Time to start telling – and doing – the truth in the liturgy

Monday, September 14th, 2020

As parishes re-open to varying extents – and with a range of anti-viral measures from face-shields to people scattered by tape in near-empty benches, many clergy note that the numbers have not returned to the pre-COVID-19 level.

The preferred explanation seems to be that now is still not ‘normality’ and that many are fearful about a church gathering as a potential source of infection.

I have no reason to doubt that this is a plausible explanation for some, but perhaps these clergy should be more circumspect in their optimism that parochial ‘normality’ will return.

Worrying counter-indications

First, in the same localities, the numbers who have returned to shopping is far closer to pre-pandemic levels, and people are going on holidays in one way or another trusting that masks, hand sanitizers and care will keep the enemy at bay.

Second, there is a sizable group of Catholics – but I doubt if it can yet be quantified – who are asking if ‘going back to Mass’ will make all that much difference to them.

For this group, there is a real crisis in relation to the utility of liturgy within their lives.

This is a new challenge to those whose task is to act as pastors within the Church.

This group will not be content with a resumed liturgy – that has been discovered since March to be less attractive than they had imagined – but will need a renewed liturgy that speaks meaningfully to them.

Pastors need to internalize the challenge: we cannot simply resume, we must renew.

But did we not ‘renew’ in the 1960s? The simple answer is no.

In 1970 most parishes made the minimal changes demanded by the law – and clergy brought up with the minimalism that was the concomitant of a popular, but false, understanding of ex opere operato, could not understand that liturgical renewal involved a lot more than altering their rubrics, language and furniture.

Where do you start?

There is something inherently lovely about any genuine article. A good one-kilo hammer that just does what a hammer is for and will drive a nail straight.

A cup of freshly brewed coffee that is made from freshly ground beans. Someone who sells you something and points out the flaw so that you can make your decision knowingly.

Someone who says they will do a job by mid-day and you know you can trust them. Someone whose word is their bond. Truth, goodness, loveliness – we know these are connected deep down.

By contrast, there is a feeling of being cheated, somewhere deep inside, when you have been taken for a fool, ‘sold a pup’ or a ‘pig in a poke.’

We all have been conned and we are on our guard! As a cynic in advertising once said: learn to fake sincerity and you have got it made.

The world of over-promising and under-delivering is pervasive – and advertising keeps much of our economy/society running: just turn of Facebook and watch how you have been profiled, packaged, and now are being bombarded with ads in such a way that you have minimal critical resistance.

We Christians have long seen falsehood as the basic currency of evil and sin in the world. In John’s gospel this saying is attributed Jesus about the devil: ‘When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies’ (8, 44).

Falsehood seems to beget falsehood, one lie links to another – and all of a sudden we are in a dark world of shadows, confusions, shoddy words, deceptions and sham. This unreality is the very antithesis of the holy.

Altar bread: it has no resemblance to bread, it is not ‘one loaf,’ it is not broken, and it can hardly be said to be ‘the work of human hands.’

But surely our liturgy is free from sham! I am not so sure: we use lots of words, but they lack genuine reference; we make statements that do not accord with actions; we used high-sounding phrases but our senses, our eyes and taste and touch, give them the lie.

On the night of betrayal, Jesus took a loaf …

We say that we want to be authentic in our following of Jesus – this is the basis of all orthodoxy – and we want to be truthful.

Jesus took a loaf of bread: do we?

We hear that he broke up that loaf and gave it to the disciples: do we do this?

We are told – reading Paul to the Corinthians – that ‘we though many are one, because we have share in the one loaf’.

Do we share one loaf?

Surely the pre-cut roundels are the very opposite of a broken part – it is a ready-made mini whole. In fact, we use sacramental ‘fast food.’ And as for taste: no one tasting altar bread (without other ‘information’) would ever suggest that it was a kind of bread.

We speak publicly of the bread as ‘the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands’ – but do the wafers (it is a sign of theological confusion to call them ‘hosts’ – which means ‘victims’) look like the fruit of the good earth? Is this the work of human-sized work, of human hands, or an early example of industrial mass production?

We want to celebrate the bread of life, we can at least begin our journey of faith with the reality underpinning the religious image: some real bread as we know it, experience it, see and taste it in ordinary life.

Our liturgy makes the bold claim that we imitate one of the unique actions of Jesus – the way he used bread when he blessed and thanked the Father – but do we imitate when no one who is not ‘in’ on the game would ever think that our altar bread is bread?

Is it any wonder that liturgy seems so far from real life for so many when what it uses for bread what is so far removed from real bread?

Two realities – a simple test

Look carefully at these images – and note your reactions.

Which has meaning for you? Ordinary meaning is the essential springboard for sacramental meaning.

Which speaks more to you? Which seems the genuine article for the language we use in the liturgy? Do you now agree that the renewal of the liturgy might have only just begun?

Now we need to think about the danger of ‘resuming business as usual’ and face again the need to really renew the liturgy.

Words, deeds, things must sing together the joyful hymn of praise; when apart they convey shoddiness and suggest the world of falsehood.

Don’t resume; renew!

Thomas O’Loughlin is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton, emeritus professor of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK) and director of the Centre of Applied Theology, UK. His latest award-winning book is Eating Together, Becoming One: Taking Up Pope Francis’s Call to Theologians (Liturgical Press, 2019).