Kevin Kelly/Key photo ames and Helen Hull Hitchcock present the gifts to Bishop Robert W. Finn at the opening Mass for the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars convention Sept. 22 at the Hilton Airport Hotel in Kansas City.

"Kansas City is home to institutions which, on the one hand, have seen in the Council a license to promote democratization of the church and to proclaim, in too many instances, a 'prophetic freedom' for departing from the most fundamental of church teachings," Bishop Finn said in his homily as he celebrated the convention's opening Mass Sept. 22.

"On the other side, an international society of clergy and laity that maintain very serious suspicions about the validity of Catholic Church teachings and practice since the Council has established its U.S. base in our diocese," he said.

"The desire we have to fulfill the plan of our Lord Jesus Christ for our unity has been a theme of our (diocesan 50th anniversary) jubilee celebrations, and I welcome the reflections of this fellowship which I believe will contribute to a more mature hermenuetic on one of (the Council's) pivotal teachings, Sacrosanctum Concilium, and a deeper love for the sacrament of unity," Bishop Finn said.

"It is perhaps true that in an earlier age, there was a deeper awareness of the transcendent power of the sacred rights and the efficacy and finality of each ritual action of the priest at Mass," the bishop said.

"In fact, we are celebrating the same Holy Mass, under the same divine mandate, and with the same infallible purpose and result," he said. "Certainly we would be at odds with Sacrosanctum Concilium and the discipline of the church if we, as individuals, were to add, remove or change the well-defined elements of the church's liturgy."

Noting the continuing debate over liturgy, Bishop Finn said that "at times it seems as though the pendulum is still swinging somewhere between innovation and restoration, and that we are not much closer to home than when we started."

"At other moments, it is possible to hope that we are getting near the top of the hill and, someday soon, we will fall gently over the tipping point, onto the other side of our disunity and lingering disarray, and wonder happily how we got here and what took so long," he said.

"And in the meantime, while in these days we reread and study where we have been and where we must go at the beckoning of Sacrosanctum Concilium, we ask for the light and fire of the Holy Spirit," the bishop said.

In his keynote address that evening, James Hitchcock, St. Louis University professor of history, lamented many of the liturgical "experts" who implemented Sacrosanctum Concilium.

"For some reason, they ignored the way in which the ritual of the church is deeply and organically rooted in the mystical community and this ignorance severely damaged liturgical life in ways that are only now being seriously addressed," Hitchcock said.

Hitchcock said that the Liturgical Movement that led to changes in the Mass "underwent a radical change immediately after the Council."

The movement, he said, was "no longer aiming to lead worshippers ever more deeply into the divine mysteries, but seeking instead to make liturgy 'relevant' by minimizing its mystical elements and assimilating it to a community celebration."

Hitchcock said that "liturgical innovators correctly understood that liturgy is in some ways an expression of life of the worshipping community."

"But the innovators had a radically impoverished, essentially secular, idea of what that expression might be, reducing 'participation' merely to such things as singing and praying aloud, and reducing 'community' merely to those people actually gathered for worship at a particular moment, no longer with any sense of membership in the invisible and eternal Communion of Saints, of the Mystical Body," Hitchcock said.

Hitchcock decried a "new Puritanical spirit" following the Second Vatican Council that "systematically, even fanatically, changed or discarded the architecture, symbolism and music that spoke of eternity and transcendence and, as the poverty of this new spirit came belatedly to be recognized, sought to create new symbols - dancing, banners - by fiat, not comprehending the way in which genuine ritual has to be deeply imbedded in the life of a community over a period of generations."

"The spiritual and psychological effects of all this went so deep that even now they are only imperfectly understood, often reduced merely to the level of personal preference," Hitchcock said.

"Sacred ritual always presents itself as divinely ordained, but the speed with which liturgical changes were introduced, the confusing and often contradictory things said about them, the way in which they were decreed by committees and bureaucratic offices, the continuing debates, the replacement of sacred liturgical books by discardable leaflets, the wholesale destruction of so much that was venerable, and the endless tinkering all had the cumulative effect of making the liturgy seem an all-too-human activity, not a divine action in which humans were privileged to participate, but something they themselves created," Hitchcock said.

"The present liturgical conflict is often presented as between 'traditionalists' and 'innovators,' something that does not pose the issue adequately," he said.

"Adherence to tradition is of course fundamental to the Catholic faith, but development has always been a part of tradition itself, so that in principle liturgists are justified in urging certain changes," Hitchcock said.

However, Hitchcock said, the "single greatest liturgical error following the council" was to present the liturgy as "the new liturgy, and the consequent failure to make people understand how it was continuous with the old."

"The severing of continuity with tradition, whether deliberate or inadvertent, has had the result of throwing self-consciously modern Catholics entirely back on their own spiritual resources, which is a terrible kind of spiritual impoverishment," Hitchcock said.

"Because the past is experienced as dead, the structure of the church is also experienced as oppressive so that 'meaningful' religion necessarily involves the progressive rejection of doctrines and practices considered to be impositions on the self," he said.

"The more the ideal of community was extolled, the more elusive it remained to the point where for some people, the local parish itself could no longer function as community and they gathered for worship only with people of like mind, their refusal to participate in the ordinary rituals of the church, their desire to find specialized celebrations in either 'liberal' or 'conservative' versions becoming a continuing symbol of the fragmentation of community," Hitchcock said.

"As worshippers are urged to turn primarily to one another, all divisions are magnified to the point where only homogeneous communities are possible," he said.

This has led not to freedom but to "a different kind of bondage as the worshipper finds himself constrained not by the prescribed liturgy of the universal church, but by the arbitrary demands of a particular diocese or parish," Hitchcock said.

"In the end, eager participants in self-consciously 'modern' liturgies want to hear only echoes of themselves, confirming Emile Durkheim's claim that religion is finally the community objectifying and worshipping itself," he said.

"The time now seems ripe for the 'reform of the reform,' as Pope Benedict has called it," Hitchcock said.

"As the Holy Father has also noted, a sweeping kind of reform, even if it moved in a good direction, would itself have a deeply upsetting effect on the community of the church, comparable to that which followed the Council," he said.

"It appears at this point that the church has no alternative but to tolerate a kind of liturgical pluralism, continuing to insist on the obligation to observe the official rituals, but within those limits allowing a variety of styles, from the Tridentine rite to the 'guitar' Mass," Hitchcock said.

"However indirect the process of renewal may turn out to be, our goals must remain clear so that over what will probably be a period of decades rather than of years the movement of authentic reform may succeed," he said.

END