Egeria--The Tourist Pilgrim Nun From the Fourth Century and the Liturgy of Holy Week

Egeria 

I think one of the reasons I am so enamored of the Holy Week Liturgies is that they continue the oldest known liturgical forms of worship in the Church.  While there are hints about the worship of the late first century in the Book of Revelation, and while the Didache, the Didascalia Apostolorum, and Hippolytus provide some glimpses into the liturgies of the second and third centuries, tt is the travel journal of Egeria, a nun from modern Galicia (North-western Spain) describing the annual commemoration of the Lord’s Pasch in Jerusalem that really fills out our understanding of the Church’s foundational liturgical practices. And reading her account of the festivities of Palm Sunday and the drama of the Triduum we can see just how our liturgical uses developed from the practices of the early Church. 

The Christians of Jerusalem in Egeria’s day were far more devout than we—Holy Week was an almost continuous single prayer with the faithful gathering from before cockcrow in the morning until after dark at night for the singing of psalms and attentive listening to readings, but the noted elements of our Holy Week—the procession with palms, the evening Eucharist on Holy Thursday, The veneration of the Cross on the Friday of the Lord’s Passion, the baptisms at the Great Vigil—are all there in the last decades of the fourth century at Jerusalem.  There is also a somewhat primitive sense of the Stations of the Cross—admittedly not a liturgical service for us but it was for them—on the Friday of the Lord’s Passion, when the faithful gather at the various sites such as the column of the scourging for prayers.  Egeria (I prefer the more classic spelling Aegeria but no one else seems to) spent three years in the Jerusalem and wrote her sisters back in Galicia a fervent and detailed account of the Church practices.   

Reading Egeria’s account I cannot but wonder what we can do to deepen our appreciation of the mysteries of Our Lord’s death and Resurrection during Holy Week.  I think an increased use of the daily offices and in particular the re-introduction of Tenebrae, would be a good step.  Modern adaptations of the singing of psalms and prayers such as Taizé prayer also can be deeply moving.  Night time processions with guided meditations and hymns at various stations would recapture the way the Church moved from the Garden of Olives to Golgotha and the tomb.  Even reviving the medieval tradition of the “watch at the tomb” could deepen the experience. 

From a historical point of view, Egeria’s journal is particularly fascinating not only because she shows us the basic development of the Holy Week Liturgy as it had evolved by the end of the fourth century, but because we have a woman who is free to travel as extensively as Egeria did on her pilgrimage that lasted over a period of years; we have a woman who can comment insightfully on the Liturgy  and on the practices of the Church, and we have a woman who is—unlike other women in the Romano-Christian world, in charge of her own destiny and not subject to the oversight of a male superior, familial or ecclesiastical.  Today she would be on the leadership team of the LCWR or one of the “Nuns On The Bus.” 

A careful reading of her account permits us to see the fissures that were already developing between the Liturgical approaches of the Eastern and Western Rites.  Some of the ceremonies she describes survive only in the West, many more only in the East.  In both the East and West the liturgies would become more and more elaborate over the centuries but the central core would remain.  In the Middle Ages, both East and West began to play around with the clock giving the ceremonies of Holy Week a surrealism.  Matins and Lauds gradually get shifted from the earliest hours of the pre-dawn (say 2 am until 4:30) to the evening before so as not to discourage the sleepy from prayerful vigil.  And thus prayers and hymns written for the morning are being celebrated at night.  To balance this out, Vespers—the evening prayer—is being said at midday and often even in the morning.  The Good Friday Liturgy is moved from the Hour of the Lord’s Death into the morning and the Easter Vigil is now on Holy Saturday morning.  The Liturgy had become, as the Irish say, “a dog’s dinner”—a mashup of all sorts of things that are totally out of step with the mysteries being celebrated.

During the Second World War the German and Austrian clergy, and especially the monks, restricted from so much of their pastoral work by the Third Reich undertook extensive research in the history of the Liturgical development.  The Abbey of Maria Laach in Germany was particularly ambitious in reconstructing the older forms of the Triduum liturgies.  Their work paid off when in 1955 Pius XII decreed the first reforms in centuries of the Holy Week Liturgies, stripping away much of the bells and whistles that had been added over the years and restoring the Liturgies to their proper hours. These reforms of the Holy Week Liturgies were the precursors of the far more widespread Liturgical Reforms mandated by the Council and carried out by Paul VI in the Missal of 1970.

Reason 1 For Why the "New Mass" Is Superior to the Old Rite

Ok--off and running on our ten reasons to attend the Mass in the Ordinary Form (as differentiated from the Extraordinary Form, the "Traditional Latin Mass.")  Reason One:  

saints are formed by prayer that draws them into deep participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

One of the curious elements in the history of our Catholic Church and the development of its varied traditions of spirituality—Ignatian, Carmelite, Salesian, Redemptorist, Montforian, et.al—is the “great divorce” between mental prayer and liturgical prayer. The Benedictine/Cistercian spiritual tradition alone has preserved the rooting of one’s personal spiritual exercises in the corporate celebration of the Liturgy.   The Eucharist is, of course, central to all Catholic Spirituality—but it is a truncated appreciation of the Eucharist as the Reserved Sacrament/Holy Communion that has been the focus for the last eight or nine centuries, whereas in the ancient teachings of the Fathers of the Church it was always the entire Eucharistic action—and that action extended from the Mass through the celebration of the Divine Offices—that was the fountain from which all prayer flowed.  There is a markedly different emphasis on Eucharistic Spirituality in Ambrose and Augustine, for example, than for Teresa of Avila or Jeanne Chezard de Matel or John Eudes.  Only in the monastic heritage of the Benedictine/Cistercian movement—and not always there—was the integral connection preserved between Liturgical Prayer and one’s private devotional life.  Only there—and again not for all—did the Liturgy provide the source for one’s entire spiritual life. 

One of the reasons for this dis-integration of spirituality was the failure of the liturgy to develop with the culture in which the mystics—and the rest of us—lived (and live).  The Liturgy became more and more a separate world into which the Christian would retreat for prayer but then would have to leave—and leave behind—for daily life.  The major factor of this was, of course, the failure of liturgical prayer to keep abreast with the linguistic breakdown of Latin into what would become the modern languages of the Western World.  When the worshipper could no longer access the sacred texts of what was becoming an arcane language, he or she had to turn to other sources for spiritual nourishment.  A second factor was the tendency in the medieval period to separate the world of the sacred from the everyday.  As the Image of Christ was more and more modified to a sort of Monophysitism in which his Humanity was swallowed into and overwhelmed by his Divinity, the Liturgy came to reflect this higher sacral world within the church as different from the everyday world in the streets outside. This liturgical monophysitism became the new orthodoxy as the laity were more and more blocked out from direct participation in the Liturgy. Rails and curtains and screens and even walls were erected between altar and people—blockades which incidentally the Council of Trent ordered taken down but without the mentality of separation being reversed.  The laity were no longer permitted to handle the Eucharist or even the sacred vessels.  The role of the laity in the liturgical dialogue was taken over by and restricted to the acolytes and the choirs.  The reception of Holy Communion for the faithful was removed from the Mass with only the priest receiving at the altar, and the few faithful who were to receive being required to receive either before or after the Mass and only allowed access to the Sacrament on a bi-weekly or monthly basis.  More and more emphasis was placed on the Reserved Sacrament rather than the received Sacrament with the Eucharist becoming a static reality of Christ’s Presence rather than participation in his Death and Resurrection.  This was a serious distortion of the Divine Gift passed on from Christ to the Apostles and the Apostles to the first generations of the Church.

The Mass is meant to be the source of all sanctity in our lives in as that it is our mystical participation in theosis, that is to say in our coming to share in the Divine Nature.  In Baptism we were baptized into death with Christ so that being buried with Christ in baptism we might be raised with Christ into the New Life in him.  This baptismal regeneration by which we can say that “I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live but Christ Jesus who lives in me” is renewed and reinforced every time we participate in the Eucharist.  The bread and wine which are presented to the priest for consecration are symbols of our lives.  They are placed upon the altar and the Holy Spirit is called down to consecrate them, making them Christ’s own Body and Blood.  That same Spirit is called down upon us—if you listen carefully to the Eucharistic Prayer—to make us into Christ’s Body, the Church.  Then nourished by that Body and Blood “we become what we eat”—Christ lives in us, transforming us into himself and giving us a participatory share in his Divine Nature.  One of the problems with the pre-conciliar rite is how much this transformative process of the Eucharist is obscured.  There is no procession from the people culminating in the presentation of the gifts and so the connection between the unconsecrated bread and wine and the people whom they symbolize is lost.  They are simply carried from the credence table in the presbyterium by an altar server and handed to the priest at the altar.  Eucharistic Prayer I, the so-called Roman Canon, lacks a proper epiclesis (the invocation of the Holy Spirit) to transform the gifts of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ and it also fails to ask that the Holy Spirit draw us from our individualism into the unity of the Body of Christ, the Church.  Indeed the corporate worship of the revised Rite stands in distinct contrast to the emphasized individualism into which the pre-conciliar rite had devolved.

There were those medieval and early modern saints who did, of course, find the Liturgy to be the source of their spirituality.  Saint Thomas Aquinas was deeply shaped in his holiness by the Sacred Liturgy—his magnificent Office composed for the newly instituted Feast of Corpus Christi shows us how the profound depths of his mysticism were forged by his participation in the Sacred Rites and especially the Mass.  But he is a rare exception to the spirituality of the saints in the post-Patristic period.  We see historically that as the world around them changed at a far different pace than did the Mass, that the saints had to look elsewhere for a path to holiness.  Yes, the Eucharist would be an important—though not always central—aspect to their journey into the Mystery of Christ, it would almost always be the Eucharist divorced from the Mass with the Mass reduced from the Sacred Mystery of our Salvation to the mere act of confecting the Saving Presence of Christ.  Indeed for most of these centuries—from perhaps the eighth until the twentieth—access to receiving Christ in the Eucharist was highly restricted with even deeply holy persons such as Thomas More or Teresa of Avila able to receive only one or two times a month.  The connection had been broken between the Eucharistic Sacrifice and receiving Christ in the Holy Communion.  A theology stressing the ex opere operato function of the rite had to be developed because the ex opere operantis had become obsolete.  The Mysterium Fidei remained accessible to priest-saints (and priests who were not saints) such as Thomas Aquinas and Francis de Sales and they passed it on second-hand to the devout, but for the average Catholic Christian the Mass remained a mystery so ineffable that its invitation to the faithful to offer himself or herself with Christ in obedience to the Father, to be mystically conformed to Christ in his death so as to be transformed into Christ in his Resurrection as we participate in the offering of bread and wine, in the transformative showering of the Holy Spirit, and in the incorporation into Christ by being devoured by him whom we devour, was lost.  I dare say that even today most Catholics have yet to move beyond seeing the point of the Mass being to consecrate the bread and wine so that they become the Body and Blood of Christ for our consumption. 

It is too early for the revised rites to bear the fruits of canonized saints.  We can see that it certainly supplied nourishment for Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Pope John Paul II, and the handful of other contemporaries beatified or canonized these past few years.  But I look around me at Mass and I see the fruits of the revised liturgy with our shut-ins receiving communion weekly or even daily from our Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist; I see the immense pile of gifts around the altar all through Advent that are destined for the poor in our twinned-parish; I see the squads of youth and adults going on mission to build housing for people in Appalachia;  I see the volunteer “lay chaplains” at our local hospital,  I see the outreach to immigrants with clothing and school supplies; and I see how people are being nourished with hearing the Word of God at Mass and translating into discipleship through the week.  I see people making the connection between the Mass and living a Christ-formed life through their week. 

I am old enough to remember the Mass before the Council.  My Dad went to Mass every morning, my mother every Sunday and Holy Day.  They were good people.  Dad belonged to the Holy Name Society; Mom to the Altar and Rosary Society.  And yes, they worked in the local soup-kitchen.  And my mother drove Meals on Wheels.  And they stood up for open-housing legislation in an era where a lot of our neighbors were afraid an African-American family would move onto our street.  But their faith was not shaped by the Liturgy.  Their faith was shaped by the Christian Family Movement to which they belonged.  Their faith was shaped by the many priest friends who haunted our house (and drank their liquor and ate their steaks—to which they were most welcome, by the way.)  Their faith was shaped by reading Thomas Merton and Bishop Sheen.   The Mass provided them some peace and quiet; some solitary prayer while Father did at the altar whatever he did.  I am not saying that there were no saints before Vatican II but only that the power of the Liturgy to make saints had been diluted and I believe that the holiness that was there could have been even greater, much greater, had the Liturgy been a true and actual prayer that drew them into its depths and not only a pious devotion.  

WHAT IF THERE HAD NEVER BEEN A VATICAN II?

What if Vatican II had never happened?  If there had been no Pope John XXIII?  If Cardinal Siri had been elected instead of Cardinal Roncalli?  Or Cardinal Agagianian?  Or Cardinal Lercaro?

“What if’s” are a tricky field.  But it would not have made much difference who succeeded to the papacy after Pius XII’s death in 1958.  In the 56 and one half years since Pius’ reign ended, there have been six popes on the throne of Saint Peter.  The extraordinarily long reign of John Paul II is balanced by the extraordinarily short reign of John Paul I and the moderately short reigns of John XXIII and Benedict XVI.  In any scenario there probably would have been between five and seven popes for those decades.  While the terms “liberal” or “progressive” would probably be defined somewhat more narrowly, the right end of the spectrum would be, I would think, somewhat the same as it is now and, without the unexpected developments in liturgy, ecumenism, the role of the laity, and other “fruits” of Vatican II, I don’t think there would be the rancor we experience today between the extremes on either end of the spectrum. 

There would have been change.  Not the degree of change that we experienced; but there would have been change.  As for the Liturgy I think we only need to look at the work that was being done in several of the German Abbeys such as Beuron and Maria Laach in the 1940’s and 50’s as well as the scholarship of men like Josef Jungmann and Louis Bouyer.  Changes began even before the Council.  Pius XII had shortened the communion fast and introduced restored rites for the Sacred Triduum at the end of Holy Week.  The Mass of Pius V would still be the foundation for the Roman Rite but I suspect that a certain amount of vernacular would have replaced the Latin, especially in the Liturgy of the Word.  I think too that vernacular chants such as were developed by musicians like Lucien Deiss and Joseph Gelineau would have been introduced.  Even dramatic Mass settings like the Congolese Missa Luba would probably have emerged and been used in culturally appropriate settings.  Laity would have been introduced to do the readings.  On the other hand, I don’t think the chalice would have been restored to the faithful, at least on any sort of ordinary basis and I doubt that Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist would have been introduced.  As I think the “vocation crisis” would still have happened, there may have been a restoration to laymen of the minor order of acolyte with permission for them to administer Holy Communion. 

While the majority of altars would still be turned so that the priest faces the apse of the Church during the celebration of Mass, the practice of positioning the altar so that the priest faces the congregation had already begun in Europe before the Council.  The practice of versus populum altars was particularly strong in Rome where Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius X, in their restoration of countless Roman Churches to their ancient forms, had so situated altars in what in pre-baroque Rome was the typical position. At the Council when bishops from America and other outreaches of the Catholic world saw this they brought the practice home, but altars that “faced the people” were not only common in Rome but not unknown in Germany and France with the Liturgical Renewal of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. 

There would be no outreach to those of other Christian denominations or to those of non-Christian religions.  We would be instructed to be courteous to all, but any sort of collaboration in either mission or worship would be totally out of the question except perhaps charitable work in times of critical need. 

The distinctiveness of our Liturgy, the peculiarities of our practices (such as no meat on Fridays and other days of fast), the prohibition of social contact with our non-Catholic neighbors (where we could not be in their weddings nor they in ours, or even our being forbidden to attend weddings and funerals involving a non-Catholic service) and the strong barriers against mixed marriages would have led to a great deal of isolation for Catholics that in America and would have created considerable social difficulties.  I suspect that there would have been considerable defections to liberal Protestant groups, especially those with a liturgy similar to ours such as Episcopalians and Lutherans, and that even more Catholics would simply not practice their faith.  John Kennedy could probably not have been elected president in 1960 and there would be few Catholics in public office.  The secularization of the culture might initially have been slowed down a bit if the Church had itself resisted inculturalization, but it would have happened none the less and probably over the decades picked up even more speed than it has.   Those families and individuals who remained practicing Catholics would have a stronger sense of Catholic identity simply because they would be so clearly differentiated from mainstream American families. While I think we would still have our automobiles and even our televisions (for select programming) Catholics would be a lot like the Amish in terms of a closed community.  Such Catholic families would still be happy to see a son or a daughter give themselves to the Church in a vocation and the number might be there to serve those remaining active in the practice of the faith but as the community of the active faithful would be so much smaller, I think too the number of priests and sisters would never reach the numbers of the early 1960’s. 

Without the Council and its program of adapting the liturgy and the catechesis of the faith to local cultures the missionary activity of Asia and especially of Africa would probably not have been nearly as successful as it is. The revitalization of the Church in Latin America would probably not have happened either.  Remaining a European Church culturally would mean that the majority of Catholics would still be in the Northern hemisphere.  It would be a much smaller Church but a more distinct and even, perhaps, a more energetic church internally.  It influence on the world outside its own isolation, however, would be negligible.  The Pope would probably be a sort of Christian Dalai Lama, admired for his compassion and piety—even, perhaps with a good pope, for his wisdom—but with little or no impact on the world and its challenges.  

Are We Sure There Were No Women Apostles?

I was going to do an entry today on evangelical Catholicism and its ramifications for the migration crisis playing out on our Southern borders, but given that today is the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, I want to go in a somewhat different direction and will do the evangelical Catholic/migration posting tomorrow. And then back to Elizabeth I and the English Reformation.

The priest said something interesting at Mass today (for a change) and it reminded me of the ancient Tradition of Mary Magdalene being the Apostola Apostolorum: the Apostle of the Apostles.  In John’s Gospel, the author never refers to anyone as an “Apostle”—a term used only by the synoptics.    But John does—once—use the verb ɑποστολέίν (apostolein) which is usually translated in English as “go and tell,” the commission given in the gospels to the Apostles by Jesus when he sent them out to announce the Gospel of the Kingdom of God to all nations and baptize them in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.   And John uses this same verb in the commission of Christ to Mary Magdalene to “go and tell” the others that she has seen the Risen Christ.  By the way, this commission to be a witness to the Risen Christ is precisely what St. Paul argues makes him an apostle even though he had not be commissioned with the other apostles before the Ascension.   

This leads to an ancient tradition whereby Mary was called the Apostle to the Apostles, a tradition going back at least as far as Hippolytus in the 3^rd century and embraced by such luminaries as Abbot Hugh of Cluny and Doctor and Father of the Church, St. Bernard of Clairvaux.  This tradition was maintained up through the end of the Middle Ages and survived in the liturgical texts until the early modern era whereby the feast of Mary Magdalene was celebrated as the Feast of an Apostle: with red vestments and the Gloria and Creed being recited as done on the feast of an apostle.  The Creed was dropped as recently as 1945 in a round of liturgical reforms by Pius XII.  Eventually this theme of Mary Magdalene being an Apostle was backed away from in favor of her being a “penitent,” the implications of a female apostle having serious theological implications. Yes, we all understand those serious theological implications, don't we?   The 1970 Missal dropped “penitent” and unfortunately made this very significant saint a mere memorial as if the first witness of the Resurrection were no more than some pious Reverend Mother from Poland or a Spanish Spinster. 

With the discussion of the ordination of women the idea of a female Apostle becomes a somewhat hot potato.  It surprises many to know that this argument is not new to the Vatican II generation.  There were sects in primitive Christianity such as the Montanists and the Collrydians who ordained women to the office of presbyter (priest) and even episcopus (bishop).  These communities were not in communion with “The Great Church”—the historic Christian communion in which both Orthodoxy and Catholicism have their roots.  There is no clear evidence of admitting women to the Orders of Priest or Bishop in the Great Church, though there were women deacons.  One of the factors that drew some to the Montanists, the Collrydians, and other groups that ordained women was the opportunity for women to enter these ministries.  In the medieval period there are not infrequent instances in which Abbesses, by virtue of their Abbatial Blessing, presumed to celebrate Mass or administer other sacraments, especially hearing the confession of their nuns.  After Lateran IV in 1215, when discovered, this usurpation of priestly ministry always met with strong censure from ecclesial authorities and with the removal of the errant Abbess.  During the Protestant Reformation most Conservative (Lutheran) and Moderate (Calvinist) reformers maintained an all-male clergy, but various (though far from all) Anabaptist groups and other radical reformers admitted women to full ministerial positions.  The Catholic Church did not but also lost members who favored women to these groups. 

A curiosity among the lives of the saints in the modern era is that of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, now a Doctor of the Church, who wrote in her autobiography that she felt called to the priesthood.  She was never ordained, of course, but what is so peculiar is that it never seems to have entered her mind that—because she was a woman—she was not eligible for ordination.  Another voice who, though she did not feel called herself to be ordained, argued that there was no serious reason against women being ordained, is Saint Edith Stein, a Jewish convert from agnosticism who became a Carmelite nun and ended her life at Auschwitz.  At the end of the nineteenth century the Church banned pictures and statutes of the Blessed Virgin dressed in priestly vestments to end a rising popular devotion to “Blessed Mary, the Priest.”   Indeed the "priesthood" of the Blessed Mother was a frequent theme of sermons and popular piety at various times in the Church's history, not just the 1800's.   It is an example of what can go awry when devotions get too far from scripture or Tradition.  

I don’t want to be misunderstood as arguing for women’s ordination, but am only stating that women in the apostolic ministry is anything but a new controversy and we can see why the image of Mary Magdalene as the Apostle to the Apostles is a bit loaded politically.  Nevertheless, I did notice this morning that the priest, while he did not use the Creed as one does on the feast of an apostle, did use the preface of Apostles for the Mass.  Good for him.  It gave the Apostola Apostolorum the honor she deserves.