Should ‘all experimentation’ cease?

Is liturgy a static thing? Is it frozen in time?
Is hospitality part of a celebrant’s role?
An incident prompts Peter Murnane 
to ask some basic questions.

This year at Holy Thursday Mass, for the first time in forty years as a priest, I chose not to take part as a co-celebrant at the altar but instead received Communion among the congregation. It was a painful decision, on the day when we remember Jesus first giving us himself in Eucharist, but was prompted by recent attempts to control how our community celebrates this gift. As I saw it, the power given to priests had been misused, and I did not want even to seem to be part of the structure doing this.

For some years our parish custom has been to giver Holy Communion to the congregation BEFORE the celebrant and other ministers. This practice - practised widely in this country and overseas - echoes our cultural practice of hostess or host serving guests before they sit down themselves. It obeys what Jesus taught us to do at the Last Supper, to put others first. (Lk 22:24-27; cf Mk 10:42-45)

People often complimented us for making this simple change. But just before Holy Thursday this year, without any consultation of the community, it was suddenly stopped.

Someone had written a letter to the bishop, their complaint based on the 2004 document Redemptionis Sacramentum from the Congregation for Divine Worship. That Instruction presumes to take central control of every aspect of the way Roman Rite Catholics worship God in hundreds of different cultures.

A flawed concept:

Astonishingly it declares:

“As early as the year 1970, the apostolic see announced the cessation of all experimentation. Accordingly, individual bishops and their conferences do not have the faculty to permit experimentation with liturgical texts or the other matters...” (27) 

The document promotes a static liturgy, but the concept is flawed:

First because it asks the impossible, commanding humans to behave with unvarying, mechanical sameness. Experimentation and creative innovation are intrinsic to human life. We humans creatively produce diversity in language, art and even law, which originates in human custom.

 Secondly the document is flawed because the Congregation’s absolute statement tramples on important principles taught by Vatican II. Surely the teachings of a General Council, endorsed by subsequent popes, outweighs the claims of a Roman Congregation?

 Some principles which Redemptionis Sacramentum flouts are:

The Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931) called this a “most weighty principle in social philosophy.. It is an injustice... a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.” (79)

 Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus (1991) repeated: “A community of a higher order should not interfere in the life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions... [100]

 Perhaps most important of all:

“The well-being of society requires absolutely that individuals and groups be free to exercise initiative.” The role of authority is essentially positive, “not to create difficulties or to suppress, [though sometimes it is necessary to correct]. (Pastoral Instruction on Media, 1971, 85-86)

The danger of tyranny

Persons wielding power and authority always face the temptation to abuse it. When this power is linked to the Sacred, the temptation is the more dangerous. But we who have to obey authority are also tempted: to accept passively what it tells us to do. Part of the burden of our freedom is that we are called to use our conscience to examine how power is being used in our midst, even while we co-operate with it to build up of the community.

We cannot afford to forget the terrible dictatorships that have terrorized our era. They could only arise when they had brought about a culture of fear, subservience and the “informer mentality”. Dictatorships feed on fear; particularly the fear that informers will report you to Authority. Difficult as it is to believe, this Christian document, Redemptionis Sacramentum tries to bind “each and every one” with the “most serious duty” of informing on their fellow Christians! On what should they inform?

The list is interesting: “any and every irreverence or distortion” and all “abuses”. In making every mass-goer a potential informer, Cardinal Arinze (who authorised this document) lumps together the heinous “sin” of “distortion” - which apparently includes rubric-altering - with the worst possible sacrilege. (183)

It was such an “informer” who precipitated our local crisis, complaining in a letter to the bishop about how we receive Communion. Under the influence of Redemptionis Sacramentum hasty decisions were made. Authority was appealed to and drastic change was announced without consulting the people who are the parish. It was to protest against this that on Holy Thursday I stood among the congregation, rather than at the altar as priest co-celebrant.

Many deeply were deeply hurt by what seemed like dictates dissolving the earlier decisions of pastors and liturgy groups; and some stayed away from our Easter liturgy. The sorry event highlights the way that our church’s over-centralised authority structures can push people to make quite flawed decisions.

Thankfully, through later consultation, solutions are being worked out. Every crisis is an opportunity.

The conflict that wounded our parish during Holy Week was also an opening to display and evaluate the flaws embedded in our church’s current structures.

Is it mature, adult behaviour to want world-wide sameness in rubrics? Or zealously to inform on those who do not conform in every detail to such an artificial norm for liturgy? Would Jesus, who came promising “life to the full” (Jn 10:10), expect from us total uniformity of word and action in our public prayer, or reasonable flexibility?

Consultation and interpretation

We have made some progress. Forty years ago consultation was much less common and priests and bishops used power more despotically than now. Even today, although a pastor might consult the parish he knows that Canon Law gives him power of veto over Parish Councils. Does this imbalance of structure need to be changed before we can live more accurately Jesus’ words: “The greatest among you must behave as if... the youngest; the leader as if ...the one who serves”? (Luke 22:26)

Our local parish disagreements are trivial when compared to the trials of people in the Majority World: lifelong hunger, suffering and premature death. But our incident exposes the vital question: is Redemptionis Sacramentum faithful to what Vatican II taught about the Church: that we are a community, all joined in Christ?

This demands that we find the courage to talk openly in the parish community and to bishops about what each sector needs. When our conscience detects manipulation or bullying we are called to exercise loyal dissent as Paul criticised Peter (Gal 2:10)

We need to study the history of liturgy and the theology underlying Magisterium, while showing “in all things, charity”, as Pope John XXIII said echoing St Paul.

But four decades after his death we may well wonder about the condition of the windows in the Vatican and our own houses: how shall we get the strength to open them as far as we need?

Peter Murnane OP is a member of the Dominican Preaching Team working out of Auckland.

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