I conceived this reflection as a modest contribution to the discussion taking place within Western traditionalism — among my fellow Christians, my brothers and sisters in the Catholic faith—a faith which we express and experience differently, yet remain united through Baptism, mutual charity, trust in one another’s good faith, and obedience to the See of St Peter.
Within traditionalist discourse, one often encounters the claim that the Traditional Latin Mass differs from the Novus Ordo principally in its greater emphasis on sacrifice. The older Mass, it is argued, more forcefully expresses the sacrificial nature of the mystery being celebrated, whereas the Novus Ordo places greater emphasis upon ‘the banquet of faith’ — the meal of the faithful who partake of the Lamb. This, we are told, was a concession to Protestantism, one that blurred the clarity of Catholic doctrine so evident in the Traditional Latin Mass. The result, according to this narrative, is communio for the sake of community: a congregation celebrating itself. An anthropocentric—even solipsistic—understanding of Christian worship.
That, broadly speaking, is the narrative.
In what follows, I should like to suggest a different perspective on several of these issues by addressing a few questions.
Question 1. Why did Martin Luther hate the Roman Mass?
Indeed, it is true that Martin Luther advocated the simplification of the rites and the translation of the principal parts of the Mass — especially the Scriptural readings — into the vernacular.
Luther’s German Mass (Deutsche Messe, 1526) proposes a thorough reform of the liturgy. He was not, however, proposing a greater emphasis on the meal or the table. The original Lutheran order places particular emphasis upon the catechetical purpose of divine worship that consists of the following parts:
- Opening: A German psalm or hymn.
- Kyrie: Sung three times instead of nine.
- Collect: Read by the priest.
- Epistle: Sung facing the people.
- German hymn: Sung by the choir or congregation after the Epistle.
- Gospel: Read facing the people.
- Creed: Sung by the whole congregation in German.
- Sermon: The central element of the service.
- Preparation for Holy Communion: The Lord’s Prayer and an exhortation emphasising faith in Christ’s promise and the forgiveness of sins.
- Consecration and Communion: The Words of Institution are spoken; Communion is distributed immediately after the consecration of the bread, followed by the consecration and distribution of the chalice.
- Elevation: Explicitly retained as a visual remembrance of Christ and an aid to faith.
- Conclusion of the Mass: German Sanctus, a collect of thanksgiving, and the blessing.
At first glance, much of this sounds remarkably familiar. The vernacular, the simplification of ceremonies, the prominence of Scripture, congregational participation, the centrality of preaching — these are precisely the features that traditionalists today often identify with the post-conciliar reform. Yet none of these constituted the heart of Luther’s break with the Roman Mass.
The decisive point lies elsewhere. It is precisely this governing principle that explains one striking omission from Luther’s order of Mass. No, it is not the Consecration. It is not even about the Roman Canon, although he naturally got rid of it. Structurally speaking, it is the Offertory. This element fundamentally distinguishes the Catholic Mass from the Lutheran service.
This becomes unmistakably clear not only from the structure of the German Mass itself as we have briefly considered, but also from Luther’s polemical writings and from the works of his closest collaborators like Philipp Melanchthon whose thought lies beyond the scope of the present essay.
One example will suffice. Let us return to Dr Martin with his work named The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520):
The third captivity of this sacrament is by far the most wicked abuse of all, in consequence of which there is no opinion more generally held or more firmly believed in the church today than this, that the mass is a good work and a sacrifice. And this abuse has brought an endless host of other abuses in its train, so that the faith of this sacrament has become utterly extinct and the holy sacrament has been turned into mere merchandise, a market, and a profit-making business (emphasis mine)
The main criticism was about the Roman Mass being a sacrifice offered by men and for men.
But when there was license to add and to change as it suited anyone, then because of the tyranny of avarice and sacerdotal ambition, those altars and images of Baal and all gods began to be placed in the temple of the Lord by our impious kings, that is, the bishops and pastors (shepherds). Here impious Ahaz took away the brazen altar and erected another brought from Damascus. But I am speaking about II Kings the Canon, that mangled and abominable thing gathered from much filth and scum. Then the Mass began to be a sacrifice; the Offertories and paid for prayers were added; then Sequences and Proses were inserted in the Sanctus and the Gloria in excelsis. (…) Then came masses for the dead, for travelers, for riches, and who can name the titles alone for which the Mass was made a sacrifice? (emphasis mine)[1]
As this text itself makes clear, Dr Martin’s criticism of the sacrificial character of the Mass was directed not against sacrifice as such or that of Jesus Christ as an event of greatest ramifications, but against two particular ideas: first, the notion that man somehow participates in the work of atonement by ‘crucifying’ the Lord ones more every time; and secondly, what he regarded as the ‘secularisation’ of the mystery through the multiplication of sacrificial intentions for temporal concerns — in the ancient do ut des sense of reciprocal exchange.[2]
There is a standard misunderstanding that holds that the essence of liturgical abuse (as it is perceived today and its supposed ties with Protestantism) lies in diminishing the sacrifice of Jesus Christ offered upon the altar. On the contrary, Fr Martin Luther himself would have agreed that the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ occupies a uniquely central place in salvific history and even within the Mass. Just, not by the sacrificers. It is His work, and thus, as Dr Martin thought, not that of the Church, not that of the priest, and certainly not that of the people, but for their praise and thanksgiving that were not supposed to have any sacrificial merit at all. For a) He, Jesus, alone performed the Sacrifice, once for all; b) all men share a completely broken nature.
According to Paul Zeller Strodach, a prominent Lutheran theologian,
Dr. Martin’s attitude towards the Mass was both ‘sacramental and sacrificial; but sacrificial in the spirit of pure devotion, not in the Roman sense; what there is of sacrifice is the prayer, praise, and thanksgiving of man to the Dispenser of the Sacramental Gift.[3]
His objection, indeed, concerned human participation in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, its re-presentation, and its association with the actions of priests — their ‘works’, their ministry, their ritual acts. And it was indeed the foundation for his reformed version of the Mass — a reform animated by the ideal of purification and rejection of novelty.
In his own words:
Therefore repudiating all those things which smack of sacrifice and of the Offertory, together with the entire Canon, let us retain those things which are pure and holy, and then we will order our in this fashion.[4]
Let us now perform two thought experiments. The first is to compare all those elements concerning sacrifice that are common to both the Traditional Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo.
The Novus Ordo Offertory prayer:
Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.
(…) Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the wine we offer you: fruit of the vine and work of human hands it will become our spiritual drink.
(…) With humble spirit and contrite heart may we be accepted by you, O Lord, and may our sacrifice in your sight this day be pleasing to you, Lord God.
The TLM offertory in English:
P: Receive, O Holy Father, almighty and eternal God, this spotless host, which I, Thine unworthy servant, offer unto Thee, my living and true God, for my countless sins, trespasses, and omissions; likewise for all here present, and for all faithful Christians, whether living or dead, that it may avail both me and them to salvation, unto life everlasting. Amen.
(…) We offer unto Thee, O Lord, the chalice of salvation, beseeching Thy clemency that it may ascend as a sweet odor before Thy divine majesty, for our own salvation, and for that of the whole world. Amen.
Humbled in mind, and contrite of heart, may we find favour with Thee, O Lord; and may the sacrifice we this day offer up be well pleasing to Thee, Who art our Lord and our God.
Let us ask ourselves a simple question: what would Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon have approved of, and what would they have rejected?
In both versions, they would have rejected everything contained in the language of ‘we do’: we offer, we present, I offer. Such expressions werefundamentally unacceptablefrom Luther’s perspective.
Yet it seems to me that the Novus Ordo formulation would be even more provocative from the standpoint of classical Protestant sensibilities. There we offer to God that which is both the fruit of nature — God’s gift — and of human labour (good works), which we place upon the altar. But this is precisely the language of action and offering, of work and sacrifice; and that is a red flag, indeed a deal-breaker, for Doctor Martin and his learned companion Melanchthon.
It may be objected that the Roman Canon contains more explicit references to sacrifice than certain Eucharistic Prayers of the Novus Ordo. This is true, particularly given the plurality of Eucharistic Prayers in the reformed Missal. Nevertheless, the Orate, fratres invariably retains the formula ‘my sacrifice and yours’, while the very word sacrifice appears in three of the four principal Eucharistic Prayers—including the Roman Canon. Only Eucharistic Prayer II, the briefest of the four, omits the term explicitly. Besides, if the Offertory was the principal object of Luther’s criticism, then its continued presence cannot reasonably be described as a concession to Lutheran theology.
Let us now turn to another question.
Question 2. Did Luther place the emphasis on the ‘meal’—on the ‘table’?
No. Because he knew the Old Testament.
In the biblical tradition, the meal always accompanies the sacrifice. Where there is sacrifice, there is a meal; where there is a meal, there is sacrifice.
Historically, from the standpoint of both Jewish studies and Church history, this is simply the case. The same logic is reflected in the Novus Ordo: I, and we, have offered the sacrifice; now we partake of its fruits, feast on it.
Incidentally, the Byzantine Rite, so deeply imbued with Jewish sacrificial symbolism, contains countless references to the sacrifice offered by the priest in the person of Christ and on behalf of the Church. Yet even there the altar is commonly called the Holy Table. Such language would be virtually unthinkable for Protestantism as a whole.
For this reason, I believe it would be fruitful to revisit the question and cease opposing the table to the sacrifice. That opposition serves neither the liturgical ‘left’ nor the liturgical ‘right.’
The only logical way for this ‘meal’ argument to continue is to become more radical:
As the biblical opposition is not between sacrifice and meal, but between true sacrifice and false sacrifice, for the meal belongs to both, some partake in God, others in Belphegor.
Dreadful and blasphemous as one of the possible conclusions is, at least it is more consistent compared to the previous strawman argument of ‘the sacrifice’ against ‘the meal.’
Then, one relevant question remains for my current considerations.
Question 3. “Where man occupies too much space, God occupies too little.” Do we agree with this statement?
Why did I ask this question?
Because I think that, at bottom, both the Greek–Latin controversies and the Roman–Lutheran controversies concern the same fundamental question: the proportion of divine and human participation in the Eucharistic sacrifice.
In the fourteenth century, after the schism with Rome, though before the Council of Florence, the Greeks added the Prayer of the Third Hour to the Eucharistic Canon:
O Lord, who at the third hour didst send down Thy Most Holy Spirit upon Thine Apostles: take Him not from us, O Good One, but renew Him in us who pray unto Thee.
This was a consequence of the controversy with the Latins. The Greeks believed that the Latins consecrated the gifts without an invocation of the Holy Spirit, as though they imagined that they accomplished the consecration themselves, almost as though they took pride in possessing an authority over God.
The Greeks, by contrast, wanted to emphasise that the work is accomplished by God, not by the priest. Or, to put it in Latin terms, the human sacrifice is offered to God “by the hands of the holy angel” upon the “heavenly altar”—the formulation of the Traditional Latin Mass, with which some Greeks would also have been perfectly comfortable.
And so, immediately before the historic and extraordinarily bold words, “and make this bread the precious Body of Christ, and that which is in this chalice the precious Blood of Christ, changing them by Thy Holy Spirit. Amen, Amen, Amen”, they inserted the explicit invocation of the Holy Spirit.
They felt that the traditional formula did not sufficiently reduce the role of man. And, remarkably, this happened during the crisis of the medieval synthesis, at the very dawn of the modern age.
Luther seems to have sensed the same problem and went further still: he abolished the Offertory altogether, precisely that part of the Latin rite which most clearly expressed human participation in the offering of the sacrifice.
So, are we really saying that where there is more of man, there is less of God?
If the answer is yes, then I fear that this is itself a profoundly Lutheran intuition, rooted in an early-modern reading of Catholic scholasticism. The intuition that is also akin to that of the schismatic Greeks who criticized Rome for the same… ‘blasphemy.’ Whether one considers that intuition true or false, beneficial or harmful, it is difficult not to recognise that it has continued to run through the veins of the Church—not only in the simplification of the rites and the translation of the liturgy into the vernacular, but also in the adoption of a strikingly pessimistic anthropology and, consequently, of an ecclesiology in which Jesus Christ incarnate—the Son of Man and the Light of the Nations—is no longer quite so clearly at its core and centre.
A sacramental theology which is so intent upon diminishing human participation that it effectively pushes man away from the very realm of the Sacrament strikes my Eastern sensibility as profoundly unbalanced and, at the very least, vulnerable to a Monophysite tendency. And this is before we even begin to consider the opposite danger of ritualism.
The point, then, is not that human participation is somehow opposed to divine action. Rather, the question is whether we have come to regard the very presence of man in the sacramental offering as something which necessarily diminishes the presence and action of God. If so, then the problem may lie not in the liturgy, but in the theological intuition by which we judge it.
Question 4. What exactly is and is not the ‘pure and holy’ devotion?
Every Catholic, I believe, ought to reflect seriously upon the true nature of the Offertory—not only by studying the liturgical texts themselves, but also by observing the spiritual experience of fellow Christians around us. Such reflection may also prove helpful in understanding the phenomenon commonly described as liturgical abuse.
Consider the clown who comes to a ‘clown Mass’ and, together with the bread and wine, brings to the altar—as he has been taught by a post-conciliar liturgist—his red nose and the endless handkerchief from his jacket. What, for him, is the Offertory?
Is he attempting to offend God through a lack of reverence? Or is the opposite true? Is he, perhaps, preventing God from acting precisely through an excess of his own, all too secular piety? Or is the whole matter ultimately one of social habit, so that our liturgical problems are, in the end, social problems as well, arising from the absence of a shared culture?
These are all legitimate questions within Christian discourse. They were asked throughout the Middle Ages, during the great missionary encounters with India and the New World, and they remain worth asking today—with honesty, intellectual charity, and without constructing false dichotomies.
Paul Strodach observes that Dr Martin’s attitude towards the Mass was both sacramental and sacrificial; but sacrificial”in the spirit of pure devotion, not in the Roman sense.“
Yet we, all too often, fall into the habit of contrasting our pure devotion with theirs—whether that of the Romans, the Greeks, the Protestants, or even the clowns. I suspect this is a cognitive distortion. As a Russian quip has it: Humanity is divided into two categories; unfortunately, everyone has forgotten what the categories actually are.
Having said this, I shall ask only one thing: let us pray.
May the Lord straighten our paths and bring all Christians into the unity of the faith within the Catholic Church, under the leadership of the Successor of St Peter. And may every liturgical rite serve the greater glory of God and the salvation of every human person.
[1] Martin Luther, Works of Martin Luther, The Philadelphia Edition, vol. 6 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, for the Board of Publication of the United Lutheran Church in America, 1932), p. 85
[2] As was often the case, this idea of abuses was developed in greater detail by Philip Melanchthon in his Apology of the Augsburg Confession: ‘It was profitable that such examples as these, which contain admonitions for either faith or fear or the administration of the state, be recited. But certain triflers, endowed with no knowledge either of faith or for governing states, have invented stories in imitation of poems, in which there are nothing but superstitious examples concerning certain prayers, certain fastings, and certain additions of service for bringing in gain [where there are nothing but examples as to how the saints wore hair shirts, how they prayed at the seven canonical hours how they lived upon bread and water].’
[3] Ibid, p. 76.
[4] Ibid, p. 89