A Colonial Williamsburg Approach To The Paschal Sacrifice

A reader asked me about the Rites of Holy Week prior to the 1955 revision by Pius XII.  Let me refer anyone interested to a fascinating (fascinating to those of us who love the arcane) series of articles by Gregory DiPippo on the Blog New Liturgical Movement.  As I have pointed out in previous postings New Liturgical Movement has definitely gone down the rabbit hole into ecclesiastical surrealism, but the historical research can actually be quite good.  Mr. DiPippo’s series of articles begins with the Palm Sunday offices http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2009/03/compendium-of-1955-holy-week-revisions_28.html and will lead you to the subsequent articles as he gives an extraordinarily detailed description of both the pre-1955 rite and the revisions of Pius XII. 

Let me first explain the importance of the 1955 revisions in preparing the way for the extensive liturgical changes that have followed the Second Vatican Council.  The earlier rites were taken from the 1570 Missal of Pius V which was accompanied by a Papal Bull known as Quo Primum.  Quo Primum declared that

"Let all everywhere adopt and observe what has been handed down by the Holy Roman Church, the Mother and Teacher of the other Churches, and let Masses not be sung or read according to any other formula than that of this Missal published by Us. This ordinance applies henceforth, now, and forever, throughout all the provinces of the Christian world" Pius V went on to say: "By this present Constitution, which will be valid henceforth, now, and forever, We order and enjoin that nothing must be added to Our recently published Missal, nothing omitted from it, nor anything whatsoever be changed within it…. No one whosoever is permitted to alter this notice of Our permission, statute, ordinance, command, precept, grant, indult, declaration, will, decree, and prohibition. Should anyone dare to contravene it, let him know that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul."   In other words, Pius allegedly fixed the Roman Liturgy unchangeable for all time and in all places.  No liturgical changes.  Or so it was held. 

Despite Pius’ monitum to the contrary, over the centuries from the Pius V to Pius XII various minor alterations had, in fact, been made to the Liturgy.  New propers were composed and new feasts were added as saints were canonized.  Prayers were appended to the end of the recited or low Mass.  The communion of the faithful was re-introduced into the body of the Mass rather than more usually being a separate rite before or after Mass.  But none of these changes were nearly as drastic as the revisions to the Holy Week rites that Pius XII introduced in 1955 and yet there was no claim that Pius lacked the authority to change the rites established by his predecessor.  The changes proceeded smoothly but in many respects they were the Fort Sumter of our current Civil War of Liturgical renewal.  Neo-Trads are beginning to identify the original villain of Liturgical Reform of Vatican II as Pius XII and Holy Week as his Trojan Horse. 

Mr. DiPippo goes into great detail about both the pre and post 1955 rites and it would take me, as is did him, a long series of turgid postings to go over them in detail.  Let me just outline a few for you.

1. In the pre-1955 rites only the priest received Holy Communion on Good Friday.  At the Holy Thursday Mass the priest consecrated two large hosts, one for Holy Thursday and one to be reserved in the altar of repose for Good Friday.   The Good Friday host was placed in a chalice covered by an inverted paten and pall and then veiled.  The veil was ties securely around the knob of the chalice and it was carried beneath a humeral veil in solemn procession to the altar of repose where  it remained until the Communion Rite of the Good Friday “Mass of the Pre-sanctified.”   It was then carried in solemn procession back to the main altar of the church where it was placed on the corporal.  Wine and water were poured into the chalice and the priest celebrant communicated.  The other ministers and the laity did not communicate.  In the 1955 revision, Pius XII mandated that sufficient hosts be consecrated for the faithful to also receive on Good Friday

2. In the pre-1955 rites the Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper, the Friday “Mass of the Pre-Sanctified,” and the Saturday Easter Vigil were all celebrated about 9 a.m.  The Vigil was a totally separate liturgy from the First Mass of Easter, which was to be celebrated at, or about midnight of Saturday into Sunday.  This Saturday morning vigil led to the perception that “Lent is over at noon on Holy Saturday—pass the chocolate.”  Similarly, Tenebrae (the offices of Matins and Lauds) which should have been said in the final hours of the night before dawn had shifted to early evening of the day before. 

3. The pre-1955 rites required at least six sacred ministers in Holy Orders: a priest, four deacons, and a subdeacon. (It was common for priests to take the liturgical roles of deacon and subdeacon so you didn’t have to have four actual deacons or an actual subdeacon, six priests would do.)  The unavailability of sufficient clergy in most churches led to a bit of cheating where the priest/celebrant, the deacon, and the subdeacon of the Mass of the Pre-sanctified removed their chasubles and assumed diaconal stoles to stand in as deacons for the chanting of the Passion. 

4. The deacons and subdeacon(s) for the various ceremonies did not wear dalmatics and tunicles but the planetae plicatae

or folded chasubles—a chasuble—usually in the “fiddleback” style pinned up over the chest.  (I remember seeing these as late as an ordination in 1964 and they were pinned both front and back, but Mr. DiPippo speaks only of them being pinned in front.  I suspect the ordination folded chasubles were of a different symbolism than the ones in the Holy Week rites as this particular ordination was held a good nine years after the folded chasubles of Holy Week had been abolished.)  At certain times the deacon also wore the chasuble folded over the left shoulder and caught at the right side below the hip so as to give the impression of the “broad stole.”  This was worn over the deacon’s proper stole.  The 1955 revisions did away with all this and replaced the planetae plicatae with tunicles and dalmatics. 

5. The Blessing of Palms on Palm Sunday was an especially curious custom as while it preceded the Mass of the Palm Sunday it was a rite of its own that in many ways paralleled the Mass.  The congregation met ideally in a church or chapel distinct from the sanctuary where the Mass was to be offered.  The rite is a bizarre parallel to the Mass.  The palms awaiting the blessing were placed flat on the altar.  As the sacred ministers entered there was a sung introit followed by collect, epistle, gradual and gospel.  This was followed by a prayer that corresponds to the “Prayer over the Gifts at Mass,” and that, in turn was followed by a preface, Sanctus, and a pseudo-canon consisting of five prayers over the palms.   The palms were the distributed and a prayer, corresponding to the post-communion prayer is said before the procession leaves for the main church where the Mass was to be said.  Violet vestments were used throughout both the Blessing of Palms and the Mass.  (In the 1955 Rite, Red vestments are used for the Rite of Palms, Violet for the Mass.  Similarly the Good Friday Service is done entirely in Black Vestments but in the 1955 revision, violet is substituted for black during the communion rite.  This required   more changes of vestments in the 1955 Rite than in the previous rites, especially for Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and the Vigil of Easter.) 

I could go into far more detail about the pre-1955 rites but the point that strikes me most about both the 1570 Rite and the 1955 Rite is how little it incorporates the faithful.  Other than for the Procession of Palms, there is no point in a congregation gathering—they are entirely irrelevant to the Sacred Action.  It is, at best, an elegant ballet carried out by the corps des prêtres; often it was more of a “Chinese Fire Drill” of confused clergy, obtuse chierichetti, and unmarried men of a certain age and a seminary background who just like to hang around inside the altar rail fussing over burses, discarded copes, and the occasional humeral veil.  I have seen a lot of this crap (carefully chosen word) lately on some neo-trad blogs about how one can have “full, active, and conscious participation” in the Liturgy simply by being present attentively.  I understand that.  That is how I fully, actively, and consciously participate in La Boehme as I don’t think I can any longer hit the higher notes and besides I would lose my season tickets if I even tried.  But La Boehme is not the Mystery by which I am saved.  Popes going back to Pius X have encouraged direct participation in the liturgy by the assembly.   There have always been those liturgical mandarins who have wanted to restrict the liturgy to their own private preserve.  Some are priests.  (You know the pathology: “It’s my Mass!!!  We will do it my way!!!) Others are choir directors.  And now we have “liturgists.”  It can be Father’s “friend” who has his or her hand in every pie.   It can be any combination of people but in the end we must remember that the Liturgy is the work of the entire Church and it belongs equally to every member of the Church. 

So I was delighted to participate in the simple and reverent rituals of my parish church with beautiful music, devoid of pomp, prayerful and solemn but not stilted with our women getting their feet washed alongside the guys, our altar girls and boys, lectors and catechumens.  The only drama it encouraged was to walk the way of the Cross interiorly, in one own’s heart, as we accompanied Christ from the Upper Room of Thursday to the Empty Tomb of Easter Morn.

For What Did Christ Die?

As many of my regular readers know, one neo-trad site that I find worthwhile is New Liturgical Movement.  While those contributors whose focus is on the philosophical merits of restoring the pre-conciliar rites are generally not worth the time, there are frequent articles on historical points that give interesting insights into the history and development of our Catholic, indeed our Christian, faith.  In our storehouse of Catholicism’s two millennia of treasures there are more than some old gilt chairs that broke under the weight of the fat arse of some doddering prelate.  We have Chartres and the In Paradisum and blue as a liturgical color.  (In fact we have yellow as a liturgical color which is really a bit outré.)  We have Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus and the Canon of Addai and Mara, and the Easter Sepulcher and the hymns of the Roman Breviary.   Some, many, of the old things are probably best left in the storeroom, but some really need to be taken out a bit more often and polished-up and used.  But in doing so we always need to ask ourselves: What is the Church for which Jesus gave his life? 

There was a great video of the coronation of Pius XII (March 12, 1939) on the site.  It led me to a host of other old videos of the old days of prelates clad in silks and furs like Hollywood starlets or the San Francisco Gay Pride parade. (C’mon boys, even Cardinal Burke says that men should dress like men. Not that he practices what he preaches.) It is a reminder that to work on reinforcing our liturgy with elements both old and new is the work of wise stewards, but to build kingdoms other than the Kingdom of God is to make a mockery of the Cross.  

Reason 7 Why The New Mass Is an Improvement over the Old Liturgy

As I make my way around to various meetings and conferences, I am always a little leery about where I will end up for Mass.  The other week I was in northern Illinois and “caught” the 10:45 AM Mass at Saint Paul the Apostle Gurnee. I am sure that neither Good Pope John nor the “Fathers of Vatican II,” ever dreamed that the changes in the Liturgy for which they called would have resulted no only in such a radically transformed mode of worship, but such a dynamic and mission-minded Christian community.

Being off-radar these past two weeks have convinced me that I need to focus more and to tie up my various “series” lest they get lost in the pile of postings that are scattered over my hardrive.  One of those series I am close to finishing is the one on the ten reasons why the Liturgical Rites promulgated in the1970 Missal are superior to the rites of the 1570 Missal incorporating the liturgical reforms of the Council of Trent.

I had begun my series on why the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council are an advancement over the rites used prior to the Council in response to an article published on the Neo-Traditional website New Liturgical Movement making the counter claim in the NLM agenda of restoring the pre-conciliar rites as the normative.

So lets get back to the subject of why the current liturgical rites are the best available for the Roman Rite.  I am not saying that the current rites could not be better.  They could be much better.  But they are a vast improvement over the old rites.

And so to reason 7:

The Liturgy introduces us to the life of discipleship as we follow the saints through the Church year. 

This may sound strange because the “Old Mass” had a calendar of saints that rolled on day after day, in season and out of season, piling up two, three and four saints for any given day.  (If you checked out the martyrology for any given day you may find another dozen or so who didn’t make the Missal but who still, under certain circumstances, had an expectation of being commemorated.

The priest “reading the Mass” had to read, in order of importance of the feast assigned to each saint of the day, collect after collect, gathering them under a signal concluding

Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum, Filium tuum: qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum.

 This complex roll-calling of the Saints is one of the reasons that priests—both to avoid lengthening the daily morning Mass and to escape the liturgical ennui that is a by-product of saying Mass every day—took cover under the choice of saying the “Black Mass” (i.e. the requiem) leaving the saints unmentioned. 

There also are the numerous popes, bishops, virgins, and martyrs rattled off by the priest during Eucharistic Prayer I.    However, since both the (most often multiple) collects and the Eucharistic Prayer were recited sotto voce, the faithful in the pew was left in the dark about which of his heavenly brothers and sisters may be today receiving the honors of the Church.  The absence of homilies at daily (and not infrequently, Sunday) Mass did not help either.  We may have had saints but they didn’t get mentioned from the altar.  And when they did get mentioned it was too often for incredible legends of beheaded bishops walking the streets of Paris or a young virgin martyr suddenly springing a new pair of breasts to replace those the pervert executioner had amputated.  (If you want some omg laughs, read the antiphons for some of he feasts in the pre-conciliar breviary.)   

The calendar of the 1970 Rites has been pared down considerably and Lent and Advent have been designated for very few commemorations in order to allow the focus to remain on the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption.  There are norms to allow Saints from the older calendar, from the martyrology, or significant to the local church to still be celebrated but, excluding S N. and companions,  only one saint to the day is to be commemorated.  While many have been removed from the calendar, several hundred remain including more recent saints who have been introduced into the Liturgy in order to inspire contemporary Christians in the choices of discipleship. 

Most important, however, is the shift of place in which the saints have found themselves.  The current rites of the Church make it clear that Chris is our only intercessor at the Throne of Grace.  The saints today stand not above us presenting our prayers to God, but with us—praying with us, strengthening us, inspiriting us, accompanying us.  They are still powerful in their prayers but even stronger in the communion we share that knits us, saint and sinner into the One Body of Christ.  

When They Don't Let Truth Stand In The Way Of Their Story

 

The Sacrament House at
Furstenwalde Cathedral
in Germany 

On Monday last I posted the 5^th of my 10 reasons why the post-Vatican II Rite of the Mass is superior to the various pre-conciliar Rites used since the sixteenth century.  The series is in response to a posting on New Liturgical Movement by Professor Peter Kwasniwski of Wyoming Catholic College in which he makes the opposite claim.  In my argument for reason 5, I asserted that the New Rite more clearly unites the self-sacrifice of the worshipper to the Sacrifice of Christ and that the worshipper is not merely a passive witness to the priest’s offering of Christ in the Sacrifice of the Mass but recognizes that he or she, the worshipper, must surrender himself or herself to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in order to ourselves be transformed into Christ.  I took as my anchor for this understanding of the Mass and the transformative nature of the Eucharist Paul’s line in Galatians: I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live but Christ Jesus who lives in me.  I further backed this up with the post-consecration epiclesis in each of the Eucharistic Prayers—except for Prayer I (the so-called Roman Canon which is the only Eucharistic Prayer used in the pre-Conciliar Rites and which lacks a proper epiclesis) which invokes the Holy Spirit to come upon us and gather us into One in Christ’s Body.   The Mystery of our Faith, so well expressed in Romans 6, is that in our baptism we have been buried together with Christ so that we may be raised to newness of life in Christ.  There is nothing new in this idea of the Eucharist.  It can be found throughout the Fathers of the Church.  This dynamic understanding of the Eucharist is, I believe, lacking in the pre-Conciliar Rites which reflect the Scholastic, or Neo-Scholastic formulations of doctrine rather than the more ancient Patristic sources and are the much poorer theologically for that lack of Patristic foundation. 

In one of those moments of considerable irony, at the very minute I was posting my argument for this more intense understanding of Sacrifice in the Mass, Professor Kwasniewski was posting a new article on New Liturgical Movement blaming the loss of appreciation for the Sacrificial nature of the Mass on the removal of the tabernacle from the main altars of the churches.  I looked at the article quickly and planned to return to it later to find the flaws in this argument, but when I returned the next day to do my forensic work, the article was gone.  It has been taken down and replaced with the reprint on a rather pallid essay on how to determine the September Ember Days.  I regret that I had not cut and pasted the article into my files but, to be honest, I had never known New Liturgical Movement to remove a posting.  It can only be, I believe, because it was so egregiously wrong that it would have been an embarrassment to NLM to keep it.   As I have written in other postings, while I disagree with the agenda of New Liturgical Movement in its plans to make the Extraordinary Ordinary, that is to replace the revised Liturgy with the pre-Conciliar rites, I do find that many of their articles are, from a historical (or perhaps better, an antiquarian) point, quite good.  Indeed they save me a lot of work in my research by providing the very examples of late-Medieval and Tridentine liturgical texts that show the theological problems in the 16^th century Rites.   But Professor Kwasniewski doesn’t do that sort of historical work; he confines himself to opining on pious sentiments quite removed from the historical or even the theological. 

This article was a good example of his slipshod approach. In the first place it showed a soaring ignorance of the history of Eucharistic Reservation.  Secondly it betrayed a theological confusion over the relationship of the Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reserved Sacrament.  And finally—that this is what I find most appalling—it revealed the good Professor’s commitment to that very flaw I had warned against in my essay: the idea that the Eucharistic Sacrifice is something the priest does on our behalf but to which we are only passive onlookers.  The gentleman from Wyoming Catholic College provided the very proof of my allegation that in regards to the Eucharist demanding of us, the faithful, to unite ourselves to Christ in offering ourselves with Christ to the Father, the reformed rites of Vatican II express this mystery with far greater clarity than the pre-conciliar rites.  The entire article was about the Sacrifice of the Mass from the perspective that the priest offers the Sacrifice on our behalf rather than that Christ, in his Mystical Body (the Church, the community of the faithful) and personified by the ministry of the priest, invites us into the Sacrifice of Calvary by joining our lives to his in his offering of himself to the Father.  As by baptism we are joined indissolubly to Christ, it is required of us when we participate in the Eucharist to be with Christ the hostia of the Sacrifice.  In the Eucharist as in Baptism, We are to be crucified with Christ so that it is no longer we who live but Christ Jesus who lives in us.  This is no mere pious sentiment but being joined into Christ in perfect conformity to the Will of the Father is the essence of Christian living—not that we reach it, but that we are on the journey of such conversion.  Professor Kwasniewski has a different understanding of the Sacrifice of the Mass, one that stresses the atonement of Christ for our sins but one that doesn’t demand much of us in return.  But then the more I read of his work the more obvious it is that he is working outside his field of specialty.  That’s ok.  We all have our hobbies we do for enjoyment and sometimes we even become skilled at them.  May it be so for the good Professor. 

So while we are at it, let’s look at the history of Eucharistic Reservation, another topic the Professor isn’t adept in and one that is in my bailiwick. 

An acquaintance of mine who once taught sacramental theology at Saint Charles Seminary in Philadelphia told the story that when he was covering the practice of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament and mentioned that this is a 13^th century Rite, some Franciscan Missionaries of the Incarnate Word (the community of Religious men associated with Mother Angelica of EWTN fame) objected as “Mother” had told them how the apostles used to have Benediction and Eucharistic devotions such as processions.  Well, as they say, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.  But Eucharistic Adoration—and its accompanying ceremonials such as Benediction and Eucharistic Processions—do in fact date only the 13^th century and are pretty much limited to the Western Church.  The custom of reserving the Eucharist, on the other hand, does date back to the early days of the Church but in some very different forms than those which we practice and some forms which would cause a modern day chancery rat to run to his canon law books. 

In the earliest centuries of the Church when the Eucharist was normally celebrated only Sundays and the anniversaries of some key martyrs, the faithful often brought the Eucharist home to consume during the week.  It was also brought by the deacons or by other special ministers to those in prison or to the sick who were unable to come to the Eucharistic celebration.  In the same way, some of the Eucharistic bread would be kept in the church building or in the home of the bishop for viaticum or communion for the dying.  There was nothing special about how it was reserved.  It would most often be in a locked cabinet along with the scriptural books and other books used for the liturgy.  The sacred oils might also be kept in the same cabinet. 

By the sixth and seventh centuries, it became more common to reserve the Eucharist by itself and in the church proper.  In the 9^th and 10^th century it was common in many places in northern Europe to reserve the Eucharistic bread in a silver (or other metal) dove suspended over the altar.  In other places it was not unusual for it to be kept in an aumbry, a safe set into the rear wall of a chapel or church.  By the High Middle Ages (the 12 century and after) Sacrament Houses began appearing: a tall column with something not unlike a modern tabernacle on top.  These usually stood in the sanctuary of the church, somewhere behind the altar. 

Through the course of the Middle Ages it became a custom to put candles, relics, flowers, and other devotional objects or decorations on stands behind the altar.  In the baroque period (16^th century) these eventually became affixed to the altar in the form of step-like shelves known as gradines.   It was about this time that the form of the altar that most of us knew growing up: an altar facing away from the people with candles and flowers arranged behind and a tabernacle and crucifix built into the gradines behind, became normative in the Western Church.

Under the 1917 Code of Canon Law, it was forbidden to reserve the Blessed Sacrament on the main altar of a Cathedral or a Collegiate Church.  In those cases the Blessed Sacrament was to be reserved in a chapel of its own, distinct from the main body of the Church.  In the Papal Basilicas of Rome the Blessed Sacrament is always reserved in it own chapel which admittedly is larger than most parish churches in this country. 

While the canons governing the reservation of the Eucharist had from the earliest days demanded that it be kept in a safe place and treated with honor, the practice of adoring the Reserved Sacrament only emerges at the beginning of the 13^th century and was due to several heretical groups, most notably the Cathars or Albigensians, denying that Christ was truly present in the Eucharist.

The Church had (and still has) the custom of displaying relics of the saints in reliquaries of precious or semi-precious metals with a crystal or glass ocula through which the relic could be seen.  Well the forearm of Saint Anne or some strands of hair from Saint  George are all well and good, but hey: we have here in the Eucharist a “relic” of Jesus, a piece of his flesh as it were.  And so in the 13^th centuries monstrances or ostensaria, a reliquary for Jesus if you would, came into practice in the Western Church.  Other devotional practices long associated with the relics of the saints—processions, blessings, etc—now came to be done with the Blessed Sacrament as well.  I am not sure that we want to consider the Blessed Sacrament equivalent to some relic of a saint but that is how those practices developed. 

In 1264 Pope Urban IV instituted the feast of Corpus Christi and commissioned Thomas Aquinas to write the office for the new feast.   

I have mentioned “The Western Church” pretty consistently through this posting.  What about the East?  While the exact practices of reservation differ somewhat from rite to rite, there has not developed a cult of the Blessed Sacrament as developed in the Western Church.  For awhile in the 18^th and 19^th centuries attempts to “Latinize” some of the Eastern Rites introduced Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament as well as Stations of the Cross and other Western Rite devotions.  In Eastern Europe and the Near East most of these Latinizations were resisted but in the immigrant Church in the United States they often were signs of “belonging.”  Since Vatican II  however, the various Synods of the Eastern Churches have eliminated Western practices that had snuck in to the Eastern Rites and you won’t find any tradition of worshipping the Eucharistic elements as we do in the West. 

In the East, like in the Western Church, the Eucharist was at first kept in a cupboard in the sacristy or in the church itself along with other sacred objects used for the Eucharist.  It was reserved only for communion outside of the Liturgy, especially for the sick or for the dying. The Eastern Church traditionally does not celebrate the Liturgy every day and it is forbidden to celebrate on Wednesdays and Fridays of Lent.  On these days communion is given to the faithful at the Liturgy of the Pre-Sanctified Gifts from the Eucharist consecrated the previous Sunday.  At the Liturgy of the pre-Sanctified gifts, the Eucharistic bread which has been reserved rather simply, often on the Prothesis or Table of Preparation where the bread and wine are prepared for the Eucharist, is cut into cubes and placed into the chalice.  The priest then adds unconsecrated wine which, by contact with the consecrated bread, becomes the Blood of Christ and is admininistered to the faithful on a communion spoon in the same fashion as at the Liturgy proper. 

Eucharistic Reservation is a bit of a challenge in the Eastern Churches because they use leavened bread which is more easily subject to mold or other deformations.  To reserve the Eucharist for more than a few days, the “lamb” the core of the Eucharistic loaf, is soaked in the Precious Blood and allowed to dry.  It is then stored in a tabernacle kept on the altar and which is often shaped like a small church. When the priest wishes to bring communion to the sick he scrapes some crumbs from the dried “Lamb” and puts them into a pyx.  At the home of the sick person he places these fragments in a chalice to which he adds ordinary wine.  The wine is considered consecrated by contact with the “Lamb” and he administers this to the sick person on a Eucharistic spoon. 

So we can see that while Professor Kwasniewski might want to see the tabernacle returned to the main altar, he can’t claim that this is the ancient practice of the Church.  Moreover counter to his thesis that removing the tabernacle from the main altar has weakened our appreciation of the Sacrifice of the Mass, we can see that in the centuries where our theology of Eucharistic Sacrifice evolved there was no practice of reserving the Eucharist on the main Altar.  And it never was the custom in cathedrals or major churches.  I am sure it brings back memories of his childhood ecstasies but ultimately it is a matter of piety and not faith; nostalgia and not theology. Oh,--and it would make those awful priest-facing-the-people Masses obsolete. Maybe that is his real agenda.