Why Silence Matters at Mass
What Catholics Get Right and Wrong
If you could change one thing about the liturgy and it wouldn’t be undone, what would you do? These are the kind of questions that make many a liturgy buff stay up all night, and can turn a discussion among traditionalists into trench warfare. When you ask this question, you get a lot of answers, many of them good. For some it might be restoring the communion rail and having communion kneeling and on the tongue. For others its bringing back ad orientem, so that the priest and congregation are on the same journey towards God. For others its doing away with the awful hymns you hear in the majority of parishes where the Novus Ordo is celebrated, where now we have a generation that views Marty Haugen and David Haas as the music of their ancestors. For me, I would reintroduce silence.
The Importance of Silence
There are many things that are jarring in the Latin Mass for the first-time visitor. While the language is certainly a big change, I would argue that silence is the bigger culture shock. In the Latin Mass, there are prolonged periods of silence built into the liturgy, where the priests either say various prayer silently, or inaudibly. As part of the liturgical reform, these periods of silence were eliminated (or greatly reduced to a brief pause after Holy Communion), out of the mistaken belief that participation required visible or audible activity to count as true participation. Reducing the Mass to a university seminar, all prayers became audible, out of the belief that the people needed to hear the prayers to understand what was happening. These twin reforms (the belief that participation had to be audible and that audible took precedence over everything else) probably did more than anything else to ruin the sense of the sacred within Mass in the Roman Rite. (Eastern Rites, while lacking prolonged periods of silence, have other mechanisms to reinforce that sacred sense, such as the iconostasis.)
Why does silence matter? I think the best explanation of the importance of silence comes from the story of Elijah and the cave. Following his challenge against the pagan priests of his day (where Elijah called down fire from heaven), he was driven into exile. He retreats to Mt. Horeb (aka Mt. Sinai) and the following occurs in a small cave:
And there he came to a cave, and lodged there; and behold, the word of the Lord came to him, and he said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He said, “I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the people of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thy altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” And he said, “Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him, and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
In this story, not only does Elijah not encounter God’s presence in the flashy occurrences of nature, but they are also serving as a distraction from God’s presence, which was always there in a stillness, in silence. When we truly encounter God at Mass, it is through such occurrences of silence. God is not in the organ, or the priest’s homily, but rather in stillness. The Latin Mass does much to capture this understanding by drowning out the noise in several key parts of the Mass, encouraging us to search for that stillness.
The Idolatry of Silence
While this silence is important, we created beings have a habit of turning the gifts of God into gods themselves, like the Israelites did with the scepter of Aaron. From the truth that we encounter God in silence, some Catholics erect a belief system that any unplanned noise during Mass detracts from God. This can be anything from the truly inappropriate (the constant idle chatter before and during Mass) to the silly (looking down on someone asking questions during Mass) to the perverse (looking down on children making noise.) This is a bit of a personal crusade of mine, so you will get a bit of a tangent here.
I have two children with autism. One with extreme social anxiety combined with constant verbal scripting/stimming (the repeating of noises/words and phrases continuously) that make the mere attendance of Mass extremely difficult. (COVID lockdowns were particularly hard on her Mass attendance.) For my other child, they can attend Mass, but not as a “normal” child. He cannot sit in a pew, he makes constant noise (albeit at a more managed decibel). He is occasionally prone to loud outbursts.
In both the Novus Ordo and the Latin Mass, priest and congregation have gone out of their way to try and make me feel unwelcome at worst, an oddity to be hidden from public view at best. I have also experienced untold kindness from priest and congregation towards our plight. I have been told to leave if I couldn’t control my kid, which led to a shouting match after mass where the usher learned my son wasn’t the only one capable of loud outbursts, and unlike my son, I was 6 feet tall and lifted 5 days a week. I take great solace in the fact that the divisions of the Roman Church can be set aside, and great anger at everyone doing their best to tell my children not to be in Church as the cause of that unity.
The Silence of the Heart
We should oppose this false idol of silence by instead emphasizing the end of silence: opening ourselves to God. The act of reverent silence is always about how we contribute to that silence, more than what others contribute to it. When Elijah encountered the silence and the stillness, flames were still everywhere, rocks were still breaking, the damage from the wind was still present and causing a scene. When you reach a certain point of closeness with God, that stillness drowns out everything else.
We should also remember that Mass is not a play where you pay and expect studio silence. The priest and altar servers are not performing for you. The music is not performed for your enlightenment or entertainment. The Mass is a sacred action directed towards God, and realizing the Mass is not about you is the first step towards being able to have true silence within your heart, the kind that can invite God in. The more people follow out, the more silence becomes the order of the day at Mass when appropriate, and the less bothered by distraction and noise you become. Like Elijah, we encounter that stillness, and it drowns out everything else. Only at that point do we hear God speak. Silence is a means, not an end.
"God is not in the organ, or the priest’s homily, but rather in stillness." Agreed. I hate when folks think the Dialog Mass is traditional so they reply as if they are acolytes.
Materially, silence is rare at a High Mass. There are all sorts of musical interludes, whether instrumental or not. But by emphasizing that by silence you really mean stillness, then all of a sudden the music itself qualifies under silence at high mass. Gregorian chant and even polyphony qualify as silence, in a sense covering up or muffling the little noises. At any novus ordo parish where you recite the creed, even that low hum of voices can be disturbed by a contrary voice. However, there is something about music which covers up the little noises and little outbursts of toddlers and those who might sneeze or cough. In this sense, proper musical context creates stillness, more stillness, and in fact more silence than the lack of music would.
It's actually the aural version of the old and kind of silly explanation of incense. As if its first purpose were really to cover up the body odor of a large congregation! It seems to me the most important purpose of incense is to create a fragrant scent appropriate to the Mass. In the same way, the first purpose of sacred music is to create an aural atmosphere appropriate to the Mass, but a special bonus is that it creates more stillness than its lack would. I think this is sufficient reason to explain why the clanging and clashing of cymbals of Psalm 150 doesn't describe the way we praise God at Mass, at least until those moments when our attentions are really needed at the consecration, and then bells ring.