Modernist anticlericalism which seeks to destroy the priesthood. Constant threat to leave the Church if they don't get their way.
Barbara Staudigl on church commitment, worship and leaving the church and what happens in between.
"My name is Peter, I'm standing on the edge and I'm walking another metre." The sentence came up in a random table conversation among people with a church employer; they were talking about their own church commitment and that of their children, if they had any. The sentence makes it clear that people who leave do not leave from the centre, but from the edge. When they leave, they don't walk the long way from the centre, but just walk another metre to be outside. The real thing happened much earlier, without anyone seeming to have noticed. Apparently, the departure is only noticed when income from church taxes is missing or church service attendees are counted. Both times it is too late.
Before people leave the church, they have gone from the centre to the margins.
Yet the people who are leaving have gone from the centre to the margins much earlier, or even been pushed to the margins. And I actually believe that worship is meaningful for where one stands in the church. A church that sees worship as the culmination of what it does and the source of its strength does well to take worship and the way people relate to it seriously in terms of its meaningfulness.2 Being reduced to the passive role of visitor and at no point sharing responsibility for the liturgical process makes it easy to walk another metre. The (few) other visitors to a mass, looking forward and focused on the priest, would hardly notice what is happening at their back. The priest, far away in the sanctuary, probably wouldn't either.
In the last forty years we have reverted to a clericalist understanding of liturgy, where the service begins when the priest appears and not when the people are gathered. Yet in the wake of Vatican II there would have been beginnings of a liturgy closer to the people. I was pleased to read how Stephan Schmid-Keiser, in his article "Celebrating divine services - not without a new sensibility for it" , tells us that in the second half of the Council the experience of community in a circle around the altar or in house liturgies or in new, more open spaces became possible and important. With joy, because I know these forms from my youth in the 80s and associate them with good memories.
I experienced church as communion.
In the church I experienced as a teenager, you would have noticed people missing and leaving. I experienced church as a communion, services were prepared together and celebrated together. There was also a priest, but he was no more and no less than a part of the community - and his role was one - alongside musicians or people who prepared the intercessions. These were not services made possible by the appearance of a priest, but by the helping together of many in advance who contributed their skills. This experience, that a joint celebration requires joint preparation in advance, still shapes my image of the church today. Now with great sadness, because it is only a remembered experience.
When in the last forty years that separate me from my youth experience and youth memory did we lose this communion church? In my theology studies of the late 80s this experience was still recallable. Certainly not everywhere and not by default. But one knew where to go to experience a Communio-Church. In theology, however, people were already clearly distancing themselves from a liturgical understanding of communion. Formalisms became more important: Who is allowed to do what in the service? And even more important: who is not allowed to do what?
Since the 1980s, there has been a tacit turning away from the liturgical understanding of Vatican II. There was a tacit return from the people as an active community to the priest, whose appearance from the sacristy marks the beginning of the service. One could experience this particularly drastically during the lock-down in the Corona pandemic: The people were gone, the ministers worshipped without the people. The Graz liturgical scholar Peter Ebenbauer calls this "priest-centred solo liturgies ". I would like to know what the deeper meaning is. In my understanding of a personal God, God does not need solitary services of individual priests, but people need the experience of being gathered and connected with each other in the worship of God.
Arrogant and bitter how lay people are marginalised.
With horror I recently heard the report of a religious education teacher friend of mine who had offered to prepare the intercessions for the Sunday service in her home parish. She met with little approval from the priest. If she really wanted to do it, she should hand in the intercessions at the latest on the Friday before so that he could revise them. An arrogant and bitter lesson on how to marginalise the laity. And a presumption to come between God and the petitions of the people.
I mean, you can relate the strong focus on liturgy and the celebrant with the pontificates of Karol Wojtyla or Joseph Ratzinger, with the installation of bishops and cardinals who fit the theological lineage of those two popes and in turn attracted men as priests who also fit into this line. And of course the increasing clericalization with a simultaneous massive decline in the number of priests is not only an ideological, but also a highly pragmatic answer to why liturgical communion experiences are no longer a matter of course: if there is no parish leadership without priests, if they alone can preside over church services, when the few priests in ever-larger parish associations come to celebrate: How is the priest supposed to be a part of the community?
No more desire to work subaltern under priests.
Of course, the pragmatic side could be solved, because the local community could prepare and wait until the person who has the role of priest is there. But the preparatory roles for the service were pushed to the sidelines, no longer cultivated, abandoned. And now, in a church that has embraced clericalism, there is an increasing lack of full-time pastoral and lay lay staff who have no desire to work subalternly among priests.
A difficult situation, not attractive for those who stand on the edge - and one is tempted to call out to that Peter: Walk another meter, you have not much to lose. But in the members of my generation there is still the remembered experience of a communion church. And I miss her. I can accept that a priest has a central role in worship, even though I don't share the Catholic Church's teaching on who can become a priest. What I cannot accept is the passive role of the worshipers.
Wherever it was possible in my life, I tried to build on my communion experiences: in children's church services and at school in the Monday morning groups in which the classroom became a different place and the first hour became a different time. The circle situation was always constitutive. Because nobody stands on the edge in a circle, everyone is noticed in the circle - and nobody can walk a meter and be outside without the others noticing.
I was annoyed when liturgical spaces of experience designed in this way were dismissed as “appropriate for children”. I hope, of course, that they were – and where I still do it today, they are. But what a delusion to think that sitting passively on hard wooden pews with a priest in the sanctuary is the "adult form" of liturgy. I find it lacking in relationships to sit somewhere in the church space, far away from others, not knowing who is sitting behind you - and the priests in the sanctuary far away from everyone. It always amazes me that they still celebrate Mass without asking people to move closer together, to come forward. But maybe they have no memories or no longing for a communion church like me.
Longing for a church in which the basic services of communion and liturgy are thought of together.
I long for a church in which the basic services of communion and liturgy are thought of together, in which one remembers theological traditions that take the people of God seriously as an active subject and not just clerics. I would like services to be celebrated on Sundays in Catholic kindergartens or Catholic schools - in places where everyday life happens and communities already exist, in places of life. I wish for services that are prepared and celebrated together and the priest does not have a solo role, but fulfills his task in the canon of many other tasks.
And I would like to invite that Peter into such a church: Walk another meter - but don't go out, come back!
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