1 April 1983
Your Excellency:
We trust that you will be as scandalized by the pictures and report which follow as were the readers who sent them to us. Unfortunately, there is little that we can do beyond registering our protest. You, however, have the power to prevent such abuses. In our first letter to you we quoted from the letter Dominicae Cenae of Pope John Paul II, in which he apologized in his own name and that of the bishops of the world for the scandal and disturbance caused to the faithful by such abuses as those described in this letter. He expressed the hope that the bishops would act to prevent such scandals in the future, but since the publication of this letter in 1980 the situation has worsened almost weekly here in the United States.
Your Excellency, the Mass is the making present of the Sacrifice of Calvary upon the altar. It is the most solemn and awesome event in which a human being can participate. It is indeed an occasion during which we should praise the Lord, but, Your Excellency, how can it possibly be an occasion when we should "pet the pooch"? We ask you to convey our most vehement protest to the Holy Father concerning this outrageous profanation of the Holy Sacrifice, and we beg you to use all your influence to insure that Monsignor Schnacky terminates the "special role" played by a dog in his ministry. The picture and report which follows appeared in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 13 February 1983 edition.
By John Hammond
Mass at St. Catherine of Siena Church is for all creatures great and small.
As Msgr. Albert H. Schnacky begins the service, a German Shepherd walks slowly up the aisle. The dog stops several times for parishioners to pat it on the head. Greetings extended, it lays down near the altar and gazes at the congregation. Near the end of the service, the dog rises, stretches, and ambles past the pews again. It joins Schnacky as he leaves the altar at the conclusion of Mass.
It's all part of the setting of what may be Monroe County's most informal church.
Schnacky, 64, has been nurturing a relaxed pastoral environment at St. Catherine's in rural Mendon for 27 years. He says that Heidi the German shepherd "joined the staff" ten years ago.
"We bought her as a puppy at 11 weeks, and she's been going to church ever since," he says.
Heidi plays a special role in Schnacky's ministry. She helps bring informality to the church and also helps bring children to services.
"The dog brings the children—the four-, fve-, six-year-olds—the ones that don't understand the worship but understand the dog," he says.
Children frequently sit on the aisle so they can pet Heidi during services. "Instead of a distraction, it becomes an attraction," says Schnacky. "It really works."
He said he's never really had any problem with his parishioners accepting Heidi. Several visitors have been surprised by Heidi's presence in the church, though.
"Once in a while people try to put her out, but other people step in and tell them she belongs," he says.
Heidi isn't the only informal aspect of Schnacky's ministry. At Sunday Masses, he welcomes parishioners in a conversational tone of voice, then asks for volunteers to help take up the collection and act as ushers during the Holy Eucharist later in the worship.
Your Excellency, we would like to assure you that in no way are we dog-haters, we love dogs—in their proper place. Similarly, we do not dislike traditional jazz. We consider it to be an authentic form of our American culture, and some of us enjoy listening to it—in its proper place. But we believe that the proper place for jazz is not a Catholic Church, above all during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is often said today that everything possible should be done to help the faithful "enjoy" the Mass, that the Mass is essentially a "celebration"—and that a celebration is no time for solemnity. However, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us that "celebrate" means to: "perform publicly and duly (religious ceremony), etc." "Enjoy," of course, means "to experience pleasure." We should certainly experience pleasure when participating in the Mass, but we need to define what we mean by "pleasure" very carefully.
There is a pleasure proper to every human activity; the nature and quality of pleasure varies with the type of activity which causes it. There are purely sensual pleasures such as eating or drinking, but even here the quality of the pleasure can vary greatly. The pleasure to be derived from cordon bleu accompanied by a vintage wine is certainly a more refined nature than the consumption of three or four hamburgers washed down with a six-pack. There is a pleasure to be derived from sporting activities, from watching or participating. Moving to a higher level there is a pleasure proper to reading good books or listening to worthwhile music, to meeting a good friend, being in the company of the person we love. Highest of all is the pleasure proper to religious activities, with the mystical union between a favored soul and God at the very summit. It might be appropriate to define pleasure in the sense that we have been describing it here as "the reaction appropriate to a particular activity."
This brings us to the Jazz Mass which is described below. We have no doubt that most of those present "enjoyed" the Mass, but their enjoyment was not derived by reacting in an appropriate manner to the making present of the Sacrifice of Calvary in their midst. The pleasure they derived was that appropriate to a Jazz recital, which is of a secular and rather sensual nature, the rhythm of jazz music being directed to dancing rather than the raising of the heart and mind to God. The same can be said of much of the music which Catholics, particularly young Catholics, are said to enjoy at Mass today. Certain very shallow liturgical thinkers note that the typical teenager appears to enjoy a certain form of music in a secular connotation, and ensures that he hears the same form of secular music at Mass. It may well be that he then "enjoys" the Mass, but the enjoyment he derives from it is totally inappropriate, his "pleasure" is not the appropriate reaction to the Mass, which is a feeling of reverence and awe. In any case, experience shows that if the liturgy is reduced to a second-rate imitation of the local disco, young people will quite logically come to the conclusion that they might as well enjoy such music on Saturday night and stay in bed on Sunday morning. Similarly, if the "pleasure" they derive from the Mass is that of petting "a pooch," they might just as well stay at home and pet one there.
Heidi pauses for middle-of-the-aisle stretch after Mass.
This shallow approach to liturgical celebrations had already become widespread within a year of the Council's conclusion, so much so that in the October 1966 issue of "Triumph", Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand posed a question which gets to the very basis of the type of abuse to which we are drawing your attention in this letter. He asked:
... Whether we better meet Christ in the Mass by soaring up to Him or by dragging Him down into our own pedestrian, workaday world. The innovators would replace holy intimacy with Christ by an unbecoming familiarity. The new liturgy actually threatens to frustrate the confrontation with Christ, for it discourages reverence in the face of mystery, precludes awe, and all but extinguishes a sense of sacredness. What really matters, surely, is not whether the faithful feel at home at Mass, but whether they are drawn out of their ordinary lives into the world of Christ—whether their attitude is the response of ultimate reverence: whether they are imbued with the reality of Christ.
The account of the "Jazz Mass" which follows appeared in the 24 July 1982 issue of The San Antonio Light.
Band Ready To Jazz Up Mass
Archbishop Patrick Flores will be the chief celebrant at a Jazz Mass in San Fernando Cathedral Sunday. Rev. Louis White, associate pastor of the cathedral, will be concelebrant.
Jim Cullum's Happy Jazz Band will be featured in the 7:30 p.m. Mass, playing a mixture of hymns, spirituals and gospel music in the jazz idiom. The Holy Redeemer Gospel Choir also will be an integral part of the ritual.
San Fernando, Texas's oldest sanctuary, celebrated the first Jazz Mass in a Catholic church in this area last July, with the Happy Jazz and Gospel Choir featured.
Developed by Cullum and his band for a Eucharist held by St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Trinity Univerity's Parker Chapel in 1980, the unique service has also been held at St. Luke's; St. John's Episcopal Church, McAllen; St. Michael's and All Angels Episcopal Church, Dallas; and at the Holy Family Catholic Church, St. Louis.
Your Excellency, the gravity of this particular abuse is aggravated considerably by the fact that the person responsible was the shepherd of the diocese. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
We remain your obedient servants.
The Editors
The Most Reverend Pio Laghi
The Apostolic Delegation
3339 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20008
