Semana Santa en Sevilla


I knew I was not in America anymore when on the night before Palm Sunday we walked into a bar in Moron de la Frontera. The bar belonged to the Confraternity of Loreto, and the men and their sons were all abuzz, for the next day would begin once again the most famous celebration annual celebration of Holy Week: Semana Santa in Seville. The men were comparing the knots that had developed on the backside of their necks after years of carrying floats called pasos in these celebrations. And the young boys looked up to their fathers and the day that they too would carry in their bodies the sign of the Passion they celebrate in such a sumptuous manner.

Two Americans, Fr Luke Melcher of Louisiana, and I, went to visit our friend Don Pedro, who is Chaplain to the American Air Force Base in Moron as well as pastor of two parishes outside of Seville. This Palm Sunday morning I celebrated the Mass in the parish of Moron for the community there, and after Mass we began the great adventure Semana Santa in Seville.

I had heard of the world-famous celebrations of Holy Week before. I had seen the pictures on the Internet and Youtube videos. But nothing would prepare me for what really is the largest Catholic block party in the world. Of course, before we could begin, we had to have lunch in the one of the chic quarters of cosmopolitan Seville and plan out our day.

Good thing there is a IPhone App for Semana Santa in Seville. But we also had the ABC Newspaper’s several sheet spread timetable to choose which processions we would follow. As we drove into the city, we were listening to the ESPN of Religion, a running commentary on the radio of every moment of every procession. Of course, having as our guide one of the most well-connected young priests in Spain was like having an all-access pass to be up close and personal with this amazing religious event.

In the early afternoon, we were able to work our way to the area around the famous Cathedral with its imposing belltower, the Giralda. To say that it was crowded does not begin to describe it. But on this incredibly hot afternoon, what struck me was how everyone was dressed. Nowhere in all of my travels through the Americas and Europe have I ever seen such a large number of snazzily and preppily dressed people. I don’t know if the indomitable blogger of the Sartorialist has ever been to Semana Santa, but he has no idea what he is missing!

Every procession follows a similar pattern. The first float depicts a mystery during the events of the Passion. The statue compositions rest upon wooden or silver and gold tables and often weigh up to two tons. Beneath them are from 36 to 56 men who carry the float. Each float has an elaborately carved knocker. A precentor uses the knocker to give instructions to the litter-bearers, who are hidden beneath the float by richly embroidered velvet cloths. Water boys occasionally steal under the floats to bring these men something to hydrate them. The famous penitents, in their distinctive robes and hoods, process in full anonymity. Behind the float depicting the mystery of Christ is a band, always playing a hymn in a minor key. Not far behind are more penitents. Many carry silver staffs, crosses, or the Rule of the Confraternity that sponsors that procession, often a book itself encased in silver.

Each procession also has another float with a statue of the Blessed Virgin, under a canopy, often of fine silver filigree work. Each canopy as eight or ten poles, and tassels of precious metal. Around the Blessed Virgin is a forest of candles as well as wax flowers as well as real flowers. The interesting thing about these floats is that everything is in motion. While the candlesticks, poles, and vases are all attached, they are attached in such a way that the entire float moves graciously and there is a peculiar sound of metal in perpetual motion. Acolytes with crucifix and torches are vested in dalmatics of velvet and couched gold embroidery over handmade lace albs, and are accompanied by several thurifers with so many charcoals in their censers I still do not know they did not melt every thurible in Andalucia. Following the Marian float would be another band, playing lively music in a major key.

The music for the procession that the bands use dates mostly from the 19th century, and not a small portion of it sounds suspiciously Puccini-inspired. Occasionally from a balcony a Spanish VIP with a stentorian voice would intone a saeta, a haunting Arabic-sounding serenade to the Blessed Virgin.

While this is the general procedure for a procession, it is important to understand that at any given time, day or night, for an entire week, there are several elaborate processions going on at the same time. As Our Lord of Victories, triumphant in his resignation to the chalice of suffering was making His way in front of us, behind us He was also marching triumphantly into Jerusalem as two processions skirted opposite ends of the plaza.

One of the most edifying things was the comportment of the faithful. Extraordinarily well-dressed young men and women climbed on top of anything that could give them a better view and kept a reverent silence when the floats passed, and the Sign of the Cross was reverently made. In some of the processions, those who processed walk backwards as a sign of reverence to Our LORD and Our Lady.

After several hours of watching processions under the blazing Andalucian sun, we stopped into Starbucks (America, America everywhere) for cold Frapuccinos. By this point, around 9pm, I was ready for a liter of sangria and bed. But the night had just begun.

We went to the Cathedral where the Confraternity that Don Pedro’s family has belonged to since time immemorial, La Estrella (Stella Maris), was beginning its procession. He was avidly looking for his brother, but how do you find your brother when he is dressed in a robe and a hood along with thousands upon thousands of other penitents? But they did find each other, and so Fr Luke and I gazed upon the delightful scene of two brothers, one a priest and the other penitent, chatting in the nave of the Cathedral, one shrouded in anonymity and the other in his clerics, taking part in a ritual that existed centuries before Christopher Columbus, who awaits the Resurrection of the Body in the Cathedral of Seville, ever thought of a voyage of discovery.

We spent several hours in the Cathedral, working our way through the endless files of people in procession. The Archbishop of Seville and his Auxiliary were seated in a makeshift throne room in a side chapel where we were granted a brief but warm audience. But one of the most emotional scenes of the day was when the Archbishop rushed to one of the floats, and went under it and knelt before the men who carried it. With those poor men who had been carrying the float through the streets of Seville for hours he prayed. He asked them to pray with him for vocations to the priesthood, for holy priests to shepherd the flock of Christ. He prayed for World Youth Day, for young people. He begged their prayers and prayed with them. Fortified by the blessing of their shepherd, at the sound of the knocker, the men in unison jumped as high as they could in the air and the procession began once again.

The greatest honour of the day was to accompany this procession through the streets of Seville, rather than being mere spectators. We saw so many tears of gratitude, prayer, and repentance. We saw so many acts of kindness to the penitents and the float-bearers. And what an edifying thing to see among the hooded throngs barefoot children walking through the streets with candles taller than they were, all meditating in their own way on the Passion of Christ.

It was quite the introduction to Holy Week. It is now after 3am. The streets of Seville are still thronged with worshippers, and they are still at it. They are predicting rain this week, but as absolutely exhausted as I am (and I can only imagine those who carried the floats or walked barefoot through the streets in procession), I am praying ad repellendam tempestates. I do not want to miss a minute of this extraordinarily Catholic manifestation of faith.

As one float passed by of Christ silent before the unjust judgment of Pilate, I was moved to pray for the Church, for her priests, for those who have been abused, for those who have been accused falsely, for all of those who do not have a voice. Somehow the prayer that comes from meditation over a scene like that seems so much useful than the angry words, political machinations and ideological battles which ruin our lives in society and the Church.

Something like Semana Santa is not strictly liturgical. It does not correspond to historical-critical interpretations of Scripture. It is impervious to the politically correct mindset of those who would force reforms on the Church hardly consonant with Catholic tradition. It is folkloric, but it is not pagan. It is a massive movement of humanity in dialogue with the power of the narrative of the Passion of Christ. A movement which brings tears to the eyes, which are tears of joy, repentance, fatigue, and wonder.

The world needs Semana Santa. The world needs Semana Santa because in Seville at least, people recognize their own fragility and limitations in a dramatic way. But they recognize even more that there is Victory in the Blood of Jesus, and they call down the power of that Blood upon them and the whole world in prayer, penance and works of mercy. I can hardly think of a better way to live Holy Week than that.

Check out my PicasaWeb Album of Semana Santa pictures I will be updating ALL WEEK LONG!

The Liturgical Formation of Theologians

I was in high school when I first read Vittorio Messori’s The Ratzinger Report, a book-long interview with the then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In this book I was presented for the first time with the one of the premier intellectuals of our age. And what struck me the most was how obviously Ratzinger was a man of the Church and a man of prayer, and none of that stopped him from being a rigorous scientific thinker. I thought to myself, “I want to be like him when I grow up,” and a love affair with theology began.

There are many young men and women of my generation who were born and raised under the pontificate of John Paul II, but feel very akin to Benedict XVI. I know many young fathers whose love of theology, sparked by reading something Ratzinger wrote once and probably forgot about, has led them to do night classes and online courses in theology while raising families and putting food on the table. It is now officially “cool” to be a dogmatic theologian, and Generations X and Y are working their way to becoming the theologians of the future.

The life of these young theologians, however, is not what you think it might be. Many inspired to study theology have entered undergraduate or graduate programs in theology. Their lives are spent in classrooms and libraries, they live and breathe theology. But something is missing. The self-described orthodox among them are keen on getting the doctrine right and serving the Church in fidelity to the Magisterium. And so they slough through years of lectures, papers, exams and theses. If they can even consider an entry-level job as a professor, they then enter the rat race for tenure, the pressure to publish, and they are imprisoned in the ivory tower of academia. They look around them years later and then wonder what happened to their dreams to serve Jesus Christ and His Kingdom on Earth.

Many of them look for faculties with recognized names and faculty. Not a few of them even choose to go to non-Catholic faculties of theology where brilliant Catholic scholars can mentor them. They fully agree with John Paul II that they have to do theology on their knees, but what that means is usually praying to keep their head above water in the topsy turvy lifestyle they have chosen. They are faithful Catholics, and many of them carve out of their busy schedule time for Sunday Mass in their local parish. The parish with the bad preaching, happy-clappy hymns, and, banal language.

Formed as theologians in this type of environment, working as theologians in this type of environment, will inevitably take its toll. It is very easy to see theology as an independent science, a matter of thinking independently about religious matters so that we may enlighten others as to what has come to mind. It becomes an individual quest. And it becomes detached from the lived communion of the Church, and from the founts which inform theological reflection: ecclesial life and prayer.

Theology becomes an academic discipline in a rarified university setting where its practitioners occasionally emerge to go to Mass and a parish social function. Is this what is meant by the “ecclesial vocation of the theologian” who learns his craft “on his knees”?

The doctrine which is the sine qua non of dogmatic and moral theology is more than creedal statements of the Magisterium. The teaching of Christ is celebrated in the liturgical experience of the Church. A theologian will approach the mystery of faith only as well as he has encountered the mystery through the sacred liturgy.

The document Ex corde ecclesiae is important not because it establishes a minimum of Catholic identity by way of imposing certain prohibitions on university life: we don’t do plays about body parts that talk, we don’t think that latex will save the world, we don’t allow teachers to say like the fool that there is no God. The document is important because it re-establishes contact between the search for Truth and the Truth who is grasped most fully through the Church at Prayer. For the theologian to be worthy of the doctrine he plumbs, he must be able to say Domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum and understand as much as he can about why that phrase is so important.

The Catholic educational world must be suffused with the spirit of the liturgy if it is to produce seekers of wisdom and if its theology is to be authentic.

It is not surprising that in Pope Benedict’s theology, we are always bumping up against the liturgy. He could do theology by a rigorous examination of the statements of the Creed in the light of all of the human sciences. But for him, theology flows from the encounter with Christ in prayer, which is both liturgical-communal-ecclesial, as well as private-individual-contemplative.

This is why the experience our theologians have of the liturgy will inevitably shape the way they explore the words they pray every Sunday in the Creed which makes theology possible. The weekly experience of trite man-made counterfeits for liturgy will weigh heavily in their thought.

But what if students and professors of theology participated fully and actively every day in a sung liturgy? What if their reflection on the Incarnation naturally began, not from the latest book written by a PhD on Christology, but from the Introit Dominus dixit ad me from the Midnight Mass of Christmas that rang in their ears and the homilies of the Fathers in the Breviary?

Christendom College, where I began to study theology, was a place like this. Every First Friday the college community gathered in the chapel for a Holy Hour and Nocturnal Adoration. And most of that time, we sang St Thomas Aquinas’ Prayer, O Sacred Feast, according to the peaceful and beautiful setting of Healy Willan. Doing that year in and year out, the prayer and its music are etched in my memory. If I ever stop to think about the Eucharist, the soundtrack of that song, the memory of our worship of the Sacrament, is in my mind. It does not take away from the conceptual theological rigour with which I must think about the Eucharist. But would I think about the Eucharist in the same way if all I had ever heard was a praise band singing Our God is an Awesome God?

The liturgy of the Church, particularly the Propers and the Orations of the Mass, are an inexhaustible source of inspiration for prayer and theology. When they are omitted, substituted, or badly translated and expressed, they are emptied of their power to form our minds as well as our souls. The Gregorian chant which is the Church’s own gift to mankind, word made music, must be as an integral part of the life of the theologian as it is of the choirmaster. The Graduale Romanum is as important tool for the theologian as Denziger’s Enchiridion symbolorum. Think of how one’s reflection on the Holy Spirit is different if one looks for the little light inside to let it shine in a Pentecostal blaze of emotional glory, than when one listens to the readings of the Pentecost Mass, hears the Factus est repente antiphon with its musical incarnation of tongues of flame, and sings the Veni creator spiritus.

There are some who say that diocesan seminarians and lay theology students need to experience the liturgy as it will be seen in their parishes. Anything else is just monastic, wasteful and irrelevant. But is not all Christian life ordered to contemplation? What can we contemplate, if not the truths of the faith that we apprehend through their ritual celebration? How can we transcend the limitation of our darkened intellects and weakened wills, if we are not borne aloft to heaven by the symphony of the Church’s praise? How can we pass from the noise of a passing world to the inner silence of mystery, if we do not spend much time with the Word of God transfigured in glory on the Mount Tabor of our richly nourishing Mass?

I do not know if Pope Benedict XVI has a plan for renewing the Church through the reform of the liturgy. I do know, however, that he is a first-rate theologian capable of presenting the timeless truths of the faith to the time-shackled victims of the culture of death. He can do so because he is a man of the Church and a man of prayer. And in being who he is, he gives us as theologians the best example of how to be thinkers in the heart of the Church. For those of us who have caught the “theology bug” from him, we do well to make sure that the center of our theological study, reflection and work is not our own professional career, but the Christ encountered in the Liturgy and life of the Church.

Priestly Personality and Ecclesial Communion

Many of us have experienced five or six parishes in the same city that often seem like different religions.

It is part of the ecclesiastical topography of many a mid-sized town in America. Many of the priests in these parishes are extraordinarily gifted, intelligent, and, each in his own way, very Catholic. There is some good natured ribbing between them, and occasionally some tension, but nothing serious. But many of the laity have migrated between these parishes for years, and not a few of them define themselves by the churchmanship of their pastor. The attempts of the clergy to blunt the more acute excesses of their fans and detractors have not been very successful. To some, this may seem like a snapshot of post-Vatican II Catholicism, it shows the creativity and diversity of the Catholic community. For others, it is a manifestation of the decomposition of unity within the American church.

At any rate, it is certainly different than American Catholicism in the 1950s. Then, people defined themselves by what parish they attended because that was the church closest to them. Curates transferred to and fro, and the Pastors remained for decades, fixed as the stars in the sky. In all of them, Low Mass was celebrated every day in Latin and at very few was a High Mass celebrated occasionally, usually with the Curate singing the Requiem from the gallery, because a pious donor upped the Mass stipend by 100%.

It must be said that the current dramatically different situation has been a natural outgrowth of what has happened to American Catholicism in the last forty years. Each parish and priest’s “style” responds to a real or a perceived need in the Church. Some choose one or the other for reverence, preaching, orthodox catechesis, social justice, convenience, good music: a whole constellation of reasons. Before, the clergy and their people would hop from parish to parish once a year for the Forty Hours Devotion. Now, clergy and their people feel more at their ease in a Jewish synagogue, Islamic mosque, or Unitarian meeting than the Catholic church down the street, because it doesn’t feel like home.

To some extent, this situation has come about because those needs are real ones, and no one parish could hope to respond to how people thought those needs should be met. But it also is a direct outgrowth of the whole concept of liturgical style, and how that style often masks (or unmasks) theology. Now, in this town I do not think that any of the priests want this situation to obtain or to continue.

But again, if we are to renew our parishes, not along sectarian lines, but along the way of reform and restoration that is part and parcel of Catholic Tradition, we have to go back to basics.

The concept of the active participation of the faithful is one of the great landmarks of Vatican II’s teaching on the liturgy, and has been enthusiastically welcomed by clergy and faithful alike. What has not been as happily accepted is the same Council’s clear distinction between the baptismal priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood of Holy Orders. In fact, they have often been posited as mutually exclusive. The hierarchical nature of the Church (and, may I say it, the monarchical episcopate and the infallible papacy) have been obscured by a vague sense that Vatican II desired a certain, or a radical, democratization, of the Church’s life.

Some thinkers have posited specific changes of the Liturgical Reform for creating this situation. It is not the scope of this essay to deny or validate that claim. I am sure, however, that there has been a loss of sight of what the liturgy actually is, and in consequence, it has made the liturgy, and the parishes where it is celebrated, susceptible to monopolization by the person of the celebrant or of those who plan the liturgy in a way unprecedented in Catholic history.

It has been repeated that the liturgy has a vertical and a horizontal dimension, and that the two will exist in uneasy tension until the liturgical consummation of all things at the end of the world. The post-conciliar Catholic experience has privileged the concept of community and the meal aspect of the Mass. It may be true that experience of the Mass before the Council did not incarnate those aspects of Catholic life as well as it could have. But it is also important to see that those two aspects can never be separated from two other important aspects: the concept of transcendence and the sacrificial aspect of the Mass.

As soon as the concept of community is inserted into the discussion, the question becomes: Whose community? An authentically Catholic understanding of community comes from Baptism. By Baptism, we become part of the community of faith that is the Church, the Body of Christ, and are part of a hierarchical communion of holy people, places and things. Because of that, we are linked to the community of the universal Church as well as the community of the time and place where we are called to live and witness to the faith. Community has often been interpreted in our time in a narrow way: community is restricted to those with whom I choose to have community. My socio-economic status, political leanings, theological opinions, linguistic limitations all become factors in how I define community, even if I am trying to escape or transcend them all. Community in a ecclesial communion is replaced by community in a self-defining clique. All of a sudden, people are no longer just Catholics. They are liberal/conservative, Latin/English, Tridentine/Novus Ordo, traditional/charismatic. Such a perversion of community can happen where community is interpreted in varying ways.

The next question becomes: What kind of meal? Each one of us has experienced a wide variety of ways of eating. Formal state banquets, family TV dinners, fast food in a drive-through, fun barbeques, and the parish pot-luck. In each one, who does what, how and what one cooks, and how it is served is important. When the Mass is restricted to a meal, all of these questions take center stage. When this happens against the backdrop of a narrow vision of community, then struggles ensue as to who determines the community and the meal.

The only way to avoid the disunity which comes from privileging community and meal as horizontal aspects of the liturgy is to place them in the context of their vertical correlatives. By transcendence, we realize first and foremost that the Mass is the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ to His Father in the Holy Ghost on the Cross, a sacrifice which is renewed in a very specific ritual form which both manifests and produces the hierarchial communion of the Church. When transcendence is foremost, community becomes the Church produced by the Eucharist, not by the community. By sacrifice, we realize that the fruits of that sacrifice are given under the sacramental veils of bread and wine, and that the ritual re-enactment of the Mass is not principally about re-creating a first-century meal in Palestine, but about connecting heaven and earth.

When community and meal are not balanced by transcendence and sacrifice, a priest, and by extension his parish, loses sight of what it means to be a priest. The cultic (as well as ministerial) liturgical role of the priest, defined by sacrifice and the sacred, is reduced to one aspect of the priestly reality, that of giving human support to people. The Catholic sacramental view of the priesthood is replaced by a Protestant view of ministry, and that in turn by a secular view of humanist employment. When these things are not balanced, a parish begins to see its identity no longer as formed by the reality they celebrate, each one in his own way, but as something they create each one according to his own arbitrary principles.

When this is translated into the liturgy, the priest becomes the presider who acts as a witness to what the community does. What the community does in this case still refers to God, but what is offered to God is a sacrifice of praise, and what is received is the good feeling that comes from the sacrifice of praise. In such an optic, the presence of God is clearly within the community. Any attempt to assert another type of presence, or a cultic transcendent liturgy is vehemently rejected. Yet Catholic teaching, even after Vatican II and the Ordinary Form of the Mass, has never denied that the Mass is a true sacrifice and the priest is a true sacrificial priest. In this optic, the direction, or orientation of the sacrifice, is on the sacrifice itself. Thus, it is on the Altar of Sacrifice, the Sacrifice which is made clear symbolically on the Crucifix joined to the Altar of Sacrifice, and really in the gifts of the Body and Blood of Christ when they are on the Altar of Sacrifice and given in Holy Communion.

The distinctly priestly character of the sacred liturgy does not, however, mean that the lay faithful are reduced to mere spectators of a re-enacted ritual that produces a sacrament which is their only participation in it. While the priest, standing in persona Christi capitis, truly celebrates the sacrifice according to the ritual form the Church has prescribed, the faithful participate in a very real way. They do not participate by way of doing particular actions in accord with how their community has democratically voted them into be done.

Because by Baptism, they are the Body of Christ, the entire Church is transcendentally and mystically present at the Sacrifice because the Body is completely united to the Head. The liturgy, therefore, is a corporate action in which the ministerial priest in his hierarchical and cultic function re-enacts in persona Christi capitis the sacrifice which has made the Body attached to that Head what it is, by its being in union with the Trinity.

This view of the liturgy is hardly clericalist. While a priest is necessary for the Mass, the faithful are by right of their being a royal priesthood just as necessary for the Mass because they are the Body of Christ. It is a nobler function for the laity, because it is not tied to mere human ways of doing. It stems from what the laity are as elevated by grace to unity with the divine. If the laity understand the dignity of their vocation within the liturgy, then they will cease to be preoccupied with the ways in which they can do things to give them a sense of purpose and praise. They will realize that they are the Body of Christ and all of their actions have meaning only insofar as they are in conformity with the Christ of which they are image and likeness.

Before any tinkering with rites and words of the Mass will produce renewal in the Church, clergy and laity must once again rediscover what, or rather who, the Mass really is.

When we lose sight of this, the clergy are sorely tempted to view their work in the vineyard as “their” ministry, and the laity follow. Priests with larger than life personalities and the parishes formed by them see themselves as “us” and others as “them.” A liturgy created and sustained by man, be it the priest or the liturgy committee or a panel of experts, will inevitably cut off those who identify with one particular community and its meal, from the Church and her Sacrifice.

We are now witnessing in our own time gifted and bright clergy who prefer the liturgy and the community they have created to the Sacrifice of the Church and communion with the Church created by that Sacrifice. They feel they have to choose between the Catholic Church and the community they have created. Others have rejected the corrected translation of the English Mass or papal instructions on the liturgy because they do not conform to the narrow community they have invented in their own minds. Priests separate God from His Church, charism from institution, because they cannot reconcile the liturgy of their hopes and dreams with the liturgy of a Church which is not theirs to create, but theirs to serve.

These are all false choices. The restoration of peace in the Church can come only when priests and people abandon the idols of their own making and return to a liturgy which is not about them, but entirely about the worship of God. The only choice a Catholic can ever make is to worship Him in spirit and truth. That has nothing to do with priestly personalities, styles of liturgy, or actions and reactions.

Baptismal Preparation Based on the Liturgy and Its Possibilities

I was looking through the pictures of a friend of mine on Facebook the other day and saw something that disturbed me. There were pictures of a group of people sitting around a swimming pool in an apartment complex, with a fully clothed man in the middle, motioning for one of the onlookers to come in. It seemed like any number of FB pics of swimming pools. But the caption beneath it read simply, Baptism. The friend who posted the picture is a sincere Christian, a member of one of these emerging house church communities that are the reaction to the megachurch phenomenon in the evangelical world. For those unfamiliar with this kind of religion, it seems be very much Calvin on justification, Wesley on personal holiness, Jars of Clay on music, and post-modern in its approach to religious practice. At any rate, the picture was very different than the FB pics of the Extraordinary Form Baptism of my youngest godson.

The way that a Catholic approaches Baptism is obviously going to be different than the way an Emerger (what else does one call them?) would. For the Emerger, Baptism is an outward sign that expresses an internal conversion of a believer towards Jesus Christ. Water is a symbol, nothing more, and the reality that Baptism symbolizes could be had just as well without the water, but in obedience to the LORD’s command, water is used as an external symbol of what is going on internally. Precisely because it is just a symbol, then it makes just as much sense for Baptism to take place in an apartment complex swimming pool as it is does in the Baptistery of St John Lateran in Rome. There is no accompanying ritual or ceremony. On the contrary, it is a highly casual affair even if the conversion that it symbolizes is very deep and sincere. If there is anything sacred about the Baptism, the sacred is Jesus Christ Himself who saves the sinner through that conversion.

Catholic belief in Baptism is very different. But I wonder if, you gave the average Catholic the above description of Baptism according to the Emergers and asked if it were Catholic teaching, they would say yes. In reality, for the Catholic Church, the sacralization of the world and human flesh by its union with the Divinity in Jesus Christ means that there can be such a thing as sacraments, in which outward signs produce what they signify: as the water cleanses the body, the action of the creature water accompanied by the action of the Spirit cleanses the soul. But Baptism is not just a sacrament of Regeneration. It is also one of Initiation. Baptism does not only appropriate, as it were, the merits of the Redemption wrought by Jesus. It grafts its recipient onto Jesus Christ, inserts him in the life of the Trinity, and makes him a member of the Body of Christ, the Church. Precisely because it is not a symbol, Catholic Baptism is celebrated in a way different than that of the Emergers.

Of course, when there is an emergency, all bets are off. I have baptized infants in incubators using the Trinitarian formula and no accompanying ceremonies or prayers, when time was of the essence. But generally, Catholic Baptism happens first of all in a church. Why? When I went to the Holy Land, I saw Protestants baptizing believers in the Jordan River. We Catholics renewed our Baptismal Promises at the River, but it would never have occurred to us to baptize anyone there. Surely the Jordan River where Jesus was baptized is as if not more sacred than the faux marble font in Our Lady of Suburbia in Peripheria, Illinois?

As Catholics, we are members of the Church Universal. But the Church also is very local. According to canon law, the Pastor has a right to baptize his flock. Catholics belong to a Parish, a local manifestation, as it were, of the Church Universal. The relationship that a Catholic has to Church Universal, his Pastor and his Parish is different than that of an Emerger. For the latter, the Church Universal is the Church of the individual soul, and the Pastor is merely a witness, as it were, to help the believer on the Way. For a Catholic, there are bonds of communion which bind the believer to a real community, which exists in Heaven and Purgatory as much as it does on Earth, and a community which is very particular, with a particular sub-grouping of the faithful and a particular shepherd. That is why Baptism generally takes place in the parish church at the parish font, in the same place where the sub-grouping, so to speak, also celebrates the Eucharistic Sacrifice and Communion. Baptism is ordered to all of the other sacraments, and particularly to the Eucharist.

The sacred in Baptism extends to more than just the church and the parish. It extends to all of the rites and ceremonies which accompany the sacramental action. The water itself is natural water, but is set apart, made holy, by the prayers of the Church. These consecratory prayers give God’s natural creation back to Him in thanksgiving, as it were, and in return are given back to the Church as a means for supernatural re-creation. The blessing of the water, the consecration of the oil of catechumens and chrism, the exorcisms, and the rites of clothing the neophyte in the white garment and handing him a lit candle are not just explicative rites. They are not just pious traditions which some people call sacramentals. They all actually “do” something, as they are intimately united with the action of the sacrament of Baptism. Whether the Baptism takes place in the Ordinary or Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, or the Byzantine or Maronite Rite, the Church vests her newly baptized not with a customary rite of passage, but with a sumptuous wedding feast to Christ filled with the richest of symbolic and real fare.

The reason that I present here such a stark comparison of two very different conceptions of Baptism is not as an exercise in comparative religion. It is because I wonder to what extent many who present their children or themselves for Baptism in Catholic churches have an essentially Emerging theology of Baptism, combined with respect for the external visuals of the rite as pious tradition.

A pastoral problem the Catholic Church is grappling with is this: if the largest religious group in the US is Catholics, the second is lapsed Catholics. Statistics are beginning to indicate that our ability to retain Catholics is decreasing even as the number of Catholics increases. And how many of those who were baptized as Catholics have migrated to ecclesiastical communities of the Emerging type, especially in Latin America?

We can argue all day long as to the reasons for this phenomenon. We can blame secularism, the American consumerist mentality of religion, the sex abuse scandal in the Church, the lack of valid marriages, the unwillingness of many to accept the Church’s teachings on family life, and so on. But where the rubber hits the road is Baptism. It is time to stop the blame game and go back to where it all starts.

There are two extreme policies about administering the sacrament of Baptism in our day. One, which we may cite as more evangelical, states that Baptism should only be administered to the children of serious Catholics who know their faith, and have been prepared by a rigorous preparation akin to the catechumenate. They point to the Patristic era, with its comparable stinginess about baptisizing people, as an example. The other, which we may cite as traditionalist, looks at the famous relic of the arm of St Francis Xavier who baptized everyone in sight to free them from the possibility of eternal hellfire, and seeks to baptize every human being in arm’s length. Both policies are being seen in our parishes today, along with the policy that “we just baptize anyone who asks because it is our custom.”

I would like to propose that we need to re-think these policies in light of what is going on in the Church and the world today. If Our LORD stated, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them” then it is clear that we are supposed to baptize everyone we can. But that Baptism is also connected with a life of discipleship. Baptism is the beginning of discipleship, not only for the child or adult convert who is plunged into the saving waters, but often for the parents and godparents as well.

I think it is less important whom we baptize than that the person who is baptized, or their family, is catechized well. How many times in our parishes does Baptismal preparation consist of some agonizing paperwork, a 1970s video about Christian initiation, and a poorly expressed dress code for the baptizee, all done in 45 minutes by a parish volunteer? How many times do we reject families who have not darkened the door of their parish church, failing to seize a moment to bring them to faith, and then make our faithful families jump through endless hoops to get their sixth or seventh baby baptized?

In the Extraordinary Form, Baptism begins with the simple question, “What do you seek of the Church of God?” The answer is, “Faith.” When anyone comes to our doors seeking Baptism, it is because, in some way, they want faith. They may also come to our doors for all kinds of less than authentic reasons (they hate the priest in the neighboring parish, they want to do less paperwork, because Grandma will disinherit me if I don’t baptize the baby), but when they are there, we have a sacred duty to transmit to them the faith.

The liturgical rites of Baptism already give the structure for a meaningful catechesis, not only on the sacrament itself, but the entire Christian life. Somehow I think that a 45 minute video presentation by a parish volunteer does not do justice to the evangelizing possibilities for the faith and for people’s lives that the Baptismal liturgy can offer. The questions that the rite asks of the parents can be the springboard for lively discussion and explanation of what it means to live as a Catholic. The Creed can be the occasion for explaining what we believe and why we believe it, something many parents were never taught.

Many pastors worry about the fact that of the children who are presented for Baptism, few return for Holy Communion, even fewer for Confirmation, and fewer still for Marriage. The sacramental economy seems to be breaking down. We can make the Church smaller and purer by admitting to the sacraments only those who measure up to our exacting standards. We can make it larger and broader by watering down the meaning of the sacraments and producing more uncatechized semi-pagans. Or we can roll up our sleeves and do what needs to be done. Engage every person who comes for Baptism as if they were sent by God, which they have been, to learn the Faith in its entirety. Maybe, if we do that, the downward spiral of Catholic faith and practice might begin to turn around? If Christian faith and practice begins with Baptism, then Baptism has to be where we assure, not just a bare minimum, but a comprehensive introduction to faith and practice.

Challenging the Liturgical Status Quo

For the last year, I have been doing my doctoral research on the French Jesuit Henri De Lubac (1896-1991). This mild-mannered man who played a heroic part in the resistance to the Nazis in France was catapulted to a dubious fame in 1946 when he published a little book called Surnaturel.

The book was ostensibly little more than an historical survey about the concept of the supernatural in Catholic theology, but behind it was a more ambitious project. De Lubac, together with some other French and German theologians, was convinced that the evil of secularization had arisen in part because of a decadent interpretation of theology that had gripped the Church ever since St Thomas Aquinas. For them, the only way to shake the Church out of its fortress mentality and allow her to engage with the world was by renewing theology to re-establish contact between contemporary thought and the early Fathers of the Church.

When De Lubac charged that the noted commentator Tommaso di Vio, better known as Cajetan (1469-1534), had falsified St Thomas’ teaching on the supernatural, the theologians of the day reacted bitterly. For several years, the debate raged in French theological magazines. De Lubac was removed from his teaching post in Lyon. Then, Pope Blessed John XXIII was elected Pope and convoked the Second Vatican Council. This theologian was asked to be a consultor to the council, and his name was inscribed among the theological glitterati who comprised a school that came to be known as the nouvelle theologie. In the wake of the Council, De Lubac, who had been known before it as a dangerous radical, was just as easily dismissed as a reactionary throwback. De Lubac had always maintained that the answer to the question How is God related to human nature? was crucial, not only for theology, but for every aspect of the Church’s life. Within a decade after the Council, theologians were speaking of the twilight of the supernatural as if it were a theological category which had passed into the land of fairy tales, along with limbo and the doctrine that outside the Church there is no salvation.

De Lubac, to his credit, made some valid criticisms about the theology of the supernatural as had come to be explained in his time. He also rejected in great part the entire neo-scholastic system in which theology had been taught for centuries, but did not foresee that his name would be invoked for every kind of trend from liberation theology to Radical Orthodoxy, whose tenets he hardly would have supported. Yet his critique of the theology of the supernatural was accepted prima facie for generations, as it turns out, rather uncritically.

De Lubac’s rejection of the post-Tridentine Baroque commentatorial tradition was part of a fascinating phenomenon in mid-twentieth century theology. Throughout Catholic academia, there was the growing belief that there was something not quite right with the Council of Trent and what came after it. Theologians looked at the often dry and boring manuals of theology of the time and compared them with the vivacity of Patristic and early Medieval authors, and found the former wanting. These academic accurately foresaw the wind of secularism.

What they did not see was the whirlwind of the disintegration of a unitary method of Catholic theology. There had always been pluralism in Catholic theology. Every major university had chairs in Dominican, Franciscan, Jesuit, Thomistic and nominalist theologies. But the critique men of the Church like De Lubac made of the hegemony of neo-Thomism in their time actually gave a tool for others to replace legitimate theological pluralism with doctrinal disorder and chaos.

In matters liturgical, there was also the growing feeling that what happened to the liturgy at Trent and afterwards was somehow not quite right. Eminent liturgical thinkers like Louis Bouyer decried what they saw to be the theatricality of a baroque liturgy removed from the active participation of the people. They looked backwards to the liturgical experience of the primitive Church as having some kind of normative status even as it was admittedly shrouded in mystery.

Pope Pius XII, who was very much in favour of theological progress and research, did see the dangers with such an approach. His encyclicals, Humani generis and Mediator Dei, sought to put thinkers on the alert that such thinking was really anachronistic, and could actually harbour dangers for the integrity of the faith. The exuberant optimism of the conciliar period, however, confident in its own scientific claims, ignored this warning, and continued to propose that the only way forward, for theology as for liturgy, was to go backwards into a better time and forwards into an even better time. What had to be done was not only challenge, but eliminate, the status quo. In doing so, a new Church could be sung into being which would be more authentically Catholic.

The chief problem with this mindset is not the often sincere intentions for ecclesiastical renewal which accompanied it. This problem is expressed in two postulates. The first, is that there existed in the past some point of reference in which the liturgy, theology and Church life was pure, was what should be. This is incorrect, because the Church is never pure and what should be will only be in Heaven. The second, is that placing such a vision in dialogue with contemporary trends will renew the Church. This is also incorrect, because it assumes that such a dialogue and a renewal is always and everywhere possible.

After the Second Vatican Council, these two errors accompanied critiques of liturgy, theology, and Church life from left, right and center. Catholicism in the latter half of the twentieth century had imbibed the myth that there was out there a perfect way to do theology, make liturgy, and be the Church. If we read the memoirs of Annibale Bugnini and Cardinal Antonelli, both deeply involved in the Liturgical Reform and also divided by it, we can see that these two men in different ways took these postulates to be true, differing only in the details.

The assumption that the liturgy was broken and needed to be fixed, that theology was broken and needed to be fixed, that the Church was broken and needed to be fixed, began well before Vatican II and has continued unabated every since. People’s assumptions of how all of this came to be broken, and what must be done to fix it, have divided Catholics ever since.

The Neo-Thomists who reacted to De Lubac and others associated with the nouvelle theologie often refused to entertain legitimate points of their criticism because it was not expressed in a form they recognized. Likewise, those who felt themselves attacked rejected everything dear to their attackers because they were being attacked. A similar thing is happening with the liturgy. Many self-appointed proponents of what is now known as the Extraordinary Form of the liturgy defend one particular form of liturgy without always engaging concerns about the way in which liturgy is celebrated and intended to be. (One thinks of the rather odd situation of those who defend the 1962 Missal and the 1955 Holy Week Reforms without granting that they were as much the brainchild of Bugnini as the 1970 Missal). Likewise, liturgical revolutionaries have successfully poisoned the minds of many an otherwise faithful Catholic against liturgical forms of previous and current times because they do not conform to standards which they themselves set and which often have little to do with the liturgy at all.

In the past ten years, some younger theologians who were born after the debate over De Lubac’s Surnaturel and for whom the mid-century theological debates are about as personally relevant as those at Nicea I, have begun to ask themselves: What was the fuss all about anyway? In doing so, they have pointed out that De Lubac, even as he rightly pointed out certain aspects of the supernatural problem that had been obfuscated and hoped for a renewal of theology, still created more problems than he solved with his answer. These theologians do not accept De Lubac’s critique as unassailable and are realizing that the wholesale rejection of the Baroque commentatorial tradition was a mistake. They do not seek to return to a pre-St Thomas, pre-Cajetan, or a pre-De Lubac position. They do seek to renew theology by questioning what had become universally accepted, namely that the Baroque theology was bunk.

Liturgy is experiencing something similar. A younger generation, which does not have the baggage of the experience of Vatican II, are questioning the fundamental assumption that the Tridentine liturgy was bunk and the liturgical reform was good. They do not seek to return to a pre-Trent, or pre-Vatican II position. They do seek to recover a celebration of the liturgy in which there need not be temporally chauvinistic dividing lines.

So what does this mean for the future of the liturgy? There will continue to be those who argue that there will be renewal in the Church only when we go back (or forward) to a certain liturgical text, or time period, or modus celebrandi. The temporal chauvinist is always tempted by time: to be progressive or conservative, to go backwards or to go forwards. But there are also those within the Church who argue that in the Church’s life, whether it be at the Altar in the liturgy or in Classroom in theology, there is no time, there is no progress or regress, backwards or forwards. There is only the extent to which our prayer and our work are in fidelity to Christ and the timeless Revelation of His Truth for us. Authentic Catholicism is not within the realm of how we get theology, liturgy, or the Church right. Authentic Catholicism is right because it is encounter with the fullness of Truth celebrated in Beauty.

In this optic, the most important question is not to decide for ourselves how to worship: what words to say in what language (hieratic or everday English, Latin or vernacular), what rite to celebrate (Tridentine or Byzantine or Amchurch), or what music to accompany the narrative of our lives of faith (chant, Lifeteen or Viennese orchestral masses). When we realize that Catholic worship is the self-oblation of Christ to His Father through the Holy Spirit for the Redemption of the world, the fruits of which we receive in Holy Communion and which constitute the Church herself, and give her a theological and evangelical mission, then those questions will work themselves out.

We are right to challenge the liturgical and theological status quo. But we are wrong to do so if we think that by doing so, we can foist upon the Church our own pet project vision of how things should be. We should always challenge ourselves as to how we enter into the Mystery of Salvation, of how our celebration of the Paschal Mystery is not bound to criticism, but to Glory.

Julian Green, Liturgical Reform and Our Spiritual Combat

Like all American Francophiles, I love books written by expats living in Paris. So you can imagine my delight to discover, on my last trip to the City of Lights, the bilingual book simply entitled Paris by Julien Green. It’s the kind of travel guide which makes you beg for an auto-da-fe to cast Rick Steves and the Lonely Planet people headlong into, because it is the rare work, like Georgina Masson’s Rome, which is an experience and not just a series of lists with vapid sound-bites. Julien Green is not a household name for most Americans, not even for those of us who are connoisseurs of Catholic literature. This remarkable writer was born in 1900 in Paris to parents from Savannah, Georgia, better known for Flannery O’Connor (tip of the biretta at the Holy Name). He was also the first foreigner elected to the prestigious Academie Francaise – an American! Green managed to channel that languid Southern prose most of us know only via Pat Conroy into the crisp idiom of a modern French which made him a noted literary figure in Paris, where he lived most of his adult life. He also continued to use that delightful tense of passé simple long after it was cast into the oubliettes of history, and for all of that still managed to capture a very contemporary audience. (One wonders why he was not asked to collaborate to translate the Roman Missal into French!)

At 16, after his domineering and controlling mother died, Green followed his father into the Catholic Church. After a brief stint as a soldier during World War I, he studied at the University of Virginia. Shortly after, his star appeared in the French literary firmament. He abandoned the Faith for a brief period of time, choosing Buddhism as a means of escaping what he felt to be Catholicism’s rigid morality. But he soon came back to the Faith.

Like that other famous literary convert, Graham Greene, he will probably never be canonized. As one of those people who never left a thought unpublished, between his novels and his nine-volume journal, he engaged in a spiritual battle over his passions so intense that its very Gallic transparency strikes the most hedonistic Anglo-Saxon as frankly exhibitionistic. But unlike other bon-vivants of the 19th and 20th centuries with religious obsessions and sexual issues, he did not wait until the end to live as a Catholic, like Oscar Wilde, nor did he abandon himself to grotesque identity politics and thirst for ecclesiastical revolution, like Andre Gide. None of his novels will be part of a book club for homeschooling moms at an SSPX chapel. And I daresay no red-blooded American man could stomach reading more than a few pages of them.

Green remained, despite his perpetual spiritual and moral anguish, a convinced Catholic. Having read Pascal, he imbibed some of the rigorism of Jansenism which probably exacerbated a sensitive conscience. But he was always aware of the reality of the body and soul composite that is man, and realized the futility of dualist temptations to pretend that one can have purity of soul without purity of the body. He also knew that the “thorn in his flesh” was something which would be put to rest and healed only in the resurrected body in heaven, and that the supernatural life of the sacraments in the Church alone could get him there.

Green also realized that tremendous paradox of life in the Church, that its holiness is proved, not by its saints, but by its perseverance amidst sin. As he wrote in an ironically titled work, Pamphlet Against the Catholics, “It is not the saints that one has to talk about if one is to prove the sanctity of the Church. It’s bad priests and popes. A Church governed by saints continues on, that’s normal and human. But a Church that can be governed by villains and imbeciles, and still continue, that is neither normal nor human.” Green’s intensely lived struggles, lived openly through his literature, and his devout frequentation of the sacraments, caused Jacques Maritain to declare that he was a mystic. For Green, the true mystic, the true man, was St Francis, “God’s fool” as he entitled a book dedicated to the saint. That encounter with Christ, which was the true reality which allowed man to transcend the struggle between flesh and spirit, came through the humanity of Christ which gave man access to Divinity via the sacraments.

Green’s profoundly sacramental humanism, if we can call it that, conditioned his reaction to the way the sacraments came to be celebrated after the Second Vatican Council. One would expect that this master of the French language and celebrant of sacramental realism would have welcomed the liturgical reform. When he first heard French used for the Psalms at Tenebrae on Good Friday in 1956, he wrote, “Psalms mooed as if by cows in French . . . How can Catholics not revolt against such ugliness? One bitterly misses the Latin of former times”. As the reforms progressed and the liturgy took on what to him were more Protestant characteristics, he and his sister Mary, also a convert, suffered intensely. He once wrote to her, “Why did we even convert?”

Green’s biographer Anthony Newbury suggests that, for Green, the “solitude of the individual with his conscience as unique authority” that was Protestantism was simply untenable. Green needed a Church with “real authority” so he felt he actually had a place other than the tortured one of his own conscience. If Newbury is right, it indicates why Green suffered the apparent Protestantization of the liturgy as a real crisis of faith. But the Frenchman clung to his faith until his death in 1998, and continued to explore in his later novels the crass sexualization of a world in which conscience has been emptied of its ties to the sacraments and to true religion.

Green’s reaction to the liturgical reform is very instructive. He did not reject the post-conciliar liturgy because he was a decadent aesthete or a nostalgic stick-in-the-mud. He rejected the deformation of the liturgy because he foresaw its disastrous consequences in the moral realm. One of the byproducts of vernacular liturgy in the post-Vatican II Church has been a didacticism which borders on pedantry. At its best, the didactic liturgy becomes a vehicle for teaching which, while orthodox, preaches moral rectitude in conformity with the ethical teachings of the Church, but comes across as little more than moralizing and preaching at people. At its worst, it strips the real authority of the Church in the moral sphere of any imaginative ability to inspire people to live a life worthy of the Mystery to which the liturgy and faith call them.

The dramatic situation in which we find ourselves today finds orthodox Catholics calling out for clear teaching on sexual morality and life issues to challenge the hedonism of our day. But if the faith is reduced merely to the observance of a moral code, and liturgy to explaining how to observe it, that faith will not be able to dialogue with anyone except those who are already convinced and opens itself up to Pharisaism. (This is incidentally a point that Pope Benedict makes in his new book). A Julian Green could be inspired to struggle against his passions and cling to Christ, not because of moralizing from the pulpit, but by entering into those beautiful Prayers over the People from the Lenten liturgies of the Roman Mass, which gave him hope that he could, by prayer, fasting and works of mercy, create a space in his heart where God could take Him up into Himself, where Love would find him.

The restoration of the sacred in the liturgy is a must. Clear teaching on the moral life is a must. But if the way of the disciple is not to be highjacked by self-righteousness, that moral teaching must be expressed not by the lips of us sinners, but in the beauty and the transcendence of the sacred liturgy.

I have known many young men and women like Julian Green in my parishes. They come from a world which hates everything the Church stands for in the culture wars. They come because they think the Catholic Church will give them something more. That desire does not keep them from falling into sin, or being tempted. But they come. They want a real place where they can live besides the dreary world and their own weak consciences. A banal liturgy, clerical officiousness, and a poorly formulated moral teaching cloaked in crusader talk will extinguish the pale flame of faith that has been lit in them. But if we trust in the power of Christ acting through the sacraments, through a liturgy celebrated according to the real authority of the true religion and in all of its transcendent beauty, that flame will burst into a fire which will consume them with zeal.

His whole life, Julian Green struggled to master himself and convert to Christ in whom he found authentic love. He was not always successful in his quest, but he held fast to a faith which is real and true because it is not from mortal flesh and human spirit. He was able to do so because of his experience of the true religion, the power of the sacraments, and heavenly liturgy. His works are difficult reads, because they expose the deep fault lines of the spiritual combat. They are as uncomfortable as the Lenten penances which train us for that war against princes and principalities. But for all of that, they are also profoundly Catholic, not because they show the saint in the apotheosis of glory, but because they show what sinful humanity is capable of when assumed by the LORD of glory.

The Liturgy and Play

I study at an Opus Dei university, so I hear a lot about how work sanctifies our daily life, one of the principal teachings of St Josemaria Escrivà. Because Jesus, the Word Made Flesh, labored alongside St Joseph in the carpenter’s workshop in Nazareth, work has been redeemed. The ordinary tasks on daily life can now be an opening to the extraordinary action of God, if we just let it. The skeptic in me, however, is reminded of the fact that work is a four-letter word. It was a punishment for original sin. Toil, that other four-letter word, is an inescapable quality of work in this valley of tears. So shouldn’t we try to escape it as much as possible, and thereby anticipate our re-entry into the Garden of Paradise where there was no work and no toil?

One of my professors here at Navarre is convinced that Spain has been so backwards for so long, not because of a lack of resources or talent, but because of a cultural propensity going back for centuries that viewed work as beneath the dignity of man. As for me, I try to avoid work as much as possible, and as I write my 300th page of my thesis for the faculty here, I am beginning to think that this very Castilian and very not Opus Dei idea of work as getting in the way of life is not a bad idea at all.

I am struck by the fact that we have made the liturgy into work. From one point of view, this makes sense. After all, liturgy comes from the Greek word leitourgeia, which described the work done on behalf of the people by pagan priests in offering rites as part of civic ceremonies. And with all of the bother of decapitating animals and disemboweling them and reading their entrails, it seems that liturgy has been a lot of work since even before Christ changed the meaning of sacrifice and rite forever.

But we still see liturgy as work. If there is one thing everyone along the liturgical spectrum is doing nowadays, it is working at the liturgy. It is a lot like the welder who puts together lots of various pieces by heat and light, and then sends those welded pieces off to a faceless assembly line where technological efficiency makes them into the things which make our lives more comfortable.

It is also like the lab researcher who breaks compounds down into the most minute particles to see what it is all made of and see how those particles can be out together differently to make other things. It is truly like the advertising mavericks of Mad Men who brainstorm ways to dupe the masses into buying a product that will make them rich.

Everyone is working at the liturgy. The traditionalists: busy restoring the Mass of the Ages to every altar of the world. ICEL: busy preparing a translation that had a shelf-life shorter than a Facebook status. Vox Clara: busy preparing a translation that its adversaries predict will bring about the end of ecumenical councils and the action of the Holy Ghost/Spirit/She Who Is and Must Be Obeyed. Clowns: busying preparing their noses for their next gig in an Austrian Cathedral. People: building Christ our Light in Oakland and people building the chapel for Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai. Canons regular: restoring the sacred and Jesuits lost in Holy Week. Everyone is busy at the liturgy.

I am so busy I am exhausted. I say a twenty minute Mass in a hospital chapel every day and toil over the Liturgy of the Minutes, and I am practically exercised by my patrimony. Why am I so tired, then, when I spend so little actual time reading/praying/proclaiming/celebrating/being Liturgy? Because I spend the rest of my time picking apart why our translations are so bad, why the liturgical reform happened and why it has been so difficult, how I can amass a sacristy to rival the Lateran Basilica’s, plotting the hire of a CMAA musician to make Westminster Cathedral look like chump change, worrying over how to explain to the Liturgy Committee that I can’t wash women’s hands/feets/bad hair coloring job next Maundy Thursday. Like a lot of people, I am tired of working at the liturgy.

How different is the attitude of the children all over the world who open their presents on Christmas morning. Gifts all around them, brought by an invisible but familiar figure, and warmth and love all around. The children rip apart the wrapping paper and play with the wrapping paper for hours. Then they notice that there is a box, and they are fascinated by the containers.

Finally, they get to the actual present, and they realize that the whole experience has been a gift that keeps on giving: so many levels and so much playing to do before Mom and Dad call us to go to Mass because they didn’t go to the Vigil Mass like every other family in the parish who hasn’t been to church since the Easter Bunny went though the house with silent furry feet.

The liturgy is much like that. The central core is not the work we do (unless you are a blood thirsty pagan or a social activist), but the Sacrifice of Calvary. At first glance, it may seem like blasphemy to liken the august Sacrament of the Altar to play. But Our LORD in his wisdom knows our weakness, and so He cloaks the Terrible and Awesome Event of the Passion in the soft garments of sign and symbol, Word and Sacrament.

We are irresistibly attracted to the wrapping in which the Gift is found: the delight to the senses that the ceremonies of the Church produces. And then we gaze and rip into the container for that Gift: the words, the music, the gestures, the art, the architecture. We revel in them. It is as if we play Hide and Seek with the Baby Jesus among the boxes and bows and debris of signs and symbols and rites and ceremonies. He reveals even as He conceals. And our response is one of wonder and awe, but also of joy and perfect gladness. So by the time we get to the Gift, we are ready for it. And it is marvelous in our eyes, because it is what we have always wanted. Not the Gift, the Giver.

When we work too hard at the liturgy, when we think the liturgy depends on our work to tie the bow right or wrap up the box in a certain way, we miss the Gift and the Giver. The Gift and the Giver: the Eucharist received in Holy Communion and the Christ who offers Himself up to the Father in the unity of the Spirit for the salvation of the world. Only when we let ourselves be carried away like children at play with awe and wonder for the gift of the liturgy, can we then work at our daily tasks, and even at the necessary tasks to make the liturgy happen, without being exhausted. The dried blood caked on our baptismal robes from the useless toil of our human working at the liturgy is replaced by the fresh springs of the Precious Blood of Christ renewing the Church through the divine working through the liturgy to help us play with God as His friends. And that, my dear friends, is how we truly sanctify our world.