ARTICLES
April 2004 ARTICLES
Contents © 2004
by Jim Holman.
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It's Awkward to Kneel in the Catacombs
Liturgical Posture in the L.A. Archdiocese
BY KIRK KRAMER
Why is the liturgical practice of the archdiocese of Los Angeles different than in the rest of the United States? Monsignor William Smith, academic dean of St. Joseph's Seminary in the archdiocese of New York, thought the explanation for not kneeling at the customary times during Mass might be seismic. "The danger of earthquakes," he opined. "They want to be able to run out of church if one strikes during Mass."
"They are out of step in Los Angeles," Monsignor Smith said. "The cardinal [Mahony] jumped all over Mother Angelica for her criticism of his pastoral Gather Faithfully Together, the 1997 letter on Sunday Mass]. That letter is full of goofy things. I can't prove it, but I think it was written by Gabe Huck [inclusive-language liturgist fired by Cardinal George of Chicago]. The same silly things, the same coat of paint, keep appearing in that archdiocese. If he [Cardinal Mahony] thinks this is a time when people are overwhelmed with excessive respect for the Blessed Sacrament, we're living on a different planet."
In an article in the October 24, 2003 issue of the Tidings, the archdiocesan newspaper, Cardinal Mahony expressed the hope that the new General Instruction on the Roman Missal will be "fruitfully implemented" by the First Sunday of Lent 2004, to "further our efforts at a liturgical renewal that is at once vibrant and reverent." Among the things now "fruitfully implemented" is a peculiarly Los Angeles version of the practice of kneeling. Section 43 of the new General Instruction stipulates that the congregation should kneel after the Agnus Dei, at the moment when the priest holds up the Host and says, "This is the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world." But in his October 24 letter in Tidings, Cardinal Mahony wrote, "in this archdiocese, the faithful stand from the Our Father until all have received Communion."
Some Catholic leaders in the United States are puzzled at why in the matter of kneeling the archdiocese of Los Angeles is "out of step" with the rest of the country. Helen Hull Hitchcock is a member of the executive committee of Adoremus, the Society for the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy, founded by Father Joseph Fessio in 1995 with the encouragement of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. She is editor of Adoremus Bulletin, the organization's monthly journal. When asked why the practice in Los Angeles is different than in other American dioceses, Hitchcock said, "this question was brought up at a meeting of the bishops' conference when Cardinal Mahony said people should stand through the whole Eucharistic prayer. Another cardinal present that day asked how one diocese doing something different from the others could be justified. The idea of some dioceses standing and some kneeling was not accepted by the bishops."
Hitchcock is blunt in criticizing the harm inflicted on the Church's unity by liturgical aberrations. "In several dioceses," she said, "not the majority, but several, the liturgical norms are interpreted in ways which are not in accordance with the rules. There's nothing which says the people should stand in the communion rite or pray the Our Father with their hands raised, the so-called orans posture. The orans posture has never been the custom in the Latin Church for the laity. In discussing the ICEL [International Commission on English in the Liturgy] revisions, the bishops specifically rejected the orans posture. But in many places, including southern California, people are told they are being disobedient to the Holy Father if they do not stand at communion time, or assume the orans position.
"These comments," Hitchcock said, "are not made in good faith.
"It's hard for people to understand why a bishop wouldn't be happy when by kneeling his people are showing the deepest kind of reverence anyone can show," Hitchcock continued. "No Catholic should be put in this position. The balkanization of the liturgy is very unhealthy."
Catholics shell-shocked by the ongoing liturgical chaos in Los Angeles and elsewhere have been heartened in recent years by the strong action taken by Francis Cardinal Arinze, prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Divine Worship, and his predecessor, Jorge Arturo Cardinal Medina Estevez, to restore order to the sacred liturgy. "Arinze has stood down whole hierarchies," said Monsignor Smith of the cardinal's defense of the liturgy against the International Commission on English in the Liturgy and some of its friends in the hierarchy. "It's very difficult for a couple of people in Rome to say, 'this is how you speak your own language,' but they had no choice. ICEL had extreme problems with Rome. I think English is the only language where translations have gone back to the pope."
Monsignor Smith gave an example of the International Commission's work. "The first preface for Lent in the missal refers in the Latin to in ieiunio tempore -- roughly, in this time of fasting. ICEL translated it as 'this joyful season.' That's not translating -- that's editorializing. I often say or concelebrate Mass in Spanish. The word 'fasting' occurs almost every day in Lent in the post-communion prayers in the Spanish missal. In the English missal, ICEL simply left it out. They think the word 'fasting' is negative."
Monsignor Smith said other examples of editorializing include the "original version of the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer," where the International Commission translated calice, chalice, as 'wine.' Rome rejected that. You don't have to be Cicero to know that sacra means 'holy'. Every time the word sacra comes up, ICEL ducks."
"The paramount object of Cardinals Medina and Arinze," according to Hitchcock, "has been the necessity of resacralizing the Mass. The liturgical changes forced on Catholics by a lot of liturgists have led to the horizontalizing of the Mass so that it's nothing but a celebration of community."
One Catholic activist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, expressed skepticism at one buzzword promoted in some liturgical circles in recent decades. "You often hear Catholics today -- even priests, who ought to know better -- say the purpose of the Mass is to celebrate community. Well, it's not," he said, "that's false -- in fact, to borrow a phrase from Ludwig Ott, it's a monstrosity of heretical mania. The Second Vatican Council, in the Constitution on the Liturgy, tells us what the purpose of the Mass is. It says its purpose is the adoration of the divine Majesty -- to worship God. In no sense whatever is the purpose of the Mass to celebrate community. A small-town basketball game, the lunch served to a grieving family by the ladies of a parish after a funeral, a neighborhood street festival -- all those things are celebrations of community, if you want to use that silly phrase. The Mass isn't, and it's hard for me to believe that a grown man can talk like that and keep a straight face."
This same layman sent me an excerpt from a talk given to the bishops of Chile by Cardinal Ratzinger in 1988 after the excommunication of French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre for his consecration of four bishops without the permission of the pope. "The liturgy is not a festivity; it is not a meeting for the purpose of having a good time," said Cardinal Ratzinger. "The liturgy is what makes the Thrice-Holy God present amongst us; it is the burning bush; it is the Alliance of God with man in Jesus Christ, Who has died and risen again. The grandeur of the liturgy does not rest upon the fact that it offers an interesting entertainment, but in rendering tangible the Other, Whom we are not capable of summoning. The essential in the liturgy is the Mystery, which is realized in the common ritual of the Church; all the rest diminishes it. Men experiment with it in lively fashion, and find themselves deceived, when the Mystery is transformed into distraction, when the chief actor in the liturgy is not the Living God but the priest or the liturgical director."
Monsignor Smith shares Cardinal Ratzinger's dismay at the activities of liturgical directors. "The word 'divine' has suffered in divine worship," Monsignor Smith said. "Too many liturgists practice light bulb theology. They are supposed to be experts, but I'm not impressed with their expertise. Worship is treated so trivially that people conclude this isn't that important. Which has had its part in the decline of Catholic practice."
Attempts to reduce kneeling at Mass have been a major preoccupation of the liturgical establishment. As Helen Hitchcock has written, modernist liturgists think of kneeling "as a penitential and private posture and a medieval innovation, an outgrowth of the feudal practice of kneeling in obeisance before the overlord or prince, and was unknown in Catholic worship before feudal times. The early church, according to this view, did not kneel."
When asked to respond to this position, Monsignor Smith answered, "It was awkward to kneel in the catacombs -- it led to arthritis.
"Look, we have surveys telling us there's flabbiness about belief in the Eucharist. The left end of the liturgical establishment is obsessed with choreography and posture. These people are obsessed with insubstantial things when substantial things need to be addressed. They have contributed to destabilizing the worship of God.
"And we've never had feudalism in the United States."
Cardinal Medina has waded into the middle of the controversies over kneeling with some official responses he gave in 2000 to questions posed by an American bishop about the revised General Instruction. Cardinal Medina was asked, in his capacity as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, two questions, which bear on the new rules which the archdiocese is attempting to impose on Los Angeles Catholics.
The first question: does the Holy See intend "to prohibit the faithful from kneeling during any part of the Mass except during the Consecration, that is, to prohibit the faithful from kneeling after the Agnus Dei and following the reception of Holy Communion?" The second: does the Holy See intend "that the people may no longer genuflect or bow as a sign of reverence to the Blessed Sacrament immediately before they receive Holy Communion?"
To both of these questions, Cardinal Medina answered no.
HE WHO BELIEVES, KNEELS
Cardinal Ratzinger himself, in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, has addressed the theology of kneeling. Here are a few passages from the chapter, "The Body and the Liturgy."
"Kneeling does not come from any culture -- it comes from the Bible and its knowledge of God. The central importance of kneeling in the Bible can be seen in a very concrete way. The word proskynein [to kneel before] alone occurs fifty-nine times in the New Testament, twenty-four of which are in the Apocalypse, the book of the heavenly Liturgy, which is presented to the Church as the standard for her own Liturgy....
After considering several Biblical passages, Cardinal Ratzinger continues: "I have lingered over these texts, because they bring to light something important. In the two passages that we looked at most closely, the spiritual and bodily meanings of proskynein are really inseparable. The bodily gesture itself is the bearer of the spiritual meaning, which is precisely that of worship. Without the worship, the bodily gesture would be meaningless, while the spiritual act must of its very nature, because of the psychosomatic unity of man, express itself in the bodily gesture.
"The two aspects are united in the one word, because in a very profound way they belong together. When kneeling becomes merely external, a merely physical act, it becomes meaningless. On the other hand, when someone tries to take worship back into the purely spiritual realm and refuses to give it embodied form, the act of worship evaporates, for what is purely spiritual is inappropriate to the nature of man. Worship is one of those fundamental acts that affect the whole man. That is why bending the knee before the presence of the living God is something we cannot abandon....
"There is a story that comes from the sayings of the Desert Fathers, according to which the devil was compelled by God to show himself to a certain monk. The devil looked black and ugly, with frighteningly thin limbs, but most strikingly, he had no knees. The inability to kneel is seen as the very essence of the diabolical.
"...The expression used by Saint Luke to describe the kneeling of Christians (theis ta gonata) is unknown in classical Greek. We are dealing here with a specifically Christian word. With that remark, our reflections turn full circle to where they began. It may well be that kneeling is alien to modern culture -- insofar as it is a culture, for this culture has turned away from the faith and no longer knows the one before whom kneeling is the right, indeed the intrinsically necessary gesture. The man who learns to believe learns also to kneel, and a faith or a liturgy no longer familiar with kneeling would be sick at the core. Where it has been lost, kneeling must be rediscovered, so that, in our prayer, we remain in fellowship with the apostles and martyrs, in fellowship with the whole cosmos, indeed in union with Jesus Christ Himself."