Tradition Needed
The National Catholic Register recently published a piece about a priest in the diocese of Saginaw, MI, that was removed/reassigned from his (short-lived) assignment at Our Lady of Peace in Bay City, MI, by bishop Walter Hurley. Save the details, the gist of the article is that the priest, Fr. Edwin Dwyer, who, by the way, is a canon lawyer, was removed from the parish because of the congregation being “divided.” How so? Fr. Dwyer began to introduce more traditional aspects of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass such as Gregorian Chant, Latin, smells, bells, etc…
This apparently caused a ripple effect in the parish and it reached the bishop on “a number of occasions” to the point that bishop Hurley felt compelled to remove Fr. Dwyer from his assignment as parochial administrator.
What a shame. What a shame indeed that a priest who wants to get his flock back to more correct liturgical worship was reprimanded for doing so. Fr. Dwyer is quoted as saying:
“I have not been here long, but folks tell me they’re noticing more young families and crying babies. And if the church ain’t cryin’, the church is dyin,’” he said. “My goal is to hear a chorus of crying babies before my time here ends. To do that, however, we need to embrace what works with the young. We need to more greatly embrace timeless traditions. We cannot keep the status quo.”
It is too easy to lament the case at hand. I want to highlight something that Fr. Dwyer said, namely “…we need to embrace what works with the young. We need to more greatly embrace timeless traditions. We cannot keep with the status quo.”
Yes and no. I would have preferred the quote omit the first part: “we need to embrace what works with the young.” I wish instead that the quote was modified to say that when we embrace the timeless tradition, the youth are drawn into the faith, as it does not keep with the status quo.
The caution is just that: trying to make the youth happy. Or trying to make anyone happy, really. When we feed the consumeristic mindset with regards to liturgy, the spirit of the liturgy is lost. The Church has timeless traditions and only recently in the last 60 years have we largely abandoned those and we are hemorrhaging Catholics as a result.
I had joined and since left an effort put on by my parish called “The Liturgical Life Commission” because it became clear to me that the commission was trying to get social approval for taking the Mass and altering it to become more “appropriate” for the people, more “contemporary,” more “relatable,” and so on. I left the commission as soon as I realized that they were trying to leave Tradition behind and make the shift toward the progressive-moving train that the decades following the second Vatican council produced. The parish has since added another contemporary Mass as well as another children’s liturgy, both of which are symptomatic of missing the point of the Mass.
There were some other younger millennial Catholics in the commission that I imagine are still participating in the group, but I haven’t kept up with it. They were on the other end of the spectrum of faith, if you will; that of the more progressive-minded, contemporary-craving youth. There were many participants who were much older, 60s, 70s, and even older, who were very much in favor of modernizing the liturgy and all it entails, much like my peers were.
When this happens, the Church inevitably bleeds out its youth; the youth that will strive to be saints and martyrs. The Church becomes like a civil institution without any noticeable variation between protestant churches and even non-profits.
When you have a parish who seeks to realign itself (assuming they’ve gone astray, as many have) to Tradition, you will see a growth of youth who try to live an authentic life for Christ Jesus. An important detail to remember is that the youth need direction and guidance, namely the Church. When the youth are given charge of determining what is “gospel” and how the Church ought to act, then all is lost.
The Magisterium sets the tone, and has for almost two millennia. The youth will respond well to authentic orthodoxy and orthopraxy; just look at any of the growing pockets of the Tridentine Latin Mass, or any parish that practices ad orientem in the Novus Ordo. In these parishes, you will find a congregation who place a very high priority on the holy sacrifice of the Mass in its orthopraxy and reverence. What then follows, in my experience, is youth who strive for sainthood.
This is not to say that parishes who have drum sets for the novus ordo are not holy or lack the capacity to be so. I do say, however, that when we remove the consumeristic mindset from the liturgy, and accept magisterial teaching, the strive for sanctification will follow as a natural byproduct. We must pray that we can weed out the desire to “get something” out of Mass, and when we accomplish this, we can recognize the Mass as prayer and offering.
________________________________________________________________
1) http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/saginaw-priest-removed-from-parish-for-traditional-style-of-worship
