Good For Them
I listened, this week, to a Catholic television program speaking despairingly about Catholics in the Amazonian region who are in conversation with Rome about the formation of a Roman Rite of the Mass that might incorporate some elements of its indigenous cultural heritage.
The commentators were appalled by the idea, even though they did quote Saint John Paul II who spoke clearly about the need for the Mass to touch the cultural life of a people.
Their fear, it seems to me, is that pagan culture would contaminate an otherwise “pure” form of Catholic worship. But I’m not sure I would agree, since many of our Catholic traditions are actually redeemed forms of customs handed on by pagans groping in the dark. The sights and sounds of Christmas come to mind.
I, personally, don’t think the Amazonian people want to paganize the Mass, but rather to enter into it in a more meaningful way, a way that corresponds to their cultural experience of the mystery of life and the meaning of Christ.
I’ve been reading about Father Slavko Barbaric, the Franciscan priest who served longest in the parish of Saint James, Medjugorje, because we’re leaving for Medjugorje on pilgrimage this Tuesday. And this morning I read his recounting of a cultural custom of his own Croatian people in a way that confirmed the desire of my heart to speak with gentleness about the relationship between pagan customs and Catholic culture.
He was speaking to a friend about the custom of burning large bundles of straw on the night before special days, sending sparks high into the sky, and then running through the smoldering ashes in the morning, partly to ward off boils. He said some of the boys of the community set those fires on the evening before the Feast of Saint John the Baptist in 1981, which was the day Our Lady first appeared to the children in Medjugorje.
His friend laughed and said, “What unusual and pagan customs!”
But Father Slavko replied, “They were nice and useful customs. Unfortunately, because of these (modern) times, they are slowly becoming a thing of the past. Midsummer bonfires are rare now. The hills and mountains spark up only rarely. That - that dark - reminds me of pagan customs.”
Paganism, dark as it is in its ignorance of Christ, nevertheless prepares the human heart for Christianity and acts in that heart as a deeply rooted point of reference to the fulfillment of that religious sense offered to us by Christ. But some of modernity is not even pagan. And that’s sad. At least pagans wrestled with the meaning and purpose of life.
Perhaps we should thank God that the Amazonian people see Christ and the Catholic Church as the fulfillment of the age-old longing of the human heart for God. Maybe we should be more concerned about our own spiritually anesthetized western culture, which, although it is dogmatic and legalistic, is formless and irreverent.
Could it be that we in the West are not even falling back into a kind of paganism, but something worse? Are we falling into a heresy not against the Church, but against our own humanity? +
