Heading west for good liturgy: 'Middle Ages not normative,' LA group says - Includes a related article on the text of Los Angeles' Cardinal Roger Mahoney's letter on the celebration of mass

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 24, 1997 by Leslie Wirpsa

LOS ANGELES -- What can provoke more change, stir up more storms, cause more commotion and be more threatening than El Nino?

The answer: liturgists.

It was Bishop Donald Trautman, of Erie, Pa., who used this quip to inspire an auditorium filled with pastoral leaders from the Los Angeles archdiocese last week. His address, which received a standing ovation, and a similar one in Spanish by Rev. Domingo Rodriguez, launched 2,000 people from dozens of parishes on a mission: the renewal of liturgy for the millennium in the spirit of Vatican II.

Gathering Oct. 10 in consultation with their priests and regional bishops, Los Angeles Catholic leaders sought to implement "Gather Faithfully Together: A Guide for Sunday Mass," a pastoral letter distributed in September by their archbishop, Cardinal Roger Mahony. According to Trautman, the letter is the first of its kind to address "the problems the celebrating community faces each time it goes to the altar."

The letter is so significant and timely, Trautman said, that it will have an effect far beyond Los Angeles. "I think when other bishops read the pastoral letter, they will want to copy it for their own people. The cardinal has taken the problems we all face of enlivening the liturgy and addressed them through the example of a parish," he said. "It's not like other pastoral letters. It is not aloof from the people. It is a practical and creative approach."

Gabe Huck, an acquisitions editor for Liturgy Training Publications of Chicago, which published the letter for national distribution, said the letter comes at a crucial moment in the life of the U.S. Catholic church.

"We've been through the sacramentary wars at the bishops' meetings, then the lectionary wars last spring. It sort of seemed to mean to people that the excitement and renewal is past, that there was retrenchment," Huck said.

The tensions over liturgical renewal were also manifest at the local level, he said. For example, in St. Louis, Archbishop Justin Rigali recently mandated 13 liturgical norms for the archdiocese that ranged from a requirement to kneel during the eucharistic prayer to reverential methods of purifying communion vessels.

"It was that kind of atmosphere. And here comes one of the most important church leaders saying things like, `We don't learn to be Catholics from the catechism, but from doing our liturgy.' ... At a point where a major figure needed to be heard from, here he is.... It was wonderful," Huck said of Mahony's letter.

He said he believes that many bishops who are feeling timid in the face of an atmosphere of retrenchment will, with Mahony's letter, be emboldened. "Here, they've got something important to look to," he said.

The letter, said Huck, is indicative of a growing tendency among church leaders committed to reform to look now to the West, particularly Los Angeles, and beyond traditional hubs of church renewal in the Midwest. "Progressive leadership has long come from the Midwestern church, good steady stuff. But there are problems now. And you can't look to the East. Things never took hold there in many ways," he said. "Los Angeles is not only a positive influence, but the rest of California seems to be a lot more exciting than what we're seeing."

By inviting Trautman to deliver the keynote address at the conference, Mahony sent an unmistakable message that the Los Angeles archdiocese would resist efforts to turn back liturgical reforms inspired by the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.

In June, Trautman, a biblical scholar, drew national attention with an address to a gathering of liturgists at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind., where he openly criticized the "reform the reform" movement, which is led by powerful U.S. conservatives. He termed the movement "a sophisticated applying of the brakes to liturgical renewal and an attempt to return to a liturgy that looks more like that before the council."

In Los Angeles, Trautman delivered a talk titled "New Wine in New Wineskins," in which he equated the liturgical reforms of Vatican II to the "new wine" that "our people have tasted ... and have found it to be very good." Mahony's letter, he said, is "more good wine."

In an apparent reference to the atmosphere surrounding liturgical renewal today, Trautman reminded conference attendees of the tensions Christ faced when confronted with the Judaic legalism of the day, "those who blindly defend the ways of the past, those who are closed to new ideas, those incapable of acquiring new, fresh ideas."

Trautman said he hopes the Los Angeles letter will "be seen as a positive step for us, important in the renewal of Vatican II." Echoing Mahony in the letter, Trautman, in an interview and during his address, emphasized the importance of early Christians as a model for liturgical renewal today.

"There are some folks who would like us to stop in the-Middle Ages, when the laity didn't even bring gifts to the altar, when the choir replaced the congregation, when the liturgical books [omitted] the laity," Trautman said. "The Middle Ages are not normative. What is normative is the apostolic era of the early church."