I don’t post too much about religion or politics here, mostly because they are not my area of expertise and because others so often say it better. But this defense of old fashioned Catholic rituals and customs from Dappled things strikes me as exactly right.
“But it’s a false dichotomy to say one must choose between the external trappings of religion and the interior stuff that has eternal significance. There’s no reason in the world why one can’t have both, and Catholicism has traditionally kept them both together. To be unimpressed by a triple tiara certainly does not make one a bad Catholic, but I wonder whether zealously opposing all these little grace notes in the religious score might not. To my mind, at any rate, all these things speak of the magnanimity and exuberance of a religious spirit that spills out into the world in all sorts of unlikely and delightful ways. They knock us out of the prosaic and linear existence of everyday life and remind us that old-fashioned religion, in addition to being good, saving, and true, is also charming, merry, and even whimsical. A woman in white veils and orange blossoms would be ludicrous walking down the aisle of Wal-Mart, but there is something right about her walking so attired down the aisle of the church in a wedding. Perhaps not every bride will choose to exercise that option, but only a grinch would want to deprive her of that choice.
“And this is what I think drives the progressive hacking away at all that is quaint and definitely non-prosaic in our religious customs: not just plodding utilitarianism, but a spirit of grinchiness. The Calvinists and their Catholic cousins, the Jansenists, pioneered that spirit in Christianity, and the sober rationalists of the Englightenment did the same for secular society. Purge away everything but the non-essential and you may indeed retain Christian truth, but you will have made the practice of it into something much grimmer than it has to be. Chesterton’s Rolling English Road [ “the rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road”] illustrates that insight wonderfully, and Hopkins’ Pied Beauty does the same.
“So, take the tiara or leave it, bring your cocker spaniel to be blessed or leave it at home, but think twice before you write it all off as distraction and poofery.”
Funny, my experience is that in the wars between the progressives and the traditionalists it’s the progressives who want to sing songs and make the congregation sing, and decorate the church so that Lent and Advent and Easter and Christmas and All Souls and Ordinary Time look different, and go outside so that you can process in on Palm Sunday (singing All Glory Laud And Honor, of course), and put the whole congregation (singing Pange Lingua) in the procession to Holy Thursday Adoration, and go outside and light a fire on Holy Saturday, and wait until it’s actually dark to start the Easter Vigil, and wait until Christmas to decorate the Church for Christmas.
It’s the traditionalists who stand there close-mouthed and glare at the cantor because mass is gonna take more than 45 minutes if there’s music, and think anything other than some flowers on the altar is proof of apostasy, and think palms should be in the cusotdy of the ushers until you pick them up on the way out of Palm Sunday mass, and don’t go to Triduum services because they aren’t holy days of obligation, and besides they’re too long and those people are just showing off anyway, and think, just like Madison Ave, that Christmas starts the day after Thanksgiving and they think “Boxing Day” is the day to put the plastic tree and all the other Christmas decorations back in the boxes in the attic…
cathy 🙂