Liturgical kid stuff: Real or imagined?

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 04, 2023

About ten months ago I mentioned that there are some intercessory prayers in the Liturgy of the Hours that are remarkably banal or even incorrect as written. (See Ersatz Prayers of the Faithful.) I’ve recently noticed two more of these inept prayers, and I am sure most of us have also heard badly-phrased or inappropriate items occasionally in the Prayers of the Faithful at Mass. There are, of course, options for rolling our own intercessory prayers at Mass. But the Divine Office as published is supposed to be compiled by “professionals”.

Anyway, try this one on for size:

You opened Paradise to the thief who believed in you,
—do not close the gates of heaven to the faithful departed.

Are we to suppose that God might close heaven to those who have been faithful to him?

Now I admit that there are subtleties of piety involved in such prayers. For example, we have probably all prayed, at one time or another, the beautiful Eternal Rest prayer (below in its masculine form):

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

But even so, there is a subtle yet vital difference. In this prayer, we are primarily begging God for mercy for a particular soul whose eternal destiny is hidden from us, and the remainder of the prayer is essentially an affirmation of God’s mercy to the faithful departed. This prayer does not suggest that there is any possibility that God will slam the door, contrary to the supernatural virtue of hope we received in Baptism. Rather, it affirms that virtuous hope. But the intercessory prayer from the Divine Office appears to call it into question.

Or consider a second example:

Save your people from their sins, Lord,
—make them pleasing to you.

Call me picky, but hasn’t Our Lord already saved His people from their sins? We can interpret the versicle (save your people from their sins) in terms of the response (make them pleasing to you) by assuming that this prayer is directed toward Christ’s ongoing work of sanctification, by which the salvation of each soul is actualized through ever-deeper union with God. Still, we would display remarkable ignorance if we formed a picket line at the pearly gates carrying signs demanding that God save us from our sins.

Of course, these are humorous examples, more or less “tragic” depending on whether we view them as efforts to meet a deadline or as the patient work of Catholic theologians. I confess that the intercessory prayers are my least favorite portions of both the Office and the Mass, even as I affirm our personal and liturgical need to pray for the the Church and her leaders, the world and its leaders, the various communities throughout the world, those in particular need, the sick, and the suffering both here on earth and in purgatory. I also believe that no sincere prayer is ever wasted. Every one of them will be patched up and applied by Christ for the good of souls.

This is part of what we call the “economy of salvation”. But given what Our Lord has already accomplished, words such as “strengthen us in in our trials” (or even “lead us not into temptation”) make a far more sensible and faithful prayer than “save your people from their sins”.

Kid stuff

Now let me move on to another pet peeve, about which I feel very certain, but I really am not intellectually sure. I am speaking of my concern about children playing specialized roles in the Sacred Liturgy. We see this everywhere, sometimes at a particular Sunday Mass each week, and usually at Masses for those who attend the lower grades in Catholic schools. I strongly suspect that this is psychologically all wrong, and that (all other things being equal) it decreases rather than increases the likelihood that these children will remain Catholic as adults. At the same time, this is a problem with many activities throughout our culture, in which children are “prepared for adulthood” by being given “adult roles” prematurely.

Apart from altar boys, I do not think this was a feature of liturgical life in my childhood (the 1950s), but I would apply my concern even to altar servers now. There is a dignity about formal service at Mass which ought, I think, to be taken seriously in an adult way. Clearly our contemporary secular culture, as a general rule, no longer pays much attention to rites of passage into adulthood, apart for age restrictions on driving and drinking. We typically raise our children to be extraordinarily “willful” and “self-determining” from the earliest possible age. We have almost universally forgotten the Biblical precept about sparing the rod and spoiling the child. There is a dominant tendency to encourage our kids to pretend to adult roles, and this is nowhere more evident than at Church.

Considered psychologically and spiritually, my strong suspicion is that it would be far better to reserve all liturgical roles, including altar service, to spiritual adults, which I would define as those who are at least beginning to show natural adult levels of maturity and, in the Roman Catholic Church, have received the Sacrament of Confirmation. (This suggestion does not map perfectly to Eastern Catholic bodies which confer the three sacraments of initiation—Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist, in that order—all in infancy. But clearly I am thinking in terms of the middle-teen years.) In any case, I believe it would be more salutary, both liturgically and in terms of spiritual development, to restrict to appropriately mature persons all service as lectors, cantors, altar servers, and even ushers, musicians and members of the choir. (Eucharistic ministers must already have received these sacraments and be at least eighteen years old.)

There are two reasons for my opinion (and that is all it is, my opinion). The first is that this will typically upgrade the quality of the liturgical celebration, changing it back from “kid time” to a serious Catholic spiritual responsibility. The second is that I believe our culture as a whole has the transition to adulthood backwards. If children see that taking on particular liturgical roles is considered a serious adult responsibility, I believe that—all other things being equal—they will be more likely to persevere in their participation in parish life as adults, rather than to view Confirmation or high school graduation as the signal that this participation can now come to an end.

Your thoughts?

This may be a relatively minor factor, but I do consider it a factor. Is Mass an appropriate setting for the response, “Oh, aren’t they cute?!” What does it say about our own attitude toward the Sacred Liturgy if our answer to this question is “Yes”? I would be very interested in the thoughts of others on this admittedly tricky subject.

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Am I a gnarly old grinch…or am I on to something?