By Father Henry Gracz

“There’s a deadly struggle going on in the Roman Catholic Church right now,” said Rev. John Thomas at a meeting preliminary to the 28th National Liturgical Conference.

This struggle was all to evident as the meeting progressed last week in Kansas City. The theme, “Experiments in Community,” pointed to the reason for this struggle; there is a tragic lack of community on numerous levels. Dr. Robert McAllister, speaking on the “Psychology of Community” noted that “we scan the photographs of death on the front pages of the newspapers, and hurry on to the comic page because we are concerned with the death of one of Rex Morgan’s patients. Rates take over human housing in our ghettos, and we are amused by the fantasy problems of Snoopy and the Red Baron.”

But the liturgists who had gathered were not content to live in their incense-filled towers and tear apart others. They saw that our worship often lacks the spirit that binds people together, and the blame for the lack has to be shared.

Father Robert Hovda said that a priest “whose nervousness or nervous mannerisms betray a lack of assurance and confidence cannot serve the assembly well. Whatever weakness we may feel, the time of celebration is not the time to make our weakness the burden of the community. Christians have a right to look for strength in the person who exercises the office of presidency. No longer ‘magical persons,’ we are servants now who must earn attention and respect and cooperation.”

Those planning the week saw that now was the hour to try to build and establish a sense of unity. Realizing that over 11,000 attended the week, they did accomplish a monumental task. They opened with a “HAPPENING” of music choral, folk and electronic; with films depicting Dachau, Selma, sin and innocence on eight movie screens.

To some it seemed contrived, but it did bring about an effective beginning to that sought after unity. But the unity finally came about in a direction that few expected.

In the past the conference drew extremists from both ranges of convictions: those who wanted to be ‘hold-the-line Latinists’ and those who wanted to sack any element of tradition. Those in attendance felt strongly that they were in the mainstream. As Archbishop Hallinan said: “The time to recover the past must go on, the true restoration of our full liturgical heritage. But parallel to it, the church should listen to and speak to contemporary man in the accents of a new creative spontaneity.”

There was a unanimous anxiety that we still have to begin experimentation on local levels, when members of the Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy appeared in a panel before the members of the conference, the sustained and continuous applause of thousands voiced approval to the bishops’ suggestion that there be not only centers for experimentation and study throughout the country, but that bishops be empowered to allow experimentation in their own diocese.

Inevitably, there will be those who return from a conference and will ring the death knell for the event because a demonstration was not effective, or because they felt a particular discussion was poorly handled. But this year, the conference was a strong voice representing all areas of our country, a voice which spoke with the bishops assembled, a voice which was eager for continued renewal, a voice which prayed in manners traditional and contemporary that it would be effective and be heard.

(Ed. Note: Father Gracz is priest-secretary of the Archdiocesan Liturgy Commission. Chairman Lou Erbs and Sister Louis Mary R.S.M., a member, attended the conference along with Archbishop Hallinan).