re quality of catholic liturgy in apr athos rutgers edu jemurray magnus acs ohio state edu john e murray writes i would like the opinion of netters on a subject that has been bothering my wife and me lately liturgy in particular catholic liturgy in the last few years it seems that there are more and more ad hoc events during mass it s driving me crazy the most grace filled aspect of a liturgical tradition is that what happens is something we all do together because we all know how to do it led by the priest of course which makes it a kind of dialogue we present to god but the best masses i ve been to were participatory prayers having lived through the kicking and screaming in the s and s as the catholics were invited to participate in the liturgy instead of counting their rosary beads during mass i find this comment interesting there is a massively longer tradition for proclaiming the passion accounts without active participation if you know the latin one really beautiful way to hear the passion is it s being chanted by three deacons the narrator chants in the middle baritone range jesus chants in the bass and others directly quoted are handled by a high tenor this is actually the basis for the common proclamation of the passion that john would prefer but there is always a judgement call based on pastoral considerations each pastor makes his own decisions it isn t a church wide conspiracy against participation the palm sunday liturgy with its initial blessing and distribution of the palms and procession is already getting long before you get to the passion some pastors feel that they should not make the people stand through that long narrative also the orchestrated proclamation with multiple readers and public participation in the crowd quotations runs longer than the single reader proclamation in churches with multiple masses for the sunday it might be necessary to go with the briefer options just to get em in and get em out each parish is different catholics are no longer canonically tied to their geographic parishes it is possible that another catholic parish in the columbus area based on the ohio state address has a liturgy closer to your preferences or talk to some of your fellow parishioners and see how common your preferences are pastors generally are willing to listen to non confrontational requests though you probably should bring along a paramedic in case he reacts too strongly to the shock of people asked for a longer sunday mass perhaps the problem is that recent liturgical development hasn t follow the continuous evolution model the accumulation of small changes no single one of which is too hard to take but rather the punctuated equilibrium model things stay the same and we get accustomed to them then the marked mutation hits my apologies if i am mis remembering the names of the evolutionary theories tim rolfe rolfe dsuvax dsu edu rolfe junior dsu edu rolfet columbia dsu edu
