New Parish – Liturgy as communal meal?

My family and I have been at our new parish in the Calgary diocese for around a month now and I guess the culture shock is starting to wear off. For the past couple of years we had been at a small parish in the Ottawa area where the pastor’s focus was on being a faithful priest and celebrating mass reverently and obediently. His homilies weren’t brilliant, sometimes rather ham-fisted, but he at least really did aim to humbly and frankly preach the truths of the Catholic faith. There was no music, which meant we didn’t have to put up with the usual, liturgically inappropriate music – bad Catholic hymns from the 70's or dumb contemporary protestant P&W pop songs – that is standard at most parishes, and instead there was a healthy amount of silence.

At our first mass at our new parish, by contrast, it felt like the priest was doing his best ‘priestly’ impression of Rockin’ Rob (or whatever his name was) the rodeo clown, whose groaner jokes and antics we’d semi-enjoyed the preceding afternoon at a local rodeo. Communion was reminiscent of the wild-cow milking – do they really need so many (extraordinary) ministers of (Holy) Communion? – and just prior to the conclusion of mass, advertisements are displayed on the overhead projectors while the priest unfailingly (so far!) wanders around in search of visitors, asking them “Where y’all from? Did you come to see our smoke? It’s not ours, y’ know, it’s from BC! YUK YUK!” He's a nice guy, as people say, but not my style, so adjust we must (or go in search of a less-convenient better-pastored parish? – ‘tis an option of course).

On a theological note, during our first mass the priest made some fuzzily heartwarming comments about the Eucharistic liturgy as the celebration of a ‘community/communal meal.’ I guess some people think that’s what Holy Communion is, or is supposed to be, even though it’s obviously not that. It seems to me that anybody who thinks it is that has clearly never been to a real community meal. At a real community meal you get a plate, you fill it, you probably also get a drink and a fork and a seat, often a second helping and dessert, and you mingle and chat while you enjoy your meal with your community. Holy Communion is just nothing like that.

In any case, the idea of the Eucharistic liturgy as a communal meal evidently has some currency. In his book The Spirit of the Liturgy (Ignatius, 2000 – see ch. 3), Joseph then-Cardinal Ratzinger argues that this common view is a fruit of the extremely prevalent post-Vatican II reorientation of the celebrating priest “toward the people” (versus populum), “in such a way that priest and people looked at each other and formed together the circle of the celebrating community.” Ratzinger notes that Vatican II itself says nothing about the priest “turning toward the people,” but also that this reordering of liturgical worship “brings with it a new idea of the essence of the liturgy – the liturgy as a communal meal.” He claims that the embrace of this view of the liturgy is based on a misunderstanding of its alleged historical precedents in the Roman liturgy and on an inaccurate view of what ancient communal meals, including the Last Supper, were actually like.

More importantly he notes that “the Eucharist that Christians celebrate really cannot be adequately described by the term ‘meal’” – a point which, as I claimed above, is obvious! “True, the Lord established the new reality of Christian worship within the framework of a Jewish (Passover) meal, but it was precisely this new reality [of Christian worship], not the meal as such, that he commanded us to repeat.”

Ratzinger then describes how the real significance of the Eucharistic liturgy became obscured and fell into oblivion, so that it is “the meal” which has become “the normative idea of liturgical celebration for Christians.” But if we get beyond this implausible normative idea, which priests and others still try to sell, the reality of what has happened with the priest’s “turn-to-the-people,” Ratzinger argues, is quite different:

“In reality what happened was that an unprecedented clericalization came on the scene. Now the priest – the ‘presider’, as they now prefer to call him – becomes the real point of reference for the whole liturgy. Everything depends on him. We have to see him, to respond to him, to be involved in what he is doing. His creativity sustains the whole thing. Not surprisingly, people try to reduce this newly created role by assigning all kinds of liturgical functions to different individuals and entrusting the ‘creative’ planning of the liturgy to groups of people who like to, and are supposed to, ‘make their own contribution’. Less and less is God in the picture. More and more important is what is done by the human beings who meet here and do not like to subject themselves to a ‘pre-determined pattern’. The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle. [Fittingly, our new parish also features a sacred garden with a (self-enclosed, circular) labyrinth!] In its outward form, it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself.”

So says Ratzinger. Now to be fair, there’s more than one way for a group to become closed in on itself, but it strikes me, unfortunately, that liturgy is critically important, and that Ratzinger’s description here is all too accurate for many a parish.

To conclude, community meals are great. The Eucharist makes for a lousy community meal. But that's okay because, whatever your priest might say, that's not what the Eucharist essentially is or is essentially supposed to be anyway.