PARISH BULLETIN: Liturgical reflections
The Summer Slump
Edward Foley |  Summer 2009

The principle of progressive solemnity can help us avoid summer doldrums of “really ordinary time.”

As the rising temperatures and increasing sunlight herald the onset of summer, many parishes slow their pace in most things pastoral, including the weekly worship cycle. May 31st this year is almost comparable to what the medievals used to call a "duplex" feast: it is both the solemnity of Pentecost, announcing the end of the Easter season, and simultaneously the first full weekend of the unofficial summer announced with the onset of Memorial Day on May 25th.

The liturgical fallout from this doublet is palpable across parish worship in the United States. Choirs inevitably pull out all the stops for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost Sunday. Then, rehearsal weary from the Lenten-Triduum-Easter span that started way back on the 25th of February, they close their music folders, metaphorically pack up their larynxes, and bid us adieu until some time in early September, after Labor Day has ushered in the post-summer transition to autumn. Besides the choirs and other musicians who begin their liturgical hibernation at the end of May, other shifts in ministry patterns and even worship schedules announce the onset of summer—or what one parishioner years ago informed me was "really ordinary time." Some parishes adjust the times for weekday and even Sunday eucharistic liturgies, occasionally even eliminating a Mass from the parish schedule for the duration. In small towns across the United States or in sprawling suburbia, there are other summer adjustments that might not be so obvious to the ordinary pew dweller, such as the increased pressure on lector and minister of Communion schedulers to make sure all the slots are filled amid the family trips. Even finding those multiple preadolescent servers who abound during the school year can be difficult in this turning of the seasons. The exception, of course, is if you are ministering in some vacation destination or tourist haven, which means that summer becomes not just high season but a heightened liturgical season for you.

In some ways this liturgical down-sizing that affects the majority of us could be considered an unavoidable, necessary, and even welcome de-solemnization of parochial worship. As such, it provides an opening to consider that almost instinctual but seldom discussed principle of "progressive solemnity."

Progressive Solemnity

The principle of progressive solemnity is not new. Various degrees of festivity were clearly differentiated in the medieval West for virtually every day of the liturgical year. Across Latin Christianity it was quite common to find feasts ranked as principal feasts, duplex feasts, semi-duplex, etc. These common designations were standardized after the Council of Trent (1545-1563). While the language of duplex or semi-duplex feast was suppressed after Vatican II, current ordos still distinguish between solemnities, feasts, memorials, and optional memorials. Practically, these distinctions translate into whether or not a "Glory to God" or proper orations are required.

Though it was not called a principle of progressive solemnity, the 1967 document Musicam sacram (Sacred Music), prepared by the Consilium for the proper implementation of the Constitution and issued by the Sacred Congregation of Rites, does speak about "degrees of participation" (no. 28) within the sung Mass. This concept is offered so that, in the words of the document, "it will become easier, in accord with each congregation's capabilities, to make the celebration of Mass more solemn through the use of singing" (no. 28).

This concept of "degrees" of musical participation received a welcome refinement in the General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours (1970). GILH recognizes that not all days of the liturgical year are equal and that "different degrees of solemnity" need to be recognized (n. 271). Furthermore, that document recognizes that, even on the same liturgical day, all the hours are not of equal importance, and that morning and evening prayer, which are the "hinge hours of the day" should receive greater prominence through the use of singing (n. 272). In a useful summary statement, the document notes,

The principle of “progressive solemnity” therefore is one that recognizes several intermediate stages between singing the office in full and just reciting all the parts. Its application offers the possibility of a rich and pleasing variety. The criteria are the particular day or hour being celebrated, the character of the individual elements comprising the office, the size and composition of the community, as well as the number of singers available in the ircumstances." (n. 273).

This principle was introduced to a wider audience in the 1982 music document of the U.S. bishops, Liturgical Music Today. That document expanded this principle beyond the liturgy of the hours. Speaking more generally of music in the liturgy, it noted that this principle "takes into account the abilities of the assembly, the relative importance of the individual rites and their constituent parts, and the relative festivity of the liturgical day."

Eating the Seasons

While music is certainly one important element in distinguishing degrees of solemnity, it is definitely not the only one. Moreover, the issue of progressive solemnity is not essentially even about degrees of solemnity, as odd as that might sound. Rather, in my estimation, this principle is first a way of recognizing that liturgy is less about words and more about symbols, less about explanations and more about experiences, less about information and more about formation.

When I joined my religious community in the mid 1960s, even though Vatican II had finished its formal sessions (1962-1965), we still operated according to many of the traditions, customs, and devotions common throughout the early 1900s. One of those was a highly regulated approach to eating. Breakfast was basically a bowl of coffee and bread; lunch was often soup and bread; dinner was the most substantial and only really full meal of the day.

While I was yet to learn explicitly the principle of progressive solemnity, I was clear that this process helped me acquire an embodied imagination about the progression of day, week, season, and solemnity through an analogous yet gustatory principle. We observed two Lents in those days. First was the common forty-day preparation for Easter, but a forty days that was extended some weeks in the pre-Lent punctuated by Quinquagesima, Sexagesima, and Septuagesima Sundays. A second Lent started on the feast of Martin of Tours (11 November) and filled in the fasting gap until the serious fasting of Advent began. During these various Lents we fasted and abstained from meat on all Wednesdays and Fridays.

While this could sound like dreary dining, we were not relegated to ingesting some medieval gruel or other penal food. Instead, our gifted and well-trained cooks created meals of steaming pancakes piled high with sweet butter and syrup, homemade soups thickened with fresh vegetables and substantive stocks, or rich quiches and hearty whole-grain breads. This rhythm of fasting and fattening was itself not monophonic, and this patterned eating and dining was interrupted by vigils and festivals, the death of a brother or the arrival of a special guest, the onset of Sunday or the onset of summer.

Summer as Liturgical Demise or Ritual Strategy?

These reminiscences of my infancy in religious life are not meant as self-indulgent or nostalgic. Actually, those were very difficult times for the 17-year-old novice I once was. They were also filled with ritual revelations for which I only acquired language years later to explain. I, along with many others, was being ritualized into a liturgical formation—ironically one that was often better celebrated than explained, and often more effectively prepared in the dining room than in the chapel. It was a ritual formation that embraced the whole cycle of the liturgical year and the movement through the seasons, and tuned me to the power of this waxing and waning of liturgical time.

The landscape of "summer" is clearly a time of desolemnization for many of our parishes. Yet, if it is only a season of scarcity, a period of barren sanctuaries and musical paucity whose liturgical poverty is the result of exhausted ministers and vacation-driven absences, then we have seriously undermined this important principle. Summer is not a time when we stop decorating the environment, but when we decorate it differently. It is not a time when we abandon all part singing or instrumental obbligatos, but maybe we settle for an occasional duet or a little flute music. It is not a time when incense and extra ministers are never deployed, but maybe deployed more judiciously.

There are festivals that do need extra liturgical attention. Some may be part of your own liturgical cycle, such as a parish carnival or launch of summer Bible school that needs a liturgical complement. Maybe the Fourth of July could use a little ritual embellishment, or maybe your patronal feast falls during summer—it is, after all, a banquet of feasts, with Thomas (July 3) and James (July 25), the Transfiguration (August 6), and Lawrence (August 10). Then, of course, there are the Solemnities of the Trinity (June 7), the Body and Blood of Christ (June 14), the Nativity of John the Baptist (June 24), and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin (August 15).

Nathan Mitchell is keen to point out that liturgy, like all ritual, is a kind of skin technology, whose sensory logic is different than that of a well-crafted prayer or epistolary instruction from St. Paul. Those of us who take on the responsibility for liturgical leadership are called to embrace this vocation as skin technologists. And that is a vocation without a vacation.The summer provides us with maybe our most challenging season for enacting the principle of progressive solemnity. Think "modest imagination" at a slower pace. If we can figure out how to do it during August, the Triduum will be a snap.

The Rev. Edward Foley, OFM Cap, is on the faculty of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.