When our daughter Alexandra was a toddler, we attended the Methodist church with my parents one Sunday morning. She preceded us down the aisle and genuflected deeply and crossed herself before entering the pew, as she did every Sunday at church—eliciting amused smiles from the grownups. (Later her father quipped that she was reverencing the “Real Absence.”) But, of course, it had never occurred to her not to genuflect before entering the pew. It was a habit she learned early, even if she did not understand the reason for her gesture of reverence.
On another occasion, a cousin was visiting us with her two little girls, and we were all kneeling in our pew before Mass began, praying the Rosary. The two-year-old knelt with us, and suddenly began to cry. I had a hunch what was the matter—so I handed her a Rosary. She was instantly calm, and began to finger the beads, her head bowed reverently. Though she was far too young to know what the Rosary was, or the reason we were kneeling in prayer before Mass, she did understand that it was important, and she wanted to be a part of it.
These tiny children did not and could not understand fully the symbolism of what they did, of course. Nevertheless, their desire to express reverence as they had seen others do was beyond question. If inchoate, their acts of worship were no less powerfully expressive. […]
One of the mistakes in implementing the liturgical changes following the Second Vatican Council was downplaying, often eliminating, traditional gestures of Catholic ritual—physical actions that express our faith. Exactly why this happened is not easy to explain, but one reason was a kind of super-rational approach to worship that prevailed in the years following the Council. Some thought that such ritual gestures as kneeling, genuflecting, bowing, making the sign of the cross, and striking the breast were mindless habits without real meaning, empty gestures possibly tainted with superstition. Many liturgists (and priests and catechists) stressed understanding the “why” of everything we do in worship—which is a good idea in itself, but when overemphasized it can (and often did) lead to rejecting anything one does not completely understand: if I don’t get it, I won’t do it. According to this view, the rational always trumps the ritual.
A misguided view of “updating” Catholic worship also led to the elimination of these distinctive symbolic actions, which were no longer seen as an integration of body and soul in authentic worship. Lost in all this was the idea that these bodily actions express both a personal and communal response to the Mystery of Faith and to the sacramental world the liturgy represents—and that these actions are a means of uniting all believers with the sacramental life of the Church. Instead, they were thought to be prompted only by subjective piety and an overly sentimental sense of devotion. Many liturgists had come to regard these ritual gestures as liturgical debris accumulated over the centuries—debris that obscured the pure form of Christian worship and that needed to be removed. The result gives a new meaning to “ritual cleansing.”
Another contributing factor was that before the Council some gestures—such as striking the breast during the Confiteor (mea culpa—“through my fault”) or at the Domine non sum dignus (“Lord, I am not worthy”) just before Communion—were not made by the congregation. These prayers were said inaudibly by clergy and altar servers only, and only they made these gestures. After the Council, when the vernacular translation changed these prayers and eliminated the triple repetitions, the accompanying gestures were simply discontinued, even those explicitly indicated in the rubrics. Thus, lacking the example of the priests and servers, the people in the congregation never took up this practice.
The origin of most of these symbolic gestures that are integral to Catholic worship—a wordless liturgical language—is, in many cases, lost in history. A basic vocabulary would include genuflecting toward the altar and tabernacle, bowing the head at the name of Jesus and when the names of the Trinity are pronounced (the Doxology, or “Glory be…”), along with bowing toward the crucifix, striking the breast and making the sign of the cross. They do have meaning and significance as powerful signs of worship even if the way this happens is only dimly understood.
The above excerpt appeared in the February 2010 Adoremus Bulletin.
