Bishop Barron's The Mass -- A "Privileged Encounter"?

That feeling when the point is missed, in its entirety, with many little misses along the way

Suppose someone wakes up one day and decides he is going to produce a film (or how about a series?) about the Mass and its glories — what it is and why it matters; I personally think he is going to be presented with some difficulties. It won’t do to ignore them.

If the producer is Bishop Barron, and the film (series) is The Mass, clearly packaged for diocesan and youth group and adult formation, complete with study guides and accompanying books, these difficulties will be ignored. But while I was watching, they came to my mind over and over.

The first difficulty is the one the hierarchy is in heavy denial about: Church attendance and membership has been in steep decline since the Second Vatican Council. Say what you want about society at large, the cracks in the pre-conciliar façade, and what have you.

We know what we know.

Here is an overview from Michael Davies, a staunch traditionalist, of what can only be described as collapse: The Stark Fruits of Vatican II; here’s one from a mostly “reform of the reform” source: Policy Suggestions for the Church. (The latter begins, in true “we know what we know” fashion, with a quote from the redoubtable Msgr. Kelly: “In what was perhaps his last public lecture, given at the Nassau Community College Center for Catholic Studies, in Garden City, New York, on March 29th, 2003, Monsignor George A. Kelly started his talk on the reasons for the founding of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars by declaring bluntly that ‘sometime after Vatican II, the Church went to hell.’”)

Another difficulty faced by a bishop wanting to get everyone back to their local parish: “Just one-third of U.S. Catholics agree with their church that Eucharist is body, blood of Christ.” The Mass is the celebration of the Eucharist. To be honest, the number who don’t get the Real Presence is probably less than the one-third reported.

The average Catholic (let alone non-Catholic) watching any presentation about the Mass will not have the necessary formation to put it into a context that makes sense, and more to the point, he will not have encountered a liturgy that makes the mysteries* apprehensible to him, experientially.

The filmmaker will have to grapple with that ignorance.

In the Department of Elephants in the Room, an ongoing difficulty for our hypothetical filmmaker is the sexual abuse crisis. In the minds of church establishment figures, this situation has been taken care of. Policies and procedures have been put into place. It’s a thing of the past.

And yet… the general perception of the mildly hostile public is that priests abuse young people (even as that same public expects a world with no sexual morality whatsoever — the contradiction doesn’t bother it). It doesn’t help that dioceses have to shell out money on a regular basis to deal with the problem: “The Diocese of San Diego filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, the latest U.S. diocese to do so in response to hundreds of sexual abuse allegations leveled against it.”

Also in that same Department is that other elephant: the complete lockdown, nay, lockout, including over Easter 2020, of worship. If the Mass offers us something cosmic as well as heavenly, why did they take it away?

The first episode begins in a lovely old mission church (built by the poor, remember; very appealing). There are not many people in it; none of them are children. The statues are old but the priest, processing behind quasi-vested, pony-tailed women, has a microphone wrapped around his neck. The voiceover is about “Christ the Head and His mystical Body.” The surroundings are meant to evoke something transcendent; the particulars do not.

Throughout the movie, the images alternate between pre-Vatican II churches of beauty, appropriated by the filmmaker to lend an air of fittingness, and churches built in our own era — modern, pedestrian, ugly, utilitarian.

The first sort, the older, beautiful ones, have on me at least, an unintended effect: they immediately call to mind the aggressive new iconoclasm carried out as the liturgy was re-fashioned to leave behind the past. As Fr. Dwight Longenecker says,

The Second Vatican Council in the 1960s ushered in the most iconoclastic ideology since the Protestant revolution. Across the Western world, in a spirit of enthusiastic reform, Catholic churches were erected with no reference to the past. A new wave of ideologically driven priests teamed up with modernist architects to create round churches, fan-shaped mass centers, multi purpose worship spaces and utilitarian cement block boxes.

As someone who has struggled my whole Catholic life with the intentional opposition of the Novus Ordo Mass to beauty, this continued visual juxtaposition leaves a taste of bitterness.

For most of the film, we watch Bishop Barron with the backdrop of a more traditional sanctuary (carpeted and bannered with polyester though it may be) behind him, as he lectures an audience on his Big Idea about the Mass.

This Idea is that the Mass is “a privileged encounter” — this is the title of the first episode — with God. The episode centers on this idea as well as on our relationship to God and what we get out of the Mass. Not mentioned even once: sacrifice; that the Mass is the Sacrifice of Calvary**. Mentioned I think once: the word sin. But the Mass as reparation for our sin? Not mentioned. That Vatican II demanded a full, active, conscious participation? Mentioned a lot.

This word, privileged, is not making its appearance with Bishop Barron for the first time. It means something to him. He infamously used it when answering a point-blank question from Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew. Shapiro said that he strives to keep all 613 of God’s Laws and asks if he will go to heaven as a Jew or is he “basically screwed here.”

Bishop Barron, repeatedly citing Vatican II, assures Shapiro that while “Christ is the privileged route to salvation,” there are other ways. He irrelevantly posits the hypothetical of an atheist who has never heard of the Lord Jesus but who is saved by his desire; he completely ignores the believer in God seated before him, offering an opportunity for witness. He speaks of conscience, yet ignores the claims of his own conscience to speak the truth to the seeker in his midst, not to mention the millions watching, many of whom were undoubtedly also wondering about the state of their souls.

In doing so, he belied the Gospel, in which we read, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6)

Similarly, there is some equivocation going on here in The Mass.

Bishop Barron in the first episode of The Mass: A Privileged Encounter references Romano Guardini (and implies, though carefully does not state, that Pope Francis studied under him; Pope Francis may possibly have read a book by him back in the mists of time; he certainly never finished the doctorate he went to Rome to undertake).

Rather inappropriately, Barron brings up Guardini’s philosophical and nuanced notion of the Mass as “play.” It’s hard to conceive of a characteristic, however ontologically correct, less suited to bring to the notice of today’s Mass-goer.

Of course, he fails to mention the context in Guardini’s musings regarding the seriousness of the Mass (something his friend, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, insisted he add so as not to be misunderstood):

The liturgy has laid down the serious rules of the sacred game which the soul plays before God. And, if we are desirous of touching bottom in this mystery, it is the Spirit of fire and of holy discipline “Who has knowledge of the world” — the Holy Ghost — Who has ordained the game which the Eternal Wisdom plays before the Heavenly Father in the Church, Its kingdom on earth. And “Its delight” is in this way “to be with the children of men.”

(For more on Guardini’s theology of the Mass and what could be said about it, read my Inside the Vatican review, The Mass is central to the Faith; God is central to the Mass, of Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s book, The Catholic Mass: Steps to Restore the Centrality of God, which I highly recommend.)

Bishop Barron never explains what he means by the word privileged, with its inherent conditionality. How can the Mass be conditional, or what does it depend on for us? Upon what does its elite status rest, with the implication that something else is more ordinary, less special? We are considered privileged if we go to Princeton or Stanford; yet we can get an education by reading books with a good teacher. Is that what he means?

What does he mean?

He never explains why the Mass currently in place does not, for the vast numbers of Catholics, offer tangible evidence of “the cosmic element” he claims it contains, tacitly admitting it when he says we might go to “Gothic cathedrals” with their symbols of nature, fecundity, stars to experience it — due to those things being taken away from us, intentionally, by our own churchmen, unless they happened by chance to have survived the reforming sledgehammer.

Instead he reflects on “our being most ourselves when we are gathered together, and the Mass effects that”; a very Protestant idea, since the Catholic believes that even a priest saying Mass alone is rightly worshiping God (and is not alone, as the angels and saints are there).

He does refer to the case that most do not believe that Christ is present, body, blood, soul, and divinity, in the Eucharist. But he doesn’t explain why they don’t; instead, like most bishops, he makes it seem like they just haven’t heard enough lectures about it, watched enough videos, or read enough books — that somehow it’s their fault.

And yet, he fails to say that it is He, Our Lord, there, at the Mass, coming to the altar at the hands of the priest, offered to God as a ransom for our souls. He speaks of liturgy and how it expresses our beliefs, vaguely. But how ironic that all the ignored difficulties I began with come down to a very important matter, which is how the liturgy is celebrated.

That a rift occurred and tradition was banished is the unmentionable original sin that has plunged us into the very situation he tries, with so little self-awareness in his episcopal persona, to address with his materials available for sale on his website.

Haranguing the people about their need to realize and embrace things that are not actually offered to them has its own particular ironic futility. It feels like an exercise of veiled but real power over the victim. It seems like a subterfuge to distract from the question of why the bishops don’t believe. No one is more in a position to remedy things than a believing bishop (unless it were the Pope, but, baby steps).

We need less motivational speaking, fewer misleading images, and more addressing of the real issues and elephants, starting with action items for bishops.

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*Speaking of the mysteries: Bishop Barron is not an unintelligent or uneducated man. He has translated St. Thomas Aquinas. Presumably he knows when he should look things up. He seems to be wanting to offer more here. Yet, when he sets out to explain what is meant in the Mass when the phrase is uttered, “to celebrate these sacred mysteries,” he gives a lame quote from “a friend of mine and one of the great experts on liturgy” viz.: “A concrete something that when you bump into it, it puts you in contact with the divine reality.”

Well, I can’t give you a complete answer here in this post, but surely he could have done better. The sacred mysteries are the sacraments (and called so in the eastern churches); the action of the Holy Spirit; the ineffable Presence, an encounter with the living God. “Surely you have heard about the administration of God’s grace that was given to me for you, that is, the mystery made known to me by revelation, as I have already written briefly” (Eph 3:3–4).

**I tried to watch the video in the series about sacrifice, but had to turn it off when the collection baskets and the cash put in them were repeatedly shown and depicted as integral to the Mass, along with the offering of bread and wine.

It grieves me to think that the contents of these videos are to be offered as formation for those in the Church. The state of our catechesis is bad enough without this sort of thing.