Bring on the Dancing Girls!

Monsignor Joseph M. Champlin is described by his publisher as perhaps "the most read Catholic author in America today." With the Church in its present state I am quite prepared to believe this. He was Associate Director of the Bishops' Committee on liturgy and is now Vicar for Parish Life and Worship in the Diocese of Syracuse. He organizes dancing during the Mass in his own parish and assures us that: "Our American Bishops have given a stamp of approval to the concept." He should know. Dancing during the Mass is now quite commonplace in a number of American dioceses.

NOTE FROM THE WEB MASTER:

In 1975, the Vatican's Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship issued a document titled, Dance in the Liturgy, which it declared is to be treated as "an authoritative point of reference for every discussion on the matter."

The document noted that in western culture dancing is tied with love, with diversion, with profaneness, with unbridling of the senses . . .

"For that reason it cannot be introduced into liturgical celebrations of any kind whatever: that would be to inject into the liturgy one of the most desacralized and desacralizing elements; and so it would be equivalent to creating an atmosphere of profaneness which would easily recall to those present and to the participants in the celebration worldly places and situations."

The document went on to note concerning the pseudo-ballet:

 "Neither can acceptance be had of the proposal to introduce into the liturgy the so-called artistic ballet because there would be presentation here also of a spectacle at which [only] one would assist, while in the liturgy one of the norms from which one cannot prescind is that of participation [by all]."

This remains the law today.