Kathy, my own opinion is that this idea of "celebration" is a phase, part and parcel of the hoo-haw of the last 40 years, which is going away as people realize that you can get a lot more "celebration" for yourself at your favorite restaurant - good food, good friends, sounds like Miller Time! People need more than superficial happiness of celebration; they need the deep joy that comes from worship.

For celebrating, I'll take the Magic Kingdom! ;-)

chink, I agree that is true, but in many, if not most of the cases I've seen, people who say they want the Mass to be a "celebration" mean they want to par-tay.

"Celebration", in the Church's documents, always refers to carrying out a rite, and it doesn't refer to parties and entertainment. After all, priests commonly "celebrate" funerals.

So if there are confused people looking for an atmosphere of frivolity in church, there's a need for some education there.

On laziness in performing the rituals of the Church: that is a good way to put it. A more deliberate and studied celebration of the rites cannot help but move people.

I was wondering about the use of "celebration" more along the lines that Greg mentioned. There's a religious ed curriculum used at a former parish titled, "We Celebrate!", which I don't recall ever used the word "sacrifice", at least there was no emphasis on the "Sacrifice of the Mass". It does seem to me that the "party" connotation of "celebration" is more commonly used in our culture, and the meaning in the church documents of "carrying out a rite" is lost on the common Catholic.

EAF: By "wedding", I meant the party afterwards, not the Mass. The lecturer said good folk music is very appropriate to cultural celebrations, weddings being one of the clearest examples. So I was distinguishing between the Mass, as "sacrament and sacrifice" and the celebrations of the party type.

Kathy

I was wondering about the use of "celebration" more along the lines that Greg mentioned. There's a religious ed curriculum used at a former parish titled, "We Celebrate!", which I don't recall ever used the word "sacrifice", at least there was no emphasis on the "Sacrifice of the Mass". It does seem to me that the "party" connotation of "celebration" is more commonly used in our culture, and the meaning in the church documents of "carrying out a rite" is lost on the common Catholic.

Well, that Pius X uses the term only three times is somewhat immaterial then. "Celebrate" could be used thirty times thirty times in his instructions on the Missal and still not mean what someone using it today once means by it. This and "social justice," appropriated code words as thin as tissue paper. It's high time to reclaim the technical meaning of word, at least in these contexts.

One video at RCIA we were shown contrasted how in those dirty Middle Ages the Mass lost a personal dimension and was called a "great and terrible sacrifice." This may be true or false; I am not competent to judge it. Just after this, however, came the "but now, since Vatican II ..." part of the video.

So... that definitely was a problem.

Yes, the confusion for me was in the use of the word "celebrate". Understanding the Latin and realizing that is the meaning used in the church documents, clears that up.

Thanks! Kathy

Perhaps a better juxtaposition would be "celebration & meal" vs "sacrament and sacrifice". Celebration and meal go hand-in-hand in our culture, thinking again particularly of wedding celebrations. And how do we celebrate holidays, including birthdays? With a big meal! (And, if I'm not mistaken, this was the very idea promoted in the religious ed curriculum I mentioned--comparing the Eucharist to a big holiday meal)

Kathy

Perhaps you don't understand my question.

TM24(Kathy)
I pray you simply mistook Adam's response as being in direct reply to your opinion. I assure you, it wasn't. There was a simple coincidence that his referral to a post he authored at the Cafe simply followed your comment. So, I hope you don't think it was a personal comment directed at you.

Charles is correct. I used the occasion of this conversation as a jumping off point to talk about something different, but related.

I do think there is one fallacy with your question/post, though- it assumes that people are "doing liturgy" based on one faulty premise about it's nature, and that if people changed their premise, we would see better music and liturgy.

The fact of the matter is, most bad liturgy suffers not from wrong thinking but rather lack of thinking at all. Pseudo-theological babble from "liturgists" about Mass being a community feast tends to be a cover for "we do what we like, so whatevs, yo."

Communities that ACTUALLY treat Eucharist like a community meal (modeled after, for example, a reconstruction of the Early Church's Agape meal) don't look anything like what happens at the average suburban American parish. They are intimate, reverent, prayerful. You might disagree with the theology being communicated, but you wouldn't mistake it for thoughtlessness.

Now that's funny!
Liam's vocabulary is exponentially larger than both the Oxford Dictionary and the former Soviet Union's nuclear (nuke-YOO-ler) arsenal before the collapse! Thus he has become an enabler of my verbosity and loquacious pomposity for which the likes of many on this board have garroted, pilloried and gibbeted (can it be verb'd?) me for years! I actually saw some guy on the TV yesterday (EWTN) who said a "shibboleth" was some visual totem by which its bearer gained access to guarded territory. I just thought it meant some sort of distraction! Silly me, Twix are for kids.

When over-employed by my liberal friends ("truth to power," etc, etc) I like to call them shibbolefts.

Adam

Indeed. I started out with my progressive peers. For a long time. Still do it to them. Shibboleths are shibboleths on all sides: precisely because they are markers to signify which side one is on, and that they tend become more observed than reality.