What part of the living Christ is the Mass? As each Sacrament is a point at which divine grace flows into human life, the Mass is the juxtaposition wherein the Eternal meets the external, where Divinity meets ordinary matter. “The Bread I give you is life for the world” – here Our Lord was talking about the inimitable role of the Eucharist. The Mass is like a spring, life flowing up and spreading throughout the whole Body. Its importance and centrality to the Church cannot be overestimated. As the great Jewish scholar Levinas once described the Sanhedrin as the the navel of the universe, so Christ fulfills and supersedes the Sanhedrin, Himself becoming and remaining the Divine and human navel of the universe. It is the renewal of Christ’s life-giving sacrifice on Calvary; and I use the word renewal, or remembrance, as the Hebrews used it in relation to the Passover: that participation in this mystery places the participant within the eternal now, so that we are all present at Christ’s sacrifice; and not only that, He Himself nourishes us, body and soul, with Himself: as He promised His disciples. The sacrifice on Calvary is thus historically, mystically and truly, the center point of creation.
Protestants and protestantized Catholics have an inherent distaste for the particular-ness of the Sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist. “Christ, Body and Soul, in a piece of bread? How-how primitive!” they will think. This is the same reaction many of Christ’s followers among the Jews had when He gave his sermon on the Bread of Life. Yet He didn’t explain their “confusion” away: instead, He repeated Himself more explicitly: “My flesh is flesh indeed”. Yet the particular-ness of an Incarnate God, the particular-ness of the Holy Eucharist made present at the Holy Mass are one and the same. Our Lord does not become a piece of bread: rather, the piece of bread, its substance, is changed into Christ Himself, only under the appearance of bread and wine. For sure, this scandal of particularity is a stumbling block for many, as Christ said He would be; but think, for a minute, how great a God would have to be to be so particular, so close to every detail of every life, close enough to know how many hairs are on your head at a given moment, to know each joy and sorrow of each soul, and yet be over and above everything: a Creator who is constantly creative, so large that He can be so small as to tickle a baby’s feet in the womb. The scandal of particularity is not really a scandal when one realizes how great and large one must be to be truly small for each person.
Such is Christ: and such is He most visibly, most especially, in the Eucharist. There He is at His most humble and vulnerable: and so there we must give Him the most honor, reverence, attention and tenderness. And yet, in God’s kingdom, there is He the greatest and most powerful: for He enters into each of us who partake of Him in a very real physical way, miraculously juxtaposed perfectly with the eternal. All of us: our soul, body, mind, heart: all are involved intimately with the Lord at the moment of communion. In this moment everything should help us in the endeavor to see the Lord: the liturgy, music, the symbolism present in each action of the Mass.
How then, can the method and mode, the music and appearance, all the symbolism imbibed almost subconsciously, surrounding this spring of life for God’s Church-how can all these be undervalued or thought as mere accoutrements to be changed like the changing of an outfit?
No. Like all Tradition, the parts of Christ’s continued presence on earth grew organically, carefully, beautifully, as a pearl is covered carefully in layers of oyster’s riches. These growths, from the Holy Scriptures to the Sacraments, to the lives of the saints, the martyrdoms and the marriages, the vestments, the music of Pope St. Gregory, and most importantly, the liturgy of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass- were carefully tended and pruned, fertilized with the blood of martyrs and the life work of the priests.
Until Henry the VII wanted a divorce. This was the first real stone rolling from the battlements surrounding the Traditions of the Church. Mr. Davies writes eloquently of the process of a Novus Ordo “mass” promulgated not by the Pope, but by Cranmer, the man who was dressing up in the Archbishop of Canterbury's clothes at the time of Henry VII and Elizabeth I. Cranmer formulated a “new order of service” that would “divest the English people of their errors and papistry”- in other words, would change their beliefs. He crafted a series of changes in the service which was once the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, changes like making the altar “The Lord’s Table” and emphasizing the meal aspect of the service. It was crafted to break the people away from Rome and the Pope, and whether inadvertently or not, it began to destroy the people’s belief in the Real Presence. In Mr. Davies’ book, Cranmer’s Godly Order: The Destruction of Catholicism Through Liturgical Change, the author shows how the liturgy of England’s Anglican faith (pretending to be Catholic) was used as a weapon to destroy the faith of the people. The most important victory for these revolutionaries was won in the destruction of the mass by the destruction of its liturgy. Effectively then, the destruction flowed outward, and the Catholic England that St. Edmund of Canterbury knew was dead.
But Catholic England did not die quietly. Yesterday, October 25, is the commemoration of the English Martyrs: St. Edmund Campion, St. Margaret Clitherow, among many others, died in the defense of Catholic orthopraxis and orthodoxy: but they did not die for dry “ortho” words. They would not have died for the right vestments or an altar, but that these were the vestments worn by Christ’s priests, and for Christ’s altar, those small but eternally significant proofs of His living Presence among us still. They died for Christ in the Eucharist, which is only made possible in the Mass of the Church.
For the Church, England was lost in the wake of the Protestants out in the Channel; hope lied buried there until the flowering of the Oxford Movement at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries- that which gave us Chesterton and Knox, Belloc and Sayers. But in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Counter-Reformation burst out in Europe and the Church, wounded but still strong, rallied to Her Traditions- and the Jesuits were but an example of what was born out of that time. The next time Our Lord’s Church would be seriously wounded, it would be from within the very conclaves of Her citadel.
In 1962, Cardinals, bishops, priests, peritti and even some Protestants marched eagerly into the Vatican for the Second Vatican Council. It was a council called like never before in the history of the Church: not as a council called as a necessary response to a specific threat to faith and morals, but a progressive movement from within the Church Herself, a movement outward to make Herself more understandable to the modern world. But was it a missionary movement? To this question, the answer seems vague. And this is the first sign of danger. However, the traditional schemata were drawn up, documents of clarity and good explanation of the Tradition. As Mr. Davies relates, there was a strange movement among some of the bishops to simply scrap these schemata (which had taken many months to write), and to, in my words, “Go with the flow”. I use this slang because it comes from that time, the optimistic and dreamy early sixties, when the girdles guarding tradition in every sphere were being loosened everywhere and in every institution.
For the Council, then, everything was suddenly out of the traditional ways of handling such a large undertaking, and there was a lot of room for creative action and writing. All of this sounds kind of refreshing and even good to my modern ears, my ears trained in the seventies and eighties in open classrooms. However, within a Tradition: when that which is handed down is part of Christ Himself in the world, creative action and “go with the flow” sounds akin to remaking Christ in one’s own image.
What would happen? Would the Council Fathers work together to protect Tradition whilst becoming missionaries to the world? Would there be a “new springtime”? What would happen if ambiguities and as Mr. Davies puts it “liturgical time bombs” were allowed into the documents approved by the Council Fathers? Was the “smoke of Satan” entering the Church? What would this mean, especially for the jewel in the crown of Tradition, the Holy Mass?
..to be continued
