Continuing to meander through the excellent Habits of Devotion on which I initially blogged a few days ago here. The topic for today is "participation."

If you lurk in internet discussions of liturgy and simply tradition in general, you’ll find that "participation" is a surprisingly hot topic. The reason comes down to a single section (14)  in The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy:

14. Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that fully conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the Liturgy. Such participation by the Christian people as "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a redeemed people (I Pet 2:9; cf. 2:4-5), is their right and duty by reason of their baptism.

In the restoration and promotion of the Sacred Liturgy, this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else; for it is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit; and therefore pastors of souls must zealously strive to achieve it, by means of the necessary instruction, in all their pastoral work.

Yet it would be futile to entertain any hopes of realizing this unless the pastors themselves, in the first place, become thoroughly imbued with the spirit and power of the Liturgy, and undertake to give instruction about it. A prime need, therefore, is that attention be directed, first of all, to the liturgical instruction of the clergy. Wherefore the sacred Council has decided to enact as follows:

(What follows is a series of paragraphs declaring that seminary instruction on liturgy should be given more emphasis and so on. It continues:)

19. With zeal and patience, pastors of souls must promote the liturgical instruction of the faithful, and also their active participation in the Liturgy both internally and externally, taking into account their age and condition, their way of life, and standard of religious culture. By so doing, pastors will be fulfilling one of the chief duties of a faithful dispenser of the mysteries of God; and in this matter they must lead their flock not only in word but also by example.

(And before we get fully immersed in the V2 wars, I’ll just say straight out that I’m pretty uninterested in liturgical innovators chiseling it on stone tablets SC14 as a rationalization for their innovations. Why? Because most of these innovators tend to ignore most of the rest of Sacrosantcum Concilium, regularly, and as a matter of policy. Like: 3. Therefore no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the Liturgy on his own authority.

Etc.)

(As I mentioned the other day, there was a most interesting discussion of this subject at the Shrine of the Holy Whapping last week, a discussion that’s up to now 91 comments, and begins with Whapster Dan’s reflections on many Indult Masses he attends, the lack of visible, external participation by the faithful, and the suggestion that Indult Masses might appeal to more, especially the young, if the practice of what was, in the liturgical movement, called the "dialogue Mass" was utilized more frequently:

So what I’m asking is this. Is there any reason we can’t revisit the notion of the dialogue Mass? That kind of thing was being done in the 1940’s and 50’s, yet seems to have disappeared completely? Is it really healthy not to be able to develop in this way? I say this because the traditional Mass carried out as a museum piece from the 1920’s does not have a future in the Church. Rather, I think a dynamically celebrated form of this Mass has greater potential as an evangelical tool, reaching out to those who are interested but might be turned off by the present celebration of the traditional rite.

So, even though I have engaged in some diversion myself, let’s get back to business. You can tell this is going to be one of those posts.

This full, active and conscious participation was obviously a felt need by the Council Fathers, although some of the contemporary (as in 2007) conversations about this would lead you to believe that it’s simply not so – that everything was fine before Vatican II, everyone knew exactly what they were doing and were, indeed, participating "fully" until the vernacular and the cantors, put in place by Freemasons, came along to convince them that they weren’t.

On the other hand, the "other side" of the conversation will try to convince you that most Catholics before 1965 or so were ignorant, complacent, oblivous pew slugs rattling their rosaries who obviously had no idea what they were doing, ever, until the vernacular and the cantors came along to save them and invite them to participate.

Clearly, there’s a middle ground, which is where reality usually sits, a middle ground that is clearly engagingly laid out with increasingly frequency, for example, by historians of lay spirituality throughout Catholic history. Read The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy or Cities of God by Augustine Thompson, OP. This section of Joseph Chinnici’s essay further clarifies the past, noting for us the efforts to deepen American Catholics’ meaningful participation in prayer and liturgy from 1926 to 1960.

Chinnici tracks this through an examination of movements and national conferences, beginning with the first national conventionof the Sodality Movement in 1926. The Jesuit in charge noted, with great satisfaction, the participation of the youth in attendance at the Masses, participation he judged by two criterea: their response to the Missa Recitata (a dialogue Mass), and how many received Communion.

(Remember this was an era in which a minority of any given congregation at Mass received Communion. A later essay deals in more detail with the shifting understanding of Communion reception, but let me just point this out: Observers and pastoral figures within American Catholicism actively worked to see more people receive Communion at Mass and took it as a point of pride when they did. What we can’t fail to note, though, is that the presumption was that these recipients were properly disposed and had probably gone to Confession fairly recently, if not the day before – if not during Mass (up to the Consecration, I believe, or perhaps the beginning of the Canon.) Alongside the good news they reported about communicant numbers were, just as importantly, the numbers of penitents they could report.)

The priest wrote in a letter to Fr. Virgil Michel, one of the stalwarts of the liturgical movement in the US:

I am convinced now that the Missa Recitata is the ideal and only method for our students. They like it; they love the Mass for it; and the appreciate more and more what the Mass is for them. (40)

It was the Sodality movement, which by 1959 claimed 18,000 "chapters" and more than one million members, led the charge on the dialogue Mass, its 1926 manual specifying that if a bishop permitted it, the "Sodalists’ Mass should be a Dialog Mass." A survey taken in 1941 indicated that 98 dioceses, by that point, had approved its use in the United States.

This "pedagogy of participation," Chinnici goes on to detail, extended to understanding of parish life and catechetics that were began to flourish at the time. He concludes this section:

….the pedagogy of participation, in both content and method, had helped prepare the way. Without it the general acceptance of the liturgical changes and the sudden outburst of new forms of the Catholic pattern of prayer that were just a few years away cannot be understood. Perhaps the men and women who had learned their spiritual speech in the dialogue Mass, who had taken the Scriptures into their own hands, who on pilgrimage had learned to cross boundaries and form new communities…perhaps these people simply could no longer wrap themselves in the social garment of their teachers.

The rest of the essay goes on to explore the rupture and discontinuity between the periods, but I’ll save that for another time.

I think it’s useful for us who grapple with this question today to see how our grandparents and parents were being formed and the movements many of them were encountering in their lives as Catholics. There was definitely a spirit in the air that lay Catholics could and should be able to understand more about their faith, to see the unity of it and as a consequence, be formed into stronger disciples.

The language and the nature of the discourse is different from much of what followed, though. The emphasis for those involved in Sodality and various other lay formation and spiritual movements was on binding oneself to Christ through the Church – to sense Christ more fully alive within their spirits and even parish lives, not to shape and reshape that experience and truth in light of their own lives, but to be shaped by it. The "participation" wasn’t about feeling more "accepted" or finding "a place at the table" or "exploring my own response to the Jesus-event" or because "this place ain’t nothing without my participation." It was about digging more deeply into this Gift of Christ through His Church, knowing that this the Way, the Truth and the Life. Again, it seems, something important is subsumed by a cultural tsunami, doesn’t it?

So I think that middle ground is important to claim. Yes, those being formed in this "pedagogy of participation" probably understood very well that they could deeply participate in a Mass in which they said not a word but "Amen." But it must have been true that something about that experience was also mitigating against a sense of full participation – people felt that some external, visible participation would assist them in strengthening their internal "active" participation. This is not exactly crazy or an exercise in self-absorbed humanistic hooey. What shifted, I suppose was the definition of full, active, conscious participation – that it could only be "measured" by external, physical actions.

A while back, I blogged on my Theory of Everything, a post which I left too much out of, things that keep coming to me in bits and pieces. My Theory claims that everything will eventually go haywire, so the way we structure things needs to admit that and take it into account – that at some point, most of us will be just fine with living as the Least Common Denominator, doing the minimal on our merry way down the Path of Least Resistance.

The "pedagogy of participation" seemed to be concerned that a silent Mass in which the laity did not externally participate might tend to encourage things to go haywire by creating a situation in which someone might end up thinking that understanding or even internal participation was unnecessary in order to reap the benefits, that all that was needed was your presence in that moment, without really knowing what was going on in a way that would impact your life as a disciple in a challenging, life-changing way. (I’m just conjecturing…bear with me)

What then happened was that the effort to solve that problem – a real problem, as perceived by those in pastoral ministry – in that process, any negative consequences on the other end were rejected out of hand – negative consequences as in an emphasis on external participation (the people’s parts in the Mass, lay liturgical ministries) might tend to overwhelm the need for internal active participation. That saying the words doesn’t mean you’re actually paying attention to what the words are and mean, and the very act of saying them can "trick" you into thinking you’ve done it. Or that in hearing the priest’s prayers in the vernacular, not English, automatically means that everyone is actively participating (you might remember my test from a few months back – after the Opening Prayer, turn to the person next to you and say, "What did he say?" Uh…… Or ask a random sample of parishioners pouring out of Sunday Mass what the Scripture readings were (parents of young children excluded from survey sample, please). ) Or that the emphasis on the "people" participating might have the cumulative effect of "the people" getting the idea that the Mass is really about them, after all.

I’m not saying that any of this is a given. I’m just a fan of the Law of Unintended Consquences. Well, not a fan, but a member of its staff, as are all of us. I’m simply trying to understand how we got where we are – which, as I’ve said before, is not a terrible place at all, and much the same place that we, as Church, have been in for nigh on 2000 years. I will take that one to the mat.

I’m just trying to point out that "participation" as a goal isn’t the invention of Vatican II, and that the defintion of "participation" at work, not just among the professional liturgists, but among active, interested, committed laity, was a definition generally  inclusive of external, vocal participation.