Why the Confiteor Before Communion Should Be Retained (or Reintroduced)

The Confiteor at the start of Mass

In this article, I will defend the fittingness of the repetition of the Confiteor by the ministers immediately before their communion — sung by the deacon and subdeacon at Solemn Mass, said by the acolytes at the Missa Cantata and Low Mass. I shall argue that it not only deserves to be retained, but that it should be used everywhere in the usus antiquior, and not omitted.

Before moving to this question, let us consider for a moment why there ought to be a double Confiteor at the start of the Mass, in the penitential section at the foot of the altar, prior to the ministers’ ascending the mountain of the Lord to offer the twofold sacrifice: first, the verbal sacrifice of the readings, followed by the unbloody sacrifice of the Lamb of God.

At first glance, it might appear that there should be only a single Confiteor of priest and people together, and indeed, this is what the Novus Ordo Missae provides, having relied on scholars to purge it of “useless repetitions.”

Nevertheless, the double Confiteor is far from useless. It strongly brings out the dialogical nature of liturgical worship, where the celebrant acts as a mediator for the people, and where each member of the body is praying for the other. The doubling formalizes the mediation as well as the mutual assistance. It reinforces the humility needed in the celebrant, who confesses his sins alone coram omnibus, and also exhibits the dignity of the servant who says to the master: “May almighty God have mercy on thee, and having forgiven thy sins, lead thee to eternal life.” It reflects the truth of cosmic and ecclesiastical hierarchy and pushes against one of the dominant errors of our time, that of democratic egalitarianism, which lumps everyone together into an undifferentiated mass (or Mass).

Bishop Athanasius Schneider once told of a Low Mass he was offering in Africa at a large traditional Catholic school for girls. When he had confessed his sins, he heard all these little girls say to him, in perfect Latin, “Misereatur tui omnipotens Deus, et dimissis peccatis tuis, perducat te ad vitam aeternam.” He was overcome with feelings of humility, littleness, and joy. This experience of the priest confessing his own sins in front of the people—or, for that matter, the bishop, or the pope—is something we could use a great deal more of in the Church today, together (of course) with the confession of the people. And all of this in the humbling and strengthening presence of the saints invoked by name, twice: “Blessed Mary ever-virgin, St. Michael the Archangel, St. John the Baptist, the holy apostles Peter and Paul, and all the saints” — not (as we were just saying) lumped together in an undifferentiated mass of “all the angels and saints,” mentioned only once, for efficiency’s sake. There are no shortcuts in penance and forgiveness.

Now, moving to our main topic — the Confiteor before communion — it was not only the repetition at this moment of something that had “already been done” earlier in the Mass that the liturgical reformers objected to; it was rather the impression that the communion rite for the faithful is “tacked on to” the Mass as an extrinsic piece rather than something intrinsic to it. Eliding the communion rite(s) was a way of underlining the unity of liturgical action.

Yet the old practice makes theological sense, at least from the vantage of the dogmatic teaching of the Council of Trent. The communion of the offering priest is essential to the completion of the sacrifice in a way that the communion of no one else is. In fact, the obscuring of this point by having a single communion rite in which the priest announces “Ecce Agnus Dei” prior to receiving Christ and distributing Him to the faithful is among the many factors that have contributed to the obscuring of the difference in kind between the ministerial priesthood and the priesthood of the faithful.

Moreover, one should not evaluate this practice only from a low Mass standpoint, but also from the Solemn High Mass, the normative Mass of the Roman Rite. Seeing the priest flanked by his close companions, the deacon and the subdeacon, with the deacon chanting the Confiteor, throws into sharp relief how the sacrifice is essentially complete with the communion of the priest, who stands in for Christ the High Priest, and that the further communions are an extension of this sacrifice to the ministers and the faithful, a sacramental “rippling out” comparable to the rippling out of the Pax, the gesture of peace, passed down from on high — much as the higher angels communicate illuminations to lower angels.

The one offering brings the sacrifice to completion by himself partaking of the sacrificial Victim. No other communion is necessary for this completion, although obviously the Church rejoices in the participation of as many faithful as are in a state of grace and prepared to receive Our Lord. The scholastic distinction between intensity and extension is helpful here. For example, the separated soul in heaven fully possesses beatitude intensively, but when the body is reunited to it in the resurrection, that happiness will overflow into the flesh and so the beatitude will be greater extensively, i.e., it will have a greater extension.

The separate communions of priest and people, with the Confiteor as a visible and audible caesura, is the liturgy’s way of representing the dogmatic truth spoken of by Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis Christi when he distinguishes between the “objective redemption” that Christ accomplished in full on the Cross and the “subjective redemption” of Christians, which occurs through the application of the merits of His Passion to our souls in the sacraments of the Church. St. Thomas speaks of this point often, as when he explains why the faithful need not receive the chalice: “The perfection of this sacrament does not lie in the use of the faithful, but in the consecration of the matter. And hence there is nothing derogatory to the perfection of this sacrament, if the people receive the body without the blood, provided that the priest who consecrates receive both” (Summa theologiae III, q. 80, a. 12, ad 2). “Our Lord’s Passion is represented in the very consecration of this sacrament, in which the body ought not to be consecrated without the blood. But the body can be received by the people without the blood: nor is this detrimental to the sacrament, because the priest both offers and consumes the blood on behalf of all; and Christ is fully contained under either species, as was shown above (q. 76, a. 2)” (ibid., ad 3).

This aspect of the usus antiquior points unambiguously to the essence of the Mass as the re-presentation of the Sacrifice of the Cross at the hands of the ordained minister, and forcefully sets aside the Protestant conflation of the Mass and the Last Supper, i.e., the simple identification of the Eucharist with communion — an error so ubiquitous in our day that Catholics not only take it for granted but are unaware that there is any other way of thinking about the matter.

Again, at a high Mass, the faithful are usually not able to hear the Confiteor of the priest and the servers at the beginning, as these preparatory prayers in the sanctuary are muffled under the soaring sound of the Introit. Thus, when the deacon sings or the servers say the Confiteor right before communion, everyone is able to hear it and make it their own, since there is nothing else “covering over” this action.[1] Holy Mother Church offers all the faithful one final opportunity to bow low before the altar, express contrition for sins, call upon saints and angels as intercessors, and receive a minor absolution prior to approaching the Sanctissimum, the Most Holy One, before whom even the Cherubim and Seraphim veil their faces. Thus we see that this Confiteor is both theologically appropriate and spiritually profitable.

To my mind (and probably, I’ll admit, for quite incidental reasons), the suppression of this Confiteor before communion in the missal promulgated by Pope John XXIII serves as the “poster child” of all that went wrong during that strange no-man’s-land between Mediator Dei (1947) and the imposition of the Novus Ordo (1969). In this period of two decades, official papal language still paid lip service to the binding force of tradition and the non-negotiable good of continuity, while at the same time three Popes in succession permitted changes to the liturgy — at first tentatively and in smaller ways, but subsequently growing in audacity to embrace whole sacramental rituals from top to bottom — that led with a kind of inevitability to the jettisoning of the historic Roman Rite and its replacement by the “modern papal rite” (as Gamber calls the Novus Ordo).

Let there be no mistake about it: the incremental changes of Pius XII and John XXIII to the Mass and its rubrics — the abolition of most octaves and vigils, multiple collects, doubled lections, the “Benedicamus Domino,” folded chasubles, etc. — are also corruptions, even if lesser corruptions than Montini’s, and deserve to be rejected by those who care for the Roman Rite in its integrity and plenitude just as readily and easily as the more egregious novelties of the late sixties.

A last consideration, since we are on the subject of the Confiteor and the role of penitence in the rite of Mass: I read in an article at PrayTell about the proposal, fashionable among today’s “with-it” liturgists, to move the penitential rite to after the “Liturgy of the Word.” Their theory (fine on paper, as always) is that we should first hear the Word of God summoning us to faith and repentance, and then express our acceptance of the message in the Creed and a penitential rite immediately prior to the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Probably the sign of peace would be moved into this intermediate section as well, so that we can take care of all the Eucharistic preliminaries at once.

Now, I have two reactions to this idea.

First, this proposal and any other like it would make sense only if liturgy is just something we make up according to our own brilliant ideas, rather than a form of prayer we receive from those who came before us and whom we revere as our fathers in Christ, from whom we receive the faith together with its enactment in rites. And surely this is a tempting view, since modern people are seen consistently to have better ideas and to produce greater art than their predecessors. Just think of primitives like Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Shakespeare, Bach and Mozart, and compare them with Rorty and Derrida, Cummings and Kerouac, the Beach Boys and Eminem. We are clearly in a better position to design liturgy than the men who built Hagia Sophia or Notre Dame Cathedral.

What is astonishing to me is that such proposals can be made, let alone taken seriously. Do we know better than the millennia of Latin Catholics who started off the liturgy with penitential preparation—or for that matter, Eastern Christians who can’t help chanting “Lord, have mercy” from the get-go? But we can forgive them and, well, ignore them; after all, among professional liturgists, Byzantines get a pass for everything, no matter how outlandish; the more litanies, processions, blessings, and chants, the better. The East is the exotic “other” whose presence allows us to loathe ourselves in a perpetual inferiority complex, which prompts us to “act out” irrationally from time to time by lopping off another ancient feature that connects us with the East.

Second, in an irony that repeats itself on a regular basis, what the fashionable liturgists say they want is already present in the unreformed (I mean, pre-1962) traditional Mass. They say they want a moment, after the Word and before the Eucharist, in which to express our repentance. The old Mass gives us the Confiteor before communion and the threefold “Domine, non sum dignus...” with the minor absolution from the priest. The old rite, embodying a deep instinct for symmetry, has in that sense two penitential rites: the one prior to receiving the Word, and the one prior to receiving the Word-made-flesh.

The more we ponder the inherited liturgy, the more riches we find in it, and the less we are inclined to tinker with it or accept the tinkering of others, bereft of the fear of God the Father, the love of Christ the High Priest, and the unction of the Holy Spirit. We give thanks to the Most Holy Trinity for beginning to deliver His people from the seventy-year Babylonian captivity of liturgical reform (ca. 1948–2018), stretching from Pius XII’s creation of the committee that would produce the neo-Tridentine Holy Week to the year when Ecclesia Dei granted permission to the ICKSP and FSSP to return to the unreformed Holy Week. We are coming full circle at last, and there is no turning back.

(Portions of this article are excerpted from my lecture at St. Mary’s in Norwalk, “Poets, Lovers, Children, Madmen — and Worshipers: Why We Repeat Ourselves in the Liturgy.”)

Note

[1] Needless to say, if it is to serve a corporate purpose, the Confiteor needs to be heard at this point rather than mumbled or muttered into the acolyte's sleeve. No need for loudness; an articulate voice and a reasonable pacing will suffice to make the prayer audible even in a large church. For more thoughts along these lines, see my article "Two Modest Proposals for Improving the Prayerfulness of Low Mass."

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Useful Repetition in the Divine Office

On Thursday, February 14, I gave a lecture at St Mary’s parish, Norwalk, Connecticut, on “Poets, Lovers, Children, Madmen—and Worshipers: Why We Repeat Ourselves in the Liturgy.” (The full text of the lecture may be found here.)

Ever since I first read the words of Sacrosanctum Concilium §34 about how “useless repetitions” (repetitiones inutiles) needed to be removed from the traditional Roman liturgy, I have been on the lookout for instances of repetition as I pray the old Divine Office — or to be more precise, the monastic office as it stood in the 1940s — and as I attend Mass in the usus antiquior, and receive or observe other sacraments in the older use. After over twenty years of observation and reflection, I have still not been able to find a single example of a repetitio inutilis.

Yes, yes, I know the examples that people like to toss out, and in my foolish youth, I would do the same thing. It sounds sophisticated to be able to criticize liturgical practices that have endured for centuries: “You know, those poor Catholics were so conservative that they just kept these irrational customs in place, even though we now see clearly that they make no sense. Far better to streamline the rite, make it more logical.”

That juvenile point of view was replaced by a growing appreciation for the subtlety of the elements of the liturgy, small and large — even those that seem to have come about “by accident.” As Padre Pio once said: “With God, there’s no such thing as chance.” Such appreciation requires both the patience to await meaning and the imagination to see it, neither of which seem to be widespread in our times.

Examples from the Divine Office

After the hour of Prime [1] the Martyrology is read, and then prayers before the day’s work. These prayers commence with a triple “V. Deus, in adjutorium meum intende. R. Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina,” followed by a Gloria Patri, a Kyrie/Christe/Kyrie, a Pater Noster, versicles, another Gloria Patri, and an oration.

There is a lot of repetition here. I have no elaborate rationale to offer, but my experience, having prayed it for a long time, is that this arrangement has a steadying effect and is well suited to begging God’s help at the start of the day's work. The one who begs asks for what he needs more than once, indeed insistently. This is the origin of the Jesus Prayer and of every litany that has ever existed. Praying the Lord’s Prayer a second time, only a few moments after having said it at the end of Prime, typically alerts me to the fact that I had not prayed it the first time with due attention, which prompts me to make my second go at it more earnest. The same is true of the doxology: resisting the temptation to rush through it, one enters more deeply into the origin and goal of all of our actions, the supreme actuality of the Blessed Trinity.

A second example, and one of the most familiar: the Benedicite. Talk about a repetitious prayer! But once one is familiar with it and realizes that we are standing in for the whole of creation, transforming its mute necessities into voluntary praise, there is a special privilege in uttering the verses and a comfort in their lilting succession, like the rolling of waves: “Benedicite omnia opera Domini, Domino: laudate et superexaltate eum in saecula. Benedicite, Angeli Domini, Domino: benedicite caeli, Domino.”

The interruptions of the pattern prompt a reawakening of attention. After saying “Benedicite” 17 times, we say: “Benedicat terra Dominum.” After 8 more iterations of “Benedicite,” we say: “Benedicat Israël Dominum.” Then “Benedicite” is said 5 more times, until we reach “Benedicamus Patrem et Filium cum Sancto Spiritu” and “Benedictus es, Domine.” 30 times we say “Bless” as an imperative; 3 times we say “Let this or that bless” in the subjunctive; and 1 time we say “Blessed art Thou” in the indicative. A pronounced Trinitarian and Christological numerology undergirds this hymn, which is placed on our lips as a kind of litany of blessing admirably suited to Sundays and Holy Days.

A third example, also from Lauds, is the daily repetition of Psalms 148 to 150, which was done by everyone in the West for at least 15 centuries but now remains alive only among the monks and nuns who retain their ancient cursus. This trio of psalms puts on our lips some form of laus or laudare 23 times, giving Lauds its very name, and emphatically stamping it the principal office of pure praise in the Church. There is something captivatingly beautiful in a prayer that has no obvious “use value,” one that is not directed to obtaining a benefit or ridding oneself of an evil. The “gratuitous” repetition, as one might call it, both symbolizes that for-itselfness and serves as a vehicle for inculcating it in us impatient beings who are too often preoccupied with ulterior motives.

A fourth example is the refrain quoniam in aeternum misericordia ejus, repeated 27 times in the recitation or chanting of Psalm 135. A psalm praising the eternity of God’s mercy distantly echoes eternity in its unchanging refrain, like an anchor holding a ship in place, despite the churning waves. It may be hard at times to keep our minds from wandering as we repeat the phrase, but obviously the divine Teacher designed this psalm, as He did all the others down to their last letter, with the spiritual needs of each and every disciple in view.

A final example, and of a rather different character, is the indirect repetitiousness found in Psalm 118, recited daily in the Roman Breviary and once a week in the monastic (namely, divided over the little hours of Sunday and Monday). It takes no great intimacy with Psalm 118 to see that it is conceptually highly repetitive, weaving as many variations with “law, testimonies, commandments, statutes, precepts, judgments, justifications, and sayings” as the psalmist can devise. The Church puts this psalm consistently before us in order to fix our meandering minds and rebellious hearts on the unchanging law of the Lord, which is ultimately His eternal law, His very self, His mercy expressed to us as a rule of life in which we will find life. The layout of the psalm implies that in all the variety we see, in all the vicissitudes we suffer, and even in the seeming pointlessness of the neverending cycle to which Ecclesiastes bears witness, there is a single order of wisdom, a single manifestation of the mystery of God’s love.

So far I have spoken only of textual repetition, but a thorough treatment of our subject would have to include repetitions and seeming redundancies in personnel, ceremonial, gestures, and chant.

The Fate of Repetition

Some of these elements of repetition in the Divine Office were retained in St. Pius X’s breviary and later on in Paul VI’s Liturgy of the Hours, but sadly, many of them were lessened or abandoned. As the Mass was simplified by the reformers to make it briefer and self-explanatory, transparent and accessible, so too was the Office simplified and abbreviated for busy clergy — and this, in spite of the fact that a majority of the Council Fathers, judging from their speeches in the aula, supported neither major changes in the Mass nor a major reduction of the breviary.

Nevertheless, after decades of the new liturgy running alongside the somewhat unexpected survival of the old, it has been possible not only to conceptualize but to experience how the trend toward simplification, the abandonment of formalities, and the rude dismissal of aesthetic principles has brought about a damping of spiritual impact and a lessening of spiritual discipline.

Even the late Fr. Robert Taft, outspokenly anti-Tridentine though he was, admitted this point:

The West might learn from the East to recapture a sense of tradition, and stop getting tripped up in its own clichés. Liturgy should avoid repetition? Repetition is of the essence of ritual behavior. Liturgy should offer variety? Too much variety is the enemy of popular participation. Liturgy should be creative? But whose creativity? It is presumptuous of those who have never manifested the least creativity in any other aspect of their lives to think they are Beethoven and Shakespeare when it comes to liturgy. [2]

What he failed to note, however, is that the liturgy as it came down to us is already the equivalent, albeit on a far greater scale, of a symphony by Beethoven or a romance by Shakespeare. Like the cycles of medieval mystery plays, traditional Catholic worship has a depth, variety, color, and subtlety that defies simple explanation and resists simplification. Patterns of intelligent repetition are one of its most common and effective means for achieving a formal expression of earnestness and a mounting intensification of desire.

Whether, in practice, repetition always retains this value is a subject for the examination of conscience, but it is surely not difficult to see why it is a feature of every historic Christian liturgy, indeed of every religion known to man. From this perspective, the rather ruthless purge of repetitions from the Divine Office, the Mass, and many other rites is yet another angle from which to demonstrate the essentially unhistorical, unliturgical, and irreligious drive behind the liturgical reforms of the last century.

NOTES

[1] It may be noted in passing that the suppression of the very ancient office of Prime, in and of itself, is sufficient to prompt serious doubts about the entire campaign of revision announced in Sacrosanctum Concilium, and allows us to bury once and for all the lie that the liturgical reform was about “restoring ancient worship.” See Wolfram Schrems, “The Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy: Reform or revolution?,” published online at Rorate Caeli on May 3, 2018.

[2] “Return to Our Roots: Recovering Western Liturgical Traditions,” published online at America, May 26, 2008.

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Beat Your Own Breast

Even if Advent is not a penitential season in quite the same way Lent is, nevertheless, a penitential note has always been struck in this time of preparation and expectancy, in the weeks that lead up to the great feast of Christmas. In keeping therefore with the hopeful asceticism of the season, and the many Scriptural readings that call us to vigilance, I would like to have a look at one of the “lost gestures” of the Roman Rite which, thanks be to God, is now making a comeback.

Why do we beat our breasts? Many years ago, Fr. Cassian Folsom, O.S.B., prior of the Monastery of Norcia, wrote a lovely article entitled “Sacred Signs and Active Participation at Mass: What Do These Actions Mean, and Why Are They So Important?” Apropos our topic, Fr. Cassian says:

This is a sign of repentance, of humility, like the parable of the Pharisee and publican in the Gospel: “But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying: O God, be merciful to me a sinner!” (Lk 18:13). In the Missal of Pius V, the rubric for this gesture was very specific: “He strikes his breast three times, saying: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” The rubric in the Missal of Paul VI is less precise. It simply says: “Striking themselves on the breast they say mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” … The words express our repentance verbally. Striking the breast expresses our repentance physically, in body language.

Fr. Cassian continues, quoting one of my favorite books, Guardini’s Sacred Signs:

Guardini has something to say about this gesture too. He asks the question: “What is the significance of this striking the breast? All its meaning lies in its being rightly done. To brush one’s clothes with the tip of one’s fingers is not to strike the breast. We should beat upon our breasts with our closed fists. In the old picture of Saint Jerome in the desert he is kneeling on the ground and striking his breast with a stone. It is an honest blow, not an elegant gesture. To strike the breast is to beat against the gates of our inner world in order to shatter them. This is its significance.” … The gesture of striking the breast, made carefully and with full awareness, can communicate to ourselves and to others more than mere words can say, that we recognize our sinfulness and publicly declare our sorrow for our sins. … Try it yourself. The rib cage is like an echo chamber. If you strike your breast properly, you’ll hear the sound of it: like the sound of thunder.

This, then, is why we have this gesture and why it is important not to let it slip away into a manner of worship that is too verbal and not sufficiently physical and interior.

I don’t know if others have done the same, but ever since the new translation of the Roman Missal appeared, I’ve been wondering if the People of God in my neighborhood would start beating their breasts as they say: “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.” After all, this rhythmic repetition, evidently not a useless repetition but a highly necessary one, almost begs to be accompanied by some bodily action: “through my fault (thump), through my fault (thump), through my most grievous fault (thump).”

The results seem to be mixed so far. The younger people pick it up quickly: they are natural imitators, they delight in ritual observances, and as soon as they see a few adults who do it, they start to emulate. But those who have lived a very long time without the beating of the breast — which was, I’m afraid, lost during the confusion of “the changes” — for the most part do not seem to have resumed the custom, and, alas, I cannot remember a single homily in which the custom was mentioned, either to explain it, or to encourage it.

Still, there’s hope. The beating of the breast will come back, for three reasons: firstly, the increasing number of Catholics who attend the Extraordinary Form cannot avoid seeing it happening many times (and, perchance, reading it in their missals); secondly, members of the younger generation who are liturgically conscientious are taking it up again at both the Ordinary and Extraoridnary Forms; thirdly and most deeply, it is a profoundly human, natural, humble, and effective sign, of which we always stand in need. This gives it a kind of elemental claim on us that easily reasserts itself in spite of decades of abeyance. One sees the same thing with the reintroduction of kneeling for communion, the use of incense, the Benedictine altar arrangement, ad orientem, and lots of other examples. They may have been totally unfamiliar in a certain community, but when they reappear on the watch of a pastor more attuned to Catholic tradition, they make such intuitive sense in worship that the reaction of many is: “Ah, yes — that’s what we’ve been missing.”

* * *

There is also a practical issue that a reader once raised with me, in connection with the traditional Latin Mass. He wrote:

At the the Agnus Dei (Angelus Press Missal, pp. 906–7; Lasance, p. 788; Saint Andrew, p. 981), I have noticed that people in the pews strike their breast three times. They often do the same at the Communion of the Priest (Angelus Press Missal, pp. 910–11; Lasance, p. 790; Saint Andrew, p. 983). My understanding, perhaps mistaken, is that at these two points in the Mass, the priest is the only person who should be doing this, while the faithful in the pews are supposed to do it only at the Communion of the Faithful (Angelus Press, pp. 912–13; Lasance, p. 791; Saint Andrew, p. 984). There seems to be some confusion about this amongst those of us in the pews. I’d appreciate it if you could let me know what is correct.

It’s a good question, and similar to many other questions that people can and do raise about posture and customs at the TLM. In response, let me mention a few points:

1. As surprising as it may seem, what the laity are supposed to do in the old Mass is nowhere explicitly determined. There are no obligatory rubrics for the laity. There are customs and expectations, but no instructions. (In this regard it is different from the Novus Ordo, which specifies what the congregation is supposed to do at every stage of the liturgy. When Fr. Cassian said above that the old rubric is more precise than the new, he was of course referring to the old rubric for the priest and server; there was none for the laity in attendance. The new rubric is less precise about how many times to beat the breast, but it is more inclusive in that it prescribes the action for all present.) Accordingly, it cannot be “right” or “wrong” to beat one’s breast at any point during the traditional Mass. Granted, if someone were to beat his breast so often and so loudly that it became a distraction to his neighbors, that could well be a venial sin against charity. Otherwise, whether you sit, stand, kneel, pray the Rosary, read your missal, etc., is all up to you.

2. That being said, certain customs are so widespread and longstanding, e.g., standing during the Gospel or kneeling during the Canon, that departing from them would be strange. To kneel during the Gospel or to stand during the Canon would be symbolically unfitting and certainly a huge distraction to others. Frankly, it’s very rare to find a community that is not united around such obvious symbols.

3. But then there is the realm of local customs that prevail in a given region or country, in a given parish or chapel, or in a given religious order that may be in charge of the liturgy you attend. There are bound to be some consistent customs, and, if you are new or visiting, it is wisest to follow St. Augustine’s advice in his famous Letter 54 to Januarius to fall in with local custom if there is nothing inherently evil in it. (One of his examples is which days to fast on: if in a place you are newly residing the choice of days is different from the choice you are accustomed to, you should not stubbornly maintain your past practice but adopt the one of your new locale.)

4. Now, I would have to do more research to find out about how widespread is the custom of beating the breast three times at the Agnus Dei. Still, the Agnus Dei is a part of the Mass Ordinary, which belongs (at High Mass) to the people to sing. Why should they not strike their breasts, too? Indeed, one might infer that this custom had been around before the Council because one almost always sees some people today at OF Masses striking their breast during the Agnus Dei — which is certainly not something mentioned in the new rubrics and could be a carry-over from the past. When, on the other hand, the priest strikes his breast at his “Domine, non sum dignus,” it would not make equal sense for the people to do so, because he is preparing for his own communion, and shortly afterwards, when he raises the host and says “Ecce Agnus Dei,” the people have their own opportunity to say “Domine, non sum dignus” three times and to strike their own breasts, as is right and fitting.

Thus, in my opinion, people shouldn’t do this at the priest’s communion, but they should do it at the Agnus Dei and for their own communion. But this is merely my opinion, since there are no official rubrics for the people’s postures and gestures. (And let's not forget all the other wonderful opportunities for striking one's breast that the traditional liturgy offers — active participation to the max!)

As we move towards the season of Christmas revelry, when people are apt to celebrate more and more, let’s not forget the Catholic B.Y.O.B.: Beat Your Own Breast.