As 'swine flu' seems to have become the most popular subject for discussion the following article from Canon eddie may help to update us on what the church is doing and how it and we intends to deal with an outbreak.>
The Catholic Church in England and Wales has issued valuable guidelines for people during the present pandemic: they are largely common sense advice and much of it applies to non-church situations as well, but there are some points which are specific to churches. Copies of the guidelines have been available in St Joseph’s in printed form since they were first issued. They can also be found online at www.liturgyoffice.org.uk/Resources.
Soon after the guidelines were issued our own Diocese of Westminster issued more detailed advice about what to do in parishes where swine flu is widespread. This can be accessed on www.rcdow.org.uk/ and then scrolling through the news items.
According to the guidelines, there are two stages at which action needs to be taken:
Stage 1. Suspension of the Chalice and Communion on the Tongue
1) There are a large number of cases swine flu locally 2) At least some schools have closed or have very high levels of sickness absence including schools which educate the parish children 3) There are multiple confirmed or suspected cases known to be near the parish community or are personally known to parishioners.
Stage 2 Suspending or changing the Sign of Peace
1) There are a large number of cases locally 2) At least some local schools have closed or are operating on very high levels of absence including the schools which educate the parish children 3) There are multiple confirmed or probable cases in the parish community.
The two stages differ substantially only in no.3. I therefore propose to implement all the restrictions together (suspension of the Chalice and Communion on the Tongue, and changing the Sign of Peace) as and when the conditions of Stage 1 are verified.
At the time of writing (12th August), I know of only one confirmed case of swine flu in the parish, and Bishop’s Stortford in general appears at present to be clear of the pandemic. When schools reopen at the beginning of September and commuters return from holidays the picture may well change quite drastically; if so, we will then take the appropriate actions.
What happens if I, the only priest here, go down with swine flu? I would not soldier on bravely because I would be a carrier of the virus and to carry on regardless would be irresponsible. As I indicated above, it is very hard to find stand-in priests, and so we might face the prospect of a weekend without Mass at St Joseph’s. In its place, a simple Liturgy of the Word and Holy Communion presided over by a lay Minister of Communion might be the answer.
All this is speculation, of course, but I want you to know my thinking and to be assured that although the pandemic has not yet hit Bishop’s Stortford in a big way, it is not being ignored. Meanwhile, let’s pray for the people who are already affected by swine flu and that Bishop’s Stortford will be protected from it. Canon Eddie Matthews
Our Parish Worship: a personal view
Canon Eddie Matthews
1. Introduction
I am a cradle Catholic, born into a committed Roman Catholic family; and my first experience of the Church was in that family, through its ethos and daily devotional practices. But my first conscious memories of the Church are of its liturgy, its worship; first of all at Christ the King church, Cockfosters (a very faint memory because I would have been barely age 2 at the time), and then at the church of the Sacred Heart, Exeter, where I made my First Confession and Communion and learned to serve Mass.
No surprise that the liturgy should feature in my memory because it is the heart of the Church’s life: without its liturgy there would be no Church. My life as an ordained priest is to activate and lead that liturgy for the community of St Joseph and the English Martyrs in Bishop’s Stortford. Although being a parish priest entails a whole kaleidoscope of different tasks and responsibilities, celebrating the liturgy with my brothers and sisters in the faith is the one essential activity which makes sense of the ministerial/ordained priesthood, as well as the priesthood of the baptised, as we will see later.
In 2008 our parish conducted a fact-finding exercise which we named Parish Liturgy Audit. The aim was to discover what parishioners really thought about the liturgy of St Joseph’s. The results (see elsewhere on the parish website for the details) have already led us to make some changes in the way we do things (for instance, I have tried to cut down the length of my homily), and provide us with an on-going agenda for the future. Part of that agenda is further formation in the meaning and understanding of the liturgy, and this series of pieces is a contribution to that formation. It is in no way intended to be exhaustive but simply reflections on the Church’s liturgy in the context of this parish.
At the time of writing, I have no idea how long these reflections will be. After an initial examination of what liturgy is all about, I will go on to take a look at the Mass. After that – well, my guess is as good as yours. My aim is to produce a fresh piece each week, but that may not always be possible.
I hope you will find this interesting and helpful. If it helps some people to play a more conscious, active and prayerful part in the liturgy of the Church, I shall be satisfied.
2. Gathering Together
Here they come, in ones and twos, in family groups; in cars or on foot; up and down the hill; from near and far, from the town and the villages nearby. All heading for the church and the celebration of Sunday Mass.
Though they – we – are many individuals with our own lives and stories to tell, now is the time we gather together to celebrate our oneness in Christ. By our baptism we all share the one life of Jesus Christ (which is why we are called Christ-ians). In a wonderful passage, St Paul tells the people of Corinth, ‘Just as a human body, though it is made up of many parts, is a single unit because all these parts, though many, make one body, so it is with Christ. In the one Spirit we were all baptised, Jews as well as Greeks, slaves as well as citizens, and one Spirit was given to us all to drink’ (1 Cor 12:12 fol.).
Just a little earlier St Paul reminds the Corinthians of the amazing power of the Eucharist when he writes, ‘The blessing-cup that we bless is a communion with the blood of Christ, and the bread that we break is a communion with the body of Christ. The fact that there is only one loaf means that, though there are many of us, we form a single body because we all have a share in this one loaf’ (1 Cor 10:17). So baptism is our birth into oneness with Christ and with each other; the Eucharist is the way we feed that oneness and build it up. (The word ‘loaf’ is an almost visual description of what holy communion is all about.)
The same is true of all the Church’s liturgy, even though I am for the present focussing on the celebration of Mass. We are one Church, and we are never more Church than when we come together to worship God in the Church’s official liturgy.
The Church teaches that ‘the Church, in Christ, is in the nature of sacrament – a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of unity among all men….’. (Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church). The seven sacraments form us into that one sacrament called Church. That is why the liturgy is so important in our lives. Gathering together is therefore not one option among others: it is essential to the very existence of the Church and to our individual identity as Catholic Christians.
Of course, gathering together to celebrate the Church’s liturgy is not always very congenial: maybe the church building is too cold, or we are not keen on the parish priest or on the manner in which the liturgy is celebrated, or we feel we can pray more easily in the comfort and quiet of our own homes. These are issues which are important and which the community should address, as St Joseph’s is attempting to do through its Parish Liturgy Audit. But if we allow personal considerations to get in the way of our regular participation in the Church’s worship, we have to ask ourselves whether we truly understand what the Church is.
Taking part in the Mass as a regular feature of our lives has all manner of spin-offs. It builds us up into the Body of Christ, as we have seen; it also creates a living, social, community, leading to deep and lasting friendships; it leads to the formation of groups devoted to charitable works (SVP, for instance); it nurtures our private and personal prayer.
A St Joseph’s practice which I have admired ever since I moved to this parish is the way in which so many groups of people remain in the church after Mass, chatting and socialising. It seems to be the natural result of our Christian oneness which does not freeze the moment the Mass is ended. We gather together, not as liturgical automata but as living, vibrant, social beings. Then, off we go home – until the next time…..
3. Gathering with Christ
Gathering together to worship God in the liturgy can be a fulfilling, even exciting experience. It’s not just a matter of a few like-minded people pursuing a mutual interest: it’s the gathering of individuals who are sharers in the one life of Christ. And we are therefore also sharers in his real presence.
The real presence of Christ is most commonly associated in the Catholic mind with the consecrated Eucharistic bread and wine. But we must add to that Jesus’ own promise, ‘Where two or three meet in my name, I shall be there with them’ (Matthew 18:20). It is a presence which truly is real, not an ‘as if’ presence, and no less real than under the appearances of bread and wine. Some of us may find that a little hard to grasp, brought up, as we have been, with a spiritual vision focussed very sharply on Christ’s Eucharistic presence. Quoting Jesus’ words above, the bishops of Vatican II reaffirmed the teaching that ‘…he is present when the Church prays and sings’ (Constitution on the Liturgy 7).
It follows that we should have reverence and respect for one another when we gather together to celebrate the liturgy. In a real and humble sense, we are a holy people who have assembled to do a holy thing and who have Christ as an active partner in the enterprise. Thus, following on from what was said above, Vatican II declares, ‘From this it follows that every liturgical celebration, because it is an action of Christ the Priest and of his Body, which is the Church, is a sacred action surpassing all others. No other action of the Church can equal its efficacy by the same title and to the same degree’.
This is a powerful teaching of the Church and deserves our close attention. Maybe we need to examine our consciences in regard to the way we celebrate the liturgy, both as individuals and as a community. I know I do. A priest has the danger of over-familiarity, of celebrating the liturgy so often he falls into perfunctory routine. It’s hard to keep your mind on the essentials when, for instance, you spot a member of one of your parish committees and you make a mental note to speak to him after Mass about next Monday’s agenda which is all about…………. And before you realise it, you are at the end of Mass inviting the community to ‘go out to love and to serve the Lord’.
It helps to prepare for our celebration before we reach the church. Some preparation is ordinary but important – getting the children ready, driving the car, giving a wave to a fellow-worshipper coming up the road: all actions targeted at gathering together for worship. To that we can add prayer: maybe a personal moment of silence, both before setting out for church and on arrival. Or perhaps before leaving home the family might pause to pray togeTo be avoided is the sense of merely going to church out of an obligation to a law; because the Church’s law exists not for its own sake but for Christ’s and that of the whole community. Our respect and reverence for the community means we must bring to the celebration minds and hearts willing to be caught up in the process of worship. We may not always feel enthusiastic, not always able to keep our minds on what is going on, but by letting ourselves be carried along by the prayer, the song and the ritual our weaknesses are counterbalanced by the power of the whole worshipping community, the Church. The liturgy is the action of Jesus Christ: he makes up for what is lacking in us.ther, calling to mind what they about to do and its importance.
4. Gathering with Christ - and the priest
Last time (and it seems so long ago - I apologise) we reminded ourselves that when the parish community comes together to worship, Christ is really present in the community and that this presence is as real as in the consecrated bread and wine. That's not all. He is also present in the presiding priest, for this is what the Church teaches in the Second Vatican Council (Constitution on the Liturgy, 7): 'To accomplish so great a work Christ is always present in his Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations. He is present in the Sacrifice of the Mass not only in the person of the minister, "the same now offering, through the ministry of priests, who formerly offered himself on the cross" [Council of Trent], but especially in the Eucharistic species. By his power he is present in the sacraments so that when anybody baptises it is really Christ himself who baptises'.
Just as well that is so, because if the sacraments depended for their effectiveness on the presiding minister, priest or deacon (a deacon can baptise and preside at marriages), they wouldn't be sacraments as we understand them. They must be the action of Christ, otherwise they would not work.
For me, that is a great consolation because I sometimes say to myself, ‘Who am I that all these people should depend on me for leading their worship?' The answer is it's not me, it's Jesus Christ. Baptising a baby, absolving a penitent from his or her sins, or consecrating bread and wine, is me doing the actions and saying the words but Christ working his power through me. I am all too aware of my distractedness, my lack of effort, and all my other faults and foibles which get in the way of the community's worship; yet it is Christ who for some reason uses me as his minister.
Before each celebration of the Mass I pray a little prayer which goes something like this, "Dear Lord, help me to help these people worship you". I like to think that, ideally, people will go away from Sunday Mass, not thinking about the priest's 'performance', but about how they experienced a true encounter with their Saviour, Jesus Christ.
I use the word 'priest' of the one who presides at Mass, but that is not strictly correct because it appears to assume that there is only one priest - the ordained minister. The full truth is that all baptised people share in the priesthood of Jesus Christ; indeed, that is how the entire People of God is empowered to offer full and proper worship to the Father. The ordained priest's job is to enable or activate the baptismal priesthood of everybody else, to lead them in the exercise of their priesthood. His ministry is truly one of service.
In some parts of the world the title 'presbyter' (= elder) is increasingly used of the ordained minister. It has good scriptural pedigree as well as being more accurate.
The Church in this country, like so many others in Europe, is facing a down-turn in the number of ordained priests. Not so far from Bishop’s Stortford, East Anglia has had to amalgamate many parishes under a single priest. Our diocese of Westminster does not yet have as great a problem, but with a high average age of currently active priests real shortages are not far away in the future. All of us, laity and clergy, families and schools, must do our utmost to promote in young men the consideration of a life in the ministerial priesthood. After all, the sufficient supply of priests guarantees the future of our liturgy.