Worship in a Time of War

By Published on July 25, 2015

Few things are more distasteful to me than the prospect of watching well-fed, healthy, comfortable people who sleep well under the blanket of the rule of law, clapping and rocking while singing the hymn (ditty?), “He’s got the whole world in His hands.” Worship is a bit too facile and a lot less urgent and compelling when it takes place in the comfortable arms of the world’s embrace.

Thus I find the photo above so irresistible. It is a photo of a Solemn Mass offered in one of the great cathedrals of Europe, St. Paulus-Dom, in Munster, Germany, shortly after World War II. The photo shows the devastation of the cathedral and the rubble of its surroundings. Somehow (miraculously?) an altar and tabernacle survived. Somehow (perhaps even more miraculously?) faithful laity and clergy desired to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The ruined cathedral and the wreckage of the world around it could scarcely be less consonant with the sentiment, “He’s got the whole world in His hands.”  Surely, the smell of gunpowder and the stench of death were familiar to the laity and clergy at that Mass; likely those odors permeated the air around them before, during and after the Mass. In the presence of such darkness and death, how could the inclination to worship survive?

Read the article “Worship in a Time of War” on aleteia.org.

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