To Genuflect or Not to Genuflect?

The distinctions between Roman Catholic and Protestant worship once symbolized the split between the churches; increasingly, they now express the churches' growth toward unity. In the chapel at the Jesuit University of Santa Clara recently, a Lutheran minister presided as a mixed congregation of Catholics and Protestants recited his church's version of vespers; a priest and a Baptist minister alternated reading the lessons. Last fall, in Boca Raton, Fla., an Anglican priest celebrated Mass before another interfaith group, using a new canon, or prayer of consecration, composed by a Dutch Jesuit.

Without checking the sign on the announcement board, it is now sometimes hard to tell whether a new church is Catholic or Protestant. Abandoning baroque altars and ornate candelabra, modern Catholic churches are all but statueless and feature bare, tablelike altars; at the same time, many Protestant ministers have come to recognize the validity of more ceremony in worship, and are celebrating Communion every Sunday with Eucharistic vestments, candles, and even incense. Thanks to changes inspired by the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Mass in the vernacular features such venerable Protestant institutions as longer sermons, lay readers, and full-throated congregational singing.

A Common Lectionary. This convergent evolution of worship seems likely to continue. The Church of England will soon introduce an experimental order of Communion that is structurally closer to the Catholic Mass than existing forms, and includes a translation of the Lord's Prayer identical to the one recited by Catholics. Looking ahead, liturgists hope that eventually Catholics and Protestants will share a common lectionary and thus hear the same selections from Scripture on the same Sundays throughout the year.

Musically, the principle of borrowing is well established. Appalled by the sugary ineptitude of many Catholic hymns, church musicians have happily borrowed from Protestantism's musical heritage; of the 101 hymns in one new service book approved for use in U.S. Catholic churches, about two-thirds are of Protestant origin. Some Catholic musicologists are experimenting with Anglican plain chant to accompany the texts used at High Mass, while many Protestant churches have adopted the simple melodic settings of the Psalms composed by French Jesuit Joseph Gelineau. Men of both faiths are jointly exploring the liturgical use of new artistic forms such as sacred dance.

What underlies this developing similarity of worship is the liturgists' conviction that the Sacrament and the preached word belong together--a fact brought home by research into the origins and forms of the rites used by the early Christians. Eventually, suggests Benedictine Liturgist Godfrey Diekmann of St. John's Abbey in Minnesota, Protestants and Catholics may be able to share, as an alternative to existing rites, a common form of Eucharistic prayer, possibly based on a simple liturgy used in the early church.

Until then, there is a small danger that in their enthusiasm to borrow from alien traditions, Catholic and Protestant experimenters may pass each other in opposite directions. Recently, an Episcopal priest gleefully told Diekmann how his own church had taken to the new practice of genuflecting during the Creed and the consecration of the elements. Diekmann heaved a weary sigh: Catholicism is just at the point of discarding the genuflection altogether.

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