What do you see and experience when you attend Mass? The Sacred? Or are you distracted by other concerns?
My own experience as a lay person and a priest was that other things got in the way and the focus shifted from the four “ends” of the Mass to something else altogether different, a focus away from God. The focus was on us, I, as an individual, and we as a community. The focus was on how to do this, that and the other, what to call, this, that and the other, where to celebrate, this, that and the other, and what to use at mass, this, that or the other? This is what Pope Benedict XVI decried as the shift from the “vertical” to the “horizontal.”
If you want to see how things got off track and very early after Vatican II, Adoremus has an article that lets you know exactly what was happening and how there became a pre-occupation with reform of the liturgy that became the driving force of the purpose of the post-Conciliar Mass, how best to reform by reforming, this, that and the other--that became the preoccupation for liturgy geeks of the reformed Ordinary Form Mass. And it is what these geeks did to the Ordinary Form of the Mass by constantly redecorating the Mass with innovations that has led now to about 12% of Catholics in some places actually attending Mass.
Here are a few of the doozies from the article I link below. Press title for complete article:
-- I have deferred to suggestions and have employed the word "presider", rather than "celebrant", "president", or priest, to denote the one who presides over the Eucharist and proclaims the Eucharistic Prayer…. It is hoped that this usage will enable us even more to realize that the entire assembly celebrates the Eucharist, that each person present is truly a con-celebrant, and the role of the priest is to preside over a communal act of worship. (p. 2)
-- Furthermore, the Western bias for hosts and grape wine as the only acceptable materials for Eucharist symbolizes not only the dominance of a specific culture but also of a specific ecosystem. (p. 24)
--Ritual sacrifices are the ultimate act of scapegoating and foundational for many of the world’s religions. Could it be that our neutralization of bread by transforming it into otherworldly hosts gave us the implicit permission to sacrifice not only the host but also the physical world in order to satisfy our violent tendencies?
-- If we persist in using lily-white little mass-produced hosts pressed flat by professionals, and antique, highly stylized vessels, the assembly will be hard-pressed to see the gifts as their own, as symbols of themselves, of the goodness of creation and the dignity of the human action required to bake bread and make wine. The gifts become so fossilized that their purpose and natural symbolism of God can no longer shine forth.
--I won’t ask how many of us have never celebrated a Liturgy of the Word in one place and a Liturgy of the Eucharist in another place, but I bet there are two or three of us in this room who haven’t done that. At Theological College last Holy Saturday the liturgy of the fire was celebrated outside in the garden; the Liturgy of the Word was celebrated on the second floor in a big room that’s used for the rector’s conferences and other big meetings, and the Liturgy of the Eucharist was celebrated upstairs in the chapel. They’ve been doing that since the 1960’s. The 1970 Instruction didn’t affect the way that they celebrated. It’s still been going on.
Read it all by pressing below and you'll know why the Ordinary Form of the Mass drifted from its four main ends of the Mass--I guess Jesus is in some of these details but its easy to miss Him!
Online Edition – July-August 2004
Vol. X, No. 5
4 comments:
Father McDonald,
Thanks for sharing. Adoremus is an excellent publication and generally has well researched and written articles on the sacred liturgy.
That article reads like a transcript from a psychologists journal.
This is useful, although liturgists and clerics and their camp-followers of a certain persuasion will find it very irritating. There is a lot of "memory-holing" going on these days, claiming that the accounts of how bad things got are exaggerated; that, for example, it's simply not true that Eucharistic adoration was discouraged. So this helps keep the factual record clear, and also helps explain to people where some of the problems came from. Remember, lots of clergy and laity naturally reposed trust in various experts, and followed their lead, and however foolish that may have been in retrospect, it was not malicious on the part of those who were trusting.
Here's good news...
At least in the context of my diocese, and in relation to our diocesan seminary, many of us priests who have first-hand experience of abuses and their justifications, particularly in our experience of the seminary, have begun to realize in recent years that we don't really need to lay it on too thick with the new men. First, we don't have to inoculate them against theological viruses that no longer circulate in our seminary. Second, we don't have to bind up wounds from abuses that growing numbers of them have not experienced. Don't get me wrong: I am not claiming our seminarians haven't experienced abuses in liturgy. What I am saying is that so much of the terrible stuff that happened routinely not so many years ago have been cleaned up. However much some of us priests love to share our "war stories," there is a point at which a younger generation just rolls its collective eyes, and that's normal.
(I erroneously posted this to the following thread a day ago...)
The 'Adoremus' article appeared over sixteen years ago and the comments are mostly from the 1980s and 1990s. Ralph Keifer, quoted more than once, died in 1987. Apart from being dated, the views expressed by these 'liturgists' were largely confined to academic circles in the USA and arguably had little impact outside a restricted audience of like-minded academics.
They were elitist in the sense that they assumed that their extreme position was so convincing that all Catholics would be more than happy to go along with it. Congregations surely had an overwhelming desire to be co-celebrants, making their presence felt by repeated vocal 'acclamations'.
That most practising Catholics would have run a mile rather than take part in such shenanegans probably didn't occur to them, and if it did could be discounted since 'we know best'.
The legacy of the post-V2 liturgical revolution is not egregious liturgical abuse (which is rare) but rather a mind-numbing mediocrity and lack of attention to detail.
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