Quite a little buzz on the blogs has been created in the last few days by the release of an amateur video on a website called YouTube.  The video was of a Mass celebrated a couple of weeks ago in a parish in Orange County, CA.  The Mass was so strange, that even the local secular newspaper picked up on it and seemed a bit perplexed and dismayed.

Perplexed and dismayed fairly accurately describes my own reaction when I watched the video.  Apparently, parishioners had been encouraged to show up to Sunday Mass in Halloween costume.  The choir was dressed in angel costumes (not too bad, I suppose), but it got worse.  There’s footage of the cantor, dressed as a witch, singing the responsorial psalm, and there’s footage of an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion, dressed in a devil costume, distributing the body of Christ.  Thankfully, judging by the communion line, most of the parishioners didn’t seem to be too “into” the whole thing.  Very few of them were in costume.  And a number of them had a rather disgusted look on their faces.

The priest celebrating Mass was in regular Mass vestments, thank the Lord.  That is, at least, until the prayer after Communion.  At that point he left, only to return a few minutes later dressed in a “Barney” costume, in order to begin a procession – a procession of Halloween costumes.

 All of us know that in the last 35 or so years, some strange things have happened at Masses.  The sad thing is that what I just described to you is not the worse that I have seen.  Even after the publication in 2002 of the 3^rd Edition of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, which governs the celebration of Mass and sought to clarify some points and the publication in 2004 of Redemptionis Sacramentum, an instruction from the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments which reprobated and imposed penalties for a number of liturgical abuses, things like this continue to happen.

 And then we wonder why surveys indicate that the majority of Catholics in America do not believe in the Real Presence and, in many cases, don’t even know what that phrase means.

 When I was in the seminary, the faculty spent a lot of time railing against “clericalism.”  They defined that term as meaning that before the Second Vatican Council, priests thought that they were better than everybody else.  Undoubtedly, clericalism, defined in that way, was a problem then.  But I don’t believe that every priest, or even most priests, at that time believed that way.

Nowadays, according to the faculty, things were not like that, and they saw their task as making sure that us men in formation understood that point.  And so they watched us for signs of clericalism: receiving communion on the tongue instead of the hand, kneeling in the pew after communion at daily Mass, a fondness for Latin, and, above all else, refusing to be “open.”  That meant refusing to accept theological positions which were plainly against the teaching of the Church and refusing to accept an “anything goes” mentality at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  And, of course, the worse possible violation imaginable – wearing a cassock.

 That was what came out of one side of their mouths.  What came out of the other side was clericalism of, in my opinion, the worse possible variety, although they didn’t see it that way.  Stay away from big words and complex theological topics in your homilies, I was told in homiletics class.  The people don’t need to know all that and can’t understand what you’re talking about anyway.

 My personal favorite was in the final-year class on celebrating Mass, where we practiced.  “Don’t be focused on the altar during the Eucharistic Prayer.  Look out at the people, make broad gestures.  You should be drawing them into the prayer, as their leader in worship.”

 That is the very worst kind of clericalism, because by doing that a priest shifts the focus of the Mass on to himself.  The focus no longer rests on Christ, on the sacrifice of Calvary, on His eternal offering of Himself to the Father.  The Mass ceases to be prayer and instead becomes a talk-show with the priest in the role of Dr. Phil.  Or, the Mass becomes a theatrical production with the Eucharistic Prayer a script that the priest recites while gazing fixedly on his audience.

 The Mass as entertainment, with the priest as the star of the show.  Understood in that way, a Halloween Mass with costumes is a very natural consequence.

I am not Dr. Phil.  I am not Tom Cruise.  I am not a stand-up comic.  I am a priest of Jesus Christ.  I was ordained to function in persona Christi capitus (in the person of Christ the Head), offering the sacrifice of the Mass for your benefit and for my own.  My focus, and your focus, should not be on me.  It should be on the altar and what is happening there.  If I am doing the job of a priest at Mass correctly, then I should be transparent, and you should know only Christ and Him crucified, died, and resurrected.