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Adoremus Bulletin, September 2020
Outside Voice & Inside Voice: How Domestic Liturgy and Devotions Offer Promise for the Universal Church
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n March 10, 2020, the state of Michigan, where I reside, recorded its first positive case of the novel COVID-19 coronavirus. Within days, the seven dioceses across the state all decided to close Mass to the public in an effort to help slow the spread of the disease and help the civil and medical authorities respond to the health crisis. But Michigan wasn’t alone as the entire country soon understood the gravity of the situation. Immediately, parishes and dioceses across the U.S. began a major outreach to move local celebrations of the Mass to online streaming services. Resources were posted on social media and websites encouraged individuals and families to follow along at home and gave instructions on how best to bring the “Sunday Experience” into the living room. My own family was featured in a diocesan video with our three small children on April 8. The video voiceover of my wife and I described our two- and four-year-old setting out icons, crucifixes, and candles alongside the iPad. What the video left out were the screams, jumping on the couch, and running through the living room while the livestream played—not to mention the poor behavior of our children. Continually, my wife and I left these livestreamed Masses feeling unfulfilled and uneasy. We wanted to be at the sacred liturgy, but we couldn’t shake the fact that we had merely been trying to simulate the Mass in our home. We weren’t participating in the Mass: we were watching other people participate in the Mass. Four weeks into “attending Mass” in our living room, my wife and I had a serious talk about how we were going to continue to honor the Lord’s Day.
The Pattern of the Church’s Prayer Romano Guardini opens his 1918 classic, The Spirit of the Liturgy, with a reflection on the nature of prayer in the liturgy. He begins this reflection by first establishing the difference between the characteristics of liturgical prayer and devotional prayer: “The primary and exclusive aim of the liturgy is not the expression of the individual’s reverence and worship for God. It is not even concerned with the awakening, formation, and sanctification of the individual soul as such. Nor does the onus of liturgical prayer rest with the individual.”1 He goes on to explain, “The liturgical entity consists rather of the united body of the faithful as such—the Church—a body which infinitely outnumbers the mere congregation.”2 He concludes by saying, “The liturgy is the Church’s public and lawful act of worship.... God is to be honored by the body of the faithful, and the latter is in its turn to derive sanctification from this act of worship.”3 Guardini then goes on to explain the nature of devotional prayer. He begins, “Now, side by side with the strictly ritual and entirely objective forms of devotion, others exist, in which the personal element is more strongly marked.... [T]hey bear the stamp of their time and surroundings, and are the direct expression of the characteristic quality or temper of an individual congregation.”4 Guardini notes that, while popular devotions may be similar to the liturgy in their communal and more objective nature, they more properly express the individual piety of the local community and therefore greater stress is placed on popular devotion for the “individual need of edification.” These two forms of prayer—the objective/liturgical and the subjective/devotional—each play a foundational role in the life of prayer and should exist side by side, since the human person has a dual nature that is at once both social and individual, objective and subjective. “The changing demands of time, place, and special circumstance can express themselves in popular devotion; facing the latter stands the liturgy, from which clearly issue the fundamental laws—eternally and universally unchanging—which govern all genuine and healthy piety.”5 These two forms of prayer, Guardini notes, mutually enrich each other and great care should be taken that they do not lose their particular forms for the sake of the other. “There could be no greater mistake than that of discarding the valuable elements in the spiritual life of the people for the sake of the liturgy, or than the desire of assimilating them to it.”6 Each must be respect-
ed for what it is, Guardini concludes, so that the totality of human piety may be expressed; the objective by liturgical prayer and the subjective by devotional prayer. This notion is not merely the opinion of one theologian writing a hundred years ago, however. In the document Sacrosanctum Concilium we have described this dual nature of prayer when the Council explained that “[t]he spiritual life, however, is not limited solely to participation in the liturgy. The Christian is indeed called to pray with his brethren, but he must also enter into his chamber to pray to the Father, in secret…. Popular devotions of the Christian people are to be highly commended, provided they accord with the laws and norms of the Church.”7
A Lost Distinction From October to November of 1983, the University of Notre Dame conducted a study of parish life as it stood 18 years after the Second Vatican Council. The study sampled 1,850 parishes and covered a multitude of aspects regarding the late 20th-century parish, including the identification, family and ethnicity, activity level, etc. of membership. It covered leadership, both lay and clerical, liturgy and spirituality, the fostering of community, religious education, and finances. It is still a useful study because it gives us a glimpse into the direction of the parish in the first generation after the Council. The study describes the character of 19th- and early 20th-century parishes as strongly devotional, with ethnic parishes providing specific flavors of Catholic devotional practice. The study describes a strong culture of novenas, parish missions, statues of patron saints and feasts. Yet, when discussing the patterns of piety in the late 20th century, it had this to say: “What Flannery O’Connor called the ‘novena-rosary’ style of religion has undergone a dramatic decline. Gone is the elabo-
AB/ ISTOCKPHOTO
By Richard Budd
worshiping God in a liturgical way. The very style of the vocabulary reveals the transcendent nature of who the worshiping assembly is.
“My wife and I,” writes author Rich Budd (whose family is not pictured here), “left livestreamed Masses feeling unfulfilled and uneasy. We wanted to be at the sacred liturgy, but we couldn’t shake the fact that we had merely been trying to simulate the Mass in our home. We weren’t participating in the Mass: we were watching other people participate in the Mass.”
“Today within the same parish community, a visitor can observe quite different styles of liturgies that are indicative of very diverse patterns of piety. The 8:00 Mass is often strikingly different from the 10:30 Mass. It is almost as though there are different congregations within the same parish.” This understanding of differing forms of prayer and their role was operative in the document Liturgiam Authenticam which lays down the principles of translating liturgical texts: “Even if expressions should be avoided which hinder comprehension because of their excessively unusual or awkward nature, the liturgical texts should be considered as the voice of the Church at prayer, rather than of only particular congregations or individuals; thus, they should be free of an overly servile adherence to prevailing modes of expression. If indeed, in the liturgical texts, words or expressions are sometimes employed which differ somewhat from usual and everyday speech, it is often enough by virtue of this very fact that the texts become truly memorable and capable of expressing heavenly realities” [emphasis added].8 Here again, we see applied the concept that the body at prayer in a liturgical assembly transcends the particular congregation or individual. Rather, it is the whole Church which assembles, even to the extent that it includes those members of the Church which may no longer have earthly life. Liturgiam Authenticam argues that even sacrificing language that is immediately familiar and perceptible in favor of language which is more opaque to the specific congregation can be considered a good because it expands that congregation into the larger worshiping Church. This principle expresses the nature of the liturgy and the language it employs when
rate network of devotional Catholicism with its statues, medals, scapulars, novenas, and parish revivals.”9 If what the study describes is true,10 what meets the subjective-devotional need of the human person discussed above? If the person, who is a combination of objective/subjective and liturgical/devotional, once had prayer forms that met and enabled particular communities and individuals to express their piety to God in a well-rounded way, then what are the implications of such a wide-ranging abandonment of devotional prayer today? This need for subjective expressions of piety required an outlet, and as the Mass was now practically the only avenue of devotional prayer, that need was then imposed on the sacred liturgy. The study noticed this phenomenon as well when it described the alreadychanging liturgy: “Undoubtedly the most visible indicator of this change in Catholics’ devotional or spiritual lives is the variety of Sunday liturgies or Masses in the parish.... Today within the same parish community, a visitor can observe quite different styles of liturgies that are indicative of very diverse patterns of piety. The 8:00 Mass is often strikingly different from the 10:30 Mass. It is almost as though there are different congregations within the same parish.”11 Again, the study describes what most of us witness
