Lifeteen Mass:

I went to Lifeteen Mass last night, and I remembered why I didn't like Lifeteen Masses. I've been trying to quantify this for non-aesthetic reasons for the past day. I have two major complaints that I've been able to come up with that are more substantial than "I find the music wholly uninspired."

Lifeteen Masses tend to encourage the view of religious music as a performance. I realise this problem is hardly restricted to Lifeteen Masses and that many people may not even see it as a problem, but I don't like it. To me, church music should be sung to glorify God, not to sound good. Musicians shouldn't be recording music sung during a Mass to put it on their resume. Now that's not to say that I don't enjoy good music at Mass, or that I don't believe that musical groups should try to practice as hard as they can to sound as good as they can. It's more that I don't think music not a part of the liturgy should be sung. That second song that almost every church plays at the communion is the prime example, though all the verses that are sung in every song, long after the priest has left the church or come in or the collection is finished. I hate the way people feel like they should clap at the end of the Mass. YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO CLAP FOR LITURGICAL MUSIC. And this is not unique to Lifeteen, but it is worse there than at any other Mass I have been to.

Lifeteen Mass dramatically alter the prayers used so that they will fit to pre-chosen music. This is to a certain extent true of all prayers, but the two it is worst for are the Gloria and the Credo. I'm going to bitch about the Credo here, both because it is the prayer I know most about and because it is probably the most important prayer of the Mass. Compare the Nicene Creed with the much-adulterated Lifeteen version (right hand column). Now, clearly these prayers are totally different, but I'm going to highlight two missing phrases in the Lifeteen version. One is: "one in being with the Father," (consubstantiality) the Church Fathers' rejection of Arianism. They were willing to risk the fate of the Church over the one iota of difference between homoousios (lit. same substance, Catholic belief) and homoiousios (lit. similar substance, Arian belief). This may seem like nit-picking (as so much of theology does to me) but this decision had major historical impacts that are in many ways still being felt today. The Fathers risked the destruction of the Church when they condemned this heresy at Nicaea, so clearly this was an important distinction to them. The other missing phrase that I find particularly egregious is "who proceeds from the Father and the Son." This clause, called the Filioque by the Latin Church, was not added to the Creed until much after Nicaea and was used by the Eastern Church as an example of the heresy that the Western Church had fallen into at the time of the schism. At least one attempt to reunite the two Churches was halted by the Greek Church's refusal to accept the Filioque and the Latin Church's refusal to renounce it.

The historical influence is sort of secondary to the main point, that the consequences of keeping these two phrases shows the importance of them to the Church Fathers. So why does the Church just allow Lifeteen to remove them from the liturgy? I remember the giant mess when the phrase "This is the Word of the Lord" was changed to "The Word of the Lord." I mean, removing "this is" is hardly a major difference. But for some reason completely changing a prayer is no big deal.

I do think most of the changes of Vatican II were good. Though I personally prefer the Latin Mass, the changes made in Vatican II have allowed the Church to survive even though she doesn't have the priests she once did. Turning the laity into ministers was necessary and probably the most enduring change of Vatican II. But I regret that the prayer "Laudamus te. Benedicimus te. Adoramus te. Glorificamus te." became "we worship you, we give you praise, we glorify your name," that "In spiritu humilitatis, et in animo contrito suscipiamur a te, Domine: et sic fiat sacrificum nostrum in conspectu tuo hodie, ut placeat tibi, Domine Deus." became "pray, brothers and sisters, that this our sacrifice may be acceptable to God the Father Almighty," that "Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam" is gone from the Mass. But this is just my own aesthetic sense.

For a really really interesting take on some of the negative effects of Vatican II, I recommend Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez. I had to read this for a class I hated (*cough,cough* Hum) and this book was one of the only worthwhile things out of it. All of the essays were good, but I think it was the fourth one that was about the Church pre- and post-Vatican II.