So last night the whole family went down to the Cathedral of the Angels for the annual Requiem for the Unborn. This mass is held every year on the Saturday nearest to the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, which is 22 January, or today. It is a funeral mass for the the victims of abortion over the past year, and particularly for those aborted in the city of Los Angeles on the day of the requiem. At the end of the mass, one candle is lit for each of them, and placed around the altar; and then silence is maintained. This year there were 150 candles; on average, 150 unborn people are being killed each day in the City of Los Angeles, and we were silent for 150 seconds.

Progress is clearly being made. There were 180 candles last year, if we recall correctly; and at the first Requiem for the Unborn (this year’s was the ninth) there were over 450.

The celebrant was our new bishop, Archbishop José Gomez; also in attendance were the remaining bishops of the archdiocese (including Cardinal Mahoney) many priests and deacons, the seminarians from our seminary, many sisters, a sizable cohort of the Knights of Columbus, and many, many just plain folks like us. The Cathedral was packed.

We had a surprise guest, Cardinal Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, who concelebrated the mass with Archbishop Gomez and Cardinal Mahoney. I have no idea what Cardinal Pell is doing in Los Angeles, and he didn’t speak at the mass.

Archbishop Gomez gave the homily, naturally. I was eager to hear it, as this is the first chance I’d had to hear him since he became our bishop. The gospel text concerned the Magi and King Herod, the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, and Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents. The archbishop compared Herod to those in the present day who will do anything to keep God from interfering with their control of the world. It was interesting to compare Gomez’ homily with those Cardinal Mahoney gave at this mass over the last several years; Mahoney usually gave a talk about the state of the pro-life movement and the progress being made, complete with statistics. Gomez gave a genuine homily, making his points but drawing them from the scriptures read at the mass. In one way I was sorry for this; I wanted to get a sense of what Gomez is like as a person, and was hoping for something less formal. But on the other hand, a homily is supposed to be a homily, not an informal, off-the-cuff speech, and I’m glad that’s what we got.

In general, the mass went much as it had in past years; the music was the same, the Shantigarh Requiem for the Unborn, a piece written for this mass, and there were still liturgical “dancers”, sort of. I put “dancers” in quotes, because it’s almost certain to give the wrong impression. The dancers are young women in white dresses. They came in at the beginning of the procession with incense in these metal cones or funnels, as they have in past years; but they did so more quickly, and almost perfunctorily, than in the past, and there was also a server with a traditional censer that I don’t remember having seen in the past. (I might well be mistaken about that.) They brought in the altar cloths at the time of the offertory, and dressed the altar as they had done in the past. They led the procession of 150 candles at the end of the mass, and were responsible for placing the candles around the altar; but I’m not sure they processed out afterwards, and they certainly didn’t dance down the aisle as they had in the past.

What I’m trying to convey with all this is that even in past years, there was very little actual dancing being done; the “dancers” were mostly a fancy kind of altar server. More than that, any real dancing took place outside of the mass proper, which is to say that it wasn’t really liturgical dancing because it wasn’t part of the liturgy. And this year, even that was muted; apparently our new archbishop is already making his mark.