Saturday, December 31, 2005
On Liturgical Innovation
I give him credit for trying. Fr Murphy, our diocesan vicar-general, is in residence at the parish. At the two Christmas Masses at which we overlapped, he prefaced reciting the Creed with the instruction to pause and genuflect at the words of the Nativity. If anyone did, years of liturgical brainwashing stampeded right through. I did see one person kneel all the way through the Creed. At the other Mass, I heard two elderly people sitting behind me say the Creed the way they've probably been saying it since 1966.
It's a tough time to introduce something like this. I read the internet jibes about "So where was your pastoral sense when you rammed the vernacular, anti-orientam Mass down our throats?" (Forgetting that I was a pagan child when the New Missal was carved out of Italian marble.) When I say the people won't stand for massive changes in the Ordo Missae, I'm not just blowing it out to hear my whistle. I'm saying that we might not even get most of the clergy on board with this.
It's been my practice to bow my head at the credal recollection of the Birth. It took me months to get into the habit, and occasionally, my mind wanders off at this point of the Mass and I miss it. It's the liturgical equivalent of trying to tell a kid something when she or he's at recess. You've been sitting tight listening to readings and a homily for the past fifteen to twenty minutes. Now you get to stand up, stretch, and say something. You think something's going to break through? Not with ease, it won't.
It speaks to the issue of bringing a sense of mindfulness to the liturgy. New, improved rubrics aren't going to help.
On another note, I applaud a bit of productive fallout from the new instructions on Eucharistic Ministers entering the sanctuary. The people are singing a substantial portion of the Communion Song--something they did less of in the past. At one Mass this Christmas, we actually got to the middle of verse 4 of "The First Nowell" before the priest and EM's were in place to begin distributing Communion.
Anybody with more success on the Creed?
