If Mass going and Eucharist ceases to be important for most people... (Main Forum)

The things Jerome wrote prompted this...

Until I was fifteen I went to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day. My mother used tell anyone willing to listen that she always took me to Mass from the first Sunday after she came home from hospital with me and that I never mucked up once. On the strength of that I expect they are just waiting for me to die to open my cause for canonisation.

Whether I mucked up or not I did go to Mass regularly because it was a mortal sin to miss.
Once I became an altar boy aged about nine I went even more often and at the urging of the brothers I did the Nine First Fridays year after year. While I have not done the Nine First Fridays lately I presume the ones I did every year until I was thirty two must be recorded somewhere in heaven and surely the promise will be honoured when I die, that is that I will be rescued from Purgatory on the first Friday after my death. As I also did the Nine First Saturdays for seventeen years I expect that if I die on a Friday night I will be rescued from Purgatory promptly the next morning rather than waiting for a Friday.

I cannot remember when I first heard the word liturgy. I expect it was in 1960 when I was a child in the Brothers’ juniorate. Before that there were only the Mass, or the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, or the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and there was Benediction which wasn’t the Mass we were often reminded, though it was nearly always more interesting because we took part by singing and there were flowers, candles and incense.

Benediction took place every Friday for all the Catholic school kids in our country town parish and also on Wednesday and Sunday evenings and s part of the Novena of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour on Saturday nights. The Friday at midday school kids’ version was preceded by a talk from one of the four priests in our parish, all Irishmen. I cannot remember one thing they said in my eleven years there but I can remember benediction and the occasional event like the day one of the altar boys caught fire trying to light the tall candles while his unwatched surplice sleeve dangled into the low lighted candles. He was quickly put out and order was restored. Another time Sister Loyola had piled vase after vase filled with gladioli on every available flat space on the altar (it must have been a BIG feast day) and someone didn’t close the sacristy door properly and a gust of wind brought the whole lot cascading onto the sanctuary.

When old Catholics like me talk about ‘the good old days’ I think this is what they mean and they are right. Nothing like that happens now and more is the pity. It kept us awake.

Mass though well attended was pretty awful. We were always being told “It’s the Mass that matters” and threatened with eternal punishment if we didn’t go but it was not very exciting when you got there. When I was fourteen it picked up a bit because I could watch some of the convent girls coming back from communion but that wasn’t enough to make the whole thing work.

And the Mass was often badly said. Some priests were good at Latin pronunciation and had clear voices and if you were not asleep you could hear them even if you could not follow them. Some priests were simply atrocious. Father O’Whatsis from the nearby parish used turn up at our church now and then. He said Mass in eleven minutes in his high whining voice. He’d spin around and screech “Domernis verbiskeeeerm” and by the time the altar boy tried to answer he’d be several prayers away.

Of course, Mass being in Latin and almost all silent most people there either read it in their missals or said the rosary or read from other prayer books like The Garden of the Soul or The Perpetual Novena to St Philomena. There would be the mumble of the priest up the front and the Psssssssp, psssssssp of the old ladies saying their rosary with the occasional simple soul who could not read silently reading his or her prayers out nearly loud.

About 1966 guitar hymns came in. Most religion teachers my age can still play a few chords on the guitar from then when we taught the kids the latest hymns. Some of these hymns gave banality a bad name. They were much, much worse than banal: rubbish like ‘Sons of God hear his holy word’, ‘When will I ever be me?’ and ‘Joy is like the rain.’

But they were no worse than many of the hymns we were made to sing in the 1940s and 1950s: wretched things like ‘Bring flowers of the fairest’, ‘Oh mother I could weep for mirth’, ‘Daily daily sing to Mary’, ‘Sweet sacrament Divine’, ‘Mother of Perpetual Succour with your eyes so sadly sweet’, ‘Pure as Carmel’s snows and lovely’, and ‘Oh purest of creatures’.

‘Faith of our fathers’ was awful too, not so much a hymn as a football song that pretended we were all Irish and would be happy if England was beaten at everything forever. There was also ‘Hail glorious St Patrick dear saint of our isle’ sung by us children as if we were in Erin’s green valleys instead of where we really were, on the drought ridden leeward slopes of Australia’s Great Dividing Range.

Some of you might think I am going on a bit. And maybe I am. I am doing it because some people want us to believe that once upon a time before the Vatican Council we had good liturgy in Australia and it simply is not true.

We did have good liturgy for a few years, in a few places, if you were enormously lucky. But it didn’t begin until about 1960. And as I said you had to be lucky.

I was. Aged fifteen I came to the Christian Brothers’ Training College at Strathfield and there between musicians like Colin Smith, and hymn writers like James McAuley, Richard Connolly, Joseph Gelineau and others and good liturgists like Ron Hyne, Cornelius Van Der Geist, Neil Collins and others and the Living Parish Group and the Society of St Pius X (amazing to think that a group of real radicals would call themselves that!) I got to the stage where I used look forward to Sunday Mass, or Sunday Eucharists as we were beginning to call it by then.

Why did I want to go to Mass?

Because we were learning good music, we were all involved in good singing that we could reach with our voices and because it was all good theology or good scripture, the psalms especially. And because the priests prepared their homilies and they were based on the readings of the day and I went away feeling I had learnt something or been encouraged to live a better Christian life or something like that. I felt I was becoming a Catholic adult in an adult Church.

It wasn’t only the Christian Brothers obviously. I wasn’t in any of the other places but as I got older I ran into many Catholics who had had a similar experience somewhere; it was happening in pockets across Australia.

Meanwhile bad liturgy carried on apace.

Why? Because some priests no matter what they are supposed to be doing are not good at liturgy. Some could be better if they involved their parish and used their talents but some of the men who are not good at liturgy are also threatened by people who are talented.

I think the main skill in leadership is being able to make use of the talent you have available and poor leaders are in a double bind, they can’t do it themselves and they can’t ask.

Some bad liturgy was because some people were beyond change. Men who had survived in the old system couldn’t survive in the new. It came too late or it destroyed what they had learnt. Some people jus resisted. There were usually parishes that accommodated them and they gradually died out. That always happens around major change.

AND society changed.

This is the major variable in all this. The world that 1950s Catholicism thrived in or made do in simply vanished. It’s all over Red Rover. There are so many things that changed in the Church and so many things that changed in Australian society.

The main theological change I’d guess (Someone out there will argue with this) is that most of us no longer believe in a God who demands sacrifice of us and so the Mass is now the Eucharist for most of us and is not the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Another major change is that for many of us the theology of ministry has changed.

This needs unwrapping but I suspect many of us do not think of priesthood as the best model because priests are about sacrifice rather than Eucharistic Ministry (again some will argue with this).

Enough from me!

I think we need a thorough going discussion of Eucharist and liturgy. I am glad this discussion began. Thanks all. I look forward to what you have to say.