Liturgical Reform?

Is division in the Church over its liturgy a tempest in a teapot, or a real threat to the mystical body of Christ? On the one hand, the whole church is already divided by heresy, schism and myriad denominations, all of which might be, by the way, providential, confounding as they do the tongues of those pointing arrows in all sorts of directions in the name of truth. The church is now used to division, so why all this hubbub about the liturgy? On the other hand, the Catholic Church is known by its unity. Unity is the sine qua non of Catholicism. Is it a matter of kooky kat'liks spreading their wings in their 15 minutes, or is the matter far graver?

Sancrosanctum Concilium (SC), the first constitution (on sacred liturgy) to emerge from Vatican II, sought to put into practice for the whole Catholic Church the reforms initiated here and there over 100 years prior to the start of the Council in 1962. The sole purpose of the renewal of the liturgy was to authenticate the role of the laity in the rites of the sacred liturgies ("Mass" in the western church). "Authentication" of this role refers to the ratification of the priesthood of the baptized, meaningful participation in the celebration of the mass, and the effecting of catechesis that would accomplish these goals. 

The Council fathers desired to promulgate a palpable change in the experience of attending Mass. The shape and sense of the change was called aggiornamento, renewal, updating (not modernization), a sprucing up, a cleaning up of stained-glass windows to let new light shine through. Where is aggiornamento today? I suppose it's a bit old, if not wizened, and if it's anywhere, it's more in the camp of those who champion the old rite of the mass--the Tridentine Mass--where a fraction of the practicing faithful have experienced a new sense of belonging, communion and faith in action, than in the novus ordo camp--the authorized version of the old rite made new--(new order of the Mass). 

So, what's going on here? The Council fathers had no intention of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: they had no concept of the total replacement of the old rite with a new one. Aggiornamento doesn't start from scratch; it works with what's already there to let light shine more brightly on what lay beneath crusted candle soot and rote, tired movements and speech.

I recall that my family attended Mass on every Sunday and holy days of obligation. I received my first Holy Communion under the 1962 missal and Confirmation under the novus ordo. I had a sense of the transition from one to the other. It was an exciting time to be Catholic. We were singing more (even my father would sing, a man whose voice was not known for anything close to a velvet fog) and most amazingly, we were speaking Latin. "Et cum spiritu tuo!" All the kids in the neighborhood (mostly the Catholic kids) were chanting Latin in the streets: et cum spirit, 2-2-0--ohh. Well, we certainly knew what we were saying in church--the large, folding missal cards were printed in red and black, and the English translation was clear. In retrospect, the council fathers had achieved something special and good. Alas, how long could a good thing last?

While the Tridentine liturgy had truly passed into a new reality--true renewal and updating--they are not long the days of wine and bread. Time happened. The music began to change: lyrics and melody/harmony became so pedestrian as to give "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" a new luster. The words of the liturgy itself became vague and prosaic, for example, "Lord I am not worthy that you enter under my roof..." became "Lord I am not worthy to receive you...," erasing any direct reference to the Gospel's healing of the centurion's servant (interestingly, after 30 years, this debacle was corrected in the current missal). Much of this has gotten better and real desecrations have now been expunged from the newer missal, but the effects have been devasting: poor mass attendance (the pandemic notwithstanding), horrible catechesis buttressed by ambiguous liturgical theology (a recent, and now famous Pew study demonstrated that 66% of American Catholics have no sense of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and 33% of regular Sunday worshippers think the consecrated bread and wine--the body of Jesus Christ and his precious blood--are merely symbols of Jesus); old-fashioned traditional Catholics now have the moral, theological, devotional high ground with a Tridentine liturgy they fully understand and find wholesome, devout, transforming, holy, sacred. As such, a sliver of the church seems poised for schism. Pope Francis is at a loss for a pastoral solution (Saint Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict had little luck with their own pastoral approaches).

The best Pope Francis can come up with is placing restrictions on the Celebration of the Tridentine rite. He wants to phase it out--not wipe it off the face of the earth, but put it in its historical context, juxtaposed with the novus ordo, and he wants to clarify the continuity of the one rite with the other, much as we had sensed so many years ago. That seems right to me. The Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, reserves the right to celebrate the Mass according to its increasing understanding of its ecclesiology, Christology and various theologies. That the Tridentine Mass is still celebrated is at best peculiar, for there has never been a timeless, unchanging rite of Christian worship. In fact, change and dynamism are more to the point than some idolatry of the etched-in-stone. Sadly, the bishops continue to underestimate the intelligence of the laity (are American Catholics so ineducable that they cannot learn enough Latin to continue a Latin rite, at least in part...in Latin?!?!), and their pathetically paternalistic attitudes combined with theologies of the what's-happening-now, had until recently given the Faithful pablum instead of the very real presence of Christ's body and his most precious blood. We'll just have to wait and see how their attempt at Eucharistic renewal turns out.

As Sebastian Maniscalco has duly noted, "I blame the parents," or in this case, the fathers. 

"Sacramental Slapstick" and Ecclesiological Banana Peels

 In a recent comment on my review of CM Gschwandtner's Welcoming Finitude, Joseph Charles noted a preposterous story appearing in the Associated Press, which reported the possibility that some infants might not have validly received the sacrament of baptism because of an anomaly in the form of the sacrament ministered by a certain deacon who altered the language "I baptize" to "We baptize." Joseph appropriately dubbed this hilarity with the hilarious phrase, "sacramental slapstick." Now while Joseph's critique of Catholicism runs very deep and sharp, far more deeply and sharply than his detour through a modicum of levity (indeed, he might find more "slapstick" in what follows), it does serve to underscore what's been afoot in Catholic circles these days.

First, a little reassurance for the worried well: unless the deacon was a malicious and evil person---intending to defraud the church---then the sacrament is valid (even if liceity is put into question). To keep things simple, a review of the basic tenet of sacramental theology: a sacrament has a hylomorphic structure, that is, it is constructed of a form, in this case the words used in the ceremony/liturgy, and the matter, in this case, water. In the sacrament of baptism, the core of the form is "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," not "I/we" (which are always ambiguous). Moreover, any baptized Christian can baptize, so long as she does what the Church has always intended to do. Now if the deacon deliberately intended to do otherwise than what the Church has always done, there could be a problem with validity. The first-person pronoun's use here would not invalidate the sacrament in and of itself.

So just what has turned sacramental theology into low comedy's banana peel in the path of everyday Catholics? My surmise is the appearance of the ugly head of ultramontane fundamentalism slowly creeping into the life of the church. One needn't look too far to find well-meaning but misguided Catholics who have lost faith in Pope Francis because of his human frailties, as if the pope were himself the Church. When such fundamentalist Catholics put all their faith in a particular personage, it is easy to see how fragile such faith can become. Such faith has recourse only to dogma, and closes itself off to the living, breathing Catholic faith.

Such Catholics find reassurance in "knowing" just how many people are in hell, for example, and shiver in their boots at the suggestion that humans on earth cannot know the judgement of God at the end of any human life. It seems such people cannot have faith in their own 'heavenly reward' unless the reward of bad people is clearly stated, known and an incontrovertible fact. For such people, there can be no beatific vision without the music of the sizzling flesh of the damned.

Many such Catholics identify themselves as "traditional," and as such, embrace many Catholic devotions, such as the Tridentine Rite of the Mass. Truth be told, I personally have great admiration for the beauty and majesty of that rite; it is the rite of my own childhood. There is nothing in the 1962 missal that warrants the fundamentalism that slips on the banana peels of the "I/we," or the reluctance of a pope who is slow to judge. 

Whatever happened to the notion of the indefectability of the church? Popes come and go, but nothing can militate against the abiding presence of Christ in the church. The 1962 missal has become a stumbling block, a wedge between Catholic and Catholic, a scandal that threatens to reduce ritual and liturgy to "slapstick," and fertile ground for the work of the devil's divisiveness. The blinding zeal of fundamentalism will undoubtedly lead to a blindness to banana peels. When did the likes of Jerry Lewis become papabile?