Learned Blunders: The Impact of Flawed Scholarship on the Liturgical Reforms of the Twentieth Century

Most of the debates about the liturgical reforms of the twentieth century are understandably concerned with theological or ideological elements. Critics of the 1962 Missal worry that the old Mass is too hierarchical and too aligned with an outdated political ideology, a relic of the days of the Ancien Régime. Critics of the 1969 Missal, on other hand, wonder if the new Mass is too egalitarian, modernist, Protestant, Masonic, etc. My goal in this essay, however, is to focus on the role that honest mistakes about historical facts may have played in the formation and implementation of the 1969 Missal.

Honest mistakes about history are different from theological and ideological convictions, although there can be a thin line between the two, and they often influence each other. It is one thing to believe that Mass facing the people is a better way to worship because it is less alienating and more inclusive; it is another thing to believe that the early Church celebrated Mass facing the people. One is a theological opinion that may or may not be true and may be contingent on circumstances; the other is a historical claim that either did or did not happen – period.

But if I believe that the early Church celebrated Mass facing the people, then I might be more inclined to conclude that the Church today should do so as well: in this case, my grasp of the facts shapes my opinion. On the other hand, if I fervently believe that the Church today should have Mass facing the people, I may become predisposed to interpret some archeological data as evidence that the early Church celebrated Mass facing the people; in that case, my opinion shapes my grasp of the facts.

Granted, the adjective “honest” makes my task more complicated, for it presumes to assess the purity of another person’s intention. To avoid any cynical presumption, I will simply assume that the scholars involved in the following blunders acted in good faith.

1. A Patristic Golden Age

A common feature of twentieth-century liturgical scholarship is the conviction that the liturgies of the Patristic era, from the second to the fifth centuries A.D., constitute a Golden Age of sacred worship. I do not know if this belief is an honest historical mistake or a theological conviction or both, but either way it must be mentioned because it influenced and gave great weight to the other mistakes that I will discuss: indeed, it influenced the Council itself. Paragraph 50 of Sacrosanctum Concilium states:

The rite of the Mass is to be revised in such a way that the intrinsic nature and purpose of its several parts, as also the connection between them, may be more clearly manifested, and that devout and active participation by the faithful may be more easily achieved. For this purpose the rites are to be simplified, due care being taken to preserve their substance; elements which, with the passage of time, came to be duplicated, or were added with but little advantage, are now to be discarded; other elements which have suffered injury through accidents of history are now to be restored to the vigor which they had in the days of the holy Fathers, as may seem useful or necessary.

The Latin is even stronger: instead of the “vigor” of the holy Fathers, the document states that certain liturgical elements are to be restored to the “pristine norm” (pristina norma) of the holy Fathers.

While this passage does not explicitly state that the Patristic era, i.e., the time of the Church Fathers, was a Golden Age, it can easily be used to support such a belief, and as such it stands in tension with Pope Pius XII’s 1947 Mediator Dei, which warns precisely against this lens of interpretation:

The liturgy of the early ages is most certainly worthy of all veneration. But ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity. The more recent liturgical rites likewise deserve reverence and respect. They, too, owe their inspiration to the Holy Spirit, who assists the Church in every age even to the consummation of the world. They are equally the resources used by the majestic Spouse of Jesus Christ to promote and procure the sanctity of man (61).

Pope Pius XII lists examples of decisions that would be wrong-headed: the return of the altar to a primitive table form as well as the suppression of black vestments, sacred images, statues, crucifixes of Christus passus, and polyphony (see 62).

The Holy Father offers a theological reason for rejecting Golden Ageism, namely, that it discounts or even denies the ongoing inspiration of the Holy Spirit on liturgical development—that is, it discounts a providentially guided organic development. Golden Ageism is, at the end of the day, an arbitrary attachment, not a historical fact. Objectively and dispassionately speaking, how do we know that one age is better than another, liturgically or otherwise? I had a wise liturgical studies professor who once said that the difference between Protestant fundamentalists and Catholic fundamentalists is that fundamentalist Protestants try in vain to leapfrog over history and return to the first century while Catholic traditionalists try in vain to leapfrog over history and return to the thirteenth century. Fair enough, yet did not so many twentieth-century liturgical reformers try in vain to leapfrog over history and return to the third or fourth century? Perhaps we all need to stop leapfrogging and recognize that we are the beneficiaries of an ongoing and inspired sacred history.

The tug to the Patristic era was strong. The general consensus in the early- to mid-twentieth century was that the early Church was more communitarian, more egalitarian, and more participatory, and that later developments were misguided and alienating “barnacles” on the Barque that obscured the liturgy’s original vision and purpose. Although there are still stalwart proponents of this view (even in the highest echelons of Church leadership), few dispassionate and serious scholars hold it today. In the understated assessment of Albert Gerhards and Benedikt Kranemann:

This idea was often based on the hypothesis of a degeneration in which the “golden age” of patristics was followed by the “dark Middle Ages” leading to a “rigid standard liturgy” in the period between Trent and Vatican II. This way of looking at the history of liturgy is being radically called into question today. [1]

2. Liturgical Orientation

Because of Golden-Ageism, with its myth of a pristine Patristic norm, any mistake made about how the early Church worshiped was given undue weight by scholars in their reconstruction of the past and in their recommendations for the present.

That is certainly true of the orientation of the priest at Mass. The consensus of scholars in the 1930s was that the Church originally had Mass “facing the people”. This consensus was no doubt influenced by ideology, some of it egalitarian and some of it anti-sacrificial – the idea being that “when” the Church thought of the Eucharist as a meal, it had Mass facing the people, and when it came to think of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, it had Mass facing the apse. [2]

But at least two archeological data also shaped opinion: the existence of free-standing altars in ancient churches, and the fact that some of these churches were built on a west-east axis, with the entrance and façade on the east and the sanctuary on the west. In the latter churches, if the priest were to face East to confect the Eucharist, he would have to “face the people” to do so. What they did not consider (which later scholarship discovered) was the possibility that during the Consecration, the people turned around and faced the East, with the Sacrifice taking place behind them. At that moment the priest and congregation resembled sailors on a ship, with the captain at the helm in the rear as they sailed to meet their Lord, who is to come again from the East. Perhaps that is why a church nave takes its name from the Latin word for ship, navis.

The Second Vatican Council only states that future churches should be built with free-standing altars, and the General Instructions for the (new) Roman Missal presupposes that the priest is turned towards the Lord and not the people during the Consecration. Nevertheless, “Mass facing the people” has been treated as a cornerstone of liturgical renewal, with bishops forbidding priests from celebrating in the traditional manner.

Scholarly doubt about the versus populum position began to emerge shortly after Vatican II. The prominent liturgist Fr. Josef Jungmann dismissed it as “a legend” in 1966. That same year, a member of the Concilium that created the Novus Ordo, Fr. Louis Bouyer, rejected the meal vs. sacrifice dichotomy, pointing out that in antiquity “the communal character of a meal was emphasized…[by] the fact that all the participants were on the same side of the table.” [3] Moroever, Monsignor Klaus Gamber’s Die Reform der römischen Liturgie (The Reform of the Roman Rite) includes a scathing critique of both the theological and historical arguments favoring versus populum. But the definitive treatment of the subject came in 2009 with Fr. Uwe Michael Lang’s Turning towards the Lord, which demonstrates that there has always been a tradition of facing East during liturgical prayer and never a tradition of priest and people facing each other. The book received the approval of Pope Benedict XVI. More recently, Luisella Scrosati has a series on the orientation of Christian worship in Italian that was translated last year into English for the New Liturgical Movement website (see here).

3. Concelebration

Twentieth-century liturgists were so convinced that the early Church has Masses regularly concelebrated by two or more priests that the Second Vatican Council was moved to make the following changes:

Concelebration, whereby the unity of the priesthood is appropriately manifested, has remained in use to this day in the Church both in the east and in the west. For this reason it has seemed good to the Council to extend permission for concelebration to the following cases (Sacrosanctum Concilium 57.1).

The Council goes on to allow concelebration for both the Chrism Mass and evening Mass on Holy Thursday, for Masses during Bishops’ meetings, and for Masses for the blessing of an abbot. It also gives Bishops the authority to allow concelebration at parish Masses, and it calls for a new rite for concelebration to be drawn up and inserted into the Missal and the Pontifical (58). The Council Fathers declare that “each priest shall always retain his right to celebrate Mass individually” (57.2), but many priests today feel pressure to concelebrate every Mass they attend.

There was no definitive or extensive study of concelebration prior to the Second Vatican Council; one wonders how everyone was so confident about a conviction based on so little research. Finally, in 1982, Carmelite Father Joseph de Sainte-Marie published an almost 600 page book entitled L’eucharistie salut du monde, which in 2015 appeared as The Holy Eucharist – The World’s Salvation: Studies on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, its Celebration and its Concelebration (Leominster: Gracewing, 2015). The magnum opus covers a range of topics, such as the sacrificial character of the Eucharist, but it is especially concerned with separating fact from fiction regarding concelebration.

Sainte-Marie’s conclusion, as the back-cover puts it, is that the “present practice of daily concelebration, especially among simple priests without their Ordinary presiding, far from being a return to an ancient norm, is in fact a new development.” Earlier liturgists made a crucial mistake, failing to distinguish between ceremonial concelebration and sacramental concelebration, when two or more ministers confect the same sacrament. Sacramental concelebration happened on occasion, especially with a Mass led by a bishop, but in both the East and the West, the preference was for ceremonial concelebrations and for individually celebrated Masses, which multiplied graces flowing into the world.

Sainte-Marie researched the debates the Council Fathers had about concelebration, and he shows how the Council Fathers were unaware of this distinction. If concelebration remains “in use to this day in the Church both in the east and in the west” as the Council claims, then why do most Orthodox churches refuse sacramental concelebration on principle, and why are the only Eastern Churches that practice sacramental concelebration the ones that are in union with Rome, and even then only beginning in the eighteenth century and only under Western influence?

The World’s Salvation did not come out in time to stop the campaign to make concelebrated the Masses norm, especially in religious communities, but it was able to stop further damage. I am told that plans were being made to make it a requirement of Canon Law that all members of a religious community concelebrate the same Mass, but Sainte-Marie’s scholarship changed their minds.

Unfortunately, the Vatican has recently doubled down on this flawed scholarship by forcing the Anglican Ordinariate to adopt concelebration. For recent treatments on the subject, see here.

4. Ordinary Time

Contrary to a popular misconception, Ordinary Time in the new calendar is not “Ordinal” Time but an Ordinary of Times. [4] Ordinary Time was designed to be a generic season in contrast to the special seasons of Christmas and Easter. The architect of this new schema was Fr. Pierre Jounel, who believed that the Masses of the early Church outside the Christmas and Easter cycles had no special “theme” and that the modern Church should return to that model. Each of the new Sundays in Ordinary Time, he writes, “is a Lord’s Day in its pure state as presented to us in the Church’s tradition,” that is, the state in which the primitive Church celebrated it.

The problem with this thesis is that we do not know for certain what the primitive Church did. Second, Jounel linked indistinction with purity and purity with the early Church, but both assumptions are questionable. Third, he is guilty of archeologism or Golden Age-ism, for Jounel wanted to return to a third-century practice and ignore seventeen hundred years of valid development. Fourth, Jounel is also guilty of novelty (ironically), for the way he endeavored to return to “the Lord’s Day in its pure state” was to invent an entirely new season that not a single soul in the Patristic era would have recognized, for no liturgical calendar prior to that of the Novus Ordo had a single-block season that is “interrupted” by the Easter cycle and that then picks up where it left off. Fifth, despite Jounel’s claim that the new season is indistinct, the final Sundays of Ordinary Time retain the distinctive theme that they had in the previous calendar, that of the End Times.

The 1962 Missal

My criticisms have centered on the scholarship that shaped the 1969 Missal, but that does not mean that the 1962 Missal is flawless. I will mention three, though no doubt there are more.

First, the feast day of Pope St. Felix I (269-274) was mistakenly assigned to May 30 instead of December 30 (the day of his martyrdom) because a medieval scribe wrote “III Kal. Jun.” (third day to the calends of June) instead of “III Kal. Jan.” (third day to the calends of January).

Second, according to tradition, September 14, 326 is the date that St. Helen discovered the True Cross during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and September 14, 335 is the anniversary of the consecration of her son Constantine’s basilicas of the Holy Sepulchre and Calvary in Jerusalem. September 14 was thus celebrated as the Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross. May 3, on the other hand, was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, celebrating the return of the Cross to Jerusalem in 629 after the Persians had stolen it. Over time, however, the two dates were confused and May 3 became the Feast of the Finding of the Cross and September 14 the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. The May 3 feast was dropped in 1960, and both the 1962 and 1969 calendars still have September 14 as the Feast of the Exaltation or Triumph of the Cross.

Third, the Tridentine Missal’s use of the Vulgate for its biblical readings is not without controversy, for although we have it on the authority of the Council of Trent that the Vulgate is “authentic,” we also know that “authentic” does not mean “infallible,” nor did Trent tell us which edition of the Vulgate was authentic, and there were several competing versions at the time. In the 1962 Missal, the Epistle reading for Low Sunday (1 John 5, 4-10) is different than what are considered the most reliable Greek manuscripts of that passage, particularly verse 7, which does not exist in the oldest manuscripts. [5]

What I find interesting about the errors in the 1962 Missal is that they seem to be mostly the result of failed efforts to retain, while the aforementioned mistakes from the twentieth century are the result of failed efforts to rediscover. The latter is by its nature more fraught with risk and uncertainty, and so it is not surprising that the failures, when they happen, are more egregious.

Conclusions

Two final clarifications are in order.

First, in and of themselves scholarly mistakes do not disqualify a liturgical practice. It is entirely possible that even if something was done in error, it could turn out to be providential, a sort of felix culpa. That said, when new discoveries expose old mistakes, they should be used to consider – with a grain of salt, of course, lest we keep the same slavish mentality to the “experts” – how to move forward. At any rate, since the cure always begins with an accurate diagnosis of the disease, we need to admit that we live in a world of liturgical upheaval, as Peter Jeffrey puts it, “with its own excesses of competing and fanciful historical claims.” [6]

Second, we should not banish scholarship from liturgical decision-making simply because of these mistakes. Scholarship may have been the rope with which we used to hang ourselves, but it is also the same rope that can pull us out of the ditch. Every example of flawed scholarship that we have mentioned has been brought to light by good scholarship, so scholarship per se is not the problem. Scholarship is simply a form of human inquiry, and like any other temporal good, it is subject to abuse, especially in the hands of the proud. And even if it does succeed in creating an accurate view of the past, that does not necessarily mean that it should be used to overthrow later developments or practices. Let the Holy Spirit and not the absent-minded professor have the final say on what goes on in Christ’s Church.

We will look at more learned blunders at a later time.

This article originally appeared in The Latin Mass magazine 35:1 (Spring 2025), pp. 38-42. Many thanks to its editors for allowing its republication here.

Notes

[1] Albert Gerhards and Benedikt Kranemann, Introduction to the Study of Liturgy (Liturgical Press, 2017), pp. 81-82. Gerhards and Kranemann argue that Vatican II avoided “Golden Age-ism” by quoting SC 21, that the liturgy “is made up of unchangeable elements divinely instituted, and of elements subject to change.” One can hold this view, however, and still believe that the Patristic era was the high watermark of liturgy. Moreover, the authors ignore the implications of SC 50’s language of the pristine norm of the Church Fathers.

[2] Such is the contention of Otto Nußbaum, but it is false. The earliest references to the Eucharist, from the second century, refer to it as a sacrifice.

[3] Louis Bouyer, Eucharistie: Theologie et spiritualite de la priere eucharistique (Tournai, 1966) [trans. Charles Underhill Quinn as Eucharist: Theology and Spirituality of the Eucharistic Prayer (Notre Dame, Ind., and London: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968)], p.55-56, quoted in Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger Collected Works: Theology of the Liturgy.

[4] See my “The Origins and Meaning of Ordinary Time,” Antiphon: A Journal of Liturgical Renewal 23:1 (2019), pp. 43-77. A revised version in two parts also appears on this website, here and here.

[5] Quoniam tres sunt, qui testimonium dant in caelo : Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus Sanctus : et hi tres unum sunt. “And there are three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one.”

[6] Peter Jeffrey, “Eastern and Western Elements in the Irish Monastic Prayer of the Hours,” in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages, eds. Margot A. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer (Oxford University Press, 2000), 134.

How Contrary Orientations Signify Contradictory Theologies

Catholics who delve into serious discussions of liturgy, wishing perhaps to know what all the fuss is about, quickly discover that one of the hottest of hot-button questions, and in some ways the most important, is the orientation of the liturgy. What is the big deal about the direction the priest happens to be facing at Mass? [1]

For starters, the custom of all Christians either offering or participating in the Eucharistic liturgy facing East has the same apostolic roots and the same universality in Church history as the use of water baptism, the praying of the Psalms, the worship of the risen Christ on Sunday, the veneration of the Mother of God and the saints, and of their relics. As a matter of fact, eastward orientation predates the use of official priestly vestments, consecrated church buildings, and even the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed that we recite every Sunday. Does that make it old enough and widespread enough to take seriously? If not, why do we take the other things seriously? They should be just as dispensable, or more so.

Think of it this way: Would you, if you are a practicing Catholic, want Sunday to be abolished, replaced by another day of the week, or simply taken off the roster? That would be an unthinkable deviation from Christian practice. Would you want all the Psalms removed from the Mass and the Divine Office? Should we replace water baptism with a civil naming ceremony, or stop honoring our Blessed Mother because it might make us feel like immature children or offend anti-maternal feminists? Have priests celebrating in jeans and T-shirts, because that’s the common clothing of our day, as robes and cloaks were the common clothing of ancient times? Impossible! It cannot be that something we have done for millennia should suddenly be dropped.

But this is exactly what we have done with ad orientem worship. For nearly 2,000 years, clergy and faithful together faced in the same direction in expectation of Christ and in adoration of Him, the One who already comes in mystery in the Most Holy Eucharist, the One who is to come manifestly at the end of the world to judge the living and the dead and the world by fire.

Ad orientem preserves the eschatological orientation of the liturgy. When Christians first gathered on Sundays to worship the Lord, they were anticipating the second coming of Christ — this seems to be the very oldest characteristic of our corporate worship. As Dom Gregory Dix notes, the “primordial form” of Sunday was not so much a feast looking back to the resurrection of Christ on the first Easter, or to any particular mystery or moment of His earthly life, but rather a looking forward with longing to the Lord’s return in glory, imploring Him to deliver us from the evils of sin, death, and hell. Sunday Mass was about the life of the world to come, which the early Christians, suffering bitter and horrific trials, must have thought about a great deal as they hoped and prayed that they would remain faithful: “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” [2] For this reason, the eastward focus of prayer was a poignant symbol: after the dark and cold night, the sun will rise gloriously on the eastern horizon, shedding light and warmth.

Not to mention all the Scripture passages, repeatedly commented on by the Church Fathers, that either call Christ “the East”, or say that He ascends to the East, or that He will come from the East (cf., inter alia, Ps. 67, 34; Acts 1, 10–11; Mt. 24, 27; Zech. 6, 11–12). [3]

In turning the priest towards the people, we decisively severed ourselves from that which was most ancient, most intrinsic, and most distinctive in our worship as Christians. When we return to ad orientem, we return decisively to the fundamentals of Christian faith and its original practice. Ironically, in adopting the novelty of versus populum — a supposed “return to the earliest practice” in the judgment of mid-20th century scholars, whose conclusions have all been overturned by the work of subsequent scholars — we ended up losing the most ancient element of all.

It is not hard to see why this custom should have been nearly convertible with Christian worship as such. Most simply, worship is about God, not about us. Or rather, it is about us only insofar as we are from God, in God, and for God, our Creator, Savior, Sanctifier, and Judge. Hence, even to the extent that, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, the liturgy is for our needs, since God who is infinitely good stands to gain nothing for Himself, it is still done for the love and praise and thanking of God, who is the source and fulfillment of our needs. Our need, in short, is FOR GOD; our deepest need is to go beyond ourselves into Him. The very purpose of worship is to take ourselves out of ourselves and establish us in God. In this sense, any aspect of liturgy that does not clearly terminate in God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or any aspect that seems to terminate in us, is not liturgy, whatever else it may be (e.g., self-regard, social posturing, therapy, superstition).

Hence, the ad orientem stance simply expresses the act of worship as such, whereas the versus populum stance contradicts it outright. This is why it is not merely unfitting but antithetical to religion. [4] The theologian Max Thurien, writing (somewhat surprisingly) in the official Vatican journal Notitiae, observed, in a statement that anticipated Ratzinger’s similar and more famous remark in The Spirit of the Liturgy:

The whole celebration [of Mass] is often conducted as if it were a conversation and dialogue in which there is no longer room for adoration, contemplation, and silence. The fact that the celebrants and faithful constantly face each other closes the liturgy in on itself. [5]

Along the same lines, the papal master of ceremonies Guido Marini remarked at a conference in Rome:

In our time, the expression “celebrating facing the people” has entered our common vocabulary. … [S]uch an expression would be categorically unacceptable the moment it comes to express a theological proposition. Theologically speaking, the holy Mass, as a matter of fact, is always addressed to God through Christ our Lord, and it would be a grievous error to imagine that the principal orientation of the sacrificial action is the community. Such an orientation, therefore, of turning towards the Lord must animate the interior participation of each individual during the liturgy. It is likewise equally important that this orientation be quite visible in the liturgical sign as well. [6] 

Marini helps us to see not only that the object of liturgy should always be God, or the God-man Jesus Christ, never mere man, but also that this objective orientation (we cannot avoid the East even in our ordinary way of speaking!) should be visible, evident to the senses, easily grasped by the intellect, and easily translated into the movement of the will that we call love, which is ordered to the good — to a good outside of ourselves, in the case of our ultimate end.

I will characterize the contrast between the contradictory postures in terms of their subject/object signification.

In the ad orientem arrangement, the subject/object appears as man/God. The priest both looks and acts like an image of Christ, the mediator between God and man. Paradoxically, the ceremonial centrality of the priest in the old rite serves to emphasize that God is the one and only object of worship, since the priest is so obviously assimilated to his office as alter Christus.

In the versus populum arrangement, the subject/object appears as people/priest. The priest, even with the best of intentions and behavior, looks and acts like an empowered facilitator of a communal event; the vis-à-vis positioning confers on him a sort of autocratic prominence as the one to whom the congregation is subordinated and beholden. This may be the psychological reason why some priests overcompensate with informality, jokes, banter, smiles, waves, applause, or what have you — the priest’s very “over-againstness” in versus populum seems to demand a downplaying of the over-against by means of emphasizing that he’s really “one of us,” after all! How sad that the one true and obvious way of representing that the priest is “one of us” — namely, by having him face in the same direction as everyone else and offer the sacrifice on their behalf, the very same sacrifice they are offering in the hearts — has been discarded as an opaque and expired symbol, to be replaced by a format that turns the Mass into something done towards the people and, in a sense, imposed upon them. In reality, the Mass is something Jesus Christ according to His human nature does towards the Most Holy Trinity, as the great prayer “Suscipe, Sancta Trinitas” perfectly expresses — and we are permitted to join in.

Ironically for a rite that is supposed to be less clericocentric and more popular, the priest in the new rite becomes far more central and attention-getting because his personality, his “vernacular style” or “way of being a priest,” intrudes. Versus populum does nothing but underline this unfortunate amplification of human presidency at the cost of assimilation to Christ’s kenosis and unique mediation.

Kathleen Pluth brilliantly captures the problem and the solution. Having said that she hates being a cause of distraction to others by cantoring in the front of a church and that she much prefers finding refuge in a choir loft (singers should be heard and not seen), she then turns to the celebrant of the Mass:

The role of the priest is exponentially more complex. He cannot hide. His role is inherently, and in some regards primarily, visible, leading the congregation through the veil, into the Holy of Holies. We follow him, as he expresses in the highest possible way his conformity to Jesus, our advocate before the Father. For centuries the symbolism of our “following” the priest was clear. However, in the postconciliar period, and without a direct referrent in the Council’s documents themselves, the character of the priest’s relationship to the people has been visibly distorted by the versus populum posture.
          When people face each other, they aim to please. They make eye contact; they smile encouragingly. There is a word for such gestures: flattery. People flatter their priests and their priests flatter them, at an average ratio of, say, 500 to 1. None of this is encouraged in the Council documents. The versus populum posture is specifically worldly. It sets up the priest, not as a model to follow, but as a talk show host to be flattered insofar as he delights us. There are no good reasons for this.
          The lines of sight to God should be made clear in the Liturgy (see Pseudo-Dionysius’ Ecclesiastical Hierarchy for a beautiful exposition of how this should work), but instead our path towards God is obscured by the distracting cycle of eye-contact and feedback. The Sunday liturgy is for everyone their primary and for many their only contact with the Church. As such, its symbols should express the truth, including the truth about ecclesial relationships, which should not be a matter of flattery but of service. The Psalmist sings, “Let your priests be clothed with holiness/The faithful shall ring out their joy.” Ad orientem posture lets priests be priests and the people be themselves too, all facing God together.[7]

Accordingly, it was much to the devil’s advantage to turn the priest around to the people, creating a charmed circle of neighborly affirmation that brought the experience of the Mass down to the level of a horizontal exchange, a back-and-forth in everyday speech. There is nothing transcendent about that; on the contrary, God is domesticated, tamed, manipulable — not a recipient of sacrifice but a subject of conversation.

In the Western context, moreover, where the use of a sacral language had been the nearly universal and exceptionless practice for most of the Church’s history, the sudden introduction of the vernacular — until recently, a bland and boorish vernacular, at that — contributed to this serpentine leveling as well. Ad orientem, use of Latin and plainchant, and kneeling for communion are simple but potent ways to repudiate the democratic horizontalism that has afflicted the liturgy for the past fifty years. The dismantling of these things — the removal of communion rails, the practice of communion standing (again, I speak within the Western experience as it developed over the second millennium), the reception of communion in the hand, the abolition of the acolyte with the paten, and so forth — all of these are consistent with a larger perspective of the warping of the act of worship into an act of precipitous self-esteem, one that is hauntingly reminiscent of the scenario played out in the Garden of Eden.

NOTES

[1] Of course, this topic has been taken up many times at NLM, but there are always more angles from which to pursue it, and we will never leave it alone. Here are some earlier articles: “Why Does Facing Ad Orientem Matter?”; “The Marian Character of Ad Orientem Worship”; “The Priestly Character of Ad Orientem Worship”; “Fr. Dwight Longenecker on Worship Ad Orientem”; “The Normativity of Ad Orientem Worship According to the Ordinary Form’s Rubrics.”

[2] See Dom Daniel Augustine Oppenheimer, “Towards the Second Coming: Facing the Liturgical East.”

[3] All these texts and more, with good commentary, may be found in this article: “Convertere, Israël, ad Dominum Deum Tuum!: A Benedictine Monk Defends Worshiping Eastwards.”

[4] This argument is developed at greater length in my article “Mass ‘Facing the People’ as Counter-Catechesis and Irreligion.”

[5] Max Thurian, “La Liturgie, contemplation du mystère,” Notitiae 32 (1996), 692; reprinted in English in L’Osservatore Romano, 24 June 1996, p. 2.

[6] The full text may be found here.

[7] The article may be found here.

Mass “Facing the People” as Counter-Catechesis and Irreligion

The essence of the Mass is not that it is a communal gathering, for there are many sorts of communal gatherings that are not Masses, and, as the Church has consistently taught, a Mass celebrated privately by a priest and a server, or even in a case of necessity, by a priest alone, is still a true and proper Mass. No, the essence of the Mass is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on Calvary, made present anew in the immolation of the Victim under the species of bread and wine, and offered again to the Father as a sweet-smelling oblation for the salvation of the world. This, and not the circle of people who may or may not gather around the table, is the essence of the Mass.

As a consequence, the Mass is a theocentric prayer. It is ordered to God. As the Gloria sings: propter magnam gloriam tuam, for the sake of Thy great glory; or in the words of the doxology at the end of the Canon: “All glory and honor are Thine, Almighty Father…” Yes, the Mass was given to us by Our Lord at the Last Supper for our benefit, but it benefits us precisely by ordering us to God first, giving Him the primacy that is His by nature and by conquest. We are benefited by being subordinated to God, yielding ourselves to Him as a rational sacrifice (cf. Rom 12:1); we profit from being decentered on ourselves and recentered on Him, our first beginning and last end.

It is exactly for these reasons that celebration of the Mass versus populum or “facing the people” is not merely an unfortunate aberration based on poor scholarship and democratic-socialist habits of thought endemic to modern Westerners. It is a contradiction of the essence of the Mass and a distortion of the proper relationship of man to God. Because of its inversion of the proper directionality of the worshiping community, people and priest alike, to the uncreated Font and Origin, it functions as a sort of “immunization” against the rational self-sacrifice that turns our souls and our bodies towards the Father, in union with His beloved Son, whose meat is to do the Father’s will, not His own as a man (cf Jn 4:34; Jn 6:38).

To privilege a partial, secondary truth over the fundamental truth is to inculcate untruth.

We can see this if we look at the history of Christian heresy. When the Arians privileged the truth that the Son is in some sense less than the Father (cf Jn 14:28) but neglected the more fundamental truth that He is God—God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God—they inculcated an untruth, for the Son is not less than the Father simply speaking.

When the Pelagians privileged the truth that man is not saved without his own effort, but neglected the more fundamental truth that even our efforts are God’s gift and that without His aid we can do nothing, they inculcated an untruth, for we are saved not by works simply speaking.

When the Protestants privileged the truth that Jesus Christ is our Savior but neglected the truth that He saves us in and through a visible body, the Church, of which we must become members in order to benefit from His saving action, they inculcated an untruth, for there is no salvation outside of the body of the Savior. A subjective conviction that “I am saved” has nothing to do with what we see happening in the New Testament, let alone the history of the early Church.

When modern-day European liberals privilege the truth that man has innate dignity but neglect the truth that his dignity is not absolute or independent of his social nature with its ensuing obligations towards society and its susceptibility to just punishment up to and including death, they inculcate an untruth, for neither death nor the punitive sovereignty of civil authority is contrary to human dignity simply speaking.

In all of these examples (and of course they could be multiplied almost indefinitely), we see how the emphasis of a partial truth taken out of the context of the network of truths that give it meaning results in the establishment of a false system of belief, an -ism that separates itself from Catholicism.

I maintain that the same is true of versus populum. When liturgical reformers privileged the idea of a communal gathering for table fellowship, but neglected the more fundamental truth (recognized as de fide dogma by Trent) that the Mass is the unbloody representation of the bloody Sacrifice of the Cross, they inculcated an untruth, for the Mass is not first and foremost a group doing something together, but Jesus Christ offering Himself in sacrifice and granting us the opportunity to unite ourselves to this perfect, all-sufficient offering, in which our very salvation consists. It is the man who has, over his lifetime, become one with Jesus on the Cross who will be saved, not the man who gets together with friends to reminisce about the itinerant preacher of kindness from Nazareth. The emphasis of a partial truth (that the Mass is a social or communal event involving edible refreshment), when taken out of the context of the larger dogma that gives this event its meaning and power (that the Mass is the sacrifice of Christ, Head and members), falsifies the partial truth and in fact makes it to be harmful, in the same way as Arianism, Pelagianism, and Protestantism are harmful, although each is built upon a truth.

Celebration of the Liturgy of the Eucharist facing the people necessarily decontextualizes and falsifies the social nature of the Mass and unavoidably (even if, in many instances, contrary to the devout wishes of its celebrant) suppresses its theocentric essence. For this reason, it inculcates a false understanding of the Mass, effectively decatechizing the faithful as to its true nature. It does not simply tilt the emphasis to one side or the other; it cancels out the orientation that is demanded by the very meaning of sacrifice, which is to be offered manifestly to God alone. He alone, moreover, deserves and demands our adoration, and if it is not clear that we are united together in adoration of the One who alone is worthy of latreia or divine worship, then the unique right of God to such worship in spirit and in truth has been compromised or canceled out.

If we recall that “religion” names for St. Thomas Aquinas the moral virtue by which we offer to God what is owed to Him by means of external signs and rites (cf. Summa theologiae II-II, q. 81), it would be accurate to say that ad orientem worship and versus populum ‘worship’ are the expression of different “religions,” at least in the sense that something different is being displayed and given.

The problem, then, is not merely that the practice of celebrating Mass “towards the people” has no foundation whatsoever in the history of Catholic or Orthodox worship. No, it is much worse than an unfortunate sociological aberration, like the current fashion of body-piercing. The use of versus populum erodes and corrupts the faith of the people as to the very essence of the Mass and the adoration of God propter magnam gloriam eius — the absolute primacy of God over man, and the corresponding duty of man to subordinate himself to God, as opposed to the ancient sophists and enlightened moderns who unite in the error that “man is the measure of all things.”

The "Benedictine altar arrangement" in a Mass versus populum

Years ago, I used to think that the “Benedictine altar arrangement,” whereby six candles and a crucifix are placed on the front of the altar between the congregation and the celebrant (with the crucifix facing the celebrant as a resting point for his gaze), was an imperfect but valid temporary solution to the dramatic pastoral crisis of the anthropocentric inversion of the Mass. I still believe it is better, all things considered, if only to break up the closed circle and offer visual respite from the tête-à-tête, but I can no longer see it as adequate to the magnitude of the problem.

The placement of six candles and a crucifix on the west side of the altar, useful though it may seem as an “instant fix,” creates two major problems of its own. First, it leaves the false orientation intact, as the priest is still standing with his back to the East (and, in a church with a centrally-located tabernacle, his back to the Lord!), towards the West which — as indicated in the Byzantine rite of baptism — symbolizes the kingdom of darkness. The idea of a “virtual East” represented by the crucifix, while clever, is too cerebral; it is contradicted by the “body language” of the sanctuary, the altar, and the priest.

Second, it throws up an arbitrary barrier between the celebrant and the people, in a way that never happens in ad orientem worship, where everyone faces the same direction and feels the unity of this common orientation.  That is, it could subtly accentuate the “priest over against people” mood that is already such an annoying characteristic of the Novus Ordo, which was composed by clericalists masquerading as populists.

I am not at all opposed to the existence of real, permanent barriers in a church whenever they make sense liturgically and ceremonially: the ancient curtains around the baldachin, the chancel screen or rood screen, the iconostasis, the communion rail. Such barriers articulate liturgical space and provide for a meaningful progression of ministers and actions, while catechizing the faithful about hierarchy, sacredness, and eschatology. But introducing a line of furnishings on the western end of an altar in order to make up (somehow) for the lack of a proper common orientation is arbitrary. It looks temporary and temporizing, as it is, and more often than not, marks an awkward caesura in the sanctuary, like a divider between office cubicles.

In versus populum is symbolized and promoted the anthropocentrism of modernity; its forgetfulness of God; its refusal to order all created reality to the uncreated source; its humanistic this-worldliness, which does not decisively subordinate the here and now to the Lord, the Orient, who has come and who will come again to judge the living and the dead. With this change alone, the liturgical ethos or consciousness of Christianity was shattered. If the old Mass were suddenly to be celebrated versus populum, in the manner in which the Novus Ordo generally is, it would be totally undermined by this one change; if the reformed Mass were to be celebrated ad orientem, this liturgical prodigal son would, by that metanoia, have already begun its journey back to the father’s house.

So much depends on the priest and the people facing east together, that it would be no exaggeration to say that orthodox Christianity will thrive only where public prayer is thus offered, and will suffer attrition wherever it has been abandoned.

The eastward stance and all that it symbolizes and implies is not a mere accident, an incidental feature that we can take or leave, like this or that style of chasuble. It is a constitutive element of the rite of the Holy Sacrifice. We should stop pretending that this is a matter of “six or one-half dozen,” a case of de gustibus non disputandum. A Mass that refuses to orient itself in continuity with the universal tradition and theology of Christian worship is irregular, harmful to the priest and people whom it malforms in an anthropocentric mentality, harmful to the Mystical Body in which it perpetuates rupture and discontinuity, and less pleasing to God whom it deprives of due adoration.

The Normativity of Ad Orientem Worship According to the Ordinary Form’s Rubrics

Ordinary Form Mass in Salt Lake City (Sacred Music Colloquium 2013)

Today, most people who take a serious interest in liturgy know that celebrating Mass “facing the people” or versus populum was never mentioned even once in the documents of Vatican II, that it was never mandated by any law or instruction of the Church, that the Vatican said historic high altars should continue to be used and not supplanted by table altars, and that it remains perfectly lawful for any priest at any time to celebrate Mass “facing east” or ad orientem. (For more reading on these points, see last week’s post.)

What is still not known nearly as well as it should be is the simple fact that the very rubrics of the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite demonstrate the normativity of the traditional orientation of prayer at Mass. Every edition of the Novus Ordo Missae, from the earliest down to the latest revised translation, contains rubrics that clearly presuppose that the priest is facing the altar or “liturgical east” and that he will need to turn around to address the people at various points.

For some readers this will be familiar territory, but for others, it may be one of those obvious points that has nevertheless managed to escape notice until now. Below, I will simply reproduce the texts that contain instructions pertinent to the priest’s position vis-à-vis the people.

From “The Order of Mass” (MR 2002/2008 in the current English translation)

(Numbers below refer to the internal numbers in the Missal. The quoted texts are taken verbatim from the current Missal.)

       1. When the people are gathered, the Priest approaches the altar with the ministers while the Entrance Chant is sung. When he has arrived at the altar, after making a profound bow with the ministers, the Priest venerates the altar with a kiss and, if appropriate, incenses the cross and the altar. Then, with the ministers, he goes to the chair. When the Entrance Chant is concluded, the Priest and the faithful, standing, sign themselves with the Sign of the Cross, while the Priest, facing the people, says: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” The people reply: “Amen.”

       23. The Priest, standing at the altar, takes the paten with the bread and holds it slightly raised above the altar with both hands, saying in a low voice: “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.” Then he places the paten with the bread on the corporal. If, however, the Offertory Chant is not sung, the Priest may speak these words aloud; at the end, the people may acclaim: “Blessed be God for ever.”
       (24. Water and wine. 25. The prayer over the chalice. 26. “With humble spirit…” 27. Incensations.)
       28. Then the Priest, standing at the side of the altar, washes his hands, saying quietly: “Wash me, O Lord, from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.”
       29. Standing at the middle of the altar, facing the people, extending and then joining his hands, he says: “Pray, brethren…”

If the priest were assumed to be always or normatively facing the people throughout the offertory, there would be no need for the rubric to specify that at the “Pray, brethren” he should now be “facing the people.” This phrase is to be taken in contraposition to “standing at the altar,” i.e., in the ad orientem position.

After the Preface, the Eucharistic Prayer, and the Lord’s Prayer, we come to the giving of peace:

       127. The Priest, turned towards the people, extending and then joining his hands, adds: “The peace of the Lord be with you always.” The people reply: “And with your spirit.”

Again, if during the Eucharistic Prayer and ensuing Communion Rite the priest had already been facing the people throughout, the boldfaced rubric would be superfluous. There is no reason to specify that the peace should be given “turned towards the people” unless he has been turned away from them until this point.

Summarizing the next few paragraphs: 128. If appropriate, the sign of peace. 129. Fracture. (Note that if the priest is celebrating ad orientem, he will be turning towards the Lord again at this point — which will make sense out of the upcoming n. 132, as we shall see below.) 130. Agnus Dei. 131. Prayer before communion.

       132. The Priest genuflects, takes the host and, holding it slightly raised above the paten or above the chalice, while facing the people, says aloud: “Behold the Lamb of God…”

Here and in the following number, the rubrical presupposition of eastward celebration is particularly obvious. If we imagine that the priest is celebrating versus populum, it would be strangely inconsequential for the rubrics to say that he should be turned towards the people at the giving of peace (n. 127) and then to note again, a mere matter of moments later, that he should be “facing the people” for the “Behold the Lamb of God” (n. 132). The obvious implication is that between these two moments, he must have turned eastwards to face the Lord present upon the altar of sacrifice. Once he picks up the host and paten or host and chalice, he then needs to turn around again to address the people. This reading is confirmed by n. 133.

       133. The Priest, facing the altar, says quietly: “May the Body of Christ keep me safe for eternal life. And he reverently consumes the Body of Christ.”…

Again, if “facing the altar” and “facing the people” mean one and the same thing, as they do in a versus populum scenario, this phrase is meaningless. But once we re-envision the rubrics in the context of an ad orientem celebration, it all clicks into place. The pattern goes like this:

• From the Prayer over the Gifts to the giving of peace, the priest has been facing ad orientem.
• At the giving of peace, he turns around to address the congregation (n. 127).
• He turns again to the altar for the fraction, Agnus Dei, and prayer before communion.
• He turns to the people to say “Behold the Lamb of God…” (n. 132).
• He faces the altar again to consume the precious Body and Blood of Christ (n. 133).

This may sound like a lot of turning back and forth, but as clergy and faithful know who have attended Ordinary Form Masses celebrated in perfect accord with these rubrics, the actions flow smoothly and, what is far more important, they make sense. When addressing primarily the people, the priest faces them; when addressing primarily God, he remains in the normative position of facing Him, symbolized by the east and, after the consecration, truly present upon the altar of sacrifice.

       139. Then, standing at the altar or at the chair and facing the people, with hands joined, the Priest says: “Let us pray.” All pray in silence with the Priest for a while, unless silence has just been observed. Then the Priest, with hands extended, says the Prayer after Communion, at the end of which the people acclaim: “Amen.”

It should not be necessary by now to point out that if there exists a need to specify that the priest ought to be facing the people for the Prayer after Communion, it is because he cleansed the vessels in his usual posture for the Liturgy of the Eucharist, viz., standing at the western side of the altar, facing eastwards.

       140. If they are necessary, any brief announcements to the people follow here.
       141. Then the dismissal takes place. The Priest, facing the people and extending his hands, says: “The Lord be with you…”

The phrase “facing the people” would seem superfluous here, but the possibility of an interruption by announcements might prompt a question about the stance the priest should take up afterwards. In any case, this rubric falls into the pattern of the priest being told to face the people when saying “The Lord be with you,” with some notable exceptions: see n. 31 and all the Preface dialogues, where the priest is never told to be facing the people.

The General Instruction of the Roman Missal (2011, 2nd ed.) matches the foregoing rubrics in every respect, with the same implications as above.[1] One may consult GIRM 124, 146, 154, 157, 158, and 165; cf. 181, 185, 243, 244, 257, 268. The controversy over the egregious mistranslation of GIRM 299 is not our concern at present; see here to read more. I will limit myself to the observation that one who clings to the mistranslation of n. 299 effectively consigns over a dozen other paragraphs of the GIRM, namely those listed above, to incoherence or total superfluity.

Particularly striking, in any case, is this passage from GIRM 2:

[T]he doctrine which stands out in the following sentence, already notable and concisely expressed in the ancient Sacramentary commonly called the Leonine — “for whenever the memorial of this sacrifice is celebrated the work of our redemption is accomplished” — is aptly and exactly expounded in the Eucharistic Prayers; for as in these the Priest enacts the anamnesis, while turned towards God likewise in the name of all the people, he renders thanks and offers the living and holy sacrifice, that is, the Church’s oblation and the sacrificial Victim by whose death God himself willed to reconcile us to himself; and the Priest also prays that the Body and Blood of Christ may be a sacrifice which is acceptable to the Father and which brings salvation to the whole world.

Part of the new liturgical movement is surely rediscovering how just and right it is when the priest is "turned towards God in the name of all the people" -- and when the people, facing east together with him, offer up the sacrifice of praise.

“Convertere, Israël, ad Dominum Deum Tuum!” : A Benedictine Monk Defends Worshiping Eastwards

A monk of Norcia offering Holy Mass

Fittingly, as we approach the season of Advent, NLM is pleased to make available to readers a new resource for explaining and defending ad orientem worship — a magnificent essay by one of the monks of the Benedictine monastery in Norcia, Br. Evagrius Hayden, O.S.B., entitled “Convertere, Israël, ad Dominum Deum Tuum!”: Whether the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass Ought to be Celebrated Towards the East. 

It is a tour de force of evidence and argumentation, drawing from many sources (biblical, patristic, scholastic, magisterial), and refuting the reasonings by which people today attempt to defend the versus populum arrangement. The essay takes the form of a Thomistic article, with objections, sed contras, a response, and replies to the objections. One benefit of this approach is that it shows the author has thought carefully about why people would prefer versus populum and/or object to ad orientem, and yet, at the end of the day, why these arguments fail. Br. Evagrius, moreover, does a great job summarizing the cosmological, anthropological, scriptural, and historical foundations for eastward-facing worship.

To give you a taste, here is Br. Evagrius (minus the copious footnotes) on biblical indications of the preeminence and symbolism of the east:

From the inspired testimony of Sacred Scripture we also have several passages that indicate the preeminence of worshiping towards the east. These are of two kinds, either they indicate that Christ departs into and returns from the east, or else that certain geographical locations are to be found in the east that are known for the eminent nobility of their symbolism.
       The verse from Psalm 67 where God is said to “mount above the heaven of heavens, to the east” (Ps. 67:34) is attributed by John Damascene, Augustine, Aquinas, Bellarmine, and the fathers in general, to Christ’s resurrection and ascension into heaven.  It is stated that Christ will come again from the east just as he ascended (Acts 1:10-11) and that his appearance will be like lightning that comes “out of the east and appeareth even into the west” (Mt. 24:27). Christ is also referred to as “the light of the world” (Jn. 8:12; 9:5), a term that could only be derived from the sun which shines over all. At the transfiguration his face “shines like the sun” (Mt. 17:2). He is the “sun of justice” (Mal. 4:2). He even replaces the sun by becoming our “everlasting light” (Is. 60:19), and finally he is the very east itself, for “the orient is his name” (Zech. 6:11-12), and from the east he calls to us.  And thus, as the great doctor of the Church Robert Bellarmine concludes, “so that we might signify in our prayer that we are illuminated by Christ, the sun of justice, thus just as those who look to the east are illuminated by the corporeal sun, so in the same way do we use this ceremony [of facing towards the east].”
       Likewise, Christ himself was crucified facing west, as Damascene and Bellarmine attest, and thus we must face east so as to look upon him whom we worship.  And since Christ ascended to the east, so do “we turn to the east just as if we were stretching out to him in his ascending with our prayers and our offerings.”  And we must expect him to come again from the east at the last judgment.
       Besides the numerous texts from Scripture that refer to Christ as going into and coming from the east, and as being light, sun, and orient, there are also other places that refer to the nobility of the east as the origin of the human race and as the most fitting dwelling place for God’s people. According to the Septuagint, the Lord planted Eden in the east. And thus, as Basil the Great concludes, “we all look to the East at our prayers, but few of us know that we are seeking our own old country, Paradise, which God planted in Eden in the East.”  Likewise Moses placed his tent in the east, the tribe of Judah camped there as well, and the gate of the temple of Solomon was turned in that direction.  And then finally, the star of Bethlehem that led the wise men to worship at the crib of our Lord rose in the eastern sky (Mt. 2:2,9).

Anyone looking for a thorough account should take a moment to download and print off this essay -- and share it with others. Here is a link to the PDF.

Other handy articles on the roots and reasonableness of ad orientem worship:

• Bishop James Conley, "Looking to the East"
• Fr. Thomas Kocik, "[Re]Turn to the East?"
• Fr. U. M. Lang, "Orientation in Liturgical Prayer"
• Peter Kwasniewski, "Fr. Dwight Longenecker on Worship Ad Orientem"
• Dom Daniel Augustine Oppenheimer, "Towards the Second Coming: Facing the Liturgical East"
• And of course, there is Fr. Lang's definitive study, Turning Towards the Lord.

Next week, I will publish at NLM a study of the rubrics of the Roman Missal (Ordinary Form), demonstrating that it presumes the ad orientem stance.

From Fr. Kocik: Form Following Function

A renewed emphasis on the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist could, among other things, facilitate a general return in the Latin Church to ad orientem worship. (After all, one offers sacrifice standing before the altar, not behind it.) This, it seems, is a frightening prospect to some, if not many, liturgists. Which explains, in part, the recent calls to redefine the doctrine of Christ’s redeeming Sacrifice (and thus of the Sacrifice of the Mass)—or, if not actually redefine it, then at least relocate its central meaning. I addressed this challenge here on NLM as well as in the journal Antiphon (Vol. 14 [2010], pp. 295-97), arguing that the rationale behind a common “turning towards the Lord” (priest and people alike) does not stand or fall with the traditional theology of eucharistic sacrifice. I bring this up by means of “piggybacking” on Shawn Tribe’s recent post about the Liturgical Movement's regrettable failure, in some cases, to preserve equilibrium when bringing aspects of the Tradition into fresh focus.

On Ordination and Orientation

A French reader of NLM sent me these photos of a recent priestly ordination in the French diocese of Bayonne. The bishop, Msgr. Marc Aillet, is author of The Old Mass and the New (Ignatius Press, 2010), which provides a strong defense of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum. Unlike most of the French hierarchy, Bishop Aillet supports, in both word and deed, the "new Liturgical Movement" or "reform of the reform" as called for and articulated by Pope Benedict XVI.

On a tangential note, while concelebrating the ordination Mass held in my own diocese last Saturday, the thought occurred to me during the Litany of Supplication: If the bishop can turn around to face the apse as we invoke the aid of God and the saints, then why not during the other parts of the Mass when God is directly addressed? I wondered if the incongruity of turning ad orientem for the litany but not for the Liturgy of the Eucharist was noted by anyone else present. (Funny how no one complained that the bishop and his assistants "turned their backs" on the people during the litany.) The so-called Benedictine altar arrangement (which is not employed in my cathedral) is a half measure which I find unsatisfactory where the original "high" altar (with its mensa) is intact. It does, however, have the advantage of focusing the attention of both priest and people on the altar of sacrifice, and in so doing helps instill a sensibility more receptive to a literal re-orientating of the liturgy — and not only during litanies. As Fr. Z. would say, "brick by brick."

Mauro Gagliardi on the Centrality of the Crucified Christ in the Liturgical Celebration

Fr Mauro Gagliardi, lecturer at the Pontifical Athenaeum "Regina Apostolorum", who was appointed Consultor to the Office of Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff last September (see an excerpt of a Zenit interview with him from January here), has an important piece in today's edition of the Osservatore Romano which - while we do not have to agree with every point made in it, cf. my end note - furthers, sustains and explains an important point of Pope Benedict's liturgical theology, and also practice in what we have come to call the "Benedictine Altar Arrangement". Here it is in an NLM translation:

The centrality of the crucified Christ in the liturgical celebration

"They shall look on Him whom they have pierced."

By Mauro Gagliardi
Consultor to the Office of Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff

In this season of Lent, one cannot but think of the great mystery of the sacred Triduum at the end of these forty days will make us meditate and live again in the today of the liturgy, the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus. An aid on this way of conversion comes from meditation on the centrality of the Cross in the cult and, consequently, in the life of the Christian. The biblical readings of the Mass of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (September 14) present, among others, the theme of looking upon. The Israelites must look upon the bronze serpent lifted on the pole, to be healed from the poison of the snakes (cf. Numbers 21, 4b-9). Jesus in the Gospel of this liturgical celebration, says that he must be lifted up from the earth as the mosaic serpent, so that who believes in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting (cf. John 3, 13-17). The Israelites looked upon the serpent of bronze, but had to make an act of faith in the God who heals. For the disciples of Jesus, however, there is perfect convergence between "looking at" and believing: in order to obtain salvation, one must believe in Him upon Whom one looks: the crucified Risen One, and live in a manner consistent with this fundamental view.

This is the fundamental insight of the traditional liturgcial usage, according to which the sacred minister and the faithful are together turned towards the Crucified. At the time when the practice of celebrating towards the people came into use, the problem arose of the position of the priest at the altar, because now he had his back to the tabernacle and the crucifix. Initially, in several places was restored the box-shaped tabernacle placed above the altar separated from the wall: that way the tabernacle came to be between the priest and the faithful, in such a way that, although the one was still facing the others, both sacred minister and faithful could all look towards the Lord during the Liturgy of the Eucharist. [NLM note: I don't think I have ever consciously seen such an arrangement and would be most curious to see an image, should any of our readers know of one.] This provisional solution was, however, soon superseded, mainly based on the conviction that this arrangement of the tabernacle generated a conflict of presneces: one could not keep the Blessed Sacrament on the altar of celebration, because this would put in contradicttion the different forms of presence of Christ in the liturgy. In the end, this was resolved by the displacement of the tabernacle to a side chapel. There was still the crucifix, to which the celebrant continued to turn his back, since as a rule it still remained at the center. This was resolved even more easily, by providing that it could now also be placed to the side of the altar. In this way, to be sure, the minister did not turn his back to it anymore, but the image of the crucified Lord lost its centrality and, in any case, the problem was not solved consisting in the fact that the priest was still not able to "look toward the Crucified" during the liturgy.

The liturgical norms, established for the current Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, allow to place crucifix and tabernacle in abgesondert positions, however this does prevent a continued discussion about the greater appropriateness of them being placed in the center, as it must be with the altar. [NLM note: a point not always observed in some proposals for modern churches.] This is especially true for the image of the Crucified. The Instruction "Eucharisticum mysterium" [NLM note: issued by the Sacred Congregation of Rites in 1967, cf. here], in fact, states that "because of the sign" (ratione signi, no. 55), it is better that on the altar on which Mass is celebrated is not placed the tabernacle, because the real presence of the Lord is the fruit of the consecration and should be seen as such. This does not exclude that the tabernacle can as a rule remain at the centre of the liturgical edifice, especially where there is the presence of an older altar, which is now behind the new altar (see no. 54, which among other things the licitness of the placement of the tabernacle on the altar facing the people). Although this is a complex question and would require a more profound reflection, one can probably ackowledge that the moving of the tabernacle from the altar of celebration versus populum (i.e., the new altar) has some arguments more in its favor, since it is based not only on the conflict of presences, but also on the principle of the truth of the liturgical signs. [NLM note: This does indeed require further reflections, not least in the light of the pronouncements of the Servant of God Pius XII who only ten years prior to this instrcution rejected the separation of altar and tabernacle in his famous allocution to the Assisi liturgical congress.] But one cannot say the same about the crucifix. If the centrality of the crucifix is eliminated, the common understanding of the meaning of the liturgy runs the risk of being distorted as a result.

It is obvious that the "looking to" cannot be reduced to a mere outward gesture, made with the simple direction of the eyes. In contrast, it is mainly an attitude of the heart, which can and must be maintained whatever orientation is assumed by the body of the one praying and whatever the direction of the eyes during prayer. Still, in the Roman Canon, even in the missal of Paul VI, there is the rubric that requires the priest to raise his eyes to heaven just before pronouncing the words of consecration over the bread. The orientation of the spirit is more important, but the bodily expression accompanies and sustains the movement within. If it is true, then, that looking toward the Crucified is an act of the spirit, an act of faith and adoration, it remains true, nevertheless, that to look to the image of the Crucified during the liturgy helps and sustains very much the movement of the heart. We need sacred signs and gestures, which, while not a substitute for it, support the movement of the heart which yearns for sanctification: this, too, means acting liturgically ratione signi. Sacredness of the gesture and sanctification of the one praying are not elements opposed to each other, but aspects of one single reality.

If, therefore, the use of celebration versus populum has some positive aspects, one must nevertheless also recognise its limitations: in particular the risk of creating a closed circle between the minister and the faithful, who relegates to the second tier just the One to whom everyone must look with faith during the liturgical cult. It is possible to counter risks by returning to the liturgical prayer its orientation, in particular concerning the Eucharistic liturgy. While the liturgy of the word has its most appropriate form if the priest is facing the people, it seems theologically and pastorally most appropriate to apply the option - recognised by the missal of Paul VI in its various editions - to continue to celebrate the Eucharist toward the Crucified. This can be realised in practice in various ways, including placing the image of the Crucified at the center of the altar of the celebration versus populum, so that everyone, priest and faithful, can look to the Lord during the celebration of His holy sacrifice. In the preface to the first volume of his Gesammelte Schriften [opera omnia], Benedict XVI has said that he is happy that a proposal is gaining more and more ground which he had made in his Introduction to the Spirit of the Liturgy. This, as the Pope has written, consisted in suggesting "not to proceed with new transformations, but simply to put the cross in the center of the altar, towards which the priest and faithful can look together, to be guided in this way to the Lord, to whom we all pray together."

(© L'Osservatore Romano - 9/10 March 2009)

Now, to add a caveat, it might seem like in the last paragraph Fr Gagliardi were suggesting that we should not celebrate Mass ad orientem in the traditional sense, nor even make minor, non-structural re-arrangements. I do not think this is actually his point; instead, he is rather focusing on the "Benedictine altar arrangement" as a primary means by which to begin re-orienting our approach to the liturgy because it is the most easily practicable way of achieving it and the least likely to cause a repetition of the upheaval of the structural changes introduced into most sanctuaries following the reforms of the 1960s. This, then, does not mean that ad orientem in its traditional expression is outside the pale -- indeed, it is envisioned and allowed for by the Missal and by liturgical law. Since Fr Gagliardi makes express reference to the preface of the Pope's Opera omnia, it would be worthwhile to consider again the points Shawn made on the occasion of the publication of said preface about Pope Benedict's actual thought and proposals with regard to the re-orientation of the liturgy (see second half of that post).

From Fr. Kocik: Benedict XVI on Liturgical Orientation: Salient Quotes

One of our readers thinks it would be helpful, and time-saving, to provide a collection of quotations from then-Cardinal Ratzinger on the subject of orientation in liturgical prayer. With gratitude to Michael Kowalewski, here it is:

Despite all the variations in practice that have taken place far into the second millenium, one thing has remained clear for the whole of Christendom: praying toward the east is a tradition that goes back to the beginning.
-- The Spirit of the Liturgy (Ignatius Press, 2000), pg. 75.

As I have written in my books, I think that celebration turned towards the east, towards the Christ who is coming, is an apostolic tradition.
-- Looking Again at the Question of Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger, ed. Alcuin Reid (St. Michael's Abbey, 2003), pg. 151.

The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle. In its outward form, it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself. The common turning toward the east was not a "celebration toward the wall"; it did not mean that the priest "had his back to the people": the priest himself was not regarded as so important. For just as the congregation in the synagogue looked together toward Jerusalem, so in the Christian liturgy the congregation looked together "toward the Lord".... They did not close themselves into a circle; they did not gaze at one another; but as the pilgrim People of God they set off for the Oriens, for the Christ who comes to meet us.... [A]common turning to the east during the Eucharistic Prayer remains essential. This is not a case of something accidental, but of what is essential. Looking at the priest has no importance. What matters is looking together at the Lord.
-- The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 80-81.

Moving the altar cross to the side to give an uninterrupted view of the priest is something I regard as one of the truly absurd phenomena of recent decades. Is the cross disruptive during the Mass? Is the priest more important than the Lord? This mistake should be corrected as quickly as possible; it can be done without further rebuilding.
-- The Spirit of the Liturgy, pg. 84

[I]n St. Peter's [Basilica], during the pontificate of St. Gregory the Great (590-604), the altar was moved nearer to the bishop's chair, probably for the simple reason that he was supposed to stand as much as possible above the tomb of St. Peter.... Because of topographical circumstances, it turned out that St. Peter's faced west. Thus, if the celebrating priest wanted--as the Christian tradition of prayer demands--to face east, he had to stand behind the people and look--this is the logical conclusion--toward the people.... The liturgical renewal in our own century took up this alleged model and developed from it a new idea for the form of the liturgy. The Eucharist--so it was said--had to be celebrated versus populum (toward the people). The altar--as can be seen in the normative model of St. Peter's--had to be positioned in such a way that priest and people looked at each other and formed together the circle of a celebrating community. This alone--so it was said--was compatible with the meaning of the Christian liturgy, with the requirement of active participation. This alone conformed to the primordial model of the Last Supper. These arguments seemed in the end so persuasive that after the Council (which says nothing about "turning toward the people") new altars were set up everywhere, and today celebration versus populum really does look like the characteristic fruit of Vatican II's liturgical renewal. In fact it is the most conspicuous consequence of a reordering that not only signifies a new external arrangement of the places dedicated to the liturgy, but also brings with it a new idea of the essence of the liturgy--the liturgy as a communal meal.
-- The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 76-77

In addition to the above, I add the following:

[T]he positive content of the old eastward-facing direction lay not in its orientation to the tabernacle.... The original meaning of what nowadays is called "the priest turning his back on the people" is, in fact--as J.A. Jungmann has consistently shown--the priest and people together facing the same way in a common act of trinitarian worship.... Where priest and people together face the same way, what we have is a cosmic orientation and also an interpretation of the Eucharist in terms of resurrection and trinitarian theology. Hence it is also an interpretation in terms of parousia, a theology of hope, in which every Mass is an approach to the return of Christ.
-- The Feast of Faith (Ignatius Press, 1986), pg. 140

[T]he cross on the altar is not obstructing the view; it is a common point of reference. It is an open "iconostasis" which, far from hindering unity, actually facilitates it: it is the image which draws and unites the attention of everyone. I would even be so bold as to suggest that the cross on the altar is actually a necessary precondition for celebrating toward the people.
-- The Feast of Faith, pg. 145

[A]mong the faithful there is an increasing sense of the problems inherent in an arrangement that hardly shows the liturgy to be open to the things that are above and to the world to come.
-- Foreword to U.M. Lang's Turning towards the Lord (Ignatius Press, 2004), pg. 11

Bishop of Tulsa to Celebrate Ad Orientem

Fr John Zuhlsdorf of the "What Does the Prayer Really Say" blog has some very encouraging news about the bishop of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Most Rev. Edward Slattery. According to the news bulletin of Holy Family Cathedral, Tulsa, Okla., the bishop is going to celebrate the 10 a.m. Mass at the ad orientem during Advent and Christmastime. The bulletin gives a very good two page exposition of the reasons for this, including a quite pronounced critique of the "negative effects" of the versus populum posture. At the end, the bishop expresses his hope "that this common posture of the Church at prayer will help you to experience the transcendent truth of the Mass in a new and timeless way" and "that this restored practice will help us understand that at Mass we participate in the authentic worship which Christ offers to His Father by being ‘obedient unto death.’"