Posted on 03/03/2010 6:43:03 AM PST by marshmallow
To downplay the council's impact, dividing Catholics into 'hermeneutic' camps has become a favorite tactic
Editor’s note: This is the second part of a series exploring the long-standing "liturgy wars" and how they shape today’s understanding of the Second Vatican Council.
Not too long ago, when bishops spoke about the Second Vatican Council, the language you’d hear would often include words like people of God, dialogue and collegiality.
That was then. Now, if a bishop speaks of that council, which involved the world’s bishops in meetings spanning the years 1962 through 1965, another word -- hermeneutics -- will likely dominate the discussion. It’s an unwieldy term that traditionally was used in college-level classrooms and referred to principles of interpretation, particularly in matters of scripture.
When it comes to Vatican II, however, the term has come to mean how one interprets that event and it is usually modified by phrases that have become a sound-bite way of separating Catholics into two general camps:
* Hermeneutic of discontinuity (sometimes referred to as the hermeneutic of rupture) is used to refer to those who think the council represented a distinct change from the past, and is used often to disparage those who speak of a pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II church. * Hermeneutic of continuity or renewal refers to those who would hold that very little actually changed at Vatican II, that it was a “reaffirmation” of all that went before only cast in new language so as to be understandable to the modern era.
Dividing people into hermeneutic camps has become a favorite tactic of conservative commentators and some bishops, especially those who most want to downplay the idea that the council altered the teaching or attitude of the church in any significant way. Others, however, see the categories as artificial and overstated, attempts at marginalizing as extreme anyone convinced that Vatican II ushered in important changes.
Talking points
Whatever one’s point of view, “hermeneutics” has taken on a life equivalent to campaign talking points. The categories provide a coherent, easy-to-understand critique of what has become a standard perception of the council. Hermeneutics is echoing around the Catholic landscape and is being used to package ideas ranging from the investigation of religious orders to alterations in the liturgy.
Bishop Robert C. MorlinoBishop Robert C. MorlinoThe term played large at a meeting in September of last year at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass., a gathering said to have been influential in the decision of Cardinal Franc Rodé to initiate an investigation of women religious in the United States. At that gathering, Bishop Robert C. Morlino of Madison, Wis., spoke of the “discontinuity hermeneutic” and “the language of rupture.”
He was responding to a talk by Rodé about religious formation and education.
“The language that many people have learned -- it is clear from today that most of you resisted learning it, and I resisted learning it -- but the language that many people have learned is the language of the discontinuity hermeneutic, the language of the rupture, between pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II,” Morlino said. “Many if not most of our people have learned the language of the discontinuity hermeneutic. And in order to learn the language that Pope John Paul the Great and Pope Benedict are trying to teach us they have to unlearn the language that they learned.”
In an October pastoral letter on the “future of the church in the diocese of Sioux City, Iowa,” Bishop R. Walker Nickless picked from the text of Pope John XXIII’s speech opening the council, a few lines that might be seen as undergirding the hermeneutics-of-continuity point of view. “In opening the council, Blessed John stated that the ‘greatest concern of the ecumenical council’ was twofold: ‘that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be [both] guarded and taught more efficaciously,’ ” wrote Nickless. “Later in the speech he elaborated on this: ‘The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another.’ ” For Nickless, that means that the teachings of the church “must be loved and guarded, yet brought forth and taught in a way understandable to the modern world.”
A few paragraphs later, he cites a 2005 speech by Pope Benedict XVI to the Roman curia in which the pope states that a large part of the difficulty in implementing the council stems from the fact “that two contrary hermeneutics came face-to-face and quarreled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit.”
The “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” said Benedict, “has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology.” The alternative is hermeneutic of reform, which he also describes as the hermeneutic “of renewal in the continuity of the one subject -- church -- which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying people of God.”
Shortly after that passage, Nickless declares: “The so-called ‘spirit’ of the council has no authoritative interpretation. It is a ghost or demon that must be exorcised if we are to proceed with the Lord’s work.”
A third hermeneutic
The matter of language is not insignificant, as Jesuit historian Fr. John W. O’Malley draws out at some length in his essay for the 2007 book Vatican II: Did Anything Happen? O’Malley argues, first, that it would hardly be exceptional for a council to be “discontinuous” or distinctive from past councils. Perhaps the only thing common to councils prior to Vatican II, he says, is that they were all assemblies of bishops “that have made authoritative decisions binding on the whole church. Other than that they differ considerably among themselves” and were “to a greater or lesser degree discontinuous with one another.”
What made Vatican II especially different from all councils that preceded it, writes O’Malley, is the language used, a language so distinctive that it requires “a new hermeneutic ... that takes serious account of the discontinuity, thus putting the council’s continuity in perspective.” For lack of a sound-bite name, one might just call O’Malley’s version the third hermeneutic.
Further, he says, the “characteristic style of discourse” of prior councils comprised “two basic elements” -- the canon, or law, formulated to impose a punishment, and the vocabulary appropriate to that genre. It uses “power words,” or “words of threat and intimidation, words of surveillance and punishment, words of a superior speaking to inferiors or … to an enemy.” The language is used to define and limit, to make clear who is included and who excluded.
In contrast, Vatican II used “empowerment words,” words of reciprocity and persuasion as different from commands and anathemas. “There is scarcely a page in the council documents on which ‘dialogue’ or its equivalent does not occur. ‘Dialogue’ manifests a radical shift from the prophetic I-say-unto-you style that earlier prevailed and indicates something other than unilateral decision-making.” Such language, writes O’Malley, did not make it into the documents “without a fierce battle.” Things, indeed, were different about Vatican II at a fundamental level. Whether that difference is expressed in a hermeneutic of discontinuity or of renewal is a battle that still rages, along with, in some circles, the original fight over the language itself.
O’Malley’s view, of course, is that of one person. But it is widely seen, if the reviews are to be believed, as an updated and valuable articulation of the segment of the church that believes that the council represented significant change from previous ways of doing church business.
O’Malley’s analysis was important enough in the eyes of those advocating the hermeneutic of continuity to draw considerable attention from conservatives, not least of which was the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in the October 2008 issue of his magazine, First Things. He disapprovingly termed O’Malley’s book “a 372-page brief for the party of novelty and discontinuity.” He declared at review’s end that the 2008 book Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition, edited by Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering and offering an opposing view from O’Malley’s, makes “it evident that the hermeneutics of continuity is prevailing, if it has not already definitively prevailed.”
How the scorecard ultimately nets out is probably more complex than the scoring system for Olympic figure skating. Longtime Catholic church observer and former New York Times columnist Peter Steinfels, reviewing the O’Malley book in December 2008, notes that the world’s bishops 50 years ago could have simply “rubberstamped a series of routine texts prepared under Vatican oversight and gone home.”
“How the bishops took charge of the agenda and radically reshaped the outcome is a story of bold confrontations, clashing personalities and behind-the-scenes maneuvers,” he writes. Acknowledging that some, claiming an elusive “spirit of the council,” have used the event to stake claim to changes well beyond any imagined by the council’s participants, Steinfels nonetheless argues that “any effort to shuffle the cards of continuity and discontinuity so as to minimize the profound reorientation wrought by the council borders on the ludicrous.”
If, indeed, a “profound reorientation” occurred because of the council, what does that mean today? And does the talk of a need to relearn language an attempt to return to, for lack of a more nuanced phrase, a pre-Vatican II reality? Morlino’s comments would certainly suggest such a course as would the later words of Rodé, who said in an interview with NCR that Vatican II precipitated “the greatest crisis in church history” (NCR, Oct. 30).
Still seeking resolution
If there is little love in the Vatican these days for the council, experts in liturgy and history still exist who understand how profoundly some things have changed. Benedictine Sr. Mary Collins, a liturgy expert and former prioress, recalled in an interview that it wasn’t long before the council that Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical on liturgy, declared “quite matter-of-factly that the role of the priest is essential and the role of the laity is not essential in the Mass, that it is the priest who effects the sacrifice of the Eucharist.”
In contrast, she noted, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy and the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church that came out of Vatican II articulated a far different ecclesiology, one in which “it is the right and privilege and responsibility of the baptized, who are fully involved in the liturgy of the Eucharist.” The point, she said, was not to downplay the role of clergy, but rather to explain the more integral role of laity in the Eucharist.
“Twenty years out,” she said, “I hope we’re not still arguing about Vatican II. I think the way this gets played out and resolved will make a massive difference in the shape the church takes 50 years from now. This is not a matter of irrelevance to the future of the church, but I would not presume to predict how it sorts itself out.”
The liturgy is at the cutting edge of the debate over the direction of the council and while in the English-speaking world the “continuity hermeneutic” seems to have won the day with new prayer versions that attempt to be one-to-one translations from the Latin, the arguments seem far from resolved.
Fr. Michael Ryan, pastor of St. James Cathedral in Seattle for more than two decades, in December began a campaign to slow down implementation of the new translations of the missal. “For some time I’ve followed the bishops’ debates, read many of the new texts, discussed them with brother priests, and visited about them with Catholics in the pews, and I’ve become aware of how difficult it’s going to be to ‘sell’ ordinary, faithful, good Catholics on the new, Latinized translations of the Missal,” Ryan said in an earlier interview (NCR, Dec. 25).
So far he’s garnered more than 17,000 supporters in an online campaign at whatifwejustsaidwait.org.
In January, Benedictine Fr. Anscar J. Chupungco, director of the Paul VI Institute of Liturgy in the Philippines and former president of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute at Sant’Anselmo in Rome, gave a stinging critique of the “reform of the reform,” a phrase used weeks earlier by none other than the papal master of ceremonies, Msgr. Guido Marini.
In a talk at Australia’s University of Newcastle’s program of liturgical studies, Chupungco responded to Marini’s claim that the Vatican II liturgical reform has “not always in its practical implementation found a timely and happy fulfillment.”
“What are the possible implications of a reform of the postconciliar reform?” Chupungco asked. “What remedy does it offer for a reform that according to some Catholics has gone bad? What agenda does it put forward so that liturgical worship could be more reverent and prayerful?”
The liturgy envisioned by the council, he stated, “was marked by noble simplicity and clarity. It wanted a liturgy that the people could easily follow. In sharp contrast is the attempt to revive, at the expense of active participation, the medieval usage that was espoused by the Tridentine [or pre-Vatican II] rite and to retrieve eagerly the liturgical paraphernalia that had been deposited in museums as historical artifacts.”
Comparing the reforms of Vatican II to a springtime renewal, Chupungco lamented that after more than four decades “the church is now experiencing the cold chill of winter brought about by contrasting ideas of what the liturgy is and how it should be celebrated.” Such tension, he said, “could be a healthy sign that the interest in the liturgy has not abated.” But he cautioned that after the council, “we are not free to propound views” apart from principles established by the council. “There are surely instances of postconciliar implementation that are debatable, but we should be careful to distinguish them from the conciliar principles, especially the full, active participation of all God’s people in the liturgy.”
[Tom Roberts is NCR editor at large. His e-mail address is troberts@ncronline.org.]
Apparently they want a liturgy "which people can easily follow". As if the liturgy is a) ours to tinker and monkey with in any way we please and b)designed to be like reading a newspaper or the instructions on a packet of soup.
The terms "mystery", "sacred" and "sacrifice" are meaningless to these barbarians.
There will be a Vatican III somewhere around the ‘30s.
By their fruits you will know them. Wolves in sheep’s (read shepherd’s) clothing.
The modernists of Vatican II and those that followed them have monkeyed and tinkered with the liturgy to the point that it is incomprehensible as liturgy worthy of worship of Jesus Christ.
It is very close to what passes for liturgy in the Methodist Church!
What passes for a Catholic Church today looks more like a vast, vacant airplane hangar.
Today's so-called leaders and recent Popes have much explaining to do to their maker at the time of judgment!
Bookmarking to read later.
Just curious why you didn’t make this a catholic caucus thread since it’s nobody’s business but Roman Catholics.
I'm not sure whether they're really worth the trouble, anyway. Recently there have been cases where threads were "caucused" and those who wanted to discuss the issue but were excluded by virtue of the "caucus" tag simply reposted the thread without the tag.
I gather you have strong convictions about the matters involved.
What a surprise! LOL.
I found these paragraphs particularly poignant:
##################
In contrast, Vatican II used “empowerment words,” words of reciprocity and persuasion as different from commands and anathemas. “There is scarcely a page in the council documents on which ‘dialogue’ or its equivalent does not occur. ‘Dialogue’ manifests a radical shift from the prophetic I-say-unto-you style that earlier prevailed and indicates something other than unilateral decision-making.” Such language, writes O’Malley, did not make it into the documents “without a fierce battle.” Things, indeed, were different about Vatican II at a fundamental level. Whether that difference is expressed in a hermeneutic of discontinuity or of renewal is a battle that still rages, along with, in some circles, the original fight over the language itself. O’Malley’s view, of course, is that of one person. But it is widely seen, if the reviews are to be believed, as an updated and valuable articulation of the segment of the church that believes that the council represented significant change from previous ways of doing church business. O’Malley’s analysis was important enough in the eyes of those advocating the hermeneutic of continuity to draw considerable attention from conservatives, not least of which was the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in the October 2008 issue of his magazine, First Things. He disapprovingly termed O’Malley’s book “a 372-page brief for the party of novelty and discontinuity.” He declared at review’s end that the 2008 book Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition, edited by Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering and offering an opposing view from O’Malley’s, makes “it evident that the hermeneutics of continuity is prevailing, if it has not already definitively prevailed.” How the scorecard ultimately nets out is probably more complex than the scoring system for Olympic figure skating. Longtime Catholic church observer and former New York Times columnist Peter Steinfels, reviewing the O’Malley book in December 2008, notes that the world’s bishops 50 years ago could have simply “rubberstamped a series of routine texts prepared under Vatican oversight and gone home.” “How the bishops took charge of the agenda and radically reshaped the outcome is a story of bold confrontations, clashing personalities and behind-the-scenes maneuvers,” he writes. Acknowledging that some, claiming an elusive “spirit of the council,” have used the event to stake claim to changes well beyond any imagined by the council’s participants, Steinfels nonetheless argues that “any effort to shuffle the cards of continuity and discontinuity so as to minimize the profound reorientation wrought by the council borders on the ludicrous.” If, indeed, a “profound reorientation” occurred because of the council, what does that mean today? And does the talk of a need to relearn language an attempt to return to, for lack of a more nuanced phrase, a pre-Vatican II reality? Morlino’s comments would certainly suggest such a course as would the later words of Rodé, who said in an interview with NCR that Vatican II precipitated “the greatest crisis in church history” (NCR, Oct. 30).
imho,
A lot of Prottys and particularly Pentecostals would be loathe, in a lot of quarters and senses, to admit to much liturgy in any stiffly formal or even persistently dogmatic sense.
However, Prottys, contrary to some Vatican perspectives, are human, too. The same pernicious tendencies afflict them individually and en masse, too, as afflicted the RELIGIOUS leaders 2000 years ago.
A leader says something. Or maybe even a leader declares something in the founding of a congregation . . . or maybe when the torch is passed from one aged head pastor to a new generation. There are new memes, customs, phrases that take the spotlight . . . and that become MORE RIGHTEOUS than older ones.
Or maybe just slowly by osmosis, ways of doing things become deeply entrenched as though Christ spoke in KJV English and as though all Heaven marches in lock step with the specific ways that congregation does things.
Yet, what is the New Testament model?
What did Christ come as man, as God-man, as God and DIE for?
To embellish, gild, affirm, buttress, expand, multiply
NOT on HIS Life!
Certainly He fulfilled The Law.
He also TURNED UPSIDE DOWN AND INSIDE OUT
What RELIGIOUS accoutraments have imposed themselves between GOD AND MAN afresh, with DEADLY ENGULFMENT?
Really, it's more like . . . what RELIGIOUS accoutraments have imposed themselves between GOD AND MAN corruptively 'a-mouldy' with DEADLY ENGULFMENT?
Where has
THE ROT,
THE FOSSILIZATION,
THE SELF-AGGRANDIZEMENTS,
THE GLORIFICATION OF RITUALIZED PULLING-OURSELVES-UP-BY-OUR OWN-BOOTSTRAPS,
THE PSEUDO-SANCTIFICATION OF FLESH SATURATED GOING-THROUGH-THE-MOTIONS,
THE ELABORATE MICRO-METER THICK PSEUDO-SPIRITUALITY,
THE PRISSING, PRANCING, PONTIFICATING, PARAPHERNALIA-SATURATED PARASITISM,
.
TAKEN INSIDIOUS ROOT . . . YET AGAIN!??!
It has been my observation that individuals who PUT GOD HEART-FIRST manage to do so regardless of the accoutraments--though they may be more or less comfortable when squeezed into doing their SPIRITUAL [vs RELIGIOUS] observances through particular memes, customs, rituals. Somehow, they will manage to FOCUS ON GOD SUPREMELY REGARDLESS.
Some, because of personality and personal/family history variables and factors will be hindered to annoyed by a lot of ritualized fuss and 'requirements.' Others will feel carried away on the pomp and circumstance as though on angelic wings to the lap of God--somehow without being seduced & entrapped, like so many, by the same pomp and circumstance.
However, there are a LOT of folks who are neither hot nor cold . . . who wander the mid-range of spirituality and who are ripe to be seduced, entrapped and raped with deadly results by the shallow [though often gilded] FORM(s) OF RELIGION that denies the POWER OF GOD THEREOF.
Leaders who encourage, countenance, support, promulgate, proffer such hideousness will find they are unable to pay even 1% of the tax on such hideousness.
Christ did not come and DIE . . . and rend the curtain . . . only to have a repeat performance of the same DISTANCING-FROM-THE-FATHER STUFF FLOOD BACK IN.
However, without and too often within each of us are the world, the flesh and the devil . . . READY AND MOST EAGER to open the FLOOD GATES on just such a flood.
WHEN RELIGIOUS [particularly when they pretend to be spiritual or super spiritual] leaders, structures and systems aid and abet such a flood . . . the evil DISTANCING stuff has a field day, an orgy of deadliness. . . . all wrapped in the best gilding and most saintly LOOKING, sounding, feeling accoutraments.
I think I used to minimize the import of Alamo-Girl's wholesale beyond disdain for ALL the doctrines of man.
I've increasingly come to be utterly convinced that her perspective is 100% spot on.
There's NO ROOM in the heart, mind, spirit, life of one FOCUSED UTTERLY, FOREMOST AND COMPLETELY ON GOD FIRST, LAST AND ALWAYS to be bogged down in the deadly smelly muck of the wood, hay and stubble of the doctrines of man.
One can gild a horse biscuit. It's still a horse biscuit hiding in a very thin layer of gold.
Oh, I know . . .
YOU [generic you/your in this post] AND YOUR IN-GROUP have NO such doctrines of men.
'YOUR' IN-GROUP has been sanctified and perfectly, flawlessly righteous from before Adam as all your lofted noses attest.
It's only those OUT-GROUP PSEUDO-'CHRISTIANS' OVER THERE who have such problems with deadly unrighteous RELIGIOUS RITUALS AND THE LIKE.
Raaaaahhhhhhhhhggggggt. /sar
I do not think that many priests are saved, but that those who perish are more numerous. ( St. John Chrysostom)
They who are enlightened to walk in the way of perfection, and through lukewarmness wish to tread the ordinary paths, shall be abandoned. (Bl. Angela of Foligno)
They who are to be saved as Saints, and wish to be saved as imperfect souls, shall not be saved. (Pope St. Gregory the Great)
St. Teresa.... had she not risen from the state of lukewarmness in which she lived, she would in the end have lost the grace of God and been damned. ( St. Alphonsus Liguori)
I’ve observed that it seems to be extremely difficult
to stay focused intensely enough and
with proper focus enough ON GOD AND HIS PRIORITIES;
ON GOD FIRST LAST AND FOREMOST
SUFFICIENTLY
day in and day out
in ANY CHRISTIAN congregation or organization
for HIS ANOINTING TO ABIDE over an even moderate period of time—too often—even a short period of time.
Some months ago, God’s MANIFEST PRESENCE was showing up virtually every service in a big way with folks being healed and delivered rather routinely; lives being rescued from alcoholism and other dreadful stuff; relationships being healed etc.
And, certainly the leadership has had every heart motivation to facilitate such continuing whether the Pastor and Preaching were more or less sidelined by GOD’S MANIFEST PRESENCE, or not.
Yet, the rot of the routine has set in again. And Holy Spirit has pulled way back. There’s an inkling that maybe on Wed evening with a much smaller group, that our focus is again getting aligned aright sufficiently for HIM to Mainfest HIS OVERT DOINGS yet again. Has been so a couple of Wednesday evenings now. We shall see.
The Old Testament had many examples of Israel getting off on their focus and resulting distancing from God.
It’s evident in the New Testament, too but not always so starkly so.
I tend to think that the Catholic church in the US is much more liberalized than in other parts of the world. Although I’m not Catholic, my wife is a Catholic from Italy, and when we go to mass here in the US, she is totally shocked. She says that what goes on here (campfire songs, electric guitars, drums, jokes by the priest, watered-down liturgy, women serving communion, etc) would never fly in Italy. Needless to say she feels like a fish out of water and is rather distressed by it. I’m going to try taking her to a church with the traditional Latin mass and see if that’s an improvement.
And your Italian wife can tell you that less than 30% of the Italian population actually goes to mass on a regular basis.
It is true, however, that the liturgy is more "liberal" in the Americas and in Australia than it is in the Phillipines or even Germany. Nevertheless, I have seen the hippy dippy guitar masses firsthand in Austria and Spain, back when I used to be Catholic.
Good for you. The TLM will be no different than a TLM in Italy or anywhere else. I understand that contemporary Masses in Europe vary considerably and Spain has had some real doozies.
“The “reform of the reform” has the NCR all in a tizz!”
Pity. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is making a return in a huge way too.
For all their work plugging a dike with one’s finger, the Holy Spirit makes a mockery of their milksop and Christ’s own Church prevails again over the barbarians.
( I think you left out the attribution. This was first said by Howard Dean, I believe.)
Alamo girl already knows that I think that some of "sacred tradition" is "sacred" because it is not "of men." If we can agree to let that slide, then I also agree with her.
I will also have to "postulate" that the sacraments of the Catholic Church are what I call "reliable." They are not "exclusive." That is, for example, you do not have to go to confession to be forgiven, but if you go to confession, truly (if only partially) contrite and all the rest, you are reliably forgiven.
Then some of the "hocus pocus" can be viewed as a kind of guarantee that this particular sacrament has been "confected."
But that doesn't mean it's magic, in this way. Aquinas has a nice pair of personal prayers for before and after Mass. They both include the sense that "I" need some grace in me for the "real" (or "reliable") sacrament to be for my good, and not my condemnation.
All of this is stuff to sweep out of the way.
And it is very important to say that however much mercy we can imagine, God always has more and GIVES more.
So NOW I can try to address what you say. Some of my favorite Masses are those which are simplest. Simple church, minimal vestments, minimal ceremonial. The Rite (that is the "word" part) can be, at least to those who have studied liturgy, VERY simple, almost bald. Short prayer. Short prayer for forgiveness.
Reading from Bible, Psalm, Reading from one of the Gospels, Homily, prayers for the Church and the world (can be made up on the spot by the priest and room is given for the people to add their particular concerns).
"lay the table" (get bread, wine+water)
Pray, remembering aloud the Last Supper.
Lord's Prayer
Prayer for peace, and People in the congregation greet one another.
"fraction" (that is breaking of the bread)
Communion
clean up
Prayer
Blessing and Dismissal.
It can be done in a dignified way in 25 minutes, or even fewer!
There is no question that even that can be a distraction for some. It is easy for a kind of liturgical aesthete to be so concerned with HOW all this is done, that, well, you hardly ever hear them talking about the Mercy of God. Something is definitely wrong there.
But both in the moment and obviously, or much less later and discerned almost (as it were) by chance, one can find that "a great thing happened here."
AND it can be great and holy fun. Our Easter Vigil is wonderful ... tacky but wonderful! After the lighting of the new fire outside, and bringing the huge and heavy paschal candle into the church, as we all file in with our little candles, there is a wonderful solo hymn sung to ask God to bless the candle. Then there are many readings of the mighty saving acts of God in ancient times. Between are psalms and hymns.
Then, as the organ plays a fanfare which shakes the foundations, the lights are all lit, a huge banner is unfurled which says "Worthy is the Lamb." Ladies come from all directions with pots and pots of flowers and surround the altar in a sea of lilies and other flowers. Other flowers are placed at other places in the church. We all sing what for these forty days I call "the A-word" (work on it.)
And I tend to burst into tears.
And that's just the beginning! We read "Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us." We sing more A-words. We read the Easter Proclamation.
Then we baptize the converts, and receive and confirm those already baptized but coming "into full communion."
And then the Mass continues with sermon and prayers and all the rest.
It takes about 2.5 - 3 hours. There is incense -- lots of incense. There is ceremonial. There are bells, little bells and big bells. We are putting on the dog and having a PARTY! There are tears of joy.
And yes, there are splendid silks and linens, and many arts are represented. Trumpets and timpanies!
In a way it could be called "formal." I mean, for example, it is so artificial not to say the A-word for all of Lent. We are always rejoicing. Paul tells us to.
But to say it after a 40 day fast from saying it, and to remember what event makes the A-word always appropriate ... well, it's pretty good stuff.
How this touches Vatican II is maybe not so clear. At least not to me. I guess the thing is like this. In The Great Divorce Lewis points out that some can be so involved with collecting books that they never read. Some can be so concerned for helping the poor that they never notice that they've lost all charity for the poor person down the street. And some can be so tied up in the wording of this or that document, or even in the importance of this or that teaching (which is, truly, important) that they forget that, well, theology is one thing, and God is quite another -- something ELSE!
And I would say that, maybe, that is not the fault of theology, but of some theologians. It is only the grace of God which can make us humble. No amount of studying all the writers about humility can do that. But its not bad to study those writers, while it is disastrous to forget that without grace much study is a weariness of the flesh.
Enough. I think at bottom we are in agreement. God is in heaven, whatever He will to do He does -- and He wills to love us! May He be praised forever.
A-word. Definitely A-word!
Sometimes it’s amazing how much and how persistently I agree with you.
This was one of those posts.
Thanks.
Psst. Please don’t tell anyone . . . SOMETIMES even I can enjoy pagentry, pomp and circumstance.
I’m really looking forward to the REAL THING, however, the MARRIAGE SUPPER OF THE LAMB.
Everything else is shabby dress rehearsal.
NOPE.
Y’ALL ARE WRONG AGAIN.
Bump.
Thanks for posting this interesting thread.
NO THANKS for not making it a caucus thread.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.