Category: Liturgy and Music

We did.

Like Mark Shea is always saying, we have the shepherds we want.

Let me paint a picture for you. We’ll keep it in the attic and the image will age and decay over time while the actual subject of the painting never seems to age. Sound familiar? I’m not talking about Oscar Wild’s Dorian Gray or Ted Kennedy’s liver, I’m talking about sacred liturgy in this country post-Vatican II.

Dress the Mass up in the faux-glitz of OCP toonz and the sacred becomes mundane. Instead of being comported for communion with Our Lord we are prepared for an encounter with subjective sentimentality, shlock, and shmaltz. It’s one thing when people experience the Mass this way because they don’t know any better. It’s another entirely when the priest approaches the Mass in this way.

I went to Mass yesterday at a parish I don’t normally attend. The church was jammed – standing room only with people packed into the narthex. When we got the homily the priest began, “I was a little worried about getting a seat in here the place is so crowded, but I have this nice green chair up here on the altar. I thought it had a slot I could put a quarter in to make a vibrator.”

I’m not making this up. I wish I were.

A piece in today’s WSJ (subscribers only) looks at the popularity of funerary eulogies and mentions the new regulation in Newark:

Religious leaders are looking for ways to make eulogies more appropriate and to give verbose eulogists the hook. (A minister’s consoling hand on a eulogist’s shoulder really means, “Enough.”) Earlier this year, Roman Catholic Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark, N.J., caused a furor by decreeing that eulogies don’t belong at a funeral Mass. Too many eulogies are more about “how grandpa was a great pool player,” without any mention of religious significance, says the archbishop’s spokesman, Jim Goodness.
Archbishop Myers would prefer that “words of remembrance” be given at funeral homes or gravesites, but says priests may consider allowing brief comments before Mass begins. His decree, which went into effect July 1, has already sharply reduced church eulogies among the 1.3 million Catholics in the area. Other dioceses are fine-tuning their own eulogy guidelines.
Understandably, many mourners argue that eulogies are the most meaningful part of a service.

In some funeral services, that may be so, but when the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the setting, the context in which a funeral takes place, Christ speaks — and has already spoken — His word about the value of the departed one.
Sometimes the efforts of a eulogist can backfire:

Even noncontroversial eulogies can be problematic. [One funeral director] recalls a funeral in which eulogist after eulogist said glowing things about the man who died, leading an exasperated audience [sic] member to stand up and say, “Let’s stop joking. He was a no-good S.O.B.!” The room went silent, and the priest quickly concluded the Requiem Mass.

Does your parish only seat 150 people?
Does everyone seem to know everyone by name?
Is everyone in approximately the same age group?
Is everything sung as though it’s the last selection before Christ returns in glory?
Does the congregation burst into memorized songs during Communion?
Does everyone pal-around before Mass and linger afterwards?
Does just about everyone participate in some form of ministry involving the general operation of the parish?
If you answered yes to more than one of the questions above, you probably attend a Boutique Parish.
A music director I know recently went to a Mass at St. Boutique’s. She enthusiastically told me about it: everyone sang the roof off, everyone memorized the words, people were very friendly, it was so inspiring…
The boutique experience is great, but there’s a problem:

The Collect for the Solemnity today is an impressively inverted piece of Latin. Anybody want to help me parse it?

Deus, qui huius diei venerandam sanctamque laetitiam in apostolorum Petri et Pauli sollemnitate tribuisti, da Ecclesiae tuae eorum in omnibus sequi praeceptum, per quos religionis sumpsit exordium.

The petition is pretty straightforward:”grant to thy Church to follow their teaching in all things, by whom (She) took up the beginning (i.e., the introduction) of religion.”
The tough part is the first long clause (up to tribuisti). I’m not really confident about venerandam — does it modify laetitiam along with sanctam? What does venerandam laetitiam mean? And where does the genitive huius diei fit in?

Now, this liturgical dance I like!