Pre-Vatican 2 Memories

I was born into the Pre-Vatican II Church. So I am fortunate to remember what the Church was like before and after that great time of change in the Church. 

My first memory of Church was when I was very young, maybe five years old or so. It was a December Sunday before Christmas. I dressed in my "good" clothes, ones I wasn't allowed to play outside in, and together we walked the two blocks from our home on Loomis Street down to Archer Avenue and St. Bridget's Church.  

We entered the Church and my mother dipped her finger into the holy water font and traced a sign of the cross on my forehead and made the sign of the cross herself.  we walked down the aisle and my mother stopped at one of the pews and she went down on one knee and got back up. I did the same think and filed into the pew. She pulled down this thing that was attached to the pew in front of us and knelt down. I did not follow suit because when I tried it, I could not see anything. I just sat down and looked around. In back of me an old man held rosary beads in his hand and they clinked against the pew and as his lips moved the made almost inaudible sounds.  I was a disgustingly good kid. I just sat there and looked around at what was happening. Then the church bells started tolling in the ding dong pattered that seemed to sing "you're late, you're late" to the people rushing in from the parking lot.  The moments after the bells stopped, a single chime sounded inside and everyone stood up. The man wearing some funny clothes said something in a language I did not understand and all those around me, except the old man with the rosary who stayed on task with his beads, made what I learned later was the sign of the cross. Not wanted to be left out, I tried to imitate what I observed and my mother told me that it appeared that I was attempting to shoe away flies.  This is the extent of what I remember about my first time at mass. 

It would not be the last time I would attend mass with my mother but when I entered Kindergarten I started attending the nine A.M. Children's mass with my classmates under the watchful eyes of the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary and later under the even more watchful eyes of the Sisters of St. Joseph. 

In those early days being a child Catholic meant that you had to be adept in memorizing. We did not learn much about the Bible directly but we learned the truths of the Catholic Church using the ever popular Baltimore Catechism. This book presented the Kingdom of God in bite size pieces in a question and answer format, starting for first simple general principles, defining who God was, what He did, and why He did it. Now I sucked at math and diagramming sentences escaped me, but I could tell you who God was,what sin was, who various characters in the Bible were and what they did. So, while Protestants learned these things through exposure to the Bible and could tell you the chapter and verse the stories came from, we Catholics knew the stories but not where they were in the Bible. 

When my grandmother Anna Barbara Remeikis died the Church was still operating in the old traditional mode. The body was carried into church and the priest was dressed in black vestments and the casket was covered in a black pall. The music sounded somber and was in Latin. Women all wore hats or little rags called "chapel veils."  The whole thing seemed to accentuate the finality of death. We then drove to the cemetery and the casket was carried by the pall bearers, of which I was one, to the grave. I remember looking at the yawning open hole, seeing the tears streaming down my mothers face as we put the casket on the device that would lower Grandma to her final resting place. We pall bearers took off our white gloves and laid them atop the casket. The casket was incensed and the prayers of committal were said, the casket received a blessing with holy water and then it was over. The undertaker announced that all of the mourners were invited to go to this banquet room near the cemetery to partake of a memorial luncheon in the honor of Anna Barbara Remeikis. 

Several years later Frank Remaikis was called home. This was after the reforms of Vatican II were propagated and there was a different feeling to his funeral. The somber sounding Gregorian chant had disappeared in favor of more modern Catholic hymns. The black pall that reminded everyone of death was gone and was replaced by a white pall that represented the fact that Frank had been baptized and was now with God and that we should be happy for him in that his earthly labors were over. If anyone deserved to go directly to heaven, my grandfather should have been a candidate as he suffered as few have suffered on this earth. He was a cancer survivor not once or twice but three times!  Once he had been opened up like a side of beef.  He never complained. But his remarkable story is for another time. His funeral was a celebration. We were reminded at the homily that we would see Frank again in Heaven and his body would rise again when Jesus came back again. When the mass was over we drove to the cemetery and instead of looking into a black empty hole, the final commitment was done in a bright chapel. Sure we were all sad that Frank was gone, but we knew he would return someday. 

Other changes were made in the way Catholics lived their faith life. In the olden days the altar railing separated the holy from the profane and unauthorized persons were not permitted to open the gates and approach the altar without permission. If you were an altar boy you had that permission, other than that civilians were to keep out. The priest read the epistles and the Gospel and when communion time came we wall went up to the border and knelt down and Father would come by and place the consecrated host on your tongue and he would mumble something in Latin to which you responded "Amen."  You did not chew the host, you let it melt in your mouth, which if it got caught on the roof of your moth could take awhile ! 

Post Vatican II the communion ritual changed a bit. First of course the Mass changed, instead of facing the altar the priest now turned around and faced the people. The Mass was celebrated in English and people clinking rosary beads on pews during Mass started to become less frequent. Communion now could be placed in your hand. This was something not heard of in the old Church.  Pre-Vatican II only the consecrated hands of the priest could touch the sacred species. The average every day Catholic could now hold out his unconsecrated hand and receive the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ right in his own hand. This is an amazing change. 

There were other changes in church discipline. Catholics, who had received the name "mackerel snappers" because they were not allowed to eat meat on Friday were absolved from this practice and the crowds roared their approval. Of course, most of the Catholics never read the second part of this loosening of discipline, they were supposed to choose something else to replace the Friday abstinence. Most of us, me included never did. 

It is this loosening of the Friday discipline that shows one of the most important things that Vatican II did for us. Vatican II allowed us to become spiritual adults. We could foster our relationship with God using practices that meant something to us personally. As in the example what happened was the discipline was relaxed and we accepted the relaxation but did not really look into something to replace it. 

It's opinion time! I appreciate the reforms that were suggested by the church fathers as they tried to change us from children of faith into adults of faith. The changes were needed. What went wrong was how the changes were applied. The Catholic Church has been around for two thousand years and will most likely be around two thousand years from now. The church erred not in the reforms themselves, but how they were pushed out to the users.  There was time, lots of it, and these reforms could have been pushed out slowly after enough teaching about the reform(s) had been made. The way it was done had a tendency to alienate some of the older, more traditional Catholics, the ones that clinked beads against the pews during Mass for example. While many were singing Kumbya and Michael Row the Boat Ashore, the more traditional Catholics longed to hear Ave Maria.  While changing to English was one of the best ideas to come out of the council, the Church suddenly, almost overnight, changed and did not really give the oldsters a Latin Mass to go to, well they still had them, like at seven in the evening at a church so far out in the sticks that you might have had to take a Greyhound bus to get there! 

Today, we Catholics are paying the price for this unintentional mis-management.  we have fewer priests and our youth do not seem to find priestly or religious life a way to go. But we are the Catholic Church and we will survive.  Thank God for the reforms of Vatican II. They were needed and now with our perfect 20/20 hindsight the Church will begin to repair the damage caused and they will open further the windows that Vatican II opened and the Holy Spirit will do His work and we will be even stronger. 

God Bless!