Today at mass, there was a blessing of the children. While walking down the aisles, people stuck out their hands in a manner reminicent of the Bellamy Salute. (Well, they were supposed to salute that way but most people cocked their elbows). If you try to Google “Catholic salute”, you get a ton of propogandist websites. So I’ll ask the Dope:
–What exactly is the name of the gesture?
–I don’t remember the gesture when I was going to mass in the 80s and 90s. Is it a recent innovation, or was it just confined to certain churches?
–Has its similarity to the Fascist salute caused any problems, especially in Central European countries?
They’re just holding out their hands to “cast” the blessing.
It’s not a salute any more than asking someone for directions results in a salute.
Other possible gestures used for a blessing include:
the person casting the blessing placing both hands atop the person, animal or item being blessed,
the person casting the blessing placing one hand atop the person, animal or item being blessed and making the sign of the Cross with the other,
making the sign of the Cross in the air, while the other hand is either holding a staff or on the chest.
I’ve seen priests stretch both arms from the pulpit or altar for a blessing, but I’ve never seen someone walking around with arms stretched in a fixed position. It would be death on one’s back, for starters…
i’m Catholic and I hate hate hate this. I refuse to do it. If God needs me to do the Hitler salute to bestow a blessing being given by an ordained priest who can change bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ (yes, I believe that), then there’s something wrong.
I don’t have an answer, but I want the OP to know that I share their observation. I don’t ever remember seeing it in the 80s or 90s, then I pretty much stopped going to church, but now (since 2004 or so, when I shifted my career focus to wedding photography) I see it all the time at Catholic weddings (when everyone blesses the bride and groom at the end. Not all churches do this, but seems like most do). Now, it could be that they’ve always done it at weddings, as I simply did not attend many at that time and didn’t notice (and I didn’t attend many weddings before being professionally involved in them), but I, too, was reminded of the Bellamy Salute the first time I saw it.
Another one is the holding of hands during The Lord’s Prayer. The parishes I attended as a kid never did that in that same time period. Now, they all seem to. Could very well be confirmation bias, though.
Catholic liturgy has undergone a lot of changes in the past few decades. Vatican II and the 1970’s ushered in a huge wave of changes (remember the RCC hadn’t budged an iota since the Counter Reformation so it was like an earthquake), and ever since then has been tinkering and tinkering. Many if not most of the post-Vatican II changes were toward making the liturgy less like spectation and more like participation. The biggest shifts were Mass in the local vernacular instead of Latin, and the altar moved so that the celebrant faces the people over the table instead of facing the reredos (the front wall). This continuing trend is where the group blessing thing came from.
I was a convert so I’ve only been liturgy-watching about 25 years. In that time there has been a counter-shift towards more central control. Most recently the English translation of the Mass has been corrected to be more in line with the Latin, and everyone had to remember to say “consubstantial with the Father” instead of “one in being with the Father”. This is Vatican bureaucracy being busy and important.
When I first attended Mass, the norm was to hold hands during the Lord’s Prayer. Then there was a push to stop doing that (less liturgically correct somehow, smacking of the kumbaya 1970’s), and most people don’t anymore. Although no one is going to say anything if you do.
However, every bishop and every pastor puts his own stamp on things. Our last pastor, a conservative man, brought back the ringing of bells at the consecration, which dates way back. Our new pastor hates being called Father, and wants everyone to call him by his first name. Good luck with that, Bob, since the English speakers in the parish have a median age of seventy or so. Like many American parishes, we are gradually transitioning once again to being an immigrants’ church. Parishes not in areas of expanding immigration are folding up shop. We now have a Mexican associate pastor and two young deacons (priests-in-training), one from Vietnam and the other from the Philippines. Those countries have quite different cultural norms for liturgy so it’ll be interesting.
It’s also a deeply held Catholic tradition to whinge about every single thing that isn’t exactly the way it used to be when you were a kid. So there’s that.
Bless you, Ulfreida for the correct spelling of “whinge”.
Do you also know where to place the word “only” in a sentence? Or is that expecting too much in this “Day and Age”? 
That’s not uncommon here. My parish did that in the 80s and 90s, and I’d say it’s about 50-50 with the parishes I attend now have the ringing or not. The Polish masses pretty much always have it. I can’t think of a time they didn’t. The English language ones are hit and miss, but not uncommon.
That’s local to you guys. That massive blessing others have mentioned is also not a general thing.
That’s very surprising, since both of the parishes I go to (both in Washington State) have always done that. They’re about as different as you can get demographically: one’s big city, mostly upper middle class and very white, the other overwhelmingly farmworker Hispanic small town. The small town one does the ringing of the bells, but the one I mentioned in the OP doesn’t. The small town one doesn’t do the arm blessing thing.
I’m literally stunned by that. I can’t imagine anyone calling a priest anything but “Father”. Even when I went to a Jesuit college and had professors as priests, we always called them “Father”.
My brother’s first job as a teacher has been in our old High School, called San Francisco Javier. The director (and father superior) wants to be called Jorge. When people call him and he doesn’t answer quick enough, he ends up getting a “Most Revered Father Superior Don Jorge [lastname], if I could have your attention please?” It usually works before they finish reverendo.
See, this is exactly the opposite of my experience. Twenty to thirty years ago, nobody was holding hands in the parishes around here, now everybody seems to hold hands. Perhaps the local parishes are just behind the times (which can very well be true; the parishes I attended were fairly traditional.)
I had 16 years of Catholic Education, enough to cure me of it. I’ve seen liturgy go from latin to kumbaya. However, I haven’t been to a mass since my step-sister’s funeral 8 years ago, or a high school reunion backyard mass 3 years ago … and I have NO idea what you’re talking about. Must be recent or regional.
(But I do remember:
“Go, the Mass is ended.”
“Thanks be to God!”
It took a few years for the Vatican to catch on to that one. )
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They might not agree the goal was specifically to make the English translation of the (originally Greek) Nicene Creed more similar to the Latin translation, but it’s true that’s the practical result in case of ‘homoousios’ in Greek now translated ‘consubstantial’ rather than ‘one in being’ in English whereas had been ‘consubstantialem’ in Latin. That’s one of a number of standard English translation changes in the liturgy of several years ago though which don’t all have that particular relationship to Latin. And needless to say they aren’t universal in every language. I’m highly familiar w/ the Catholic liturgy only in English and Korean. The Korean translations did not change at that time IIRC, definitely not that one (was and is ‘seongbu wa han bonche’, ’ with the father one essence’). I wonder did it change in any other language?
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It’s still standard to hold hands during Lord’s Prayer where I live (Archdiocese of Newark NJ), and I don’t recall otherwise in recent years traveling around in the US, in English speaking parishes. They don’t do it in Korea or Korean speaking ones though IME.
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I’ve never heard of that, but my general impression is that many parish priests are on pretty long leashes nowadays for that kind of thing. I think the hierarchy tends to limit its attention to more profound departures from Church teaching, or serious transgressions of the kind where supervisory negligence contributed to such grave scandals.
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Our parish is an interesting counterpoint. Thirty years ago when we moved to the area there was a growing Spanish speaking population alongside the mainly Italian old guard and remnant of the Irish very old guard whose ancestors founded the parish in the 1850’s. Now it’s become predominantly diverse upper middle class and younger as the area has gentrified; attendance is higher too.
Spanish says de la misma naturaleza que el Padre (of/with the same nature/essence as the Father).
Catalan, de la mateixa naturalesa que el Pare. Ibid.
Italian, della stessa sostanza del Padre. Makes three.
Basque, Aitaren izate berekoa. My Basque can’t even be called wobbly, but it seems to be exactly the same as above “with-Father nature/essence/being same/shared”.
My potentially incomplete/incorrect understanding as a history geek and as admittedly not the best Catholic ever is that the Church’s use of the gesture predates the Nazis’ use of it, and it was just one of those things they threw into their shopping cart full of appropriated cultural symbolism to make Nazism seem more deeply rooted than it was (see also, the swastika, which among other populations, was used by several Native American tribes and one US infantry division before the rise of the Nazi party; that one is still fairly common to encounter on shrines in eastern Asia, where the Nazis presumably made less of an impact on folks than in Europe or America.)
When one uses a hand gesture to cast a prayer, is it aimed, or is it pray and spray and pray?