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Sunday Is About Community

Oakland Diocese Holds Liturgical Conference

By Phil Sevilla

The diocese of Oakland sponsored a daylong liturgical conference on August 24 at St. Isidore's parish in Danville. Of the three hundred liturgy planners who gathered at St. Isidore's upscale multi-purpose conference center cum gymnasium approximately 75 percent were women. One could detect a few priests in Roman collars in the audience, including Father Brian Joyce, pastor of Christ the King parish in Pleasant Hill, a promoter of "clown" Masses, eco-spirituality, and the theology of Teilhard de Chardin. Bishop John Cummins made a brief appearance at the conference and left for another engagement before noon.

All the prayers and hymns were said and sung in English and Spanish, reflecting Bishop Cummins' emphasis on multiculturalism. Yet, despite this emphasis, I was struck by the division between the English-speaking and Hispanic liturgists. For most of the conference, Hispanics gathered apart in a separate conference room, even through the lunch hour.

The special speaker of the day, Father Baldovin, appeared in an open-collared shirt, blazer and slacks. Father Baldovin is professor of historical and liturgical theology at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- a Jesuit seminary not known for its orthodoxy. Father Baldovin is a consultant to the International Commission on English in the Liturgy. (The International Commission has been under scrutiny by the Vatican and the American bishops for producing deficient translations of liturgical documents.) Baldovin spent fifteen years teaching at the Jesuit school in Berkeley; he has served as a member of Oakland's liturgical commission.

Father Baldovin's talk during the morning focused on Dies Domini, Pope John Paul II's 1998 apostolic letter on the Lord's day. Though the pope in his letter wrote that "the Mass in fact truly makes present the sacrifice of the Cross" and insisted that "on Sundays and other holy days of obligation the faithful are bound to attend Mass," Father Baldovin did not mention the sacrificial nature of the Mass or the obligation to go to Mass. Instead, Baldovin emphasized that "Eucharist is more than a memory. Sunday is about community."

Father Baldovin said that he finds the pope's spirituality intensely "erotic." "The pope, you know, has a marvelous nuptial spirituality. One that is very erotic, very intense and erotic." Baldovin pulled this quote from the pope's letter on one's duty to the poor: "Saint John Chrysostom is no less demanding: 'Do you wish to honor the body of Christ? Do not ignore him when he is naked. Do not pay him homage in the temple clad in silk only then to neglect him outside where he suffers cold and nakedness. He who said: 'This is my body' is the same One who said: 'You saw me hungry and you gave me no food', and 'Whatever you did to the least of my brothers you did also to me....' What good is it if the Eucharistic table is overloaded with golden chalices, when he is dying of hunger? Start by satisfying his hunger, and then with what is left you may adorn the altar as well." This quote brought on some hand clapping among the attendees. Subsequent questions focused on how to get parishioners manning soup kitchens and homeless shelters on Sundays.

We finished up the morning with a group discussion on the question: "How would Sunday in our parish community look different if we were to take the Pope's message seriously? In particular, how does our community make the connections between Sunday Eucharist and outreach to the poor and needy?" Unlike the pope's letter, outreach to the needy was not placed in context with the worship of God. For instance, the Holy Father's last words on the Eucharist never made the light of day at the conference: "the Eucharist is the full realization of the worship which humanity owes to God, and it cannot be compared to any other religious experience. A particularly efficacious expression of this is the Sunday gathering of the entire community, obedient to the voice of the Risen Lord who calls the faithful together to give them the light of his word and the nourishment of his Body as the perennial sacramental wellspring of redemption. The grace flowing from this wellspring renews mankind, life and history."

During the afternoon session, Father Baldovin showed a video produced by Los Angeles archbishop Cardinal Roger Mahony, which was meant as a training component to the pastoral letter he published in 1997 titled, Gather Faithfully Together. Father Baldovin introduced the video, thus: "How can a group of individuals become an assembly? The collection of money? Saturday evening Masses -- different? Cardinal Mahony's steps: a worshipping people, a prepared people, an ecclesial people, being Church outside Church, giving thanks always."

The cardinal's video depicted a dramatization of an idealized multicultural Mass. In the video, the first and second readings alternated between English and Spanish. The altar cloth was prepared and placed on the altar during the preparation of the gifts. It appeared to this writer that the hosts used in the video were leavened. They were huge and looked like pita bread. Lay people stood behind the altar facing the assembly and broke the bread.

After the video showing, the attendees once again huddled in groups to answer these questions posed by Father Baldovin: "How is our parish already implementing Cardinal Mahony's suggestions? What can we do better? What can we do now?"

There was a multitude of resource books on liturgy offered at the conference which were openly defiant of Church law. A booklet titled, "Guide for Lay Preachers," published by Liturgy Training Publications, featured pictures of women in vestments. According to the pamphlet, lay ministers have become "an expected and welcomed part of the experience of Sunday Mass for the majority of Roman Catholics." They serve as greeters, lectors.. bread bakers." The pamphlet states that lay preaching began in the mid-1980s: "as more laypersons take on the roles of pastoral associate, parish director or administrator, it is less unusual to hear about or to participate in weekday or Sunday rituals at which that lay pastoral worker presides and preaches." The author then proceeds to argue for the legitimacy of lay preachers based on the historical record, though Canon Law and post-conciliar instructions have prohibited the preaching of lay people at Mass.

Another resource was a book titled Eucharist: Toward the Third Millenium. The book features eight essays by different authors. In his essay, "A Prophetic Eucharist in a Prophetic Church," author David Power, O.M.I., offers the view that "many liturgists and theologians voice the opinion that the policy of ordination needs to change. That seems self-evident, even if, oddly, it is not admitted, because perhaps the determining focus is on ideas and structures of power, not on communities of faith." Another essay in the book, titled "Ritual Studies and the Eucharist. Paying Attention to Performance," by Margaret Mary Kelleher, O.S.U., talks of "ritual bodies performing liturgy" and asserts that "dance is clearly a mode of ritual prayer." Agitating for women in ministry, she says: "There is a noticeable absence of female bodies preaching or leading assemblies in their eucharistic prayer at the table." Another book, Real Presence: The Work of Eucharist, quotes Andrew Greeley: "any 'erosion' of Catholic identity results not from a failure on the part of lay people to adhere to traditional doctrine, but from authoritarianism and ineffectiveness of the church's leadership."

Towards the end of the conference, I overheard the comments of one group of attendees. These people did not seem interested in Cardinal Mahony's liturgy; instead they were interested in instituting rosary prayer before the Mass; putting out signs requesting silence; maintaining traditional hymns which the people in the pews preferred.

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