Are Sunday Masses Too Long Or Are They Too Banal?

[00:00:15] Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York recently wrote an article asking if Sunday Masses were too long. [00:00:22] While he took a potshot at against more traditional features of the liturgy, he also seems to completely miss the essence of what makes the Mass different than any other human activity. That's what we're going to talk about today on Crisis Point. Hello, I'm Eric Samuels, your host and the inner chief of Cris magazine. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to smash that like button. Just destroy it, hit it, be very violent to it. Also be nice to the subscribe button. Hit that one as well. You can follow us on social media at crisis mag. Also subscribe to our newsletter. It's every day that we have an article. We usually have two articles every day. You'll get it right to your inbox. Makes it a lot easier to follow what we're doing at Crisis. You can just go to our website, Crisismagazine.com to subscribe to the email newsletter. Okay, so I saw this article at Arsenal visitor from Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Obviously, Cardinal Dolan is one of the highest ranking members of the Church. Being a cardinal, the Archbishop of New York, he's probably one of the most important cardinal archbishops in our country, if not the most important, most influential in a lot of ways. So obviously, his views on Catholic matters matter because he has a lot of influence and a lot of people read what he says. And so his article was titled are Sunday Masses Too Long? So I'm going to pull up the article here for you, and those who are listening can just follow along. I'll make sure I read it. And so what you'll see is cardinal Dolan, our Sunday Mass is just too long. Okay, let me go ahead. Oh, my scrolling does not work. I'm not quite sure why. Let me try this again. [00:02:04] Okay, well, let me just use the okay, we have a problem, a technical problem. Can we solve it? Will I be able to solve it on the fly? Let me try again to share it and see if this works. [00:02:20] No, it's not able to scroll down for some reason. [00:02:25] Okay, well, I'm going to just read the article to you then. You're not going to be able to see the lovely words on the screen. You're going to have to listen to my voice. Okay, so basically what he wrote was in our preparation for the Synod. Of course, it's got to do with the Synod. Here in the Archdiocese of New York, close to 7000 people accepted our invitation to attend listening sessions or respond online to issues of concern in the life of the Church today. One question I always posed was how can we get people back to Sunday Mass? Why have so many of our folks stopped coming? Now, I just want to stop there for a minute and address an underlying premise he has that cardinal Dolan has. And you'll see this in almost every church leader now that we're in the age of synodality. And it's the idea that somehow our leaders, our bishops, the cardinals, our various leaders, they need to pull the laity on how to run the church, not only how to run the church, but as we'll see how to celebrate the mass. [00:03:32] This is a complete inversion of how things have always been in the church. [00:03:38] Now, at the risk of sounding clericalist, and I'm definitely not clericalist in general, the fact is that the bishops are our shepherds. And shepherds are supposed to lead the sheep. They don't ask the sheep questions. [00:03:55] They simply lead them to greener pastures. They lead them to where they need to go. [00:04:02] And so I would just argue that the underlying premise that Cardinal Dolan starts with, and almost every church leader starts with this premise is faulty. The idea that just asking people, how can we get people back to Sunday mass, why so many of our folks stopped coming? Well, first of all, there's some very obvious reasons that you refuse to acknowledge. Now, I will say Cardinal Dolan did, he did make a comment not long ago that maybe they went a little overboard in their COVID response, but even that was very light. He didn't really apologize or say it was a bad thing, like really a bad thing. But I mean, it doesn't take a genius to see that mass attendance dropped a lot after the COVID restrictions were lifted. So maybe that's one of the reasons. I mean, you shouldn't have to ask me to figure that out. You shouldn't need a focus group to figure that out, likewise with most of these things. But I would just say, though, the underlying premise here is faulty. It's this idea of making the church democratic where we all get a vote on things. Because the problem isn't that you shouldn't ever listen to the laity. Yeah, sure. You should listen to laity on what their issues are and things like that. At times. The problem is that everything has become up for grabs with the laity, with everybody, whether it be the music that's sung at mass to whether Christian morality, the 6th commandment, I mean, everything is up for grabs for a vote, basically, it seems like in this age of synodality. [00:05:36] So continuing the article that Cardinal Dolan wrote, he said, I was amazed at the high interest this generated, apart from the predictable carping from both fringes. Okay, this is an important part. I just want to bring this up. Apart from the predictable carping from both fringes, the far left claiming that the only way to increase mass attendance was to drop all liturgical guidelines and go back to the do your own thing hoot nannies of the 1970s, or the alt right urging turning the altar around and getting the fiddlebacks out of mothballs. [00:06:12] I'll read that again. The two fringes, according to Cardinal Dolan are the far left wanting the 1970s hoot nannies at Mass and the alt right urging turning the altar around and getting the fiddlebacks out of mothballs. [00:06:27] I bring that up. I want to make sure we don't skip over that because as an editor, one of the things I always want to urge my writers and I try to do this in my own writing is you want to stay focused on your article topic, especially a short internet article. You don't want to throw in distracting comments that take you away from your main point. Because when you do that, what happens is people focus just on that throwaway comment that you thought was a throwaway comment, and they don't really listen to your full main point. And that's exactly what I'm going to do here. I'm going to focus for a minute on his throwaway comment. [00:07:07] There's so many problems with this. First of all, he's equating Catholics who want to go back to do your own thing, hoot nannies of the 70s with people who want to celebrate ad orientum. [00:07:22] Carl Doley's equating those two things as equal. [00:07:26] If you know anything about the liturgical history of the Church, you'll know that the entire church, east and west, celebrated adorantum with the altar around, turn around, whatever you want to call it since basically the beginning of the Church all throughout the world for thousands of years. [00:07:48] And he's saying that's, wanting to do that, wanting to join with all those Catholics who've come before us in how we celebrate Mass and wanting to join with them, you're just like some kook who wants to go back to crazy liturgical experimentation in 1970s. [00:08:06] Putting those two things on equal footing just shows how liturgically ignorant Cardinal Dolan is. To be blunt, he doesn't have a clue of what he's talking about if he thinks those two things are essentially two things that are equivalent in being wrong. One is literally saying, I want to go back to I want to do what millions of Catholics have done for thousands of years, and the other one is like, I want to do what some crazy people in the 1970s wanted to do. [00:08:33] Secondly, he throws out the term alt right. Does anybody even use that term anymore? What does he even mean by alt right? So because I want to celebrate ad orientum, I'm now alt right? Does that mean I'm like a neo Nazi? What does that mean? I mean, it's just unbelievable that he would use that term alt right to talk about people who would like to celebrate ad orientum. And note it's not just tradies who think we should celebrate ad orientum. Like I already said, everybody in the east celebrates adorantum. The Ordinariate Masses are ad orientum from the Anglican heritage, and lots of conservative Catholics who attend the Novus Ordo want it to be adorantum or priests who do celebrate adorantum the Novus Ordo. But yet this is just like some crazy alt right scheme, according to Cardinal Dolan. Another thing I want to mention about that comment is the fact that Cardinal Dolan felt comfortable throwing that line out there shows his opinion of more traditional Catholics. He dismisses them as irrelevant. You know how a lot of Catholics feel like they're not being heard by the hierarchy during the Sonatal process. We're supposed to be a listening church, but yet it's clear they're not listening to certain people. This is proof right here. Sure, Cardinal Dolan is not going to listen to crazy 1970s liberals. Good. That's good. But he's also not going to listen to anybody who wants to have more traditional elements to the Church, to the liturgy. He dismisses them as crazies. I mean, it's obvious the way he writes this, that he dismisses them as not being worthy of being heard. Yet if Cardinal Dolan took the time, he would see that the communities that are growing the fastest are those that are turning the altar around and getting the fiddlebacks out of mothballs. We, of course, know that the fiddlebacks out of mothballs isn't the reason why, but the point is that this is what's growing. So you literally are asking the question, how can we get people back to Sunday Mass? And you're making fun of the parishes that are getting people back to Sunday Mass. [00:10:52] It makes me think you're not really serious, Cardinal Dolan. It makes me think you don't really want to know the answer. You want an answer that conforms to what you already think and doesn't challenge you any. [00:11:07] You want an answer that basically just says what you want to hear because you're not going to listen to any answers that actually have been proven to be working in the Church right now. [00:11:19] And then finally, one more thing about this throwaway comment he had is that he clearly sees, like, the fiddleback out of the mothballs and turn the altar around. The way he talks about it, he sees it completely as an aesthetical issue. [00:11:37] It's all a performance. It's all a matter of just how we perceive it. Has nothing to do with giving glory to God, has nothing to do with directing our worship to God. And we're going to see this throughout this article. Actually. [00:11:49] It's not a matter of the appearances. That's not why people love the more traditional elements of the liturgy. The traditional At Mass, the Eastern Liturgies, the Ordinariate, and even Nova sortos, they're celebrating more traditionally, more like the traditional Latin Mass. It's not just simply because of, oh, it looks pretty, it sounds pretty. It has to do with the idea of the worship being directed towards God and giving glory to Him. But Cardinal Dolan doesn't see it like that clearly. [00:12:16] Okay, so then he goes on. [00:12:19] He says the largest majority replied that the top reasons people were no longer coming to Sunday Mass were, are you ready for this one? Because they couldn't understand the priest. I don't even get that, I guess because foreign priest, I'm not sure. Two, their parish had been closed. Well, duh. I mean, you're not going to go to Mass if your parish a lot of people, a lot of Catholics, let's just be honest. If their parish closes or closes down for months because of COVID they don't come back. I know they should, but they don't. And the third reason mass was too long. And that's what he wants to concentrate. He says, let's contrary on the third reason, mass was too long. So people are saying that the reason people aren't coming to Mass is because it's too long. [00:13:02] And then he writes that let me go on. He says, a liturgical scholar, he's talking about how the liturgical renewal of the 1960s and such got rid of the quickie Masses, which is a good thing. But then he says a liturgical scholar observed to me this is Cardinal Dolan speaking recently. The greatest advantage of liturgical renewal after the council was the restoration of the prominence and solemnity of the Easter Vigil. [00:13:30] Okay, I just got to take a side note. I've attended a pre Vatican II type Easter Vigil, and it had a lot of prominence and solemnity. Yes, it was in the morning, which was a little bit odd, I admit. I thought that was OD rather than the evening of Holy Saturday, but it had prominence and slimming day. But then it goes on to say, but the greatest negative of these last decades has been that every Sunday Mass is now as long as Holy Saturday. And is it supposed to be funny and supposed to make a point, but what world are these people on? [00:14:01] I attended exclusively a Novus Ordo parish for the first 15 years as a Catholic, and in the next 15 years I still attend a novice ordo a lot. [00:14:15] I was more going to church Mass, but I still attend Nova Sorta a lot. I have almost never attended a regular Sunday Mass at a Nova Sordo parish that wasn't an hour long, almost to the minute. I mean, it's down to a science. And I've traveled and been at a lot of different parishes over the years, and every single one of them Mass was an hour long. I do not know what he is talking about when he says, and he talks about this later, that Masses are like an hour and a half long. Is this a New York thing? I admit I think I've only been to Mass once in the Diocese of New York because I don't really feel like visiting Babylon. [00:14:55] But outside of mean, it's just not true, at least in America, at least in my experience, which is pretty broad, that Masses are over an hour a Novus Ordo, which is what he's talking about, masses are over an hour. That's very common, a Sunday Masses an hour. So I think it's like you're setting up a crazy situation here that's just not true. [00:15:19] And so then he goes on and he talks about he goes the dismal stories people shared with me reach litany length. Now they tell me mass starts with music rehearsal, then an obligatory greeting to those around you. By then we were five minutes past when Mass was supposed to start. The celebrant will usually give a very lengthy introduction. The gloria can exhaust the angelic choir, to say nothing of an ending sung responsorial psalm. The prayers of faithful can go on forever, with the final petition for the deceased added to on the spot as some are dropping dead in front of us. Then we sit and wait a while for the collection and offer Tory procession. [00:16:01] That's interesting. We sit and wait a while. That's literally talking about the Eucharistic prayer. During that part we're just sitting and waiting a while. The Lamb of God can reach the length of a baseball game. Often we add a reflection after Communion and subsequent announcements. Don't forget the long list of thank yous for all those who had a part in Mass. God forbid we should leave before all five verses of closing hymn are sung. And I have not even mentioned the biggest culprit of all the mammoth homily from priests and deacons who ignore Pope Francis's admonition to keep homilies at eight to ten minutes. Now he admits he's exaggerating a bit, but I know what he's talking about. I've experienced all these things. The long gloria I can't sing, so I won't sing it to you. We all know what we're talking about, where they just go on and on and on with a gloria. The prayers of the faithful that are often just cringeworthy and long. The Lamb of God. When they do the Lamb of God, where they do the 15 different instead of just three times, they do it like 1520 times, just until the priest is ready to say something again. The announcements, the reflection of communion, which shouldn't be allowed, the thank yous as part of Mass and yes, homilies that drag on. So all these things are true, although, like I said, I've never experienced it. Where they all combine to be over an hour, because what they'll do is they'll whip through the Eucharistic prayer number two real quick and it doesn't really even take very long with 4000 Communion extraordinary ministers, communion goes through like that even if you have 2000 people at the parish. [00:17:31] So the problem here though, is that everything here that he talks about, you can tell it's all because of the mentality of the people leading the liturgy, the priest and like the music minister and everybody else who coordinates it. The mentality is a horizontal dimension rather than a vertical dimension. What I mean by that is everything is geared towards the people. [00:18:03] You're doing these prayers of the faithful on and on, not because you're necessarily praying for them. But because you want the people to be impressed about what you're praying for. You do this long, Gloria, because you want to show off the choir and how you've learned this new song. You have the Lamb of God, 15 different verses because you're deadly afraid of silence. And so you got to have something being said at all times of the Mass. There can't be any moment of silence. The announcements, which of course, throw it in a bulletin if your prisoner is too lazy to read it, who cares? They don't care. [00:18:37] The longest of thank you is completely unnecessary. And of course, the homily. And the homily only feels long. I tell you, I've been the homies that are five minutes long, that felt like eternity. And I've heard homies that were 30 minutes long and I felt like 5 seconds. [00:18:54] It's not the length of what's being said. It's not the length of the homily. It's what's being said in the homily is what makes it feel long or short. We all know this. When you have a dry homilist, a guy who's terrible, who's just going to say some bland comments that basically don't challenge you and don't mean anything, you want him to finish, like as soon as he gets started. But when you have somebody preaching the Word and really talking and challenging you in your faith, maybe digging deep into the Scriptures or into Catholic teaching and really explaining things that you want to understand, you'll be there a long time. I know for a long time, when I lived in Maryland, down the street, a Mass was said in his community. And it was Father Francis Martin who was he's passed away now, God rest his soul. He was a biblical scholar, a top notch biblical scholar. He was brilliant, but he also was like a down to earth kind of guy, kind of priest, and he could explain things in ways that we can understand at daily Mass. Everybody knew this. Before he went to his Daily Masses, he would have homilies that would go 2030 minutes. [00:20:03] And nobody complained. Nobody thought they were too long. In fact, we all wanted to go to them because we wanted to sit there and listen. We wanted to hear what he had to say. [00:20:13] Nobody complained about it being too long. Even though a daily Mass, a 2030 minutes homily, I mean, that can really that's like basically doubles the length of the Mass, but nobody minded. [00:20:23] And so all these things, though, are directed at the horizontal dimension, about how we can look at how can we please the people, how can we entertain them? And so essentially what happens is that Cardinal Dolan is pointing out these things, but he doesn't understand why they're happening. He doesn't understand why it's a will. I do want to give him credit for one thing. He says near the end, he says, I do know that the late, great Pope St. John paul II had a point. Silence must be part of the Eucharist. The verbosity at Mass are compulsion as celebrants to comment constantly and explain everything at Mass. And the tendency of choirs who do great jobs to fill every free moment with another verse is grating on people. Amen. Hallelujah. Absolutely. Cardinal Dolan is completely right about that. [00:21:15] There is a fear of silence at a lot of Masses. I mean, you see it when they have to have that background music playing at any moment, when the priest isn't saying something. [00:21:25] That's a fear of silence. You have to fill it up. And the fact is, silence is the way the laity at least should worship God in general. We're not supposed to say anything. We're supposed to be silent in the face of God, in his presence. I mean, think about when you go to adoration. [00:21:48] Are you chitchatting out loud? You shouldn't be. You're adoring the Lord. And at Mass, it's a similar situation. [00:21:56] Part of mass is adoration. You should be silenced. There should be silence. There should be an opportunity for recollection, to understand what's going on, to enter into the mysteries. But without silence, you can't do that, really now. So in this article, I really think I feel like Cardinal Dolan misses the point. And actually, I'm not really picking on Cardinal Dolan because I think most bishops would agree with the sentiments he said in this article. The idea of let's ask the people what they want and give it to them. But most importantly, like asking the wrong question, it's not that Mass is too long. It's that Mass is too banal. [00:22:42] Mass isn't too long. It's too banal. [00:22:45] For the past almost 15 years now, I've been attending most Sundays a high traditional Latin Mass, a sung traditional Latin Mass. Usually it lasts about an hour and a half. [00:23:01] I don't even notice it. And I'm not saying I'm like, some holy person who's just, like, have these visions during Mass and so time stands still. No, I get very impatient. I want to be places. I admit that I'm not a patient. I don't sit through things very easily. When I go to a lot of things, okay, don't tell anybody I said this, but if I go to a kid's dancer shower or something like that, I'm looking at my watch. I want to get out of there. I want to see my own kid, and I want to get out of there. Don't tell my kids I said that. [00:23:31] But in general, though, at Mass, at an hour and a half Mass, I'm not even noticing it. Why? [00:23:38] Because the mass isn't banal. [00:23:41] But here is the secret. Here is the paradox, I should say. [00:23:48] When you set up the Mass and celebrate it to entertain the people, you make it boring. You make it banal. When, however, you set up and celebrate the Mass to worship God and give Him glory, you make it for lack of a better word, interesting. You make it absorbing. You make it something that people want to go to and want to be part of, and they don't want to leave. That's the paradox. When you point the direction of your activities towards people, the people are not interested. When you point the direction of activities towards God, then people are. I mean, that's really the secret right there, because that's what I noticed, is that a traditional Latin Mass and this is true of the Eastern Liturgies, like I've said, the ordinary Masses as well, they're directed towards God, and that makes them absorbing. That makes it something that you want to be part of. There's essentially no transcendence in anything that Cardinal Dolan wrote in this article. There's no talk of transcendence. I mean, a little bit of a hint with the silence part, but the idea of all the thank yous, the announcements, the boring homily, all of that is unnecessary because Mass is supposed to be transcendent. It's heaven on earth. [00:25:06] When we go to Mass, we should now I get okay, before I say this, I get men celebrate Mass, fallen men, weak men who are not perfect. I'm not saying every single Mass has ever been celebrated is going to be like this, even if it's celebrated. Right? However, there should be a certain sense when you attend Mass of what the representatives of Prince Vladimir of Russia, what they told him when they went to the Divine Liturgy in Hagia Sophia, I did not know whether I was in Heaven or on Earth. Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily going to be true at a Low Mass during the week, but yes, your High Mass at a parish that has resources, that should be somewhat of your attitude. That should be what you should be thinking. I know. I don't think I've ever been to an Eastern Liturgy where I didn't have that, at least somewhat. It's supposed to be transcendent. And so when we start thinking about these details, okay, let's make the homily shorter. Let's make the announcements shorter. Let's make sure that we don't do too long of a Lamb of God. [00:26:09] We're thinking on human terms. We're thinking like the organizer of a conference would think. He'd be like, okay, I got to make sure the talks aren't too long. I make sure there's a lot of activity to do. I don't want too much downtime. That's how a conference organizer is. Someone who used to be a conference organizer for a diocese. I know this. That's how you think. There's nothing wrong with that. But that's not how the celebrant of a Mass should think. That's not how the Liturgy should be treated. You don't treat as a human endeavor. It's a divine endeavor that we are privileged to be part of. [00:26:40] And so I think Cardinal Dolan and the bishops, I pray that they would recognize this, because when he, like, when he dismissed the idea of turning the altar around. You're not turning the altar around because it's somehow more beautiful or more engaging. In fact, let's be honest, looking at somebody's back isn't as engaging as looking at their face. Human wisdom would say looking at the priest directly is going to engage the people more than looking at his back. I mean, how many speakers talks have you ever been to by dynamic speakers where the speaker didn't face you, he faced the wall behind him or maybe the big PowerPoint screen behind him? That'd be a case of a terrible talk that nobody be interested in. However, from a divine perspective, when all of a sudden the priest turns around and he's facing God and leading us in worship, our own eyes in our mind go beyond him to God. And who's more engaging? Some priest who might make a couple of good jokes or the Godhead? [00:27:50] I think it's obvious which one it is. And so that's the type of attitude I really want Catholics to be thinking, and especially our bishops, to realize. It's not a matter of rearranging the decks on the Titanic. [00:28:04] Rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Sorry. [00:28:08] It's about completely reorienting how we look at Mass. [00:28:12] And one last thing I want to bring up, and this is something that's not Cardinal Dolan's article, but it's something a debate came up on Twitter. I don't get on Twitter on the weekends, especially on Sunday, and it happened while I was out and I came back to it. It was the perennial debate that comes up a couple of times a year on Catholic Twitter about the traditional Mass versus the Nova. Sordo but more specifically, driving away from your geographic parish to attend another parish, whether it be a traditional Latin Mass parish or even a more conservative, more orthodox, more reverent parish than your geographic parish. And there was a lot of debate about this because there's still some Catholics who think that we have an obligation to attend our geographic parish. Now, the fact is, there is no obligation under canon law, none whatsoever, for a layperson to attend their geographic parish. That being said, I do think the ideal would be that you would attend your geographic parish. I'd be the first to admit that that would be a world I want to live in, a church I want to live in where everybody can just simply attend their geographic parish. However, the problem is that we have to raise kids. We have to raise kids to understand what the Mass is. And if they attend week in and week out, a Mass that is directed towards the people, that has its orientation here on Earth rather than in heaven, then they're going to get an idea Mass that it is just another human activity. And guess what? When they grow up, they're going to think Mass is too long as well, because it is too long. It's a boring. Activity, if it's a completely human activity, it's too long. If it's 15 minutes long, if it's just a boring human activity, but if it is really heaven on Earth, if it's our participation in the heavenly liturgy here on Earth, then it can't be too long. It could last hours, and we wouldn't think it's too long. And so what we need to and here's the thing, is people think that the only reason you wouldn't attend your geographic parish is because of some obvious abuse. Like they go crazy and they have, I don't know, women preachers or they have clown Masses or something like that, or they're preaching heresy. Obviously, in those cases, you should not attend your geographic parish. However, I don't think what people realize is how banality really does over time have an impact on people, because remember, you're not going to Mass once. If I'm traveling and I end up at a Mass, I go to the local Mass and it's a clown Mass, that's not going to impact my faith. [00:30:42] However, if I'm a young person and I attend Mass growing up for the first 20 years of my life at a parish where it's an insipid liturgy, where the preaching is boring, it's just very human directed, very human oriented, that will have an impact on my faith. Absolutely, positively it will. In fact, I would argue it's one of the main reasons so many people leave the church, because their number one contact with the Catholic Church is Sunday Mass. And Sunday Mass, by all appearances, is just a human activity. That's boring. [00:31:19] That's why teenagers say it's boring, because it is if you don't have the right orientation. And so I would argue that definitely Catholics should be very wary about going to especially Catholic parents about going to the local geographic parish if it's simply a typical Nova sort of liturgy, because they're not going that is going to have an impact week in and week out. It's not a matter of a one off thing. It's a matter of a one off, really bad abuse. It's a matter of week in, week out, a very weak liturgy that is not reverent and gets your mind only at the human level and doesn't raise your heart to God. [00:32:02] So I'll end it there. I just want to say pray for Cardinal Dolan, that he would see more clearly the purpose of the Mass and really how it should be oriented. And pray for your own local bishop particularly, because obviously Cardinal Dolan doesn't necessarily have an impact on your bishop, your diocese, but pray that your local bishop would see that. And pray also for your pastor who is the most to do in directing your liturgy at your parish. Pray for your pastor too, that he would always be oriented towards God in his celebration of liturgy. Okay, that's it for now. Until next time, everybody. God love.