Eucharistic Theology and the Rite of Mass

Father Aidan Nichols, OP

From August 24-28, 2009, the Latin Mass Society of Great Britain sponsored a training conference on celebrating the Mass in the Usus Antiquior for priests at All Saints Pastoral Centre, London Colney, Herts. During this conference, Father Nichols delivered the following lecture which stressed the plurality of rites in the Church and then discussed the strengths of the Rite of St Pius V and the contribution it can make to Pope Benedict’s project to restore a more authentic liturgical life. [Reprinted from Mass of Ages, the quarterly magazine of the Latin Mass Society of Great Britain, number 162/Nov. 2009; for more information about The Latin Mass Society, go to www.latin-mass-society.org]

Introduction 

From December 1576 to April 1577 the students at Douai studied the (to them) unfamiliar Roman rite under the direction of Dr Laurence Webbe, who had come from Rome to teach it. George Godsalf, ordained on 20 December 1576, must have been the first English priest to say Mass according to the reformed Missal. If Douai used the Solemn Mass, or the students were old enough to have assisted at such a Mass in Mary Tudor’s reign, they may have regretted the disappearance of the three. five or seven deacons and as many sub-deacons, the two or more thurifers, the three cross-bearers, the fan of rich materials held over the celebrant’s head by a deacon during the Canon, and doubtless other things I don’t know about. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Or is it? The difference between the Use of Sarum, to which English students at Douai had hitherto been accustomed, and the newly promulgated Rite of Pius V was certainly less than that between the Rite of Pius V, even with such changes as affected it over the next four hundred years, and the reformed Missal of 1970. Still, it is well to be reminded that the Usus Antiquior or, as I prefer to say, on the analogy of Novus Ordo, the Antiquus Ordo, was itself once novus even if it is closely related to late mediaeval precedents, especially the Missal of the Franciscans and the Roman Curia.

Why is it well to be so reminded? For two reasons. The first is that, shocking as the radicalism of the reformers of the post Vatican II Concilium was, we cannot in all honesty call the history of the Western Liturgy a seamless garment, without rupture of any kind. And secondly, to preserve a sense of perspective in these matters, we need to recognize that, by and large, the plurality of Eucharistic rites in the Church is, in the words of Sellars and Yeatman [cf. 1066 and All That], a “Good Thing”. Such plurality is, on the whole, a good thing because it serves the better manifestation of Catholic truth.

Benefit of a plurality of rites

Why do I say that? Where public worship is concerned, not everything able to throw light on the mystery of the Mass can be said in words or executed in ritual equally comprehensively by everyone everywhere at one and the same time. In Lord of the World, Robert Hugh Benson has Fr Percy Franklin, the future Pope Sylvester III, describe the abolition of all the non-Latin rites in the Church as a form of ecclesial consolidation in the face of a widespread apostasy that turns out to be the prelude to the coming of Antichrist. The circumstances were, to say the least, unusual. But Benson doesn’t give the impression he realizes how much poorer the worshipping life of the Church would be if she were deprived of, for instance, the Byzantine Liturgy. By ‘poorer’, I don’t just mean aesthetically poorer, but poorer in her grasp of the mystery she celebrates in the Holy Eucharist.

To take one seemingly small example: the rite of the Zeon, where a little warm water is added to the consecrated chalice, reminds us that the Eucharistic Lord the faithful will receive in Communion is the risen and glorified Lord whose blood is warm with superabundant life. That point, thus made in ritual, is not unimportant. Some Catholic Traditionalists, who view the Mass, rightly, as the re-presentation of Calvary through the symbolism of immolation provided by the separate consecration of the bread/Body and wine/Blood, don’t seem to have taken on board that the Mass would not be the Mass without the Resurrection. In The Mysteries of Christianity, the late nineteenth century German Catholic theologian, Matthias Joseph Scheeben, wrote, contrastingly:

The glorious immortality of Christ’s Body after its Resurrection, far from being an impediment to the continuation of his Sacrifice, is the very condition without which the Sacrifice, once consummated, could not avail as a Sacrifice that is to endure for all eternity.

Or again, speaking of learning from another Liturgy, what about the merits of the Byzantine formula for the administering of Communion? It runs, “The servant of God N., receives the precious and holy Body and Blood of our Lord and God and Savior, Jesus Christ, for the remission of his sins and life everlasting.” We might think that the Byzantines, like the Latin Church of the Middle Ages, had good reason to amplify the somewhat bald patristic formula, “The Body of Christ”, “The Blood of Christ”, to which the post-Conciliar reformers, in a rush to the head of what Pius XII in ‘Mediator Dei’ called “archeologism”, were keen to return us.

Testimony to Eucharistic faith

There is (this at any rate is my claim) in the best sense of the word, a ‘conspiracy’ among the various Liturgies, a conspiratio, a concerted action of the Holy Spirit, to give us a testimony as adequate as any testimony can be, this side of Heaven, to what the Eucharist is and does.

When we hear the phrase “the Church’s Eucharistic doctrine”, we’re liable, if we are orthodox, to call to mind first the body of conciliar and papal teaching which has responded to various crises in the history of this sacrament. One thinks of the early mediaeval controversies about the Real Presence which lie behind Lateran IV’s teaching on the “wonderful conversion” of bread and wine into the Lord’s Body and Blood, reiterated, in the face of early Protestantism, in Session 13 of the Council of Trent, or the same Council’s doctrine of the Euucharistic Sacrifice, in Session 22, which clarified Catholic teaching over against the Reformers, or Pope Paul VI’s 1965 letter ‘Mysterium Fidei’, drawing attention to the weaknesses of theories of the Eucharistic change emanating largely from the Netherlands.

And yet the Word of God in transmission tells us about the Eucharistic Mystery chiefly through the actual celebration of that Mystery in the worship of the Church where the Scriptures are actualized and the contribution of the Fathers is integrated. This is the ‘theological place’ that the sixteenth century Dominican, Melchior Cano, supposedly the first person to write a treatise on theological method, called “praxis Ecclesiae”, the “practice of the Church”. Magisterial documents, though essential markers for our faith, cannot take the place of the witness given to the doctrine of the Eucharist by the Liturgies themselves. And by “the Liturgies” I mean all the historic Liturgies which have been celebrated in peace and union with the Catholic Church, whose own apostolically given guardian of canonical unity is the See of Rome.

Is the Novus Ordo included?

So you see, perhaps, the direction in which I’m heading. I certainly wouldn’t want to rule out the possibility that the Novus Ordo can play a role in this ‘conspiracy’, can offer something to enrich the Eucharistic sensibility of the Catholica. We know that the Second and Fourth Eucharistic Prayers in the Missal of Paul VI are themselves examples of historic borrowing, one from the long forgotten early Roman book later known to scholars as the Egyptian Church Order and the other from the Syrian-Byzantine Anaphora of St Basil. The Third, however, though innovatory, is nonetheless a deeply satisfying text whose section beginning with the words “Respice, quaesumus, in oblationem Ecclesiae tuae” is, I believe, a better condensed statement of the Mass as both sacrifice of the Church and sacrifice of Christ than is anyone such section in the Roman Canon. What a pity the itchy fingers of Roman bureaucrats didn’t stop with the four forms the Great Prayer took in 1970, but couldn’t resist adding further Eucharistic Prayers, the inspiration of which is a good deal more debatable.

Today, however, at this gathering, we have not come to praise or even blame the Novus Ordo. We have come to acclaim the Antiquus Ordo in the sense of the Rite of St Pius V. So I shall devote the rest of this talk to that with, however, occasional continuing glances at the East. And at least one feature of the Usus Antiquior I’ll be drawing attention to is only, to my mind, distinctive of it because we have let things slip in the celebration of the Usus Recentior, to our loss.

The Mass of St Pius V: the Sacrifice

As I wrote in a recent article in The Catholic Herald (3 July 2009), the single most obvious reason we have, in terms of Eucharistic doctrine, for looking to the Rite of St Pius V, is the liturgical expression there of the Mass as Sacrifice. Assuming we are used to praying the Roman Canon as the First Eucharistic Prayer of the revised Missal and don’t cold-shoulder it as too complex for modem congregations or too different from its fellows, then the most striking textual difference between the Mass of St Pius V and the Mass of Paul VI will be the Offertory prayers of the former with their reiterated concern with the Sacrifice being offered or about to be offered.

Though disliked by people with tidy Germanic minds, the anticipation of the Anaphora, the Prayer of Oblation, in the preparation and presentation of the Gifts is a frequent feature of historic Liturgy. It is even more pronounced in the Byzantine rite, where the opening ceremonies of preparation include the piercing with a lance-shaped knife of the bread set aside for the Eucharist, as a reminder of the lance that pierced the Savior’s side. Furthermore, in that Liturgy, as the dedicated bread and wine are transferred to the altar at the Great Entrance the choir sings, “Let us who here mystically represent the Cherubim in singing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-giving Trinity, now lay aside every earthly care so that we may welcome the King of the universe who comes escorted by invisible armies of angels”, even though that “King” only “comes” in the sense that the dedicated gifts are now brought in so that they may be offered in the Holy Sacrifice, there to be converted into His real Presence and received as the fruit of His Sacrifice. To the worshipping mind of a Byzantine Christian they are, however already images of the Lord’s Body and Blood, and proleptically, the King does come with them, since he will come in them at the consecration. Liturgical time is not just ordinary time – which is one of the arguments of Dr Catherine Pickstock of Emmanuel College, Cambridge in her defense of the of the older Roman rite in After Writing: the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy.

So, at the Pian Offertory, which is much fuller than the one I personally am familiar with in the Dominican Use, the celebrant prays that the Father may accept this “immaculatam hostiam”, (“unblemished sacrificial offering”). He calls the wine offered “calicem salutaris”, (the “saving chalice”). In what might be termed the ‘epiclesis of the offertory’ he asks the sanctifying Spirit (“Veni sanctificator”) to come and bless the sacrificial gifts, “prepared for the glory of thy holy name”. And in the concluding prayer, “Suscipe sancta Trinitas”, he entreats the triune Lord to bring it about that “hanc oblationenem” (“this offering”) may bring honor to the Mother of God and the saints as well as salvation to ourselves.

At the risk of sounding like Msgr. Ronald Knox addressing schoolgirls in The Mass in Slow Motion, it’s as though the Church can’t wait to get to the Prayer of Oblation, and above all, to the Consecration, the moment when her gifts, which represent herself, will be transformed into Christ’s Gift which does not simply represent Him but embodies Him in His Sacrifice for her. So it’s the Bride impatient to get to the Nuptials on the Cross, to the Paschal Mystery, the thought of which is so fascinating that it draws to itself by anticipation what is in a preliminary way being done. The loss of these prayers undermines the way we should habituate ourselves to inhabit Eucharistic time, and, as I say, it also weakens the sense of the Mass as Sacrifice.

I add in parenthesis that common orientation of priest and people is, to put it mildly, highly congruent with the sacrifice pervaded attitude of the Antiquus Ordo, even though Mass facing or, at side altars, half-facing, the people was not, historically speaking, entirely unknown. Among the Catholic Liturgies, common orientation is normal. As one interpreter of the Ethiopian Liturgy (a lecturer in the major seminary of the Eparchy of Adigrat), has written:

Facing the East means that the main actor at the celebration is Christ the High Priest and that the life we receive is the Trinitarian life… In the ‘anamnesis’ of the Anaphora of the Apostles [one of the Ethiopian Eucharistic Prayers] the priest, representing the entire congregation, says: ‘We thank you Lord because you made us worthy of the privilege of standing before you and offering you this priestly service’. It is logical, therefore, that the one who receives faces the one who gives; the one who asks faces the one asked.

I give the theme of the Sacrifice pride of place in what we can learn from the Rite of St Pius V because the entire content of Catholic Eucharistic theology is best surveyed from the vantage-point of the Mass as Sacrifice. Holy Communion, for instance, is best presented not simply as just any personal encounter with our Lord in the sacrament but a meeting with Him there as the slain and glorified Lamb who died for me and has opened a new and living way into the presence of the Father, into the holy of holies. Of course, we can bring all our aspirations, concerns, anxieties to Him in the moment of Holy Communion but these thoughts should always be related to that center, which also explains why thanksgiving after Communion is desirable, and what it is we can give thanks for, weekly or even daily. I envy the Welsh for the way their language, or so I understand, calls the Mass “Yr Offeren” (“The Oblation”).

The Mass of Pius V: the ‘Apologies’

Another point to which I would draw attention, and is especially relevant to priests, is the role of the so-called ‘Apologies’ in the Rite of St. Pius V. The ‘Apologies’, I gather, is the name liturgical historians give to the semi-secret prayers, added when the Roman rite went north of the Alps into the Frankish kingdom, in which the priest expresses his own unworthiness and that, most likely, of his congregation when it comes to the celebration of these rites. Although three such “Apologies” have survived the recent liturgical reform – before Communion, where there is a choice of two, and at the ablutions where there is one – they are far more persistent in the older rite, notably in the prayers at the foot of the altar; at the moment of going up to the altar in the prayer “Aufer a nobis”; again, when bowing to the altar and kissing it after that prayer is said; in the offertory prayers, and in the combined duo of prayers before the priest’s Communion and the further prayer, “Corpus tuum”, omitted from the Novus Ordo, at the ablutions. Granted the danger of over-familiarity with this sacrament which some of us are obliged to celebrate daily, and all of us are recommended to celebrate daily, and the ever-present possibility, therefore, of banalization and trivialization, I think we should find these prayers helpful, indeed salutary.

To say as much might seem to give vent to a purely pragmatic or, at best, pastoral, consideration, rather than one that has much to do with dogmatic theology. But the ‘Apologies’ seek to bring home to us our real supernatural situation at the Eucharistic Liturgy. They do so by emphasizing that the contrast of sin and grace can never be expressed too acutely. In the Ethiopian Rite, the reply of the people to the deacon’s invitation to exchange the kiss of peace – possibly, in our modern liturgical experience in the West, the most ‘horizontal’ or even secular moment we know in church – is: “0 Christ our God, make us worthy to greet one another with a holy kiss, and to partake without condemnation of your holy, immortal, and heavenly Gift …. ” That is an equivalent to the priestly ‘Apologies’ in the Usus Antiquior. In the kiss as, even more so, in Holy Communion, we have to beware making do with being human, all too human, rather than seeing everything in the perspective of Redemption. It is, of course, because the modern Western kiss is experienced as an exit from this perspective, and, so, a disincentive to preparation for Holy Communion, that a recent Synod of Bishops asked Pope Benedict to consider moving it from the position it has had at Rome for the last fifteen hundred years: in the mediaeval rites, the Rite of St Pius V, and the Novus Ordo.

The problem with the kiss is, however, its choreography not its location. The beauty of the traditional Roman location is it allows it to become apparent that the peace radiates out from the Presence on the altar, something especially clear in the Dominican Use where the celebrant kisses the chalice before declaring the peace, thus showing from where the peace comes. The twelfth century theologian, Peter of Troyes, says that the fruit of the “true, proper and sacramental” body of Christ in the Eucharist is the “caro mystica”, (the “mystical flesh”), of a Church rendered one social body by this sacrament which has it in its power to create supernatural peace and concord.

The Mass of St Pius V: reverence

The third most obvious thing that strikes me about the Mass of St Pius V is how opportune its expressions of reverence are for the doctrine of the Real Presence. If we were looking for an historic Liturgy which is strong on the theological theme of the Eucharist as foundation of the Church’s communion, or the doctrinal motif of the Eucharist as foretaste of the Age to Come, we might not look in this direction. We might prefer to look east instead. The Liturgy Constitution of the Second Vatican Council, whose practical provisions are concerned exclusively with the Mass of the Roman rite, has a theoretical preamble which speaks of the Eucharist in all the Liturgies of the Church, and perhaps this is why ‘Sacrosanctum Concilium’ was stronger on the eschatological dimension of worship than had been ‘Mediator Dei’. But for an apprehension of the Presence, as well as of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, it is to the Mass of St Pius V that I should turn.

I am not thinking only of the consistently heightened language in which the oblata are spoken of, even, as we saw, during the Offertory rite. It is also a matter of a vocabulary of gesture. The multiple signs of the Cross over Host and Chalice, whether, before the consecration, hallowing them or, after it, indicating their holiness (if made with dignity and not in the way that led Victorian visitors to Italian churches to think the priest had a problem with blue bottles), are a lesson in themselves. The same could be said about the repeated genuflections and, likewise, the rubrics concerning the care to be taken about the particles of the Host (which we should observe without, however, falling into scrupulosity in such matters). These gestures of reverence punctuating the Canon, and, especially, accompanying the words of consecration, “built”, as Dom Cassian Folsom has put it, “a protective wall around this sacred moment of the Mass and in that way reinforced Catholic Eucharistic theology”. It was anthropologically naive to think their removal would have no effect at all on popular or even clerical attitudes.

That concerns the making of the sacrament. But then there is also the question of its reception. The mode of receiving Communion in this rite is a magnificent expression of our Eucharistic theology, especially if the houseling cloths are used simultaneously to cover the hands and to indicate that this is sacred food which is approaching. The altar is a tomb for the dead Christ and a throne for the risen Savior but it is also a table of which communion rails are the extension.

We can surely learn from the older Mass how to have a more reverential reception in the reformed rite. If kneeling for Communion is not possible, then we should introduce the prior gesture of obeisance called for by the official documents. If Communion on the tongue is not possible, we should explain to people that, when, in the ancient Church, Communion was received on the hand, it was always in the right hand, the hand of dignity, which was treated as a kind of Communion paten from which the host was transferred directly into the mouth, something that can most easily, as well as fittingly, be done if at the same time one makes what Fortescue and O’Connell call “a moderate bow”. That would be learning from the spirit of the Antiquus Ordo though not its letter, but at least it would be better than nothing.

I should like to know by what means in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century the chalice was administered in this rite to the faithful over large areas of central Europe. It is good theology to say that, while nothing is added to perfection of sacramental effect for the communicant when the chalice is offered, something is gained in terms of the perfection of the sign. The situations envisaged for the administration of the chalice in ‘Sacrosanctum Concilium’, such as the Mass of profession of a monastic making solemn vows or the Mass following baptism of a catechumen, could presumably be accommodated easily enough in the Mass of St Pius V. It may not be widely known that from 1564 onwards the Pores allowed various metropolitans in the Holy Roman Empire to license the administration of the chalice to all the faithful. That continued in some places for as long as sixty years, so obviously as a ritual act it took place within the Mass of St Pius V. Patently, that is not something required by the rite, but neither can it be described as altogether alien to it, historically speaking. The minister at the Solemn Mass would be, presumably, the deacon, and otherwise the celebrant. The equivalent at the Novus Ordo would be administration by priest, deacon or a properly commissioned acolyte, suitably vested. Granted that the whole Christ is received sub specie panis, it’s not clear to me how the case for extraordinary ministers of the chalice can adequately be made.

I hope these possibly rather scrappy and dislocated ruminations may be of some use along the lines of Pope Benedict’s desire for a recovery of a more authentic liturgical life by the simultaneous exploitation (in the best sense of the word) of the varied liturgical riches of the Church. We can do something for the ordinary parish Masses by learning from the spirit of the older rite, though until we have a more adequate reform, integrating the best of the pre-modem West as well as, no doubt, more of that sporadic borrowing from the East which has been a feature of the liturgical history of Western Catholicism, we are stymied in doing as much as we might wish.