Revealing Anecdote of the Week (about liturgists and devotions)

Courtesy of USCatholic.org:

Orsi is the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton) follows Thank You, St. Jude (Yale) and The Madonna of 115th Street (Yale).

In the late 1980s, when Robert Orsi had just begun his work studying devotion to St. Jude, he had dinner with a prominent liturgist who had spent years promoting liturgical change after Vatican 11.

As Orsi began to describe his research on St. Jude devotees, he noticed the liturgist becoming more and more agitated. "Suddenly he pushed himself back from the table," writes Orsi, "and said loudly and furiously as he got to his feet something along the lines of 'You are trying to bring back everything we worked so hard to do away with.' Then he walked out."

Orsi would beg to differ. He is most certainly not, he says, trying to bring back the devotions he has spent his life documenting. But, he says, Catholics would do well to examine why almost any mention of these traditions produces such extreme reactions among some. We need a "disciplined attentiveness" to these practices, he insists, "particularly those we find alien or objectionable."

Good advice. And from a bit further down in the interview:

What are people who try to wipe this out of the Catholic past afraid of?

Before the Second Vatican Council, American Catholicism was a culture with many opportunities to have direct experiences of the holy. Not simply you and the host at Mass, but lots of other opportunities to have powerful encounters with sacred presence. Today sacred presence is not tolerated in the modern world. This is true everywhere modernity has landed. I think that because a certain experience of presence became threatening in the modern world, liberal Catholics thought a firewall had to be drawn against those experiences.

Huh. And yet, strangely enough, we have been told for decades now how openminded and deeply spiritual liberal Catholics are compared to those uptight, narrowminded Catholics who adhere to both orthodox doctrine and traditional ("superstitious"!) devotions. Go figure. While I don't necessarily agree with every thing that Orsi says, he makes many excellent points and the interview is certainly worth reading.

Comments

[Titus]

Sounds highly reminiscent of Eamon Duffy, another not-exactly-a-traditionalist-here type who has highlighted the shortsighted iconoclasm that destroyed devotional life in the 1970s.

[John James]

You've probably heard that old joke about what the difference is between a liturgist and a terrorist.
ANSWER; You can negotiate with a terrorist.