Mixing It Up in the Wonderful World of Catholic Liturgy

Here's a report on an interesting real-life experiment in running two fundamentally different liturgies in one parish building (from National Catholic
Reporter):

By MELISSA MUSICK NUSSBAUM
My New England-raised daughter-in-law remembers the day she broke the language code of my Southern family. “You can say anything to anyone,” she marveled, “however outlandish, or even cruel, as long as you preface it with the phrase, ‘Bless your/her/his heart.’” And then she gave an example: “Well, bless her heart, she looks as big as a barn in those jeans.”
On July 7, Pope Benedict XVI should have begun his letter to the universal church, “Well, bless your heart,” given what follows. He writes that the 1962 Roman Missal of John XXIII and the 1970 Roman Missal of Paul VI should stand side by side as “two expressions of the law of prayer (lex orandi) of the church.” And, here comes the “anything to anyone” part: He argues that these two expressions “in no way lead to a division of the law of prayer of the church, for they are two uses of the one Roman Rite.”
I don’t know if Pope Benedict has ever been part of a parish where the two rites have shared one space, but I have. Before it had its own building, our local Tridentine Rite community accepted an invitation to worship in our cathedral.
I remember the hope with which we entered into this arrangement. We shared Benedict’s expectation of living out “two uses of the one Roman Rite,” but we moved from division to division. For example, Ecclesia Dei kept a calendar and a lectionary separate from ours. Or, from their members’ perspective, we kept the separate calendar and lectionary.
Forget which side has it right and simply imagine a family in which four members celebrate Dad’s birthday in one month and five celebrate it in another, both groups insisting theirs is the proper, indeed, only, day on which the observance must be held. There will be more kitchen and dining room time, for sure, but none of it shared.
Imagine a family in which one set of ancestors’ stories is told, but only by the five in the separate birthday group. All that time our forebears spent in Israel? One group tells the story over and over. The other doesn’t think it has all that much to do with who we are now. Don’t think about this example in terms of church but in terms of any family you know and answer honestly whether this would lead to deeper union or deeper division.
Then imagine that one of the family groups believes any woman entering her father’s house without a head covering is showing grave disrespect to him. How peacefully do you think she will dwell there with her bareheaded sister? Not very, I should think, based both on my experiences as part of a family and as part of a parish where we tried Benedict’s experiment.
As for the Ecclesia Dei members who shared our space but not our bulletin, our confessors, our Sunday morning classes, our attempts at conversation or our hymnal? They wouldn’t even share our coffee and doughnuts -- a universal law of Roman Catholic parish life if ever there was -- but maintained a separate coffee cart, clearly marked “Ecclesia Dei” and, here’s my favorite part, kept it chained and locked. OK, so maybe some Novus Ordo type was stealing the Creamora. Big deal, you say. But when it came to the structural remodeling and restoration of our old building, we learned how deep and real the divisions are. We learned that the space itself was at issue.
In Article One of his letter, Benedict writes, “The Roman Missal promulgated by Paul VI is to be regarded as the ordinary expression of the law of prayer (lex orandi) of the Catholic church of Latin Rite, while the Roman Missal promulgated by St. Pius V and published again by Blessed John XXIII as the extraordinary expression of the law of prayer.”
With the Novus Ordo as the ordinary expression of the law of prayer, we set out to shape a building hospitable to the rite. The Ecclesia Dei community was vocal in its insistence that the church be made hospitable, or at least, more so, to the 1962 Roman Rite. Why? Well, as we discovered in the open meetings we held at the beginning of the process, the 1962 party did not acknowledge “two uses of one Roman Rite.” It acknowledged two uses of one Roman Rite, one false and one true. A church in which the tabernacle is not on the altar is not an expression of one use of one Roman Rite, but a misuse of the one Roman Rite. As is an altar that suggests a table, or seating for the assembly that reveals the gathered faithful to be a sign of the body of Christ in our midst. It is not one use of one Roman Rite, community members told us, for the baptized -- who everywhere care for the body of Christ -- to receive the body of Christ in their hands. It is a misuse.
Will parishes need two altars under this letter? Two tabernacles, one on the altar and one in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel? If Pope Benedict would like to hear more about our experiences, I’d be happy to talk with him. I know just how I’d begin the conversation. I’d pick up the phone and say, “Well, bless your heart.”

Melissa Musick Nussbaum lives in Colorado Springs, Colo. She writes a monthly column in Celebration, NCR’s sister publication.
National Catholic Reporter, July 20, 2007