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?