Vatican II Goofs
In at least two important respects, I think Vatican II goofed. The first is in regard to the structure of the ritual in the second part of the Mass. The Liturgy of the Eucharist should be different from the Liturgy of the Word in nature, in tone, and in how we participate. And it is not, from where I sit.
I think the church in the old days got the Liturgy of the Eucharist right (even if they got pretty much everything else wrong). But I don’t think Vatican II should (in practice if not by decree) be considered infallible, any more than whatever proceeded it. Let’s remember that As Gary Wills rightly points out (see post below), no one asked the laity about any of this.
Sometimes the yearning for the rituals of old, like the Latin Mass, are written off as nostalgia. I don’t consider it a question of nostalgia at all; it’s a question of how best to construct a ritual that both signifies and creates the real presence of the divine in church. If we all thought God was being made present at the Consecration, would we really busy ourselves standing and kneeling and speaking and shaking hands? I don’t think so. It’s all good stuff, just not where it’s presently situated.
I don’t miss the Latin; I miss the quiet. That’s when you could actually sense the presence of God (not that I entirely know what that means). Such receptivity requires time and silence. That’s where the real grace and healing goes on. As Wills says, we came to church “to do things-witness the miracle, and believe in it; consume the Eucharist, and believe in that.”
To me it all comes down to what we think is actually going on during the Consecration. Figure that out and the proper ritual will fall into place. I just don’t think we’re there yet.
Which brings us to what I think was the second goof of Vatican II. From reading O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II, it seems one of the big changes was a move from a faith with a rigorous, systematic intellectual content (unfortunately–and incorrectly–used to browbeat the “Modernists”) to a more pastoral, Scripture and Church-fathers-based approach. This was clearly needed but as in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, we may have thrown out the baby with the bath water. Looking at the textbooks my kids grew up with, the basic message of Christianity is that Jesus was nice and you should be nice too. I think there’s a little more to it than that.
… From “Qualified Non-expert:”
I absolutely agree with you in saying that the Church made a goof in the new liturgy that followed Vatican II, in that it neglects the importance of quiet. The old liturgy had (among many other elements, not all beneficial) a cadence of sound passing to silence passing to music passing to the spoken word passing to silence. This reflects a very positive USAGE of silence as a tool for prayer. We lost that.
This is a part of the overall most central loss in the new liturgy – the sense that the participation we are called on to perform is inherently interior, though it flows over into external action. Virtually every choir member, lector, extraordinary minister, alter server, and even usher, feels that his or her “participation” is more active precisely because of fulfilling those roles. Whereas the reality is that fulfilling these roles is usually more of a distraction to the interior participation that the Council focussed on.
However, I would be careful of calling this failing a goof of Vatican II. The Council called for a reform of the liturgy, and laid down certain principles for this. The actual group that Paul VI called together to form the new mass clearly ignored the principles laid down, and wrote whatever they wanted to write (with an eye to getting it close enough to OK for Paul to let it go, without his throwing the whole effort away and starting over). Benedict XVI is on record for aligning himself with the view that the reform of liturgy that the Council called for never happened.
One of the major problems with changing ritual is that ritual is imbued with a wealth of symbolic meaning, often on a whole range of different levels. It is extraordinarily difficult to be certain, when deciding what should be done away with, that you have correctly understood the full range of symbolic meaning, to correctly estimate the value that ritual adds to the liturgy. For example, the loss of the all-male altar boy cadre will have an inestimable impact on the psychology of young people trying to understand non-identical but complementary roles for the sexes.
Tags: bureaucracy, Vatican II
