Notes from the 2016 Notre Dame Symposium 4: Sociology - the Mobile Culture

MICHAEL MCCALLION: "Liturgy, Sociology and the New Evangelization" 

We have a communal relationship with the liturgy. 

The problem: we have to stay put in order to have community.  We have "collective effervescence" -  too much individualism.

What is the optimal level of social connectedness? 

We need communal relationship with Jesus.  But our first impulse is individualism and we have such mobile lives...   We live de-synchronized with friends and family.

What are the ways we create community in the liturgy?

Common repertoire of liturgical music is important. People in pews appreciate fewer songs. They don't sing if they don't know the songs.

It boils down to "Playing well" with the liturgy.

How do we evaluate if?

We need fewer meetings, more processions.

Pp 129 -133 in Tim I'malleys book. Eucharistic  center - Who's going to do this?  

We need better trained staff, more commitment to develop better liturgy

It's the music... people

The issue is upward social mobility. We move away... Makes it hard to form community.

Q & A:

Disses Rebuilt for breaking up community...

Architecture facilitates or hinders community

Balance -Needs to internalize faith and take it out into the homes personal and communal in balance.

NEXT NOTES: 5: "Liturgy, Formation and Evangelization"

Notes from the 2016 Notre Dame Symposium 3: Popular Culture - What Can We Learn from It?

DORA TOBAR: "Popular Culture and Liturgy in the New Evangelization" 

Popularized cultures in North American church's evangelization scenario:

Secularized Spiritual Culture - more pervasive. Sacred is recognized in society but we in the church fail to recognize it as sacred. We need to make pact with it.

• Spirituality without form - new age - trying to break free from tradition. Defines itself by contrast with established religiosity. People are thirsty for spiritual experience 
• Spiritual spontaneity 
• Search for wholeness and holistic integration with reality
• Search for personal-existential relationship with the sacred
• Feminine aspect of humanity and women's leadership 
• Incarnational-existential relationship with divinity in a new integral cosmology(looking for a new cosmology that makes sense in our reality 
• Creation-friendly religion (Pope Francis is trying to do this
• Wholeness rather than an ideal human perfection
• Integrality without dualism  
• Inner consciences and discernment rather than hierarchical authority
• Spirituality and real, concrete stories (religion as experiences of individual people
• Authenticity before worldly powers
• Sibling model of brotherhood rather than hierarchical difference 
• 
  

New spirituality is not collective, but is a personal experience.  

Hispanic popular piety- characteristics result of centuries of intercultural dialog

• Is magic - sense that is supra-rational and intuitive 
• Is symbolic and rich in images (natural and supernatural) people want to touch God
• Is emotional- exististential
• Festive-theatrical 
• Collective and politic religiosity identifies and unites them
• Is natural cosmic religiosity- follows natural times and moments (bad when their is a new cosmology for new generation)
• Family rooted tradition transmitted at home by mothers and grandmothers -issues arise when families no longer speak a common language between the generations.

Charismatic Hispanic Movement

• Spiritual gifts (charisma) available to contemporary and ordinary Christians
• Preachers -often women- give testimonies, not lectures
• Music and invocations to pray allow everyone to participate
• Rich in emotional and existential connection - many bodily expressions are involved
• Worship is centered on establishing wa personal connection with God
• 
  

Lot of commonality between these three spiritualities. All are outside the temple, all rely on the Holy Spirit...

Charismatic movement engages more in renewed experience of faith than traditional devotions.

For younger Hispanics raised in modern cosmology,  traditional symbols don't make sense.

See EG 123,  EN  48, AAS 68 popular religiosity 

Popular religiosity has much to teach us, has missionary power.  EG 124

Nw evangelization has - Pope Francis (in common with popular religiosity)

• Incarnational-sympathetic commitment with human pain 
• Not message to pass but personal encounter with JC
• Joy and festive Attitude mark the style 
• Discerning and openness is pastoral attitude
• Jesus, with his Holy Spirit is primary agent EG 11.  & 49
• Starts at intimacy with Holy Family

See SC 40!!!! If people cannot understand the liturgy in their culture, adaptations must be made

Question: Should we do more Liturgical catechesis or should we make liturgical language more accessible to today's people's cultural range of comprehension?

Inculturation is not simply adaptation is dialog that allows people to fully and consciously participate in the liturgy. Pastoral suggestions:

• Happy popular beauty connect liturgy with heart and soul of the people 
• Personal-exististential language in preaching is essential
• Listen to the Spirit

NEXT NOTES: 4 - "Liturgy, Sociology and the New Evangelization"

Notes from the 2016 Notre Dame Symposium 2: Liturgy in a Digital World

DANIELLA ZSUSPAN-JEROME: "Digital Media and the Liturgical Capacity of the Christian"

The myth of the Golem (Jewish) symbol of dark side of technology... he was a created monster... Digital technology is our Golem today.  Digital culture has spiritual implications  profound relationship to the liturgy.

Not talking about technology IN the liturgy. EWTN Mass -example: book, glasses, TV camera... We forget these are also forms of human technology.

Techne (Greek) =art, skill or craft

Practical things that extend human capacity - always paired with human action

Technology sometimes has become symbol in the liturgy.  Candle is example. So is microphone headset... it means leadership.

However, objects and tools matter. They make sense in broader cultural context. Multiple meanings "Madonna headset" became a name for the headset mic, for example.

Technology always has a interactive human element.

Digital culture has subcultures, lots of layers.

LENSES to look at technology:

• Values - innovation participation, ubiquity, collaboration simultaneity, creativity
• Beliefs - newer is better, belonging matters over content, partipation matters, access is possible
• Practices - (missed it - sorry)
• Artifacts- mobile devices with cameras, apps, bio-responsive technology, social media platforms, Internet of Things

Curation - focusing and filtering information to avoid information overload. Individuals choose trusted filters.  The Missal and Lectionary are  examples of curation of texts.

Key question: How do we (re)establish the liturgy as primary curator of meaning?

Connection: we are plugged in all the time and loosely connected to others through information... Belonging to the network.  Continuous partial attention. We are not in the habit of going deep.

How can the liturgy be way to move us from connection to communion?

Self instrumentalization. Data about us is currency of digital age. As data we are means to an end. We are willing to do this as a price for continual connection. Violent communication is one outcome. (We are critical and some people do not care what they say (trolls)

How do we recover encounter instead of instrumentality and primacy of person in communion?

Liturgy gives us an Incarnational model for culture, including digital culture. see Ad Gentes 10

The incarnation speaks to digital culture. Communion et progressio 11. 

Liturgy embodies culture. Offers context for how incarnation offers model for digital world

Communicating in the manner of the incarnation:

• Listen First - Mary as open to welcome the Word her fiat is trust choosing a posture of -trust and authenticity 
• Words  Give Life -  Mary with child in womb - mutual encounter communication - body and presence
• Self Gift in Love  Christ is perfect communicator. Communication begets communion. Deeper connection  to liturgy
• Bear the Fruit  - openness to Spirit... faithful and authentic communication Galations 5:22 in the liturgy how do we connect the Word as fruit

What can the liturgy do? What can it not do? What do we want it to do? How can it reveal the pattern of the incarnation? How can it be prophetic?

Q & A

Shallowness of encounter in parish life... Distinction between digital culture and reality is not there

Value of the new. (New is better.)

Relationship between digital culture and the aesthetic....


NEXT NOTES: 3 - "Popular Culture and the New Evangelization"

Notes from the 2016 Notre Dame Symposium 1: Parents Matter

CHRISTIAN SMITH & JUSTIN BARTKUS:  "From Generation to Generation: How American Catholic Parents Today Approach Passing on the Faith to their Children"

Parents are the biggest influence on American teenagers. The predicted religiosity of young adults can be identified by age 15. Parents who attend religious services regularly have teens whose religiosity is stable- high. Other factors don't have quite as much effect. The most powerful factor is parents who talk about faith at home.

Studied 245 parents 73 were Catholic from upper, middle & lower classes. Personal in depth interviews

The household is a culture in miniature a meaning-making project. It is fundamental to children's existential initiation. It is permeable to other cultures - sports, faith, etc.

Parental transmission of faith is a cultural project
Catholicism is a lifelong commitment
Success happens when maturing children see that Catholic commitment = success.
Failure happens when maturing children see that Catholic commitment = failure.

Children must perceive intrinsic value to religious commitment. They easily see inauthenticity when they see gaps in modeling or elevation of other priorities.

Parents are "arch-celebrities" in their household by power of personality practices and way of being - they model & generate culture of household. they are the dominant influence.

Many Catholic parents outsource religion to the parish program.

Interview with mother of 3 teens who is personally devoted to faith.. has the intention to transmit, but her religiosity is thin. So sends them to religious ed.

Any household that intends to transmit faith has to have

1. narrative of motives
2. degree of conscious intentionality
3. parents supplying religious content
4. enacted interpretation of intended religiosity at key moments in family life

Common motives:

• Dogmatic
• Individualistic
• Morale boost
• Ethnic -family identity 
• Formational
• Moralistic

Many are inarticulate/ineffective

Key question is there gap between motive and commitment?

When parents reflect on their motive there is coherence
Frequent, repetitive and participatory

Religious content takes several forms:
Practices
Relationships
Volunteering

Institutions and programs are secondary to parental modeling.
Failure is not because of bad programming but failure of parental modeling
Effective households reflect inter penetration of church & home
Religious content is not in itself enough

Enacted interpretation:

• Conversations in household
• Parental explicitness about transmission
• Outward manifestation of parental conversion
• Substantial processing of religious motives in life experiences I the household

Spiritual personality of parents is single most powerful force. Possible only if they intend transmission

Parents and churches both need to understand centrality of parental role. Faith cannot be seen as belonging only to parents.Parents are Gatekeepers, Sponsors, Interpreters of Catholicism to their children

Q & A
Who is the carrier of Catholic faith now? The old carriers in our culture don't carry any more. The challenge is for parent and churches to be reflexive now.

Empower parents to share faith, don't shame them.


NEXT NOTES: 2 - "Digital Media and the Liturgical Capacity of the Christian"

It's Simple: If Parents Want Kids to Be Catholics, THEY Need to be Catholics!

Marc Cardonarella boils it down to its essence: kids are disengaged and leave the Church after Confirmation because many parents are doing it wrong. Expecting the local parish religious education program to turn their kids into lifelong Catholics in one hour a week (or a Catholic school to do it when the parents don't practice the faith at home) is futile.

In his new book,  Keep Your Kids Catholic: Sharing Your Faith and Making it Stick, Cardonarella, a parent and religious educator who himself was missing from the Church between Confirmation and late young adulthood, lays it on the line for parents:  "Your actions are an education for your children. How you live your life will significantly influence who and what  they become. So, if you want them to be religious, you need to be religious yourself."  This is the heart of what we need to say to parents.

Cardonarella doesn't stop with saying it. He leads the reader through a process of self-evaluation of relationship with God, prayer life, liturgical life - and more - and lays out a plan for parents to learn and grow in the faith.

His analysis of how typical catechesis is failing to engage young people, based on the wisdom of Cardinal Newman, hits at the heart of how that, too, needs to change. In Chapter 3, he notes:

Teaching that come solely from a textbook creates a merely notional assent, passive involvement, and a distanced and indifferent religion. Thus, students' lives are never touched by the real and personal. They remain unchanged by their religion because the religion they experience is bland, weak and unspectacular....Human persons are moved to action not by intellectual abstractions, but by personal influence and powerful example, as well as by engaging their imagines with the concrete realities of life. When we interact with others personally, we open ourselves to deep encounter and change. Without that engagement and interaction, Catholicism is just a bunch of words and listless actions. To some, it will be logical, reasonable, even interesting, but will remain just one theory among many. Faith itself becomes notional - abstract and distant - rather than real.

 So, beyond laying out a path for parents, he challenges religious educators to reconsider how they are delivering the faith.  Recently he presented a webinar on just that topic:

Keep Your Kids Catholic is a real page-turner, filled with stories, personal witness and a concrete plan for change. It is must-read for parents, but also for religious educators.  Highly recommended.

Disclaimer: I received a review copy at no charge in exchange for an honest review. 

Sacrosanctum Concilium: The Renewal of the Liturgy has a Long Way to Go

Last night, I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Timothy O'Malley of the University of Notre Dame Center for Liturgy speak on "The Work of Our Redemption: A Liturgical Theology of Sacrosanctum Concilium" wherein he noted that this Vatican II Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was aimed not so much at "reform" but "renewal" of the liturgy.

He noted two important things in particular about that infamous "full, conscious and active participation" mentioned in SC that I will have to spend more time with: that the combined voices of the people at Mass are the voice of Christ, lifting up the prayer of the Mass to the Father and that the people are there to offer their lives, along with Christ, to the Father with the sacrifice of the Mass - to become a sacrifice of "self-giving love," as O'Malley emphasizes in his book.

Certainly, neither concept is new to me. However, in reflection on what I heard last night, I am even more convinced that these are two areas in which we have almost completely failed  in typical parish catechesis. Many of our young people leave behind  practice of the Mass after Confirmation (current stats are that only 22% of young adults regularly attend). Why? They think Mass is boring and repetitive. They don't see the point in going. This is not just true of young people, but of many in previous generations as well. Even those in the pews tell me that they really don't fully understand the role of the Assembly (the people in the pews) at Mass.

Most parish catechesis does a reasonably benign job of helping people understand the missional actions of love which Christ calls us to - those works of mercy expressed so well in the words of St. Teresa of Avila:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

What's missing from this equation?  Christ has no voice but yours - no voice to lift his sacrifice of praise to the Father. We don't teach people that their voice, in word and song at Mass, is integral to their identity as members of the Body of Christ.  Why else would people attend Mass passively, not singing or responding, only mimicking the postures and gestures of everyone else in the room? (Yes, I see that - as a cantor, facing the people. I see parents not participating and kids beside them, learning by example not to participate.)

Parish leaders and catechists think that preparation for lifelong participation in the Mass is complete after they prepare someone for their First Eucharist. We have, often, a congregation of people who have not progressed a whole lot in their level of appreciation or participation beyond a second-grade level. They sit, stand and kneel on cue, and most at least stumble through the Creed and say the "Our Father" but may do little else. Why?  Because they have never seen their "job description" for full participation in the Mass. This needs to change. Want to look at that "job description?" This might help.

That second point, offering their lives to God at the Mass, is key, but it, too, has gotten little attention. When I tell people about paragraph 901 in the Catechism, it is often the first time they have heard that when the bread and wine are offered on the altar, they are to offer their lives:

 "Hence the laity, dedicated as they are to Christ and anointed by the Holy Spirit, are marvellously called and prepared so that even richer fruits of the Spirit maybe produced in them. For all their works, prayers, and apostolic undertakings, family and married life, daily work, relaxation of mind and body, if they are accomplished in the Spirit - indeed even the hardships of life if patiently born - all these become spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. In the celebration of the Eucharist these may most fittingly be offered to the Father along with the body of the Lord. and so, worshipping everywhere by their holy actions, the laity consecrate the world itself to God, everywhere offering worship by the holiness of their lives."  (CCC 901)

That consecration of the world is the real goal of the work of the people that is the liturgy. Growing in holiness themselves through participation in the sacrifice and taking it beyond the church doors to sanctify the world through their actions of self-giving love - none of that happens if they are simply sleepwalking through the Mass.  We have work to do!

If you have been reading this blog or know the book project I just completed with Liturgy Training Publications, you know it has long been a passion of mine to help people understand their role in the Mass. What I heard last night confirmed that this is crucially important work - something all church leaders need to be about. If we continue to fail to help people see why the Mass is important to them - and they are important to the Mass, we will continue to see a decline in the Church. The time to wake up to the need for good liturgical catechesis at all age levels in parishes is now. The very life of the Church depends on it.

A Special Community: All Are Welcome to Celebrate in Their Own Way

Yesterday, in my role as diocesan contact for disabilities, I had the privilege of joining one of our local parishes for a celebration of the 50th anniversary of their special needs religious education program and the first communion of three young people in the program. Rarely have I felt such a sense that everyone at a Mass belonged to a large and diverse family, all united by one goal - the love of special children. This unity of purpose certainly permeated the celebration of the liturgy.

The opening procession was a delightfully messy affair that included all the children in the program and their parents. Some kids walked in on their own, others with the help of a parent's guiding hands firmly on their shoulders. Some even wore noise-canceling headphones because of their sensitivity to noise.

As the choir and the rest of the assembly sang the opening "Song of the Body of Christ" the children and young adults shuffled, marched and were gently prodded into place in the pews. "We come as your people. We come as your own, United with each other, love finds a home." Indeed.

The pastor preceded his formal greeting with a shout of joy.  "Whoo-eee!  Fifty years! That's a long time!" What followed was a beautiful, sincere celebration.  The liturgy was simple and heartfelt and those who took roles in the ministries of the Mass were competent, or assisted in whatever ways they needed to be competent. There was no hesitation. These are people who do this often, and they do it well.

The altar server performed his duties reverently and admirably. The first reader signed as the interpreter read.  Those who read intercessions did so with little prompting or need for assistance. The petite young woman with Down Syndrome who served as an Extraordinary Ministry of the Eucharist was competent and confident.

Everything was interpreted in sign language for the benefit of the deaf, who sat in a special section. There were only a few children who shouted out or got away from their parents.  On the contrary - all of them knew exactly what to do at Mass. (In fact, most were better behaved and more engaged in the Mass than typical children their age!) The three who received their First Communion had obviously been well-prepared.

Special young people indeed. These live with Down Syndrome, Autism and many other varieties of disability, but there was no lack of ability to celebrate the liturgy. Those who could sing did. The deaf signed their responses.  Applause, when called for, was expressed by waving their hands in the air.  "Alleluia" was two index fingers crooked and twirled in the air. At the end of the Mass, all the young people gathered in the sanctuary to offer their own praise by joining in gestures to an upbeat version of "How Great Thou Art"

Through it all, there were the parents. From the moment they firmly guided their children into church, it was clear that not only did they love these kids and want them to be a part of the community of faith, but that they shared their lives of  joy and challenges with this community. There was a sense of purpose and solidarity. None of these families have an easy life, but it was not hard to believe that dealing with their challenges together has made them stronger. This is a beautiful community with staying power. Yesterday, they brought all that to the altar and offered their thanks and praise to the God who sustains them, It could not have been more powerful.