Looking back at the weekly messages of Father Paul Counce, first published in The Carpenter, our weekly Parish Bulletin
Published: October 06, 2019
I promise that this will be – for a while at least! – a last column for The Carpenter in which I “muse” at bit on a few changes that I’ve noticed in my life in the Church since celebrating my 40th priestly anniversary. I honestly could go on for weeks, but you’d find that a bit wearying! Two weeks ago I recalled a pretty negative change: the steep decline in the number of parish priests since 1979. Last week I noted a positive trend: the renewed interest in the Sacrament of Penance and the increased numbers of confessions in recent years. How about two other topics?
Liturgical changes deserve to be mentioned. I was ordained a decade after the renewal of the Church’s worship following the Second Vatican Council. It was still a priority to learn how to best “present” the Mass and other worship well, since just finally being able to offer the prayers in a vernacular language that everyone could understand was not all that was needed. It’s no secret that a well-meaning but too free-spirited liturgical renewal had begun in the late 1960’s and began to end about 1978, when St. John Paul II was elected pope. Since then good liturgy has increasingly been less “creative” and more respectful of its actual identity as a work of Christ Himself, for us but not about us. I like to think that here at the Cathedral we have a “comfortable and friendly” level of formality in our very proper worship.
In any case, as perhaps one who can remember the previous typical Parish liturgies (I was serving Mass before Vatican II, remember!), I can testify there was much that needed renewal. Thank God for it. Mumbled prayers and hidden actions inspired little other than a longing for it to be over. Far too many – in fact most – Masses back then were hurried and sloppy, and preaching likely more obscure than helpful. And years of Latin in the seminary have led me simultaneously to rejoice and to regret: it’s a practical good that everyone can understand what’s being said and done now, but an artistic loss in other, mostly musical, ways.
So by this point in my life and priesthood I’m rather more positive. I don’t fight “liturgy wars,” trying either to return to the 15th century or to jettison what Christ instituted at the Last Supper, for instance. I was taught to be both formal and flexible in prayer, especially when sharing Eucharist, and I’m grateful that that’s turned out to be the best way to be.
One final, huge change for me over the past 40 years began in 1986, when Bishop Stanley Joseph Ott assigned me to obtain a pontifical license in canon law. It was the beginning of a long and for me very satisfying vocation as a canonist. A few months ago Bishop Michael Duca reappointed me to a 7th five-year term as diocesan Judicial Vicar, so I figure I must be doing an okay job with it! Canon law was an incredibly minor subject when I was in the seminary but for more than three decades now it’s been a rather central focus of my ministry. I hope I’m not too strange in liking it, and even more that I’ve been able to help people with it. Mostly through providing clarity about failed marriages in our Tribunal’s work, but also in sharing legal facts and insights regarding sacraments, administration, etc. – yes, including penal law in the Church’s “crisis” of abuse since 1982 – I’ve tried to provide some service.
Yours in the Lord,
Father Paul
