I've written so extensively about our new parish priest that most of you probably didn't even know we got one. In other words, I haven't written about him at all though all you really need to know is that his liturgical views are pretty standard (and you know how highly I regard standard liturgical practice in this country).

Something he has introduced recently that is very good is the practice of having the altar servers come around to our side of the altar during the Eucharistic prayer. Previously they used to kneel behind the priest so that we could watch them picking their noses or whatever, now they kneel (the feint of heart should look away now) with their backs to us!

The whole thing reminds me a bit of this...

Okay, so our priest is still on his side more like a science lecturer doing a demonstration than someone going up to the altar on our behalf, but I digress.

The fact is that the orientation has shifted, if only slightly. Where previously we saw a big rectangular altar front, we now see people kneeling. Facing East.

I was thinking about this when I stumbled on the following via the excellent LION & the CARDINAL blog.

St John of Damascus writes...

The eyewitnesses and ministers of the word not only handed down the law of the Church in writings, but also in certain unwritten traditions. For whence do we know the holy place of the skull? Whence the memorial of life? Does not a child learn it from his father without anything being written down? It is written that the Lord was crucified in the place of the skull and buried in a tomb, that Joseph had hewn in a rock; but that these are the places now venerated we know from unwritten tradition, and there are many other examples like this. What is the origin of threefold baptism, that is with three immersions? Whence praying facing the East? Whence veneration of the cross? Are they not from unwritten tradition? Therefore the divine apostle says, So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter. Since many things have been handed down in unwritten form in the Church and preserved up to now, why do you split hairs over the images? Manichees composed the Gospel according to Thomas; are you now going to write the Gospel according to Leo? I do not accept any emperor who tyrannically snatches at the priesthood. Have emperors received the authority to bind and loose? ... I am not persuaded that the church should be constituted by imperial canons, but rather by patristic traditions, both written and unwritten. For just as the Gospel was proclaimed in all the world in written form, so in all the world it has been handed down in unwritten form that Christ the incarnate God should be depicted, and the saints, just as the cross is venerated and we stand to pray, facing the East.

[link]

St John of Damascus defends the practice of depicting Christ in works of art by appealing to the certainty with which people pray facing East.

How do we know we are allowed pictures of Jesus? The same way we know to pray facing East.

Oh wait, we don't pray facing East.

Oh wait, we don't have any pictures of Jesus either...

[photo source]

Yeah, Middlesbrough Diocese's brand new church. They spent one and a half million pounds (mostly borrowed money) and they couldn't afford to buy a proper Jesus for the cross behind the altar.

St John of Damascus was obviously wrong then...

Back in January 2008 I blogged about a chapter of the book Spirit of the Liturgy by Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI).

In that book he writes that...

a common turning to the east during the Eucharistic Prayer remains essential. This is not a case of something accidental, but of what is essential. Looking at the priest has no importance.

And he makes a suggestion...

Where a direct common turning toward the east is not possible, the cross can serve as an interior "east" of faith. It should stand in the middle of the altar and be the common point of focus for both priest and praying community.

You can read that full blog entry here but the main point I made is this: That the Pope didn't just suggest this when he was a cardinal, he is doing it now that he is the Pope... Should we not be doing what the Pope is doing?

Last week the Papal MC (the guy looking over the Pope's shoulder in the picture above) gave an address at a clergy conference in Rome. He spoke about a great many things but I've sliced it right down for the lazybones among you... (you should really read the whole thing - it's excellent)

...one conviction has always remained clear within the Christian community, almost down to the present day. I am referring to praying facing east, a tradition which goes back to the origins of Christianity.

...

...we would like to reaffirm that prayer facing east, more specifically, facing the Lord, is a characteristic expression of the authentic spirit of the liturgy.

...

Hence the reason for the proposal made by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, and presently reaffirmed during the course of his pontificate, to place the Crucifix on the center of the altar, in order that all, during the celebration of the liturgy, may concretely face and look upon Lord, in such a way as to orient also their prayer and hearts.

link

There are two highly significant things here. The first being that "prayer facing east, more specifically, facing the Lord, is a characteristic expression of the authentic spirit of the liturgy".

In other words, it's not an optional extra for a small minority of people who happen to like it. It's characteristic. You should be able to see it in most places and if this characteristic expression is missing, there's a good chance your parish priest is missing something in his interpretation of the liturgy.

But even more important is this, that the proposal to place the crucifix in the center of the altar is being presently reaffirmed during the course of his [Pope Benedict's] pontificate.

This leads us to the obvious question...

If the Pope suggested it, and the Pope does it, and the Pope's MC says that the Pope intends to reaffirm it, why don't we do it?

It is because we are deaf?

Coming soon to a parish not near me. Around here the Mass isn't so much a sacrifice as something that has been sacrificed to the gods of the community spirit and the shared meal.

... I would agree with you that we need to 're-sacrificialise', in your invented but useful word, our common or garden usage of the rite of Paul VI - if not, in some respects, the rite itself.

But to my mind the single greatest contribution we can make to that end is to press - judiciously and with respect - for the celebration of the Mass versus orientem, the Liturgy 'turned towards the Lord'. The celebrant stands ministerially in the place of Christ the High Priest. Appropriately, since our Great High Priest is Mediator between God and men, the Church's priest, during the Liturgy of the Sacrifice - after, that is, the litany-like moment of the Bidding Prayers - turns at key moments to the body of the faithful, engaging their response ('active' participation means engaged participation, not jumping up and down) to the sacred action of which he is protagonist.

Essentially, however, in the celebration of the Sacrifice the ministerial priest is turned - always in spiritual attitude if, in our current practice, seldom in empirical fact - not to face the people but, with the beloved Son, to face the Father, to whom the Oblation of praise and thanksgiving, propitiation and supplication is addressed. Your desire for a clearer indication of the change in level as we move from the Liturgy of the Word to the Liturgy of the Sacrifice would be well met by the change of direction whereby the priest at that shift in gear turns from facing the people to facing the Father.

[link]

I suppose it comes down to whether we want a Mass like this:

Or more like this:

I know which I would prefer...

Due to the fact that his sanctuary floor has been removed during the renovation works that are currently underway, Fr Ray Blake of St Mary Magdalen had no choice (I bet he was gutted) but to say his Ordinary Form Mass Ad Orientem...

Like any reasonable man, I am deeply offended by this photo. The way the priest is clearly lording it over the ordinary folk in the congregation like some kind of celebrity gameshow host. It's obviously all about him.

Um...

Fr Z of the WDTPRS blog has posted a marvelous pair of before/after shots of masses in the Sistine Chapel.

To my (clearly far too young to understand) mind it is obvious that in one of these photos Christ is the focus and in the other he looks like a long forgotten ornament.

Meanwhile, Amy Welborn has posted a similar photo and asked for peoples views:

In a charitable, clear manner, explain what you see here. What gratifies you about the action in the photograph. What bothers you. Those who see it as beautiful, explain why and its deeper relation to your Catholic faith. Those who are bothered by it or mystified by it, explain why.

You can see the responses here. In her followup post Amy says:

As I've said before, my big ah-ha moment over the past couple of years has been the realization that most of us - myself included - have been formed to think of the Mass as a prayer meeting. A highly structured prayer meeting, but a prayer meeting nonetheless, one which emphasizes community and who we are in the here and now, a prayer meeting which should somehow be expressive of who we are as individuals and a community.

Prayer meetings are good. But that's not what the Mass is.

And that understanding is what I see reflected in the comments below. It seems fairly obvious to me - those who respond positively to the photo seem to emphasize the Sacrificial aspect of the Mass, and the necessity of the ritual and other externals reflecting that reality.

I also find Fr Rob Johansen's anlysis of this particularly interesting. You can read his full analysis here.

Less than a week ago I wrote about the book Pope Benedict wrote as Cardinal Ratzinger. In Spirit of the Liturgy there is left no doubt whatsoever that Pope Benedict considers a return to eastward facing masses to be essensial. He wrote: a common turning to the east during the Eucharistic Prayer remains essential. This is not a case of something accidental, but of what is essential. Looking at the priest has no importance.. If you missed that blog entry you can catch it here.

At mass yesterday, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, I tested the theory. I tried to look away from Fr Massie (the Pope says that looking at him has no importance) and instead at the Cross. Mass was different.

A few thousand miles away another mass was different yesterday morning. As reported in the New York Times (Try to ignore, for a moment, the horrendous impropriety of somebody writing publically about something that happened at a mass):

Pope Turns Back on Congregation In Old Mass Ritual

Pope Benedict celebrated parts of Sunday's Mass with his back turned on the congregation, re-introducing an old ritual that had not been used in decades.

The Pope used the Sistine Chapel's ancient altar set right against the wall under Michelangelo's dramatic depiction of the Last Judgment, instead of the altar placed on a mobile platform that allowed his predecessor John Paul II to face the faithful.

A statement by the Vatican's office for liturgical celebrations said it had been decided to use the old altar, where ballots are placed during papal elections, to respect "the beauty and the harmony of this architectonic jewel."

[source]

No negative bias there then. First of all, people need to remember that in Church terms "not used in decades" and "old" are not really synonymous. I've been alive for decades remember and I am not even old enough to understand why we can't say mass like the Pope! Besides which it has been used in decades, it's used regularly around the world by many priests when they celebrate mass in private. Can you imagine a priest stood away from the altar celebrating on his own to an empty room? Perhaps that's what the NYT think happens...

Also, they cut short the Vatican statement:

That placement of the altar, added the note, implied that in some moments the Pope "had his back to the faithful and his gaze upon the cross, orienting the attitude and disposition of the whole assembly in this way," though he did not use the 1962 missal.

[source]

Anyways... the long and the short of it is this:

The Pope celebrated the new mass in the ad orientem style yesterday. So it can be done. How about I repeat the question from last time...

Should we not be doing what the Pope does? If not, why not?

Are we not interested in the cosmos any more? Are we today really hopelessly huddled in our own little circle? Is it not important, precisely today, to find room for the dimension of the future, for hope in the Lord who is to come again, to recognise again, indeed to live, the dynamism of the new creation as an essential form of the liturgy?

So why not?

So, resolved to read more I have been reading. Not lots but while Ella was away at Stonyhurst and once Leona goes to bed I had more peace and quiet than I've had in aeons. I'm reading The Spirit of the Liturgy by one Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

It raises a question and I believe it is a serious question. Which way should the priest face during the mass? Come to think of it... which way should the people face during mass?

Cue scoffing. I sort of half asked why the priest switched direction a while back. We've done this one James... before you were born... we used to say mass "facing away from the people" (ad orientem) and now we say mass "facing the people" (versus populum). The only rational explanation I have been able to aquire is "you are too young to remember it so I must know best". And on an on and ad hominem. If I am wrong about this, perhaps somebody could explain my mistake instead of simply pointing out the difference in our respective ages.

Cardinal Razinger quotes Bouyer:

"Never, and nowhere, before [that is, before the sixteenth century] have we any indication that any importance, or even attention, was given to whether the priest celebrated with the people before him or behind him. As Professor Cyrille Vogel has recently deomonstrated it, the only thing the insisted upon, or even mentioned, was that he should say the eucharistic prayer, as all the other prayers, facing East... Even when the orientation of the church enabled the celebrant to pray turned toward the people, when at the altar, we must not forget that it was not the priest alone who, then, turned East: it was the whole congregation together with him."

Then Ratzinger says himself...

Admittedly, these connections were obscured or fell into total oblivion in the church buildings and liturgical practices of the modern age. This is the only explanation for the fact that the common direction of prayer of priests and people were labelled as "celebrating toward the wall" or "turning your back on the people" and came to seem absurd and totally unacceptable.

...

In reality what happened was that an unprecedented clericalization came on the scene. Now the priest - the "presider", as they now prefer to call him - becomes the real point of reference for the whole liturgy. Everything depends on him. We have to see him, respond to him, to be involved in what he is doing. His creativity sustains the whole thing. Not suprisingly, people try to reduce this newly created role by assigning all kinds of liturgical functions to different individuals and entrusting the "creative" planning of the liturgy to groups of people who like to, and are supposed to, "make their own contribution".

Less and less is God in the picture. More and more important is what is done by the human beings who meet here and do not like to subject themselves to a "pre-determined pattern". The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self enclosed circle. In its outward form, it no longer opens out to what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself. The common turning toward the east was not a "celebration toward the wall"; it did not mean that the priest "had his back to the people": the priest himself was not regarded as so important. For just as the congregation of the synagogue looked together toward Jerusalem, so in the Christian liturgy the congregation looked together "toward the Lord".

But Raztinger (like myself) is not a member of the Traditionalists for the Mass as a Historical Recreation of the Past Society. He continues...

It would surely be a mistake to reject all the reforms of our century wholesale. When the altar was very remote from the faithful, it was right to move it back to the people. In cathedrals this made it possible to recover the tradition of having the altar at the crossing, the meeting place of the nave and the presbyterium. It was also important clearly to distinguish the place for the Liturgy of the Word from the place for the properly Eucharistic liturtgy. For the Liturgy of the Word is about speaking and responding, and so a face-to-face exchange between proclaimer and hearer does make sense. In the psalm the hearer internalizes what he has heard, takes it into himself, and transforms it into prayer, so that it becomes a response.

On the other hand, a common turning to the east during the Eucharistic Prayer remains essential. This is not a case of something accidental, but of what is essential. Looking at the priest has no importance. What matters is looking together at the Lord. It is not now a question of dialogue but of common worship, of setting off toward the One who is to come. What corresponds to reality of what is happening is not the closed circle but the common movement forward, expressed in a common direction for prayer.

I didn't write the paragraph above. The present Pope did. He says that turning to the east is "essential". If I was a priest, I would feel the need to have a bloody good reason for disagreeing. As Cardinal Ratzinger, he encountered some objections and he covers them in his book...

Haussling thinks that turning to the east, towards the rising sun, is something that nowadays we just cannot bring into the liturgy.

Is that really the case? Are we not interested in the cosmos any more? Are we today really hopelessly huddled in our own little circle? Is it not important, precisely today, to find room for the dimension of the future, for hope in the Lord who is to come again, to recognise again, indeed to live, the dynamism of the new creation as an essential form of the liturgy?

Another argument is that we do not need to look toward the east, toward the crucifix - that, when priest and faithful look at one another they are looking at the image of God in man, and so facing each other is the right direction for prayer.

I find it hard to believe that the famous critic thought this was a serious argument. For we do not see the image of God in man in such a simplistic way. The "image of God" in man is not, of course, something that we can photograph or see with a merely photographic kind of perception. We can indeed see it, just as we can see the goodness in a man, his honesty, interior truth, humiliy, love - everything, in fact, that gives him a certain likeness to God. But if we are to do this, we must learn a new kind of seeing, and that is what the Eucharist is for.

A more important objection is the practical order. Ought we really to be rearranging everything all over again? Nothing is more harmfull to the liturgy than a constant activism, even if it seems to be for the sake of genuine renewal.

Here's the part where it gets really interesting. Here's the part that affects us. Now. Today.

Facing east, as we heard, was linked with the "sign of the Son of Man", with the Cross, which announces the Lord's Second Coming. That is why very early on the east was linked with the sign of the Cross. Where a direct common turning toward the east is not possible, the cross can serve as an interior "east" of faith. It should stand in the middle of the altar and be the common point of focus for both priest and praying community. In this way we obey the ancient call to prayer: "Conversi ad Dominum", Turn toward the Lord! In this way we look together at the One whose death tore the veil of the Temple - the One who stands before the Father for us and encloses us in his arms in order to make us the new and living Temple.

Moving the altar cross to the side to give an uninterrupted view of the priest is something I regard as one of the truly absurd phenomena of recent decades. Is the cross disruptive during mass? Is the priest more important than the Lord? This mistake should be corrected as quickly as possible; it can be done without further rebuilding. The Lord is the point of reference. He is the rising sun of History. That is why there could be a cross of the Passion, which represents the suffering Lord who for us let his side be pierced, from which flowed Blood and Water (Eucharist and Baptism), as well as a cross of triumph, which expresses the idea of the Second Coming and guides our eyes toward it. For it is always the one Lord: Christ yesterday, today, and forever.

I don't have anything to add. He has spelled it out. However, one final objection remains. When Cardinal Ratzinger wrote this book he was only a Cardinal and we can ignore him because, you know, it's convenient. Has he said anything telling us to put a cross in the middle of the altar since he became Pope?

Well, a picture is worth a thousand words...

So here's a question... Should we not be doing what the Pope does? If not, why not?

From my reading of other blogs, I was sure today Pope Benedict was to declare the beginning of a 'year of Saint Paul'. He did declare a a year of Saint Paul, only, it doesn't start until June 2008. Something to look forward too.

I wonder what it is the year of at the moment?

Anyway, this year we had a private mass which was pretty special. Our friends Mark and Monica had been unable to make it to mass because they were traveling all day to Leona's baptism. Ella and I had been disorganised and not noticed the time as we prepared for the baptism (a poor excuse I know). As a result we were all set to fail in our Holy Day Obligation.

Fortunately, however, Father Massie had been to Scotland for an ordination and had also not said mass yet. He was going to do so in his chapel and so we joined him. There were only the seven of us (including Leona) and Father Massie celebrated ad orientem. He did this for purely practical reasons (the room is small and the altar is against the wall). Also, we received communion kneeling, also for practical reasons (the room is small and there was nowhere to get up).

Given the option, I think I'd have every mass ad orientem and receive communion kneeling at the altar rail, but then I'm young so what do I know? I'm not modern and dynamic like the old people.

A special thanks to Norris who isn't Catholic but who patiently waits while we have masses. He is a good egg.