Introduction Lee Palmer Wandel in 1939, As Nazi Forces First Abolished the Theological Faculty of the Univer
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INTRODUCTION Lee Palmer Wandel The first Holy Mass was said on “the same night in which he was betrayed” (1 Corinthians 11:23) Josef Andreas Jungmann, S.J., Missarum Sollemnia1 In 1939, as Nazi forces first abolished the theological faculty of the Univer- sity of Innsbruck, then seized the Canisianum and closed the Collegium Maximum, the Jesuit Josef Jungmann (1889–1975), finding, as he wrote, his time freed, decided to write what he would call a “genetic” clarification of the Roman Mass, what would be translated into English as The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development.2 Like Fernand Braudel, severed from libraries but seeking to record in the face of so many annihilations, Jungmann took up a topic in some ways not unlike the Mediterranean— connecting lives and things across time and distance, vibrant, vital, and at center, in different ways, in so many lives.3 1 Josef Andreas Jungmann S.J., The Mass of the Roman Rite: It Origins and Development, trans. Francis A. Brunner (Allen, TX, 1986), p. 7; idem, “Die Feier der heiligen Messe hat ihren Anfang genommen ‘in der Nacht, in der Er verraten wurde,’” Missarum Sollemnia: Eine Genetische Erklärung der Römischen Messe, 2 vols. (Freiburg, 1962; Bonn, 2003), 1:9. Jungmann published the first edition of Missarum Sollemnis in 1948; during his lifetime, it underwent five editions. 2 Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, p. v. Jungmann’s notion of “organic develop- ment” has proven especially important for modern thinking on the liturgy. See, for exam- ple, Alcuin Reid, O.S.B., The Organic Development of the Liturgy: The Principles of Liturgical Reform and Their Relation to the Twentieth-Century Liturgical Movement Prior to the Second Vatican Council (San Francisco, 2005). 3 Jungmann was not the first to write a history of the Mass. In The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy (London, 1914), Adrian Fortescue offered a brief “History of the Mass.” Fortescue posited a Mass immediately universal and far more constant over time. In his article, “Liturgy of the Mass,” in the Catholic Encyclopedia (first published in 1910), he defines the Mass: “the complex of prayers and ceremonies that make up the service of the Eucharist in Latin rites . From the time of the first preaching of the Christian Faith in the West, as everywhere, the Holy Eucharist was celebrated as Christ had instituted it in the Last Supper, according to His command, in memory of him.” See Adrian Fortescue, “Liturgy of the Mass,” in Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910), accessed July 21, 2012, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09790b.htm. In 1926, Hans Lietzmann had published a very different narrative, Messe und Herrenmahl: Eine Studie zur Geschichte der Liturgie (Berlin, 1926), “the most comprehensive and exhaustive inquiry into eucharistic origins,” in the words of Robert Douglas Richardson, who wrote the introduction and 2 lee palmer wandel A deceptively simple word, typically written as a singular noun, “the Mass” names what Karl Young treated as a drama—a sequence of acts, gestures, and words sometimes spoken, sometimes chanted that, again and again, carry those attending through a movement: from preparation, through thanksgiving, to communion with God, and then a return to the world outside.4 “The Mass,” as Jungmann noted, was not the oldest name. The earliest Christians called their shared act and words “the breaking of bread.” And from the turn of the first century, it became known as “Eucharistia,” a Greek word for thanksgiving which in that first century became associated with a meal. Other words—oblatio, sacrum, leiturgia, officium—were also used, intimating the growing density of meanings Christian communities were articulating as their collective worship acquired more parts and voices, discrete gestures, prayers, and texts. “The Mass [Missa],” as Jungmann argued, comes from “ite missa est,” the final words the priest speaks to dismiss the congregation—three words that themselves emerged over time as what was “done in remembrance” grew in significance and complexity.5 “Ite missa est” marked the establishment of a priestly office, a space designated for the purpose of communal wor- ship, and a “rite,” another word central to Jungmann’s analysis, which, in having a discrete ending, was a segment of time set apart, possessing its own temporal sequence, repeated again and again. Jungmann divided his history into what he called “the Mass ceremonies in detail;” parts he then further divided into discrete acts and texts.6 The division of two volumes roughly follows the separation of what he called provided roughly a second volume of “Further Inquiry” to the English translation of Lietz- mann’s work, Mass and Lord’s Supper: A Study in the History of the Liturgy, trans. Dorothea H.G. Reeve (Leiden, 1979), p. ix. More recently, Edward J. Kilmartin, S.J. wrote a history combined with a consideration of the western Latin theology of eucharistic sacrifice, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology, ed. Robert J. Daly, S.J. (Collegeville, 2004 [1998]). 4 Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1933). Dom Gregory Dix divided the liturgy into four “actions”: Offertory, Consecration, Fraction, Communion. See Gregory, The Shape of the Liturgy (London, 1945). 5 Jungmann, Missarum Sollemnia, 1:225–233. Fortescue analyzes the word, “Mass,” at greater length, but also argues this origin, in “Liturgy of the Mass.” 6 In the first volume, Jungmann divided the Fore-Mass into two: the Opening or Entrance Rite and the Service of Readings. The Opening encompassed the Præparatio ad Missam, putting on liturgical vestments, the prayers at the foot of the altar, the Confiteor, Greetings and kissing the altar, incensing the altar, the Introit chant, the Kyrie Eleison, the Gloria, the Collect, which he treated in two parts. The Service of Readings encompassed the Epistle, chants, the Gospel, the homily, the Credo, the dismissals, and the general prayer of the Church. The Sacrifice of the Mass encompassed four parts—the Offertory, the Canon Actionis, the Communion Cycle, and the Close of the Mass—each of which .