Chant Café

The Rector read out that year’s pastoral assignments for the seminarians with all of the aplomb of Charlton Heston reading a telephone book. “Don Christopher Smith, Centro d’Accoglienza.” The Welcome Center? I had visions of rest areas on US interstates, wondering if the Italian versions had chapels in them. But my wondering where I had been sent was interrupted by the spontaneous bursting into laughter of my entire seminary community. I was to find out why later. Four Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul lived in a large building not far from Rome’s main train station. In that building they took in teenage mothers and young ex-prostitutes who had nowhere to turn and wanted out of the dead ends their lives had become. I had no idea what I was supposed to do there. Why would a seminarian be sent there? I had no formation, no education to deal with this kind of problem. And I had to go every Wednesday and every Sunday for most of the day. The seminarians roared, “Imagine, Christopher, the liturgist, the musician, the theologian, hanging out with a bunch of hookers. That’s rich!” I was taunted.

Needless to say, the first time I meekly rang the bell at the Centro, I had a foreboding sense that this pastoral assignment would be my undoing. That sense would not leave me for a long while. The Sisters lived in common with the girls and their children. They had no private space to themselves, except for their Spartan rooms. And they shared in each other’s lives twenty-four hours a day. And with forty odd women living in a house, four of them Catholic nuns and the others with a vast array of psychological, mental, and emotional problems, as well as infants and toddlers all over the place, you can imagine that I had not walked into The Sound of Music.

In fact, if there was any sound at all, it was of unrelenting noise. MTV blaring in a makeshift common room, ten different languages blared into cell phones, babies crying for their mothers who were smoking on the porch, everything but quiet. Twice a week, I would nervously wend my way through the rooms of the house, feeling totally inadequate and at a loss as what to do with myself, and anxiously watch the clock for deliverance.

The Sisters had a tough regime in the house. One of the many inflexible rules was that everyone had to come to Sunday Mass in the stone chapel in the basement of the house. Priests from all over Rome take their turns coming to the house to celebrate Mass. And generally, the chapel was full of girls who wanted to be anywhere but there.

The Sisters realized that I was uncomfortable. I had lapsed into being reserved, introverted, mute and listless. I must have appeared like a haughty gentleman from a Victorian novel, a clerical D’Arcy who observed scenes with such detachment as to seem incredulous and censorious. In reality, I just had no idea how to act or what to say. The Sisters then told me to give spiritual conferences to the girls once a week on the Gospel readings. At least I felt more comfortable in the role of teacher, and on a subject of theology, but how could I do this in front of a hostile audience?

So week after week I tried, and it was unsuccessful. Then we had the Gospel of the Wise Virgins and the Foolish Virgins. With all of the girls and their children, and the Sisters assembled in the Chapel, I started my meditation. “Well, I know I’ve got to be the only virgin in here, but I am sure you can relate somehow.”

My heart stopped. Did that actually just come out of my mouth? Did I say that in front of the Blessed Sacrament? Was I going to be dragged out of here in a body bag? And then, the laughter started. First one, then three, then before I knew it, the chapel was roaring with laughter. And I was laughing too. I had let down the pretense of trying to be the perfect clerical gentleman striving too hard to say the right thing in the right way to the right people. In a singularly absurd episode, I had betrayed my own weakness. I acknowledged what had been my own discomfort, and was then able to move beyond it. I then proceeded to talk about the Gospel passage as it really related to their lives and from my heart, instead of how I thought they should interpret it according to my mind.

From that moment on, I was able to relate in a natural way with the girls and their children. Week after week, we explored the Word of God and celebrated the sacraments together. It was during those days that I realized the vital importance of something I had laughed at before: the ministry of presence. It was a brave thing for these girls to let me, a man, a priest and a young person not that much older than themselves into their world, especially when men had hurt them, priests were foreign to them, and their peers had betrayed them. Sunday Mass became more interiorly and exteriorly participated. I started to see the girls go into the chapel on their own for quiet moments in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

Then one day a seminarian suggested, “Why don’t we ask the girls over for Sunday Vespers and dinner at the seminary?” I was a little skeptical, but the Rector enthusiastically agreed. The seminary was abuzz before the big day, with lots of good-natured jokes about my “ladies of the night” coming over to pray with us. And so the day came. The nave was littered with strollers, filled with sight of young women of every nationality who had been to the school of hard knocks, and the cries of the children mingled with the sight of black cassock and white surpliced seminarians processing to their choir stalls to sing the Evening Prayer of the Church.

After Vespers, the girls and their kids came down to the refectory for dinner. What a sight it was to see the seminarians serving these women and their children at table. Although for us it was a normal Sunday dinner, many of these woman had never been invited to, much less, been served at, what seemed to them such a formal meal. And the atmosphere was one of great joy. Wine flowed freely and conversation even freer as these women and their priests-in-training shared the fruit of the vine and the work of human hands after having prayed.

This scene was repeated over and again over the rest of my time in the seminary. The girls began to learn to sing Vespers, they came to our ordinations, they shared in all of the important events of our seminary life. What a sight to see the Lateran Basilica, Mother and Head of all of the Churches of the City and the World, as a place where the fatherliness of the ministerial priesthood could meet these remarkable young women, who were not a pastoral problem to be solved, but a blessing to be cherished.

If there is one thing that Catholics on all sides of the liturgical divide can agree on, is that the besetting problem of the Catholic clergy today, and often the liturgy they celebrate, is narcissism. The navel-gazing preoccupation with the self at the expense of the common good and the communion of the Church is faulted for many of the Church’s woes. But just where that narcissism lies, Catholics are in disagreement.

There are those who argue that young priests today are unbelievably narcissistic. All they care about is cappa magnas, lace albs, highly cultured music, and imposing a pray-pay-and-obey mentality on a faithful increasingly tired of clerical self-absorption. The charge is that many of those who seek a reform of the liturgy in a certain direction are using that as a disguise for clerical narcissism.

Then there is the riposte. There are others who condemn the consciously Vatican II style priests as the real narcissists. They obscure the sacred behind talk-show, living room, vulgar antics. They advance an agenda of heresy and schism by preferring their own half-baked opinions to the solid rock of doctrine. They are the ones who have necessitated a reform of the liturgy because of their reign of narcissism.

How has this come about? Often theories are put forward based on gender confusion. For some, this narcissism is motivated by repressive, introspective tendencies that have come raging out as crass effeminacy. For others, it is squarely the effect of a womynization of the Church and capitulation to an ideology of feminazi origins. And for others, it is precisely because there are not enough women in the Church to counter the male’s tendency to fall into the pool of self-admiration.

As with most things, there are actually merits to all of the above arguments even as there are also significant problems with them as well. They also focus almost exclusively on the narcissism of the clergy, as if that alone is the root of the malaise in the contemporary Catholic Church. In this essay I would like to explore what I opine to be some of causes of narcissism in the Church and possible avenues of correcting it.

Causes of Narcissism:
1. A confusion of the natural/supernatural
One of the great projects of modern theology has been to try to underline the fundamental unity between the natural and the supernatural, and to overcome the dichotomy by which man is seen as independent of the supernatural order and God. This project has not been universally successful at the theological level. Too often, it has lapsed into subsuming the natural into the supernatural or reducing the supernatural to some pale unnecessary addition to nature.
Yet if I somehow sees the supernatural life of grace as a right owed to human nature, then it is impossible for me to see anything beyond my own intrinsic goodness. Even the recognition of my error and sin can be dismissed by a distorted understanding of Divine Mercy. How many people in our pews and sanctuaries have deceived themselves into believing that they are good people and that God must grant them eternal life just because they exist? The relativization of sin and its consequences has led to a dismissal of God’s justice. My human nature is good and this is all that is. Grace is just a good happy feeling that I have that God sees me as good too. The supernatural life of grace is reduced to my own self-esteem. This leads to an unhealthy preoccupation with myself and my own natural happiness, because of my inability to see my nature in its reality and God’s supernatural power to transform and perfect my nature. In the liturgy, this leads to an attitude that the sacraments are merely human rites that must be manipulated to grant me the maximal boost to self-esteem. Liturgy becomes a celebration of my best self.
2. The exaltation of immanence over transcendence
Often we speak of a tension between the vertical and the horizontal in the liturgy, between a focus on God and a focus on man. In reality, the liturgy contains this tension. There is the aspect of adoration, of praise rendered freely to God, as well as instruction and inspiration of man. But it also must be recognized that while the supernatural is found within the soul in sanctifying grace, immanent, it is also entirely transcendent, and independent of me. If the liturgy does not incarnate an attitude of reverence and respect for the absolute holiness of God, then it will lapse into a preoccupation with individual and social human needs. Against the backdrop of confusion over nature and the supernatural, the exaltation of the immanence of grace in me versus the transcendence of God means the end of doxological aspect of worship becomes secondary to the liturgy seen as a means to fulfill my own need to transcend myself. But that transcendence can only be had by divine agency, but having banished it, I continually seek for the liturgy to serve me instead of its being a place to praise God.
3. Gender Ambiguity
It is a truth that every human person is not only a rational animal sharing a common human nature, but an engendered individual. We are either male or female, and that brings with it a corresponding biological, spiritual and psychological component of our nature. This is independent of the way that culture and history conditions perceptions of gender roles. The liturgy incarnates in its own symbolic way the engendered nature of the human person, according to divine revelation. Political attempts to modify the cultural and historical perceptions of gender roles have been translated into the liturgy. There are calls to modify the language and symbolism of the liturgy according to the changing perception of gender roles. This leads to a preoccupation with the physical gender as well as the conformity or lack thereof to gender roles of those in the sanctuary and in the pews. It deplaces the attention from the gender-independent Mystery behind the rites to the gender of those who participate in them. In so doing, it leads to a preoccupation with conforming the liturgy to however I want to reshape gender roles instead of respecting the engendered nature of liturgical symbolism which points beyond the symbol to something transcending it.
4. Democratization and Declericalization of the Liturgy
Calls for reconstituting the Church along the lines of an imagined democratic organization have obliterated the distinction between the ministerial and the common priesthood. Emphasis on the sacraments as encounters with Christ the High Priest has been replaced by an exaggerated emphasis on the rights of the priest over the rights of the laity and vice-versa. The laity, in assuming or usurping roles that belong by right or by tradition to the clergy, have correspondingly been clericalized. The clergy who protest at such a phenomenon are dismissed as clericalists. Either way, the respect for the difference in roles at the liturgy and their ontological and theological roles has faded before the demands of a politically motivated egalitarianism. Just as in political life, the struggle for equality requires a constant calling attention to where inequalities remain, when this is translated to the liturgy, the rites become a battlefield for the destruction of inequality and not a place of prayer. Attention is given to political change within the Church and not to the adoration of the Divine Majesty reflected in the hierarchical communion of the Church whose constitution was given to it by Christ.
5. Individualism
The perduring idea that the liturgy should correspond to my likes and dislikes perpetuates individualism within the liturgy. The refusal to actively participate in the liturgy, both interiorly and exteriorly, privileges an atomist understanding of the human person vis-à-vis God. The subjection of public prayer to private devotion, individual initiative, temerarious opinion, and the arbitrary decisions of committees reinforces the idea that the liturgy is a merely human rite capable of manipulation by individual interests. When I see the liturgy in this fashion, it is easy then to focus on how I want to change the liturgy to correspond to my own individual needs.

Antidotes to Narcissism:
1. Mass is not a What, it is a Who
The first antidote to narcissism in the liturgy is catechetical. We must be taught again that the Mass is not a what, it is not a human rite which can and should be manipulated so as to express human desires or to promote human goods. The Mass is a who, rather it is the prayer of self-offering of Jesus Christ to His Father for the remission of sins. A vigorous reproposal of the teaching of the Council of Trent and Vatican II on the sacrificial aspect of the Mass will help us to overcome the tendency to make the liturgy a merely natural human phenomenon.
2. Ad Orientem
The celebration of the parts of the Mass which are not directly aimed at the instruction or the edification of the faithful must be returned to a symbolic focus which is not the people. The classical ad orientem position of the celebrant at the altar in celebrating the Sacrifice of the Mass underscores the transcendence of Christ’s action in the Mass. Facing the people during those parts of the Mass which are for their instruction or edification will then highlight the immanence of the divine life of grace in us. The balance between immanence and transcendence will thus be restored in the liturgy.
The celebration of all of the parts of the Mass versus populum actually assists clericalism. It makes the altar into a barrier between presider and people, and sets him up against the people. Rather, the fact of presider and people facing the same direction indicates the unity of the priest with his people, rather than give the opportunity for the priest to manage the people by his actions.
3. Eucharistic Cultus
Pius XII stated that the tabernacle and the altar should not be separated. This follows upon the principle that Sacrifice and Sacrament are not separated. To that end, the placement of the tabernacle once again upon the altar prevents the celebrant from arbitrarily placing himself at the center of the divine drama. It also shows the unity between the sacrifice of the Mass and the sacrament shared in Holy Communion. The adoration of the Blessed Sacrament outside of Mass flows from Mass: Adoration, Benediction, Processions and Holy Hours all stem from the Mass.
The cult of the Eucharist is a pledge of faith in the Incarnation of the God-Man. Because Jesus is a divine person with a divine but also a human nature, engendered, incarnational and Eucharistic devotion also underscores the proper sphere of gender in the human person without ambiguity, as well as points to the Mystery of God which is beyond gender and humanity.
4. Communion on the Tongue and Kneeling
There is nothing inherently wrong about receiving Holy Communion standing or in the hand. But the reception of Holy Communion kneeling is a sign of adoration of the transcendence of the Divine Majesty. It is a corrective to a democratization of the liturgy in that it emphasizes the humility of the believer who does not stand with rights before God. It also is a corrective to the declericalization of the liturgy because Communion on the tongue emphasizes that the Body and Blood of Christ come as a gift from Christ the High Priest. Just as a baby bird is nourished by its mother directly in the mouth, the Christ the Priest through the ministerial priest nourishes the spiritual child directly in the mouth with no other intervention.
5. A Liturgical Communitarian Spirituality
Homiletics during the liturgy must focus on the intrinsic connection between liturgy and life. The Eucharist has dimensions which extend far beyond the church doors. It reaches into the family hearth, the school, the workplace, the soup kitchen and the courtroom. The correspondence between the celebration of the Sacred Mysteries and the social apostolate of the Church and the moral life of families in the world combats individualism in the Church. The realization that as a Church we are a communion of holy people sharing in the Holy must be accompanied by the vision of the Church on a mission to build the Kingdom of God in the world.

These are just a few ideas of the causes of narcissism in the Church today, as well as some practical ideas for overcoming them. I have never claimed the charism of infallibility, so feel free to disagree with me or challenge the above. I do think that it is a disservice to the Church to pin narcissism on such superficial things as the fashion, hobbies, and quirks of the clergy. Those things can certainly be manifestations of narcissism, but the roots are much deeper, and affect not only the clergy, but the whole life of the Church. It is imperative that we discover those roots, and get rid of them. But the eradication of all that is less than it should be in the Church will come, not from polemic and mutual incrimination, but through conversion of heart away from ourselves and towards God.

I was at a training workshop for priests in the Extraordinary Form when Fr Calvin Goodwin, professor of theology at the seminary of the Fraternity of St Peter in Nebraska, gave me some food for thought that I have been chewing on for years now. He said that, in the West, the Latin language performed a function similar to how the iconostasis functioned in the East. I had thought of reasons why we should continue to celebrate the Sacred Liturgy in Latin for years. One was to fulfill Church law and the express wish of Vatican II in Sacrosanctum concilium 36, “The Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites.” Another was to preserve the musical and literary tradition of the Roman rite in its original form. Finally, I thought that having a common language for some of the prayers of the Mass would be useful, to express the unity of the Church across the various linguistic divides brought about by Babel’s aftermath.

All of those reasons are valid ones for the preservation of Latin in the liturgy. But they are all legal, historical or cultural. None of them are theological. At first glance, Fr Goodwin’s thesis, that Latin served to veil the rites as the iconostasis veiled them in the East did not seem to be a particularly winning thesis. On legal grounds, the fact that the vernacular had been admitted by the supreme authority of the Church in circumscribed ways (The Glagolitic Mass comes to mind) indicates that in the West, Latin was not universal and not imposed uniformly by liturgical law. On historical grounds, it must be remembered that the permanent iconostasis is a peculiarly Byzantine tradition whose use is different than the veils used at certain times in the Syrian and Coptic liturgical traditions. On cultural grounds, it also seems that there is nothing in anthropology to suggest that Latin provoked the same phenomenological response in its hearers as the other symbols used to veil in religious ceremonies in the Christian East and beyond.

But is there something else, much deeper, to Fr Goodwin’s thesis? The notion that Latin is a sacred language in and of itself has been widely rejected. Why should Latin be the language of prayer rather than any other language? The notion that Latin has become sacred because of its venerable and historical traditional use raises the question of how something becomes sacred. Does something become sacred merely by antiquity, by historical use, or its association with religious rites? Modern anthropologists may claim that, if something is sacred on those grounds, then Latin could be considered a sacred language. After all, languages associated with religious texts are often held to be sacred because of their use in communicating those texts: Arabic for the Qu’ran, Hebrew for the Torah, Sanskrit for the Rig-Veda. By the same token, Latin should be a sacred language for Catholics.

Yet the Biblical notion of sacred is not the same as that used by sociologists. The Hebrew term qadosh, which is often rendered into English as sacred or holy, in the Old Testament indicates something set apart from other things and associated with God. Here is where Latin does not seem to be a sacred language. Latin was the ordinary day-to-day language of the Romans. Its use in commerce, law, literature and scholarship continued long after it ceased to employed on the streets. So at no time was Latin ever set apart specifically as a sacred language. But it coexisted as a language employed in the service of the sacred alongside secular uses. So it is clear that Latin coexisted as a language both on reference to the sacred and the secular as it coexisted with other languages at the same time.

Yet the association of sacred languages with sacred texts is not univocal in Christianity. Christianity is not a religion “of the Book” or even a religion based on the words of a famous teacher. Christianity is a religion of the Word Made Flesh. The fact that the Word of God became incarnate, that God became man, would forever change the meaning of all words, and of all man’s ability to communicate. The union of God and man was not only with one chosen people to whom were revealed a sacred text read in a sacred language, but with all of humanity by means of a Word which made Flesh sacred.

The fact of the Incarnation means that human nature now has a passageway into the supernatural divine, but in such a way as to not change, but to elevate and perfect, that human nature. And if communication by language is part of human nature, grace also elevates and perfects human language. The fact that man can address prayers to God and that they can be heard, and acted upon by Divine Power, shows that human words, accompanied and transformed by the Word, can bring us into contact with the Word.

Yet, for all of this immanence of the divine in human nature, human nature is not itself divine. The Divinity remains what, or rather Who, it is, without change. “Between the Creator and the creature there cannot be a likeness so great that the unlikeness is not greater,” is how Lateran IV expressed it.

The gift of human language, therefore, expresses this abyss between the Divinity of the Word and the humanity of our words. If words are conventional signs of realities, they are always and everywhere going to pale with the reality behind them. This is never more true than with the Word of Divine Revelation, which is far beyond what we can ever grasp. Our human language will never exhaust the mystery which is celebrated in the Mass.

Yet, does faith not come from hearing, as the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 10.17? And did he not also write in 1 Corinthians 14.14, “If I pray in an unknown tongue, my spirit prays, but my understanding is unfruitful”? It is true that faith comes from hearing. But hearing is not merely a passive reception of the words of Sacred Scripture or the liturgy. And faith is not merely the response of acting upon those words. Hearing in the scriptural sense indicates the opening of the will of human nature to cooperate with the action of God. Faith in the scriptural sense is the assent of the intellect to the action of God to which we have opened the depths of our being. That gift of faith impels us to enter into communion with the Giver of the gift through prayer. And that prayer, be it liturgical and communal or private and individual, is more than human words. It is the encounter between the Word and our human nature, with its words, deeds and actions.

A faith reduced to mere emotional response to a sacred text needs to have the words of the text intelligible for it to produce understanding. But a faith which is a supernatural gift that is an encounter with the Word is beyond the ability of our intellect to understand. Our LORD Himself indicates the difference between the two conceptions of faith coming from hearing the Word.

In John 8.34, Jesus says, “Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say.” There were many people around Him who heard his words, which were Divine Revelation, but they were unintelligible to them. Likewise, there are many people in our churches and society today who can physically hear and understand the words of Scripture and the Mass, but they do not grasp their true meaning, and are not led by them to supernatural faith and the life of the virtues. His language is made clear, not by the words themselves, but by the gift of faith, not because of anything lacking in Him, but by what is lacking in us when we lack faith.

The singular phenomenon in which the Apostles then go out to preach this Word in all of the languages of the earth is also instructive. The Apostles may not have had intelligence of the words which were passing through their mouths, but the Word brought about through them faith in their hearers. Here we see the supernatural action of God over and above the limitations of human speech, working through human language, to bring about faith in those whose wills were open to God.

The point of this brief exegesis is to show that the supernatural action of the Word makes intelligible in the soul that which is not necessary intelligible to the mind. It is the supernatural action of the Word in the life of sanctifying grace in the believer which means someone can live a life in accord with the Truth even if he is not ever capable of knowing all there is to know nor all of the Truth.

The use of Latin in the rites of the Church is an important marker in our Catholic identity. It connects us with other believers from other languages, it gives us a common word for prayer, it links us with the history and tradition of our faith. These are important considerations, but they are human, natural ones. The use of Latin in the Mass also has another function. It reminds the worshipper that, although the Mystery of God is that which is the most intelligible thing in and of itself, it is not always intelligible to us. Even for the classicists in the sanctuaries and pews of Catholic churches around the world, Latin in the liturgy points to the abyss between us and God. It veils insofar as it conceals the human words with which Divine Revelation is expressed, emphasizing the distance between the subject and the object of our worship. It conceals the encounter between His Word and our word with words that are not of our own making as surely as the Word is not of our making. But it also reveals: it opens up the teaching of Christ for those who are willing to learn the language of the Latins, and even more so those who are open to learn the language of the spirit. It is unintelligible in that the meaning behind the words is not readily self-evident, just like the presence of God. But it is intelligible in and of itself, just as God is that which can and should be known, and will be, in the beatific vision. For that language to become intelligible to us, not only do we have to prepare nature by learning the Latin, we must open ourselves up the supernatural life of grace given by the Word.