Reply a confused Catholic: The contrasts you draw are unnecessarily sharp
By Fr Aidan Nichols

3 July 2009

Dear Moyra,

Thank you so much for your letter. You express - in a very lucid fashion! - your sense of confusion arising from the study you have been making of the life of the Church. This concerns especially the worshipping Church which, as we know, has changed greatly in the last 40 or so years. For the sake of anyone else who may be reading this exchange of letters, I should fill in the background. Pope Benedict is seeking to regularise canonically the situation of bishops, priests, religious and laity belonging to the Society of St Pius X. That will not be possible without a resolution of the difficulties those fellow Catholics encounter when they consider the Second Vatican Council, its documents and its aftermath.

As a Catholic journalist, you set yourself the task of investigating the nature of the charges the Society brings against the more recent teaching and practice of the Church. You then found yourself in a degree of sympathy with the objectors, based in part on your own earlier researches into changing styles in 20th-century church architecture, with their by no means always happy consequences for the ethos of the Liturgy. So your letter to me focuses on the accusations traditionalists level at the documents of the Council (and subsequent teaching instruments like the General Instruction on the Roman Missal (GIRM).

Their claim is that these official texts fail to do justice to the central act of the Church's worship, which is the Mass, the sacrament of the saving Sacrifice of our great High Priest, now offered in a bloodless fashion (indeed, at Christ's own insistence, through the oblation of food and drink) by the hands of the sacerdotal celebrant, the Church's minister. The source of your confusion is this. It is not clear how to respond to these objections in a way that is persuasive because it is the truth.

May I preface my remarks by an attempt at capturing the objectors' sympathies? Traditionalists and ourselves are surely in agreement that the forms of the Church's worship have developed over time, not only by incremental changes so slow and anonymous as hardly to be registered by contemporaries but, on occasion, through sharp interventions from above. But this has never previously taken place in the wholesale and systematic fashion which characterised the reform of the Missal, the rites of the remaining sacraments and the other offices of the Church, undertaken by Pope Paul VI. You, Moyra, will probably support me when I say that the scale of this reform, even had its components been entirely felicitous, was imprudently chosen, since of its nature liturgical life has to strike people as something that happens, not as something that is planned. In the Latin church, in countries like our own, the effects have been at times deeply disorienting, as is obvious to someone coming into the Church (like myself) in the 1960s, and is readily discovered by the inquiring minder of a convert of later date (such as yourself). One of the principal sufferers has been the sense of the Holy Eucharist as a sacrificial act, since the combined effect of textual, ritual and architectural changes (by the latter I have in mind the almost universal adoption of celebration facing the people) has been - unintentionally, of course - to weaken the sense that this sacrament is the renewed Calvary of the Church's oblation. And this is especially so when these changes are underpinned (as, unfortunately, is often the case) by a catechetics which prefers to concentrate virtually unilaterally on the more easily assimilable theme of the Eucharistic banquet.

But now perhaps I shall surprise you in saying that I find the contrasts you draw between the earlier and later texts you are comparing to be unnecessarily sharp. Let me take first your worries about the doctrine of the Mass, and subsequently turn my attention to the theology of priesthood. On the first of those two great subjects, I must begin by saying I do not think it is good theology to place an account of the Atoning Sacrifice of the God-man over against a description of the Paschal Mystery. The Paschal Mystery simply refers to the Atoning Sacrifice as not only offered by the Son in the Holy Spirit who is himself the Love of the Father and the Son but accepted by the Father in that same Spirit. The form his acceptance took is the Son's Resurrection, Ascension and Session at the Father's right, there to pour forth forever the salvation he has won for us.

Similarly, I do not think it is plausible to contrast a Eucharistic theology of propitiation and supplication with a teaching on the unity, charity and peace made available to us through communion in the Eucharistic Gifts. The Eucharistic Gifts are the Spotless Lamb whose offering is renewed in the Sacrifice of the altar. The unity, charity and peace involved are the communication to us of a share by participation in the Trinitarian life from the One who made the perfect Oblation for us once and for all. In each case - the once-for-all Sacrifice and its sacramental re-enactment, the mercy and pardon made available to sinners through Christ's Passion cannot be separated from the gifts of communion in his Resurrection life: both are the fruit of his endlessly meritorious reconciling work on the Cross. The Mass is often called "the Eucharist", meaning "the Thanksgiving" not in order to deflect intention from its propitiatory and satisfactory aspects but so as to underline that in it we render thanks for these blessings in their total ensemble.

Duly pondered, these doctrinal principles should indicate the basic continuity between the two sets of texts to which you appeal: the Catechism of the Council of Trent and Pius XII's Mediator Dei on the one hand, and the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy and the General Instruction on the Roman Missal (third typical edition) on the other.

The massive attendance which is still normal at the Good Friday Liturgy indicates, I suggest, that the sense of the faithful remains fundamentally sound on the topic of the saving Sacrifice. We have not become an "Easter people" in the pejorative sense of that phrase for which the Death of Christ is only the prelude to Resurrection rejoicing. Sunday is the weekly Easter, but that is because the triumph of the Cross can only be fully viewed from the side of the Resurrection. It is not because the Cross and the Tomb are put away as Saturday night draws near. Even a Sunday Mass - or, rather (I have to correct myself) especially a Sunday Mass - should be focused on the all-sufficient Sacrifice, because only that Sacrifice made Easter possible. That is why we need to work on not only catechesis but also, in the fullness of time, a revision of the Offertory texts, the ceremonial of the Mass, and (not least) the position of the celebrant so as to re-activate the diminished but by no means extinguished feeling of the faithful for the sacramental identity of Calvary and the Eucharist of the Church. The things you mention that would increase reverence (the chant, kneeling communion, communion on the tongue) are not strictly necessary accompaniments of the Mass (the Eastern churches, for instance, stand to receive), but they are congruent with the demands of the Mass (every Mass, so including those in the Novus Ordo).

Reference to the Mass celebrant brings me to the other major point you raise, Moyra, and this concerns the relative position (theologically speaking, and not just spatially considered) of priest and people. Two key words in the explanation of Catholic doctrine, frequent in the Fathers and first enunciated, in fact, in the Scriptures, are "analogy" and "participation".

You are correct to say that the ministerial priesthood of the ordained and the royal and universal priesthood of the baptised are two distinct yet related ("analogous") ways of sharing in ("participating") the priesthood of Christ. The universal priesthood is exercised most obviously in the good works which should embody faith throughout the Christian life. That general priesthood also has, however, a cultic dimension. Just as it was begun for the faithful in the sacramental mysteries of Baptism, so it finds its noblest expression in their Eucharistic worship. At Mass the baptised exercise their royal priesthood because, in Pope Pius's terminology (see Mediator Dei 88), they are "members of the Mystical Body of Christ the Priest", while the Head of that Body represents himself to them in the ministerial priest who, like Christ himself, stands before the Father on their behalf. The ordained minister's analogical participation in Christ's High Priesthood is, accordingly, different from that of the lay faithful. The latter can offer the (as yet, unconsecrated) gifts in a properly Eucharistic way only through the hands of the ministerial priest, though once those gifts have become, through the act which is his by the New Covenant sealed at the Supper, the Body and Blood of the Lamb, they co-offer with him the saving Victim to the Father. Were there, you ask me, layfolk in the Cenacle at the Last Supper? I have to answer that I don't know. But I do know that in the High Priestly Prayer recorded from that Supper in the Gospel of St John, the Saviour prays that the apostolic priesthood may truly be consecrated so that a far wider flock may be gathered into their company. Every Mass, even when celebrated by a hermit priest in the desert, is offered in the name of the whole Church: not only validly but fruitfully for the living and the dead. The Mass of the hermit is a moving testimony to the unseen. But the mystery of the Mass finds its liturgical epiphany when celebrated with the holy people of God - and notice I add the adjective "holy", as in the Latin original of the phrase (plebs sancta Dei), since mere demonstration of numbers signifies nothing in divine arithmetic.

The Liturgy is, normatively, an assembly (the case of the hermit is exceptional). But it is the sort of assembly described in the Letter to the Hebrews (12: 22-24), which includes the angels and saints and as its centre the "sprinkled blood" of the "mediator" which "speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel". Unless we can insinuate that this is the assembly we have in mind, let us have done with the language of the ordained priest as "president": colourless, banal, bureaucratic.

I hope, Moyra, that your search will be helped by these comments and that you in turn will help others to find the fullness of the faith.

Kind regards,
Aidan Nichols


Fr Aidan Nichols is a Dominican theologian. He is the author of many books, including The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England (Family Publications)