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Restoring a Sense of the Sacred to the Mass

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In October 1966, less than a year after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, philosopher and eminent Catholic theologian Dietrich Von Hildebrand asked whether or not we are better prepared to “meet Christ in the mass by soaring up to Him, or by dragging Him down into our own pedestrian, workaday world.” (The Case for the Latin Mass, Triumph Magazine, October 1966). For nearly fifty years the Church has been struggling to address this question.

Following decades in which the liturgy was intentionally stripped of almost any sense of mystery, the current attempts at reform have gradually sought to recover a sense of awe and to restore the sacred to the Mass.

Discussing the mystery present within eastern liturgies, particularly in comparison to the west, former prefect for the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith noted:

The Orthodox churches and churches of the east still carry on their liturgy in that mystical fashion: there is chanting, there is use of different languages which are not spoken languages, then there is more incense…an aura of otherness happens and after the reforms of the Council, sometimes not because of the reformers but because individual persons decided to take matters into their hands and did things rather superfluously, the Church had gradually lost that mystical element, the element of the hidden. And that’s why our people are finding our liturgy…our prayer life…boring.

In the ongoing effort to recover this “mystical element” within the liturgy, the Church has been returning to such venerable practices as the use of Latin, chant and incense during the Holy Mass. Establishing a sense of awe through such tangible means has also helped to diminish the anthropocentric tendency so prevalent in the post-conciliar liturgy.

At last years Sacra Liturgia conference in Rome, Cardinal Ranjith spoke of the importance that Summorum Pontificum has had to this end:

The re-introduction of the usus antiquior -the older form of the Roman liturgy -by Pope Benedict XVI was thus not a retrograde step as some called it, but a move to bring back to Sacred Liturgy a deeper sense of awe and mysticism and a way in which the Pope sought to prevent a blatant banalization of something so pivotal to the life of the Church.

Latin: The Language of the Liturgy

The importance of this increasing use of Latin within the Novus Ordo cannot be overstated. In a 2012 speech given to the Fourth Meeting on Catholic Unity sponsored by Réunicatho, Bishop Athanasius Schneider was so bold as to identify “the total disappearance of Latin in the huge majority of Eucharistic celebrations in the Ordinary Form” as one of five wounds of the liturgical mystical body of Christ.

Further, the restoration of Latin to the liturgy serves as a source of unity for the universal Church, both across cultures and centuries. Less than twenty years before the Second Vatican Council, Pope Pius XII reminded the faithful that the “use of the Latin language, customary in a considerable portion of the Church, is a manifest and beautiful sign of unity, as well as an effective antidote for any corruption of doctrinal truth.” (Mediator Dei, 60).

I recently heard a homily online in which the priest rejected the use of Latin within the liturgy by saying, “I’m not going to say Mass in Latin because it doesn’t say anything to me.” This particular priest, who was ordained in 1970, illustrates the very urgent necessity for restoring a sense of awe to the Church’s supreme act of worship. Forty years of poor formation and anthropocentric liturgies have devastated the very understanding of the Mass. Latin, often spoken in silence by the celebrant, serves to remind us who we are addressing in the liturgy.

Chant: Pride of Place

Gregorian chant is yet another way in which the Church is recovering a sense of the sacred. When the Second Vatican Council stated that chant has pride of place in the liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 116) it was simply reaffirming an already established and ongoing reform of music within the Roman Rite. In his 1903 Motu Proprio Tra le Sollecitudini, Pope St. Pius X reminded the faithful:

Gregorian Chant has always been regarded as the supreme model for sacred music, so that it is fully legitimate to lay down the following rule: the more closely a composition for church approaches in its movement, inspiration and savor the Gregorian form, the more sacred and liturgical it becomes; and the more out of harmony it is with that supreme model, the less worthy it is of the temple.

Sacred music within the Mass should glorify God and sanctify the faithful. In a 2013 pastoral letter to the people of the Diocese of Marquette, then Bishop Alexander Sample emphasized that music “proper” to the Sacred Liturgy possesses three qualities: sanctity, beauty, and universality. Bishop Sample explained that these qualities are not “arbitrary or subjective”, but instead “objectively flow from the essential nature and purpose of sacred music itself.”

Often in the post-conciliar years we have heard “inculturation” invoked to excuse a myriad of abuses and excesses. In his letter, Bishop Sample noted that sacred music transcends cultures and that not “every form or style of music is capable of being rendered suitable for the Mass.” As more parishes are now offering the Traditional Latin Mass in the years following Summorum Pontificum, we are now seeing a greater use of chant within the Novus Ordo as well.

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Incense: The Ambiance of Heaven

Finally, an “aura of otherness” is being further recovered in the liturgy through the use of incense. Our olfactory receptors, which facilitate our sense of smell, are directly connected to the limbic system, which is believed to be the seat of emotion in our brains. For most, the smell of incense at Mass is something separate and distinct from other scents encountered outside of the Mass. Through the use of incense, then, the Church finds yet another way to communicate that we are entering the sacred when we participate in the liturgy.

Writing in his column Straight Answers for the Arlington Catholic Herald, Father William Saunders explains that, within the sacred liturgy:

The purpose of incensing and the symbolic value of the smoke is that of purification and sanctification…the smoke symbolizes the prayers of the faithful drifting up to heaven: the Psalmist prays, “Let my prayer come like incense before you; the lifting up of my hands, like the evening sacrifice” (Psalm 141).

Turning to sacred scripture for further insight, Fr. Saunders notes:

Incense also creates the ambiance of heaven: The Book of Revelation describes the heavenly worship as follows: “Another angel came in holding a censer of gold. He took his place at the altar of incense and was given large amounts of incense to deposit on the altar of gold in front of the throne, together with the prayers of all God’s holy ones. From the angel’s hand, the smoke of the incense went up before God, and with it the prayers of God’s people.

Assessing the liturgical changes already underway by October 1966, Dietrich Von Hildebrand wrote: “The new liturgy actually threatens to frustrate the confrontation with Christ, for it discourages reverence in the face of mystery, precludes awe, and all but extinguishes a sense of sacredness.” In recent years Holy Mother Church has begun to slowly recover this sense of the sacred within the Mass through the use of Latin, Gregorian chant and incense. In the years to come may we continue to see the Church strive to “meet Christ in the mass by soaring up to Him”, fully seeking to restore the mystical element to our Catholic worship.

 

Editor’s note: this article was originally published at the author’s website. Reprinted with permission.

18 thoughts on “Restoring a Sense of the Sacred to the Mass”

  1. After the destruction following Vatican II there has been some attempts to restore liturgical life under Benedict XVI. But all this is again coming to an end under Francis, who systematically persecutes dioceses and religious orders which follow the usus antiquior or facilitate it, Summorum Pontificum notwithstanding. The currect Pope is an enemy of the Tridentine Mass and of all things traditional in Catholicism. The sad truth is that in Francis’ Church there will be no place for Catholics. There will be plenty of place for sodomites, for civilly divorced and remarried, for unrepentant sinners of all walks of life, but not for Catholics. Catholics are a danger, because they remind the Church of her glorious past, which under Francis should be forgotten and buried.

    Reply
    • i think this comment aptly describes the attitude of people who believe they are arbiters of “objective standards”. i have seen this idea that francis is an apostate expressed most often by those who believe they are the possessors of “objective standards”.
      meanwhile, quoting Vatican II on the liturgy does not reveal these “objective standards” that are being bandied about so facilely.

      Reply
  2. By the “rubrics” established in this article, the Last Supper would have been deficient in form. There are often problems, to be sure, with the way the current Mass is celebrated, and many of the author’s prescriptions might be helpful. But I wonder how the good people of the very early church were able to generate a sense of mystery, awe, and transcendence prior to the universal use of Latin, the development of Gregorian chant, or even without the use of incense. It seems to me to be an error to equate perfection with a certain point of development in the history of the Church and then dismiss out of hand anything that existed before and that came after.

    Reply
    • This appeal to the Last Supper — typically made in the absence of any historical evidence pertaining to the actual form of the first Mass — is a straw man that needs to burn. There’s a growing body of evidence from the early Church that the Church’s liturgies even from the time of the apostles resembled the Missal of Paul VI in significant ways; Adrian Fortescue argued in his 1914 liturgical study The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy:

      “Essentially the Missal of Pius V is the Gregorian Sacramentary; that again is formed from the Gelasian book, which depends on the Leonine collection. We find the prayers of our Canon in the treatise de Sacramentis and allusions to it in the 4th century. So our Mass goes back, without essential change, to the age when it first developed out of the oldest liturgy of all. It is still redolent of that liturgy, of the days when Caesar ruled the world and thought he could stamp out the faith of Christ, when our fathers met together before dawn and sang a hymn to Christ as to a God. The final result of our inquiry is that, in spite of unsolved problems, in spite of later changes, there is not in Christendom another rite so venerable as ours.”

      I just mentioned in another post Pope Pius XII’s admonition against “senseless antiquarianism” and further:

      [I]t is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive tableform; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifix so designed that the divine Redeemer’s body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; and lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See.

      Certain developments sprang up over time in order to correct what was originally deficient. Clearly, the context of an intimate Mass wherein Our Lord celebrated His passion and death with the apostles in the upper room takes on entirely different logistical manifestations in a larger context. (Worth considering are Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich’s visions of the Last Supper contained in The Dolorous Passion; she describes something a lot more like formal Mass than a meal around a table. There is a distinct change between the paschal meal and the beginning of the liturgy.)

      The Church has always believed in organic liturgical development. Some things simply weren’t foreseen. For example, no tabernacles prior to the IV Lateran Council, when widespread reservation of the Eucharist was made problematic because of both thieves and rodents getting to the Blessed Sacrament. Tabernacles led to the perpetual Eucharistic presence of Christ in our churches, which led to Eucharistic Adoration. Because there was no instruction of Eucharistic Adoration by Christ to the apostles, does this make it ahistorical?

      The Church’s wisdom prescribed certain things over time in adaptation to her experience of lived faith – another strong example is the change in practice away from communion on the hand, to increase reverence for the Blessed Sacrament and to reduce the loss of consecrated particles. But evolution can go the wrong way, and in very many cases, it has.

      Reply
      • I’m not sure my comment merited such a lengthy disputation. I’m certainly not espousing a return to ancient forms and am not “making an appeal to the Last Supper.” I’m simply saying that liturgy changes, and I’m not one who thinks that the Mass reached a pinnacle at some time in the past from which it can only decline in the future. I’m also not defending the present form in totality. I’m only suggesting that the proposed solutions, which are curiously restricted only to rituals formerly used, may not be the only ones that might return a sense of mystery to the liturgy.

        That said, I am not nearly as learned in the liturgical forms as most of the commentators here. I say this with all lightness of heart and good humor: my humble comment perhaps could have been quashed with a small cudgel rather than the weighty and scholarly club that was taken to it. (Typed with a grin and a friendly laugh.)

        God bless.

        Reply
    • “There are often problems, to be sure, with the way the current Mass is celebrated…”

      That is putting it lightly. 🙂

      Reply
  3. I am not certain that I agree that the sense of the sacred is created for all by just a few and what makes those few believe or feell they are in the presence of the sacred.
    the reason I say this is that I have never attended a mass where I did not encounter a sense of the sacred except when I myself was not inclined toward experiencing a sense of the sacred.
    imposing one’s own personal tastes on others does not, I think, reliably create a sense of the sacred in others.
    if there were an objective way to use human actions to create a sense of the sacred for everyone, Jesus would probably have provided it.

    Reply
      • where can I find these objective standards of beauty and reverence?
        after you provide them, may I can comment about why they are considered objective standards.
        also, I believe it is right to reject objective standards if they drive people away from the sacred.
        dismissing the subjective feelings of others as though they were violations of some objective standard is something I reject.

        Reply
      • where do we find these “tastes of the Church”? who determines them?
        words like these are being thrown around repeatedly, but I am not sure everyone using them define them the same.
        what makes a scholar sit in awe may very well give one of us “little people”

        Reply
        • sorry about that.
          what makes a scholar sit in awe may very well give one of us “little and ignorant people” a fit of giggles.
          those who glory in hearing latin are fine, but others may be completely turned off by being forced to sit while others speak in words that mean nothing to them.
          music that some find “objectively beautiful” may be a complete turnoff to others.
          I know, the ignorant should just accept the judgment of their betters, but that is not the way the world works.
          and, to turn off people because their standards are different from yours is not something I support when it comes to God’s grace.

          Reply
        • Not going to do all your homework for you. Read, for example, no less than Sacrosanctum Concilium, the liturgical constitution of Vatican II, which set the stage for much of the liturgical revolt that followed:

          “116. The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. But other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations, so long as they accord with the spirit of the liturgical action, as laid down in Art. 30.”

          “120. In the Latin Church the pipe organ is to be held in high esteem, for it is the traditional musical instrument which adds a wonderful splendor to the Church’s ceremonies and powerfully lifts up man’s mind to God and to higher things.”

          Etc.

          I recommend you take a look at Dr. Nowakowski’s series on learning to listen like a Catholic. You can find part one here: https://onepeterfive.wpengine.com/listening-like-catholic-discernment-personal-musical-taste/

          There’s a hierarchy of goods. Subjecting everything to personal taste turns into, as Pope Benedict called it, a “dictatorship of relativism.” Luckily, since we are made in the image and likeness of God, most of us have the capacity to find beautiful what is objectively beautiful, even if we may have preferences among different sorts of beauty.

          Reply
          • i did not speak clearly. i do not recommend submitting everything to personal taste. sorry that is what you understood from what i wrote.
            latin is objectively beautiful? i could not disagree more.

          • Latin is not so important for its beauty, but rather for its suitability in expressing the truths of the Faith. From the Apostolic Constitution, Veterum Sapientia, by Pope St. John XXIII:

            A primary place

            But amid this variety of languages a primary place must surely be given to that language which had its origins in Latium, and later proved so admirable a means for the spreading of Christianity throughout the West.

            And since in God’s special Providence this language united so many nations together under the authority of the Roman Empire — and that for so many centuries — it also became the rightful language of the Apostolic See.3 Preserved for posterity, it proved to be a bond of unity for the Christian peoples of Europe.

            The nature of Latin

            Of its very nature Latin is most suitable for promoting every form of culture among peoples. It gives rise to no jealousies. It does not favor any one nation, but presents itself with equal impartiality to all and is equally acceptable to all.

            Nor must we overlook the characteristic nobility of Latin formal structure. Its “concise, varied and harmonious style, full of majesty and dignity”4 makes for singular clarity and impressiveness of expression.

            Preservation of Latin by the Holy See

            For these reasons the Apostolic See has always been at pains to preserve Latin, deeming it worthy of being used in the exercise of her teaching authority “as the splendid vesture of her heavenly doctrine and sacred laws.”5 She further requires her sacred ministers to use it, for by so doing they are the better able, wherever they may be, to acquaint themselves with the mind of the Holy See on any matter, and communicate the more easily with Rome and with one another.

            Thus the “knowledge and use of this language,” so intimately bound up with the Church’s life, “is important not so much on cultural or literary grounds, as for religious reasons.”6 These are the words of Our Predecessor Pius XI, who conducted a scientific inquiry into this whole subject, and indicated three qualities of the Latin language which harmonize to a remarkable degree with the Church’s nature. “For the Church, precisely because it embraces all nations and is destined to endure to the end of time … of its very nature requires a language which is universal, immutable, and non-vernacular.”7

  4. the very words “tastes of the Church” implies subjectivity, not objectivity.
    “objective taste” is something of an oxymoron.

    Reply
  5. this whole concept that what the Church did 1,900 years ago or 1,500 years ago, or 1,000 years ago, or 500 years ago, or even 100 years ago is better than what it can come up with now is erroneous. all of these things are responses of good and holy people to the situations in which they found themselves. they are all man-made solutions to the problems of the particular time in which they were created. i do not question that these practices, rituals and traditions are good. i question whether they are so good that they preclude additional development and that they are so good that they should be imposed upon people for whom they were not designed.
    the whole debate within the liturgical movement is about appearance not substance. some people love the old ways far more than the new ways. i get that. i mean them no disrespect when i challenge their decisions to oppose new developments. however, i reject the idea that new development can not be more efficacious than clinging to the old.

    Reply

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