Voices October 26, 2023
Mass is the Church’s public worship, not our own
By Father Vincent Hawkswell
31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Mal 1:14-2.2, 8-10
Second Reading: 1 Thes 2:7-9, 13
Gospel Reading: Mt 23:1-12
“So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the Gospel of God but also our own selves,” St. Paul says in the Second Reading.
I know that I and my brother priests in the Vancouver Archdiocese could say as much.
Just the same, we must consider the reproaches levelled at priests in the other two readings.
Jesus notes that the scribes and Pharisees “love to have the place of honour at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces.”
God warns that if we do not “lay it to heart” to give glory to his name, rather than ourselves, he will “curse” us and our “blessings.”
Catholics appreciate the priesthood so much that they always greet us with respect and give us places of honour and the best seats. When we are first ordained, we find this distinction humbling, but, with time, we are tempted to attribute the honour and respect to ourselves, instead of to God.
This temptation surfaces even while we are saying Mass. I discovered this for myself when (with Archbishop Miller’s permission) I occasionally said an early-morning Mass facing the same way as the people.
As Father Ian Stuart remarked, “the dynamics” were “completely different.” It recalled a 1997 article by Mitch Finley in which he complained that the Mass was becoming “priest-centred,” for the congregation’s attention is almost constantly focused on the priest: we watch the priest, listen to him, and respond to him.
It is all the more important, therefore, for priests to make sure that everything in the way we say Mass shows that it is “the Church’s public worship” and not “a rite established on private initiative,” as Vatican II said.
Priests are tempted to put ourselves at centre stage, “taking ownership” of the Mass. We do it by making eye-contact with the people when we are addressing God, or by altering, adding, or omitting prescribed words and gestures.
“The ministry of the priest is the ministry of the whole Church,” say the Vatican II documents; the priest can exercise it “only in obedience, in hierarchical fellowship, and in devotion to the service of God and of his brothers.”
A priest who introduces “individualism and idiosyncrasy into celebrations which belong to the whole Church is offending the rights of the faithful,” one of which is a demand that “the Eucharistic prayer which they ratify with their final Amen” not be “totally imbued” or even “interspersed” with anyone’s “personal outlook.” Accordingly, priests may not “add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy.”
In a 1993 interview, Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, stressed that “the liturgy is not a self-celebration of the community, but is oriented toward the Lord, in such a manner that the common viewpoint of the priest and the individual worshipper is toward the Lord.”
The so-called “creativity” of individual priests and people, he said, results in “an increasingly empty liturgy.”
In his 2000 book The Spirit of the Liturgy, he stressed that “man himself cannot simply ‘make’ worship.... Real liturgy implies that God responds and reveals how we can worship him.”
Liturgy “cannot spring from imagination, our own creativity,” he said. If it does, worship becomes “no longer going up to God, but drawing God down” into our own world. It becomes “a festival of self-affirmation,” “a circle closed in on itself.” Then it “really does become pointless – just fooling around.”
In the Old Testament, God gave the Israelites extensive and extremely detailed instructions about how to worship him. Jesus did the same thing for the New Testament when he said, at the Last Supper, “Do this in remembrance of me.” Finally, he made his Church the guardian of the liturgy when he gave her “the keys of the Kingdom of heaven.”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. Next week’s topic is The Contradictions of Atheism. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.