Oran's Posture - Priest Only!?

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I read about this when it came out. I stopped doing it. Wife was furious with me about me until a State Senator ( parishioner at our church ) posted on facebook to a recently ordained Priest ( also from our Parish ).

A lot of people have read this article and no longer do this gesture at our Parish.

Do they do it at your Parish?

https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/hand-gestures-at-mass
 
Most of the people I see at Mass do this. I never did it. Not because of that Church Militant article but because I feel silly in that position, and it also just feels to me more like something a priest would do than something I want to do in the middle of a crowd. If I were off on a hilltop somewhere like “The Sound of Music” and I happened to throw my arms up and pray to God then it might feel natural, but not in church.

I’ve been folding my hands for 50 years and I prefer to just continue in that way.

I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other if others do it, any more than I care/ mind if they all hold hands during the Our Father, I just prefer to be left out of it.

Also, as a practical matter, if you’re at a very crowded Mass then there physically isn’t room for everybody in a row to do the Orans without bumping into each other.
 
Gee, don’t we have more important things to worry about? Are you trying to say such a gesture is a sin? Mortal or venial?

We do it at our parish and our pastor, a priest from Ghana, sometimes tells us to do it. I am OK with it. Having just attended a couple of Masses in India and seen what goes on there, I am not going to worry about this at all.
 
If the rubrics of the Mass specify that only the priest is to use Orans posture than I am not going to use it.

How reliable a source on such matters is Church Militant?
 
JoshuaIsLord said:
A lot of people have read this article and no longer do this gesture at our Parish.
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I never did the gesture myself, and its common here in Pittsburgh at my church.

But our area has been so depopulated, I don’t see it as a particular problem here. I think if the church was packed on Sunday morning it might pose a problem, but here it is just a peculiarity and something new I didn’t see as a kid.
 
The Orans is a very popular posture in the East.

Laity are not supposed to use it at Church though - only in private.
 
Our parish is mixed – some do, some don’t. I don’t, just my preference. I don’t think the GIRM specifically addresses the subject, but it just seems to me that’s for the priest.
 
Well for one, the “Sign of Peace” is not a handshake. It’s the “Namaste” maneuver, hands in prayer position with the thumbs on the forehead, bowing to the person you are giving the sign to. Some people venerate the statues in the church by getting on all fours and touching the feet of the statues, sometimes during Mass, but mostly before and after. The women all wear the full, colorful saris with all the regalia to Mass. The one church I went to was more colorful than ours, a bit like a Hindu temple, decorated with a lot of statues and relics. Also, a lot of people, mostly men, stand outside the church during Mass and look in through the open doors, but they don’t go in. I never figured that one out.

I have to say it seems really natural when you are actually there.
 
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Men standing outside the church looking in reminds me of the people who used to stand in the vestibule at Mass and just hang out there for the whole Mass and go in for Communion. In the 1970s, a lot of people, especially young people, did this. It seems less common in USA now; if somebody is out in the vestibule it’s usually because they came really late and didn’t want to disrupt Mass to find a seat, or because they have taken their small child out to the vestibule to run around without disturbing anybody.
 
Never used the Oran’s posture. I always keep my hands folded in the prayer posture.
 
I remember the first time I encountered it was during the 80’s. At our parish, the priest would say, “Let us join hands and pray…” etc. before the Our Father.

I’ve probably been (as a parishioner) to about a dozen parishes since then. Sometimes the priest would encourage the congregation to hold hands; other times, the priest would verbally discourage them from holding hands. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone comment on it in the last decade— people just kind of automatically do it.

Me, I don’t really hold hands, unless someone actively reaches for my hand. Then I’ll hold hands to be polite.

Here’s a Q&A on the subject from 2003… 14 years ago. 🙂 So the question has probably been around 10 or 20 years longer than that, lol… 🙂
 
well, that 80s priest was incorrect in that addition and editing… say the black, do the red. no more, no less
 
midori said:
I remember the first time I encountered it was during the 80’s. At our parish, the priest would say, “Let us join hands and pray…” etc. before the Our Father.
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Maybe the priest forgot where he was, holding hands for the Our Father is part of the rubrics for AA meetings.
 
You know how things were in the early/mid 80’s. 😉 Maybe I just bumped into some weird parishes (across different diocese in different states), but some of them seemed to be “priest’s preference” on various items, rather than being consistent. One was girl altar servers in the early-80’s; one was communion-under-one-species-only in the early 80’s; one was hold-hands-for-the-Our-Father in the mid-80’s. There was probably other stuff, but I didn’t pick up on it at the time.
 
gratefully (or sadly, depending on how you look at stuff outside of the Church) I was not alive in the 80s- im an ashamed Milennial haha
 
Good (name removed by moderator)ut, Deacon Jeff. We had a newly ordained priest join our Parish of 1,700 families about five years ago and proceed to set himself up as (it has been jokingly noted) the “rubrics police”. He wanted to actually instruct the faithful not to pray in this manner, not to hold hands during the Our Father and other issues. His point was that if it doesn’t explicitly state we should, then we shouldn’t. Our pastor and pastoral associate urged him to just “go with the flow”. That priest is now a pastor of two rural combined parishes, and has admitted to becoming more “mellow” regarding these types of issues. Meanwhile, the choice is left to the individual congregant.

Now we see a movement by the USCCB to establish a Intercultural training program, focused on the Hispanic Culture. I purchased one of the training manuals to use in my ministries, and was shocked at its content. The book recognizes the concept of “assimilation” but then goes on to describe a new generation of combined Hispanic/Western European US Church that will incorporate elements of both worshipping “traditions”. I gave the book to my pastoral associate and asked that we look at this whole topic in more depth. There are an additional 250 Hispanic families in our Parish, with 90% of their worship activities having become separate and distinct from the main congregation. So…given how it seems this cultural group is now impacting the Western European Rites potentially, I treat some of these other issues as … well, really non-issues in comparison
 
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Amen.
[Edit]
On second thoughts, I’d leave out the “probably.”
Amend to : It would be equally wrong …
 
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I don’t at Mass because it’s not the way I learned it as a kid, and in general I’m not at ease with such self-expression, I like to keep to myself in prayer. But I have nothing against those who do so, and I agree with (name removed by moderator) on this. Not a hill I would choose to die on. Most do it at the Masses I attend here in Quebec.

I do use it in my small oratory, when privately praying the Liturgy of the Hours (a pic of the oratory is my avatar).
 
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