{"id":503,"date":"2008-03-27T09:51:37","date_gmt":"2008-03-27T09:51:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/03\/is-the-easter-vigil-too-long.html"},"modified":"2008-03-27T09:51:37","modified_gmt":"2008-03-27T09:51:37","slug":"is-the-easter-vigil-too-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/03\/is-the-easter-vigil-too-long.html","title":{"rendered":"Is the Easter Vigil too long?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fr. James Martin poses the question at the America blog<\/a>
\nA good discussion at Deacon Greg Kandra’s blog<\/a>
\nMy brief (hah) answer: No.
\nDone correctly, with appropriate settings, even with a lot of baptisms, the Vigil really shouldn’t last over three hours. If it does (as was the case w\/what Fr. Martin reports) – the problems are probably not with the structure of the liturgy or even with the number of initiations, but with other elements.
\nThere’s a lot of extra “stuff” in the Vigil – all of it rich and evocative. There are nine Scripture readings, and I’m a firm believer in doing all of them, every time.
\nBut there are two factors that have the power to unnecessarily extend the length of the Vigil:
\n1) The settings of the Responsorial Psalms
\n2) The homily
\nThink about #1. If there are 7 Responsorial Psalms and each takes five minutes, that’s 35 minutes right there, and one commentor at one of the blogs noted above mentioned hearing a Responsorial Psalm of 10 minutes in length.\u00a0 I am not sure about the rubrics related to the Psalms – if you must have them, if silence can ever be substituted. What you don’t have to have are elaborate, performance-driven Psalms after each reading.
\nAnd #2 – On a night like this, the priest or deacon needs to understand that a lengthy homily distracts from, rather than emphasizes the power of the evening. What he says should be powerful, focused and point to the richness of the rest of the ritual. In about five minutes. He should understand that at the Easter Vigil, the most powerful homilists are the catechumens and candidates. There’s really not much a homilist can add to what they are “saying.”
\nBut in the end, I think the question of length, so bluntly put, is the wrong question and actually sort of …embarrassing, maybe? Especially when you consider, say, the normal length of many Orthodox or Eastern Rite liturgies – every Sunday. <\/em>And also because of course, historically, the Easter Vigil has always been long – as in all night <\/em>long, if you go back far enough. In some monasteries, it is still all night long. Michael went to the Vigil in the Extraordinary Form, and it was three hours long (from 11pm-2am) and that was with no baptisms or initiations.
\nNo, the better question is, as Fr. Martin elaborates in his post, is what elements of the Vigil, as lived out in our parishes, are reflective of artistic and homiletic excesses rather than truly at the service of God through the liturgy?
\nWhich is, of course, always <\/em>a good question to ask.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fr. James Martin poses the question at the America blog A good discussion at Deacon Greg Kandra’s blog My brief (hah) answer: No. Done correctly, with appropriate settings, even with a lot of baptisms, the Vigil really shouldn’t last over three hours. If it does (as was the case w\/what Fr. Martin reports) – the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nIs the Easter Vigil too long? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/03\/is-the-easter-vigil-too-long.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is the Easter Vigil too long? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Fr. James Martin poses the question at the America blog A good discussion at Deacon Greg Kandra’s blog My brief (hah) answer: No. Done correctly, with appropriate settings, even with a lot of baptisms, the Vigil really shouldn’t last over three hours. If it does (as was the case w\/what Fr. 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James Martin poses the question at the America blog A good discussion at Deacon Greg Kandra’s blog My brief (hah) answer: No. Done correctly, with appropriate settings, even with a lot of baptisms, the Vigil really shouldn’t last over three hours. If it does (as was the case w\/what Fr. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}