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The recently beatified Cardinal John Henry Newman was famous for his long sermons. It was not unusual for him to preach for an hour or and hour and a half. Long reflective pauses punctuated paragraph after paragraph of insights into God and the Sacred Scriptures. He had a deep desire to challenge and even shock the self-assured Christian into growth. Nothing bothered him more than the golden ticket theory. I’m a Catholic, the Catholic Church is the true Church, my salvation is assured. In a sermon for All Saints day one year, he allowed his listeners to congratulate themselves on making it to Mass for this feast day, letting them feel warm and fuzzy. How wonderful it is that you’re here! Then he rebuked them. But where are you, he said, on the days of individual saints throughout the year? Where has the devotion gone that inspired processions, novenas, triduums? Why is it, he asked, that we congratulate ourselves for making it out for All Saints, as a kind of catch all day, when so many daily occasions are lost?
Of course we can sympathize with Cardinal Newman. The very idea of Holy Days of Obligation runs contrary to the nature of the days they describe. Why should any Catholic need to be obliged to attend Mass on a special feast day? How would we feel if our wife or our husband or parents said to us, “today is my birthday, I oblige you to take me out to dinner.”? No, the very nature of these great days is that they should draw out our affection and devotion so that we want to be there, we want to celebrate with them, not out of obligation, but out of love. Why do we limit ourselves to just a few special holidays? Why not, dare I say it, every day? There was a time, when the passing of the year was defined not by Columbus Day, or Memorial Day, but by September 14th, the Exaltation of the Cross, by August 15th, the Assumption. Even the passing of seasons was inaugurated by the great feasts. Summer’s height on June the 24th the Feast of St John the Baptist, and Winter’s completion on Christmas Day.
The great love and devotion to the lives of the saints pours off the pages of the very Mass we are celebrating. Besides the cover of the program which shows Christ surrounded in majesty by all the saints, you’ll notice that nearly every single prayer that the priest prays in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass has some invocation of a saint or saints. You might play a game with your kids. Ask them to look through the program, preferably after Mass, and count how many references to the saints they can find. I have found over 50. And isn’t this totally appropriate? What do parents and grandparents do when they sit down with each other, but talk about their children and grandchildren? So at the supreme moment of the Church’s worship, she desires to mention all those who witnessed by their lives, and often their deaths, the saving power of Christ.
Where has this immersion in the liturgical calendar of the Church gone? It is now easier to find statues of saints in antique stores than in Churches. Pope Benedict has called it the new iconoclasm. The motives seem to have been two: much of the art of the last 100 years, it is said, was kitsch and distasteful. That produces a false piety which is not sound and substantial. It is not hard to disagree with such an aesthetic assessment, but one must also ask, is not all devotion slightly sentimental? Is there no place for sentiment in our loves?
The more theological rationale is the often repeated fear that devotion to the saints is superstitious and takes away our focus from the True Mediator, Jesus Christ. In the name of this fear, whole Churches have been empties, white washed, or just torn down. If this were indeed the case there would indeed be cause for concern. But what parent does not feel honored when his child is honored. What child does not revel in the warmth and comfort of his father’s achievements? If Christ is truly God, what sadness could he possibly have over celebrating all those who loved him, all those who died for Him?
The death of the cult of saints over the past forty years is all the more depressing when one recalls that the documents of the Second Vatican Council said:
It is supremely fitting, therefore, that we love those friends and coheirs of Jesus Christ, who are also our brothers and extraordinary benefactors, that we render due thanks to God for them and “suppliantly invoke them and have recourse to their prayers, their power and help in obtaining benefits from God through His Son, Jesus Christ, who is our Redeemer and Savior” (Lumen Gentium, 50,3).
To God, in this matter, there is no confusion.
Occasions like today’s Solemn Organ Mass can remind us just how much we have lost, and just how much we’ve gained. Although the Council gave no indications to diminish the cult of saints, the last forty years have systematically destroyed a world of delight and beauty. In much of that time, the recovery of that beauty seemed impossible. Only a world of stark cement and steel awaited us, where feelings and symbols had no place. And yet in the past 5 years the landscape has begun to change. A young group of priests finds increasingly that the liturgical treasures of the past are worth rediscovering. A young group of laypeople finds that the old devotions are worth recovering. A new Pope decides that and Old Mass is worth restoring. An old Cathedral decides a new organ is worth building.
And here Tolkien’s famous poem cries for a listening:
All that is gold does not glitter,
not all those who wander are lost;
the old that is strong does not wither,
deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
a light from the shadows shall spring;
renewed shall be blade that was broken,
the crownless again shall be king.