Restoring The Sacred… On Bended Knee Within The Holy Of Holies

By JAMES MONTI

In his magnificent July 5 presentation to the 2016 Sacra Liturgia UK Conference in London, His Eminence Robert Cardinal Sarah not only raised the important issue of celebrating the Ordinary Form of the Mass ad orientem, as has been widely reported, but also urged a renewed fidelity to the prescribed practice of kneeling for the consecration and the restoration of the custom of kneeling for Holy Communion (complete text posted online by the UK Catholic Herald, Tuesday, July 12, 2016).
In this context the cardinal quoted his own summation of why kneeling is essential to Catholic worship as given in his 2002 book, On the Road to Nineve (Paulines Publications Africa, 2012, p. 199): “Man is not fully man unless he falls on his knees before God to adore Him, to contemplate His dazzling sanctity and let himself be remodeled in His image and likeness.”
It is a sad reality that despite a clear rubric in the 2002 Missale Romanum specifying the kneeling of the congregation for at least the consecration (universally prescribed) and in the United States for the entire Eucharistic Prayer (GIRM, n. 43), there are still all too many places where this practice dating back over 12 centuries has disappeared.
In some cases those refusing to obey the rubric have even sought to force the faithful to stand by removing kneelers from the pews. In a June 1999 column for the Adoremus Bulletin (p. 1), Helen Hull Hitchcock and Susan Benofy told of instances in which those kneeling during the Eucharistic Prayer were publicly humiliated and even threatened with expulsion from their church.
For several decades now, what takes place in our parishes often first arises as a theory or proposal in the pages of academic journals. Thus the campaign to eliminate kneeling during the Mass has taken its lead from liturgical publications of a certain ilk. Readers are told that kneeling prevents the laity from assuming their role of full and active participation in the liturgy.
What these critics really mean is that by remaining on their knees during the consecration the laity can’t look and act like concelebrants in the confection of the Eucharist, which they most certainly are not.
The subject has been raised yet again in the July 2016 issue of the American liturgical journal Worship. In his article “Embodied Eschatology (Part 1),” the liturgist Gabriel Radle argues that kneeling during the Mass, and in particular kneeling during the consecration, arose in rather awkward contradiction to the ancient observance of standing for the liturgy on Sundays and during the Easter Season.
He presents as the centerpiece of his assertion Canon 20 of the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), which called for the universal observance of standing while at prayer on Sundays and throughout Eastertide. Radle contends that this directive of the early Church was later undermined by a growing focus upon adoration of the Consecrated Species which he suggests represented a departure from the original theology of the Eucharist.
Regarding the question as to whether the Nicaea canon precluded kneeling during the consecration, two medieval texts reveal that such kneeling arose at an early date and that in at least some places no exception to the practice appears to have been made in regard to Sunday or the Easter Season.
In a Frankish liturgical book known as Ordo 17, dating from about 790, we find instructions for the celebration of “solemn Masses” “on “all the principal festivities,” presumably including Easter. A careful reading of the rubrics reveals that from the Sanctus until nearly the end of the Roman Canon the assisting priests, the deacons and subdeacons, and the lay faithful are all to “bow their faces to the earth.”
Such a low bow must have been made from a kneeling position or by a total prostration, an interpretation confirmed by a rubric that speaks of the subdeacons rising shortly before the conclusion of the Canon (text in Msgr. Michel Andrieu, editor, Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen age, vol. 3, Spicilegium sacrum Lovaniense Administration, 1961, pp. 178, 181-182).
A few decades later, in the manuscript of an ancient Irish liturgical book known as the Stowe Missal, there appears a ninth-century Gaelic-language treatise on the Mass that states in regard to the consecration (referred to here as the periculosa oratio, the “perilous prayer,” “perilous” in that the validity of the consecration depended upon the priest’s correct recitation of the words):
“When ‘Jesus took bread’ is sung, the priest bows himself down thrice to repent of his sins…and the people kneel, and here no voice cometh lest it disturb the priest, for this is the right of it, that his mind not separate from God while he chants this lesson. Hence its name is the periculosa oratio” (English translation in George Warner, ed., The Stowe Missal, vol. 2, HBS vol. 32, Henry Bradshaw Society, 1915, p. 40).
Nowhere does the Irish treatise state that kneeling for the consecration was suspended on Sundays or during the Easter Season. Thus both this text and Ordo 17 present kneeling or prostration for the consecration as a routine practice, and not as anything exceptional or unusual.
In his article Radle does cite texts that do indeed make the “Nicaea distinction” as to whether to kneel or not during the Roman Canon, most notably Cardinal Bernard of Porto’s 12th-century Ordo officiorum for the Roman Basilica of St. John Lateran. But it doesn’t take a degree in pastoral or liturgical theology to see why over time an unyielding adherence to this distinction as to whether to adore the Holy Eucharist on bended knee or not according to what day of the week it might be would have proved problematic.
We have only to recall the confusion that arises with regard to the current method of holy day observance we have here in the United States wherein three of the holy days, the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God (January 1), the Assumption (August 15), and All Saints’ Day (November 1), are not observed as holy days of obligation if they happen to fall on a Saturday or Monday.
It should be obvious that the Fathers of the Nicaea Council would never have intended their decision to become an obstacle to expressions of adoration on Sundays or during the Easter Season.
Moreover, the Church has never abandoned the differentiation that she has traditionally made between the Day of the Resurrection, Sunday, and the other days of the week, nor between Lent and Eastertide. It is only the “mechanics” of how specifically to express that differentiation in words and actions that has been developed and refined over time.
Those perhaps hankering for the “good old days” of fourth-century Christianity ought to be asked whether they would want us likewise to return to segregating women from men on opposite sides of the church as was prescribed in the Apostolic Constitutions (book 2, chapter 57).
And curiously the nostalgia of certain liturgists eager to cite ancient practices doesn’t extend to Eucharistic Prayer I either, the Roman Canon, a text known to be at least as old as the fourth century, with passages from it quoted by St. Ambrose (De Sacramentis, book 4, chapters 5 and 6). In many an American parish this venerable prayer is scarcely ever used, as if it had been banned.

Kneeling In Adoration

Having grown up in the post-Vatican II “Novus Ordo” era here in the United States, I can testify from personal experience that the practice in our country of kneeling for the entire Eucharistic Prayer has very positively impacted my own perception of this part of the Mass as a veritable “Holy of Holies” within the Eucharistic Liturgy.
This of course is the way the Roman Canon is perceived and celebrated in the Extraordinary Form, the Traditional Latin Mass, and is the reason why in the latter the words are said by the priest in a low, almost secretive voice.
Similarly the custom of kneeling from after the recitation of the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) until one leaves the pew to receive Holy Communion and of kneeling again afterward until the priest begins the concluding prayer of the Mass has proved indispensable to establishing a sense of the sacred during the Communion Rite and in facilitating an appropriate thanksgiving for the sacrament.
It allows the faithful to realize what they are doing, that they are receiving their Lord and their God into their hearts and should make the most of this intimate encounter with Him.
In Europe, by contrast, the custom of kneeling for the entire Eucharistic Prayer was not retained when the missal of 1970 was promulgated (the faithful kneel only for the consecration). One cannot help wondering whether this has been a contributing factor in the precipitous downfall of Mass attendance and Catholic religious observance in much of Western Europe, considerably worse than the decline that has occurred here in America.
No, adoration and its outward manifestations are not elements alien to early Christian eucharistic theology that were artificially imposed upon the Church’s liturgy by medieval minds. Rather, the Mass has always been and always will be “the Church’s supreme act of adoration” (Pope Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, February 22, 2007, n. 66). Kneeling in adoration during the Mass is one of the finest expressions of full and active participation we can offer to our God.