On the Five Sundays of Lent, Father Jay Scott Newman Devoted His Weekly Bulletin Column to Explaining the Origin, Meaning, and P
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On the five Sundays of Lent, Father Jay Scott Newman devoted his weekly bulletin column to explaining the origin, meaning, and purpose of the priest and people standing together on the same side of the altar during the offering of the Eucharistic Prayer, a custom often called praying ad orientem (towards the East) or ad Deum (towards God). Here are the texts of those five bulletin columns: 1. From Christian antiquity, priests and people have celebrated the Holy Eucharist by facing together towards the LORD. This simple and obvious theological precept has been somewhat obscured in the last generation by the novel practice of the priest standing across the altar from the people during the Eucharistic Prayer, a custom almost never before found in the sacred liturgy except for rare instances of architectural necessity, and in the last few years, theologians and pastors have begun to review this novelty in light of the best scholarship and the experience of the past 40 years. Before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger was one of most thoughtful and respected critics of the unintended consequences which flow from the priest and people facing each other across the altar during the Eucharistic Prayer. Ratzinger argued that this arrangement, in addition to being a radical novelty in Christian practice, has the effect of creating a circle of congregation and celebrant closed in upon itself rather than allowing the congregation and celebrant to be a pilgrim people together turned towards the LORD. And this closed circle, in turn, too easily renders the Eucharist more of a horizontal celebration of the congregation gathered than a vertical offering of the sacrifice of Christ to the Father. This flattening of divine worship into a self-referential celebration is, in part, what leads many Catholics to experience Mass as much less than the source and summit of the Church’s life, and the remedy for this malady is to open the closed circle and experience the power of turning together towards the LORD. This can be done primarily in two ways: 1) return to the ancient and universal practice of the priest standing with the people on one side of the altar as they together face liturgical East, the place from which the glory of the LORD shines upon us, or 2) even when the priest and people remain separated on opposite sides of the altar, place a cross at the center of the altar to allow both celebrant and congregation to face the LORD. Pope Benedict, through his writing and by his example, is encouraging priests everywhere to work towards these goals to enrich the experience of divine worship and free us from the danger of solipsism which is contained in self-referential ways of praying. This is why you see today in the sanctuary a new crucifix standing at the center of the altar. In the weeks ahead, as we grow accustomed to this gentle modification of the way we pray together, I will review with you the meaning and practical consequences of the priest and people turning together towards the LORD. For those of you who would like to read about these matters in some depth, I recommend two books. The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Ratzinger and Turning Towards the Lord by Uwe Michael Lang are both excellent places to learn about the nature and purpose of divine worship and the ways in which the Church’s ritual must reflect the reality of the sacred in liturgical prayer. 2. The ritual forms of Catholic worship have changed and evolved many times throughout the centuries, and the architectural arrangements for the celebration of these ritual forms have likewise changed. Ordinarily, this process of change is slow, deliberate, and incremental, but in the 1960’s the Church experienced an intense burst of change which dramatically altered both the ritual forms of our worship and the architectural arrangements of our churches. Because there were so many changes in such a short span of time, all of the alterations were considered by most people to be essentially connected to each other, but that is not the case. A good example is the use of Latin in the liturgical texts promulgated after the II Vatican Council. Many people falsely believe that because Vatican II permitted the use of the vernacular languages in worship, the Council banished Latin from the modern Roman Rite. In fact, however, the same Council which permitted the use of the vernacular also insisted that all Catholics should be able to say and sing their parts of the new Mass in Latin. Celebrating the modern Roman Missal in Latin, therefore, is not in any way a rejection of the II Vatican Council; rather, the regular use of Latin in modern worship is precisely what the Council Fathers called for. A similar confusion exists with respect to the location of the altar and the place of the priest at the altar. From Christian antiquity, most churches had only one altar, and it was freestanding, meaning that the priest could walk completely around it during the celebration of the liturgy. This custom was retained in the Christian East by Orthodox and Catholics alike, but in the West the altar was gradually pushed back from the center to the rear wall of the sanctuary, in large measure to allow it to merge architecturally with the tabernacle. This change was later accompanied by adding additional altars to most churches, eventually yielding the custom of having three altars in each church. Even before the Second Vatican Council, pastors and theologians began to argue for a return to our own tradition of having but one altar in each church and insisting that it once again be freestanding. This was, in part, the fruit of the Liturgical Movement of the 19th and 20th centuries which reminded the Church, among other things, that the altar is the preeminent symbol of Christ in the liturgy. Accordingly, throughout the Western Church the old “high altars” found at the rear of the sanctuary were abandoned, changed, or replaced to allow the ancient and new custom of a freestanding altar. But just as this was happening, a novelty was introduced and attached to the newly detached altar: the custom of the priest and people facing each other across the altar during the Eucharistic Prayer. How and why this novelty spread so far and so fast is a tale for another time and place; for now I want only to make this point: there is no essential connection between the liturgy of Vatican II, the freestanding altar, and the priest facing the people at the altar. In fact, even now the rubrics in the modern Roman Missal are written with the assumption that the priest and people are together facing liturgical East during the Mass, and as I explained last week, Pope Benedict XVI wants Catholics everywhere to understand that to be faithful to our own tradition, we must live in continuity with the Church’s worship in every age. Next week: Why the East? 3. Praying in a “sacred direction” is a feature common in many religions (Think of Muslims who pray facing Mecca—a practice instituted by Mohammed, who initially had his followers pray facing Jerusalem.), and following similar customs in Judaism, the idea of a “sacred direction” has been a part of Christianity since the beginning. Only since the 1960’s has this concept been neglected in the Western Church, but now Pope Benedict XVI is teaching the whole Church to retrieve the babies that were thrown out with the bathwater during the confusing days of liturgical change over 40 years ago. The first Christians expected the return of Christ in glory to occur at the Mount of Olives, from where He ascended to His Father, and so it was a common practice for them during prayer to turn towards the Mount of Olives. This practice later evolved into the general custom of preferring to face Jerusalem during prayer, and as the Church spread through the Mediterranean world, this notion further changed into a connection between the light of the rising sun and the glory of the returning Son. The seeds of this idea are planted throughout Scripture (Wisdom 16:28, Zechariah 14:4, Malachi 3:2, Matthew 24:27 and 30, Luke 1:78, and Revelation 7:2), and the early Church placed great emphasis on this point. In the second century, St Justin Martyr wrote “For the word of His truth and wisdom is more ardent and more light-giving than the rays of the sun, and sinks down into the depths of heart and mind. Hence also the Scripture said, ‘His name shall rise up above the sun.’ And again, Zechariah says, ‘His name is the East.’” And St. Clement of Alexandria was even more emphatic: “In correspondence with the manner of the sun’s rising, prayers are made toward the sunrise in the East.” (For a much fuller explanation of this theme, I again recommend the splendid little book Turning Towards the Lord by Uwe Michael Lang, published in 2004 by Ignatius Press and introduced with a forward by Joseph Ratzinger.) For these reasons, since the building of Christian churches began on a large scale in the fourth century, they have literally been “oriented” to the East wherever local geography permitted this, and even when the building could not run on an east-west axis, the apse of the church and the altar within it have been understood as “liturgical East”, the symbolic place of the glory of the LORD. Moreover, because the Eucharistic Prayer is addressed to God the Father and not to the congregation, the normal posture of the priest has always been to face the East with his congregation and offer the sacrifice of the Mass with and for them to the Father.