Have decided I’d make a terrible Protestant. It’s that I can’t stand sermons and I don’t sing. As for the latter, look, I’m the guy who, discovered by the St. Catherine of Siena choirmaster in the ‘40s to be the sour note that was ruining his rehearsal, was told to stop singing.
Our #1 son has perfect pitch, the Beye School music teacher told us many years ago, but I don’t. Fellow Jesuit Tom Walsh in the early days of our training, hearing me sing something, played the note (singular) back on the piano.
So I’m no Caruso. As for sermons, well I am a recovering preacher — doing quite well, thank you, not a word for 50 years — and so make a bad audience in the best of liturgical seasons.
What’s more, I write and edit, and so find myself re-saying what I hear, bridling at neologism, redundancy, and inept metaphor, and believe me, it’s distracting.
It doesn’t help that I have a conviction, born largely of my newspaper days, that your mother has to be checked out when she says she loves you, that even out and out editorializing has to be argument-based. “Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur” — blandly stated is blandly denied.
Now having heard more than a few Protestant sermons in my years, I might be brought back to the listener’s role. They are generally better prepared than Catholics, in long and short run, and I have found myself sitting still for sermons in their churches.
Same might go for Jesuit preachers. As my Loyola-Wilmette rector Mike English used to say, “Our mediocre sermons are better than their mediocre sermons,” referring to the nearby Holy Cross at Notre Dame for Boys.
Either way, I am of course committed to my Roman Catholicism, emphasis on Roman, the world-class religious organization that with all its faults I still love if not (always) cherish and obey.
And if mediocre preaching is one of the faults, another of its habits makes up for that, namely its Holy Sacrifice.
That’s the mass as understood in my youth, not as currently, a meal, with deemphasis of the grand and the mystical in favor of the homey and familiar. Who needs it? We get homey and familiar all the time, don’t we?
That mass, celebrated “through out the world,” as the old Morning Offering has it, is quite the dramatic thing, when you get down to it. There I am in a back pew, anonymous as I can make myself, part of a worldwide event. Not bad for a onetime preacher.