A Double Scandal of Particularity

Readers of NLM will be familiar with the concept of the scandal of particularity and how it may be applied to liturgical considerations, namely:

1. The Incarnation is scandalously particular. The universal Logos takes flesh from a particular maiden at a particular time in a particular place to become the person Jesus of Nazareth. 
2. God is also scandalously particular in His love for us, not only in the way that He loves us in our individuality but in the way He reaches out to us—the parents who made sure you were baptized, the friend who gave you a book that changed your life, the time you randomly landed on a Catholic radio station that led to your conversion (all true stories). As Joseph Ratzinger puts it, “God wants to come to men only through other men.”
3. In a healthy liturgy, the scandal of particularity abounds. It is evident not only in its generous use of concrete symbols but in its embrace of its own tradition, that democracy of the dead linking us to the “other men” from the past who handed to us the Faith. Ratzinger noticed, for example, that the traditional Roman Rite is a “mysterious fabric of texts and actions [that] had grown from the faith of the Church over the centuries. It bore the whole weight of history within itself, and yet, at the same time, it was much more than the product of human history.”

In my Lost in Translation series, I often dwell on the scandal of particularity with respect to the Roman Rite’s Romanitas, its conspicuous affirmation and development of its Christian Roman heritage which, rather than creating a myopic insularity, opens up the believer to the universal Gospel. Examples include the use of Rome’s stational churches to shape the liturgical year; frequent petitions within the liturgy to the twin founders of Christian Rome, Peter and Paul; and, of course, the language of the Romans, now conquered, pruned, and repurposed to serve the truth, humbly laboring under the unglamorous sobriquet, “ecclesiastical Latin.”

I have recently learned of another aspect of the Roman Rite’s scandal of particularity: its capacity to work well with other particulars, at least holy ones. Last week I had the privilege of attending a Latin Mass in the Austrian Hospice in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem along the Via Dolorosa, the only TLM currently in the city. As I assisted, the prayers I have been saying or reading for twenty-five years took on a new meaning. A few examples:

“I confess to… blessed Mary ever Virgin,” who was born less than a few blocks east of here in what is now St. Anne’s Church, who fell asleep in the Lord at what is now Dormition Abbey three quarters of a mile south, and who was assumed into Heaven at the Tomb of the Virgin a quarter of a mile east of St. Anne’s.

“The birthplace of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Pool of Bethesda”

The crypt of the abbey of the Dormition

“I confess to… blessed John the Baptist,” who was martyred at Herod’s desert fortress in Machaerus (east of the Dead Sea in present-day Jordan), and was born five miles west of here, at what is now St. John the Baptist Church.

The birthplace of John the Baptist

“I confess to…Saint Peter,” who learned the Our Father from Jesus Christ in what is now Pater Noster Church on the Mount of Olives (one mile east), who participated in the Last Supper in the Upper Room (one mile south), who slept in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives while Our Lord underwent His agony (about half a mile east), and who denied Our Lord at Caiaphas’ residence, which is now St. Peter in Gallicantu, St. Peter at the Cock’s Crow (over a mile south).

Pater Noster Church

“The cave in which the Lord taught His Apostles on the Mount of Olives”

Upper Room/Room of the Last Supper, rebuilt by Crusaders

“I confess to… Saint Paul,” who bolted out of the Damascus Gate (about a quarter of a mile north) with a warrant to kill Christians, and came back through the same gate a contrite Christian - the gate that I used to get to this Mass.

“Take away from us our iniquities, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that we may be worthy to go in unto the Holy of Holies with pure minds,” the physical symbol of which once stood on the Temple Mount, less than half a mile southeast of here.

“Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy,” a cry that is conspicuous in Jerusalem for its absence. The Canaanite woman uttered this plea along the coasts of Tyre and Sidon (Matt. 15, 22) and the blind man did the same in Jericho (Mark 10, 47; Luke 18, 38), but there is no biblical record of anyone asking the Son of God for mercy in the Holy City.

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will,” the song of the Angels who appeared to shepherds on a hill roughly seven miles south of where I was kneeling (and which I had visited the day before).

“Cleanse my heart and my lips, O almighty God, Who didst cleanse the lips of the prophet Isaiah with a burning coal.” Isaiah was no stranger to Jerusalem. Its fiercest critic, he also rejoiced knowing that the Assyrian assault on the city would be in vain. To Sennacherib their king he relayed the following:

This is the word which the Lord hath spoken of him: ‘The virgin the daughter of Sion hath despised thee, and laughed thee to scorn: the daughter of Jerusalem hath wagged the head after thee…. When thou wast mad against me, thy pride came up to my ears: therefore I will put a ring in thy nose, and a bit between thy lips, and I will turn thee back by the way by which thou camest.’ (Isa. 37, 22 and 29)

“He suffered under Pontius Pilate,” a suffering that began when Christ was condemned by Pilate a couple of blocks up the Via Dolorosa from our location and scourged.

“He was crucified for us” on Golgotha, now the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, over a quarter of a mile southwest.

“He was buried. And on the third day He rose again,” also at what is now the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The Tomb of Jesus, inside the church

“He ascended into Heaven” from the Mount of Olives at what is now the Chapel of the Ascension, which reputedly contains the footprints of Our Lord miraculously preserved in limestone and covered with a mysterious oil, about a mile east of here.

“Communicating with and honoring…the memory of Thy blessed Apostle and Martyr James [the Less],” the first bishop of Jerusalem and the second martyr (after Stephen) who was thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple, stoned by an angry mob, and bludgeoned to death with clubs at the base of the Temple Mount.

The Martyrdom of St James, by the Master of the Oberaltaich Mans of Sorrows, early 16th century. Image from Wikimedia Commons, © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 4.0

“For this is the Chalice of My Blood of the new and everlasting testament, the mystery of Faith; which shall be shed for you and for many unto the remission of sins.” These words were first said in the Upper Room south of here. And while He carried the Cross, Jesus Christ dripped blood onto the street that is now called the Via Dolorosa, upon which I walked in order to get to Mass.

“Upon these deign to look with a favorable and serene countenance and to accept them, as Thou wert graciously pleased to accept the gifts of Thy just servant Abel and the sacrifice of our patriarch Abraham.” Abraham’s virtual sacrifice of Isaac took place on Mount Moriah, which later became the Temple Mount.

“To us sinners also, Thy servants confiding in the multitude of Thy mercies, deign to grant some part and fellowship with Thy holy Apostle and Martyr Stephen,” who was stoned to death at the Lion’s Gate near the Mount of Olives, over a quarter of a mile east.

Ecce Deus Sunday

Providence blessed me further when it arranged that I attend Mass on a rare occasion where Roman Catholic and modern Jewish memories intersect. The Church calendar contains several “baptized” Jewish holidays—Good Friday and Easter (Pesach), Pentecost (Shavuot), but all of them were celebrated by Jesus Himself. As far as I can tell, there is only one Jewish “feast day” that the Church commemorates that was instituted decades after Our Lord ascended into Heaven: Tisha B’Av.

Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, usually falls sometime in late July or early August. It is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, for it commemorates the destruction of the second Holy Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 69 as well as the Babylonians’ destruction of the First Temple in 523 B.C. For twenty-five hours, observant Jews do not eat or drink, wear leather footwear, bathe, apply ointments or creams, engage in marital relations or any form of intimacy, sit on a chair of normal height, or greet one another. The sorrow of Jews on this day is reminiscent of that of their ancestors during the Babylonian Exile: “If ever I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand be forgotten.” (Ps. 136, 5)

The priest reading the Sunday Gospel at the Austrian Hospice on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

The traditional Roman Rite’s Ninth Sunday After Pentecost, which is also celebrated sometime between late July and August, hearkens to Tisha B’av. In the Gospel reading, Our Lord has just made the arduous climb up to the Mount of Olives, which has a breathtaking view of Jerusalem. Before him lies the Holy City and its crown jewel, the Second Temple. But all Our Lord sees is the future, when the Romans legions will starve the city into submission (and cannibalism) and raise the Temple to the ground [1]:

At that time, when Jesus drew near to Jerusalem, seeing the city, He wept over it saying: “If thou also hadst known, and that in this day, the things that are to thy peace: but now they are hidden from thy eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, and thy enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and straiten thee on every side; and beat thee flat to the ground, and thy children who are in thee; and they shall not leave in thee a stone upon a stone, because thou hast not known the time of thy visitation.” (Luke 19, 41-47)

One is reminded of another lamentation of Our Lord’s:

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered together thy children, as the hen doth gather her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not. Behold, your house shall be left to you, desolate. (Mt. 23, 37-38)

On the wall of the Salon of the Austrian Hospice

This year, Tisha B’av was on July 22-23. I arrived in Jerusalem just as the Jewish fast was ending. Three days later, on July 26, I attended a Low Mass for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost. As I heard the words of the Gospel, I thought of the Temple Mount within eyesight of the Hospice. The Mount, of course, is not only bereft of its Temple but topped with the Dome of the Rock mosque. As if to echo the eeriness of Jerusalem’s history, during the Offertory and Canon, the silence was broken by the muffled sound of a muezzin’s megaphone praying to Allah from a minaret outside. [2]

The Dome of the Rock from the rooftop of the Austrian Hospice

Moreover, during the Mass I thought of the Dominus Flevit church, the site on the Mount of Olives where Our Lord wept over Jerusalem. I had visited the church the day before, and now I was hearing the Church solemnly proclaim the sacred words that gave rise to it.

Dominus Flevit Church

Notes

[1] You can read Josephus’ account in The Jewish War or Gueranger’s summary in The Liturgical Year, vol. 11, 215-223.

[2] I confirmed this with one of the congregants after Mass, an Arab Catholic born and raised in Jerusalem. When I mentioned that this was the first time I had heard a muezzin in real life, his face grew solemn and he said: “I have heard one every day of my life.”

N.B. Regarding my choice of words regarding this gentleman, I have been told that while some native Christians are fine with the label “Palestinian,” others are not because, it is claimed, 1) the nationality “Palestinian” is a construct invented by Yassar Arafat, and 2) the construct applies mostly if not exclusively to Muslims. As with everything in the Middle East, opinion on the matter is divided.