Why should I bother with Mass?

Last week I mentioned that a friend of mine had talked about the faith with a younger man, mid-twenties or so. The young man had not been raised in the Church nor had he received the sacraments, apart from baptism as an infant.  When asked why he was not a churchgoer he just said, “Why do I need it?”

This simple question is aimed right at me and my fellow clergy. We have spent more than forty years telling people that they don’t need it. Why are we surprised that they agree with us? We have at least implied that the Almighty is far too nice to punish us for our sins or to demand certain behavior from us. If there is a heaven our nice God would never send anyone to hell. Mass is a wonderful thing, but certainly, no one is obliged to participate in it. We keep trying to make Mass more understandable and more entertaining, but the more entertaining we make it, the less people seem to be interested.

We have stripped Mass of its mystery. One enters a church and sees very little he wouldn’t see anywhere else. We have removed the images, the stained glass, the altar rail that implies something remote and forbidden. We’ve painted over the frescoes and chosen the banal art of the late 60’s. When one meets a Catholic, is that Catholic any different from anyone else? We do not fast; we do not live by any other sexual code than the world.  We practice artificial birth control, abortion, co-habitation at the same rates as non-believers, and now we seem to be moving toward relationships that were formerly forbidden. How would the lives of those outside the Church be any different were they to join the Church?

Oh, yes. We urge people to be socially just, but so do the Boy Scouts. The pearl of great price is currently offered at bargain basement discount prices, but no one is buying cheap pearls these days. Why are we amazed that our churches are filled with grey heads? We offer nothing of enough value to cause someone even to inconvenience themselves on a Sunday morning by getting out of bed much less give up their lives for it. Catholicism is growing explosively around the world. It continues to grow everywhere except here. People around the world are dying as martyrs every day, just not here in the so called first world. 

So what’s the answer? What do we have that a young man or woman may eventually fine useful?  We have beauty. Admittedly in much of the church we have thrown off beauty for kitsch, but the beauty is still there. It’s just been stored for a while in the basements and attics of our souls. The world has become very ugly. We need to make sure that the liturgy is beautiful and not simply flashy.

The consistent and sustained beauty of the Mass, a ceremony that has endured in quiet simplicity for two thousand years is still the Catholic ace in the hole. I would be so bold as to suggest, as did Pope Benedict, that we stick to the rubrics. There is nothing so impressive as a priest turned away from the congregation for a few minutes while leading the congregation in addressing the Father in Heaven. Perhaps it is time to return this small bit of mystery to the celebration of Mass.

The altar is not a stage where the main protagonist faces the audience. It is an altar. A child who comes to his first Mass must wonder, “Who is that man in the special clothes talking to, Mommy and Daddy?”  “Be quiet junior, He is talking to God.”  Prayerful silence before Mass is another little bit of mystery that we might add, as suggested by the General Instruction for the Roman Missal. Have you ever thought how unusual it is for a group of people to be gathered together in silence? We live in a world filled with noise. A group of people sitting and kneeling in silence is a most unusual thing.

“Why is no one talking, Mommy?”

“Because they are talking to God in their hearts. Now be quiet.” 

Another way to add mystery is to dress up. People attend church in the same clothes that they use for working in the back yard. Maybe if we dressed like we were going to a wedding, we might eventually understand that we are attending a wedding, that of Christ and his Church. As it is, Mass is no more special that any event to which I would wear an old T-shirt. 

Let’s talk about music. This is not my strong suit. The council very much wanted the congregation to participate in the Mass, especially by singing. In much of my experience, Church music is a spectator sport. People don’t sing. The music is either too hard, or too entertaining to actually sing along with. If you are a church musician and the congregation is not singing, you are failing. Don’t assume they are singing. Put a recorder in the back of church. Get some spies to go sit in the eighth row from the back to listen to what people are actually doing. If all the congregation hears is you, you are failing. The Vatican Council re-emphasized the place of chant in worship. Chant ties us back to the temple in Jerusalem and to the early Church. Most of all, chant should be simple so that it can be sung.

I will never forget crossing the Adriatic years ago on a Greek ship. Since I couldn’t sleep, I went up top and from the bridge of the ship I could hear the grizzled Greek sailors singing along with the Sunday morning liturgy as it played on the ship’s radio. Music should be simple enough to be sung. Why? Where else in the modern world do people sing? We listen to music, but a group of adults singing together happens nowhere but in church. Even at ball games the national anthem is sung by a celebrity, of sorts. What passes as music blares out of speakers and phones and gizmos, but children have forgotten how to sing. 

“Daddy what are these people doing making noise?” 

“They are singing, junior.”

Next week: More suggestions to come

What's on the horizon?

Continued….

Back in the good old hippie days we used to sing, “It’s a hard rain’s agonna fall.” I think it was written by Bob Dylan.  He was right. There is a hard rain agonna fall but, it isn’t the rain we were expecting. No one expected the Soviet Union to break up. No one expected that we would all carry around little television screens in our pockets by means of which we could instantly communicate with someone on the other side of the world.  No one seriously suspected that robotic life might one day be able to surpass human life.

When I was in college, the university had a computer. It was the size of a large room. People holding punch cards stood in line for the chance to use it. Now computers are small enough to fit in our pockets and everyone has a few of them. No one thought that the world would be torn apart over looming religious wars. And above all, no one thought that the world population might one day collapse. Who could have anticipated that places like Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Germany, China, Russia, and Japan as well as Iran and other Islamic countries would become retirement homes full of an increasing number of dependent old people? Those are some of the countries where there are simply not enough children. I will be dead and gone by the time it happens, but people under the age of twenty may well face a frightening poverty stricken old age. There is a strong probability that around 2050AD the population of spaceship earth will begin to shrink. Certainly Europe, Asia and the Americas will. Africa may continue to value children for a while yet, but who knows? 

No one expected this. You might think fewer people on earth might be a good thing.  What we are facing is not fewer people but fewer young people.  No one to do the heavy lifting. No one to buy that stuff that makes an economy happen. No one to buy the cars, the computers, the fast food, the machine made clothing or the machines for that matter.  No one to buy the houses. Things have gotten surreal in places like Italy, Spain and Japan. There are whole villages for sale, cheap! Italy is fascinating. Think about it.

After three generations of no families you have the situation in which there are four people, each of whom inherited one house. Those four people marry and each couple has one child. Now you have two people with four houses. Those two marry and produce a third generation consisting of one child. That one child inherits the four houses of his great grandparents which are now worth almost nothing.

Real estate, the most valuable possession most people have, becomes worthless; in fact, it becomes a liability. Within the next few years we clergy in the US of A will probably see what they are seeing in Europe, lots of ecclesiastical real estate for sale.  It is just beginning here. All of a sudden, there are more churches than we need. There are not enough priests to staff them and in ten years, certainly twenty years there will be no one to warm their pews because the dear little old ladies who pay the bills and come to church anytime the doors are unlocked are going to their well-deserved heavenly reward by the busload. I wonder if the people who need to experience this new situation ever really do.

When an important church dignitary comes to a parish for an important event, he sees a full church. I wonder if said dignitary ever drops in on a church on a steamy Sunday morning in July, a church that is a third full of a congregation that has no one in it under the age of forty. We count the house annually to total up the numerical strength of the church. The pastor dutifully signs the report, which is never an underestimate. If father loves his parish he is certainly not going to lowball the figures. We, the clergy, once had job security. It was assumed that father would leave his rectory feet first.  In my youth there were two kinds of pastors, irremovable pastors who could only be removed by the pope and removable pastors who could only be removed by the pope. 

In 1972, some young progressives petitioned Rome to implement term limits for pastors. Now a pastor’s term of office is six years, renewable for another six.  A pastor is allowed to love a congregation for 12 years max unless the bishop decides he can stay longer. Then the priest will have to go love another congregation. Don’t ask father what’s going on.  He doesn’t have the job security. He isn’t prone to making objective reports on the health of his parish.  Bishops see full churches. Pastors see what they need to see in order to keep going.  Ask the funeral directors. They can tell you what’s going on.  They have great job security. As they say about cemeteries, people are just dying to get in. Funeral directors see a lot of parishes and they see very representative congregations. 

My small experience indicates that a Caucasian-American funeral often has no one in attendance younger than forty. A funeral parlor full of adults may produce 2 or 3 children.  As often as not when a priest says “The Lord be with you,” at the funeral Mass, much of the congregation looks blankly at him as if to say, “Okay!” – that is when the next generation bothers with the expense of a Mass. They don’t go to church and they plan to scatter Grandma in her vegetable garden. “Father, couldn’t you just do a service in the funeral parlor?”

A friend, a devout man who has spent his life serving the needy, was recently at a funeral of a longtime friend. The deceased had left the church over some scandal or other on top of which he had been “assessed” a large sum in a parish fundraising event. In his later years he had come back to the church, but had been away from the faith during the years he was raising his family. My friend got into a discussion with the dead man’s son who, though baptized in infancy, had never participated in the church nor received the other sacraments. He asked my friend a simple question about the faith, “Why do I need it?” Good question.

Next week: Why he needs it.

When we were too cool to be pious...

So, in the quest to figure out why so few, especially young people believe this stuff we have already seen one major reason: there are not that many young people due to artificial birth control.  Perhaps, the larger reason is we clergy. Again, there are many of the clergy, especially those who remained in the business, who are devout and exemplary. The problem is that we were taught to despise traditional piety. The devotional life of the faithful was made an object of mockery. I never once saw a priest/professor in my seminary days on his knees in chapel, except perhaps old Father George, a sort of old fashioned fossil.  We were not taught to be pious and so we were impious. We laughed at the things of long ago.

I have a wonderful book. It is hilarious. It is blasphemous. I am sure it is no longer in print. It is titled “St. Fidgetta and other Parodies.” It was published by an avant garde Catholic magazine. One part of it is titled, “The Moist Heart, a Compendium of Devotions.” One of the prayers in this mocking parody reads. “O Sweet Fidgetta, smallest candle on the sugar cake of eternity…” And so the piety of the simple was mocked and we the aspiring clergy were taught to laugh at the faithful. To this day, mention, Eucharistic Miracles, Weeping Icons, Healings, many clergy will roll their eyes or move on to another topic pretty quickly.

Fr. Brannigan of St. Armadillo’s once told me that there are only two types of people in the church, not conservative or liberal, but those who believe in supernatural realities and those who don’t.  Some priests go to the altar and claim every day to turn bread and wine into flesh and blood, and then they sneer at reports of visions and miracles. We were taught to believe in Christ as Christ the Reformer, Christ the Social Activist, Christ the Sandal wearing Long Haired Hippie. Never just in Christ.

I remember endless chatter about the Christ Figure in literature. Billy Bud, Cool Hand Luke, the protagonist in Easy Rider, just about anyone in the professor’s favorite movie or novel was a Christ figure. Again, this was perhaps only my experience in the seminary here in Frostbite Falls, but I suspect the same cynicism prevailed in some other places too. We were told that we didn’t really have to believe all this stuff literally, so we told people that they really don’t have to believe it either, and guess what? They stopped believing it.  Why are we surprised?  We, the clergy, or at least me the clergy were told to put more “pizzazz” in our sermons.  One would think that more truth would ultimately be a better thing.  I suppose to be fair, the whole thing was a reaction to the arrogance of the Church of the 50’s, but really, is it a reaction that we want?

I may sound like someone who wants to turn the clock back, but don’t be mistaken. I am going to make a frank admission. Though I taught Latin for 25 years, though I say the Latin Mass once a month, though I think that Mass facing the people is liturgically peculiar, I still like the Novus Ordo, the Ordinary form, the new Mass or whatever we are calling it this week. I like praying in my first language which happens to be English. I just wish that the celebrants would realize that this is the Mass of the Latin Rite pf the Roman Catholic Church and not the Father What’s-His-Name Show.

Do it by the book! Which of course assumes that you are facing the Lord with the people for a large hunk of the Mass. The Mass, Father, is not your vehicle of self-expression. Forget the Pizzazz. Give them the Lord. In my long years of priesthood, I have come to realize that the people are a lot holier than I am. Their devotions are the very essence of the Catholic faith. The candles, the prayer beads, the icons, the bread, the wine, the oil, the incense, the stained glass, these are all things that speak to the human heart and the mind as well.

Art in the twentieth century was meant to shock, to shock people from their bourgeois complacency and we having dumped St. Thomas Aquinas for Sartre and Marx thought that shocking art was true art. Humanity is hungry for beauty, especially poor humanity. The beautiful old gothic or Romanesque church was the palace of the poor.  We gave them spaceships from the planet ugly, because it was good for them, something that would bring them into the modern age. Beauty is quite possibly one proof for the existence of God, we did our level best in our ugly liturgies and ugly churches to prove that God did not exist, and you know what? They believed us. 

I was better than the simple in the land; the truth is that I was simply arrogant. The simplest of the faithful turns out to have been far wiser than the theologian.  They have loved God. We were taught to talk about God, never to Him. As I have already said perhaps my experience was aberrant, but I suspect that it was not.