no longer was the mediator.  The gates were gone—the rail was gone—the barrier stood no longer and we could enter the sanctuary without obstacle.  Prayer was in our own language and we could speak with God directly without Father having to take our prayers to God in Latin, God’s language of choice.  The Mass and rites of the Church shaped our prayer, but didn’t exhaust it.  Now people would gather for prayer meetings.  Now there were bible studies.  Now people began reading books about meditation and growing in the spiritual life.  Lay people began having spiritual directors and spirituality shifted from staying out of sin and saying prayers to serious paths of spiritual journeying.  It wasn’t only evangelicals who wanted an experiential prayer life—it was Catholics. 

     This has had various consequences.  For some of us, we have found communities in the Church that help us on this journey.  We attend parishes where the homilies are scriptural and make faith a matter of daily life.  The Liturgy of the Church nourishes us spiritually and is an important component of our relationship with God.  Others have found their experiences of Church lacking anything meaningful.  Sometimes this is because they don’t know what they are looking for, they just know they aren’t finding in Church, or at least the Catholic Church.  Some have found that once you take away the spoon-fed mediated sort of religion, they are not interested in the work a spiritual life takes.  Others have found the Church, or even religion in general, to be no more than stories and ceremonies in which they aren’t interested.  And still others attend churches where the priests are still trying to give them the old mediated religion where the priest will sit on them until they hatch and then feed them beak to beak the worms of piety, predigested in their priestly gullets as if that will give them the nourishment to be spiritual eagles.  I think Vatican II made a brave new start but then I think have had a loss of confidence, not unlike Simon Peter after those first tentative steps across the sea.  I think those who have taken the Council seriously have benefitted in their spiritual growth.  I know I have