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Inevitably, some bishops have been more welcoming than others of Pope Benedict’s Motu Proprio. The bishop referred to below by Jim Allen has not distinguished himself. At the same time he is proposing to reduce the forty-nine parishes in his diocese to thirty-two, leaving several with only a weekly vigil Mass. It’s called renewal! |
Recently our bishop made a visitation to a nearby parish and I went along to the main Sunday Mass to see what kind of welcome they would put on for him. I was not disappointed; it was the Novus Ordo par excellence, the sort of thing that only a really creative modern parish priest and his ‘cabinet’ could achieve.
This bishop has the ideal persona for his office, exuding paternal benevolence, big physically and possessed of real charm. He had come “Just to be with us,” he said, “that was the core reason for his visit”. All we need is love apparently; checking on orthodoxy in teaching and practice is not the main priority nowadays; too repressive and possibly endangering that most precious of diocesan values - unity. The word ‘Christian’ now means for Catholics what the world at large thinks it means: it refers to a vague ‘love’ without any form to protect and guide it, mere human kindness, being pleasant and, above all, inoffensive.
A jolly gathering
As the ‘music ministry’ got into full swing, in which the recurring refrain was ‘everybody welcome’, the eucharistic party went from strength to strength. The choir master waved his arms about energetically and even managed to extract some sound from his ‘audience’; nowhere near enough, but no mean feat considering the nature of Catholic congregations and the instantly forgettable banality of the melodic lines issued to them. The substantial ensemble behind him however, was more than capable of taking the strain. We got that excruciating sentimental line, ‘I have heard you calling in the night’, but were spared ‘Bind us together’, etc. You can’t fit everything in.
At the ‘sign of peace’, I think that just about everybody made some sort of personal contact with everybody else: but this was only the prelude to the real climax of the occasion, the eucharistic sharing. This was on a grand scale. In the sanctuary I counted four complete families, a full corps of ‘eucharistic ministers’, numerous adults whom I could not quite classify (readers?), plus the only people who had any right to be there, the bishop, parish priest and eight servers of assorted gender. It was standing room only: everybody was indeed welcome. “The people rose up to play”, and Moses, on his descent from Sinai, smiled beatifically on them all, his tablets of stone nowhere to be seen.
Make no mistake about it, the whole thing was a carefully crafted and very happy Christian gathering: the sun shone approvingly through the windows and everybody but me was smiling. But could it be called Catholic? There was no trace at all of that ‘holy hush’, that reverent palpable silence that is the hallmark of genuine Catholic worship and a sure sign of God’s presence among His people. Our Lord’s humanity was roundly celebrated but what of His divinity? The second commandment was honoured but what of the first?
The Holy Sacrifice
As for the real core of the Mass, Jesus’ awesome death on the cross from which you cannot escape in the Traditional liturgy, this was simply not perceptible. The word ‘sacrifice’ did occur but nobody was given the chance to pay suitable reverence to it; the all-pervasive, jovial social ambience simply drowned out any possibility of a few moments of awe or solemnity. It was Cana, not Calvary. How can it be right to be unmoved or even cheerful during the re-presentation of the moments when Mary and the holy women were all but dying with grief? Most of us are too spiritually shallow to be graced with such sorrow but at least we should have the decency to be solemn and silent, and this should last for the whole Mass, not just the sacred Canon. “Could you not watch with me one hour?” Jesus asks His disciples in Gethsemane.
The main cause for concern in all this is, to my mind, the well-nigh complete success of such services in pleasing the people, sending them home satisfied that God is in his heaven and they have done all that is necessary to be good Catholics, and that all is well with them spiritually. But this cannot be so. I find it very difficult to cope with the inescapable conclusion that probably at least half of these bright attractive parishioners are in a state of what was once called, and objectively still is, mortal sin. They just don't go to confession anywhere near enough, if at all, to be in a state of grace and fit to approach the Lord’s table (they all went). Confessions in this parish are “by appointment”, which speaks volumes.
Everybody welcome? Not a bit of it: only repentant sinners are invited to communion with the Lord. All others are strictly excluded and are described in John 10:1 as “Thieves who do not enter into the sheepfold by the door but climb up some other way”, e.g. bypassing confession. As for the shepherds and doorkeepers, they are not doing their job: in welcoming anybody, they are letting in occasional wolves, some of whom no longer feel it necessary even to wear sheep’s clothing.
Tradition needed
If the bishop and his priests regularly and in due season preached the ‘Four Last Things’ and the absolute need for reasonably frequent confession, these terrible careless communions would be greatly decreased in number, but they do no such thing. This is a major ‘sin of omission’, typical of our day and probably more deadly to souls than anything that has gone before. This bishop’s Mass was a prime example of the liturgy powerfully shaping the religious belief and practice of the faithful: “Lex orandi” and all that.
Looking down on this scene I suggest that the Lord may be thinking something like this: “You have chosen to put your main confidence in community rather that worshiping My presence alone. Let's see where it gets you”. Terrible statistics over the last forty years for England and Wales give the result and show a Church in terminal decline, the main cause of which must be a withdrawal of supernatural grace. (I counted only three young men and very few unattached young women at this Mass. His smiling lordship seemed unaware of the demographic catastrophe staring him in the face.) Since the main source of grace is the Mass, the fault must in some measure lie in the minimalist modern liturgy. I suggested in a previous article (Mass of Ages, November 2005) that the Novus Ordo might well be a Mass of reduced power. If so, the necessity for changing back to the perfection of the Extraordinary Form is acute. We are in an emergency situation.
[Taken from "Mass of Ages" February 2008, The Latin Mass Society's quarterly magazine]