What we've lost.

Rich Leonardi visits his father's boyhood parish church, slated for closing and sale.

Before leaving, I was permitted access to the massive choir loft for a full view of the apse and nave. At the risk of sounding maudlin, I started crying. This church, which at its peak celebrated five Masses during the week and seven on Sundays, which my father and his family spent countless hours serving and worshiping in, probably won't survive. I grew up less than five miles away. Why had my father never taken ten minutes on a Saturday afternoon to show me this place? And then I felt bitter. We traded heavenly cathedrals like this for barns in the suburbs? We gave up Mozart's "Requiem," Byrd's "Mass for Five Voices," and Schubert's "Mass in G" for guitar-strumming, tasteless "family masses"? Justice must require the payment of a debt attached to the destruction and neglect of so much beauty.

It's not so much that the guitar-strumming family masses, in and of themselves, were such a bad idea.  As a supplement to the heritage we already had --- why not?  Fads come in, fads go out, that's life.

But as a replacement for "out-dated" beauty?

I'm Catholic; I'm thirty-one. I'm angry that a whole generation before me threw all that splendor away, and wants me to say "Thank you" that I have guitar-strumming family masses instead.   My generation of Catholics has only scattered scraps of Catholic culture, that we have to pull together into a crazy-quilt, something that we can hand down to our children.   It's not clinging to the past when we ought to move forward; it's sorrowing that our inheritance was squandered.   And it's not an alien experience here in America:  what race's children hasn't sorrowed, at times, over what was lost when their parents were (by force or by choice) "assimilated?"

Blogger and matchbook-collector James Lileks has written, if I remember right, that he'd give up a year of his life to spend ten minutes walking city streets in the 1940s. I don't know if I'd give up much life for it, but I have a sort of "Twilight-Zone" fantasy that goes like this:  I am walking down a city street and happen to pass a crumbling, graceful church, the sort built to serve throngs of immigrants in the mid-1800s, just as daily Mass begins; impulsively I step in, and find myself transported back to, oh, 1920 or so, just for half an hour.   

It's part of that cultural poverty that I can't even tell you what I would see there, except for the few things (and they are the crux on which it all turns) that, by the grace of God, have remained.  I just wish I could go, and come back, knowing what it's like to be immersed in the peculiar otherness that was Catholicism in America before it became "American Catholicism."

I hold out some hope of a revival, and I want our family to be part of it.   I don't yet know what that will mean for us, but I'm keeping my eye out for it.

Comments

[John]

Sitting, suffering really, through the Novus Ordo this weekend, I couldn't help but hear in the psalm (#136. But 137 according to prots and American Bishops) a lament for the Traditional Mass.

"Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept: when we remembered Sion:

"How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land?

"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten. Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee".