The Mass of Holy Tuesday

In the oldest lectionary of the Roman Rite, ca. 650 AD [1], the Gospel of Holy Tuesday is not the Passion of St Mark, as it is today, but John 13, 1-32: Christ’s washing of the disciples’ feet (1-11), His words to them immediately afterwards (12-20), the revelation of Judas as the betrayer (21-30), and Christ’s declaration that “Now the Son of man is glorified, etc.” The Divine Office preserves a relic of this in today’s antiphon for the Benedictus, which is the first verse of this Gospel: “Before the feast day of Passover, Jesus, knowing that His hour had come, having loved His own, He loved them unto the end.”

The Washing of the Disciples’ Feet, ca. 1305, by Giotto, in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

This may seem a very counter-intuitive choice, since the Gospel begins with the words “Before the day of Passover,” which began on the evening of Good Friday when Our Lord died; and indeed, the first part of this Gospel, verses 1-15, is now read on Holy Thursday. The key to understanding this is the Roman Rite’s unique arrangement of Holy Week: it is the only rite which reads an account of the Passion on Palm Sunday, anticipating the events of Holy Thursday and Good Friday. This arrangement celebrates Holy Week as a unit, with all the parts fully and equally related to the same Paschal mystery. Likewise, the Epistle read before the blessing of the palms refers to the Good Friday rite of the Presanctified, and one of the prayers of the blessing refers to Noah’s dove, a story which is told among the prophecies of the Easter vigil.

Therefore, the original Gospels of Holy Monday (John 12, 1-36) and Tuesday (13, 1-32) supplemented the Passion narrative of Palm Sunday with material which is not included in any of the synoptic Gospels. This includes the Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, since the most ancient lectionaries do not indicate any use of the Gospel which is now read at the blessing of the palms, Matthew 21, 1-9, or its parallels in Mark and Luke. (The evidence for how Palm Sunday was celebrated in Rome in the early centuries is very scant; we cannot dismiss the possibility that such a reading was part of a blessing of palms, but we have no proof one way or the other.)

The first part of the old Gospel of Holy Tuesday, John 13, 1-32, in a Roman lectionary of the later 8th century known as the Purple Lectionary of Verona. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits, Latin 9451, folio 69r)

This would also explain two other curious features of the Roman Holy Week. One is that the Passion of St Mark was not read at any of the Masses [2], since it differs very little from Matthew’s, whereas St Luke’s, which does include several things not in Matthew or Mark, is read on Spy Wednesday. The other is the custom attested in the same lectionary mentioned above, and in the oldest Roman sacramentary, that the Mass of the Lord’s Supper began with the Secret, and hence, had no Scriptural readings. This could be done, since all that needed to be read of the Last Supper had already been read earlier in the week.

As I have noted several times, when Masses were assigned to the formerly aliturgical Thursdays of Lent, almost all of their chant parts were taken from other Masses, since the liturgical repertoire was regarded as a closed canon. In a similar way, when the Mass of the Lord’s Supper was supplied with a foremass (by the later decades of the 8th century), every element of it was taken from somewhere else in the liturgy: the introit from Holy Tuesday, the collect from Good Friday, the epistle and gradual from Tenebrae, the Gospel (reduced to the first 15 verses) also from Holy Tuesday, and the offertory from the Sundays after Epiphany.

Introitus Nos autem gloriári oportet in Cruce Dómini nostri Jesu Christi: in quo est salus, vita et resurrectio nostra: per quem salváti et liberáti sumus. Ps. 66 Deus misereátur nostri, et benedícat nobis: illúminet vultum suum super nos, et misereátur nostri. Nos autem…

Introit But we must glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection, through who we are saved and delivered. Ps. 66 May God have mercy on us, and bless us: may he cause the light of his countenance to shine upon us, and may he have mercy on us. But we must glory…

In the Tridentine Missal, this introit is cited to Galatians 6, but it is really an ecclesiastical composition, and hardly even a paraphrase of any verse of Scripture. Here again, the unity of the Paschal mystery as celebrated in the Roman Holy Week is expressed by “glorying in the Cross” three days before the day of the Crucifixion, and by speaking of it as the source of our “salvation, life and resurrection” five days before Easter.

The use of the epistle from Jeremiah, chapter 11, 18-20, is beautifully explained by St Jerome in his commentary on the prophet. “The consensus of all the churches is this, that in the person of Jeremiah they understand these things to be said by Christ, because the Father showed him how he ought to speak… and He Himself, like a lamb led to the slaughter, did not open His mouth and did not know, which is to say, did not know sin, according to what is said by the Apostle, ‘Who when he had not known sin, became sin for us.’ (2 Cor. 5, 21)

St Jerome in His Study, by Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (1587-1625). Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

‘And they said, Let us cast wood into his bread’, which means, the Cross upon the body of the Savior, for He Himself is the one who said, ‘I am the bread which came down from heaven’ (Jo. 6, 41)… but on the other hand, according to the mystery of the body which He assumed, the Son speaks to the Father, and calls upon His judgment… that He might render to the people what they merit. And He says, ‘May I see my vengeance upon them’, that is, upon those who persevere in their crime, and not on those who are turned to penance, of whom He said upon the Cross, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ (Luke 23, 34) He reveals to the Father and lays open His cause, because He was crucified, not because He in any way deserved this, but for the crime of the people, saying, ‘Behold the prince of this world comes, and he finds nothing in me.’ ” (Jo. 14, 30; PL 24, 756 B-D)

Regarding “the consensus of all the churches”, the same passage is read as the beginning of a longer lesson (Jeremiah 11, 18-23; 12, 1-5a; 9-11a; 14-15) which the Byzantine Rite reads at Prime of Holy Thursday and None of Good Friday. The Gallican and Armenian Rites both have these verses on Good Friday, while the Ambrosian copied it from the Roman.

The gradual is taken from Psalm 34, which dominates the Mass of Holy Monday.

Graduale, Ps 34, 13 et 1-2 Ego autem, dum mihi molesti essent, induébam me cilicio, et humiliábam in jejunio ánimam meam: et oratio mea in sinu meo convertétur. V. Júdica, Dómine, nocentes me, expugna impugnantes me: apprehende arma et scutum, et exsurge in adjutorium mihi.

Gradual But as for me, when they were troublesome to me, I was clothed with haircloth, and I humbled my soul in fasting; and my prayer shall be turned into my bosom. V. Judge thou, O Lord, them that wrong me: overthrow them that fight against me. Take hold of arms and shield: and rise up to help me.

A treatise known as the Breviarium in Psalmos, traditionally but incorrectly attributed to St Jerome, says that the opening words of this psalm (the verse of this gradual), are “the voice of Christ in His Passion, and of the Church in tribulation.” It then explains verse 13, the beginning of the gradual, as follows: “For the Lord put on the roughness (asperitatem, i.e. the roughness of a hairshirt) of the Passion. … He celebrated a fast unto the evening, when in the evening of the world, He was offered for its salvation. … Christ fasted not carnally but spiritually. … He hungered for the salvation of the human race, He thirsted for the faith of the church. He hungered in the passion when all, and especially the Apostles, denied Him, except the thief, who confessed Him on the cross.” (PL 26, 923D; 926B)

The offertory of Holy Monday is a verse of Psalm 142, which is said at Lauds of Friday, the day of the Passion; while the offertory of today is from Psalm 139, which is said at Friday Vespers. This psalm is also said at Vespers of Holy Thursday and Good Friday, with an antiphon taken from the same verse as this offertory.

Offertorium, Ps. 139, 5 Custódi me, Dómine, de manu peccatóris: et ab homínibus iníquis éripe me. (Keep me, O Lord, from the hand of the sinner: and from unjust men deliver me.)

The communio is from Psalm 68, which figures prominently in the Holy Week liturgy of various rites because of its general tenor, and specifically because of verse 22, “they gave me gall for my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink”, a prophecy of one of the events of the Lord’s Passion. (Matt. 27, 34). As St Augustine writes (Enarr.), “Christ speaks here; we are not permitted to doubt this, for here are the express words which are fulfilled in His passion.” It also provides the offertory of Palm Sunday and the gradual of Spy Wednesday, and is sung as the first psalm of the first Tenebrae service. The Ambrosian Rite does not have Tenebrae, but also sings it as the first psalm of Holy Thursday Matins, repeating it on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. In the Byzantine Rite, it is said at None of the Royal Hours of Good Friday.

A statue of an angel holding the sponge and reed by which the Lord was given vinegar to drink while he was on the Cross; by Antonio Giorgetti (1635-69), working as an assistant of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. This is one of ten statues of angels holding instruments of the Passion which Pope Clement IX commissioned from the elderly Bernini in 1669, to decorate the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, the main bridge by which pilgrims crossed the Tiber to get to St Peter’s basilica. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Jean-Pol Grandmont, CC BY-SA 3.0) 

Communio, Ps. 68, 13-14 Adversum me exercebantur, qui sedébant in porta: et in me psallébant, qui bibébant vinum: ego vero oratiónem meam ad te, Dómine: tempus benepláciti, Deus, in multitúdine misericordiae tuae. (They that sat in the gate were stirred up against me: and they that drank wine sang against me. But as for me, my prayer is to thee, o Lord; the time of thy good pleasure, o God, in the multitude of thy mercy (hear me.))

The Breviarium in Psalmos begins its commentary on Psalm 68 by saying, “This psalm resounds with Christ’s Passion”, and offers this very good explanation of the final words of the communio. “ ‘The time of (Thy) good pleasure, o God.’ The time of good pleasure is the time of the Passion, in which the Father said, ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ ‘The time of good pleasure, in the multitude if Thy mercy.’ For all Thy times are well-pleasing, but especially this time, in which by Thy Passion Thou redeemest the human race…”

[1] The Comes Wurzburgensis is not, properly speaking, a lectionary, but a list of liturgical days, the Scriptural pericopes assigned to them, indicated by the title of the book, and the incipit and explicit, and the Roman station church, where applicable. The Latin words “cŏmĕs – a companion” (the origin of the noble title “count – one who accompanies a king”) was used to designate a lectionary, a book which accompanies the celebration of the Mass.

[2] The Passion of St Mark (14, 1 – 15, 46) was read in some Uses of the Roman Rite as the ninth lesson of Matins on Palm Sunday. This custom is attested in the Liber Politicus (also known as the Ordo Romanus XI) of a canon of St Peter’s basilica named Benedict, ca. 1140, and was still observed at the end of the 17th century in the Use of Lyon, which also maintained the original Gospels of Holy Monday and Tuesday.

The Mass of Holy Monday

At the Mass of Holy Monday, three of the four chant propers, the introit, gradual and communion, are taken from the same Psalm, the thirty-fourth. (The tract, Domine, non secundum, is not proper to this Mass, since it is sung on most of the Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays of Lent, and for the last time on this day.) Like most of the texts from the Psalms which speak in the person of a man suffering or in distress (“Judge them that harm me, o God,” etc.), this Psalm was taken by the Church Fathers as a representation of Our Lord in the midst of His Passion. For example, a treatise known as the Breviarium in Psalmos, traditionally but incorrectly attributed to St Jerome, says that the opening words are “the voice of Christ in His Passion, and of the Church in tribulation”, and explains verse 13, “I was clothed with haircloth, I humbled my soul with fasting” as follows: “For the Lord put on the roughness (asperitatem) of the Passion. … He celebrated a fast unto the evening, when in the evening of the world, He was offered for its salvation.” (PL 26, 923D; 926D) Cassiodorus (ca. 485 – 585) begins his commentary on the same Psalm by saying, “Through this whole hymn, the words are those of Christ the Lord, spoken from the dispensation by which He suffered.” (In Psalt. Expos.; PL 70, 241B)

Introitus, Ps. 34 Júdica, Dómine, nocentes me, expugna impugnantes me: apprehende arma et scutum, et exsurge in adjutorium meum, Dómine, virtus salútis meae. ℣. Effunde frámeam, et conclúde adversus eos, qui persequuntur me: dic ánimae meae: Salus tua ego sum. Júdica, Dómine...

Introit Judge thou, O Lord, them that harm: overthrow them that fight against me. Take hold of arms and shield, and rise up to help me, o Lord, my salvation. ℣. Bring out the sword, and shut up the way against them that persecute me: say to my soul: I am thy salvation. Judge thou...

In his Enarrationes in Psalmos, St Augustine discusses this psalm as a prophecy of Christ’s Passion in a particularly beautiful way, in reference to the sufferings of the Church. “Here we understand the voice of Christ; the voice, of course, of both the head and body of Christ. When you hear of Christ, do not separate the groom from the bride, but understand that great mystery, ‘and the two shall be in one flesh.’ (Gen. 2, 24) … the Lord suffered by His will, we by necessity; He in His compassion, we in our condition. Therefore, His voluntary passion is our necessary consolation… however much the enemy raged, he was able to come only so far as the death of the body; and yet, was not able to destroy it in the case of the Lord, because He rose on the third day. That which came to pass in Him on the third day, the same shall happen to our body at the end of the age. The hope of our resurrection is put off: is it therefore taken away? Let us therefore recognize herein the words of Christ…”

The Man of Sorrows, with the instruments of the Passion, ca. 1345-50; part of an altar in the cathedral of Cologne, Germany.

Following this same understanding, the Ambrosian Rite gives this Psalm a particularly prominent place in the liturgy of Holy Week. It provides the text of both the psalmellus and cantus (the equivalents of the gradual and tract) at the Mass of Palm Sunday, plus the psalmelli of the special synaxis of readings after Terce of both Holy Thursday and Saturday, and is sung four times in the Divine Office. In the Byzantine Rite, at the special form of the day Hours of Good Friday known as the Royal Hours, it is said at Terce.

A page of an Ambrosian Missal of 1594, showing the end of the prophetic reading (Isaiah 53, 1-2), the psalmellus, the epistle (2 Thess. 2, 14 – 3, 5), the cantus and the Gospel (John 11, 55 – 12, 11).

The Epistle is the third of four passages of the prophet Isaiah known as the songs of the Suffering Servant (42, 1-4; 49, 1-6; 50, 4-11; and 52, 13 – 53 12), but does not include its first or last verse. This choice is made especially because of verse 6, which prophesies some of the injuries done to the Lord during the Passion: “I have given my body to the strikers, and my cheeks to them that plucked them: I have not turned away my face from them that rebuked me, and spat upon me.”

The fourth song (starting with the first verse of chapter 53) is read at the Mass of Holy Wednesday. Here too we note a parallel with the Byzantine Rite, which places the song from chapter 50 at the Vesperal Divine Liturgy of Holy Thursday, and the latter at Vespers of Good Friday, the principal commemoration of Our Lord’s Crucifixion and Death. (Both passages are also read at the Royal Hours of Good Friday.)

In his commentary on the prophet Isaiah (PL 24, 478D-479D), St Jerome notes that the Jews of his time (understandably, from their point of view) tried to refer this prophecy to Isaiah himself, and “by every reasoning, turn the prophecies away from Christ.” To this he responds that “These things also are to be referred to the person of the Lord… and He who kept silent in His passion now speaketh in all the world through the Apostles and their followers. … This discipline and learning opened His ears (verse 5), that He might bring to us the knowledge of the Father; and He did not contradict (or ‘resist’) Him (i.e. the Father), but became obedient even unto death, the death of the Cross.” And likewise, he explains the words of verse 8, “who will contend with me?”, to mean, “If anyone thinks that I am rightly condemned to the Cross, and have committed some sin, let him resist me.”

The Mocking of Christ, ca. 1617, by the Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656). Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

In the oldest lectionaries of the Roman Rite, the Gospel of Holy Monday is John 12, 1-36. This includes the anointing of the Lord’s feet by Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus (verses 1-3); Judas’ complaint about the expense of the ointment, St John’s “inside explanation” thereof, and the Lord’s response (4-8); the plotting of the priests to kill Lazarus (9-11); the events of Palm Sunday (12-19); Philip and Andrew bringing some gentiles to Christ (20-23); and Jesus’ speech (23-36), which is interrupted by the voice of the Father (28-30).

This passage was clearly chosen because of its opening words, “Six days before the Pasch” (i.e. Passover), since Holy Monday is six days before Easter, and “Pascha”, the Greek form of the Hebrew “Pesach – Passover”, is the Latin word for Easter. This places St John’s account of Palm Sunday on the day after it. It would be foolish to think that the first compilers of the Roman lectionary, men of extremely fine literary sensibilities, did not understand this. Their purpose seems to have been rather to reset the stage, as it were, for the commemoration of the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection in the rites of the sacred Triduum and Easter.

The Anointing of Christ’s Feet at Bethany, depicted in the Vaux Passional ca. 1503-4. Mary and Martha are shown serving at the table; the Lord has stuck one of His feet out from under it, looking forward to the anointing. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Later, however, the Gospel was split into two parts, with the second one (verses 10 to 36) assigned to the formerly aliturgical Passion Saturday, forming a kind of vigil of Palm Sunday. The Apostles’ introduction of the gentiles to Christ is thereby now read one week before the baptismal ceremonies of Holy Saturday, at which the successors of the Apostles fulfill the great Commission, to “teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28, 19) This leaves today with the washing of the Lord’s feet as its focus.

The offertory is taken from Psalm 142, the last of the Penitential Psalms, and the second of Lauds on Friday, the day of the Passion. Of it, St Hilary of Poitiers writes, “David now prophecies by his own sufferings those of the Lord, not complaining about Absalom, but about those who urged him on (literally “ignirent – kindled him”) to the crime of impiety. For according to the Apostle (Eph. 6, 16), the darts of the devil are fiery, which stuck themselves in the heart of Judas, that the Lord might be betrayed.” (Tract. super Psalmos; PL 9, 838B)

Offertorium, Ps 142 Eripe me de inimícis meis, Dómine: ad te confúgi, doce me fácere voluntátem tuam: quia Deus meus es tu. (Deliver me from my enemies, o Lord, to thee have I fled: teach me to do thy will, for thou art my God.)

In the Gospel, “Judas Iscariot, he that was about to betray him, said, ‘Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?’ ”, and as St John explains, “he said this, not because he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and having the purse, carried the things that were put therein.”

St Augustine (Enarr. ibid.) agrees with Hilary that this Psalm is about the Passion, and comments on it in general: “Therefore the Lord shall preach about His own Passion in this Psalm.” Then, commenting on the specific verses used in the offertory, he writes: “ ‘Deliver me from my enemies, o Lord, for I have fled to Thee.’ (This means) not Judas, but he who filled Judas. … For Judas accepted the morsel, and Satan entered into him, so that this David (i.e. Christ) might suffer persecution from his own son. How many Judases does Satan fill, who unworthily receive the morsel unto their own judgment? For ‘he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment unto himself. (1 Cor. 11, 27).” It seems likely, therefore, that this offertory was deliberately created as a reference to the interpretation of Ss Hilary and Augustine.

The Mass Should Not Be a Torture Device

Thanks to Austin Ivereigh, I stumbled on a thread on Twitter in which a lady of whom I had never heard (I’m taking her words only as a point of departure) expresses a view that I’ve come across many times and that I find terribly perverse:

Spelled out a bit more, it goes like this: “It’s okay if a Mass is irreverent, cringe-worthy, full of minor celebrities and contemptible music, and tortures you in a hundred ways, because, AFTER ALL, Jesus was crucified for us and the Mass is the sacrifice of the Cross, so basically, you get to be crucified with Him, ya know? And if you offer it up, that might just become the best Mass!”

That is at very least fallacious, and probably blasphemous on top of it.

At Holy Mass we participate mystically in the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension into Glory of Christ Jesus our Eternal High Priest. It is our highest form of prayer and praise by which we render to God the most pleasing act of worship, not just by consecrating the Eucharist, but by surrounding Him with the best we can give Him, internally at least, but also externally, as the Church had always striven to do. The Lord gave us the liturgy to heal us of our worldliness and to elevate us to Himself.

The Mass is not time-travel to Calvary so that we can elbow our way through the Roman soldiers and climb up onto a neighboring cross. The Mass is not there to torture us but to bathe us in the splendor of the love of God and to unite us with the innocent victim so that we may offer back to God a love worthy of Him.

That upward ascent to the throne of grace is contradicted and heavily undermined by the horizontal chumminess and the “Call-Me-Fr. Jimmy” show and the crummy music, Eucharistic informality, and all the rest of the problems Catholics too often suffer through week to week. That kind of dissonance is not something Our Lord desires nor is it something we should put up with; respect for Him forbids it. If you would not let your spouse or your parent be insulted to his or her face, why would you let Jesus be?

Those who add to the Passion of Christ by misdeeds in the Mass displease the Lord, add to the burden of His Cross, and store up wrath in the world to come. As with any sin, repentance and conversion can open the way again into His kingdom.

I think we could describe the basic fallacy here as a literalist parody of the Western emphasis on the Mass as the re-presentation of the Passion of Christ. Without a doubt the Mass is a re-presentation of the once-for-all sacrifice of Calvary, but a mystical one, by which we enter into the great mystery of the Lamb of God making intercession for us before the Father with His glorious wounds. We do not seek to emulate the historical event, as does the Oberammergau Passion Play. Dramas like that have their place, but no one (I think) has ever mistaken them for the Mass, or the Mass for them.

As a result, even if we meditate on the wondrous Passion of the Son of God during Mass, as many classic devotional books have recommended over the centuries, we should be careful not to draw the wrong conclusions. Specifically: let’s not make spiritual sadomasochism into a virtue, and let’s recognize that the crucified One is the King of Kings, entering into His glory.

One might be taken by surprise heading into an unknown situation that causes suffering, and then, as with all suffering, like stubbing your toe or getting a headache, one can offer it up as best one can. That’s what often happens to people during vacation when they have to look for a Mass in unknown surroundings (for that reason, I won’t even travel anymore on Sundays or Holy Days unless I’m able to get to a TLM). But to try to persuade oneself that a regular diet of bad liturgy is somehow good because it can be “offered up” is self-destructive and, objectively considered, insulting to God, who is not to be mocked.

Incidentally: Padre Pio is not a counterexample. That kind of mystical Passion during the Mass is on a totally different plane from what we are talking about with the inflicting of bad liturgy on the laity.

Moreover, I am not saying that one has to be comfortable at Mass. Plush-cushion pews in perfectly air-conditioned or heated suburban churches are a way to lull the congregation to sleep, not to awaken their faith and fire their charity! No, a bit of ascetical discomfort is all to the good: doing the Eucharistic fast from midnight if possible, or three hours; kneeling for long stretches during Mass, and at times on a hard floor; keeping one's back straight rather than sagging, and keeping custody of the eyes rather than seeing who's at Mass or what they're wearing... Such classic forms of freely embraced self-discipline prepare us better to assist at the divine sacrifice and partake of the mystical supper. They are, again, on a totally different plane from abusive, ugly, or unfitting liturgy imposed on us from the outside that fails to be objectively what it should be, both for God's sake and for the faithful's.

So, enough with this wretched nonsense about “it’s great when Mass makes you suffer, like Jesus!” No, no, and no.

Addendum. Prompted by this post, a reader sent me the following:

Thank you for that piece. Here is a supplement for you: a dear friend of mine once responded to an argument I was making on the basis of the leading indicators of Catholic collapse since Vatican II. He said (more or less): "Well all the people who left after the Council can't have had a very strong faith to begin with then." My response: "The purpose of the Church is not to test the faith of her members. That is the specific task of the devil."

How Do Sins Against the Eucharist Cause Our Lord to Suffer?

On June 16, 1675, Our Lord said to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque at Paray-le-Monial:

I ask of you that the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi be set apart for a special Feast to honor My Heart, by communicating on that day, and making reparation to It by a solemn act, in order to make amends for the indignities which It has received during the time It has been exposed on the altars. I promise you that My Heart shall expand Itself to shed in abundance the influence of Its divine love upon those who shall thus honor It, and cause It to be honored.

It has never been a matter of doubt that the Lord Jesus can be sinned against in the Holy Eucharist in a variety of ways — unbelief, indifference, the contempt of irreverence, reception in a state of mortal sin, sacrilege — and that He is rightly offended by these actions, for human sin and divine righteousness cannot cohabitate. As Cardinal Ratzinger exclaimed in his 2005 Via Crucis in Rome:

Should we not also think of how much Christ suffers in his own Church? How often is the Holy Sacrament of his Presence abused, how often must he enter empty and evil hearts! How often do we celebrate only ourselves, without even realizing that he is there! How often is his Word twisted and misused! What little faith is present behind so many theories, so many empty words! How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him! How much pride, how much self-complacency!

What we read of the Israelites in the Book of Numbers may be applied to the faithful who act unfaithfully: “Behold, we perish, we are undone, we are all undone. Everyone who comes near . . . shall die” (Num 17:12–13). The Eucharist is the sacrament of the Lord’s Passion. Those who approach and receive worthily are united to His mystical death and receive some share of its fruits; those who receive unworthily die the death of compounded mortal sin. All who come near can be said to die — some in order to live forever, and some, to incur the danger of dying forever (cf. Rev 20:6).

A much more difficult question arises, however, when we ask whether it is possible to say that Our Lord suffers when He is thus sinned against. Many such texts, from private revelations and from the works of theologians and spiritual writers, can be collated, all claiming that He can — as, for example, in St. John Vianney’s remarks about how an unworthy communicant crucifies the Lord again. To put the question more precisely: is there a way in which Our Lord may be said to suffer now, after His resurrection, by the things we do to His Most Holy Sacrament?

On the one hand, we know that Christ, having conquered sin and death, is no longer subject to suffering in His glorified state. The Protestant troops who desecrated hosts during the Reformation, trampling them underfoot or feeding them to the beasts, did not diminish Jesus, did not lessen His perfection or His glory; rather, the troops made themselves guilty of a horrendous crime for which they would have to suffer either in this life or in the next. On the other hand, in many approved private revelations over the span of many centuries, beginning in the Middle Ages and coming down to our own times, the Lord says that the sins of men cause Him to grieve, sorrow, and suffer. We must accept this as true in a mysterious way that we will never fully grasp in this life.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider recently weighed in on this question in the text of his “Sins Against the Blessed Sacrament and the Need of a Crusade of Eucharistic Reparation,” which was published many places online (e.g., here) and which was also published an an appendix to my last book The Holy Bread of Eternal Life: Restoring Eucharistic Reverence in an Age of Impiety (Sophia, 2020). His Excellency writes, inter alia:

To say that the Lord is not suffering because of the outrages committed against Him in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist can lead to a minimizing of the great atrocities committed. Some people say: God is offended by the abuse of the Blessed Sacrament, but the Lord does not personally suffer. This is, however, theologically and spiritually too narrow a view. Although Christ is now in His glorious state and hence no more subject to suffering in a human way, He nevertheless is affected and touched in His Sacred Heart by the abuses and outrages against the Divine majesty and the immensity of His Love in the Blessed Sacrament….
          Frère Michel de la Sainte Trinité gave a profound theological explanation of the meaning of the “suffering” or “sadness” of God because of the offenses that sinners commit against Him: “This ‘suffering,’ this ‘sadness’ of the Heavenly Father, or of Jesus since His Ascension, are to be understood analogically. They are not suffered passively as with us, but on the contrary freely willed and chosen as the ultimate expression of Their mercy towards sinners called to conversion. They are only a manifestation of God’s love for sinners, a love which is sovereignly free and gratuitous, and which is not irrevocable.”
          This analogical spiritual meaning of the “sadness” or the “suffering” of Jesus in the Eucharistic mystery is confirmed by the words of the Angel in his apparition in 1916 to the children of Fatima and especially by the words and the example of the life of St. Francisco Marto. The children were invited by the Angel to make reparation for offenses against the Eucharistic Jesus and to console Him, as we can read in the memoirs of Sister Lucia: “…He gave the Host to me, and to Jacinta and Francisco he gave the contents of the chalice to drink, saying as he did so: ‘Take and drink the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, horribly outraged by ungrateful men. Repair their crimes and console your God.’”…
          Jesus Christ continues in a mysterious way his Passion in Gethsemane throughout the ages in the mystery of His Church and also in the Eucharistic mystery, the mystery of His immense Love. Well-known is the expression of Blaise Pascal: ‘Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world. We must not sleep during that time.’… Jesus Christ in the Eucharistic mystery is not indifferent and insensitive towards the behavior which men show in His regard in this Sacrament of Love. Christ is present in this Sacrament also with His soul, which is hypostatically united with His Divine Person…. “Christ in the sacramental state sees and in a certain divine way perceives all the thoughts and affections, the worship, the homages and also the insults and sins of all men in general, of all his faithful specifically and his priests in particular; He perceives homages and sins that directly refer to this ineffable mystery of love” (Cardinal Franzelin).

Let it not be said that such language is exaggerated, sentimental, or imprecise. The mysteries of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ endure as long as His glorified humanity endures, which is to say, forever; and our behavior toward the Sacrament is our way of receiving Him or rejecting Him (cf. Prologue of St. John’s Gospel), of entering with love into His Passion, as did St. John at the Last Supper and upon the hill of Golgotha, or, conversely, of turning our backs to Him in company with Judas and the high priests, clamoring: “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” We are all present to His soul and all have an effect on His soul.

All the sins that men have committed or will commit from the beginning of time until the end of time were distinctly present to Our Lord’s mind and heart throughout His Passion, from the Garden of Gethsemane until He breathed His last  upon the Cross, and therefore He has truly received injury and suffered pain from each of our sins, until the present order of creation shall be no more. Through the perfections of His human intellect (beatific and infused knowledge), Our Lord had knowledge of men’s sins, whenever they had been or would be committed, and for each sin He suffered pain. So what St. Alphonsus says in his traditional Stations of the Cross, viz., that it is my sins that are driving in the nails, etc., is perfectly correct. The mystical reality of this Passion — in its source, which is the charity of His heart; in its effect, which is our redemption; in its primary external sign, His wounds — remains present and active for all eternity. For Christ as our High Priest is “always living to make intercession for us” (Heb 7:25).

Moreover, we may say that Christ’s power of memory, being hypostatically united to a divine Person, has a greater depth and intensity than even our primary experience, dulled as it is by the limits of our nature and of our fallen condition. His ever-living memory of His Passion is more intensely real than the experience of the same suffering and death would have been to any other human being. Could we not say that Christ’s memory of His suffering during His mortal life is more truly called suffering than our actual sufferings are? And if this is true, would they not deserve the strongest words we could give them? Yet this point could be argued against by stating that the mere memory of suffering (as St Thomas points out in speaking about the causes of pleasure) seems rather a cause for happiness, if the suffering itself has passed by.

A theologian suggested to me the following (admittedly highly speculative) possibility. We know that the possession of the beatific vision would “normally” render the possessor immune to all pain and all sadness, and yet that during His earthy life our Lord prevented the beatific vision from producing all its effects in His soul, for the sake of the Redemption. Is it impossible that in heaven, out of charity, and to provoke our charity, Christ allows some part of His soul still not to benefit from the normal effect of the beatific vision, so that there may be still some drop of sorrow, of want, in the midst of the joy of heaven? Might the same be the case for the Blessed Virgin, since private revelations seem to speak of her in very much the same way?

I conclude once more with words by Cardinal Ratzinger in his Via Crucis meditations:

His betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his Body and Blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart. We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison — Lord, save us.

The Central Point in the History of Mankind

Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov, Crucifixion (1908)

THE DEATH OF A GOD, dying for the salvation of men, is the central point in the history of mankind. All ages bear witness to and converge towards it: the preceding centuries point to its coming, the others are destined to harvest its fruits.

The death of Christ is the centre of history, and also the centre of the life of each man in particular. In the eyes of God every man will be great in proportion as he takes part in that deed; for the only true and eternal dignity is that belonging to the divine Priest. The degree of each one’s holiness will be in exact proportion as he participates in that bloody immolation. For the Lamb of God alone is holy.

But although Jesus Christ the divine High Priest appeared only once on earth, to offer up His great sacrifice on Calvary; yet, every day He appears in the person of each one of His ministers, to renew His sacrifice on the altar. In every altar, then, Calvary is seen: every altar becomes an august place, the Holy of holies, the source of all holiness. Thither all must go to seek Life, and thither all must continually return, as to the source of God’s mercies.

Those who are the Master’s privileged ones, never leave this holy place, but there they “find a dwelling,” near to the altar, so that they never need go far from it; such are monks, whose first care it is to raise temples worthy to contain altars. Making their home by the Sanctuary, they consecrate their life to the divine worship, and every day sees them grouped around the altar for the holy sacrifice. This is the event of the day, the centre to which the Hours, like the centuries, all converge: some as Hours of preparation and awaiting in the recollection of the divine praise — these begin with Lauds and Prime continued by Terce, the third Hour of the day; the others, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline, flow on in the joys of thanksgiving until sunset when the monks chant the closing in of night.

Thus the days of life pass, at the foot of the altar; thus the life of man finds its greatness and its holiness in flowing out, so to say, upon the altar, there to mingle with that Precious Blood which is daily shed in that hallowed place: for, if the life of man is as a valueless drop of water, when lost in the Blood of Christ it acquires an infinite value and can merit the divine mercy for us.

He who knows what the altar is, from it learns to live; to live by the altar is to be holy, pleasing to God, — and to go up to the altar to perform the sacred Mysteries is to be clothed upon with the most sublime of all dignities after that of the Son of God and His holy Mother.

Meditation by Dom Pius de Hemptinne (1879–1907), a discipline of Dom Columba Marmion.

“The Application of the Lord’s Passion to Us” : St Thomas on the Blessed Sacrament

For St Thomas Aquinas, the Lord of glory present under the consecrated species of bread and wine is the Christ-who-suffered, Christus passus. In the Commentary on John, he writes,

Since this sacrament is of the Lord’s Passion, it contains within itself Christ who suffered. Hence whatever is an effect of the Lord’s Passion is wholly contained in this sacrament, for it is nothing else than the application of the Lord’s Passion to us. . . . Hence it is clear that the destruction of death, which Christ accomplished by His death, and the restoration of life, which He accomplished by His resurrection, are effects of this sacrament. (Super Ioan. 6.6)

This is significant for many reasons. One reason that might be overlooked is psychological. In being made to confront symbols of the death we inflicted on Christ — the crucifix, perhaps marked with the crimson channels of blood; the sculpted corpus with five open wounds; the host lying on the grave cloth of the corporal; the  chalice filled with the “blood of the grape” — we are brought face to face with the reality of our own malice, our moral weariness, our failure to solve the problems of human existence.

Christianity does not automatically rid people of sin and every stain of sin; sincere Christians are not necessarily better than their unbelieving neighbors, and they can at times be worse. [1] But, if they are truly practicing their faith, they are aware of two things: how wicked they are in turning away from the Lord, “every one to his own way” (Isa. 53, 6); how blessed they are in being His creatures, sprinkled in the Blood of the immolated Lamb. They seek forgiveness and healing, ultimately resurrection, from the very One they have killed, who has already died for them and only awaits their turning around to Him; one might say, they merely need to “turn themselves in.” It is this prevenient offering of the sinless for the sinner and its counterpart, the surrendering of guilty assailant to holy Victim, that the Cross symbolizes and the Mass makes present in a mirror and in an enigma (cf. ST III.83.1).

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) in her breathtaking play El Divino Narciso writes:

See, at the crystal rim
of the clear, bright fountain
the beautiful white flower
of which the lover said:
This is My Body and My Blood,
which I sacrificed for you
through many martyrdoms.
Do this in remembrance of my death.

St. Thomas is ever at pains to link the Eucharist with the Passion, presence, and charity. The cumulative messsage is this: the love of God is made manifest and communicated in the broken Body of Jesus, who gave His life on the Cross in order to give it ever anew in the sacrament of His love. For all ages, this sacrament — whether dimly and imperfectly anticipated in pre-Christian cults or realized completely in the Mass — is the pulsing heart of the world, the center of gravity toward which everybody is attracted. [2] J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his son Michael in March of 1941:

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. . . . There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.

Borrowing the Apostle’s words, St. Thomas describes the highest of the three degrees of charity as a “longing to be dissolved and to be with Christ” (ST II-II.24.9). What the Lord seeks is the total gift of oneself. If nothing less will do for human lovers in their frenzied possessiveness, will Christ settle for a lukewarm exchange of goods and services? “I am come to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled!” (Luke 12, 49); “I have ardently longed to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22, 15). Unlike earthly spouses, Christ is able to effect a union of pure, total, permanent possession, in no way limited in its fullness, going to the abyss of one’s being, there where “the depths of God” (1 Cor. 2, 10) are darkly known and sweetly loved, are touched and savored.

No wonder we are bewildered. We are torn apart by a love that defies our logic, that multiplies our longings and frustrates our desires, which are always too few and too small. God would have it this way, for unless He rends us and remakes us, we cannot enter into His rest, be one with Him, be the temple of His glory, bear Him in our bodies, become His sons in our souls. This is the merciful cruelty of God, the blessed wounding spoken of by the mystics, and like its exemplar, the wise folly of the Cross, it belongs to the heart of the Christian experience. In essence, to be a mystic is to believe in the mystery Paul announces in Galatians 2, 20 (“I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me”), and to strive to live this holy communion day after day with the help of God’s grace — that and nothing else. [3] This is why Aquinas wept so often when celebrating Mass, and why he is a master and model for all of us. [4]

In his person no less than in his pages, the Angelic Doctor brings into sharp relief the primacy of contemplation, receptivity, timeless truth, over activism, performance, timely relevance. He demonstrates that no activity is more perfect than waiting on God, listening to Him, seeking His face; that no doing of mine is better than dying to my will, clinging to the Cross; that nothing can be more pertinent to man here and now, nothing more liberating for the world, than yielding in silent faith to the hidden God, the righteous God, “who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ: not by water only, but by water and blood” (1 John 5, 6).

To the cynical children of Adam, all this is completely counterintuitive, if not downright absurd. And yet, for all that, it is right; it has to look that way to fallen man (cf. 1 Cor. 1, 18–31), for his eye is bleary, his ear blocked, his desire narrow. “He who would search into the mysteries of Christ must go out, in a way, from himself and from fleshly ways,” states Thomas soberly (Super Ioan. 20.1). Jesus knew what was in the heart of man, and He came not only preaching, but healing infirmities; not only healing bodies, but divinizing souls. It was to make us His intimates that He instituted the sacraments of the new law, chief among them the sacrament of His own flesh-and-blood love, the feast of the New Covenant which is simply — and incomprehensibly — the gift of Himself.

NOTES

[1] All the same, the truth and effectiveness of the Christian faith must, in fairness, be judged not by its lukewarm half-practitioners or its apostates (should one blame a medicine that was never taken for a sickness that was not thereby ameliorated?), but by its vast company of saints who have washed their robes white in the Blood of the Lamb. Moreover, it is all too easy to take for granted how Christianized our assumptions, mores, and institutions have become due to centuries of ecclesial presence. What is routinely attributed to secular reason, to an ethic of fairness or a noble humanism, is often enough the last sputter of Gospel influence. The popes of modern times, from Leo XIII onwards, have warned that if the Gospel is not welcomed as the animating principle of individuals and societies, the West will degenerate ever more rapidly into a kind of high-tech barbarism at the service of pride, greed, and lust, contemptuous of human dignity and rights. The papal prognosis has been correct, above all for the Western Europe of today — spiritually bankrupt, culturally exhausted, demographically dried up.

[2] See Charles Journet, Theology of the Church, trans. Victor Szczurek (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 181–84.

[3] See Louis Bouyer’s beautiful work The Christian Mystery: From Pagan Myth to Christian Mysticism, trans. Illtyd Trethowan, O.S.B (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990).

[4] See Martin Grabmann, The Interior Life of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Nicholas Ashenbrener, O.P. (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1951).

Photo courtesy of Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for events, articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).