From the Editor

From the Editor Rev. Thomas M. Kocik Last summer, the Board of Directors of the Society for Catholic Liturgy invited me to assume the editorship of Antiphon at the start of 2009. I must suppose a twofold reason for having been so honored: first, my own story has been concerned for many years with issues of interest to the Society, and second, I have, if not compellingly then at least competently, articulated my views on these matters both in this journal and in other forums. As this is my editorial debut, it is perhaps not only pardonable but also fitting that I share some personal background. I am a parish priest with a broad range of intellectual pursuits (mostly theological and philosophical) and pastoral experience. My interest in the Sacred Liturgy – its theology, history, and spirituality – was born from a desire to understand the controversies attending the overhaul of Roman Catholic worship in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. Having been born in August 1965, not quite four months before the close of the Council, I grew up entirely with what is now styled the “ordinary form” of the Roman Rite, that is to say, the liturgical rites promulgated by authority of Pope Paul VI beginning in 1969. If memory serves, my interest in the “liturgical question” was sparked by the probing conversation I had, some twenty years ago, with the cassocked priest sitting beside me on an airplane. On learning that I was a practicing Catholic, he inquired about my churchgoing experiences. For me, as for 99 percent of the faithful, the Liturgy was not a subject of study or reflection. In terms I would surely not have used then, I described the liturgical celebrations at St Catherine, my parish in upstate New York, as reasonably conservative but routinely minimalist and prosaic. He then asked if I had ever been to “the traditional Latin Mass.” I answered that as a child I had heard of the not-very-distant past, when priests said Mass in Latin, with their backs to the people, adding that I could not fathom anyone preferring that style of worship to its vernacular, “user-friendly” successor. This prompted a lengthy but enthralling excursus on the theology of the Mass, laced with swipes at the “modernists” who had turned the august Sacrifice into a guitar-strumming celebration of Community. Indulging his further inquiry, I recounted some of the changes at St Catherine that had occurred over the past decade: the removal of the Antiphon 13.1 (2009): 2-6  from the editor altar rail, the displacement of the tabernacle from the “high” altar, and the proliferation of lay ministers of Holy Communion. My interlocutor elaborated on the theological significance with which these changes were fraught, and I came away from the conversation with a taste of what the Russian theologian Alexander Schmemann might have called an awakened liturgical consciousness. At about that same time, I was discerning a priestly vocation, the seeds of which, I realize now, had been planted in boyhood. Having worked as a computer programmer for three years after college, I entered the seminary in 1990 and in 1997 was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts. Anyone familiar with the situation in many seminaries and vocation offices from the 1970s until well into the 1990s will understand how a young man aspiring to be a priest in his native diocese might find himself ordained for service in another portion of the Lord’s vineyard. I will spare you the details, but it is part of a much larger, incisively analyzed, and devastatingly chronicled story of “progressive” havoc done in the name of renewal. It is enough to say here that, owing to a personal decision mandated by conscience, my theological studies took place at two decidedly different seminaries, whose divergent theological climates gave rise to opposite tendencies in liturgical piety. To draw the contrast baldly, verging on caricature, I would describe the liturgies at the first seminary as anthropocentric and at the second as theocentric. Those experiences brought home to me the truth of the old adage, Lex orandi est lex credendi. More than once was I reminded...