Catholic indifference

Over the last few months it's been getting progressively more and more noisy in our church both before and after Mass. More and more people seem to treat coming to Mass like a social gathering - as a chance to chat to those friends you haven't seen for a week.

Inevitably, the same people don't "have the time" to join in actual parish social occasions. Most won't even stay after Mass for a cup of tea and a chat.

This has really been getting to me, so I was heartened to see respected commentator George Weigel posting about this same topic just recently. Here is what he had to say:

The Chattering Classes Are Us
George Weigel
Posted: Wednesday, January 26, 2011
THE CATHOLIC DIFFERENCE
Publication Date: January 19, 2011

Catholics once had an intuitive understanding of sacred space: to enter a church, especially in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, was to enter a different kind of environment, one of the hallmarks of which was a reverent silence. Some of that intuition remains. But much of it has been lost. Thus, within the past few months, I have noted three habitual behaviors, not in parishes that are otherwise sloppy in their liturgical practice, but precisely in parishes that take their liturgical life seriously:

1) The demarcation between the narthex (or, as they say in AmChurchSpeak, the "gathering space") and the body of the church (a.k.a. the "worship space") has been severely eroded. Conversations begun in the narthex often continue when people reach the pews; new conversations are initiated in the pews. Both types of conversation sometimes continue during the choral prelude, if there is one. In any case, the new convention seems to be that in-pew conversations are quite appropriate until the processional hymn is announced.

2) The exchange of peace, which ought to be accompanied by the briefest of greetings, often becomes the occasion for a general conversational free-for-all. This breaks the rhythm of the Liturgy of the Eucharist and is anything but conducive to the gathering of mind and spirit appropriate to the period before the reception of holy communion.

3) Immediately after the conclusion of the recessional hymn, conversation, often quite loud, immediately breaks out in the pews (among those, that is, who have not already bolted for the door during the recessional). Choirs who have spent time and effort preparing a choral postlude must therefore compete with a torrent of chatter that not infrequently drowns out music that has been carefully rehearsed. This chatter is both bad liturgical form and very bad manners. Attempts to remind one's fellow congregants of the proprieties, through a pleading glance, are met with either incomprehension or hostility.

2011 could be a year in which the liturgical catechesis enjoined by Vatican II as part of the reform of the liturgy actually takes place: if pastors and parish liturgy directors see the introduction of the new English translations that will become mandatory on the First Sunday of Advent as the occasion to do what should have been done forty years ago, and equip the saints -- who have too often devolved into the liturgical chattering classes -- for their part in worship. That part was beautifully defined by the fathers of Vatican II in the chapter on the Holy Eucharist of the Council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy:

The Church...earnestly desires that Christ's faithful, when present at this mystery of faith, should not be there as strangers...They should give thanks to God. Offering the immaculate victim, not only through the hands of the priest but also together with him, they should learn to offer themselves.

That offering of self takes place through silence as well as through the "full, conscious, and active participation" the Council enjoined -- a "participation," I might add, that was not envisioned as obliterating the distinction between behavior appropriate to the parish hall and behavior fitting for the body of the church. Both our participation in the liturgy and our silence should reflect the distinctiveness of the sacred space that we are privileged to share when we come into church. If there is little discernible difference in our parishes between what happens in the narthex before and after Mass and what happens in the body of the Church during Mass, something is wrong.

Pastors and liturgical directors have a great opportunity this year to re-educate Christ's people in the nature of the liturgy. That education can be both direct and indirect: direct, by catechesis from the pulpit; indirect, by providing ample moments of silence within the liturgy. There is no reason why every available moment during Mass must be filled with speech or music; surely there ought to be moments of repose when all are allowed to listen for the "still small voice" of 1 Kings 19.12. Those moments, in turn, might help remind us that sacred space is not space for chatter.

 The subtitle of his post is "The Catholic Difference". Perhaps it should be "The Catholic Indifference".

h/t: Fr James Farfaglia at Illegitimi non carborundum

Fingerprints at Mass

From Reuters comes an unusual story.

Priest checks fingerprints for mass attendance

WARSAW

Fri Jan 29, 2010 11:46am EST

WARSAW (Reuters) - A Polish priest has installed an electronic reader in his church for schoolchildren to leave their fingerprints in order to monitor their attendance at mass, the Gazeta Wyborcza daily said on Friday.

The pupils will mark their fingerprints every time they go to church over three years and if they attend 200 masses they will be freed from the obligation of having to pass an exam prior to their confirmation, the paper said.
The pupils in the southern town of Gryfow Slaski told the daily they liked the idea and also the priest, Grzegorz Sowa, who invented it.
"This is comfortable. We don't have to stand in a line to get the priest's signature (confirming our presence at the mass) in our confirmation notebooks," said one pupil, who gave her name as Karolina.
Poland is perhaps the most devoutly Roman Catholic country in Europe today and churches are regularly packed on Sundays.

Not very inclusive is it?

We couldn't possibly do something like this in England. That's why our churches are full and Polish churches empty.

Oh, wait ...

Rorate Mass

We have a very large Polish community where I live. Indeed, our own pastor is Polish. The Polish Church maintains a very old tradition of celebrating Rorate Masses during Advent.

A Rorate Mass is so called because the Introit begins with the words "Rorate caeli desuper, et nubes pluant iustum..." (Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the Just One...) (Isaiah 45:8)

The Mass itself is a votive Mass in honour of our Lady and is held before dawn. The church is in darkness with only the sanctuary lit by candlelight. There is also a statue of our Lady placed in the sanctuary, symbolising thatChrist, our Light, is coming into the world and that He, the Light, comes from Mary.

The liturgy is wonderfully beautiful. It was a truly spiritually moving experience and reminded me, sadly, just how poor and bereft of beauty are our ordinary English Masses.

Interesting (and rather sad) NY Times piece

The original can be found by clicking here. The parts in bold are my emphasis.

LATIN MASS APPEAL

By KENNETH J. WOLFE

Published: November 28, 2009

WALKING into church 40 years ago on this first Sunday of Advent, many Roman Catholics might have wondered where they were. The priest not only spoke English rather than Latin, but he faced the congregation instead of the tabernacle; laymen took on duties previously reserved for priests; folk music filled the air. The great changes of Vatican II had hit home.

All this was a radical break from the traditional Latin Mass, codified in the 16th century at the Council of Trent. For centuries, that Mass served as a structured sacrifice with directives, called “rubrics,” that were not optional. This is how it is done, said the book. As recently as 1947, Pope Pius XII had issued an encyclical on liturgy that scoffed at modernization; he said that the idea of changes to the traditional Latin Mass “pained” him “grievously.”

Paradoxically, however, it was Pius himself who was largely responsible for the momentous changes of 1969. It was he who appointed the chief architect of the new Mass, Annibale Bugnini, to the Vatican’s liturgical commission in 1948.

Bugnini was born in 1912 and ordained a Vincentian priest in 1936. Though Bugnini had barely a decade of parish work, Pius XII made him secretary to the Commission for Liturgical Reform. In the 1950s, Bugnini led a major revision of the liturgies of Holy Week. As a result, on Good Friday of 1955, congregations for the first time joined the priest in reciting the Pater Noster, and the priest faced the congregation for some of the liturgy.

The next pope, John XXIII, named Bugnini secretary to the Preparatory Commission for the Liturgy of Vatican II, in which position he worked with Catholic clergymen and, surprisingly, some Protestant ministers on liturgical reforms. In 1962 he wrote what would eventually become the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the document that gave the form of the new Mass.

Many of Bugnini’s reforms were aimed at appeasing non-Catholics, and changes emulating Protestant services were made, including placing altars to face the people instead of a sacrifice toward the liturgical east. As he put it, “We must strip from our ... Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren, that is, for the Protestants.” (Paradoxically, the Anglicans who will join the Catholic Church as a result of the current pope’s outreach will use a liturgy that often features the priest facing in the same direction as the congregation.)

How was Bugnini able to make such sweeping changes? In part because none of the popes he served were liturgists. Bugnini changed so many things that John’s successor, Paul VI, sometimes did not know the latest directives. The pope once questioned the vestments set out for him by his staff, saying they were the wrong color, only to be told he had eliminated the week-long celebration of Pentecost and could not wear the corresponding red garments for Mass. The pope’s master of ceremonies then witnessed Paul VI break down in tears.

Bugnini fell from grace in the 1970s. Rumors spread in the Italian press that he was a Freemason, which if true would have merited excommunication. The Vatican never denied the claims, and in 1976 Bugnini, by then an archbishop, was exiled to a ceremonial post in Iran. He died, largely forgotten, in 1982.

But his legacy lived on. Pope John Paul II continued the liberalizations of Mass, allowing females to serve in place of altar boys and to permit unordained men and women to distribute communion in the hands of standing recipients. Even conservative organizations like Opus Dei adopted the liberal liturgical reforms.

But Bugnini may have finally met his match in Benedict XVI, a noted liturgist himself who is no fan of the past 40 years of change. Chanting Latin, wearing antique vestments and distributing communion only on the tongues (rather than into the hands) of kneeling Catholics, Benedict has slowly reversed the innovations of his predecessors. And the Latin Mass is back, at least on a limited basis, in places like Arlington, Va., where one in five parishes offer the old liturgy.

Benedict understands that his younger priests and seminarians — most born after Vatican II — are helping lead a counterrevolution. They value the beauty of the solemn high Mass and its accompanying chant, incense and ceremony. Priests in cassocks and sisters in habits are again common; traditionalist societies like the Institute of Christ the King are expanding.

At the beginning of this decade, Benedict (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) wrote: “The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle. In its outward form, it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself.” He was right: 40 years of the new Mass have brought chaos and banality into the most visible and outward sign of the church. Benedict XVI wants a return to order and meaning. So, it seems, does the next generation of Catholics.

St Nicholas of Chardonnet, Paris

Video of the sung Low Mass offered on the Last Sunday after Pentecost

Orignal video by protradition

Solemn High Mass on EWTN

EWTN will be showing, live, a solemn high Mass on Saturday 21 November. Broadcast time is 13h00 GMT.

The blurb from EWTN reads: "From the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, A Solemn High Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite for the Feast of The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary"