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Recent Editorials:
 Folk Mass and Folk Music
Vol. 38 No.2 - June 2008
The easiest place to find pictures on the net of a 1960s folk Mass is on ‘traditional liturgy’ sites. They love to mock the early liturgical music in the vernacular and like to pretend that all supporters of the liturgical renewal up to the present day are superficial and irreverent happy-clappers. They set up straw dogs to knock down.
Like the sixties culture in general, the folk Mass is easy to ridicule. Yet for the first generation of liturgical reformers after the Second Vatican Council, ‘folk’ was a badge worn with honour. The magazine called Ministry and Liturgy, formerly known as Modern Liturgy, was founded with the title Folk Mass and Modern Liturgy and kept this title for three years until 1976. Between 1974 and 1978 the English publisher Mayhew-McCrimmon released no less than four volumes of the 20th Century Folk Hymnal for parish use. In 1971 in Australia, Tony Newman and Peter Stone produced Travelling to Freedom: A Journey of the Spirit, a hymnal with guitar chords, designed with contemporary photographs, poetry and quotes, and published by the Living Parish Series.
Why would serious liturgy and music people, intent upon the pastoral renewal of the Church’s liturgical life, light upon the folk genre and the embarrassing term ‘folk Mass’ to define what they were doing? Perhaps we can let Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, give us the answer. Writing in 1990, he describes a place for church music somewhere between elitist art music and democratic pop music. Has the Church not always been the home of folk music? he asks. Folk music in its original sense is the musical expression of a clearly defined community held together by its language, history and way of life, which assimilates and shapes its experiences in song – the experience with God, the experiences of love and sorrow, of birth and death, as well as the experience of communion with nature. Such a community’s way of structuring music may be called naïve, but it does spring from original contact with the fundamental experiences of human existence and is therefore an expression of truth. Its naïveté belongs to that kind of simplicity from which great things can come. (Published in A New Song for the Lord, 1997, p. 107).
We are dealing here with traditions of music which are known by heart, which spring spontaneously to the lips, which play an integral role in everyday life; folk music in its simplicity is communal and accessible to all. This seemed the ideal kind of music to ensure that Christ’s faithful, when present at the mystery of faith, should not be there as strangers or silent spectators… [but] should take part in the sacred service conscious of what they are doing, with devotion and full involvement (SC 48). Liturgical music that was accessible was needed if, to promote active participation, the people [were to be] encouraged to take part by means of acclamations, responses, psalmody, antiphons and songs… (SC 30).
Unfortunately, the early years of the liturgical renewal corresponded with a ‘folk music revival’ which comprised new compositions performed by professionals. Even this appealed to church people at the time, however, because this ‘folk’ music had a message – justice, freedom, peace. But ‘folk’ changed is meaning. This new genre took folk music in the direction of pop and rock music which in turn became important influences on the developing repertoire of liturgical music. Church music was then judged to have devalued its ‘high art’ tradition in favour of mass popular culture.
The problem is not just ecclesiastical. In the last half century, we have been trying to forge a suitable repertoire of sacred music against the cultural background of rupture between art and the artist on the one hand and the public on the other. Cardinal Ratzinger commented that faith and the culture of faith have a hard time of it in the interstice between aesthetic elitism and industrial mass culture. Their position is difficult simply because art and people themselves have a hard time of it in this situation and can hardly hold their ground… Undoubtedly we will also have to let considerable tolerance reign on the margins, at the points of transition to the two antitheses of liturgically appropriate music (p. 109).
I believe the early instinct to adopt the badge ‘folk’ for liturgical music was a serious, reasonable and worthy attempt to achieve what the Council fathers were asking for in a participatory liturgy. If it has not been entirely successful, I would argue that it does not stem from a capitulation to low-brow popular culture or the abandonment of a sense of the sacred in the liturgy. I suggest that the problems are much deeper cultural issues. Ultimately we need to explore the Church’s relationship to the world. How do we harness contemporary forms and styles of art and music to express our worship before God? We cannot answer this question when there is a fundamental alienation in Western society between contemporary arts and popular appreciation. Liturgists and church musicians do not have the cultural foundation stones upon which to build. Pope John Paul II pleaded for a rapprochement between the church and the arts in his 1999 Letter to Artists (www.vatican.va, holy father). But what good will this do us if the artist is isolated from the populace?
In this issue of Liturgy News, we try to sketch the background to these questions and suggest a way forward. Gerard O’Dempsey offers an overview of our ‘adventures’ in liturgical music over the last fifty years. Ralph Morton, in view of the fact that we will soon have new Mass texts and therefore require new music settings for the Mass, sets out some important considerations for the composers who will write them and the communities who will receive them. We know by now that producing music worthy of the sacred liturgy and our celebration of it is no easy task.
TOM ELICH
Active Participation
Vol. 38 No.1 - March 2008
We participate in a symphony concert by listening in silence. It can transport us to another world or move us to tears. We do indeed participate in the music, but is this the active participation demanded by the liturgy? I would say not. Because, while we participate personally in receiving the music, we are not participating in the event of making the music.
The Vatican Council said in its Constitution on the Liturgy that the Church earnestly desires that all the faithful be led to that full, conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations called for by the very nature of the liturgy. Such participation of the Christian people as ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people’ (1 Pt 2:9) is their right and duty by reason of their baptism. In the reform and promotion of the liturgy, this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else. For it is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit and therefore pastors must zealously strive in all their pastoral work to achieve such participation by means of the necessary instruction (SC 14).
I have noticed in recent years a trend among some authors on liturgy to treat active participation almost exclusively as a kind of internal attention, akin to the way one would participate in a symphony concert. They turn to the Latin text and point out that the Council says actuosa participatio, contrasting it with activa participatio which the Council did not use. Thus they marginalise the actions of singing, walking, kneeling, or anything else that can be termed ‘active’ in their over-emphasis on the ultimate spiritual aim of ‘actuosa participatio’. They will more readily speak of participation in the divine life, in the priesthood of Christ, an interior union with Christ in the mystical body. All of which, of course, can be accepted as the final goal of Christian worship. But the Council is first urging the full, conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations as the way into the underlying spiritual reality.
Active participation does mean more than mere activity or endless ‘busyness’, and there have indeed been errors in the last fifty years – I think of the school Mass where every child must have something to ‘do’. Those engaged in parish liturgy preparation have sometimes focussed too much on the externals, the superficial workings of the liturgical event. But it is no solution to spiritualise active participation to the point where attentive listening or prayerful watching is sufficient to fulfil the demands of the Council Fathers, just so long as ultimately we are sharing with mind and heart in the divine life. The bishops at the Council themselves recognised the problem, urging those responsible for pastoral care to foster people taking an active part in the liturgy, both inwardly and outwardly, in ways suited to their age, the circumstances they are in, the kind of life they lead, and their level of religious culture (SC 19). It is ‘both—and’.
How do we relate ‘inwardly’ and outwardly’? What does ‘participatio actuosa’ really mean? Firstly we should not be tempted to understand the Latin phrase as ‘actual’ participation instead of ‘active’ participation (for this would rather be expressed in a phrase like ‘participatio vera’). ‘Activa’ means ‘practical’ as opposed to speculative or contemplative. ‘Actuosa’ means ‘full of activity’, ‘very active or lively’, ‘with energy’. So it would be a mistake to suppose that the Council Fathers intended something different from physical ‘active participation’.
The Council requires a full, conscious and active participation in ‘liturgical celebrations’. ‘Celebratio’ in Latin contains within it the idea of a great assembly, a concourse, a congregation. It is therefore a participation in the action of the liturgical assembly. This, the Council asserts, is demanded by the nature of the liturgy and is the right and duty of Christian people by virtue of their baptism. Now we get to the heart of the matter.
‘Who celebrates the liturgy?’ asks the Catholic Catechism (CCC 1136). Liturgy, it answers, is an ‘action’ of the whole Christ (Christus totus)… it is the whole community, the Body of Christ united with its Head, that celebrates. By our baptism, we are part of the Body of Christ, and it is our right and duty to act as part of the Body of Christ; it is the Body of Christ which celebrates the liturgy.
I would argue, therefore, that active participation means being present at the liturgy as ‘doers’, as the Actor, as those who really perform the liturgical action. This is more than a mental and spiritual concentration on what someone else is doing. It is being part of the doing. The people’s postures and movements, their words and singing, are a sign of their place in liturgical events (which) are not private actions but celebrations of the whole Church… these celebrations of the whole body which is the Church touch the individual members of the Church in a way related to the differences of ranks, of roles and of ‘levels’ of participation (actualis participationis) (SC 26).
What then of silence in the liturgy or listening to the proclamation of the word or the Eucharistic Prayer? I am certainly not suggesting anything as grossly literal as a communal recitation of the Scriptures or the presider’s prayers. However I am convinced that we must understand the proclamation of the word as more than the action of the reader before an audience. The activation of God’s saving word in the liturgy takes place in a proclamation from heart to heart, from faith to faith, in such a way that the engagement of the entire liturgical assembly makes God’s word something alive and active (Heb 4:12). The liturgy of the word is ministered by a reader or cantor but is a divine event for and within the whole assembly. The Eucharistic Prayer is given voice by the priest but it is the whole of the gathered Church which offers in thanksgiving the holy and living sacrifice. The ‘doing’ of the liturgy does not demand that each individual does every part of the liturgy, but it certainly means that each individual is fully conscious that they are part of a communal action. The liturgy is my prayer in so far as I throw my lot in with the Church at prayer; I am part of something bigger than myself.
Therefore whatever gives people a sense of being present at the liturgy as doers is of paramount concern, the aim to be pursued above all else. This embraces not only the activity of the liturgy, but the way the assembly is arranged and relates together as a body, the sense of ownership of the corporate liturgical action, and of course the way in which we actualise and enter sacramentally the great saving act of Christ on the cross.
Tom Elich
Ember Days
Vol. 37 No.4 - December 2007
A recent proposal put to the bishops conference asked for an annual National Day of Prayer for Good Seasons, suggesting that a Sunday be set aside for this intention. A better option might be to activate the provisions which already exist in our liturgical calendar but which have fallen into disuse in recent decades. I think the time might be right to resuscitate Ember Days and maybe even Rogation Days.
Ember Days were groups of three days which corresponded roughly with the beginning of each of the four seasons. Kept on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, they were penitential days of fasting, abstinence and prayer. They were certainly established and familiar in Rome in the fifth century when Pope Leo I provided special sermons for the Ember Days in each season; liturgical texts for the days appeared in the seventh century and fixed dates were set in the eleventh. The reform of the Second Vatican Council retained Ember Days in principle, but left it to bishops conferences to determine the extent and form of their observance. (The name ‘Ember’ is similar in derivation to the German Quatember, ‘quarter day’; the Latin name is simply ‘four seasons’ quattuor tempora which is also used in the French Quatre-Temps and the Italian Quattro Tempora.)
Rogation Days (from the Latin rogare, to ask) originated at times of calamity and were marked by processions, litanies and intercession. The principal rogation procession was eventually associated with intercession for a fruitful harvest. In England, the clergy and parishioners processed through the fields with crosses and green branches, stopping for readings and prayers at stations around the parish boundaries.
To these special penitential days, we might add every Friday and the weekdays of Lent which are also days of penance. Fridays throughout the year are nominated as days of fast and abstinence, though the bishops conference may substitute other penitential practices, prayer, self denial and helping others (CCL 1249-1253). This indeed is what the Australian bishops have done, leaving Ash Wednesday and Good Friday as the only formal days of fast and abstinence in our calendar.
The 1969 General Norms for the Liturgical Year and Calendar (45-46) explains: On rogation and ember days the practice of the Church is to offer prayers to the Lord for the needs of all people, especially for the productivity of the earth and for human labour, and to give him public thanks. In order to adapt the rogations and ember days to various regions and the different needs of people, the conferences of bishops should arrange the time and plan of their celebration. Consequently the competent authority should lay down norms, in view of local conditions, on extending such celebrations over one or several days and on repeating them during the year. This was repeated in the 1970 Instruction ‘Calendaria Particularia’ (38) which asked bishops conferences to determine the time, number, and purpose of ember days and days for rogations, specifying which of the Masses for various needs and occasions were to be used.
While the original focus of Ember Days apparently was agricultural, I would argue that, for today, refocussing on the environment, climate change, and the responsibility of our stewardship of the world’s resources would be congruent with the original purpose of the days. I particularly like the emphasis on doing penance, on fasting and abstaining in connection with these Ember Days. Prayer for rain or favourable conditions can amount to little more than a request to keep us comfortable and prosperous. However we are beginning to see that sustainable use of our resources will cost us, not only financially but in terms of our attitudes and lifestyle.
Ember Days will help us match our intercession for favourable conditions with a conversion of heart in relation to our care of the earth. Fasting and abstaining from meat will encourage us to restraint in our exploitation of natural resources. A day of penance will express our solidarity with those who are disadvantaged, especially those who suffer through famine, exploitation and the inequitable distribution of the world’s goods.
Concretely, how might the reintroduction of Ember Days into the particular liturgical calendar for Australia be set up? Firstly we would not necessarily need to retain the name Ember Day (it suggests only a dying fire to modern Australians). We could call them Days of Prayer or Penance. The Ordo for Australia would list certain Days of Penance for Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, nominating for example the first Wednesday, Friday and Saturday of September, December, March and June respectively. The Summer days would occur early in Advent, the Autumn days generally early in Lent, and the Winter days usually just after Pentecost. If three days at the beginning of each season was thought to be excessive, we could focus just on the first Friday in each season, Friday being the traditional day of penance. Should this Friday be impeded by a feast or solemnity, the Day of Penance could slide to the first available Friday in the new season.
I recommend this proposal for discussion in parishes and diocesan liturgical commissions. If it were thought to have merit, a letter of request could be sent to the bishop.
Tom Elich, editor
The Missal of John XXIII
Vol. 37 No.3 - September 2007
I am writing this on the feast of the Triumph of the Cross. Today our little mob at the parish of Sts Peter and Paul celebrated the liturgy simply and with joy. Tomorrow we will do the same to honour Our Lady of Sorrows. The sky has not yet collapsed. I do not expect it to. Today the Motu Proprio of Pope Benedict on the old form of Mass in Latin takes effect. I cannot imagine that it will change the liturgical practice of our parish. The pope is at pains to point out that our present Missal obviously is and continues to be the normal Form – the forma ordinaria – of the Eucharistic liturgy.
Continuity and Discontinuity
There is no question that the Second Vatican Council intended a serious general reform of the liturgy (SC 21). Zeal for the promotion and restoration of the liturgy is rightly held to be a sign of the providential dispositions of God in our time, a movement of the Holy Spirit in the Church (SC 43). In implementing this reform, we have undoubtedly tended to emphasise the change in attitude and practice, the discontinuity with what went before. We have always understood, of course, that we are the same Church, celebrating the same sacred mysteries in the liturgy. Even a break in practice with our immediate past was always intended to link us with more substantial parts of our Catholic tradition.
Now, in the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict has chosen to underline the theme of continuity in the Council’s liturgical reform. He does not reverse or negate the reform of the liturgy. He affirms that he is not turning back the clock. Rather he is adjusting the point of equilibrium.
It is worth recognising that the Mass of John XXIII which the pope is now allowing as an extraordinary liturgical form is itself a reformed rite. Benedict XVI sketches the evolution of the Roman Rite in broad strokes. In particular, not only does the 1962 Missal of John XXIII include an entirely revised order for Holy Week dating from the 1950s, but it also incorporates a simplification of rubrics from 1958. Again during the 1950s, Pius XII allowed the use of the vernacular in the liturgy of the sacraments, and encouraged communal participation in the responses at Mass and the singing. It is wrong to imagine that the Missal is Tridentine, that is, unchanged since the Council of Trent. Our present Missal is a further development. In the history of the liturgy, the pope writes, there is growth and progress, but no rupture.
Reconciliation
With rumours about this document flying around for the last several years, those enamoured of the Latin Mass of John XXIII have been shamelessly manipulating an uncertain situation, promising that everything they stand for would be vindicated by the restoration of the ‘classic’ Mass of the Roman Rite. In fact, they do not have much to crow about now. The burden of the Motu Proprio falls very heavily upon them. Whereas in the past, they were able to pretend that the Church of the 1950s went hand in hand with the liturgical rites of 1962, now it is clear that attachment to an extraordinary form of the Roman liturgy does not separate them doctrinally from the thinking of the Second Vatican Council. The pope insists that the two expressions of the one lex orandi will in no way lead to a division in the Church’s lex credendi. The theological teaching of the Second Vatican Council on the Church as the people of God, on the Church in the Modern World, on ecumenism and religious liberty, stands for all Catholics. Therefore the use of the Missal of John XXIII must be understood within the context of Vatican II ecclesiology and the old liturgical rites must be reinterpreted in this light. It is not a return to a pre-conciliar mentality.
Further, there is a presumption that priests who celebrate the old extraordinary form of the Roman Rite will not do so exclusively. Needless to say, writes the pope to his brother bishops, in order to experience full communion, the priests of the communities adhering to the former usage cannot, as a matter of principle, exclude celebrating according to the new books. The total exclusion of the new rite would not in fact be consistent with the recognition of its value and holiness.
The positive reason Benedict XVI issued his Motu Proprio was to achieve an interior reconciliation in the heart of the Church. He appears to intend primarily the reconciliation of the schismatic Society of Saint Pius X. But his prophetic call for reconciliation also applies to any Catholics who regularly disparage parish communities and even bishops who celebrate the ordinary form of the Roman liturgy with faith and goodwill. One positive aspect of the new provisions is that it demonstrates unequivocally that the Holy See embraces diversity as both possible and desirable within the unity of the Roman Rite.
Opportunity and Ability
For the extraordinary rite to be celebrated, a priest will need both the opportunity and the ability to do so. Neither will be easily come by. With fewer and older priests, parishes – especially those clustered around a single priest – are being forced to reduce the number of Masses. What priest will have the opportunity to celebrate the extraordinary rite for a small group of the faithful without compromise to the rest of the parish? A priest is not at liberty to celebrate extra Masses at will: the general rule is that he may not celebrate Mass more than once a day, though for good reason the bishop may allow him to celebrate twice in one day or even, if pastoral need requires it, three times on Sundays (CCL 905). There is not much room to move.
Secondly it will require quite specialised skills on the part of the priest. In the first place he must be able to understand Latin, read it fluently, and pronounce it intelligently. This was common enough several decades ago, but today hardly any priest, doctor or lawyer would be able to manage: classics departments are tiny. Next the priest must be familiar with the liturgical forms and the highly detailed rubrics of the old rite. Summorum Pontificum has spawned a flush of enthusiasm for web-based training sites and the publication of resources, but celebrating the liturgy would still require a concentrated effort for those unfamiliar with this usage. While we are all encouraged to preserve the riches of the Church’s faith and prayer and to give them their proper place, and while priests who desire to celebrate the old liturgy may do so, I do not believe there is ever any obligation on a priest to celebrate the Mass of John XXIII, nor is there any obligation upon him to learn Latin and to master the rubrics to prepare him for such an eventuality. There should be no compulsion for seminarians either to learn to celebrate it. It is an extraordinary rite.
All liturgy belongs to the whole Body of Christ under the headship of the bishop. It is never the possession of any particular interest group. Whether the Church celebrates the ordinary or the extraordinary form of the Roman liturgy, the most important thing is that it be celebrated well. All our celebrations recognise that liturgy is God’s saving action in our midst and is a holy and sacred event. It is a big enough challenge for parishes to do this using the simplified vernacular liturgy of the ordinary rite. Priests and parishes who have given their best energies to this task over recent decades are encouraged to keep up the good work.
Tom Elich, editor
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