So Much Boomer...
“When so much novelty and creativity take place in the celebration of the Mass, the community can grow in self-expression and human comfort, but might lose the ‘real presence’ of Jesus Christ, certainly less spectacular than concerts and choreographies, but the awe-inspiring power of God made man, of God becoming present in bread and wine...”
This is a Roman Catholic Midnight Mass from Christmas Eve 2021. It is Idiocracy meets the Jerry Lewis Telethon and the Super Bowl Halftime Show with a twist of Saturday Night Live.
If you don’t want to watch the extravaganza, you can read a synopsis here. But as the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words…
In an effort to foster unity, Pope Francis has recently cracked down on certain liturgical forms which foster disunity and extremism in his jurisdiction. Of course, the above is just fine. It’s the kind of thing seen here in the following that is subject to the worldwide crackdown that the Bishop of Rome believes to be horrible:
Here is an interesting conversation between Roman Catholic layman Raymond Arroyo and Fr. Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, on the controversy that pits tradition against (post)modernism - and the heavy-hand being used against the former while pushing the latter - all the while younger people yearn for reverence instead of entertainment worship.
It’s interesting that even in the Roman Church, the battleground is between the two opposing forces of Progressivism and Traditionalism - and the battleground is the liturgy itself. We are having the same battle in American Lutheranism, complete with Boomer irreverence vs. the desire on the part of younger generations for the transcendent, the reverent, the beautiful, and the holy.
As one of my professors put it, paraphrasing the boomer theologian Mick Jagger: “Time is on our side.”
The celebrant of the above hootenanny (as the late Rev. Prof. Kurt Marquart called such spectacles) was a mere twenty years old when hippies rolled around in the mud after dropping acid at Woodstock. Today, he is seventy-two years old and just looks silly in his beads and peace sign while affecting a phony ethnic accent as the emcee of the show.
And as the Boomers get older and older, the cringe factor only increases. Some Roman Catholics are calling for the “reform of the reform.” Perhaps a description of what is happening in the boomeresque Establishment Roman Catholic Church could be called the “parody of the parody.”
The front line of the battle between two fundamentally different worldviews is played out in the liturgy. And as our readers know: “Leitourgiae propria adiaphora non est.”
In 1972, Canadian novelist Brian Moore wrote a beautiful and prescient novella called Catholics that imagines a future conflict between proponents of the Latin Mass versus Vatican Establishment that cruelly seeks to stamp it out. The novella was made into a well-done short film that is word for word from the book. It is haunting and visually beautiful and powerfully acted. It is called “Catholics: A Fable” and it can be seen here: