Greater Accessibility… To Whom, To What, and Why?

Throughout the years of liturgical reform — and for many long decades thereafter — the avalanche of changes to Catholic worship were often justified by a few magical phrases that would be thrown about almost talismanically, with an air of infinite superiority to the meager mentalities of lowly laity. The leading contender was certainly the phrase “active participation,” but joining it were “Modern Man,” “meeting people where they’re at,” “doing like the early Church,” and, what is of most interest to me in this article, “greater accessibility.”

The revised liturgy was supposed to be, and was claimed and asserted to be, “more accessible,” but this is a monumental smokescreen if ever there was one. After all, nothing is more or less accessible in the abstract or without further qualification. One must always ask: “Accessible to whom? And giving access to what? And for the purpose of…?”

Almost exclusively, accessibility was understood as primarily or exclusively a verbal-conceptual phenomenon. If you can immediately grasp this bite-sized chunk of content, without further preparation, explanation, or remainder of bewilderment, then it’s considered to be accessible to you. The object of such immediate and complete comprehension obviously cannot be God, whom every orthodox theologian declares right off the bat to be incomprehensible; nor can it be man, who, as being made unto God’s image, is a mystery to himself; nor can it be the world, which is far too complicated and vast to fit into man’s mind, even if a thousand Einsteins were to chip away at it; nor can it be the mysteries revealed by God in history and delivered in Scripture, since each one of these is a combination of all of the above. Therefore, a perfectly accessible liturgy, in the sense given above, would have to be about nothing, address no one, and lead nowhere.

This, admittedly, is a limit case fortunately never reached: there is always a residue of unintelligibility in anything human beings do, even if they are trying to avoid it. To the extent that any elements of the traditional divine liturgy remained, the incomprehensibility of God, of man, of the cosmos, and of the mysteries of Christ remained. Still, the reform introduced a fundamental tension between allowing the liturgy to be mysterious, as it must be, and trying, in the name of liturgical science, to purge it of the very features that tended to make it aweful, fearful, darksome, intricate, wondrous, and yet, paradoxically, also make it orderly and ordering, familiar and comforting, unassuming and free of invasive irritation.

At Ordinations in the classical Roman rite: what’s not to love?

It seems to me that there is a mighty irony at work in the revival of the traditional Latin liturgy of the Roman church. The irony is that, in spite of everything the scholars and tinkerers were predicting, in spite of all their hand-wringing, new generations find the old rites in general quite sufficiently accessible, indeed more so than the new rites, as long as one has a broader and deeper definition of accessibility. The reason is not far to seek: the old liturgy appeals more consistently, more powerfully, to the full range of reality, natural and supernatural; of what it is to be human; of how we express ourselves, and what we are trying to express in words, gestures, songs, and sighs. It appeals to all the senses, the various temperaments and personalities, the different levels on which our interior life plays out and intersects with the external world.

The traditional Roman liturgy — and this is true of any traditional apostolic rite in Christianity — recognizes a truth on which psychologists never tire of discoursing: human beings primarily communicate non-verbally. As a matter of fact, we are never not communicating something, even if we are not talking or have no intention of conveying a meaning. Orderliness and defentiality speak volumes, just as carelessness and casualness do. A liturgy, like any human ceremony, is constantly communicating through every word, stance, gesture, position, action, silence. The old liturgy, by harnessing and regulating these things in a harmonious way to bring out their full meaning, is more communicative; in that sense, it proffers more to access, and in more ways. The reformed liturgy, by eliminating traditional non-verbal language and then leaving so much to chance and idiosyncratic habit, thins the content and its delivery, while mingling it with extraneous and contradictory matter.

Many of these thoughts were prompted by a video on body language that made me much more conscious of the importance of small and non-verbal details in liturgy (and, therefore, the importance of being aware of them and faithful to their proper execution). The expert interviewed, Joe Navarro, looks at people from the point of view of an FBI agent trying to assess potential threats, witnesses, etc. The part of the video most relevant to the liturgy runs from 7:10–8:10. Here is a transcription of some of the points he makes about body language:

• “How we dress, how we walk, have meaning, and we use that to interpret what’s in the mind of the person.”
• “We may think we’re very sophisticated, [but] we are never in a state where we’re not transmitting information.”
• “We’re all transmitting at all times; we choose the clothes that we wear, how we groom ourselves, how we dress, but also how do we carry ourselves, are we coming to the office on this particular day with a lot of energy, or are we coming in with a different sort of pace… and what we look for are differences in behaviour, down to the minutia of: what is this individual’s posture as they walk down the street, are they on the inside of the sidewalk, on the outside, can we see his blink rate, how often he is looking at his watch…”
• “You can have a poker face, but you can’t have a poker body — somewhere it’s going to be revealed.” 
• “We talk about non-verbals because it matters, because it has gravitas, because it affects how we communicate with each other.”
• “When it comes to non-verbals, this is no small matter. We primarily communicate non-verbally and we always will.”

Phrases like: “we primarily communicate non-verbally” and “we’re never not communicating something” are very relevant to the celebration of Mass. Every gesture — for example, the speed of movement around the altar; where the priest is standing or sitting, when, and why; how the sacred vessels are treated; whether the priest’s gaze is directed out to the people or modestly downcast — confesses what the celebrant, and the people, believe they are doing.

Why is it that the liturgical reformers seemed so tone-deaf or clueless about the most obvious things in life? Did they not realize that changing the bodily language, the gestures, postures, orientation, custody of the eyes, would effect a sea change in mentality and spirituality? Or . . . was it that they understood perfectly well, and therefore abolished, piece by piece, one non-verbal language, substituting for it another with a contrary message?

I am reminded of what has been said about the loss of faith in the Real Presence. This was not an unfortunate result of a lack of catechesis. It was the intended result of a renovated catechesis. It was not an accidental byproduct of liturgical reform gone awry; it was a premeditated outcome of a new ecclesiology that identified the worshiping community par excellence with the Body of Christ and sought to oppose the “fetishism” or “magic” of the Eucharistic cultus that had developed in the Church for at least a thousand years.

As Martin Mosebach points out with respect to Holy Communion:

[A]n entire bouquet of respectful gestures had surrounded the sacrament of the altar, and these gestures were the most effective homily, which continually showed priests and faithful quite clearly the mysterious presence of the Lord under the forms of bread and wine. We can be certain: no theological indoctrination of so-called enlightened theologians has so harmed the belief of Western Catholics in the presence of the Lord in the consecrated Host as the innovation of receiving communion in the hand, accompanied by the abandoning of all care in the handling of the particles of the Host.
          Yet can one really not receive communion reverently in the hand? Of course that is possible. Yet once the traditional forms of reverence were in place, exercising their blessed influence on the consciousness of the faithful, their discontinuation contained the message — and not just for the simple faithful — that so much reverence was not really necessary, and along with that there consequently grew the (initially unspoken) conviction that there was nothing there that demanded respect. (Subversive Catholicism: Papacy, Liturgy, Church, 80–81)

Fr. Roberto Spataro makes a similar but broader point:

Humility is more than a virtue. It is the condition for a virtuous life. Watch the bows and genuflections the humble man makes faithfully before God in a spirit of obedience, acknowledging His merciful sovereignty, His love without bounds, His creative wisdom. Reason is not tempted to be puffed up, as happens in the revolutionary process, because in the old rite not everything can or ought to be explained by reason which, for its part, is content to adore God without comprehending Him. It turns to Him through the means of a sacred language differing from ordinary speech, because in the harmonious order of creation that the liturgy represents in its rituals, there is never a monotonous repetition or tedious uniformity, but a symphony of diversity, sacred and profane, without opposition, respecting the alterity of each. Here reason also renounces an excessive use of words that unfortunately exists in the liturgical praxis inaugurated by the Novus Ordo, interpreted by many priests as the opportunity for pure garrulousness. In the old rite, on the other hand, reason appeals to other dimensions of communication and, besides words pronounced or sung, also gives silence a place. This silence becomes the atmosphere, impregnated with the Holy Spirit, in which believing thought and prayerful word is born. (In Praise of the Tridentine Mass and of Latin, Language of the Church, 30)

What we do with our bodies is just as communicative as what we say with our lips. The liturgy should therefore govern the motions and dispositions of our limbs and senses, harnessing them as symbols of truth and instruments of sanctification. This will help us to pray, to enter more deeply into communion with the Lord, and to yield ourselves to truths that cannot be put into words or captured in concepts. As St. Paul says in the Epistle to the Romans, we should make our bodily members “instruments of righteousness”:

“Neither yield ye your members as instruments of iniquity unto sin” — the sin of irreverence, of disrespect for holy things, of casual, haphazard, and inconsiderate behavior during our formal audience before the great King — “but present yourselves to God,” in theocentric worship that governs our self-presentation, “as those that are alive from the dead” — the living death of modern anti-natural, anti-Christic culture — “and your members as instruments of justice unto God” (Rom 6:13), the justice, namely, of the virtue of religion.

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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 Priority of Religion and Adoration over Communion

Concerning the “true and singular sacrifice” of the Eucharist, the Council of Trent famously declared (and bade that it be preached to the faithful):

He, therefore, our God and Lord, though He was about to offer Himself once on the altar of the cross unto God the Father, by means of his death, there to operate an eternal redemption; nevertheless, because His priesthood was not to be extinguished by His death, at the Last Supper, on the night in which He was betrayed — that He might leave, to His own beloved Spouse the Church, a visible sacrifice, such as the nature of man requires, whereby that bloody sacrifice, once to be accomplished on the cross, might be represented, and the memory thereof remain even unto the end of the world, and its salutary virtue be applied to the remission of those sins which we daily commit — declaring Himself constituted a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchisedech, He offered up to God the Father His own Body and Blood under the species of bread and wine. ... This, in fine, is that oblation which was prefigured by various types of sacrifices, during the period of nature, and of the law; inasmuch as it comprises all the good things signified by those sacrifices, as being the consummation and perfection of them all. (Session 22, chapter 1)

The Council goes on to speak of the effects of this sacrifice:

And forasmuch as in this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass, that same Christ is contained and immolated in an unbloody manner, who once offered Himself in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross, the holy Synod teaches that this sacrifice is truly propritiatory and that by means thereof this is effected: that we obtain mercy, and find grace in seasonable aid, if we draw nigh unto God, contrite and penitent, with a sincere heart and upright faith, with fear and reverence. … Wherefore, not only for the sins, punishments, satisfactions, and other necessities of the faithful who are living, but also for those who are departed in Christ, and who are not as yet fully purified, is it rightly offered, agreebly to a tradition of the apostles. (Sess. 22, ch. 2)

Moreover, against the errors of the Protestants, the same Council did not hesitate to affirm the adorable Real Presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ:

In the first place, the holy Synod teaches, and openly and simply professes, that, in the august sacrament of the holy Eucharist, after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and man, is truly, really, and substantially contained under the species of those sensible things. (Sess. 13, ch. 1)

After stating that the Eucharist was instituted not only as spiritual food but also as a remembrance of the riches of Christ’s divine love, so that we may venerate His memory and show forth His death until He comes to judge the world, the Fathers continue:

All the faithful of Christ may, according to the custom ever received in the Catholic Church, render in veneration the worship of latria, which is due to the true God, to this most holy sacrament. For not therefore is it the less to be adored on this account, that it was instituted by Christ, the Lord, in order to be received: for we believe that same God to be present therein, of whom the eternal Father, when introducing him into the world, says: And let all the angels of God adore him; whom the Magi falling down, adored; who, in fine, as the Scripture testifies, was adored by the apostles in Galilee. (Sess. 13, ch. 5)

These dogmas emerge out of and reinforce the very manner of offering Mass that had developed in the West well before the Council of Trent — in particular, the silent canon and the elevations. The silence and the elevations allow one to connect with and venerate the mysteries for their own sake, because they are worthy of all veneration, and our salvation is symbolized and summarized in them. In this way we are made to see an intrinsic purpose to assisting at Mass besides receiving communion: one is given the opportunity to join in the heavenly adoration of the Lamb, the elders and angels falling down before the throne, or the Magi falling down before the crib. Transubstantiation is the liturgical analogy of the Incarnation. It is a claiming of some corner of the material world for God’s Kingdom: as someone once put it, God is establishing a beachhead in enemy territory, or opening a passage for us by which we can ascend in spirit to the heavenly places. We long for the courts of the Lord and we ask Him to lead us there, as so many Postcommunions beseech.

Whenever the Mass is celebrated more like a meal, versus populum, without silence, without serious elevations and double genuflections, with a memorial acclamation breaking in on our acts of adoring faith, and an overall informal ars celebrandi, such things undermine the aforementioned Tridentine dogmas and weaken the sensus fidelium. In such circumstances, it is not surprising that holy communion becomes the high point of the service, indeed the only point; and if one does not receive, one is “left out.” Why go to Mass otherwise?

But if the focus is the priestly offering of the holy sacrifice as an act of the virtue of religion — giving to God, in justice, the right worship that is His due, which every human being owes to Him perpetually, regardless of his state or condition — then anyone and everyone has a profound, compelling, inescapable reason to go to Mass. In fact, Mass is the only way we can fulfill our debt to God of paying Him a worship with which He is perfectly pleased, and this even apart from whether or not we receive spiritual food in Holy Communion.

Approaching the question from this vantage, we come to understand a hagiographical fact that may seem to us initially surprising, namely, the fact that so many saints assisted at Mass twice a day or even more than that, often without receiving communion. St. Thomas Aquinas celebrated a Mass at which his secretary Reginald served; they then switched places and Thomas served for Reginald. St. Louis the King “heard Mass” (as the saying was) twice a day. This behavior becomes perfectly understandable when we look at it from the perspective of the Tridentine dogmas. Since the Mass is a true and proper sacrifice infinitely pleasing to God in itself, to attend it and join one’s interior homage to that of the priest is a perfect exercise of the most excellent of all moral virtues, the virtue of religion, which honors God as the first Commandment bids us do; and since the Lord Jesus Christ is really, truly, substantially present under the forms of bread and wine, we are also brought into the very throne room of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, to pay Him the homage of adoration He deserves and rewards.

For these two reasons alone — that we may exercise the virtue of religion and that we may adore Our Lord with a privileged intimacy — assisting at Mass is the best thing a Catholic can do. Granted, one has to balance religious observances with one’s other duties in life, but if St. Thomas who wrote 50 folio volumes and St. Louis IX who ruled a kingdom and fought crusades could both find time for two Masses a day, we would be hard pressed to find a sufficient excuse for not assisting at one Mass a day (provided that a truly prayerful and reverent Mass is available, which, unfortunately, cannot be taken for granted nowadays). And all this, before we have even broached that most wondrous and most gracious of all the Lord’s condescensions to us, whereby He allows us, nay, invites us, if we are properly disposed, to approach with fear and trembling the altar of the “full, final sacrifice” and partake of the all-holy, life-giving mysteries of Christ, the very flesh and blood of God.

In our own confused times above all, it seems vitally important not to get the inherent order of these elements mixed up, turned around, or otherwise confused.

1. The Mass is first the offering, through the sacrifice of Christ, of the religious worship we owe the triune God, for His own sake, because He is worthy of it and we are damaging ourselves if we do not rightly order our minds and hearts to Him.[1] As St. Thomas says, God is offended by our sins not because they injure Him but because they injure the rational creature, whom He loves (that is, whose good He wills). This worship includes the acts associated with the offering of Mass, namely, adoration, contrition, supplication, thanksgiving, and praise, which have both internal and external aspects, as St. Thomas well develops in the Secunda Secundae of the Summa.

2. Second, because the Mass is the august sacrifice of Christ, we are brought into the very presence of the divine Redeemer, “the Lamb that was slain,” who is “worthy to receive power, and divinity, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and benediction” (Rev 5:12). This is why Augustine says that before receiving, we must adore: we would sin if we did not adore.[2]

3. Third, the Mass is the sacrificial banquet of the Lamb, in which we partake of His flesh and blood for our sanctification and salvation, provided we are not conscious of any unconfessed mortal sin, which includes living in a state of life that is not allowed by divine law.

4. As a distant fourth, one might then speak about the Mass as a social event in which the people of God are seen as a people, in which the unity of the Church is represented and accomplished, and in which certain of our needs as communal beings are met.

But what we have seen in the past fifty years is precisely an inversion of these four, so that the Mass as social event is placed first; going up to receive Communion is placed second; the idea of adoration is a muted third; and the notion of the Mass as a propitiatory and impetratory sacrifice is so foreign as to be unintelligible.

In light of this complete inversion, might we not consider anew Joseph Ratzinger’s provocative proposal of a “Eucharistic fast”: are there not times when, in order to avoid the subtle danger of taking the sacrament for granted or to be in solidarity with others, we might abstain, although we could receive? Should we not at times intensify our Eucharistic hunger and thus compel ourselves to overcome routine, distraction, and trivialization? This need not be construed as in tension with Pope St. Pius X’s encouragement of frequent communion, or, indeed, as in tension with the fact that the Holy Eucharist was instituted for our spiritual nourishment: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him”; “Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you shall not have life in you.” As a rule, those who are properly disposed ought to receive: thirsty men in a desert should drink the water provided for them. No doubt Ratzinger would concur.

The overarching point we are arguing for is that there are several mysteries essentially connected with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and that these, as defined with utmost clarity by the Council of Trent, ought to inform our understanding of the nature of the sacred liturgy and our participation in it. There is a nexus mysteriorum, a network of mysteries in which one illuminates and depends on another, in a certain order.[3] The form of the liturgy and the ars celebrandi of the celebrant will either faithfully reflect and amplify these mysteries, which will be to the benefit of the Christian people, or introduce misconceptions, distractions, barriers, and even errors in their regard, which will have a harmful effect on the Church militant as a whole.


NOTES

[1] Thus it is false to say that the Mass is first of all a meal, or that it is a meal as much as it is a sacrifice. It is a sacrifice from which we are allowed to partake of the victim, just as there were sacrifices in the old covenant from whose flesh the priests could eat. A meal, in and of itself, is not a sacrifice, but a sacrifice can be a meal. This is why the Mass is not a reenactment of the Last Supper, as most Protestants (and too many uncatechized Catholics) believe, but rather a making-present of the oblation of the Son of God on the Cross on Good Friday. This is why it is not only misleading but heretical to emphasize the table of the Body and Blood of Christ as much as or more than the altar on which this victim is sacramentally sacrificed, and to celebrate the liturgy in such a way that the meal-character takes precedence over the oblation-character. It is for good reason that the Council of Trent, when defining the Mass, calls it repeatedly a sacrifice before speaking of its use by men as food and remedy.

[2] Enarr. in Ps. 98:9 (CCSL 39:1385).

[3] The Carthusian method for participating in Mass, shared recently at NLM by Gregory DiPippo, vividly exemplifies this nexus mysteriorum as it leads the worshiper through the various parts and prayers of Mass, and shows him how to unite himself to Christ in each one. This is to see the entire liturgy as an act of prolonged communion, even before one approaches the altar to receive the host.