The Elephant In The Sanctuary

We were at our parish winter dinner-dance this past Saturday chatting with friends, and the subject turned to how and when we discovered our parish. In our case, we started attending mass five years ago when, as I scouted nearby parishes during the liturgical Christmas season, I came across this elephant in the Nativity display in the sanctuary at one parish. Clearly it had helped bring the Magi to Bethlehem.

My wife told our friends, "That was it. This was going to be our new parish." Our friends explained that the elephant was in fact quite recent, although it predated our arrival. That came as a surprise to me. Somehow I supposed that this must have been some traditional artifact handed down over generations from the pre-Conciliar era of natural piety.

Our friends, who are in fact fairly well-connected members of the parish (they could control which table we were seated at for the dinner, for instance) also revealed that they were fairly new as well. The woman, based on what I could gather from her account, had become fully active as a Catholic only in the process of seeking out a catechism program for her son, and she'd settled on this parish as the "least namby-pamby". But as she became more involved, she'd found the need to climb the Catholic learning curve herself. We all toasted to no namby-pamby.

What this exchange taught me was that, although our parish has always been successful, it's had a history, and it's renewed itself throughout its history, as have its members. I was stuck in an old mythology of pre-Conciliarism in spite of myself, assuming that what was good about the parish, like the communion rail, had only survived the Council, not that it had grown and renewed itself since then. Important lesson.

Over the weekend a visitor sent me a link to a Mystery Worshipper entry on the Ship of Fools website, this one for St Thomas the Apostle, Phoenix, AZ. This appears to be a parish roughly the same size, with the same reverent OF mass as our parish, the only difference is that one Sunday mass there is ad orientem, while we're always versus populum. Oddly, the mystery worshipper isn't quite sure what to do with it.

What musical instruments were played?

Organ, an electronic instrument up in the choir loft. There was also a mixed choir – I couldn’t see up in the loft from my vantage point and so couldn’t count how many singers there were.

It sounds as though the visitor isn't familiar with contemporary organ technology. There are electronic keyboards, which are the sort of thing you bring into a cafetorium for an ordinariate mass, and then there are modern digital organs, which carry digital recordings of actual organ pipes, played by consoles with multiple manuals and foot pedals just like a regular pipe organ. These digitally generated sounds can be further tweaked both digitally and acoustically, and often mixed with actual organ pipes, to produce a significant instrument. The hybrid one in our parish dates from 2007 and is currently used in a concert series.

Given the size of the parish at St Thomas the Apostle Phoenix and the location of the organ, I've got to think the visitor is talking about something similar, and to describe it as "electronic" is misleading. The account of the mass also suggests the visitor doesn't quite know what to make of it:

Was the worship stiff-upper-lip, happy clappy, or what?

It was the most extraordinary celebration I have ever seen. Everything was done with dignity and style. As mentioned, the priest wore traditional Roman vestments, and celebrated ad orientem. Almost everything was chanted. Incense billowed in abundance, and bells jingled at all the right places, including the Hanc igitur, which you hardly ever see anymore. The eucharistic prayer was the Roman Canon. The music was, for the most part, modern Catholic, but miles above the usual Singing Nun stuff you hear nowadays. The priest and choir chanted as much of the mass as they could. The Kyrie was chanted in Greek; the Agnus Dei in Latin. The exchange of peace was rather tame; no one offered me the peace. Given everything else, I was surprised to see that the altar party did not indulge in liturgical embraces – rather, they shook hands. The bulletin tersely warned, ‘Only Catholics who are not conscious of grave sin and have fasted for one hour may be admitted to Holy Communion.’ I did not receive; those who did received under the species of bread only.

This sounds slightly higher-church than our parish (we normally use Eucharistic Prayer 3, but at certain times sing the Kyrie in Greek and the Agnus Dei in Latin). But this is an OF mass like ours, and the visitor found it "extraordinary". And it comfortably filled a nave with 1100 capacity on Super Sunday.

But a day or two after the visitor sent the link to the St Thomas Pnoenix mass, another visitor sent a link to a Reverent Mass Directory. Curious, I did a spot check, and neither our parish nor St Thomas the Apostle Phoenix appeared -- but oddly, every ordinariate parish is listed. Now, we might allow that perhaps a dozen ordinariate parishes might fully qualify with a significant organ, a music program, and more than low double digits at mass. But every last one is on this list, and as my rgular correspondent put it, "including Our Lady of Good Counsel, Jacksonville, NC, meeting in a suite in a strip mall for the OF with guitar accompaniment. At least we could say that this indicates that the Ordinariate has a good rep, however unevenly merited."

But this leads me to think many Catholics have a knee-jerk expectation that most parishes do not have reverent masses, while Eastern rite or Latin mass parishes automatically do -- which is reflected in that rather silly directory the visitor sent me. Even for myself, I find I need to rethink this sort of expectation. You can find real parishes with reverent Catholics far more frequently than you'd think.

The visitor who sent me the directory said,

I love Anglican English but it's not as big in the larger culture anymore so there's a lack of interest in keeping it going. Born Catholics usually don't care about the English in the services (at Mass, for most people). They only care about the English they have a tradition of using, the prayers of the rosary. That's why the missal and even the most liberal parish drop back to Tudor English for the Our Father. But some who do discover Anglican English,and a traditionalism that's not in Latin love them. We'll disagree on whether that's a good thing.

Opus Dei doesn't work. It's a good idea on paper - recruit whiz kids and spiritually form them so they can apply Christianity when they rule - but it flopped, maybe because it's the world's way, not God's. That doesn't mean Escriva was bad. Just mistaken. Saints can make mistakes.

. . . I'm happy for conservative OF, the traditional Latin Mass (a big part of my formation), the ordinariate (same, in a way: born Episcopal), and the Eastern rites, one of which, Byzantine, has become my home. If something/someone follows all our teachings and respects my customs, I won't trash his part of Team Catholic.