The idea of this symposium came from a meeting between the editors of Catholic Re-Visions and of the Journal of Global Catholicism. As we were looking for a potential topic bridging our respective focuses – political theology and Global Catholicism – the issue of liturgy appeared to us as one that laid at the core both of the intersections between the global Church and its local actualizations, and of the power that circulates where the divine and the political meet. Indeed, as “the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed” and “the font from which all her power flows” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 1963, §10), liturgy constitutes a space and a time in which theopolitical power circulates across many scales, with all the solidarities, tensions, conflicts, interpretations, appropriations, and subversions that this entails. The papers gathered here, which after their publication on the blog will be elaborated at greater length in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism, explore the lived reality of liturgical practices as they are enacted in various contexts and by diverse people, both reproducing and stretching the boundaries of Catholicism.
As liturgy represents “the outstanding means whereby the faithful may express in their lives, and manifest to others, the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 1963, §2), the struggle for its control is one of the central issues in the life of the Church. Here, the tensions between tradition and innovation, inculturation and Roman centralization (Berríos, 2014), modus operatum and modus operandi (Napolitano, 2016: 176-177) clergy and laity (Lacoste, 2023; Marshall Potter, 2023) give rise to debates and practices that have direct impacts on the beliefs and practices of the faithful. Liturgies can, therefore, be the theatre of imaginations and enactments that unsettle official teachings, as people strive to render both their liturgical practices and their social contexts meaningful by imbuing each with the other. This is made particularly clear by Ellen Webber’s contribution, where she analyzes the devotion to La Santa Muerte in Mexico. Situating this devotion within the violent context from which it emerged, Webber shows how people develop liturgical and devotional practices in accordance with their lived realities. Folk saints like La Santa Muerte, she argues, although they have not gone through the (questionable) channels of official canonization, respond nevertheless to the damaged character of our world and allow devotees to seek “God in the messiness of a broken world.” On her part, Jieun Han considers the histories of Korean Catholic rituals of mourning and burials and shows the various obstacles Catholics had to go through. The introduction of the 2003 Sangjang yesik, or Rites for mourning and funerals, attempted to harmonize Catholic Korean funeral rites and the more traditional rites associated with Buddhism and Confucianism. Through a thorough description of the funeral rites currently practiced by Catholics in Korea, Han reveals a deep lineage of religious inculturation through this specific practice.
While these two papers show how liturgy can be reworked and adapted as it enters cultural contexts different from those in which it was conceived, it is also important to consider how liturgy can be unsettled and expanded by the intrusion into its unfolding of bodies that it initially sought to exclude. Indeed, bodies are crucial elements of liturgical events and gestures. As Carvalho Silva and Martins Filho (2022: 295) have argued, “liturgical rites are fundamentally realized with the body, for the body, by the body and on the body.” On one hand, liturgies represent the physical encounter of the body of Christ with the bodies of the gathered faithful, and, on the other, the encounter of these bodies among themselves. These profoundly affective spaces and moments of touch and distance (Napolitano, 2020; Norget, 2021), of loving embrace and hurtful exclusions, allow for both the reaffirmation and transformation of racialized and gendered boundaries within the Church (Symmonds, 2023). By analyzing a Eucharist celebrated by the members of the Québec radical feminist and Christian collective L’autre Parole in 1988, Catherine Foisy highlights, in her paper, the collective’s efforts towards the construction of an alternative ecclesia, reshaped by the bodies, experiences and wisdoms of women. In doing so, the collective questioned the gendered boundaries constructed by the Catholic Church by reappropriating its most central celebration while standing outside of the Church’s exclusionary borders. This tension between inclusion and exclusion is also developed in Sarah Kathleen Johnson’s paper, in which she documents the experiences of the members of an American Catholic liturgical choir with diverse religious affiliations. By analyzing the interviews she conducted with these singers, she shows how ecclesial boundaries cross their bodies in different ways, causing both harmony and dissonance within their ecclesial formation.
The theopolitics of liturgy also far exceed the narrow walls of any given church. Recent studies have shown how liturgical events and gestures can take the form of affective irruptions, able both to challenge and reinforce given institutional formations (Napolitano, 2020; Norget, 2021). As the etymology of the word suggests (from the Greek leitourgía meaning “public service”), liturgies can take the form of public events able to sustain or transform both the ecclesia and the polis. As a practice of community, liturgy invokes notions of fellowship, gathering, solemnity, and celebration (Moten, 2014). Understood in this broad sense, liturgy allows scholars to identify the social norms on display within a community, as well as the bases and loci of authority the community might be challenging. Through interviews with parishioners of the Christ the King Catholic Church in Accra, Ghana, Ebenezer Akesseh reflects on how the dispositions that the liturgical celebration seeks to inculcate to the faithful can challenge corruption within Ghana. Closely analyzing how his parishioners reflect and experience different parts of the Mass, Akesseh argues that the Eucharist can form in them a durable vision that is incompatible with the attitudes that lead to corruption. Also interested in the relations between the liturgy and society more broadly, Erik Sorensen draws on extensive qualitative research conducted in a social justice-oriented parish in Ottawa and notes how explicit and implicit connections between social justice and liturgy emerge, highlighting the gaps that exist between the parishioners’ operant and espoused theologies. Sorensen asks how these differing theological voices can be reconciled and suggests to see “both parish liturgies and parish outreach activities as ritualizations” in order to offer new avenues of incarnation for the Holy Spirit.
All these contributions, therefore, share a concern with the local and global social realities that make their way into liturgical practices. Connecting the divine and the political across various scales in five different countries, the papers show the interpermeability between these core Catholic practices and the societies in which they unfold.
