In the years prior to the Second Vatican Council, I
also remember attending daily Mass before elementary school, which, because we
had fasted for three hours, allowed us to eat breakfast in Mr. Sullivan’s math
class. I remember bellowing out Tantum
Ergo at Wednesday Evening
Benediction, which I was in the habit of attending with my Mom, siblings and
“Gramp,” (her Dad, John). I also remember looking forward to participating in
the praying of that most sublime form of prayer, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass,
with my St. Joseph’s Daily Missal.
With Pope Benedict’s having granted permission for
priests to offer the Extraordinary form of the Roman Rite, we hear much ado in
the form of reaction against this from Catholic “progressives,” and about how
the Council placed a new emphasis on the laity’s participation at Mass, the
implication being that Catholics did not actively participate at Mass prior to
Vatican II, opting for such devotions as the praying of the Rosary or Holy
Cards. To such persons I say: you should’ve seen me (and pal Bob, for that
matter) at Mass in third grade! Not only did I pray along with the priest in
the Latin Missal, but I was a better-than-average singer of Gregorian chant,
thanks to convert Mrs. Crowley’s daily faithful rendering of the chanted
antiphons and propers in Latin. I, who failed becoming an altar server by
stumbling over one Latin syllable in my tryout test, (Sr. Isabelle must have
had a bad habit day that day), also remember telling my younger brother John,
who passed, how he forgot the proper order in covering the communion rails
before Holy Communion.
St. Eugene’s eventually closed in the Year of Our Lord
1989 due to “white flight” and demographic changes after the 1967 riots in
Detroit, and with this came to an end the place where I spent some of the
holiest years of my life, years in which neither I nor my classmates were
ashamed to publicly give witness to our faith in Christ (yes, I too
dressed in sheets and played the priest in acting out the Mass with my
siblings). My memories of participation at Mass are exalted ones. There was a sense
of the sacred that has since, through misimplementation of Sacrosanctum
Concilium, long since evaporated at Mass (though Jesus is just as present
as He always was and will be), which has manifested itself in the words of my
Catholic high school students as “Why do we have to go to Mass?”
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