FIXING THE LITURGY It's time for Catholics to get beyond ideological conflict over the Mass Better liturgy is in everyone's interest
Steinfels, Peter
FIXING THE LITURGY What we have done & what we have failed to do Peter Steinfels on an average Sunday, approximately 20 million Catholics go to Mass in the United States. Contrary to conventional...
...What is so crucial to the future of American Catholicism, though, is the great in-between, parishes becalmed in mediocrity or parishes mixing thoughtful and effective liturgical efforts with elements that grate like fingernails on a blackboard...
...What tension exists between these devotional practices and the renewed liturgy may also be clearer on paper than in practice...
...Attendance, though, is not the chief topic of the passionate debates that the new liturgy and its impact continue to stir...
...What, concretely, would emphasizing empirical observation and practical competence mean...
...In both ways, the liturgy ceased to be private, passive, otherworldly, ahistorical...
...But on that level alone, a glance around most Catholic congregations leaves a very mixed impression...
...Or so it was in theory...
...So much upheaval...
...A thoughtful, eloquent liturgy can revive the spark of faith...
...He celebrated Mass facing the other worshipers across a freestanding altar, with the pews grouped, where possible, in something like a semicircle...
...In 1998, Pope John Paul II issued Dies Domini, a lengthy and eloquent letter on the Lord's Day...
...The challenge of aligning Catholicism with the world-historical changes in women's roles can be neither won nor lost on the playing fields of liturgical language...
...Day named names and took serial numbers...
...In 1990, Thomas Day's small polemic, Why Catholics Can't Sing, skewered the sentimental Irish-American musical heritage that he argued had found new life in what passed for "contemporary" church music...
...There was nowhere to go but up...
...Whether in the person of chatty Father Hank or emoting Father Histrionic or Mr...
...In the preaching league, Catholic clergy traditionally occupied last place...
...Leaving a Mass where many things have been done right but one or two elements have seriously marred the possibility of worship-execrable music, perhaps, or an ill-prepared, poorly reasoned homily-I often compare it to my experience as a magazine editor and newspaper reporter...
...Refusing to retranslate the Nicene Creed recited at Mass so that the eternally begotten Son comes down from heaven "for us and for our salvation" rather than "for us men and for our salvation"-on the grounds that "men" still really means "men and women"-is simply to beg for noncompliance...
...Have they diminished "respect for and belief in the real presence in the Eucharist...
...We compliment, console, offer tips, and try to figure out how we can preach better...
...The other chief topics recently provoking heated debate and sharp divisions about Catholic worship are translations of the liturgical prayers and Eucharistic adoration outside of Mass...
...Departing from the assumption of many liturgical reformers that the reformed patterns of worship would be self-explanatory, the bishop himself, a masterful, low-intensity teacher, began celebrating "teaching Masses" in parish after parish...
...The question was always "What is it we're trying to do at this point in the Mass...
...In reality, there was very little solemn or "mysterious," serene or aesthetically elevating, about the Tridentine Mass as it was actually celebrated by the average priest in the average parish...
...The energy invested in these liturgical wars would be better devoted to more basic and less doctrinally divisive questions about Catholic worship...
...Even before the 1990s, a consensus had formed that after the council the first English translations had been rushed and executed without sufficient appreciation of the requirements of ritual and the validity of a heightened language for sacred matters...
...Whatever boasts the church could make of great preachers in its past, it could make far more of its musical heritage...
...Common sense suggests that rigorously excluding feminine images of God and sticking to the supposedly "generic" use of masculine pronouns to cover both men and women diminishes women's sense of their own presence in Scripture and worship...
...The priest now led the prayers in a language understood by all...
...Women as well as men proclaimed readings from the pulpit and offered the chalice to communicants...
...Are Catholic parishes really prepared for those life-cycle events-baptisms and marriages and, above all, funerals-that foresee-ably bring to the pews family members and friends who, for one reason or another, have drifted from the church...
...Sunday Mass attendance What, then, explains the decline in Sunday Mass attendance...
...Polls show that the vast majority of Catholic women, unlike those who have become hypersensitized to language questions, are not dismayed by traditional wordings...
...The proclaimed and preached Scripture, along with the congregational praying and singing, was part of another shift in the liturgy, from a chiefly visual rite, with inaudible prayers but dramatic gestures, to one both voiced and heard...
...In fact, having advocated reform for decades in the teeth of entrenched habit and misunderstanding, liturgical experts had become highly defensive about what had been achieved and often seem to close ranks against almost any serious criticism...
...The official Catechism of the Catholic Church states that missing Mass on Sunday without a serious reason is a grave sin...
...Other experiments went further, for example, inviting the congregants, after the first two readings, to share their thoughts with the persons next to them...
...If requiring people to worship under threat of eternal punishment now strikes many Catholics as reflecting badly on God, at least the requirement sent a message about the importance of Sunday worship that must now be signaled by the liturgy itself...
...He had begun the preaching project "with trepidation," he said, but the response was overwhelmingly positive...
...How much time do priests really spend preparing their homilies...
...Since 1965, the Roman Catholic liturgy has been radically reshaped...
...If the force of "the Sunday obligation" has faded, that only sets a higher standard for a ritual that must now draw people because they really want to be there...
...The pope is evidently no more willing than the neighborhood pastor to get people to church out of fear of damnation rather than love of the Eucharist...
...Imagine a birthday celebration where two or three out of ten family members actually sang "Happy Birthday" and the rest stood silent or barely moving their lips...
...Virtually all the evidence indicates that the reshaping did not cause the decline...
...This is the time when Catholics become most aware of their corporate existence, when they welcome new members, pray for the ill and deceased, nourish and mobilize themselves for activities on behalf of those in need...
...Those few with strong voices don't know whether to stand out as quasi-soloists...
...No hellfire and no heavy theology, simply friendly messages about loving one another linked loosely to the Scripture readings and brightened with the homilisf s anecdotes...
...They're no longer even beating their breasts," he said...
...Surely, Untener's approach is only one of many possibilities...
...To the extent that the physical arrangements stressed the communal and reduced sharp distinctions, marked by the altar rail, for example, between the sacred and the profane, salvation was apt to be understood more in terms of service in everyday life-the worshipers actively and publicly giving witness to God's reign-and less as the individual soul's escape from a sinful world...
...As Bishop Kenneth Untener of Saginaw, Michigan, put it, "When I grew up you had two choices: go to Mass...or go to hell...
...and unless that leadership is truly willing to act on that assessment...
...Evangelicals currently worship weekly at that rate, without being driven by the concept of mortal sin...
...You can almost hear something collapsing," Day writes...
...By contrast, now the Scripture readings and a homily were held to be integral parts of the liturgy...
...These Catholics would be drawn voluntarily by liturgies that rendered inner, spiritual transformation visible, audible, tangible-in the heartfelt participation of the congregation, the beauty and grace of the ritual, and the honesty and intelligence of the preaching...
...It might well have been welcomed by conservatives, except for two factors...
...When the International Commission for English in the Liturgy undertook a new round of translations in the 1990s, the thrust of its work took, in many ways, a traditional direction...
...And then: "Good morning, everybody...
...Or are they essentially watching and hearing someone else do it for them...
...Each one listened to a tape and sent in written observations...
...In Saying Amen (Liturgy Training Publications), a small "mystagogy of the sacraments" published the same year, Sister Kathleen Hughes similarly asked, "Has the reform lost its soul...
...These criticisms can be exaggerated, but they also contain truths, and liturgists would be wiser to pay attention than to denounce the messengers...
...Then he began working his way alphabetically through the diocese's roster of priests, four at a time, plus a deacon or lay preacher...
...A second professional woman present was a theologian and spiritual director...
...His most important criticism aimed at the connected phenomena of "de-ritualiza-tion" and "display of personality...
...Untener described the sessions as doing "what golfers do after a match...
...Active participation in Eucharistic worship was at the center of the liturgical renewal, and here the change has been undeniable...
...In an analysis prepared for a 1999 meeting of the Common Ground Initiative, he matched familiar criticism of conservatives who still treated the Mass as private prayer or an occasion for aesthetic exaltation with a more unexpected interrogation of the liturgical reformers: Have the reforms, and all the efforts to be "creative" in worship, Weakland asked, obscured the sense that God rather than the community is the primary actor in the Mass...
...Before the council, the church was clearly "sacred space" for God enthroned in the tabernacle...
...Of course, active participation, as conservatives have pointed out, is more than outward activity...
...The contrast between the standards for worship and the standards that Catholics expect to be met in the rest of their lives is dramatic...
...The consensus is "almost none...
...There are intimations of the church's concerns with peace, economic justice, racial inclusiveness, but nothing so specific as to be distressing or controversial...
...It would be a mistake to think that there is nothing at stake in the battles over these matters, but I would argue that they are peripheral to the most pressing problems...
...The problem is that the worshipers don't sing, and when they don't sing, the result is worse than if they had never been expected to...
...In 1995, Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Brussels told a conference at the University of Notre Dame, "In order to take one's place in the liturgical enterprise, one has to know one's craft...
...They object to a "dumbing down" of the rites...
...The council's call for congregational singing as part of the liturgy posed a serious challenge to American parishes...
...His view: "People are immensely thirsty for understanding...
...unless that leadership candidly, and where possible empirically, identifies successes, failures, and major obstacles...
...few had ever infused the physical gestures of the Mass with meaning...
...That is not an immoderate goal...
...If the Lord's Prayer is recited rather than sung, worshipers typically join in heartily, just as most share the greeting of peace heartily...
...Both demanded a way of moving and speaking, a posture and a presence, a choice of vocal and facial expressiveness that were suited to the action...
...The piety engendered in Eucharist adoration outside of Mass just may support active participation at Mass...
...One of the startling things is how little effort is being made to find out exactly what is going on liturgically in churches on Sunday morning...
...Is it unthinkable to envision, for the year 2015-fifty years after the council-a Eucharistic church with at least half its members coming together to worship each weekend and another quarter or more frequently joining them...
...The music is, well, nice- planned and performed by devoted musicians with good voices but eliciting little response from the congregation...
...The first edited transcript to be examined was the bishop's, "and I tell her, be ruthless," he said...
...Caruso, the parish songleader, personality becomes the center of attention...
...But what had been the results...
...Another involved the whole congregation in bringing forward their Sunday offerings...
...This "liturgy of the Word" preceded and paralleled the "liturgy of the table," which was in effect the Word made flesh...
...it is a distinctly dispiriting experience, a positive obstacle to worship...
...One set the context for the first two biblical readings with a phrase ("Six hundred years before Christ, the Israelites are in captivity" or "Paul is answering questions he received in letters...
...A very generous estimate would be that half the congregants join in, and weakly at that...
...A distinct minority appears in genuine interaction with the celebrant, while a sizable number of worshipers, often a majority, are silent or barely moving their lips...
...Unfortunately, with a Catholic population better and better educated, the bar may be going up faster than preaching can improve...
...How many pastors ever experience Mass as a member of the congregation does...
...If Catholics are drawn to Mass less and less, or if they continue to go while the experience makes less and less impact, inclusive language and Eucharistic devotion will be moot issues...
...The priest declares, "Let us give thanks to the Lord our God" and the congregation divides between those content to respond, "It is right to give him thanks and praise" and those responding "It is right to give GOD thanks and praise...
...One was the growth of an organized conservatism during the papacy of John Paul II that looked on the guild of liturgical specialists as a hotbed of questionable theology and included among its adherents many wed to the pre-conciliar rite...
...So much ferment," she noted...
...There continues to be an unresolved tension in presiding between projecting an inviting warmth and a sober solemnity, but there is also a large, reasonable middle ground in which more and more priests can be found...
...The preaching, too, is nice...
...Perhaps the reason for the evident liturgical poverty in so many places throughout the world," the cardinal said, "is simply a lack of competence...
...Using a stop watch to measure exactly how much time the congregation spent in speaking or moving, he realized that worshipers in general had little more to do than in the preconciliar liturgy...
...With the position of the priest reversed and the people gathered around the altar, God was now experienced in the midst of the assembly, not someplace above or beyond it, or residing in the tabernacle in front of it...
...The idea that this can occur in a pluralistic society like the United States, replete with competing worldviews and allegiances, is highly unrealistic...
...He added a tape of a sermon of his own to theirs and sent out copies, along with transcripts, so that the whole group had heard one another's tapes, including the bishop's, before meeting for two hours to discuss them...
...It takes the reforms of Vatican II as its mandated framework, but it is not caught up in redebating the council, criticizing or defending its implementation, accusing people of distorting or betraying its intentions, or using the liturgy to promote other causes...
...At another extreme, some militant Catholic feminists want nothing to do with a liturgy over which only a male priest can preside, and they have created their own substitutes, with heavy doses of New Age syncretism...
...He began some experiments...
...and unless that leadership is truly willing to act on that assessment...
...A single reference to God as "he" can make many feminist Catholics angry, let alone generic references like the "men" for whom the Son came down from heaven (Nicene Creed) or "man" formed in God's image (Eucharistic Prayer IV) or even the fool who says in his heart that there is no God (Psalm 14...
...In fairness, some criticism, though not Day's, has suffered from a continuing confusion about the very nature of the liturgy and a distorting nostalgia, reflected in talk about a lost sense of "mystery," solemnity, and beauty...
...The real focus today ought to be on questions of practical competence, of implementation, and, insofar as things of the spirit can be observed or measured, of empirical examination-in short, what in sports is called "execution...
...The same sort of false dichotomy has sucked energy into the conflict about Eucharistic presence and spirituality...
...He asked them to tape a live sermon and send him the tape...
...Nor did the worshipers expect to find anything but the vaguest meaning in those actions, any more than in the Latin phrases...
...This is mediocrity...
...This is the prime moment for Catholics to reaffirm their faith and deepen their knowledge and understanding of it...
...Those with uncertain voices hesitate in the absence of a collective sound into which they can blend...
...Almost every diocese will have one or two or perhaps a half-dozen parishes outstanding for their worship...
...Catholics clearly expect more from their homilists than they are getting...
...Or when people do or do not join in the prayers...
...In fact the changes constituted a kind of Copernican revolution in Catholic worship...
...Previously, it is difficult to generalize about the nineteen thousand parishes, large and small, urban, suburban, and rural, serving congregations differing widely in class and cultural heritage across the United States...
...Yet this is not going to happen unless church leadership-bishops and priests, of course, but also litur-gists, theologians, catechists, and active, thoughtful Catholics generally-makes this goal a leading priority...
...a sloppy, mechanical liturgy reminds people why they exited in the first place...
...More important, it raises questions about the deeper meaning of active participation: Do Catholics worship with the conviction that they are themselves, together, offering this great thanksgiving...
...and no one is charged with checking on him or his parish...
...Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is here at the liturgy, not in the bedroom, that the future of the church will be determined...
...The aim was always to make that clear and tangible...
...The problem is not that some, maybe much, of the music is an affront to good taste, although that is true...
...We think they're involved because more individuals are involved, as lectors reading Scripture or as ministers helping to distribute Communion...
...They felt on a roll, so that even though the new round of translations responded to many conservative insights about language, why not hold out for more, for something still closer to the older Latin forms...
...A broad swath of centrist-to-conservative commentators, many of them sympathetic to the basic thrust of the council's reforms, have also been dismayed by how those reforms were put into practice...
...Most of us chose Mass...
...A pastoral, practical approach does not assume that having a liturgically correct position on Vatican II' s reforms, whether of a more liberal or conservative character, substitutes for truly effective, intellectually and emotionally transforming worship...
...Again, he met with priests, in groups of four, after they all received copies of their videos and took notes...
...All this, as Commonweal readers know well, was radically altered...
...Preaching, too, has improved...
...At Mass, minor shouting matches sometimes break out in adjacent pews...
...Quite the contrary...
...In the name of congregational participation, the church's treasury of chant and polyphony was traded in for guitar-accompanied pseudo-folk and soft-rock hymns...
...He listed many of Why Catholics Can't Sing outraged liturgical specialists, as the author almost certainly hoped it would...
...The ragged, half-hearted, dutiful singing that marks so many Catholic Masses is more than a lost opportunity...
...A minute later the competition is renewed...
...Music is perhaps the weakest link in Catholic worship today...
...The reconfiguration was, to begin with, physical...
...At what we might call Saint Suburbia a neighborly informality prevails...
...In 1993, Untener decided to do something very practical about the quality of Catholic preaching...
...the readings, homily, and prayers reminded the worshipers that they were part of a people chosen to be disciples and light and salt for the world...
...How much of the budget is really devoted to liturgical matters...
...He analyzed self-congratulatory lyrics and crooning song leaders who blasted aside congregations with their over-amplified microphones...
...Liberated from Latin and the old rubrics, priests began acting like emcees...
...Experts in Catholic worship regularly fill scholarly journals and contending newsletters with articles on liturgical history and theory, but there appears to be an almost complete lack of empirical study of what actually is happening in parishes...
...It is known that, despite some initial cries of outrage and a great deal more of bafflement and loss, the new reformed liturgy has been widely accepted...
...The conversations can get very spiritual," Untener said, "for example, how hard it is to pray, really pray, in front of other people, not just performing prayer...
...This new balance placed the otherwise isolated "miracle" of the Eucharist in the broad context of God's dealings with Israel, the message of Jesus, and the witness of the early church...
...The switch from Latin into vernacular languages was a symbolic move from a special sacred "Sunday" language to ordinary weekday tongues...
...It is first of all an end in itself-core, continuation, and culmination of daily existence, "source and summit of the Christian life," according to the Second Vatican Council...
...Few priests possessed a ritual sense...
...At the outside, the return to Solemn Benediction and Perpetual Adoration encouraged by the pope and many bishops could again separate the Eucharist from the church's assembly...
...It is as though one page out of thirty-two were to come out upside down or with smudged ink making it unreadable, and we would simply congratulate ourselves that at least the other thirty-one were all right...
...In the popular mind, these changes are often equated with the replacement of Latin by local languages-and certainly, to many Catholics, the disruption of familiar words and gestures could not but be wrenching...
...Yet in the vast majority, although real efforts had been made, the outcome often seemed to be rancor over what to sing, when to stand or kneel, whether to avoid addressing God as "he," how to honor the Blessed Sacrament-a whole "minefield of competing and conflicting theologies, pastoral strategies, and sometimes simply aesthetic sensibilities...
...One example comes from the diocese of Saginaw, Michigan, where Bishop Kenneth Untener began working with his priests and lay ministers first on preaching and then on the Sunday celebration generally...
...Meanwhile the repetitions and circumlocutions aimed at circumventing masculine pronouns make traditionalists wince...
...He first proposed the idea to his priests' council and obtained their unanimous endorsement...
...Evaluating the liturgy The quality of a parish's worship can be usefully examined under four headings: presiding, preaching, participation, and music...
...Such an approach, focused on presiding, preaching, participation, and music, would also frankly ask whether the priority that parishes and dioceses claim to give worship is reflected in commitments of time and resources...
...Beyond that, I find the response in most congregations highly uneven...
...Later on, just for symmetry, the celebrant will conclude the liturgy with a cheerful 'Havernice day.'" Ritual traditionally and literally cloaked the Catholic celebrant in a special garb but beyond that it cloaked him with a set of words and actions belonging to the whole community regardless of the individual at the altar...
...How many, that is, actually register what proportion of the congregants is singing, and singing which hymns...
...Some might even consider it a bare minimum...
...Others, as Thomas Day complained, became emcees or flamboyantly made themselves, not the ritual, the center of attention...
...That meant a good helping of spirituality, insight, pastoral awareness, and instruction, he said, but the fact that "there is no lack of engagement or dedication or imagination" had not proved sufficient...
...But the much more inflammatory factor was the question of gender-neutral or inclusive language that had arisen since the original translations...
...Once a priest is ordained, he evidently has a license for forty years of liturgical malpractice-or superb liturgical leadership...
...Of course, these shifts in understanding were not conveyed by the physical changes alone...
...It is a memorial of Christ's Last Supper, of his life, sacrificial death, and resurrection...
...De-ritualization" purposely broke the sense of actions that were out of the ordinary...
...What would be the message...
...Any probing of the church's future vitality must begin with this truth, and hence with Sunday worship...
...It brings together the faithful around the altar with all their labors, sufferings, and joys and, in praise and thanksgiving, unites them and their efforts to the redemptive acts of God in Jesus...
...Sunday worship, no less than personal prayer, was at its core internal and silent, and the spirituality fostered was strongly individualistic-God and I locked in gaze or interior conversation...
...An expert in liturgical theology was there to help with the underlying theory...
...At one extreme, a small minority believes that the Tri-dentine Mass authorized by Pope Pius V is the fullest expression of the Catholic faith, and the new Mass falls just short of not being a Mass at all...
...It remains grounded in the experience of the worshiping congregation and its leaders...
...The centrality of Sunday worship has obvious consequences for the church as an institution...
...Priests started asking, 'When's my turn?'" Success regarding homilies encouraged Untener to look at the Mass...
...These are extraordinary opportunities for extending welcome, healing wounds, restoring ties-or for confirming alienation...
...Wonderful in some places, she said, dispiriting in others...
...That meant taking time at the beginning of each liturgy, and then interrupting its distinct parts if necessary, to explain the actions and symbolism...
...Or even whether the sound system works...
...A trained musician and expert in liturgical chant, he was one of the 140 official consultors appointed to recommend specific changes in Catholic rites to implement the council's general instructions...
...Nor, on the other hand, is there any evidence that the American bishops' 1990 policy of encouraging gender-neutral language generally while retaining masculine references to the deity has created a slippery slope toward goddess worship rather than a barrier against it...
...How many parish worship committees systematically observe their own services...
...God's presence was felt as much temporally, when the community assembled for the liturgy, as spatially within the church building and the tabernacle...
...It still does...
...Of all the changes in the church's life stemming from the Second Vatican Council, nothing else touched ordinary Catholics so immediately and tangibly as the changes in the liturgy...
...After the council, Catholics could still justly repeat traditional definitions of the Mass and other sacraments...
...So while there are fierce debates about music, they are debates, by and large, about the aesthetic quality of the music and the theology of the lyrics- debates that could as well take place on the basis of comparing hymnals alone and quite apart from the experience of worshiping congregations...
...When the liturgical reforms turned the presider around to face the congregation, those gestures were brought into full view, just as the prayers were brought into understandable English...
...In the years immediately after Vatican II, presiding was a disaster zone...
...One thing above all, but it had little to do with alterations in the liturgy: Catholics stopped thinking of the Eucharist as their "Sunday obligation," something done under pain of committing a mortal sin and risking eternal damnation...
...Ultimately, "have we reduced the sense of the transcendent and an appreciation for God's presence and role in the liturgy...
...This remodeling of Catholic churches has been the subject of fierce controversy...
...There were other important changes...
...The burden of proof certainly rests with the innovators...
...Both theologically and experientially, there is a gulf between those attitudes...
...Still, holding it up as an ideal seriously discredits criticism of current practice...
...On the other hand, when bedrock Christian formulas begin to be altered ("In the name of the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier" instead of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit"), resistance is appropriate...
...The preconciliar liturgy had its power...
...Of its eighty-seven numbered sections, only one focuses on the history of church law regarding Catholics' Sunday obligation, and only one sentence declares, somewhat obliquely, "This legislation has normally been understood as entailing a grave obligation...
...Worse, an aging, overworked clergy can only improve so much...
...Acts of reverence like genuflecting and making private "visits" to the Blessed Sacrament fit naturally into the atmosphere of a court audience...
...But dissatisfaction is not limited to the extremes...
...But how bad is mediocrity, or even how mediocre is mediocrity...
...At no other time are the vast majority of Catholics in such contact with one another and with church leaders...
...In striving for intelligibility and familiarity, they complain, the translations from Latin into English achieved only banality...
...The significant point here, however, is that modified churches manifested physically and spatially a reconsidered faith...
...and music leaders like martinets...
...THUD...
...With its cycles of readings and liturgical colors and seasonal prayers, Sunday worship provides a living calendar that gives Catholic life a rhythm of preparation and celebration...
...And, yes, these devotions are sometimes promoted as an implicit, occasionally even explicit, counter to a liturgical renewal thought to have downplayed the aspects of Catholic belief about real presence at odds with contemporary doubts about the supernatural and, with communal participation, to have crowded out meditative, individual forms of worship...
...Nonetheless, the new rites incorporated an altered understanding of God, church, priesthood, and salvation...
...It is hard to imagine searching adolescents or young adults being drawn in by this ritual or well-educated, professional suburbanites being either repelled or attracted by this preaching, or remembering it the next day...
...It was frequently hurried, graceless, with slurred prayers and jerky gestures...
...Whether the decline can be halted and reversed, however, depends very much on what the church does with the reshaping...
...Unprepared for this challenge, some priests celebrated Mass in flat tones and with jerky, mechanical movements...
...De-ritualization, in Day's view, opened the door to a display of personality, of charm, folksiness, dramatics...
...Day gave the example of the solemn entrance procession with resounding organ, followed by a moment of silence while the priest adjusts the microphone...
...Yet like preaching, music was long considered something optional in parishes, an adornment to worship, not the thing itself...
...Where the Communion rail was removed, the division into priestly and congregational areas disappeared...
...The answer is immensely complicated and, in some respects, still unknown...
...The inclusive-language issue has been rubbed raw by both proponents and opponents...
...The Eucharist is not a means for improving the rest of life, a "timeout" when individuals seek inspiration or moral instruction...
...It is my strong impression that presiding at worship is much improved...
...The important thing is that, without neglecting theological understanding and official rubrics, it emphasizes the pastoral, the concrete, the practical...
...This, too, reduced the priest's monopoly on sacred actions and shortened the distance in status between the ordained and the baptized...
...These experiments were not about making worship "interesting" with novelties...
...Music is a special form of participation...
...One way or the other, he is accountable to no one, at least this side of egregious violations of the rites...
...Stripped of this nostalgia, an unusual amount of criticism is now being voiced by thoughtful liturgists who have been at the very heart of the liturgical reform...
...Liturgical craftsmanship If athletic terminology sounds inappropriate, another word could also serve: craftsmanship...
...The effect is hardly inspiriting...
...primate of the Benedictines, the order that pioneered much of the liturgical revival in Europe and the United States...
...Catholics are not unaware of the widespread failure of their sung worship-but by and large it is treated as peripheral: it would be nice, of course, to have better singing, just as it would be nice if the church had a new paint job, but it is hardly essential...
...Six lay people from a different diocese (and therefore unfamiliar with any of the preachers) constituted a final source of comment...
...The idiosyncrasies and excesses are much diminished, although that very fact may make those remaining stand out as inexcusable...
...The key, of course, was honesty-and the fact that the bishop himself was as much on the line as others...
...Indeed, Catholics who report attending Mass, receiving Communion, and praying frequently as children are at least eight times more likely to report such frequent practice as adults...
...The diocesan communications director, a trained journalist, joined the sessions...
...How could it not...
...On the books at least, that is still the case...
...Yet somewhere along the line church leaders stopped preaching this and church members stopped believing it...
...In thoroughly Catholic cultures, where reminders of the faith are part of the very landscape and religious beliefs are deeply woven into family and folk practices, Catholicism has persisted even when attendance at Mass is occasional or infrequent...
...Human psychology is not as ei-ther-or as liturgical theories...
...Some were modest...
...Not just the altar boys but all the worshipers together were to respond to the priest's greetings and invocations, affirm prayers made by him in their name with a collective "Amen," exchange the "sign of peace"-a handshake or embrace- throughout the church, and raise their voices in song...
...So did the practice of receiving Communion in the hand and taking the chalice oneself...
...Over the same period, Catholic Sunday Mass attendance has declined by at least a third and perhaps closer to a half, depending on which figures one trusts...
...and the good of all GOD'S church...
...The priest prays that "our sacrifice may be acceptable to God" and the congregation responds "May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all his church"-except that some voices, male as well as female, emphatically say "for the praise and glory of GOD'S name...
...The rubrics are observed-nothing experimental...
...Having edited two of the transcripts the way a tough-minded editor would, she came with explanations of her changes...
...It deserves to be understood rather than dismissed...
...The old Mass was defined as offertory, consecration, and communion-all focused on the elements of bread and wine and their presentation, transformation, and reception...
...Stranger even than the lack of large-scale empirical studies is the apparent lack of parish self-examination...
...Study after study shows that Catholics who attend church weekly or almost weekly are distinctly more knowledgeable about their faith and committed to the church-and so are their children...
...He began having priests video a whole liturgy, first with the camera focusing on the priest but later on the congregation from behind the altar...
...The church at worship was now experienced more as an egalitarian assembly sharing a common baptism and engaged in a common public prayer...
...Retired Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee once served as abbot the most popular new hymns and hymnals and cut into them with detailed criticism...
...The last thing I want," Untener insisted, "is a gimmick for each week...
...What was the impact of these radical changes in practice...
...For years I have been asking widely traveled priests and church officials how many parishes build such simple reporting-leaving aside more sophisticated inquiries into the effectiveness of homilies or ritual actions-into their staff responsibilities and regular meetings...
...For Catholicism, more than for many other forms of Western Christianity, religious life is sacramental, and the regular heartbeat of this sacramental life is the Sunday Eucharist...
...Day did not stop with music...
...How much attention, energy, and personnel do the pastor and staff direct to the quality of worship...
Vol. 130 • July 2003 • No. 13
