Discovering Vibrant Conservative Catholic Communities

I do not know how many people would have the courage to put these three words together - vibrant and conservative and catholic; or if I even think about it these two words - vibrant and conservative.

I move around quite a bit, for work and for personal travel and on all these trips, I tend to visit any Catholic Church I come across so I can keep up with my daily ritual of attending mass.

Anyone will tell you that the beauty about being a catholic is that you can walk into a church in any part of the world and completely feel at home. The rites are the same, the pattern is the same; it has been made this way to preserve the universal nature of the church.

However of recent I have noticed some shifts in the actual celebration of the rites; not in the actual rites because these cannot be changed, but in the way they are promulgated. In light of the new evangelization, there has been a general call for the clergy and faithful to 'breathe life' back into the celebrations, to incite and create the atmosphere for that encounter that all should have when they are in the presence of God.

I have seen several manifestations of this incitement, from the use of musical instruments, orchestra, dancing and rendering of songs during mass, to different styles of preaching from the deeply theological and scripted preaching to impromptu preaching, usually cursory and delivered in a Pentecostal manner quoting a few bible passages. I have also seen this incitement to vibrancy in the prayer of the faithful where the traditional mode of calling the faithful to pray on pre-selected points have in some places been replaced with selecting some members of the congregation to make intercessory prayers on behalf of all, or even in some other cases having a full blown prayer service within the mass.

I commend all those, clergy and laity, who are genuinely working towards rebuilding their parishes into spirit filled communities; however, I think it is important that our parishes do not lose their catholic identity in the process.

Who are we? What are we? Catholic means universal, so we should be truly universal in our celebrations. By all means it is good and even necessary to have some 'local' flavor added into our celebrations, but we must ensure that we do not lose our substance as Catholics, that which distinguishes us from our separated brethren. We are not like them, we cannot be like them, the depths of our faith far outreach the periphery of their beliefs and practices and we should be teaching them to reach out to the deep not coming to shallow waters ourselves.

So when I visit a Catholic Church in which the priest intones the Gloria, or Credo, or Agnus Dei or Sanctus, and the congregation are unable to follow including the choir; but during praise and worship everyone is singing along to those choruses we have borrowed from our separated brethren, then there is something seriously wrong.

I guess perhaps we still think that vibrancy of worship is the forte of the Pentecostal churches but I can assure you that this is not the case. I know of parishes where with the use of music and even a well prepared sermon, vibrancy is being restored back to the church. And this has been achieved without these parishes losing their identity.

So I guess the question is can we really have vibrant conservative catholic communities? And I believe the answer is most definitely, of course we can. We already do.