Joseph, Benedict and the End of the Goofy Mass

One can hope, anyway.

You can, if you squint hard enough, detect the New York Times’s understated glee that Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church’s “pre-eminent conservative thinker and leader,” is dead. “Now he is gone,” the paper says at one point; elsewhere, reporting on the pontiff’s body lying in state, the paper notes that his remains were displayed without “the silver staff with crucifix or pallium, the vestment symbolizing papal authority” (emphasis added). And in a vignette about Benedict’s extended sway over the Church’s conservative wing after his retirement, the Times remarks: “Now no one has that influence.” Gee, I’m detecting a sentiment here. I dunno.

Benedict is indeed gone; for the practical day-to-day implications of the Church he has been gone for nearly a decade. There has certainly been quiet rejoicing from the Church’s “liberal” reformers on that front. Pope Francis has in some cases functioned as the precise opposite of Benedict, the former at times replacing the latter’s careful and cautious theology with a sort of freewheeling, scattershot approach to Catholic law. His “Amoris Laetitia” in 2016, for example, appeared chaotically to both re-affirm and upend settled Church teaching on divorce and remarriage; elsewhere he has signaled his support for homosexual “civil unions,” which anyone at this point can tell you is always a mere predecessor to “gay marriage.”

Francis is not as unabashedly progressive as his defenders in the media would have you believe—he has stood relatively firm on a considerable number of core Catholic beliefs and has pretty admirably criticized the people attacking them—but his papacy at times has felt like a perfect accompaniment to the modern Catholic Church in the way that Benedict’s felt like a coda to the earlier one. Non-Catholics might not be aware of this, but the Catholic Mass is a pretty rigidly proscribed ceremony, its forms and functions set and mandated in all but a few narrow aspects. And yet for several decades the Catholic Liturgy has been marked by wacky sort of disassociation, where priests who came up in the midcentury decades of liturgical reform just sort of hold court at their own weird leisure, in what I think of as the Goofy Mass. Go to any Mass today being led by a priest in his 60s or 70s and you’re apt to see that kind of thing: Random, rambling soliloquies inserted into the Mass for no discernible reason, corny props brought up to the altar to give the faithful a chuckle, priests riffing on the Missal offhand instead of reading from the clear and unambiguous text in front of them.

I’ve been to one local parish near me several times where, almost without fail, the priest will perform the following routine: During the homily he’ll go to reference some widely known pop-culture touchstone, a musician or a TV show or movie, and he’ll stop and stroke his chin and say, “Hmm, now what was it again? I can’t remember the name,” after which various members of the parish will shout out the word he’s looking for and he’ll snap his fingers and say, “That was it!” It is a bizarre thing to witness, in large part because it appears to be a regular part of how this priest does Mass. This has been de rigueur in much of the Church and has been for years: Priests just sort of winging it, the liturgy kind of a blank canvas upon which celebrants have painted their own loose interpretation of how a Mass should be. And that kind of carefree approach to the liturgy has in many cases bled over into the broader theological administration of the Church, watering down Catholic teaching to the point that it more closely resembles something almost akin to the Church of England.

And yet, the Times’s insistence notwithstanding, this kind of slapdash theology actually appears to be on its way out. Most notably, the parishes at which it’s still practiced are very old and getting older; at these churches there tends to be far more gray hair and far fewer bald babies in attendance. Unsurprisingly it’s the conservative parishes that have the youngest population, the actively growing base, the classically huge Catholic families. As Mark Steyn likes to say, the future belongs to those who show up for it, and the Catholics showing up for the future are largely the ones who want nothing to do with the Goofy Mass. The newest crop of priests and many of the younger bishops, meanwhile, are also increasingly devoted to reverent worship and vigorous theology; there has been something of a shift away from the dominant theological impulses of midcentury Catholicism (“Oh, I’m sure God doesn’t mind if you do that”) to something more resembling actual historical Catholic belief (“Go to Confession once a month, for starters”). None of it is yet perfect and of course it never will be, but there are encouraging signs nonetheless; the Times, for instance, acknowledges the broad sentiment that “the church’s future seems to lie in the southern hemisphere, especially in Africa and Asia,” which are still bastions of theological and liturgical conservatism.

So in a final burst of irony, it is actually Francis, not Benedict, who appears to be presiding over the functional end of his own preferred theological and liturgical styles, at least in the rough sort of way we can judge these things in the Church. His own demure suggestions notwithstanding, Francis still appears to have a great deal of life in him; at 86 he appears 10 years younger than Pope Saint John Paul II did at 84 when he died. He could have many years ahead of him in which to realize his particular visions. But even if we are to assume the most uncharitable things about Francis (and I don’t think we should), the contours of the Church appear to be moving much closer toward something more recognizably Benedictine, so to speak. Benedict is gone, and yes, “now no one has that influence,” but also it doesn’t appear to matter as much at this point, which is kind of how it’s supposed to be.