Changing the Subject: The Liturgy as an Object of Experience

1 I have to thank several members of the Toronto Oratory for help in preparing this article. Especially, I am grateful to Fr. Philip Cleevely both for suggesting the title and for his criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper. Fr. Juvenal Merriell and Fr. Derek Cross have also been generous with their time and assistance. Fr. Robert Barringer, C.S.B., also read a draft of this paper and made many helpful suggestions. 365 The Thomist 75 (2011): 365-91 CHANGING THE SUBJECT: THE LITURGY AS AN OBJECT OF EXPERIENCE1 JONATHAN ROBINSON The Oratory Toronto, Ontario, Canada I N THIS ARTICLE I want to enquire into how we should begin to understand the reciprocal relationship between the external and objective aspects of the worship of the Church and the personal or individual elements of this worship. I want to pursue this discussion by considering how various themes from St. Thomas throw some light on my enquiry. This is not an overview of Thomas’s system; I am, rather, picking and choosing aspects of his teaching which will help my discussion forward. Nor is it a unified or completed theory about these matters. It is rather a statement of some of the elements that ought to be part of any such final theory. Examples from ordinary parish life show that something has gone seriously wrong with how many Catholics today understand the liturgical life of the Church. (To say “how they relate to,” or “how they are affected by” that life, rather than “how they understand it,” would perhaps make it clear that I am not going to describe a series of reasoned conclusions; I am trying to capture a spirit or an attitude towards worship that is pervasive and destructive.) In many Churches it is the custom at a funeral Mass, after the communion antiphon, to allow a family member or a friend to give what is in fact a eulogy of the dead person. My JONATHAN ROBINSON 366 2 I have tried to deal with this aspect of the question in The Mass and Modernity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), chap. 4, “Hume and Atheism: Giving up on God and Everlasting Life.” concern is not the fact that these talks are usually of the nature of instant canonization in which Purgatory or the need for prayers for the dead are left unstated, and probably not even thought about.2 Rather I want to capture what all too often seems to be the attitude of those attending these Masses. It is something like this: they are resentful and bored with the official liturgical aspects of the rite of Christian Burial, and they only come alive and identify with what is going on when the eulogy begins. Very often, of course, this sort of congregation is made up largely of Catholics who do not practice, and non-Catholic friends, but that only makes what I am talking about easier to see. The attitude itself, though, seems to apply right across the board, and the exceptions are few. On the one hand, any sense of the reality and importance of the objective has all but disappeared. On the other hand, the personal and the individual elements of worship are misunderstood and valued for the wrong reasons. That is the fact of the matter and unless it is recognized and dealt with, any sort of liturgical reform, or reform of the reform, or abolishing of the reform, or whatever, will be nothing more than plastering over the cracks in the foundations. It is difficult to get a handle on this problematic of objectivity and personal experience within the maelstrom of contemporary liturgical practice and theory. We are faced with a tangle of fishing lines, fishing lines of theology and experience, of catechesis and social communication, of prayer and psychology, of Scripture and tradition, of magisterium and the claims of integrity. All of these lines have hooks attached to them which make untangling wellnigh impossible—and the hooks snag the unwary with their barbs. We are certainly not dealing with disagreements, or differences of emphasis, about a clearly delineated series of issues. Even my question about the mutual relationship between the external to...

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