The Excision of the Institution Narratives from Pius XII’s Holy Week

This past Holy Week I was once again able to assist at the Roman Rite in its ancient-medieval-baroque plenitude, or, to put it more simply, “pre-55.” I have now attended for several years, and the contrast between it and the rite of Eugenio Pacelli is nothing less than astonishing: I would say it is of the same kind of contrast as one finds between the old and new missals in general, if the new be done in the most conservative way possible. Indeed, the ultimate irony is that there are features in the Novus Ordo Triduum that restore what Pacelli had removed—one of the few times in the year when Tridentine and Montinian rub shoulders, so to speak.

Each year I assist at the pre-55 ceremonies, my love and appreciation for them grow. If I had to use a single word, I would say they are sublime. The texts and actions are coherent in a way that those of the Pius XII remix aren’t. These rites move with a majestic, unhurried inevitability, dense with interlocking symbolism. Something about their sheer massiveness, and their utter indifference to pragmatic considerations, makes it easier to lose the sense of time; one surrenders to something so great that it can just as well exist without you, but you are humbly glad to be a part of it. It is not always the case that shortening and simplifying a rite in fact makes it feel easier and shorter. The flow of a rite, and the sacral atmosphere it creates, is far more important for pulling a man out of himself than anything a clock can measure.

The problems with Pius XII’s “restored” Holy Week—which was officially in force from 1955 to 1969, only fourteen years, not long enough to constitute any kind of custom worthy of preservation, as compared with the many centuries of the traditional Holy Week—begin on Palm Sunday and continue throughout nearly every Mass and office till Easter. I provide an overview of some of these points in chapter 12 of The Once and Future Roman Rite, though of course Gregory’s series here at NLM is already a classic, as is Stefano Carusi’s article, and the critique of Pius XII’s master of ceremonies Msgr. Léon Gromier. A simple comparison may be found here.

This year I was more struck than usual by the jarring absence of the Last Supper from the Passion accounts as read in the ’62 missal (the TLM reads all four Passions in Holy Week every year, unlike the NOM which cycles through the Synoptics on Palm Sunday). Everyone who knows about the Roman Tradition (pre-55) vs. Pius XII’s neo-Holy Week talks about this, but I think it has more of an impact if you can see it visually.

Here is what happened to the Passion according to St. Matthew, from Palm Sunday. The images are taken from my 1948 St. Andrew's Daily Missal.

Here is what Pius XII did to the Passion according to St. Mark, read on Tuesday of Holy Week. The ending is intact, but not the beginning: once again, the institution of the Holy Eucharist is completely removed.

Here are the verses chopped out of St. Luke’s Passion on the Wednesday of Pius XII’s Holy Week. 

The upshot of these cuts is that nowhere in the 1962 missal, except for a rarely-used votive Mass, are any of the institution narratives read.

But were the readings too long?

One objection that has been made to the Roman tradition of reading the Passion narratives in their entirety—a practice done for many centuries prior to 1955, and which was to a large extent resumed with the Novus Ordo (!), albeit with a rotation cycle for the Synoptics—is that these accounts are just too long.

Well, yes, they are very long. However, that hardly seems like a serious objection during Holy Week. Do we have anything better to do during Holy Week than read Scripture and pray? If one is going to read the Passion, then one ought to read about the “Sacrament of the Passion” (as St Thomas calls the Eucharist), in order to underline, as Our Lord Himself did at the Last Supper, the intimate connection between the Holy Eucharist, the Sacrifice of Calvary, and the perfect charity of which the former is a sign and the latter is the principal act. It is hard to defend the theological coherence of skipping out on the sign Jesus gave us of His loving atonement and atoning love. As my esteemed colleague Gregory wrote on social media: “The whole aim of the 1955 Holy Week reform is to divorce the Mass from the Passion and the Cross.”

Regarding length of readings, Gregory added:

Objecting to the length of the Roman Passion accounts is just foolish; the Roman arrangement is the simplest and shortest of all the historical liturgies. In the Ambrosian Rite, the narrative of all the principal services from Spy Wednesday to the Easter vigil inclusive is carried entirely by St Matthew, so the Passions of Mark, Luke, and John are all read at one ceremony: the Matins of Good Friday. The Byzantine Rite does something similar with St Matthew, starting at the beginning of chapter 21 at Matins of Palm Sunday, and getting to the end of the Gospel (chapter 28) at Vespers of Holy Saturday. On Good Friday, there are twelve Gospels of the Passion at Matins, the first of which is more than four full chapters of John (!), then large parts of all four Passions are repeated at the Royal Hours. And this, in the midst of a huge number of other readings, endless canons and other kinds of hymns, etc., with almost none of the typical features of the Divine Office omitted.

A deacon commented:

I remember attending the Paschal Divine Liturgy at an Orthodox monastery one year, which begins with the chanting of the entire book of Acts. The liturgy was about four hours, and since there was no electricity at this monastery (and no pews), two of the monks threaded their way through the church replacing peoples’ candles as they burned down. Nobody complained about the length of the service. When it was over, the people went to their cars or tents to get a few hours sleep while two monks took turns tolling the bells all night long. Early in the morning, we were all up again for Divine Liturgy, followed by a meal. Let’s face it: we’ve become sissies. 

The question is forced: What in the world was going on with Pius XII that he allowed such liturgical tomfoolery under his watch?

The first thing we have to rule out—sorry, conspiracy theorists—is that Bugnini was the “author” of the Pacellian Holy Week. He was no such thing. At the time, he was a lowly secretary to the secret committee for proposing liturgical reforms, but the major players, older than he and more influential, steered the entire project. It was other Vatican officials, not Bugnini, who pushed through the new Holy Week. The secretary, for his part, watched open-eyed, learned the tricks of the trade, acquired the insider rolodex, and prepared for his day in the sun under Paul VI.

Here is how historian Yves Chiron puts it in his biography of Bugnini:

On May 28, 1948, Pius XII set up a Pontifical Commission for the Reform of the Liturgy that was eventually to be termed Commissio Piana. It was created within the Congregation of Rites, with Cardinal Micara, the new prefect of the same Congregation, as its president. Its creation was not made public; for a long time it worked in secrecy. Only when the first of the reforms it had prepared was promulgated was its existence revealed to the greater number, including most liturgists. It numbered few members and, unlike the commissions that later pontificates were to establish, it relied on few liturgy experts.
            With Cardinal Micara as president, the Pontifical Commission for the Reform of the Liturgy originally numbered only six members: Archbishop Alfonso Carinci, undersecretary of the Congregation of Rites; Fr Ferdinando Antonelli, OFM, relator general of the historical section of the Congregation of Rites; Fr Josef Löw, CSSR, vice-relator general of the same historical section; Fr Anselmo Albareda, OSB, prefect of the Vatican Library; Fr Augustin Bea, SJ, rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute; and Fr Bugnini who, in his capacity as director of Ephemerides Liturgicae, was named secretary of this commission.
            Later on Bugnini would exercise the same function of secretary in the conciliar preparatory commission on the liturgy as well as in the postconciliar Consilium for liturgical reform. Yet whereas he played a decisive role in the preparatory commission and in the Consilium, he did not have a leading role on the Commissio Piana. He was an invaluable worker11 and rarely intervened in the discussions. He learned and observed much, probably became aware of certain problems, but never exerted a decisive influence. 

As to what might have been going on with Pius XII, readers may consult two articles of mine:

• “Coincidences during the reign of Pius XII? Political background to Vatican II and liturgical changes”
• “Lights and Shadows in the Pontificate of Pius XII”

Quite simply: it is time to let go of the postwar experiments and return, humbly and gratefully, to the Roman tradition embodied in the 1570 missal and its line of continuous successors.
 

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Florentine Frescoes of the Last Supper

For obvious reasons, the Last Supper is a popular subject matter for the decorations of the refectories of religious houses, and many famous artists were commissioned to put their hand to the subject during the Italian Renaissance. Our Ambrosian writer Nicola de’ Grandi has kindly shared with us his pictures of such frescoes from four different houses in the city of Florence, the epicenter of the Renaissance. (The author of the most famous Last Supper of all, Leonardo di Ser Pietro, was from small town called Vinci about 20 miles to the west of Florence, and a citizen of the Florentine Republic, but his contribution to the subject is in Nicola’s native city, Milan.)

Sant’ Apollonia – Andrea del Castagno (di Bartolo), 1447

The monastery of St Apollonia, founded in 1339, was the largest and most important house of Benedictine nuns in Florence. Del Castagno’s work here is rightly admired for the richness of its decoration, and painstaking attention to even the smallest details.

To the left, we see a fresco of the Crucifixion (detached from its original location), also by del Castagno, and to the right, a “sinopia”, a kind of preparatory image used by fresco painters as a guideline for the finished work.

In the upper part, far less well preserved, we see (from left to right) the Resurrection, the Crucifixion, and the Deposition from the Cross.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Possibly Dubious Liturgical Legacy of Leonardo’s Last Supper

While I was kneeling in a church recently, I started to look more closely at its Gothic high altar, and noticed that the bas relief scene on the front of the altar just below the mensa reproduced, with a high degree of exactitude, the famous, possibly too famous, Last Supper painting by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), the 500th anniversary of whose death has been celebrated throughout 2019.

Leonardo’s Last Supper and many others paintings like it — Ghirlandaio’s at San Marco and Andrea del Castagno’s at the convent of St Apollonia, both in Florence; Giovan Pietro da Cemmo’s in the convent of St Augustine in Crema, etc. — were painted for the refectories of religious houses; they were not intended as images for churches, much less for sanctuaries of churches. The open, longitudinal arrangement was designed to place Christ at the center, to make the action at the table clearly visible, and to separate Judas more evidently from the rest of the Apostles. The spiritual lesson of such refectory paintings was manifold: that one should see the figure of Christ in one’s religious superior at the head table; that one should decide to be among the good apostles by being a good and obedient religious, and not faithless like Judas; that one should remember how every meal shared with the brethren bears a likeness to this banquet of supreme charity, which explains why the refectory service is a little liturgy in its own right.

Regarding the Rule of St. Benedict, Dom Mark Kirby, OSB, comments:

The liturgy of the refectory is sacred; the rubrics that govern it safeguard its Eucharistic character so that the words of the Apostle may be rightly fulfilled in the monastery day after day: “Whether you eat or drink, or whatsoever else you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). All are to come to refectory without delay and in time for the verse and the prayer, and all, says Saint Benedict, are to sit down together at table. A Benedictine monk never “grabs a bite” or eats in an individualistic manner. He enters into the liturgical order of the refectory, before, during, and after the meal, taking care to conform to the corporate actions of the whole community. One who despises the liturgy of the common table will be separated from it and even deprived of his portion of wine — a terrible punishment for the Mediterranean man — in order to be brought to his senses.

Benedictines honour the liturgy of eating and drinking in the refectory, and see the refectory as a kind of mirror of the Oratory. Even the disposition is same as in the choir: the tables facing each other; the Prior’s table with the crucifix behind it; the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary; and the reader’s desk. Twice daily the refectory resounds with the chanting of psalms and prayers. Like the Oratory, the refectory is a place of silence. It is also a place of joy, according to what Saint Luke writes in the Book of Acts: “They took their share of food with gladness and simplicity of heart” (Acts 2:46).

Because Leonardo’s Last Supper was in a refectory, it was not really intended for “public consumption.” Therefore, the hypothesis I will float concerns not so much this great artist’s intentions for his piece as it does deleterious consequences of an overuse of replications of it in modern churches.

Returning now to the altar sculpture: the figure of Christ dominated in the center, looking squarely out at me, with His disciples gathered round. Although I have seen this image a thousand times, I was suddenly struck by the impression that, placed front and center at the altar, this might look somewhat like a priest celebrating Mass versus populum:

In his superb overview of the history, form, and theology of the classical Roman rite (due to appear soon from Angelico Press), Michael Fiedrowicz offers a gentle critique of Leonardo:

Luther had already invoked the Last Supper practice of Jesus for his corresponding demand [that the Eucharist should be celebrated versus populum]. A new type of visual representation that began to be implemented during the thirteenth century must have been formative for his notion of the events of that time. This representation is familiar in Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper: Jesus sitting on the rear side of a table in the middle of the Apostles, turned toward the observer of the scene. If Mass were made to correspond to this artistic presentation, the priest should stand at the altar across from the people and turn his gaze on them. This argument, however, is based on a misapprehension of ancient table manners as they would have been practiced at the Last Supper. There was at that time either a round or a semicircular table at whose open front side the food would be brought, while those partaking of the meal sat or reclined at the rear semicircle of the table. The place of honor was not in the middle, but rather on the right side. The one presiding over a meal never had another partaker across from his place. These original arrangements are shown in the oldest representations of the Last Supper until the Middle Ages. If this finding alone prevents the derivation of celebrating versus populum from Jesus’ practice at the Last Supper, a look at the historical beginnings of the Eucharistic celebration demonstrates yet more that the primitive Church’s congregation in no way repeated the Last Supper as such and did not consider the meal as the ritual original form of the Eucharist.

It is more than a little chilling to read the following words of Martin Luther and to reflect on the current situation of Roman Catholic worship: “But in the true Mass among genuine Christians, the altar would not have to remain so [sc. facing east], and the priest would always turn to the people, as without doubt Christ did at the Lord’s Supper. Well, that will be so in good time” (Deutsche Messe und Ordnung des Gottesdienstes, 1526 [WA 19, 80]).

In his book No Trifling Matter: On the Inviolability of the Sacraments (Angelico, 2018), Msgr. Nicola Bux makes a similar point:

Not a few people hold that it was only in late antiquity or the early Middle Ages that the Churches of the East and the West began to prefer administering it directly in the mouth. But did Jesus give communion to the apostles on the hand or asking them to take it with their own hands? Visiting an exhibition of Tintoretto in Rome, I observed some “Last Suppers” in which Jesus gives communion to the apostles in the mouth. One could think that this has to do with an interpretation by the painter after the fact, a little like the posture of Jesus and the apostles at table, in the cenacle of Leonardo, which “updates” in the Western manner the Jewish custom, which was, instead, to be reclining at table. Reflecting further on this, the custom of giving communion to the faithful directly in the mouth can be considered not only as a Jewish tradition, and therefore apostolic, but also as going back to the Lord Jesus. The Jews and the peoples of the East in general had and today still have the custom of taking food with one’s hands and placing it directly in the mouth of the lover or the friend. In the West this is done between couples in love and by the mother toward her little one, who is still inexperienced. The text of John is understood in this way: “Jesus then answered him [John]: ‘It is he to whom I shall give a morsel of dipped bread.’ Then, having dipped a morsel of bread, he gave it to Judas, son of Simon Iscariot. And as soon as he had taken the mouthful Satan entered into him” (13:26–27). But what should be said about the invitation of Jesus: “Take and eat. . . . Take and drink”? Take (in Greek, labete; in Latin, accipite) also means receive. If the mouthful is dipped, it cannot be taken with the hands; rather it is received directly into the mouth. It is true that Jesus consecrated bread and wine separately. But if during the “mystic supper” (as the East calls it) or Last Supper, the two consecrating gestures happened, so it seems, in different phases of the Paschal supper, nevertheless after Pentecost the apostles, aided by Jewish priests who had converted (cf. Acts 6:7), and who were, as we would say, experts in religious worship, united the gestures within the great Eucharistic prayer. (94–95)

My experience has been that a lot of Catholic church altars — especially the less expensive ones in the United States that were trying to look “traditional,” from the late 19th century up to the middle of the 20th — feature exactly this image of Leonardo’s Last Supper carved into the front, where the priest and people would see it day after day after day. (Note, however, that according to older rubrics, such art should be visible only between the stripping of the altar on Maundy Thursday and the Easter Vigil; for the remaining 362/3 days of the year, it would be masked by the antependium. Alas, antependia tended to go the way of all flesh and are making a slow return at best.) Here is another example:

I wonder . . . Might this have something to do with slowly disposing everyone to reimagine the Mass as an imitation of the Last Supper, and not even as a Jewish meal, but as a banquet fictitiously depicted by Leonardo? Perhaps the near-ubiquity of the faux supper made it easier, when the time came, to justify the dismantling of a high altar that bore upon itself an image seemingly in contradiction with it, while at the same time installing a free-standing table that permitted the “presider” to imitate Leonardo’s Christ, and perhaps the concelebrating clergy to imitate Leonard’s apostles circled round the table.

Now, if we look at churches with much older altars, or Liturgical Movement altars, we will see a far greater variety of iconographical images carved into the fronts of altars: the Lamb, especially; wreaths, palms, and other arborial designs; angels; cosmatesque patterns; etc. It seems much more appropriate for an altar to have such symbolic designs or to be dressed in cloth altar frontals in liturgical colors than to bear the by-now overdone Leonardo spin-off. It just goes to show how a work of artistic but ahistorical genius can intersect with commercial demand to flood the market with well-intentioned but conceptually harmful kitsch.

I am not an art historian but simply someone keenly interested in the fine arts and in ecclesiastical art in particular. I would therefore be grateful if any readers have more thoughts or information pertinent to this theory of a possible relationship between the introduction of versus populum and the emblazoning of modern church altars with decontextualized Last Suppers.

One can find images of Christ standing at the other side of the altar (over against the viewer) in Byzantine iconography as well, but this depiction does not, to my eye, suggest versus populum as a manner of celebrating, if only because the cross and book seem set up for ad orientem worship; certainly the iconographic style makes it easier to see such an image rather as the expression of a mysterious present reality, the Lord coming into our midst through the liturgy we offer to Him and He offers through us, than of an historical event, a Jewish Passover meal, in dramatic reenactment, as the Leonardo so strongly (but misleadingly) conveys.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website for articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Newman, Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen, Roguet, Croegaert), his SoundCloud page for lectures and interviews, and his YouTube channel for talks and sacred music.