ENTERING ONE’S TWILIGHT YEARS HELPS TO BECOME INTROSPECTIVE AND FUTURE ORIENTED AT THE SAME TIME

Auxiliary Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Astana, Kazakhstan:

Since Vatican II we observed within the life of the Church a shift to an ecclesiastic anthropocentrism where the horizontal, organizational, bureaucratic realities and human action gained primacy over prayer and contemplation and the supernatural, strictly divine realities. This tendency manifests itself first in the liturgy. The loss of the supernatural is a turning of man toward himself, a focus on self and this is reflected very visibly in the manner of celebrating Mass facing the people after the council. We can see here the primary disease of the life of the Church in our day, the disease of anthropocentrism.
I call this situation liturgical exile because Christ, who is the very center of the liturgy, finds himself in our day during the liturgical man-centered celebrations, as it were, in exile.

As I head toward my 70’s and a life more retired than active, I find myself nostalgic about my past and evaluating so many false gods I thought important as a seminarian and priest. What really matters and what doesn’t in the life of faith and as one looks forward to the dreaded four last things that we will all face together and the purpose of our “walking together”: “death, judgement, heaven and hell.” 

Crux has a good interview with Bishop Anthanasius Schneider on the Mass and I agree with him although I know that he is viewed as a right winger and a “Francis critic”.  You can read it there:

Francis critic sees the church in a time of ‘liturgical exile’

My liturgical journey beginning with 1965 was a mixed bag of liking and disliking the changes in the Mass and Church. Initially it all seem to be cosmetic and a sense of a more repressive or authoritarian, paternalistic Catholicism coming to an end. 

As an adolescent and young adult wanting to be adult I liked that the Church was calling adults to be adult in their faith and not like small children in their relationship with priests and nuns who were very paternalistic. 

I liked the vernacular Mass, the priest facing the people and modified habits for nuns which most Catholics in the south could not understand how the poor nuns could live in the heat of the south and wear so many layers of clothing. We felt relief when the sisters in the south in pre-Vatican II times were allowed to change from a black habit to a white one for the summer months. 

But things went south around 1968. All discipline in the Church was collapsing and no one was happy. There was alarm among traditionalists about doctrinal decline and change and anger as well and alarm and anger from progressives that things were not going forward fast enough. No one was happy! And criticism of this, that and the other, especially the Mass and what was happening in the priesthood and religious life were at a high. And young Catholics of my generation at the time were aghast at Humanae Vitae and its prohibition against contraception and what was seen as the Church meddling in the sex lives of laity and without any knowledge of what the laity’s sex life was like and the challenges it presented within and outside of marriage. 

And I a teenager looking to the Church for some stability and answers found only chaos and marshmallow like indifference. Who needed that!

In 2007 when I started celebrating the pre-Vatican II version of the Mass, I discovered that all my false gods about the liturgy were just that false gods. 

What are those false gods? And yes they are. It begins with an ideology of lay participation that blurs the distinction between clergy and laity and tries to eliminate it. That has implications for the identity of the Church in all areas but in the liturgy it has to do with lay lectors, communion ministers and a more horizontal approach to the Mass which dumbs it down, makes it pedestrian and without mysticism or reverence. 

Yes, in the pre-Vatican II Church, the fact that laity could not touch the Host or Sacred Vessels with their hands and only receive Holy Communion from a priest created an ambiance of sacredness. The clergy were for worship and the laity for the profane things of the world like politics and the public square. 

That all became blurred in the late 60’s forward. And the laity were being made into a new caste system of clerics and they were a minority in the parish, but clericalized nonetheless.

For example, the standard for a good, practicing Catholic in the 1950’s was that laity went to Church each Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, gave their children a Catholic education and believed what the Catholic Church taught. They went to confession regularly and tried not to give scandal to others. That was it. They weren’t chastised for passivity during Mass and not being more involved in what mattered at Mass like becoming lectors and communion ministers. They weren’t even chastised for not receiving Holy Communion at every Mass or that priests gave them Communion from the tabernacle not from the Mass just celebrated. 

After Vatican II, the super laity were those who became churchyfied. They were communion ministers and lectors and involved on the parish council and finance council and cozied up to the priests and religious in the parish. They were in the in-crowed and the others, well we were on the periphery and looked down upon.

The pre-Vatican II Mass taught me that all those things are false gods presented as gods. 

Bishop Schneider is right about the crisis in the Mass.