SDG here, at the beginning of my 17th year as a Catholic, with some thoughts in response to a combox post from a reader calling himself John:
My wife and kids and I joined the Catholic Church last Easter, went to mass fairly reliably for the first number of months, then less consistently over the ensuing months. My wife revealed to me a few months ago that she just can’t stand all the pageantry and symbolic acts of the mass; that it seems contrived and unnecessary, and that she doesn’t think she needs to attend confession, that she can simply bring her issues straight to Jesus. She and I agree the preaching (homily) is quite weak at all the services we’ve attended compared to nearly every other type of church we’ve attended, and we don’t get that same feeling leaving church like we did years ago while attending Lutheran services. Our kids are also bored to tears at Mass and really dislike going. We’ve started visiting other churches (baptist, free churches, etc.) but haven’t found one we like. I still feel some sort of attachement to the Catholic Church, but don’t know what to do…any suggestions?
John, you raise a lot of important and complicated issues in a few sentences. One thing that might help me (and others) as we try to offer responses would be to know more about what originally led your family to the Church in the first place. Did you have friends that were Catholic? Were you convinced by the stories and arguments of converts? Did you read books? Were you drawn by the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, or by the teaching authority of the Magisterium?
Since the issues you mention are significantly (though not entirely) experiential, for what it’s worth, I’d like to share something of my experiences over the last 16 years.
First of all, let me say that I understand and empathize with your experience of not getting what you want out of going to Mass. While that is very far from my present experience, it has been my experience for long stretches in my past.
My wife Suzanne and I were received into the Church on Easter Vigil 1992, the year after we were married, in what I would consider a far-from-great diocese in a far-from-great parish. (I remember one “homily” consisting solely of a dramatic reading of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go!) Shortly afterwards, we moved to Philadelphia, where I entered the Religious Studies MA program at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary.
Our years in Philadelphia were in many ways a godsend. We had some solid priests, my studies at St. Charles were wonderful, and partly through St. Charles we connected with a vibrant community of Catholic young people in the area. Among other things, we met semi-regularly for Catholic movie nights in which we watched morally and spiritually rich films, prayed night prayer, and sang hymns. Once a month early on a Saturday morning, there was a pro-life prayer vigil that began with Mass followed by a rosary prayed outside a nearby abortion clinic, then back to the church for eucharistic exposition. Often afterwards a number of us would go out for brunch together.
Although we never found a parish where we felt deeply at home, those Philadelphia years were in many ways a blessed time for us, and helped us connect culturally and experientially with the Catholic faith we had originally come to embrace for scriptural, theological and historical reasons.
Then this blessed time ended, and whatever strength we gained was sorely put to the test after we moved to a diocese where we struggled in isolation and agony for years. During that time we visited nearly every Catholic church we could find within a thirty-minute radius. Almost uniformly, the liturgy was more or less miscarried, the music ranged from lame to unbearable, the preaching ranged from insipid to downright heretical, and the architecture was high-school gymnasium/auditorium by way of 1960s décor.
For the most part, we tended to alternate between two parishes with adequate pastors. One was a convert from Lutheranism, a staid and steady fellow with a canon-law background who wasn’t much of a people person but had the great virtue of doing the liturgy with punctilious correctness. It was a well-to-do parish of mostly older parishioners, which for a young family like us wasn’t great from a community perspective, but did have the virtue of bringing a certain dignity and traditionalism to the music and hymn choices, too. However, we never really connected with anyone at that parish, and always felt like visitors even though we were as involved as we could be (we taught seventh-grade CCD, among other things).
The other parish we frequented had a pastor with a lively faith and a good heart, but among other things had a hard time saying no to anyone, and one consequence of this was that the so-called music ministry was pretty oppressive: guitars, drums and aging hippies singing glory-and-praise songs off-key. I vividly recall one bleak Good Friday service with a younger guitarist enthusiastically drumming on his guitar during a rousing rendition of “We Come to Tell Our Story.” My only comfort in that dark moment was that I could dimly relate to Jesus’ Psalm 22 cry on the cross.
Incidentally, at that parish we were befriended by a lovely Catholic family who became our only local Catholic friends at that time in our lives. Shortly after that, they moved to Boston, and we were alone again.
This went on for five years. It was an arid, lonely, miserable time; looking back, I call it our years of wandering in the wilderness. In the grand scheme of things, we were blessed — two kids, a good job (mine) that allowed Suz to stay home with the kids, a house, family nearby, and toward the end the beginning of my work with Decent Films. Still, many, many times I prayed to God to deliver us.
And then, about six or seven years ago, He did.
It happened all at once: A third kid, a new job, a different commute, and suddenly we were looking at houses in a different neighborhood, a different diocese. Before long we became aware how different the diocese of Newark — to which Archbishop Myers was just moving at that time, same as we were — was from where we had been.
Before long, we found a parish home with solid priests and strong community that has gotten stronger over time. We worship in a magnificent 150-year-old French Gothic church with nearly all of its traditional accoutrements intact. We are surrounded by (generally large) Catholic families who love their church (local and universal) and take their faith seriously, Recently we began holding monthly men’s meetings and women’s meetings (we have to take turns because there’s way too many children for the men and women to regularly get together at the same time).
The music has been a great blessing. Our church is known for its Hook & Hastings pipe organ (Thomas Edison, who lived just down the road, did some work on it). Our former music director, a convert from Episcopalianism, was a treasure, and when he retired I was not sanguine about finding someone to fill his shoes. Glory to God, we did (another convert from Episcopalianism!). I’m just coming off four days of Triduum and Easter singing in the choir or cantoring at four Masses plus the Good Friday service, with Latin, polyphony, plainchant, traditional hymns, and not a glory-and-praise ditty in sight. On Easter Sunday we had a small brass orchestra and both children’s and adult choirs (on Christmas we had a small string orchestra). I can truly speak of praising God “with greater joy than ever” in this Easter season.
Our life here isn’t perfect, but it’s richly blessed in so many ways that I can’t begin to thank God for it all. I’m especially glad to be able to raise my children in this environment, to let them grow up in a church that looks like the church is meant to look. (Incidentally, we now have five children, and are expecting our sixth.)
Looking back now at our wilderness years, I believe we were being tested. A vibrant faith community of like-minded believers is a wonderful thing, and I’m profoundly grateful for what we have now. But it’s not something God owes us. Nor is it a sine quo non of the Christian life. We are called to be faithful in good times and in bad.
John, your wife talks about being able to bring her issues straight to Jesus. All right. But is that an argument for not going to a Catholic church? Or for not going to church at all? Why go to any church, since one can take one’s issues straight to Jesus?
Where would you go, anyway? Some evangelical church with 45 minutes of praise songs and/or an hour of Bible class? That might be rewarding (or not), as far as it goes. But it’s not church. I have an MA in religious studies; I’ve taken a lot of Bible classes, and I’m a big fan. But that’s not the historic pattern of Christian worship. And neither is 45 minutes of praise songs.
As regards the “pageantry and symbolism” of the Mass, John, I’d hazard a guess that your wife could possibly be reacting to the lousy way the ritual and ceremony of the Mass has been enacted in her experience. Just wondering, has she read Thomas Howard’s Evangelical is Not Enough? I highly recommend it. Of course it helps that I encountered that powerful little book at a time in my life when I was utterly ripe for it, when I was fed up with reductionist Protestant forms of Sunday gatherings and ready for something richer and fuller. For me, Howard crystalized a thousand and one things I had already begun to work my way toward on my own.
Ritual and ceremony are not contrived and unnecessary, except in the sense that all human culture and experience is contrived and unnecessary. Wedding rings, shaking hands, Christmas trees, birthday cakes, napkin on the left, pallbearers, tuck the children in at night, floral arrangements in church or at a wedding or a funeral, Easter eggs, “Hail to the Chief,” bride and groom cut the cake, stand up for the judge, mortar boards at graduation, hold the door for the lady, kiss each other hello and goodbye and good morning and good night — none of these are pragmatically necessary, and all of it is how we human beings order our lives — if not with these symbols, then with something else.
In ordinary life, what the particular symbols and gestures are often enough doesn’t matter. But to be Christian is to believe, first of all, that the Creator of the world happened to make contact with our race within the context of a specific cultural milieu, in a specific symbolic world sovereignly chosen and carefully shaped and guided for millennia by His Spirit. From circumcision to Passover, from the annual chanting of the psalms of ascents on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to the vestments of the Aaronic priesthood, the world into which Jesus was born was full of pageantry and symbolism.
And then, when our Creator favored our race by taking on our flesh and offering us so great salvation, He left us with symbols and gestures chosen by Himself and not matters of human convention. He took bread and broke it, and wine, and pronounced them to be His body and blood. He commissioned His disciples to go about immersing people in water in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit fell on Pentecost, He did not proceed to liberate the people from pageantry and symbolism: Three thousand people were ceremonially dunked in water on the first day alone, and they immediately proceeded to devote themselves to the business with the breaking of the bread, along with the apostles’ teaching, fellowship and the prayers (Acts 2:42), particularly on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7).
The Lord left His church in the care of apostles who went about laying their hands on chosen men and appointing them to continue the ministry of the church. The New Testament also mentions anointing with oil and laying on of hands for the sick. The Gospels record set words given by Jesus: This is my body; in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; Our Father who art in Heaven. Given by Jesus, not made up by us.
The book of Revelation describes pageantry and symbolism even in the worship of Heaven itself: thrones, crowns, robes, antiphonal exclamations, prostration. Why should the twenty-four elders not only fall down before the throne of God, but also throw their crowns at His feet, of all things? Does God need or require such lavish outward gestures of worship and self-abnegation? No. But we creatures of bodies and senses and imagination find in such outward acts and symbols the crown and completion of the worship in our hearts.
From the outset the worship of the early church was structured and liturgical. St. Justin Martyr describes it in his mid-second century Apology, only decades after St. John’s death, and there are glimpses of it in the earlier Didache as well as the New Testament. As documented by St. Justin and other early sources, it’s the same basic structure the Church has followed for 2000 years. The brethren assemble on the first day of the week. First comes what we today call the liturgy of the word. There are readings from the Apostles’ memoirs and the prophets, followed by instruction and exhortation from the one presiding. Then comes what we today call the liturgy of the Eucharist. All rise for the prayers; bread and wine are brought; the one presiding offers prayers and thanksgiving, thanking God at length for our being counted worthy to receive the sacred things. Justin cites the words of Jesus at the Last Supper: This is My body; this is My blood. No ordinary food and drink these; they are the body and blood of Jesus Christ. All the people give their amen — what we today call the Great Amen — and the Eucharist is distributed (by deacons) only to the baptized. For those who are infirm and unable to be in attendance, the Eucharist is carried to them.
This is what Christian worship looks like. For some of us, it may come more naturally than others. For all of us, it is essential. I have great sympathy for those who struggle through services with “creative” priests, popcorn music and Protestantized architecture — and all the more for those struggling to raise Catholic kids in such an environment. It is hard to look past all that and see yourself surrounded by angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. And yet there it is: It is in the Eucharistic liturgy, as nowhere else on earth, that we when we lift up our hearts to the Lord we are actually caught up into the eternal worship of the heavenly liturgy.
For those who struggle with seeing it, I can only report that God is faithful and faithfulness is rewarded. Early in our journey to Catholic faith, Suzanne, as yet reluctant and unhappy, wanted to know what would be expected of her: Would she have to pray the rosary, or have statues in her house? No, I told her: Mary must be honored, but the rosary is not strictly obligatory, nor would she have to own statues. Today, Suzanne has sizable collections of rosaries and statues, and what began as her daily rosary with our eldest daughter has become an evening routine for our whole family.
John, I’m glad, truly, that your wife continues to value her faith in Jesus. Obviously I can’t in this post begin to touch on all the apologetical issues, but I do want to say that in what will be very soon forty years of following Christ, I have struggled through many issues, doubts and uncertainties — but one thing I have not found reason to doubt in going on 20 years as a Catholic, one thing I have come ever more firmly to hold as a fundamental conviction, is this: If there is any truth whatsoever to the whole Christian story — if Jesus is who He says He is, and if in this Easter week we can truly celebrate His victory over death — the fullness of that truth is nothing else than the Catholic Faith. Biblically, historically, theologically, Catholicism is Christianity, in its full and complete form. The Christianity that Jesus left on earth, the Christianity proclaimed by the apostles and those who received the faith from them and passed it on to others who then passed it on to others in turn, is a Christianity with a saving water baptism that washes away sins, a priesthood offering a eucharistic sacrifice in which Jesus is really present, an episcopal office reigning in place of the apostles.
Every other Christianity that has come along is truncated, fragmentary, partial in relation to Catholicism. The essence of heresy is to deny, to pick and choose, to pit one truth against another, affirming the part over the whole (“catholic” = pertaining to the whole). Heresy never adds to the whole. It always begins with subtraction. The Arians subtract Christ’s divinity; the Docetists, his humanity. Modernists subtract the divine authorship of scripture; fundamentalists, the human authorship. Pelagians detract from God’s grace and sovereignty; Calvinists (some at least) from human freedom and responsibility. Various monarchian, modalistic and monadic sects, from Islam to Jehovah’s Witnesses and even the Jewish people, deny God’s Triune nature; most Protestant communions subtract the efficacy of the sacraments as well as the authority of the ecumenical councils and of sacred tradition; even the Orthodox subtract the Petrine office of the bishop of Rome.
Of course many of these groups try to spin their denials as positives and Rome’s affirmations as negatives. But these efforts are transparent special pleading. Non-Trinitarians claim that Trinitarians “deny” the oneness of God, but of course we don’t: We affirm both that God is one being and also that He is three Persons. It is they who deny, not we. The Orthodox claim that Catholics effectively deny the principle of conciliarity, but in fact we affirm both conciliarity and also the Petrine office; the denial is theirs, not ours. Protestants say that Catholics deny sola scriptura and sola fide; but in fact it is the Protestant solas, the “onlys,” that constitute denials and fragment the faith; Catholics affirm both the authority of sacred scripture and also that of sacred tradition; both the sufficiency of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice and also the efficacy of the sacraments in communicating the grace of that sacrifice to us, the salutary effects of that grace in our lives and works done in Christ, and so forth.
These are intellectual arguments, but for me there is something critical at the bottom of them that holds me fast to the Church, whether I am blessed with a good parish, as now, or suffer in the wilderness as formerly: I will not exchange or sacrifice any part of the historic Christian faith for whatever potential perks I might hope to get hanging my hat at a different church.
Indeed, having been brought by God to where I am now, I literally could not go elsewhere; there is nowhere else to go. Like St. Peter in John 6, I can only say to the Church that is our Lord’s Bride and Body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all: To whom would I go? You alone have the words of eternal life. It is here that Jesus gives us His flesh and blood to eat and drink, here that the whole Christ is really present, here that the teaching of Christ is proclaimed in its fullness. There is nowhere else to go.
SDG here with 
