In Defense of Multiple Orations

This and other photos: Missale Romanum editio VI juxta typicam Vaticanam, New York, 1947

In each Mass, there are three very important prayers familiarly grouped as the “orations”: the Collect, which comes near the beginning; the Secret, said silently just before the Preface to the Canon; and the Postcommunion, said after the ablutions. For centuries, it was the custom for priests to say or to sing more than one set of orations at Mass. (This carried over into Lauds and Vespers as well.) The rubrics often told the priest which additional prayers to use. For example, in Advent, from the first Sunday, the pre-1956 Missal prescribes the addition of a second collect of the Blessed Virgin Mary and a third collect for either the Church or for the Pope, although if there are saints to be commemorated, their prayers would be used instead. On Sundays, too, saints would be commemorated instead of simply ignored.

To give a sense of how this would work in practice, let’s take Sunday, June 30, 2019. I choose this day because it is a typical Roman “constellation”: the Third Sunday after Pentecost, in the Octave of the Sacred Heart and of the birth of St. John the Baptist, but also the commemoration of St. Paul, who is always accompanied by his fellow Apostle St. Peter. So the priest at Mass would say or sing five Collects: Sunday’s, followed by St. Paul, St. Peter, the Sacred Heart, and St. John the Baptist.

Paul Cavendish, master of the 1939 rubrics, offers a primer for adding votive collects beyond those required for the day. The commemorations of occurring saints are almost always done with the exception on Doubles of the First Class. Other than of occurring saints, the general principle is that the seasonal and ad libitum commemorations are done only on days of Semidouble and Simple rank. There are some exceptions, but on any day of these two lowest ranks, there have to be at least three orations at Mass. For most of the year, the third is specified by the season, either for the church or the pope (for about 2/3 of the year) or the prayer for the living and the dead (in Lent: the third prayer is ad libitum after February 2, but is for the church or pope before the Purification, during the time after Epiphany and in Septuagesimatide). If it were a feria per annum, for example, a priest could not choose simply to omit the second and third orations, even when the last was an open choice — he still had to choose some set of third orations to add. Doubles of any grade are the most festive and do not add these extra orations.

Essentially, these are the principles that had been in place since Trent up to 1955, with tweaks here and there (and not taking into account the orationes imperatae, which have their own requirements). The rules for the “seasonal collects” are described in chapter IX of the pre-1960 Rubricæ generales of the Missal, a translation of which is found at the end of this article. They remained unchanged from 1570 until 1960 — a period of almost four centuries.

Prior to 1955, the maximum number of Orations at a low Mass on simple days was five or seven (depending on circumstances).[1] In 1955, this number was reduced to three, and mandatory prayers of the season were abolished. In 1960, the possibility of additional orations was reduced still further, and done away with altogether for most Sundays of the year. All this was done in pursuit of streamlined rational simplicity. The end game was the Novus Ordo, which never has more than one set of orations per Mass.

But should we not ask why the custom of praying several orations arose to begin with? What role did it play? What we have lost by its unceremonious abolition?

It seems to me evident that this custom was the way in which the Roman rite expanded the urgency and comprehensiveness of its petitions, making room for the needs of the priest and of the community, for special occasions or seasons or devotions. For example, at the Benedictine monastery in Norcia, a town that was devastated by earthquakes a few years ago, the monks will still at times add the orations against earthquakes at their private Masses. Other priests may pray for the gift of charity, the gift of continence, or the gift of tears. Sometimes a celebrant will add a Collect for his parents, for a friend in need, for peace in time of war, or for the unity of the Church; for people in authority and those under their charge, for those in temptation or tribulation, or for help against persecutors and evildoers; for rain or fine weather, to avert storms, to beg for a good harvest or to beg the lifting of a plague. Thus, a wise and controlled liberty, solely drawing on fully-formed prayers hallowed by centuries of use, allowed for responses to personal and local needs.

These Collects, moreover, expressed and inculcated devotion to Our Lady and the saints, including the patron saint of the church in which the people are gathered for prayer. I remember my first introduction to the riches of the additional Collects in a visit to Norcia, when I assisted at an early morning Low Mass. The celebrant added the orations “To implore the intercession of the saints” (appointed for after the Purification until Ash Wednesday and during the Time after Pentecost — translation from the St. Andrew Daily Missal, 1945 edition, p. 1712):

Collect. Defend us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, from all dangers of mind and body; that through the intercession of the blessed and glorious ever Virgin Mary, Mother of God, together with blessed Joseph, Thy blessed apostles Peter and Paul, blessed N. [titular saint of the church], and all the saints, mercifully grant us safety and peace, that all adversities and errors being overcome, Thy Church may serve Thee in security and freedom. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son…

Secret. Graciously hear us, O God our Savior, and by the virtue of this sacrament protect us from all enemies of soul and body, bestowing on us both grace in this life and glory hereafter. Through our Lord Jesus Christ…

Postcommunion. May the oblation of this divine Sacrament both cleanse and defend us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, through the intercession of the blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, with blessed Joseph, Thy blessed apostles, Peter and Paul, blessed N. [titular saint of the church], and all the saints, render us at once purified from all perversities and freed from all adversities. Through our Lord Jesus Christ…

The prayers translated below are found on the left page

To give another example, here is a translation of the second set of orations appointed to be said from Ash Wednesday to Passion Sunday (ibid., p. 1713):

Collect. O almighty and eternal God, Who hast dominion over the living and the dead, and art merciful to all whom Thou foreknowest will be Thine by faith and good works: we humbly beseech Thee that they for whom we have purposed to pour forth our prayers, whether this present world still detains them in the flesh or the next world hath already received them divested of their bodies, may, by the intercession of Thy saints and the clemency of Thy goodness, obtain pardon and full remission of all their sins. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son… 

Secret. O God, Who alone knowest the number of the elect to be admitted to the supreme felicity of Heaven, grant, we beseech Thee, that through the intercession of all Thy saints, the names of all who have been recommended to our prayers and of all the faithful, may be inscribed in the book of blessed predestination. Through our Lord Jesus Christ…

Postcommunion. Let us pray. May the sacraments which we have received purify us, we beseech Thee, O almighty and merciful Lord; and through the intercession of all Thy saints, grant that this Thy sacrament may not be unto us a condemnation, but a salutary intercession for pardon; may it be the washing away of sin, the strength of the weak, a protection against all dangers of the world, and a remission of all the sins of the faithful, whether living or dead. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Who livest and reignest, with God the Father, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God For ever and ever. R. Amen.

Quite apart from the obvious value of praying for intentions like these on a regular basis, one cannot fail to note the extraordinary beauty and profound theology of these additional orations, where the lex orandi expresses with incomparable luminosity the lex credendi on the predestination and intercession of the saints.

This practice of multiple collects was the daily liturgical equivalent — on a smaller scale, of course — of the Good Friday intercessions, which, let us recall, are not in the form of a Byzantine litany, much less in the form of the Novus Ordo “prayers of the faithful” or General Intercessions, but rather take the form of a series of petitions announced and then prayed for with Collects. The intercessory element survived in the orationes ad libitum and the orationes imperatae, obviating the need for an artificially constructed “prayer of the faithful” or “general intercessions.” Once again, we see that the Roman tradition in its Tridentine maturity already contained within itself the resources it needed for bringing before God the needs of the celebrant, the local community, the larger world, or certain categories of people. It was already all there. It was only after those resources had been hacked out under Pius XII and John XXIII that the Consilium discovered a “lack” that had to be filled with a pseudo-antiquarian modern invention.

A significant benefit of leaving room for multiple orations is the way in which it permits the temporal and sanctoral cycles to interpenetrate and harmonize as it were effortlessly, without great loss suffered on either level. Sundays may be privileged, but they do not exclude the saints; the saints, too, receive our devotion, but not at the expense of the ferial prayers of Advent and Lent.[2] When the Novus Ordo brutally reduced orations to a single set per Mass across the board, it introduced for the first time an outright opposition between the temporal and sanctoral cycles, an either/or that is highly uncharacteristic of the Catholic both/and. Rather than a great conjunction where two planets draw near in our vision without being in danger of actual collision, the insistence on a single set of orations bespeaks a tunnel-vision incapable of taking in the breadth of revelation, Church history, and the ebb and flow of seasons.

Far too many treasured orations of the Roman rite effectively disappeared from the prayer of the Church due to the shortsighted postwar reforms, particularly those contained in the 1960 code of rubrics, which, let us be candid, marks a significant rupture with the Tridentine inheritance — a sort of dry run for principles that would be applied with still further ruthlessness in the 1969 missal and its code, the Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani. The recovery of multiple Collects — initially three, but eventually a larger number, of which five may be a good ceiling — will therefore certainly become a more familiar feature in our churches, as priests rediscover the once and future Roman Rite.

I express my thanks to several Facebook friends (you know who you are) for your help with navigating rubrical details and understanding when and how the rubrics changed in the twentieth century.

An illustration from Bussard-Kirsch, The Meaning of the Mass (CUA, 1942)

APPENDIX

(Translation of Chapter IX of the pre-1960 Rubricæ generales of the Missale Romanum, by Gerhard Eger, originally published on Canticum Salomonis.)

IX. On Collects

1. On double Feasts only one Collect is said, unless another Commemoration is to be made, as said above.

2. On semidouble feasts occurring from the Octave of Pentecost until Advent, and from the Candlemas until Lent, the second Collect is A cunctis, and the third ad libitum.

3. On semidouble Feasts occurring from the Octave of Epiphany until Candlemas, the second Collect is Deus, qui salútis, and the third Ecclésiæ tuæ or Deus, ómnium fidélium for the Pope.

4. On semidouble Feasts from Ash Wednesday until Passion Sunday, the second Collect is of the Feria, and the third A cunctis.

5. On Semidoubles from Passion Sunday until Palm Sunday, the second Collect is of the Feria, and the third Ecclésiæ tuæ or for the Pope.

6. On semidouble Feasts from the Octave of Easter until Ascension, the second Collect is Concéde nos of Our Lady, and the third Ecclésiæ tuæ or for the Pope.

7. On semidouble feasts occurring within Octaves, the second collect is of the Octave, and the third the one placed in second place within the Octave.

8. During the Octaves of Easter and Pentecost, on Masses of the Octave only two Collects are said, one of the day, and the second Ecclésiæ tuæ or for the Pope.

9. During other Octaves, and on fasting Vigils (except the Vigil of Christmas and of Pentecost), three Collects are said, one of the day, the second of Our Lady, and the third Ecclésiæ tuæ or for the Pope. But during Octaves of Our Lady, and on the Vigil and during the Octave of All Saints, the second Collect is Deus, qui corda of the Holy Ghost, and the third Ecclésiæ tuæ or for the Pope.

10. On Sundays occurring within Octaves two Collects are said, one of the Sunday, and the second of the Octave. On the Octave day, only one Collect is said, unless another Commemoration is to be made.

11. On Sundays three Collects are said, as assigned in the Ordinary, except on the Sundays otherwise noted.

12. On simple Feasts and Ferias per annum, unless otherwise noted three Collects are said, as on Semidoubles, or five, or even up to seven ad libitum.

13. On Ember days and when several Lessons are read, these several Collects are said after the last Collect before the Epistle, as is noted in the Proper de Tempore of the Missal.

14. In votive Masses said solemnly for a grave matter or for a public cause of the Church, only one Collect is said. On a Mass for Thanksgiving, however another Collect is added, as noted in the proper place. In other votive Masses, however, several Collects are always said, as on simple Feasts.

15. On votive Masses of Our Lady the second Collect is of the Office of the day, and the third of the Holy Ghost. But when the Office of Our Lady is said on Saturday, the second Collect is of the Holy Ghost, and the third Ecclésiæ tuæ or for the Pope. On votive Masses of the Apostles, the Collect of Our Lady Concéde nos is said in place of the Collect A cunctis.

16. If, when several Collects are said, there should occur a Commemoration of some Saint, the Commemoration is said in second place, and the third Collect is the one that was otherwise in second place.

17. Let the following arrangement be observed for the conclusion of Collects. If the Collect is directed to the Father, it concludes Per Dóminum nostrum, etc. If to the Son, Qui vivis et regnas cum Deo Patre, etc. If the Son is mentioned at the beginning of the Collect, it concludes Per eúndem Dóminum nostrum, etc. If the Son is mentioned at the end of the Collect, it concludes Qui tecum vivit, etc. If the Holy Ghost is mentioned, at the conclusion one says: In unitáte ejúsdem Spíritus Sancti, etc. Let the other things be also followed in the saying of Collects that are said above in the Rubric on Commemorations.

NOTES

[1] Denis the Carthusian comments on why the tradition specified an odd number of Collects: “When the counter-greeting of the people is done, Et cum spiritu tuo, the priest pours forth prayers for the people and for himself [the Collects]. And it is said in the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum [of Durandus] that the numbers of prayers is always odd in number, that is, one, because of the unity of the divine nature; or three, because of the mystery of the Trinity; or five, because of the five wounds of Christ; or seven, because that is the total number of petitions in the Lord’s Prayer. Nor ought there be more than this [seven], without a very special and serious reason, because Christ did not exceed this number of petitions.”

[2] In like manner, the custom of multiple orations for Sundays kept fresh the memory of older liturgical strata. For example, when Trinity Sunday was imposed on the First Sunday after Pentecost, or the Holy Family on the First Sunday after Epiphany, the dominical orations would still be said, instead of being shuffled off to the nearest available feria (as occurs with the 1962 missal). “No Collect left behind” was the wise policy of our forefathers. It hardly needs to be added that all of the considerations in this article apply, perhaps even moreso, to the Divine Office. In the old office of Lauds and Vespers, there would always be a commemoration of the lesser occurring feast or season, with its Benedictus or Magnificat antiphon, versicle, and Collect. In the new Liturgy of the Hours, the intertwining between temporal and sanctoral has been eliminated with barbaric totality.

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East-West Disagreements about the Epiclesis and Transubstantiation

Back in February, Hieromonk Enoch published an article entitled “Pre-Schism West Against the Scholastic View of Eucharistic Consecration.” The author weaves together a fabric of half-digested quotations from Western and Eastern authors to argue his claim that it was not the words of institution (Hoc est enim Corpus meum, Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei, etc.) but the Supplices te rogamus prayer that was seen by “pre-Schism” Latins as the prayer that effected the mystery of transubstantiation.

It is certainly true that the Eucharistic Prayer was understood in a more holistic sense by our predecessors who were not yet in the grips of what can be called “neoscholastic reductionism,” but it is certainly going too far to claim that granting a special status to the words of Christ spoken over the elements was a medieval scholastic development.

Ludwig Ott’s ever helpful Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (I shall be referring to the revised edition from Baronius Press, with a corrected translation newly typeset) qualifies the following proposition as sententia certa: “The form of the Eucharist consists in Christ’s Words of institution, uttered at the Consecration” (416). He continues:

While the Greek-Orthodox Church wrongly placed the power of change either in the Epiclesis alone, following after the narrative of the institution, or in the connection of the words of institution with the Epiclesis (Confessio orth. I 107), the Catholic Church adheres firmly to the view that the priest consummates the transubstantiation solely by the uttering of the words of institution.

Ott then cites the Decretum pro Armenis of Florence and the parallel passage of Trent, and makes an argument from the Gospel narrative. He then cites testimonies from Tertullian (“He took bread…and made it into His Body, by speaking: ‘This is my Body,’” Adv. Marc. IV 40), St. Ambrose (“The words of Christ bring about this Sacrament,” De sacr. IV 4,14), and St. John Chrysostom (“The priest stands there and sets up the outward sign, while speaking these words; but the power and the grace are of God. ‘This is my body,’ he says. These words transmute the gifts,” De proditione Judae, Hom. I 6). Implicit testimonies are cited from St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, and Origen; St. John Damascene metnions both the words of institution and the Epiclesis (De fide orth. IV 13).

So, then, what are we to make of the Epiclesis? I find the next bit in Ott especially interesting:

In agreement with Cardinal Bessarion, the words of the Epiclesis are to be taken as referring to the time to which they are related, and not to the time at which they are spoken. That which happens in one single moment in the consecration is liturgically developed and explained in the subsequent words of the Epiclesis. It has only a declaratory, and no consecratory, significance. The view of H. Schell that the Greeks consecrate by the Epiclesis alone, and the Latins by the words of institution alone, must be rejected, since the substance of the Sacraments is not within the disposition of the Church. DH 3556. (417)

Cardinal Basilios Bessarion (1403-1472)

An enlightening discussion of this issue is found in Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s grand commentary on the Summa theologiae, much of which, sadly, has never been translated. For my students in Gaming, Austria, some time ago I produced a translation (available here) of interesting passages in De Eucharistia et Poenitentia. On Tertia Pars, question 78, we find this commentary:

It is clear that the questions that have arisen between Catholics and schismatics concerning the form of consecration and the epiclesis may only now be treated, the questions of the Real Presence and of transubstantiation being presupposed.
       To begin with, we have before our eyes definitions of the Church. The Church has declared that the form of this sacrament are the words of Christ, not the epiclesis (the subsequent prayer, as the Greeks call it). Cf. Denz. 414, 698, 715, 876, 938, 3043, 3035. [1] The Council of Florence (D. 698) says: “The form of this sacrament are the Savior’s words, with which he confected this sacrament; the priest then speaking in persona Christi, confects this sacrament. For by the power of those words the substance of bread is converted into the body of Christ, and the substance of wine into His blood.” ... The Council of Trent (D. 876) says: “By the force of the words [of consecration], the body of Christ is under the appearance of bread and the blood under the appearance of wine.” [See also D. 938 and 949.]
       Innocent IV, in the year 1254, concerning the Greek rite, declares: “The Greeks should be permitted to celebrate Masses at the hour which is according to their own custom, provided that they observe, in the confection or consecration, the very words expressed and handed down by the Lord” (D. 3043). In fact, Pius X, in the year 1910 (D. 3035), condemning doctrine recently defended, declares against certain errors of the Orientals: [in brief, consecration is effected by the words of consecration, not by the epiclesis, which is not strictly necessary]. Denziger notes here that many earlier popes have declared that the epiclesis is not required for consecration, namely Benedict XII (D. 532), Clement VI, Benedict XIII, Benedict XIV and Pius VII.
       From the fourteenth century on, schismatic Greeks say that the Eucharist is confected by the prayers which are poured out after the words “This is my body, This is my blood” have been pronounced, according to their liturgical prayers as follows: “We beseech you, Father, that you send Your spirit over us and over these gifts set before us, and make this bread the precious body of your Son and that which is in the chalice the precious blood of your Son.” To say that this prayer is necessary for consecration is to affirm that the Masses celebrated in the Roman Church are invalid and is, moreover, contrary to the declaration of the Council of Florence (D. 698 and 715). The chief proponents of this error were Cabasilas, Mark of Ephesus, and Simeon of Thessalonica, who were refuted by Cardinal Bessarion in his work De Eucharistia, as well as by Allatius and Arcudius. (Cf. Dict. Théol. Cath., s. v. «Epiclèse», P. Salaville.)

Then Garrigou-Lagrange proceeds to give an account of the liturgical meaning of the epiclesis:

There is a twofold explanation of the meaning of the epiclesis after the words of consecration.
       (1) One explanation is: When it is read after the consecration, as it now is [in the Greek rite], the epiclesis invokes the Holy Spirit, not to effect transubstantiation, which is already accomplished, that is, not so that the bread become the body of Christ, but that it may become this for us, namely, that it may profit the priest and the faithful, especially those who are going to receive communion. In this way speak Vasquez, Bellarmine, Suárez, de Lugo, Billuart, and among the recent authors, Billot. But this explanation does not seem literal enough [i.e., it doesn’t account for the seemingly obvious meaning of the prayer].
       (2) The second explanation, which is more common, was proposed by Cardinal Bessarion. The epiclesis invokes the Holy Spirit exactly inasmuch as the consecration, being a work ad extra, is common to the three divine Persons, and accordingly the Holy Spirit is invoked, so that, with the Father and the Son already having been invoked, He Himself [in unity with them] may bring about transubstantiation. Indeed, this transubstantiation is accomplished in an instant, by the words of consecration already pronounced; but because, by our human speech, all these things cannot be expressed in one and the same instant, “things which are completed in an instant are declared one after another.” In this way speak Bessarion, Bossuet, Ferraris, Cagin, Franzelin, Salaville.

Later, Garrigou notes that a similar principle is at work in the narrative of the Last Supper, where Jesus takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and speaks the words: “narration is successive and announces words after facts, when really the words spoken are simultaneous with the facts.” [2]

These two theories, in spite of their superficial disagreement, help us to understand the “moment of consecration” in a non-reductionist sense. Even if there must be a moment after which the real Body or Blood of Our Lord is present and thus deserving of the worship of latreia, as we can extrapolate from the behavior of clergy in every traditional Eucharistic rite [3], nevertheless beings like ourselves, who live, think, and speak in time, must pray in such a way that our anaphoras (and our liturgies as a whole) draw out, step by step as it were, the meaning of mysteries that occur timelessly.

The reason why this kind of temporal disjunction happens is not hard to see. We humans can only speak of an instantaneous coming-to-be in language of change and therefore of measurable duration (consider all the troubles theologians have had to face when speaking of “creation ex nihilo”). Thus, every orthodox Christian liturgy speaks at length of the conversion of the gifts—it calls down the Spirit, recalls or repeats the institution, offers up the gifts to the heavenly Father, and so on (in different sequences for different rites)—but really, these things are occurring simultaneously. This we cannot express with our time-bound language.

This explains why traditional rites grow, over time, in their textual witness to the substance of what is happening: they grow in doctrinal precision, spiritual amplitude, poetic grandeur, and ascetical demands. It would be unworthy of the magnitude of the moment of consecration to treat it cheaply and to think that, having said “the magic words,” we’re pretty close to being done with what we have come to do. The attitude of a true believer is quite the opposite: so great is this moment that it must be surrounded by wall after wall of language, silence, chant, incense, gesture; it must be placed like a mighty jewel in the most exquisite setting; it must be approached by many steps, and these not always audaciously forward-moving, but sometimes circular, hesitant, reiterative.

Thus, so far from supporting a reductionist view of consecration, the position summarized by Garrigou-Lagrange works against it, and in favor of the fullness of expression one finds in the Greek tradition as well as in the undeformed Latin tradition.


NOTES

[1] These are not the most up-to-date Denzinger numbers; they would reflect the edition nearest 1948.

[2] We need not linger here over the issue of whether or not the traditional Roman Rite has or ever had an epiclesis, and whether its absence is anything of a defect. The debate has gone back and forth for a long time. Readers today are likely to encounter it in two authors: Martin Mosebach and Fr. John Hunwicke. Mosebach claims that the Veni Sanctificator of the Offertory is an epiclesis. Hunwicke, having noted that the Roman Canon predates the Macedonian controversy through which the epiclesis entered the Greek liturgy, argues that the Roman Canon rests on a theology of the Father’s omnipotent good pleasure sufficient to account for the transformation of the gifts when He is asked to do so in the Name of His beloved Son (see here for an NLM round-up).

[3] I defend this position in my article “On ‘Pinpointing’ Consecration: A Letter for the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas.” I also defended this position in the hardest possible case, namely, for an anaphora that seems to lack the words of institution. See my article “Doing and Speaking in the Person of Christ: Eucharistic Form in the Anaphora of Addai and Mari,” Nova et Vetera 4 (2006): 313–79. Br. Ansgar Santogrossi has subjected my arguments to a welcome critique; some portions of this may be found here and here. I am not particularly wedded to a defense of this anaphora. My stated goal was simply to see if any way could be found, on the basis of principles of Thomistic sacramental theology, to explain how transubstantiation might be efficaciously signified and recognized without the words of institution.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website, SoundCloud page, and YouTube channel.

“The Way is the Goal”: Against Reducing the Mass to a Sacramental Delivery System

In the years when I lived in Austria, I used to see a popular bumpersticker that read: “Der Weg ist das Ziel” — “the way is the goal.” This statement has been attributed to Confucius, although it might sound like the motto of a postmodern German relativist who does Yoga on the weekends and, having spurned the Cardinal Marxes of the world, directs her church tax to the upkeep of the EU. If, moreover, one is fortunate enough to have an Audi, a Mercedes, or a BMW, as many Germans and Austrians do, one might be tempted to drive with no particular goal in mind. But here I should like, perhaps unexpectedly, to suggest that this motto admits of a special application to Catholic liturgy.

Unlike a business trip where the whole point is to get to a meeting or conference and the journey stands somewhere between a necessary evil and an inconvenience, liturgy is not just about getting a certain result or outcome.

“Results” there may and should be, of course: Holy Communion may be consumed, a newly-wed couple may walk out of the church, a new priest may step forth into the sunshine, a body may be carried off to the cemetery. But such results do not exhaust, much less cancel out, the intrinsic reasons why we worship, and the inherent needs and demands of that worship.

Liturgy — the formal, solemn, public cultus of God, wherein the Church, on behalf of mankind and all of creation, adores, blesses, glorifies, and gives thanks to the Most Holy Trinity — is the reason we do liturgy. The way is the goal. If liturgy truly is our participation in the heavenly worship of the angels and saints gathered around their High Priest in the sanctuary not made by human hands, then we are participating in this heavenly worship now, and, depending on how we worship, will be participating well or poorly.

Put it this way: what Our Lord expects of us in worship is not that we get something or get somewhere, but that we be a certain way in His presence, that we know and love Him in a certain way. This is the precondition for being fitted to receive any gift He wishes to give, most especially His Body in the Eucharist. In that sense, if we do not take seriously the way, we are not taking seriously the goal, either. We do not reach the goal except by the way thither, and, in the spiritual realm, our behavior or attitude on the way determines our worthiness or fitness to come to the goal.

Liturgy mirrors our earthly pilgrimage. If we expect to come to heaven, the only determining factor is how we live our lives en route. It’s not as if we can live a slipshod life and die a godless death, and then expect to be rewarded for it with beatitude. It’s not as if we’re given another chance after death. The way we live is the way we die. If we live for God now, even the now that verges on death, we are already at the goal: union with God in love.

As Pope Leo XIII says in his encyclical Divinum Illud Munus, the difference between a soul in the state of grace and a soul in the state of glory is the hiddenness of the presence of God: in this life His indwelling is invisible to us, while in the next we see Him face-to-face in the beatific vision. But in both states He is truly present in us, and we in Him. In a sense, then, one may say of the Christian life as a whole what one may say of the liturgy: the way is the goal.

Vespers at Blackfriars in Oxford

Where we see this truth most splendidly is the Divine Office, which is pure verbal incense, burned up in the presence of the Lord, and for His sake. This is not to say that we do not benefit from it; quite the contrary. St. Thomas Aquinas says plainly enough that since we cannot improve God by our worship, any benefits must accrue to us. But the benefit consists in the very doing of it, not in something other than the doing of it. Perhaps this is why the Office has fallen on such hard times: for pragmatic, utilitarian, materialistic people such as we modern Westerners are — even, at times, in spite of our best intentions — the Office fails to “deliver the goods.” Where’s the thing we get at the end of it? The ashes, palm branch, bulletin, anointing, host? We tend to look at the Office through the lens of the Mass and find it wanting, because it seems to be unable to compete with the sacramental results of the latter.

What is needed, rather, is to see the Mass through the lens of the Office. We need to see the Mass as a sweet-smelling sacrifice of praise offered up in psalms, hymns, and spiritual canticles, thanking God for His great glory, adoring, placating, supplicating Him. Only after that does it make sense to see it as a banquet to which we are invited. We are invited to a sacrifice of which we may then partake if we are properly disposed; we reap spiritual fruit in proportion to how well we have been prepared by the very liturgical action in which we have participated.[1]

* * *

Some weeks ago I published an article here entitled “The Continual Spectre of False Antiquarianism,” in which I expressed my amazement that there are Catholics who, having been exposed to the traditional liturgy or having some awareness that it exists and is richer than its streamlined modern counterpart, still seem to shrug their shoulders and say, in effect, “it’s not such a big deal.” Arguably, a precondition for arriving at this stance is the implicit or explicit acceptance of a reductionistic conception of the Mass that equates it with the consecration: as long as we have Jesus in the Eucharist, that’s all that matters.[2]

It sounds plausible, and yet it is not, for several reasons.

The Mass is not a utilitarian process designed to maximize the efficient delivery of goods. The Mass is not, as such, a communion service. It is a complex ceremony of repentance, adoration, petition, and thanksgiving, with a sacramental sacrifice at its core. It was given to us by our Lord and His Church as the highest form of prayer, which prepares for, culminates in, and gives thanks for the gift of His Most Holy Body and Blood. It does not begin and end with that gift.

So, the first problem with the Novus Ordo Missae is that, given its very content and ceremonial, it tends not to cultivate and prompt acts of repentance, adoration, petition, and thanksgiving nearly as well as the old Mass does. The next problem, intimately linked with the foregoing, is that it does not prepare us for the reception of the Most Holy Eucharist as well as the old rite does. Hence, it falters even if we view the Mass under the more restricted aspect of being an opportunity for sacramental communion.[3]

Think of it this way: If you were Mary of Bethany, sitting at the feet of Jesus and soaking in His words, would you want to sit there quietly, for quite some time, preparing yourself deeply for the spiritual marriage with Him — “the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath prepared herself” (Rev 19:7) — or would you want to listen for a few minutes, jump up, give Him a hug and a kiss, and be off to the next thing? Or worse, what if Mary greeted Him with a smile, said “Gotta do some stuff — be with you in a moment,” busied herself with a few chores, and then came back with hors d’oeuvres, in order to be “actively participating” in this colloquy? Meanwhile, Jesus patiently and humbly sits there, waiting until Mary will stop goofing around and sit down. In the contemporary Church, it’s mostly Martha, very little Mary; mostly busyness, little contemplation; efficiency, in place of wasteful love.

James Tissot, Martha and Mary

Beyond this devotional angle, we must consider the Mass in its diachronic continuity. The Mass is handed down to us from apostolic tradition, developed over the centuries of faith by the real devotional life of the People of God. It is therefore like a living, breathing, growing organism, reflecting and, in a mysterious way, sharing in the divine and human life of the Son of God and of His Mystical Body. The Mass is something we gratefully and humbly receive, just as we do our human nature and our supernatural life in baptism. Thus, even if per impossibile the Mass were no more than a glorified communion service, we would STILL have no right, no business, deconstructing and reconstructing the Mass of the Roman Rite, an inheritance the Church always considered it her duty to guard and protect.

It was and is a crime for Church leaders to treat the Church’s tradition in such a contemptuous way; it was and is an incalculable loss for the spiritual vitality and sanctification of her members; it was and still is the principal cause of the crisis of faith through which we have been passing in the decades since the Council. The only way we will restore an integrally Catholic way of life is with an integral liturgy, the liturgy that the Holy Spirit built up over twenty centuries with the living stones of clergy, religious, and laity, with the breath of their orations, lections, and chants, with the fire of the Spirit poured forth upon the Church at Pentecost. No matter how valid a new sacramental rite may be, no one can create for it a history ex nihilo, no one can make it to be a treasure handed down when it is not. No matter how valid it may be, if it is defective in regard to the way of worship, it will be defective also in leading people to the end of worship. The way and the goal cannot be divorced: “what God has joined together, let no man (and no committee) put asunder.”

In short: the Mass is not just about communion. It is a many-sided service of prayer, part of which is a careful preparation for communion and thanksgiving for it[4] — and it is a prayer handed down to us along the line of the apostolic tradition to which we belong. For both of these reasons, a stripped-down, heavily redacted, modified, and innovated rite of Mass is a bad thing for the life of the Church and the life of individual Catholics, regardless of whether or not the consecration is valid.

Let us consider this fact. It would have been a lot “simpler” if Jesus had remained among us under His natural appearances until the end of time. He surely could have done that; the Ascension was not necessary, in the strict logical sense of necessity. He chose nevertheless to depart and to communicate His grace and truth to us in other ways — in specifically sacramental, liturgical, ecclesial ways, which therefore deserve our trust, our homage, our best efforts, and our gratitude.

The liturgy is not a mere shell for the Real Presence, like a monstrance holding a host, nor is it a mere container for a product, like a tube full of toothpaste; it is the privileged way He becomes present to us and we to Him. And that way is not a modern highway along which we speed as quickly as we can to reach our exit, not paying much attention to the road; it is a path along which we are sanctified, prepared to reach our goal worthily.[5]

Allow me to draw out a corollary from the foregoing discussion. A liturgical rite is constituted by its particular texture and content of chants, texts, ceremonies, the language it has made its own, the stance of the priests, the motions of the ministers, and so forth. These things are not supplementary to or decorative of the liturgy; they simply are the liturgical rite. Thus, it can be said with precision that the Novus Ordo is not a form of the Roman Rite; it is not the same liturgy as the Roman Rite. For it is possible to have a Novus Ordo celebration in which almost nothing said and done is held in common with what is said and done in the Roman Rite as it historically existed: one can have different proper antiphons (or none at all), different orations, different readings, a different anaphora, the contrary stance of the priest, etc.; and even if all of the “right” options were chosen, they remain essentially “at option” and thus not inherent and constitutive of the rite.

So the next time someone says: “It doesn’t matter which Mass you go to, the OF or the EF — Jesus is present in both!” (which is usually said with a triumphant assurance that this is the end of the discussion, when in fact the real discussion hasn’t even begun), you might want to slow them down and ask what their conception of the Mass is. Are they reducing it to consecration and communion? We may be dealing here with a sort of Catholic parallel to the popular Protestant notion of “salvation by faith alone,” namely: “liturgy by Eucharist alone.” To the oft-posed Fundamentalist question “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” would correspond the sacramentally reductionist question: “Has your Mass transubstantiated bread and wine?”

If such a position were true, the ultimate Novus Ordo — the Novissimus Ordo, as it were — would start off with a priest standing over bread and wine, who, right after a greeting, immediately says the words of consecration, distributes communion, and closes with a blessing. Over and done with in less than three minutes (particularly if armies of EMHCs are called upon), and, don’t you know, “we’ve got Jesus.” What more could we ask for?[6]

Our Lord Himself gives us the kernel of a response: “I came, that they may have life — and have it in abundance.” This abundance is the mysteries of His human and divine life, unfolded and elaborated, made real and present for us, in the sacred liturgy developed and delivered over twenty centuries. The children of the Church should settle for nothing less, as they continue to resist the reductionism of the liturgical reform.

NOTES

[1] See “The Priority of Religion and Adoration over Communion,” NLM, October 9, 2017.
[2] For more on this point, see “The Long Shadow of Neoscholastic Reductionism,” NLM, July 3, 2017; cf. “Is the Mass ‘Just’ the Mass?,” OnePeterFive, February 3, 2016. Readers may charge me with being unfair by suggesting that Catholics who frequent the Novus Ordo have this mentality. But I have heard this countless times in discussions: If the Eucharist is present, what more do you want? What more do we need? The fact that this is such a common reaction suggests a systemic problem in the way of our thinking, since the Church has never held to such reductionism.
[3] For a detailed exposition of the claims of this paragraph, see the five-part series at NLM: “Time for the Soul to Absorb the Mysteries” (all links available here), and “Bad Liturgical Parenting,” OnePeterFive, November 8, 2018.
[4] See “Priestly Preparation Before Mass and Thanksgiving After Mass,” NLM, September 28, 2015.
[5] See, for an application to the usus antiquior, “Two Modest Proposals for Improving the Prayerfulness of Low Mass,” NLM, November 12, 2018.
[6] Indeed, it would be even “better,” from this reductionist vantage, for a priest to consecrate a bushel or two of hosts at a given location, and then to allow lay ministers to distribute communion daily for the next several months. This would at once solve the problem of the priest shortage and empower laity with new forms of active participation! Absurdity aside, what we see is that the Catholic Faith demands the figure and function of the priest to remain what it is and to carry on the worship to which we are deputed in our baptism. Therefore, we are obliged to seek the liturgical form that most fully reflects the sacramental identity and unique activity of the priest, and to resist anything that dilutes it or farms it out to those to whom it is foreign.

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