ONE YEAR LATER, HAS MUCH CHANGED IN THE MASS IN YOUR NECK OF THE WOODS? AND DO ANY OF YOU FEEL LIKE JIMMY FALLON?

Does your parish Mass in the Ordinary Form look anything like this Ordinary Form Mass? If not, why not? Is there anything wrong with this? Of course you can't tell who the celebrant is and that might disappoint those who have their favorite priest or bishop to look at, because in this image, you really can't tell who the celebrant is, it could be anyone in the world, maybe even the pope, but who knows? Of course those who appreciate the anonymity of the human priest in this awesome style of the Mass get it!

I know I live in a vacuum and that what we do at St. Joseph Church in Macon may well be extraordinary when compared to most Catholic parishes in the USA. And what we do I think is very main-line, nothing really radical. We are reform of the reform but not to the extreme. We sing traditional hymns from the traditional St. Michael Hymnal, with thee and thous in the traditional hymns no less, but I wouldn't say that we are on the cutting edge of having an all chanted Mass in English, although our Extraordinary Form High Mass once a month is all chanted and marvelously so.

We've been making the Mass at St. Joseph as solemn as possible, all are sung and two are completely sung. There is no Low Sunday Mass here. But we have active participation both internally and externally, we have boys and girls serving, men and women reading and men and women Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion.

Apart from implementing the new English translation smoothly and with absolutely no fuss and I mean absolutely no fuss, and this in a parish that is very eclectic with multinationals, people for whom English is a second language and from all over the country too, we have done only five things that are what some would consider radical, but nonetheless permitted by the Church and both which the Holy Father has observed and modeled.

The first is that we offer Holy Communion at four of our five weekend Masses by way of intinction. This means that the Ordinary or Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion "dip" the Host into the Precious Blood and say to the communicant, "The Body and Blood of Christ." The Holy Father has done this on a number of high solemnities. However, we have written instructions which indicate that if one wishes to receive in the hand, one must make that clear to the minister prior to the Host being intincted.

The second is that we have provided kneelers for those who wish to take the exception to the norm of standing in the USA to receive Holy Communion. No one is forced to either stand or kneel, it is the choice of the communicant to observe the USA norm or to take the exception and to do the exception comfortably. Of course the Holy Father mandates that communicants in his line kneel at the kneeler, nothing unusual here.

The third is that our Ordinary Form 12:10 PM Sung Mass is now being celebrated "ad orientem" for the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The parts of the Mass from the priest's chair remain at the chair. I asked for constructive criticism or advice from the congregation. Everyone who offered me their opinion except one were all very positive about it. The one who was negative normally does not attend that Mass but wanted to see it to offer an opinion to me.

The fourth is that we have for the past three years had the cantor chant the official Introit prior to the processional hymn as well as the Offertory and Communion antiphons. I would like to see us move in the direction of a more solemn way of singing this with a schola or choir at least at two of our Masses.

The fifth is that we celebrate the EF High Mass monthly and on other occasions and have it as a low Mass each Tuesday at 5:00 PM.

Of course we have an extraordinarily beautiful church which is very ornate and a beatiful free-standing altar that compliments the older altars in the church. We hope to restore the altar railing within the next year or so.

Now, compare this to the following written at the Shazamaholic Blog yesterday. I wonder too, now that we only have about 25% of Catholics attending Mass regularly, if a good percentage of them who don't feel like Jimmy Fallon:

Well, its been a whole year since the new English translation of the Roman Missal has been promulgated. I can neither say it has been a success nor a failure. The rebellion against the translation the critics on the left were hoping for never happened. The vast majority accepted the new English words with nary a kick or a scream. Yet, there hasn't been a fundamental change in the way Mass is celebrated in the typical parish, either. Despite the new words, there are still the stripped down sanctuaries, with tiny wood altars that look like dining room tables. There is still the hand holding, the banal Broadway show tune Mass Settings and adult contemporary hymns that celebrate people while ignoring all things mystical and spiritual. In the typical parish, mine included, Mass is still a liturgical Woodstock wannabe. I don't listen to Broadway show tunes. Why in the world would I want to go to Church and hear Mass settings in a Broadway style? What I have come to realize is that the problem is in the rubrics, or more accurately the lack of rubrics, in the Ordinary Form (rubrics are the actions that go along with the words, such as kneeling, facing ad orientum, how often the priest makes the sign of the cross, etc... think of it as choreography). The Ordinary Form, aka Novus Ordo, was fabricated by Annibale Bugnini, and was to be a simplified form. It has so few rubrics, it allows priests to celebrate, or rather "preside" (as the Novus Ordo rubrics call it) Mass in their own individual styles, and sadly, many adopted a hippie social worker style that seems to be eternally stuck in the early 1970s.

I find myself agreeing with comedian Jimmy Fallon, who expressed his thoughts on the Catholic Mass in this interview with NPR. On the traditional Mass, he said,
"I just, I loved the church. I loved the idea of it. I loved the smell of the incense. I loved the feeling you get when you left church. I loved like how this priest can make people feel this good. I just thought it was, I loved the whole idea of it. My grandfather was very religious, so I used to go to mass with him at like 6:45 in the morning serve mass and then you made money too if you did weddings and funerals. They'd give you, you'd get like five bucks. And so I go okay, I can make money too. I go this could be a good deal for me. I thought I had the calling. "

But on the way Mass has gone since the Novus Ordo was implemented, he said,
"I don't go to - I tried to go back. When I was out in L.A. and I was like kind of struggling for a bit I went to church for a while, but it's kind of, it's gotten gigantic now for me. It's like too, there's a band. There's a band there now and you got to, you have to hold hands with people through the whole mass now, and I don't like doing that. You know, I mean it used to be the shaking hands piece was the only time you touched each other. Now I'm holding, now I'm lifting people. Like Simba. I'm holding them, ha nah hey nah ho. I'm doing too much. I don't want - there's Frisbees being thrown, there's beach balls going around, people waving lighters, and I go this is too much for me. I want the old way. I want to hang out with the, you know, with the nuns, you know, that was my favorite type of mass, and the Grotto and just like straight up, just mass-mass."

I find myself having similar thoughts. My own parish has the casual, Broadway-Woodstock style Mass, that I find increasing difficult to sit through. I want tradition. I want to hear chant. I want some Latin. I want to hear bells and smell incense. I want the priest to be a spiritual leader, leading us in prayer and sermonizing about faith and miracles, not a performer who tries to entertain us, while making social justice his only message. There is another parish in my neighborhood that has a more traditional Mass, with bells, incense, chant, and even some Latin. They even have the Extraordinary Form (aka Tridentine Latin Mass) every week. Can I bring myself to quit my parish and join this other one? In time, I may not have a choice, if going to Mass at my parish continues to be like a chore or a penance to suffer through.

If I had the Pope's ear, I would humbly suggest to him that the Order of the Mass for the Ordinary Form needs to be reformed. The 1965 Order should be restored to the Ordinary Form Roman Missal, replacing the Annibale Bugnini fabricated Order. The 1965 Order of the Mass was, essentially, a vernacular translation of the Tridentine Latin Order, slightly simplified in rubrics, with some repetition removed, thus making it fulfill Vatican II's requirements- - in fact, the 1965 Missal was heralded "The Mass Of Vatican II".
Posted by Shazamaholic at 2:32 PM