Restoring The Sacred… Preparing For Holy Week: The Holy Thursday Mandatum

By JAMES MONTI

This year many readers are undoubtedly wondering about the Holy Thursday Mandatum Rite, the liturgical washing of the feet, in the wake of the recent January 6, 2016 mandate of Pope Francis and the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments ordering a change in the Ordinary Form rubrics of the missal to allow the inclusion of women among those selected for this ceremony.
After having read the complete text of this directive and its accompanying commentary, I want to reassure you that for the many of us (including myself) who would like to see preserved the ancient tradition of an all-male Mandatum to represent with fitting symbolism the action of our Lord at the Last Supper there is nothing in the instructions that “orders” women to be inserted into the rite. The text certainly allows the latter, and is presumably intended to encourage it, but it does not make this mandatory.
The new decree’s instruction that the selection of individuals for the foot-washing rite should represent the “variety” of the “people of God” can be satisfied by selecting a range of men from the parish’s different organizations and ethnic groups.
If we want to preserve the traditional form of the Mandatum we need to be able to articulate in a coherent manner the reasons for an all-male foot-washing rite in the Holy Thursday liturgy. In media discussions of the new directive there has been some confusion as to the actual history of the Mandatum and its meaning. One headline even summed up the change as a return to tradition. It must be stated at the outset that there is no tradition whatsoever for the inclusion of women in the liturgical rite of the Mandatum — the form of the rite in which the “celebrant” is a priest or bishop.
Some have attempted to cite instances of queens washing the feet of twelve poor women (as was the tradition of the Spanish monarchy) and of abbesses washing the feet of twelve nuns. But these customs are simply imitations of the liturgical Mandatum that has always been carried out by a priest or bishop. It is also erroneous to claim that in England’s medieval Sarum Rite the feet of everyone, men and women alike, were washed; the “all” to which the Sarum Missal refers are all the clergy of the church, not the laity. Prior to the emergence of “mixed” foot-washings as an illicit liturgical practice in the 1970s, there is no evidence of a priest or bishop washing women’s feet in the liturgical Mandatum rite.
Then there is the issue of what the rite is supposed to have represented over the centuries. The Gregorian chants that were used for this rite from the late ninth century up to the late fifteenth century are particularly instructive in this regard. Mostly drawn from the Scriptures, these antiphons address three themes: the words and actions of our Lord as He washed the apostles’ feet, including His exchange with St. Peter (John 13:1-20); the bond of fraternal charity; and the washing and anointing of Christ’s feet by the penitent woman (Luke 7:37-50), traditionally identified as St. Mary Magdalen, conjoined with the second anointing by Mary in Bethany (John 12:1-8).
The last theme accentuates the wisdom of selecting men for the rite, for by associating the Mandatum also with the washing of Christ’s own feet it casts each of those receiving the foot-washing as a symbol of Christ Himself.
The first theme is underlined by what is actually done during the rite. The “celebrant” is a priest or bishop, clearly meant to represent Christ. And it is feet that he washes, as our Lord expressly did at the Last Supper. The selection of twelve to receive the foot-washing from the priest indicates that these individuals are intended collectively to symbolize the apostles. While admittedly in the past the number of participants has varied over time and from place to place, the specification of twelve for the foot-washing is found by the tenth century in both Jerusalem and Constantinople and in Rome before 1200.
Elsewhere the selection of twelve for the ceremony appears in Benedictine monastic books of tenth century Einsiedeln, Switzerland, and Gladbeck, Germany, and at Cluny, France in the twelfth century.
In twelfth century Rome the papal liturgy featured two Holy Thursday Mandatum rites, one with twelve subdeacons and a second with poor men. There were likewise two Mandatum rites at the aforementioned monasteries of Einsiedeln, Gladbeck, and Cluny, at each of which twelve male paupers received the foot-washing. At these monasteries, in the second Mandatum rite the abbot would wash the feet of all the other monks, with no number specified. In this case, the entire monastic community represented the band of the apostles, for the relationship between an abbot and his monks certainly mirrored the Master-Disciple relationship between Christ and the apostles.
At the paupers’ Mandatum in twelfth-century Rome, it was the feet of thirteen men that were washed, a number that four centuries later entered the official book of ceremonies for bishops, the Caeremoniale Episcoporum of 1600, the observances of which are preserved to the present day in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite (albeit with a subsequent change from thirteen men to twelve).
Why thirteen? There was a tradition that as Pope Saint Gregory I (+604) was washing the feet of twelve paupers a thirteenth showed up — this stranger was an angel. But the thirteenth participant in the Mandatum has been explained in various other ways, most notably as representing Christ whose feet were washed by the penitent woman. The thirteenth pauper has also been described by some as representing St. Paul, or St. Matthias, the apostle who replaced Judas.
Of course the selection of thirteen is just a variant of the “twelve-men” tradition. The Theatine liturgist Fr. Cajetan Merati (+1744) stressed that the washing of twelve represents beyond a doubt Christ washing the feet of the apostles. Pope Benedict XIV (+1758) observed that for the papal paupers’ Mandatum poor priests were usually selected to accentuate this apostolic symbolism.
The number of twelve has come to prevail with good reason, and it goes to the heart of why we should preserve the “twelve-men” tradition of the Mandatum. The Lord could have performed the washing of the feet at any point in His public ministry, washing the feet of the “seventy-two disciples” or an even larger number drawn from the multitudes of men and women who came to Him. He certainly did not wait until the Last Supper to preach the law of charity. So why did He wait until Holy Thursday evening to perform this profound gesture of charity?
He deliberately chose to bestow this beautiful privilege only upon His “chosen band,” the men He had selected to lead His Church as priests and as bishops, within the sacred intimacy of the Last Supper, when only this “chosen band” was present to witness it. Obviously from His own words it is clear He did not want them to keep this profound moment to themselves, but He did want it to be seen within the solemn context of His approaching Passion and the institution of the priesthood.

For The Sake Of Propriety

In revisiting this event, there is a human need to give our representation of it some reasonable semblance to what took place. Selecting twelve men serves to accomplish this — to take us into the Upper Room to see symbolically that “chosen band” alone with their Master. And just as our Lord’s original gesture of washing the feet of the Twelve Apostles was sufficient to express His law of love for the entire People of God, so too a Mandatum of twelve men suffices to express this in our own age as well.
To say that there never was any reason to choose men in particular to represent what happened at the Last Supper would be like saying that it has never really mattered what part of the body was washed during the ceremony — that washing twelve sets of hands is just as efficacious a symbol of what Christ did as is washing the feet. The water and towels that the priest uses, corresponding to the water that Christ poured from a basin and the towel with which He girt Himself, are further confirmation that the Mandatum is intended to raise the biblical scene in detail before our very eyes.
It is also prudent for the sake of propriety that the 2016 directive does not order parishes to change to the new “mixed-gender” selection of participants. For reasons of Christian modesty and chastity, both a parish priest as the “celebrant” of this rite and any woman asked to participate in it may very well feel uncomfortable with the new “inclusive” version of the foot-washing.
So let us hope that aggressive “liturgical experts” don’t try to force anyone to make this change in the same way that there have been attempts to force people to receive Holy Communion in the hand or standing.
Significantly the commentary accompanying the new instruction states that however the ceremony is carried out it should not be allowed to overshadow the solemn character of the Holy Thursday liturgy. The priest still has the option of omitting the Mandatum entirely rather than letting it degenerate into a circus of political correctness and agendas or of bickering over who “gets to participate.”