ON OUR OWN

This morning I attended what the French Church now calls an A.D.A.P.: Assemblée dominicale en l’absence d’un prêtre, a Sunday assembly in the absence of a priest. This is relatively new: it was foreseen by Vatican II, but it is growing in importance as the number of priests declines and the number of clochers (literally ‘spires’) served by each increases. Our local parish priest now has 48 spires, which obviously borders on the ridiculous, indeed the monstrous. 

In the little modern missal-cum-hymnbook I found the official passage explaining ADAPs and giving some idea as to what they should be like. Some of the points I remember: congregations should be reminded that where two or three are gathered together, Christ is in the midst of them, and should therefore rate such events at their proper value (read: don’t complain because there’s no Mass); there should be readings from Scripture and prayers; but on the whole there should not be communion (from previously consecrated Hosts), because then people might end up thinking of the Mass as only one of several available ways to receive communion. 

What fascinated me was that for the form of such assemblies, no rules are given at all: ‘they can take many different forms’ is all that is said. They appear to have no consciousness of, or no interest in, the fact that in the Anglican Church, for example, there are beautifully-structured ADAPs called Matins and Evensong, which can perfectly well be celebrated without a priest: the only difference is that in such a case the Absolution is replaced by the glorious Collect for Trinity 21:

Grant, we beseech thee,

merciful Lord,

to thy faithful people

pardon and peace;

that they may be cleansed from all their sins

and serve thee with a quiet mind

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I don’t believe that the way ADAPs are conceived here includes a Confession and Absolution of any kind; at least this morning’s had none. (What I found alarming was the first intercessory prayer: ‘for those who confuse the Faith with a collection of rituals to practice: for those whose prideful obstinacy divides the Church and the World and imperils Peace; for them, Lord, we pray.')

I once owned (and have now, alas, misplaced) a beautiful little French translation of the Book of Common Prayer, published (curiously) in Dublin in 1777. Later I discovered that many Huguenots (French Protestants) who had fled France when their faith was proscribed by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 had gone to England but had then continued on to Ireland and joined the Church of Ireland. Being French, they were clearly not known for their ability to learn languages, so the CofI decided to print French Prayer Books, just for them. I should rustle up the texts of Matins and Evensong from that book again, remove the prayers for the Queen and Royal Family, and present them to the organisers of the next ADAP . . .

NB: the exquisite little painting above represents a village congregation coming from Evensong. It is by Samuel Palmer, a pupil of William Blake's, and was painted during his mystical year at the village of Shoreham in Kent. 

THE JOYS OF TRANSLATION

My priestly daughter suggested I translate into English the admirable little French book on the Mass about which I wrote here in October 2014, Missa Est by Daniel-Rops with stunning photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot. Little did I think what joy the work would give me. One may read a book, which is already an improvement to skimming it; but when you translate it you read it a far more profound way: you have not only to find the words' equivalents but their meaning, which includes their resonance and their overtones. It is this meaning that must be recreated in the new language.
   (I have since discovered that there exists a 1950s American translation put out under the aegis of the very media-oriented Bishop Fulton Sheen, with photographs by the great Canadian Yousuf Karsh; but I don't want to see it before finishing my own, as you can perhaps imagine.)
   Apart from a whole new appreciation of Daniel-Rops's writing, both in the historical explanations and in the fervent meditations on each part of the ceremony, I've been struck by the intricacy, the structure, the profundity of significance and the potential for spirituality of the 1570 Tridentine Roman Mass. We non-Roman Catholics often grew up with an apprehension of things Papist on the one hand; and on the other, our Roman brethren have now, since the Second Vatican Council, so altered the liturgy that it often bears only the faintest, reminiscent resemblance to its magnificent forebear.

   The intricacy, first: as Daniel-Rops explains in his Preface, not one of its 30 parts can be considered, as the Tridentine Catechism puts it, 'as useless or superfluous'. 'The smallest versicle, the sentence it takes only seconds to pronounce, are an integral part of a whole where are associated and proclaimed the gift of God, the oblation of Christ and the Grace we receive. It is like a spiritual symphony, where all the themes come back, complete one another, and unite in a single intention.'
   The structure, second: we enter with anticipated joy; find our emphatically-imperfect inner mess a block, so confess; are absolved; hear the Church's teaching in readings and homily; include the world in our preparatory prayers; offer the fruits of the earth that will be transformed; assist, in wonder and prayer, at the Consecration; communicate; are brought back to the world in the Postcommunion; are blessed, and go back to our lives. It is as structured as a great play. 
   Profundity of significance. There is not a detail -- as I once explained to student to whom all this was new and fascinating -- that does not have at least six centuries of meaning attached to it; that does not come from years, decades or centuries of intelligence feeding devotion. Take the Confiteor, the General Confession: the priest who leads it, and who is sometimes followed in this by members of the congregation, strikes his breast three times, an ancient sign of humility. These three strikes are knocks: Christ's knocking at the door of our closed and stubborn heart. If we open to them in the Confession, we may be freed from our burden by the Absolution. 
   Finally, the potential for spirituality. If we participate entirely, with our whole being, in such a Mass, we will emerge as from a great tragedy: scoured and cleansed, washed and slightly trembling, but with a renewal of joy, hope and courage for the days to come. 

But where to find such a Mass, today? The international and universal intelligibility of Latin has gone, and visitors can barely follow what is going on. The Mass as I experience it in my cluster of French villages is a travesty; the gestures are hurried if not suppressed, half the words are missing, the atmosphere is that of an amicable chat among friends; the texts are half improvised, the homilies bellowed into an unnecessary microphone --- and yet the villagers are happy. The flow of the liturgy is brutally checked by the exchange of the Peace, as if King Lear were interrupted in the middle of Act IV by a loquacious bumpkin engaging the audience; yet the elderly peasants smile and say 'La paix du Christ' to their neighbours. It is all very Evangelical and sort of Baptist in atmosphere. It is, apparently, what the Council Fathers in the Sixties wanted, and one suspects it suits our present Pope perfectly. 

Yet those who want something else, who need, who crave a true, silent, adoring worship; who need time and stillness for intense prayer but time and stillness not alone but in community; they are short-changed. Those who yearn for worship of the Highest in reverence, in beauty, in quiet, in a movement of the spirit they can join in, in a 'spiritual symphony', are neglected and, if they are not close to some major city where there is an eccentric Church more or less frowned upon by the authorities, have nowhere to go.

   I do not know the answer to this. I simply hope that those of us who have the need for such a Mass (or Eucharist), replete with the history of our faith and of our Church, filled with the wealth of symbolism it carries, will have the courage to make our needs felt and not to let ourselves be treated as antisocial, egocentric and reactionary aesthetes. 
   As for us Anglicans, who have long had good reason to feel dubious (to say the least) about the Council of Trent, perhaps we should look again at this Mass, which our otherwise admirable ancestors dismissed as diabolical flummery: if we look again, with a devout eye and an open mind, we shall find such a wealth of nourishment for the soul as will last us days, weeks, months, and even years.    

COMFORT YE MY PEOPLE?

Fernandel as Don Camillo

Is Christianity no longer a religion for ordinary people?

 This sounds peculiar, I know; but it has been haunting me for a long time. There is, I admit, a splendid congruence between St Paul on the one hand and, say, Pope Francis on the other: both keep hammering away at the extraordinary nature of discipleship, the total availability expected of all followers of Christ, the complete scission beteen them and the “world”, the prodigies of charity we are called upon to perform, the complete solidarity we are expected to show at all times of day, week, or year with the world’s poor and miserable, the entire purity our motives and behaviour must exhibit, and the fact that, as disciples, everyone calling himself a Christian is expected to follow the Master to the Cross, to be nailed there like St Peter or stoned like St Stephen.

 This is the voice of the 21^st-century Church, faced with minority status, massive desertion, indifference on the part of both bond traders and jobless single mothers, and the loss of everything that gave its members simple joys and pleasures.

 Now go back to Giovannino Guareschi’s Don Camillo. Or to the Dutch novelist Aart van der Leeuw’s I and my Minstrel. They show a world – admittedly not in a mode of gritty naturalism – where a village can have a Catholic priest and a Communist mayor, where the former can discuss with the figure on the Cross, where a Sunday can begin with a Mass and end with a dance, where ordinary life (in other words) can be blessed by the priest’s holy water and where ordinary folk can be encouraged, shriven when penitent, and feel that their daily round, with all its difficulties, is regarded by a Father’s benevolent and smiling eye.

 Could it be – I sometimes wonder – that we have put the cart before the horse? That the changes in our Church are not, in fact, a reaction to its desertion by thousands but that said desertion is, on the contrary, at least in part a reaction to the changes?

 There were hundreds, if not thousands, that were touched, healed, fed by Jesus, all over Galilee and points South. There were twelve – count them, twelve – disciples, eleven of whom skedaddled on Good Friday; there were at most 72 apostles, sent to convert the planet. What about the others? What happened to the Roman officer, to the Samaritan woman, to the healed epileptic, to the diners at Emmaus, afterwards?

 To want to re-institute a Church that will bless daily life, expect confession but offer absolution, accompany ordinary people in their problems while projecting a timeless and benevolent authority, is nowadays to put oneself beyond the Pale. I find it deeply sad that not only the Anglican Eucharist but the Catholic Mass no longer offers absolution following the General Confession, giving the worshipper instead only the thin gruel of a conditional.

 The world does not consist only of wealthy financiers on the one hand and immigrant drug dealers in the housing projects on the other. The world mostly consists of simple people doing their best in difficulties ranging from indigence to Alzheimer’s. What they need from the Church is, among other things, a sense of stability, of visibility, of serenity, of being there for them – not (as Pope Francis said at the beginning of his Papacy but has largely negated since) as an activist NGO but as the father and mother they lack, as the kindly encouraging parent or grandparent missing in their world. Not the urgent and absolute love of a saint ready to be stoned for them: the comforting practical love of a family member ready to take them in for a meal, a song, a dance, and a good sleep. They need priests visible in cassocks, nuns visible in habits, timeless liturgies, and a blessing at the end of the day.  

P.S. The original of Guareschi's Don Camillo, Don Camillo Valota, was not only a parish priest but a fighter with the Partisans during World War II and a prisoner in two concentration camps.