If I had a large readership I would post a poll. It would be interesting if one of the big Catholic bloggers did place such a poll, just in case any drop by. I wonder if many Catholics even know what a monstrance is.
This, courtesy of Wikipedia, is what one looks like:
The ugly one is the modern one. I don't have to tell you which one is the ugly one do I? It's the one that looks more like a logo for a UN agency than like something that belongs in a church.
I probably don't have to tell you what it is for either. A consecrated host goes in the glass chamber in order to display it to the people; "monstrance" comes from the same root as "demonstrate". People in the pews before the consecrated host in the monstrance and contemplate and adore it. That may trouble non-Catholics but it should not trouble Catholics because we believe that Jesus is really present in the consecrated host.
And yet the monstrance has disappeared because it obviously did trouble a lot of people who were not just Catholics but Catholic priests.
I am privileged in that my parish is a rare one that has and uses a monstrance. Today is First Friday and at the end of the twelve-fifteen mass today, the priest will conduct a ceremony in which the host is placed in the monstrance and then it will replace the crucifix that is on the high altar. It will remain there until the four-thirty mass this afternoon.
Incidentally, or perhaps not so incidentally, both those masses will have better attendance than most other Catholic churches get on Sunday
I've never seen that done, where the monstrance replaces the crucifix on the high altar for an extended period of time. Here, the only time the monstrance is and was ever used--even before Vatican II--is for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. To my knowledge, this only happens after Stations of the Cross on Fridays during Lent, when the priest takes the monstrance out and shows it to the congregation, lifts it up high, while the congregation or the choir sings Tantum Ergo followed by Holy God We Praise Thy Name. More recently, one church here created a very small Adoration Chapel out of what had been a storeroom adjacent to the church but accessible from the outside, and the monstrance with the consecrated host is on a small altar. It won't hold more than one person at a time, and when people sign up to spend an hour in Adoration they give you the code that allows access.
ReplyDeleteThank you very much for explaining this. After reading your original post, I did look it up to learn, and had an aha! moment.
ReplyDeleteLast week I was channel surfing one night while running on a treadmill (I'd had a tiring day driving and was hoping to work up an appetite) and saw the ceremony you mention (or the tail end of it) on what I imagine must have been a local community channel in Syracuse NY(?) I'm protestant, and was completely, utterly, totally baffled. I didn't even know how to describe what I'd seen to Mrs. Carmichael.
Now I do! Thank you for sharing.
P.S. I don't like church on TV. It's just wrong. Liturgy isn't an academic exercise or a spectator sport. But it was, by leagues, the best thing on.
A lot of Catholics would probably be equally baffled.
ReplyDeleteI agree about church on television. I'm old school and I don't even like seeing cameras at weddings. Worse, it becomes an excuse for clergy and laypeople to not visit the sick in their homes.