

The recent half-century of Pope Paul VI’s reformed (“Ordinary Form,” or OF) Mass, which came shortly after the twelfth anniversary of the liberalization of the previous (“Extraordinary Form,” or EF) form of Mass, should stimulate us to engage in a constructive debate about the strengths and weaknesses of the two forms. It would be a terrible waste of our hard-earned historical experience if we learnt nothing from it. Equally, now that there are well-entrenched communities of Latin Rite Catholics attached to each form, we need to avoid the kind of polemic which creates bitterness and mutual distrust. Regrettably or not, we must all live with this situation in which the old and the new (now not so new) exist side by side. They will clearly continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

As a contribution to this process, “The Gift of the Liturgical Reform” by the Scripture scholar Prof. Mary Healy in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review makes a very promising start. She acknowledges many of the criticisms of the reform, and the reasons why some Catholics appreciate the EF. The weakness of her paper is in its characterization of the older Mass. This is perhaps inevitable. Few supporters of the ancient Mass are not thoroughly familiar with the Novus Ordo, but the inverse does not hold.

She writes, for example, in her discussion of the Lectionary:

The virtual absence of the Hebrew Scriptures easily lends itself to a view of Jesus and the Church detached from their Jewish roots.

It is true that the EF Lectionary does not contain a great deal of Old Testament material, but Prof. Healy’s generalization about the EF as a whole does not follow. In contrast to the OF, the EF is soaked in the language and symbolism of the Old Testament. Most obviously, the Psalms are not simply decorative elements: they are used. I mean that the psalm Judica, recited in the priest’s ascent to the altar, is a psalm to be said in a priest’s ascent to the altar. The psalm Lavabo, recited at the washing of the priest’s washing of hands, is about washing one’s hands before making a ritual offering. The same is true of the psalms of penance, grief, joy, petition, thanksgiving, and contrition, sung in the propers of the Mass, and used in the other sacraments and the blessings of the Rituale. The Psalter, the Church teaches us, is the prayer-book of the Church: this is really so in the older liturgy.

Similarly, the tradition of Gregorian chant goes back to the Temple in Jerusalem, where we are told professional singers were employed (2 Chron 5:15); the use of Latin recalls the use of Hebrew as a sacred language, when the language of the Jewish people had become Aramaic; the traditional liturgy’s emphasis on priest, altar, and sacrifice is redolent of the atmosphere of ancient Jewish worship, something sometimes noted by Jewish converts.

Interestingly enough, Prof. Healy makes this point herself. In a later section of her paper she notes the EF’s affinity with the form of worship we find in the Old Testament and the Jewish tradition:

All of Israel’s priestly rites were designed to instill a sense of God’s holiness, which means that he is utterly set apart from everything earthly.

Oddly enough, in this later section she is arguing that this affinity with the Old Testament is a problem, as the Old Testament type of worship was done away with by Christ. She seems to have forgotten that she had earlier told us that “a view of Jesus and the Church detached from their Jewish roots” is a bad thing, and continuity a good thing. We can note, at any rate, that by her own account we cannot criticize the EF for failing to respect and make present to the Catholics of today the Old Testament roots of the Faith.

Prof. Healy goes on to say that the EF Lectionary presents Scripture in ‘“disconnected excerpts,” as opposed to the “continuous reading” of the OF. It is worth noting the perspective of the ordinary Mass-goer here. Few people are able to attend Mass every day. In the EF, when they do go they are presented with readily comprehensible readings, typically an exhortation to holiness from St. Paul and a familiar parable or miracle from the Gospel, appropriate to the feast and season. In the OF, they can find themselves listening to deeply obscure passages of Scripture with no discernible connection with the liturgical day. It may even feel more like a serving of “disconnected excerpts” than in the EF.

Moving on the question of the use of Latin, Prof. Healy writes:

Nothing can take the place of a person’s mother tongue in enabling him or her to pray to God intimately, from the heart. That is why in the earliest days of the Church the liturgy was translated from the Apostles’ native Aramaic into Greek, then later into Latin, Coptic, Gothic, Slavonic, and other languages that were in use at the time.

It would be very surprising if the Apostles agreed with Prof. Healy’s claim, since, as Jews, they were brought up to pray and sing the Psalms in Hebrew, as well as in their mother tongue. No word of criticism of sacred languages is to be found in Scripture, and the earliest liturgies were by no means composed in the language of the street. In Greek-speaking areas, the Church was able to employ the sacred register created by the Septuagint translation of the Bible: a distinct form of Greek already two centuries old and filled with Hebraisms. Latin liturgy did not emerge until Latin translations of the Bible had created something equivalent, and, when it did, we find a liturgy in a sacred Latin with a specialized vocabulary, replete with archaisms, loan-words, and other peculiarities; similarly, liturgical Coptic is an archaic language larded with Greek terms and written in Greek letters. As for Church Slavonic and the language of the Glagolithic Missal, their origins and history are not reducible to the simple idea of the “language in use at the time,” and, in any case, they quickly become liturgical languages for people not able to understand them. They remain culturally connected to the peoples they serve, but not readily comprehensible by them.

One is obliged to conclude from this history that the Church’s preference for sacred languages is so powerful that it expressed itself in one cultural context after another.

Up until the mid-twentieth century, then, the Church simply did not take the view that prayer “from the heart” was impeded by the use of a sacred language. St. Patrick evangelized the Irish, St. Boniface the Germans, the Templars the Baltic nations, and the Jesuits the Americas, with extraordinary success, with a Latin liturgy. Perhaps this was because, even to cultures with little or no debt to ancient Rome, this liturgy made apparent the grandeur and beauty of the Faith in such a way, as Prof. Healy puts it, not to keep the people at a distance, but to draw them in. Certainly, it proved able to form saints in those cultures, just as it had in medieval Europe, saints deeply immersed in the Latin liturgy.

The use of a sacred language also avoids the problems created by minority languages and multi-lingual congregations. Tens of millions of our fellow Catholics today experience a liturgy in a language not their own, but the language of a sometimes-oppressive ruling group or former colonial power, whether this be comprehensible or not. For example, of the sixty-nine languages used by the people of Kenya, only English and Swahili are employed for Mass. Of the many languages and dialects of the vast country of China, only modernized Mandarin is used.

Having insisted on the need for linguistic diversity in the liturgy, it is surprising to read Prof. Healy’s claim that “the reformed liturgy highlights that which is equally necessary but had been neglected: the horizontal dimension of our communion with one another in Christ.” Even the reform’s most ardent defenders have had to concede that Latin is a powerful sign of unity. Indeed, this point may even sometimes be exaggerated, since this unity pertains only to the Latin Church. But it should be added that, as well as a unity across space, the ancient liturgy (to a much greater extent than the reformed liturgy celebrated in Latin) is a sign of unity over time. To worship using the self-same words as our predecessors in the Faith is an eloquent reminder of the “horizontal” unity of the Church, a great mass of people of all ages and places. With the OF, multi-lingual parishes cannot achieve such a unity even within the “parish community,” which can find itself broken up into different language groups who seldom interact.

Prof. Healy develops her point about unity with our fellow worshipers in the context of the sign of peace:

When we approach the altar to receive the body of Christ, we are giving our solemn “Amen” not only to Christ the Head, but also to all the members of his body. . . . The rite of peace is placed immediately before Communion precisely so we can grasp the connection between communion with Christ and communion with the members of his body.

Prof. Healy ignores the Kiss of Peace (or Pax) found in the EF. In its most developed form it takes place in Masses celebrated with deacon and subdeacon. It maintains the principle found in the Pax from a very early date, that the peace at issue is the Peace of Christ, emanating from the Consecrated Species present, at the moment of this ceremony (“just before Communion”), on the altar. This is symbolized by the priest kissing the altar next to the Host, and then giving the Kiss to the deacon, who gives it to the subdeacon, the Peace being passed on in this way to others in the sanctuary and choir, and occasionally (in Spain, for example) to the congregation. The simultaneous handshake of the OF has largely lost this connection with the Blessed Sacrament, and it is partly for this reason that it can come across as something of a secular moment of distraction before Communion, even leading to serious calls for it to be moved from its historic place in Mass.

On celebration facing the people or the ambo, Prof. Healy writes:

Although in the earliest liturgies the celebrant faced the congregation, within a few centuries the practice changed so that, during the prayers, both the celebrant and congregation faced east, which meant the celebrant had his back to the people.

Her footnote reference in this passages reveals she is basing her claim on scholarship dating from the 1940s (Josef Jungmann) and 1970s (Johannes H. Emminghaus). Scholarly fashion has moved on. While not universal in the earliest centuries, worship ad orientem was widespread. Nor is this surprising, given the tradition of praying towards Jerusalem found in the Old Testament (Dan 6:10); the Synagogues of Our Lord’s time were sometimes oriented to Jerusalem. Again, the idea of a “shared meal,” to which Prof. Healy appeals, does not suggest people facing each other over a table: in antiquity, dinner guests sat (or reclined) on one side of a table, to be served from the other side, just as they are depicted as doing in ancient representations of the Last Supper.

Prof. Healy makes an interesting connection, remarking that “on the Cross, the Lord was facing his disciples.” This is reflected in a beautiful way in the EF by the Crucifix, and sometimes a painting of the Crucifixion over the altar, facing priest and people. In celebrations “facing the people,” this place of the altar Crucifix has become problematic. How can priest and people both look at Our Lord, in the Crucifix? As well as representing Christ, the celebrant must also be able to look at Him.

It is true that some of the ceremonies are harder to see when the priest is facing the apse. Prof. Healy takes this point further, suggesting that, in the EF, “the fulcrum of the Mass, the consecration, is invisible (and often inaudible) to the congregation, thereby losing much of its value as a sacramental sign.” This is a puzzling claim: it is generally acknowledged that the EF Consecration, with its double genuflections and ringing of bells in the middle of a period of intent silent prayer, is more dramatic and “visible,” as a “sign”: indeed the emphasis placed in this moment by the whole structure of the Mass is sometimes criticized.

This vein of criticism is echoed in the earlier section of Prof. Healy’s paper, on the Liturgy of the Word, in which she suggests that the balance between the proclamation of Scripture and the Sacrifice of the Mass fails to do justice to the Scripture. Such a criticism is out of place if, as Prof. Healy observes, the Consecration is not just one side of the scales, but the “fulcrum.”

A final point of Prof. Healy’s which I would like to address is the argument of “empty formalism.” She is correct that this is a danger to be guarded against wherever a person’s interior disposition and exterior actions can come apart. The extreme case of this is habitual hypocrisy or Phariseeism. At the same time, it is true that outward words, actions, and postures can assist us in modifying our interior disposition in a positive direction: to get into the spirit of things, as we might say.

What does not make sense, at least not without further argument, is the position Prof. Healy appears to fall into: that the use of external actions in the EF should be criticized on the grounds of “empty formalism,” whereas the external actions of the OF should be praised as assisting the people in their liturgical participation. Surely sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

To put this in a slightly different way, one cannot criticize the EF Mass for “empty formalism,” and simultaneously criticize it for attending only to the worshiper’s interior state (“a purely passive, interior role for the people is contrary to the very nature of the Eucharist”).

The reality is that all liturgy — by its very nature, indeed — includes external ceremonies, postures, responses, and so on, and interior dispositions. The latter is what really counts, and the former must be assessed in relation to the latter: do they help or hinder the worshiper? The problem of the OF Sign of Peace, already noted, being experienced as a distraction, has been raised a the very highest levels of the Church, and we too must take seriously our fellow Catholics’ experience. Equally, when Catholics attached to the ancient Mass tell us that they experience the Latin, the silence, and the ceremonies of the older Mass, and its celebration ad orientem, as helpful in coming to a “profound sense of the Eucharistic Mystery” (to use Pope John Paul II’s words about Latin), we must take that equally seriously.