Five years ago tonight, as a priest, I celebrated my first Tridentine Mass which for centuries upon centuries was the Ordinary Form of the Latin Rite and in which I was baptized, confirmed, made my first Confession and First Holy Communion. It is the Mass that I am an eye-witness to its reforms which begin in my humble little home parish of Saint Joseph in Augusta, Georgia.
Around 1965/66 when the changes trickled down in a slow cascade, I was 11/12 years old. I was so excited when Fr. Nicholas Quinlan our pastor told us in the weeks leading up to the first change that would be implemented that the Mass would henceforth be celebrated facing the congregation. I had always wondered what the priest was doing up there with his back turned to us, although we had plenty of picture books with illustrations of what the priest was doing.
I can remember having a discussion of the Mass with my Dad when I was preparing for my First Holy Communion and asking why the priest didn't face the people. My father said in Italy there were churches, like St. Peter's, where the pope celebrates Mass, where the pope actually faces the congregation for the Mass. He thought a good idea was to put mirrors above the altar so the congregation could see the actions of the priest--not a bad idea I thought, although I worried about how those mirrors would be hung!
Here my recollection gets a bit fuzzy, but I think that first Sunday with Mass facing the people also included the first English parts of the Mass. It was a low Mass for us so all was spoken and the congregation urged to take their parts, with the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, the alternation of the nine-fold Kyrie, the English Gloria (much more like the one we have just revised). We said the Creed together and the Sanctus. I still have the worship aid, a double fold off white card with all that the congregation was expected to say and do.
I thought it all to be very cool and exciting.
But then it all became so very sloppy. Folk music in the four hymn variety was foisted upon us and in an entertainment mode. Altar servers who once had complicated and well trained roles had nothing to do and did what little they had to do in a very sloppy way and cassocks and surplices went to KKK type albs with hoods and cinctures. They looked like potato bags out for a night of cross burning!
Then some priests started to take liberties with the Mass and improvised and told us all kinds of weird things about more changes coming that would even effect doctrine and dogma. Of course that didn't happen except in the spirit of Vatican II that had nothing to do with Vatican II itself.
Confusion reigned supreme and the Church which had been like a rock of salvation in the storms of life turned into a marshmallow which bounced a lot of formerly good or nominal Catholics right out of the Church into the hands of secularist social justice types or more rigid fundamentalist type denominations.
But five years ago on September 14, 2007 I celebrated the EF Mass as a Low Mass here at St. Joseph in Macon at 7:00 PM, also a Friday night, with tornado warnings, pouring down rain, thunder and lightening and a church filled with about 300 people. I was more nervous about this first Mass and sweated more at it, than I was at my first Ordinary form Mass on Sunday, June 8, 1980. How appropriate that today is the Exaltation of the Most Holy Cross!
The Church and her Ordinary Form Mass are much improved since the abysmal days of the late 60's and well into the 90's and now the gravitational pull of the EF Mass is being felt in my parish as I try to make the two look and feel similar although the OF is in the vernacular.
Starting the day after the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council October 13, 1962 when I was merely 8 years old, we will celebrate our normal 12:10 PM Mass,on October 14, 2012, one out of five weekend Masses we have, with the Liturgy of the Eucharist ad orientem. If that isn't gravitation pull, I don't know what is.
This 12:10 PM Mass will be as we always celebrate it, with the Introductory Rite and concluding Rite at the Chair, the Liturgy of the Word as it is done in the Ordinary Form, but the Liturgy of the Eucharist will be ad orientem but in the vernacular. Our 12:10 PM Mass is a sung Mass from the Sign of the Cross to the Final blessing, except for the Scripture readings, as is our 9:30 AM Mass. If our deacons could sing, which they can't, I'd require them to chant the Gospel. Oh, well!
As an aside, that first Mass I witnessed with the priest celebrating toward the congregation was everything I had dreamed for except for one thing and I wasn't alone in noticing it and at the time there was a very clear etiquette that one shouldn't do in front of others what others aren't doing at the same time. Can you guess this sin against the etiquette of the day?
Well I'll tell you. We were all shocked when the priest ate and drank the Body and Blood of Christ in front of us, for us to watch--it was almost like watching someone do some so intimate that one should refrain from watching as though a show! My Italian mother was aghast as were others in the congregation.
But worse yet was the dichotomy between what the laity were taught about receiving the Host and how the priest consumed the host. He place the entire large host in his mouth and actually chewed it, of course with his mouth closed, but chewed it in front of us! We were told that one simply did not do that, that you allowed the host to slowly melt on your tongue and at a time when you knew you would not gag, to swallow the host.
But that eating in front of the congregation when the congregation was waiting to go to Holy Communion was truly shocking. We longed for the day when the priest did that with his back to us!
7 comments:
A very well told tale, Father. I remember my one and only folk Mass. The brand new altar was plywood, and the music was... out of place, to be sure.
I think that marked my departure from the Church.
Those Spirit of Vatican II people have much for which to answer. So much damage was done, not just in the wreckovations, but the very real damage to people who found the changes--and the abrupt transformations--appalling.
When I think back to the way the changes were made, and the near total lack of catechesis in advance of those changes, and then look at the incredible care taken bringing in the new translation, it is appalling again. How on earth could it require months of preparation for the laity to accept the so vary small changes which affected them this time? And still more months to remember something so simple as "and with your spirit"?
I look forward to eventually finding a parish near me which offers the sacrifice of the EF.
Kudos to you Father. A sung Mass, either in Latin or the vernacular, restores the objectivity so often missing in OF celebrations.
Is it that your deacons can't sing or won't sing? I suspect the latter, in which case they should be reminded that singing the Epistle and Gospel goes with the dalmatic. ICEL provides full instruction and examples on its website, using the translations currently used in both North America and the British Isles. One of the frustrating things from a layman's point of view is the number of men in the clerical state (and this includes priests and even bishops) who are not competent to perform the liturgical role which is the primary reason for their ordination. In any other profession, such incompetence would occasion dismissal.
My heartfelt congratulations, Fr. McDonald, both on this your fifth EF anniversary and on your shepherding of your parish. With enough true pastors of their flocks like you, many of the Church's current problems would not seem so daunting. However, ...
"except in the spirit of Vatican II that had nothing to do with Vatican II itself."
This, I have painfully come to think, is a distinction without much difference.
Because in studying the deliberations at Vatican II, I have found that the real machinery of the Council--in its commissions that drafted its documents and controlled their consideration--was controlled by a relatively small number of liturgical and theological activists drawn disportionately from the liberal fringes, who carefully crafted the documents so that they could both gain floor approval from the predominately traditional bishops who voted on them, and then after the Council their ambiguities could be exploited by post-conciliar groups consisting largely of those same activists, to implement their documents in ways that the bishops at the Council never envisioned and would never have approved.
In short, it was the very same "spirit of Vatican II" that controlled the formulation of the documents of Vatican II, and their implementation after the Council, by pretty much the same "experts" in both cases, acting beyond the direct control of the bishops of the Church.
As Card. Ratzinger has pointed out in his Fontgombault conference remarks, that after the Council the bishops lost control of the liturgy to extra-hierarchical groups and commissions, thus explaining how a fast-moving liturgical revolution was engineered, when the Council Fathers had not envisioned or intended anything resembling a "revolution"--as many, I know personally, did not approve when it was happening before their eyes in their own dioceses. Surely most felt as Bishop Lefebvre did when he cast his "placet" vote on the liturgical constitution, having been assured by his peritus that nothing much would come of it.
Thus--the Council and its "spirit"--a distinction without enough difference to justify its reflexive inclusion in discussions of what went wrong after the council. Whatever it is, it went wrong in the Council itself.
Courtesy of Fr. Ray Blake at http://marymagdalen.blogspot.com/
Happy Summorum Pontificum Day
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEdyIvvUJB0&feature=player_embedded
John, you asked, "Is it that your deacons can't sing or won't sing?"
As a parishioner at St. Joseph, let me assure you that our deacons cannot sing.
I really like the expression: "The Ordinary Form of the Mass celebrated extraordinarily!" Last August my son was married at such a Mass. The Propers were chanted in English, the Ordinary chanted in Latin, all (and I mean all) the parts of the priest and responses chanted in English. The two readings were proclaimed and the deacon chanted the Gospel. Ad Orientem was used with altar boys and incense. The wedding vows exchanged in speech but all the blessings chanted. The recessional was a hymn "Lord of creation .....". The primacy of the human voice was the instrument. A comment from a non-Catholic said it was the most sacred liturgy he had ever attended. So the OF can be done in an extraordinary way - we only have to do it and the more I go the more I am convinced that this is what Vatican II really envisioned.
Father, this is great. I think that ad orientem Eucharist is the most important reform of the reform that needs to come. I hope that that you are a pioneer who has many followers.
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