EASTERN OKLAHOMA CATHOLIC
Edward J. Slattery Bishop of Tulsa
Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a series
of articles detailing Bishop Slattery’s
response to the pastoral recommendations
issued by the members of the Diocesan
Synod. Following up on his last article in
the Eastern Oklahoma Catholic in which
the Bishop discussed the importance of
remaining faithful to the General
Instruction of the Roman Missal as an essential way of our
fostering communion with God, the Bishop this week speaks on
the importance of silence in the liturgy and challenges singers
and musicians to maintain (or if necessary restore) the proper
balance in our liturgical music between sound and silence,
between word and melody, between proclamation and
response, and finally the balance between the one who
proclaims and those who respond.
In order that you be better able to connect this article in the
Eastern Oklahoma Catholic with the article of the last issue, we
will repeat the final paragraphs from that article as the
introduction to this article.

"Parishes must recover sense of the sacredness of the sanctuary
He speaks to us, yet we do not
hear Him since we prefer to
engage in unnecessary
and trivial conversations with
those around us".

"The Eucharist is not a ‘thing’ to be manipulated
I do not consider fidelity to the General Instruction of the
Roman Missal as a legalistic imposition, nor as simply
“following the rubrics.”Rather, our obedience here is an open,
public profession that the Eucharist is something which we
have received and not something which we ourselves make. It
is something which we must hand on in its entirety to our
children and grandchildren.
This is the same over-riding concern which prompted St.
Paul to write to the Corinthians: “For I myself have received
from the Lord that which I in turn handed on to you, that the
Lord Jesus on the night when He was betrayed took bread and
giving thanks, broke it and said, ‘This is my body which is
given up for you.’”(1 Corinthians 11:23)
Our fidelity to the General Instruction is also a daily
reminder that the Eucharist is not a “thing” which can be
manipulated or played with. The Eucharist is not subject to
the whims of those who celebrate it nor those who derive
their life from it. The Eucharist is a Person, Jesus Christ, who
gives Himself to us that we might participate in His selfsurrender.
It is the celebration of the Mass which constitutes the
Church as that faithful assembly called to righteousness and
justified by the Blood of Christ which we receive in the
Eucharist. This is why St. Paul continues: “Therefore whoever
eats this bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will
be guilty of the Body and the Blood of the Lord.” (1
Corinthians 11:27)

He who was handed over
The Church has always been quite insistent that when we
celebrate the Eucharist we neither invent it nor do we make it
as if from nothing. Rather, it is something we have received,
and that “something” is Christ’s own being handed over, so
that we can say that every individual celebration of the saving
action of the Mass - whether in Holy Family Cathedral or one
of our storefront missions - is a participation in the full
Paschal Mystery of Christ who is the same “yesterday, today
and always.”(Hebrews 13:8)
It is Christ who allows us to receive this liturgical action
and through it to participate in His obediential worship of the
Father. The Mass is not something that we do, but something
that we receive, and all those who celebrate the Mass, both the
celebrant and the congregation,must be conscious that what
we have received must in turn be handed over in its entirety
to those who come after us.
It is this very action of receiving and handing over which
recalls the salvific will of the Father in such a way as to make
manifest in the liturgy what St. Paul calls “God’s hidden plan,
set forth in Christ from the beginning but only now made
manifest” (cf. Ephesians 1: 9) whereby the Father hands over
His Son Jesus in the incarnation and then allows his Son Jesus
to be handed over again, this time into the hands of sinners
that He who knew no sin might become sin (2 Cor. 5:21) and
thus become Himself the price of our redemption.
But it must also be said that when we enumerate the saving
mysteries which are made manifest in the liturgical action of
the Mass we do not exhaust the list by our reference to the
Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery
.
The Mass as our re-creation
The Mass is also that action which recreates us, for the
world’s first creation has been imprisoned by sin and death,
and to be freed from that corruption we have to be recreated.
It is only when we have been recreated as the children of God
that we can enter into the eternal Sabbath whose rest is
prefigured in a marvelous way by the Lord’s Day rest (as I
have spoken of previously here in the EOC).
It is proper for us, then, to look at the Mass through the
prism of creation, when, at the beginning, the Father spoke
His eternal Word, and the vast silence of uncreated time and
space was penetrated by the Presence of perfect love. This
penetration brings forth the world with all its created forms.
They sprang from utter nothingness in response to God’s
perfect word, and in a wholly marvelous parallel, when God
speaks that same Word to us at Mass, our world is re-created,
and all that which is finite becomes infinite, and that which is
corruptible takes on incorruptibility, beginning with the
Eucharistic elements of bread and wine.
This is why it is absolutely essential that our liturgies be
characterized by the kind of openness which can only be
created by a deep and genuine silence which will allow the recreating
Word of God to be heard in its fullness.
By silence, I do not mean the mere avoidance of noise,but a
much more profound silence, that deep silence of the heart
which promotes an attitude of openness and receptivity to the
Word spoken by the Father and proclaimed in the Scriptures.
This is the silence which we experienced during Pope John
Paul II’s Year of the Eucharist, when we rested in silent
adoration each Sunday after Communion.

Don’t fill reflective space with music for
music’s sake
There are periods in the liturgy into which silence naturally
fits, periods in which silence allows the worshipper to dispose
himself or herself to participate in the saving action of the
Mass by listening for the voice of God Who speaks to the
heart in silence.These periods are specified in the GIRM, and
I am asking our pastors and priests to respect the
congregation’s need for reflective space in the penitential rite,
in the Liturgy of the Word after the first reading and again
after the homily and, finally, after Communion.
At the same time, I am asking choir directors, musicians
and liturgy coordinators not to fill those open spaces with
music for music’s sake. Let there be silence so that God’s
creative and redeeming Word can be heard. Let the Word
penetrate the heart and the mind of the pray-er.
I am also asking our people to recover their sense of the
sacredness of the sanctuary by refraining from idle
conversation in Church before and after Mass. How is it that
Christ, the Host of this Sacred Banquet, can invite us as guests
to share communion with Him and yet we do not respond?
He speaks to us, yet we do not hear Him since we prefer to
engage in unnecessary and trivial conversations with those
around us. Is there any topic of greater value or of more
pressing urgency than His love for us? Let us then be mindful
of Who it is who calls us so that we might direct our
conversation to Him, in gratitude for his love and with sorrow
for our sins.
Since it is important to guard this sense of silence, this
sense of the sacred, even at times of great joy and after
celebrations involving the whole parish, I am asking that
pastors exercise reasonable caution after baptisms,
confirmations and weddings to ensure that a family’s desire
for keepsake photographs does not give way to an attitude
which disregards the sacredness of our churches and the
Presence - after Mass as well as during Communion - of Him
who is the Author of the Sacraments we celebrate.

The same balance in music and song
I am also asking that the music in our liturgical
celebrations be completely renewed through the restoration of
music’s proper balance. Part of that balance is to be found in
the relation between sound and silence, partly between word
and melody and partly in the balance between the celebrant
and the choir or cantor.
Since the Synod presents us with a necessary opportunity
to review various facets of diocesan life, I would like to ask all
those concerned with the music of our liturgical celebrations,
that is, priests, deacons, cantors, musicians, organists and
liturgical planners, to review the musical programs which
they present in the light of their careful and complete
rereading of the Vatican Council’s document on the liturgy
Sacrosanctum Concilium.
I ask them to pay special attention to the sections devoted
to Sacred Music (Chapter 6, ß112 - 121) that those who share
responsibility in a parish for the implementation of the
Council’s liturgical norms might reacquaint themselves with
what the Council Fathers actually wrote concerning the
requirements of proper liturgical music, and in particular the
principle which places the text in importance over the

Page 12
Bishop Slattery Continued from page 3
melody, thus acknowledging the primacy
of Gregorian Chant among the Church’s
musical traditions, not merely from the
position of its great venerability and
beauty, but also because chant, having no
rhythm, never forces the text to be
rewritten to fit a specific meter. Chant
allows us a certain sacred space within
which that Word which God spoke in
ancient times can be heard today with
greater clarity and fidelity.
I understand that this review of music
must lead to changes and that changes will
often be irksome and problematic. For this
reason I would caution that this gradual,
but definite, reintroduction of Gregorian
chant into our parishes and communities
be done with careful study, deliberate
consultation and much prayer. However, as
a sign of the seriousness with which I
approach this topic, I am asking that
pastors move with some dispatch to
introduce their congregations to the simpler
chants of the Kyria, including the Gloria,
Sanctus, Pater Noster and the Agnus Dei.

The balance between
proclamation and response
At this point, too, some mention must be
made of the great dis-ease I feel when I see
the celebrant at the altar while the cantor or
the choir stands arrayed either to his right
or to his left. I am uncomfortable when I
watch the congregation forced to shift their
focus from the celebrant to the singers, and
from the singers back to the celebrant, over
and over again during the course of the
liturgy. This greatly upsets the balance of
the Mass between proclamation and
response (when our song is our response to
what has been proclaimed) by making the
response itself something that we have to
respond to.
Our focus should always remain on
Christ, and it is the priest who celebrates
the Mass with the deacon who assists him
who are the living image, the true icons, of
Christ the High Priest and Christ the true
Servant. Our attention should remain
comfortably focused on them so that we
can be completely joined with them in
their priestly prayer. If, instead, our
attention is repeatedly pulled away from
the altar to the presence of the cantor or the
choir, then our participation at Mass can
become a kind of tennis match, and our
response in prayer remains shallow and
disjointed.
If we have built our churches in such a
way that the only place for the choir, the
cantor and the musicians is beside or
behind the sanctuary, then we face an
architectural difficulty which will have to
be addressed eventually by architects and
designers. But we should be honest enough
to acknowledge that the placement of the
choir, the cantor and the musicians has
proven to be a terrible distraction in many
parishes.
This problem has been confounded in
some communities by a further
distraction. In my travels around the
Diocese, I have noted certain communities
where the music at Mass has tended more
toward entertainment than toward prayer.
The choir or cantors consciously draw the
attention of the congregation to their
performance and really stirring
performances are rewarded by the
congregation’s grateful applause. In this
case, the placement of the choir, cantor or
musicians in the most visible and
prominent part of the sanctuary not only
proves to be a distraction to the
congregation, but provides a kind of center
stage for a concert of religious music.
When this happens, the music becomes
the center of the experience, and the
sacramental transformation of the
worshipper is reduced to his or her being
merely inspired, the liturgical action of the
Mass becoming itself a distraction.
While such a scenario is still quite rare in
our Diocese, I think we are in danger of
moving in that direction, and it concerns
me as your Bishop"