Left Behind: A Different Take on the Mass of Paul VI

There is no Last Gospel. The preparatory prayers are gone. There is a single Confiteor. The collects and readings are gone or moved. It is done facing the people. There is no more chant. This is different. That is different. So much is different.

Writers in the last five or six decades, whether defending or condemning the 20th century changes to the Roman rite, often focus on what is different and whether or not that is a good thing. What no one seems to talk much about is what the reformers retained from the old rite and how strange those things are, given the antiquarian motives behind the new liturgy. Is it not strange that certain ancient elements of the old rite went dormant while the oddest medieval accretions remained?

Many, many years ago this writer went to an old rite Mass at Sacred Heart Church in New Haven, Connecticut sung by a professional schola of men to a congregation of less than a hundred people. I had one of those little red Ecclesia Dei pew booklets, which I discarded after being unable to follow the Mass with it. Instead, I watched the Mass as people in past times, bereft of literature, watched it, by following the dramatic actions: the priest ascending the altar after striking his breast in unworthiness, the words of Christ incensed and sung at the Gospel, the offering of bread and wine, the elevation of the Sacred elements at the moment of Transubstantiation, protestations of unworthiness at Communion and more. After Mass I was convinced I saw something of a different ethos from what I grew up knowing at St. Bridget's. What was strangest to me was not what was different (the rites were obviously quite different), but what was the same.

Well over a decade later, and only slightly less ignorant about the Roman liturgy, that initial confusion continues. Is the new Mass more "Protestant"? Some believe so, and in practice it is, but textually this is doubtful. The reception of the new liturgy, unfortunately, came in an ecumenical age with unrestricted optimism as to the future integration of religious parties. Mass facing the people and vernacular, misunderstood as the primitive norm, were only the contemporary norm of heretics, and received in the same praxis as that of the heretics. Strictly speaking, I agree with Geoffrey Hull that the new Mass is fundamentally a twin child of Jansenist spirituality and antiquarian scholarship. As such, it is a communitarian reimagination of the Eucharist in a third century Roman home. The Pauline liturgy, through that lens, is somewhat confusing.

The first and foremost oddity is the introduction with the Confiteor, an early medieval emandation to the liturgy. The Introit, initially an entrance hymn, became abbreviated with the addition of the Little Hours to the Mass and the grander cathedral ceremonies inspired by monastic chapters. The beginning of Mass became confined to the sanctuary and the clergy, rather than simply approach the altar, made protestations of unworthiness to stand at the altar of God as did the high priests of the Old Covenant, lest they be struck dead and removed by the length of a rope. In the old low Mass, the server makes the responses at the Iudica me and Confiteor, not on behalf of the people, but in place of the deacon and subdeacon. It is, essentially, a clerical act of purification caught up in the medieval aesthetic of ritual propriety. Why, then, did it remain in the reformed liturgy, albeit in a reduced fashion?

It was kept in an amended fashion, not only in reduction of the number of saints mentioned, but also in purpose. The single Confiteor functions much more like a collective act than a priestly act. The purpose of this does not seem to be to reduce the priesthood, as some may think, but to involve the laity more in a point at which they are not naturally involved. The 1964/7 revisions of the Tridentine Mass also indicated the Confiteor be said allowed from the sedilia, an expansion of a mistake on the low Mass. In this, the reformers took the low Mass to be the absolute norm for the old Mass and acted accordingly.

Next, and similarly debated, is the Offertory. Why is there an Offertory in the reformed Mass? As late as the 8th century, in the Ordo Romanus I, the Roman Church had still resisted the oriental introduction of Eucharistic preparation rites. The Lord Pope simply accepted the offering of the bread from whoever baked it and brought it to the altar. The Frankish and Gallican liturgies introduced elaborate Offertory processions, possibly extant in the 1474 Curial Missal, and ante-Eucharistic prayers, anticipating the Sacrifice, to accompany them. The entire act was caught up in quintessentially medieval Eucharistic theology of the Mass as the anamnesis of Calvary, as Christ's Sacrifice of the Cross manifested again in plain sight. 

Pope Paul's Mass, curiously, retains an Offertory, but unlike the Confiteor, it is not a modification of the Tridentine rite. Nay, it is an altogether new series of prayers based on 3rd century Jewish Seder Meal Prayers which Christ never said and which were, certainly, never part of the primitive house Masses of the Roman Church. Why retain a vitiated ceremony? Could it be that, as with the preparatory prayers, the reformers took the existing liturgy as normative and reacted against exact elements they disliked? Some writers envision the reformers as having ripped apart the old liturgy, brick by brick, and having replaced it with something fabricated ex nihilo. For the Office, collects, and readings this is true; for the ordo Missae it is apparent that the Consilium began was an understanding of the essentials of the current Mass and then went backward, piece by piece. In the Offertory there was no antiquarian antecedent, and so they had to invent one.

The last, and most medieval, element of the old Mass that the reformers retained is the elevation of the Sacred species. In the late Dark Ages and early part of the High Middle Ages, after the sung Canon transformed into a silently spoken prayer, the people demanded to see the Host, to know that the priest had said the proper prayers to change the elements at the proper time. Popular piety, which included lay and sacerdotal prostrations to the ground (not unlike those still done in the Greek rite), met the now said Canon and found the laity unsure of what was transpiring for five quiet minutes. The elevation was in fact an elaboration of participatio actuosa on the part of the people and the priests who understood it was their duty to serve their wishes before the altar of God.

The medieval elevation brought God's presence to the church in a particular instant, an act of theophany before a congregation hoping for the Sacrifice to be accepted. The same Incarnational piety that generated the mystery plays, Eucharistic processions, and which added Saint John's Prologue to the end of Mass also created the elevation and enhanced it by breaking the silence of the Canon was exclamatory hymns that said this was the same body born of the Virgin and hung upon the Cross for our salvation:

Ave verum corpus, natum
de Maria Virgine,
vere passum, immolatum
in cruce pro homine
cuius latus perforatum
fluxit aqua et sanguine:
esto nobis praegustatum
in mortis examine.
O Iesu dulcis, O Iesu pie,
O Iesu, fili Mariae.
Miserere mei. Amen.

Pope Paul's Mass continues to elevate the Host and Chalice, and even has an exclamation after the elevation of the Chalice. The exclamation, whichever is chosen, departs from the previous focus on the Real Presence of Christ at the altar, which has just taken place, and moves into an apocalyptic, forward looking approach:

Mortem tuam annuntiamus, Domine, et tuam resurrectionem confitemur, donec venias.

One aspect of the Pauline Mass which I hold to be a theoretical improvement over the existing liturgy is that the Canon can be sung aloud as it once was at the celebrant's discretion. This option, even if accompanying the de facto norm of Mass versus populum, more or less eliminates the need for the elevations, given that its context has all but disappeared. No more would children and their fathers huddle in the pew waiting for the bell to ring and the celebrant to list the bread. They could now hear it, and probably see it, in live time.

This post is not so much a critique of the Pauline Mass, over which endless debate has raged long enough. I mean only to highlight that certain parts of the old Mass remain, disjointedly, because the reformers took much of the old rite as their basis before applying their suppositions. For all their inventiveness they took much for granted.