Adoremus Bulletin - January 2021 Issue

Adoremus Bulletin

JANUARY 2021

USCCB: ‘All are Welcome’ Hymn Not Welcome at Mass

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CNA—The doctrine committee of the U.S. bishops’ conference (USCCB) earlier in 2020 produced a guide to evaluating the lyrics of hymns on the basis of their doctrinal content, noting that Vatican II declared sacred music’s purpose to be “the glory of God and the sanctification of the faithful.”

The document was distributed to bishops in December 2020; they were encouraged by the USCCB to share it with diocesan worship offices, pastors, and parish musicians.

The U.S. bishops’ doctrine committee provided two general guidelines for determining whether a hymn is doctrinally suitable for liturgical use: whether it conforms to Catholic doctrine, and whether its images and vocabulary appropriately reflect the usage of Scripture and the liturgical prayer of the Church.

While hymns needn’t “be composed of doctrinal formulae…, [i]t is important to avoid language that could be easily misconstrued in a way that is contrary to Catholic doctrine,” the bishops explained.

Hymnody’s beauty “is constitutively related to the truth of the mystery of faith it proposes for our wonder and praise,” the document’s preface notes.

It adds that since beauty and truth are convertible, “there can be no competition, much less contradiction, between the two. The truth of the faith need not be—and indeed must not be—compromised or subordinated to the canons of compositional style or the needs of musical or poetic form. At the same time, the beauty of the faith cannot be neglected Please see HYMN on next page

XXVI, No.4

The Liturgy—Truly Human, Truly Divine Louis Bouyer on the Transfiguration of the Sacred by the Divine Sacrifice of the Eucharist

By Keith Lemna

D

oes Christian worship require the setting aside of a special sacred space and time in distinction from the profane space and time of our everyday lives? Should it elevate our moral and aesthetic sensibilities by putting Christian prayer in a ritual-symbolic context that moves our attention in a vertical direction beyond the horizontal plane of our daily experience?

These and similar questions were at the center of a major debate in the Christian world that arose shortly after the Second World War. At that time, so-called “Death of God” theologians emerged on the scene in America and Europe who argued that the age of the sacred begun in the Neolithic period of human history was now being effectively succeeded by the age of technology, secularism, and, at long last, the consecration of daily human life in its intrinsic goodness. These theologians held that the loss of the transcendent common in our modern era of secularism should not be taken by Christians to be something deplorable. Rather, it should be recognized as a sign of human maturation to a new and advanced form of consciousness, enabling humanity to live at last at the heart of the world in full self-possession. The ancient divide between the sacred and the profane was now thought to be otiose.

The development of this form of secularizing theology greatly impacted Catholic liturgists at that time, although it was foreign to the sensibilities of many of those who were the leading lights in the liturgical movement in the first half of the 20th century. It was not uncommon for theologians and liturgists influenced by this new current of thought to argue that our current era of secularization offers the opportunity to overcome at last the fissure between the sacred and profane realms

AB

Adoremus Bulletin JANUARY 2021

AB/WIKIMEDIA/EDVARD MUNCH (1863-1944)

News & Views

For the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy

Philosopher Frederich Nietzsche claimed that “God is Dead, and we have killed him.”

In this same spirit, after the Second World War, so-called “Death of God” theologians emerged on the scene in America and Europe who argued that the age of the sacred begun in the Neolithic period of human history was now being effectively succeeded by the age of technology, secularism, and, at long last, the consecration of daily human life such as it is in its intrinsic goodness.

that Jesus himself had drawn together by the fact of his Incarnation. Indeed, secularity could no longer be denigrated as “profane,” and liturgy should no longer be “God-centered and vertical.” Sacred space and time, in its true Christian meaning, is not something to be set apart from the secular domain of our quotidian history, the new liturgical theologians thought. Liturgical vestments, music, art, the rhythm of prayer—all these ritual or ceremonial externalities should be given new form befitting our awakening to the fact that Christ did not come to call us out of the world but to take root in it precisely within the context of what we used to denigrate mistakenly as profane.

Recovery Efforts Keith Lemna is on a mission to restore the sacred and—with the help of Conciliar contributor Louis Bouyer—to rescue the reality behind what we say when we pray the liturgy. .................................................1 2020: Revised Edition The new year may be greeting us like a blank sheet of paper—but Christopher Carstens takes a closer look and sees 2020’s faded text still offering us lessons for 2021...............3 Middle-Age Crisis?

Not so, says Timothy O’Malley, who refutes a presumptive “narrative of decline” in the Mass of the Medieval Church—seeing in it, instead, a rising model for liturgy today ........6

This secularizing view was common in the 1960s and 1970s, but the greatest theologians in the Church in those days were not all on board with the liturgical specialists who were perhaps the most fervent champions of this theological persective. It was opposed by theologians of the stature of Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Joseph Ratzinger, and Louis Bouyer. Each of these theologians recognized that the loss of the sacred in Christian liturgy was detrimental to the faith and that desacralization in its extreme forms needed to be challenged. These eminent theologians realized that the profane, just as it is, is not the foreordained divine milieu Please see BOUYER on page 4 To Our Best Recollection Each collect of the Mass, according to Father Randy Stice, serves as a powerful focal point of grace and gratitude through clarity and eloquence for priest and people ......................8 Bestselling Author—Ever!

Jeremy Priest’s review of the Ignatius NoteTaking and Journaling Bible shows why God remains as good as his Word in this deluxe edition of the ultimate bestseller ...................12 News & Views ...................................................1 Readers’ Quiz .....................................................3 The Rite Questions ..........................................11

2 Continued from HYMN, page 1 —indeed it must be reverenced and highlighted—in the desire to communicate effectively the truth of what has been revealed.”

Hymn-writers are bound to honor and communicate “the mystery of faith in word and music, and this requires genuine artistry, industry, and fidelity,” the bishops wrote. They added that “while there are a number of factors that affect the suitability of hymns for use in Catholic liturgy, such as singability, beauty of language, poetry, etc., in this resource we are concerned with their doctrinal content.”

Scripture provides “the normative idiom for the expression of the mystery,” the bishops said. “The sacred texts, and the liturgical sources which draw on the living Word, provide something of a ‘norm’ for expression when communicating the mystery of faith in liturgical poetics, or hymnody.”

The bishops emphasized both the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Vatican II in their own writing.

Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council’s 1963 constitution on the sacred liturgy, noted, “The texts intended to be sung must always be in conformity with Catholic doctrine; indeed they should be drawn chiefly from holy scripture and from liturgical sources.”

The bishops’ document refers to, and includes as an appendix, the 1997 report of then-Archbishop of Indianapolis Daniel Buechlein on 10 common deficiencies in catechetical materials.

“Since contemporary hymnody and contemporary catechetical texts evolved, to some extent, together, it can be useful to use this list of ten imprecisions to alert a bishop, pastor, or liturgical music minister to deficiencies they may find in hymns, or in a collection of hymns as a whole,” the doctrine committee advised.

They urged that those involved in hymnody “be especially attentive” to six categories of potential deficiencies: in the presentation of Eucharistic doctrine; of Trinitarian doctrine; in the doctrine of God and his relation to humans; a view of the Church that sees her as essentially a human construction; doctrinally incorrect views of the Jewish people; and incorrect Christian anthropology.

Regarding Eucharistic doctrine, the bishops warned that “Catholics nurtured on a steady diet of certain hymns will learn from them that at Mass we come together to share bread and wine, which remain bread and wine, a common meal, even if under special circumstances…. A steady diet of these hymns would erode Catholic sensibility regarding the fullness of Eucharistic teaching, on the Mass as sacrifice, and eventually on the Church, as formed by that sacrifice.”

Examples of hymns that offend the presentation of Eucharistic doctrine, they said, include “God is Here! As We His People”; “Now in This Banquet”; “Let Us Break Bread Together on Our Knees”; and “All Are Welcome.”

Hymns with poor presentation of Trinitarian doctrine include “The Play of the Godhead” and “Led by the Spirit,” while the bishops said that “God Beyond All Names” is a hymn that “fails to respect God’s transcendence.”

Those that erroneously see the Church as a human construct include “Sing a New Church” and “As a Fire is Meant for Burning.”

The bishops wrote that hymns “that imply that the Jews as a people are collectively responsible for the death of Christ” would be ruled out, naming in particular “The Lord of the Dance” and “O Crucified Messiah.”

The document on hymns said that “Canticle of the Sun” “teaches that death is natural and necessary for our life to have something at stake and thus be ‘real.’ In fact, it is the Resurrection of Christ that makes our life ‘real,’ restoring what we had lost in Adam, and it is the Passion of Christ, not death per se, that ‘helps us to feel.’ Death is not a necessary part of human nature.”

The advisory on the use of hymns comes as the USCCB has been approving new translations of components of the Liturgy of the Hours.

Vatican Upholds Bishop’s Temporary Suspension of Communion on Tongue CNA—The secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship wrote to a petitioner last month rejecting the appeal against the Bishop of Knoxville’s decision to ban temporarily reception of Communion on the tongue because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The congregation “received and attentively studied [the] petition making recourse against the decision of Bishop Richard F. Stika to suspend reception of Holy Communion on the tongue at public Masses throughout the Diocese of Knoxville for the duration of the public health emergency caused by the coronavirus pandemic,”

Adoremus Bulletin, January 2021

NEWS & VIEWS

Archbishop Arthur Roche wrote November 13 to the petitioner, whose name has been redacted from the publicly available copy of the letter.

Archbishop Roche, Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, cited a letter sent in August by the congregation’s prefect, Robert Cardinal Sarah, in which the cardinal wrote: “in times of difficulty (e.g., wars, pandemics), Bishops and Episcopal Conferences can give provisional norms which must be obeyed…. These measures given by the Bishops and Episcopal Conferences expire when the situation returns to normal.”

Roche interpreted this letter as saying the provisional norms can be given “as in this case, to suspend for whatever time might be required, reception of Holy Communion on the tongue at the public celebration of the Holy Mass.”

“This Dicastery does hereby therefore act to confirm the decision of Bishop Stika and thereby rejects your petition seeking its modification,” Archbishop Roche wrote.

The rejection of the petition suggests a change in policy or rationale by the congregation. In July 2009, during the swine flu pandemic, the congregation responded to a similar inquiry regarding the right to receive Communion on the tongue, recalling that the 2004 instruction Redemptionis sacramentum “clearly stipulates” that each of the faithful always has the right to receive on the tongue, and that it is illicit to deny Communion to any of the faithful who are not impeded by law.

Bishop Stika lifted the restriction on reception of Communion on the tongue in late November. He had imposed it when he permitted the resumption of public Masses in the diocese at the end of May. In March, the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon concluded that the risk of transmitting infection when receiving on the tongue or hand is “more or less equal.”

Similarly, the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois said earlier this year that “Given the Church’s existing guidance on this point (see Redemptionis Sacramentum, no.

92), and recognizing the differing judgments and sensibilities of the experts involved, we believe that, with the additional precautions listed here, it is possible to distribute on the tongue without unreasonable risk.”

Creative Translations Featured in New Italian Missal

By Hannah Brockhaus

CNA—As the Church in Italy introduced its new translation of the Roman Missal on November 29, 2020, the bishop in charge of its creation hopes the changes will help Catholics rediscover the beauty of the Mass.

In a November 26 interview with ACI Stampa, CNA’s Italian-language partner agency, Maniago said “the hope, therefore, is that, by welcoming the new edition of the missal, the desire to take this opportunity to rediscover the beauty and fruitfulness of the celebration of the Eucharist, in which she experiences and announces to everyone that Christ is alive, may arise in the Italian Church.”

Maniago is the bishop of Castellaneta and president of the Italian bishops’ conference’s liturgy commission, which was responsible for putting together the third edition of the Roman Missal.

The Roman Missal is the book containing the texts and prayers for the celebration of Mass throughout the year. The new Italian translation was used for the first time at Masses on November 29, the First Sunday of Advent and the start of a new liturgical year.

The project has taken years, with the Vatican giving final approval of the translation in June 2019.

Most of the changes from the second to third edition are in the words of the priest, including several changes from “voi fratelli” (brothers) to “voi fratelli e sorelle” (brothers and sisters). But there are also changes to lines in the Our Father and the Gloria.

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The reason for the changes, Maniago said, was to have “a greater fidelity to the Latin text, so that its original meaning would not be altered, but rather it should be more and more specific.”

He pointed to the change in the Our Father. “This text so dear to Christians would not have been altered, if not to underline the deeper meaning of the prayer that Jesus taught, that is, to show the fatherhood of God,” the bishop said.

The new edition translates the penultimate line of the Our Father, “ne nos indúcas in tentatiónem” (lead us not into temptation, in Latin), as “non abbandonarci alla tentazione” (do not abandon us to temptation). The previous version had translated it as “non ci indurre in tentazione” (lead us not into temptation).

In the Gloria, the line “in térra pax homínibus bónae voluntátis” (on earth peace to people of good will) will be translated as “pace in terra agli uomini, amati dal Signore” (peace on earth to men, loved by the Lord). Previously it was translated “pace in terra agli uomini di buona volontà” (peace on earth to men of good will).

Maniago said that, though the changes will be uncomfortable at first, he believed Catholics would welcome the new translation with “the awareness that the missal is not a book like any other, but the text that preserves the Church’s obedience to the Lord, who asked us to celebrate in his memory the text that rules every Mass so that it is faithful to this tradition.”

Pope Francis: Inculturated Mass Shows Gifts of the Holy Spirit

By Hannah Brockhaus

CNA—Pope Francis said in a video message published December 1 that inculturated liturgy can teach Catholics to better appreciate the diverse gifts of the Holy Spirit.

In a preface to a new book, Pope Francis said “this process of liturgical inculturation in Congo is an invitation to value the various gifts of the Holy Spirit, which are a treasure for all humanity.”

A year ago, Pope Francis offered Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica for Congolese immigrants, marking the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the Congolese Catholic Chaplaincy of Rome.

The inculturated Mass included traditional Congolese music and the Zaire Use of the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite.

The Zaire Use is an inculturated Mass formally approved in 1988 for the dioceses of what was then known as the Republic of Zaire, now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in central Africa.

The only inculturated Eucharistic celebration approved after the Second Vatican Council, the Zaire Use was developed following a call for adaptation of the liturgy in Sacrosanctum Concilium, Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.

“One of the main contributions of the Second Vatican Council was precisely that of proposing norms for adapting to the disposition and traditions of various peoples,” the pope said.

“The experience of the Congolese rite of the celebration of Mass can serve as an example and model for other cultures,” the pope said in the video message.

He urged the bishops of Congo, as St. Pope John Paul II did during the bishops’ visit to Rome in 1988, to complete the rite by also adapting the other sacraments and sacramentals.

The pope sent the video message in advance of the Vatican’s publication of the Italian-language book, Pope Francis and the ‘Roman Missal for the Dioceses of Zaire.’

Francis said that the subtitle, “A Promising Rite for Other Cultures,” “indicates the fundamental reason behind this publication: a book that is the testimony of a celebration lived with faith and joy.”

Please see NEWS & VIEWS page 9 EDITOR - PUBLISHER: Christopher Carstens MANAGING EDITOR: Joseph O’Brien CONTENT MANAGER: Jeremy Priest GRAPHIC DESIGNER: Danelle Bjornson OFFICE MANAGER: Elizabeth Gallagher WEBSITE AND TECHNOLOGY: Matt Korger MARKETING AND FUNDRAISING: Eugene Diamond SOCIAL MEDIA: Jesse Weiler INQUIRIES TO THE EDITOR P.O. Box 385 La Crosse, WI 54602-0385 editor@adoremus.org

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE The Rev. Jerry Pokorsky ✝ Helen Hull Hitchcock The Rev. Joseph Fessio, SJ

Contents copyright © 2021 by ADOREMUS. All rights reserved.

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Adoremus Bulletin, January 2021

Time to Turn the Palimpsest on 2020

By Christopher Carstens, Editor

T

he benefits of serving as Adoremus’s editor abound.

For one, I get to read—and reread and re-reread— each excellent entry submitted by our fine authors.

I’m able to work with a talented and generous team on a constant basis to deliver orthodox, joyful, and practical teaching on things liturgical. My frequent contacts with our readers and donors encourage me that our efforts are hitting home. It is work with many graces attached.

The work is also as informative for me as I hope it is for our readers. For example, one word that entered my lexicon this past year—thanks to our Managing Editor, Joseph O’Brien—is palimpsest. Even though Adoremus doesn’t have a “word of the year” entry, this old-fashioned yet newly-applicable term might be it.

A “palimpsest,” so I’ve learned, refers to a sheaf of writing material which has its text scraped or rubbed clear so that the sheaf can be reused. With the advent of the printing press, the term became largely the domain of archeologists and philologists seeking to discover fragments from yet one more lost work of Homer or Aristotle, for example, whose works were often copied by ancient scribes or medieval monks—only to be scraped (mostly) clean to make room for some more immediate need, such as a monastery’s pantry inventory.

Imagine how time intensive and therefore costly it was to create a piece of parchment: a lamb was born, fed and watered, killed, and flayed. Its skin was then cleaned, soaked, stretched, stored carefully, and then used to inscribe everything from laundry lists to epic poems—and back again. Unlike modern paper that is easily tossed and replaced afresh, a used piece of parchment was effaced and reused, even though past markings still remained. A well-used and well-loved palimpsest thus held signs of its past, even as it was used in the present, for the sake of future generations.

So: what possible application does “palimpsest” have to the Church’s liturgical life as 2020 turns into 2021? I propose that we turn the page—or the palimpsest—on the old year, but not without first considering what we learned from the already-fading text of 2020.

First consider how, figuratively speaking, the pages of the Missal were “scoured clean” of much of their content: Holy Week was cancelled (at least as far as the public was concerned). Palms were eliminated. No washing of the feet. No veneration of the Cross. No Easter fire or Lumen Christi. And then, when Masses did resume on a regular basis, singing was silenced, holy water drained, the sign of

Readers’ Quiz On the Liturgical Movement

Our current Roman Missal was “Renewed by Decree of the Most Holy Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican” (front matter to the current bound Missal). And of the Second Vatican Council’s 16 documents, the first was Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. “It was no accident,” one commentator noted, “that the first completed work of Vatican Council II proved to be the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy…. For decades, a vigorous liturgical movement had been going on…. Thus, when the Council addressed itself to the liturgy, all the basic spadework had been done.” So, if we wish to understand as fully as possible our current Missal, then we must also read accurately the Second Vatican Council—which entails also an appreciation of the great minds of the modern liturgical movement. In this quiz on the liturgical movement, we’ll see how the Liturgical Movement can assist our reading of the Council and its Missal through what Pope Benedict XVI called “a hermeneutic of reform” and renewal. How well do you know the Liturgical Movement that helped form the Missal used each day?

1. The “Liturgical Movement,” as its name implies, desires to move or change something. What is it that the movement’s key figures wished to change? a. People’s generally unfavorable opinions about liturgists. b. The Mass. c. The people who attend liturgical services. d. Liturgical dances. e. Liturgical law and tradition.

peace prohibited. The communion to the faithful hardly resembled what the Missal prescribed: no chalice, no communion on the tongue, and even the dialogue, “The Body of Christ,” followed by the communicants’ “Amen,” was occasionally omitted. In some places, the faithful were even encouraged to depart the building immediately after receiving!

This past year’s COVID restrictions on the Mass—however time will judge them—obscured the “red and the black” texts of the Missal, leaving only traces of its full power and radiance. Instead, liturgical celebrations only dimly revealed the full radiance of the Lamb. In short, this palimpsest-of-a-Missal lost much of the legibility it possessed during pre-pandemic times.

On the other hand—and here is the second reason why we wish to turn the palimpsest on 2020—we are given a kind of subsequent clean slate in 2021 to restore the Missal to its full power (continuing COVID restrictions notwithstanding). The wiping away of much of the Missal’s prescriptions provides the opportunity to restore them appropriately. When singing returns, for example, what ought it sound like? Rubbed clear of insipid and doctrinally questionable hymns, let liturgical music resound with scriptural antiphons—just as the Missal itself desires (see General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM) 40-41, 48). When the all-clear sounds to reinstate the sign of peace, how ought it be restored? Not to its former state of meaningless glad-handing, but as a solemn occasion to encounter the peace of the risen Christ—just as the Missal writes (GIRM 82, 154). When the chalice is offered to the people once again, how ought they receive it? Not as the

time to “get the wine” or the occasion to once again needlessly multiply extraordinary ministers of holy communion, but as the humble honor to share in the sacrificial banquet of Christ, to consummate the sacrifice that we, the baptized, have in our own proper way helped to offer through the priest’s hands, and to be transformed by entering the very bloodstream of Christ (a kind of “consanguinity,” as Pope Benedict once put it)—just as the pages of the Missal envision (GIRM 85, 162, 281-3).

Recall, a palimpsest has scraped clear undesirable or unnecessary text, but these marks are not altogether lost but survive in faint hints, much like a faded photograph. As far as our Missal and our Mass are concerned, we should be glad to be rid of 2020’s liturgical deformations, even while we carry lessons learned into 2021. And as we do restore the Missal and the Mass to their full form, we do so reading also the marks of tradition. Pope John Paul II offers a remark on the 25th anniversary of Sacrosanctum Concilium about liturgical reform that is applicable to our experience of 2020 and our hopes for 2021. He says, “The seed was sown; it has known the rigors of winter, but the seed has sprouted, and become a tree. It is a matter of the organic growth of a tree becoming ever stronger the deeper it sinks its roots into the soil of tradition” (Vicesimus Quintus Annus, 23).

As our Missal and Mass have known the “rigors” of 2020’s COVID-19, may we turn the page and find 2021’s experience one of sinking “its roots into the soil of tradition” and yielding abundant fruit for years to come.

2. What event is most commonly associated with the beginning of the modern Liturgical Movement? a. Dom Prosper Guéranger’s reestablishment of the Benedictine Priory of Solesmes in 1833. b. The First Vatican Council (1869-70). c. Pius XI’s 1928 apostolic constitution, Divini Cultus, “On Divine Worship.” d. Pius XII’s 1947 encyclical, Mediator Dei. e. The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).

6. On the heights above the Bavarian town of Rothenfels stands a castle. Which Liturgical Movement figure discussed liturgy, culture, and social issues with college students in this castle? a. Dietrich von Hildebrand. b. Maurus Wolter, OSB. c. Columba Marmion, OSB. d. Romano Guardini. e. Ildefons Herwegen, OSB.

3. True or False: The founders of the modern liturgical movement thought it necessary to downplay the importance of the ordained priest in order to elevate the common priesthood of the faithful—and thus facilitate the latter’s “active participation.”

7. To many minds today, devotion to the liturgy and service to those in need are mutually exclusive: you can do one or the other, but not both. True or False: This perceived divorce between liturgical worship and social action finds its roots in the Liturgical Movement.

4. Which liturgical movement figure claimed that “many years will have to pass before this type of [reformed] liturgical edifice…can appear purified of the squalidness brought by time, newly resplendent with dignity and fitting order”? a. Pope Paul VI. b. Annibale Bugnini. c. Pope Pius X. d. Louis Bouyer. e. Romano Guardini.

8. Who wrote the first encyclical devoted entirely to the topic of the Liturgy? a. Pius X. b. Pius XI. c. Pius XII. d. John Paul II. e. Benedict XVI.

5. Which Liturgical Movement figure did Pope Benedict XVI claim to have “perhaps the most fruitful theological idea of our century”? a. Romano Guardini. b. Pius Parsch. c. Louis Bouyer. d. Hans Urs von Balthasar. e. Odo Casel.

9. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, echoing Pope Pius X, placed which as the “aim to be considered before all else” in the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy? a. Sacred music. b. Active participation. c. Lay ministry. d. Frequent reception of Holy Communion. e. Catechesis.

10. What were some of the goals successfully achieved by the Liturgical Movement?

ANSWERS on page 10

Adoremus Bulletin, January 2021 in his perfect humanity the harmonious liturgy of the cosmos. For Bouyer, it is in the context of this grasp of the cosmic proportions of human being in connection with the angelic realms that we must situate liturgy.

The natural sacred in history is like a remnant sign of our liturgical connection to the whole creation, and natural human religious ritual prefigures the liturgy of the Church, without suggesting that such natural ritual serves as a sort of anticipatory Procrustean Bed onto which the supernatural sacred can be fitted.

The second study that must be carried out, on Bouyer’s admonition, concerns the direct communication of God to humanity in the revelation of the divine Word in the Old Testament. In God’s revelation to the people that he called out in Abraham, the Lord utilizes the entire structure of our religious and cultural existence in order to make himself known to us and to unite us to his eternal life. In the native situation of our existence, we coalesce as natural societies around the sacred, which is our first experience of the world in its totality unified by what we intuit to be qualitatively unique

AB/IGNATIUS PRESS

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Adoremus co-founder, Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio, speaks with Father Louis Bouyer in 1978. Ignatius Press, which Fessio also founded, would go on to publish many of Bouyer’s titles.

Continued from BOUYER, page 1 that the “Death of God” theologians were proclaiming it to be. Bouyer’s work was particularly important in this regard because it centered throughout, in a uniquely comprehensive fashion in many books and articles, on the question of the relationship of Christian revelation to the sacred; in his work, Bouyer explored the issue with unsurpassed depth and breadth. He made the question of the sacred central to his theology of liturgy, and he made theology of liturgy central to his larger body of work.

Bouyer by the Book(s) Father Louis Bouyer (1913-2004) was born into a French Protestant family in 1913. After seminary studies, he was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1936 and was later received into the Catholic Church in 1939.

He was ordained a Catholic priest in the French Congregation of the Oratory in 1944. He was named to the preparatory commission of the Second Vatican Council and again as a consultant to the Consilium in several key areas of the reform of the liturgy. Bouyer not only distinguished himself in many areas of scholarship (patristics, biblical studies, Reformation studies, dogmatic theology, and liturgical studies), but lectured widely in both English and French. He was particularly esteemed

by Pope Paul VI who wanted to elevate him on the merits of his scholarly achievements to the college of cardinals. The pope was advised against it as a result of the controversial, combative attitude Bouyer assumed toward “mainstream” liturgists and others in power in the Church in France in the 1960s and 70s, and so the elevation never occurred. He was a particularly esteemed mentor of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger (19262007), the Archbishop of Paris from 1981 to 2005, who himself combatted many of the trends in French Catholicism that Bouyer deplored.

Bouyer’s first book exploring the sacred in liturgical theology, Le Mystère Pascal (The Paschal Mystery), released in 1945, was a milestone publication in the history of the liturgical movement in the 20th century. It was a meditation on the liturgy of the final days of Holy Week and presented an integrated theological vision of divine mystery and Christian assimilation to this vision.

Indeed, the book may have introduced the expression “Paschal Mystery” into common usage in the Church.

Bouyer followed this book with other seminal titles in the study of liturgy, such as Liturgical Piety, Eucharist, and Liturgy and Architecture.

The two books in which Bouyer addressed the question of the sacred most comprehensively were Rite and Man, published on the eve of the Second Vatican Council and read by many conciliar periti, and Cosmos: the World and the Glory of God, a thorough treatise on cosmology. A book of interviews that Bouyer granted to Catholic journalist Georges Daix, Le métier de théologien, added important clarifications to these more systematic productions.

Rite and Man was a major inspiration for James Hitchcock in writing The Recovery of the Sacred, and

Hitchcock summarized in his own book Bouyer’s work on the sacred: “As the Second Vatican Council was beginning, the French theologian Louis Bouyer was analyzing rites and man, arguing that both an unrestrained embrace of the ethos of the sacred—rites, mysteries, sacraments—and a severe Puritanism are heretical from the standpoint of Catholic tradition, pointing out the opposed dangers of regarding the words of worship as meaningless in themselves and hence as magic or merely as means for conveying doctrinal teaching.”1 In the Bouyerian optic, the liturgical rites of the Church are not a divine overturning of creation, as if they show forth a willful divine prerogative that is intrinsically unintelligible. Nor are they simply pedagogical tools.

Rather, they are vessels of divine action through which the mystery of Christ is communicated to his followers so that their real filial adoption into the divine life might be effected and the whole of creation made new.

“Bouyer moves the study of liturgy beyond a mere scientia rubricarum (science of rubrics).”

In Rite and Man, Bouyer argues that the liturgy of the Church is rooted in the “ritual realism” inherent to all living religion. For vital religions that have not lapsed into magic, ritual is not an arbitrary construct of divine or human will but accords with the religious valence of natural signs and symbols of the sacred in our experience. Liturgy works on the foundation of the ritual realism of natural religion. For instance, Eucharist and baptism connect with natural ritual eating and washing. Christ’s institution of the sacraments is not an arbitrary imposition on the good ordering of creation, and the natural sacramental sign is not abrogated when it is elevated onto the supernatural plane.

Cosmic Undertaking Bouyer moves the study of liturgy beyond a mere scientia rubricarum (science of rubrics). He shows the meaning of liturgy in its vastest cosmic and historical horizon, and demonstrates that there is no way to understand liturgy in depth without carrying out three connected studies that link the theology of liturgy to the theology of creation and redemption. The first study has to do with the meaning of liturgy in relation to the natural situation of humanity in the world. Bouyer takes up in this regard the great theme of Eastern Patristic theology—that humanity is a microcosm that sums up the whole world, a vision comprehensively articulated in the seventh century by St. Maximus the Confessor in his theology of “cosmic liturgy.” We are (to use St. Thomas Aquinas’ later concepts) a body-soul composite unity by nature, and we draw our vitality and knowledge from the cosmos. Maximus understood humanity to be a bridge or pontifex (bridge-builder) for creation that unites or reconciles all things and restores by faithful obedience to and union with Christ

“Liturgical rites are are vessels of divine action through which the mystery of Christ is communicated to his followers.” or “Wholly Other.” The sacred is given to us through “hierophanies” such as the sky, the sun, mountains, or the fire used in some forms of ritual sacrifice. These hierophanies obscurely point to the divine presence of the Creator in the world, who is experienced as a tremendous power or force transcendent to it and yet mysteriously immanent in it.

With many Church Fathers, Bouyer holds that the divine might be given to us in sacred symbols by virtue of angelic mediation, but this mediation is distorted by the intrusion of the demonic into the human sphere.

We are ordered by the sacred to a reality that we cannot control and that transcends us. As the German theologian Rudolph Otto (1869-1937) explained, the sacred both fills us with dread or terror and fascinates us with its beauty. It can be desecrated, in which case the profane at last comes into being. The profane is not the ab origine reality of human culture. Rather, humanity constructed the profane by pushing the sacred aside, and it sought to wrest control of the divine through magical manipulation of the sacred.

In the economy of the Old Covenant, God in his divine Word worked through the pagan or natural sacred to transfigure it and to elevate humanity onto a new, direct plane of relationship with him. God thereby came to his people as who he is in accordance with who human beings are as inherently religious creatures, each possessing an innate cultural need for sacred rite, myth, and prayer. God rectified the sacred by replacing the pagan cults with a cult that keeps to some degree the materiality of natural cults but, unlike these earlier cults, leads directly to him. He began to bring about in this way a new creation from the old through a new humanity rescued from sin.

The Sacred in the Flesh The third level of study that Bouyer recommends concerns the New Covenant that God established by his direct embodiment in history in the person of Christ the New Adam. The Incarnation effected a transfiguration of sacred experience on an even deeper level than was attained in the Old Testament. With the redemptive Incarnation of Christ, those obscure signs of the Creator that were present in the hierophanies of the natural sacred now became direct signs of the embodied Redeemer who is not only a Word present to us in the external form of command or teaching but a personal presence fully immanent within the flesh of our historical humanity. He grasped and consummated our being in his own and carried out the decisive action in the Paschal Mystery which will make all things new with the transfiguration of the cosmos.

The Eucharistic sacrifice of the Church offers the most important example of what Bouyer means by speaking of the transfiguration of the natural sacred in the ambit of the history of salvation. The natural sacred is present in an especially significant way in the sacrificial cults of the pagan world. Following a line of analysis present in eminent historians of religion such as William Robertson Smith (1846-1894), Gerard Van der Leeuw (1890-1950), and R.K. Yerkes (fl. 1953), Bouyer stressed that sacrifice in its original material expression is a sacred meal. This is most assuredly not to say that it is a common meal but a meal that recovers our fundamental givenness and dependence on God.

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Reality’s Rubrics If Bouyer’s studies of the theology of liturgy are not primarily about rubrics or liturgical forms, they nevertheless bear directly on these, especially with respect to the meaning and validity of the sacred and sacrifice in liturgy. As indicated above, the sacred is originally a kind of proto-sacramental experience given through natural signs of a transcendent power or an efficacious force.

This power exists at the level of the heavens and of celestial deities. The sacred meal attests to the way that the sacred orients the totality of human life to the transcendent in a living—and life-giving—religion. Divine revelation does not abolish this orientation. Rather, it heals, perfects, and elevates the natural sacred by bringing it into the domain of the new creation in Christ through the sacrifice of the Eucharist. Through the Eucharist, God extends through the supernatural mysteries of the sacraments his elevating grace to all aspects of our lives, transforming us in toto with his transcendent being that has become fully immanent to us and in us.

The mainstream of reformers after the Council oftentimes thought in terms of rupture and discontinuity, and this was of a piece with their desacralizing tendencies. Oftentimes, they also operated on the premise that God came in Christ to overturn the old sacral orders of creation and the Church that encouraged an otherworldly pointing to the heavens and to the need for humanity to transcend the world as it is in its fallen condition. The Law of the Incarnation, they insisted, undermines this otherworldliness. In their view, Christ came in the Incarnation to consecrate the profane precisely as profane, that is, to leave the world as it was in its fallen and wounded state. Liturgy thus became the self-expression of participants such as they are and not as God wants them to become. Bouyer insisted that the Eucharistic mystery is the communication of the glory of the Cross and Resurrection to us, and that we are in-

to reject the idea that the Eucharist is a divine sacrifice.

Indeed, Stefan Orth summarized the situation when he said that numerous Catholics today follow Luther’s dictum according to which talk of “the sacrifice of the Mass” is the “most appalling horror” and a “damnable impiety.”2

“Everything we have, including most basically our nourishment and our very life, comes to us from a transcendent Giver. The sacred meal shows forth our absolute dependence on the divine.” serted into the very mystery of Christ, finding ourselves anew only by losing ourselves in him. Too often, many reformers thought in a contrary way that liturgy should be the celebration of natural life—even in its fallenness.

How did this play out with respect to liturgical symbolism in concreto? There are several areas of disappointment in this regard that Bouyer relates in Le métier de théologien: improvised Eucharistic prayers that glorified secular and profane human existence rather than the mirabilia Dei (the wondrous works of God) that bring about our transformation in Christ; the suppression of the consecration of churches; making the Eucharistic meal a common meal with an everyday table rather than a proper altar; the replacement in some places of scriptural readings with secular texts; the use—or abolition—of liturgical vestments (such as doing away with the chasuble and maniple) that do not accord with the meaning of particular feasts or celebrations, thereby failing to distinguish properly the sacramental function of the priest.

On this last point, Bouyer especially laments the progressive abandonment by bishops of the miter. He thinks that this abandonment stems from a rank tendency to confuse simplicity with mediocrity as well as poverty with indigence. He suggests that bishops have lost touch with the meaning of their sacred office, evidenced in displays of what Bouyer calls “false humility” (humilité fausse). Honor addressed to them and their special place in the liturgical service has not to do with their person first and foremost but with their office, and they have forgotten this crucial distinction.

Call for Clarity Continues The abuses that Bouyer detailed are not as common and ubiquitous in our day as they were in the 1970s, but they still exist, and ambiguous theologies of the sacred are not lacking. It is not uncommon for Catholic scholars

AB

Everything we have, including most basically our nourishment and our very life, comes to us from a transcendent Giver. The sacred meal shows forth our absolute dependence on the divine. Against theologians who thought of sacrifice as first and foremost destruction or a blood offering, Bouyer stressed that immolation and oblation are secondary aspects of sacrifice that have purpose only with respect to the meal. The sacrificial animal is slaughtered so that it may be shared with the gods, the priests, and the faithful who participate in the sacrifice, which is, it should be noted, understood to be fundamentally an act of the gods. In immolation there is a symbolic transfer of goods, an oblation from this world to the next, but such acts of immolation include the recognition that all we have and all we presume to possess is given to us as gift.

Sharing in the meal, we do not give God something that he does not have; rather, through this sacred meal, we humans receive our lives anew.

The sacrificial meal is present in the ancient world in seasonal festivals of cosmic rebirth. Maintaining some connection to the materiality of these pagan rituals, the most important figure of sacrifice in the covenant of God with Israel is the paschal commemoration in which the people of God celebrate their deliverance from Egypt.

The sacrifice of Christ, recapitulating the sacrificial history of human religion especially summed up in the Pasch, conjoins the Cross with the Last Supper. In the uniquely divine sacrifice of the Eucharist, God in Christ is directly offerer, priest, and victim of the sacrifice, and sacrifice is now recognized as God’s self-offering to us in the body of the Eucharist. His immolation and oblation on the Cross serve this end. God does not take pleasure in a ritual putting-to-death of his Son but offers his Son for us as the new Paschal Lamb. He is both lamb and shepherd who feeds his sheep with his own body and blood. As Presbyterorum Ordinis from Vatican II teaches, Christ in the Eucharist is the “living bread which gives life to men through his flesh.” In this understanding, the Eucharistic liturgy of the Church is not a sacrifice, on the one hand, and also a meal, on the other, as if the two emphases were separate—as is sometimes claimed. Rather, the Eucharist is a sacrifice because it is the sacred meal par excellence, the action through which God brings about in the culmination of all his work on our behalf the renewal of creation through the Son of Man.

Le Mystère Pascal (The Paschal Mystery -

A new generation of priests seems to be vehemently dissatisfied with this postconciliar situation, but the theological understanding that accompanies their reaction oftentimes lacks theological depth. Some are attracted to the obtuse theology of self-styled traditionalists who go so far as to reject essential theological advances present in the texts of the Second Vatican Council. In a talk in 2001, Joseph Ratzinger publicly lamented an example of “traditionalist” confusion along these lines: “I mention this strange opposition between the Passover and sacrifice, because it represents the architectonic principle of a book recently published by the Society of St. Pius X, claiming that a dogmatic rupture exists between the new liturgy of Paul VI and the preceding catholic liturgical tradition. This rupture is seen [by the Society] precisely in the fact that everything is interpreted henceforth on the basis of the ‘paschal mystery,’ instead of the redeeming sacrifice of expiation of Christ; the category of the paschal mystery is said to be the heart of the liturgical reform, and it is precisely that which appears to be the proof of the rupture with the classical doctrine of the Church.”3 Please see BOUYER on page 11

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Medieval Assent: Communion of Body and Soul as an Ascending Model for Liturgy Evidence Challenges the Narrative of Decline Regarding Lay Liturgical Participation in the Middle Ages

By Timothy O’Malley

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espite the wealth of scholarship pertaining to liturgical participation among lay medieval Christians, the narrative of medieval liturgical decline is enshrined in most histories of Christian worship. Indeed, the general story—as it is related in formal courses in liturgical history at seminaries, colleges, and universities—proceeds as one of decline.

The narrative of decline progresses as follows. In the early Church, participation in the Eucharist—including reception of the Eucharist—was normal for all Christians. As the Church became more clericalized and as the doctrine of real presence developed, Eucharistic participation by the laity declined. Medieval piety was expressed through ocular communion in which lay men and women would communicate spiritually by gazing upon the Host at the sounding of the sacring bell. Abuses occurred, such as lay men and women running from church to church just to see the Host. Because of architecture, the silent Canon, the use of Latin rather than the vernacular, and the advent of rood screens, it is assumed that lay people did not understand what was happening in the liturgical rites of the Church. Their participation was superstitious, perhaps, even compulsory, but it was not an active or intelligent participation. This non-active participation became enshrined in Catholicism at the Council of Trent, lay people inserted an array of devotions into the Eucharistic celebration like the rosary, and only the 20th-century liturgical movement and the reforms of the Council restored liturgical worship to its original purpose as the sacrifice of the whole Body of Christ.

This narrative contains some truth. A lack of reception of the Blessed Sacrament was concerning to medieval Catholic clerics, canonists, and theologians. The requirement to confess one’s sins and to receive the Blessed Sacrament once a year, decreed at the Lateran Council IV in 1215, is evidence that the Church wanted lay people to consume the Body of Christ more regularly. Thomas Aquinas’ own theology attends to the Eucharist as the presence of Christ, which is to be consumed in the Eucharistic banquet. Even if St. Thomas did not imagine that lay people might regularly receive the Eucharist each day in the 20th century, the meal dimension of the Eucharistic sacrifice is integral to St. Thomas’ poetic account of the Blessed Sacrament in the hymns he composed for Corpus Christi. The liturgical movement of the 20th century also strove to attune men and women to an active participation in this sacrifice of Christ, one in which the lay faithful received the Blessed Sacrament during the Eucharistic liturgy proper.

The modern liturgical movement was thus not a unique event in the history of liturgical development. An emphasis on participation in the liturgical rites by lay men and women was a persistent concern in late medieval life, and not just among the Church leadership, as mentioned above.

The popularity of lay Mass books with commentaries on the Eucharist, the presence of Lay Book of Hours well before the Reformation, and the flourishing of the arts in late medieval Catholicism testifies to a robust desire for participation in the rites of the Church.

“The modern liturgical movement was thus not a unique event in the history of liturgical development.”

This medieval sense of participation is not precisely the same that many Catholics emphasize today. And it is here that lay medieval practice may be salutary for the Church in the 21st century. The purpose of this essay is to interrupt this narrative of decline, attending to the kinds of participation that were desired among lay medieval Catholics. Participation happened, and it was primarily social and aesthetic. The goal in this essay, therefore, is not to make the Church today into a medieval village parish or monastic community. The reformed Rites of the Church presume a distinct kind of participation by lay men and women, including involvement in Eucharistic dialogues and chanting the Mass Propers.

But intelligibility of such texts and actions should not be the exclusive way of assessing lay Eucharistic participation. The social and aesthetic dimensions of liturgical prayer also must be considered. The way that we tell the history of liturgical

The artistic monuments of the medieval liturgy should not be understood as exclusively for the illiterate. Instead, aesthetics is the pr Beaune Altarpiece

evolution (or perhaps de-evolution, based on the story of decline) is not just evidence of bad history but a theological and philosophical assumption about participation. This assumption not only skews the true history of the liturgy but it also proves untrue to what it means to be a human being.

The Social Dimension of Lay Participation Cracks in the narrative of decline within liturgical history have surfaced initially through the work of social historians.

Two such historians, John Bossy and Virginia Reinburg, have argued that lay participation in the Eucharist was common, but it was not equivalent to clerical participation. Bossy’s

There was an understanding in Medieval times of the Mass

1983 article, “The Mass as a Social Institution 1200-1700,” argues that lay men and women participated in the Eucharistic liturgy as a social drama, which brought peace into the community of believers. Liturgical commentators understood the Canon of the Mass not only as an occasion for Eucharistic consecration but as the honoring of God and the saints, praying for the living and the dead, and asking God that the sacrifice of the Mass might relate to the needs of the ones praying the Mass.1 Lay participation in the Eucharist often pertained to these three dimensions of the Canon.

Bossy argues that even if lay people did not fully understand Latin, or have access to the Roman Canon, they were surely aware that the Mass was a sacrifice of Christ for the benefit of the living and the dead. The practice of interceding for the dead was not just a religious custom but integral to medieval life. Bossy writes, “The devotion, theology, liturgy, architecture, finances, social structure and institutions of late medieval Christianity are inconceivable without the assumption that friends and relatives of the souls in purgatory had an absolute obligation to procure their release, above all by having masses said for them.”2 Praying for the dead, especially after the consecration when Christ was present upon the altar in the Blessed Sacrament, was a regular practice for the devout.

And yet, as Bossy notes, liturgical participation was not reserved exclusively to praying for souls in purgatory. The

regular celebration of the Mass also brought peace into the community celebrating the liturgy. The yearly reception of the Blessed Sacrament was a time of great festivity within the rural parish. Men and women would receive the Blessed Sacrament, as well as non-consecrated ablution wine, and then would proceed to a parish or fraternity feast.3 Even if Holy Communion were not received regularly at Mass by the lay faithful, the pax board established Eucharistic solidarity among the community. Having witnessed the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross, men and women in their turn kissed this decorated board as it was passed among them, receiving the peace of Christ from the altar. This peace was to unite them into a Eucharistic fraternity.

Virginia Reinburg’s “Liturgy and Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France” advances the argument of Bossy.

She challenges the claim that lay men and women had no intellectual understanding of the Eucharist, arguing that this perspective is drawn primarily from the critique of both Protestant and Catholic reformers. She contends that the Mass was meaningful for lay men and women “because it was conducted in a ritual language of gestures and symbols they knew from secular life.”4 Most liturgical historians look to the books of clergy to assess lay participation. Reinburg notes that this is the wrong place to look. Lay prayer books reveal the distinct practices of lay men and women during the Eucharistic liturgy. Even if the Gospel was not understood by the lay faithful, being read in Latin, nonetheless the lay person was urged to stand and worship at the reading of the Gospel because the power of God’s word transcends understanding.5 To stand, as showing respect, was familiar to the lay faithful from their daily interactions in society.

Further, the ritual actions surrounding the elevation of the Host were intended to draw the attention of the lay faithful to the awesome meaning of Eucharistic worship. The high elevation of the Eucharistic Host, on the part of the priest, was meant to facilitate lay participation rather than discourage it. The choir screen was sometimes opened at this time, and there was the ritual use of both bells and candles. The visual experience of this moment of elevation was “built upon layers of visual memories associating the elevation with the crucifixion, and with the actual presence of Christ among those attending mass.”7 Even the pax board, for Reinburg, was intended to facilitate deeper Eucharistic participation among the lay faithful.

Because of the gravity of Eucharistic reception, few would regularly receive the Host. And yet, the kiss of peace as mediated through the pax board and the reception of blessed and non-consecrated bread at the conclusion of Mass was available to all those attending Mass.8 According to social historians, liturgical participation of laity was simply part of medieval life. Not every lay medieval Catholic was devout. Surely, some did engage in religious practices as a form of magic or superstition. But, as a rule, there was an understanding of the Mass as a sacrifice that united the lay faithful “with God, the Church, and each other.”9 The participation was not equivalent to clerical participation, but participation was active insofar as it involved

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AB/WIKIPEDIA

gaze leads one into sin, there is also a redemptive gaze. As Biernoff shows, the increased attention in late medieval devotional life upon gazing on the image of Christ crucified or looking upon the Host is not fundamentally about distance but proximity. Beholding is an act of communion between the seer and the object of sight—and it is a communion in which salutary images heal men and women.

Of course, not just the eyes are involved in this act of beholding, but all the senses. Liturgical historians have tended to deal almost exclusively with texts. And yet, as Eric Palazzo shows, one cannot understand medieval liturgy as primarily a textual phenomenon. In other words, liturgical par-

rivileged mode by which the human person as body-soul is enabled to participate in the liturgical act. The altarpiece—such as the

lay men and women in the social life of the Eucharistic community.

The Aesthetic Dimension of Lay Participation The aesthetic dimension of the liturgy is often misunderstood, even by medieval historians, who tend to perpetuate the assumption that the aesthetic culture of the liturgy was the “Bible for the illiterate.” The literate monk can participate in the rites of the Church, read manuscripts, while the illiterate lay person is catechized through stained glass windows and altarpieces. This assumption is problematic because it presumes that the aesthetic dimension of the liturgy—the act of beholding—is purely a passive phenomenon, reserved for lay life. Art and music historians have begun to deconstruct this assumption, showing that the act of beholding— whether through the eyes or the ears—is a supreme occasion of participation for both cleric and lay person alike.

Many liturgical historians presume that both seeing and hearing are purely passive activities. Implicit in such presumptions, we must infer that these historians see it as an act of non-participation to behold a rite that is unfolding within

“The eye does not participate in a distant gaze but communes or touches the object to which it directs its attention.” a space or to listen to a polyphonic setting of the Sanctus.

This assumption takes as normative a modern approach to both sensation and knowledge. Real knowledge is an internal phenomenon, whereas the act of sensation is at best a passive reception of the senses. In her book Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages, Suzannah Biernoff provides an alternative account of sensation based in the medieval optics of Roger Bacon (1220-1292). Medieval optics understood any act of seeing as both passive and active. The eye does not just behold from a distance but engages in a physical encounter between the perceiver and the object perceived. It is through the eye that the physical world penetrates the body of the one perceiving. Biernoff writes, “As a medium and meditator between the sensitive soul and the sensible world, the eye, like the skin, is both part of us and external to us, …the flesh of the skin and eyes constitutes a permeable membrane and not—or not only—the body’s border.”10 The eye does not participate in a distant gaze but communes or touches the object to which it directs its attention.

This optical theory was not known exclusively by literate clerics. Evidence shows that many of these same clerics shared this theory with their congregations, its consequences suffusing both monastic and lay sermons at the time. For example, the custody of the eyes was so essential, because to gaze erotically upon the human body or food was an embodied act. It was a physical encounter between the one who looks and the object or person. The eyes are the windows of the soul, because they are penetrable by the outside world, allowing the external world a port of entry into the soul.

And yet, not all seeing was bad seeing. If the pornographic

ticipation is not exclusively for the literate. Rather, liturgy is intended to enable the participation of all persons. He writes, “in addition to its strong theological connotations and meanings, the liturgy was by its nature a ‘synthesis of the arts,’ where all the senses are appealed to, since man, made of a soul and a body, is himself an image, a ‘representation’ of the church in its theological sense as well as its material dimension.”11 One participated in an ecclesial identity through the act of sensation in the liturgy.

The artistic monuments of the medieval liturgy should not therefore be understood as exclusively for the illiterate. Instead, aesthetics is the privileged mode by which the human person as body-soul is enabled to participate in the liturgical act. The altarpiece is not reducible to educative scenes but enables men and women to participate visually in the sacrifice of Christ in the context of an image to which a variety of devotional registers are associated.12 Likewise, the singing of polyphonic music in later medieval liturgy was part of this act of dramatic beholding, creating an aural backdrop by which the wondrous elevation of the Host might be connected to salvation history such as the moment of Annunciation where the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us.13 Polyphonic music often drew upon melodies from popular love songs, allowing erotic desire to be directed toward Eucharistic beholding. From this context, is it a surprise that

ing nun.14 The texts that were written at Helfta (near Leipzig, Germany) would be translated into the vernacular for lay readers, inspiring later Eucharistic and liturgical devotion throughout Europe.

Lay participation in the entirety of the liturgical life of the Church, not just the Mass, therefore, was facilitated through the aesthetic culture of the medieval Church. The idea that lay people were passive receptacles during the medieval period is increasingly untenable based on the work of musicologists, art historians, and those retrieving the liturgical poetics and rhetoric of women mystics who influenced later vernacular literature.

Past Present As noted in the introduction, the purpose of this essay is not to force us back into a medieval worldview. Nor is it to offer a critique of the reformed rites of the Second Vatican Council that emphasized intelligibility of sacramental rites. Rather, it is to offer a correction to historians who tend to misread what constitutes lay participation in medieval life for three major reasons.

First, these historians focus almost exclusively upon liturgical texts. Liturgical history is not entirely textual, and further when dealing with lay piety, liturgical texts will not reveal much. Lay participation is facilitated through devotional manuals, social norms, public rituals, and the material culture of the medieval West. Lay participation in medieval times unfolded more in these media than the ritual books of the Roman Rite—and may even do so today.

Second, these historians presume a particularly modern—and, indeed, problematic—account of participation in the first place. According to these historians, participation necessitates intellectual recognition of what is happening.

Therefore, so many liturgical catechists after the Council continue to say, “If people only knew what they were doing, then everything would be great.” Such attitudes reflect a thin sense of participation, focused almost exclusively on grasping the intellectual context of the liturgical act. Participation includes initiation into a social drama, as well as the involvement of the totality of the senses. Seeing is not passive. Hearing is not submissive or inactive. Medieval optics and theories of the senses have more in common with contemporary phenomenologists of the senses like Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) than exclusively modern accounts of sensation drawn from Enlightenment philosophy.15 If people do not delight in the liturgy today, it may be because there is little to behold.

Third, liturgical history rarely examines its theological or philosophical assumptions. Because it is inattentive to intellectual history, it judges eras based upon a series of assumptions that do not resonate with the life of that period. It is true that medieval lay folk did not participate in the liturgy in the way that we do. But that does not mean that there was no participation. Although eschewing a golden era, such scholars continue to stand outside of history, assessing as a neutral referee what is good and bad. The referee is not as neutral as he or she purports to be. Rather than treat liturgical history as gathering evidence for a future reform—whatever that reform is to be—one should enter sympathetically into the worldview (as best as possible) of those one is studying. Some degree of neutrality is needed, especially when studying eras that have been continually underappreciated such as medieval liturgy or Baroque reforms.

If we learn to read correctly the nature of medieval participation, it is possible that we will discover that it has something to teach even those of us who regularly celebrate the reformed liturgies of the Second Vatican Council. And from that insight may come forth a fresh ressourcement in which we perceive the Spirit of God acting in what many too often judge as the darkest of ages. We need not make the world medieval again. But we must learn to appreciate the medieval world if we are to participate actively in the liturgy ourselves.

Timothy P. O’Malley is academic director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, University of Notre Dame.

It is no surprise that the women mystics of Helfta, such as the Benedictine nun Gertrude the Great (1256-1302), produce rich nuptial imagery around the act of liturgical contempla-

the women mystics of Helfta, such as the Benedictine nuns Mechthild of Hackeborn (1241-1298) or Gertrude the Great (1256-1302), produce rich nuptial imagery around the act of liturgical contemplation? Antiphons blossom into rich images of Christ, coming to redeem in his very flesh the pray-

1. John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution 1200-1700,” Past & Present 100 (August 1983): 36.

2. Ibid., 42.

3. Ibid., 54.

4. Virginia Reinburg, “Liturgy and Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 23.3 (Autumn 1992): 529.

5. Ibid., 530.

6. Ibid., 533.

7. Ibid., 537.

8. Ibid., 539.

9. Ibid., 541.

10. Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 90.

11. Eric Palazzo, “Art, Liturgy, and the Five Senses in the Early Middle Ages,” Viator 41.1 (2010): 27.

12. Beth Williamson, “Altarpieces, Liturgy, and Devotion,” Speculum 79.2 (2004): 341-406.

13. M. Jennifer Bloxam, “Music and Ritual,” in The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 518-520.

14. Anna Harrison, “‘I am Wholly Your Own’: Liturgical Piety and Community among the Nuns of Helfta,” Church History 78.3 (2009): 549-583.

15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012).

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Adoremus Bulletin, January 2021

The Grand Outlines of the Spiritual Universe: Praying the Collects of the Roman Rite

By Father Randy Stice

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AB/WIKIMEDIA: SAINT AUGUSTINE, BY PHILIPPE DE CHAMPAIGNE (1602-1674)

he Introductory Rites of the Mass culminate with the first proper oration, the collect. Following the invitation to pray and a brief silence so that the people of God “may become aware of being in God’s presence and may call to mind their intentions,” the celebrant collects the unspoken prayers of the assembly into the Church’s prayer, the collect, which he proclaims to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Through this concise and quintessentially Roman prayer, “the character of the celebration finds expression” (General Instruction of the Roman Missal, 54).

The importance of the collect—offering to God the intentions of the assembly and proclaiming what God is about to do among us—urges us to deepen our understanding of it. In this article we will look at three questions. What is the rhetorical and historical genius of the collect? Why does it sound the way that it does? How can we better understand it and pray it like saints?

Collective Soul The name itself, collect, originally referred to the place where people came together before leaving for the stational liturgy (a Mass celebrated at a Roman church to which the people would process), but “then the meaning was extended and applied to the oration pronounced at the time when the whole assembly is gathered.”1 In the early centuries of the Church, the celebrant had the option either “to extemporize…or to recite a text previously fixed and written down by himself or by another.”2 St. Augustine knew both practices. In On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed, he describes on the one hand

“Each celebration of the Eucharist communicates special graces to us, and the collect, because it concisely expresses the character of each celebration, indicates for us these unique graces.” prelates and ministers who address God “in language marked by barbarisms and solecisms,” and on the other celebrants who do not understand “correctly the very words which they are pronouncing, and mak[e] confused pauses.”3 When encountering such celebrants, St. Augustine reminds his readers “that there is no voice for the ears of God save the affection of the soul” and that “in the church it is in the desire that the grace of speech resides.”4 Collects found in the earliest sacramentaries were likely formed from the third to the sixth centuries, when the Church’s liturgy was moving from the Greek to the Latin language.

Say It Straight This brings us to our second question: Why does the collect sound the way that it does? While the Roman Rite includes poetic texts, the collect is not one of them.

Josef Jungmann explains why. In the collect, he writes, “the Roman liturgy never once overstepped the line dividing prose from verse.” This reflects, says Jungmann, our response when we come “face-to-face with the majesty of God…. [W]hen human speech turns directly to God, any possible play of verse dies on the lips of the petitioner who is conscious of what he is doing.”5 The Ratio Translationis for the English Language lists a number of ways in which the language of pagan Roman religious practice influenced the Roman Rite, especially the orations. These include “a sacral vocabulary; specialized religious syntax; ways of addressing God with corresponding patterns of closure in prayer; various rhetorical forms; brevity and conciseness of style found in sober, practical and clear expression; and a manner of praying centered around the duty or obligation of the individual and the community to practice true religion.”6 Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Church wove these elements into “tiny productions of literary artistry, clear, succinct, and memorable, examples of polished formulation and lapidary form.”7 All collects share, with some variation, a common structure. Each collect begins with an address to God

In On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed, St. Augustine (d.430) criticized early forms of praying the collect, describing on the one hand prelates and ministers who in the collect address God “in language marked by barbarisms and solecisms,” and on the other celebrants who do not understand “correctly the very words which they are pronouncing, and make confused pauses.” Instead, a well-prayed and rightly heard collect is a moment of heart-to-heart communion with God.

expanded by a relative clause of description. This leads to a petition and “a fuller description of the petition or an expression of its motivation.”8 The collect concludes with “a devout closure, expressing hope of divine action.”9 The collect for the Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time10 illustrates this basic structure. The address to God, “O God,” is elaborated by a relative clause: “who cause the minds of the faithful to unite in a single purpose.” This clause leads to the petition, “grant your people to love what you command and to desire what you promise.” It concludes with the motivating desire and hope for God’s action: “that, amid the uncertainties of this world, our hearts may be fixed on that place where true gladness is found.”

“The importance of the collect— offering to God the intentions of the assembly and proclaiming what God is about to do among us—urges us to deepen our understanding of it.”

The structure of the collect is supported by the use of sense lines, known as colometrics, which were restored in the 1970 editio typica after being absent from most editions of the Missal after 1570. Sense lines assist in understanding the collect by grouping “together the elements of a complete thought,” clarifying “the relationship of parts-to-the-whole,” and indicating “where emphasis is to be placed in relation to content.”11 Understanding the constituent elements and the structure of the collect is essential for grasping the full meaning of the collect. The fathers of the Liturgical Movement understood this well. Pius Parsch’s commentary on the collect for Epiphany is an instructive example. Here is the collect:12

O God, who on this day revealed your Only Begotten Son to the nations by the guidance of a star, grant in your mercy that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ…

Pius Parsch (1884-1954) wrote, “In balanced phrases a beautiful Collect unravels the meaning of today’s Mass-mystery; we, it indicates, are the Magi, guided by the star of faith and grace in our journey to Christ through the wilderness of this life, through the persecutions of Herod (i.e., the devil). There is this difference, however: we go to meet, not Christ the Infant of Bethlehem, but Christ the King in the glory of His Second Coming, a coming that is now forewrought in the Mass, even as it was foreshadowed, as to its outward signs, in the extraordinary experiences granted to the Magi (star—Infant; sacred Host—glorified Savior).”13 Parsch’s commentary on this collect exemplifies his conviction that “What we read as past history and what we await as future hope merge into a holy now and a holy today in the Mass.”14 The Catechism of the Catholic Church reiterates Parsch’s emphasis on the holy today of the Mass: “When the Church celebrates the mystery of Christ, there is a word that marks her prayer: ‘Today!’—a word echoing the prayer her Lord taught her and the call of the Holy Spirit.”15 Each celebration of the Eucharist communicates special graces to us, and the collect, because it concisely expresses the character of each celebration, indicates for us these unique graces. Pope Pius XII wrote in Mediator Dei that “each mystery brings its own special grace for our salvation” and that “our holy Mother the Church, while proposing for our contemplation the mysteries of our Redeemer, asks in her prayers for those gifts which would give her children the greatest possible share in

Adoremus Bulletin, January 2021

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the spirit of these mysteries through the merits of Christ.”16 In Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the Second Vatican Council taught that, in the liturgical celebration of the events of our salvation, “the Church opens to the faithful the riches of her Lord’s powers and merits, so that these are in some way made present for all time, and the faithful are enabled to lay hold upon them and become filled with saving grace.”17 We hear this teaching again in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Christian liturgy not only recalls the events that saved us but actualizes them, makes them present.”18 Each collect announces the unique graces of the liturgical celebration, so prayerfully meditating on the collect can dispose us to receive the unique graces of each Mass.

“All collects share, with some variation, a common structure.”

Take Up and Read…

This brings us to our third question. How can we understand the collects so as to pray them like saints? I would like to suggest the ancient method of divine reading, lectio divina. Although this method is primarily used with Sacred Scripture, it can be fruitfully used with the collect. In the 12th century, a monk named Guigo II (+1188) wrote the classic description of lectio divina in a short treatise entitled “The Ladder of Monks,” a work that “was more widely read and more highly praised than any other work of its kind.”19 Guigo II compared this method to a ladder with four rungs—reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation—that lifts us “from earth to heaven.” Reading carefully and attentively, one listens to the text, “concentrating all one’s powers on it.”

Meditation is more analytical, seeking “with the help of one’s own reason for knowledge of hidden truth.” It “goes to the heart of the matter, examines each point thoroughly.”20 Prayer, the third rung, is “the heart’s devoted turning to God to drive away evil and obtain what is good.” In the final stage, contemplation, “the mind is in some sort lifted up to God and held above itself, so that it tastes the joys of everlasting sweetness.”21 Reading and meditation lead us to an understanding of the substance of each collect. The descriptive phrase that follows the address to God can serve as the basis for meditation on the person and work of God. Consider a few examples of what the collects during Ordinary Time teach us about God. He is the One “from whom all good things come” (10th), the “giver of every good gift” (22nd), and the “strength of those who hope in [him]” (11th). The collects remind us that we are invoking the One “who governs all things, both in heaven and on earth” (2nd), “whose providence never fails in its design” (9th) and yet who manifests his “almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy” (26th).

The third rung of lectio divina, prayer, is given to us in the collect’s petition. On Sundays during Ordinary Time we ask that “we may so fashioned by your grace as to become a dwelling pleasing to you” (6th), that “we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error but always stand in the bright light of truth” (13th), that we “may receive true freedom and an everlasting inheritance (23rd), and “that we may hasten without stumbling to receive the things you have promised” (31st). Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, these petitions become personal and concrete for us, for others, for the Church, Continued from NEWS & VIEWS page 2

English Bishops Adjust Liturgical Translation, Following Vatican Concern

By Carl Bunderson

CNA—The English and Welsh bishops’ conference has decreed that in the translation of the conclusion of collects in the Roman Missal, “one” is to be omitted before “God.” The conclusions will now read “God, for ever and ever.”

The decision follows a letter sent earlier in 2020 by Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, addressing a concern about the English translation.

A November 9 decree signed by Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster, and Father Christopher Thomas, the president and general secretary, respectively, of the English and Welsh bishops’ conference, notes that “until now” in the three formulae of conclusions to collects, “the Latin words ‘Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum’ are rendered in English as ‘one God, for ever and ever.’”

“The addition of ‘one’ before ‘God’ in the conclusion of

Each collect announces the unique graces of the liturgical celebration, so prayerfully meditating on the collect can dispose us to receive the unique graces of each Mass.

and for the world. This leads us to the fourth rung, contemplation, in which we rest in the presence of God and the promise of the graces that he will bestow during the Eucharist. Lectio divina is a method that responds to the deepest desires of our soul, as Guigo understood: “Reading seeks for the sweetness of a blessed life, meditation perceives it, prayer asks for it, contemplation tastes it.”22

“Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, these petitions become personal and concrete for us, for others, for the Church, and for the world.”

has served as a parochial vicar, a pastor, and from 2017 to 2020 was the Associate Director of the Secretariat of Divine Worship at the USCCB. He holds an STL in Systematic Theology from Mundelein Seminary and an MA in Liturgy from the Liturgical Institute. He is the author of three books: Understanding the Sacraments of Healing (LTP, 2015), Understanding the Sacraments of Vocation (LTP, 2016), and Understanding the Sacraments of Initiation (LTP, 2017).

Father Randy Stice is the Director of the Office of Worship and Liturgy for the Diocese of Knoxville, TN. He

1. Eric Palazzo, A History of Liturgical Books: From the Beginning to the Thirteenth Century, trans. Madeleine Beaumont, A Pueblo Book (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1998), 25, n. 21.

2. Joseph A. Jungmann, SJ, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, 2 vols. (Dublin: Four Courts/Christian Classics, 1986), I:373.

3. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1303.htm, accessed November 9, 2020.

4. Ibid.

5. Jungmann, I, 377.

6. Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, (Vatican City, 2007), no. 31.

7. Johannes H. Emminghaus, The Eucharist: Essence, Form, Celebration, trans. Linda M. Maloney, rev. and ed. Theodor Mass Ewerd (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1997), 129.

8. Ratio Translationis, no. 32.

9. Ibid.

10. Roman Missal, 3rd ed.

11. Ratio Translationis, no. 105.

12. In the Roman Missal, 3rd ed., this is the Collect At the Mass during the Day. 13. Dr. Pius Parsch, trans William G. Heidt, OSB, The Church’s Year of Grace (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1959), Vol. I, 269.

14. Ibid.

15. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1997), 1165.

16. Pius XII, Mediator Dei, no. 165.

17. SC 102, cf. CCC, 1163.

18. CCC, 1104.

19. Jordan Aumann, Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), p. 92.

20. Guigo II: The Ladder of Monks: A Letter on the Contemplative Life and Twelve Meditations, translated and with an Introduction by Edmund Colledge, OSA and James Walsh, SJ, (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1979), 70.

21. Guigo II, 68.

22. Ibid., 68-69.

23. Jungmann, I, 379.

24. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1303.htm, accessed November 9, 2020.

the Collects could be construed as mistaken and problematic. ‘Deus’ here refers to the earlier mention of ‘the Son’ and is a Christological, anti-Arian affirmation, and not directly Trinitarian in this context,” the decree states.

The bishops of England and Wales voted “that these formulae should be adjusted, according with the removal of the word ‘one’ from the conclusion of the Collect.”

The most common formula, used when a collect is addressed to the Father, will read: “Through our Lord Jesus Christ your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.”

The correction took effect in the dioceses of England and Wales on November 29, 2020, the First Sunday of Advent.

An explanatory note added that the decision is “in harmony” with the bishops’ conferences in Scotland and Ireland, “as well as with other English-speaking territories.”

The addition of “one” before “God” “could serve to undermine the statement of the unique dignity of the Son within the Trinity,” or “could be interpreted as saying that Jesus is ‘one God,’” the explanatory note stated. “Either or both of these interpretations is injurious to the faith of the Church.”

Continuing, the note said that the insertion of “one”

before God “risks suggesting that Jesus became a god independent of the Blessed Trinity and is one god among many.... [W]hat we pray needs to express what the Church believes, requiring that, in liturgical formulae, we uphold the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity.”

The Trinitarian doxology that concludes the collects “emphasizes the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who as the Incarnate Son, intercedes on our behalf to the Father, ...thus, the Son’s role of priestly mediation is made clear.”

The explanatory note says the phrase was adopted in the fourth century “as a means to combat the Arian heresy,” which held that Jesus Christ became God, rather than having been God eternally.

Moreover, the note adds, “one” is not used in the translations of the conclusion in French, German, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese: “The English translation has, therefore, diverged from those of other major language groups.”

The executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Divine Worship, Father Andrew Menke, told CNA that Cardinal Sarah’s letter has been discussed by the conference’s divine worship committee, who “will probably discuss the question again” at their next meeting, in January.

Map to the Universe The collect, writes Josef Jungmann, “makes visible to us the grand outlines of that spiritual universe in which our prayer lives and moves and is; it arises in the communion of holy Church and ascends through Christ to God on high.”23 In order to enter into the spiritual universe sketched out in the collect, we need to understand the nature, structure, and unity of each collect. We also do well to take to heart St. Augustine’s counsel that the voice God hears is “the affection of the soul” and that the grace of speech is in “the desire.”24 We can also be mindful that the collect speaks to us of what God is doing in our midst “today.” Finally, practicing the discipline of lectio divina with the collect can assist us in experiencing a true and profound encounter with the Most Holy Trinity. Through understanding and prayerful meditation, the collect becomes our introduction to “that spiritual universe in which our prayer lives and moves and is.”

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Adoremus Bulletin, January 2021

Readers’ Quiz Answers: From Quiz on page 3

1. c. The people who attend liturgical services. As the 1930 pamphlet, “The Liturgical Movement,” explains: “The word ‘movement’ is rightly understood to indicate an endeavor ‘to bring about a change.’ The false notions in this matter are due principally to a misunderstanding as to the subject of the proposed change…. [W]hat is really being striven for is a change in the spiritual orientation of the faithful…. The Liturgical Movement, therefore, as the words indicate, is a movement—a movement towards the liturgy” (Popular Liturgical Library, Series IV, No. 3, Liturgical Press in Collegeville, MN, 5). While the work of the Liturgical Movement turned its focus to ritual changes in the 1950s, the initial goals of the Movement were principally geared toward moving the people into the depths of the liturgy. Joseph Ratzinger subscribed to this same principle, as he explains in his 2000 book, The Spirit of the Liturgy: “If this book were to encourage, in a new way, something like a ‘liturgical movement’, a movement toward the liturgy and toward the right way of celebrating the liturgy, inwardly and outwardly, then the intention that inspired its writing would be richly fulfilled” (8-9).

2. a. Dom Prosper Guéranger’s reestablishment of the Benedictine Priory of Solesmes in 1833. Prosper Louis Pascal Guéranger (1805-1875) was ordained in 1827 a priest of the Diocese of Le Mans, France. In 1833 he purchased the property and buildings of the former Benedictine Abbey at Solesmes, which had been shuttered with the French Revolution. There, with a handful of other men, he turned Solesmes into a center of Roman liturgy (versus Gallican liturgy), historical and liturgical studies (St. Thérèse of Lisieux recalls her parents reading Guéranger’s Liturgical Year to her and her sisters as children), and Gregorian Chant (Solesmes versions of chant fill the Church’s official sacred music books to this day). Besides Guérenger’s 1833 reopening of the Solesmes Priory (later named an Abbey), other possible answers include Pius X’s 1903 motu proprio, Tra le Sollecitudini, or Dom Lambert Beauduin’s presentation at the 1909 Liturgical Conference in Malines, Belgium.

3. False. Dom Lambert Beauduian, OSB (1873-1960), called the ministerial priesthood the “fundamental principle” to the restoration of the liturgy in his 1914 “manual” on the Liturgical Movement, Liturgy: The Life of the Church. He writes: “The superabundant source of all supernatural life is the sacerdotal power of the High Priest of the New Covenant. But this sanctifying power of Jesus Christ does not exercise here below except through the ministry of a visible hierarchy…. [Thus, liturgical piety] derives its transcendent character above all from what we can call this hierarchical character. It procures the full sanctifying influence of the visible priesthood of the mystical body of Jesus Christ for the members of this body. The life of God is in Christ; the life of Christ is in the hierarchy of the Church” (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1926, 1, 7).

4. c. Pope Pius X. In his 1911 apostolic constitution, Divino Afflatu, Pope Pius X (reigned 1903-1914) established a new (and controversial) psalter for use in the Divine Office for the entire Church. In this same 1911 letter, he

wrote, “As the arrangement of the psaltery has a certain intimate connection with all the divine office and the liturgy, it will be clear to everybody that by what we have here decreed we have taken the first step to the emendation of the Roman breviary and the missal, but for this we shall appoint shortly a special council or commission.” In 1913, two years later (literally, in Latin, abhinc duos annos), the Holy Father gave an update on the work, saying that the intervening years had been occupied with other more pressing tasks that hadn’t allowed him to move forward on liturgical reform. Thus, “in the judgment of wise and learned persons, all this would require considerable work and time. For this reason, many years will have to pass before this type of liturgical edifice, composed with intelligent care for the spouse of Christ to express her piety and faith, can appear purified of the squalidness brought by time, newly resplendent with dignity and fitting order” (Abhinc Duos Annos).

5. e. Odo Casel. Odo Casel (1886-1948) was a Benedictine Monk of the Maria Laach Abbey in the Rhineland area of western Germany. The “theologian” of the Liturgical Movement, Casel articulated what he called Mysterientheologie, or “Mystery Theology.” This mystery-in-the-present claims that Christ and his saving work—and not simply his grace—are in some way present and manifest to the baptized of every age through the liturgy and the sacraments. That is, the entirety of God’s “plan of the mystery” (Ephesians 3:9), the pinnacle of which is the saving action of Christ, reveals itself in our liturgical presence.

Of this Mystery Theology, Pope Benedict says: “[O]ur age has been called the century of the Church; it could just as well be called the century of the liturgical and sacramental movement…. Perhaps the most fruitful theological idea of our century, the mystery theology of Odo Casel, belongs to the field of sacramental theology, and one can probably say without exaggeration that not since the end of the patristic era has the theology of the sacraments experienced such a flowering as was granted to it in this century in connection with Casel’s ideas” (Ratzinger, Collected Works (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016) 153).

6. d. Romano Guardini. The Italian-born Romano Guardini (1885-1968) taught at the University of Berlin from 1923-1939, holding the Chair of Philosophy of Religion and Catholic World View. During these same years, he continued his work among college-aged students at the Castle Rothenfels, where he and students engaged religious, liturgical, and social questions of the day. The Nazis confiscated the Castle in 1939, along with relieving Guardini from teaching in the same year. Pope Benedict XVI, in his interview book Last Testament, recalls meeting Guardini at Burg Rothenfels: “In 1956 we [Benedict and his brother, Georg Ratzinger] went with a friend to Franconia, where an uncle lived, one of my mother’s brothers. So when we passed through Rothenfels, we thought, now we have to go up to the castle where Guardini had been bringing young people for decades. It was of course highly fitting that Romano Guardini walked out of the castle gate just then. We go up there, and what’s going on? Guardini walks out of the castle gate! [Laughs loudly] It was like a dream. He showed himself to be most delighted. ‘It’s strange who you bump into just because you’re there!’ Then we had a little chat” (London: Bloomsbury, 2017, 85).

7. False. Dom Virgil Michel, OSB (1890-1938), “Father” of the American Liturgical Movement, best summarizes the relation between liturgy and Catholic Action (the social apostolate in the world) at the conclusion of his 1935 article, “The Liturgy the Basis of Social Regeneration.” He says: “Pius X tells us that the liturgy is the indispensable source of the true Christian spirit; Pius XI says that the true Christian spirit is indispensable for social regeneration. Hence the conclusion: The liturgy is the indispensable basis of Christian social regeneration.” Consider, too, the Catholic Worker Movement founded and developed

by Dorothy Day (1897-1980), who writes, “You cannot receive the Blessed Sacrament without becoming sensitive to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit, and these inspirations are to be put into practice…. We can link up liturgy and sociology, in other words” (The Catholic Worker, February 1935, 7).

8. c. Pius XII. Pope Pius XII (reigned 1939-1958) wrote Mediator Dei in 1947, the first encyclical on the topic of the sacred liturgy. The Holy Father begins, “Mediator between God and men, and High Priest who has gone before us into heaven, Jesus the Son of God quite clearly had one aim in view when he undertook the mission of mercy which was to endow mankind with the rich blessings of supernatural grace. Sin had disturbed the right relationship between man and his Creator; the Son of God would restore it…. [T]he Church prolongs the priestly mission of Jesus Christ mainly by means of the sacred liturgy” (1, 3).

9. b. Active participation. In his 1903 motu proprio Tra le Sollecitudini, Pope Pius X wrote: “Filled as We are with a most ardent desire to see the true Christian spirit flourish in every respect and be preserved by all the faithful, We deem it necessary to provide before anything else for the sanctity and dignity of the temple, in which the faithful assemble for no other object than that of acquiring this spirit from its foremost and indispensable font, which is the active participation in the most holy mysteries and in the public and solemn prayer of the Church.”

In making “this full and active participation by all the people…the aim to be considered before all else” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 14), the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council should also be understood as having Pius X’s mind on what constituted active participation, namely, the worthy and attentive participation in the liturgy. Pius X, for example, is identified as “Pope of the Eucharist” since he encouraged frequent, even daily, communion in 1905. In 1910, he lowered the age of First Communion to about the age of discretion. These pastoral acts reveal his thinking on active participation.

10. Success can be measured in many ways, but the ultimate measure is holiness, which honors God to the fullest. Apart from the holiness that many Liturgical Movement figures helped Christ’s faithful to attain, there are a number of figures who have been declared saints or whose cause for canonization has begun, such as: Pope St. Pius X, Pope St. John XXIII, Pope St. Paul VI, Pope St. John Paul II, Blessed Columba Marmion, Venerable Pius XII, Servant of God Prosper Guérnager, Servant of God Romano Guardini, and Servant of God Dorothy Day. All you saints, blesseds, and holy men and women: pray for us!

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Adoremus Bulletin, January 2021

Q:

A

How many holy days of obligation are there?

: The Code of Canon Law lists 10 holy days of obligation besides Sunday: Holy Mary the Mother of God (January 1), the Epiphany (January 6), St. Joseph (March 19), the Ascension (Thursday of the Sixth Week of Easter), the Body and Blood of Christ (Thursday after Trinity Sunday), St. Peter and St. Paul the Apostles (June 29), the Assumption (August 15), All Saints (November 1), the Immaculate Conception (December 8), and the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ (December 25) (Canon 1246 §1).

Local bishops’ conferences can add to this list (for instance, St. Patrick’s Day on March 17 is a holy day of obligation in Ireland), remove days from the list, or transfer some days to a Sunday (see Canon 1246 §2). In the United States, for example, the bishops have removed the Solemnity of St. Joseph on March 19 and the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29 from the National Calendar, thus reducing the number of holy days of obligation to eight. The United States bishops have also transferred the Epiphany (traditionally on January 6) to the Sunday between January 2 and 8, and the Body and Blood of Christ, customarily observed on Thursday after Trinity Sunday, to the Sunday following Trinity Sunday. Further, many ecclesiastical provinces (groups of dioceses) have transferred the Ascension of the Lord from Thursday of the Sixth Week of Easter—40 days after the Resurrection—to the Seventh Sunday of Easter.

After these removals or transfers, this leaves as few as five holy days of obligation in the dioceses of the United States: Holy Mary the Mother of God, January 1; the Assumption of Mary, August 15; All Saints Day, November 1; the Immaculate Conception, December 8; and Christmas, December 25. The first three of these holy days— Holy Mary the Mother of God, her Assumption, and All Saints—cease to be obligatory if they fall on a Saturday or a Monday. Only the Immaculate Conception and Christmas retain their obligatory character, regardless of the day of the week.

—Answered by the Editors

THE RITE QUESTIONS : Pope John XXIII added St. Joseph to the Canon (Eucharistic Prayer

Q

I) of the Mass in 1962. Several years ago St. Joseph was also added to Eucharistic Prayers II, III, and IV. What was the reason for adding St. Joseph to these prayers?

A

: This is a fitting question in light of Pope Francis’s announcement that 2021 will be the Year of St. Joseph. Several years ago Pope Benedict XVI mandated that the name of St. Joseph be inserted into Eucharistic Prayers II, III, and IV. This is a great gift to us because of St. Joseph’s pivotal role as Jesus’ foster father. Instead of simply writing a document outlining his importance, a solemnity was established for his feast day (March 19th) by Pope Gregory XV, establishing it as a holy day of obligation in 1621. St. Joseph was declared the patron of the Universal Church by Pope Pius IX on December 8, 1870. In 1955 Pope Pius XII established May 1st as a feast day for workers under St. Joseph’s patronage and Pope St. John XXIII mandated that St. Joseph be added to the Roman Canon (the first eucharistic prayer) on December 8, 1962. However, in the reforms after Vatican II, somehow, St. Joseph was left out of the newly composed eucharistic prayers. Pope Benedict XVI remedied this, not because St. Joseph is just a particular favorite of Joseph Ratzinger’s, but because St. Joseph is so fundamental to salvation history and, with his inclusion in the four main Eucharistic Prayers, the entire Holy Family is now recalled at our regular celebration of the liturgy of the Mass.

Indeed, the calling to mind of the Holy Family not only speaks to the needs of our time, when the family is so deeply under attack, but speaks to the needs of every time because the “history of mankind, the history of salvation, passes by way of the family” (John Paul II, “Letter to Families,” 23). There is an “importance and universality of the patronage of St. Joseph ‘to whose care God entrusted the beginning of our redemption,’ ‘and his most valuable treasures’” (Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy, 220). St. Joseph, “the just man” (cf. Matthew 1:19), gives a beautiful example to us in his “happy death,” his faithful work, his chaste and faithful love, his obedience to the Lord in the birth of Jesus, giving Jesus his name, and in his faithfulness in raising Jesus according to the Law of the Lord. With this now daily invocation of St. Joseph in the Liturgy of the Church we ask for his intercession more often and so more readily take him as our model in daily life. Truly, every one of us “can discover in Joseph—the man who goes unnoticed, a daily, discreet and hidden presence—an intercessor, a support and a guide in times of trouble” (Pope Francis, Patris Corde). St. Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, pray for us!

Q

A

—Answered by the Editors

: When addressing clergy by letter or correspondence, how

ought they be called?

: Any idea what is the most visited page on the Adoremus Website? Answer: “How to Address Church Officials, Bishops, Priests.” What’s more, it is no contest, as this page has seen more visitors each year for more than a decade.

Perhaps you would like to write a letter to the Pope, to a cardinal, or to your bishop? Or perhaps you’ve wondered not only their mailing address, but which form of address to use (e.g., Dear “Bishop”—or “Your Excellency”—or “Most Reverend”?). If so, please visit the recently updated site at https://adoremus.org/2009/08/how-to-address-churchofficials-bishops-priests/. The lost art of letter writing could be just the new year’s resolution you have been looking for.

—Answered by the Editors

MEMORIAL FOR Leo and Daniel O’Dowd from Leslie O’Dowd

TO HONOR Gretchen Reese - Birthday from Kitty Ricketts Don and Katherine Ricketts - Wedding Anniversary from Jack and Gretchen Reese

IN THANKSGIVING For blessings received, from Nancy Kyle Shelli, Lance, Brennen, Estelle, Landon from Pop and Grandma Leger

Continued from BOUYER, page 5 In fact, the expression “Paschal Mystery,” so crucial to Bouyer’s influence on the Church, refers to the unity of Christ’s action from Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday.

Bringing the theology of the Paschal Mystery front and center we see that in the sacrificial dimension of Holy Week the Last Supper cannot be cut off from the event of the Cross or from the Resurrection. Christ’s body is broken and his blood shed in order that it may be given to us as the food and drink of eternal life. In the dispensation of the Church, the endpoint of immolation is communion with God and with one another by our being fed with the Bread of Life. The meaning of both sacred history and sacrifice is unveiled in the totality of creation’s common yearning for Christ’s paschal action communicated to us throughout the entirety of Holy Week.

Bouyer’s Human Connections Louis Bouyer’s theology of liturgy demonstrates in exemplary fashion the interconnection of all these points.

It shows how the act of redemption unveils the meaning of the whole of creation from the First Adam to the Second Adam and his Parousia. As St. Augustine realized, we were made from the beginning to be elevated to new life in the Second Adam. The natural sacred attests, confusedly and obscurely, to the meaning of our being

“The symbolism of liturgy should connect to our humanity at the most basic level.” as ordered from creation onward to transcendence in Christ and his Body. The Lord empties himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming our Paschal Lamb, in order to make us partakers of the divine nature and to fill us with the charity of his Spirit by feeding us with his own flesh, the flesh of the One who is God’s only Son, the Second Person of the Trinity incarnate.

The symbolism of liturgy should connect to our humanity at the most basic level. Inscribed in our being from the start is an implicit ordering, a hidden and often suppressed yearning for union with the transcendent God that only Christ can give us in His Spirit. Tertullian once said: “O noble testimony of the soul by nature Christian! ....It looks not to the Capitol, but to the heavens. It knows that there is the throne of the living God, as from him and from thence itself came down.” The throne of God descended into our midst in the Incarnation, but the glory of God’s royal dignity was in no way sullied by this divine condescendence. Indeed, the di-

vine glory was communicated anew—to us who are by nature (as St. Irenaeus said) the glory of the living God in the world, and who were created in his image but tarnished by our sin. The symbolism of our liturgical practice should reflect with proper verticality the transcendence to which we are called in Christ and his Spirit of glory. This is not indicative of a theology of escape from the world but of liturgical understanding centered on the need for the reconciliation of all things in Christ the Second Adam and Paschal Lamb, so that the harmonious chorus of cosmic liturgy might resound from the new and higher plateau of the Church that God always willed it to do in his Wisdom.

Keith Lemna is associate professor of theology at Saint Meinrad Seminary in Indiana. He is the author of The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer’s Theological Recovery of the Cosmos (Angelico Press, 2019).

1. James Hitchock, Recovery of the Sacred: Reforming the Reformed Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 21.

2. See Joseph Ratzinger, “The Theology of the Liturgy” in Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger: Proceedings of the July 2001 Fontgombault Liturgical Conference, ed. Fontgombault Liturgical Conference and Alcuin Reid (Farnborough, Hampshire, UK: St. Michael’s Abbey Press, 2003), 19–27, at 24.

3. Joseph Ratzinger, “The Theology of the Liturgy,” 24.

12

Adoremus Bulletin, January 2021

Ignatius Press Bible Offers Something Ever-Ancient, Ever-New

By Jeremy Priest Ignatius Note-Taking and Journaling Bible. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020. 1,290 pp. ISBN: 9781621641902. $39.95 Paperback.

O

f the printing of Bibles, there is no end (cf.

Ecclesiastes 12:12). Whether it’s a new translation, a new typeface, the inclusion of study notes, or a fancy cover, the Bible continues to be the bestselling book in the world—and publishers know it. While digital books and Bible software abound, the reading of the Sacred Scriptures is nevertheless an experience where tangible contact with a physical volume (dedicated solely to the Biblical text) is irreplaceable.

While new Bibles abound, the Ignatius Note-Taking and Journaling Bible published by Ignatius Press (2020) stands out in the midst of the Bible-publishing crush.

Firstly, this Bible is gorgeously crafted. The Smythsewn binding holds the pages together in nearly-square dimensions (6.25” x 7.25”) and allows the Bible to lay flat whether you’re reading Genesis, Revelation, or anything in between. A synthetic soft black leather cover allows the nearly 1,300 pages of this volume to fit neatly and comfortably in the hand. Surprisingly, the cover is really quite remarkable in its feel, soft to the touch. A sturdy elastic band is built into the cover to keep the volume closed tight in transit, making it wonderfully portable.

The pages of the new Ignatius Bible are thin so as not to make the volume too bulky, but sufficiently thick for writing notes with a ballpoint pen. While the font used for the biblical text is small (7 point, Palatino), the cream-colored paper helps the sharply printed text catch the eye of the reader. The small font provides room for the two inches of lined writing space for taking notes on each page. While some may scoff at writing on the Sacred Page, such ample writing space harkens back to the “thick margins” which “became more and more crowded with the glosses of [medieval] scribes who prayed, studied, memorized, and recopied —in a word, celebrated—the text inexhaustibly.”1 An important feature of the Ignatius Note-Taking and Journaling Bible is that it employs the Second Edition of the Revised Standard Version (RSV-2CE), modified in accord with Liturgiam Authenticam in 2001. To “rephrase the Preacher’s melancholy observation…, ‘Of the making of many translations of the Bible there is no end!’” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). Indeed, “between the publication in 1952 of the Revised Standard Version and the publication in 1990 of the New Revised Standard Version, 27 English renderings of the entire Bible were issued.”2 While one can certainly lament the dizzying deluge of translations,3 each translation highlights how the handing on of the Scriptures from generation to generation enriches the Church through the “different ways by which the word of God is proclaimed, understood and experienced” (Pope Francis, Sacra Scripturae Affectus).

In this line, the RSV-2CE represents not only a deeply faithful translation, but an effort to pass on the patrimony of the Catholic tradition. The readers of this translation of the Bible will not only find a consistent word-for-word (formal equivalence) translation of the biblical text from the original languages, but with additional care being taken to consult the traditional Latin Vulgate “as an auxiliary tool…in order to maintain the tradition of interpretation that is proper to the Latin Liturgy” (Liturgiam Authenticam, 24). As the editors put it in the introduction to the 1966 RSV-CE, “critical evidence being evenly balanced, considerations of Catholic tradition have favored a particular rendering” of the Biblical text. The concrete payoff of such an approach is glimpsed, for example, when we read the traditional appellation given to the Blessed Mother in Luke 1:28: instead of “favored one,” as in the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NAB-RE), the RSV-2CE renders the Greek κεχαριτωμένη with the traditional, “full of grace.” This is not only an exegetical

decision based on the sense of the utterly unique Greek verb, κεχαριτωμένη, but also a choice to take into account the longstanding Latin translation of this word by the phrase, gratia plena, which dates back to the second century—paralleling the Syriac translation. As the late Abbot Denis Farkasfalvy writes, the “interpretation of this choice of words [“full of grace”] is a matter of exegesis and theology and cannot be debated on purely grammatical grounds as a correct or an incorrect rendition.”4 That said, the rendering of this Greek word into English by the phrase “full of grace” represents a consistent theological and exegetical understanding of the Catholic tradition for almost two millennia. Readers of the RSV-2CE can be confident in reading a text that incorporates the received tradition of the Latin West.

Another advantage of using the RSV-2CE is that its immediate predecessor, the RSV-CE, has the distinction of being the translation that was used in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997). That said, the RSV-2CE is slightly different from the RSV-CE. The move from the RSV-CE to the RSV-2CE did little more than to update the idiom of the English language. For example, the many thees and thous in the Old Testament, have been changed to a more modern form of expression, as seen in these verses from 2 Samuel 7: “28 And now, O Lord GOD, art God, and thy words are true, and thou hast promised this good thing to thy servant; 29 now therefore may it please thee to bless the house of thy servant, that it may continue for ever before thee; for thou, O Lord GOD, hast spoken, and with thy blessing shall the house of thy servant be blessed for ever.” – RSV-CE “28 And now, O Lord GOD, you are God, and your words are true, and you have promised this good thing to your servant; 29 now therefore may it please you to bless the house of your servant, that it may continue for ever before you; for you, O Lord GOD, have spoken, and with your blessing shall the house of your servant be blessed for ever.” –RSV-2CE Practically speaking, the updating of language in the RSV-CE was done so as to prepare the text of the RSV-2CE for lectionary use in the English-speaking portions of dioceses in India. Translations made for liturgical use are “characterized by a certain manner of expression that differs from that found in everyday speech,” but consideration should also be taken to “employ the full possibilities of the vernacular language skillfully in order to achieve as integrally as possible the same effect as” the base language (Liturgiam Authenticam, 59). While many laud this updating of archaic language, others lament the loss of the traditional language of King James’ Authorized Version, from which

the RSV derives its lineage. Nevertheless, the revision of the RSV-2CE was, strictly speaking, limited to updating language for liturgical use. The 2006 RSV-2CE remains the fruit of translators working from the best manuscript evidence of the 1940s and 50s, nearly 80 years ago. This also means that infelicities in the previous text went unchanged. For example, in the RSV2CE, Genesis 3:6 states that Eve “also gave some to her husband.” This clause is “followed in the Hebrew text by the phrase ‘with her,’”5 captured well in the ESV, the NABRE, the NRSV, and the Nova Vulgata: “she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate” (ESV-CE, emphasis added). While the RSV-2CE is following the Vulgate in its translation, such a noteworthy difference should at least have a footnote indicating its omission. This is especially the case since the Nova Vulgata Editio is the volume to “be consulted as an auxiliary tool” (Liturgiam Authenticam, 24).

As St. Josemaria Escriva wrote, “How I wish your bearing and conversation were such that, on seeing or hearing you, people will say: This man reads the life of Jesus Christ” (The Way, n. 2). Ignatius Press’s contribution to biblical publishing will certainly provide such an opportunity. While no translation or edition of the Bible provides for every need, the Ignatius Note-Taking and Journaling Bible is a wonderful contribution to the life of the Church in the English-speaking world. This edition is well-suited for “the diligent reading of Sacred Scripture accompanied by prayer” that “brings about that intimate dialogue in which the person reading hears God who is speaking, and in praying, responds to him with trusting openness of heart (cf. Dei Verbum, n. 25)” (Benedict XVI, Address on the Occasion of the 40th Anniversary of Dei Verbum). For those who practice Lectio Divina with a Bible to hand, this edition of the biblical text offers ample space to jot down insights received in prayer that will endure for the lifetime of the Bible and beyond. As Pope Benedict XVI said, if Lectio Divina “is effectively promoted, [it] will bring to the Church—I am convinced of it—a new spiritual springtime.”

1. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, Chapters 1–25, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996–2012), 20.

2. Bruce Manning Metzger, The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001), 117.

3. See Bible Babel, by Rev. Richard John Neuhaus.

4. Denis Farkasfalvy, The Marian Mystery: The Outline of a Mariology (New York: St Pauls, 2014), 58.

5. Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch, Genesis: With Introduction, Commentary, and Notes, ed. Revised Standard Version and Second Catholic Edition, The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 22. See also David E.S. Stein, “A Rejoinder concerning Genesis 3:6 and the NJPS Translation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134 (2015): 51–52.

The staff of the Adoremus Bulletin wishes all of our readers

God’s Blessings in 2021 St. Joseph, Patron of the Unviersal Church: Pray for us!