Father Richard Cipolla
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| Traditional Mass in Indianapolis during the Eucharistic Congress |
The United States Catholic Conference of Bishops recently sponsored a series of events that were meant to be an affirmation of witness to the Catholic belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The first was a series of Eucharistic processions from disparate points in the United States whose ultimate goal was the site of the major event of the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, Indiana. I must confess that when I first heard about the plans for the processions and the Congress in Indiana, my southern Italian quasi-cynical genes kicked in, fed by my experience as a Catholic priest for much of forty years. Much of those forty years were marked by a severe lack of Eucharistic piety by both clergy and laity.
At the beginning of this article I must state that I applaud the witness of the thousands of laity and the many clergy who participated in the processions and in the Congress itself. During and after the Congress, so many laity and clergy postedtheir responses to and observations of these days of witness to their belief in Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist with joy and thanksgiving. I did not attend the Congress itself, but I did participate in one of the Eucharistic processions in my Diocese of Bridgeport at the parish of SS Cyril and Methodius. I have previously written about my moving experience there in an article posted a few weeks ago on Rorate Caeli. An occasion of being once again “surprised by joy”. God indeed is the God of surprises.
When I first heard of the plan for the processions from different points in the country meeting finally in Indianapolis, I admit to being skeptical, because the great majority of American parishes do not have processions, especially in public, except when mandated by liturgical law, such as on Holy Thursday. Even on Christmas and Corpus Christi when it was customary in the past to have a procession, it has been for many years the fact that very few parishes still carry the infant Jesus, the bambino Gesù, into the church before the Mass and place him in the creche, or who have a procession with the Blessed Sacrament outdoors in the neighborhood on Corpus Christi.
One of the highlights of the year in my last parish as pastor was the Good Friday procession, first organized by the Hispanic members of the congregation: the Cristo Muerto carried on the bier by men in their traditional dress, followed by the image of Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, our Lady of Sorrows, dressed in black with tears in her eyes, accompanied by the womenmourners walking at her side, the band playing the customarydirges, the thirty or more altar servers, the thurifer whose prideand joy always moved me deeply, the people on the sidewalkswondering what this was all about, the re-entry into the church, the placing of the Cristo muerto in the sanctuary, the washing ofthe image by the priest, the procession of women of the parishdressed in black, each holding a rose to place around the Cristo muerto. In all of this I always prayed that the whole Churchwould regain its forgotten sense of the importance of ritual in the Catholic faith and thanked God that the people of my parish ,not only the Hispanics but also those of all backgrounds and ethnicities understood this and gave witness to their Catholicfaith in these ways, especially at Solemn Mass on Sundays, thatare part of the living Tradition of the Catholic Church.
The great testaments of witness and faith after the Congress that were posted everywhere on social media were signs of a real revival of Eucharistic faith. I was happy to see that among the daily Masses at the Congress there were included those celebrated in the forms of the Traditional Roman Mass and Catholic Eastern rites as well as those celebrated according to the Missal of Pope St. Paul VI. And the many hours of Eucharistic prayer and devotion in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament exposed in a monstrance will indeed bear good fruit for the Church.
But the pressing question for me is this: what effect will the fruits of the processions and the Congress have on the Catholic Church as a whole in the United States. Those who took part in the processions and the Congress will go back to their parisheswith their hearts burning, lit by the fire of the presence of ourLord in the Blessed Sacrament. But they, both priests and laity, are a tiny fraction of those who go to Mass in some regular fashion. So their influence in what we may call parish renewal in general will be small. This group of clergy and laity may also succumb to the temptation to try to make Eucharistic adorationthe solution to the basic problem of lack of ardor for the Catholic faith in their parishes.
This would be a real mistake. For there seems to be a deliberate blindness to the root cause of the at best lukewarm Catholicism that is the mark of so many parishes and of why seventy percent of Catholics who practice their faith to some extent do not believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Host consecrated at Mass. The root cause of lukewarmness and disbelief is how the Mass is celebrated in most parishes, especially on Sundays. It is the refusal of both bishops and priests to acknowledge this that keeps the Church in this country in the vapid bondage in which it finds itself.
The history of the terrible iconoclasm in Catholic parishes in this country has not been written, perhaps because the terrible history of clerical abuse was so searing that the people could not bear to hear about what happened to so many churches in the name of a Council whose document on the Liturgy had little effect on the post-conciliar Church. But when does not talk about terrible things in the past, there is little hope that the effects of that past can be overcome.
The cause of the disbelief in the Real Presence and the increasing numbers, especially among young people, who have “left” the Church is how the Mass has been celebrated in many parishes after the Second Vatican Council. A layman described to me some years ago his impression of the Sunday Mass in his parish: “a secularized pottage of seemingly endless words by the priests and the lay people, punctured by songs—not hymns—that are based in the vapid sentimentality of the ‘70s and ‘80s.”This man is still a faithful Catholic, which is evidence of the power of the Holy Spirit to act in times when the Church on earth seemed to prefer the spirit of the age.
That there has been in the past few years a small but important rediscovery of Tradition in the liturgy is something for which we must be grateful. But the fact is that in most parishes the liturgy is still locked into a parish Mass where the priest will use the shortest “eucharistic prayer” to save time for himself and the congregation, who will not sing any parts of the Mass because that would take too long and because he has never been taught how to sing a Collect. The priest may even sit down during the distribution of Holy Communion and let “lay ministers” distribute Holy Communion to the people, forgetting that it is part of his “job description” as the one who offers the Sacrifice of the Mass to distribute the Fruit of that Sacrifice to his flock. There are still many parishes where missalettes are used, where the people read along with the lector or Father thus reducing the Mass to infantile didacticism, and the parishioners are forced to sing trite ditties that pass for hymns, played on electric keyboards by well- meaning choir directors who know little about the Catholic Tradition of music. This is not what was specifically recommended in Sacrosanctum Concilium. In fact,the norm in Catholic parishes denies both the spirit and the letter of that document.
The past two generations of Catholics, both those who remain in the Church and those who have drifted away, have no idea that the Catholic Church is the womb from which came Western music, Western art, Western drama and literature. This is not only because some may ascribe to Henry Ford’s dictum “history is bunk”, but also because they never see the evidence of that truth of history in how the Mass is celebrated in their parish church. As good as adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is for the spiritual health of a parish, it cannot take the place of the Mass, which is the very heart of the raison d’etre for the existence of a parish church. It is vitally important that our bishops make it clear to their priests that the re-presentation of the Sacrifice of our Lord on the Cross is the heart of the Mass,and therefore must be offered with great reverence and beauty. Holy Communion is indeed a great gift of real grace, but it is not why we have a Sunday obligation to be present at Mass. The obligation is to worship God in spirit and truth, that worship that is an icon of the eternal worship of heaven.
