At a small Catholic church south of Los Angeles, the pressing moral question comes to this: Does kneeling at the wrong time during worship make you a sinner?
Kneeling “is clearly rebellion, grave disobedience and mortal sin,” Father Martin Tran, pastor at St. Mary’s by the Sea, in Huntington Beach, Calif., told his flock in a recent church bulletin. The Diocese of Orange backs Tran’s anti-kneeling edict.
While told by the pastor and the archdiocese to stand during certain parts of the liturgy, a third of the congregation still gets on its knees during Mass.
“Kneeling is an act of adoration,” said Judith M. Clark, 68, one of at least 55 parishioners who have received letters from church leaders urging them to get off their knees or quit St. Mary’s and the Diocese of Orange.
“You almost automatically kneel because you’re so used to it. Now the priest says we should stand, but we all just ignore him.”
The debate is being played out in at least a dozen U.S. parishes.
Since at least the seventh century, Catholics have been kneeling following the Agnus Dei, the point during Mass when the priest holds up the chalice and consecrated bread and says, “Behold the lamb of God.”
But four years ago, the Vatican revised its instructions, allowing bishops to decide at some points in the Mass whether their flocks should get on their knees.
The debate is part of the argument among Catholics between tradition and change. Traditionalists see it as the ultimate posture of submission to and adoration of God; modernists view kneeling as the vestige of a feudal past they’d like to leave behind.
At the center of the controversy is the church’s concept of Christ, said Jesuit Father Lawrence J. Madden, director of the Georgetown Center for Liturgy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Because the earliest Christians viewed Christ as God and man, Madden said, they generally stood during worship services to show reverence and equality. About the seventh century, however, Catholic theologians put more emphasis on Christ’s divinity and introduced kneeling as the only appropriate posture at points in the Mass when God was believed to be present.
Things started to change in the 1960s, Madden said, when Vatican II began moving the church back to its earliest roots. What has ensued, he said, is the predictable struggle of an institution revising centuries of religious practices.
Lesa Truxaw, the Orange Diocese director of worship, said Bishop Tod D. Brown banned kneeling because standing “reflects our human dignity. It’s not that we think we’re equal to God, but we recognize that we are made in the image and likeness of God.”
Orange County parishioners are still allowed to kneel at other points in the Mass, including the Eucharistic prayers. Kneeling is optional as worshippers receive communion.
The controversy at St. Mary’s by the Sea began to intensify late last year after Brown appointed Tran to lead the 1,500-family parish. Tran took over following the retirement of the church’s longtime pastor, who had offered a popular traditional Latin Mass.
Tran’s Mass reverted to the more modern English form practiced in most American churches, and hundreds of parishioners signed a petition in protest. Then, in an effort to pull the church into the modern era, the priest told members they were not to kneel following the Agnus Dei.
Many refused to comply. “Not kneeling would be sinful,” said Manuel Ruiz, 45, “because that is what I believe I should do.”
Mary Tripoli, 54, a former member of the parish council, was dismissed for her insistence on kneeling. “Standing may be reverence, but kneeling is adoration. It’s the one thing that means Catholicism throughout the world. It’s what sets us apart.”
At least two altar boys, the parish altar servers coordinator and three members of the parish council have been dismissed from their duties for kneeling at the wrong time, according to parishioners.
Angered by the anti-kneeling edict, a group calling itself Save Saint Mary’s began distributing leaflets calling for its return outside church each Sunday.
Tran responded in the church bulletin with a series of strident weekly statements condemning what he called “despising the authority of the local bishop” by refusing his orders to stand, and calling the disobedience a mortal sin, considered the worst kind of transgression, usually reserved for acts such as premeditated murder.
Tran sent letters to 55 kneeling parishioners “inviting” them to leave the parish and the diocese for, among other things, “creating misleading, confusion, division and chaos in the parish by intentional disobedience and opposition to the current liturgical norms.”
Father Joe Fenton, a spokesman for the Diocese of Orange, said the diocese supports Tran’s view that disobeying the anti-kneeling edict is a mortal sin. “That’s Father Tran’s interpretation, and he’s the pastor,” Fenton said. “We stand behind Father Tran.”
Recipients of Tran’s letter said they have declined his “invitation” to depart.
Kneeling, said Teri Carpentier, 50, is praying “with our bodies, not just our minds.”
During a recent Saturday afternoon Mass, dozens of worshippers defiantly knelt following the Agnus Dei.
One who didn’t was Winifred Mentzer, 84.
“I’ve been standing lately,” she later said, “because I’m all the way up front, and I know that the priest is watching. But I’m kneeling in my heart.”
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