Liturgical Abuses

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 5/20/04)

After what appears to have been a somewhat contentious process involving arguments over what to say, the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments last month published a new document about abuses in the celebration of the Eucharistic liturgy.

The contents of Redemptionis Sacramentum ("The Sacrament of Redemption") have been widely reported and discussed. Here I want to focus on something else. Why in heaven's name should presumably sane Catholics need to be cautioned against abusing the Eucharist?

It seems to me that at least part of the answer may be along these lines. Some 40 years ago, sneering references to "filling station" parishes began to crop up here and there in avant-garde Catholic circles. Such parishes, it seemed, were places where Catholics went to attend Mass, receive the sacraments, and not a whole lot else.

The complaints seemed to reflect the dissatisfaction of certain priests who felt that what went on in parishes like this didn't make sufficient use of their talents or give them sufficient opportunity to be creative, and they were mad about that.

I must admit that even then I found this a little hard to understand. A parish priest, I thought, had plenty of important work to do and plenty of room for creativity in doing it. Along with celebrating Mass—an enormous privilege in itself, we'd often been told—the work included preparing and delivering homilies, offering spiritual counsel in and out of the confessional, and teaching the faith to children, young people, and adults.

Was it possible, then, that clerics who talked this way were bored because they weren't pushing themselves too hard? Or was there a more serious mistake at work here — the notion that the Eucharistic liturgy, at its heart the action of Christ, is an appropriate setting for the celebrant to draw attention to himself by his distinctive "style"?

In short order, though, the "spirit of Vatican II" put such questions to flight. Suddenly we were awash in creativity. So creative did the celebration of the liturgy become, in fact, that unless you knew the celebrant (and not always even then) you couldn't be quite sure what would happen at any particular Mass.

Although liturgical tinkering probably has diminished since then, old habits die hard. Just the other day, in a magazine letters column, I came across a priest's slighting reference to the idea that priests are "sacrament-dispensing machines." No one thinks that, of course, but the man who said it was signaling discontent with things as they are.

"Arbitrary actions…are detrimental to the right of Christ's faithful to a liturgical celebration that is an expression of the Church's life in accordance with her tradition and discipline," the new Roman document intones in its typically stiff language.

But besides the harm that it does to worship, the trouble with this kind of abuse (and abuse is what it is) is its tendency to spread into other areas of Catholic life, encouraging the idea that there are no unbreakable rules or inviolable truths in regard to liturgy or anything else. The only absolute and unbendable rule is the maxim of the personality cult: "Do your own thing."

In a way it's quaint — a throwback to the bourgeois Catholic radicalism of the '60s and '70s. But its day has long since passed. Time to put the toys away, boys and girls. And if it takes a Roman document about liturgical abuse to make that simple point, so be it. If anything, it's long overdue.

Copyright ©2004 Arlington Catholic Herald.  All rights reserved.