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Ever Ambiguous

THE CARDINAL'S LITURGY PASTORAL -- RENEWAL OR REVOLUTION?

By Don Gueranger

"I believe we are at a crucial place in the liturgical renewal" -- so states the second draft of Roger Cardinal Mahony's pastoral letter on the liturgy. As yet unpublished (a copy was leaked to the Mission by an archdiocesan source), and still open to review and revision, the document, nevertheless, represents a striking departure from the historical liturgical practice in every liturgical tradition of the Catholic Church, East and West.

Since it is yet unofficially signed by the cardinal and, perhaps, not even written by him, the document will, henceforth, be referred to only as "the draft."

The draft claims that the renewal of the liturgy it lays out is an extension of the liturgical renewal of Vatican II. "Liturgical renewal," it states, "has taken us many years, and many mistakes.... Only here and there have we seen the sustained effort from well-prepared leaders toward a Sunday eucharist that is for the people of that parish the nourishment they need, the deeds they cherish." In order to "renew" Sunday liturgies in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the draft calls for and details the renewal in three areas: the liturgical assembly, the priest-celebrant or "presider", and the understanding and use of symbol.

Referencing Vatican II's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the draft calls for the full and active participation of the "assembly" at Sunday liturgy. Full participation, according to the draft, is the full engagement of the entire assembly in the liturgy--"our duty isn't just to be there, our duty is to be fully there." It is the realization that each in the assembly has that he "must... be prepared to be a good member of the assembly." This preparation begins even before the liturgy in each member's individual preparation, whether it be fasting until after Mass, in reading the Scriptures before Mass, or in preserving Sunday morning as a time of quiet reflection.

Active participation, warns the draft, is not "the opposite of contemplative." It calls us "to an awareness of others" both in the immediate assembly of the baptized and in the larger world. "If we want to know about good living, about justice, about service, about the great and small decisions of daily life, then draw deeply from the liturgy."

This awareness of others, however, is not an awareness of what divides: the Sunday assembly brings us into "the one room in our lives today when we will not be sorted out by the level of our education, or by intelligence, politics, sexual orientation [emphasis added], wealth or lack of it, or any other human condition." The inclusion of sexual orientation as just any other human condition is arresting.

This emphasis on inclusiveness leads the draft to propose a new kind of liturgical inculturation. Gone will be the ethnic Masses, the wave of the future, it would seem, for the L.A. Archdiocese is the multicultural Mass: "[L]et the still largely European liturgy take on the pace and the sounds and the shape that other cultures bring; strive in our parishes to witness that in this church there is finally no longer this people or that people but one single assembly in Christ Jesus." "All of us can, as a first step, sing acclamations and litanies in other languages."

The draft, as well, details what it calls "the wrong sort of inculturation." These "practices and attitudes from American society that have no place in the liturgy" are, says the draft, "the hurried pace, the tyranny of the clock, the inattention to the arts, the casual tone of the presider."

Inculturation, however, is but one practical step in the renewal of the assembly. Other steps are detailed in the draft's description of an imaginary Sunday Mass at Our Saviour's Parish in the year 2000. Renovations of church buildings, removing the sanctuary, and placing altars more or less in the center of the church, it seems, will be part of this renewal: "At Our Savior's, the renovation put people on three sides of the area where the altar and the ambo are, so members of the assembly are nearly always seeing other members of the assembly. Only in the 'back,' near the main entrance, are people fifty or more feet from the altar, and so unable to see anything except the backs of heads (to that extent, the renovation didn't go far enough)."

The altar is so placed that members of Our Savior's assembly might stand around it during the Eucharistic prayer. Says the draft: "When the song and the prayer over the gifts have concluded, all who wish leave their chairs to come forward and stand nearer to the table. Some remain behind, but it is clear from these people standing around the table that all in this room are one, one people standing in God's presence and now ready to do their most essential and hardest work.... giving of praise and thanks."

Other changes, such a smaller repertory of psalms so that the assembly can learn to sing the liturgy by heart, and not through the medium of a missalette, and the training of lectors who read "as if the church were full of people hungry for the word of God" are proposed to engage everyone directly in the action of the assembly. In fact, "for two years now there have been no booklets for the assembly to follow the reading... free of books, [the assembly] gives all its attention to the reader."

The draft insists on the use of inclusive language, so that none, perhaps, will feel left out. "[W]hen we are dealing with texts other than those officially approved (for example: the homily itself, annoucements, invitations), every effort must be made to use inclusive language. Further, let us be at least as rich and broad as scripture when in homily or song we employ images for God. God is not male. But our exclusive use of male imagery risks a kind of idolatry."

Essential to the renewal of the assembly is the priest-celebrant--whom the draft almost always calls "the presider". According to the draft, the presider must engage the assembly as an integral part of the liturgy. He must not be a performer, and so turn the assembly into an audience. No, he must remember that his role is a limited one--it is the assembly's, not his, liturgy. Carefully preparing every gesture, every text of the liturgy in accordance with how this assembly experiences liturgy, he must be fully engaged in the ritual. With blinding clarity the draft states that "presiders should seek the experience of liturgy celebrated as the life-sustaining work of the assembly."

It is important, too, says the draft, that the presider have a respect for symbol: "to preside, a person must know that the literal is not the only way to be." Calling for a rediscovery of symbol, the draft says, "respect for the power of symbol cannot come easily in these times. Even in the church, we have a fear of symbol. We want the facts, the dimensions. We want the literal truth, but the literal can never be the way and the truth and the life. The symbol by which we life [sic] is large, ever ambiguous, ever engaging us anew."

A return to symbol requires a renewal of liturgical symbols. Thus, the bread used in the Mass is to be baked by members of the assembly; it is not to be flat wafers, but bread "that is bread to all the senses." Whether such bread is leavened or unleavened, or whether it will be baked without the addition of invalidating ingredients, is never mentioned. Reform of symbol, says the draft, would also require that no hosts consecrated at a previous Mass be distributed in communion at Sunday liturgy, "except when some rare lack of planning has led to too little consecrated bread from the present liturgy." The use of previously consecrated hosts, says the draft, "is nowhere allowed in the rubrics. Nor would it be allowed by a right understanding of the eucharistic prayer and the assembly."

"The cup of wine and the flagon full of wine for the whole assembly" are also important symbols for Our Savior's liturgy, where Communion under both kinds is the norm. Symbols of the unity of the assembly, such as standing around the altar and standing from the Our Father to Communion, are also important. (Nowhere is kneeling forbidden; it is never mentioned).

While some of the aims of the proposed liturgical renewal are appealing--the subordination of the priest's personality to the liturgy, the engaged attention of the assembly--others mentioned above will be disturbing to orthodox Catholics. More disturbing still is the draft's ambiguity on several points of doctrine relating to the liturgy. Granted, the draft is a liturgical document, and not a treatise on the nature of the Mass, still one would wish to see clearer statements of Catholic doctrine therein. Instead, one finds a troubling vagueness.

For instance, the essential character of the "presider" is obscure; he is said to have "a certain role" in the liturgy, but what is that role? That he stands in persona Christi and confects the Eucharist is nowhere stated. Rather, as the repeated use of the term "presider" indicates, the priest is more an orchestrator of the liturgical action of the assembly. Admittedly, the term "presider" is not first used here, but is found in post-conciliar liturgical documents emanating from the Vatican; nevertheless, when the draft does address the question of the role of the presider, it gives an incomplete answer, at best. Says the draft: "Many of us remember living with an understanding that the liturgy was simply the work of a priest. Now we have begun to grasp in what way the assembled church, the body of Christ, celebrates the liturgy. What is the ministry of the ordained priest at Sunday Mass?... [O]n Sunday, the one who presides, the ordained priest, comes not only as the other ministers do, from the assembly, but comes as the one who 'orders' this assembly, who relates this assembly to the bishop and to the larger church." [emphasis added].

The only reference to the priest consecrating comes in a passage which tells us what the assembly now understands about the Eucharistic Prayer. "But for years," says the draft, "no one in this parish could have told you anything about the eucharistic prayer except that 'the priest does the consecration.' Now they can tell you a lot. They can talk about how it feels to stand around this table and sing God's praise together, about how they begin to see how much their lives need to be filled with thanksgiving, about how their presence to one another at this table is filled with remembering, about solidarity, about sacrifice, and above all about the dawning of a powerful sense for the presence of Christ in the simple gifts of bread and wine and in the mystery that is this church."

The draft is, as well, deficient in its treatment of the nature and purpose of the Mass. While stating that in the liturgy the assembly "sings God's praise," it does not speak of sacrifice, nor of the forgiveness of sins. "Liturgy," says the document, "is not diversion, not entertainment, not measured by any standard suitable to such. It is instead a complex of word and silence, chant and gesture, procession and attention, that we are to know, wonderfully, by heart."

The draft treats of the liturgy's purpose only in terms of human community. "What an image this time of cathedral building can be for the building that is far more important," exclaims its author, "the building up of the body of Christ that is you, me, all of us baptized into Christ's death and living now Christ's life. It is the liturgy that builds up that life." And while the liturgy presents us "the very shape of a Catholic life," that life, it appears, rests only in "how to teach well, how to do justice, how to love the world as God loves the world." "Our rites are indeed filled with passion, but it is the church's passion, the deep caring for the world, for creation, for God's love to be manifest. Ritual is, in a good play of words, about the passion of Christ."

Normally, when the document treats reverence it is in relation to being "in this world with reverence, with a sense for human community, with a love of God that is incarnate in how one sees the world, how one speaks to others, how one moves with a sense of the holiness of matter and of time." The draft does speak of reverence for the Body of Christ, when it says "at Sunday eucharist, there is no reverence for the body of Christ when we have not sought bread that is bread to all the senses..." or enacted certian other liturgical reforms, but the document is so vague in its references to the Body of Christ, it is hard to know what is meant here.

For, and this is the draft's most disturbing ambiguity, the phrase "body of Christ" refers mostly to the assembly, and only twice, clearly, to the Eucharistic species. Often the consecrated species are called "consecrated wine and consecrated bread," but just as often, they are called simply "wine" and "bread." Christ is said to be present "in the simple gifts of bread and wine and in the mystery that is this church"--but how is He present? Is He equally present in both? Perhaps "in the simple acts of presenting, blessing and breaking bread and sharing the cup, Christ is present in memory and in hope," as Archbishop Mahony stated in his 1988 pastoral letter, The Day on Which We Gather. But who can say?

More confusing, while the Eucharist is called the body and blood of Christ, so is the assembly: "To be with them," says the draft, "is to know deeply that we are the body and blood of Christ." Saying what communion time means, the draft states that "the key was unfolding for all" at Our Savior's "for all the wonder and thanksgiving at the body of Christ--the consecrated bread and wine, and the church. Both have the same name. What does it mean for the body of Christ to receive the body of Christ?"

What does it mean? The draft never says. But since the rule of prayer is the rule of faith (lex orandi, lex credendi), one may find an answer to this query by examing the proposed ritual changes. The communion rite is interesting in this regard. Says the draft: "The ministers of this Sunday eucharist... are in no hurry and neither is the assembly. Yet there seems to be enough of them that the procession can keep moving while each individual is treated with that reverence again: Each person is looked in the eye, each hears without any rushing the words 'The body of Christ,' 'The blood of Christ.'" To what does the "body" and "blood" refer? The sacrament or the people receiving?

Perhaps His Eminence will clarify that in the final draft.

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