As a child starting school in the late 1950s, there was not much about “hearing” Mass that was readily accessible to me. There were lots of intriguing mysteries about what went on up there between the priest (whose back was turned to us) and the Tabernacle (directly in front of him on the altar) to which he seemed to be whispering in secret; however, little of it filtered down to the fourth-to-the-last pew of the nave of St. Ann’s Parish, our usual Sunday morning haunt.

I spent the first five years of Catholic school memorizing the Baltimore Catechism. We were also taught to honor with extreme reverence all things related to the Mass. We were told that the sanctuary (inside the altar rail) was a hallowed space, honored with the same respect as the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies. I would never dare to touch the Holy Eucharist or the chalice—only the priest’s hands, anointed with chrism at his ordination, were permitted to touch the Sacred Elements. Low Mass most Sundays was very quiet—the people had only a few phrases to speak aloud; they hardly ever sang. Only the priest heard the words of Consecration, spoken in whispers as he bowed low before the tabernacle in the center of the altar—his back to the congregation. All we understood was that the priest was conversing with God, participating in the great mystery of the miracle of transubstantiation.

Sadly, however, Mass was not always shrouded in solemnity: the Old Rite had its abuses, too. “Phoning in Mass” sounds very critical, but some priests spoke the Latin phrases so quickly that it sounded like gibberish—even if the congregation followed the English translations in their missals. Some priests were proud of the expeditious way they could “say” Mass, and a contingent of the laity preferred to “hear” Mass as quickly as possible. Going to Holy Communion was not the same then, either. Most of the congregation did not receive on a regular basis; they felt the need to prepare spiritually by going to Confession the week before receiving the Holy Eucharist—demonstrating a deep reverence for Jesus at the most personal level. The only exception to this reticence to receive was during Easter season, when all knew they were required to go to Holy Communion at least once a year.

Pater Noster—Our Father

One Sunday near the end of my fourth-grade year, I decided to teach myself to say the Pater Noster during Mass. Our parish celebrated the Ordo Missæ of the Dialogue Mass, where the congregation prayed the entire Our Father aloud in Latin—instead of the older form where they spoke aloud only the final phrase: “sed libera nos a malo.” Even though I did not know exactly what I was saying, I knew it was the Our Father. Every Sunday I chipped away at it, memorizing one new phrase every few weeks. In the fall of my sixth-grade year, I was finally able to stay afloat through the entire prayer. Unfortunately, I made it through the entire Pater Noster only once, for on the Sunday following this personal triumph, Mass was said in English.

I remember having sharply divided feelings about this. One day a year earlier in my fifth-grade class, my teacher, a Sister of Loretto, announced with an exuberant smile that her prayers had been answered! Mass would soon be said in English because the Holy Father John XXIII had “opened a window in the Church to let the Holy Spirit in” by calling an “Ecumenical Council”—whatever that was. Naturally, I absorbed her enthusiasm, but I later came to mourn the passing of my personal milestone, my Pater Noster, which became a useless relic of the past—literally overnight.

My parents took no joy in the changes; they were bewildered and dismayed at having their “Church taken away from them.” My religious education in school from sixth to eighth grades was a careful indoctrination about “the changes,” all the whys and hows, covering those stormy years of transition, when there was a “commentator” as well as a lector with a separate pulpit in the sanctuary during Mass. The commentator’s job was to explain the new rite as it was happening, and why, as well as to remind the congregation about what they were supposed to do at each particular moment (stand, sit, kneel, etc.). I lectured my parents that Mass was not just a private “hearing” of the Sacrifice shrouded in sacred ritual, away from the eyes of the congregation, but, rather, “community,” the coming together of the Body of Christ to share in the table of his Banquet. My mother would just sigh and say, “They’ve taken all the beauty and mystery out of the Mass.” My dad would chuckle sarcastically and mumble, “We’re holy rollers now.”

Good, Bad, and Ugh!

Watching the Mass with the priest facing us was like having grandma’s treasure chest open in front of us, where we could delve into all its delicious secrets. I was happy that the Mass now belonged to us, not just the priest; now we could hear and understand the holy words of the Consecration even as he spoke them, seeing the bread and wine as the miracle of transubstantiation took place before our eyes. It was like taking a tour of the Holy of Holies in the Temple. Wow.

But other aspects of the changes did not seem to make sense. Why did we stop saying the Last Gospel, which I had always loved, at the end of Mass? And the prayer to St. Michael? Does this mean that the devil has now been thrust into hell and we don’t need to say that prayer anymore? What other reason could there be? If the adults were bewildered, just imagine how confusing it was for a child!

My eighth-grade teacher, Sister John Paul, a Notre Dame Sister, insisted that our class read the four major documents of Vatican II. Good move, Sister. Had the Church changed any truths of the Faith? No way. Had the Church abandoned her ancient rituals? Look again. Sister reassured our troubled, busy little minds. Nothing has been changed, only renewed: the substance of the truth remained, even if the forms were modified to answer “the needs of the modern world.” Indeed, Sister drummed it into us that the Church could not change its essential truths, nor was the Council even called for that purpose. It was an ecumenical Council, with the driving force of the Holy Spirit being to open up the Catholic Church to the world, to get rid of the ossified, stuffy air inside the Church by opening the stained-glass windows.

I would like to publicly thank Sister John Paul for this education, for when, 15 years later, I found myself at Georgetown University’s Dahlgren Chapel at Mass listening to an erudite Jesuit theologian’s Sunday sermon on “why we no longer need to believe in transubstantiation,” I finally realized that the “Spirit of Vatican II” had become a rudderless ship blown perilously off-course. I did not reach this conclusion because of the sourdough “pass the Chalice” Masses I had attended seated on the floor of a dorm room in college; nor the extemporaneous diatribe of the “butterfly” priests of the seventies—who made up the prayers as they went along; nor the slide shows, liturgical dances, and sermon-dramas; nor the gradual denuding of our Catholic culture in song, statuary, ritual, and symbol. I had convinced myself that, even though those experimental forms were personally distasteful to me, they were just that: form, not substance.

However, in the exact moment of that Jesuit professor’s sermon, I realized that form had overtaken substance, that the “reformers” were actually “revolutionaries” bent on changing not just how we believe, but what we believe. I saw finally that forms can inform substance, color it, define it, preserve it—and even pervert it. Maybe my parents were not as intractable as I had thought. Rightly, one should not be hidebound to forms for their own sake—but neither can one abandon forms as guardians of substance.

Slips, Slaps, and Slop…

Then came the years of range war. The liberals were encamped round the table of the Word, bowing to the altar even as they wheeled the tabernacle into another room. Beleaguered orthodox Catholics, coming in from the cold one by one, were trying to reclaim the Church one word, one song, one Rosary at a time. The pastor said that singing Latin in church was “seditious” and that Marian devotions were “not liturgical” (read, the kiss of death). Jesuit retreat leaders lectured that “if Jesus had cared about crumbs, he would have come as a jellybean.” Angry letters complaining about lectors who took it upon themselves to make the words of the Epistles “more inclusive” were met with silent disdain. Requests for Benediction were openly laughed at. Exquisite statuary and altar vessels were discarded or displayed in church lobbies, as sanctuaries were made more “simple” and churches became “worship spaces.” The faithful, who were supposed to be “more active” in their participation of Church rituals, evidently could only do so in rituals that fit the liberal mold. But where was the substance of the Faith in all this?

“New ways of interpreting” the theology of the Mass seemed to mean taking emphasis away from adoring God and humbling ourselves before him. We were told to “make church”—that the Body of Christ was not “just” the Real Presence in the Sacred Elements, but the kinship of the worshiping community when all partake of the one meal. Then the priest, whose hands are consecrated during Holy Orders to confect the Blessed Sacrament at Mass, became not so much the intermediary between God and mankind in the “unbloody Sacrifice of the Altar” as the “presider” of a ritual meal of “remembering,” in which all those present were celebrants! The goal of the liberal theology seemed less about pleasing God than pleasing each other.

Then the landscape changed again. Orthodoxy experienced an explosive resurgence in some quarters, with many kinds of initiatives: some argued that Mass should be reinstated to its Tridentine form—only then could we be “sure.” Some were happy with the Novus Ordo Mass in Latin—at least there were no ICEL “dynamic equivalent” translations to water down or blur the language of the Roman Missal. Others fought for reforms on many fronts: retranslating the Mass into literal English, returning the Tabernacle to the main altar, reinstating altar rails, relearning Gregorian chant, and on and on.

For my part, I have been haunted since the age of 12 by the knowledge that, as a member of the last group of Catholics who really remember the pre-Vatican II church, when those of my generation (who are still Catholic) are gone, the living memory of those ancient rituals will die with us. But this sadness was not caused by the Second Vatican Council, but by the misplaced zeal of those who tried, through systematic indoctrination and intimidation, to stamp out and suppress whatever they and their agenda rejected as “not in the spirit of Vatican II,” thereby robbing generations of Catholics of their rightful cultural, liturgical, devotional, and spiritual heritage—even though these traditions were specifically mandated to be preserved by the Council itself.

Add to this the new aesthetic of the “simple,” which was apparently extrapolated from §34 of Sacrosanctum Concilium: “The rites should be distinguished by a noble simplicity,” a phrase used to strip sanctuaries and gut the collective treasury of sacred symbols and images, along with Environment and Art in Catholic Worship (1978), prepared by the Bishops’ Committee on Liturgy but never approved by vote of the American bishops. Anyone who has been to St. Peter’s in Rome can see that more than one crucifix does not lessen the value of the symbol. Multiplicity of images done properly can have the same effect as beautiful polyphony, echoing and reechoing the glories of God.

No longer was it just a matter of confusion in the Church, but of open conflict. Call to Action, a group of Catholic dissenters who questioned the faith and morals of the Church, had their conservative brothers and sisters arrested, tried, and fined for protesting that such meetings should not take place in Catholic church facilities—so much for Christ’s admonition to “come to terms” with your brethren “on the way to court” (Matthew 5:25; 1 Corinthians 6:1-7). On another front, a group of dissenting Catholics chose to stand every Sunday at Mass to protest the all-male priesthood, disrupting the rituals and prayers of those around them, shamelessly drawing attention to themselves and away from the Real Presence of Jesus on the altar. It seemed that practically every aspect of the moral and liturgical life of the Catholic Church was in flux, in disarray, or at least called in question.

Conversion, Renewal, Resplendence…

Was there a miracle in all this confusion? What was the reason for the Second Ecumenical Council? Quietly, in spite of all those tempests, the Holy Spirit was at work. When I was a child, I remember witnessing just once the initiation of an adult into the Catholic Church. Then it seemed odd; being Catholic then was more like being Jewish—you usually came to it from the cradle or by marriage. However, many of the faithful today are new to the Faith. Many of the most ardent Catholic converts have found their way to the Church despite all the obstacles, setbacks, and confusion placed in their paths. Some of the brightest minds today in Catholic Scripture study and theology began as Protestant ministers. Now they are among us, strengthening and restoring us with their enthusiasm and expertise.

The Master gave a banquet, but the invited guests declined to come. So he invited anybody who came down the road, and, to round things out, the poor and sick whom no one else wanted. He sent his servants out looking for them. Why would the Holy Spirit not seek out the forgotten and confused and make it as easy as possible to bring them to the Feast of the Holy Sacrifice of Love? In spite of all the permutations of the last 60 years, Vatican II did open up the stained-glass windows—but without intending to remove them! Being Catholic is not an exclusive club or tribe; it is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church of Christ himself intended for the whole world until the end of time. I just wish that the generations who followed my generation could have known the rock-hard solidity of the Church that I knew as a child.