The LA Times picks up the story about the kneeling wars in an Orange County parish

This has been extensively discussed on many Catholic blogs, and the LATimes story gets most of it right, although it is a little light on background and context. There is more to the kneeling "side" than simply kneeling  – you can read more here at the LA Catholic Mission and by scanning what the blogs have to say via this search. They have a lengthier list of complaints. The complexity of the issue is rather daunting: some complain about the lack of liturgical unity within and through Catholic Masses, but when an ordinary wants to enforce unity in an area in which they disagree, they’re all for going to another source of authority (here, "parish" tradition and/or, broader historical considerations).  Advising altar servers, for example, to disobey diocesan directives on this score, doesn’t give complainers much credibility:

The reprisals extend to the altar servers. In a letter dated December 14, 2005, Father Martin dismissed Damian Garcia as altar servers coordinator because "three times you did not follow these norms during Sunday Masses … you knelt down after the Lamb of God right in front of the people." Father Tran noted, "for our first meeting, I said very clear that you would be the Altar Servers Coordinator with the condition that you should follow the liturgical norms of the diocese. And you promised that. Now, you broke it."

Garcia says that this was the last of three letters he received during Advent. "He wanted me to train altar girls — I thought it wouldn’t be a problem, but my conscience got the better of me, and I decided not to, although I didn’t talk about it. He also wanted me to obey the norms of the diocese. When I told him we knelt after the Lamb of God, he said, ‘we don’t do that here.’ I told him, ‘we have a precedent here of local custom.’ We did dispute that idea, and his interpretation was to conform to the diocese, and my interpretation was that we could follow the custom of the parish. So the First Sunday of Advent he wanted to institute these changes, and I knelt down, and all the altar boys knelt down — I had been the director of altar boys for about 15 years. He sent a letter later that week, hinting that he did not want me to kneel. The following Sunday I knelt again, and some of the altar boys did too, but not all of them. Again, he warned me not to kneel. On the Third Sunday of Advent, I knelt at the Lamb of God, and later that week, I got the letter dismissing me.

Well, yeah.

On the other hand, liturgical "progressives" are all for diversity, except when it comes to a pet issue or two – like this one. And we’re all pretty tired of it, and we all see through it.

Unity and conformity (not the same thing) are matters that are not as easy to tease out in Catholic tradition as we sometimes think. It is my generally less-than-expert sense that the weight of demands for unity and conformity in the Catholic liturgical tradition has been on what the priests and other liturgical ministers were supposed to do, rather than the congregation. Now, then, this is also the consequence of the congregation’ s gradual, but definite loss of any "active" role in the Mass (I put "active" in quotes for the sake of trying to avoid discussions about what "active" means. Yes, I know that praying is "active participation.) In this context, I simply mean…if the congregation really didn’t have to or wasn’t supposed to verbalize, then their conformity was not an issue. My limited experience in Orthodox and Eastern Rite churches reveals an echo of this sensibility (although the congregations in those contexts are permitted more of an externally participatory role than in the Tridentine Rite, I believe, if they choose.)  – as people are kneeling, sitting, standing or even milling around during various parts of the liturgies. At the parish Mass we attended in Rome (I’m not counting St. Peter’s, because that’s a special case, and isn’t normative for parish life, considering its tourist-weighty congregation), after Communion, some knelt, some sat, a few stood in the back. It was all fairly relaxed and seemed understood that here, there might not be a need to demand that the congregational stance physically reflect someone’s idea of what unity would mean.

This "no kneeling" story is, in the end, not about kneeling. It’s about about a broader base of complaints that this group has and about the bishop and pastor’s stance toward this particular group and its complaints, and whatever fears and potential problems those complaints give rise to in the clerics’ hearts.  It’s about power, and in a sense, it’s even about those "thinking," "well-informed" Catholics that we’ve been hankering for since the end of Vatican II. What happens when the "thinking" "well-informed" Catholics can give back as much as you can when it comes to quoting liturgical experts, past and present, and are arguing against your views? Not exactly what we expected, is it?

It is just insane, in a way. The whole "stand from the Lord’s Prayer to the end of Communion" thing is lame, artificial and manipulative. It is anything but organic and just has a feel of puppetry about it. (I’ve been in two parishes in the past two months in two different dioceses where this directive is in force.) To tell people it’s a mortal sin – the first time the phrase  "mortal sin" has probably been mentioned in the Diocese of Orange since 1962, I imagine – strikes me as, well, sinful.