MUSINGS: LITURGY

FOOTBALL SATURDAY AND LITURGY, OR, WHAT BIG TIME COLLEGE FOOTBALL PROGRAMS KNOW ABOUT LITURGY THAT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH LEADERS DO NOT

As I recently watched the University of Michigan marching band go through their pre-game and post-game program, all of which are choreographed perfectly and without deviation from other times, I could not help reflect on how what they were doing was an inspiring liturgy, a glorious paean to the University.

For some 25 seasons starting with 1983 I had seasons tickets to the Michigan football games. During that time and beyond, not much ever changed. Michigan usually wins, of course, but in this essay I wish to focus on the fact that the band members as well as cheerleaders come and go, and yet, the “liturgy” changes hardly at all. Moreover, in the stadium, the thousands of students, almost none of whom were even alive in 1983, follow along with the festivities as if they had been born knowing what to do. What changes there have been have come about almost organically.

There is good reason why so little is allowed to change. The liturgy serves the purpose, sociologically speaking, of making new University members, mostly students, and some faculty and administrative staff personnel, know how to re-produce an important aspect, specifically sports, of the the University culture. It also serves to make the Alumni in the stadium feel that nothing essential has changed and that they remain part of something greater than themselves. College sports does serve to bind the people to their respective universities. 

All of which of course made me think of how the Catholic Church made an incredibly stupid decision to change the liturgy of the Mass in 1970. Apparently, the liturgical “experts” gave no thought to acculturation, the process of making newcomers feeling that they are part of an ongoing social environment, and what is more, feeling a strong tie to it. The insipid and frequently changing liturgical changes left young Catholics unable to reproduce the Church's society. The Novus Ordo, bad enough as it is, permitted priests to “experiment” with the liturgy, to say Mass as they saw fit, to ad lib the readings, and to allow the congregation to do their own experimenting, which now results in hand holding during the praying of the Our Father. Frequent change does not lend itself to an ability to re-produce society. Moreover, older Catholics, the Church's Alumni so to speak, have lost their sense of belonging to an ancient society, to be a member of the Church Militant, on their way to the glorious Church Triumphant.

Also, beneath the stadium stands I noted posters of many of the greatest Michigan football players of long past seasons. It was a secular form of veneration of the saints, something else the contemporary Church all but ignores.

In other words, I am saying that the secular University of Michigan has a better sense of liturgy than does the Catholic Church. After all, the University can take newcomers and in many ways, but including the Saturday football games, instill the University of Michigan ethos into newcomers, such as our daughter Dr. Rose Cory, an incoming University professor; and strengthen the sense of belonging to those already acclimated.  All the above has plenty to do with why so very many Michigan graduates stay close to their Alma Mater and generously fund it too. The modern Church on the other hand has little holding power. That has been unfortunately proven by the hundreds of millions that have left the Church in recent decades. The Church leaders could take a lesson from a secular university.

In 1974, Michael Novak wrote The Joy of Sports. Among other astute observations, he noted that people were getting something from sports that, as I understood him to mean, was absent in their daily lives. Which is to say that sporting events were filling a void in modern man. Now, I never trace any cause to a single variable, but I must note that the Catholic Church gave modern American man an uninspiring liturgy at the worst possible time, that is, when the culture was in flux with what amounted to a full scale cultural revolution. Instead of fighting back by keeping to the old ways, which would identify the Church as the counter-cultural institution that it is meant to be, the Church more or less joined the revolution by enjoining an “up-to-date” liturgy (read: a liturgy that more or less apes contemporary forms of personal interaction, music, and art; minus the liturgical conventions of attention, dignity, and reverence).

As I recall, there was a demeaning of college sports at that time. It did not last. The sporting events prevailed. I dare say they prevailed because they provided something the social revolution did not. To put it another way, big time college sports, and professional sports also, serve as a partial default to spiritual emptiness. Granted, sports are not sufficient onto salvation, but they are doing something that Catholicism,which is charged with bringing man to salvation, is not.