Routine apologies for lack of posting. To tell the truth, when I began this, I didn’t envision it as a place for regularly, frequent posting anyway, but more as an archive. A neglected archive, it seems.
But I’m back today because of a related dustup in the American Catholic world - about kneeling.
I won’t rehash the situation, but in short: Cardinal Cupich of Chicago wrote a column telling people to stand for Communion, implication: don’t kneel to receive.
Catholic World Report turned it into an article.
Larry Chapp elaborated, again in Catholic World Report.
Some have responded with incredulity: Why in the world? What’s wrong with kneeling? Why would anyone have a problem with it? Reflecting, once again, the value of historical memory.
Now, this blog is intended to be a record-keeper, not an explainer, but I’ll start by reprinting how I responded to that incredulity in a post on X:
The post V2 liturgical reform was shaped by a few factors and assumptions:
1. The dignity of the People of God, and an assumption that the older liturgy reflected a medieval mindset that, in turn reflected a hierarchical worldview in which the congregation, as observers and receivers, were not "equal" to the clerics who controlled the action. Kneeling was an expression of this framework: lay people knelt as a vassal knelt before his liege, but the People of God have a dignity in light of the Gospel in which we are all brothers and sisters, all children of God, and therefore standing is more an expression of that than kneeling.
2. We are an Easter people! That is, standing is an expression of hope and trust, being ready, symbolically, to move and greet the Lord.
3. It was said that the "early Christians" - the historicist root for the reform - did not kneel. They also excommunicated people for serious sins and made them do public penance for years, but never mind.
4. Related, but less emphasized was the experience of Eastern Christianity in which, it is true, standing is the normative posture during the liturgy.
(Would that more of the actual Roman liturgical reform taken the lead from Eastern practice rather than an vision of Rome joining, at least in spirit, the World Council of Churches...things might have been different...)
This seems wordy, but it really is the way priests who were formed in the 70's through..I don't know when ...were formed to think about this. Along with the insistence that all the laity doing the same thing at the same time at Mass, a weird reversal, as I have said elsewhere, of pre-V2 rubrics, in which the clergy were micromanaged and the laity mostly left alone. Now, it's the reverse, it seems.
In short a cleric of that generation will tell you to get up off your knees because you need to understand that you shouldn't think of yourself as an abject, inferior sinner, you have a "dignity" in God's eyes that is best expressed by standing, as well as that the congregation's shared, identical posture is an expression of their active participation. Or something.
A couple of pages from a book I randomly pulled from the Internet Archive, published in 1970, gives a sense of this. I include the pages on reception of Communion because the priest-author uses another aspect of the "we are adults with dignity" assumption - that receiving Communion in the hand "calls forth on the part of the communicant a more virile and less infantile attitude."
Virile? Looks like Sister has some work to do...
I would add to that there was an effort to discourage thinking of the Mass as a moment of individual piety, but the expression of the community’s identity of of the Body of Christ, and Communion in particular not as the individual’s moment so much as the moment in which the nature of the Body of Christ is made real and visible, in the reformers’ vision, by the congregation standing, moving, singing as one.
Now for what this blog is actually for: recording experiences:
My memories are not much help here. As I’ve said before, I wasn’t taken to Mass until I was five years old, which was 1965, and most of the parishes I attended as a child were in college towns, which meant they were a little more forward-looking than the norm. Of course there was kneeling during the Eucharistic prayer - I don’t remember standing for that until well into young adulthood - but I also don’t remember ever receiving, as a child, at an altar rail.
Altar rails, which are, incidentally, making a comeback, it seems.
Since then, while traveling, including in Europe, I have been in Masses where standing through Mass was the norm, and in some areas it long has been anyway - but I have not experienced any aggressive policing of that, either - that is, the brief era in which some liturgists were insisting that there should be no private prayer after receiving Communion, and everyone must keep standing and keep singing. Eyes front, people!
So, for example in France and Italy, I have found that standing is, indeed, the norm, but there are always a few who kneel and it is not a big deal.
So…what about you? Anyone else old enough to have some memories?
Started going to Mass later than you (mid 70s) and our very post-VII church had no pews (we used chairs) or kneelers. I have a memory of attending my first Stations of the Cross and trying to do all the kneeling without kneelers and it was a bit tough on the knees...:-) We also knelt in a group for Confirmation (still got a gentle slap back then when the bishop went down the row) and I don't see that at all anymore. As a deacon, I'll say that there isn't a lot of "uniformity" when folks come up for communion. Some smile, some frown,some hold their hands up high while some have them so low I have to bend over to give them the host. A few receive on the tongue and a couple kneel. All part of the wonderful diversity of the People of God...:-)