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Contents © 2000
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

LETTERS
OCTOBER 2000

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WHY DO WE COME TO CHURCH?

Re: comment to tabernacle placement surveyors (Faith, September 2000). "Jesus would turn over in His grave if he knew about this [questioning the placement of the tabernacle in churches]." It is a telling comment about the state of the teaching and preaching in the church today, that one cannot be certain whether the Healdsburg parishioner who offered those statements was revealing her theology or merely taking some questionably advised literary freedoms in making her otherwise good point that it would be the Devil rather than Our Lord who would have us mucking around in contention -- perhaps especially when that contention involves fundamentals to the faith. Perhaps the most significant question is: Why do we come to church?

Jeffrey Foxmore
Town withheld by request


WHOSE CONCERN?

The ad in the June edition of the handbook, The Renovation Manipulation, makes me wonder how it is allowed to have above the altar at the Christ Child Chapel a risen instead of a crucified Christ statue and then the tabernacle, a wooden box with a plain symbol of the cross. The tabernacle is the Blessed Mother with God within and should be decorated with gold. I recently attended a Memorial Mass at Immaculate Conception in San Francisco and there at the altar was the Blessed Mother ascending and the tabernacle was centered at the altar on the left of the main altar.

Who's responsible? I should think it would be the concern starting with the bishop.

Sincerely,

Margaret Aileson
Los Gatos


MY PERFECT MASS

If you read faithful Catholic publications like the Faith, you can't help but notice the big ads for the New Oxford Review. I normally don't pay attention to them, but in the September 2000 Faith, something made me take notice. The ad described the situation at a truly awful parish. Priests dancing in the aisles, no kneelers, nothing sacred about the sanctuary: The ad listed all of the things we hear rumors about. I've never seen a parish that was this bad, though some have come close (the North Coast parish that acts out the Gospel comes to mind). But even if things aren't this bad at any one place, they are this bad in certain respects at any parish you can think of. Some places do have truly awful music. Some places do treat the Eucharistic sacrifice with less than total respect. In most places, people dress like they were going to a barbecue and not to meet our Lord in the Eucharist. After several years, you can't help but notice these things. So it got me thinking: What would a perfect Mass be in the perfect parish in my perfect Catholic Church?

When I arrive, I'm not greeted by a "Greeter," since such a person might be a distraction to those trying to prepare their souls for Mass. As I enter the church and bless myself with holy water from a holy water font (and not a hot tub/baptismal font), I notice the priest (or some other priest) is hearing confessions, lest anyone receive communion in something less than a state of grace. Yes, people can go to reconciliation on Saturday afternoons. But my experience in countless churches across America is that few do. Where I see priests hearing confessions before Mass, however, there is usually a good line.

As I kneel to pray, I notice that men do not come dressed in shorts. Women are not wearing revealing or otherwise immodest clothing. Maybe God doesn't care how we come; maybe He just wants us to come. And not everyone can afford fancy clothes to wear to church. But everyone can afford to dress respectfully, which is the point. After all, who among us would dress shabbily if we had a meeting with the Pope? We would put on our best clothes, wouldn't we? But yet when we go to meet his boss at Mass, we feel we can dress like we were going to the beach. It's not something I understand.

As I pray, I'm not distracted by the talking of people old enough to know better. Friends aren't catching up or trading recipes; they're sitting in courteous silence or talking with God and listening to Him in the stillness of their hearts. No choir or "band" is warming up; all is still and reverent. There is nothing to distract from the purpose of the moment.

The priest enters not in some big, ostentatious procession, but simply. The altar boy rings the bell next to the sanctuary door, and in comes the priest. Not the celebrant. Not the presider. The priest. He is accompanied by altar boys, not girls. This is not a sexist comment. Were there actually a purpose to people serving in the post-Vatican II Mass, I might be of a different mind. But there is nothing a server does now that a priest cannot do by himself. Rather, I've always thought that the point of servers in the novus ordo was to foster vocations to the priesthood. Since young women can never become priests, what is the point of their serving in this capacity?

For the penitential rite, the priest does both forms in keeping with the tradition of the Church. And when we say, "...that I have sinned through my own fault," he leads by example by striking his breast, as the rubrics in every missallette say to do. He chants the original Greek Kyrie with a melody that is as beautiful as it is ancient. If the Gloria is sung, it is done by a practiced choir that can switch effortlessly from polyphony to chant to hymns. One week we might hear a Gloria by Palestrina, the next week one by Joan Cererols or de Rore or Mozart or Beethoven. Or maybe simple plain chant. Anything but guitars that sound tinny through even the best PA systems, and anything but awful choirs made up of earnest people who simply can't sing and who break our ears trying. Yes, as Chesterton said, if something's worth doing, it is worth doing badly. But not at Mass, please. It is distracting and doesn't tend our minds toward prayer and worship, which is, after all, the whole point of being at Mass.

After the Gospel, we hear a homily that has some meat to it. Studies show most Catholics today are poorly catechized. For the overwhelming majority, their last contact with catechesis was when they were confirmed. And given the state of catechesis over the last 35 years, what they received wasn't really adequate to being well-formed in their faith. Ask them where to find the biblical basis for confession, they can't say. Ask them if the Eucharist is real or a symbol, as many will choose the latter as the former. Ask them what the cardinal virtues are or to list the precepts of the Church, they can't tell you. It's no wonder that large portions of many Evangelical congregations consist of lapsed Catholics hungry for the "Word." So wouldn't it be nice to have homilies actually used as catechetical tools? For instance, over the course of two Sundays in August, we heard passages from the John 6. I would be willing to bet that many priests and deacons let pass this great opportunity to explain transubstantiation and the Eucharist and how it really is the Real Presence. Instead, we heard a lot about loving our neighbor and how God is peace and love. These things are all true and all very important, granted. But can't we ever simply have some good solid doctrine preached from the pulpit?

During the Nicene Creed, the priest once again leads the way by bowing during the words "by the power of the Holy Spirit, he was born of the Virgin Mary and became man" as per the rubrics in every missallette. At the offertory, the collection isn't done with lots of noise from jingling change. The collection basket is placed unobtrusively at the side of the altar, and if gifts are brought up by congregants, the reception of them isn't made into a production. Better yet, the gifts are off to the side of the altar where the priests and servers have easy access to them.

In keeping with Sacrosanctum Concilium, Vatican II's document on the liturgy, the Mass from this point until the end is done in Latin, the faithful following along with printed translations. Latin is the timeless language of the Church, and the beauty of the prayers in Latin is unmatched. Also, it is harder for a priest to improvise when they're in this tongue. But most importantly, Latin allows us to assist at the Mass using the same language that so many great saints did. When we pray in Latin during the liturgy, we pray with the same words that St. Phillip Neri, Bl. Miguel Pro, St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Andrew Kim, and countless other saints prayed in. Latin connects us to the timeless tradition of our faith. I'm not speaking of the Tridentine rite, as beautiful as that rite is.

Rather, I'm simply expressing a desire that the Mass reflect what the Council Fathers had in mind and which was never fully fulfilled. Maybe the priest chooses Eucharistic Prayer No. 2, but he's just as likely to choose Prayer Nos. 1 or 3 or 4. But this Sunday he opts against the drive-through mentality that seems to compel many priests to choose No. 2 since it is shortest. Instead, the priest chooses No. 1, since it continues the liturgical tradition of some 1,500 years and includes the recitation of the various early saints, including St. Joseph, whose intercession, as a family man, I greatly prize.

The consecration of the bread and wine is done reverently and bespeaks the awesomeness of the eucharistic sacrifice. When it comes time for the sign of peace, it's skipped over. The sign of peace is fine, but coming as it does, when we are preparing to receive the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, it is a distraction and thus inappropriate. Why not do the sign of peace at the beginning of Mass?

As the priest says the prayer, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you...," he is not joined by extraordinary eucharistic ministers (EEMs). As their names imply, EEMs are to be used in extraordinary circumstances, such as when there is an extraordinary number of the faithful receiving communion. They were never meant to speed Mass up by an extra five to ten minutes. "But if only one or two priests distributed, Mass would take an extra 15 minutes. Or more!" Yeah, and the point is? Most of us don't go to daily Mass. Sunday is the only time most of us spend any substantial time with God, so what's a few more minutes in the grand scheme of things?

At my perfect Mass, a priest waits in the sacristy or in the rectory biding his time until it comes time to help distribute communion, as some parishes still do. And if there is only one priest, unless it's a church that seats 1,000, then only one priest distributes. It wouldn't take that much longer. I've seen one priest distribute to several hundred and do so in a timely fashion. It isn't that hard.

When people go to receive, they do so reverently. Before receiving, they genuflect or even kneel while receiving. They don't receive in the hand, which Pope Paul VI allowed but never wanted. Hands get dirty. People do things before Mass -- garden, take out the trash, paint, play in the dirt, pick their noses, etc. -- that make their hands an unfitting throne for our Lord in the Eucharist. So people here don't receive in the hand. And when they cross themselves after receiving, it is a true sign of the cross and not the swatting away of butterflies that often happens, especially among youth.

When people return to their pews, they pray silently. Indeed, there is a period of silence in the church where neither the choir nor anyone else save a baby or child makes a sound. Silence is a crucial element to deep prayer, and we have precious little of it in parishes throughout the country. We don't engage in some mass exodus once we receive Communion.

When the Mass is over, we all wait for the priest to leave the Church first. And we save our talking until we get outside so those persons and families who wish to stay after and pray a while may do so in peace.

This all may sound pharisaical, but I would point out that the Church teaches we are to approach God in a reverent manner, especially at Mass. And what I see is too much irreverence. Where is the prayerfulness? Where is the sense of the sacred, the sense of lifting our souls up to God? It is often hard to find, and until we find more of it, I'm afraid that many of the problems afflicting our Church -- dissent, lack of vocations, Catholic falling away from their faith -- will continue. The Mass is the center of our faith, yet too often we treat it as tangential to our faith.

William Ross
San Francisco

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