I remember when I was teenager in Quebec, the priest asked a bunch of men if they would help move an old vending machine out of the church basement. I went along and we all walked downstairs and into a storage room.
And we all stopped dead in our tracks and took a deep breath. That room was packed with beauty. Sometime in the early 1960s, one of the priests, in the name of liturgical reform had cleared out a lot of stuff. He'd take the statues of dubious saints such as Christopher, Ursula and Jules (Julian in English) off their pedestals. He'd put away all the old silver chalices so they could be replaced with a ceramic one. The old tabernacle was there because it had been ripped off the high altar and replaced with a locked wooden box on top of a wooden table that served as the side altar. Nearby was the old Sacristy Lamp and the long chain that used to run all the way to the ceiling. It had been replaced with a candle in a red glass sleeve that sat on the table with the new tabernacle.
There was also a rack with a whole lot of beautiful old vestments hanging from it and a bunch of things that used to be pulled out for the annual Corpus Christi procession.
At the time I didn't know what any of this stuff was. I only knew that it was all beautiful. Most beautiful of all was the thing I didn't even what to call. It was a monstrance and even though I'd never seen one before I quickly figured out what it was used for. And I wondered aloud why anyone would want to get rid of anything so beautiful.
It was explained to me, by a Catholic priest, that the monstrance, while beautiful, represented an era when the church was oppressive and not open to the people.
I still don't get that. Pull out a vintage monstrance today and you will see why: the very old, the very young, the weak, the marginalized, the scared the lonely will all be drawn to it.
And we all stopped dead in our tracks and took a deep breath. That room was packed with beauty. Sometime in the early 1960s, one of the priests, in the name of liturgical reform had cleared out a lot of stuff. He'd take the statues of dubious saints such as Christopher, Ursula and Jules (Julian in English) off their pedestals. He'd put away all the old silver chalices so they could be replaced with a ceramic one. The old tabernacle was there because it had been ripped off the high altar and replaced with a locked wooden box on top of a wooden table that served as the side altar. Nearby was the old Sacristy Lamp and the long chain that used to run all the way to the ceiling. It had been replaced with a candle in a red glass sleeve that sat on the table with the new tabernacle.
There was also a rack with a whole lot of beautiful old vestments hanging from it and a bunch of things that used to be pulled out for the annual Corpus Christi procession.
At the time I didn't know what any of this stuff was. I only knew that it was all beautiful. Most beautiful of all was the thing I didn't even what to call. It was a monstrance and even though I'd never seen one before I quickly figured out what it was used for. And I wondered aloud why anyone would want to get rid of anything so beautiful.
It was explained to me, by a Catholic priest, that the monstrance, while beautiful, represented an era when the church was oppressive and not open to the people.
I still don't get that. Pull out a vintage monstrance today and you will see why: the very old, the very young, the weak, the marginalized, the scared the lonely will all be drawn to it.
I agree that they might unintentionally have thrown the baby out with the bath water. Just FYI, I'm a cradle Catholic, but the only time I can remember seeing a monstrance--from a distance--was on the rare occasions when they had Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament after Stations of the Cross. This was, of course, prior to Vatican II, so I don't know how widely the monstrance was used even before it became extinct, only to be resurrected in recent times for Adoration, which was unheard of when I was growing up.
ReplyDeleteBut I don't think that culture and community are mutually exclusive. The culture that we call Catholicism was begun by the early Christians within the context of community using Judaism as a model. The Jews have a culture, but they also have community--especially the Orthodox--and since 1948 a national identity. Maybe we lost the concept of community when the Church became an institution.