Where We Left the Monk
Recap in three sentences, using the cards from Tuesday. God gathers the assembly. The assembly receives before it acts. The test of a liturgy is the kind of people it makes. Ask yourself what you brought on the card today: which social reality in your community the prayers name, and which they don’t.
Then go back to Minnesota.
In 1930, Dom Virgil Michel went north to recover among the Chippewa of northern Minnesota. He was near exhaustion, and his eyes had given out. By 1933 he was back at Saint John’s Abbey, and the magazine he had started was waiting for him.
He did not return to a quiet life. The United States was in the fourth year of the Great Depression. Michel had spent seven years teaching that the liturgy belonged to everyone in the pews, and he now pressed the other half of the claim: that it also obliged them toward everyone outside the pews.
In 1935 he put the argument in print. In Orate Fratres, in an article called “The Liturgy the Basis of Social Regeneration“, he set out a syllogism: “Pius X tells us that the liturgy is the indispensable source of the true Christian Spirit; Pius XI says that the true Christian spirit is indispensable for social regeneration.” The conclusion followed in a line. The liturgy is the indispensable basis of social regeneration.
Then he acted on it. He criticized an economy that treated workers as parts. In Commonweal in 1938, he answered a writer who had called Christ the first preacher of capitalism: “What blasphemy! As if there were anything really Christian about our modern capitalism.“He supported employee-owned businesses and decentralized economies. He corresponded with the philosopher Mortimer Adler. According to Stanley Vishnewski, he visited the Catholic Worker and told the community about the Mystical Body of Christ’s relationship to society.
On 26 November 1938, in the infirmary at Saint John’s, Virgil Michel died of pneumonia and a streptococcus infection. He was 48.
Dorothy Day wrote the next year: “What a great loss we all suffered when this great priest died.“
The Turn
The monk who broke under the weight of a movement spent his last years arguing that the movement rested on something other than himself.
That reading is mine, and Michel might have resisted it. But the shape is plain enough for this blog post. The community he wanted would not be built from one person’s exhaustion. It had to come from what he kept pointing to: a people gathered by God around a table and then sent out. Today we ask what that kind of liturgy asks of the people who attend it.
(Let that sink in for a moment.)
Judge: The Church’s First Words About God
(Get out your New Testament and read: 1 Corinthians 10:16–17, then 12:12–27.)
Now think: Is the liturgy the Church’s primary theology? Aidan Kavanagh, a Benedictine of Saint Meinrad Archabbey, gave the Hale Memorial Lectures at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in 1981. They were published as On Liturgical Theology (Pueblo, 1984). He claims that liturgy is theologia prima, primary theology. Books, lectures, and propositions come second. They are the Church thinking about what it has already done. (This is key to understanding the work of historians with liturgy and the history of the Church)
Four consequences follow, and each bears on community.
1. Liturgy is meant to be done, not read, observed, or studied.
2. The worshipping assembly is not incidental to theology. It is one place where theology happens.
3. Faith is not a set of correct ideas that later produces worship. Right worship forms, displays, and sustains a way of life.
4. A church does not first agree and then express its agreement in liturgy. By doing the liturgy, a people learns to live as a re-created world.
This is also the old Benedictine instinct that Michel carried in Minnesota. His own formula, preserved by the American Catholic History podcast, ran lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi: how a people prays shapes what it believes, and what it believes shapes how it lives. The original formulation comes from St. Prosper of Aquitaine (5th century), a Christian writer and disciple of St. Augustine. In his work De Auctoritate Episcoporum (On the Authority of the Past Bishops of the Apostolic See). (If you haven’t figured out by now, I love being a public historian… Just saying :))
In his earlier handbook Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style (Pueblo, 1982), Kavanagh wanted liturgy to be “festive, ordered, aesthetic, canonical, eschatological and, above all, normal.” Teach the last word carefully. Normal does not mean casual or mediocre. It means that worship belongs to the ordinary, durable life of a people: eating and drinking, gathering and reconciling, listening and responding, grieving and hoping, receiving and giving.
“The liturgical assembly is less a gathering of individuals than a dynamic coordination of orders.”
One Bread, Many Hands
Thomas Merton makes the communal point harder than anyone. In “Christian Worship and Social Reform,“ he writes:
“Liturgical worship is not only a communal celebration but a celebration of community, of communion ‘‘in the Spirit.”
Merton goes on to say that liturgy unites people to Christ’s worship of the Father, that it expresses “the mystery of peace and unity in Christ“, and that “we who eat of one bread are one in Christ.“ That last phrase is Paul’s, from 1 Corinthians 10:17:
“ Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.“
The verse makes a theological claim and an ethical claim in one breath. To receive one bread while holding contempt, exploitation, exclusion, or indifference toward fellow members of Christ’s body is a contradiction, and the liturgy itself exposes it. Paul does the same thing a chapter later. In 1 Corinthians 12, the body has many members, none of them dispensable, and verse 26 says that when one member suffers, all suffer together.
Think of all the times we leave the Church after liturgy, and in our hearts hold contempt, exclusion, or indifference toward people because of what we see, hear, and experience in the news and on social media.
Merton adds a practical corollary. Liturgy, he says, “expresses a communal responsibility and reciprocity“ that should then show up in ordinary work. A parish that shares the altar and withholds fair wages from its own custodian has told two different stories, and the second is the one that teaches. The same applies for a diocese and the teachers in their schools.
Two False Escapes
Merton rejects two tempting simplifications, and you should be drawn to one or the other.
* The first escape says liturgy is sacred privacy. Worship withdraws from history into a protected hour, and the world can wait in the parking lot.
* The second escape says liturgy is worth only what it can measure. Worship becomes a rally, and its value is counted in hours volunteered and dollars raised.
Both escapes are understandable. The first protects the mystery. The second protects low-income people from pious indifference. The tradition answers that each one guards a real good and then loses the other. Liturgy is not reducible to activism, and it cannot stay indifferent to the concrete world. Merton insisted that active participation by the laity is vital “to manifest the struggle for peace and brotherhood in the great crises of the twentieth century.“ Mitchell, from the other side, said that Christian worship is inherently worldly.
The teaching sentence for this movement: the liturgy does not remove the Church from the world. It trains the Church to see the world truthfully, love it sacrificially, and serve it faithfully.
Act: What a Monday Looks Like
The goal of the Act movement in the Cardin tradition is not to make worship more entertaining or busier. It is to help the assembly enact more fully the communion it has received. Offer these five practices as invitations, and tell us to pick one.
1. Recover the assembly as the real subject of worship. Plan every liturgy around one question: What is this entire assembly called to do before God? Treat the congregation as a praying body, not an audience. Use silence on purpose, so that people can hear, consent, grieve, and receive. Make acclamations, responses, sung prayer, posture, and ritual movement intelligible and genuinely shared. Add ministries only when each one serves the prayer of the whole body, and attend to access so that children, elders, disabled persons, and newcomers can take part with dignity.
2. Make the intercessions local and concrete. The Prayer of the Faithful is where the assembly learns to carry the world before God. Shape it around the community’s actual wounds and joys. (For pastors, I think this is important. I am basing this on many conversations with my classmates who are ordained.) Name those affected by poverty, violence, displacement, illness, imprisonment, and ecological harm. Name public leaders and the institutions that shape the common good. Name the dead and the grieving, and name the divisions that need reconciliation. Mitchell’s conviction stands behind this: liturgy meets God’s action in the real world.
3. Tie the table to the parish. If the Eucharist forms one body, parish life should make the unity visible. Hold regular shared meals across differences of age, class, and politics- yes, politics- remember Jesus and the gospels are political, not partisan. Build a reliable pastoral-care network for illness, grief, job loss, caregiving, and isolation. Pair social ministries with mutual encounter, so that charity does not run in only one direction. Invite testimony from members whose lives show a community need. Examine whether the budget, hospitality, leadership, and building access say the same thing about the equal dignity of the baptized. Merton’s phrase common work is the test: do the parish’s economic habits resemble the reciprocity professed at the altar?
4. Practice reconciliation before symbolic peace. The sign of peace turns routine without practices of repair behind it. Build clear processes for conflict and harm. Build habits of listening across difference. Make room for confession, lament, apology, forgiveness, and restitution. Agree together never to use Christian language to cover hostility or inequality. The peace of Christ is not politeness. It is the costly reconciliation the Church receives and is commanded to practice.
5. Form liturgical leaders as theologians of the assembly. Following Kavanagh, those who preside, preach, sing, read, serve, decorate, welcome, and prepare the space are helping the Church enact its primary theology. Train them in Scripture and sacrament, in symbol, gesture, silence, movement, and space, and in how worship shapes social imagination. Prefer simplicity to constant novelty. Judge their work by whether the community’s prayer is truthful, hospitable, and mission-forming, not only by whether it ran smoothly.
The objection to answer. A parish leader will say, with some justice, that volunteers are scarce, that people are exhausted, and that five new practices are a recipe for burnout. Michel’s story gives the objection a hearing. He wrote more than a third of his magazine’s first volume himself, and within four years he was near exhaustion. Hence the rule for the exercise below: one change, sustained, shared among many hands.
My Suggestion For A Three-Week Practice
1. Week one, See. Observe one Eucharistic celebration. Note who acts, who is absent, how the assembly takes part, what the prayers name, and which social realities stay invisible.
2. Week two, Judge. Read 1 Corinthians 10:16–17 and 12:12–27 beside short excerpts from Merton, Mitchell, and Kavanagh. Ask what vision of Church appears there, and how your practice compares.
3. Week three, Act. Choose one change you can sustain for at least three months: a more locally grounded intercession, a hospitality practice, a listening circle, an accessible worship adjustment, a shared meal, or a ministry of reconciliation.
As The Old Saying Goes: Pray, Brethren
The question we began with, two days ago, was what turns a gathering into a community. The Christian answer is not common interests, shared culture, or emotional affinity. The Church becomes itself when God gathers diverse persons into Christ’s self-offering, gives them a common Word, forms them at one table, and sends them into a wounded world as agents of reconciliation.
The synthesis, for the index card.
1. Merton: liturgy is communion expressed as common work, mutual responsibility, and peace.
2. Mitchell: liturgy is God’s work, and a meeting with mystery that turns people toward God, neighbor, and world.
3. Kavanagh: liturgy is primary theology, the Church’s first enactment of what it believes and who it is.
The closing affirmation. In liturgy we do not merely attend a sacred event. We become, by grace, the people we are called to be: a body gathered from many lives, reconciled in Christ, nourished for common responsibility, and sent in peace for the life of the world.
The return to Collegeville. Go back to the magazine’s name. Orate Fratres is the priest’s invitation before the great prayer of thanksgiving, and it is never a monologue. The people have a line to speak in reply. They ask the Lord to accept the sacrifice from the priest’s hands, for the praise and glory of God’s name, for our good, and for the good of all the Church.
In 1930, the man who had named a movement for that invitation could not say it. The invitation did not fail. It never depended on one voice, and it never belonged to the one who issued it. The assembly was always going to answer, and in the end the movement he started carried on without his strength. The magazine still exists, under the name Worship. Read it.
That is the claim of these two evenings. The liturgy does not wait for the most capable person in the room. It waits for the people.
Questions to Carry Home
* Where does our community most clearly embody the communion it celebrates?
* Where is there a gap between our Eucharistic practice and our social life?
* What would change if we viewed the liturgy not as a service we attend but as God’s work that forms us into Christ’s body?
* How might our worship better reveal concern for those who are absent, marginalized, or wounded?
* What is one practice we can adopt so that “ Go in peace” becomes a real communal mission rather than a closing formula?
Let’s close this by asking you to say aloud the one practice you will try for three months.
Pray, brethren.
The people answer.