Dear Denys,
My husband and I are only recently arrived in Phoenix from a large central European country, one in which homeschooling is criminalized but prostitution and hashish are not. We have enrolled our two older children in a Catholic school, and my 9-year old daughter is finding the transition difficult. Last week she was coming home very upset from the Friday school Mass, and I don’t know what to do.
First, she was not able to find the holy water when she entered the church. She was looking to her right as she came in the door and there was not anything there. When she was in a panic asking her teacher about what happened to the holy water, she was pointed to a large and noisy fountain at the back of the building, something that seemed
more fitting to a shopping mall than to a church. This was very confusing for her, not to have the holy water in the traditional basin, especially since the water in this fountain was giving a slight odor of chlorine, and she could not bring herself to dip her fingers into it. I am just glad she was not tossing in a coin for good luck or something.
When it was time to receive communion, she was really frightened when around twenty ladies came up to the altar and took most of the consecrated Hosts away from the priest. I have heard that this kind of thing is normal here, but my daughter had not seen this before and thought that the women should be stopped before they took Jesus out of the building and into their large Chevrolet Suburban vehicles.
When it came time for her to receive, she noticed that of the several hundred schoolchildren at the Mass, no single one was receiving the Lord on the tongue. Everyone was putting out their hands, and she again panicked, thinking that that was the only way being allowed here. She too took communion in the hand for the first time in her life and was very upset about it afterwards.
Also she says that many of the other schoolchildren are always being so noisy all the time during the Mass, that there is even chatter at the consecration. Apparently the priest is often encouraging this conversational mood, as he prefers to dialogue with the students during the homily, walking around with his microphone as on a TV program, joking with his “audience”.
I was thinking of asking to have a meeting with the pastor to talk about all this. Maybe I am being too worried. But my daughter is very sensitive about the Eucharist and about the proper worship—all of these new things are to her very troubling. What should I do?
Mit brennender Sorge
Dear mbS:
First of all, welcome to Phoenix. I am sure that there are many things about your relocation to America that are disorienting. Any time you feel homesick for a tall, refreshing Weißbier, you are welcome to bring some over to share at Denys’ table.
The situation in your daughter’s school’s parish sounds like the mainstream of American liturgical praxis to me. For reasons I will explain later, I would discourage you from asking to meet with the pastor. First, allow me to offer some general orientation:
1. I have seen the electric fountain approach to making holy water available to the faithful before, though only in certain church buildings constructed between 1993 and about 2002. It seems to have been a fad that never quite caught on. At one large parish in the Diocese of Phoenix, the rushing water of the holy fount was so noisy that it was always dramatically shut off right before the rock band started the stirring opening anthem for Mass. When the splashing and gushing sounds stopped, a hush fell upon the crowd, trembling with excitement over the beginning of the show. (By the way, the now-laicized and excommunicate former pastor of that parish has just written an informative book about himself; perhaps you might take a look at it to learn more about the fountain and the other cutting-edge liturgical innovations that led him into schism.)
2. It is the case that the 1983 Code of Canon Law established the possibility of lay “extraordinary ministers” to help distribute communion in the Catholic Church any place in the world. However, we Americans have really taken this concept to a uniquely advanced stage of development, as we have also done with the personal vehicle, the firearm, and the retail store. Some might call it excess; others, our native national genius.
I have partaken of the Mass in places where there are 20, maybe even 30 extraordinary lay ministers in action, sometimes with each sporting a special emblem around their necks to indicate their function. While the 2004 instruction Redemptionis sacramentum goes out of its way to state that “a brief prolongation (in the distribution of Communion) is not at all a sufficient reason” to employ extraordinary ministers, Americans’ understanding of “a brief prolongation” clocks in at around 1:20, or about the time it takes a large Chevrolet Suburban vehicle to burn a dollar’s worth of fuel. Consequently, while technically “extraordinary,” lay assistance in the distribution of the Eucharist is run-of-the-mill and nearly universal in American Catholic worship.
(I am sure that the only reason the extraordinary ministers were all women at your daughter’s school Mass is because it was a weekday liturgy—go back on a Sunday and I am confident you will see a much more balanced ratio of women to men, like, say 80%-20%.)
3. Communion-in-the-hand is another example of the extraordinary-become-ordinary in American liturgical praxis. I believe that the Holy See formally gave the American bishops permission to experiment with this in 1977, though an earlier instruction from Rome, 1969’s Memoriale Domini, had insisted that the world’s bishops NOT do this, unless they really wanted to. (The clarity of this document seems to represent an entire era.)
A letter that accompanied the 1969 instruction stated that any moves towards communion in the hand “must not be imposed in a way that would exclude the traditional practice”.
So what happened to “the traditional practice”? No one forbade it—all that had to happen was that it was introduced and encouraged during a time of significant change and experimentation in worship, during which it was impossible for the faithful to tell what was being ordered by Rome, what was being permitted by Rome, and what was being made up at the weekly liturgy committee meetings in the parish. The American Church has had nearly four decades of communion in the hand now, and those who want to receive reverently on the tongue without feeling divided from their brethren in Christ will always need to ignore what everyone around them is doing and think only about Jesus. It’s simple, hard, and true.
I will be the first to admit that this is very difficult for me, with a choleric temper and nosy disposition. But I will also be the first to say that I have never, ever been denied communion on the tongue, even in a very loopy California parish where there were no regular confession times and where the extraordinary lay minister, when confronted with the sight of me standing there towering a foot above her with my mouth open, made a face as if she were reaching up to remove a dead rat from an upper shelf in the kitchen pantry.
I would not recommend that you ask for any kind of meeting with the pastor of this parish to discuss the liturgy. In my experience, when a parish church has a somewhat non-Roman liturgical ars celebrandi, the clergy responsible for it are aware of what they are doing and are pretty pumped up about it to boot. Laity who ask questions about liturgical praxis will be told that these things do not matter because “ours is a Christ-centered faith community in which we empower each other through love, justice, and lay involvement” or something; if you even suggest that Communion on the tongue is a teensy-weensy bit more reverent than in the hand, you will get a legal-positivist smack-down: “It’s perfectly licit; end of story.”
I once attended a crowded mandatory staff and volunteer training event in a very orthodox parish at which the presider—a lay psychologist—proclaimed from the podium that “Our community is spiritually safe…that means that here, no one way of worship is better than another.” That this spirit of valueless relativism flourishes in so many American Catholic churches should not be surprising, since this is the spirit that quickens nearly all of American secular life: download whatever you want, order whatever you want from one of five drive-thru restaurants within 1.4 miles of you, choose whatever courses you want to take, wear what you want, copulate with who or what you want in the way that you want it; don’t let anyone tell you that any other choices are better than yours. God help us.
So my advice to you is this: either decide that you can cope, or quietly move on without making a noise. If you stay where you are at, try to help your daughter develop some strategies for managing. If lay extraordinary ministers distract her, tell her she can always make an effort to be the last one in the priest’s line, thus practicing some humility as well. If communion in the hand bothers her, remind her that she can keep her head down in prayer while others are receiving, and that she can always take the Lord’s body on the tongue no matter what all the other kids are doing.
I know it’s hard to teach a child to ignore her peers and only think about Christ, but anything you can do now to help her think this way will bless her and you with augmented rewards, not least of all when adolescence kicks in.
DPJ
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