Respect for the praying People of God
By Joseph F. Wilson

"Why don't you have everyone come in and join us," I ask quietly, and almost always they all come in to gather around the bed. Like most priests I frequently find myself at sick beds. One learns what to look for, and develops a sensitivity to the needs of the situation. Often the family members feel helpless as their loved one sinks into the final illness; some deal with this helplessness by aggressively taking over the situation and questioning medical decisions, while others retreat into a passive silence. Not infrequently there have been family quarrels during the illness, and sullen quiet reigns.

It's a wonderful thing, then, to be able to gather everyone around the bed to pray. One sees the great advantage of the vernacular rite for administering the sacraments, although often it is necessary to trim the verbose prayers and exhortations (privately I harbor the dark suspicion that, even in cases where the patient is not in extremis, there are probably very few priests actually reading through the "Prayer over the Oil" before anointing!). Joining together in prayer is a good experience for all present-the prayer of the liturgy as well as our devotional prayers.

Recently I was administering the sacraments to an elderly lady as her family gathered around, and as she was unable to make her confession I asked her to be sorry for her sins as we prayed the Act of Contrition. I could see that she was carefully following the familiar words, and what a lovely moment it was as the family members joined me as we expressed sorrow for our sins "most of all, because they offend Thee, my God, Who art all good, and worthy of all my love."

All, that is, except the younger family members. They didn't know the words.

A few days later I was presiding at a wake service. The deceased was a member of the Rosary Society, and, as is my custom, I suggested that we join in a decade of the Rosary before the final prayer. Older folks present knew precisely what we were doing, but I sensed confusion among the many young people as I started the Our Father (for they had never prayed antiphonally before, and some said the whole prayer with me). They knew the Hail Mary (nowadays we thank God for little things!), and caught on that they were supposed to say the second part of each prayer. But they fell completely silent at the Gloria Patri, and when I started the Hail, Holy Queen there were no more than ten voices out of fifty praying with me.

We've lost a common language of prayer, and I suspect that we don't even realize how this loss has impoverished us. I think the loss is regrettable, and, insofar as it has been deliberate, it is reprehensible.

Why do I say deliberate?

Several years ago the Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy (BCL) published a prayer book for the home, Catholic Household Blessings and Prayers. It was widely advertised and enthusiastically promoted, and I was asked to review it for a Catholic publication. It was published as a sort of ancillary volume to the new official Book of Blessings, the ritual for blessing persons, places and things, and it was meant to serve the home, the domestic church. Initially I was very well disposed to this effort. The idea of the Catholic Family prayer book, beautifully bound and illustrated, a book with prayer texts for the whole family to use and re-use and come to love-what a neat idea! This was a book for the living room coffee table, or the dining room sideboard, a book to which the family would have daily recourse whether they were praying together after supper or individually. I intended to promote it among families of my parish.

The BCL prayer book is a remarkable book-I have seldom encountered anything so disappointing. It was put together so carefully, and promoted so enthusiastically, but upon careful examination I came away wondering for whom it had been compiled. A multiplicity of prayer texts for every occasion had been included in this book, many of which were scriptural quotes or scripturally-based-but I have never met a Catholic family which would take this book to heart. How could the BCL have put together a prayer book intended for Catholic Americans which virtually ignored the rich devotional traditions of the different ethnic groups which make up our Church-not to mention the Eastern Church? Here was an opportunity for us to learn from each other about the different ways of prayer we received from our parents-an opportunity squandered.

The BCL prayer book was composed for people without parents or grandparents or traditions. How is it possible that there are no novenas in this prayer book? Were none of the members of the BCL ever parish priests? Did none of them ever know a parishioner with a deeply urgent prayer intention who appreciated the prayer form of a novena, stretching out his or her prayer over nine days or a month? Did they never encounter a parishioner who was bedridden and would love to pray, say, the Miraculous Medal Novena every Monday-to mention the most famous of them-because she had faithfully attended the Novena in her parish church for years? The section on Marian Prayer would have been laughable if it were not so sad-four prayers, with a curt explanation on the Rosary from which no one could possibly have learned how it is prayed (the Litany of Loreto is also included, in another section of the book). What if one wanted to bring this prayer book to church to pray the stations of the cross? There are a number of rich forms for praying the stations-you won't find them here. A great practical help in a prayer book is the examination of conscience in preparation for confession, and how helpful it would also be to have a children's examination of conscience for parents helping their kids to get ready for the sacrament of penance: you won't find it in the BCL prayer book. Were you seeking to use its section on preparing for Holy Communion or thanksgiving afterwards, you'll find a few brief prayers in the section on preparing for Communion (new and banal translations of the Prayer Before a Crucifix and Pange Lingua), no section at all on thanksgiving after Communion. One would be able to turn to any good-sized Catholic prayer book of a generation ago to find rich resources for these needs.

A generation ago, Catholic prayer books were put together with real Catholics in mind- praying people. A Catholic prayer book was a celebration of our Catholic customs-one opened it and encountered a host of familiar friends, prayer texts with which one had been raised. The BCL book is an excessively cerebral, idealized attempt by a committee to present a prayer resource for people who only exist on paper. The compilers were transfixed by the desire to promote a form of prayer they called "blessings," rooted in scripture and giving thanks for this and that, and obviously desired to mold Catholic devotional prayer in a new direction.

I don't invoke this book's memory here because of any influence it has had-as far as I can see it sank with a thud to the murky depths of postconciliar experimentation, where it rests with "Bible Vigils" and Lucien Deiss and Ray Repp hymns. I only mention it because it is an example of a disturbing, deliberate and well-established tendency to ignore, and treat with irreverence, the cherished customs of our people-the people whom we profess to serve. It's a revealing example, because it is an official example of what some of our bishops apparently would like to do with our people's devotional lives-for the BCL is their committee. It looks to me as though the book suffers from a lack of acquaintance with and appreciation for our people's devotional customs.

In the course of the liturgical revision, did anyone ever stop to ask, "Should we really change the text of the Gloria Patri? Isn't this one of our common texts, belonging to all of us?" If no one ever asked that question, I think it's very sad. The people in my parish pray the Rosary twice a day in common, reciting as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. But when the text is encountered in the liturgy, as in the Office, they find as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen. Leaving aside the question of whether this is an improvement (I can't resist noting here that the editors of the American edition of The Liturgy of the Hours have presumed to improve even on Cardinal Newman's hymns by updating them-I sincerely doubt that quality was ever a goal they espoused), why let a committee tamper with something which should be our common property as Catholics? The liturgists went so far as to try to introduce a New and Improved Our Father into the liturgy, but even our bishops balked at that.

A Catholic turning to the BCL prayer book to look up the Memorare-wishing, perhaps, to teach it to his children-will indeed find it, kinda, sort of. Remember, most loving Virgin Mary, never was it heard that anyone who turned to you for help was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, though burdened by my sins, I run to your protection, for you are my mother . . . If he were to look for the familiar Prayer Before a Crucifix, this is what he would find:

Good and gentle Jesus,

I doubt that anyone would describe that text as noble, or inspiring-in fact, it isn't even catchy! Obviously someone thinks it is effective-it's in one of the official publications of our Church. It makes me wonder: in the world, there are few people under more pressure than advertising executives. They spend their days scrutinizing the packaging as well as the message, and they do so with the criterion of effectiveness in their minds. I wonder how they would look at that text-or at any of the texts or methods of teaching we have adopted in the last quarter century, in light of a Mass attendance drop which may be as high as 60 percent.

The end result of this is so sad-gather a group of Catholics together and it is almost impossible to lead them in anything but an Our Father and a Hail Mary unless everyone's nose is buried in a worship aid. The older Catholic prays with texts which Acts of Committee have discarded; younger Catholics haven't learned most of the prayers to begin with. Where I as a priest should be able to invite a group of Catholics to join together in a Memorare or a Hail Holy Queen or the Divine Praises, I often have to refrain because it would exclude more people than it would include.

And the saddest thing of all is to see how joyfully responsive younger Catholics often are when they encounter traditional devotions and customs such as the Forty Hours-I say "saddest" because it shows that the impoverished state of our common prayer has robbed them of their birthright and the Church of a great deal of vitality.

Not long ago I was speaking with a contemporary liturgist about my conviction that we are the poorer for the passing of the hand missal, with the daily Mass texts and a good section of devotional prayers, and its replacement with the widespread use of throwaway worship aids. The liturgist reacted strongly, of course-he hates to see people using missals at Mass (even though people find them helpful), and he went on to say, as strongly as possible, that if a book contains liturgical texts it is a liturgical book and it's wrong to have devotional prayers appear in a liturgical book-even one designed for use by the people.

This is madness. This guy isn't interested in what helps people to pray! The devotional section I clearly remember in the hand missal of my youth-its prayers before and after Communion, its litanies, its examination of conscience-it was all incorrect? It helped me to pray. It greatly enhanced the value of the missal to me. But it has now been decided that it was technically incorrect. As a matter of fact, upon looking back I can see that there was a lot of technically incorrect stuff going on in our churches a generation ago. . . . our filled churches.

A final hospital story. Three days ago as I write this, I was making my rounds in the hospital covered by my parish, and found myself by the bed of a woman in her seventies who brightened as soon as she saw me. She was on the phone, and I offered to return, but she would have none of it; she sat up and asked me if I had brought her the sacraments. We chatted for a bit and she reached over to the drawer by her bed, pulling out a small, worn manila envelope. In it was a battered Key of Heaven, the old prayer book which was the mainstay of an earlier generation's prayer, and something else I've often seen-a rubber-banded wad of prayer cards containing everything from novenas to prayers to the saints to obituary cards of loved ones. "Oh, Father, I'm never alone, not even here. God is always with us," she said serenely, holding the precious parcel of her prayers, those little pieces of paper so fragrant for her with happy, prayerful associations.

Being a parish priest is wonderful-you learn far more than you could ever teach. I left the hospital that night reflecting on that kind of piety, which nowadays so many seem impatiently, contemptuously to overlook, waiting for it to die out. I hope that it never does-but it would be nice if, as a Church, we actually fostered it; if when that lady's granddaughter reaches old age and ends up in a hospital bed she has something to hold on to and isn't reduced to humming Eagles' Wings over and over again. Let us hope and pray that as a Church we might begin to recover a few things we are losing, and teach them to our young, so that if, should some priest standing by her bed murmur, Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, she can answer trustfully, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. n