Aristotle contends that man is a political animal; the Catholic Church, the world's foremost expert on human nature, has long known this fact.  Man by his nature forms societies and interacts with his fellow man: most fundamentally in the family, and then in larger and more complex levels of private and civil communities.  For this reason (among others), the Church sets her chief act of worship, the Eucharistic sacrifice, in the context of liturgy, of a public form of worship.

Underlying most of the last 50 years of battles over the particularities of liturgical worship (ad orientem vs. versus populum, vernacular vs. Latin, chant vs. folksy hymnody, etc.) have been contending liturgical philosophies: that of sacrality and that of folk-inculturation.  The two visions do more than profoundly affect how we believe; I contend that these visions of the liturgy effect not only the lex orandi and the lex credendi, but also on the lex agendi.  In short, the focuses and emphases of our liturgical worship impact how we go out from the liturgy to spread the Gospel.

To analyze, let me lay out the two contending visions: that of sacrality, and of folk-inculturation.

Sacrality


A liturgy that is genuinely sacred (a word that, in its most primitive Latin origins, had a meaning of "being set apart") presents an objective, divine reality to the worshiping community, encouraging the community to pursue that divine reality while simultaneously encountering the grace to accomplish this task.  Thus, the Mass called Christians away from an ordinary, worldly life, towards a divine vision of Christian life and love united to Christ's sacrifice.

How did the Church do this, practically?  It did it through ceremony, language and custom that emphasized the "otherness" of the holiness of Christ's sacrifice.  Latin was a language "set apart" from the vernacular.  The priest's and ministers' vestments were "set apart" from our normal clothes.  The ceremonies were "set apart" through their orderliness, regulation, and precision, as defined in the rubrics of the Missal.  Chant was "set apart" from other, more common, forms of music.  The sanctuary was frequently (literally) set apart from the body of the church by partitions of some sort (rood screens and curtains in the West, iconostases in the East).

In certain respects, the Church was quite daring in how she would present her liturgy to her faithful.  She didn't care that almost nobody spoke Latin.  She didn't care that the priest didn't look at the people for much of the Mass.  She didn't care about the immediate difficulty one might experience in comprehending chant or polyphony.  In effect, the Church was saying, "We don't care if you don't understand this right now.  But we dare you to experience this without getting a glimpse of what holiness is.  We dare you to experience this without it touching your heart.  We dare you to experience this without looking at your conscience and finding something wanting."

It is precisely by calling man out of the humdrum of ordinary life towards “divinization,” that the Church incited her faithful towards impacting the broader political community positively.  Through such a liturgical life, a Catholic is called to change his former ways, to live a more “divinized” existence that communicates the gift we receive in Mass (the source of all grace, Jesus Christ) to the community surrounding us.  The Mass is “other,” it makes us “other,” and we must then attempt to make society something “other.”

Folk-Inculturation


I do not wish to appear to be disparaging inculturation as a concept. Authentic inculturation does exist: it is one that imports into the liturgy the best, highest, most beautiful contributions of a given culture's art, architecture, music, etc. in a fashion that is harmonious with the liturgy's authentic nature.  This is entirely congruous with the vision of liturgical sacrality.

I like to distinguish this from what I call folk-inculturation (or perhaps faux-inculturation).  This style of liturgical worship takes to an extreme the concept of the "active participation of the laity" in the liturgical action.  To further this goal, the folk-inculturation movement promoted a vision of Catholic liturgy purely as an expression of the community participating in it.  As such, it explicitly eschews musical and artistic forms that possess this characteristic of the "other.”  It only embraces art forms comfortable to the “folk,” the common culture of the community celebrating Mass.

This is why, in the 1970s, many deemed it appropriate to employ songs by Bob Dylan or Cat Stevens (musicians within the American folk tradition) in the context of the liturgy.  Mass had become an expression of current, popular culture, not the re-presentation of the transcendent reality of the sacrifice of Christ.  In other countries, this mindset has led to such incongruities as Mariachi Masses (not a traditional part of Mexican Catholicism), Polka Masses (not a traditional part of Bavarian Catholicism), and Rock and Roll Masses (not a traditional part of any kind of Catholicism).

Cardinal Ratzinger described the versus populum liturgical posture as promoting a liturgical community focused inward upon itself, rather than focused outwards towards the Lord.  This is perhaps the best description of the folk-inculturation mindset in general.  It views the particular Christian community as having more to impact upon the Mass than the Mass does upon the people.

The Societal Impact


It is impossible to trace the post-Vatican II decline of the Church in the United States (the decrease in Mass attendance, basic understanding of Catholic teaching, vocations to the priesthood and religious life, etc.) entirely to the liturgical reform following the Council.  Nevertheless, the grand postconciliar initiatives promised a liturgy that was readily understandable, that would allow for "full, conscious, active participation of the laity," and that would emphasize a didactic element of the Mass that had allegedly been lost over time.  When only 50 percent of Catholics actually know what the Church teaches about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, it is hard to call the liturgical reforms a ringing success.

This isn't entirely the fault of the Novus Ordo.  Because the folk-inculturation crowd took control of liturgical practice within the United States, most Catholics never have seen the modern form celebrated in continuity with the prior tradition.  If every priest and bishop would regularly offer Mass in the Ordinary Form in a similar fashion to the Papal Masses of Benedict XVI (though on a smaller scale), things could possibly be quite different.

Nevertheless, the Novus Ordo must share some of the blame for lacking the rubrical content and structure that kept the traditional rite from being abused by the folk-inculturationists.  In fact, the Novus Ordo was so lacking in structure, shape, and form, that it resulted in a liturgical rite that can legitimately be shaped by any local community into an expression of itself.  Other than bad taste, there's no reason why Mariachi music, Cat Stevens, or electric guitars and drums cannot all be employed in a Mass in the modern form.  It was tailor made for folk-inculturationists to corrupt.

How Should We Teach?


How we worship has a profound impact on what we believe and how we put our faith into practice.  The Church has always known this, which is why the Catechism, citing Lumen Gentium, refers to the Eucharist as the "source and summit of the Christian life."  How we worship God impacts the entirety of the Christian life.

If Catholics are to have a positive impact on the political communities in which they find themselves, they must draw the strength to have such an impact from the Eucharist, from the "source and summit," and naturally from their liturgical worship.  Yet, when we remain in the grip of a liturgical culture that is still more focused on the community actualizing itself than on rendering worship to and receiving grace from God, how can we expect the Church to have the kind of cultural impact it ought to have?

I am not a Republican shill, but it's still a depressing fact that more than half of all Catholics voted for a pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, anti-Church freedom candidate for president in 2012.  Even 42% of Catholics who go to Mass weekly voted for him.  This isn't acceptable.

Changing our manner of worship won't immediately result in Catholics who are magically pro-life, but at the very least it will force some Catholics out of their comfort zone.  It will make the Mass challenging, rather than a big act of communal self-affirmation. It will crack the self-centered shell of the church-goer and open his heart to teachings of the Church that challenge him to pick up his disciple’s cross, rather than ignore it. It will teach the faithful that, far from the liturgy being a malleable self-celebration of the community, the liturgy contains a message from which they can learn and grow, and then pass on.