Confessions
of a folk Mass guitarist
by Rory O'Day,
Oriens
FOR SOME curious reason I have no memory of the Latin Mass, but
can recall the first English Mass in my home town.
As a small schoolboy I clearly recall a group of older
schoolgirls bursting out of the church after having timed the
ceremony. To their dismay the new Mass had been only briefly
shorter than the old one said the previous week.
This little event touches on what went wrong with the changes to
the liturgy which took place post-Vatican II. Instead of dwelling
on the mystery of the Eucharist, Catholics began to judge the
Mass on what they got out of it. Innovation and experimentation,
however distasteful, became a necessity in the search for
relevance.
On a deeper level, of course, there was also the deliberate
strategy of trying to soften the differences between the
allegedly
over-ritualised Catholic Mass and the communion services of the
Protestant churches. But the blurring of what distinguished the
Catholic Mass actually resulted in its emasculation.
The stripping of the altars, the de-emphasis of the sacrificial
nature of the Mass, have been superimposed instead by a new
minimalist ritual based on the gathering of the Christian
community to partake in a communal meal.
The destructive nature of the changes is something that took many
years to fully comprehend. What is clear now is that the efforts
of the liturgical renewal brigade were fundamentally flawed.
While much of the distrust and sectarianism of old has
disappeared in Australia (for a variety of reasons unrelated to
changes in the Catholic Mass) we are no closer to union with the
Anglicans or Uniting Church, and on some issues (such as female
priests and homosexual marriages) we are further apart than ever.
And the young people to whom many of the changes appeared to be
directed no longer see the Church as "meeting their
needs" and mostly give Sunday Mass the flick at the first
opportunity either just before or just after leaving school.
Vague misgivings
I always had vague misgivings about the innovations. Going to
Mass where chalices were replaced with odd bits of pottery, where
crumbly damper replaced unleavened hosts, was disturbing, but few
others seemed to see a problem.
At other times it was embarrassing, like the Christmas plastic
angel which zoomed across the nave on a flying fox contraption,
or the Palm Sunday when two people inside a donkey suit marched
into church like an amateur vaudeville routine.
At high school I became a member of the school musical group
which played for the so-called "youth Masses" on Sunday
evenings. Although a pretty poor guitarist, being a 16-year-old I
thought that being in a band (any band) might make me more
attractive to the opposite sex.
In fact, the youth were rarely if ever enthralled by the rock
Masses despite the best efforts of some nuns and youth leaders.
The songs were mostly bland, uninspiring and quite often
theologically unsound.
Studying Reformation history was a turning point for me. Like a
university student in Stalinist Russia who came across a banned
history book, I discovered that the martyrs of Reformation
England had died for the things we were getting rid of. This was
not anything I had been taught in my Catholic schools.
At university I found a group of conservative young men who were
similarly baffled by what was going on. Once we tried to get the
chaplain to have Benediction - looking back that in itself was
extraordinary. But far from encouraging us his reluctance
destroyed our enthusiasm, and when it was finally conducted it
was so modernised, we did not bother pursuing it again.
Sometimes when things got really out of hand I'd go to Mass
getting angrier and angrier -- Satan's strategem must have been
going exactly to plan. Like countless others I gave up going to
Mass for periods, but always returned because I knew deep down I
had nowhere else to go. In hindsight I can see that if ever there
was a point where folk Masses (and the even more improbable 'rock
Masses') fulfilled their objective in capturing the spirit of the
times, they were ultimately destined for failure.
There are two reasons.
First, the Church would never be able to keep up with the
rapidly changing fashions which exploded onto western society
from the 1960s. Is there anything more unfashionable than a
thoroughly modern nun?
Making the Mass relevant to young people might have worked for
the milli-second of history which coincided with Woodstock,
Peter, Paul and Mary and the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. But
after that the Church was always going to be embarrassingly out
of sync. At the risk of being sacrilegious, should the Church
have adapted liturgical music to include the new disco sound,
dance music, rap, ska, even punk? Instead of admitting the
absurdity of being relevant, liturgists decided instead to impose
a freeze on modern hymns around the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Any music which went before was expurgated and a time warp
created.
Time warp
The irony is that a period of bad taste and inferior music has
become a kind of cultural apex of 2000 years of Christendom. Most
churches in Australia are locked into this interminable rehash of
the 1970s. And while the youth fled, the older Catholics were
denied their own Irish Catholic heritage. Faith of Our Fathers
joined the forbidden list of what Catholics could not read or
sing.
The second problem was that liturgists were setting young people
up for disappointment and disillusionment.
If a school Mass was filled with liturgical dancing, multiple
readers, greeters and commentators, elaborate offertory
processions, student decorations of the church and altar, Gospel
miming, slide shows, drums, tambourines and electric guitars,
what happens when they went to their normal (and obligatory)
Sunday Mass?
What incenses me most is the sight of a Baby Boomer group at Mass
(no doubt partly because I'm on the cusp of becoming middle aged
myself) trying to thrash the last life out of the 'folk Mass'
Young people are absent from the pews, just a sad greying
congregation of Catholics sprinkled with the equally bewildered
ethnic Australians. Where no Baby Boomers are available there is
the ubiquitous casette player?the ultimate symbol of the failed
new liturgy.
Some conservative Catholic friends encouraged me to go to the
Latin Mass, and I approached it with some trepidation.
While I railed against the seeming total autonomy parishes seemed
to have in determining what was allowed and what was not allowed
during Mass, I feared the rigidity of the Latin rite.
There was also a resistance to becoming part of a group of
Catholic reactionaries or, even worse, sentimentalists.
It took several return visits to the new rite, and back to the
old to find my way. Gradually I have built an attachment to the
old Mass to its richness, depth and profundity.
And the people who go to the old Mass are Catholics who are very
positive about their faith, who go to the old rite because they
love it, who evangalise and who live the faith.
The old Mass allows people to adore the real presence of Christ,
to contemplate quietly the mystery of our faith which is more of
an add-on in the new Mass. Instead of being self-centred it is
Christ-centred.
There are still things that puzzle me ? barriers to my total
acceptance. For example, I find it strange that the priest alone
says the Our Father and that the readings are not in the
vernacular.
For all that I have no wish to advocate change. The fact is I
have never reflected on the Gospel and Epistle as I have at the
traditional Mass. Despite lingering questions and obstacles, I
have entered more deeply into the Mass.
The mistakes that were made in the post-Conciliar period range
from the grave to the totally unnecessary: the four-year
calendar, multiple choice Eucharistic prayers, changes to crucial
words at Mass, down to relatively minor things such as standing
in line to receive Holy Communion.
Fatal flaws
I have come to believe that the priest facing the people is a
fatal error, making the priest the pivotal figure in the ceremony
and the relationship between him and us more important than
between God and us. Performance becomes all important. Adoration
goes out the door.
Even worse, when a priest doubts the real presence, as many seem
to do, they sometimes betray themselves by what they do at the
altar, or pointedly omit. Mercifully the old rite throws a veil
over these interior battles and saves the layman from the
temptation to judge.
And surely the Sign of Peace is an almost diabolically placed
event--designed to ensure that everyone is diverted from the
great miracle which has just occurred. Instead in the traditional
rite I have found a sense of peace and deepening wonder at the
gift of Himself that Christ left us each time we go to Mass.
On the other hand it has left me with a terrible unresolved
conundrum:
how could the Church have got it so wrong?