We have lost our minds..

Letter to Mary K. Lastima, the grand finale.

It must seem a little far fetched to you, that somehow the banality with which the liturgy is celebrated by many officiants, the prevalence of abortion and the worship of demonic spirits are somehow all tied together. Perhaps I should throw in space aliens and Bigfoot while I am at it.

I say the Mass of St. Pius V (more commonly called the Tridentine Mass) regularly.  I more often say the Mass of the Venerable Paul VI (commonly called the Ordinary form of the Novus Ordo. I am not opposed to the Mass of Paul VI. I actually love it. It is the Mass that I have mostly said all of my priesthood. My problems are not with the Novus Ordo, so called, but with the outrageous manipulation of the liturgy for personal or political motives. I think of liturgies with giant paper mache heads, old women dancing in flowing skirts and fat men dancing about in tight white pants, or I think of para-liturgies that feature angels roller skating to circus music. I’m not making this up. You can look this stuff up at the following sites.

Liturgical Abuse: Puppets (WCCTA 2008)

And in the next one, the men are not as fat, but they are still wearing white. Why do large liturgical men favor white when black is so slimming?

Novena Solene | Entrada da Bíblia - 3º dia - dia 05 de Outubro

I love the Mass of Paul VI. I remember once reading that the liturgy of the Latin rite is characterized by its simplicity and dignity. One is reminded of that old song, “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma.”  Paper Mache dancing heads and fat guys in white pants? Dignity? Simplicity?

Still, I maintain that the simplified Mass of Paul VI offered the way intended is very beautiful. The way we priests have mangled it has lowered our standard of the sacred, with horrifying consequences. The Mass as said in many parishes is a venue for rebellion, not for worship. “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry.” (1Sam. 15:23) I am regularly asked why a priest changes the Mass, or uses his own words or leaves part out while he puts in things that aren’t supposed to be there. It is simple. He is a rebel and “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry.”  Three thousand years ago the prophet Samuel saw a connection between the abuse of liturgy and the demonic. Look it up: First Book of Samuel the 15^th chapter. Saul offered sacrifice which was forbidden to him and for this he lost the crown and his life, as well as the life of his son, Jonathan.

Have you ever read the Book of Wisdom, also called the Wisdom of Solomon? It’s one of those extra Catholic books. You would have read, “…through the envy of the devil came death into the world.” For what, you may ask, is the devil envious of us? He is immortal; he is immeasurably smarter and more powerful than we. This, too, is simple: Angels don’t reproduce, and the devils, who are fallen angels, can only steal our children. God shared something with us that He didn’t share with the angels. We can create something immortal.

God creates the soul, but a man and a woman in their coming together create the body, which is immortal, if Christ’s promise of resurrection is true. Humanity in its art and in its children shares the creativity of God in a way that angels cannot. Therefore, the devil hates art and beauty, for which the Catholic Mass and Catholic churches were the principle venue for a thousand years. The devil has convinced us to swap the amazing music and architecture of Catholicism for ugly buildings and banal music. The simplicity dignity and beauty of the Latin rite, both in the new mass and the old, gives way to the spectacle of the circus. But more than art, the devil hates children. They remind him that “God so loved the world.” In his diabolical envy, he has contrived to create sterile art and sterile marriages. Abortion, artificial birth control, rampant divorce, same sex marriage, on-line and off line pornography. They are the utensils with which the devil devours children and we feed them to him as surely as our forbears threw their children into the fires of the demon-god Moloch, all for the sake of our well being and prosperity.

Why do I lump divorce in with all those other more clearly anti-reproductive activities? Simple: Children need stable homes in which to flourish. Even faithful marriages between men and women who cannot themselves have children strengthen the dignity and reverence in which marriage and the home are held. If the sacredness of the bond between a man and a woman can be cheapened, then children may be born, but in their hearts they usually can’t flourish.

The Latin word sacrament means an oath to the death. We have reduced it to a show, a kind of entertainment, and shamefully this is not just done at the new Mass, but I have seen Tridentine Masses where it is all about the show. The degradation of one sacrament, the breaking of one solemn oath hardens our hearts. We receive the Body and Blood or the Lord without reverence, without “discerning the body” as St. Paul says, and we likewise have no trouble breaking the oath that gives life in the flesh after we have cheapened the oath which gives us life in the spirit.  I cannot fathom how a person can think that the pleasures of what is most certainly an aberrant, use of our bodies, even if it is pleasurable to some, can be compared to the sacred, life-giving secret shared by a husband and wife.

I said earlier, the devil hates good art and the devil hates children, He has tried to teach us that sexual desirability is the ultimate beauty. We go to the gym, the diet clinic and the plastic surgeon to keep ourselves physically desirable. All the while we remain morally and spiritually weak and deformed. We are cheap paintings in expensive frames. We are fifty dollar haircuts on seventy five cent heads. When we mistake the paint, the hair dye and the varnish for beauty, we are fools. True beauty lifts us to God. False beauty fixes our eyes only on our desires. True beauty makes us better. False beauty makes us less. False beauty ties us up in our own needs and fantasies. It fixes our gaze on the filth beneath our feet, not on the stars over our heads.

How can what the modern world calls love ever be compared with that love that brings new life? The disordered desires of the modern marriage movement bring nothing but passing pleasures that are soon devoured by boredom and regret. I know three things that are beautiful: a simple Mass, an old couple and a newborn baby.

A simple Mass simply said, lifts the heart and mind to God. A simple Mass doesn’t entertain. It brings heaven down to earth and earth to heaven in the flesh and blood of the Savior made present on the altar.

The charm of a young couple in love cannot be compared to the beauty of an old man and woman, who after a life of faithfulness walk hand in hand with each other and call each other by names like “sweetheart,” or “Mama” and “Papa”. 

And more beautiful still is that ultimate work of art, fashioned by the Maker of all things in a woman’s sacred womb: a child. Is there anything more wonderful than that little bundle of hope that reminds us of God’s great love? We have trashed the churches and murdered the children, all in the name of progress, freedom and tolerance.

We have lost our minds.

The Rev. Know-it-all

Is the microphone or the piano more important for Mass?

DISCLAIMER: As you know I am an exceptionally whiny person. For me the glass is always half empty, and I suspect it has a small leak. These are the reflections of one remarkably incompetent diocesan priest who doesn’t know anything about what it is like to be a priest in a religious order, or even what goes on in the parish down the road. They do not reflect any other members of the clergy, all of whom are happy, healthy and productive. The stories that I will be telling are entirely fictional and the characters, and I do mean characters, are entirely made up. None of these accounts have anything to do with you or anyone you know. All the imaginary names in these made up stories have been changed to protect the innocent... or least me. And if I hold my breath for a really long time, quarters come out of my ears.

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

I am on the parish liturgy committee here at St. Thespia’s and was recently asked on a survey, “Which do you find most indispensable for worship: a microphone, a guitar or a piano?” What would you have answered.

Yours,

Lee Turjiste

Dear Lee,

What do I think essential for worship?  Bread, wine and a humble heart. I wish you hadn’t asked this question. I fear that it may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. For some time now, I have been resisting the urge just to tell liturgical horror stories, and what it is really like to be a diocesan priest. Cooler heads and wiser minds have counseled me that this would be a bad idea. Has this ever stopped me? 

One of the reasons that I am advised not to bring up the topic is that it might discourage vocations. This is preposterous. It might discourage those who want to get a job as a diocesan priest. The calling to the priesthood, as any calling, is a fire in your bones. It is like falling in love. If a person has a vocation to the priesthood, you can no more discourage him than you could have discouraged Jeremiah from  prophesying,

You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped; you were too strong for me, and you triumphed. All the day I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me. ...The word of the LORD has brought me derision and reproach all the day. I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones; I grow weary holding it in.... (Jeremiah 20: 7 and following)

Perhaps this will serve to discourage those who are looking for a career in religion, and that would be all for the good. So here goes...

WHAT HAPPENED?!? How did we end up in this mess. (Do a web search for “Liturgical Abuse: Puppets (WCCTA 2008) - YouTube” or “Novena Solene Entrada da Bíblia”). If you are asking, “What mess?” I am not simply clucking my tongue at liturgical abuse. I am dismayed by something quite different. I am tired of the constant innovation that passes for Catholicism and its ancient liturgy.   

If one more liturgist asks me “What is the theme of today’s Mass”, I will probably have to be carted away in a straight jacket. 

I remember an encounter a few years ago. As people were scurrying about getting everything ready for a grand two-choir, four-star liturgy, one of God’s helpers asked me if he should put the microphone up on the stage. I was about to explain that it was an altar, not a stage, but I looked at him and realized that he had never been to a Mass that did not require electricity and so I said, “Yes, put it up on the stage.” 

That’s what I am complaining about. We have swapped the altar for a stage. And we priests are critiqued by the audience, which is most certainly not God and His Angels and Saints assembled! I was just commiserating with another priest here about a funeral mass he had offered not long ago. There are three types of people you meet at funerals these days. The first and most common group, when you say, “The Lord be with you.” responds “Okay.” The second group responds, “and also with you.” This mean they haven’t actually been in a church for at least three years. The third and smallest group responds, “and with your spirit.” 

I am actually a bit startled when I hear more than one or two people who know the correct response at a wedding or funeral. At this particular funeral the crowd was among the “Okay” first group. They had, however,  a detailed list of things that the priest was to say in the sermon at the funeral of their dear Aunt Kunigunda. One of the most important details was that Aunt Kunigunda had always baked fruit cakes for all the children in the family. The priest offering the funeral Mass did his best to fondly reminisce about someone he had never actually seen breathing, and he dutifully said that dear Aunt Kunigunda had baked cakes for the children. 

The grieving crowd was livid. They sent letters of protest to the diocese here in frostbite Falls and sent copies to the pope for good measure. They pointed out that the careless celebrant had said “cakes”, not “fruit cakes”! The Horror!!! a ruined funeral. He should just have read the script that they wrote. They had paid good money for the performance and the lead actor had not even bothered to read his lines!  The ridiculous post script is that the liturgy office took the whole thing seriously, looked into the complaint and asked the offending clergyman to write a letter of apology.

I recently had a funeral that involved show people. Due to a “eulogy gone wrong” I found myself sitting in the local police station the following week. I was not accused of anything, but the uncle of the deceased was about to be arrested. I was there to explain that no matter what the arresting officer had heard, the event in question was not a stage performance, but a Mass.  An estranged family member of a very devout family had died under tragic circumstance. The family of the deceased, the uncle in particular, had arranged Christian burial for the renegade who had done his best to make their lives miserable. 

A simple funeral was planned for close friends and family, no eulogies, very simple music. Here the plot thickens. It seems that the deceased had run off with the circus at some point in his youth, and a lot of circus people showed up at the funeral, large people with odd colored hair. They promptly took over the funeral. 

Some acquaintance of the beloved dead wheeled the piano out of the sacristy and started to play what can only be described as Protestant hymns in the style of a lounge singer. The family of the deceased didn’t want to make a scene and so they went along with it. We all tried to get along. Just before the distribution of communion, a rather strange fellow, one of the clowns I think, approached me at the altar and whispered, “I got something to say.” 

I responded, “Not now.”   

At which point he went straight to the pulpit and launched into a denunciation of the family of the deceased. The uncle who, in his goodness had arranged the funeral, came up to escort the clown off the altar, assisted by a few other family members. The would be orator started to pelt everyone within reach with hymnals. As was he was finally dragged off the altar the enraged thespian shouted, "You killed him, It’s your fault you bleepin’... bleeped...bleepers..." 

The  clown left, contacted the authorities and demanded to press charges for assault. He said that he had been dragged off the stage in the middle of his speech. That’s how I ended up in the police station. When I explained to the authorities that it was an altar not a stage and that he had been told to sit down, the impending arrest was scrapped. 

Quite a story, but my point is not that the liturgy was interrupted by a clown. It is that the clown couldn’t tell the difference between a stage and an altar. I suspect that there are many liturgists who are in the same boat. And many rank and file Catholics. And many of the clergy. 

A few years back, one of my predecessors at another parish removed the altar on Holy Saturday and replaced it with long folding tables on which a turkey dinner had been spread out. He said a sort of Mass wearing street clothes in the midst of the mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and then invited the congregation up to have communion and dinner. He is no longer in the business of religion. 

Why shouldn’t the faithful treat the altar like a stage? We, the clergy have done very little to give a different impression. We let some liturgists go to extremes of performance art. In my seminary days, we were introduced to the “Mass as Extravaganza”. We called such Masses “elephant Masses,” because one fully expected the celebrant to be brought in at the end of the procession on an elephant like the groom in a Hindu wedding.

(More to come. I have not yet begun to whine.)

A short history of the Hootenanny Mass & other absurdities... part 18

Letter to Harold “Hoot” and Annie Gibson cont. part 18

(Note to the squeamish: I am not making a word of this up. I have fogged the identities of some people. I have no desire to be sued.)

INTO THE ABYSS:
THE ERA OF LITURGY COMMITTEES

Do whatever steps you want if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff
Everybody say his own Kyrie Eleison
Doin' the Vatican Rag

Make a cross on your abdomen
When in Rome do like a Roman
Ave Maria, gee it's good to see ya
Gettin' ecstatic an' sorta dramatic an'
Doin' the Vatican Rag

So go the lyrics of a song recorded in 1965 by the Harvard mathematics professor/comedian, Tom Lehrer. In the preamble to what is an amazingly offensive song by one of my favorite humorists, Professor Lehrer says that the Vatican, “...in an attempt to make the Mass more entertaining, has allowed more popular music to be used at Mass” or words to that effect. When I say offensive, I really mean it. If you love our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament the song can make you weep. Still, the song sums up a very strange moment in history. I remember about that time, going into a darkened church where a wooden altar had been set up in preparation for the first mass facing the people in our parish. Monsignor O’Brien, a veteran of the old Liturgical Movement, had held off until the last possible moment, but the liturgists had told him that he could postpone things no longer. I remember looking at that flimsy wooden table that now hid the marble altar on which Mass had been said for years and thinking that tomorrow the world would change forever. “Everybody say his own Kyrie Eleison.” Being a young man at the time, I was all for change, but as I saw that wooden table, a wave of sadness swept over me. And now that I am an old man, the sadness sweeps back reminding me of all that has been swept away.

All the old rules about liturgical propriety were melting away like gray March snow on a beautiful spring day. Permission could be given to say “home masses.” It had been forbidden to say Mass outside an approved place without special permission. Now permission was given at a local level, and when it wasn’t given, well who cared? We lived a few doors from a huge Romanesque church, and the young assistant pastor came to our house one night to celebrate the first home Mass in the parish. We “had” Mass sitting around the dining room table. A choir of habited nuns perched on the dining room radiator and the house was filled with neighbors who’d come to experience this wondrous new thing in the life of the Church. We really believed that this was what the early Church must have been like, guitar playing nuns and all. By the way, the nuns’ habits were gone within the year, and the nuns themselves were gone a few years after that. I myself was a folk singer at the time, folk singers being defined as anyone who could play three major chords and two minor ones on a guitar and could sing badly enough to sound authentic. I was drafted into playing for the first small group Mass at my high school. We sang those classic Catholic hymns, “Sons of God”, “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore” and “Kumbaya.” (I was not sure what Kumbaya really meant. I assumed it was religious, perhaps a form of speaking in tongues.)

From there, the slide downhill continued unabated. Any song that anybody liked now became liturgical music, especially if the words could be adapted. I remember hearing the Jim Morrison tune, “Come on Jesus, Light my Fire” played as an offertory song. And there was that inspiring communion hymn, “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I’ve got God in my Tummy.” And of course almost anything by Bob Dylan was essentially religious. As I went off to the college seminary, such great lyrics as “Today while the blossoms still cling to the vine...” made splendid offertory songs, after all, the song does mention wine. I remember an old seminary professor preaching an extended homily on the lyrics of the Judy Collins song “Clouds,” which I believe was the communion hymn that day. We had regular small group masses celebrated with loaves of pita bread and port wine on coffee tables in recreation rooms. Some clergy actually used coffee and doughnuts for Mass, though I myself never participated in a Dunkin’ Doughnuts Liturgy. At the first such small group Mass in my dormitory, the music played on a record player by the celebrant was taken from the Beatles “Lonely Hearts Club Band” album. For a while in my first year of college seminary, we would still troop in to chapel for morning prayer, (if we were awake) and evening prayer (if we were still awake). For Lent and Advent, the different dorms would plan the services. I remember one vespers service that consisted entirely of the playing of the musical sound track of the “Wizard of Oz.” Lauds and Vespers definitively ended one fateful morning when the morning prayer service was designed around that Christian classic, the movie “Easy Rider.” There we sat, a few hundred groggy adolescents recovering form the disciplined academic life of the late sixties seminary in which we had immersed ourselves on the previous evening. From the back of the chapel we heard the revving of a motor, and a liturgical presenter did a wheelie up the main aisle of the chapel. I do not remember another morning or evening prayer being held in the chapel for the rest of my college career.

And thus were trained the pastors, theologians and liturgists of today by the glorious experimentation of the sixties. The competition to make the next liturgy more exciting than the last was huge in my college seminary. Plans were kept hush-hush, lest the competition figure out how to top what we were planning. I remember a great theologian, on loan to us from another diocese. He was furious with me because I had figured out the chords to a Jacques Brel song that his liturgy committee was planning on using. I had, he said, no right to steal a song that they had already stolen, and I was to stop playing it immediately. He went on to be the director of a prestigious pastoral institute, a renowned author on moral theology and the moral consultant to an archbishop, who is long since dead. His career hit a bit of a speed bump when he announced that he was leaving the priesthood and the Church to marry someone who was very, very interesting. He has since resumed lecturing on moral theology and is a very popular speaker in some Catholic circles. His theories on the near impossibility of committing a mortal sin had a major effect on the thinking of the times and still exercise a great influence in Catholic morality even now.

You cannot imagine how exciting it all was, this return to the spontaneity of the early Church. It was such fun to go to Mass. You never knew what you were going to get. The hootenanny Mass quickly gave way to liturgical dancers, rock bands, clown Masses in which priest and congregation dressed in clown costumes and the liturgical music was invariably taken from the musical “Godspell” along with the Beatles hymn “Fool on the Hill.” Some time after I was ordained and I had sobered up from the sixties (which seemed to drag on through the 70's and 80's), I was invited to be the celebrant of a special youth group Mass. I was carefully coached by the liturgist in charge how to time the words of the consecration to fit in with music and the visual images projected on a screen behind me. It was at that point that I had finally had enough. The unbloody re-presentation of Christ’s Sacrifice on Calvary had become a joke, just like Tom Lehrer’s prophetic 1965 song, “Everybody say his own Kyrie Eleison.” Every priest his own pope, every theologian infallible, every opinion valid whether it comes from the bishop of Rome or a rock musician/liturgist. I actually remember my liturgy teacher from seminary say in reference to a papal statement about the liturgy, “Well, that’s one man’s opinion.” My liturgy teacher was certainly an exceptional American. He wasn’t about to let some Italian bishop stand in the way of liturgical progress. It seems that Luther got his way and more, Mass is no longer a sacrifice, but a vehicle for the consolation and instruction, and dare I add, the entertainment of the faithful.

Next week: ON THE LITURGICAL USE OF DRUMS, UMBRELLAS, AND FIRECRACKERS. and OUR MOTHER WHO ART IN HEAVEN