50 (or more) years on - Sacrosanctum Concilium

[Peter Jones]

In this Year of Faith, we are asked to study the Constitutions of the Second Vatican Council.
Alongside that study, and especially for those of us who have long memories, how have we experienced both the build up to Sacrosanctum Concilium and its subsequent implementation at parish level?

For example, four years before the promulgation of the foundational document of this Society - Divini Cultus of Pius XI (1928) - the Sacred Congregation had already begun to promote the Dialogue Mass. (That's 90 years ago.) Yet its implementation was left to local bishops. So in my childhood in the 1950s, I had the experience of singing the Ordinary of the Mass and the dialogues, if the family attended the local Missa Cantata, but if we attended an earlier Low Mass, we made no utterance whatsoever. The servers made all the responses. I was taught the Dialogue Mass in primary school c.1959/1960 - and, in retrospect - am saddened that I later discovered that parts of continental Europe had been "dialoguing" for decades before.

I was fascinated by the Dialogue Mass, when it got underway. I began to feel a part of the celebration - not just, as it were, a spectator.

[nazard]

Dialogue Mass was well established in the Black Country in the fifties. My parish was St Francis Xavier, Oldbury, but we also went to relations' parishes, St Hubert, Oldbury, the English Martyrs, Whiteheath, St Gregory, Bearwood, the Immaculate Conception, Edgbaston, and of course, St Chad's. I have no recollection of a silent Congregation anywhere. I started catholic primary school in 1958 and we were immediately started on learning the "Domine non sum dignus", a prayer for a young lady named Annie Marmea and her boyfriend Richard (I did type the common shorter form, but it got beeped!) Verbo which was said just before communion. To be fair, we were taught the meaning of it word by word as well.

I only came across the "silent congregation" phenomenon recently, but I have grown fond of it. It does give you the opportunity to concentrate.

When the new mass came in the most obvious effect was the rapid decline in congregations.

[JW]

Well, in 1955, weekday Masses at my convent boarding school at the age of 4 were silent or you got walloped (up at 6.30, Mass at 7). The Epistle and Gospel were read in English on a Sunday often instead of a homily - they had already been read in Latin. You were given improving books to look at during Mass according to ability - I was given a Latin/English Junior Missal for my 1st Communion aged 6, I still possess it. Dialogue Masses started in my parish about 1960, with a loud-voiced gentleman up in the West Gallery leading the responses. As an altar server from the age of 7, I remember wearing white gloves and trained to be both word- and gesture-perfect. There are lots of other, happier, memories, like being released from the morning's boarding-school lessons to serve at funerals and burials of people I'd never heard of at the local parish church and cemetery (never understood what was wrong with the local children doing this).

And people want to go back to this!!

[Peter Jones]

When the new mass came in the most obvious effect was the rapid decline in congregations.

Well OK but this was not just an RC phenomenon. Off the top of my head, in the 1950s half the population of the country - across all ecclesial communities - was attending church regularly. Church-going declined rapidly in subsequent decades. Look how the Methodists are really struggling now in some areas. -

[Peter Jones]

The Epistle and Gospel were read in English on a Sunday often instead of a homily...........

Read Clifford Howell here. The year is 1954.

[Southern Comfort]

When the new mass came in the most obvious effect was the rapid decline in congregations.

I suggest that this effect was not produced by a new Order of Mass but by the encyclical Humanæ Vitæ which, you will recall, preceded the new Order of Mass by only a year. The Church's (yes, I know it was a badly-advised Paul VI) biggest mistake in centuries.....

[nazard]

You have hit on a serious problem here. It is a principle of experimentation that you only change one thing at a time, but the introduction of the New Mass was not considered to be an experiment. The church was conceited enough to think the the new mass was right first time. Well, pride was considered a sin: perhaps in this brave new world it is not.

The thing people leaving the church gave as their excuse was the lack of gorm in the new mass. Of course, they would have been far too embarrassed to talk to teenagers about contraception, so no great reliance can be placed on this observation. However, the protestant churches did not have Humanae Vitae but did rewrite their liturgies, and their congregations walked out.

The church now has two big problems of its own making. An encyclical which, were its logic to be applied widely, would preclude weeding, vermin control, safety precautions and defence provisions, and the Mass of the Cutting Room Floor, cobbled together from bits which had been tried once and dropped. The mass congregation has autoselected largely to those who like it that way. To go forward from here needs a great deal of wisdom. Perhaps an old formula would help - Praeceptis salutaribus moniti, et Divini institutione formati...

By the way, just in case anyone misunderstands, I have not said that the old mass is perfect and the only way forward is to return to it. After forty years experience it must surely be time for a major edit?

[Nick Baty]

Only the most extreme Daily Mail reader would claim that our churches would still be full if we had retained just one form of the Mass. Society was changing: changes in the Mass might have been implemented in 1965 and 1967 – but there was also the Summer of Love of 1967, Hair and the Sexual Offences Act in the same year, student protests and the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968. And that's just off the top of my head. Too young to remember it, but I really can't imagine crowds walking out of the churches simply because Mass was in English!

[nazard]

Very few people have ever told me that they left because mass was in English.

[Peter Jones]

People no longer following is not something new - read Jesus' own plaintive question - John 6: 67 ‘Do you also wish to go away?’

I repeat - departure from organised religion was (and is) not just an RC phenomenon. It was (and is) pan-denominational and now affects not just the Christian faith but all faiths in Europe, including that of Islam. Read Jimmy Crichton As it was.., for example. There has never been a so-called Golden Age of Catholicism when everyone went to Mass on a Sunday.
Lest Humanae Vitae side-tracks us from matters liturgical, may we return to Sacrosanctum Concilium?

[JW]

The link between Humanae Vitae and Sacrosanctum Concilium is that, rightly or wrongly, the sentiment afoot post Council was that the Church would listen to its people. That this sentiment was erroneous was highlighted by Humanae Vitae. Humanae Vitae was an early example of listening and a the Pope chose to ignore the majority of the advice he was given: one wonders why the commission was formed in the first place if there was only ever going to be one answer. I suspect that even many who may be considered traditionalists in liturgical matters disagree in practical terms with the main conclusion of Humanae Vitae.

Even Sacrosanctum Concilium gave hope that popular culture would be acknowledged in liturgy and this was the reason for the liturgical upheaval us older folk experienced (and loved).

37. Even in the liturgy, the Church has no wish to impose a rigid uniformity in matters which do not implicate the faith or the good of the whole community; rather does she respect and foster the genius and talents of the various races and peoples. Anything in these peoples' way of life which is not indissolubly bound up with superstition and error she studies with sympathy and, if possible, preserves intact. Sometimes in fact she admits such things into the liturgy itself, so long as they harmonize with its true and authentic spirit.

It's worth considering this paragraph in the light of the recent imposition of the new translation.

[nazard]

Notice the word "sometimes" in your quote from Sacrosanctum Consilium. This word may well be used in the sense of "rarely". The new translation was imposed in exactly the same way as the other changes since 1962. The return of the tridentine mass is the first morsel of choice - let us hope for more. Offering people choice is the only real way to find out what people want.

[Southern Comfort]

The thing people leaving the church gave as their excuse was the lack of gorm in the new mass.

Had to look up gorm.... no idea what it was (wondered if it was a typo for GIRM!) — and found this:

(In the Urban Dictionary)

1. Gorm

Shortened version of the word 'Gormless' Used to describe a stupid individual looking seriously deprived of intelligence.

''Neil You gorm''

2. Gorm

If someone is gormless, they're unofficially and temporarily semi-braindead. So it figures that if you can be gormless, you can also be full of gorm. People without gorm are boring - so people with Gorm are super-fly!

"my brain is turning gormless.

i can almost feel all of my gorm dissapearing.

come back gorm!! "

If the first meaning is the one intended. then lacking gorm (i.e. lacking someone seriously deprived in intelligence) would be a good thing. If the second, then this may mean that the Mass is boring.

Of course there's also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorm and http://www.gnustep.org/experience/Gorm.html, etc....



I have heard very few people citing lack of gorm or anything else in the 1969 Missa Normativa as a reason for desisting from going to Mass, or even leaving the Church. I have, however, come across a multitude of people who stopped because of Humanae Vitae, or because they had a bad experience with an unsympathetic priest, or because they found the priest's way of presiding at a revised Order of Mass in a way similar to the way he celebrated the Tridentine Mass simply too tedious. We all need to put much more work into what we have today: coasting along on autopilot simply won't do.

I would also say that the overwhelming majority embraced the revised Order of Mass, and the use of the vernacular, with great joy, and say they do not want to return to the previous régime under any circumstances.

[Nick Baty]

Interesting to listen to the memories of people of my mum's age group - she's nearly 90 so roughly half her life pre revised liturgy and half since. She embraced the reformed liturgy because she could understand it for the first time - and, no, I'm mot putting words into her mouth. She remains a daily Mass-goer although she's struggling with the new translation - it's not good for people with Alzheimer's.

[Peter Jones]

............or because they found the priest's way of presiding at a revised Order of Mass in a way similar to the way he celebrated the Tridentine Mass simply too tedious........

Some years ago I did read an article on this. Many priests who were used to "putting on Christ" in the manner of the Pius V/1962 Missal, could no longer hide their personalities - including their insecurities and their "stage fright" - beneath their vestments. Many found the expectations of presiding difficult - and I have fond memories of a fairly-recently deceased colleague who never really mastered the skills of presiding with the Missal of Paul VI because he became a nervous wreck facing a church full of people.