A friend shared with me some thoughts about the question of laity imitating the priest in the orans posture, which was once very popular among the faithful, has died down somewhat over the years, and has recently been clamped down on by the Archbishop of Portland. Here’s what he wrote:
Since we have “orans posture discourse” making the rounds yet again, I thought I’d offer some reasons for why this issue arises to begin with.It is entirely natural for people who are acting with or responding to someone to mimic or mirror their actions. When someone waves or extends a hand, we tend to wave or extend a hand. Hence, when the priest makes the Sign of the Cross in blessing, he does it with his hand away from his body, symbolizing that it’s being given (or ‘sent’), and in response the faithful make the Sign of the Cross touching their body, symbolizing their reception of it. In the Eastern Church they take this one step further: the priest makes the Sign of the Cross in blessing the ‘regular way’ (towards his left first, then his right), and the faithful in response make it the opposite way (right shoulder, then left shoulder), in a literal mirror image of his action.
Most of the actions of the faithful during the Mass (both Novus Ordo and TLM) can be boiled down to ‘responding’ to the priest’s actions, not ‘mirroring’ it. There are exceptions (sitting and standing in unison with the priest, for instance). For the most part, this can be explained by the fact that the laity are simply not doing exactly what the priest is doing. They don’t have a host or a chalice in front of them at the elevation, so they don’t elevate anything, and so on.
By Catholic Answers’ count, the ‘orans posture’ is used 28 times during the (Novus Ordo) Mass. There has been widespread controversy about the faithful mirroring it at exactly one of these 28 times. Maybe there are times and places where the faithful mimic it more than that one time, but I haven’t heard much about it; evidently, they’re much rarer.
So why does it happen in this case? At that one time out of the 28, the faithful are expressly told to say (or sing) exactly what the priest is saying (or singing), namely, the Lord’s Prayer. They are speaking in unison with him, rather than listening and responding with Sed libera nos a malo or, as occurs with the Collect, ‘Amen’ (at which time he uses the exact same orans posture). Is it any surprise, then, that if they’re supposed to be saying just what he says, and they’re looking him right in the eyes, they will then (consciously or unconsciously) start doing what he does? Isn’t that just human nature?
The fact that an official rubric requests something directly contrary to what’s natural and intuitive for humans is quite silly. This is not a case where human nature is fallen and we need to work against it; all the principles of human intuition at work here are entirely in accord with right reason.
So the bishops and even the Vatican can clarify all they like (as they did in a 1997 statement) that “neither may deacons or non-ordained members of the faithful use gestures or actions which are proper to the same priest celebrant.” But that hardly fixes the clash with human nature itself found within the rubrics. No amount of clarifications will help the fact that the faithful are “not sure what to do with [our] hands” (as the meme goes).
The bimillennial Western tradition is wiser in this regard: the celebrant faces away from the people, so that they are not picking up cues from him, and he alone recites or chants the Lord’s Prayer, at the end of which the servers, or all the faithful at High Mass, respond: Sed libera nos a malo. This preserves the recitation/response model that is customary throughout the Mass.
