Your Priest Is Not Your Performer

Imagine that you’re in a quiet chapel and trying to pray before the tabernacle. But in the sanctuary, staring at you, is someone else. That person is also, at least nominally, trying to pray. It is easy to imagine that this mutual posture is not conducive to the most productive kind of prayer. Yet, this is increasingly how we orient our highest form of worship, with neglect for the impact on the priest who leads such prayer.

Every weekday morning, I co-host a Catholic radio show, which we begin with a classic Morning Offering: “O my Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer you my works, sufferings…” The show is available on YouTube, so I am looking into a lens throughout. For months I have been haunted by the question, “Am I really praying?” I am performing the physical gestures and saying the right words, but if prayer (imperfectly defined) is to place oneself in the presence of God, it would be very difficult for me to say yes.

Ultimately, however earnestly I am trying to pray, I am conscious of the live audience and how they perceive the moment. They evaluate everything: the perceived flippancy or reverence as I cross myself, the emphasis placed on certain words, whether I glance around the room or stay focused, whether I nod at the name of Jesus, everything. As a result, that prayer becomes inherently somewhat performative.

Faced with this question, I was drawn back to the Mass and to the priest, who ultimately prays it. In most iterations of the Novus Ordo Mass, the priest faces the people throughout (though it does not have to be this way). We are told that his facing of the people in this manner (“versus populum”) is better because it helps parishioners to feel included or to be aware of what is happening. These things might be true, but a more important question that is rarely considered is, “How does it affect a priest’s ability to pray through the Mass?”

Much has (rightly) been said about the direction of the priest facing East and thus toward God to best symbolize the actualized reality of his leading the congregation in worship in a way that only he can. Those are not trivial details, for we understand the Mass largely through symbolism, which aids us as a source of continual catechesis and formation. But less noted is the internal reality: how a structure in which every mannerism is evaluated by the congregation can affect the prayer life of the priest by reducing what is sacrificial to what is merely performative. Thus, I resolved to ask priests who have experience facing both toward and away from the congregation (and toward God) during the celebration of the Mass how each posture affects their prayer.

The responses were consistent, and yet tragic. Here are a couple of the clearest responses:

“Ad orientem, I attend to the ‘one thing necessary’—to make the sacrifice of Calvary present again—and the people pray along with me; versus populum, I’m inevitably monitoring the congregation, even as they are evaluating me.”

“It is much harder [to pray]. The feeling I have versus populum (even if I know this isn’t true) is that I’m an entertainer. When I celebrate TLM ad orientem, the feeling is of solidarity, that we are all facing God and praying together.”

A recently ordained priest respondent acknowledged the desire for understanding among the laity but warned that “understanding is horizontal (man to man) not vertical (man to God), so everything becomes a big show.” Add to this the microphone he must now wear so that his prayers are heard by the congregation, and it becomes nearly impossible to reach appropriate closeness with the Divine.

The consistency of these answers should not surprise us. Those who accepted the call to the priesthood offered themselves and their lives with totality, so it stands to reason that they would have rich prayer lives. They know what it is to pray deeply, and they know the humility that comes from doing so. To unite with God in such a manner is to recognize one’s smallness (and brokenness). That is a prerequisite to the recognition of the depths of God’s love and mercy. That self-understanding of our smallness in relation to God is the opposite of performance, which is why the evaluation of others while praying is so distracting and even prohibitive of deeper union.

Every action before a crowd feels meaningfully different from the same action performed alone. Even leading a rosary is spiritually and emotionally more cumbersome than one’s daily ritual. Presumably, you know the Apostles’ Creed, but there is a key distinction between knowing it and being able to demonstrate that you know it before a crowd. The latter is something you only consider in the seconds before doing so.

If we can acknowledge the spiritual distinctions even in such tiny gestures, how much more important when applied to our highest form of worship, the Mass? Our priority as laity should be not our own comfort level (which is likewise how we got folk choirs) but what is most fitting and the best that we can offer to God. Thus, this is not a question that can be reduced to some variation of “but I like watching…”; rather, we must foremost acknowledge what we cannot see.

If we treat the priest as our personal performer, we sully his vocation, reduce the sanctuary to a mere stage, and do the disservice of reorienting the Mass toward us—both physically and spiritually. The Mass will never entertain us as secular performances do. It was never meant to. The altar is where Heaven meets Earth and is therefore beyond us and our fickleness. Let us orient ourselves to that reality.