In the year 2000 of the era of fewer priests and lower Mass attendance -- roping off back pews, mystery dissolving, belief on the chopping block . . .

Vatican II's People of God, following orders . . .

(Posted 6/6/2000) Is the two-mass Sunday schedule related to diminishing numbers among priests? Is the change a one-timer, or are we headed for one-mass Sundays in our cathedral-class Gothic church with the big oak doors? [The latter, as the world turned. ]

A certain kind of person is reminded of magazines and newspapers faced with declining circulation, whose editors remake the publication only to find the changes alienate regulars and attract too few new readers. Tricky business.

One is also reminded of earlier efforts at bringing the body religious into new realms. In the tragicomic vein, there’s the recent roping off of back pews (by a previous pastor, later a bishop) in this very church, with a view to getting us Catholics to sit up front and close to each other, not at comfortable distances, though close enough to exchange handclasp of peace at the appointed time.

There were the lines of yellow police tape one Sunday, silently telling us to move up front, as if plaster was going to fall soon on the prohibited pews. Yes, dear reader, in due time someone tore the tape and moved into the forbidden territory. This is rebellion, dear reader, the sort to be cherished years after the fact, as at class reunions.

More seriously (and successfully) was the all-church changeover from Latin to English after Vatican Council II. Was this centralized planning or not? Enough to make a statist weep with envy. The world over, Catholics got used to mass in everyday language. It became part of the worldwide social engineering taking place, change by design, not by natural influences — not “organically,” as Pope Benedict XVIII would have it.

Vatican II celebrated the freedom of the children of God, but not in liturgy. Latin had to go. Latin went. Rebels were marginalized. Only recently has Latin returned with church authority’s blessings.

So it goes, change dictated from above for our own good by people who know what’s best. My friend M., in his last year before ordination as a holy Jesuit, complained. He had enough trouble believing in the mass in Latin, he said. Now the mystery would be severely lessened. He was not happy.

This from a Catholic-school-educated fellow, including Jesuit high school and college in the 1950s, a straight-arrow fellow from an Irish Catholic Chicago neighborhood. who swallowed hard and went on to be ordained — later to fall by priestly wayside, get married: the full catastrophe, as Zorba said.

M.’s problems sound strange to today’s 27-year-old who learned her Catholicism in our parish - the part about the mass being hard to believe in. But friend M. had much more to believe about the mass than she does today, when it’s essentially a church-sponsored, Scripture-referenced celebration of unity with each other. He had to believe in transubstantiation - who now says the word? The bread and wine became the body and blood of Jesus in substance, while accidents (of breadness, etc.) remained.

The priest held the host (bread) and believed he held the body of Christ. Some few could hardly do it and would stutter at the “words of consecration,” barely able to say them. A whole new mass developed after Vatican II, was developed quite consciously. We young Jesuits debated it in the mid-50s, looking ahead. This liturgy of the future, vernacularized, would be as much communicating with people as with God. The priest would face the people, look at them, saying the words, making them more pew-sitter-friendly.

My friend M. saw the mystery dissolving away, and with it his belief. This has happened. Mass is now something else - arguably a very good thing, in which we celebrate unity with each other. As for the mystical and mysterious, that’s a happy memory, fast fading from Catholic consciousness.