To spurn the Mass is to violate the Catholic chronicle of history

Wednesday, 4th March 2009

Father Peter Kennedy’s dismissal highlights a growing belief in the archival importance of the pre-Vatican II Mass, says John Heard

And, God knows, Australian Catholics — apprised of the experimentation at St Mary’s — now understand the need for prayers and signs that the radicals of another generation derided as repetitious, effete and meaningless. Those specifically worded so as to save the priest and servers, and the people generally, from straying into heresy and sin seem newly important, and enduringly relevant.

Indeed, quick studies of the Extraordinary Rite (Latin) Mass, and attendance at faithfully served Roman Rite (New) Masses, can even highlight the prayers and actions meant to model the rituals of Judaism, linking humble suburban Masses with the sacrifices of Israel in the Temple at Jerusalem.

Many Australian Catholics, starved for beauty in the liturgy and meaning during Mass, now find it hard to fault this tradition. They revel in its layered meanings. They are suspicious of the St Mary’s crowd, and loyal to the Bishops.

Forty years after Vatican II, the task of totally reordering the Mass, and radically changing the Church, seems too big to take on, and the benefits appear distant, hard to quantify and ambiguous. There is a growing sense that the Fathers of the Council mandated no such rupture, and that much of the experimentation in liturgical practice has failed.

Beyond that, it has tended towards the ugly, and when it has not been directly heretical, it has too often served up meaningless pabulum instead of spiritual riches.

The emerging consensus is that Catholic worship should be characterised by just the sort of organic development, the idea of persistent memory, the accumulation of sign and context and symbols — of meaning — that typified liturgical reform before 1962.

There is a feeling that the yearning of the medieval chroniclers, the compiling urge in the human condition, the work of the ages, is achieved and expressed most beautifully in the Mass of the ages: a record of humanity constantly transfigured by association with the divine.

In that sense, then, the crisis at St Mary’s will go down as a queer footnote in the very long history of Catholicism: under the slim but growing chapter for Australia, on the pages marked ‘liturgical oddities’ and ‘eccentricities of the Church in Queensland’.