Monday, December 26, 2005
DID YOU WATCH THE PAPAL MASS
at midnight on Christmas Eve? I was setting the table for Christmas dinner and my husband was flipping through the channels when it came on at my house. It wasn't long before I was sitting down to watch.
Forty-five years of Catholicism and frustration melted away as I listened. It was 1961 once again.
No, he didn't use the Tridentine rite, he was saying the Novus Ordo; but I think it would be fair to conclude the Novus Ordo doesn't sound or look like that in most parishes in the U.S. Much of it was in Latin. It was chanted. But not only was it chanted, it was chanted to the same melody I grew up on--the same melody I heard every morning, five days a week, nine months of the year from 1953 to 1961. When I closed my eyes, a school day morning filled my thoughts. I could anticipate the words. I knew the prayers as they were chanted even after all this time. At long last there was a sense of continuity...a sense that the long march of Catholicism down through the centuries was continuing unabated.
Yes, there were differences. Parts were in Italian. He faced the congregation. Some of the prayers were said in other languages. There was inculturation.
This inculturation was dignified. It was reverent. It was consistent with worship of a majestic God who is worthy of our worship, rather than somebody's idea of a little godlet we can play with this morning in our one act play. This Mass was serious business, reflective of our life and death need to believe in Him who made this Mass possible. This God belonged to no earthly culture. This God belonged to the culture of heaven open to all who wish to come.
But most of all--best of all--were those prayers chanted in Latin that bridged the 40-year gap from the time before the Council. Those Latin prayers drew all the nationalities together before the throne of their Creator, and the differences melted away. This, I think, is what heaven will be like. This is brotherhood not in the Masonic sense of all gods welcome, no god worshiped; but in the Catholic sense of one God who bekons to all of creation. This is the ritual of the God who calls us to see our brother in every man by passing through the sight of our Father in Him.
If this midnight Mass is a taste of what the real intent of the Council amounted to, it was not off track. It was moving in the right direction toward a fuller awareness of God in the midst of international humanity that modern transportation has made inevitable. If this is what we had gotten, I suspect we would not now be atomized.
There was a nutcracker with my name upon it under our Christmas tree. There was the warmth of family gathered together and laughing. Through it all there was that papal Mass--those Latin chants--that permeated everything else with the joy of continuity and Tradition, with the knowledge that God was present in our midst and still consistent with all of His promises.
For this American Catholic, the papal midnight Mass was the best Christmas gift of all.
