By JAMES MONTI
Many of us have had the happy privilege of offering our respect to a newly ordained priest after receiving his first blessing by kissing his hands. The most important reason why those hands are so sacred is what they have the God-given power to do at the most sublime moment of the Mass (apart from Holy Communion) — the consecration.
Fr. Robert Barron, in his popular television series Catholicism (episode 7), aptly likened the power of the priest’s pronunciation of the words of consecration to God’s command in creating the world, “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3).
In his treatise on the Mass (chapter 1), the Franciscan Observant priest St. Leonard of Port Maurice (+1751) develops this comparison fully:
“. . . who could ever have imagined that the voice of man, which by nature hath not the power even to raise a straw from the ground, should obtain through grace a power so stupendous to bring from Heaven to earth the Son of God! It is a greater power than that which would be required to change the place of mountains, to dry up seas, and to turn round the heavens; it even emulates in a certain manner that first ‘fiat’ with which God brought all things out of nothing. . . .”
Our own personal sense of the sacred as Catholics, in the liturgy and even beyond, hinges in large part upon how well we perceive and respond to the mystery of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. For this sacramental presence is the foremost way for a disciple of the Lord in our own time to encounter in a direct and intimate manner his God and Savior. This is our faith.
The campaign that began in earnest in the 1960s to persuade Catholics that in their understanding of the Mass they needed to get away from being so focused upon the moment of consecration and the Real Presence of Christ on the altar has perhaps done more than almost anything else to erode the perception of the sacred.
The Catholic laity were made to listen to a lot of fine-sounding talk about how they needed to see the Mass primarily as a meal and a community gathering and that Eastern eucharistic theology was not fixated upon a particular “moment” of consecration in the way we had been in the Roman Rite, the implication being of course that we in the West had somehow gotten this wrong. The story of medieval Catholics running from one church to another for no other reason than to watch the moment of consecration was told and retold to persuade us of the “danger” of being “obsessed” with this aspect of the Mass and the doctrine of transubstantiation.
The heretical notion of “transignification” was dished out as “the new normal” of how we were to understand what happened to the bread and wine at Mass (that the “meaning” rather than the substance of the bread and wine was changed into the Body and Blood of Christ). Even when transignification was not openly touted from the pulpit, the Eucharist came to be treated in many places as if transignification were true — as if the Eucharistic Species were merely “special” bread and “special” wine.
The author of a 2009 book on the Eucharist arrogantly asserted that what he called “moment-of-consecration theology” — the traditional understanding of the consecration — had been permanently discredited.
It took two extraordinary men, Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, to begin stemming the tide of this liturgical disorder. In a 2006 address at the Polish shrine of Czestochowa, Pope Benedict told seminarians in reference to their future ministry as priests, “. . . as you genuflect at the moment of consecration, preserve in your soul the ability to wonder and to adore.”
A major component of the New Evangelization will have to be the re-evangelization of Catholics regarding the Eucharist. We need to get back to experiencing a sense of awe in witnessing the consecration that we might again perceive it as the extraordinary miracle it truly is, to see it as Pope St. Gregory the Great (+604) describes it:
“For who of the faithful could doubt, at the very hour of the sacrifice, the heavens to be opened at the voice of the priest, in that mystery of Jesus Christ the choirs of angels to be present, the depths united to the heights, earthly things joined to those of Heaven, and out of things visible and invisible made one?” (Dialogues, book 4, chapter 60).
To this end I would like to share with you just some of what our fathers in the faith had to say about the consecration and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. But rather than turning to authors who are already household names among serious Catholics, I want to present a few hidden treasures from authors whose names may be unfamiliar but whose words burn with an incredible ardor for the Sacrament of the Altar.
The Portuguese Jesuit priest Francisco Antonio (+1610) in his 1596 commentary on the Mass described the consecration as “the summit of the mountain” in the Roman Canon. Commenting upon a phrase from one of the prefaces to the Canon, namely, “Powers tremble” (book 2, chapter 23), he observed that insofar as all creatures ought “to tremble and be struck with wonder, considering how little, and how nothing they are compared with the immensity of God,” this should especially be our response in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament:
“. . . although in every place , and in all the Sacraments this reverence is owed to God, yet much more ought [creatures] to tremble and be abashed before the Most Holy Sacrament, where is really Christ our Lord, where is represented His sacred Passion, at which the earth trembled, the rocks were torn asunder, and the graves were opened. And in figure of this we read that when the Patriarch Jacob saw that ladder which reached from earth to Heaven, and that by it angels descended and ascended, and God near by the top of it (Gen. 28:12-17), terrified, he said: ‘[How] awesome is this place; there is no doubt but that this is the house of God, and the gate of Heaven’ (cf. Gen. 28:17).
“And of this same reverence and trembling of wonder which is owed to God, especially in the Most Blessed Sacrament, we are able to understand that which holy Job said: ‘The pillars of Heaven tremble before the divine gaze’ (cf. Job 26:11).”
The Glory Of God
In his 1622 work Psalmodia Eucharistica, the Spanish Mercedarian priest Melchior Prieto (+1648) describes the Holy Eucharist as “the glory of God,” “a work of the infinite power of God” surpassing all of creation, “the most beautiful work of all those of Christ,” “a memorial of the infinite love of God,” comparable to “the infinite magnificence of God,” and that “Christ in this Sacrament is most merciful.”
The power and efficacy of the words of consecration, taken from the Scriptures, by which the priest confects the Eucharist, are for Fr. Melchior a prime example of what the Letter to the Hebrews says about the Word of God: “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword. . . .” (Heb. 4:12). And just as the Psalmist declares, “He [God] sends forth his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly” (Psalm 147:15), so too, Fr. Melchior observes, at the very instant that the priest pronounces the words of consecration the miracle of Transubstantiation is accomplished.
When in 1607 the Spanish priest and Franciscan friar Juan de Alcocer published a comprehensive ceremonial to instruct priests in the celebration of the Mass, he dedicated his book to Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, addressing Him as “your sovereign Majesty and Greatness,” and beseeching Him as he began to write, “Vouchsafe to give the hand of your infinite power to my weakness….” Continuing his dedication, he then expresses his aspiration of offering liturgical instruction for the greater glory of God:
“It is one spark of that sacrosanct fire, O my sovereign Lord, which you came to sow here on earth, and one particle, although very small, of the ardent zeal that took you from the house of the Eternal Father, that has moved me to offer my small coin in the treasury of your sacred Temple, desiring that your priests and ministers succeed in doing well that which pertains to their ministries. For if those who call themselves kings and lords on earth…wish to be served with particular care, what care and what respect shall suffice for venerating your greatness, O King Supreme?”
The sense of the sacred expressed through the specific actions and gestures accompanying the consecration, too rich a topic to be covered in a few sentences, will be the subject of a future essay in this series. The above reflections from authors of the past can put us in the proper frame of mind for witnessing the consecration with the eyes of faith. That frame of mind, a spirit of profound reverence, will in turn inform how we are to bring forth the treasures of the Mass into our daily lives.
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