ARTICLES
February 2002 ARTICLES
Contents © 2002
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
If She Wants Your Head on a Platter, She's Got It
Is Liturgical Dance an Expression of Vatican II?
By Soren Filipski
On Sunday, December 16, I read the announcement in my parish bulletin in Bakersfield that, on December 17 and 18, "Bishop Remi De Roo, the retired bishop of Victoria, British Columbia and one who participated in all the sessions of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, will be giving a two-day Advent Mini-Retreat at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church's Parish Hall.... This is a rare opportunity to hear a bishop who was in on the ground floor of the Church's ongoing renewal." The following night, I found myself sitting pen in hand among an audience of a few hundred waiting to hear Bishop De Roo.
Remi De Roo, who is one of only two living bishops in North America who attended the Second Vatican Council, visits Bakersfield once a year to see his sister, who lives here. He retired as bishop two years ago following disclosure of his financial mismanagement of his diocese in the 90s. The diocese lost seventeen million dollars due to faulty investments done without due diligence or proper consultation the Vatican.
The main theme of the bishop's address on the first night of the retreat was that since the Holy Spirit is the most difficult person of the Trinity to understand, it is therefore especially necessary to experience the Holy Spirit in our hearts, since our intellects are so insufficient in understanding Him. "The Holy Spirit is the least well-known of the three persons of the Trinity," said Bishop De Roo. "We have meditated, prayed and discussed God the Father pretty often ... and it is relatively easy to see how God is the origin of all things.... Also, because we know the story of Jesus, it is easy to see how there could be God the Son.... But it is difficult to see the Holy Spirit; it is the most intimate dimension of the mystery, it must be entered into with the heart.... Years ago when we were beginning to study theology, we studied Aristotle and Plato and so on. But we didn't get very far in really understanding God. Reason and the mind are just not enough.... So the Holy Spirit brings to us a wisdom which is of the heart." The bishop then turned to the Scriptures to point out many places where the role of Holy Spirit is seen as a manifestation of God's loving will to create.
Although Vatican II was not the explicit theme of the evening, De Roo often shared his memories of being present at the event. At one point he told a story about a corridor in the Vatican, where participants would meet to refresh themselves during breaks in the official proceedings. The corridor had three bars. The first one was called "Bar Jonah" after Pope John XXIII. The second bar, which always served a number of monks, was called "Bar Abbot." A third bar, which served groups of women, who were invited to the later sessions of the council, was called "Bar Nun." According to De Roo, it was in that corridor where many key decisions of Vatican II were actually made by cardinals and bishops discussing issues privately, among themselves.
The bishop expressed high hopes that Vatican II would lead to a healing of divisions within the Church, particularly with respect to the schism with the Orthodox. De Roo believed that Vatican II could help draw the Eastern Church back by allowing the Catholic Church to accommodate certain points of difference between the two faiths. When one person asked specifically if the bishop believed that the filioque dispute could be settled with the Eastern Church, he answered "Yes" with a jolting promptness. (The filioque dispute refers to the addition of the words "and the Son" to the clause, "who proceeds from the Father." The Orthodox argue that it is an unwarranted, even heretical, addition to the Creed.) According to the bishop, the Catholic Church could accommodate the omission of the filioque in the Eastern Creed, and indeed, the Holy Father had recently celebrated a mass without it. Said De Roo, "The filioque isn't wrong, but we don't need it."
On the second evening, when speaking on the subject of Mary, De Roo spoke more directly about Vatican II. "Since I retired two years ago," said Bishop De Roo, "I decided to devote myself to telling the story of Vatican II.... Vatican II can only live in the Church by being a part of Tradition, which means that the story of Vatican II needs to be told so that the tradition stays alive."
Here the bishop turned to the subject of Mary, and explained that, although Vatican II had little to say about Mary, the council was nonetheless instructive in the way that Christians should understand the development of Marian doctrine. "We had a huge struggle during the Vatican Council.... There was a big argument that there should be a document on Mary, but wiser minds prevailed." According to De Roo it was best to "put Mary in the context of the Church." Because she has been such a bone of controversy among Christian sects, for a council to issue a document about her, he said, would breed more division, whereas if we understand Mary as she is understood by the Church at large, the Church's teachings on Mary becomes clear even without a council to spell them all out. On the subject of the current debate over whether the Church should define Mary as co-redeemer with Christ, De Roo advised against it. "It would be an ecumenical bombshell," he said. "There is a way you can understand and explain 'co-redeemer' that makes sense and is true, but not really in English.... It's a loaded word."
De Roo thought that the best approach to Mary begins with the Scriptures. "I'm going to plead for a return to Scripture," he said. "We don't understand the meaning of the Blessed Virgin unless we go back to Scripture." He then went on to outline Mary's place in the Bible, after which he made an unusual suggestion about how we ought to pray to the Blessed Mother. The bishop said that the fifteen mysteries of the rosary "are not enough" to express all the mysteries surrounding the Virgin Mary and the Church. He therefore proposed a number of additional mysteries which a person might add to their devotions. Among these mysteries he recommended meditation on the prophetic words of Simeon and Anna, the domestic life of the Holy Family, Christ's public ministry, the appearances of Jesus to Mary Magdalene, the experiences of the early Church, the Church's split from the synagogues ("a wound in the side of the Church"), and Mary's old age. "All of these are mysteries," he said, "and can be a part of prayer."
Later in the evening, De Roo took some time to describe what he called the "conservatism of the Second Vatican Council." He told the crowd, "Vatican II was the most conservative council in Church history" because "the council went beyond the Reformation, beyond the schism with the Eastern Church" and "rediscovered old doctrines which had been somewhat forgotten." The bishop cited specifically the council's "recovery" of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which the Eastern bishops had vigorously promoted. By reaching back to the Church's ancient roots, the council "gave us a more Catholic vision" which is truly conservative "in the right sense of the word."
I asked Bishop De Roo afterward to explain Vatican II's conservatism at greater length, particularly since Vatican II is often supposed to be "the Council that changed the Church." He responded that many of the "new" practices that have cropped up in the Church since Vatican II are not really new, but are simply restorations of older practices, which had fallen into neglect and been allowed to atrophy. Thus many of the seemingly "new and different" practices of the modern Church are nothing more than restorations of past Catholic customs. Conversely, Bishop De Roo said that many liturgical practices which have sometimes been given the exclusive title of "tradition" on account of their perceived antiquity actually come from much more recent traditions than many people believe. To illustrate his point, the bishop observed that the practice of kneeling during Mass was not always performed in the Church and was, indeed, banned in the earliest centuries. "In the past, Christians were forbidden to kneel because kneeling is the posture of slaves.... But a Christian, who is alive in Christ, is free."
The bishop also saw the Church's departure from an all-Latin liturgy as part of the council's conservatism. He explained that the Mass had been said in various languages long before the Latin language became universal. The bishop maintained that since Jesus' own language was not Latin, but Aramaic, and it was in Aramaic that the first Mass was probably celebrated, the most ancient form of the Mass would be Aramaic, not Latin. According to De Roo, Vatican II did not supplant the Church's Latin traditions so much as it restored an even older tradition of translating the Mass into many languages. "People who say Latin is the only language for liturgy simply don't understand history," said De Roo.
The bishop found another expression of Vatican II's conservatism in the current flowering of liturgical dance and of many other of the so-called "touchy-feely" practices that have spread throughout the Church since the 60s. At various points throughout both of his presentations, Bishop De Roo voiced his support for the practice of liturgical dance. As an argument from sacred tradition, he stressed that, throughout history, many Catholic societies around the world have practiced liturgical dance. "You should see the way they dance in Africa. It's wonderful," he said. He also hastened to cite the Biblical example of David dancing before the Ark. "Not only that," he afterwards told me, "but when his wife thought that he had flung himself around too much and shown his private parts, he told her, 'You will bear no children by me.' He didn't apologize, he gave her a curse." The bishop also argued in favor of liturgical dance from the standpoint of human nature. De Roo maintained that a complete liturgy should involve the entire body of its participants because man's nature is bodily as well as spiritual. More jestingly, the bishop related an anecdote to the crowd about an anti-dance bishop who was chagrined to come across a liturgical dance at a parish in his diocese. As a lovely woman went parading past the altar, he leaned over to the pastor and said, "If she wants your head on a platter, she's got it." When I asked him specifically about the Vatican's current views about liturgical dance, he said, "there may be some guys in the curia who don't like liturgical dance for whatever reason. I don't know what the pope thinks about [it].... He's never written anything against it. I read the papal documents."
When one of the crowd asked if there would be a Vatican III, De Roo replied, "only the Holy Spirit knows that. Before we have a Vatican III we have to fully implement Vatican II." Then he added, "if there is another council, I hope it's Jerusalem III."
The bishop ended his second presentation by urging the importance of doctrinal orthodoxy as well as obedience to the Church's episcopacy. He said, "you cannot be out of communion with your bishop and be in communion with the Church."
Bishop De Roo was well received by those who were present. Susan Rizo, a member of an inter-parish committee, which had organized the bishop's appearance said, "I enjoyed how easily he spoke to us. He was very biblically based and it is important to understand our Biblical roots. We've learned a lot from his experience of Vatican II." Another attendee added, "his presentation was very much in the mainstream of Catholic thought and belief today."