After receiving (and distributing) Holy Communion, the priest purifies the sacred vessels and his canonical digits. As Fr. Nicholas Gihr notes, “the exterior act of cleansing the chalice and also his fingers” prompts a meditation on his interior, [1] and thus he prays:
Quod ore sumpsimus, Domine, pura mente capiamus: et de munere temporali fiat nobis remedium sempiternum.
Which I translate as:
Grant, O Lord, that what we have received with our mouth we may take hold of with a pure mind; and out of a temporal gift may it become for us an eternal remedy.
A transition from the physical to the spiritual is a common theme in traditional Catholic prayer. For example, the Postcommunion Prayer for Low Sunday (the Sunday after Easter) is:
Præsta, quaesumus, omnipotens Deus: ut, qui pascalia festa peregimus; haec, te largiente, moribus et vita teneamus. Per Dominum.
Which I translate as:
Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that we who have finished the Paschal feasts may, by Thy bounty, hold onto them in our practices and in our life. Through Our Lord.
The prayer also forms a contrast between the receptivity involved in Holy Communion and the activity involved in profiting from it. Capiamus, which we have translated as “take hold of,” is a vigorous verb, meaning to seize, grab, or capture. The contrast calls to mind St. Augustine’s interpretation of the myth of Proteus, the god who, once captured, turned into terrifying deceptive shapes. But if his assailant ignored these appearances and held on to him, Proteus would disclose the truth. For Augustine, the appearances are what the senses grasp and the truth is what the mind grasps. [2] Similarly, in Holy Communion, the mouth senses a wafer but the mind, illumined by Faith, grasps the Real Presence.
Finally, the prayer does not ask that a temporal gift may become an eternal remedy but that the Eucharist may become an eternal remedy from a temporal gift. I must confess that I am perplexed by this construction. If anyone has any ideas, please share in the commentary section.
The 2011 ICEL translation is:
What has passed our lips as food, O Lord,may we possess in purity of heart,that what has been given to us in timemay be our healing for eternity.
Next, the priest prays:
Corpus tuum, Domine, quod sumpsi, et Sanguis, quem potavi, adhaereat visceribus meis: et praesta; ut in me non remaneat scelerum macula, quem pura et sancta refecerunt Sacramenta: Qui vivis et regnas in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Which I translate as:
May Thy Body, O Lord, which I have received, and Thy Blood which I have drunk, stick to my innards; and grant that no stain of sin may remain in me, I who have been fed with this pure and holy Sacrament; Who livest and reignest forever and ever. Amen.
The prayer follows the same pattern of external to internal—although, ironically, the “external” here is the physically internal. As Jungmann notes,
In regard to its contents, this prayer goes a step beyond the preceding one. It does not feature the contrast between the outer sign and the inner efficacy; instead, the Sacrament Itself appears almost as the grace: through that which It contains, It is so pure and so holy that in a certain sense It need only remain in us in order to push aside and burn up all stain of sin.[3]
The prayer also contains a petition that is difficult to translate: adhaereat visceribus meis. Viscera in Latin designates the internal organs of an animal, though it can also be used metaphorically for the flesh. [4] The English equivalent is “bowels,” defined as “the interior or inside of the body.” [5] But unfortunately, “bowels” has been the victim of semantic narrowing in our own day and age: what once meant all the innards, both noble (such as the heart) and less noble, has been reduced to that part of the body which produces excrement. That’s quite a movement.
This migration of language presents a quandary to the modern translator, and yet the biblical use of viscera is unmistakable. Consider the following:
From the Benedictus:
Through the bowels of the mercy of our God, in which the Orient from on high hath visited us. (Luke 1, 78).
And Philippians 1, 8:
For God is my witness, how I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ.
And Colossians 3, 12:
Put ye on therefore, as the elect of God, holy, and beloved, the bowels of mercy, benignity, humility, modesty, patience.
And this choice imperative from Philemon 1, 12, where St. Paul asks Philemon to welcome back the fugitive slave Onesimus:
Whom I have sent back to thee. And do thou receive him as my own bowels.
It is perfectly understandable that modern liturgists would wish to shy away from such gutsy language, for it is likely to induce a snicker rather than a pious response. (The 1970/2002 Roman Missal omits the entire prayer). And yet, to eliminate this language is to feed indirectly the heresy of Gnosticism, with its pronounced discomfort of the body. I am not suggesting that the architects of the Novus Ordo were dyed-in-the-wool Gnostics, but I do raise the question as to whether their genteel bowdlerizations divorce us from the earthy side of our Faith, which is, after all, deeply Incarnational. Paul exults when he speaks from the bowels of Jesus Christ, and perhaps so should we.
Notes
[1] Gihr, 744.
[2] Against the Academics 3.6.13.
[3] Jungmann, vol. 2, 402-403.
[4] “Viscum,” n., Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary, 1.I and 1.I.B.
[5] “Bowel,” n., Oxford English Dictionary, II.2.c.
