What makes this piece so different and well worth a read is Fr. Capuano’s balance, and deep, deep sense of charity. He works with men who do great, sacrificial work in the mission field, and he puzzles through the question of why they, brought together for study and formation, just ignore liturgical norms..and if it matters.
Who are the perpetrators of these liturgical abuses? I look around the room at my brother Jesuits here in Salamanca and I see a man who puts his life on the line every day in Timor, another ministering to Indians lost in villages in the Andes, another ministering in Mozambique.
I see a Pole who tries to keep the faith alive in the midst of the vertigo of change in his country. I see Brazilians fighting against the oppressive poverty and fragmentation of culture that robs their people of their hope and faith. I see Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese worried sick about the growing secularism of Europe and throwing all their efforts into stemming the tide. I see real men of prayer and service. I see kind, generous priests who want to serve Christ.
It is too simple to put all those who abuse the liturgy in the same barrel and condemn them. We must recognize that we live in an imperfect world and in imperfect religious communities. These imperfections manifest themselves most clearly in the liturgy. Weeds grow among the wheat.
One of the things that attracted me to the Society of Jesus was that Jesuits talk about the devil, spiritual combat and how the Good Spirit and evil spirit are present in the world and in our hearts. I consider this essay as an exercise in “discernment of spirits”. Ultimately, we must look for spiritual causes of liturgical abuse. It is the Good Spirit that sows the seeds of virtue and the evil spirit that sows seeds of vice.
Liturgical abuse is now a cultural problem, the product of bad habits — vices, if you will — that have become part of a sub-culture of the Church and of religious communities in particular. In a sense the perpetrators of liturgical abuse are themselves victims of the formation they received and the subtle temptations of, as Saint Ignatius says, the “enemy of our human nature”.
Peter Kreeft would say, “they are our patients not our enemies”.
So this is my dilemma: living in a religious community, where genuinely good men do not respect liturgical norms, what is a religious to do?
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