Too Many Words

Pope S. Paul VI at the Yankee Stadium NY 1965.

One of the characteristics of the Roman Rite until the introduction of the Missal of Pope Paul VI in 1970, was the balance it achieved between silence, singing, the spoken word and ritual action. Even the so-called Interim Rite, which had various iterations between 1964 and 1968, still preserved much of this balance.  The Roman Rite "spoke" to people on a number of levels, not just the cerebral level. Its silences spoke, its aesthetics spoke, its unique and unworldly music spoke.

On the other hand, one of the great flaws of the Missal of Pope Paul VI is that it is far too cerebral. Everything has to be comprehensible intellectually. The Council Fathers decreed that the Church's Rites had to be "intelligible", but unhappily, the new Missal took this injunction too far.

The typical celebration of the New Mass, Ordinary Form - call it what you will - is very wordy. If the texts in the Missal itself weren't more than enough, we are also subjected to little commentaries, entertainments, even ferverini during the Mass.  There is the Three Sermon Syndrome, where the celebrant speaks at the beginning of the Mass, after the Gospel and then before the Last Blessing. Words, words, words. Too many words.  How can one encounter the transcendent with so many words?

At the same time, ritual action in the New Order of Mass has been reduced to a minimum. Silence is imposed by the celebrant, rather than being organic to the rite. One strange example of this, which we suffer too often, and which has become the touchstone of the more contemporary ars celebrandi, is where the celebrant - having preached his homily - goes and sits down and a period of silence is endured. Presumably we are to meditate on his spoken wisdom: but does anyone remember more than two sentences that he said?  How quintessential such a made-up ritual is to the inward-looking and artificial ethos of the New Order of Mass.

Let us be very careful to avoid an overly-cerebral approach to the Sacred Liturgy (New or Old).  Might we not aim, rather, to recapture and preserve that old balance of the Roman Rite: silence and song supporting the Ritual actions?