Full attention to and focus on the Mass?
I think it’s important to develop a definition of “active participation” that can’t be fully satisfied by someone watching on TV. In other words, if we define the concept down too far, it loses meaning and is no longer useful in discussing the liturgy.
Part of the problem, I think, is the notion people have that the faithful should “fully and actively participate” in
every part of the Mass. Since it’s obvious that we participate in a different way when we pray the Our Father out loud than when we listen to the priest confect the Eucharist, this leads those people to conclude that either (a) just listening and paying attention is sufficient for full and active participation, so nothing extra is happening during the Our Father that wouldn’t be happening if we all just thought about it silently, or (b) the Our Father is the right model, so we need to get people involved more in saying the Eucharistic Prayer, that sort of thing.
Both of these views, seem to me to be in error. The people simply don’t fully participate in confecting the Eucharist. The just
don’t. If they were all texting and listening to their iPods, or if they all got up and walked out, it would still happen in exactly the same way. The most we can say is that by paying attention and praying along they can participate
to the fullness of their station.
After all, if sitting and paying attention is as full and active as you can get, then what’s the priest moving his mouth and waving his hands for? Sit down, shut up, and quit distracting me from my full active participation, will ya?
All of this is fine by me. But it does mean that “full participation” is defined by the structure of each actor’s role in the liturgy, not the other way around. That seems to me to be the same way the Holy Father understands the concept in his writings. So when you sit and listen intently to the readings, you’re participating fully because that’s how the liturgy defines the extent of your role: to sit there and listen.
The problem, then, comes because you can no longer use “full participation” to shoot down people’s desire to have a more active role in the liturgy. “I’d like to do more.” --“You’re already doing all that the liturgy defines to be your role, so you’re participating fully.” --“Yes, I know; that’s why I want you to
change the liturgy, so that the definition of my proper role includes more.” And what that means is that there are no easy answers. If the liturgy defines your role as sitting there while the ministers quietly say the Kyrie, then you participate fully by sitting there. If the liturgy says you should respond alternatim with the celebrant, then that’s what you do. You can’t decide between these two models by saying you want the one that allows the laity to participate fully; they both do.
What about “actively,” though; does that give us a criterion to decide by?
If you think that I participated as actively in Bp. Slattery’s Mass at the National Shrine by thinking the Our Father while watching it on TV as I did by chanting the Our Father out loud together with a churchfull of people at Mass this past Sunday, I must say I disagree. If “thinking along” while watching on TV is as active as it gets, then why bother assembling a group of people for the liturgy at all? No, I don’t believe it.
There are different levels of activity in participation, and I don’t think that the laity must be
fully active in
everything. And they really can’t, unless they’re writing the prayers and confecting the Eucharist. That’s
okay, though. Screw “fully active” participation, it’s a myth and always has been. Only the must utter radicals (non-Catholic) could possibly support it if they knew what it was. Instead, they like the
sound of the phrase, but agree with you and me about the implementation, so they misdefine the phrase to mean, “Pretty much what we have now.”
So if someone says, “I’d like to participate more actively in the Collect,” the answer can’t be, “That’s impossible, you can’t get more active than listening to it, which is what you already do” because it the person got to write the Collect then go up to the front and recite it for everyone, that simply
would be a more active role. Instead, you actually have to do some of the mental heavy lifting and explain
why the laity’s proper role is listening to the priest recite the Collect, and no more.
Rant over. My ultimate point is that either (1) full, active participation is a meaningless platitude that means “paying attention,” in which case it can have no effect on the shape of the liturgy, since if you can fully pay attention to prayers you can’t hear while the priest is facing away from you then you can pay attention to
anything, or (2) we need to fess up and admit that people can
fully participate by filling their prescribed role, which in many cases will not be
fully active, but in any event (3) people could always be given a more active role in the liturgy than they have – like developing and running it – but we’re not going to give it to them, and we actually need to come up with structural and theological explanations as to why that is.
I think it’s a safe bet they won’t change “Et cum spiritu tuo.”