Another Posting On Why The Revised Rites of Vatican II Are Better Than The Unreformed Pre-Conciliar Rites

Reason 6 of why the current liturgical rites are superior to the pre-Conciliar rites is that the liturgy walks us through the cycle of Christ’s birth, life, teaching, suffering, death, resurrection and sending the Holy Spirit. 

Of course the pre-Conciliar rites also took us through the anticipation of Christ’s Incarnation (Advent), The Mystery of his Incarnation (Christmas) his teaching (Sundays after Epiphany and Sundays after Pentecost) and the Paschal Mystery of his Suffering, Death and Resurrection (Septuagesima, Lent, Easter and Pentecost), but it was a very different experience.  In the first place the 1970 revision uses a three-year cycle of readings that literally triples the amount of Gospel and Scripture readings to which we are exposed in the Sunday Liturgy.  (The Daily Lectionary is a two-year cycle which therefore increases the scriptures used at daily Mass by 50% as the Gospels are the same in both years.)  The expanded Lectionary not only exposes us to more of the Word of God, but gives us the same narratives of the life and teaching of Jesus from the perspectives of the different Evangelists. 

In addition to the expanded Lectionary and the more extended use of Scripture readings, the faithful actually hear the readings.  While the custom before the Council was generally that the Gospel be read a second time in the vernacular on Sundays, at daily Mass the readings were simply read sotto voce by the priest at the altar and in Latin, meaning that only if the faithful had a daily missal with them could they access the readings.  And it was not unknown in the “old Mass” that not even the Gospel was read to the people in their own language.  It only mattered that the priest “say the Mass” as he “said it for us” and we were onlookers to the sacred action. We had neither to hear nor to comprehend but only to be present.   

Another example of how little we were exposed to the scriptures before the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council is that it was the common practice that whenever possible the Requiem Mass be said for the person for whom the stipend was being offered.  The readings for the Requiem Mass did not change from day to day but were always the exact same reading.  It was entirely possible that from a Monday through a Saturday, the same Epistle and Gospel were read at Mass each day.

When there was a feast that pre-empted the opportunity to use the Requiem Mass, the readings were almost always from the propers of that feast, or more exactly the “commons” of the particular genre to which the saint of the day belonged.  So if the feast were that of a Virgin Martyr such as Saint Cecilia, the exact same readings were used for several dozen other feasts through the year—Saints Ursula, Barbara, Lucy, Perpetua, Agatha, etc.  Same for Bishop Confessors: Martin, Patrick, Ambrose, Gregory, Leo.   Same for Martyrs: George, Vincent, Justin, Ignatius, etc.  Greater Apostles (Peter, Paul, John) might have their particular readings, or at least a particular Gospel, but the majority of them—Jude, Simon, Matthias, Thomas, etc tended to get lumped together with the same readings, or at least for their Epistles.  And of course Saturdays were the Votive Mass of Our Lady with the same readings each week.  All in all, it was a tiny portion of the New Testament that was read at Mass and little, if any, of the Old. 

Lent was extended with the addition of Septuagesima—a period of three weeks affixed to the First Sunday of Lent.  This took three Sundays where the Vatican II Liturgy focuses on the teaching and miracles of Jesus and added them to the focus on his Passion and Death.  This deemphasizes discipleship in favor of our being passive onlookers to the Passion and Death of the Lord. 

All in all the pre-Conciliar Rites minimized the importance of the Scriptures and restricted liturgical access to them in favor of the priest offering the Sacrifice on our behalf but without our active participation.  It fit the needs of the sixteenth century where the bulk of Catholics were illiterate and uncatechized but it also kept the faithful from growing in their faith and committing themselves to active discipleship.  

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.  

Reason 5 Why The "New Mass" Is Superior To The Old Rite

Doesn't it just say: I have been
crucified with Christ; it is no longer
I who live but Christ Jesus who
lives in me.

Well, by this time it is probably clear that I have some form of ADHD as I start various series and keep jumping around from one topic to another.  I need to focus.  And so I want to get back to my ten reasons why the Ordinary Form of the Mass in the Roman Rite (the Vatican II Rite or the 1970 Missal) is superior to the Extraordinary Form (The Tridentine Rite, or the various editions of the Roman Missal—and associated rites such as the Dominican or Carmelite or Carthusian—that were produced in 1570 or at other points between the Council of Trent and the Second Vatican Council).

This series was triggered by a set of articles in New Liturgical Movement by one Professor Peter Kwasniewski of Wyoming Catholic College making the opposite claim.  While New Liturgical Movement often has some well researched historical articles that are invaluable sources for the historical development of the Liturgy, Doctor Kwasniewski usually contents himself with more specious essays bordering on the inane.  Nevertheless, as poorly reasoned as his article was, it does give me the opportunity to point out why the Liturgical Reforms of Vatican II are not only greatly beneficial to Christian life but were absolutely necessary to correct the faulty trajectory the Church was headed down ever since the Neo-Scholastic/Romantic revival of the 19^th century.  So lets look at reason 5 of why the New Liturgy is superior to the pre-conciliar rite: Because of its centrality in conforming us to Christ, the Liturgy must be a clear and unambiguous witness of our Trinitarian and Incarnational faith

Let’s begin with “What is the Mass?”  And let’s go back to the old Baltimore Catechism so beloved of the krazies who want to bring back the old Mass and everything with it.  the Catechism says

The Mass is the sacrifice of the New Law in which Christ, through the ministry of the priest, offers Himself to God in an unbloody manner under the appearances of bread and wine. 

This actually isn’t a bad answer.  At least as a beginning.  The trouble with the Catechism, however—and the theological framework which produced it—is that it takes the sacraments in isolation and does not see the relationship between them.  The key sacrament of the Catholic Church is not the Eucharist but Baptism and the Eucharist can only be understood in the light of what happens at Baptism

Now for Baptism I am not going to go back to the Catechism because the Catechism reflects the problem created when Scholastic Theology—based on Aristotelian logic—replaced the ancient Patristic theological tradition in which the Fathers of the Church rooted themselves.  The Fathers of the Church drew on scriptures and interpreted them in the light of neo-Platonic thought which was not so much rational as mystical.  The Fathers saw our earthly rites as having spiritual or heavenly meanings.  They were big into symbolism while the Scholastics liked a certain literalism.  The Scholastics got a bit carried away with the idea that Baptism is about “washing away” original sin.  The Fathers of the Church, drawing on Saint Paul, had seen Baptism as entering into death with Christ and being raised with him to newness of life. 

Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.

The earthly rite of entering into the waters of baptism and emerging from them are symbolic of being buried with Christ and being raised with him.  It had nothing to do with original sin.

The idea of original sin is in the Fathers of the Church, Saint Augustine in particular, but it is found only in the Fathers of the Western Church and is rooted, in great part, in a misunderstanding by Saint Augustine of Saint Paul’s famous line

Therefore, just as through one person sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned

Augustine had mistranslated this passage to read

Therefore, just as through one man (Adam) sin entered the world, and through sin death, and thus death came to all because one man (Adam) had sinned.

As the Western Church began more and more to emphasize original sin in the central Middle Ages (800-1100) it also forgot the Patristic theology that Baptism is about dying and rising with Christ.  When the Scholastics came along in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, they saw the water being poured and thought: “Washing, we are purifying the person of original sin. Scrub! Scrub!  Scrub!  Out, out, damned Spot.” 

The Eastern Church kept the practice of immersion baptism and so the visual symbol of dying and rising in Christ was strong, while the sacramental minimalism of the Western Church permitted baptism to be reduced to a sprinkling or pouring and the sign became purification rather than dying and rising.  This is one reason why it is so important to restore immersion as the normal form of baptism.  But I don’t want to wander far away from the topic of the Mass, so let me refocus.

In the first centuries of the Church, the practice was that only the baptized faithful could be present for the Eucharist.  The unbaptized, including the catechumens, were dismissed at the end of the sermon.  Thus the first time Christians were present at the Eucharist was on the night of their baptism.  They had just been through this profound rite of being led down into a pool of water where they were submerged three times—in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  They had died in Christ and were then led up out of the pool and anointed with sweet oil as prayer invoking the Holy Spirit were said over them by the bishop, and finally dressed in a new white garment.  Carrying a lighted candle or small oil lamp they were then brought into the Church where they heard the Bishop invoke God to send that same Holy Spirit which had been called down upon them to now come down upon the gifts of bread and wine so that the bread and wine too could be transformed into Christ. 

They had died to selves and been raised in Christ; now they were to be fed with bread and wine that had been transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ.  There is an intimate contact between Baptism and Eucharist.  Every Eucharist is a renewal of the Baptismal commitment:

I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ Jesus who lives in me!

And so too for us.  We are nourished by the Word of God in the Liturgy of the Word.  Then gifts that represent us—bread, “which human hands have made,” and wine, "the fruit of the vine and work of human hands”—are placed on the altar and the priest prays that the Holy Spirit will come upon these gifts to make them for us to be the Body and the Blood of Christ.  But the priest also prays that the Holy Spirit will come upon us and make us One in Christ, that is unite us in the Body of Christ which is the Church.  Thus the Eucharist renews our Baptismal Vocation to be transformed into Christ by being joined with him in his death and raised as a member of his resurrected Body the Church.   

Now, why didn’t Sister Mater Dolorosa teach us this back in the fifth grade at Saint Sophronia’s Academy for the Pour Souls?  In great part it was because over centuries of deformation the Roman Rite had obscured its own rich heritage.  Perhaps the greatest flaw in the so-called Extraordinary Form is the lack of a proper epiclesis in the Canon of the Mass.  The epiclesis is the prayer invoking the Holy Spirit to transform the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ.  This is not a minor prayer.  In the Eastern tradition—including the Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church—it is considered the consecration proper, the same role played by the Words of Institution in the Western Church.  It is essential for validity—or would be, if only we hadn’t lost it in the Western Church.  Thank heavens for economia which is the theological principle that permits the Church to jump the theological gaps between theory and practice.  The equivalent prayer in the “Roman Canon” used exclusively in the Extraordinary Form reads:

Be pleased, O God, we pray, to bless, acknowledge, and approve this offering in every respect; make it spiritual and acceptable, so that it may become for us the Body and Blood of your most beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

See, no mention of the Holy Spirit though still the petition that the gifts will become the Body and Blood of Christ through God’s action (as differentiated from the “power” of the priest celebrant.)

The prayer invoking the Holy Spirit upon us to make us one in Christ’s Body is even more ambivalent with, again, no mention of the Holy Spirit and no explicit mention of us being united in the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, only that we may be filled with every grace and blessing. 

In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God: command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high in the sight of your divine majesty, so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son,may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing.

In the Mass, then we are intimately joined to the sacrifice of Christ where we renew our commitment to be crucified with Christ into death and be rasied no longer alive to self but alive in Christ Jesus as a member of his Risen Body.  While such grace is operative in the Liturgy regardless of the rite in which it is celebrated, in the so-called “Traditional Mass” it has been obscured by rituals that imply that the sacrifice is Christ being offered for us by the priest rather than directly involving ourselves—by grace, not our own efforts—in dying and rising with Christ.  Nor is it clear in the “Traditional Rite” that we ourselves are to be transformed into Christ.  We are passive recipients rather than active participants of grace. 

It is ironic that Luther was so opposed to this theology of the Sacrifice of the Mass because the Traditional Mass really reflects his anthropology.  For Luther, the human person was was sinful to the core—“a pile of shit” is how Luther described him.  Grace does not change that but rather like the snow that covers the “pile of shit” covers the flaw from God’s eye.   Man is still worthless, but Grace bridges the gap with God.  Our Catholic understanding begins in the same place.  We are—and this is for all your fans of original sin out there—that same pile of shit.  But grace transforms us—makes us, as it were, into manure: something good  and life-giving.  In fact, the Eucharist takes us sinful people and transforms us into something far greater than manure but into Christ himself.