By Harry Murphy, Editor, The Georgia Bulletin

Some 2,500 from Georgia and the Carolinas heard about a church shift, football games, cocktail parties and a variety of other subjects related to worship.

“...the clergy and laity...are no longer simply speaking AT society, but are addressing themselves TO the needs of men FROM their midst,” said Bishop Gerard L. Frey of Savannah.

Speaking to the Third Southeastern Congress on Worship, the bishop thus summed up the status of the Church in this country today and also captured the theme of the congress, “Join Hands In Prayer.”

The program of the April 16-18 event at the Atlanta Civic Center placed emphasis on community, liturgical renewal at the grassroots level, “making men aware of the value and meaning of worship, and also leading them to a deeper personal growth through study and celebration.” “In the past, the Church sought to bring about needed changes in human society by, if you will, simply speaking AT society, but remaining apart from society,” Bishop Frey said in his opening night address. “The great early Papal Encyclicals on the rights of labor and the working man for instance, were addressed to a Secular World from a Spiritual World. They were addressed to men and women ‘in the world’ from a Church which saw itself as divorced from the world.” History has shown the ineffectiveness of this approach, he said and noted: “The right of labor and working peoples are still unrealized concepts in many places and though the Gospel imperatives of love for God and fellowman have been preached by the Church for 2,000 years, many white people still hate or despise or ignore black people and growing numbers of black people are finding it difficult not to return hate for hate. Vice and corruption flourish in what we normally think of as ‘Western Christian Civilization.’”

The Church’s new tactic of speaking from the midst of society angers some who believe that the Church should “stay in the pulpit,” Bishop Frey said. “But the truth of the matter is that today only the pulpit from which the Church can effectively announce the glad tidings of the Gospel, the truth which makes men free and in which they can find true brotherhood, universally justice and peace is to be found in the midst of the people WHERE THEY ARE. That’s what Jesus did. His Church can do no less.”

Father J. Paul Byron of Jacksonville, N.C., national chairman of the bishops subcommittee on music, urged in his second of a study of football games and cocktail parties in order to know what liturgy is about in our day.

“The key word is event,” he said. “Fifty thousand people in the Atlanta Stadium on a Sunday afternoon in autumn are responding to an event, the action out there on the field. They sit and watch, they stand and cheer, they clap perfect strangers on the back, analyze the work of the quarterback and issue confident judgments. In a dozen different ways they are involved personally in the event, and they respond.

“In another way, the cocktail party is an event of much the same sort. Often those who are invited are mostly strangers. There are introductions, and small knots of quiet conversation, polite and not very profound.” “Gradually people begin to circulate, to get to know one another, to reach out. The conversation becomes more animated, perhaps some major question of the day is brought up, and a general involvement occurs in which a great many ideas are exchanged, and strong views asserted and responded to. By the time people start to leave, some kind of community has been achieved, in which people have come to know and understand one another better.

“What do these things have to do with worship? I think they tell us something about how people meet in groups and crowds in our day and how they respond. A person who goes off in a corner at a cocktail party with his own thoughts is in for a trying time. He’s just in the wrong place for private meditation.”

He explained that, “You can pray privately, but you cannot worship privately, because worship is the action of a community, responding to an event.”

Father Byron viewed every Mass a “capsule history of our salvation,” and said, “We are there to commemorate it, to assert our involvement, to renew the life of Christ in us.” Previously, he said, only the clergy worshipped and the people “went about their private prayers and adoration....less and less did people receive the Holy Eucharist. They believed, but they did not receive.” Being a spectator at the Holy Drama may have been enough for people of earlier times, the priest added, but “for people like us, it just won’t do.” This is being learned at different rates of speed and “One wonders whether a typical large American Sunday congregation, where most people act like strangers who don’t even want to say good morning, it can ever really happen.”

Small gatherings have a better chance, he contended, but the same thing can be achieved in a great crowd “when the crowd is gathered with some common purpose, and when they are together long enough to feel one another, and when there is some kind of community spirit that begins to assert itself, which may well be the spirit of God.” Atlanta Archbishop Thomas A. Donnellan, welcomed the Congress’ participants and said they will have success in their endeavors if they proceed “in a spirit of love and not of condescension or of having special knowledge.”

The multi-media presentation which concluded the evening brought some adverse criticism from persons who objected to its anti-war and pro-city strikers themes, but it generally was well-received.

“I know (Mayor Sam) Massell,” complained Archdiocesan Property Commission Chairman Michael Sertich, “and I believe he has tried to be fair with the strikers.”

Some contended that the war scenes would cause unnecessary grief to those who had lost loved ones in the conflict.

The presentation featured six simultaneous projections on screens, live and recorded music and live voices commenting on the strike, war, abortion and several other current problems.

It was written and directed by Verlin Yenzer.

In a social action workshop Friday, Father William Coleman of Macon contended that there had been very little leadership in the Church in this field and that it was still “very middle class.” “To get out warm socks would be difficult indeed,” he said.

Joe Flanagan, Atlanta, St. Vincent de Paul Society director, said some contended that “Christianity hasn’t failed the world, the Church has.”

The Rev. Don Dautrie of the First Congregational Church said the answer was “to force the leadership to take positions.”

Father Coleman said the problem may be, “We have not turned to Jesus Christ who is the head of the Church. It is not the pope or the bishop who is the head.”

Christiane Brussleman of Belgium, a professional catechist and Fordham University professor, told a Friday night audience that “routine and habit” have made people unaware of the gesture of the liturgy.

She said that the starting point of her prayer each day is in the 10-block walk to Fordham where a drug addict may urge her “to help me make New York clean” and “a little old lady who decides to drive her wheelchair down the middle of Broadway.”

“It is much easier to go sound asleep in church, but we must keep constantly searching...We are not worshippers, but collaborators...lead us to be true worshippers,” she implored.

Father Clement McNaspy, associate editor of “America” magazine, spoke to the closing Saturday morning session, and said “music helps us get out of the common and the humdrum.”

The first poor People’s March on Washington had no unity until the strains of “We Shall Overcome” rippled through the crowd, he said.

“The frailty and motion of music suggest mobility,” he added. “No religion, in the dynamic phase, is without music...Music fosters an approach and an intimacy, a sharing, a community which does not threaten - an expression of good will shared experience.

“While words tend to be cold, merely descriptive counters, sung words evince more, they increase the embodiment of thought and feeling, they are more incarnated - in that sense more Christian.”

The congress was dedicated to the late Msgr. John Toomey of the Savannah Diocese, who helped the Southeastern Worship Congresses get started, and to the late Clarence Jordan of Americus’ Koinonia Farm, who has to have been a speaker at the congress.