Reform of the Reform

Instead of grumbling about liturgical abuses I have been asked to do something about it. First, I must confess that I am not a liturgical expert. I am more of a 'big picture' person. I'm more interested in reasons than rubrics. In other words, I'm interested in why we do something more than what we do because I think that if we know why we're doing it the 'what' will follow.

In modern liturgical practices there are two different centers of focus: God and Neighbor. These two centers of gravity for the liturgy determine sides one takes on all the liturgy wars. Generally speaking you have the folks who believe the liturgy is all about the worship of God. They emphasize the vertical aspect of worship. For them the Mass is always the 'holy  sacrifice of the Mass' which the priest offers up on behalf of the people. This awesome mystery is to be kept at a proper, reverent distance from the people. It is being done for them, not by them. The emphasis, therefore is no what is done at the altar by the priest. The sacrifice is objective. Whether the people 'get anything out of it' or not is secondary. Once this is understood then everything else--music, architecture, altar servers, art, preaching falls into a logical place.

The second center of focus for the liturgy is not God, but the people. With this view the horizontal is emphasized. The Mass becomes not so much the divine sacrifice, but the fellowship meal of the people of God. The priest is the 'presider' and may even be seen as the 'first among equals' for the action of the Mass has become the action of the whole people of God who are, themselves, a 'priestly nation.' The music, actions, art and architecture all, then, serve this function--to draw the people closer together as they worship God. The extreme view of this is that in worshipping together and facing one another they actually are worshipping God for we are taught to see the face of God in other people.

I don't know what people expect of me, but I suppose they think I am all for the first type of worship and down on the second. I'm not. In fact, I think both aspects need to be remembered and emphasized. However, within the whole life of the church the proper emphasis on God and neighbor occur in different areas. In the liturgy the worship must be first and foremost centered on God. That's simply what worship is: our adoration of God. It is proper to focus on the people of God--but not in the liturgy. We focus on people in the rest of our life together--through education, evangelization, fellowship, social concern, care for the sick and dying etc.

This is not to say, however, that the liturgy must ignore the needs of the people. One of my criticisms of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass as it is often celebrated, is that there is no concern at all for the needs of 'ordinary' Catholics. It's almost as if you have to be an 'extraordinary Catholic' to appreciate the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. It is simply not good enough to impose on ordinary Catholics a form of Mass in which the music is so high falutin' as to call attention to itself and put people off. Neither is it right to impose Latin on people who are not properly prepared and catechized and open to suddenly hearing Mass in a language they cannot understand after years of hearing Mass in the vernacular.

I am not opposed to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, and I am glad it is being more widely celebrated, but I don't imagine for a minute that it is going to be the cure all for the ills of the Catholic Church. Anyone who thinks, "The Latin Mass is so beautiful and reverent, and once ordinary Catholics get a glimpse of it they will all flock to it..." is living in la la land.

In fact, the experience of an awful lot of ordinary Catholics after experiencing the Latin Mass is that they don't like it all and couldn't think of anything worse for their parish. Proper pastoral concern for such people takes time to listen to them, meet them where they are and realize that their concerns and questions are valid. Just dismissing them as 'Novus Ordo Clown Mass' Catholics is arrogant and counter productive.

The celebration of the Latin Mass is a good thing, but a better thing will be for priests and people to begin celebrating the new translation of the Mass in a more reverent, God-centered and worshipful way--balancing the need for more reverence and God-centered liturgy with the practical and pastoral needs of the people as they adjust.

Therefore in a series of articles here I will set down what practical thoughts I have on the matter. Again, I do not for a moment pretend to be a liturgical expert. I would never presume to tell my fellow priests (who are usually far more experienced than I am) how to celebrate Mass. My own experience comes from ten years as an Anglican priest and four and a half years as a Catholic priest serving at St Mary's, Greenville, St Joseph's Catholic School and now in my own parish.

However, while I do not claim to be an expert, what I say will be based on sound principles as set forth in The Spirit of the Liturgy, and from the bit of experience I have had so far.

Slubgrip Instructs - 5

Here is the fifth installment of Slubgrip's lectures on popular culture.

Chust for Nice

(Click to enlarge)
Monreal in Sicily - more photos from Fr Ray Blake here.

Politically Correct in the UK

This article reveals to what extremes political correctness has gone in the UK. New Home Office regulations give privileges to transgender inmates. Already the prison guards must refer to inmates as 'Mister' so and so. Now they've got to be more specific because some of the inmates mustn't be referred to as 'Mister' but 'Miss'. The fellas who think they're girls are to be allowed padded bras, make up to cover their beards and separate shower facilities. (all of this courtesy of the British taxpayer of course...) Finally, once they have legally become Jane and not Tarzan they can apply to be transferred to a female prison.

I think there is room here for a fantastic comedy film. One of the old fashioned sort of British Ealing comedies which starred Alastair Sim (pictured) The pitch is--One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets Some Like it Hot meets Belles of St Trinians meets Cell Block H. Two guys who are prisoners in a British prison decide that their lives are in danger so they decide to be transsexual and get transferred to a women's prison only to find that the conditions there are even worse. The women prisoners are a nastier lot than they anticipated so they try to get back to the men's prison, only to find that their 'operation' has been planned and there's no turning back. So they have to escape in order to save, ermm, their future.

I'll write the script. Anyone want to put up the money?

Or there is this continuing saga in Britain in which a Christian couple have been denied the right to be foster parents because their Christian faith leads them to disapprove of homosexuality. They've been told that they shouldn't even plan to appeal the judges' decision because they don't have a chance of it being over turned. "There's no place for Christianity within the British judicial system" they were told.

By the way, the same article on trans-gendered people in British prisons adds in a final paragraph that pagans in British prisons already have the rights to have ceremonial robes, wands and days off to celebrate the pagan holy days.

There's another movie waiting to be made: Porridge meets The Wicker Man meets Shawshank Redemption meets Harry Potter...

Words and Works

Here is my latest article for Catholic Online. It's on the need for words and works in Evangelization.

Relevant and Relative

Whenever I meet another convert to the Catholic faith from Anglicanism. I listen as they express extreme dismay and disappointment at the liturgical wasteland that is the American Catholic Church. He criticized the celebrant's game show style--all chatty and 'relevant' and full of jokes. He loathed most priest's lame attempts to make the words of the liturgy 'meaningful.' The Lord be with YOU!  with a huge smile and almost a hug. Next under fire was the sentimental, saccharine music with the heretical lyrics, and the rec room atmosphere of the church--all soft lights and carpet and comfort. Why no cup holders in the pews?

"Why oh why" he lamented "is the Catholic Church in America so awful?"

I think it comes down to this: the historical and liturgical development of the Anglican and Catholic Churches, since the Reformation has been very different. The Anglicans got used to liturgy in the vernacular and they eventually had their own 'reform of the reform' in which they learned to celebrate the liturgy with beauty, reverence and care while using the vernacular. 

Catholics, in the meantime, continued to use Latin. Then when the floodgates opened at the second Vatican Council the Catholics (many of whom felt that the Latin was totally inaccessible and arcane) went whole hog on making the liturgy 'understandable' 'relevant' and 'accessible'. Everything from the old days was considered to be inaccessible, elevated, cut off from the people and all the old traditions and customs were deemed out of touch, out of date and so out the window.

I honestly believe that many Catholics had no idea what most of the stuff they had in church and did in church meant. This includes the priests and bishops. I don't think they understood the rich history of vestments and architecture and liturgy and incense and sacred music and sacred art and candles and bells and crucifixes and confession and pilgrimages and processions and relics and saints days and the whole vast treasure house of Catholic tradition.

Nobody had explained it to them, and nobody had explained it because nobody could. Nobody could remember what all that ornate clobber was for. Everybody had forgotten about reverence and solemnity and beauty and dignity and they even forgot what worship was for in the first place. They were just going through the motions.

None of it made sense to them. They didn't know what they were doing or why. Consequently, they were longing for something more relevant, more real and more connected with the people's lives. The good ones wanted the Lord to touch people. They wanted the people to know the faith and love the faith and to know and love the Lord. So they listened to the Protestant-minded progressives and saw all the traditions and customs as burdens and blockages so they chucked the whole lot. They were like people in an art gallery who don't understand medieval paintings and so put them out for the garbage man and replace them with Andy Warhol and  Roy Lichtenstein--who are of course, 'much more accessible.'

In swept the liturgical reforms and everything became 'relevant'. I can understand what people wanted. They wanted the liturgy to relate to ordinary people and connect. That's a laudable intention. The problem is, that when liturgy is relevant it is also relative. When you change the liturgy in an attempt to relate to a particular culture, a particular people, in a particular time and place you end up making the liturgy not only relevant, but relative. What you do might be fashionable and 'cool' but it soon goes out of date. You know the old saw, "He who marries the fashion of the age will soon be a widower."

So we now go into the flying saucer churches with big sound systems and carpet on the floor polyester vestments, abstract artwork and an architecture that was clever or cool in the seventies and it all looks as hopelessly out of date as refrigerators in harvest gold or avocado green, bell bottoms, tie dyed T shirts and Scoobydoo cartoons. Then we see the people who are doing music "that will attract the young" but the only people who like it are old. We see priests and religious trying hard to "be relevant" and they are as embarrassing as Uncle Mack with his comb over, suntan, open neck shirt and gold jewelry.

The Anglicans (at least some of them) understood, in the meantime, that the liturgy was timeless and that it should be celebrated thus. Of course I'm aware that I'm painting with broad strokes. There are plenty of Anglicans who were just as wacky and 'relevant' as the Catholics. You only have to check out Madame Schori and her gang to confirm that one. Likewise there were Catholics who saw what was happening and tried to stem the tide.

Last thing is this: how do you change it? A better liturgy will change some things, but what really needs to happen is for there to be a fundamental change in what people believe about the faith. We must see the faith as timeless and at once irrelevant in whatever age or culture it finds itself and at the same time the most relevant and necessary thing for the people of any age to hear.

Those who want to make the church 'relevant' should realize that the faith, when it is radically lived out will always be both "relevant" and "irrelevant" at the same time. It will be relevant if it is radical and critical of the age in which it exists. In other words, it will be relevant exactly at the point that it seems to be irrelevant and 'out of touch.'

Likewise, and just as paradoxically, when Christians try to make the church 'relevant' that is when it is least relevant, for that is when it has lost it's chutzpah--in trying to please the children of this age--it will lose all its salt and all its oomph.

And if a dish has lost its salt and a church has lost it's oomph it's lost everything. It's lukewarm and the Lord says he will spit it out.

Slubgrip Exhorts

Hinge. I've come across your type before. Snobbish little devil called Bracket. I expect you went to training college together over at Stygian Hall. That's where you developed your fine taste in brimstone, started filing your horns, getting that embossed filigree on your wings, and what's this? A black silk cape with a red lining? And your initials monogrammed in red silk? Where are you going... the opera? I can see you've had your beard trimmed as well--got rid of the goatee and are cultivating the well trimmed look are we? Don't you think that's a bit, well, Mefistofelean?

Forget all your vanities Hinge. Don't you know that dreary season of Lent is coming up? It's bad enough that you allow your patient to read that nauseating blog of 'Father' Longenecker's but have you realized that your patient is thinking of purchasing Fr Longenecker's infantile and revolting expose called The Gargoyle Code?


The priest who writes tacky little articles like 'The Cheerful Exorcist' keeps bouncing through life with a jaunty air about him which makes me sick. He's a thoroughly proud and arrogant priest who always affects an air of self deprecating humor and mock humility. He makes me want to vomit my lava.

Your patient must not read that book Hinge. It's designed to be read during Lent, and to reveal to the patient all our most clever tricks and subterfuges. Attack Hinge. Do everything you can to prevent your patient laying hands on the book. Put him under a haze. Put him under a shadow. Entrance him. Entrap him. Keep him anesthetized and dozy.

And keep him away from that Gargoyle Code piece of propaganda.

Why Being Right is Wrong

There is a line in a poem by e.e.cummings which sticks with me: "Even on a Sunday may I be wrong, for whenever men are right they are not young."

Of course I am not disputing the necessity of believing the right thing and behaving the right way. What I am wary of is the human foible of (having pursued what is right) believing that we have arrived and we are right. How much self righteousness, pride and broken relationships result in believing we are right. How much humility, humor and good relationships can be built when we honestly believe that we are wrong--or if not wrong, then not completely right.

Can you persist in an argument with anyone if you stop for a moment and question your own position? Can you persist in an argument once you've stopped to see it from their point of view? Don't arguments fade away once you take the blame? What if you really are right? Stop for a moment. You may be right, but they are right too in some way or there would not be an argument. When you stop to say, "I'm wrong!" or at least, "I could be wrong!" The heart of the argument fades.

Think how often you've stirred things up because you think the other person is 'just wrong!" But what if you stopped and looked at it from their perspective? What if you gave the other person the benefit of the doubt? What if you imagined for a moment in your selfish pride that you were actually wrong and they were right? What if, you couldn't do that but you were at least able to grant that they had a point that should be considered? What if you stopped to listen really listen?

Forget about arguments, and think for a moment how much more you would learn about life if you were wrong and not right all the time. Think what new curiosity you would be given, what a young and positive and inquisitive spirit you would have if you knew your ignorance rather than knowing how much you know. Think how much you would discover if you knew what you don't know rather than being so sure of what you know.

Think for a moment of how little humor and fun there is in being right. Have you ever met a "righteous" person who has a sense of humor? I once spoke to a Jehovah's Witness who was ever so 'right' and told him the main reason I could never follow his religion is because I never saw him smile. How many righteous religious people do you know who are so grim and glum in their being right? Too many I fear. Why is that? Because all the best humor is based on a misunderstanding, a fault, a problem and a failure. We laugh when "righteousness" and false dignity are undermined. It is far funnier when the pompous mayor has a pie in the face or when the pompous prelate slips on the banana skin.

I often wonder how I ever got to be a priest since I so often feel I am not very religious--at least in that 'I'm religious and have got all the answers kind of way." I become irritated at the religious people therefore who use their religion as a way to re-inforce their prejudices and support their comfort zone. Too many use religion to close down enquiry and close down the adventure of faith and take refuge in 'being right', and the next step from that closing down of the human heart and mind is to blame others who have opened up.

The sick kind of religious mentality must construct not only a comfort zone, but eventually a fortress, for the comfort zone is never comfortable and safe enough, and once they construct the fortress they are still not safe enough inside, so they must soon find an enemy on the outside, and if there is no clear enemy they soon create one.

This is the aspect of religion which drives me wild with anger and fear. Their obsession with "being right" has made them use religion for exactly the opposite purpose of God's intention. Religion was meant to be a trampoline. They've turned it into an easy chair. It was supposed to launch them into life and they've used it to lock themselves into a cage. It was supposed to propel them into the adventure of the abundant life and they've used it to narrow everything down into a life that is an ever decreasing downward spiral.

Good Lord deliver us from being right, "and even on a Sunday may I be wrong for whenever men are right they are not young."

Here endeth the rant.

Greenville to Nashville

It's a beautiful five hour drive through the mountains from Greenville, South Carolina to Nashville, TN. Mrs Longenecker and I took some time together to make the drive today. Tomorrow I'll be one of the speakers at the Nashville Highest Call Men's Conference along with Patrick Coffin from Catholic Answers. I'll be speaking on the theme of my book, Listen My Son --St Benedict for Fathers--relating the ancient Rule of St Benedict to the needs of Catholic men today. If you're in town, come and join us at the cathedral in Nashville.

The Cheerful Exorcist

Here's my latest article for InsideCatholic--on being cheerful and cheeky in our battles with Satan.

Jane Russell RIP

Did you know Hollywood actress Jane Russell, (pictured here in her most famous role as Mantilla the Hon) who died this week, was a deeply Christian woman who was active in the pro life cause? This post highlights her views, pointing out that the obit calls for donations to a prominent pro life charity in lieu of flowers. She had a backstreet abortion as a teenager and was rendered sterile as a result. She adopted three kids and founded two adoption charities and lobbied for the promotion of adoption as a positive option.

Of course the mainstream media somehow overlooked all that, not to mention the fact that she was a darned good actress and decent person. Instead they focused on her 'sultry bombshell' image.

Being Good or Going to Mass?

Not long ago I had a conversation with a woman which is pretty typical. She's real nice, wealthy, upper middle class and Catholic. I ask her where they go to Mass. She says they don't go to Mass, but they are "really good people." She then proceeds to tell me how good she is.

So I'm at St Joseph's Catholic School and I ask the kids, "So here's a Catholic question for you..what's better to be good and not go to Mass or to go to Mass and be bad?" They're pretty smart. A few of them say, "Be good and not go to Mass." Some others come up with better answers, "What if you went to Mass and you were bad, but going to Mass made you realize you were bad, and so you went to confession. Wouldn't that be better?" Another said, "You couldn't go to Mass and fully participate and be bad. Just going and being close to God would make you good." Another was even smarter, "The person who says they're good is bad because they're self righteous. It's the person who thinks they're bad who's really good."

So the conversation continues and I ask individual kids, "Steven, are you a good person?" Now they're beginning to get it and they're laughing.  Steve says, "No Father, I'm not good. I'm bad."

"That's the right answer!" I exclaim. "Mary are you a good person?" She comes up with a corker, "By God's grace I hope I might one day be good." Wow! These kids are on it.

This is the how exciting paradox of religion. Anyone who says, "We don't go to Mass, but we are really good people" have missed the Christian bus big time. They don't get it and so greatly don't get it that they are almost uneducable. Their misunderstanding is so profound that you couldn't even say to them what they haven't got because they don't know what they don't know. The astounding blind ness of such folks is that nine times out of then they then turn around and blame the people who do go to Mass for being hypocrites. Their lack of self awareness and spiritual awareness reveals the depth of their own hypocrisy for they think they are good, and never see that the essential prayer--the prayer at the heart of it all is the sinner's plea, "Lord Jesus Christ, Have Mercy on me a Sinner."

This prayer, so simple and so profound is the prayer that truly liberates. See how free and how child like you can be if you simply say this prayer? Within this prayer is the soul's freedom and the soul's joy. Within this prayer is the  simple trust in God on which everything else depends. Therefore, "Being good or Going to Mass" is a totally false dichotomy.

As one of the students said, "You can't really go to Mass and mean it and be bad, and if you don't go to Mass you can't really be good."

Busy Padre

Sorry so little blogging lately. This week I've been out of my normal schedule because of the mini mester at St Joseph's Catholic School. My mini mester course was Help Haiti. Some of you very kindly made donations through the blog. We raised $2,000.00 and the kids went shopping and bought and filled 60 plastic shoe box sized boxes to make 'survival boxes' for kids living in tent cities in Haiti. Into the boxes went, flashlight, rosary, t shirt, flip flops, sun hat, bouncy ball, holy card, washcloth, water bottle, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, soapbox, little toys, holy medals. They also bought and filled 60 folders with paper, pens, pencils, erasers, and other school supplies. Today we took them all to Atlanta and visited the charity FODAC--who will ship the stuff out to Haiti. Here are some of the kids with the big box of stuff to go to Haiti. Those are the folders with school supplies on top.  Those of you who contribute--thanks very much!

Highest Call

I'll be in Nashville on Saturday for the Highest Call Men's Conference. I'll be speaking on Listen My Son--St Benedict for Fathers in my first talk and then speaking on the three fold Benedictine Way on my second talk. Y'all come! It will be good to meet you. Here's the conference website.

Gargoyle Code Review

Prodigal Daughter has a nice review of Gargoyle Code here.