"Peace, Baby!" (A Sign Of The Times)

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was published on August 6th, 2014. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

   In his indispensable book Why Catholics Can’t Sing Thomas Day recounts an incident that occurred shortly after the ancient practice of the Sign of Peace had been reinstated in the Latin Rite Mass after an absence of many centuries.  He turned at the appropriate time to an elderly woman who had been piously praying over her rosary beads and extended his hand.  The woman, says Day, responded with a curt “I don’t believe in that s - - t”, and returned to her rosary.

     While not everyone has quite as negative a view as Day’s pious fellow congregant, there have continued to be concerns about the role of the Sign of Peace (also known as the Kiss of Peace) in the Mass.  Nine years ago the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments made a formal decision to examine the role of the Sign of Peace, especially whether it should be moved to another part of the Mass.  According to the Catholic News Service, the Congregation has finally issued its report (article here).

     As to the question of whether to move the Sign of Peace, the Congregation has decided to leave it where it is, for now at least.  That is not to say, however, that all is well as it is.  According to the CNS article, the Congregation

asked bishops to study whether it might be time to find “more appropriate gestures” to replace a sign of peace using “familiar and profane gestures of greeting.”

That sounds good to me.  I’m all for anything that leads to more reverence at Mass and makes it seem less like a business meeting – or a cocktail party.  The letter also asks bishops to discourage abuses, such as congregants (or priests) leaving their places to give the sign of peace, or using it as an occasion to exchange other greetings (“Peace be with you – and happy birthday!”) or even (this is a new one on me, but someone must be doing it) accompanying it with a “song for peace”.

     This sounds like a step in the right direction.  The Sign of Peace should not be obtrusive.  Really, it doesn’t need to be done at all: it’s optional.  All the same, I can’t recall ever seeing it omitted at an Ordinary Form Mass*, but I have seen most of the disruptive abuses noted above on many occasions.  At high school student Masses the Sign of Peace generally erupts into a frenzy of wide-ranging glad handing, backslapping, and general good fellowship that could, and would, go on for a very long time if permitted.  While things rarely get so rowdy in the parish church, one will often see the same thing on a smaller scale.  It’s conceivable that some people might get the impression that the Sign of Peace is really supposed to be one of the high points of the Mass.

     Well, what if they do get that impression?  Would that be so bad?  Yes, it would.  Here’s the problem: for most of us, the Mass is our most direct and profound encounter with Jesus Christ in this world, and it is centered upon the Eucharist, the “Source and Summit of the Whole Christian life” (Lumen Gentium 11).  A raucous outbreak of joviality among ourselves between the Consecration and the reception of Communion not only detracts from an appropriate sense of reverence at this most solemn part of the Mass, but also draws our attention away from the miracle of the Eucharist.  We need to remember that the word “communion” when we speak of the Eucharist means communion with Christ, the God made Man, through the reception of his body and blood; our communion with each other is only through Christ.  This is most emphatically what we call a “vertical” relationship: we people “down here” directing ourselves to God, in the person of Jesus Christ, “up there”.  The interruption of a very “horizontal” relationship (that is, you and I directing attention to each other) threatens to distort our understanding of the true significance of what we are experiencing, particularly if the horizontal seems to be receiving more emphasis.

     So, yes, the letter from the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments is a good first step.  We should hope to see some real follow-up on its recommendations.  In explaining why the Sign of Peace will remain where it is in the Latin Rite Mass, the Congregation says that it relates to “the ‘paschal kiss’ of the risen Christ present on the altar”, and points out that it immediately precedes the moment in which “the Lamb of God is implored to give us his peace”.  The letter further explains:

Christ is our peace, the divine peace, announced by the prophets and by the angels, and which he brought to the world by means of his paschal mystery.

And so, the Sign of Peace is really all about Christ, not about us.  If that reality can be clearly taught and practiced, maybe even Thomas Day’s skeptical pew mate will be satisfied.


*Since I first published this post last August (2014) I have attended one Ordinary Form Mass that omitted the Sign of Peace, a beautifully planned and conducted liturgy at Thomas More College; to read more see my post "The Reform of the Reform" 

St. Peregrinus: Pilgrim & Martyr for Peace

     Over the past two millenia the Church has seen an endless flood of inspiring Saints.  Most of these heroes of The Faith are not officially recognized, but thousands of them are commemorated with a feast day (in most cases, the date of the saint’s death, which is to say the anniversary of when he or she joined God in Heaven).  The major commemoration today, of course, is for the Immaculate Heart of Mary.  It is also the feast day of St. Anthony of Padua [here], one of the great Saints and a Doctor of the Church. But it is also the feast of St. Augustine of Huy, one of the Vietnamese Martyrs, of whom most of us westerners know far too little (the bio of the saint [here] on Catholic.org tells us that somewhere between 130,000 and 300,000 Catholics have been martyred in Vietnam over the past two centuries, both under the imperial government of the nineteenth century and the more recent communist regime, and often by horrific means: St. Augustine of Huy was literally sawed into pieces while still alive).  There are also saints about whom little more than the name has survived, such as the Irish St. Damhnade and the African Saints Fortunatus and Lucian.

     One of the lesser-known saints commemorated today is St. Peregrinus [bio here], whose actual name was Cetteus.  We are warned that his biography is largely unverifiable, but it seems believable enough.  He was bishop of the Italian city of Amiternum in the 6^th century.  There was a feud between two of the invading Lombards, one of whom was threatened with death.  The bishop successfully pleaded to save his life, for which reason the other, assuming the bishop was simply taking his rival's side, had him thrown into a river with a large stone tied around his neck.  Cetteus was called "Peregrinus" (which means "pilgrim" or "traveler") by the fishermen who discovered his body, who knew he was a bishop by his vestments, but did not know his name.
     Several things stand out from the story of St. Peregrinus.  One, of course, is that Christ's followers would "be hated by all" (Matthew 10:22), even for doing nothing more than trying to spread peace. We don't need to look back to the early centuries of the Church to see the truth in that. We also see, in the Lombard chieftain whose imagination could not conceive of any motives higher than his own ambitions, the truth of St. Paul's assertion that "The wisdom of this world is folly with God" (1 Corinthians 3:19). The Saint's adopted name also reminds that, as St. Paul tells us (Phil. 3:20), our true citizenship is not here, but in heaven.  St. Augustine adds that "We are but travelers [peregrini] on a journey without yet a fixed abode . . ."
     Peregrini is sometimes translated as "pilgrims", because we are travelers on our way to a Holy Place (in our case, we hope, the Holiest of Places).  Let us ask St. Peregrinus to pray for us on our earthly journey, so that we might enjoy with him eternity in the Presence of Our Lord.