Sunday, February 26, 2006
DIOGENES MAKE A GOOD POINT
in "The Catholic World Report", Feb. 2006. He discusses the "dislocation" experienced by Catholics as they contemplate the liturgy they experience in spite of the fact that they have a rich liturgical tradition and Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope... a "heavyweight" who still cannot seem to effect a cure to what ails our liturgy. He writes:
C. S. Lewis once discussed the problem in these terms: During Mass I can exercise either a critical or a devotional faculty, and the two are mutually exclusive. If my critical faculty is alert, it interferes with worshiping God, and has to be "lulled to sleep" as it were. The eucharistic rite, when enacted properly, is precisely the instrument by which this faculty can be quieted and the devotional faculty engaged. However, this is dependent upon the expectation of participation in the Church's liturgy, not Father So-and-so's adaptation of it. For if I have reason to believe that the celebrant will depart from the text or the rubrics, my critical faculty is switched on whether I want it to be or not, because the celebrant's departures may be tendentious or heretical or imbecilic or all three. And even if the celebrant's changes turn out to be within the bounds of orthodoxy and good taste, I sill would have been forced, against my will, to engage in an activity of criticism rather than of worship. I will have been cheated of a Mass.
I can usually count on liturgy according to the rubrics at my church, and so my devotional faculty is engaged. But when traveling, the critical faculty is too often front and center. It's not that I want it to dominate. It's not that I dredge it upon entering a church door. I may even want to supress it. But when the liturgy is tweaked, there it is dominating my thoughts and destroying the purpose for which I am at Mass.
I've never been able to describe this phenomenon quite so clearly and precisely as Diogenes has done it.
