What In The World Will be Postmodern Catholicism? 2

Notre Dame du Cap in the
heartland of what was once
French and Catholic Canada 

I am spending a vacation week in French Canada—my first return here in almost fifty years.  The area is stamped with its Catholic heritage.  Place names: Sainte Anne, Saint Benoit, Notre Dame du Cap, Saint Sebastian, Sainte Madeleine, l’Ange Guardien, Saint Luc.  Streets are named after saints, bishops, nuns and priests.  Every significant ville has its Couvent des Ursulines, invariably now a museum.  Driving along route 138 north of Quebec the towns are dotted with their charming 18^th century church steeples.   But the Catholic faith—vibrant only a few decades ago—is now all but dead.  This is not only the story in Nouvelle France, but in Old France as well.  And Spain.  And Germany.  Ireland is falling fast into the crevice of a post-Christian banishment of God from the culture.  And we are not far behind.

This is not simply a Catholic problem.  Calvinist Holland and Switzerland, Lutheran Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Anglican England, Baptist Wales, Presbyterian Scotland all find their empty churches turning into discothèques and restaurants and senior centers.  God simply is not relevant to contemporary culture. 

The problem is not, of course, God.  And while contemporary culture may be the challenge, it is not the problem.  The problem is our reluctance to have enough faith to be able to strip away the cultural accretions we have added to our faith over the centuries and shape the essentials to speak the Good News of the Kingdom of God in the language of our Postmodern culture. 

I write of “accretions” and “essentials.”  The Gospel remains the Gospel across the centuries and cultures.   God so love the world that he sent his only Son that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.  God did not send his son to condemn the world but rather that the world might have live in him.  That message remains ever valid.  The problems are the layers of gilt that we have applied to the lily in God’s name when they really have always been more to our fancy.  We don’t need the gilt.  The Lily is enough the way God made it.  And God has given us a rich heritage that, remodeled to present its best face to our world, can be an invaluable tool for re-evangelizing our Postmodern culture. 

What aspects of our Catholic heritage speak best to the contemporary world?

1.    A sense of mission.  Mission challenges people today.  Many feel a need to make a difference in bettering the world.  For some this may be the challenge of turning back the negative impact we have had on our environment.  For others it may be making a difference in third-world nations.  For still others it might be making a difference in our inner-city public schools.  The campaigns are as varied as are the interests.  One Catholic Church that has been enormously successful in attracting people of all ages and backgrounds is the Church of the Nativity in Burke VA.   A huge part of the glue that binds this community of faith is the passion for the people of Haiti which their late pastor, Father Richard Martin, encouraged.  They have made a huge difference.  The parish’s Operation Starfish has, since 1998, built over 1300 homes along with schools, clinics, sewing co-ops, fishing co-ops, small businesses, and vocational training centers in 10 “Nativity Villages” in Haiti.  Under Father Martin’s leadership and with his drive to make a better world in some very concrete and demonstrable ways, the parish tripled in membership.  This is only one example of how a sense of Mission can energize people and give them a reason to be plugged into Church. 

2.    A sense of community.  The old sitcom Cheers featured a bar “where everyone knows your name.”  The increasing isolation in today’s society is counter-balanced by a longing people have to belong to groups where others know them and they know others.  Really know.  Connect.  So often today people are no more than a cog in the impersonal wheel of life.  Gone are the days when one worked for an employer who knew them and cared about them and their families.  Today people migrate from employer to employer, leaving no impact and forgotten within days after their leaving.  The Church needs to be far more personal.  As Catholics we have maintained the heritage of community over the individualism of Protestantism, but too often community is only a theological concept and not a tangible reality.  I have seen churches that are genuine communities.  Within the last year I attended the funeral of a friend at an impossibly large church in Northern Virginia.  The sanctuary seats over 1200, though the funeral was held in the more intimate “Day Chapel” that holds maybe 200.  I was amazed to see how people rallied around my friend’s husband and children.  The chapel was packed.  There were a full set of volunteer ministers: Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, readers, cantors, servers.  A squad of parishioners prepared and served a lunch for us—all 200—after the Mass.  People milled around, talking to us out-of-towners and welcoming us to their “parish family.”  Given the size of the parish, it is not rare for such funerals to happen three and four times a week but an inclusive community makes this possible.  And I want to highlight inclusive.  I noticed that at this parish there are regular meetings for AA and other 12 step programs including for those with compulsive sexual behaviors.  “And we have gone out of our way to welcome the LGBT community,” the pastor told me when, writing this blog, I called for more information.  There are support groups for the divorced and remarried as well as for singles, widows, and others who need the affirmation of a Christian fellowship.  While many of their neighboring parishes are withering on the vine, this Church (the pastor asked me not to reveal it’s name because of its gay-friendly policy in a people-hostile diocese) is growing steadily. 

3.    A recovery of our mystical tradition.  The fine points of doctrine do not interest most people under sixty today but there is a deep interest in the spiritual journey.  X-Catholics are turning to Buddhism, Hinduism, Wicca, and New Age gimmicks when we have an incredibly rich and far more sound spiritual heritage in Francis de Sales, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius Loyola and his Spiritual Excercises, Meister Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis and his Imitation of Christ, Brother Lawrence, Elizabeth of the Trinity, and a host of other spiritual writers.  How many of our clergy or religious today know anything substantial of this heritage?  I have had dinner at Wolfington Hall with the Jesuits at Georgetown University, an experience nonpareil in both gastronomy and lively conversation.  Jesus did figure in the conversations; Ignatius did not.  Pity.  There is a light here not to be hid under a bushel.  For all the academic vigor of the Jesuits, please remember your first and most needed gift is the spiritual tradition of Ignatian Spirituality.  You can educate the best but what we need you to pass on—that which only you can pass on—is that experience of Jesus which Ignatius has revealed.  And you Carmelites—the rigors of your silences and fasts are wasted if you don’t pass on the profound path to heart where Jesus waits that Teresa and John have shown us.  And who hears anything today of Francis de Sales and the Introduction To The Devout Life?   I don’t want a Salesian pastor administrating my parish or a Visitation Nun teaching French—they need to bring out the treasures that belong to the Church and make them available to a world that wants to find meaning in their lives.   I wish I could say that I knew any parish that was doing this, but the popularity of Richard Rohr and Richard Rohlheiser and Joan Chittester and Thomas Keating and the late Thomas Merton and John Main all testify to the powerful draw that the spiritual path has today. 

4.    We need a new path in worship.  The Second Vatican Council called for the Liturgy to be adapted to the cultures it encounters in its outreach to the peoples of Asia, Oceania, Africa, as well as the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia.  We are now encountering a radically shifted culture in the Developed World and we need to be open to adapting our rituals and prayers to that new culture.  I am going to write more on this specific topic in a future posting but suffice it to say that neither a return to the frozen-in-time (which is radically different from “timeless”) farce of liturgical restorationism and the reestablishment of the baroque rite of the 1570 Missal, nor slapping the Band-Aids of “being hip” on the 1970 rite can meet the crisis.  The central core, not of the ritual but of the Mysterium Fidei, can and must remain but we must not be afraid to deconstruct the edifice and from its ancient stones build anew. 

There is an urgency in proclaiming the Gospel in the cultural vernacular.  Saint Paul did it in the first century when he encountered the Greek Culture of the Mediterranean world.  Patrick did it bringing the faith to the Irish as Bonfiace did to the Germans and Ansgar to the Scandinavians.  Matteo Ricci tried to do it to bring the Gospel to the Imperial Court in Beijing and had he not been undermined by the Dominicans and Augustinians who were so locked in the prison of religion that faith was no longer a living reality, China today might be Catholic.  The acculturated Gospel has made the Dancing Church of Africa come alive in faith, has sustained the Vietnamese in their years of limited freedom, and has shifted the center of gravity in the Catholic world from the tired North to the Global South.  It can fan the embers of European and American Christianity in life again.  

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 1 For Why the "New Mass" Is Superior to the Old Rite

Ok--off and running on our ten reasons to attend the Mass in the Ordinary Form (as differentiated from the Extraordinary Form, the "Traditional Latin Mass.")  Reason One:  

saints are formed by prayer that draws them into deep participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

One of the curious elements in the history of our Catholic Church and the development of its varied traditions of spirituality—Ignatian, Carmelite, Salesian, Redemptorist, Montforian, et.al—is the “great divorce” between mental prayer and liturgical prayer. The Benedictine/Cistercian spiritual tradition alone has preserved the rooting of one’s personal spiritual exercises in the corporate celebration of the Liturgy.   The Eucharist is, of course, central to all Catholic Spirituality—but it is a truncated appreciation of the Eucharist as the Reserved Sacrament/Holy Communion that has been the focus for the last eight or nine centuries, whereas in the ancient teachings of the Fathers of the Church it was always the entire Eucharistic action—and that action extended from the Mass through the celebration of the Divine Offices—that was the fountain from which all prayer flowed.  There is a markedly different emphasis on Eucharistic Spirituality in Ambrose and Augustine, for example, than for Teresa of Avila or Jeanne Chezard de Matel or John Eudes.  Only in the monastic heritage of the Benedictine/Cistercian movement—and not always there—was the integral connection preserved between Liturgical Prayer and one’s private devotional life.  Only there—and again not for all—did the Liturgy provide the source for one’s entire spiritual life. 

One of the reasons for this dis-integration of spirituality was the failure of the liturgy to develop with the culture in which the mystics—and the rest of us—lived (and live).  The Liturgy became more and more a separate world into which the Christian would retreat for prayer but then would have to leave—and leave behind—for daily life.  The major factor of this was, of course, the failure of liturgical prayer to keep abreast with the linguistic breakdown of Latin into what would become the modern languages of the Western World.  When the worshipper could no longer access the sacred texts of what was becoming an arcane language, he or she had to turn to other sources for spiritual nourishment.  A second factor was the tendency in the medieval period to separate the world of the sacred from the everyday.  As the Image of Christ was more and more modified to a sort of Monophysitism in which his Humanity was swallowed into and overwhelmed by his Divinity, the Liturgy came to reflect this higher sacral world within the church as different from the everyday world in the streets outside. This liturgical monophysitism became the new orthodoxy as the laity were more and more blocked out from direct participation in the Liturgy. Rails and curtains and screens and even walls were erected between altar and people—blockades which incidentally the Council of Trent ordered taken down but without the mentality of separation being reversed.  The laity were no longer permitted to handle the Eucharist or even the sacred vessels.  The role of the laity in the liturgical dialogue was taken over by and restricted to the acolytes and the choirs.  The reception of Holy Communion for the faithful was removed from the Mass with only the priest receiving at the altar, and the few faithful who were to receive being required to receive either before or after the Mass and only allowed access to the Sacrament on a bi-weekly or monthly basis.  More and more emphasis was placed on the Reserved Sacrament rather than the received Sacrament with the Eucharist becoming a static reality of Christ’s Presence rather than participation in his Death and Resurrection.  This was a serious distortion of the Divine Gift passed on from Christ to the Apostles and the Apostles to the first generations of the Church.

The Mass is meant to be the source of all sanctity in our lives in as that it is our mystical participation in theosis, that is to say in our coming to share in the Divine Nature.  In Baptism we were baptized into death with Christ so that being buried with Christ in baptism we might be raised with Christ into the New Life in him.  This baptismal regeneration by which we can say that “I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live but Christ Jesus who lives in me” is renewed and reinforced every time we participate in the Eucharist.  The bread and wine which are presented to the priest for consecration are symbols of our lives.  They are placed upon the altar and the Holy Spirit is called down to consecrate them, making them Christ’s own Body and Blood.  That same Spirit is called down upon us—if you listen carefully to the Eucharistic Prayer—to make us into Christ’s Body, the Church.  Then nourished by that Body and Blood “we become what we eat”—Christ lives in us, transforming us into himself and giving us a participatory share in his Divine Nature.  One of the problems with the pre-conciliar rite is how much this transformative process of the Eucharist is obscured.  There is no procession from the people culminating in the presentation of the gifts and so the connection between the unconsecrated bread and wine and the people whom they symbolize is lost.  They are simply carried from the credence table in the presbyterium by an altar server and handed to the priest at the altar.  Eucharistic Prayer I, the so-called Roman Canon, lacks a proper epiclesis (the invocation of the Holy Spirit) to transform the gifts of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ and it also fails to ask that the Holy Spirit draw us from our individualism into the unity of the Body of Christ, the Church.  Indeed the corporate worship of the revised Rite stands in distinct contrast to the emphasized individualism into which the pre-conciliar rite had devolved.

There were those medieval and early modern saints who did, of course, find the Liturgy to be the source of their spirituality.  Saint Thomas Aquinas was deeply shaped in his holiness by the Sacred Liturgy—his magnificent Office composed for the newly instituted Feast of Corpus Christi shows us how the profound depths of his mysticism were forged by his participation in the Sacred Rites and especially the Mass.  But he is a rare exception to the spirituality of the saints in the post-Patristic period.  We see historically that as the world around them changed at a far different pace than did the Mass, that the saints had to look elsewhere for a path to holiness.  Yes, the Eucharist would be an important—though not always central—aspect to their journey into the Mystery of Christ, it would almost always be the Eucharist divorced from the Mass with the Mass reduced from the Sacred Mystery of our Salvation to the mere act of confecting the Saving Presence of Christ.  Indeed for most of these centuries—from perhaps the eighth until the twentieth—access to receiving Christ in the Eucharist was highly restricted with even deeply holy persons such as Thomas More or Teresa of Avila able to receive only one or two times a month.  The connection had been broken between the Eucharistic Sacrifice and receiving Christ in the Holy Communion.  A theology stressing the ex opere operato function of the rite had to be developed because the ex opere operantis had become obsolete.  The Mysterium Fidei remained accessible to priest-saints (and priests who were not saints) such as Thomas Aquinas and Francis de Sales and they passed it on second-hand to the devout, but for the average Catholic Christian the Mass remained a mystery so ineffable that its invitation to the faithful to offer himself or herself with Christ in obedience to the Father, to be mystically conformed to Christ in his death so as to be transformed into Christ in his Resurrection as we participate in the offering of bread and wine, in the transformative showering of the Holy Spirit, and in the incorporation into Christ by being devoured by him whom we devour, was lost.  I dare say that even today most Catholics have yet to move beyond seeing the point of the Mass being to consecrate the bread and wine so that they become the Body and Blood of Christ for our consumption. 

It is too early for the revised rites to bear the fruits of canonized saints.  We can see that it certainly supplied nourishment for Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Pope John Paul II, and the handful of other contemporaries beatified or canonized these past few years.  But I look around me at Mass and I see the fruits of the revised liturgy with our shut-ins receiving communion weekly or even daily from our Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist; I see the immense pile of gifts around the altar all through Advent that are destined for the poor in our twinned-parish; I see the squads of youth and adults going on mission to build housing for people in Appalachia;  I see the volunteer “lay chaplains” at our local hospital,  I see the outreach to immigrants with clothing and school supplies; and I see how people are being nourished with hearing the Word of God at Mass and translating into discipleship through the week.  I see people making the connection between the Mass and living a Christ-formed life through their week. 

I am old enough to remember the Mass before the Council.  My Dad went to Mass every morning, my mother every Sunday and Holy Day.  They were good people.  Dad belonged to the Holy Name Society; Mom to the Altar and Rosary Society.  And yes, they worked in the local soup-kitchen.  And my mother drove Meals on Wheels.  And they stood up for open-housing legislation in an era where a lot of our neighbors were afraid an African-American family would move onto our street.  But their faith was not shaped by the Liturgy.  Their faith was shaped by the Christian Family Movement to which they belonged.  Their faith was shaped by the many priest friends who haunted our house (and drank their liquor and ate their steaks—to which they were most welcome, by the way.)  Their faith was shaped by reading Thomas Merton and Bishop Sheen.   The Mass provided them some peace and quiet; some solitary prayer while Father did at the altar whatever he did.  I am not saying that there were no saints before Vatican II but only that the power of the Liturgy to make saints had been diluted and I believe that the holiness that was there could have been even greater, much greater, had the Liturgy been a true and actual prayer that drew them into its depths and not only a pious devotion.