Paul Turner
Music & Liturgy 49.2 (June 2023)
Fr Paul Turner is Pastor of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kansas City, Missouri, and Director of the Office of Divine Worship for the Diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph and a member of the Catholic Academy of Liturgy.
Participating at Mass
Participating at Mass is responding to a lover’s call. ‘Every time we go to Mass, the first reason is that we are drawn there by [Christ’s] desire for us.’ Pope Francis describes participation that way in Desiderio Desideravi (n.6). As in any meaningful relationship, if we want it to grow, we act in ways that please the one we love. We enjoy love in the moment, but if we want to sustain it, we live according to the other’s desire. Specifically, when together at table, we rejoice in the other’s presence, and we hunger not only for food, but to draw out more from the other’s love, even when we are apart.
Contributing to the enticement of a lover’s meal is an art. It requires active participation in speech, silence and action. To avoid artifice, we live outside the meal in such a way that love permeates our being. Then we can add fullness to the moments when we are together, for we have prepared our attitude to respond with art.
The term ars celebrandi commonly applies to priests as they preside for the Eucharist. It presupposes an idealised ‘art of celebrating’, a service that each priest aspires to perform well. Faithful to the Church’s expectations of his role in the Mass, he also draws out the participation of the people.
Pope Francis writes, ‘For this service to be well done – indeed, with art! – it is of fundamental importance that the priest have a keen awareness of being, through God’s mercy, a particular presence of the risen Lord’ (n.57). The priest is to say the correct words and perform the correct actions, but through them to preside in a way that the people encounter Christ who has called them. ‘The assembly has the right to be able to feel in those gestures and words the desire that the Lord has, today as at the Last Supper, to eat the Passover with us’ (n.57).
However, the Holy Father applies this term to all the faithful, not just priests. Speaking of ars celebrandi, ‘we are inclined to think of it only in regards to ordained ministers carrying out the service of presiding. But, in fact, this is an attitude that all the baptised are called to live’ (n 51). Indeed, the very subtitle of Pope Francis’s apostolic letter prepares for this interpretation. His words are not directed toward the liturgical formation of priests alone, but rather, ‘On the Liturgical Formation of the People of God’. Christ desires to dine with all. All are to acquire the attitude of ars celebrandi.
Preventing poisons
For Pope Francis, the liturgy provides an antidote to the poisons of contemporary culture. Properly celebrated, it will strengthen the faithful against the lure of spiritual worldliness (n.17).
One such poison is gnosticism, the belief that proper knowledge can only be attained by a few. Some Catholics approach the liturgy as individuals, leaning into the celebration first with their own reason and feelings. They take a subjective approach to prayer, as though they alone understand its correct properties. Pope Francis recalls that the liturgy belongs to the entire Christ-Church, to all the faithful. The liturgy ‘does not leave us alone to search out an individual supposed knowledge of the mystery of God. Rather, it takes us by the hand, together, as an assembly, to lead us deep within the mystery that the Word and the sacramental signs reveal to us’ (n.19).
This poison afflicts priests and people. Each Catholic is tempted to bring their personal preference to the liturgy as if they alone know how to celebrate it best. However, when the liturgy does not meet their standards, the celebration is not always at fault. Perhaps they have not fully entered the heart of the community that experiences the liturgy.
Another poison is neo-Pelagianism. It presumes that the faithful earn their salvation through their own efforts. Some Catholics approach the Mass as if its execution depended entirely on the application of their own skills. ‘Participating in the Eucharistic sacrifice is not our own achievement, as if because of it we could boast before God or before our brothers and sisters . . . It is the gift of the Paschal Mystery of the Lord which, received with docility, makes our life new’ (n.20).
Those whose attention to Mass stops at its details fail to let the whole of the liturgy conquer them. They succumb to self-reliant analysis, rather than the embrace of the paschal mystery.
The Holy Father concludes that the liturgy is the antidote to these poisons. Its celebration offers contemporary culture a way out of its malaise. It mixes the collective wisdom of the Church with the gracious invitation of Christ. For the People of God to adopt an art of celebrating, they forsake these poisons. The liturgy will offer true knowledge. The liturgy will supply blessed docility.
Forming the assembly
To participate with art requires proper formation. The Holy Father distinguishes two aspects: formation for the liturgy and formation by the liturgy. The second, he says, is essential, and the first depends on it (n.34).
Each member of the assembly is a full, conscious, active participant in the liturgy that forms them. Participation is not just the venue of the priest, deacon, server, reader, musician, and minister of holy communion. Every person in the room participates, even those without such titles. All have responsibilities. Therefore, each owes attention to the Holy Father’s words: ‘every aspect of the celebration must be carefully tended to (space, time, gestures, words, objects, vestments, song, music . . . ) and every rubric must be observed’ (n.23).
Those sitting in pews play an essential part. They choose a space for worship within the church. They set aside sufficient time. They observe the postures. They speak assigned words. They handle the objects and furnishings with care. They notice the vestments and decorations. They join in singing. All these aspects belong to the rubrics of the People of God.
Each person is to pay attention to even the smallest details of their words and actions and infuse them with meaning. The Holy Father notes that a single action can have multiple meanings: kneeling can mean asking pardon, bending our pride, handing God one’s tears, begging intervention, or thanking for a gift’ (n.53). Therefore, ‘kneeling should be done with art, that is to say, with a full awareness of its symbolic sense and the need that we have of this gesture to express our way of being in the presence of the Lord’ (n.53).
This ‘full awareness’ applies to every other action at Mass, its words, and even to communal silence, which Pope Francis says occupies ‘a place of absolute importance’ (n.52). Being quiet together with others is one of the deepest ways to participate as a community of believers fully aware. The best of friends need not always be in conversation. They enjoy passing time also in attentive silence.
Hearing the Word of God and letting it inspire one’s life ‘is worthy of utmost attention’ (n.53). Listening is not a passive experience. Listening in silence to the scriptures at Mass expresses one’s participation in the celebration. Each person hears Christ speaking to them and reflects on his message.
Pope Francis says that participating at Mass requires different types of knowledge. The faithful experience the paschal mystery as it unfolds in their midst. They also perceive how the Holy Spirit acts in every celebration. They explore the dynamics of symbolic language, so prevalent when Christians pray (n.49). Symbols draw believers to a deeper knowledge of the mystery of God in various ways.
The art of celebration, therefore, cannot be improvised. It relies on a sturdy structure. Artisans, those who merely reproduce items, employ technique. But artists need more. They need inspiration, and indeed they become possessed by their art. To celebrate well, people let the liturgy possess them (n.50). They are not merely artisans reproducing words and actions in every celebration. They are artists who infuse them with attention and meaning.
The interplay of priest and people
Pope Francis writes beautifully about the ars celebrandi of the priest. The presider at Mass ‘should be overpowered by this desire for communion that the Lord has towards each person. It is as if he were placed in the middle between Jesus’ burning heart of love and the heart of each of the faithful, which is the object of the Lord’s love. To preside at Eucharist is to be plunged into the furnace of God’s love’ (n.57). All are called to artful participation because the burning love of the Lord extends to all. The priest is to facilitate that encounter with Christ, but he depends on the people to participate well.
To participate at Mass is to draw closer to that burning heart of the Lord. If the art of celebrating is ‘an attitude that all the baptised are called to live’ (n.51), then all the faithful are called to live even outside the liturgy in a way that pleases the loving Lord who invites them to the eucharistic meal.
When people gather at church, each of them has a role. Each is ‘on stage’ all the time. A good Catholic arrives on time for Mass, sings the songs, adopts the common gestures, makes the responses, observes the silences, listens to the readings, joins quietly in the prayers that the priest articulates, receives communion and stays for the end. This is not being passive while others do ministry. This is practising the art of celebrating. It is responding to the loving call of Christ.