The Liturgy And The People

The Mystical Body
American Magazines
By DOM BERNARD McELLIGOTT The September number of Orate Fratres has just reached us. America certainly produces an impressive quartet of magazines in Liturgical Arts, Orate Fratres, the Christian Front and Liturgy and Sociology. All these are concerned with the liturgy as the centre of Catholic life; the last two with the liturgy as the rock from which the waters of social justice may issue to a thirsting world.
It is a pity we have no monthly in England like Orate Fratres. The present number has excellent articles on " The Christian possession of goods," " Liturgy and religious experience," " The dress of the liturgy," and an open letter from a priest called " An answer to an enquiry." There is also a nine page review of activities and Book Reviews. The articles are to the point, and make one wonder if the American Catholic mind is at present more fully awake than our own to the supreme importance of the liturgy as the source of all Catholic life.
A sentence like the following, quoted in Orate Fratres from The Christian Front is striking in its assurance and insight: " The spiritual life of Catholicism is, according to the liturgy, a corporate life, and the social life of Catholicism is modelled after its spiritual life. Out of the ranks of those who live the liturgy will come the Catholic leaders we need."
Out of the ranks of ordinary men will come the captains of a Christian renewal. Their training for that leadership will be Catholic liturgical life. This idea, expressed with such confidence and energy in the American magazine, shows us the way the wind of the spirit is blowing.
We seem to have arrived, bewildered and exhausted at the end of an epoch. A whole social system is dying a lingering and discreditable death, and Christianity, even old and even young, is renewing itself in men's minds to meet our common crisis.
The Catholic renewal, as now appears evident, is taking the form of a spiritual movement based on the liturgy and the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ.
The sense of community in Christ, of belonging to each other as members of His Body, is the core of liturgical worship and social justice. These two things, liturgy and social justice, are not separate; they are the inner and outer actions of the same great doctrine, the Mystical Body.
Social justice is the fruit of a social liturgy. Communal worship—that is Catholic life at its inmost radiant centre—issues outwards into Catholic action on the world. It endeavours to transform it into Christ according to the ideas learnt in the liturgy—the membership of all in Christ and the consequent striving for a social and economic life of communal justice and charity.
The right, the Catholic way of working is from the centre outwards. External activities, parish organisations, social work, plans for the betterment of economic conditions, can only be sound and effective when they flow from the inner life and thought of a communal Christianity. All groups (including any forms of totalitarianism) not rooted in the liturgical life are for that reason already in a state of unbalance and disintegration.
Any Catholic activity, even, which is not vitalized by the spirit of the whole Mystical Body, is useless. It has not the sap of life in it. The reason is plain. The life of the Mystical Body is the supernatural life of grace, imparted by Christ to every member. The chief source of this life is the Sacrifice of the Mass.
Here we reach a truth which for many Catholics clears up the whole question of the liturgy : the individual Catholic cannot rely on this communal life of the Mystical Body to carry him along without effort of mind and will on his own part. To share in the common life of grace he must contribute something to it. He must co-operate actively with Christ and the other members in the communal life and prayer. Now the liturgy, by which is meant especially the Mass, is the most important part of that life. It is the very centre of it, the communal prayer and worship of Christ-plus-Christians.
It follows that the co-operation of Christians in the Mass should be a communal co-operation, each individual contributing, freely and generously, his mind, heart and voice to the common prayer of the whole Body.
It is that " voice " which seems so difficult. It isn't, as a matter of fact, nearly so difficult as it seems. (And anyhow, it is the contribution of mind and heart that is difficult—the use of voice makes it easier to concentrate mind and heart on the prayer and the offering). But there are, let us face it, certain difficulties about starting a congregation singing in a church where the people have always " listened" to a sung Mass. The tradition of silence has settled in and taken root. Natural inertia, our all but common lot, hedges itself round with this tradition until it takes fantastic shape as the Catholic tradition, the normal accompaniment of a Catholic service. Mrs. Smith, in the second bench, might be disturbed, almost shocked, if she were asked to take part in a congregational Kyrie. She might pronounce it " not devotional," or worse—not customary.
There is (more weighty difficulty) the usual congregational shyness to win over. And there may be also the dead weight of previous failures to contend with. A congregational Benediction has been tried, perhaps, with discouraging results. The front benches felt rather conspicuous, or stayed away, leaving an acephalous nave. The back benches felt too far away. In effect, the Tantum Ergo emerged as a shamefaced hum, with a tendency to drone. And the priest, who has spent three Sundays exhorting the congregation to sing, but who is aware of cross-currents, decides that the time is not yet. The American priest who writes the open letter in Orate Fratres has some things to say about such a situation. But we must leave him for a fortnight.