Tag Archive for ‘Vatican II’
In the old days, we had priests who knew how to perform their sacred role. They put on the vestments and performed the sacred rituals behind the altar rail where no one else went, the inner sanctum of the sacred space that was the church. Unfortunately they often conflated that role with an often appalling clericalism, assuming that because they performed a sacred role, they themselves (and the institution that supported them) were also somehow sacred. From that they took leave to perpetrate all manner of malfeasance from which we are now still suffering. (In Chicago at least, I bet the white ethnic alderman didn’t invent the blingy pinky ring; I bet he copied it from his pastor.)
In the old days, the sacred role of the priest often became enmeshed with the ego of the priest and the ego in turn of the institution. In the pedophile scandal we have seen the havoc wrought by the egos of some of these priests and the egos of the diocesan institutions that protected them.
Then came Vatican II and all that was supposed to have changed. The sacredotal role of the priest was de-emphasized, the liturgy was opened up so the people could participate, and the role of the priest was broadened beyond just administering the sacraments to the proclaimer of the Word of God, leader of the community and worker for the common good.
What actually happened was that the priest became more human. Many priests became much more approachable and much more socially and politically active (often to the consternation of their bishops or superiors). The Mass also became more human, much more a function of the action of the community coming together as one. Altar rails were removed, altars turned to face the people, the deaconate was opened (to men), and the laity were allowed to distribute communion. The sanctuary, which was once considered off limits, now became all of a piece with the rest of the church. The Mass became the community itself, celebrating the Word of God, rather than a result of the sacred action of the one anointed to offer the sacrifice and the silent, interior but also sacred participation of the congregation.
So what’s wrong with this picture? I totally get the impetus behind it; Vatican II was a long-overdue lurch towards sanity and we have a long way to go until we really get there. But the ritual of the Mass (at least in my experience) has too little to do with the sacred. As the priest discovered his humanity and took himself out into the community and world, that old sacredotal role, enmeshed as with was with clericalism and authoritarianism, got left behind.
But now we face a different kind of enmeshment. Now, if the priest is just an ordinary human being, the ritual he celebrates is also ordinary. To be egalitarian, one must open the ritual to all. Anything associated with the priest as a specially anointed one who celebrates the sacred rituals is seen as pompous and somewhat ridiculous. The priest, being his fully human self, has to be his fully human self not just outside the ritual but inside it. There is no difference. He is Father Joe on the altar, as approachable as can be, saying the words of the Consecration, as much as he is Father Joe, standing in the lobby in full vestments, greeting the parishioners.
(Of course all this egalitarianism is only skin deep. We may have lost the communion rail and the priest may face the people. But he is still a male celibate, the institution still protects its own, bishops are still closing parish schools, the Pope is still smacking down theologians and threatening excommunications–except for the Holocaust denier whose excommunication is getting his lifted. Since Vatican II the church may have lost its sense of the sacred and its understanding of the intellectual content of the faith but it has hung squarely on to its authoritarianism.)
Again, the problem is conflation of ego and role. What is the answer, for those who would like to see a more vibrant sense of the sacred in the liturgy without a return to the authoritarian days of old? I think the answer is to break the enmeshment between the ego and the role. Like the soldier who guards the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the priest could consciously choose to absolutely distinguish between his role and his person. When in the role, he’s in it, like the soldier is in his role as guard or an actor is in a role in a drama. As a recognition of the sacredness of what is going on, he maintains the role until the ritual is over and the ritual objects are put aside. He would no more chat from the altar than the soldier guarding the tomb would wave to a friend or an actor break the suspension of disbelief in a play by waving to his Mom.
Of course all this assumes that there is a problem, that there is disquiet in the ranks, that there is a perceived lack in the way the Mass is celebrated. Many people I’m sure actually experience a strong sense of the sacred in church or are otherwise quite satisfied with things as they stand; not all experience a lack of the sacred and if they did might not see it as a loss. But many do and that is, after all, the traditional role of religion: to create spaces, times and actions that make manifest the sacred in relation to the divine.
Of course the biggest question of all is this: What exactly is going on at the Consecration? In his sacred role, what sacred act is the priest performing? Our understanding of this will drive the structuring of the ritual. Unless we believe that there actually is something transcendent going on, something set apart from the ordinary, that the actions of the priest bring about the Real Presence of Christ on the altar, then a push for an increased sense of the sacred isn’t going to make much sense.
If we don’t believe it, then what’s the point, let’s all find a nice Protestant church somewhere, complete with good sermons, women ministers, and a nice community. The only reason many of us hang around the Catholic church and tolerate its authoritarian nonsense is because of the sacred ritual of the Mass. If that has become ordinary, what’s the point?
If, however, we do believe it, if we believe that the action of the ordained and specially anointed priest in consecrating the bread and wine is both the sign and the act that brings forth the Real Presence of Christ among us, then what is going on is so much more than a gathering. If that is the case, the ritual needs to be consciously set apart from the ordinary. We need to leave the concept of the priest and the people as one to the Liturgy of the Word and let the priest and the congregation get on with their sacred actions, which are deserving of all the special forms of respect, honor, reverence, protection and veneration that we can give them, not because of the person of the priest but because of the role he is playing. We need to put back the threshold separating the sacred from the ordinary. We can never revitalize the church by returning to the authoritarian days of old or by rehabilitating various right-wing heretics. We can however, return it to its roots by restoring the tradition of the transcendent mystery of sacred space, time and action to the practice of the liturgy.
Tags: bureaucracy, church, loss of the sacred, Vatican II
It seems to me that the two big negatories from Vatican II are the loss of the sacred and the loss of a clear statement of the intellectual content of the faith. The importance of the sacredotal role of the priest got lost in the enthusiasm of going back to the sources and restoring the importance of the Liturgy of the Word. And a systematic statement of the faith got sidetracked in the move toward a more pastoral way of speaking (and the well-deserved blowback against the Curial neo-scholastics). So in two of the most important things the conservatives could conserve, they blew it. But the centralized power of the Pope and the authority of the Curia remain intact. Well. We all got the short end on that one.
Tags: bureaucracy, Vatican II
So yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the launch of Macintosh and today is the 50th anniversary of the announcement that launched Vatican II, both splendid, world-changing events. I won’t carry on too much about the Macintosh, but I really hope we celebrate the heck out of Vatican II, since it really was quite the thing.
Slipping into the mode of thinking that Vatican II wasn’t a big deal implies the church today behaves in much the same way as it did in the hundred and fifty years before Vatican II, which is a bit of a stretch. It implies the church in all its hierarchical glory was never wrong about most of the major issues of the day: It was not wrong in its stand against democracy, it was not wrong when it said a state should be able to dictate the religion of its people, it was not wrong about the importance of Scripture and the early Church Fathers, about the uses of history, about Bible studies, about the relationship of the hierarchy to scholarship, or about the laity. This sorry history (and all it implies about how wrong the church can be on so many critical issues over such an extended period of time) is wiped from memory when we say that at Vatican II nothing really happened.
The other thing it means is this. If nothing really happened, then there is no unfinished business. If nothing happened, the fact hat no women or laity played a role in the Council is just a quaint historical tidbit. If nothing happened, the fact that birth control, celibacy, the reform of the Curia and the formation of the Synod of Bishops were taken off the Council’s agenda by Pope Paul VI is meaningless. The fact that the issue of the authority of the Pope vs the authority of the bishops was not satisfactorily resolved is irrelevant. If nothing happened at Vatican II then who needs Vatican III?
Not only did something happen, a lot more needs to happen, so let’s celebrate the event as much as we can.
Tags: bureaucracy, Vatican II
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
According to John O’Malley’s book What Happened at Vatican II, Gary Wills’ comment about Vatican II being a theologians’ rebellion (see post below) against the Curia may not be wide of the mark. O’Malley says that Pius XII’s fourth encyclical Humani Generis (1950) was a renewed attack against Modernism (e.g., historical scholarship, exploration of the early church fathers, democracy, free speech, evolution, etc. etc. etc.). It was an “unremitting condemnation of a number of ‘false opinions’ and ‘novelties’ that threatened to undermine Catholic truth.” What followed was a “wide-ranging clamp-down on theologians” like “Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Marie-Dominique Chenu … and Karl Rahner.” They were “removed from their teaching positions and forbidden to publish.” “Thus the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office … had by the time of the council screwed the lid on tight. Its actions were bitterly resented not only by the theologians but also by a number of bishops, who felt that ‘Rome’ was overstepping its bounds. … What they resented as much as the punishment of theologians was the autocratic style on which it was meted out.” Of course all these theologians ended up being “rehabilitated” and played leading roles in the Council.
It seems the ‘culture wars’ played out with the French, German (including Ratzinger in his progressive phase) and Belgian cardinals, bishops and theologians lined up against the “anti-Modernist” Roman Curia types. Both sides were driven by a passionate but relatively small band of leaders, and both sides realized it. O’Malley says that “Council figures as diverse as Siri [Team Curia] and Congar [Team Scholarship] both lamented the theological inadequacy of most of the bishops at the council and the disproportionate role they thought the theologians played in it.”
A few things are striking to me about all this. One is the clearly European nature of the dispute. For the most part, there were few Americans involved in these disputes. Apparently we were too busy building parishes, schools and universities (ironically for mostly European immigrants). The second is just how nutty the anti-Modernists were. Apparently it took the church quite some time to get through the Counter-Reformation and to get over the French Revolution and the consequent loss of the Papal States. The third is how overtly political this history is, and how over the first 50 years of the twentieth century things oscillated back and forth. Democracy, free speech, and biblical scholarship is BAD. Oops, now it’s good, go for it. Oops, now it BAD AGAIN. Of course each time the mood swung to the BAD side, people’s careers got screwed and seemingly infallible edicts were issued. It’s amazing there was anyone with a brain left in the church.
Tags: bureaucracy, Vatican II
I wonder if the loss of the sacred may have been an accidental victim of Vatican II and its desire to encourage the full participation of the whole assembly in the liturgy. This ‘togetherness’ by its very nature is completely opposite a style that would allow the sacred to bloom. It’s as though the style of the Liturgy of the Word washed over the Liturgy of the Eucharist.
In his book In Search of the Sacred, Josef Pieper says that it is important to distinguish between the Liturgy of the Word and the sacred acts. “Proclamation, instruction, teaching, preaching, etc. these are all part of the everyday world.” But at its heart the liturgy is “not common meal or an assembly for instruction, etc. It is the sacred action that brings about the true presence of God among us.”
Structured rituals provide “the unique opportunity for the individual to transcend the confines of his own subjective self precisely by accepting the communal challenge and entering into the objective form of a structured and stately ritual. The sacred action takes the solemnity of its stately form, transcending all individual peculiarities.” And “The consecrated enclosure establishes explicit boundary lines between the area of the ordinary and everyday life ‘outside’ and an ‘inside’ where different norms of behavior obtain. And when a church is consecrated the altar is consecrated. It is a table for the ritual meal and a ‘stone of sacrifice’ upon which the sacred mysteries are celebrated.”
Yet if you think the Mass it just about a ‘common meal’ and the ‘proclamation of the word’ then you don’t really see the need for all that ‘sacred mystery’ stuff. But that’s the very thing we’re missing.
Tags: loss of the sacred, Vatican II
Great stuff on the loss of the sacred, from Gary Wills in Bare Ruined Choirs (a bracingly cynical read).
He points out the obvious, that the Council was conceived and run by the Pope, the bishops and a select number of theologians, not by the faithful. “The Mass was not brought into the vernacular for him–the laity did not ask for the change … the innovations were made in the name of freedom, though they had to be imposed on many laymen, and Latin was not even retained as an option, as a gesture to men’s right of choice. The priest, you see, was the one being freed–the priest, with his face to the wall before him, his only contact with the congregation a brace of juveniles (aka altar boys).”
“Escape from Latin involved for these men more than the Latin Mass; it meant the breviary as well, and–most important–it meant escape from the years of theology learned in Latin by rote … Vatican II was a theologians’ rebellion, that of the periti (expert consultants) against the Curia. The Latin theology class was resented even more than that of the Mass–and both were resented by younger faculty and the recently ordained, not by laymen.”
The layman came to church “to do things–witness the miracle, and believe in it; consume the eucharist, and believe in that. Belief, as a result of the priest’s formulation (and of the people’s expectations, formed on that), had been ritualized; it was not a thing one heard about or held by intellect, but a rite to be gone through. Change the rite, and belief would inevitably change, despite all assurances that it was changeless. A Monsignor addressing the Latin Mass Society of England in 1967 put the matter with stark truthfulness: ‘The Blessed Sacrament has been removed from the high altar by the simple expedient of turning the altar around.’ When the shrine, a thing removed, was brought down into the congregation’s midst, the whole genius of devotion at (and to) that shrine evaporated.”
Tags: loss of the sacred, mystery, Vatican II
