A Vuvuzela Liturgy

by Sue Rakoczy · December 14, 2009

A vuvuzela liturgy? Does this mean that vuvuzelas accompanied the choir? No, I use this term to describe the incredible volume of the priest�s voice at the liturgy I attended this Sunday. The venue was a small chapel.
The liturgy began badly. The priest wanted to sing a chorus but he could not sing the right melody. After he made several false starts, a member of the congregation began it. That did not deter him from attempting to sing (!!) some of the parts of the liturgy, including the Gospel. This was done in a pseudo-opera style with many extravagant trills. I had read and prayed over the Gospel earlier that morning and I hardly recognised any of the text.
But from the first greeting he shouted at us in a very, very loud voice. The chapel is small and normally the lectors and the priest need only to raise their voices a bit over normal conversational tones. After the Gospel came a very long-winded homily (!) which wound hither and yon through the readings. At times his voice went from shouting to bellowing, especially when he exhorted us against extortion and corruption.
After 25 minutes of this verbal battering, I had had enough. I had tried all sorts of techniques to try to focus away from all this shouting, doing breathing exercises and earnest prayers that he would stop. I left the chapel for a few minutes to gather my strength for the rest of the liturgy, which continued in the same bombastic style.
Why did he shout at us? This is a very good question. Shouting is used to alert people of danger, eg �FIRE�, or in anger, or to speak in a large room that has no public address system. But during a liturgy? Maybe he wants to be a travelling evangelist and was practicing on us.
He had brought a group of teenagers who were making a vocation weekend at his community house. I wonder what they thought. I am sure that all of them missed the fact that with one exception, we were addressed as �brothers� during the homily and the whole liturgy, although there were twice as many women as men present.
Perhaps he wanted to show them how important the priest is and what power he has in the liturgy. And he showed it. His attempts at opera and his shouting were �all about me�.
It was Gaudete Sunday but there was no joy in my heart when I left the chapel, only a great relief that this liturgy was over. It was an experience of severe verbal abuse�and guess what�we the People of God have no recourse. He can return next Sunday and do the exact same thing and we have to take a deep breath and bear it. No matter how a priest abuses the People of God during a liturgy, he can get away with it.