COVID-19 has done more to enliven the liturgical debate than anything else in the last decades.
The vast amount of material produced in the run-up to Easter was astounding. It’s been a long time since I have seen so much that guided, challenged and questioned our liturgical response to lockdown.
It was as if the liturgical dam that has been built over the last twenty years or more finally burst and the resulting international conversation has revealed how deep the need is for an ecclesial reform that allows liturgical life to grow and ministry to blossom.
Taking the Mass online has shown priests celebrating Mass in empty churches and believers kneeling in front of their television sets.
Questions about the post-Vatican II liturgical renewal
These images have raised important questions concerning presence and reality and the meaning of these words when applied to liturgical-Eucharistic participation in a virtual environment.
They have made me wonder about the depth of the Pauline renewal (i.e. the liturgical renewal carried out by Paul VI), given the propensity to slide back into pre-Vatican II ritual patterns – such as spiritual communion – more akin to the world of the 1962 Missal.
Some priests spoke positively of their experience with virtual liturgies and marvelled that they drew more people than their normal congregation.
This also makes me wonder if any of the key concepts we use to describe Pauline liturgy – encounter, mysterion, communion, participation, meal and presence – have any shared meaning in our liturgical lexicon.
The correspondence raises many questions for me regarding the future of what, over the last fifty years, we have called liturgy. Here are but a couple:
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- Will liturgical praxis be described in pre- and post-COVID terms?
- Does the online Mass, which began as a stopgap response, reveal a consumerist approach to worship and prayer?
A consumerist approach to Eucharistic participation
The driving force behind COVID liturgical solutions is the need to communicate. Catholics know innately that the liturgy is a means of communication.
I am reminded of an ancient Māori proverb that says: “What is the most important thing in the world? It is people; it is people, it is people.”
Liturgy, at the level of rites, is structured symbolic communication. It is an interpersonal, sensate dialogue – on many levels – that uses symbols and signs to communicate its meaning and purpose.
Authentic liturgical communication is essentially a dialogue, and the rites are adapted so that a community can “see” itself mirrored in its liturgical praxis. As a result, authentic liturgical adaptation is always ongoing because the community is ever-changing.
I think our need for religious communication has driven our use of contemporary communication platforms for Sunday Masses, and affluent churches have done this with ease.
As Masses, prayer groups and prayer services went virtual, and daily religious emails doubled, the number of websites offering all sorts of “liturgical wares” seemed to increase.
The Amazon and McDonalds models
Online shopping and online worship seemed to meld into one as we moved quickly to the “Amazon Model” of religious experience. Liturgy became another online product.
I suspect the driving force and desire at the beginning was to keep the “shop open and the lights on”, even when all around the world the Church was deemed a non-essential service and religious gatherings potential health risks.
In the United States, thanks to the country’s vibrant fast-food and entertainment culture, the “drive-through” confession became operational, and the possibility of a “drive-in-Mass” or a “drive-up” Mass was proposed, raising the MacDonaldization of the Church to a new level.
If the usual Sunday Mass form – not just the ritual, but the context, presentation and participation – can be so easily transferred online to a virtual context, where performance, engagement and spiritual communion are “real” enough for viewers to “feel” or “know” themselves to be connected and fully participating, then what does this tell us about the usual motivations and typical Sunday experience of worshippers and presiders?
If virtual Eucharistic participation in a virtual environment is participatory enough, then we are entering a new phase of post-COVID liturgical renewal for which post-conciliar liturgical and theological concepts are inadequate.
The question then becomes whether virtual liturgical-Eucharistic participation, in a virtual environment, is the new groundbreaking dialogue-form that creates community, sustains a worshipping assembly, and defines ministry.
Good and just good enough
If it is, then sacramental mediation can go online too, and the priest shortage is solved, with one priest in each time zone for each language group. And, if the vernacular language is removed in favour of a single universal language, then one priest in each time zone is sufficient.
Also the necessity of confession and communion could be legislated to a minimum requirement of once per year, perhaps around Easter, just to ensure that people remember the meal part of the Eucharistic participation.
On the hand, if believers are not attending online Masses because virtual reality cannot deliver real physical presence and participation, then we must acknowledge there is a qualitative difference that virtual environments cannot deliver.
They are reminding us that technologized worship can supply an immediate need, but it cannot feed the soul. We need proximate, not virtual, presence, as well as active conscious participation in Eucharistic worship – at least in the Pauline tradition.
So, I still have questions concerning virtual reality as the reality consistent with liturgical mediation. While communication is the key to liturgical praxis, not all communication platforms are proper to the liturgical act, its meaning, history and purpose.
What is essential to Pauline liturgical practice is the full, conscious and active participation of the Church – clergy and laity – in the single act of worship. I remain convinced that this is missing in virtual Eucharistic experiences.
Active participation: A non-consumerist approach to liturgical presence
Most would agree that Sacrosanctum Concilium is the key conciliar document of the Pauline reform that shapes the vision of contemporary liturgical prayer.
It defines the difference between the ritual structures of the 1962 and 1969 Roman Missals and how each understands worship and liturgical ministry.
Within Sacrosanctum Concilium, I would suggest that active participation (actuosa, plena et conscia participatio) is the central principle that defines Pauline liturgical praxis and this principle calls into question the meaning of virtual Masses and their celebration without the physical presence of the assembly.
Sacrosanctum Concilium’s vision of active liturgical participation is one that is shared by the entire baptized community (ordained and laity).
Active participation has an inner expression through presence and silence. And it has an external expression through listening together, singing together, reciting together, bringing gifts to the Table and, ultimately, through sharing communion of the Body and Blood of the Lord.
Active participation is the underlying reason for the revision of texts and the use of vernacular languages.
In virtual worship, active participation cannot mediate the balance between the immanent and the transcendent elements of liturgy, as it usually does through the liturgical arts of movement, symbol, music, posture and gesture, which are all elements of active liturgical participation.
Not all can actively participate in virtual Eucharist
Active participation expresses the reality of the liturgical assembly as the subject of the liturgy. In doing so, it puts an end to the pastoral and ritual clericalism that, since the Middle Ages, had marked the Mass and popular Eucharistic devotion.
The necessity of active liturgical participation is raised in online clerical gatherings when the priest (or concelebrants) fulfil all the liturgical functions, while the female cantor and organist supply the music and do not appear to share communion.
The significant move forward in the Pauline reform was to unite the liturgical prayer of the priest and assembly in one, interwoven prayer. No longer do believers go to “hear father say his Mass” while praying their prayers in parallel.
Active participation is the simple and powerful organizational idea that frames liturgy in the Pauline tradition. It articulates the interrelationships of space, place, movement, ritual, presence, assembly and ministers.
Its loss, through the present crisis, has seen a reversion to pre-conciliar thinking, where virtual Eucharistic liturgy is considered as participatory.
I would still argue that a virtual environment is an inadequate environment for liturgical-Eucharistic participation because virtual reality or presence is always virtual. The virtual environment is a simulated environment where interaction is seemingly real or seemingly physical.
Going online has been easy for parishes and communities that are technologically progressive. It has provided a ritual comfort. But it may have missed the greater task of staying with the struggle, of staying with the people.
I suspect online Masses will remain until believers can wean themselves away from their comfy “movie world” Mass. This will happen when they intuit that liturgy requires more from us anthropologically – as work of the whole people, not just some of them – than we can give and get digitally.
- Joe Grayland is a theologian and a priest of the Diocese of Palmerston North. His latest book is titled: Catholics. Prayer, Belief and Diversity in a Secular Context (Te Hepara Pai, 2020).
- Article first published in La Croix International. Republished with the author’s permission.