| Written by Dorothy Cummings,
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I know a priest who celebrates Sunday Mass as though he were aiming for the Novus Ordo land speed record. Summer has given him an excuse to dispense with hymns completely, so he has managed to shave more minutes from his time. I think he’s got it to under half an hour now. Long-time parishioners discreetly check their watches after the dismissal. Father’s a bit of a control freak, so it’s their only form of protest.
It used to be amusing to see what else this priest could do to the Mass — substitute the word “the people” when the Gospel says “Israel”, for example, or eliminate the Good Friday prayer for the Jews. However, I could see that this watchfulness was having a negative effect on my character, and now I go elsewhere to worship.
Indeed, I have been going to a German-language Mass lately, and although I cannot understand the homilies, I do understand that the priests have great reverence for the Mass. It never occurs to me to check the time afterwards. No, instead I give thanks for the Mass and then go to the parish hall for coffee and cake.
Much ink has been spilled on the subject of the liturgy. The novelist Moses Mosebach writes in his The Heresy of Formlessness that there was a terrible rift when the Tridentine Mass was jettisoned in favour of the present Novus Ordo. And I keep meeting young Catholics, many of them converts, who flock to Tridentine Masses. I am intrigued by this, for I once went to a Tridentine Mass and I was terribly bored. However, this might be because I knew nothing about it at all. I learned a little in my class on Christian Latin. The professor had us read prayers for the Tridentine Mass and pointed out that hidden within them were concrete poems: the words made shapes. This, of course, was entirely lost in translation. It made me wonder what else has been lost.
I heard or read an anecdote somewhere about a Muslim man who simply could not believe that Catholics believed that God was present in the Eucharist. If he had believed that God, Almighty God, was present in the gold box or in the priest’s hands, he would have thrown himself on his face, cowering. And yet all around him Catholics stood and looked on at the Host, eyes glazed over. Ho hum. Incidentally, Mosebach points out that whatever standing meant liturgically for the Early Christians, it doesn’t mean the same thing now. C.S. Lewis said his nightly prayers by his bed on his knees like a child.
But it is not my intention to criticize Catholics who stand when other Catholics kneel (in the absence of kneelers, there isn’t much choice ). No, today I am shaking my lay woman’s finger at priests who give scandal by their lackadaisical or even presumptuous treatment of the most holy and sacred Mass. Why should the average Catholic show great reverence for the Mass when some of their priests don’t themselves? What is Mass anyway? A sacrifice? A prayer meeting? A sing-song with quiet bits? Something to do on Sunday mornings to assuage the conscience or instil the kids with “values”? All the above? I have been going to Mass since the early 70s, and my earliest memories of the Mass include a folk-rock band and Father announcing that there would be only a very short homily because of the Ti-Cats-Argonauts game afterward. And now they tell me the majority of Catholics no longer go to Mass. Holy smoke! Why might that be?
Lay people don’t, as a rule, make a fuss at Mass. They keep their mouths shut no matter what Father gets up to at the altar. The one exception I can think of is the man who protested when Father Land Speed Record interrupted Mass to snap (again) at parents of loudly gurgling infants. “They’re not bothering us,” said the man, and there was a chorus of murmured assent.
But in general lay people have too much respect for the Mass to impose their personalities on it. For example, it would seem churlish to appear in church wearing a “Do the Red, Say the Black” T-shirt to remind the priest to follow the actual Order of the Mass as it is written. So instead I’m writing it here on behalf of silently suffering fellow lay people: Do the Red. Say the Black. Take the time.
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