Lex orandi Catholicism

Note: This was written on Tuesday in order that it could appear on Good Friday. John L Allen had a piece recently where he wrote that what Catholicism needs is "a grass-roots movement to rebuild zones of friendship in the church". Allen seems like a good guy but a general rule of thumb is that ugly language tends to reflect bad thinking and the English language does not get any uglier than the phrase "zones of friendship". The following is what I think Catholics really need.

Today is Good Friday. This is a day when we think about what it would be like to live without God. We feast while the bridegroom is with us but today we think about what it would be like if he were not. So we fast. And that makes us think about what it is that we are doing without. What it will mean to feast in God's presence again on Sunday.

The old line is lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. This is sometimes rendered along the lines of, 'As as we pray, so shall we believe and so shall we live'. That's a pretty translation but it pays to be literal about these things sometimes. A more literal translation would be the law of prayer is the basis of the law of belief which is the basis of the laws of living. (Lex = law, statute, rule, principle, contract, condition; it means all these things.)

That literal sense is important because otherwise you might make the mistake that Deacon Keith Fournier makes at Catholic Online:

The Church has long understood that part of her role as mother and teacher is to watch over worship, for the sake of the faithful and in obedience to the God whom she serves. How we worship not only reveals and guards what we believe but guides us in how we live our Christian faith and fulfill our Christian mission in the world. 

I've added that emphasis. No, it's not part of her role. It is the church's role to watch over worship. That is the thing that makes the church the church. She can fail in every other way and still be the church. Her priests can gamble, drive drunk and have secret marriages and, while that would all be horrible, she would still be the church for all her horrible sins. But the second the church stops watching over worship, she stops being the church.



And that does more than guide us in how we live our Christian faith; it forms us. It makes us what we are.

What is the most important thing for a Catholic to do in order to really be be a Catholic? It is to pray as the church says we ought to pray. And that means to attend mass regularly and to receive communion at least once a year. And "attend mass regularly" means to do it the way the church tells us the way it should be done. That is the most important thing
All sorts of things follow from that of course but the sacrifice of the mass is the thing that matters more than anything else. If there is one thing that the kinds of Catholic arguments I oppose tend to have in common it is that they don't start with the law of prayer.

I recently heard a Catholic priest and theologian argue that there is nothing worse than to start by thinking about what you have to believe in order to be a Catholic and then deriving your way of praying from that. I think he is right in that. If you "became" a Catholic because you agree with the church's teaching on sexuality or abortion or social issues, then you never really became a Catholic in the first place. If the main thing that really keeps you a Catholic is that you agree with the church on some Creedal matter, then you aren't really a Catholic anymore.

Turn to God and pray. Don't say just any prayer, go to the prayer that the church directs you to pray, which is to say, Go to Mass. Don't listen to the person who tells you that you have to change your life before you can come to God. Don't listen to anyone who tells you that you have to believe a certain set of things before you can come to God. Do it the other way. Go to God. You don't have to receive communion. Just go in to the church and pray according to the rules. What you believe and how you live can wait, go to God now.

When we were kids, my sisters and I used to marvel at the way my mother could stop in the middle of a rage at us (almost always a justified rage), pick up the phone and say "hello" in a sweet tone. Then she'd speak kindly and respectfully to the person on the other end. Sometimes, she'd hang up and go back to chewing us out for whatever it was we had done that day without missing a beat. If you can't do anything else, do that for God. Turn away from everything else for a while and go to mass.

That is what I believe Catholics need most now.