Selective in our scandals--part

Selective in our scandals--part three
Is it any surprise that people who naturally manipulate the Liturgy naturally manipulate every other aspect of the Faith too?

Friday, June 27, 2002

Fr. Joseph F. Wilson

On Friday mornings we had "alley Masses." On other days, the seminary community would gather in the lovely main chapel, its beautiful simplicity modelled after a medieval Burgundian Cistercian choir. But the "Program for Priestly Formation (PPF)," the document of the bishops’ conference setting forth the principles for seminary education in our country, encouraged the formation of smaller communities within the larger seminary community (actually, the program outlined in the PPF was in the process of turning the larger seminary communities into much smaller seminary communities, and doing it quite effectively, bless the bishops’ hearts!! -- but that is another article!). In pursuit of this goal, on Fridays the House broke up for "alley Masses," alleys being the corridors on which we live in small groups.

If there were some reason one could not be at the community Mass, there was a crypt chapel area with a number of exquisite minor altars, relics of a previous dispensation: in preconciliar days, these were the altars where in the old days the priest professors would offer their private Masses, each served by a student. In my day, these minor altars were utilized by only a couple of alley profs for the Friday Masses. The effect for which one strove at these affairs was a deliberate casualness, which I suppose was an attempt at intimacy with the Lord. Most alley Masses therefore took place away from the chapels.

Early Friday morning, my alley would groggily assemble in the alley prof’s living room. The daily community Mass was in the middle of the day, but our alley priest was busily pursuing a degree in counselling (preparing to leave the priesthood in a few months, as it turned out), and his field work made it necessary for him to schedule our Mass very early.

His room was across the hall from mine, and once he had opened his door one was aware of frantic but systematic efforts at housecleaning within. If one were patient and waited, one discovered that underneath what had looked like mounds of books and papers and graphs were various pieces of furniture. The piles of stuff were moved from the couches and chairs and the coffee table into the bedroom, where they were stacked up atop the blanket.

As my groggy alleymates sleepwalked into the room and flung themselves on the seats, Father J. was animated, "wired" as we would say, chatting excitedly about his field work and his coming day. The Friday morning clean-up was the set time to water the plants, or rather I should say the remnants of the plants, as we were doubtful that there was anything alive in the five flower pots hanging in the window, from which we could see struggling tattered bedraggled shoots struggling to escape. Fr J. would hop the arms of the couch and loom over the five or six seminarians sitting there as he poured water into each hanging pot; then, jumping down, he would dash into his bedroom for the next task as what was for me the most enjoyable moment of the proceedings commenced -- the dripping of the excess water from the bottom of the hanging pots into the window sill and the back of the couch.

"Here,’ Fr J. might say to me, "You do the first reading." And I would choose a seat and locate the reading, preview it carefully and then put the book on the side table next to me, carefully removing the three or four empty Diet Pepsi cans and gingerly setting them down on the floor so as not to disturb anything growing inside. By now, the extent of the congregation would be pretty clear (i.e., we would know who had managed to stumble out of bed), and we would be ready to commence the Holy Synaxis, the Foretaste of the Eschatological Banquet, or, what I privately but accurately referred to as the ‘Awful Sacrifice.’

Fr. J was a fascinating combination of the old and the new. He would fully vest for the liturgy, chasuble and all. Then he would sit in a captain’s chair, before which was a wicker coffee table with a corporal spread over it. One could not say that he ignored the prescribed Liturgy at all -- he would keep it always in sight, even if only in the corner of his eye, always within nodding distance, ready to be yanked back by the string on its tail if he needed it. The Sacramentary and his Lectionary were piled on the floor at his feet. He would begin each prayer with the words of the Church, then wax poetic and eloquent as he took that prayer in directions never envisioned by Holy Mother Church -- "Father, You are holy indeed, and all creation rightly gives You praise, for everywhere and at all times people everywhere are mindful of Your goodness and praising You constantly..." He had a remarkably optimistic notion of how people occupy themselves. But sooner or later he would start to run our of steam, or gas if you prefer, and he would while still talking reach down to pick up the Sacramentary at his feet, deftly flip it open and settle on the next paragraph, or rather the opening line thereof which served as his new launching pad: ‘And so, Father we bring you these gifts, not just this bread and wine but the gift of our lives and all that we are and all that we do..."

It was Liturgy-as-stream-of-consciousness, the most idiosyncratic performance of anything I have ever witnessed. I had never quite seen anything like it before: a fully vested priest, sitting in an armchair with his legs crossed, prattling away as though he were giving the itinerary of his last trip to Ireland except that this was the Mass, with ten or so sleepy seminarians arranged in armchairs or on couches or squatting like Indians on the floor. He got the words of consecration in amidst the prattling, and the paten with the Hosts and the ceramic cup with the Precious Blood were passed amidst the dripping from the Faithful Departed flora hanging in the window and within sight of the green things growing in the Diet Pepsi cans at my feet. With a quick blessing we were briskly dismissed, a welcome hot cup of coffee in the refectory in the place where God had always intended that the Last Gospel should be. Ite missa est.

Now, although I have recounted this story in a light-hearted way, it is a serious story. It isn’t exaggerated -- this really happened, and I sat through it week after week for the year I was on that alley. And there is a serious reason I recount it here.

Informal liturgies were not always celebrated in that tawdry way. Some years earlier, in the college seminary, our alley priest also preferred to celebrate the alley Mass in his living room. The whole atmosphere was different. He was a reverent, prayerful man, with a strong preference for simplicity. He celebrated the Mass sitting on the floor before a small table, carefully and prayerfully, giving due respect to the words of the Liturgy.

I do not therefore wish to caricature all informal liturgies as tawdry and irreverent.

But that whole approach to the sacred Liturgy is seriously flawed, and the important point I wish to make is that a whole generation of seminarians was formed to accept that kind of approach to the Liturgy as natural. There is simply no way one could read the liturgical documents and come to the conclusion that either of these priests was celebrating the Mass in the way the Church envisioned. They were both therefore taking the Liturgy, the common property of the People of God, a Gift received from God through the tradition, and they were manipulating and using it as they wished. The second celebrant, the reverent one, achieved something of the effect I imagine the Japanese tea ceremony accomplishes in its participants; the first was so dead to every rubric and dictate of reverence he had once learned that he might as well have been confecting the Eucharist in a garage on the hood of an Edsel. In neither case were we joining in the Liturgy of the Church, as the Church sets it forth.

There is something awesome happening when we gather around the altar for the Holy Sacrifice. It is that God Himself is acting, in a unique way. It is that Jesus Himself is the Priest, and He is offering Himself, Jesus the Victim, to the eternal Father, for us and for our salvation. It is that the one, perfect Sacrifice of Jesus, Calvary itself, is made present to us, so that we can be there -- we can, literally, stand at the Foot of the Cross with our blessed Lady and St John. I, as the Priest, do a few things, and you, as the People, do a few things, and we say a few things, but the holy Mass is primarily about what God Himself does for us. It is the most awesome reality in this world.

Whether or not one realizes it, the contemporary approach to the Liturgy undercuts one’s awareness of grace, of God working. It changes one’s whole focus.

If you are a seminarian, if you are formed in such a way that you experience the Liturgy of the Mass as a vehicle for your own self-expression or for the group expression of those who are gathered together in the congregation, then how can you be expected not to use the Liturgy in that way? And if you are a member of the congregation of a Priest formed in that way, and if the Priest shapes the liturgy in such a way that it is a celebration of the community and its gifts, aren’t you, at first, likely to think that’s a great thing?

And after that pales, and you get bored with the ceaseless karaoke liturgizing, aren’t you likely to join the sixty percent of the congregation that has voted with its feet over the last forty years?

As I wrote at the beginning of this series of articles, the current, well publicized scandals are not our only crises. What has happened to the Liturgy of our Church in this country is, simply, tragic, and the fact that it has not been addressed does no credit to our chief pastors. I would like to further explore this theme, in our next articles looking at different aspects of the Liturgy. But as we consider these different points, please bear in mind that all over the Church, the worshipping life of Catholic congregations rests in the hands of priests. Thanks be to God, many approach this responsibility seriously and reverently. But there are older priests who found the "revised liturgy" a welcomed opportunity to break free of the restraints of the traditional rite and "express themselves," and there are younger priests who were trained to look at the Mass as their opportunity for self-expression.

Is it any surprise that Jesus gets pushed to the side -- is it any surprise that people who naturally manipulate the Liturgy naturally manipulate every other aspect of the Faith too?

Email author: frwilson@cruxnews.com

Used with permission

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