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.  

Anger, Ritual, and Krazies

Jonathan Edwards

Ritual is a highly complex set of symbols that expresses—both on conscious and less-than-conscious levels our relationship with the Divine, with society, with specific others, and with ourselves.  Anthropologists can tell much about societies from their rituals and much about individuals, not only by their private rituals but also by how they relate to the communal rituals to the various societies to which they belong. 

While we are going to be looking at religious rituals in particular in this posting, ritual goes far beyond the religious.  We stand for the national anthem.  We sing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” during the seventh-inning stretch.  We eat roast turkey for Thanksgiving.  Brides wear white for their first wedding.  We blow out candles on a cake and sing happy-birthday to mark another year of age.  When individuals deviate from these rituals, or elaborate on them, or ignore them completely, it tells us some things about them. 

Families have rituals too.  Italian families often have pasta as the first course of Sunday dinner; Portuguese have a fish plate to begin the meal.  Some families go out to breakfast after Sunday Mass, others cook a big breakfast at home.  Some families have a particular grace they say before a meal.  Some parents say night prayers with their children before they go to bed.  Some families keep an Infant of Prague or a statue of the Blessed Mother in a prominent place in their home.  Most families put up a tree at Christmas and have traditional ornaments that are particular to their family.  All these things reflect certain values and ideas, theologies even, about the various families. 

And individuals have rituals.  There are certain prayers they say in the morning or at night.  They may pray the rosary or begin a car trip with a specific prayer.  They may telephone a parent or a sibling at a specific time each week.  They may choose a certain flower for their garden or put a religious statue somewhere in their garden.  There might be a certain song they listen to when lonely or when wanting to remember a loved one.  They may visit a cemetery or go back to a specific place that holds a special memory.  

Many of these rituals which we celebrate we do without reflecting on their meaning but they each, in some way or other, bring us comfort or fulfill some meaning in our lives.  Anthropologists, psychologists, or other social scientists can tell us things about ourselves by the rituals we follow or the approach we take to social rituals.  The father of some friends of mine was raised in a very strict Polish Catholic family but in college became—or claims to have become—an atheist.  Every year on Good Friday he eats a big plate of kielbasa at three in the afternoon.  It is a ritual for him.  He says that it expresses his belief that religion is a bunch of b.s.   It may, but I think it also represents a rebellious anger against his upbringing and his desire to disassimilate himself from the Polish and Catholic heritage in which he was raised.  When I was in college—many, many years ago—I used to attend Sunday night services in the Lutheran Church up the street. It was an informal service and people could request a favorite hymn.  There was one gentleman who every week asked for “Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling.”  It wasn’t church if we didn’t sing “Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling.”  This song carried some specific meaning for him on which his entire relationship with God seemed to depend.  I don’t think that was particularly healthy but then rituals can, and often do, express more about our neuroses than our healthy side, especially when those rituals become compulsive behaviors. 

We wrote in the previous posting about the popularity of an angry God in certain circles.  An angry God reflects the faith of an angry believer.  Our society is riddled with anger, indeed we can talk about the “culture of anger” which is another aspect of what Pope John Paul referred to as the “culture of death.”  How much of our television and our movies are about anger, violence, and vengeance?  We are raising our children on the pornography of violence with video games that are about destruction, violence, and death.  Some people feel a need to have semi-automatic weapons in their homes and the strongest lobby in our country is the N.R.A., an organization that builds a culture of fear directed towards a host of undifferentiated “others” from Hispanic immigrants to the Federal Government to Muslims to unspecified liberals to an invasion force from Canada. 

I refer to the “Katholic Krazies” as a spectrum of wing-nuts from hausfrauen Mary Ann Kreitzer of Les Femmes and Janet Baker of Restore DC Catholicism to the genuinely sociopathic minds behind Pope Francis The Destroyer and Mundabor’s Blog to the delusional episcopal wannabes of sedevacantists Daniel Dolan and Mark Pivarunas.  What they have in common is an attraction to an angry god. 

The roots of societal anger—by which I mean those who are angry with society or because of society—are that people feel powerless and disenfranchised.  Often they feel they are not being heard, their opinions are not being respected, they have no influence over the way that the larger society in which they live is running its course.  A sense of powerlessness creates panic and panic can manifest itself in strong anger.  Religious people who feel powerless about the Church—any Church, their Church whichever Church it is—project their anger onto God to validate and make “righteous” their anger.  One can go back to Jonathan Edwards and his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” preached at Northampton Massachusetts in 1741.  Edwards had much to be unhappy about.  While Independence was thirty-five years in the future, the colonists were already feeling themselves to be second-class Englishmen, disregarded by the establishment at home in London.  Moreover, Edwards was a “dissenter”—a Congregationalist in a Congregationalist colony but an Anglican empire.  And he could see that even in his colony of Massachusetts Congregationalism was losing ground to Anglicanism on the one side and to Unitarianism on the other.  Indeed, as the Congregationalists lost their grip on control of Massachusetts, the colony—and indeed all the American colonies—were becoming less and less religious as they grew more and more prosperous.  The original Puritan vision for Massachusetts of a commonwealth was fast disappearing as the Boston merchant class grew wealthier and wealthier and the farmers in western Massachusetts (where Northampton is) worked harder and harder just to survive. 

Puritans like Edwards had certain rituals and ritualistic principles to which they clung furiously.  These principles were essentially re-active in as that they were a reaction to the liturgical principles of the Church of England which Puritans thought had not been sufficiently “purified” of Catholic practices.  (In the next several entries on the History of the Anglican Church we are going to see more about this conflict.)  The set prayers of the Anglican Prayer Book were rejected for the extempore prayer of the Puritan preacher.  The Surplice was rejected for the black academic gown.  The communion table was set aside for a dominant pulpit.  Kneeling for communion was replaced by remaining in one’s seat as the bread and cup were passed along to you in your place. 

What about our angry Catholics and how they view ritual?  An angry God needs propitiation to hold back his wrath.  The Mass, therefore, is first and foremost (and for many, exclusively) a sacrifice.  Christ the victim is offered in sacrifice to appease the Divine Wrath.  Day after day the sacrifice is repeated, the Divine Victim is offered again and again, to counter-balance the sinfulness of the world. 

A sacrifice requires a priest who offers the sacrifice on our behalf.  Because he offers it on our behalf, he goes forth from us and ascends the altar to offer his victim.  The place of sacrifice needs separation from the unholy for whom it is offered.  It is to be elevated and walled off.  Only the priest and his assistants can be in the sacred space.  The priest, since he faces God on our behalf, needs to stand between us and God, thus with his back turned towards us.  It also is necessary that he clearly be not one of us.  He must be worthy of the role of intermediary between God and us, as sinless as possible.  Thus he should have nothing to do with sex, which is the primal base of human sinfulness.  He needs to be dressed differently from us to mark that he is consecrated in a way that we are not.  He needs to speak to God in an arcane language and in a whisper we cannot, for the most part, hear.  The sacrifice must be an experience of total otherness if it is to be accepted by God who is wholly Other. 

We can see why the current liturgy is so threatening to those who have a need for their prayer to appease an angry God.  An altar that positions the priest standing in the middle of the congregation, or even with the priest facing the people across it, changes the entire dynamic.  The idea of a community of people, not huddled in fear but relaxed and comfortable and “very much themselves” in the presence of God undermines their entire concept of God as the Divine Reflection of their rage.  For the priest to celebrate the Mass—to offer the Sacrifice—not on their behalf but with them as full, conscious, and active participants requires a drastic theological—as well as psychological and anthropological—shift that is just too much for some.  We look at this in more detail in future postings.  

More on the Mass as Sacrifice --What It Means and What it doesn't Mean

14th century bas-relief depicting

Mass facing the People on the

facade of Lucca Cathedral.

OK, this posting will be a little more heavy than my usual and it may interest a more limited audience, but in the last posting, I dealt with the idea of the Mass as Sacrifice from the perspective of the prayers in the offertory of the Mass of Pius V where the bread and wine are specifically referred to as a Sacrifice.  This is theologically problematic and is one of the reasons that the offertory rite was so drastically revised in the Reform of the Liturgy following the Second Vatican Council.  The Mass is a Sacrifice in as that in the Mass we participate in the one eternal Sacrifice of Christ made on the Cross at Calvary and to which we become mystically present when “we proclaim the Death of the Lord until he comes…”  (I am using the word “mystically” here in the sense that Pius XII used it so describe the Church as the Body of Christ in Mystici Corporis. It does not mean “spiritually” or “symbolically,” nor is it meant to connote the abstraction that is often meant when we use the word “mystic.”  In some sense, mystic means “sacramental,” but it is meant to convey a reality that is more authentic—more real—than the literal or physical sense.  In other words, in the Eucharistic Celebration we are truly and fully present to the Sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, even more present to it than were those who stood there at the foot of the Cross.)  In no sense is Christ offered in Sacrifice again and again each day on the altars of our churches, much less do we offer God a sacrifice of bread and wine.  We do present to God’s service the gifts of bread and wine so that the Lord’s Death might be proclaimed until he comes again but this should not be considered a “sacrifice.”  Were I a theologian I might go on about how the bread and wine are symbols of our own lives which are presented on the altar so that by Christ’s Redeeming Sacrifice and the Power of the Holy Spirit called down we, by virtue of our baptism, are conformed to Christ in his death and Resurrection and so become his Body—but since I am not a theologian I don’t intend to go there.  I had planned in this posting to talk about Cranmer’s reaction to the concept of the Mass as Sacrifice, but I realize that before I go there, I need to look at the Roman Canon, the Eucharistic Prayer which, in Cranmer’s day was the only Eucharistic Prayer used in the Western Church (including the distinctly English Rites), to see how the idea of the Mass as Sacrifice is found there.  So let’s look at the Roman Canon. 
There are various phrases in the canon that make it clear that a sacrifice is being offered to God in this rite.  I will highlight the sacrificial language.  Pardon the Latin, but to demonstrate the point, we need to cite the untranslated text lest the translation add or subtract meaning. 

uti accepta habeas et benedicas  haec dona haec munera, haec sancta sacrificia illibata,

vel qui tibi offerunt hoc sacrificium laudis, pro se suisque omnibus: pro redemtione animarum suarum, pro spe salutis et incolumitatis suae:

Hanc igitur oblationem servitutis nostrae, sed et cunctae familiae tuae, quaesumus, Domine, ut placatus accipias:

Supra quae propitio ac sereno vultu respicere digneris: et accepta habere, siculti accepta habere dignatus es munera pueri tui iusti Abel, et sacrificium Patriarchae nostri Abrahae, et quod tibi obtulit summus sacerdos tuus Melchisedech, sanctum sacrificium, immaculatam hostiam.

Supplices te rogamus, omnipotens Deus: iube haec perferri per manus sancti Angeli tui in sublime altare tuum, in conspectu divinae maiestatis tuae;

But it is also clear from the prayers, that the sacrifice being offered is not bread and wine, but Christ himself, highlighting not only the sacrificial language, but the reference to the sacrifice being Christ. 

Quam oblationem tu, Deus, in omnibus, quaesumus, benedictam, adscriptam, ratam, rationabilem, acceptabilemque facere digneris: ut nobis Corpus et Sanguis fiat dilectissimi Filii tui, Domini nostri Iesu Christi.

ut quotquot ex hac altaris participatione sacrosanctum Filii tui Corpus et Sanguinem sumpserimus,

And it is clear that Christ is not being sacrificed anew but rather that are recalling his one eternal sacrifice.  I have highlighted the phrase, unde et memores, in addition to the sacrificial language because that phrase, usually translated “Calling to mind…”  or in the current translation, “we celebrate the memorial” neither of which phrase keeps the Latin syntax despite Liturgiam authenticam.   

Unde et memores, Domine, nos servi tui, sed et plebs tua sancta, eiusdem Christi, Filii Tui, Domini nostri, tam beatae passionis, necnon et ab inferis resurrectionis, sed et in caelos gloriosae ascensionis: offerimus praeclarae maiestati tuae de tuis donis ac datis hostiam puram, hostiam sanctam, hostiam immaculatam, Panem sanctam vitae aeternae et Calicem salutis perpetuae.

What may have been clear in the seventh century when the Roman Canon achieved what was more or less to be its definitive form, was no longer clear in the sixteenth century (much less the 20^th)  and the nuances of the theology of Eucharistic sacrifice were lost leading to exaggerated ideas.  In their attempts to restore the pristine faith regarding the Eucharist, reformers from Luther to Cranmer to Calvin to Zwingli universally rejected any and all sacrificial language, thus snapping the connection of the Eucharist to the Cross and reducing the Eucharist is a commemoration, not of the cross but of the Last Supper.  Fortunately the recovery of the patristic tradition has led most Protestant—or at least Anglican and Lutheran—scholars back to appreciation of the Eucharist as a sacramental participation in the Death of the Lord until he comes again.  It can also be said regarding us Catholics, that the revised Liturgy of Paul VI has done much to restore our balance in approaching the Eucharist as Sacrifice by clarifying the relationship of the Eucharistic Celebration to the paschal mystery and reducing the superstitious understanding prevalent at the time of the Reformation and, among the ignorant, still prevalent on the eve of the Council.  In regard to a clear theology of the Eucharist, the revised rites of Paul VI are greatly superior to the ambiguities found in the old Missal used until the revisions of Vatican II. 

 

Grateful to Father Anthony For Recognition

Shortly before I was taken ill last month, I received an email from a friend and colleague in Australia telling me that my Blog: What Sister Never Knew and Father Never Told You, had come to the favorable attention of Father Anthony Ruff, OSB and the blog he coordinates: Pray Tell http://www.praytellblog.com/ .  I have never done anything to promote my blog and have watched it grow slowly over the last several years.  I had been a bit startled to suddenly see the number of hits double and even treble in mid-February and wondered for what reason this might account.  I was flattered to have Father Anthony write: Whoever runs the blog about church history “What Sister Never Knew and Father Never Told You” knows his stuff. 
I have long admired Anthony Ruff.  Dom Anthony is a monk of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville and teaches Liturgy and Liturgical Music there at the University.  He also writes well on monastic spirituality.  Father Anthony had served on the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) in preparing the revised translation of the Third Edition of the Roman Missal which was introduced two years ago as the “new translation” of the Roman Liturgy in the United States.  At the last moment, Father Anthony withdrew from ICEL and published an open letter explaining why he would not promote the “new translation.”  “I'm sure bishops want a speaker who can put the new missal in a positive light, and that would require me to say things I do not believe."
I am not as negative as many towards this new translation.  Overall I find it extremely artificial with its retention of Latin Syntax which simply does not translate well into contemporary English.  On the other hand, there is some lovely phraseology and in particular I am grateful for the return of “From the Rising of the Sun unto its Setting, a Perfect Sacrifice may be offered to the Glory of Your Name” rather than that pedestrian (though still idiomatically accurate) translation: “From East to West etc.”  The better celebrants I know somewhat pick and choose and between the various translations and massage the faux-Ciceronian syntax into something intelligible.  One priest told me that he actually likes the new translation because it has freed him from a slavish dependency on the book and encouraged him to “pray” the prayers from his heart rather than read them by rote.  But I wander.
I am flattered at Father Anthony’s review of my entry on Cranmer and Eucharistic Sacrifice (http://www.praytellblog.com/index.php/2014/02/15/what-sister-never-knew-and-father-never-told-you-about-the-mass-as-sacrifice/) and amused at the firestorm it unleashed.  The comments section validated my reasons for talking about the Anglican Liturgy of the First and Second Prayer Books of King Edward VI.  I could not care less about sixteenth-century Anglican liturgies no one uses today.  My point was to draw attention to the flaws regarding an oblatio of bread and wine in some late medieval western liturgies and in the Missal of Pius V.  I am deeply grateful for the 1970 Missal and what is, I believe, a far more clear celebration of our Christian Faith in Christ’s Redemptive Sacrifice as we encounter it Sunday after Sunday (or, for some of us, day after day) in the Eucharistic Banquet.   Father Anthony cited my posting as a reason why “we can’t go back” and that is very much my point.  The 1970 Missal has several flaws, but so does the 1570 Rite (and its 1962 Edition) and there is no doubt that the 1970 Rite is vastly superior as an expression of our historic faith as found in the Scriptures and the Church Fathers. 
That being said, it was later drawn to my attention that this blog, What Sister Never Knew and Father Never Told You  was also given a recognition on  New Catholic Blogs http://newcatholicblogs.blogspot.com/.  I don’t seek acknowledgement but am grateful for whatever attention these mentions bring What Sister Never Knew and Father Never Told You.  

More on the Problem of a Double Sacrifice

I had an interesting response to one of my postings and I want to examine it critically as it shows, I believe, some of the misunderstandings of our Catholic faith by people who have been inadequately catechized. 

Isn't an offering of bread and wine an appropriate at this point in the mass, preceding as it does the Eucharistic sacrifice, seeing as Jesus is high priest according to the order of Melchizedek? Melchizedek, after all, did offer bread and wine. By this I mean, as Melchizedek was the Old Testament figure of Christ as High Priest, and priests offer sacrifices. Seeing as the Mass is a recapitulation of the saving action of The Word of God, including some referent to the pre-Incarnation work of God redeeming mankind isn't out of place. Ergo, if it is an offering, even if it suggests that there are in fact two offerings during the mass, essentially, so what? From what little I've read, while not being specifically prepared to respond to your trumped up accusation of "blasphemy", I pretty sure I could gather up support that refutes your charge.   Foundations of the Anglican Church LXVII

“Isn’t an offering of bread and wine appropriate at this point in the mass…”   Offering is an ambiguous word.    In the sense of presenting the bread and wine for the Eucharistic Sacrifice, there is no problem, but I wasn’t writing of an “offering” but rather of a sacrifice (oblatio, the word used in the prayer Suscipe Sancte Pater and where the hostiam being offered is not Christ the Victim but the bread and the wine).  The Church teaches that the Sacrifice of Christ is the one efficacious sacrifice and the only sacrifice of the new covenant.  It is demeaning of the Sacrifice of Calvary in which each Mass participates to consider any other “sacrifice” that might be offered.  The bread and wine—and indeed the financial gifts and other items presented—oil, candles, flowers, etc. may be said to be “offered” but offered as gifts and not as Sacrifice.    This is not a fine line.  We can present things to God’s service.  We may donate a vestment to the Church or sacred vessels to be used at Mass.  We may make a charitable donation for the homeless.  These gifts may be a “sacrifice” in the that they cost us more than we can comfortably give.  But as for Sacrifice: there is one and one only in the new Covenant and it is Christ’s Sacrifice at Calvary in which we participate each time we “proclaim the Lord’s Death until he comes again.” 

Our correspondent continues:
Seeing as the Mass is a recapitulation of the saving action of The Word of God, including some referent to the pre-Incarnation work of God redeeming mankind isn't out of place.
I am not sure where our reader got the idea that the mass is a recapitulation of the saving action of the Word of God, including the pre Incarnation work of God redeeming mankind, but he certainly did not get this from either Scripture or our Catholic Tradition.  There are pious writers who suggest such things for meditation, and within certain limits that is fine, but The Mass is a participation in the Saving action of Christ on Calvary.  It, or rather the Sacrifice of Calvary, may sum up the entire redemptive work of God through both covenants in as that it is the completing and fulfilling deed, but it is Calvary’s Sacrifice and Calvary’s Sacrifice alone which the Mass re-presents.  There is no other work by which we are saved than Christ’s Sacrifice at Calvary.  Our salvation is not the result of a cumulative process of God’s saving acts.  There is one and one only definitive act by which we are saved and that is the cross.   At the Mass we may recall the Passover of the Hebrew people (Especially on Holy Thursday), or the deliverance of Noah and his family, or the victory of the Maccabees, or the sacrifice of bread and wine by Melchizedek,  but we certainly don’t simply place the Cross at the end of this long string of God’s redemptive acts.  The Cross stands alone as the sole and definitive Sacrifice by which we are saved.  Through the entire liturgy—including the Liturgy of the Hours, and especially in the Easter Vigil, we recall this long saga of salvation but the relationship of Christ’s eternal sacrifice to the Mass is unique and uncompromised for it is by Calvary and Calvary alone that humankind is reconciled to the Father.  In other words, the relationship of the Liturgy to the Giving of the Law on Sinai, for example, is not the same as the relationship of the Mass to the Death of the Lord. 
We are not saved through Noah or Melchizedek or even Abraham’s faith.   Cardinal Ratzinger made it abundantly clear in Dominus Iesus that salvation is through Christ and Christ alone.  Pious reflection on the parallels of the Sacrifice of Melchizedek and the Eucharistic banquet are very appropriate and sources of grace—but they must not be stretched to theological distortion. 
The issue behind this discussion is that the oblatio of bread and wine in the Mass of Pius V is seriously problematic from a theological background.  The development of a second sacrifice of bread and wine is inconsistent with the ancient liturgies and indeed with our faith that Christ offers the one eternal redemptive Sacrifice at Calvary.  Each Mass participates in that one eternal Sacrifice but in no way is Christ sacrificed anew and in no way is bread and wine a hostiam (sacrificial victim) at the mass as the word oblatio in the prayer Suscipe Sancte Pater, implies.  I am not saying that this theological slop-shop invalidates the Mass.  By no means.  That Liturgy served as the Church’s primary vehicle for the Church’s latria  for four centuries.  But its elimination from the 1970 Rite corrects a serious flaw in the 1570 Rite and, as Father Anthony Ruff points out, serves as a serious reason why we cannot go back to the earlier Rite. 
Our correspondent goes even more off track about Christ and the priesthood of Melchizedek but let me save that for another time.