The difficulties in the way of the people's participation, which were discussed in the previous chapter, were the external difficulties arising from the present form of the liturgy. But this failure of the external form of the Mass to express to the people its internal content has given rise to a very serious internal difficulty which also needs to be studied.

It is the fact that their minds are not attuned to the social nature which is intrinsic to the Mass. They are individualists, whereas the Mass is in reality community worship. Hence the true nature of the Mass is alien to their dispositions. Their personal piety is not in harmony with the action that is going on; hence not only are they, in general, unable to take part, but they are not willing to take part, even to the extent which remains (though with difficulty) open to them.

This is because their piety is not derived from the "primary and indispensable source" which is "active participation in the liturgy". It is derived from secondary sources which are largely individualistic devotions. It is these which shape their minds. The liturgy, because it has become for them a dead thing, exercises no influence in forming their attitude.

It was not always so. In early days the people understood the liturgy (for it was in their own tongue) and took their full part in it (for it was constituted of elements which were all within their natural powers of seeing, hearing, walking and singing). The liturgy was, in consequence, something which had a profound effect on their mental and spiritual formation. It was a "live thing"; it gripped their attention and welded them together in conscious unity; it made them active in praying, singing, giving and receiving, in constant union with the sacred ministers and with each other. It brought to them no sense of loneliness, no repression, no aloofness, there was no sense of compulsion, of mystification, of irrelevance or of boredom.

Rather there was fascination, joy, enthusiasm and inspiration. And all of this engendered in them a certain spiritual attitude or "type of piety" which was based on vivid realisation of those basic truths which the understood words and participated actions of the liturgy constantly impressed on them.

They vividly realised and powerfully felt that these basic truths intimately concerned themselves. They might not have been able to express them in the accurate terminology found in our modern catechisms; but these truths meant far more to them than they do to our modern people.

What are these fundamentals which the liturgy of those days, year in and year out, so effectively brought home to them, and which therefore conditioned and orientated their whole spiritual outlook?

It is clear from many early writings that have come down to us, especially from the way in which their preachers talked to them, that these early Christians were filled with the spirit of joy. They exulted in the conviction that Christ their Lord had liberated them from the death of sin and endowed them with His grace; they triumphed in the knowledge of His victory over the devil; they gloried in the consciousness that He was their Head, the First-born of many brethren. They knew that they were themselves the Brethren, belonging to each other in one body with Christ.

To them Christ was the one Mediator through whom they had access with confidence to their heavenly Father. They were elated in the assurance that through Him and with Him and in Him they could offer to God the Father all honour and glory. For them the whole of life was a Godward movement made possible for them by the fact that their triumphant and risen Lord, who had Himself gone to the Father, had made them His very own. He was now reigning in glory at the right hand of the Father, and one day He would come again in majesty to summon them into His eternal kingdom. He had conquered sin and death, and given to them grace and life. They felt all this as concerning themselves because they were members of His Body which is the Church.

For Christ, then, they lived; in Christ they would die, so that through Christ they might rise again to eternal life with the Father.

These are the thoughts which are constantly expressed in the liturgy; these are the truths which penetrated their minds by reason of their habitual participation in the liturgy; these are the convictions which shaped their outlook and formed their attitude towards their religion.

Their piety thus was a communal or social piety, motivated by their incorporation into the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. Their piety was Christo-centric, ever concerned with Christ their Saviour, their Head, their Mediator. Their piety was joyous and triumphant, in the spirit of the "Gospel" or Good Tidings that they were redeemed, baptised, endowed with grace and destined for everlasting life.

How different things became when people became estranged from the liturgy by reason of the fact that they could no longer participate in it or understand it! By the Middle Ages the liturgy had not changed with the people and so it became an exclusively clerical ritual in which the people had no part. They could but watch with unperceiving eyes and listen with uncomprehending ears. They were no longer spiritually nourished by intelligent and active participation in communal sacrifice; the great basic truths living in the liturgy did not take possession of their minds and shape their attitude towards life.

Hence the piety inspired by the liturgy practically died out. A very different type of piety began to grow and develop.

Whereas in olden days there had been a social or gregarious sort of piety based on the communal cult of the Church, inspired by the consciousness of grace, of membership of the Mystical Body, and centred on Christ the Mediator, now there arose instead an individualistic type of piety concerned with the salvation of the individual soul, with the fear of sin, the consciousness of guilt, and the need for intercession. The spirit of joy was largely taken out of religion, and the spirit of fear took its place. There arose that cultural dread, that sense of unworthiness in the presence of "the awful mysteries" which was the fore runner of Jansenism.

The concept of the Church as a living organism of the grace-filled brethren and members of Christ became obscured, and uppermost in. consciousness was the view of the Church as a juridic organisation with power to impose commands under pain of mortal sin.

"Devotions" of all kinds arose - the only ways in which the people could now exercise their piety, seeing that they had little outlet in the Mass itself. As the great dogmatic truths and their immediate relevance became less apparent to the popular mind, there was an increasing dispersion of effort in spheres which are merely peripheral to the redemptive and sanctifying work of Christ.

An enhanced value was placed on arousing personal feelings - feelings of contrition, of sorrow, of compassion, of pity, of love. Piety became measured largely by the intensity of personal emotions which its various exercises engendered; devotions were assessed in proportion to the favours they were reputed to obtain. A lack of balance and dogmatic soundness became ever more apparent in the expressions of popular piety.

Of course the people still knew the great truths; they knew that Christ had redeemed them on His cross, that He had risen and ascended into heaven, that He had conquered sin and death; but they believed these things with a kind of notional assent much as we might believe that Julius Caesar once conquered Gaul.

These were not the considerations which coloured their minds and motivated their worship. They were concerned rather with avoiding sin, escaping hell, winning merits, curtailing purgatory, obtaining favours and so forth. It was an attitude utterly different from the joyful, communal, Christo-centric outlook of the early Christians.

And this is the heritage from which the piety of our modern peoples is descended. Apart from that small minority who have been touched by the recent liturgical revival, our people live and move and have their being in this spiritual atmosphere so divorced from the liturgy, a welter of individualism, sentimentalism, legalism, emotionalism, sensationalism, fear and consciousness of sin.

The conclusion, of course, is not that practices of devotion other than the liturgy should be discouraged. Most certainly they have their legitimate place. But they should not have a greater, nor even an equal formative influence on the popular mind as compared with the liturgy itself. They ought not to have a style and content which unfits people psychologically for due participation in the liturgy. Instead they should, as the Pope says, "be influenced by the spirit and principles of the liturgy" (Mediator Dei, fl. 196). They should be such that they "strengthen the spiritual life of Christians and help them to take their part with better dispositions in the august sacrifice of the altar" (Mediator Dei, n. 39).

A spirituality which is formed only by private devotions, and not at all by the liturgy, is ill-balanced; it is the cause of the abuse, so widespread these days, that the people carry on with their private devotions (legitimate in private time) during the public and social worship of the Mystical Body of Christ.

The liturgy is used as a sort of "holy background" for the entirely different personal devotions of a lot of people who are simultaneously present, but are not disposed to take any part in corporate worship. They just do not want to do so, for any such activity would "distract them from their prayers".

This I hold to be the key problem of public worship as it faces us today. The extrinsic difficulties of the esoteric liturgy we have had for centuries have produced an intrinsic difficulty of mental maladjustment.

The only radical cure for this is a reorientation of the public mind from their hyper-sentimental, individualistic, self-centred type of piety to the dogma-filled, communal and Christo-centric type of piety which is enshrined (or should one say buried?) in the liturgy. If they are to worship liturgically, then they must learn to think and feel liturgically. For otherwise they would be performing external actions which are not expressive of their internal dispositions. This would be mere empty ritual, since the ultimate purpose of such actions is none other than to express the interior acts of the mind and will.

The complete solution to the problem is to form the people's minds by means of the liturgy. There ought to be a Mass-liturgy which will of itself grip their interest, delight their minds, warm their hearts, evoke their co-operation and give them scope for joyful, intelligent and enthusiastic participation. Such a liturgy would of itself instruct them, form their minds, move their wills and expand their hearts, thus producing a type of piety in conformity with itself.

Of course it would not be possible, nor would it be desirable, to restore in modern times the identical Mass-liturgy which St. Gregory designed for the people of his own day. The ideal would be something which would suit our people as well as his Mass-liturgy suited his people; hut naturally we cannot expect that just yet! There are, however, many signs that liturgical reform has already begun; the New Psalter, the restored Easter Vigil, and the vernacular Ritualia now used in many countries are promising indications.

What can be done in the meantime? We can do much with partial and local solutions. Our goal must be to bring to the people as full an understanding of the present liturgy of the Mass and sacraments as may be possible with things as they are.

We must keep them in touch with the Church's liturgical year by such expedients as getting them to sing, before and after Mass, vernacular hymns suited to the feast or season; we must draw them into the activity of the worship by teaching them to sing the responses and the common (to simple settings) at high Mass. To the utmost extent allowed by our bishops we must foster the Dialogue Mass, and the use of lectors and speaking choirs for the Propers of such Masses; we must devise token offertory processions, well-ordered Communion processions, and all those other ways and means which practical liturgists have thought out as being feasible yet not in conflict with existing rubrics.

But most important is the psychological preparation which must precede these practical steps. If we cannot form the people's minds by the liturgy which is in Latin that they cannot understand, then we must try to form them for the liturgy by instructions in the vernacular which they can understand.

We must, as the Pope says, "see that they are instructed concerning the treasures of devotion which the liturgy contains, by sermons, and especially by dissertations, periodical courses and Weeks devoted to the study of the liturgy" (Mediator Dei, n. 202). According to canon law every parish must have a mission periodically. One could wish for some law that every parish should, every year, have one "week devoted to the study of the liturgy." If such a practice were adopted, great progress would result.

It is certainly possible - though as the fruit of much hard work - to make a proportion of the people in any given parish take some active part even in the present liturgy. But this will do little or no good, and can have no permanent results, unless the people are helped to understand what they are expected to do and why they should do it. Their minds must first be formed to appreciate it, to accept it, and thus to collaborate.

The very minimum mental equipment which people need before they can be said to be "liturgically minded" would be, I think:

All these ideas have been discussed in the preceding chapters. I hope, then, that they may be judged to have served their purpose as an introduction to the subject of liturgy for those to whom such viewpoints were new, and as a teaching aid to those whose concern it is to pass on these ideas to others.

But I would like to emphasise that they are but an introduction. There is an immense sphere of fascinating interest waiting now to be explored by those who will take the trouble to follow up this mere beginning by further reading in the many more advanced books and periodicals which deal with "liturgy" under its various aspects.

"May the God we worship graciously grant to us all that with one mind and heart we may so take part in the sacred liturgy during our earthly exile that it may be a preparation and prophetic token of that heavenly liturgy wherein, as we trust, together with her who is the august Mother of God and our most dear Mother, we shall one day sing: 'Blessing and honour and glory and power, through endless ages, to Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb' " (Mediator Dei, n. 222).