Bishops Meet to Renew the Language of the Liturgy
January 15, 2006
[Anthony Esolen, “unknown source” of the Dies Irae spoof, sends us this news of the latest liturgical chicanery. - Ed.]
The discovery of an ancient formula governing the worship of the earliest Christians has spurred the Catholic bishops of the English-speaking world to revise the Mass, both in language and in ritual gesture. A scrap of paper found among kitchen refuse excavated on Crete suggests that solemnity and reverence were hardly the sole aims of Christian worship.
“Lex orandi, lex ridendi,” beamed Bishop Minnow of Lakeland. “We need to show that we are a Laughter People, a Happiness People, a Welcoming of Everybody People.”
To that end, Bishop Minnow and his colleagues at the International Commission on English Transfiguration (ICE-T) have suggested modifying the new Mass in order to meet the jocular needs of the average person, while remaining sensitive to the traditions of various minorities within the church, including women, children, the handicapped, and the liturgically challenged—those who just don’t see the relevance of the liturgy as it stands.
“The Novus Ordo model has been out for forty years,” said the Bishop. “We don’t want to become the Studebakers of the Christian world!” The updated Mass, which the conference calls the Novus Improvatus Ordo, will take many of the faithful by surprise. Instead of the weary old greeting and response, the priest and congregation will trade a pleasant salutation such as one might hear in an alley or in the waiting room of an unemployment office. Here, for instance, is the revised version of the Preface:
Hey there!
Hey yourself.
Be happy!
Already am.
Be thankful!
Sure, why not?
Some of the more traditional bishops objected to the removal of words such as “Lord” and “God,” but as Bishop Minnow shrewdly notes, many of the changes in Catholic worship have already blurred that category, breaching the distinction between the human and the divine. “Why stick at that,” he laughs, “when you have already taken down the communion rail? And when you already sing the words of the deity in the first person?”
“Besides, I believe that Jesus was all about breaking down walls,” said Rosemary Ratched, a sister of the new order of Our Lady of Empowerment. “He showed us that we were already divine.” Jesus spent most of his time on earth laughing and carrying on, agreed Elaine Pagans, a scholar of the Neo-Testament; but the apostle Paul perverted the original message to fit his racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and homophobia. “Paul was not a barrel of laughs,” said she.
But the bishops aren’t ready to do away with sin entirely. “We prefer to call it imperfection,” said Bishop Minnow. Thus the ancient prayer Confiteor is retained, though with modest revision:
You know, I have to admit it, sometimes I goof up.
But that’s all right.
Parishes preferring a more traditional form will be allowed to use the following instead:
You know, I have to admit it, sometimes I’m not all I should be.
I goof up, I goof up, I goof up really bad.
But Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,
That’s all right.
Similarly, the people will prepare for Communion by emphasizing what makes them feel happy:
Come on down and work out those last imperfections!
Hey, I’m all right already, but what can it hurt?
Hearing of some objections that the revised Mass encourages no reverence, Bishop Minnow shakes his head. “We take very seriously the requirement that the people fast before Communion,” he says. “Therefore there will be no eating of cookies or crackers as one waits in line to receive. Furthermore, all those chewing gum will be encouraged to move the gum to the left side of the mouth, that there may be a free area on the right for the Lord to enter.”
It is crucially important, says the Bishop, that people understand the language of worship. “We’ve been too formal! How can we expect the lamebr—, I mean, the laity, to understand ‘one in being with the Father’ and all that?” So ICE-T has proposed alternative expressions for various groups:
Yo, Mary (South Philadelphia)
Our Legal Guardian (inner cities)
Boddhi-boddhi-boddhi-That’s All, Folks! (southern California)
Liturgical dancing and holding hands will also be encouraged. “The most ancient texts suggest,” said Dr. Pagans, “that the paralytic whom Jesus healed was a cinaedus, that is, a male ballet dancer, and that he was not paralytic but merely had a charley horse, which one of the apostles worked out with therapeutic massage. We have every reason to believe, then, that the man went dancing home. He took up his ballet.” But not every congregation will practice the same form of dancing. “We are not ecclesiastical leotards,” jests Bishop Minnow. “One size does not fit all! The kicklines and can-cans that work in Arizona would feel out of place and irreverent in Maine.”
Finally, ICE-T, concerned that the Novus Improvatus Ordo would be rejected by some members of the congregation as silly and sissified, has recommended that at the entry to the church all teenage boys be provided with video games. “It will keep their attention off the sermon,” says one of the conservative members of the commission, “and that is probably just as well.”
This is Bishops Meet to Renew the Language of the Liturgy in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Bigger Than Chuck | Next: I’m too principled for this church, too principled for this church, so principled it hurts | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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