Adoremus Bulletin - March 2024

For the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy

The Paschal Mystery: “Truly Right and Just” A Study of the Central Sacramental Reality of the Liturgy

By Father Daniel Eusterman

Vatican Doctrine Office Releases Note on Discerning Validity of Sacraments

By Courtney Mares

CNA—The Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) released a note on February 3 on discerning the validity of the sacraments.

The new document signed by Pope Francis and DDF Prefect Cardinal Victor Fernández is titled “Gestis Verbisque,” or “Deeds and Words.”

Cardinal Fernández wrote in his introduction to the text that the note on the sacraments was written “to help bishops in their task as promoters and custodians of the liturgical life of the particular Churches entrusted to them.”

“The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith intends to offer in this note some elements of a doctrinal nature with regard to discernment on the validity of the celebration of the sacraments, paying attention also to some disciplinary and pastoral implications,” he wrote.

The 11-page text published only in Italian on February 3 reiterates that for all sacraments in the Catholic Church, the “observance of both matter and form has always been required for the validity of the celebration.”

“Both matter and form, summarized in the Code of Canon Law, are established in the liturgical books promulgated by the competent authority, which must therefore be faithfully observed, without ‘adding, removing, or changing anything,’” it says.

The document adds that arbitrary changes to either matter or

4

Story

On the most sacred night of each year—the Easter Vigil—our freshly illuminated Church interiors resound with the celebrant’s chanting of the Easter Preface which begins the Eucharistic apex of the Vigil’s celebration:

It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, at all times to acclaim you, O Lord, but on this night above all to laud you yet more gloriously, when Christ our Passover has been sacrificed. For he is the true lamb who has taken away the sins of the world; by dying he has destroyed our death, and by rising, restored our life.1

For at least the last 1,300 years, the Church in her Latin Tradition has prayed this same preface annually at each Easter Vigil. It is present in the Gregorian Sacramentary of the eighth century, the Missale Romanum of the Council of Trent, and it remains the same in today’s Missale Romanum. As an ancient prayer of the Church, the only novel characteristic of the preface from our recent reforms is the title given to it: “The Paschal Mystery.” Providentially, we can observe the history of the first Preface of Easter as a “microcosm” of the Church’s rediscovery of the Paschal Mystery in her sacramental-liturgical theology.

Just as this prayer is ancient in its use and content but has carried a new title and familiarity in recent decades, so, too, the theology of the Paschal Mystery, made emblematic in the last 100 years by liturgical reform, has ancient scriptural and patristic roots—but it never bore either this title or such a familiarity as it does today. In particular, it was the labors of the Liturgical Movement which set the foundation for the Church’s magisterial proclamation of the theology of the Paschal Mystery.

particularly salvific actions, and, on the other, how this saving event has been made accessible to the faithful through the liturgy.

“ When we look at the life of Jesus in the Gospels, it seems strange to ask which actions in his ministry can be considered ‘salvific.’ Could any of Jesus’ actions not be salvific?”

In order to more fruitfully understand and participate in the coming feasts within Holy Week, those rites that most vividly celebrate the Paschal Mystery, this article will reflect on two questions. First, what is the Church’s understanding of the term “Paschal Mystery”? Second, in what way is it a new concept in the last century, and how did the Paschal Mystery come to hold such a central place in the Church’s theology and catechesis today?

Paschal Theology

The theology of the Paschal Mystery has a twofold substance: it describes, on the one hand, the united “event” of Christ’s

When we look at the life of Jesus in the Gospels, it seems strange to ask which actions in his ministry can be considered “salvific.” Could any of Jesus’ actions not be salvific? On the contrary, all of Christ’s life and actions are involved in the saving missio of the Only-begotten Son by the Father. Yet, there is a unique quality to the events surrounding his final Hour. This is evidenced during Lent, when we set our hearts towards the celebration of Holy Week, just as Jesus shifted his focus towards his coming Passion in Luke’s Gospel, “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:5).

Sacrosanctum Concilium names the particular actions of Jesus which comprise the Paschal Mystery: “His blessed passion, resurrection from the dead, and the glorious ascension.”2 In fact, within the liturgical tradition of the Church, the Roman Canon has, from ancient times, identified these actions with the Eucharistic memorial. After the consecration, the Unde et memores identifies the saving events memorialized on the altar: “[W]e celebrate the memorial of the blessed Passion, the Resurrection from the dead, and the

Prepositional Proposition

“What’s in a word?” Plenty, according to Michael Brummond, especially when that word is communicating how, through the Word, the Trinity accomplishes the work of the liturgy 8

Right Rites Done Right

In a review of Msgr. Marc Caron’s Ceremonial for Priests, John Grondelski sees the perfect book for showing priests how to keep the ars in the celebrandi of the liturgy 12

The theology of the Paschal Mystery has a twofold substance: it describes, on the one hand, the united “event” of Christ’s particularly salvific actions, and, on the other, how this saving event has been made accessible to the faithful through the liturgy.

Continued from NEWS & VIEWS

form “jeopardize the effective bestowal of sacramental grace, to the obvious detriment of the faithful” and that the “severity and invalidating force” of such changes “must be ascertained on a case-by-case basis.”

“Gestis Verbisque” frequently refers to the dicastery’s 2020 doctrinal note on the modification of the sacramental formula of baptism, which clarified that changing the words to the baptismal formula to “we baptize you” invalidated the baptism, requiring anyone who had been baptized with this formula to be considered as not yet having received the sacrament.

Cardinal Fernández writes that in 2022 cardinals and bishops taking part in the DDF’s January plenary assembly had already expressed concern about “the multiplication of situations in which they were forced to note the invalidity of the sacraments celebrated.”

Specific examples, listed by the cardinal, include using “I baptize you in the name of the Creator…” or “In the name of your father and mother…we baptize you,” instead of the established baptismal formula.

“While in other areas of the Church’s pastoral action there is ample room for creativity, such inventiveness in the context of the celebration of the sacraments turns rather into a ‘manipulative will’ and therefore cannot be invoked,” the cardinal prefect said.

“We ministers are therefore required to have the strength to overcome the temptation to feel like owners of the Church,” Cardinal Fernández added.

The cardinal later commented that when the priest acts “in persona Christi capitis,” it does not mean that the priest is “the boss” with the ability to exercise arbitrary power, but that Christ alone is “‘the head of the body, the Church,’” citing Colossians 1:18.

“It seems increasingly urgent to mature an art of celebrating that, keeping at a distance as much from rigid rubricism as from unbridled imagination, leads to a discipline to be respected, precisely in order to be authentic disciples,” Cardinal Fernández said.

Pope Francis approved the text of the DDF note during a private audience with Cardinal Fernández on January 31 after the note was discussed and unanimously approved by the cardinals and bishops who attended the dicastery’s recent January plenary assembly.

Cardinal Fernández and Monsignor Armando Matteo, the secretary for the dicastery’s doctrinal section, signed the note on February 2, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord.

“Precisely by constituting the Church as his mystical body, Christ makes believers partakers of his own life, uniting them to his death and resurrection in a real and mysterious way through the sacraments,” the note says.

“Indeed, the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit acts in the faithful through sacramental signs, making them living stones of a spiritual edifice, founded on the cornerstone that is Christ the Lord, and constituting them as a priestly people, partakers of the one priesthood of Christ.”

Vatican’s Liturgy Meeting Focuses on Liturgical Formation, Implementation

By Matthew Santucci

The Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments held its annual plenary assembly February 6–9 at the Jesuit Curia in Rome.

“The intent is to delve into the theme of liturgical formation 60 years after the promulgation of the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, tracing the practical paths on the indications contained in [Pope Francis’s] apostolic letter Desiderio Desideravi, published in June 2022,” a press release from the dicastery stated.

The 2022 letter addressed what the Holy Father called “the liturgical formation of the people of God.” Quoting from Desiderio Desideravi, the dicastery’s statement this week said that the “non-acceptance of the liturgical reform…distracts us from the obligation of finding responses” to questions regarding reform of liturgy.

“How do we continue to let ourselves be amazed at what happens in the celebration under our very eyes?” the statement said, quoting the Holy Father. “We are in need of a serious and dynamic liturgical formation.”

The assembly was composed of various working groups in order to address the “liturgical formation from Sacrosanctum Concilium to Desiderio Desideravi” for ordained ministers as well as “liturgical training courses for the people of God.” It also provided “bishops with practical suggestions for developing pastoral projects in their dioceses with the aim of putting into practice the reflections of the papal document.”

The members of the plenary assembly were also received by the Holy Father in an audience.

Sacrosanctum Concilium, or the Constitution on

Adoremus Bulletin, March 2024

the Sacred Liturgy, promulgated by St. Paul VI on Decemeber 4, 1963, focused on laying the groundwork for Paul VI’s 1969 apostolic constitution Missale Romanum, which introduced the ordinary form of the Mass, also known as the novus ordo

The dicastery’s meeting sought to bring a synthesis between the seminal conciliar document and Desiderio Desideravi, the latter of which highlighted the centrality of the liturgy in the life of Catholics while also underscoring the need to be faithful to the liturgical forms of the Second Vatican Council.

Emphasizing the importance of “a serious and dynamic liturgical formation,” Pope Francis noted in that document that “it would be trivial to read the tensions, unfortunately present around the celebration, as a simple divergence between different tastes concerning a particular ritual form.”

The pope also stressed that the principles stated in Sacrosanctum Concilium have been fundamental for the reform of the liturgy and continue to be fundamental for the promotion of its “full, conscious, active, and fruitful celebration.”

A June 2022 press release from the dicastery noted that the pontiff’s letter emerged from “the propositions that resulted from the plenary session of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments” in February 2019.

Pope Francis: “Without Liturgical Reform There Is No Reform of the Church”

By Matthew Santucci

Pope Francis met with members of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments on February 8 to discuss the importance of liturgical reform as a core feature of the broader “renewal of the Church.”

The address came as the dicastery was meeting for its annual plenary assembly, which addressed the “liturgical formation from Sacrosanctum Concilium to Desiderio Desideravi” for ordained ministers as well as “liturgical training courses for the people of God.”

Recalling that it has been 60 years since the promulgation of the Second Vatican Council’s seminal document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, the pope stressed in his February 8 address that liturgical reform underscored the council fathers’ objective of renewing the Church’s “fundamental dimensions” such as “spiritual, pastoral, ecumenical, and missionary” work.

“Without liturgical reform there is no reform of the Church,” the pope said.

“A church that does not feel the passion for spiritual growth, that does not try to speak in an understandable way to the men and women of his time, that does not feel pain for the division between Christians, who does not tremble with the anxiety of announcing Christ to the people, is a sick Church, and these are the symptoms,” the Holy Father emphasized in his address.

The pope qualified these remarks by saying “we can only make such a statement by understanding what the liturgy is in its theological sense.”

Speaking specifically on the theme of the assembly’s 2024 meeting, the pope noted that their work must focus on making formation more accessible so it is not a “specialization for a few experts, but of an interior disposition of all the people of God.”

“This naturally does not exclude that there is a priority in the training of those who, by virtue of the sacrament of orders, are called to be mystagogues, that is, to take each other by the hand and accompany the faithful in the knowledge of the holy mysteries,” Pope Francis continued.

The Holy Father also noted that liturgical formation is predicated upon a love for Christ by highlighting the theological representation of the Church as Christ’s bride,

saying: “Every instance of reform of the Church is always a question of spousal fidelity.”

“The Church is a woman, the Church is a mother, the Church has its figure in Mary and the Church-woman.”

The pope added that the Church “is more than Peter…everything cannot be reduced to ministeriality. The woman in herself has a very great symbol in the Church as a woman, without reducing her to ministeriality.”

“This is why I said that every instance of reform of the Church is always a question of spousal fidelity, because she [the Church] is a woman.”

The pope also reflected on the centrality of the liturgy in our lives, saying that “it is the place for excellence in which to encounter the living Christ,” which “continually animates and renews baptismal life.”

The pope also said that it is his desire that the dicastery undertakes this work in collaboration with the Dicastery for Culture and Education, the Dicastery for the Clergy, and the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life to reflect “the spirit of synodal collaboration.”

Holy Communion and Worship of the Eucharistic Mystery outside Mass to Be Implemented on the First Sunday of Advent 2024

US Bishops’ Committee on Divine Worship Newsletter, January 2024

After a standard editorial review process by the Secretariat of Divine Worship, along with additional dialogue with the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, a timeline has been set for the implementation of Holy Communion and Worship of the Eucharistic Mystery outside Mass (HCWEMOM), and was issued on January 25, 2024 in a decree of promulgation by Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, USCCB President.

The Holy See confirmed HCWEMOM for liturgical use in the United States on March 7, 2023 (Prot. n. 99/22); the text was received by the USCCB the following month and announced in the May-June 2023 Newsletter Several U.S. adaptations were approved, almost all of them found in the Order of Eucharistic Exposition and Benediction in chapter III.

The goal of the adaptations is to harmonize the book with existing customs for Eucharistic Adoration in this country, for example:

• No. 92—a rubric has been added to officially permit the priest or deacon to wear a white cope for Exposition;

• Nos. 93 and 97—the lyrics of the traditional hymns

O salutaris Hostia and Tantum ergo Sacramentum, in Latin and English, have been inserted; other Eucharistic hymns may continue to be used;

• No. 96—clarifying instructions have been added for praying the Liturgy of the Hours during Adoration, especially Morning and Evening Prayer;

• No. 99—the text of the Divine Praises has been inserted for use during Benediction;

• No. 100—in addition to saying an acclamation, the people may alternatively sing a hymn as the minister withdraws after Benediction.

Ritual editions will go on sale beginning August 1, 2024, and its optional use will be permitted as of September 14, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The obligatory-use date of HCWEMOM has been established for the United States as the First Sunday of Advent, December 1.

Five publishers will produce liturgical books: Catholic Book Publishing Co., Liturgical Press, Liturgy Training Publications, Magnificat, and Midwest Theological Forum, and further information on their editions will be released in a future Newsletter

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Our Easter Resolution: Become an Eternal Offering, A Living Sacrifice

By Christopher Carstens, Editor

For some of us (many of us?), the Lenten resolutions that began back on Ash Wednesday may have fallen by the wayside. Our road to Easter joy might not be as we had planned. Weak wills, self-justified exceptions and exemptions, or life’s legitimate twists and turns may have found us approaching Easter in about the same shape as when we set off.

Oh well, there’s always next year. (Maybe...)

But why wait for what may not happen? Between this Lenten season and the next, there is another chance at Easter glory. In fact, the Easter season—or, better, the Triduum that precedes it—is the perfect time to make a new resolution for a new life. The not-so-hidden secret to this last-minute yet genuine opportunity for renewal is found in the Eucharistic Prayer of the Mass.

Just as the Paschal Triduum of Jesus’ suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension marks the center of the liturgical year, so the Liturgy of the Eucharist forms the heart of the Mass. It is during the Eucharistic Prayers that we ask the Father to “make of us an eternal offering” (Eucharistic Payer III) and, having offered ourselves, to “become a living sacrifice in Christ to the praise of your glory” (Eucharistic Prayer IV). But what do we mean when we pray to become an “eternal offering” and a “living sacrifice”? And why should we want to become these?

“Sacrifice,” Pope Benedict XVI observed, “is a concept that has been buried under the debris of endless misunderstandings” (The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), p.27). The misunderstood and all-too-common view of “sacrifice” sees it principally as giving up, losing out, or destruction. But how, he goes on to ask, is God satisfied by our suffering pain or loss? Is God somehow more glorified by destruction? Is this why the Father was pleased by what he saw on Calvary—the torture and death of his only beloved Son—and why he opened the gates of paradise to the race that destroyed

The Christian in the World

Editor’s note: The following reprint from “A Letter to Diognetus” appears in the Office of Readings from Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter.

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives. They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law.

Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.

Does our participation in the sacrifice of Christ resemble, at its core, the sacrifice of Isaac? Or is there something more and greater to our sacrifice?

him? “Obviously not,” Pope Benedict says. “Belonging to God has nothing to do with destruction or nonbeing” (p.28).

So, if “sacrifice” is not, at its core, destruction (even though sacrifice very well may include pain and loss), what is the true understanding of sacrifice? In a series of remarkable phrases, Benedict proposes that sacrifice is essentially loving union with God Sacrifice “in its essence is simply returning to love and therefore divinization” (p.33). “The essence of worship, of sacrifice [is] growth in love” (p.33). Sacrifice is “transformation into love” (p.47). Sacrifice “is humanity becoming love with Christ” (p.76). “True ‘sacrifice’ is the civitas Dei, that is, love-transformed mankind, the divinization of creation and the surrender of all things to God: God all in all (cf. 1 Cor 15:28). That is the purpose of the world. That is the essence of sacrifice and worship” (27-8).

I wonder if my Lenten resolutions—and if my progress along the Lenten path—would have been any different had I seen clearly that “sacrifice” and “offering” are, at their core, a loving union with and transformation into God?

But it is precisely this “returning to love,” this “transformation into love” that we pray for, work

toward, and should expect when the Liturgy of the Eucharist asks that we become “eternal offerings” and “living sacrifices.” Far from signing up to be perpetually slaughtered and destroyed, we can experience the power of the Eucharistic prayer to change us, even divinize us, if we resolve (such is our Easter resolution) to become one with Christ, in the Spirit, in union with his Father. As St. Paul says (in perhaps Pope Benedict’s favorite quote from scripture): “I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship. Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:1-2).

It is “this age” that deals in death and destruction, divorced as it is from God. But to “offer our bodies as a living sacrifice” gives true life. If you’ll allow just one last quote from Pope Benedict, the abundant life of one who has made himself, in God, an “eternal offering” and a “living sacrifice” is beyond measure. “‘Eternal life’ is not…life after death, in contrast to this present life, which is transient and not eternal. ‘Eternal life’ is life itself, real life, which can also be lived in the present age and is no longer challenged by physical death. This is the point: to seize ‘life’ here and now, real life that can no longer be destroyed by anything or anyone. …[A] distinguishing feature of the disciple of Jesus is that he ‘lives’: beyond the mere fact of existing, he has found and embraced the real life that everyone is seeking. On the basis of such texts, the early Christians called themselves simply ‘the living’ (hoi zōntes). They had found what all are seeking— life itself, full and, hence, indestructible life” (Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 82-83).

If this is what becoming an eternal offering and a living sacrifice means, let us resolve to do it! The Paschal Mystery of Christ, now present to us in the Eucharistic Prayer, has power (almost) beyond belief. And it is ours for the taking.

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs, and yet there is something extraordinary about their lives….

To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.

Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body’s hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.

Continued from PASCHAL MYSTERY, page 1

glorious Ascension into heaven of Christ, your Son, our Lord….”3

Yet, how does the Paschal Mystery reach us today? The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “The Paschal mystery of Christ…cannot remain only in the past... [it] participates in the divine eternity, and so transcends all time while being made present in them all.”4 The saving work of Jesus cannot be contained by the single historical moments of his earthly life and death. Further, access to this event was founded by Christ in his Church through Christian ritual: “Do this in remembrance of me” (Mark 14:22-25; Luke 22:18-20; 1 Corinthians 11:23-25). The normative means by which the Paschal Mystery reaches souls is through the liturgy of the Church.5 After his Resurrection, Jesus sent his Apostles to proclaim his Paschal Mystery to all nations and, in addition, our Lord sent them “that they might accomplish the work of salvation which they had proclaimed, by means of sacrifice and sacraments, around which the entire liturgical life revolves.”6 In other words, the Paschal Mystery is accomplished in you and me when we participate in the liturgy of the Church.

This is the heart of the Easter Preface. It reveals both aspects of the Paschal Mystery, the saving event as well as the effective memorial. Quoting St. Paul, the preface identifies Christ as the fulfillment of the Old Testament blood offerings: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). Then, holding his death and resurrection together, the prayer applies them to us: “by dying he has destroyed our death, and by rising, restored our life.” The preface draws us towards the historical mystery of Christ which is accessible at every Mass.

“Newness” and Centrality

Though the term “Paschal Mystery” was not widely known 100 years ago, the content of this term is not altogether novel to the history of the Church. Rather, by magisterially adopting aspects of the theology from the Liturgical Movement, the Church has recovered an ancient understanding of what is today named the Paschal Mystery.

The earliest known use of the phrase Mysterium Paschale goes back to a bishop of the second century, Melito of Sardis, who, like many of the Fathers, examined the life and death of Christ in light of the Old Testament types. Melito recognized in the life and death of Jesus the final and eternal fulfillment of the sacrifice of the Jewish Passover lamb.7 However, though such typology was common throughout the Patristic age, Mysterium Paschale had yet to become a standard term for this concept.

Yet, the core of this theology is rooted in St. Paul. In several instances, Paul’s letters show the faithful how the mystery of Jesus’ saving actions is ritually present in their own lives:

• “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4 ).

• “by grace [we] have been saved—and raised up with him and seated with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:5-6).

• “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above” (Colossians 3:1).

• “If we have died with him, we will also live with him” (2 Timothy 2:11).

This language of those events are echoed by Church Fathers as St. Cyril who in his Mystagogical Catecheses compares the baptism and anointing of Christ with our own reception of the sacraments: “And as Christ was in reality crucified, and buried, and raised, and you are in Baptism accounted worthy of being crucified with (συσταυρωθῆναι), buried with (συνταφῆναι), and raised together with (συναναστῆναι) Him in a likeness.”8 This is the mystery of the liturgy: we can encounter the reality of Christ’s actions by participation in their likeness

Recovering the Mystery

It wasn’t until the Liturgical Movement recognized the liturgy as “mystery” once again that the term “Paschal Mystery” was established within ecclesial vocabulary. Due to the complex history involved and the brief nature of this article, only broad sweeps can be made concerning this intricate (and controversial)

Responding to the hyper-rationalist approach to nature, man, and liturgy in his day, Dom Odo Casel (1886-1948), a Benedictine priest of Maria Laach, developed his Mysterientheologie (“Mystery Theology”) in the work “The Mystery of Christian Worship.” Casel’s hope was to restore a vision of the liturgy as “mystery” to aid the faithful’s participation in the reality residing there. The earliest known use of the phrase Mysterium Paschale goes back to a bishop of the second century, Melito of Sardis, who, like many of the Fathers, examined the life and death of Christ in light of the Old Testament types. Melito recognized in the life and death of Jesus the final and eternal fulfillment of the sacrifice of the Jewish Passover lamb.

theological development.

The Liturgical Movement sought to rediscover the ancient sources of the Church’s belief and praxis through studying the Scriptures, the Fathers, and liturgical texts. They noticed a difference between the ancient vision of the liturgy from that of the postEnlightenment setting in recent centuries. Responding to the hyper-rationalist approach to nature, man, and liturgy in his day, Dom Odo Casel (1886-1948), a Benedictine priest of Maria Laach, developed his Mysterientheologie (“Mystery Theology”). In an age

“For Casel a ‘mystery’ was not primarily a mysterious truth beyond our reason but a reality—a divine reality, hidden yet communicated.”

where “[l]ove, religion, friendship, ideals—all have been exploded as mere nervous twitchings,”9 and where “[m]odern man thinks that he has thus finally driven out the darkness of the Mystery, and that he stands at last in the clear light of sober reason,”10 Casel’s hope was to restore a vision of the liturgy as “mystery” to aid the faithful’s participation in the reality residing there. “For Casel a ‘mystery’ was not primarily a mysterious truth beyond our reason but a reality—a divine reality, hidden yet communicated.”11 Casel’s invitation was to draw all the faithful personally closer into that mysterious reality: “For man it is an acting-with, a suffering-with, a rising-with, that is, an acting and suffering that follows an objectively existing, more powerful acting and suffering. This acting-suffering is the work of Christ himself, which we reach, however, through the sacramental image.”12

Thus, the sacraments put Christ’s saving work within reach of the faithful so that Christ acts, suffers, and rises within those participating in the liturgy. Casel explains, “[T]he content of the res [reality] of the sacrament is not something new, such as a new sacrifice of the Lord, but it is that sacrifice which happened once for all and which brought about salvation. Thus, in the mystery we have, truly and really present, the work of salvation which has occurred in history.”13 This work illuminates the true work of the Liturgical Movement, not focusing primarily on external reforms and ministries, but, rather, on the invitation to actively, or ‘actually,’

participate (participatio actuosa) in this reality.

This shift from viewing the liturgy from a rationalist perspective to one of an encounter with the mystery of Christ was recognized by Joseph Ratzinger as one of the greatest concepts of our age: “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, which in turn can be understood only against the background of the Liturgical Movement and its rediscovery of ancient Christian liturgy.”14 Such claims from Ratzinger hint at the motivations for the Church’s gradual development of the theology of the Paschal Mystery. However, the Church did not embrace all of Casel’s work as such, but, rather, certain essentials of his insight as they were “not so much contradicted but reorganized,”15 especially through the work of Louis Bouyer.

Bouyer (1913-2004), an Oratorian priest of Paris, played a crucial role in the early Liturgical Movement of France. His initial work, Le Mystère Pascal, is a “meditation on the liturgy of the last three days of Holy Week,”16 which endeavors to bring us into a greater understanding of and contact with the mystery celebrated in Holy Week. Ironically, Bouyer did not approve of the title chosen by a Dominican colleague, the theologican and liturgist Aimon-Marie Roguet: “Father Roguet...suggested the title: Le Mystère pascal, which everyone today imagines to have been a common expression in the patristic and Middle Ages, while, as I pointed out in vain, Christian Latin was very familiar with Paschale sacramentum, but not mysterium paschale....”17 In time, as the Church began to rediscover the content of the Paschal Mystery, the term itself was firmly established.

Bouyer built upon Casel’s foundations, but in a manner that kept more strictly to the Scriptural and Patristic tradition. Where Casel understood mystery, in part, through the pagan mystery cults, Bouyer demonstrated the essence of mystery theology within our own biblical theology. He argued that it is not necessary to look to the pagan cults for the context and foundation of our Pauline and particularly Christian mystery. Rather, Bouyer argues that such a historical move was to “obscure our appreciation of the creative originality, and therefore, everlasting validity, of that great vision of Christianity.”18

Soon after Vatican II, Bouyer emphasized the magisterial adoption of Paschal Mystery theology in two ways. First, he recognized the gradual adoption of the Liturgical Movement’s theology from Pius XII’s Mediator Dei to the more elaborate, explicit, and

Eucharistic Revival: A Big Tent for the Liturgy and Sacraments

Why the Upcoming Eucharistic Congress Needs to Tap All Channels of Grace

By Roland Millare

The Risen Christ revived the faith of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus as he opened up the scriptures “beginning with Moses and all the prophets” and he took, blessed, broke, and gave the Church the gift of his Presence in the Holy Eucharist once again (Luke 24: 27; 30-31). St. Luke’s account of Jesus making himself known in the breaking of the bread is a reminder that the source of renewal and revival for the Church begins first and foremost with Jesus himself. This does not preclude the Church from intentionally cultivating renewal through our own intentional campaigns, but our efforts at any form of revival will come to naught without the Lord as the foundation and center of the work.

A 2022 CARA study, “Eucharist Beliefs: A National Survey of Adult Catholics” reveals that two-thirds of Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, but only 17% attend Mass on a weekly basis. The CARA survey underscores the need for a revival in Eucharistic belief and practice; but how can the present Eucharistic revival bolster its present effort beyond the culminating Eucharistic congress in Indianapolis?

Jesuit Father Robert McTeigue1 and the executive director of the National Eucharistic Revival, Tim Glemkowski,2 engaged in a brief exchange of articles that brought to the forefront of my attention the need for an ongoing Eucharistic revival to focus on liturgical renewal and the relationship of the Holy Eucharist with the other sacraments. In particular, we must highlight the intrinsic link between the Eucharist and the sacrament of Penance. There has a been a great deal of focus on the renewal of eucharistic faith through catechesis on the Eucharist, Eucharistic piety/devotion, and an emphasis on the need for a subjective personal encounter with our Lord in the Eucharist. An authentic revival in Eucharistic piety and faith is inseparable from liturgical renewal—as is the altar from the confessional.

Liturgy as Opus Dei

The “Leader’s playbook” developed by the National Eucharistic Revival emphasizes the need for attentiveness to the rubrics and the ars celebrandi of the liturgy. The foundation for renewal must begin

Continued from PASCHAL MYSTERY, page 4

“most solemn expression of the whole teaching of the Church” in Sacrosanctum Concilium 19 Yet, secondly, in the Church’s proclamation of the Paschal Mystery in that Constitution, Bouyer soberly notes how the Church engaged the work of Casel and the school of Maria Laach concerning their Mysterientheologie: [T]he supreme authority in the Church has now distinguished, in the thinking of these pioneers, the nucleus of undisputable truth from hypotheses or mere personal opinions.20

Bouyer is referring to the formulation of the Paschal Mystery as given in Sacrosanctum Concilium21 and, later, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, as described at the start of this article. Yet, how do we understand the Church’s magisterial adoption of this novel term with its ancient content? Bouyer explains, “It is, as the Council makes so clear, the view of the Church forever, precisely because it springs forth from the whole of Scripture.”22 It is how the Church has always prayed, continues to pray now, and it is how she will pray this and every Holy Week in our own parishes.

Our Active Participation

Though the reality of the Paschal Mystery is present and accessible in all of the liturgies of the Church, it is during the celebrations of the Sacred Triduum in which the lines seem to fade away between our own personal histories and Christ’s saving event, fulfilled in history. The liturgies of Holy Week display the Paschal Mystery in word and gesture most explicitly. From Genesis to Jesus, the scriptural narrative invites us to walk (and even fall down) with Christ. Holy Thursday marks the free handing over of the Son as he institutes the saving Eucharist and Priesthood for sacrifice and service. Good Friday sets our own suffering on the redemptive way of the Cross, to witness the central act

“ Two-thirds of Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, but only 17% attend Mass on a weekly basis.”

by focusing on the notion that the liturgy is first and foremost the opus Dei (“work of God”). The Second Vatican Council, in continuity with Pope Pius XII’s Mediator Dei, taught that Jesus Christ the High Priest is the main subject of the liturgy. The Council highlighted the centrality of the Paschal Mystery within the liturgy and the action of the liturgy as the work of Jesus Christ and his Body, the Church.3 The liturgy can never be

of self-gift of the God-Man in his Passion and death. Then, at the Vigil, with the Paschal Candle aflame and darkness in flight, the announcement of our glorious salvation in Jesus’ victory rings out: “This is the night, when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.”

“ The liturgies of Holy Week display the Paschal Mystery in word and gesture most explicitly.”

These liturgies invite us, with St. Paul, the Church Fathers, and every century of the Church’s celebration, to actively participate in the reality of the Paschal Mystery made present and tangible within the Holy Mass. During this Holy Week, as Christ’s Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension seem to burst forth from the hymns, prayers, and rituals of Mother Church, you and I come into mysterious contact with the reality of the event of salvation. Through the liturgy, we are not left alone in our own histories. In these and all the Church’s liturgies, the Paschal Mystery is accomplished in us who worthily participate in the sacrifice: we suffer with, rise with, and even experience the ascent into glory with Jesus the Christ, Savior and Head of his Body, the Church. To him be glory forever.

Father Daniel Eusterman was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Denver, May 13, 2017. He received his STL and STD in Rome from the University of the Holy Cross (Santa Croce), through its Liturgical Institute. He is currently an instructor of theology and a formation advisor at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver.

understood as the “work of the people” in the sense that the liturgy can be manipulated according to our subjective whims or preferences.

The focus on the liturgy as the opus Dei has consistently been articulated by Joseph Ratzinger throughout his varying works dedicated to the theology of the liturgy, which “means that God acts in the liturgy through Christ and that we can act only through him and with him. Of ourselves, we cannot construct the way to God.”4 I would suggest that the Church finds itself in need of a revival because we have come to view the liturgy as something we can construct, make, refashion, or fabricate for ourselves. The efforts of the Eucharist Revival should help the Church to reflect on how the Church came to view the

Please see REVIVAL, page 9

1 The Roman Missal, Third Typical Edition, “Preface I of Easter: The Paschal Mystery,” 2011.

2 Sacrosanctum Concilium [SC], 5.

3 Unde et memores sumus domine nos tui servi, sed et plebs tua sancta christi filii tui domini dei nostri, tam beatae passionis, necnon et ab inferis resurrectionis, sed et in caelis gloriosae ascensionis… This memorial prayer continues unchanged from the Gregorian Sacramentary (eighth century), to the Missale Romanum of the Council of Trent (16th century), and the current Missale Romanum

4 CCC 1085.

5 Cf. SC 7.

6 SC 6.

7 Cf. Melito of Sardis, On Pascha, (trans.) Alistair Stewart-Sykes in Popular Patristics Series, Number 20, (ed.) John Behr (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 31-34 and 37ff.

8 Cyril of Jerusalem, “Mystagogical Catecheses,” Edwin Hamilton Gifford (trans.), in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Volume 7, (eds.) Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894), III.2.

9 Odo Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship: and Other Writings, (ed.) Burkhard Neunheuser (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1962), 2.

10 Odo Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship, 3.

11 Burkhard Neunheuser, “Preface,” in Odo Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship, ix.

12 Odo Casel, “Glaube, Gnosis und Mysterium,” Jahrbuch für Liturgiewissenschaft

15 (1941) 155-305, 251 (my translation). For better understanding of Casel’s theology of the sacramental “image” cf. Juan Rego, “O. Casel y el sacramento como imagen simbólica,” Annales Theologici 25 (2011), 289-304.

13 Odo Casel, “Glaube, Gnosis und Mysterium,” 251 (my translation).

14 Joseph Ratzinger, “I. The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” in Collected Works: Theology of the Liturgy, Volume II (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014; original German 2008), 153.

15 Louis Bouyer, The Christian Mystery: From Pagan Myth to Christian Mysticism, (trans.) Illtyd Trethowan (Petersham, MA: Saint Bede’s Publications, 1990), 2.

16 Louis Bouyer, The Paschal Mystery: Meditations on the Last Three Days of Holy Week, (trans.) Mary Benoit (Providence, RI: Cluny, 2022), xiii.

17 Louis Bouyer, Memoirs (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2015), 186. This parallels the dogmatic work of Hans Urs von Balthasar who wrote Theologie der drei Tage [“Theology of the Three Days”] (1969), in which he argues that the Passion, Death, Descent, Resurrection, and Ascension (what we now call the Paschal Mystery) reveal not only something about the Trinity as witnessed in their “economic” action, but, also, that they reveal something of the very nature of the immanent Trinity itself. This work, when translated into English, years later, was given the title Mysterium Paschale (Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, (trans.) Aiden Nichols (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2000)).

18 Louis Bouyer, The Liturgy Revived: A Doctrinal Commentary of the Conciliar Constitution on the Liturgy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), 15.

19 Most especially numbers 5–7 which define and elaborate on the Paschal Mystery as it is celebrated in the liturgy. For more on this gradual development of doctrine, cf. Dominic M. Langevin, From Passion to Paschal Mystery: A Recent Magisterial Development Concerning the Christological Foundation of the Sacraments (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2015).

20 L. Bouyer, The Liturgy Revived, 11.

21 Cf. SC 5-7.

22 L. Bouyer, The Liturgy Revived, 15.

The Second Vatican Council, in continuity with Pope Pius XII’s Mediator Dei, taught that Jesus Christ the High Priest is the main subject of the liturgy. The Council highlighted the centrality of the Paschal Mystery within the liturgy and the action of the liturgy as the work of Jesus Christ and his Body, the Church. The liturgy can never be understood as the “work of the people” in the sense that the liturgy can be manipulated according to our subjective whims or preferences.

The Holy Mass as Liturgy of Light

By Father Michael Rennier

Children often ask me about the candles on the altar.

Why are they there?

One basic explanation is an appeal to fittingness.

Imagine a fancy dinner, a wedding feast. It’s natural to solemnize the occasion with candles on the tables. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the greatest of nuptial feasts, so it makes sense we burn candles.

There’s also a prosaic explanation. The priest needs to see the text in the missal. In the days before electric light, stone church buildings without large, clear windows to admit natural light remained dim even on the brightest days. I know this because when on a few occasions the power has gone out during Mass, I needed a server to bring a candle to the missal.

There’s also a more subtle explanation for the candles, one that goes to the very source of religion and human nature.

Natural Light and Solar Religion

On the natural level, light has shaped human existence from the beginning. The cycle of the sun affects our growing season, when we sleep, how we see, and even regulates our hormone levels. Ancient man acknowledged the importance of light by inventing solar deities. The Egyptians had Aten, the Greeks Apollo, the Incans Inti, the Persians Mithra, and so on.

The Israelites refused to deify the sun, but they revered light. Hanukkah, for instance, celebrates the restoration of light in the temple. Josephus, in the Antiquities, writes, “We celebrate this festival, and we call it Lights.” Other festivals on the Jewish calendar are connected to the sun and its attendant cycles of planting and harvesting. These religious rituals didn’t worship the sun but, rather, apprehended light as a sensible sign of God’s glorious presence—what the Israelite’s called his shekinah As Paul Claudel comments, “It is a light, infinitely more delicate than all the sensory organs.”

The Church’s liturgical calendar is also sensitive to the movement of the sun in the sky. Harvest feasts, such as rogation days, are only the beginning of the nuances in our calendar. The nativity of St. John the Baptist aligns with the summer solstice. From his birth, the daylight of the one-who-must-decrease grows shorter. St. Lucy, a virgin martyr who sacrificed her vision for love of her Savior, was blinded and martyred on December 13, near the winter solstice and darkest

day of the year. Christmas then occasions an increase of sunlight. The days grow brighter into and through the Easter season, punctuated by the great celebration of light that is Epiphany. Donald DeMarco recently wrote a lovely essay for Adoremus about Candlemas, which falls halfway through winter. He points out the poetic implications of candles as light sources that gain strength with the sun.

The metaphor of light is brought to fullness in Christ the Rising Sun. Our Lord gives away his life in eclipsed darkness at the Cross and, three days later, rises in a blinding flash of light. Forty days later he ascends to the New Jerusalem, which is lit by the glory of his presence. This heavenly city is arriving in ever-increasing redemptive luminosity until some day, when we least expect, the Light of the World will return like the sun bursting over the eastern horizon, light radiating and spilling into every dark valley and shadowed corner.

For this reason, Christians have always preferred to pray facing east, watching and waiting for the Light.

They took this orientation to the Rising Sun extremely seriously. The traditional method to position new churches was along the solar axis. Architects marked out the position of the rising sun on the feast day of the patron saint for that particular church. This solar position then became “true east” for the building. For example, on the feast of St. Luke, at dawn the sun would rise directly before the altar at St. Luke’s parish. The people of God literally faced the Light.

Supernatural Light

two are not the same but they also aren’t different. In the hierarchy, the natural always leads to the supernatural and depends upon it.

This primacy of the spiritual realm is clear from the first chapter of Genesis. God creates light before he creates the sun. When the liturgy orients itself to the sun, it is our Lord, the uncreated supernatural Light who is the object of our adoration. Through his priesthood we also adore the luminous Trinity.

The sun is the symbol. Christ is the light. The Mass is a poetic communication of Light, the procession of lumen de lumine which illumines the human soul. As Claudel writes, “Speaking of the happiness of the purified soul, compare it to a light, and not to all light, but precisely to that of the morning which crosses its fires with the light whose name above the deserts is: O Oriens.” He goes on to write that divine light directs us towards “the happiness of being constituted at every moment at the source.”

“This primacy of the spiritual realm is clear from the first chapter of Genesis. God creates light before he creates the sun. The sun is the symbol: Christ is the light.”

Christ the Light is a correction of and fulfillment of the ancient solar religions. In particular, he unveils the Old Covenant. The Light was always there. It burned whitehot at the burning bush and in the column of fire that led the Twelve Tribes. It lit the face of Moses so powerfully that it disfigured him and he covered his countenance. It descended onto the holy of holies when the tabernacle was completed and, again, was veiled under ritual and symbol.

If it’s natural for mankind to look up with awe at the sun, acknowledge the truth of our dependence on it, and endow it with religious significance, it’s even more true that the sun’s power is entirely dependent on Christ who is the Light.

We’ve noted that the sun affects our liturgical calendar. It’s more accurate, though, to say that the liturgical calendar dictates the cycle of the sun. The spiritual reality underpinning the cosmos is more necessary and fundamental than sensible phenomena. Creation is an occasion of wide-eyed wonder, but it’s a reflection. In a mysterious way, by some secret ladder, heaven and earth are joined in an analogy of being. The

The Light was always there even if the people didn’t see it. It never ceased to shine. Sacrifices of incense as physical phenomena of captured, congealed sunlight were burned by the priests on a regular basis. The high priest vested in a white robe, an impressive display that gestured towards divine light in an era when clothing was difficult to keep bright and clean. Over his robe, he wore vestments of many colors embedded with gemstones, reminiscent of God’s rainbow of promise. The vestments descend from Joseph’s coat of many colors, a garment of light bent through a prism. This is the dense symbolic imagery into which Christ is born. On the night he arrives, the sky flashes with his glory. In midnight, the Light enters his world. St. John sums it up, “In the beginning was the Word. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.”

Ancient man acknowledged the importance of light by inventing solar deities. The Egyptians had Aten, the Greeks Apollo, the Incans Inti, the Persians Mithra, and so on. But only Christians worship the true Son. Christ the Light is a correction of and fulfillment of the ancient solar religions.

Throughout his Gospel, St. John recognizes Christ’s glory contrasted with lack of light in those who fail to recognize his divinity. Nicodemus departs by night, Judas runs into the night to betray his Lord, and the Magdalene arrives at her Lord’s tomb in pre-dawn. St. John the Baptist, on the other hand, testifies to the light, the miracles of Our Lord are “signs” pointing to heavenly glory, and the crucifixion itself is, ironically, the fullest revelation of Christ’s glorious light. This is where he is crowned with thorns, a halo formed in conjunction with suffering.

To those without eyes to see, the light of Christ cannot be apprehended. Our Lord, however, desires that we would all see, so throughout his ministry he reveals the deeper meaning of Jewish liturgical practices. In doing so, he reveals the light at the heart of the Old Law and how, with Christ as its fulfillment, it will blaze up into a burning sun. At Cana, he transforms ritual water for purification into new wine. At his baptism, he steps into the old waters of repentance and elevates them into sacrament. He attends the Feast of Tabernacles and there declares himself the Light of the World.

The Feast of Tabernacles was a spectacle of light. During the eight feast days, the temple gates were left open so the faithful could gather for the ritual lighting of four lamps. Each lamp was mounted on a stand over 70-feet tall. Each of the four massive golden bowls was filled with oil and lit by the priests. Once burning, they were said to illuminate every courtyard in Jerusalem. It would have been immensely impressive to the ancient eye, unaccustomed as it was to artificial light of that magnitude.

This is when Christ makes his announcement: “I am the Light of the World.” He is greater even than the dazzling religious spectacle. He is the fulfillment, the Messiah. This is made crystal clear in the context of the reading from Zechariah that was prayed during Tabernacles: “On that day there will be neither sunlight nor cold, frosty darkness. It will be a unique day a day known only to the Lord with no distinction between day and night. When evening comes, there will be light.”

The Mass and Light as Sacrifice

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is a liturgy of light because light is a symbol of great poetic power with which our Lord specifically identifies. It’s helpful to our devotion to be cognizant of these symbols and think of our Lord under his divine title Light of the World.

I want to make an even more incisive point, though. Not only is the Mass a celebration of light as poetic metaphor, but the Mass is actually the sacrifice of light Light is a rare resource, particularly before electric light bulbs. Offering our Heavenly Father the gift of light is a precious oblation.

Thus, the burning of incense at every Solemn Mass: incense is a piece of crystalized sunshine that we immolate and consume in fire at the altar. It is a sacrifice

“Incense is a piece of crystalized sunshine that we immolate and consume in fire at the altar. It is a sacrifice of light that visibly rises to our Father.”

of light that visibly rises to our Father.

Like priests of the old covenant, a Catholic priest is clothed in vestments of colored light not only as a visual symbol of light but also to eliminate his personality from divine worship. The priest temporarily sacrifices his identity as an individual in order to step into a new identity. He is a single ray of light sacramentally joined to the Source, flooded by and even overwhelmed by divine glory.

Returning to the candles on the altar. Not only are they poetic instances of light, not only are they practically suited to illuminating text, but they, too, are part of the sacrifice. St. Anselm teaches about candles that the wax is the flesh of Our Lord, the wick his soul, and the flame his divinity. As the candles burn, the wax is consumed. The candle visibly diminishes as it is sacrificed. The candles, like other elements at the heart of the Mass, are a gift of the Light to the Father.

Note that the candles are meant to be seven total, a number for the divine perfection of the Light. To this day, when a bishop celebrates the Mass, the seventh is placed on the altar and lit. At Mass celebrated by a priest, however, there are only six candles. Where is the seventh? It’s still there. It is transfigured into the altar crucifix. The crucifix, the perfect sacrifice, is luminous with glory.

Not only is the crucified Christ present in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, but so also is the resurrected Christ. Easter is there, too. The Light of the World is the sacrifice. Remember, the Light came into the world but the world knew him not.

Still, he shines.

The Light is redemptive, re-making the world by the power of divine glory, revealing the luminous heart of God. The Mass, as sacrifice, is our celebration of the Light, for it is in his Passion and Resurrection that he shines brightest. Even more, the Mass stirs embers within our individual souls. Grace is a consuming fire. United to Christ in his sacrifice, we too will shine.

Father Michael Rennier lives in St. Louis with his wife and children. A convert from Anglicanism with his family, he has an MDiv from Yale Divinity School and is a Catholic priest for the Archdiocese of St. Louis. He is associate editor at Dappled Things: A Quarterly of Ideas, Art & Faith, and a regular contributor at Aleteia.

Christians have always preferred to pray facing east, watching and waiting for the Light. They took this orientation to the Rising Sun extremely seriously. The traditional method to position new churches was along the solar axis. Architects marked out the position of the rising sun on the feast day of the patron saint for that particular church. This solar position then became “true east” for the building. For example, on the feast of St. Luke, at dawn the sun would rise directly before the altar at St. Luke’s parish. The people of God literally faced the Light.

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is a liturgy of light because light is a symbol of great poetic power with which our Lord specifically identifies. But not only are candles poetic instances of light, not only are they practically suited to illuminating text, but they, too, are part of the sacrifice. St. Anselm teaches about candles that the wax is the flesh of Our Lord, the wick his soul, and the flame his divinity. As the candles burn, the wax is consumed. The candle visibly diminishes as it is sacrificed. The candles, like other elements at the heart of the Mass, are a gift of the Light to the Father.

Per Christum Dominum Nostrum: The Work of the Son in the Liturgy

By Michael Brummond

Editor’s note: This second of three installments follows a previous article from the January 2024 Bulletin which discussed God the Father as the font and end of liturgy.

Often, one of the most perplexing aspects of learning a new language is mastering its prepositions. These short words—of, to, in, from, etc.—can be challenging to master because of the great deal of meaning they carry, while their exact usage can vary from one language to another. Prepositions generally express the relationship between nouns. Thomas being in Chicago and Thomas being from Chicago both tell us something about a person and a place, but the two different prepositions carry a great deal of the significance of what is being said.

Our language about the trinitarian God, and our liturgical prayers by which we worship him, are imbued with these meaning-filled prepositions. The Lord Jesus is “true God from true God.” The Holy Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.” Most of our prayers in the liturgy are addressed to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.” In this installment of the work of the Trinity in the liturgy, we will focus on our prayer through the Son.

The word “through” relates our prayer to the Father by means of Christ. It is the prepositional form of the scriptural affirmation that “there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). For liturgist and Dominican Father Anscar Chupungco, the phrase “through Christ our Lord,” “stands for the role that Christ played in salvation history and in its continuing realization in the liturgy.”1 Just as the economy of salvation centered on the person and work of Christ, so the liturgy bears this same Christocentric character.

“Indeed,” writes liturgist and Benedictine Father Cyprian Vagaggini, “in our liturgy the part played by Christ is thus so real, so vivid, so present and preponderant, that in the final analysis there is in the world but one liturgist, Christ, and but one liturgy, Christ’s liturgy.”2 The work of the Son in the liturgy is to introduce us into the eternal trinitarian dialogue through a participation in his Paschal Mystery as members of his Mystical Body. In the liturgy we encounter Christ who is present to us as our great High Priest. All of this should elicit our astonishment and wonder.

Join the Dialogue

the dialogue he has had from all eternity with the Father, and the result is liturgy.

“The unity between Christ and the Church is so real that Thomas Aquinas is able to say that ‘the head and members are as one mystic person.’”

The role of the Second Person of the Trinity in the liturgy finds its source already in the inner life of the Trinity. That God is a Trinity of Persons, and particularly that there is in God a divine Word or Logos, is the very condition for the possibility of liturgy. Since in God there is Word, there is in God dialogue, a dialogue into which we can be drawn. Before he was pope, Joseph Ratzinger taught that the fundamental reason that we can speak with God in prayer is that God is eternally speech: “Only because there is already speech, ‘Logos,’ in God can there be speech, ‘Logos,’ to God. Philosophically we could put it like this: the Logos in God is the onto-logical foundation of prayer…. Since there is a relationship within God himself, there can also be a participation in this relationship.”3 In God, there is dialogue, and human persons speak to God insofar as they are drawn into that trinitarian speech. Insofar as the liturgy is the dialogue of listening to God who speaks, and the response of faith, it is an echo of the dynamic that exists between the Father and his eternal Word. While we could not overcome the infinite gap between our speech and God’s own trinitarian dialogue, God has done just that when “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). As the future Pope Benedict said, “this is what the Incarnation of the Logos means: he who is speech, Word, Logos, in God and to God, participates in human speech. This has a reciprocal effect, involving man in God’s own internal speech. Or we could say that man is able to participate in the dialogue within God himself because God has first shared in human speech and has thus brought the two into communion with one another.”4 Christ has introduced into human language

Through the incarnation, Jesus becomes the visible, historical manifestation of God. Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), and whoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father (John 14:9). The sacred humanity of Jesus visibly signifies and efficaciously contains the saving grace of God. In other words, Jesus can be considered the primordial sacrament. You and I, however, do not have the ability to encounter the sacred humanity of Christ in the same way Peter and John did. After the Ascension, when Christ’s visible presence is no longer with us, “the economy of the sacraments has superseded the economy of God’s revelation in Christ’s flesh.”5 The instrumentality of Christ’s sacred humanity has been broadened to include his Church’s ministers and simple elements like bread, wine, water, and oil as instruments of grace. Thus, we might say that our sacramental liturgy is an extension of the one sacrament who is Christ and draws its meaning and efficacy from him. The incarnation and the sacraments are two analogous moments of the one divine pedagogy.

Word in Deed Christ shared in human speech and revealed the Father through a unity of words and deeds, but especially through his death and resurrection. “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.”6 Christ’s work of giving perfect glory to the Father and redeeming mankind was achieved “principally by the paschal mystery of His blessed passion, resurrection from the dead, and the glorious ascension….”7 “Paschal,” etymologically, refers to the original Old Testament Passover in which the angel of death, seeing the blood of the lamb on the Israelites’ doorposts, passed over their homes, saving them from death and slavery. Paul tells us that “Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). Through his blood we are saved from eternal death and slavery to sin. Thus, we acclaim the Lamb of God in the liturgy: “Save us, Savior of the world, for by your Cross and Resurrection you have set us free.”

These central events of the saving work of Christ occurred 2,000 years ago on the other side of the world. How, then, can we become vitally connected to them so as to share in their fruit? Though they are historically past, the events of the Paschal Mystery cannot simply remain in the past. Since they were accomplished by a divine Person, they in some way participate in the divine

eternity.8 The liturgy is what associates us with the Paschal Mystery, so that Christ’s death and resurrection do not remain remote in time and space but are present here and now in each baptismal font and on each altar. The Paschal Mystery is therefore at the heart of the liturgy. “In the liturgy of the Church, it is principally his own Paschal mystery that Christ signifies and makes present.”9 Through the liturgy, Christ dead, risen, and glorified is “in continuous act of communicating to the world the divine life of which He is the perfect and solitary dispenser.”10 Christ fulfilled his earthly liturgy principally on the cross, but now continues his glorification of the Father and our sanctification in the heavenly liturgy, and he invites us to participate in the former and anticipate the latter through the liturgy of the Church.

Verified Organic

Our participation in Christ and his Paschal Mystery is not merely a moral reality, whereby we imitate the Lord in a more or less extrinsic manner. The unity between Christ and the Church is far more profound, such that the scriptures employ organic images from living things. Christ is the vine, and we are the branches (cf. John 15:5). Paul’s favorite image is a body of which Christ is the head (Romans 12:4ff.; 1 Corinthians 12:12ff.; Colossians 1:18). Unlike any other association of individuals, the Church has an intrinsic unifying principle, the Holy Spirit. “To this Spirit of Christ, also, as to an invisible principle is to be ascribed the fact that all the parts of the Body are joined one with the other and with their exalted Head; for He is entire in the Head, entire in the Body, and entire in each of the members.”11 The unity between Christ and the Church is so real that Thomas Aquinas is able to say that “the head and members are as one mystic person.”12 As such, we not only recall the Paschal Mystery, but partake of it in our own lives so that we can say with St. Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

In the liturgy, therefore, Christ is the principal agent, but not the sole agent. Put another way, it is Christ who acts in the liturgy, but Christ the Head along with his Body. The Second Vatican Council affirmed that “Christ indeed always associates the Church with Himself in this great work wherein God is perfectly glorified and men are sanctified.”13 The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, Head and members together making up the totus Christus, the whole Christ. Thus, Sacrosanctum Concilium can describe the liturgy as “the whole public worship…performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the Head and His members.”14 Christology and Ecclesiology both necessarily find ample expression in a robust liturgical theology. As David Fagerberg says, “Christology is the doctrine of what was completed in the vine, and liturgical theology is the doctrine of the vine’s vitality extending into evernew branches.”15 Nowhere is the identity of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, and each of us as living

Cardinal Ratzinger writes, “this is what the Incarnation of the Logos means: he who is speech, Word, Logos, in God and to God, participates in human speech. This has a reciprocal effect, involving man in God’s own internal speech. Or we could say that man is able to participate in the dialogue within God himself because God has first shared in human speech and has thus brought the two into communion with one another.”

members, so clearly manifest as in the celebration of the liturgy.16

Realized Presence

Such a depth of union and shared action would be inconceivable if the Lord were absent from his Church. Indeed, Christ assured us, “I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matthew 28:20). His presence, though different from its natural, historical manner, is nonetheless real. “To accomplish so great a work, Christ is always present in His Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations.”17 Sacrosanctum Concilium enumerates the ways Christ is present: in the sacrifice of the Mass, in the person of the minister, in the Eucharistic species, in the sacraments, in his word, and when the Church prays and sings. Pope Benedict XVI once wrote that “being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” We could likewise paraphrase the Holy Father and say that liturgy is not the result of fastidiously following rubrics or the creativity of a worship committee, but an encounter with the person of Christ present in his Church.

Christ’s presence in the liturgy can be further specified as the presence of Christ our High Priest. The letter to the Hebrews says that “every high priest chosen from among men is appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins” (5:1). Christ is priest as the perfect mediator between God and man (cf. 1 Timothy 2:5) from the moment of his incarnation and consummated through the unique sacrifice of the cross.18 He willed, however, that his priesthood which he established to give perfect worship to the Father and to sanctify his people, should last in the Church until the end of time. Thus, he gives to his Church certain participations in his own priesthood.19 The members of the Mystical Body are members of their Head, Christ the priest. The liturgy is, then, “under the veil of sensible signs, a continual epiphany of the priesthood of Christ now glorious beside the Father, an epiphany which He Himself realizes among us by associating the Church to His priesthood, which is always active.”20 Thus, Sacrosanctum Concilium includes in its definition that “the liturgy is considered as an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ.”21 In the liturgy, the Church participates in the priestly action of

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liturgy in this way. Creativity has become normative in how people celebrate the Roman Rite according to the Missal of St. Paul VI (the novus ordo). Ratzinger notes that the use of this formula throughout the Pauline Missal fosters this creativity with the phrase: “sacerdos dicit sic vel simili modo…[the priest speaks thus or in a similar way…].”24 The Eucharist revival has laudably highlighted the needed “fidelity to the texts and rubrics of the Church,” but it must dive deeper and address the plethora of liturgical options that have displaced what was once normative within the celebration of the liturgy.

Liturgical Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

One concrete way in which the National Eucharistic Revival can promote liturgical renewal would be to help the Church appreciate the richness of liturgical diversity within the West and the East—a diversity which, nonetheless, reveals a pattern of normative liturgical practices within each of these other liturgical communities. An effort could be made for Latin Catholics to appreciate the distinct features of the liturgical rites of the Eastern Catholic Churches. There is a great amount of ignorance that Latin Catholics have when it comes to the Eastern Churches. A fuller understanding of their distinct liturgical practices will help foster appreciation and love of the East while at the same time enriching our own understanding of the important role a standardized liturgical form can have for the Roman rite.

With respect to the Roman Rite, it would be beneficial for the unity of the Church for the National Eucharistic Revival to offer resources to the faithful to help them understand and appreciate the distinct features of the Missal of 1962 (as used by parishes that offer the Traditional Latin Mass) and Divine Worship: The Missal (as used by parishes within the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter). Liturgical diversity can assist the faithful to understand the rich catholicity within the liturgy and ways in which these other forms of the Roman Rite may enrich the present form of the Roman

Christ is the vine, and we are the branches (cf. John 15:5). As David Fagerberg says, “Christology is the doctrine of what was completed in the vine, and liturgical theology is the doctrine of the vine’s vitality extending into ever-new branches.” Nowhere is the identity of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, and each of us as living members, so clearly manifest as in the celebration of the liturgy.

Christ which commenced at the incarnation, reached its zenith on the cross, and continues eternally in the heavenly sanctuary.

Prepositional Cause

Probably only a professional liturgiologist or linguist could regard with awe the liturgy’s use of prepositions as we pray through our Lord Jesus Christ. The reality that this signifies, however, is another matter. “Through Christ” in the language and movements of the liturgy reflects God’s work of salvation in which Christ is sent from the Father in order to lead us back to the Father. That visible mission of the Son is a reflection in time that he proceeds eternally from the Father. The sacraments of the Church celebrated through Christ reflect the fact that the sacramental economy is the extension of God’s economy of salvation, and a foretaste of our sharing in

Rite found in the Missal of St. Paul VI. Further, the diversity of the Eastern Churches and their liturgies may highlight our need to recover a clearer eschatological and cosmological imagery via the manner in which we celebrate the liturgy, especially by means of our use of sacred art, architecture, and music.

“As far as the liturgy is concerned, we cannot say that one song is as good as another.”

Ars Celebrandi

The Eucharistic revival could contribute to a renewed liturgical movement by helping the faithful to understand the signs and symbols within the sacred liturgy, the significance of certain solemnities and feasts, and the rich breadth of the liturgical year in its varying seasons. In its handbook, the Eucharistic Revival invites the Church to “attentiveness to the Ars Celebrandi.” Pope Benedict XVI maintains the view that “The ars celebrandi should foster a sense of the sacred and the use of outward signs which help to cultivate this sense, such as, for example, the harmony of the rite, the liturgical vestments, the furnishings and the sacred space” (Sacramentum Caritatis, 40). The Eucharistic revival could help parishes revisit how their sacred furnishings, sacred vestments, sacred art, and sacred architecture could foster the mystery of the Eucharist with greater clarity. For instance, a parish might consider the need for a new tabernacle or simply a new placement for the tabernacle to help the faithful to appreciate the Holy Eucharist as the source and summit of our Christian life. A pressing need for liturgical renewal for the Church is to reflect upon how it has implemented the Church’s teaching on sacred music. Given the preeminent place of sacred music in the ars celebrandi, a Eucharistic revival must include a renewal of music within the liturgy. Benedict XVI outlines the significance of sacred music: “As far as the liturgy is concerned, we cannot say that

the divine nature, the trinitarian dynamic of love.

Pope Francis has recently referred to the response one should have before the mystery of the liturgy, which is the Paschal Mystery made present and effective for us: “If there were lacking our astonishment at the fact that the paschal mystery is rendered present in the concreteness of sacramental signs, we would truly risk being impermeable to the ocean of grace that floods every celebration.”22 The goal of liturgical formation is to cultivate more deeply in ourselves and others this sense of awe. “The astonishment or wonder of which I speak is not some sort of being overcome in the face of an obscure reality or a mysterious rite. It is, on the contrary, marveling at the fact that the salvific plan of God has been revealed in the paschal deed of Jesus (cf. Ephesians 1:3-14), and the power of this paschal deed continues to reach us in the celebration of the ‘mysteries’ of the sacraments.”23 What is astonishing is the work of the Son in the liturgy, present to his Mystical Body as their great High Priest, causing them to recapitulate in their own lives his Paschal Mystery for their sanctification and the glory of God.

Mike Brummond holds a Doctorate in Sacred Liturgy from the University of St. Mary of the Lake, Mundelein Seminary, IL. He is associate professor of systematic studies at Sacred Heart Seminary and School of Theology in Hales Corners, WI.

1. Anscar J. Chupungco, What, Then, is Liturgy? Musings and Memoir (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010), 105.

2. Cyprian Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1976), 254.

3. Joseph Ratzinger, The Feast of Faith: Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 25.

4. Ratzinger, 25-26.

5. Chupungco, 107.

6. Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, 1.

7. Sacrosanctum Concilium (hereafter SC), 5.

8. See Catechism of the Catholic Church (hereafter CCC), 1085.

9. CCC 1085.

10. Vagaggini, 252.

11. Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, 57.

12. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III,q. 48, art. 2.

13. SC, 7.

14. SC, 7.

15. David Fagerberg, Liturgical Dogmatics: How Catholic Beliefs Flow from Liturgical Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2021), 153.

16. See SC, 2: “For the liturgy, ‘through which the work of our redemption is accomplished,’ most of all in the divine sacrifice of the Eucharist, is the outstanding means whereby the faithful may express in their lives, and manifest to others, the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church.”

17. SC, 7; cf. Mediator Dei, 20.

18. See Mediator Dei, 17 and CCC 1544.

19. See Lumen Gentium, 10.

20. Vagaggini, 267.

21. SC, 7.

22. Pope Francis, Desiderio Desideravi, 24.

23. Desiderio Desideravi, 25.

24. Ratzinger, Theology of the Liturgy, 565.

one song is as good as another. Generic improvisation or the introduction of musical genres which fail to respect the meaning of the liturgy should be avoided. As an element of the liturgy, song should be well integrated into the overall celebration. Consequently everything— texts, music, execution—ought to correspond to the meaning of the mystery being celebrated, the structure of the rite and the liturgical seasons” (Sacramentum Caritatis, 42).

Benedict’s emphasis on texts and the structure of the rite highlights the need within the celebration of the liturgy to restore the singing of the entrance, offertory, and communion antiphons as a normative practice at most parishes. These are the texts given to us by the Church in the Roman Missal and the Gradual, so it seems fitting to reinvigorate worship by using the varying chant settings for these antiphons and the other proper texts of the liturgy. It would also behoove parishes to restore the norm of singing the Mass as a fuller form of liturgy that is fitting especially for Sundays, solemnities, and major feasts.

Fuller Sacramental Revival

St. Thomas Aquinas argues that the Eucharist is the greatest of the seven sacraments as it contains Jesus Christ himself, whereas the others bestow simply the grace of Christ.6 St. Thomas also teaches that the Holy Eucharist is “perfective of all the other sacraments.”7 Given that the Holy Eucharist is the end of all the other sacraments, the present Eucharistic revival can be strengthened by underscoring the relationship of the Eucharist with all of the other sacraments. An authentic revival would be strengthened by an emphasis on the sacrament of Penance in particular.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul exhorts the faithful to examine themselves before receiving Communion (11:28). St. John Paul II emphasizes that this verse helps to underscore the relationship between the sacraments of Penance and the Holy Eucharist: “The Christ who calls to the Eucharistic banquet is always the

In its handbook, the Eucharistic Revival invites the Church to “attentiveness to the Ars Celebrandi.” Pope Benedict XVI maintains the view that “The ars celebrandi should foster a sense of the sacred and the use of outward signs which help to cultivate this sense, such as, for example, the harmony of the rite, the liturgical vestments, the furnishings and the sacred space.” The Eucharistic revival could help parishes revisit how their sacred furnishings, sacred vestments, sacred art, and sacred architecture could foster the mystery of the Eucharist with greater clarity.

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same Christ who exhorts us to penance and repeats his ‘Repent.’ Without this constant ever-renewed endeavor for conversion, partaking of the Eucharist would lack its full redeeming effectiveness and there would be a loss or at least a weakening of the special readiness to offer God the spiritual sacrifice in which our sharing in the priesthood of Christ is expressed in an essential and universal manner.”8 There can be no lasting Eucharistic revival without a renewed appreciation of the sacrament of Penance. As John Paul II notes above, without the regular repentance from sin, “the Eucharist would lack its full redeeming effectiveness.”

Beyond the availability of confession at the forthcoming Eucharistic Congress, there is a need for a renewed understanding, appreciation, and availability of this sacrament of mercy. The Passion and death of Christ are referred to in the third Eucharistic prayers as the “sacrifice of reconciliation.” Holy Communion presupposes our reconciliation, so dioceses and parishes should consider how often they offer the sacrament of confession to assist the faithful in receiving the gift of grace and mercy to partake of the Eucharist worthily. Furthermore, sin is never an individual affair, as it affects the sinner’s relationship with the Church. Hence, this is why a priest gives absolution as a “minister of the Church” because he is restoring a person’s communion with the Church which has been affected by sin.

If a parish only offers the sacrament of confession from 30 minutes to an hour on a Saturday afternoon and/ or by appointment, many people will not partake of the sacrament. An effort can be made on the diocesan level or among parishes within a deanery to examine and to discuss when, how often, and where the sacrament of confession is available.

Are there ample opportunities for the sacrament to be made available in a particular deanery or other regional structuring of a diocese? Would it be possible to ensure that each day confession is available at one of the parishes in a deanery? Some dioceses have made the effort to offer confession for the same day and same time period each week in tandem with a marketing campaign to ensure that all people are aware of the power of confession. This could be a great opportunity for a group of people to develop an app or some other hub of information online that allows the faithful to know when the sacrament of reconciliation is readily available.

Closely connected with both the sacraments of confession and the Holy Eucharist is the sacrament of the sick. The Holy Eucharist as viaticum is ideally the final sacrament given to the person seriously ill and dying after having received the sacraments of confession and anointing of the sick as part of the last rites.

Unfortunately, in practice many of the faithful who are nearing the end of life receive only the gift of unction because they are unable to go to confession or receive the precious gift of viaticum. There is a clear need for the faithful and their families to appreciate the Holy Eucharist as part of the last rites, so there is a vigilance to ensure that the seriously ill and dying may receive the full gift of sacramental grace from these three sacraments.

Baptism and confirmation lay the foundation for the communion with God and the Church that is embodied by the Holy Eucharist. The friendship with God that is bestowed via the gift of grace becomes fully evident in the gift of the Eucharist. The sacraments at the service of communion, marriage, and holy orders offer graces to those recipients to extend that gift of friendship

“ There are varying opinions on the efforts of the National Eucharistic Revival, but I think there is universal agreement that the Church in the United States and beyond needs such a revival.”

with God to others through charity. As the Eucharistic Revival pivots to focus on the relationship between Eucharist and mission, it will benefit from a renewed focus on the Eucharist and all of the other sacraments.

Further Up—Further In

A unicorn in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle rejoices with these words: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…. Come further up, come further in!” Since the Church in the United States first announced the Eucharistic Revival, I have pondered the question: When will we know the “revival” in Eucharistic faith is complete? The reality is that we will never bring about a revival on our efforts. It must ultimately be the fruit of the Holy Spirit working in and through us. And a Eucharistic

following the reform; hence, a focus on Eucharistic revival is inseparable from the question of liturgical renewal. The National Eucharistic Revival could help the faithful reflect upon the significance and importance of the liturgy in light of the wisdom developed in the liturgical and theological writings of Blessed Columba Marmion, Louis Bouyer, Romano Guardini, Jean Corbon, David Fagerberg, and Joseph Ratzinger/ Benedict XVI, to name only a few. The relationship between the liturgical movement and the liturgical renewal represented by the teaching of Pope Pius XII in Mediator Dei and Sacrosanctum Concilium needs to be revisited anew to see how we may engage in the efforts of a new liturgical movement.

The greatest obstacle to individual and communal revival is sin. Without the initial and ongoing repentance from sin, we cannot progress in freedom and virtue. A Eucharistic revival is inseparable from a revival in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Communion with Jesus Christ in the company of saints is the final end which all the sacraments seek. Hence, the Eucharistic Revival must be strengthened and deepened by reflecting on the relationship between the Eucharist and all the sacraments. There are varying opinions on the efforts of the National Eucharistic Revival, but I think there is universal agreement that the Church in the United States and beyond needs such a revival. We should pray for the efforts of the National Eucharistic Revival and the forthcoming Eucharistic Congress. Pray that the Holy Spirit may work in the hearts and minds of our bishops, priests, deacons, religious, and lay people to bring about a lasting Eucharistic revival. Let us hope the revival is deepened by renewed efforts to revisit the need for liturgical renewal and to repent and believe in the Gospel. A Eucharistic mission depends on such a renewal if we desire ultimately to go “further up” and “further in.”

Roland Millare serves as vice president for curriculum and program director of Clergy Initiatives (continuing education and formation programs for priests and deacons) for the St. John Paul II Foundation, Houston, TX, and as an adjunct professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas School of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary, Houston, TX, the University of Dallas, and the Diocese of Fort Worth. He earned a doctorate in sacred theology (STD) at the Liturgical Institute/University of St. Mary of the Lake, Mundelein, IL, and is the author of the book A Living Sacrifice: Liturgy and Eschatology in Joseph Ratzinger (Emmaus Academic).

is inseparable from the question

liturgical

Revival will only be consummated when we reach our final home in the eschaton. In the meantime, every effort must be made for the faithful to understand and appreciate the Eucharist within the liturgy and with the grace that comes forth from the sacrament of confession.

In his 1965 encyclical, Mysterium Fidei, Pope St. Paul VI expresses the hope that “restoration of the sacred liturgy” via the implementation of changes to the liturgy following the Second Vatican Council would prepare for a “new wave of Eucharistic devotion” that “will sweep over the Church” (13). There was no such revival

1. See Father Robert J. McTeigue’s expression of his concerns with respect to the National Eucharistic Revival https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2023/11/04/ will-there-be-a-eucharistic-revival/

2. See Tim Glemkowski’s response to Father McTeigue: https://www. catholicworldreport.com/2023/11/07/working-for-a-eucharistic-revival-aresponse-to-fr-mcteigue/. Also see Father McTeigue’s reply to Glemkowski’s response: https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/still-concerned-about-theeucharistic-revival-a-response-to-tim-glemkowski

3. See Sacrosanctum Concilium, nos. 5 and 7.

4. Joseph Ratzinger, Theology of the Liturgy: The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence, ed. Michael J. Miller, trans. John Saward, Kenneth Baker, S.J., Henry Taylor, et al., Collected Works 11 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 556.

5. Ratzinger, Theology of the Liturgy, 565.

6. St. Thomas Aquinas, STh. III, q. 73, a. 1, ad. 3.

7. Aquinas, III, q. 75, a. 1.

8. St. John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, no. 20.

In his 1965 encyclical, Mysterium Fidei, Pope St. Paul VI expresses the hope that “restoration of the sacred liturgy” via the implementation of changes to the liturgy following the Second Vatican Council would prepare for a “new wave of Eucharistic devotion” that “will sweep over the Church.” There was no such revival following the reform; hence, a focus on Eucharistic revival

of

renewal.

Q: When should the lights come on at Easter Vigil— and why?

A: “The Deacon places the paschal candle on a large candlestand…[a]nd lights are lit throughout the church, except for the altar candles.”1 The directive is clear and requires much contortion to believe it means something else. Liturgist

Father Paul Turner calls it “probably the most ignored rubric in Holy Week.”2 The timing of turning on the lights in the church at the Easter Vigil seems to vary across parishes and dioceses and is subjective based on one’s understanding of symbolism. In this reply, we will explore the theology of light and darkness and the rubrics over the past decades. Then, we will look at the Easter Vigil liturgy texts to understand the wisdom of the rubric.

Throughout Scripture, there are references to light and darkness. We will focus particularly on their meaning in creation, the incarnation, and the Paschal Mystery.

Creation: Before the world was created, there was darkness. This darkness is described as “chaos” or “without form or shape” (Genesis 1:2). Through creation, God created light and made a definite demarcation: “God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night’” (Genesis 1:4-5).

Even though there is day and night, St. John tells us: “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 5). In his article for last month’s AB Insight (“Shedding Light on Candlemas”), Donald DeMarco stated, “‘Light and dark,’ as St. Paul has remarked, “have nothing in common.” They oppose each other in a most fundamental way.”3 Light throughout Scripture is associated with “God’s radiant splendor.”4 Darkness is not an opposing force equal to God (a form of the heresy of dualism or Manichaeism). Instead, darkness or evil can be thought of as “a corruption of something originally good or as the absence of some good that ought to be present.”5

As during the Exodus, God does not abandon us during the night. He led the Israelites during the day by a “column of cloud”; at night, a “column of fire [gave] them light” (Exodus 13:21). The Paschal Candle is a symbol of this “column of fire.” We expressly recall this event in the Exsultet: “This is the night that with a pillar of fire banished the darkness of sin.”6

The writer of Ecclesiastes compares light and dark with the wise man and fool; however, he states death comes to both (Ecclesiastes 2:13-14). But the incarnation will change this leveling power of death.

Incarnation: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone” (Isaiah 9:1). This Christmas reading from the Mass During the Night foretells Jesus as the “light of the world” (John 8:12). If God is the source of all truth, then Jesus Christ, who is “God from God, Light from Light,” is the truth (John 1:14; 8:12).

Pope Francis states, “In the absence of light everything becomes confused; it is impossible to tell good from evil, or the road to our destination from other roads which take us in endless circles, going nowhere.”7 St. Paul states that light represents “all that is good and right and true” (Ephesians 5:9). Therefore, exposing the “unfruitful works of darkness” to the light makes them visible; the hope is that this exposure of the darkness leads to repentance and conversion (Ephesians 5:13).

Christ became flesh to us to believe in him. In his final days, he encouraged the crowd to “[w]alk while you have the light, so that darkness may not overcome you; …believe in the light, so that you may become children of the light” (John 12:35-36).

Paschal Mystery: “At noon darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon” (Mark 15:33). The light and darkness analogy continues in Christ’s death and resurrection. The darkness during Christ’s three hours on the cross, foreshadowed a few chapters earlier, is a sign of an impending judgment. St. Hippolytus describes the Paschal Mystery—Christ’s death and resurrection—as follows: “Life extends over all beings and fills them with unlimited light; … the great Christ shines over all beings more brightly than the sun. Therefore a day of long, eternal light is ushered in for us who believe in him, a day which is never blotted out.”8

In a similar way, St. Cyril of Jerusalem describes

RITE QUESTIONS

Baptism as “immersed in the water it was like night for you and you could not see, but when you rose again it was like coming into broad daylight.”9 In Baptism, we are “bathed in the light,” receive the light of Christ, and are called to live as “children of the light.”10

Rubrics and Other Directives

Father Turner comments about situations where the church building remains in darkness during the Exsultet, and even during the Scripture readings: “But the rubrics envision something else.”11 For those who might think the rubric is new to the third edition of the Missal implemented in 2011, in fact, it has been the instruction for over 50 years. The rubric from the 1975 and 1985 sacramentaries is present in the same location (after the third “Light of Christ” dialogue) as that of the 2011 Sacramentary. In each case, the rubric states: “Then the lights in the church are put on.” The 1966 Sacramentary states, after the third dialogue, “The candles of the people are lighted from the blessed candle, and the lights of the church are lighted.”

A statement in the 1988 Circular Letter Concerning Preparation and Celebration of Easter Feasts says, “The light from the paschal candle should be gradually passed to the candles that all present are holding in their hands; the electric lighting should be switched off.”12 This is not inconsistent with the rubrics: the phrase “should be switched off” does not mean it occurs at that point. And the rubrics since 1975 envision that the lights within the church are off during the passing of the light and procession with the Paschal Candle.

Easter Vigil Procession

The first part of the Easter Vigil “consists of symbolic acts and gestures, which require that they be performed in all their fullness and nobility, so that their meaning, as explained by the introductory words of the celebrant and the liturgical prayers, may be truly understood by the faithful.”13 “In all our efforts on behalf of the liturgy, the determining factor must always be our looking to God. We stand before God— he speaks to us and we speak to him. Whenever in our thinking we are only concerned about making the liturgy attractive, interesting and beautiful, the battle is already lost.”14

Every liturgy relies on the union of words, actions, imagery, and symbolism—a “means of perceptible signs by which the faith is nourished, strengthened, and expressed.”15 Well-celebrated liturgy requires a congruence of all these elements. Together, they must move in the same direction to achieve the same goal.

Before the procession into the Church, the priest, as he lights the Paschal Candle, exclaims: “May the light of Christ rising in glory dispel the darkness of our hearts and minds.”16 These words foreshadow those in the Exsultet which speak of the radiance of Christ’s light banishing the darkness.

During the procession from the fire to the front of the Church, the amount of light increases with each proclamation of “The Light of Christ.” After the first proclamation, the priest lights his candle. After the second, all the people’s candles are lit. At the third, all the people are in the church with their lit candles.

The Exsultet

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops notes a progression from the beginning of the Easter Vigil: a “symbolic movement has been from darkness to light.”17 With the Exsultet, “words and music are used to praise and thank God for what the light represents: God’s saving activity throughout human history, culminating in Christ’s defeat of death and resurrection from the dead.”18

Throughout the Exsultet, we hear verses calling out for the church to be fully lit (emphasis added):

• “Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her, ablaze with light from her eternal King, let all corners of the earth be glad, knowing an end to gloom and darkness.”

• “This is the night that with a pillar of fire banished the darkness of sin.”

• “The night shall be as bright as day.”

• “The sanctifying power of this night dispels wickedness, washes faults, away, restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to mourners, drives out hatred, fosters concord, and brings down the mighty.”

• “But now we know the praises of this pillar, which glowing fire ignites for God’s honor, a fire into many flames divided, yet never dimmed by sharing of its light.”

• “this candle, hallowed to the honor of your name, may persevere undimmed, to overcome the darkness of this night.”

• “May this flame be found still burning by the Morning Star: the one Morning Star who never sets, Christ your Son.”

As seen above, having the church lights off during the Exsultet while proclaiming Christ’s radiant light is inconsistent. Likewise, sitting in darkness or semi-darkness during the Liturgy of the Word is incompatible with proclaiming Sacred Scripture. The rubric for turning on the lights before the Exsultet matches the words and what we see, helping us understand Christ’s eternal and irresistible power over darkness.

Answered by Rob Buzaitis, the Worship Director for Kaukauna Catholic Parishes, WI. He has a M.A. in Liturgy from the Liturgical Institute at the University of St. Mary of the Lake (Mundelein, IL) and a M.A. in Theology for Catholic Distance University. A liturgical musician since 1991, his first full-time position was Director of Liturgy and Music at St. Lucy Catholic Church in St. Clair Shore, MI, after attending the seminary in Fall 2016. He was a substitute musician in the Archdiocese of Detroit, and he played at churches in the Diocese of Saginaw, Diocese of Lansing, Diocese of Green Bay, and Archdiocese of Milwaukee.

1 Roman Missal, Easter Vigil in the Night ¶ 17 (emphasis added)

2 Paul Turner, Glory in the Cross (Liturgical Press: Collegeville, 2011), 127

3 https://adoremus.org/2024/01/shedding-light-on-candlemas/

4 Martin and Wright, The Gospel of John (Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, 2015), 34

5 Martin and Wright, The Gospel of John (Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, 2015), 34

6 Roman Missal, Easter Vigil in the Night ¶19 (Exsultet)(Lines 42-44)

7 Pope Francis, Lumen Fidei (2013), 3.

8 CCC 1165

9 Jerusalem Catecheses (Cat. 21, Mystagogica 3, 1-3: PG 33, 1087-1091)

10 Rite of Baptism, 47 and 64

11 https://thepriest.com/2022/03/15/this-is-the-night/

12 1988 Circular Letter Concerning Preparation and Celebration of Easter Feasts, 83.

13 1988 Circular, 82.

14 Pope Benedict XVI, Visit to Heiligenkreuz Abbey (September 9, 2007)

15 General Instruction to the Roman Missal ¶ 20

16 Missal, EV 14.

17 https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/liturgical-year-and-calendar/easter/commentary-on-easter-proclamation-exsultet

18 https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/liturgical-year-and-calendar/easter/commentary-on-easter-proclamation-exsultet

MEMORIAL FOR

Martin H. Currin from Stephen and Mary Beth Burns

Rev. Richard Feller from John Simon

Christine Fernandez from Ray Fernandez

Julia Marantino from Joseph Marantino

Gary Popel from Judith Jensen-Popel

New Book Offers

Detailed Anatomy of Liturgical Celebration

Ceremonial for Priests by Msgr. Marc Caron, STD. Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2023. ISBN: 978-1-64413-934-9. 448 pp. $29.95 Paperback; $9.99 e-book.

By John M. Grondelski

On February 2, 2024, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued Gestis verbisque, a document dealing with essentials of form, matter, and intention prerequisite to valid celebration of a sacrament. Gestis suggests that it was occasioned by the growth in cases in which bishops are compelled to examine the validity of a person’s baptism (and, thus, the rest of his sacramental life) that has been called into question through defect of form.

The proliferation of these cases is the result of ideologically driven decisions by some sacramental ministers to substitute their own language for the Church’s sacramental form. Those decisions were often fueled by “inclusive language” or “ecclesiological” agendas, resulting in invalidation of the sacrament. The most dramatic public case to date is the Rev. Matthew Hood of Detroit, whose invalid baptism (which he discovered by watching a family video of the event) also thereby invalidated his ordination.

Valid administration of baptism is not rocket science. Once upon a time, children used to learn as part of catechism what was required to baptize somebody “in danger of death.” And, once upon a time, when seminarians were enrolled in liturgical practicum to teach them to be celebrants, the whole course could be summed up in six words: “read the black, do the red,” i.e., speak what was in black print, follow the instructions in red.

The raison d’être of a priest is to bring people to God, which always has some sacramental or liturgical connection if not an explicit context. For that reason, the ars celebrandi is not something marginal for priests, something he just “picks up” as he goes along. We’re still at a juncture in the Church’s history where we’ve seen both sides of the pendulum: priests who remember pre-Vatican II rites also remember a strict— perhaps sometimes even scrupulous—rubricism, while the post-Conciliar period has often been marked by a kind of liturgical antinomianism. The latter was unwarranted, inasmuch as Sacrosanctum Concilium (22) made it clear that priests were not to tamper with the rites and the reformed rites always contained instructions for proper celebration. That Gestis verbisque had to be issued suggests not everybody was reading those instructions.

That’s why Msgr. Caron’s book fills an important niche. The book provides a comprehensive, 39-chapter guide for celebration of Mass and the sacraments throughout the liturgical year. Its author is amply qualified: a parish priest and chancery official of the Diocese of Portland, ME, he served for 14 years as diocesan master of ceremonies and four as professor of liturgy and sacraments at St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, MA, with a licentiate in liturgy from The Catholic University of America and a doctorate in theology from the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, IL.

The book is divided into six parts. Part One focuses on “celebration of the Mass,” both the “source and summit of the Christian life” as well as a priest’s foundational daily act. Caron’s treatment is all-inclusive: “gestures” (e.g., walking, bowing, kneeling, genuflecting, making signs of the cross, hand placement); preparing for Mass (with explicit

lists of “liturgical equipment” prepositioned in various places in church); and incense at Mass. Celebration of the Mass is presented in detail, from entering the church through exiting it. That Part One runs 88 pages indicates the detail of the treatment.

Part Two addresses “Matters Related to the Celebration of the Mass.” The most valuable chapter focuses on variations when Mass is celebrated ad orientem. Another chapter speaks to celebrations when one or no ministers are present or when no congregation is present. Tucking the treatment of Mass with the faithful in the absence of any minister in this chapter among “unusual circumstances” makes logical sense but seems a little odd: that configuration is likely the statistical norm in many parishes on weekdays.

In light of Gestis, Caron’s treatment of intention is valuable: his advice is “[t]he priest should have the habitual intention of consecrating everything placed on a corporal on the altar for the celebration of Mass” (131)—even if it requires multiple corporals. This part of the book also contains a discussion of “Eucharistic Worship Outside Mass,” including distribution of Communion outside Mass (with instructions on Sundays in the absence of a priest) and Exposition and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. The recovery of Eucharistic devotion today may render more clergy familiar with the rites of Exposition and Benediction, but I cannot shake memories of a deacon I met in the early 1980s who, assigned to lead Exposition, asked, “What is that?”

Part Three deals with variations on liturgical themes occasioned by the Church year. Some of them are big and intimidating, e.g., the many differences in the liturgies of the Paschal Triduum, with each of the three Great Days receiving a chapter-length treatment. Some are small but should not be overlooked, e.g., the substitution of genuflection for bowing upon mention of the Incarnation during the Profession of Faith on Christmas and the Annunciation. Some are unique and universal, e.g., imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday; some had fallen into neglect and are only now being recovered, e.g., the proclamation of moveable feasts on Epiphany or a cemetery procession on All Souls’ Day. Having all these differences in one place is useful, especially in terms of preparation for their celebration.

Part Four deals with the sacraments, both when celebrated as part of Mass and individually. That obviously does not apply to Penance, though Caron has a chapter on the rite of Reconciliation, distinguishing the sacrament from penitential services not connected to confession and absolution. Confirmation is treated briefly in conjunction with rites for the initiation of an adult; its fuller discussion is later, among celebrations with a bishop. Part Four also includes guidance for funeral Masses and when parts of the Liturgy of the Hours are celebrated either individually or during Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.

Many priests will likely find Part Five alone worth buying the book. “The Roles for Priests and Deacons in Parish Celebrations by a Bishop” talks about liturgical variations arising from when a bishop visits or celebrates. Caron treats Mass in which the bishop is principal celebrant and Confirmation administered by the bishop, whether within or outside of Mass.

Part Six, another 50 pages, is a useful supplement to Part One. “Ceremonial for Small Congregations Described” offers practical advice for liturgies celebrated in small parishes, where ministers may be few to none and the faithful limited.

The book is rounded out with an appendix containing nine diagrams illustrating a variety of functions, from where the altar is incensed when the

celebrant arrives at it (including adaptation when the altar is not circumambulatory) to the sequence of incensing the presented gifts as well as order for participants in processions at solemn Masses, Masses with a bishop, and Corpus Christi processions.

I appreciate what I would call Caron’s “hermeneutic of rubrical continuity.” While post-Conciliar liturgical directives exist, they are, in general, less detailed than earlier ones. Although Vatican II prescribed a “noble simplicity” to the rites (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 34), one suspects the Council Fathers did not envision a rubrical tabula rasa. They did not intend priests to be improv artists. Caron follows the norms but, where matters are unclear, he does not hesitate to look to how something was handled in the past. The Church, after all, has been celebrating the liturgy every day for centuries, accruing much wisdom through that practice. Caron is, however, clear when he relies on commentaries or extrapolates.

When I first approached this book, I was a little put off. Caron’s somewhat detailed discussion of where and how the priest should put his hands during the Roman Canon, for example, initially struck me as a return to Henry Davis’s Moral and Pastoral Theology, an influential work for English-speaking priests in the early-to-mid 20th century. I imagined Davis may have contributed to cases of scrupulosity as to what kind of “moral fault” might be involved depending on how vincible was one’s knowledge of the wrong number of altar cloths. But I’m now convinced Caron does not do that. He does provide a very useful service whose relevance Gestis verbisque seems to confirm: how to celebrate the liturgy properly. That is both a perennial undertaking and a proper one 60 years out from Vatican II.

If I can suggest a follow-up book, it would be great to adapt this book and its checklists, at least in terms of Mass, for ministers of the altar.

John Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) was former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ.