You and the liturgy.

Editor

* Liturgy is concerned with the forms of worship, and worship is the heart of our faith. Every Catholic, there fore, should take an interest in matters liturgical and be alert about what is being done.

Since the Second Vatican Council there have been many changes most of which appear to have been beneficial. I won't elaborate on them. But in more recent years--let us say the last two decades--the liturgy in Canada has become increasingly a source of division rather than unity. One couldn't think of a greater disaster to the Church than that. There are now quarrels about the place of the tabernacle, about standing or kneeling, about receiving in the hand or on the tongue and about many other things such as translations.

Changes don't occur by themselves; they are the result of thought, more particularly theological thought. Unfortunately, much theological thinking over the last decades, especially in liturgy, has been superficial. Some of this is due to a lack of in-depth knowledge of the Church's liturgical traditions; part of it is because translators and liturgical "experts" think that current communication theories must be the best precisely because they are contemporary and the latest; and part of it because liturgists have surrendered to ideologies of their own, with feminism leading the way. Add to that the idea that in English Canada we must have a "Canadian" liturgy, made in Ottawa, by grace of the Liturgical Commission of the Canadian bishops.

The Real Presence

My point is this. When you walk into a Catholic church and cannot find the tabernacle with the Blessed Sacrament, you know right away that you are up against a new view of Catholic worship, one that sets little store with the Real Presence in the church, if it recognizes Jesus in the tabernacle at all. When Newman College in Edmonton, the theology school for seminarians for Western Canada, renovated its chapel in the late seventies, it removed the tabernacle altogether, placed it in a small, separate, so-called meditation room, with pillows on the carpeted floor, leaving the main chapel bereft of Jesus' presence. Needless to say, over the years a number of churches in Western Canada have followed the example witnessed in their seminary.

In the United States this particular change has now aroused the ire and determined opposition of a large number of bishops (see our News in Brief, "U.S. bishops debate church architecture, tabernacle," in Jan-Feb, 2000, pp. 23-24) Their anger is directed against a 1978 document entitled Environment and Art in Catholic Worship (EACW) which launched this change. They want the document replaced. They are upset because of a decline in devotion to the Real Presence, because of changes in church architecture; and because of the bullying and arrogant way of the liturgical "experts" who insist on imposing it. All three elements apply to Canada.

For the architectural aspect, see our March issue and Philip Mecozzi's article "Temple of God or community hall?" (pp. 26-27). As for documents, Canada now has its own brand-new version of EACW called Our Place of Worship, a book sprung upon the Catholic community in the late fall of 1999 by the CCCB's Liturgy Commission. I use the words "sprung upon" to indicate the aura of secrecy and finality which surround documents coming from the Canadian Catholic Bishops Conference. Unlike in the United States, for example, their Commissions never invite public discussion beforehand. But better a discussion later than none at all. Hence, in this issue we begin an analysis of the Canadian document on page 10.

One may well ask: Who then are these liturgical "experts"? One may learn something first from the Vatican's unhappiness with them described in the March article "Vatican ices ICEL" (pp. 28-29). ICEL stands for International Commission on English in the Liturgy. This article, not to mention previous ones on the same subject, sketches the international scene, especially the battle about feminist ideology in biblical translations (but also in the composition of the 1992 Universal Catechism). Translation work, of course, concerns the aspect of language. Language, devotion, architecture, theology, all play a role in liturgy and cannot be easily separated.

Canadian experts

As for the question who are the Canadian liturgy experts, the quarterly magazine The Orator from Ottawa, in its December 1999 mammoth edition of a hundred pages, has attempted to answer this (for a summary, see pp. 30-31 in the current issue). It sketches a scene of individual views all converging to create a climate which allows changes contrary to good orthodox worship. They seem to share a general distaste for the masculine, hierarchical, papal, and traditional norms of the past 1500 years. This thinking has its foundation in such basic distortions and expressions of self-hatred as found, for example, with the editor of Saskatchewan's Prairie Messenger, Father Andrew Britz, who recently wrote that "throughout our history women have been at best second-class citizens in the Church" (editorial Jan. 19, 2000). He then implied that until the women's ordination question is "resolved," Catholicism will continue to create barriers to Christian unity. As his first assertion is false, so is the conclusion.

Painful as it may be, Catholics must become more knowledgeable about the liturgy in order to help the Church in Canada maintain unity in worship in harmony with magisterial teaching.