Little Children and the Sacred Liturgy

If you’re a parent, pastor, director of religious education, or regular pewsitter, chances are that you’ve come across some problematic notions about what the participation of children in the sacred liturgy means or looks like.

In episode 12 of Square Notes: The Sacred Music Podcast, we tackle some of these issues, and propose a more rooted understanding of what authentic participation for children is based on. The guest for the show is the academic director of Notre Dame’s Center for Liturgy, Dr. Timothy P. O’Malley.

Of particular interest to readers might be Tim’s article on this subject from the ND Church Life Journal, “The Liturgy is for (Little) Kids.”

Sinite Parvulos (Part 2) - An Excellent Column about Children at Mass

Judging from our viewing statistics, people really liked comedian Jeremy McLellan’s take on the recent discussion over bringing young children to Mass. (McLellan was responding to a piece on the blog of Fr Michael White, pastor of Nativity Church in Timonium, Maryland, entitled “Why We Don’t Encourage (Little) Kids in Church.”) On the same topic, I strongly commend to our readers’ attention a superb piece entitled “The Liturgy is for (Little) Kids” at Church Life Journal, written by founding editor Timothy O’Malley, who is also the director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy. Here are a few excerpts; you should definitely take the time to read the whole thing.

“From my perspective, Fr. White’s argument is flawed not simply because he argues for the exclusion of young children from the act of parochial worship. Rather, the blog post reveals a misunderstanding of the nature of the liturgical act itself. This misunderstanding is not unique to Fr. White, but has infected most Catholic parishes in the West well before Vatican II. When one reduces the liturgical act to “understanding,” then there is an erasure of the contemplative, aesthetic, and thus embodied formation that is integral to a worshipful existence. ...

Young children perceive the mystery of divine love in the mode that is appropriate to an infant or young child. To deny them this act of perception is in essence to say that God can only communicate in the mode that we find appropriate for our sophisticated, intelligent, rational, and adult faith. ...

In this sense, Fr. White’s blog post is but endemic of Catholic worship in the United States at this stage. Liturgies are cacophonies of verbal proclamations, of sermons, of explaining rites and the meaning of feasts. There is so little to behold in churches that have been built as suburban shopping malls. Music is chosen not because it provides something to perceive, the beauty of ordered sound used to worship God, but instead to get across a “message” in hymn texts that are often more ideological than aesthetic or theological. There is often so little gravitas to the activity of worship, a sense that we have to adjust ourselves to adore God, since what we long for is a pleasing and meaningful act of worship.

Perhaps, what we need to do is not exclude children from the act of worship. Instead, we must understand liturgical worship as if the primary participants in the act of worship will be infants. Instead of relying on endless speech, on communication media including video screens, we must create spaces where all the senses are involved in worship. Emphasizing understanding through speech brackets out a good deal of what it means to be a human being.

So rather than create a special liturgy for children appropriate to their understanding, let us have music that is worth listening to and singing along with. Let us build altarpieces and reredos that actually give both infants and adults something to behold in worship. Let us attend to the way that light sanctifies space, how color delights the eye. And perhaps some of the children are bored at Mass, not because they are incapable of understanding what is going on, but because there is too much speech and not enough silence, not enough embodied action, not enough to behold.”

Laudate, pueri, Dominum!

“Can Liturgy Heal a Secular Age?” : An Interesting Article by Prof. Timothy O’Malley

The Church Life Journal, a publication of the Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, yesterday posted an article by their founding editor, Timothy O’Malley, entitled “Can Liturgy Heal a Secular Age?”, which brings some interesting ideas to the fore.

Prof. O’Malley first describes the belief of the founders of the original Liturgical Movement that a revived liturgical life and culture would steer modern man back to God, citing as an example Jungmann’s hopes for “a new relationship to the material world itself, to the world of trades and professions ... (in which) the every-day world ... is drawn into the sacred action, joined with the sacrifice which Christ presents with His Church assembled ...” He then notes that some of the evident signs that this much-looked for and augured “(p)articipation in the sacramental life of the Church has not flourished since the Second Vatican Council.”

Secondly, I was particularly struck by this description of what religion actually is, in terms of ritual and practice:

“Religion provides a privileged culture whereby we can connect our narrative to those in the past. We see ourselves in a broader story, one that is ultimately connected to God. With the loss of religious memory, the human person is no longer able to see one’s identity as linked to the communion of saints, to the Scriptures, to the Tradition: all those markers we employ in assessing Catholic identity. Thus, all that is left is the naked individual who can assess the ‘efficacy’ of a religious tradition by the way that said tradition moves him. If it doesn’t move the person, then it has no value, because it is an isolated fact rather than part of a coherent narrative.

In other words, I’m spiritual but not religious or as Grace Davie better says, I believe but I don’t belong.”

The third section, entitled “Ritual and the Subjunctive Mood,” contrasts two different ideas of what ritual is. (Subjunctive here is understood as the tense that expresses the potential, rather than the non-real.) The first is as summed up by a quote from Nathan Mitchell’s Liturgy and the Social Sciences, “ritual is essentially a way to regulate social life; to shape personal and corporate identity; to review and renew values; to express and transmit meaning in symbolic word and act; to preserve tradition; and to insure cultural cohesion and continuity.” In other words, ritual is understood as an essentially didactic collective enterprise.

O’Malley compares this to another view of ritual as the creation of a world “ ‘as if,’ one that Catholics understand as a sacramental world not yet visible to the naked eye.” Furthermore, participation is such a ritual is not essentially didactic: “Authentic participation in the rite can thus take place even when someone does not entirely understand what is unfolding in the Eucharistic assembly. One can understand, through ritual bracketing that this action is about the restoration of communion between heaven and earth, between God and humanity, between neighbor and neighbor. ... explanation is not the function of liturgy. Ritual does something before it communicates something. (my emphasis).” And thus, in regard to secularization, “The more that our liturgical practice seems drawn from the present world, from that which emphasizes comprehension and sincerity of belief, the less the contemporary human person will see ritual as necessary.”

The complete article can be read at the link give above in the first paragraph.