Roman Catholics: A New Way of Worship

At the Roman Catholic chapel on the University of New Mexico campus last week, one woman worshiper commented on the vaguely familiar hymn sung at the end of the Mass. “It’s very pretty,” she said. “Who wrote it?” Her response was a disbelieving gasp when the priest explained that O God, Almighty Father was a Lutheran hymn.

She was not the only U.S. Catholic to be surprised as the nation’s dioceses prepared for the introduction on Nov. 29, the first Sunday in Advent, of sweeping changes in the Mass. In obedience to decrees of the Vatican Council, U.S. churches are busy making way for a reformed liturgy that is almost half in English, requires wholehearted congregational participation in word and song, and allows for such “Protestant” borrowings as plainness in altars, and hymns by Luther and Wesley.

At first, the degree of liturgical novelty will vary greatly from city to city. Traditionally, Midwestern priests and bishops have been most active in championing liturgical reform; many churches in Chicago, St. Louis and Oklahoma City, for example, have for a decade or more had such “innovations” as dialogue Mass, congregational singing of entrance hymns, altars at which priests say Mass facing the people. All this will be new to some East Coast and California dioceses, where conservative Irish-American clerics have done their best to keep the Mass to the form prescribed by the 16th century Council of Trent.

This Today, That Tomorrow. In Los Angeles, James Francis Cardinal Mc-Intyre has done nothing to encourage liturgy-reforming pastors. So far, his chancery has issued only one brief instruction on Mass revisions, and at least one parish will make no changes at all until next spring. “It’s no big deal here,” said one priest. Other bishops will conform to the spirit of the new regulations gradually. In Washington, D.C., Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle has insisted that pastors introduce the changes with 16 weeks of explanatory sermons. Says Msgr. Robert Arthur, a Washington liturgist: “You can’t just take 350,000 people and shake them and say—look, you did this today, but you’re going to do that tomorrow.”

New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman has made no secret of his preference for the traditional way. But now many churches in his archdiocese have a lay commentator to lead the congregation in reciting the Gloria, Creed and other prayers in English. In the equally conservative diocese of Brooklyn, staid Irish and Italian churches have been conducting midweek rehearsals and demonstration Masses to accustom their flocks to the prayers and hymns.

The mechanics of the change are often troublesome. Although Catholic publishers have rushed into print new altar missals for the priest, laymen will have to fumble with leaflets and mimeographed texts of the prayers in English. The new Mass should be celebrated on a plain altar by a priest facing the congregation; many pseudo-Gothic churches have ornate high altars fixed to the wall—a situation that calls for either drastic architectural surgery or the unesthetic installation of an additional altar.

Children’s Chorus. Not all Catholics like the new way. Many older priests find it hard to abandon the practices of a lifetime, and tend to obey the letter rather than spirit of the change. Some laymen also prefer the old “church of silence” and complain that spoken prayers are distracting. Says one San Francisco Catholic: “I feel like I’m a member of a children’s chorus, having to sing this wretched little hymn out loud.”

In part the complaint is justified, since the English texts of the Mass approved by the U.S. hierarchy lack the poet’s touch, and there is no easy solution to the problem of suitable music. Gregorian chant does not fit the English words. Many congregations dislike the simple but widely used psalm melodies composed by French Jesuit Joseph Gelineau, and most traditional Catholic hymns in English are so poor that the bishops have had to set contemporary composers to creating new ones.

By and large, younger Catholic laymen and priests are enthusiastic about the new approach to worship, and even some Latin diehards have found after a month or so of practice that the Mass has become a more meaningful and personal encounter with God. Besides, they know by now that the old order returneth not. In Rome a postconciliar liturgical commission is at work on an even more drastic restructuring of Catholicism’s central act of worship that will strip away many over-the-centuries accretions to the original Roman rite.