Live-Streaming the Absurdity of Versus Populum and the Prayerfulness of Ad Orientem

Now that thousands of parishes, chapels, and cathedrals around the world are livestreaming Masses on a weekly or even daily basis, it is more possible than ever to experience the bankruptcy of that postconciliar innovation that Msgr. Klaus Gamber considered the single worst liturgical change to be visited on the Catholic Church: the stance of the celebrant facing the people at Mass.

NLM has featured many articles over the years critiquing versus populum from theological, liturgical, and psychological points of view — see, for example, “Mass ‘Facing the People’ as Counter-Catechesis and Irreligion”; “How Contrary Orientations Signify Contradictory Theologies”; and, highly pertinent in light of the recent memo sent by a certain bishop in the American Mountain West, “The Normativity of Ad Orientem Worship According to the Ordinary Form’s Rubrics.” (This memo was the subject of an extended critique here.)

But with broadcasting, the problem is compounded a thousandfold, because the celebrant stands not towards a congregation, as if in a closed circle with them — for in this situation, at least there is something of a human symbol, albeit not the precise symbol called for by the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass — but towards a camera, like a talkshow host or a cook at a cooking demonstration.

Joseph Sciambra comments on his blog:

The COVID-19 crisis has also clearly revealed another point of polarization in the Church: the Novus Ordo and the Traditional Latin Mass. One is priest-centered and lends itself well to the media-age—it is suited to live-streaming over the internet with the focus on the personality of the presider; hence, many parishes have a cult of personality around a charismatic priest who is mainly known for his amicability. I remember these priests; for their rainbow-colored vestments; for their stupid jokes told during the homily; and for how they endlessly wandered about the church, hugging everyone, during the “kiss of peace.” Over the years, I have been to countless Latin Masses offered by many different priests; I do not remember the priests very well, but I remember that Christ was there.

That there is great confusion about the very essence of the Mass and the meaning of the ministerial priesthood may be gleaned from newspaper articles that interview priests who are now at loose ends because they have no congregation to engage. Having been led to define priesthood as a relation with the people when it is a relation with Christ first and foremost, on behalf of the people, they search in vain, or at least with great difficulty, for an intrinsic and transcendent meaning to the offering of due worship to the Most Holy Trinity, such as animated centuries of so-called “private Masses,” which the Magisterium of the Church encouraged right through Benedict XVI (see my article “The Church encourages priests to say Masses, even without the faithful”).

Dan Millette points out that half a century of priests being trained to “say Mass for the people” has built up in many of them a habit of thinking of Mass solely or primarily in terms of seeing and interacting with the congregation, “touching” them with eye contact, a certain tone of voice, a suburban ars celebrandi:

It [live-streaming] does raise the issue, caused by a versus populum paradigm, of priests’ need for an audience—that saying Mass alone is somehow unfulfilling or even weird. Thus, a camera is set up, often right on the altar mere inches away from the priest’s face, and his well practiced liturgical voice and gestures are given their desired audience. Along those lines, I think of an earlier story to come out of the COVID-19 crisis in Italy. It was of a lonely priest, forbidden from saying public Mass, who decided to post printed selfies of all his parishioners on the pews of the church. The action, which other priests soon imitated, was perhaps heartfelt, but nevertheless a sentimental absence of real liturgical understanding. This is not a live-stream issue per se, but it coalesces with the need priests have for saying Mass with an audience.

Here is the innovative use of taped photographs to which Millette refers:

If ever there was a reductio ad absurdum for the versus populum stance, this, the final outcome of the closed-circle mentality, would be it. If the church in which this priest is standing happened to have a tabernacle behind the altar, the inversion would be complete: a priest praying towards pieces of paper with faces, instead of praying towards the God who dwells with His people as their Head, their King, and their Shepherd, in Person—the Son of God whose bloody sacrifice on the Cross, sacramentally enacted upon the altar, is the reason Mass is said at all, for the profit of the living and the dead, wherever they may be.

Although perhaps this photo of a bishop saying Mass to a camera is just as effective a reductio ad absurdum:

More examples may be seen in an article just posted at PrayTell, including a photo of a man proclaiming the Word to an empty church:

Seeing this photo brought home to me once again the wisdom of the tradition in having the Epistle chanted eastwards and the Gospel chanted northwards: in this way the position of the reader is dictated by theological and symbolic ideas that lead to no weirdness when implemented in an empty church, unlike the scenario depicted above.

The current wealth of live-streaming opportunities has, however, brought with it a change for the better: the sheer number of ad orientem Masses (almost always in the usus antiquior) that are now just as easily available via social media as the versus populum options. To my knowledge, such eastward-facing Masses were not nearly as plentiful or visible in the eyes of the Catholic people as they are today. I wish I could find out statistics about viewers, but just as there can be no doubt that more (private) TLMs are being said right now than at any point since 1969, I would guess that the number of Catholics currently viewing ad orientem Masses from their homes is a significantly higher number than the Catholics who were already attending ad orientem Masses in person every week. The bishops’ rapid shutdown of public worship, whether or not it was required by civil authorities, may backfire on them in surprising ways.

A Catholic who desires a more prayerful immersion in the holy mysteries can end up viewing such liturgies as these instead:

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Possibly Dubious Liturgical Legacy of Leonardo’s Last Supper

While I was kneeling in a church recently, I started to look more closely at its Gothic high altar, and noticed that the bas relief scene on the front of the altar just below the mensa reproduced, with a high degree of exactitude, the famous, possibly too famous, Last Supper painting by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), the 500th anniversary of whose death has been celebrated throughout 2019.

Leonardo’s Last Supper and many others paintings like it — Ghirlandaio’s at San Marco and Andrea del Castagno’s at the convent of St Apollonia, both in Florence; Giovan Pietro da Cemmo’s in the convent of St Augustine in Crema, etc. — were painted for the refectories of religious houses; they were not intended as images for churches, much less for sanctuaries of churches. The open, longitudinal arrangement was designed to place Christ at the center, to make the action at the table clearly visible, and to separate Judas more evidently from the rest of the Apostles. The spiritual lesson of such refectory paintings was manifold: that one should see the figure of Christ in one’s religious superior at the head table; that one should decide to be among the good apostles by being a good and obedient religious, and not faithless like Judas; that one should remember how every meal shared with the brethren bears a likeness to this banquet of supreme charity, which explains why the refectory service is a little liturgy in its own right.

Regarding the Rule of St. Benedict, Dom Mark Kirby, OSB, comments:

The liturgy of the refectory is sacred; the rubrics that govern it safeguard its Eucharistic character so that the words of the Apostle may be rightly fulfilled in the monastery day after day: “Whether you eat or drink, or whatsoever else you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). All are to come to refectory without delay and in time for the verse and the prayer, and all, says Saint Benedict, are to sit down together at table. A Benedictine monk never “grabs a bite” or eats in an individualistic manner. He enters into the liturgical order of the refectory, before, during, and after the meal, taking care to conform to the corporate actions of the whole community. One who despises the liturgy of the common table will be separated from it and even deprived of his portion of wine — a terrible punishment for the Mediterranean man — in order to be brought to his senses.

Benedictines honour the liturgy of eating and drinking in the refectory, and see the refectory as a kind of mirror of the Oratory. Even the disposition is same as in the choir: the tables facing each other; the Prior’s table with the crucifix behind it; the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary; and the reader’s desk. Twice daily the refectory resounds with the chanting of psalms and prayers. Like the Oratory, the refectory is a place of silence. It is also a place of joy, according to what Saint Luke writes in the Book of Acts: “They took their share of food with gladness and simplicity of heart” (Acts 2:46).

Because Leonardo’s Last Supper was in a refectory, it was not really intended for “public consumption.” Therefore, the hypothesis I will float concerns not so much this great artist’s intentions for his piece as it does deleterious consequences of an overuse of replications of it in modern churches.

Returning now to the altar sculpture: the figure of Christ dominated in the center, looking squarely out at me, with His disciples gathered round. Although I have seen this image a thousand times, I was suddenly struck by the impression that, placed front and center at the altar, this might look somewhat like a priest celebrating Mass versus populum:

In his superb overview of the history, form, and theology of the classical Roman rite (due to appear soon from Angelico Press), Michael Fiedrowicz offers a gentle critique of Leonardo:

Luther had already invoked the Last Supper practice of Jesus for his corresponding demand [that the Eucharist should be celebrated versus populum]. A new type of visual representation that began to be implemented during the thirteenth century must have been formative for his notion of the events of that time. This representation is familiar in Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper: Jesus sitting on the rear side of a table in the middle of the Apostles, turned toward the observer of the scene. If Mass were made to correspond to this artistic presentation, the priest should stand at the altar across from the people and turn his gaze on them. This argument, however, is based on a misapprehension of ancient table manners as they would have been practiced at the Last Supper. There was at that time either a round or a semicircular table at whose open front side the food would be brought, while those partaking of the meal sat or reclined at the rear semicircle of the table. The place of honor was not in the middle, but rather on the right side. The one presiding over a meal never had another partaker across from his place. These original arrangements are shown in the oldest representations of the Last Supper until the Middle Ages. If this finding alone prevents the derivation of celebrating versus populum from Jesus’ practice at the Last Supper, a look at the historical beginnings of the Eucharistic celebration demonstrates yet more that the primitive Church’s congregation in no way repeated the Last Supper as such and did not consider the meal as the ritual original form of the Eucharist.

It is more than a little chilling to read the following words of Martin Luther and to reflect on the current situation of Roman Catholic worship: “But in the true Mass among genuine Christians, the altar would not have to remain so [sc. facing east], and the priest would always turn to the people, as without doubt Christ did at the Lord’s Supper. Well, that will be so in good time” (Deutsche Messe und Ordnung des Gottesdienstes, 1526 [WA 19, 80]).

In his book No Trifling Matter: On the Inviolability of the Sacraments (Angelico, 2018), Msgr. Nicola Bux makes a similar point:

Not a few people hold that it was only in late antiquity or the early Middle Ages that the Churches of the East and the West began to prefer administering it directly in the mouth. But did Jesus give communion to the apostles on the hand or asking them to take it with their own hands? Visiting an exhibition of Tintoretto in Rome, I observed some “Last Suppers” in which Jesus gives communion to the apostles in the mouth. One could think that this has to do with an interpretation by the painter after the fact, a little like the posture of Jesus and the apostles at table, in the cenacle of Leonardo, which “updates” in the Western manner the Jewish custom, which was, instead, to be reclining at table. Reflecting further on this, the custom of giving communion to the faithful directly in the mouth can be considered not only as a Jewish tradition, and therefore apostolic, but also as going back to the Lord Jesus. The Jews and the peoples of the East in general had and today still have the custom of taking food with one’s hands and placing it directly in the mouth of the lover or the friend. In the West this is done between couples in love and by the mother toward her little one, who is still inexperienced. The text of John is understood in this way: “Jesus then answered him [John]: ‘It is he to whom I shall give a morsel of dipped bread.’ Then, having dipped a morsel of bread, he gave it to Judas, son of Simon Iscariot. And as soon as he had taken the mouthful Satan entered into him” (13:26–27). But what should be said about the invitation of Jesus: “Take and eat. . . . Take and drink”? Take (in Greek, labete; in Latin, accipite) also means receive. If the mouthful is dipped, it cannot be taken with the hands; rather it is received directly into the mouth. It is true that Jesus consecrated bread and wine separately. But if during the “mystic supper” (as the East calls it) or Last Supper, the two consecrating gestures happened, so it seems, in different phases of the Paschal supper, nevertheless after Pentecost the apostles, aided by Jewish priests who had converted (cf. Acts 6:7), and who were, as we would say, experts in religious worship, united the gestures within the great Eucharistic prayer. (94–95)

My experience has been that a lot of Catholic church altars — especially the less expensive ones in the United States that were trying to look “traditional,” from the late 19th century up to the middle of the 20th — feature exactly this image of Leonardo’s Last Supper carved into the front, where the priest and people would see it day after day after day. (Note, however, that according to older rubrics, such art should be visible only between the stripping of the altar on Maundy Thursday and the Easter Vigil; for the remaining 362/3 days of the year, it would be masked by the antependium. Alas, antependia tended to go the way of all flesh and are making a slow return at best.) Here is another example:

I wonder . . . Might this have something to do with slowly disposing everyone to reimagine the Mass as an imitation of the Last Supper, and not even as a Jewish meal, but as a banquet fictitiously depicted by Leonardo? Perhaps the near-ubiquity of the faux supper made it easier, when the time came, to justify the dismantling of a high altar that bore upon itself an image seemingly in contradiction with it, while at the same time installing a free-standing table that permitted the “presider” to imitate Leonardo’s Christ, and perhaps the concelebrating clergy to imitate Leonard’s apostles circled round the table.

Now, if we look at churches with much older altars, or Liturgical Movement altars, we will see a far greater variety of iconographical images carved into the fronts of altars: the Lamb, especially; wreaths, palms, and other arborial designs; angels; cosmatesque patterns; etc. It seems much more appropriate for an altar to have such symbolic designs or to be dressed in cloth altar frontals in liturgical colors than to bear the by-now overdone Leonardo spin-off. It just goes to show how a work of artistic but ahistorical genius can intersect with commercial demand to flood the market with well-intentioned but conceptually harmful kitsch.

I am not an art historian but simply someone keenly interested in the fine arts and in ecclesiastical art in particular. I would therefore be grateful if any readers have more thoughts or information pertinent to this theory of a possible relationship between the introduction of versus populum and the emblazoning of modern church altars with decontextualized Last Suppers.

One can find images of Christ standing at the other side of the altar (over against the viewer) in Byzantine iconography as well, but this depiction does not, to my eye, suggest versus populum as a manner of celebrating, if only because the cross and book seem set up for ad orientem worship; certainly the iconographic style makes it easier to see such an image rather as the expression of a mysterious present reality, the Lord coming into our midst through the liturgy we offer to Him and He offers through us, than of an historical event, a Jewish Passover meal, in dramatic reenactment, as the Leonardo so strongly (but misleadingly) conveys.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website for articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Newman, Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen, Roguet, Croegaert), his SoundCloud page for lectures and interviews, and his YouTube channel for talks and sacred music.

The National Catholic Reporter’s New Resolve to Promote the Traditional Latin Mass

Which bespeaketh clericalism?

As many readers no doubt have seen or caught word of, Zita Ballinger Fletcher’s article at the National Catholic Reporter, “The Latin Mass becomes a cult of toxic tradition” — the title really captures her entire message about how terrible-awful-no good the TLM is, which she develops ad nauseam and with impressive though unintentional poetic license — has opened up a fountain of responses, both sober and humorous. It seems that the Reporter, not content to ignore usus antiquior enthusiasts, has decided to take the new editorial tack of promoting the cause of Summorum Pontificum.

To my knowledge, there have been five earnest replies and two satirical ones. I have enjoyed all of them. In the first category:

• Dr. Joseph Shaw, “Leftist Catholic magazine slams Latin Mass as ‘cult of toxic tradition’” (LifeSite, Nov. 6)
• Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, “Piteous tirade about the people who attend the Traditional Latin Mass” (WDTPRS, Nov. 6)
• Daniel Amiri, “False accusations, not the Extraordinary Form, are toxic” (Where Peter Is, Nov. 6)
• Dorothy Cummings McLean, “A laywoman’s guide to thriving at the Traditional Latin Mass” (LifeSite, Nov. 7 – In my opinion, this one deserves to be better known)
• Dr. Adam A.J. DeVille, “A response to the NCReporter’s toxic attack on the Latin Mass” (Catholic World Report, Nov. 8 – This is interesting, coming from a Byzantine Catholic)

And in the second category:

• Anonymous, “The toxic tradition of the Latin Mass” (Eccles is Saved, Nov. 7)
• Brian Williams, “The Novus Ordo becomes a cult of toxic innovation” (Liturgy Guy, Nov. 7)

In light of all this discussion (which, in general, seems to me a good thing: there are common misconceptions to be dismantled and now decades-old arguments that still need to be addressed for the ever-growing number who are awakening to the questions), I found myself thinking again about Fletcher’s claim that the old liturgy is clericalist, which was repeated as a mantra in the 60s and 70s, and is now being warmed up again in the microwave.

It seems to me really obvious, having attending both the NO and the TLM for decades, that the old Mass is far less clerico-centric, precisely because it is so ritualistic, formal, dictated, and prayerful. There is very little room at all for the “personality” of the priest.

Then I saw, while working on a book by Michael Fiedrowicz, a beautiful passage in Fr. Engelbert Recktenwald, FSSP. Now, Fr. Recktenwald and I have exchanged a few jabs on another aspect of the liturgy (namely, the use of the vernacular for readings and the postures to be observed in giving the readings at Mass), but here we are absolutely of one mind. He writes:

This retreat [into the ritual] serves to visualize the divine reality that comes from God—the earthly liturgy is the image of the heavenly liturgy—and to make way for the action of the main celebrant, namely, Christ himself—the priest acts in persona Christi. The celebrating priest becomes the more unimportant in his individual personality the more priestly his action is. In the heart of the Holy Mass, during the Canon, in which the transubstantiation and thus the descent of the one eternal High Priest occurs, the priest no longer has a face: he stands—yes!—with his back to the people, he speaks what every other priest speaks at this point, he becomes in his person completely unimportant and replaceable, because he makes room for the One for whose sake alone the believer takes part in the sacred liturgy. To emphasize eye contact with the priest at this point therefore means the utmost misunderstanding of the priestly function in its proper sense. In the highest priestly act, the priest is pure instrument and perviousness for the One.

Let’s have a look at a few contrasting photos and ask ourselves how the necessarily unique and irreducible function of the priest in Catholic worship (for there will never be a Mass without a priest) translates phenomenologically into a perception of his role within the Mystical Body.

In the following photos of the traditional High Mass, one sees, on the one hand, a certain separation of the priest from the people and a surrounding of his office with great solemnity and decorum, but on the other hand, the overall impression given is that of a whole community united in prayer, intently focused on worshiping God, each in his or her own way.

If I had to give a name to what I see in the foregoing photos, I would call it “hierarchically differentiated co-participation.”

In the following photos of the Novus Ordo Mass as celebrated nearly universally, one sees, in conjunction with the separate standing of the priest (which, as I mentioned, is unavoidable in any case), a sense of the clergy being over-against the people, in charge of their act of worship, and lording it over the faithful as if the faithful did not enjoy their own equal dignity versus Deum.

I regret to say that in this next photo of a Mass concelebrated by a bishop, newly-ordained priests, and presbyterate, the overwhelming impression is one of a bunch of concessionaires in the limelight, saying grace over the snackbar. If that last cluster of metaphors is jarring, I submit it’s no more jarring than the aesthetic reality we are dealing with. (I say this with no disrespect intended to individual persons, who may interiorly hold the Catholic faith in its integrity, but who are compelled to use ritual forms that do not express this faith.)

Due to the virtually obligatory versus populum stance and other ceremonial elements and lacunae, the overall impression given is that of a clerical caste intent on doing something in sight of the people and to them, while the people are focused on the clerical caste, because it catches the eye. The personal interaction has become the rite. If I had to give it a name, I would call it “hierarchically confrontational codependency.”

Thus there is a confused sense of what exactly the common action is or where it is directed: is it primarily to God? Or to one another? Or maybe we don’t know? In any case, there is a serious ambivalence and ambiguity about what exactly is being done, by whom, for whom, and why. This, of course, plays into the whole question of understanding the Mass as being primarily a sacrifice or primarily a meal (and, since it is both, how they relate to one another). A sacrifice can also be a meal, by way of the sacrificial victim being shared in by the ones offering; it is much harder to see how a meal, as such, would also be a sacrifice, except in the very generic sense that it costs something to put on a meal.

I’m perfectly well aware that a Novus Ordo Mass can be celebrated to look somewhat like the solemn Mass, as in this fine photo from a past CMAA Colloquium:

But three points must be made.

(1) This happens about as often as it snows in Jamaica, and every possible factor in the Church is against it at this time.

(2) If the new Mass can, due to its flexi-rubrics, be made to look somewhat like the old Mass, the old Mass, for its part, can never be celebrated to look like the jamboree version of the new Mass. This is the same objection that has been made many times to the ROTR at this blog and elsewhere: a liturgy that need not be celebrated properly, with the correct orientation and priorities, is a liturgy defective at its core. It is no surprise that the moral and institutional evil of clericalism, by which individual personalities abuse their offices, would find its corresponding lex orandi and external image in just such a liturgy. It is no surprise that the traditional lex orandi, though it cannot prevent moral and institutional evils, runs decisively against clericalism in the exacting humility, precision, and anonymity of its ritual form.

(3) The differences between the two are not only on the surface, as important as surface beauty is; they run much deeper. As a result, even if a new pope came along who suddenly declared that all Novus Ordo Masses had to be offered ad orientem, in Latin, with chant, starting the first Sunday of Advent, it would solve only the external problems — not the internal ones. It would be like repairing the face of a crash victim with plastic surgery while neglecting the more harmful damage to the internal organs.

Needless to say, this article is not the place to go further. We can, at least, be grateful to the National Catholic Reporter for stirring up such important discussions.

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

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.

Clericalism, True and False

I do not deny that there are forms of clericalism that have plagued the Western Church in periods of its history, and I would not deny that traditionalists must be on their guard against the reemergence of such forms. Nevertheless, it has been my conviction for a long time that the worst manifestations of clericalism have, in fact, been those that followed the Second Vatican Council.

In my column today at LifeSiteNews, I attempted to describe six of the ways in which "clericalism" rears its ugly head in the postconciliar world. Some excerpts:

1. When a priest, contradicting nearly 2,000 years of unanimous tradition in the apostolic churches of the East and the West, faces the people at Mass (versus populum), he unavoidably imposes himself on them as the principal actor in the liturgy, standing “over against” the passive congregation. In this way the message is transmitted—whether the priest intends it or not—that he is the center of attention, the facilitator and even the validator of the assembled faithful. This is an efficacious sign of clericalism if ever there has been one. ...

2. When a priest says “call me Fr. Jimmy,” acts casually, tells lots of jokes and stories from the pulpit, and “doesn’t stand on ceremony,” he is in fact promoting a cult of the individual personality, the cult of Jimmy, rather than humbly accepting his God-given office or role in the Church as the impersonal minister of the Lord Jesus, one of a million that God will make use of in the span of history. ...

3. On the other hand, when clergy extend traditionally clerical ministries to lay people (e.g., extraordinary ministers of holy communion), they are perpetuating the false view that the only worthwhile, validating “work” for a Catholic is to be busy in the sanctuary. This is one of the worst manifestations of clericalism. The proper role of the laity is not to substitute as “straw ministers” but to sanctify the world outside of the church building...

4. When priests, bishops, and even the pope ignore or hold in contempt the legitimate aspirations and needs of the faithful or of their subordinate clergy; when only the pope, only his collaborators, only his allies, know what is best for everyone else, regardless of education, competency, or expertise — we are facing another notorious form of clericalism, which could be summed up as: “My way or the highway.” ...

5. When bishops or priests want to intrude their personal theological opinions into their preaching and writing, rather than following and handing down the common and traditional teaching of the Church, we are certainly dealing with a particularly acidic form of clericalism.

6. When the pope appoints ambitious men as bishops and curial officials instead of imitating great reforming popes who scoured observant monasteries and parishes for humble, holy, orthodox candidates, or when people entrusted with proposing episcopal candidates fail in their grave charge, they are flexing the muscles of a clericalism that becomes mightier the more successful the ambitious are. ...

Read the full article over at LifeSite. (See here for an archive of my blog posts there, a number of which concern liturgical matters.)

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.

Homogeneity vs. Hierarchy: On the Treatment of Verbal Moments

Chanting the Epistle

In discussions of problems with the Novus Ordo Missae, its advocates will frequently say that its opponents are always assuming the “worst practices,” that is, the panoply of liturgical abuses so prevalent that they almost constitute an unspoken set of rubrics as rigidly required as that of any Latin altar missal. This is a fair point. As Cardinal Sarah has tirelessly pointed out, the Novus Ordo allows for many of the elements that Catholics devoted to the Church’s Latin liturgical tradition value: first and foremost, the ad orientem stance, which is presupposed in the very rubrics of the Missal of Paul VI; the use of Latin, Gregorian chant, the Roman Canon, incense, and beautiful vestments and vessels; a prominent place for silence; only men in the sanctuary, and always liturgically vested. True as all of this may be — and we must protest, with Martin Mosebach, that it is a profound problem for such elements to be merely allowed and not required — we are nevertheless confronted in the Novus Ordo with elements of rupture that no “hermeneutic of continuity” can heal or overcome. This post will consider one of the most obvious of these, namely, how what I shall call “verbal moments” are treated in terms of their spatial and positional differentiation.

Think about a Sunday Mass in the Ordinary Form: the first reading, the psalm, the second reading, the Gospel, the homily, and the prayer of the faithful are usually all recited, all at the same place (the ambo), always versus populum in just the same way. The Eucharistic Prayer, high point of the liturgy, is also recited from the nearby altar, versus populum, in the same voice as the Gospel is read. A huge swath of the liturgy is being performed in exactly the same manner: read aloud, in the vernacular; read towards the people; read from more or less the same place; read in the same auditorium voice. It has the effect of evening everything to the same level. There is no ascent; there is only succession. It is reminiscent of Newton’s notion of time as equably flowing at the same pace. One moment of time is the same as any other. The liturgy becomes a homogenous block of undifferentiated verbiage. It is almost a demonstration of how much greater time can be than space — as in waiting in a doctor’s or a dentist’s office.

How different, I reflected, is the traditional Roman liturgy, in the way it has developed over the centuries![1] Acknowledging the ceremonial differences between Low Mass, High Mass, Solemn High Mass, and Pontifical Mass, there is a commonality of approach whereby one can see the “genetic derivation” of the later simpler forms from the earlier and more elaborate forms.[2]

Chanting the Gospel at a Missa cantata

Chanting the Gospel at a Missa solemnis

In the Low Mass as well as in the Missa Cantata, the priest begins at the foot of the altar, where he tarries to prepare himself for the arduous ascent. He works his way up to the altar to kiss it, and commences the Introit at the southern side. All throughout the liturgy he is weaving back and forth, like a figure-skater tracing out a pattern. He reads or chants the Epistle on the side that represents the faithful — the Mediterranean south, where the Faith was first planted. The Gradual and Alleluia are chanted by the Schola somewhere else in the church, usually in a choir loft or side chapel. After these interlectional chants, the priest crosses over to read or chant the Gospel towards the side that represents the unconverted pagan world — the cold and barbaric north, where many fought to plant the Faith. He leaves the altar for the ambo, where he will explicate the Word of God to the people. When he is finished, he returns to the altar, kisses it in reverence, asks the people to join him in prayer, and enters into the heart of the Mass with the Offertory. From this point onwards, apart from a momentary excursion to the south, he is firmly fixed at the middle of the altar for the oblation of the Victim, offered to the East, facing the same way the people are. All are caught up in the same orientation — to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. The Solemn High Mass expresses all of this differentiation of “verbal moments” even more dramatically, when the subdeacon chants the Epistle, the deacon chants the Gospel, and the priest, after the homily, offers the Holy Sacrifice.

What we see here in the original Roman rite is the tracing out of a sacred geography, whereby the “verbal moments” in the Mass are hierarchically and symbolically ordered. The Epistle at the south, the Gospel towards the north, the homily towards the people, and the Canon towards the Lord demonstrate in a bodily way, with the vividness of the immediately sensible, the differentiation and articulation of liturgical acts. The multiple qualities of each “verbal moment,” whether proclaimed aloud or whispered sotto voce, gives to each its own profile, a dignity that corresponds to its function:

subdeacon	Epistle	“southerly”	epistle tone
schola	Gradual	elsewhere	melismatic tone
deacon	Gospel	northwards	Gospel tone	incense, candles
priest	homily	westwards	plain speech
priest	Canon	eastwards	silence	incense, candles, bells

The Epistle can be fully and simply the Epistle, and retains its dignity as the sacrament of the Word by not being announced to the people as if it were merely instructional. The homily, as instructional, is rightly directed to the people. Last and best of all, “in the fullness of time” (Gal 4:4), comes the Canon of the Mass, “the dispensation of the mystery which hath been hidden from eternity in God” (Eph 3:9), which is uttered in silence, as the Word was made flesh in silence (Dum medium silentium), with nothing of the priest’s individual face or voice edging into the perfect embodiment of the suffering and glorified Christ. There is an arc of spiritual progression from one moment of the liturgy to the next. We are caught up in pilgrimage. We sense ourselves to be nearing a destination, one stage of a journey after another, towards the Promised Land. Rather than one thing after another, as in a modern agenda, each step is qualitatively different — a fact impressed on us unmistakably by the use of space, posture, orientation, chant tone, and voice level.

Preaching the homily

In contrast, we see in the reformed rite an anti-hierarchical egalitarianism that levels, equalizes, homogenizes, verbalizes, and externalizes. With it comes the loss of any order of acts of intimacy — the varied series of communications from outward to inward, from echo to source, from shadow to light, from memory to reality, from word to flesh. The monotony of “out loud, versus populum” makes the entire experience uniform, contiguous, blurred, unimpressive, and unmemorable; it sends a message that all of this is book learning, directed to this congregation, in keeping with congregationalist theology. It is far different with the unreformed rite, in which hierarchy is the very soul of the liturgical event. Everything that is to be done must be done in its due (distinctive) place, making full use of compass points, background and foreground, levels of voice, contour of tones. It places heterogenous utterances at different levels, in complex relationships, driving always towards internalization of meaning, and this it does precisely through the senses, so that we see and hear and even smell the stages of the journey. The liturgy is in motion, driving towards a destination, and we are privileged to be carried along with it.

As mentioned above, hierarchical differentiation, sacred geography, and progressive motion are carried to their fullest extent in the distinctive roles and places allotted to priest, deacon, and subdeacon in the Missa solemnis or Solemn High Mass. The subdeacon’s chanting of the Epistle; the deacon’s chanting of the Gospel, using a book held by the subdeacon, flanked by acolytes bearing torches and incense; the priest’s preaching aloud and then praying in silence at the Canon, not to mention the priest’s blessing of the deacon and the latter’s return to the priest after chanting the Gospel — all of these articulations of liturgical action show a profound awareness of the language of the body and the bodiliness of language, so that we never have the feeling of being trapped in tedious talk, but are borne from one station to the next, as if we were following the Lord through the desert to the Jordan, from the Jordan to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to the heavenly sanctuary. He moves in us and among us; His ministers move; we move with Him and with them.

As is so often the case, I feel inadequate to express what I have experienced, but I take consolation in knowing that those who assist at the traditional Mass will grasp that of which I speak — and in hoping that those who have not yet had the happiness of assisting at it may be moved to seek it out, so that they, too, may join the same pilgrimage. “And it came to pass, when the days were well-nigh come that he should be received up, he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Lk 9:51).

Silently offering the Divine Victim

NOTES

[1] I say “as it has developed,” because the locations from which certain parts of the liturgy are conducted have changed over the centuries, as the architectural layout of the church and especially its sanctuary and ambo underwent various modifications. Nevertheless, every age of the Church shows us a keen awareness of the spatiality of liturgical actions, and the fittingness of assigning different moments to different places in the building, different ministers, and distinctive stances and tones.

[2] I say this deliberately because, as in the history of human languages, so in the history of liturgy, the idea of evolution from simpler to more complex is only partially true. We can find many examples where ancient forms are more complex or elaborate than later forms. Just as classical Greek is more complex than classical Latin, Latin than Italian, and 19th-century Italian than 21st-century Italian, so too is the pontifical liturgy of the Middle Ages more complex than the Missa solemnis, the Missa cantata, and the Missa recitata.