What kind of sinner are you? When Will Pope Francis Update the “Hail Mary”? New mass a lost cause, but all is not lost? LET’S HEAR IT FOR WEEKDAY MASS.
For the sinner, the disappointed, reformers, traditionalists, and for that matter the satisfied and contented but curious who wonder what's all the commotion about . . .
When dealing with sinful habits the real moral and spiritual danger is perhaps not the occasional slip or fall into the behavior, but giving into discouragement, despair, or the doubt that God’s love is abiding that can lead to scruples.
The question of being a Christian is not whether to be a ‘saint’ or a ‘sinner,’ but of deciding what kind of sinner you want to be; the sinner who lets sins lead to discouragement and an increasing selfishness, or the sort of sinner who allows the experience of sin to lead to humility and an abiding awareness of the immense mercy of God, a mercy which one can then radiate to others.
Try that on for size, why don’t you?
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Glad-handing in the middle of Mass, first of a series September 24, 2019
New Oxford Book of Christian Verse as sermon fodder . . .March 11, 2019
His daughter for a horse, Greek philosopher’s fascination with pseudo-Egyptian origins, dynamite teachers who abide no nonsense, Mailer’s white Negro?December 23, 2022
Has the time come? How about:
Hey, Mary, very nice person! The Lord is with us, and happy are we. Super is your child, Jesus. O lucky one, accompany us on our journey. Amen.
Those who draw the line at such modernization should have a look at the man’s argument.
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Act of consecration to St. Joseph re-phrased March 20, 2021
Confessions of an American Bead Counter, Part 2 – Crisis Magazine April 14, 2019
A pessimistic view of today’s Catholic liturgy:
The [post-Vatican 2] Pauline rite [Paul VI’s] is so radical a deconstruction and reconstruction of the Roman liturgy that it does not exist in the same tradition of organic development. It is a new departure, a new thing, not a revision of the old thing that had been handed down over the centuries.
As an artificial liturgical entity constructed out of pieces of the Roman heritage combined with modern scholarly inventions, any future reform of it would be no more than a variation on the new theme.
The only way forward is not to tinker any more with this “fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product” (as Ratzinger called it in 1992), but to return steadfastly and stalwartly to the Catholic and Roman liturgical tradition embodied in the preconciliar Missal.
Indeed, only in this way can the deepest aims and aspirations of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy be achieved and even applied.
In other words, it’s beyond fixing.
There are times when I agree, as when:
* The fist-bump of peace before communion becomes a silly thing, with people all over the church waving at anyone and everyone eagerly, frantically.
* The church becomes a social hall at end of mass, regardless of blessed sacrament, what we used to call the real presence up front.
* At communion time when we jockey for position to find the extraordinary minister with bread first, then the one with wine If we take wine, in each case going up to face someone who wants to engage you when you may be seeking communion of a more spiritual kind.
* The music, sometimes piano-banging, blasts away in a sort of holy vaudeville performance, one catchy tune after another.
* The sentimental lyrics with their dreary melodies threaten to stay with you like a radio commercial.
On the other hand:
Done well, the fist-bump — handshake or hug or what suits you — can be a good thing, and one can usually manage it well enough. After all, we mass-goers are a well-meaning lot and usually more than that. A moment of sincere welcome needn’t disrupt a sacred moment. The overly demonstrative can be put off with a bit of uber-solemnity. One and done is my motto here, except on family or ceremonial occasions such as a class-reunion or wedding mass.
After-mass chatting bespeaks love and even liking of one another. It’s a good thing, and with the weather so cold outside (in, say February) is making the best of a bad situation. Also, if you are serious about some after-mass contemplation or woolgathering, people usually leave you alone.
Communion time is manageable. You keep your head down, avoiding eye contact with the dispenser of communion. Sticking out your tongue, eyes closed, is a bit clumsy while standing. Some churches offer the choice (a rail and kneel space), but most don’t. Take the host and run is my motto here.
Music can be ignored along with other distractions, once you embrace your freedom as a Christian. It may call for making up your mind to ignore many sights and sounds, including what the priest says and does; he has a key role but needn’t be allowed to distract.
After a while, you spontaneously supply your own distractions, say by reading the New Testament or a missal of the olden times — anything to keep you in the spirit of worship. Then you maybe can relax and above all learn to love, even like, your fellow worshipers and the relevant ministers, they being sin-filled pilgrims like you and Pope Francis.
This work-around does not address the concerns of the man quoted above. God bless him. He makes good points, is probably right. But sometimes what he says is best kept as background data while you make do.
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Ten Things You Miss by Going to the Traditional Latin Mass, in which the Liturgy Guy has it all . . .July 30, 2022
19th Century Rediscoveries: The Mass as Experience Not a lecture, not even a prayer meeting. Being moved by the Spirit December 6, 2018
The bishop who lost his way: Tuscany in the 1780s December 4, 2018
Weekday Mass, where the worship is peaceful, quiet, and fruitful: [Linked no where, written probably in 2016 for Crux newspaper when it was a Boston Globe product by well-known radio host Margery Eagan]
My mother, a musician, struggled to endure the off-key singers who led hymns, unfortunately for us all, at Sunday Mass in my hometown parish.
So sometimes she’d sneak out of Mass early Sunday and during the week take me to daily Mass instead. No off-key singing there. No singing at all, actually. There was quiet, peacefulness, intimacy among the 20 or 30 communicants.
The lights were dim, the sermons short and to the point. “The apostle picked up his cross and followed Him,” the priest began one sermon I remember, then paused, then ended it: “Would that we would do the same.”
Sundays?
Barely a half-hour long, daily Mass felt to me mysterious and holy and sacred in a way a very busy Sunday Mass, with its ups and downs and all arounds, could not. All these years later, I still prefer it.
Try it, I tell lapsed Catholic friends who complain of no inspiration on Sundays.
It could change everything.
Deliver the body. Show up.
Eagan, continued:
I’ve tried daily Mass at St. Anthony’s Shrine in downtown Boston, seven lightning-fast Masses per day for business people on lunch hours, off-duty cops and firefighters, schoolteachers and bankers on their way to or from South Station’s buses and trains. Sometimes I’d see well-known locals, rich and powerful or politically wired, slip in and out of pews.
A gay-friendly church. Eagan, continued:
For years, I went to daily Mass near my office at the now-closed Immaculate Conception Church in Boston’s South End, then the heart of the city’s gay community. AIDS was still a killer, but this church welcomed hundreds of gays and lesbians unwelcome elsewhere. During November, a memorial table held pictures, draped in purple, of the very young men of the parish dead of the ravaging disease.
She moved along.
. . . to chapels at Boston College and eventually knew the regulars by sight, if not by name, the same crew day after day.
The alcoholics in recovery. Mass became their AA meeting. The pregnant women turned mothers with infants, then toddlers, then five- and six-year-olds in tow. The BC students and professors, the frail old ladies and men, the chaplain who, during the prayer of the faithful, would list his dying patients. Richard, Barbara, Gregory. “May God draw them closer, let us pray to the Lord.”
“Lord, hear our prayer,” we’d all reply.
There was the big, broad football star turned big, broad, middle-aged contractor. In his work boots and lumberman’s jacket, Francis would offer the same prayer: “In thanksgiving for innumerable blessings, for all those who need relief in suffering, and for perseverance in fervent daily prayer, we pray to the Lord.”
“Lord, hear our prayer.”
Saints in heaven.
On the day in 1999 when John Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn Bessette were killed in Kennedy’s airplane, I spoke to Francis about it after Mass by his pick-up. He was surprisingly upbeat. “Another two saints in heaven,” he said.
Years later, when he’d been missing from Mass, the woman who led the post-Mass rosary told me he was sick. Not long after that, his picture appeared on the chapel bulletin board. He was still young and strong, running down the field in his football uniform. The picture was from the cover of his funeral program. Francis was now another saint in heaven himself.
The fictional smoker, drinker, “morally challenged.”
The writer Andre Dubus, in his haunting short fiction, “A Father’s Story,” describes the intense attachment to early morning Mass of his protagonist, Luke Ripley. Ripley’s a smoker, a drinker, a man’s man, divorced and morally challenged, as it turns out, which makes him so relatable.
“Do not think of me as a spiritual man whose every thought during those twenty- five minutes (at Mass) is at one with the words of the Mass. Each morning I try, each morning I fail,” Ripley tells readers through Dubus. “I can receive, though: the Eucharist, and also, at Mass and at other times, moments and even minutes of contemplation.”
All this receiving teaches Ripley both the necessity and wonder of his morning ritual, Dubus writes, which “allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.”
As I say, show up.
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Musing: How to fix the mass 2016 February 10, 2019
Idea for introducing yourself to one sitting next you at church before Sunday mass . . .February 24, 2019
Father Dick told mass-goers it was over, Jake wondered what was over May 24, 2019
— More to come about