c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) As the church prays, an ancient axiom Catholic tells us, so the church believes. In short, if you want to know where the church stands on a subject, listen to its people at prayer.

We also know that one of the ancient gifts, or munera, of the church is that of R“rception,” meaning that nothing can be considered Catholic teaching until it is received, that is to say, endorsed by its acceptance by the majority of ordinary Catholics. Ordinary Catholics are the most trustworthy processors of church teaching.

This Catholic judgment is found as often in what Catholics do as in what they say.

Take the changes sent out from the Roman bureaucracy a year and more ago saying that Catholics must genuflect or bow before receiving Communion.

Watch what Catholics do during boring sermons (clean out their pocketbooks, read the church bulletin), and watch what they actually do with these new directives.

Do not attempt these maneuvers seemed good advice when these regulations were first issued, along with demands to keep lay people out of the sanctuary and to restore the altar rails that had fallen at Vatican II. There has been as little enthusiasm for bringing back altar rails as for rebuilding the Berlin Wall, both symbols of dividing people who belong together.

While very few Catholics genuflect before receiving the host, perhaps fearing to trip the person behind them and initiate a freewaylike pile-up of the pious, many Catholics have accepted the bow before Communion.

What do these good people teach us about the church? The most obvious thing is their simple dignity as they incorporate this response into their overall prayer life. They affirm their own goodness rather than a Roman official’s dumbness in reminding them that they are only lay people dwelling in the church basement far beneath the upper floor suites reserved for the clergy.

The Roman author of these rules has not gotten the uniformity he desired but the diversity that he dreaded. Good Catholics impose their own generous style on these narrow directives, rejecting their goal of making them passive, conforming, “Yes, Father, Catholics.” They make these rules Catholic.

Watch them and see the believing Church in action. For these men and women approach the priest as individuals, this one making a quick dip of a bow, as if giving a signal to someone, while the next one makes a bow deep enough for a curtain call. Others anticipate the movement, bowing to the back of the person before them rather than to the Eucharist. And some, of course, carry on, ignoring the bow completely.

The people are incorporating these rules into themselves rather than allowing themselves to be incorporated into them. They are too healthy to do something for unhealthy reasons so they smooth off the brittle salute-like character of the directives much as they long ago removed the stiffness from making the sign of the cross, transforming it into the gesture of family members at home with each other, thus reflecting exactly what the church teaches about itself and about them.

These good Catholics are doing what the church has always done: they are humanizing these actions as the church has always humanized creation, recognizing, as Pope Paul VI wrote, that it is “imbued with the Divine.” These Catholics are doing the most Catholic thing imaginable by investing these cold movements with their own human warmth, transforming the harsh bread of regulation into the true sacramental bread of the Eucharist.

You need not make a pilgrimage to Rome or Lourdes to refresh your sense of what Catholicism is all about. You can find and be deeply moved by this homely and unself-conscious revelation at your parish church every day.

DEA/JL END KENNEDY