A Place in the Tradition
by Dr. Mark Searle (†1992)
(associate professor of liturgical studies, University of Notre Dame)
Assembly Vol 12:1, September 1985
[This address was given on the occasion of the fourteenth annual conference of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, at a celebration of the life and work of Michael Mathis, C.S.C.]
Born in South Bend a hundred years ago; died in South Bend twenty-five years ago. Born just after the first Vatican Council. Died just before the second Vatican Council. He lived through two World Wars and innumerable lesser conflicts and crises. He lived under six popes, from Leo XII to Pius XII. He was born into a world without electricity and left a world on the verge of the computer age.
In such a lifetime, he received the faith handed down from the apostles and in turn handed it on enriched by his own witness to it. He inherited a Catholic world afloat with catechisms and devotions and bequeathed us a Catholic world anchored in Gospel and liturgy.
The old photographs tell us not only of a man who has gone before us, but of a generation marked with the sign of faith who gave witness to the history of a faith at once old and new.
When I first came to Notre Dame I had never heard of Father Hesburgh; I had never heard of the fighting Irish; I had never heard of the subway alumni.
Notre Dame meant liturgy: the liturgical writings published by the University Press; the liturgical studies offered by the Theology Department.
I had never heard of Michael Mathis, yet the only things I knew in Europe about Notre Dame were the things here for which Michael Mathis was responsible. His legacy.
Still, we are not here to honor Notre Dame, nor even Michael Mathis. For the baton of faith has passed to a new generation: it has passed to us.
It is right that we should share our memories of this man, for you as well as us are the heirs of his life and work. We all enjoy his legacy and the legacy of all those who, like him, received the tradition of faith and prayer in another world and handed it on to us revitalized.
An occasion such as this, then, calls for more than poring over old photographs and clucking over old memories. It calls us to become conscious of our own place in the sequence of generations, of our own place in the relay of tradition. What will be our legacy to a generation now coming to birth? Who will live the faith, and how, in a world we will not live to see?
Our world, our life, is different from the life and world of Father Mathis and his contemporaries, as the world and lives of our children will be different again from ours. But amid the differences some things remain constant, some tasks are always waiting to be taken up, some of the same responsibilities are ours to discharge, as they were the responsibilities of our parents before us and will be of our children after us.
Not the least of these is to receive the faith proclaimed in Word and Sacrament to live it faithfully and to hand it on.
Of this much may be said, but three things will suffice: like Michael Mathis and those who have gone before us, we must assume responsibility for our own history; like Michael Mathis and those who have gone before us, we must assume responsibility for our Church; like Michael Mathis and those who have gone before us, we must assume responsibility for the Word and the Sacraments.
Responsibility for History
Michael Mathis and other liturgical pioneers were people of vision because they had an acute sense of memory. Unlike us, they did not learn about the possibilities of the liturgy merely from reading current works on the topic. They saw the possibilities for liturgy because they had a profound sense of the history of the Catholic tradition.
Today, when so many people are researching their own family history, painfully piecing together from written documents the memory of their forebears which their own parents had been content to forget, we should be doing for ourselves what Mathis did: relearn the forgotten history of our own people, recover a living sense of our historical tradition.
Every Catholic child should have a sense of the wonder of the Catholic tradition into which he or she is born; every convert should be introduced with pride to the story of our Catholic family. They should know some of the stories of our saints and martyrs.
They should be shown with pride the wonderful basilicas of the ancient world, the mosaics, the icons, the frescoes, lovingly created by generations of believers.
They should know that it was our family that built the great cathedrals of Europe and the humble churches and the ancient monasteries.
They should know the family quarrels that created suspicion, hostility and even war in the 16th century and since.
They should know of the religious traditions of the people who founded this country, and of the Catholic exiles who settled along the Atlantic coast and of the Catholic missioners who evangelized the Southwest and the immigrants who built the great churches of our great cities in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I am not proposing full-blown courses in history for grade-school children: only that they be shown pictures, told stories, taken to churches, that they might take pride in their identity and know that Catholic Christianity was neither invented yesterday nor came from heaven in its present form.
It was knowledge of history which made Mathis and others see that the way things are today are not the way things always were, yet enabled them to rejoice in the continuity and resolve to strengthen it. Renewal requires identity. Identity requires that we know who we are and where we come from. Memory delivers us from the tyranny of mistakes and the idolizing of particular historical and cultural forms. Accepting responsibility for our history means knowing what must endure and what must be changed if we are to be faithful.
Responsibility for the Church
Michael Mathis' sense of history did not make him an historian but a missioner and a liturgist, teacher, a preacher and a celebrant. It made the Church of his own time all the more precious, all the more deserving of his best pastoral care.
One of the games we frequently play is that of pitting preconciliar versus postconciliar attitudes, with the assumption that postconciliar is what we ought to be.
The Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life, however, suggests that the real rift in American Catholicism is not between pre- and post-conciliar attitudes, but between individualistic religion and communal religion.
In many respects, preconciliar Catholicism was more communal than postconciliar Church, we American Catholics tend to share the convictions of our non-Catholic contemporaries that matters of faith and morals are your own affair. So we believe that it makes sense to us to believe; we choose those moral standards which appeal to us; we go to St. X's church because we like the atmosphere; we avoid St. Y's church because the way they do things get on our nerves.
In isolation, these reasons seem good enough: we like the liturgy we like, we believe the things we believe. But it is the death-knell of community. If we really believe that we must all make up our own minds, and leave it at that, what then has happened to the Body of Christ, to our vocation to be members of a Church set up as a sign among the nations?
To assume responsibility for Church means accepting that we can be held responsible by God and by the Church for playing our part in history. We may not have chosen to be Catholics, sometimes we may wish we were not. But to assume responsibility for being Church means knowing oneself to be part of something larger than ourselves: something that not only lets us express our faith, but which actually shapes our faith; something that likewise shapes our attitudes, moral values and behavior.
To accept responsibility is to be willing to be held accountable. The biggest threat to the Church in America today is not old-fashioned attitudes, but voluntarism: the belief that no one has the right to make demands upon you or teach you or require anything of you that you would rather not do. Its opposite is not blind obedience but a sense of vocation to serve the large community and to be part of a faith community that serves the world by being obedient servants of Word and Sacrament.
Responsibility for Word and Sacrament
The two great loves of Michael Mathis' life were missions and liturgy, Word and Sacrament.
In our own turn, we are now called to assume responsibility for the Word of God which has been committed to us by parents, teachers and preachers; and for the sacraments of the Church which have been handed down to us.
In a world where there is so much emphasis on the new and the latest -- the latest news in technology, or medicine, or food or fashion -- we forget that the essential things in human life remain the same: the need to establish and maintain relationships, to feed and clothe the body, grow in wisdom and grace and, eventually, to die well.
In the same way, being a Christian in the 20th century often seems to be a matter of keeping up with new ideas in theology or new events in the life of the Church. Actually, that is largely a result of the Council and the postconciliar changes: I doubt that Mathis had as much interest in innovations as he had in restorations.
Still, we need to know that there are things that change and things that remain the same, in the Church and in the world, in life and in liturgy.
In liturgy, especially, we will need to pay more attention to what is unchangeable if we are to pass on the tradition to the next generation alive and intact. The changing elements of the liturgy, however, are at the service of the unchanging. The Gospel remains ever the same: the ever-changing ways of presenting and preaching it are all ways of finding access to that eternal Gospel, or they are false to the Gospel.
Similarly with the liturgy: the point of liturgical reforms is not that we should do new things but that we should do the old things better: pray, sacrifice, praise, and grow into the mystery of life hidden with God in Christ in the community of the faithful.
Perhaps the time is coming when, instead of looking for new prayers or new rites on new music, we should concentrate on trying to use what we already have as well as we can. Are we to continue endlessly producing new volumes of Worship or Glory and Praise? We produce more new hymns in twelve months than the universal church had produced in 20 centuries. Why? Do we not trivialize our inheritance by trying to keep up with the new? Might we not be squandering our energies on the wrong things?
Those who went before us in the liturgical movement were innovators only because they remembered the old things that others had forgotten. They were outstanding individuals only because they had an unusual sense of the community. They were ahead of their time because they were more deeply rooted in our common history.
Much more might be said on the centenary of Michael Mathis' birth, but this must suffice. He lived, he served, he died. He entered into his heavenly inheritance and left us an inheritance on earth. His mantle has now passed to us.
