great commentary by Fr Martin Fox

From Bonfire of the Vanities

Monday, August 03, 2009
St. Catherine of Siena, Great Falls Virginia
(I've been remiss in telling you about the sacred places I've visited on my vacation; I will, I hope, tell you about my visit to the shrine of St. John Newmann in Philadelphia before long; but here follows my experience of Sunday Mass in Northern Virginia.)

On the Lord's Day, I had the joy of concelebrating the Mass with Father Alexander Drummond, pastor of St. Catherine Parish in Great Falls, Virginia. I had heard good things, and also a friend of mine, who is not Catholic, asked about attending Mass with me, and then we'd visit afterward; I wanted him to have a good experience of the Holy Sacrifice.

Everything was praiseworthy, and I told Father Drummond I was envious of many of the things he had accomplished. His servers were very well trained and performed beautifully. He had so many for the first Sunday in August--he said, "they flock to this Mass." He had one very young fellow, Thomas, who was learning the ropes; apparently, Father has new fellows just show up, put on a cassock and surplice, and be guided by the older, more experienced servers--although he also has classes.

This suburban parish of 4,000 families has four Masses a weekend; I took part in the 10 am Mass, which was all in Latin, except for the readings, prayers of the faithful, and of course the homily. Everything else was in Latin, from the opening Sign of the Cross to the final "Ite, Missa Est." We did pray the prayer to St. Michael in English, but the closing hymn was the Salve Regina.

Father sang a few of the prayers of the Mass, but he was using the same, Missa in Cantu book I have, that provides all the prayers of the Mass, in Latin, set to chant; I use it at the 8 am Mass every first Wednesday of the Month at St. Mary, and his copy was well-thumbed; so I'm assuming he often chants the prayers. Those he chanted, he did so impeccably.

This Mass featured the assigned music for the opening, offertory and communion: it is very little known or understood that when we use hymns at this point--as the vast majority of Catholic parishes do--we are consistently avoiding what the Second Vatican Council, and the norms for the Mass, actually call for, which is Scripture-based texts set to chant. They can be sung in the original Latin, to Gregorian tones; or they can be chanted in English; at Masses with no music, you will hear the antiphon recited from time to time--this is the bare minimum.

At this Mass, they were sung by a cantor in Latin, in Gregorian chant--and that was done beautifully. No doubt, some would react negatively: they couldn't themselves sing along (and in fact almost everyone listened); and they wouldn't immediately recognize the words. But a program was handed out that provided both the Latin text and an English translation. Of course, listening is participation; and it would be a terrible mistake to reduce music merely to its words; music, rather, marries a meaningful text to a well-chosen set of notes, something I lack the talent to do, but others possess: and the combination is the true, good and beautiful all in one. So the fact that folks did not sing it does not mean they weren't participating; sometimes something is so beautiful, you simply listen.

Because, in fact, people did sing the other prayers of the Mass, in Latin, rather well: the Gloria and the Credo in particular. There is something deeply meaningful to me about praying the Creed in it's original words: the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople, from which we derive this Creed, published this infallible statement of faith in Latin and Greek, and we recite it in the very same words (with the addition of the filioque of course, but let us not tarry on that point).

Another feature of the Mass was the use of ad orientem--that is, while at the altar for the liturgy of the Eucharist and the communion rite, the celebrant faced the same way as the people, and thus all faced the Lord together; some will refer to this as the priest "with his back to the people." Of course, I have no idea what the folks of the parish thought about it, and no doubt those who dislike it attend the other Masses where this is not done. But those present seemed cheerful and spiritually nourished as they left Mass. There were a lot of children, including young children, at the Mass; while there was a hermetically sealed "cry room," there were plenty of young ones outside of it, and I did not notice any significant increase in vocal meltdowns at this allegedly less-engaging Mass.

At this point, you may be confused--you may say, "oh, you mean you concelebrated the older form of the Mass, from before the Council." No, this is the Mass as reformed after the Council, according to all the proper norms and rubrics, as provided for the very same sacramentary, or book of Mass prayers, used at every Roman-Rite Catholic parish in the world.

"But wait, Father, how can that be? You said it was in Latin, and the priest was facing the same way as the people--wasn't all that done away with by the Council?"

While that is what a lot of people believe, and were told, the answer is no; on the contrary, many are shocked to discover that, far from abolishing these things, the Council presupposed both that Latin would continue to be used, to some degree, and the Council said not a single word about the priest moving to the other side of the altar--i.e., the Council never called for that latter change. And even the post-Counciliar implementation of the new Mass did not mandate the priest stand behind the altar and face the people. Like the use of the vernacular, it was allowed as an option, an option almost universally implemented, to the point some now insist it is mandatory. But not so.

My friend, over breakfast, said he found it beautiful and spiritually refreshing: "it was what I needed today." But he asked what many ask: "why is Latin important?"

I gave him the following reasons:

1) It connects us, in an experiential way, to our formative roots. The liturgy is not a re-creation of the Last Supper; but an experience, in mystery (i.e., via sacramental reality), of all the actions of Christ that save us: his life, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven. The Mass is all this rolled into one, and more. That's why we don't do it in Aramaic or Greek, but we do it in Latin, because the Roman form of the sacred liturgy was formed in Latin--that is the Mass's original language, and remains so this this very minute.

2) Keeping Latin just a little alive in our experience and consciousness opens us up to a vast treasury of our patrimony which orginated in Latin. Of course, the written word can be translated, but poetry and music, not so well. When was the last time someone at a wedding or funeral asked for the Ave Maria to be sung--but in English? Why do they always want it sung in Latin? Because it's beautiful; and translating it undoes the beauty of the singular expression. This is why so much of our music hasn't been translated from the Latin; it has simply been left behind.

3) There is a value to praying a kind of sacred language, based on something observable in the human mind. Alongside all the advantages of having the Mass and other sacramental rituals in our own language, there is a downside--of approaching the liturgy, and the mystery it makes present, primarily with our intellectual function. When we hear words we understand, our intellect is engaged, and we "digest" the words and the ideas they convey. This is good of course; but the danger is in thinking the mysteries made present in the Mass should be approached principally in this fashion. In fact, we do well to approach these mysteries on various levels, the level of intellectual understanding being only one level.

In short, the danger is to flatten and make mundane the mystery. Someone says, "I don't like praying words I don't understand." But who can say s/he understands what it means to call God "holy"? We are kidding ourselves if we understand the meaning of calling him "holy" better than we understand calling him "sanctus."

My point being that using Latin--even with a translation handy--provides a kind of circuit-breaker that enables us to separate the experience of mystery from the apprehension of the mystery with our intellects; so that we don't just make the distinction in an abstract way, but we experience it. Learning, after all, isn't just a matter of being told something, or getting it abstractly, but by doing: you don't learn to drive merely by having the concepts and methods explained to you; you have to get behind the wheel.

It truly saddens me that there is not more openness to this. I wish more people could experience the liturgy as I did on Sunday, as I have many times before elsewhere. The very fact that a more familiar path is closed--the path of hearing and responding in ones own language--is closed, opens up new avenues unconsidered; just as you find if, while awake, you silence yourself and your surroundings, and close your eyes, you will, after a few minutes, find you are hearing things you seemingly didn't hear a few minutes before; or when you look up into the night sky, with all the artificial light turned off: you see things you never knew were there. I am convinced that many people would have similarly surprising discoveries in the liturgy where it is celebrated to a significant degree in Latin, and with more silence and dignity, less constant pressure for everyone to be saying something and moving about; but the resistance is constant, and the steps are small.

facing face to face

I really do agree this face to face idea is really keeping people away from confession

and this too

From Fr. Z with his comments in the red

Say the BLACK do the RED

This is in from the New York Times.

Securely in the "Brick by Brick" department, but there is an interesting dimension to this which you should not miss. There will always be a liberal loser in the mix.

February 21, 2009
On Religion
In One Church, Confession Makes a Comeback
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

STAMFORD, Conn. — The day after Msgr. Stephen DiGiovanni was installed in June 1998 as the pastor of St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church here, he walked through the quiet sanctuary, appreciating the English Gothic grandeur and tallying all the repairs it required.

One particular sight seized him. The confessional at the rear of the pews had been nailed shut. The confessional in the front, nearer the altar, was filled with air-conditioning equipment. And these conditions, Monsignor DiGiovanni realized, reflected theology as much as finance. [Theology, yes! This gets it exactly right! The writer has hit this … ehem… nail on the head.]

In the wake of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, the Catholic Church began offering confession in “reconciliation rooms,” [I know these awful rooms are prevalent, but NOTHING in the documents of the Church required that. As a matter of fact I believe there are still some conditions for the construction of confessionals including a fixed grate, no? Am I wrong?] rather than the traditional booths. Even before the setting changed, habits had. The norm for American Catholics was to make confession once a year, generally in the penitential period of Lent leading up to Easter. [I think a lot of Catholics went to confession pretty regularly and not just once a year. Didn’t they?]

Monsignor DiGiovanni, though, soon noticed that there were lines for the St. John’s reconciliation room the only time it was open each week, for two hours on Saturday afternoon. So within his first month as pastor, he pried open the door to the rear confessional, wiped off the dust of decades and arranged for replacing the lights, drapes and tiles. [Well done!]

Then, in the fall of 1998, Monsignor DiGiovanni rolled back the clock of Catholic practice, having St. John’s priests hear confession in the booths before virtually every Mass. [This is NOT rolling back the clock. What sort of view is behind this? Again, I think it is a interpretive principle of rupture.] By now, as another Lent commences next week with Ash Wednesday, upwards of 450 people engage in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, as confession is formally known, during 15 time slots spread over all seven days of the week. Confessions are heard in English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.

“As humans, we’re always deciding that we are God and breaking his commandments,” said Monsignor DiGiovanni, 58, during an interview this week in his rectory. “But God is savvy enough to know that. And God wants us to come back to Him if there’s a contrite heart. Salvation is not just a one-time deal.” [Did you get that, you Born-Agains?]

His message has stirred scores of consciences at St. John’s. And while the frequency of confession, and the return to booths from the reconciliation room, puts the pastor and the parish on the conservative end of the Catholic spectrum, [having a sense of sin and going to confession, hearing confessions, makes you "conservative".] St. John’s is a standard diocesan church with a varied congregation — corporate executives, Haitian and Hispanic immigrants, Stamford’s longtime Irish and Italian middle class. [Right… it’s just a Catholic parish.]

Rosa Marchetti, an events planner for a family-owned chain of restaurants, had grown up dreading the rite of confession. The reconciliation room, while intended to allow priest and penitent to meet in a reassuring face-to-face manner something like analyst and analysand, filled her with anxiety and shame. Six years ago, Ms. Marchetti began attending St. John’s, and these days she makes a confession at least twice a month. Speaking to an unseen priest through a screen seems to her a comfort. [As it is for the vast majority of people.]

“I’d always feared that the priests would know it was me, and I never wanted to think I’d done something wrong,” she recalled of her earlier experiences. “But at St. John’s, it was explained to me that I go to the doctor for my physical well being and I have to go to confession for my spiritual well being.”

Even so, she recognizes how the practice sets her apart from a national popular culture of celebrity magazines, talk shows, Facebook pages and Twitters that is relentlessly confessional and rarely contrite. [nice phrase: "relentlessly confessional and rarely contrite".]

“You turn on Oprah and you have women crying to her, confessing what they’ve gone through,” Ms. Marchetti said. “Everyone is so quick to tell the world their problems, but they won’t tell a priest.” [And they risk their souls as a result.]

In the hope of reversing those engines, the Catholic diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., has mounted what it calls a “Lenten Confession Campaign.” The diocese’s 87 churches, which include St. John’s, will be offering confession for two hours every Tuesday night in addition to the usual Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning periods. [EXCELLENT]

To promote the campaign, the Knights of Columbus is paying for highway billboards, bus placards and radio and TV commercials — all using a slogan drawn from Corinthians, “Be Reconciled to God” — as well as the printing and distribution of 100,000 pamphlets about confession.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether the multimedia effort can change behavior on a grand scale. Monsignor DiGiovanni has changed it within his parish through a theological version of retail politics: reaching individuals and families through a decade of homilies, conversations and columns in the church bulletin.

The movement to revive confession, using the traditional booth, no less, has plenty of skeptics within American Catholicism.

[Now which progressivist aging-hippe will the writer drag in for counterpoint?]

“Confession as we once knew it is pretty much a dead letter in Catholicism today,” the Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, wrote in an e-mail message. [Yah… you knew it had to be one of these defeatists.]

Father McBrien, whose support of female ordination and married priest puts him on the theological left wing of the Catholic Church, added in a subsequent e-mail message that “the practice at the Stamford parish is an anomaly, not a sign of anything else” and at best “part of a small minority” of churches. [What would you bet he is happy that it is an anomaly?]

Majority or minority, the congregants at St. John’s firmly believe they are onto something. John F. X. Leydon, Jr., a lawyer in Stamford, has increased his pace of confession from once a year to once a month. The eldest of his four children, Mary, will be making her first confession this spring.

“The explanation we’ve given as parents is that none of us is perfect,” said Mr. Leydon, speaking also for his wife, Stacey. “However, we have to aspire to be perfect. And that should be a lifelong pursuit.”

E-mail: gfreedman@nytimes.com

An interesting article.

In the balance, McBrien looks just as foolish as he always does.

Real Confessional

now this is a confessional, from my youth, at St Joesph, Egypt

view from outside, added after the original church was built

Man was it ever cold in there in the winter ;-)
unfortunately even they fell to the reconciliation fever and changed the baptistery in the rear of the little church to a reconciliation-crier room, now the baptismal font is in the sanctuary, Oh Well, some day it will all be restored

Face to Face is a turn off

With all due credit to the Catholic Cartoon Blog,
may I add Face to Face confession, most times I just don't wish to be in a counseling session, I want CONFESSION. I just cannot sit and talk to my parish priest, I want some privacy, give me an old fashioned confessional, not a reconciliation room
The Egyptian




The Curt Jester had a post on New Year's Day about which Holy Day of Obligation is the most neglected, which led to some interesting discussions in the ComBox.
http://www.splendoroftruth.com/curtjester/archives/2009/01/feast-with-the.php

This cartoon was sparked recently when I heard a priest lament that only 37 people showed up for the Advent Penance Service. On a regular Sunday, I think we get upwards of 1000-1500 people for our 2 masses. I may be overshooting it a bit. So the 37 number was pretty sorry.

But in my 10 years back, I can count on one hand when I've heard a priest specifically mention something being a sin. And I think I can further count on this one hand while one finger is stuck in my ear. Abortion? Once. Birth Control? Once. Homosexuality? Once. The Big Three in our culture today, and I've heard them specifically mentioned probably just once each. And that's misleading, because the abortion and birth control issues were raised in one homily - by a transitional deacon, no less. (As a side note, I ran into this deacon the following week and told him that he hit a home run with his homily - he actually had tears in his eyes. My guess, and it's only a guess, is that he was probably upbraided for being so bold.)

If, in today's Church, practically NOTHING is a sin, then what exactly would need to be confessed? God loves everyone, He's never mad about what we do, and everything "bad" we do can be reasoned away with buckets full of Oprah & Dr. Phil psychological babble.