Happy With Ratzinger! (No, Really!)

Grappling With Catholic Feng Shui

Forget about whether Pope Benedict XVI will soften his attitude toward the role of women in the church or discover a more pastoral approach to homosexuals or heed the pleas of manpower-poor bishops for an experiment with married priests. For many Catholics, there is only one question about the new pope's intentions: Will he turn the altars around?

Some Catholics considerably younger than my grandmother never have reconciled themselves to what may seem to non-Catholics like a trivial dispute over furniture arrangement or, at best, a sort of Christian feng shui. But the debate over the placement of the priest at Mass is a variation on debates in many faiths between traditionalists and innovators, between those who emphasize the this-worldly nature of religion and those who are content to see dimly, looking to another world.

Where does the new pope fall along this divide? In his 1999 book "The Spirit of the Liturgy," the future pope ruefully recalls how Mass "versus populum" (toward the people) established itself after Vatican II even though Pope John XXIII's reform council hadn't directly decreed the change. The new arrangement, then-Cardinal Ratzinger sarcastically observes, was thought to be "compatible with the meaning of the Christian liturgy, with the requirement of active participation."

The conventional conservative complaint about Mass facing the people is that it "desacralizes" the Eucharist by overemphasizing its role as a meal and slighting its re-presentation, through the prayers of the priest, of Christ's sacrifice on the cross.

Ratzinger shares some of these concerns, but he also cites a different problem: Mass facing the people inflates the priest's role. "Everything depends on him," Ratzinger writes. "We have to see him, to respond to him, to know what he is doing…. Not surprisingly, people try to reduce this newly created role by assigning all kinds of liturgical functions to different individuals and entrusting the 'creative' planning of the liturgy to groups of people … to, 'make their own contribution.' Less and less is God in the picture."

Read the entire article by following the link below.

Grappling With Catholic Feng Shui

Labels: Catholic, Catholicism

posted by Norm Johnson @ 11:20 AM