Misplaced Nostalgia for the Extraordinary Form of the Mass

There is a debate among some of the more liturgy-minded Catholics about which form of the Mass is better.  The pre-Vatican II form of the Mass, now called the Extraordinary Form, has some very distinct differences between the post-Vactican II form of the Mass, called the Novus Ordo.  Below is a table showing some of the differences:

Extraordinary Form
Said in Latin
Priest faces alter
Priest alone distributes Communion
Communion received kneeling at rail on tongue
16 genuflections during Mass

Novus Ordo
Said in vernacular
Priest faces congregation
Priest and Lay Ministers distribute Communion
Communion received standing in line on tongue or in hand
3 genuflections during Mass

Although it had been 10 years since I attended an Extraordinary Form Mass, I had always thought it was a great mistake to switch to the Novus Ordo.  I believed, and still do believe, that many of the changes that were made were well intentioned, but have had negative unanticipated side affects.  So even though I’d only attended one Extraordinary Form Mass in my life (about 10 years ago), I found I had great nostalgia for it.

Last weekend, the feast of the Holy Trinity, my family finally took the half hour trip to downtown Milwaukee to attend the Extraordinary form of the Mass.  In the Milwaukee area, the only church that I am aware of that does the Mass in its Extraordinary form is Saint Stanislaus.

I noticed some things immediately:

• The Mass showed far more reverence for the Eucharist than any Novus Ordo Mass I’d ever attended.
• The music was amazing.  Obviously this isn’t dependent upon the Mass form used, but I do believe that the Extraordinary Form prioritizes Gregorian Chant.  I can’t imagine how many hours the choir must practice each week.
• Receiving the Blessed Sacrament kneeling at the Communion Rail felt far more appropriate.
• I often didn’t know what was occurring.  I saw many people following along in their Missals, but I didn’t have one.  Even if I did, it would take some practice to follow along.
• The priest prayed very quietly, almost as if he was mumbling.  Again, this made it hard to follow.
• The alter servers really seemed to understand that they were part of something miraculous.  Even though they were young boys they treated the liturgy with the utmost respect.
• Lastly, the church itself was incredibly beautiful.  I realize this isn’t specific to the Extraordinary Form itself, but I believe it conveys the beliefs of the congregation.  With the Extraordinary Form they see God in a majestic manner, and they make sure the Church is a fitting place for the Sacrament of the Eucharist to take place.

In terms of the experience, I did come away a bit disappointed.  I expected the Extraordinary Form of the Mass to be the solution to many of the liturgical abuses going on in many Catholic Churches today.  However, I can now see why the Vatican Council decided the liturgy was in need of reform.  The presentation of the Mass is very hard to follow and I don’t think that is necessary or good.  I can see why they would want the congregation to be more involved.  However, as I stated above, I believe they went too far.

I would love to see a hybrid of these two Mass types become the norm for our Eucharistic Liturgy.  We are clearly in need of more reverence for the Eucharist, so I would bring back the Communion Rail and do away with Extraordinary Eucharistic Ministers.  The Eucharist is precious and there is no reason for us laity to touch it, except during reception.  I would also prefer the priest to face the alter instead of the congregation, at least for the majority of the Liturgy of the Eucharist.  I see far too many priests who appear to be praying at the congregation, or even worse, trying to entertain them during the prayers in the Novus Ordo.  I’m sure many of the prayers have changed too.  I would bring back as much as possible that would allow for genuflections during the liturgy.  We need to treat God as God, and that means frequent kneeling.

However, I do like that most of the Mass is now in the vernacular, English for us.  I wouldn’t mind a bit more Latin than we have now, just to remind us of the ancient sources of the Mass.  But we should be able to understand the majority of it in our native tongue.  I don’t mind having the laity assist with the first and second readings, though they should be dressed like they’re meeting a king.  I like that the laity is able to understand and participate in more of the prayers, such as the entrance antiphon and the creed.

I believe as the liturgy goes, so goes our faith.  I hope the Church will start to realize that many of our current challenges can be solved by renewing our liturgy so it focuses more on God and less on us.

The 2nd amendment doesn’t work in a post-Christian society

The rash of recent mass shootings, and especially school shootings, had me pondering the second amendment. Guns are tools – they are morally neutral. They can be used for good, such as for hunting and sport. They can be used for evil, as we’ve seen in the news way too many times in the past year. The popular expression “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is true. However, does that mean guns should be widely available to the majority of the US population?

From CNN, a map of school shootings as of May 18th, 2018.

Laws that favor making guns ubiquitous to the general population have tended to fall to the conservative side of the political spectrum. Because they align with Christian values more often than their liberal counterparts, I find myself siding with conservative ideals most of the time. I inherited an appreciation and respect for the second amendment as I became more politically aware. I adopted the perspective that guns can be an effective crime deterant when given to responsible and properly trained citizens. I believed that the positive effects of our “gun culture” far outweighed the negative effects. Keep in mind that I live in Wisconsin, where hunting is a big part of our culture. Many of the people I know hunt, and I recently started deer hunting (with a bow) myself. What I’m about to suggest is almost unthinkable to many people in my town, state, and even across our entire nation.

The second amendment doesn’t work now that we’re living in a post-Christian culture. This statement may seem like a tantrum being thrown by a Christian who is distraught that the culture has decided it no longer needs Christianity. However, I believe the founders of the country and authors of the second amendment would agree with me. The second amendment, which was written in 1789, guarantees citizens the right to keep and bear arms. I mention the date as a reminder of how close to the establishment of our country that the amendment was created. The government established by the founding fathers of our country is unique, and many of them knew that it wouldn’t work unless religion played a big role. John Adams wrote “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Noah Webster said “The moral principles and precepts contained in the scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws.” Our first president, George Washington, said “Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.” It’s clear many of the country’s founders expected the citizens of the nation they were creating would be good and moral people.

Is our country still full of good and moral people? There certainly are many, across all religions and demographics. But I would argue that the majority of us don’t really know how to be good and moral. There are many ways to demonstrate this argument. However, I’d like to go straight to what I see is the root of the problem, and that is a lack of respect for life. Our society likes to give us labels and tell us that fitting these labels is what give us our worth. Organizations that push rights for specific groups of people (usually genders, sexual orientations, or ethnicities) are trying to link a person’s identity to these individual traits. Our identity and our real worth comes from being God’s children. For example, accepting a (homosexual/transgender/other trait) person for who they are makes that trait the most defining part of their identity. This hugely under-emphasizes or even ignores the main thing that gives the person value – being made in the image and likeness of God.

So if we are sons and daughters of God, then each life is a share in His divinity and is worth more than all the money, power, and pleasure our world can offer. Sadly, we have been teaching our children and ourselves that the opposite is true for a long time. I believe one of the most obvious ways is the widespread use of contraception. While contraception can, from a certain perspective, seem like a good idea in a few theoretical situations, its actual use ends up being morally harmful. Our fertility is the one way that God gives us to work with Him in the creation of new life. But we reject that gift because we want the pleasure of sex without the children, or we have decided that having more children is too expensive or too much work. Contraception allows us to place these other things (money, pleasure) over the gift of life in a real, direct, and obvious way.

Contraception also leads directly to abortion, because if you decide you can’t have children but end up getting pregnant by mistake, then you need a way out. That abortion devalues life is apparent to everyone, even those who vociferously deny it. Abortion is the decision to end the life of the one who is most vulnerable and most dependent upon you because you decide it would be too much work to support that life. Abortion creates the idea, spread thickly across our society, that life is disposable.

Divorce gives one of the spouses the ability to decide that his or her happiness is more important than the lives of his/her children and the happiness of his/her spouse. Divorce is devastating to children; so many studies have confirmed this. Yet spouses still delude themselves into thinking they can still be a good parent after divorce. Divorce treats the life of husbands and wives and most importantly of children below the value of one spouse’s preconceived notion of happiness.

The list of examples can go on and on. Businesses place profit over people, both customers and employees. Politicians use people for political gain. Men use women through pornography, which has infected many of the films that Hollywood makes and that we bring into our homes. Drug addiction makes the pleasure of a high more important than the life of the user. A lack of purpose has led to a suicide epidemic among our youth. Rich people have many homes, cars, and possessions while poor people don’t have enough to eat.  All these things fail to see life as the precious gift that Christianity tells us it is.

In light of all the ways our society has decided that life is not as important, is it any surprise that we are facing unprecedented gun violence? If we are going to treat other people as objects or obstacles to our freedom and happiness, then mass shootings are inevitable. Because of this, I am in favor of placing substantial limits on gun ownership, at least until our society starts to turn back toward Christianity and God our Father.

A Call to Christian Unity On Pentecost

This Sunday the Christian world celebrates the feast of Pentecost.  Part of my pastor’s message for the feast is a contrast of the events of the building of the tower of Babel in the Old Testament with the events of the creation of the Church on Pentecost in the New Testament.  At the tower of Babel, mankind decided it could do anything without the help of God.  At Pentecost, the early Church learned it could do anything with the help of the Holy Spirit.  At the tower of Babel, God gave the people different languages so they could no longer understand each other.  At Pentecost, God gave the early Church the gift of tongues so that, although those listening were all from different lands with different languages, they could all understand the Apostle’s message.

Despite the differences in race and language, the early Church was united.  In reading the Gospels, the rest of the New Testament, and other works of the early Church it becomes apparent that unity was of vital importance to its leaders.  During Jesus’ passion, he prays “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one – I in them and you in me – so that they may be brought to complete unity (John 17:22-23).”  St Paul says “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought (1 Corinthians 1:10).”

We don’t have to look to far past Pentecost to see why this theme is so important.  Acts 8:9-11 describes a magician named Simon who was teaching errors about Jesus.  Writing in circa 153 AD, Justin Martyr describes Simon and his followers, Helena, Menander, and Marcion, as the founders of Gnosticism.  Gnosticism is the belief that there is a good spiritual world that is constantly in conflict with a bad material world.  One brand of this belief that flourished at that time was called Docetism, which held that Jesus didn’t really become man, but rather just appeared to.  John 1:14 refutes this soundly, but the problem at the time was that there was no established Bible.  There were many books, including the books of our current Bible, but also including books created and used by false teachers to reinforce their positions.  These false teachers often claimed to have received a secret teaching from the Apostles, and thus claimed to be the teachers of the true faith.  So how would an early Christian have figured out who the real teachers of Christianity were?  And with their commission to “make disciples of all nations” under dire threat, what were the Apostles and their followers to do?

The answer lies in the concept of Apostolic Succession.  The concept is first seen in Acts 1:20 with the election of Judas’ successor.  It is later seen as the Apostles found churches throughout the known world and later either leave that church to found one in another region or die.  To prove you carry the teachings that the original twelve Apostles carried on from Jesus, you trace who you learned from back to the Apostles.  Saint Peter, before moving on from Antioch to become the first Bishop of Rome, appointed his successor, who then was succeeded by a disciple of John named Ignatius, who became the third Bishop of Antioch.  There are several examples of Ignatius exhorting Christian unity through the authority of the successors of the Apostles, such as this one written during his march to Rome to be martyred: “Let there be nothing among you tending to divide you, but be united with the bishop and those who preside.”  Clement was the third successor to Peter in Rome, and wrote an epistle to the church in Corinth (chapters 42 – 44).  This epistle, which was written about the same time as the last few books of the Bible, explained the concept of Apostolic Succession exactly as it is still used today.

Without Apostolic Succession, we could not know whether the teachings we receive today are the authentic message Jesus and his Apostles were preaching almost 2,000 year ago.  Many will ask why this is important.  Why can’t we have a relationship without a Church, just me and Jesus?  First, our lack of unity is a terrible scandal to non-Christians.  How can we claim to know Jesus, who is Truth, if our disagreements have shattered us into tens of thousands of different denominations?  Second, a relationship with Jesus should challenge and transform us.  But our wide array of denominations allows us to find a church whose doctrine fits us, instead of conforming our will to that of Jesus’ bride, the Church.  If we want the joy that a life in Christ provides, we need to receive His true message preserved by His church.

So what is to be done with our many denominations?  Should they all be abandoned?  Certainly not!  Each unique denomination has something in it that has made it successful.  Those gifts, talents, and charisms need to be brought home to enrich the Church that Jesus left us.  There is so much we can learn from our brothers and sisters in Christ.  The devil succeeded in dividing Jesus’ Church, but will be robbed of any satisfaction if we can overcome our pride and bring all our unique flavors back into union with the bishop of Rome.  As was especially felt 500 year ago, the Church is always in need of reform, because she is made up of fallen humans.  But it must be a reform that keeps us together.  We face many challenges in our current world – pollution, addiction, lack of respect for life, depression, and meaninglessness.  Together, a universal Christian church can overcome these challenges and bring the joy of Christ to the whole world.

The time for action has arrived.  Pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  Only through prayer can we be moved to Truth.  Don’t accept my description of the early Church – study it yourself!  Read the works of the early Christians that we still have today.  There is a general assumption that much of the Church’s history has been lost to the sands of time, but it simply isn’t true.  We have great descriptions and histories of life back then, both from within and outside of the church.  Talk to your local church leaders about bringing your congregation home.  Visit the Coming Home Network for support in considering this difficult decision.  Browse the Catholic Answers website for explanations on why Catholics do many things differently.  We need a unified Church – Jesus knew it, the Apostles and early Christians knew it, and we need to know it too.

A Reflection on Mark 8:36 and public schools

I saw a story yesterday that caused me to reflect again on the public education system in the United States.  Growing up, I had always assumed that a free, public education was good for our society.  How could anyone questions such an assumption?  Education allows people to climb the economic ladder.  With a good education and hard work, anyone can get a well-paying job and fulfill the American dream of getting an abundance of stuff.  With an education we can finally be happy, or so the story goes.

I subconsciously began to wonder about this premise around my college years.  I went to a state sponsored community college for my first two years.  I observed in at least two of my classes (a philosophy class and a biology class) professors/lessons that were overtly hostile to Christianity.  It occurred to me that the college experience could weaken ones’ faith, but my own faith was not too important to me at the time, and I paid it very little attention to the hostility.

Later after starting a family, I again began to reflect on the university system.  The thought of my own children eventually attending an institution that praised a hedonistic lifestyle while openly mocking the traditions of our Western Christian culture was troubling.  Unfortunately, this problem isn’t even limited to the public university system.  Many universities which claim to be Catholic seem to want nothing more than to ridicule and mock the Church.  A couple of examples from Milwaukee’s own Marquette University jump to mind.  The first involves a philosophy professor refusing to allow discussion on the topic of same-sex marriage because such discussion could be construed as homophobic.  When a student brought up his differing opinion after class, the professor basically told him to drop the class.  Another professor blogged about the situation and was subsequently fired.  The second example is the hiring of those who openly and vociferously oppose the Church.  Why would a proponent of abortion be teaching moral theology at a Catholic university?  The university has had other issues related to questionable faculty hires.

Leaving those specifics aside, my premise is this: if sending my children to college will fill their heads with anti-Catholic rhetoric and thus increase the chances of them losing their faith, why do it?  In our current dysfunctional labor market, a college degree is required for a vast majority of good paying jobs.  Choosing not to go to college can be a major handicap in trying to get a good paying job and support a family.  But is the danger of losing salvation worth it?

Mark 8:36 says “For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their soul?”  I am still young; my oldest child is in first grade, so college is a very long way off.  But I still shake my head in wonder when I see good Catholic parents paying to send their children to the anti-Christian swamp that is our university system.  I believe most of us never seriously consider the situation.  America is built on opportunity for all.  In order to take advantage of that opportunity, you need to have a good education.  However, there is a difference between what our society considers to be successful and what our faith considers to be successful.  If my son becomes a prominent businessman but a nominal Catholic, is he a success?  If my daughter were to become a great politician but had to adopt pro-abortion policies, would she be successful?  I am not saying that no Catholic child should attend a university.  The hope is that as a parent you have successfully prepared your children for the lies and seduction of the world.  But if you haven’t (and some children are harder to prepare than others – everyone’s different!), then I would think twice about insisting on the importance of college for your kids.

Unfortunately, this takes a more sinister turn as we consider public grade schools.  Recently I was reading about noted Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton, and I was surprised to find that he considered public schools to be one of the five biggest threats to our Christian culture.  Chesterton wrote “The bias of the modern world is so enormous that it will allow a thing to be inefficient as long as it is also irreligious.”  Our grade schools have become the means for the progressive culture to indoctrinate our children with their anti-Christian perspectives.  At this young age, our children don’t have the mental capacity to evaluate the implications of these hostile teachings.  The children trust their teachers are giving them the truth.  But without a holistic perspective that includes the way that Math, History, and Philosophy relate to religion and God, there is no truth.

In previous times, the public school curriculum may have been devoid of God, but it is now often hostile.  Examples are easy to find: In Florida an 11th grader’s homework makes casual reference to fornication and ‘revenge sex’.  In my own hometown a survey was circulated to middle school students in an attempt to get them to question their beliefs on sexuality.  The state of California is mandating pro-homosexual and pro-abortion sex ed and not allowing parents to pull their children out of the class.  The progressive culture has realized that the public schools are a perfect instrument for promoting their anti-Christian agenda, and are ramping up its use for that purpose.

So again I bring this back to Mark 8:36.  It may be the time for us to choose which path to start our children – success in this world, or happiness in the next.  Choosing a private school (and not all are good) is expensive.  Homeschooling a a big commitment.  But our children’s souls are worth it.