by Fred Moleck
Quiet Apostates
At this writing Pope Benedict is on his way to Gotham City for yet one more round of super-solemn celebrations. “God bless him,” and a special “God bless them” to the people who have spent much of their most recent lives getting ready and “doing it.”“It” being all that it takes to get the liturgy fashioned, ministers rehearsed, and keep everybody happy.
You know—just what you do each weekend.
I vowed I would not write or comment on the music choices, the mammoth choirs, the vesture (no matter how tall the 2-foot miter is), the hucksters with the pope-products. Whoops—sorry. I slipped. Mea culpa!
But there are two quotes I want to share with you from his session with the bishops on
Wednesday. They are part of the response he made about the attrition going on with Catholics.Do people today find it difficult today to encounter God in our churches? Has our preaching lost its salt? Might it be that many people have forgotten, or never really learned, how to pray in and with the Church?. . . I think we are speaking about people who have fallen by the wayside without consciously having rejected their faith in Christ, but, for whatever reason, have not drawn life from the liturgy, the sacraments, preaching. . . . Indeed, to return to the question I just discussed, the result can be a quiet apostasy.
He offers a solution:
We need to discover, as I have suggested, new and engaging ways of proclaiming this message and awakening a thirst for the fulfillment which Christ can bring. It is in the Church’s liturgy, and above all in the sacrament of the Eucharist, that these realities are most powerfully expressed and lived in the life of the believers; perhaps we still have much to do in realizing the Council’s vision of the liturgy as the exercise of the common priesthood and the impetus for a fruitful apostolate in the world.Consider these bites:
“new and engaging ways of proclaiming this message”“awakening a thirst for the fulfillment which Christ can bring”
“we still have much to do in realizing the Council’s vision of the liturgy”
“the impetus for a fruitful apostolate in the world”
From my forty years of experience, I thought we were well on the way:
—the expansion of musical style choices by the use of folk style music and the incorporation of global music—singing hymnody from many denominations and the sprinkling of Latin items in the liturgy
—trusting the power of dynamic equivalence
—feeling empowerment as lay liturgical ministers
—(here insert your favorite Vatican II innovations)
. . . All in the name of sharing in the “common priesthood” and creating “the impetus for a fruitful apostolate in the world.”
It might be time to examine what it takes to be a “quiet apostate.”
You can reach Fred Moleck via email at fmoleck@comcast.net