Some of you will find this heartening
The parish where I grew up and performed as a folk mass guitarist for four years, which is an eco-church office away from turning into a certain fictional parish, is starting Eucharistic Adoration. Considering that I had never even heard of Adoration until I was in my mid-twenties, and attended this parish regularly from 1984 to 2004….well.
Fulfilling my obligation
My license to write a Catholic blog will be yanked if I don’t write something about the upcoming motu proprio, I think.
I make no secret of the fact that I am, by orthodox Catholic standards, a political liberal. I’ve taken a harder line on some things as I get older, but I’ll always have my particular mix of liberal/libertarian beliefs.
So I enjoy Commonweal and its blog. During the countdown to the motu proprio, though, I’m coming to realize that my politics and my liturgical conservatism don’t mix very well. I should have known this all along…but a blog post about the MP turned into a rather amusing moonbat commentfest. (And I say this as someone who was somewhere between “lapsed” and “dissident” Catholic in 2005 and really disappointed at Benedict XVI’s election. At the time!) Then there was another post with much saner comments. The fear and scorn from many commenters is strange. The goal here isn’t to re-impose the Tridentine Mass on everyone, people! It’s to allow people who want to celebrate it to do so without depending on the whims of their bishops.
I haven’t been feeling well lately and haven’t the energy for any writing I’m not getting paid for. Instead, here’s a selection of comments from the dotCommonweal post. It was rather enlightening to see a more liberal perspective on this than what I’m used to reading online. It’s good for me to get out of my particular media ghetto, I guess.
I ask this seriously - can any of those favouring the older Latin Mass explain why they prefer a Mass said in a language they can’t understand.
If one needs to know Latin to be “better custodians of the mysteries ….” (whatever THAT is supposed to mean!) then one is simply interjecting an element of Gnosticism into the picture. It smacks of “secret knowledge” available only to the initiates.
Are you saying that non-Latin speakers are lesser classes when it comes to “the mysteries?” A loose parallel in your country would be saying that an Oxbridge accent is more English than all others.
I find it strange that Jesus, the gospel and epistle writers, and the early church fathers didn’t need a special language (sans secret decoder ring, of course) in order to preach, teach and sanctify.
My point about the situation at the NDC with the LC imposition of Latin into the English language Mass was that the good little sheep of yesteryear are, in the main, gone from the picture. Most contemporary Catholics no longer roll over and play dead just because Father Says So. And so it shall be once the motu proprio is fully implemented and some eager-beaver priest tries to impose a Latin mass in a parish where it is not wanted.Diversity, nonsense. Such talk is either naive or a cynical attempt to hijack the language of the reform for the purpose of defeating it. What the proponents of the use of the 1962 liturgy are after is the suppression of the Mass of Paul VI. Read their literature, and it becomes plain. I suspect the next move will be to train all priests in both rites, so the move can easily be made later to a complete change back to the so-called Tridentine rite.
As far as Bishop Elliot is concerned I am really flabbergasted. What is he talking about? Of course mystification has always served the hierarchy well in that they would have to answer to no one.
Along with Humanae Vitae, the church’s stand on divorce and annulment, and contempt of women, people will ignore Rome and attend services and hope the clergy will come out of their wilderness.
I saved the worst of the bunch for last:
What we are witnessing vis-a-vis the upcoming motu proprio is the last gasp of a fearful and pitiful old man occupying the chair of Peter. Kinda’ sad, when one thinks of it.
What lurks down the street….
I contributed a picture of a church within walking distance of my house to the Terrible Tabernacle contest. I’m a bad person, but it’s an ugly tabernacle. Looks like a dollar-store Christmas decoration gone horribly wrong.
.
I thought that was pretty bad, but then I saw this picture of the altar. Which at first I thought was a timpani. The resemblance is hilarious.
I have to admit, when I saw pictures of this church on the Web site, I realized that it was not quite the parish for me. They have healthy attendance and a fine school…just not my “scene,” as the kids say.
In which satire gives me insight into my reversion
Spirit of Vatican II “Catholic” Faith Community makes me giggle hysterically. I admit it. I will read it and start laughing so hard that my atheist-raised roommate will look at me as if I’ve gone quite mad. I send her the pages I’m reading, but despite her abiding hatred of hippies, she doesn’t get the material or understand why so much of this blog is so wrong, but also utterly hilarious. I’m not sure anyone who wasn’t raised in this kind of Catholic church would get it, or find it nearly as funny as I do. I was talking this over with a convert friend, and she admitted that she isn’t sure what’s tongue-in-cheek and what’s real (or what’s exaggerated for effect and what really goes on in dissident parishes, I imagine.) I suppose she’s lucky in that way.
There’s a more serious side to why I find the blog (er, I mean the parish) so funny, though. The church I grew up in wasn’t quite so … nutty, but we had more than our share of forced hugging and group meditations during confirmation class, and I learned nearly all of the theology I know ten years after “graduating” from religious ed. Baptisms of children and adults were part of Mass and served the purpose of “welcoming infants/catechumens into our faith community.” Never mind exactly what that faith was in, which remained fuzzy and amorphous for me until well after I was confirmed. Doctrine, tsk! That’s so old-fashioned.
I found the forced camaraderie, the constant pressure to hug people I didn’t really like, the liturgical dance, the screechy syrupy recycled ’70s folk songs in our hymnals, .. everything…spiritually dry and sometimes even revolting. I liked participating as a guitarist (yes, folk mass. hush) and as a a lector. Indeed, a lot of things were nice about the parish I grew up in, and I also sometimes liked the bare-bones Mass we had in the Protestant chapel in college, but overall I just gave up on a certain level. I kicked around converting to Buddhism for a while, but that seemed like too much of a radical departure. Most of my college friends were neo-pagans, which didn’t appeal to me at all. I proclaimed myself “culturally Catholic,” and avoided Mass mostly in order to avoid my ex.
After I graduated from college, I tried to arrange my work schedule so that I was in the office during all possible mass times on weekends. It was a drudgery and I couldn’t stand going. I’d sooner pray on my own….provided that Anyone was listening, and as I became more lonely and depressed and discouraged about the present and about my future, I doubted that there was any deity at all. The parade of human suffering that I dealt with every day in the call center where I worked made a compelling case for that.
I moved to another city for grad school, but decided not to hang out with the Newman group on campus. I was 23, and they seemed so…young. After Pope John Paul II died, I felt compelled to attend Mass at the cathedral for some reason I didn’t quite understand. (So did a thousand or so other people, and a few local news crews. Mass attendance there is usually quite sparse.) I attended the cathedral parish on and off for about two years after that. I was drawn back even though I couldn’t articulate why. Now I realize that it was because the Masses there were reverent, traditional, and aesthetically pleasing. I attended the cathedral sporadically until sometime just after Ash Wednesday of this year, when something clicked in my brain and I knew that I needed to go back.
Poking around the Internet and reading blogs and forums made me realize–I’m not as weird as I thought. In the minority, perhaps, but not wrong. Not wanting to hold hands during the Our Father, disliking the Gather hymnal, or not having lots of sex with my youth group boyfriend were indeed not things that made me a bad Catholic, as my experience growing up had led me to believe. There wasn’t something wrong with Catholicism, or with me. The problem lay in the liturgically liberal, theologically moderate tradition in which I was raised–many people seem to find that fulfilling, but I don’t anymore.
The sadness I felt was in part a God-shaped hole inside of me, and returning to the Church according to her rules has left me serene and even content. If I want to be intellectually honest, I have to admit that I can’t ever be completely sure again that there’s a God or that he’s holding us to Catholic rules.
Maybe in time I can be sure of that again. I hope to. A total loss of faith is hard to recover from. I keep the rules and habits that I should, in hope that the doubt will disappear someday. Moral guidance is important, as is ritual, but transcendence and salvation are far more important.
When I thought I couldn’t love Colbert any more, he came out against folk Mass.
“The point is, you should not apologize for your religion. You don’t see me apologizing for what Catholics did in the past: the Crusades, the Inquisition, guitar Mass….” - The Colbert Report, 5/14/07
Oooh, a sale!
Halo Works is running a great Mother’s Day sale right now on some of their chapel veils and many other items. I took the opportunity to order two–the Junior V in white and the Spanish Essence in silver. I normally wouldn’t have bought two, but the sale made the prices very reasonable.
I have two antique chapel veils that I need to be careful with, one white and one black. I haven’t had the nerve to wear them to Mass, though. I might be able to pull it off at the cathedral, but not when I go to little churches here in the city. At those churches, everyone wears jeans (even the lectors) and I stand out for wearing skirts and dresses (aka my work clothes from my Sunday job) and my insistence on kneeling at all during any part of the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Even the church’s staff sister doesn’t wear a veil, so I think I might frighten people by wearing one.
All of this casualness turns me off.
Un-Christian impulses
I went back to St. J. this evening since I didn’t manage to make it out of the house on Saturday. I thought I’d give them a chance when it wasn’t a holiday.
Well.
I have never walked out of a church with such an overwhelming desire to drag pastoral musicians out back and beat them senseless with their hymnals. (The guitar edition of Breaking Bread could probably do a number.)
If you’re going to miss cues, at least stay sort of remotely close to on pitch.
If you’re going to be wildly off-pitch, at least hand someone a tambourine so you’re all remotely on the same measure at the same time.
If you can’t accomplish any of that…just don’t pick songs that sound like theme songs to ’80s soap operas. (I’m looking at YOU, Haugen!)
There were a few things that would make people other than me cry “liturgical abuse,” and it bothers me profoundly that people there are not in the habit of kneeling during any part of the mass whatsoever.
Those are things I could almost overlook if the music there weren’t so wretched. As a former musician, it distracts me to no end.
Parish shopping: St. P
I was hoping that my parish-shopping adventure would stop with the lovely 19th-structure that’s a few minutes’ drive from both my house and my weekend job. Turns out, well, no.
One of the more amusing insults for overly-liberal music and liturgy over on the DCF Board is “happy-clappy.” I thought that this was excessive until I saw it in action–the priest encouraged us to clap along with the choir/folk group during the last song. And applaud afterward. As a former pastoral musician (guitar) I have to say…I never liked getting applauded, except maybe at the end of a Christmas or Holy Week marathon of rehearsals and masses. Regular performances were what was expected of us; they weren’t worthy of applause. Just a regular day at the “office.”
The homily was short and enlightening, and I liked the priest a lot, but a lot of the details I couldn’t deal with. The picture at left is of this church in the mid-’50s. Lovely, isn’t it?
The entire interior (even the ceiling) is now painted white, and there is only a plain crucifix on the wall over the altar, a regular table-style altar, and the pews have been replaced with interlocking chairs. It’s bland and doesn’t match the church’s neat 19th-century exterior at all.
I’m not comfortable without kneelers. We always avoided mass at the church in my hometown that lacked them, except when the mass time was convenient and we had nowhere else to go.
I liked how the population there was very young (the church borders a college campus, and so draws many of the students.) It’s neat to be in a church of people close to my own age. What’s not neat is to see that both of the lectors were in jeans (one in ripped-up, worn ones) and one of the ushers was wearing jeans and an Aerosmith tour t-shirt. Maybe I’m being snobby, but that just didn’t sit well with me. We would have been peer-pressured out of doing that when I was in college–Newman was small and close-knit, and that just wasn’t done. It wasn’t expected.
There’s a difference between casualness and lack of respect, and I really think that people mean well. Casualness and a lack of what I call a “sense of the sacred” is what drove me away from the church, years ago.
In summary: St. P is a very friendly place and very close to my work and home, but so liberal and casual that I felt ill at ease. I feel bad saying so, since the priest and staff and parishoners were so nice, but I can’t help how I feel.
My shopping continues. Good thing I live in a Northeastern metro area with dozens of churches to choose from.
Parish Shopping: St. J
I attended Palm Sunday Mass after work at a small, very beautiful church on the edge of the city. It was an odd experience, and I’m not sure that I’m going back. The service felt thrown together, disorganized, and poorly timed. One of the readers for the Passion didn’t understand the basic principles of speaking into a microphone, and was so distractingly bad that I had to tune her out.
Let’s call the church St. J. The Sunday evening Mass happens to be the “contemporary music” one. Speaking as a former pastoral guitarist, it’s possible to do folk Mass without being chirpy and making people feel like they aren’t in church.
Here, I will digress and present Joan’s Hints for a Successful Folk Mass:
1. If you must have multiple guitars, have the players fingerpick and not strum whenever possible.
2. Use any songs written after 1970 sparingly.
3. When the choir is mostly female white sopranos around age 60, don’t let them do gospel.
4. Turn down the guitars.
5. Make sure your singers can stay on key.
6. Come to think of it, don’t use any hymnals published after 1980.
7. No vigorous tambourine.
8. Maybe hide the tambourine.
9. Don’t start up the guitars, piano, percussion, and choir just to lead the congregation in singing “Lord, hear our prayer” during the Prayer of the Faithful.
10. You probably should just unplug the guitars.
Anyway, St. J. has a beautiful interior with statues and lovely carved wood confessionals. I’m weak for that kind of thing, since I grew up attending a mid-’80s “in-the-round” church with no real aisle, no crucifix, no stained glass, contemporary statues, and light oak wood everywhere. It was like going to church in my parents’ living room.
The oddest part of this service was that nobody seemed to know when to sit, stand, or kneel. I don’t think of Palm Sunday as a service that brings out people who don’t attend regularly, so I wonder if that’s a regular occurrence there. For me, it just added to the feeling that no one had any idea what they were doing. For some reason I really dislike informality and the feeling that everyone–priest, lectors, musicians–is making it up as they go along.
I want a small, liberal, young parish, and I also seem to want High Mass every week. I’m not going to get that. I’m not going to get either one of those.
