By JAMES MONTI
In the course of each day, in the course of each hour, the single most important event that unfolds upon the face of the Earth is the celebration of Mass. It is first and foremost the re-presentation of the supreme sacrifice of Our Lord on Calvary for the salvation of the world, but also the ultimate means by which man responds to the unfathomable riches of Christ by offering to God the utmost worship and praise. This is true of every validly celebrated Mass.
Yet it is likewise true that how the Mass is celebrated can make a considerable difference in just how efficaciously our souls will respond to the unfathomable riches of the Mass. This is precisely why so many faithful Catholics continue to love the Traditional Latin Mass, even in the face of the growing obstacles and outright persecution they face in finding churches and chapels where it continues to be celebrated. For the Traditional Latin Mass, through its extremely rich treasury of sensible signs and sacral language, engages the faculties of the soul and the senses of the body in an unparalleled manner. It totally immerses us in the most intimate encounter with God here on Earth, in what transpires at the consecration and what transpires when we receive Holy Communion.
But the Traditional Latin Mass is not only a matter of what we experience in attending it; more importantly, it is a more perfect fulfillment of our duty to offer to God worship that is truly “fitting and just,” worship that at least strives to be commensurate with the infinite glory of Him whom we worship and adore.
One could say that the entire first half of the Traditional Latin Mass is the Church’s response to the summons of St. John the Baptist: “Prepare the way of the Lord” (Matt. 3:3). At High Mass on Sundays, that preparation begins with the rite of aspersion. The celebrant sprinkles all the congregants with holy water, a visual evocation of the memory of our own Baptism and of the need to cleanse our souls from sin for a worthy and efficacious participation in the solemn worship of God.
This aspersion rite is but a prelude to the Mass itself, which begins when the priest goes before the altar to pray antiphonally with the assisting clergy or altar boys Psalm 42 (Latin Vulgate), which predisposes us to see the Mass as an ascent of Mount Sinai, an ascent of Mount Zion, an ascent of Mount Carmel — an ascent to God and to His altar, set upon Mount Calvary. As this dialogue unfolds, our ears take in the choir providing a second layer to the texture of the Mass as they sing the introit, which introduces the theological theme of the particular Sunday in the liturgical year that is being celebrated.
We come then to the penitential rite, celebrated in the Traditional liturgy in a way that so manifestly surpasses what we are given in the Novus Ordo rite. For even before the people begin their public profession of guilt as audibly articulated on their behalf by the assisting clergy or the acolytes in the words of the Confiteor, the priest who is celebrating, as the shepherd of his congregation, sets the example for his people by being the first to profess his guilt.
The depth of his remorse is expressed not only by his recital of the Confiteor but also by his body posture, a profound bow that the assisting ministers will repeat when their turn to say the Confiteor comes.
It is only after both the celebrant and his ministers have completed the Confiteor that he and they are truly ready to complete the ascent to the altar, where the celebrant begins the preparation of the sanctuary for what is to follow with an incensation of the entire altar, the first of two during the Mass. The choir meanwhile completes the penitential rite with the singing of the Kyrie. The rich variety of Gregorian and polyphonic settings of the Kyrie all serve to set man’s plea for forgiveness on a cosmic scale.
Mankind’s yearning for salvation, for deliverance from sin, was answered by God in the Incarnation. So, it is most fitting that the singing of the Gloria immediately follows the Kyrie, taking us in spirit to the joy of Christmas night. It is during the Gloria that in the Traditional Latin Mass we experience the first of several intervals of perfect stillness, with the celebrant and all the assisting ministers in the sanctuary totally motionless, inviting us all to become rapt in the contemplation of the sacred mysteries.
That stillness resumes during the reading of the Epistle and the singing of the Gradual. In hearing the words of the Sacred Scriptures read and chanted in Latin, in the Church’s sacral language, we are invited to hear them in a fundamentally different way from what we hear in ordinary speech. For God is speaking to us, and His voice surpasses all other speech. There is something similar here to Our Lord’s use of parables to teach. Often enough during Our Lord’s public ministry, the meaning of a parable was not immediately obvious to the apostles and the crowds who came to hear Our Lord; the understanding of the parable would come afterwards, as when Our Lord explained the parable of the seeds that fell on both good and bad soil.
The stillness in the sanctuary is broken for the proclamation of the Gospel, the pages of the Bible that surpass all else in the Scriptures. A procession with candles and incense is formed to accompany the priest or deacon to the place where the Gospel will be read. In the homily that immediately follows, we receive our understanding of what has been read to us in Latin: for the celebrant begins by reading the same Scripture passages to us in our own language, and then explains them to us.
It is for the profession of our Catholic faith in its undiluted entirety that the martyrs died, and so it is fitting that in the Mass the Nicene Creed ought to be sung as beautifully as possible, and that the core doctrine of our faith, the Incarnation, be physically acknowledged and professed by the entire congregation not merely by a bow, but by a total genuflection. For we must be willing to humble ourselves before a God who humbled Himself for our sake.
The incensation during the Offertory announces to us that we are beginning our final approach to the great summit of the consecration. Everything and everyone in the sanctuary, and the entire congregation, must be purified and sanctified for the coming arrival of Christ upon the altar. And so not only is the altar censed on every side, but the celebrant too and all his ministers and all present at the Mass are made fragrant for God with the swinging of the thurible.
The entire congregation rises for the chanting of the Preface, the gateway that ushers us into the Holy of Holies, the Roman Canon. In the Traditional Roman liturgy, it is the Preface of the Holy Trinity that is most frequently employed, the Preface that recounts the fundamental dogma regarding the very nature of the God we adore.
With the singing of the Sanctus, the song of the Seraphim who surround the throne of God as seen by the prophet Isaiah, the celebrant passes through the veil into the Holy of Holies, where with the sacrosanct ancient words of the Roman Canon, curtained with breathless silence, he will speak to God the Father on our behalf, and with the words and actions of Christ Himself, bring God Incarnate down upon the altar. Time and again, from the consecration onwards, he will bend his knee to the earth, lest he forget even for a moment that he is treading upon holy ground. The repeated Signs of the Cross he makes, the opening and closing of his hands, his kissing of the altar, and the rings of the sacring bell all signal to us where he is in the course of praying the Roman Canon, that we may be united with him in prayer and adoration.
At the end of the Canon, the priest raises his voice, and begins the Lord’s Prayer, ushering us into the Communion Rite, the rite by which the priest in a sense descends from Mount Sinai to bring us not the sacred tablets of the Ten Commandments, but rather what is infinitely more precious, the very Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. As the moment of Holy Communion draws near for both the priest and ourselves, he and we are given repeated reminders of just how unequal we are to the privilege God is bestowing upon us.
Our Unworthiness
Drawing a setting of the Agnus Dei from the lavish treasury of the Church’s Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony, the choir expresses on our behalf our plea for God’s mercy in striving to make ourselves ready for the greatest gift we can receive in this life. This recognition of our unworthiness reaches its most intimate articulation in the Domine, non sum dignus, uttered by the priest first for his own Holy Communion and then again for all of us, as he raises a sacred Host from the ciborium before the eyes of the entire congregation.
At most celebrations of the Traditional Latin Mass, the centuries-old tradition of a second recitation of the Confiteor is also observed, as a final cleansing of our consciences before approaching the altar rail.
The required manner for receiving Holy Communion in the traditional Roman liturgy – always on one’s knees, always on the tongue, and only from the hands of a priest or a Transitional deacon (a deacon who will be ordained to the priesthood) — expresses so perfectly the sublimity of this most intimate encounter with God in all its dimensions. Our kneeling testifies to our relationship with God as His humble creatures grateful to Him for coming to us in His infinite majesty. The hands of the priest testify that it is Christ Himself who gives this Sacrament to us. And in kneeling side by side at the altar rail with our fellow communicants, we express the great bond of charity that unites us in all in Christ.
At the end of the Traditional Latin Mass, we all fall to our knees to receive the final blessing, impressing upon our minds the sheer grandeur and power of the priestly blessing. And in the priest’s recitation of the prologue of the Gospel of St. John, the concluding act of the Mass, the image of Christ as the Light whom the evil darkness of this world cannot overcome fills us with hope, the light of hope that we will afterwards carry back to our homes and our places of work.
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