Adoremus Bulletin - July 2023

Adoremus Bulletin

For the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy

News & Views

Pope Francis Adds Coptic Orthodox Martyrs to Liturgical Book of Saints

By Hannah Brockhaus

CNA—Pope Francis said on May 11 that the Coptic Orthodox martyrs killed by ISIS in 2015 will be added to the Catholic Church’s official list of saints. He also received a relic of the martyrs’ blood as a gift.

“I am glad to announce today that, with the consent of Your Holiness, these 21 martyrs will be inserted into the Roman Martyrology as a sign of the spiritual communion uniting our two Churches,” Pope Francis said in a speech to the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, Pope Tawadros II.

The Roman Martyrology is an official list of the saints and blesseds, including martyrs, recognized in the liturgy of the Catholic Church. The list is ordered according to the Church’s calendar of feast days. The pope met with Tawadros II and other Coptic Orthodox representatives at the Vatican May 11.

In his speech, Pope Francis said he had “no words” to express his gratitude for the Orthodox leader’s gift of relics of the Coptic martyrs, who were beheaded by ISIS on a beach in Libya on February 15, 2015.

“May the prayer of the Coptic martyrs, united with that of the Theotokos, continue to grow the friendship between our Churches, until the blessed day when we can celebrate together at the same altar and commune in the same Body and Blood of the Savior, ‘that the world may believe,’” Pope Francis said.

Tawadros II said the Coptic

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Sing a New and Ever-Ancient Song to the Lord! Introducing the Divine Office Hymnal

By Alexis Kazimira Kutarna

This summer, the new Divine Office Hymnal will be available in print: our first glance at the new translation of hymn texts for praying the Divine Office. This liturgical book of music represents the fruit of a decade’s worth of work for the new translation of the Liturgy of the Hours, fittingly highlighting the song of praise of the Liturgy of the Hours, the eternal song of Christ to the Father.

For as the General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours (GILH) notes, “When the Church offers praise to God in the Liturgy of the Hours, it unites itself with that hymn of praise which is sung in the heavenly places throughout all ages; it also receives a foretaste of the song of praise in heaven, described by John in the Book of Revelation, the song that is sung without ceasing before the throne of God and of the Lamb” (16).

The Divine Office Hymnal features the English translation of the hymn texts from the Latin typical edition. Each hymn is set to two different melodies: first to chant-melodies of the Gregorian repertoire, and second to metrical melodies. The choice to include both tunes from the Church’s tradition of Gregorian chant alongside metered hymn tunes serves to “encourage both aspects of the Church’s musical patrimony,” said Father Andrew Menke, executive director of the Secretariat for Divine Worship of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). He is optimistic, too, that “we might see a renaissance in praying the Liturgy of the Hours among the faithful,” echoing the call of encouragement from the Second Vatican Council for the laity to take up this daily prayer (see Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC), 100). This hymnal represents a significant contribution to the liturgical life of the Church, both for individuals as well as communities who pray the hours in common, as “the divine office is the voice of the Church, that is of the whole mystical body publicly praising God” (SC, 99). The Liturgy of the Hours “is the public prayer of the Church, is a source of piety, and nourishment for personal prayer” (SC, 90).

Second Edition

At their fall meeting in 2012, the

“When the Church offers praise to God in the liturgy of the hours, it unites itself with that hymn of praise sung throughout all ages in the halls of heaven; it also receives a foretaste of the song of praise in heaven, described by John in the Book of Revelation, the song sung continually before the throne of God and of the Lamb” (GILH 16).

USCCB voted to approve the “scope of work” for the new translation of the Liturgy of the Hours, according to the second typical edition (published by the Holy See in 1985). This scope called for the use of the entirety of the body of approved hymns from the Latin typical edition of the Liturgia Horarum and their translation into English. The work of translation of liturgical texts into English is accomplished by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) which serves the English-speaking episcopal conferences. Through the work of ICEL, the 294 Latin texts of the Office hymns were researched and translated by the efforts of several individuals and

Righteous Tunes

The Divine Office Hymnal—official soundtrack to the Liturgy of the Hours—is out and, as Alexis Kazimira Kutarna notes, its rich mix of everancient and ever-new was worth the wait 1

All-consuming Beauty

Taste and eat—taste and see! According to Mary Catherine Levri, the Catholic Church has the recipe for true beauty: Christ disfigured on the cross and Christ glorified at his Resurrection 6 De Lubac: De Profundis

Out of the deep mind of 20th-century theologian Henri De Lubac, Owen Vyner retrieves some timeless wisdom on the Eucharist and the Church as a timely way to bolster faith in both 8

the independent work of two women’s religious communities. Executive Director of ICEL, Msgr. Andrew Wadsworth, remarked that this effort represents a “phenomenal recovery of a large portion of liturgical texts that were not previously available in English.”

In the current edition of the Liturgy of the Hours, the hymns are often presented with multiple options for texts, which many times do not include the rich and ancient hymnody present in the same edition in Latin. Instead, the decision was previously made to include modern hymn texts and other songs, often replacing or omitting these great masterpieces of

Please see HYMNAL on page 4

Formation’s Foundation

In this reprint from the book Liturgical Formation—translated for the first time into English by Jan Bentz—Romano Guardini explains how true formation in the liturgy is the liturgy 5

Reading History

John Grondelski reviews Paul Turner’s Words without Alloy: A Biography of the Lectionary for Mass—and he finds enough liturgical insights to fill a three-year cycle of Sundays 12

News & Views

Editorial

Pop Quiz: Are you smarter than a liturgist?

Orthodox Church has recognized the holiness of the Coptic martyrs, and celebrates them with other modern martyrs every 8th of Amshir, the sixth month of the Coptic calendar, which roughly corresponds to February 15 on the Gregorian calendar used by the Catholic Church.

“Today we hand over part of their relics, dipped in their blood shed in the name of Christ for the Church, so that they may be remembered in the martyrology of all the Churches of the world, and know ‘we too’ are ‘surrounded by such a multitude of witnesses,’” he said.

“Precisely because the saints are one of the main pillars of our Churches, beginning with the apostles Peter, Paul, and Mark,” Pope Tawadros said, “we now write in the martyrology of the Churches the new martyrs who have guarded the faith and bore witness to Christ, who did not lose heart in the face of torture and passed on to us a living example in martyrdom.”

The May 11 meeting between Pope Francis and Pope Tawadros II, which also included a private conversation, concluded with prayer in the Redemptoris Mater Chapel of the Apostolic Palace.

The encounter was one of several events this week marking the 50th anniversary of a historic meeting between St. Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria, which was a turning point in relations between the Catholic and Coptic Orthodox Churches.

On May 10, Pope Francis and Pope Tawadros II held the Vatican’s weekly public audience together, each expressing his gratitude for the friendship of the two Churches. This date marked the 10th commemoration of the “Day of Coptic-Catholic Friendship.”

On May 10, 1973, St. Paul VI and Pope Tawadros’ predecessor, Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria, signed a joint declaration that marked a major development in relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church.

While in Rome, Pope Tawadros II also celebrated an Orthodox Divine Liturgy at the Papal Basilica of St. John Lateran and visited the local Coptic Orthodox community.

The Catholic Church recognizes the validity of the Orthodox Church’s sacraments.

Pope Tawadros II, 70, is the 118th pope of Alexandria and patriarch of the See of St. Mark, the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. There are an estimated 10 million Coptic Orthodox Christians in the world, roughly 90% of whom live in Egypt.

St. Peter’s Basilica Introduces ‘Prayer Entrance’ Amid Tourism Influx

By Courtney Mares

CNA—With 100,000 people cramming into St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday in 2023, the lines to enter the Vatican basilica have returned to their prepandemic wait times.

In light of the influx of tourists to the Eternal City, the Vatican has introduced a separate “prayer entrance” for Catholics who want to enter St. Peter’s Basilica for Mass, confession, or adoration.

The entrance, signaled only by a small sign, is immediately to the right of the barricades to enter through the metal detectors on the right side of the piazza.

Mountain Butorac, who leads small groups of Catholics on pilgrimages to Rome with his company The Catholic Traveler, calls the prayer entrance “long overdue.”

According to Butorac, it can take up to two hours of waiting in a long line to enter St. Peter’s Basilica during the peak tourism season.

“When I first moved to Rome, I was always going to Sunday Mass at St. Peter’s…, but then standing in line for an hour and a half to go to Mass got old pretty fast,” he told CNA.

“We also do weekly family confession there and we always would have to go right at 7 or 8 a.m. And now we can go later in the day,” he added.

Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, the archpriest of St. Peter’s Basilica, said the prayer entrance was introduced during Holy Week on an “experimental basis.”

“In line with the Holy Father’s wish, we would like

to restore maximum accessibility to the sanctuary for spiritual, liturgical, and celebratory life,” Cardinal Gambetti said.

The cardinal expressed hope that the new entrance will “allow the faithful, prayer groups, and pilgrims to come to pray in St. Peter’s and participate in the sacraments easily, without waiting in long queues.”

The prayer entrance will soon lead to a “pilgrim path” designated by red velvet ropes that will guide people along the right side wall of the basilica, while the throngs of tourists and guided groups will remain in the main part of the basilica.

The new path will bring pilgrims past Michelangelo’s Pietà and the tomb of St. John Paul II directly to the chapel with daily Eucharistic adoration and the back corner of the basilica reserved for confessions.

However, it appears that the Vatican is still coordinating the logistics of this prayer path after the soft launch of the new entrance during Holy Week, as the current prayer entrance merely drops pilgrims off at the front of the line to enter through security, essentially allowing those who wish to access the sacraments in the basilica an option to “skip the line.”

To enter, tell the security guard near the new prayer entrance sign that you are coming to the basilica to pray.

Recap of U.S. Bishops’ Spring Plenary in Orlando

ORLANDO, FL—TheThe United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) gathered June 14-16 for their Spring Plenary Assembly in Orlando, FL. Throughout the gathering, the bishops spent time in prayer and fraternal dialogue with one another.

Four of the action items the bishops voted on pertained to the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), the commission established for the benefit of bishops’ conferences in countries where English is used in the celebration of the Sacred Liturgy according to the Roman Rite.

1) The ICEL Gray Book of the Liturgical Texts for Saint Faustina Kowalska passed with 165 votes in favor, 0 votes against, and 2 abstentions. The approval of this requires a two-thirds vote of the Latin-rite bishops, with subsequent “confirmatio” from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

2) The ICEL Gray Book of the Ordinary of the Liturgy of the Hours passed with 165 votes in favor, 3 votes against, and 2 abstentions. The approval of this requires a two-thirds vote of the Latinrite bishops, with subsequent “confirmatio” and “recognitio” from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

3) The Proper Texts for the Dioceses of the United States of America for the Liturgy of the Hours passed with 168 votes in favor, 1 vote against, and 1 abstention. The approval of this requires a twothirds vote of the Latin-rite bishops, with subsequent “confirmatio” and “recognitio” from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

4) The bishops also passed an action item pertaining to the revision of the statutes that govern ICEL’s work with 165 votes in favor, 2 votes against, and 2 abstentions.

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Keynote Speakers Announced for 2023 Society for Catholic Liturgy Conference

The Society for Catholic Liturgy has announced that it will feature two keynote speakers at its 2023 conference, to be held in St. Paul, MN, on September 21-22—with registration starting on the evening of September 20. The theme for the 2023 Conference for the Society for Catholic Liturgy (SCL) is “Remain in me”: Liturgical Formation and the Eucharistic Revival

Both keynote addresses will emphasize the importance of liturgical formation in the life of faith. Oratorian Father Uwe Michael Lang, an Adoremus contributor and a liturgy scholar, will speak on “The Historical Formation of the Liturgy and Liturgical Formation,” and Brant J. Pitre, a biblical scholar, will speak on “Liturgical Formation and the Laity.”

Father Lang is a native of Nuremberg, Germany, and a priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in London. He has a doctorate in theology from the University of Oxford, and teaches Church history at Mater Ecclesiae College, St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, and Allen Hall Seminary, London. He is also on the Visiting Faculty of the Liturgical Institute in Mundelein, IL. He is a board member of the SCL and editor of the SCL’s journal, Antiphon.

Pitre is a New Testament scholar and Distinguished Research Professor of Scripture at the Augustine Institute in Greenwood Village, CO. He received a doctorate in theology from the University of Notre Dame and has written extensively in defense of Catholic teaching on such topics as transubstantiation, the perpetual virginity of Mary, the divinity of Jesus Christ, and the traditional authorship of the Gospels. Pitre currently lives in Louisiana with his wife and eight children.

The theme for this year’s SCL conference takes its inspiration from Pope Francis’s 2022 Apostolic Letter on the liturgy, Desiderio Desideravi. In the letter, Pope Francis calls for a “serious and vital liturgical formation” of the people of God through a “rediscovery of a theological understanding of the liturgy.” At the same time, the Catholic bishops of the United States have called for a three-year Eucharistic Revival (2022-2024), culminating in a Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, IN, in 2024.

According to the official announcement of this year’s theme, the SCL believes it has “a specific scholarly contribution to make in responding to both calls to action. We would like to pose a question: Is it possible that the recommitment to liturgical formation and the Eucharistic Revival can be integrated? How can a plan for the liturgical formation of the faithful contribute to the Eucharistic Revival in the United States?”

Referring to the Eucharistic congresses of the past century, the announcement noted, “the Eucharistic rites of the Church were presented as ways in which the whole Church might develop a new spiritual fervor that would serve as a medicine against individualism, secularization, violence, and injustice. At the heart of these efforts was the desire for a deeper participation in the mystery of Jesus Christ, the ‘true vine’ in which the life of the world remains, continuously sanctified by the prayer of the Church.”

An optional tour of the Cathedral of St. Paul will be offered on September 20, prior to registration, and Solemn Mass will be celebrated on both days of the conference. To register and for the full conference schedule, visit https://liturgysociety.org.

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Recovering Liturgical Sanity

By Christopher Carstens, Editor

It wasn’t until my sophomore year in college that I began to take my Catholic faith seriously. I was quick to quit the Sunday observance as soon as I left home. But thanks to the prayers of parents and relatives, and to the faithful example of influential peers, I was steered back to the Church through the doors of the Newman Center at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

Not long after I became more active at the Newman Center, the pastor handed me a book called Theology and Sanity by Frank Sheed. Sheed was an Australianborn writer, apologist, and street-corner evangelist and, together with his wife Maisie Ward, he founded Sheed and Ward Publishing. But beyond his example of a faithfilled, orthodox layman, Sheed’s Theology and Sanity was just what a young Catholic in my situation needed.

The thesis of Theology and Sanity is that the truths of faith, if true, are as fundamental to a sound mind—a sane mind—as the truths of biology, chemistry, or physics. Each newly conceived human life has its own, unique genetic code at conception; water is comprised of two parts Hydrogen and one part Oxygen; objects fall at a rate of around 9.8 meters per second, squared; God created all things out of nothing. Each of these aforementioned facts are true, regardless of whether or not one is a biologist, chemist, physicist, or religious believer. Whatever one wishes to do with such truths, however one wishes to respond (or not) to them, is a secondary matter. But to be unaware of them is to be ignorant; to think these truths are other than they are is to be in error—the sign of an unhealthy mind—mens insana

Liturgical truths are equally necessary for a healthy—and holy—mind. It is essential that we see the liturgy correctly if we wish to “equate the mind and the thing” (to paraphrase St. Thomas Aquinas’s definition of truth).

What, then, stands before your mind’s eye at Mass? Do you see the Paschal Sacrifice of Christ offered to the Father? Do you hear the angels sing? Do you feel the grace of the Holy Spirit pulsate through your veins (that is, the veins of the Mystical Body) as we become men of full stature? If not, then your mind may not be as healthy as it ought.

In the United States, much has been made about the 2019 Pew Study that purports to find that a mere 30 percent of Catholics see Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Or, to put it another way, nearly 70 percent are not seeing what’s really there before their praying eyes. To regain a degree of liturgical sanity, it is imperative that Catholics are “led toward a new kind of seeing, in which their eyes are gradually opened from within to the point where they recognize him afresh and cry out ‘It is the Lord!’” (Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 120).

Two practical tasks demand our attention if we wish to acquire liturgical health: first, the priest and his ministers must celebrate the liturgy beautifully, faithfully, and authentically; second, the faithful must learn to see beneath the surface of the ritual’s sacramental signs and symbols to the reality—Christ— they contain.

To begin with, the priest-celebrant is tasked with celebrating the Church’s liturgy according to the Church’s mind. At his ordination, he is asked by the bishop: “Do you resolve to celebrate the mysteries of Christ reverently and faithfully according to the tradition of the Church, especially in the Sacrifice of the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Reconciliation, for the praise of God and the sanctification of the Christian

people?” The Church, after all, is the Bride of Christ, born from his opened side upon the cross. She knows who he is, what he looks like, how he acts—she knows the truth about the Truth. And for centuries she has been cultivating sacramental rites that reveal and communicate her Bridegroom to the world.

To be sure, this Church has its human members and, consequently, human limitations: as long as human beings are involved in the advancement or restoration of the liturgy, their efforts will be marked with fallenness and finitude that struggle to express the inexpressible God. The common critique of the preconciliar liturgies, for example, claims that the rites obscured more than they revealed (“overlaid with whitewash” was how Pope Benedict XVI put it). The Second Vatican Council desired to restore ritual elements that had fallen by the wayside over the year, to eliminate unnecessary duplications, and to simplify needlessly complex components. Yet the restored missal, too, is not without its critics: the loss of liturgical symbolism has oftentimes left a liturgy cold, didactic, and lacking in mystery. But these larger matters of reform are for the most part out of the control of most priests. What is in the priest’s power is his ability—indeed, his obligation—to celebrate the rites as given, for through these sacred celebrations, Christ will appear in our midst.

The faithful play the second key part in recovering liturgical sanity, for even when the priest does celebrate the rite as flawlessly as is humanly possible, the ritual demands that those at prayer see clearly and insightfully the Christ made present in sacred signs. That is, the liturgical disease may not be with the priest and the ritual, but with me. How can I come to see the Paschal Mystery in the Mass? Or discern the Body of Christ under the signs of bread? Or hear the Word of the Trinity in the words of the liturgy?

The prescription for the faithful’s shortcomings on this score is “mystagogical catechesis,” which “initiate[s] people into the mystery of Christ by proceeding from the visible to the invisible, from the sign to the thing signified, from the ‘sacraments’ to the ‘mysteries’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1075). A central component of mystagogy uncovers a sacramental sign’s meaning (which is ultimately Christ) by examining its sources. For example, a mystagogical look at something as simple as a church’s front door would consider the cherubim who guarded the door to the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24), the door marked with the blood of the lamb at that first Passover in Egypt (Exodus 12:7), the doors of pearl through which the saved pass into heaven (Revelation 21:21)—and how each of these shows that the building’s door is none other than Christ himself, “the door” (John 10:9). Ah, yes—now I see!

Regaining one’s liturgical sanity, then, is within our grasp. It requires that our priests “celebrate the

What stands before your mind’s eye at Mass? Do you see the Paschal Sacrifice of Christ offered to the Father? Do you hear the angels sing? Do you feel the grace of the Holy Spirit pulsate through your veins (that is, the veins of the Mystical Body) as we become men of full stature? If not, then your mind may not be as healthy as it ought.

mysteries of Christ faithfully and reverently according to the tradition of the Church,” as they promised at their ordination. It also requires that the faithful do the “spiritual therapy” necessary to bring their sacramental senses back to health and be “led toward that new kind of seeing.” Let us not misdiagnose the causes of today’s liturgical insanity. It does not lie— or at least does not principally lie—with Councils, Consiliums, or Commissions, nor with clerics high and low. Rather, it lies with—and within—each of us at the liturgy.

In one of the opening paragraphs of Theology and Sanity, Sheed understands that true sanity is found in looking with the eyes of the Church. While it’s true that he was speaking about more than the liturgy, his words still apply here: “Seeing what [the Church] sees means seeing what is there. And just as loving what is good is sanctity, or the health of the will, so seeing what is there is sanity, or the health of the intellect.”

While consuming too much cantankerous commentary can make one lose one’s mind, a healthy diet of authentic liturgy, celebrated after the mind of the Church, and engaged with intelligence and docility will always be a prescription for not only, as Sheed says, intellectual health, but also and ultimately, for spiritual health.

Pop Quiz: Are You Smarter Than a Liturgist?

How would you answer these liturgy-related questions? (All of them are typically posed to liturgists.)

1. Can the dead receive the sacrament of anointing?

2. When bringing holy communion to the sick, does the extraordinary minister of Holy Communion purify the pix?

3. Can soap go into the sacrarium?

4. When is Holy Communion under both kinds allowed?

5. Can Catholic chapels (at hospitals and universities, for instance) share its resources, such as the building or altar, with non-Catholic groups?

6. When do extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion leave Mass to distribute communion to the homebound?

7. Does the Universal Prayer have to be prayed at every Mass?

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Continued from HYMNAL, page 1 liturgical poetry. However, in the second edition of the Liturgy of the Hours, these beautiful hymns have been restored to their proper place in the English liturgical books. Many of these hymns have been a part of the Church’s liturgy for centuries, complemented by newer additions for the more recent additions to the feasts on the calendar, as noted in the foreword to the hymnal. The U.S. Bishops voted to approve the translation of the hymn texts at their plenary session in November 2019. The Holy See confirmed this translation in May 2020. With the inclusion of these hymn texts, when the second edition of the Liturgy of the Hours is released, it will be the first time the whole of the proper of the Divine Office is available in English.

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Hamburg, 1690

The Divine Office Hymnal contains 128 distinct plainsong melodies, along with 52 simple and familiar metrical tunes for ease of use by the faithful. The text of the hymn “Receive, O Mary, Virgin Pure,” for example, appears with a modern, metrical tune (Winchester neW) as well as a traditional plainsong melody.

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These liturgical texts are also made available by ICEL to the other English-speaking episcopal conferences who may take up this project (e.g., England and Wales, Australia). These will be the first updated books for the Divine Office available in the English-speaking world. The U.S. edition of the Divine Office does differ in some ways from the liturgical books of other English-speaking conferences. For instance, scriptural readings will vary from conference to conference. In the dioceses of the United States, the scriptural readings are taken from the New American Bible Revised Edition, and the psalms from The Abbey Psalms and Canticles—the newest Revised Grail Psalms with the approved translation of the Old and New Testament canticles. According to the translation principles of Magnum Principium, each conference may produce its own translation of these liturgical books, but the core of the texts could be common throughout all of the English-speaking editions.

The hymn is a unique element of the Liturgy of the Hours as a non-biblical poetic composition that assists

the faithful in entering more deeply into this eternal song of Christ. In these hymns, we hear “the voice of the Church responding to the Word of God” (Foreword). The GILH describes the significance of the hymn: “A very ancient tradition gives hymns the place in the office that they still retain. By their mystical and poetic character they are specifically designed for God’s praise. But they also are an element for the people; in fact, more often than the other parts of the office, the hymns bring out the proper theme of individual hours or feasts and incline and draw the spirit to a devout celebration. The beauty of their language often adds to this power. Furthermore, in the office, hymns are the main poetic element created by the Church” (173).

AB/UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS Te Deum 683                       - - - - O God we praise you; O Lord we ac claim you E ter nal Fa ther Ï                   - - - all the earth re veres you All the an gels, the heav ens and the Pow’rs                    - - - - - -

                        - - - praise:

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Notably, the hymn translations use non-rhyming texts, a decision made in order to maintain the metrical pattern as well as the accent patterns of the

“ When the second edition of the Liturgy of the Hours is released, it will be the first time the whole of the proper of the Divine Office is available in English.”

original Latin texts. The committee recognized that emphasizing rhyme could sacrifice content and meter, and pose a challenge in maintaining the theological integrity of the texts. Another unique aspect to these texts is the elevated linguistic register of this liturgical poetry, fitting the dignity of the ancient melodies, and yet also readable even when not sung.

r y                      - - - - - - e glo rious choir of A pos tles sings to you, the no ble com pa                         - - - - - ny of proph ets prais es you the white robed ar my of mar tyrs                      - - - - - glo ri �es you, Ho ly Church through out the earth pro claims you,                      - - - - - Fa ther of bound less maj es ty with your true and on ly S on Ï                      - - - - - - - - wor thy of ad o ra tion, and the Ho ly Spir it, Par a clete                   - - - - You, O Christ, are the King of glo r y, you are the Fa ther’s ev er                    - - - last ing S on; when you re solved to save the hu man race you did not   Divine Office Hymnal.indd 724 3/24/23 9:25 AM AB/UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS

An international music committee was formed by ICEL and the USCCB. The committee considered the meter and accent placement of the Latin hymn texts with their melodies, worked with the translations, and studied and adapted the melodies for the chant. The book contains 128 distinct plainsong melodies. Additionally, the committee proposed metrical hymn tunes suitable for each of these hymn texts. The music committee selected some 52 simple and familiar metrical tunes for ease of use by the faithful. Some of these tunes may be more familiar to Catholics in Britain than to Catholics in American or Canadian communities, as this was an international effort with chant experts from multiple countries. The result is a beautiful liturgical book of music, with two options for each hymn text: one set to the chant melody and one setting to a metrical hymn on facing pages.

Plainsong Melodies

The ancient and yet ever new Gregorian melodies of the hymns are taken from the Liber Hymnarius, the Latin book of hymns for the Liturgy of the Hours. Some of the Gregorian melodies have been

slightly altered with the goal of accommodating the English accent patterns of the hymn texts as they differ from Latin accent placement. In the foreword, we are introduced to the new term “eased plainsong,” describing this light alteration of the chant melody. In fact, 76 of the melodies are “eased,” while the rest of the chant melodies remain unaltered. Notably, the most recognizable chants are intact: the Veni Creator Spiritus and the Vexilla Regis, among others. Tunes that are eased are marked with an asterisk in the index to the hymnal.

One of the beautiful features of this book is the repetition of melodies within a liturgical season or on a particular liturgical day, which provides an aural reminder of the natural rhythm to the cycles of days and seasons of the liturgical year. The foreword to the Liber Hymnarius notes that the hymns highlight

the Gregorian chant in the union of word and melody. As the foreword to the Divine Office Hymnal notes, “the natural accentuation of the text itself expresses the

reproducing the same melodic/textual combinations, the permissions are more limited. After the second edition of the Liturgy of the Hours has been available for a year, the permissions open more broadly. After five years, the permissions become even more available. The current projection for a release date of the new Liturgy of the Hours is in 2026. It is estimated that more than half of those who pray the Liturgy of the Hours currently receive it in an electronic format. The USCCB is exploring the possibility of app development so that the faithful can have free access to the prayer of the Church, a substantial step in responding to that encouragement for the faithful to take up this prayer as their own.

rhythmic character of the chant, a cantillation arising from the text.”

The melodies contained in the Divine Office Hymnal are not definitive settings, but represent a significant start to a recovery of these beautiful melodies of the Church’s continuous musical tradition. These chants are in a certain sense a link connecting Catholics with their own musical patrimony, says ICEL’s Msgr. Wadsworth.

Approved for Liturgical Use

Renewal of Musical Prayer

a theme or mood for the liturgical day, drawing the faithful into the mystery or season being celebrated. Adam Bartlett, founder of the music publisher Source and Summit, emphasizes that this hymnal is truly an “opportunity for people of the English-speaking world to understand more deeply hymnody in the liturgy.” The chant notation is presented with stemless round modern notation on the 5-line staff, which provides the greatest accessibility to a wider audience, and in a range suited to congregational singing.

For communities already familiar with the Gregorian melodies of the Liturgy of the Hours, they may note these differences in the resetting in English. For those who are interested in the nuances involved in the adaptation of Gregorian chant to the vernacular, one criticism of the new hymnal is that the musicalmetrical accent appears to be the priority, rather than the “melodic-verbal synthesis,” a term borrowed from Dom Eugène Cardine. He argues that the melodic accent and the verbal accent should reach their zenith together (see his work, Beginning Studies in Gregorian Chant). One such example in this collection is the hymn Ave Maris Stella—a shift of one note from the first syllable onto the second would have preserved the traditional placement of the word-accents in the Latin and retained its same feel in English. Of course, this is more a matter of differences in approach by chant experts than a criticism of the work as a whole. For, this is the great difficulty in adapting chant into other languages: preserving the melodic-textual integrity of

The Task of Liturgical Formation

By Father Romano Guardini

Editor’s note: Romano Guardini’s first contribution to the liturgical movement was his 1918 work, The Spirit of the Liturgy. In 1923, he moved beyond and deepened, often rather philosophically, what The Spirit of the Liturgy had begun with his short book Liturgical Formation (Liturgische Bildung). References to this 1923 book would appear throughout his subsequent writings. This short text would even be republished by Guardini in 1965 along with additional essays, and republished once again in 1992 under the title of Liturgy and Liturgical Formation (Liturgie und Liturgische Bildung). Pope Francis’s 2022

Apostolic Letter Desiderio Desideravi cites Guardini’s text regularly. Despite the significance of Guardini’s 1923 book, it had only existed in German and Italian until Liturgy Training Publications, the Adoremus Bulletin, and Adoremus contributor and translator Jan Bentz provided the text to the English-speaking world in 2022. A short excerpt from the book follows here. To order the complete work, see www.ltp.org.

Liturgy does not deal with knowledge, but with reality. There is knowledge of the liturgical action, which precedes it and could be called liturgical knowledge [Liturgik in the original German].1 And there

The Divine Office Hymnal contains hymn texts for each of the hours of the liturgical day. Following the General Roman Calendar with celebrations proper to the United States, all of the hymn texts are included for the Proper of Time, followed by the Proper of the Saints, the Commons, the Office of the Dead, and the Te Deum in English. The indices are searchable by composers, authors, and sources, plainsong melodies, metrical tunes, Latin titles, English titles, celebrations, and the Proper of Time. The index of plainsong melodies also indicates the sources of these melodies, almost entirely taken from the Liber Hymnarius

The study of the hymnody of the Divine Office will also result in a significant scholarly contribution: a forthcoming five-volume commentary on the hymns (both on their Latin texts and the significance highlighted by the English translations) will be published by Catholic University of America Press. This academic commentary will represent the rich research undertaken by ICEL, a work of tremendous value for the promotion and study of the liturgical texts under the guidance of Msgr. Wadsworth.

The hymn texts in the Divine Office Hymnal are approved for liturgical use. As in previous editions of the liturgical chant books, only the texts are given an imprimatur as the songs are not official melodies, meaning the texts could be reset to other hymn tunes. In terms of the copyright permissions, the USCCB has granted limited exclusivity to GIA Publications of Chicago to print the Divine Office Hymnal ICEL owns the copyright to the liturgical texts in English, and allows printing as directed by the USCCB. For composers eager to set these texts to original melodies, new hymn tunes and compositions can be approved (up to 10 per collection) and published until the new Liturgy of the Hours is printed. For collections

is knowledge within it; the liturgical event allows an insight into itself. To speak about this today is not easy because it has escaped our religious consciousness at large. The liturgy itself is not merely knowledge but a full reality, which embraces much more than knowledge alone: a doing, an order, and the being of itself.

Thus, when we ask ourselves which tasks are assigned to the liturgy, we are not dealing with a scientific endeavor, which would be liturgy (Liturgik). We are not dealing with spiritual counseling and magisterium, but mainly with formation, the word taken in its essential meaning. In this way, it wants to lead the individual in his entirety to the religious-cultic behavior, which makes up the essence of the liturgical life.

This task does not impose itself. Liturgy is not a hobby of an elect group of kindred spirits, but it is the center core of the unbroken Catholic ecclesiastical life itself, neither artificially made by the liturgical movement nor simply sprung forth from the awakening will of the fully Catholic-Christian way of life. This fact is unquestionable. Rather, we are dealing with how a truly liturgical life was able to develop. Not just in places where it could flourish due to favorable circumstances, with people who had a

This new liturgical book, published by the U.S. bishops and confirmed by the Holy See, is a liturgical book entirely comprised of music. What an incredible gift to the Church in this day and age! The beautiful hymn texts and the musical inheritance of the Roman Rite will be even more widely available to encourage and enrich liturgical prayer. This hymnal is a significant contribution to the whole of the Church, whether for individual priests praying the Divine Office on their own, those in religious communities and seminaries praying in common, or the faithful in their parishes and the domestic Church.

The foreword to the Divine Office Hymnal, which was written by Bishop Steven J. Lopes, Chairman of the USCCB Committee on Divine Worship, concludes with this hopeful outlook: “Almost sixty years ago, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council expressed an earnest desire that the entire Church—clergy, religious, and laity—join in offering praise to God in the Divine Office. The Council encouraged prayer in common whenever possible, and prayer that is carried out with understanding as well as devotion. We hope that this volume will contribute to a renewal in this most beautiful and powerful prayer of the Church.”

See giamusic.com/store/the-divine-office-hymnal to order.

Alexis Kazimira Kutarna is a PhD candidate in Liturgical Studies with a concentration in Church Music at the University of Vienna, and recipient of the Ratzinger Foundation Grant for doctoral studies. She earned a Master of Arts in Liturgy at The Liturgical Institute at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary. She holds a master’s and bachelor’s degree in music, as well as a Performer’s Certificate. Alexis teaches courses on the liturgy and liturgical music at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, and directs the St. Basil School of Gregorian Chant. She was the founding director of sacred music at Cathedral High School in Houston, and now serves as the school principal. Most important is her vocation as wife and mother to two daughters.

special disposition for it, or in the spiritual environment of a Benedictine abbey, but in the everyday life of a parish community. Yet exactly here lies a danger. Whosoever lives the liturgy will be happy about an attempt to unlock its treasures. However, faced with some texts on the liturgy, one will have to admit that only what comes out of its core and essence can truly serve the liturgy in the end.

If richer knowledge about liturgical things is to be taught and joy awakened regarding liturgical actions, and if liturgical concepts are to become religious exercises even to those who had been strangers to them previously, the result will be a partial success, even if there will always be room for improvement. The central question remains: What is the essence of a liturgical attitude?2 What would be required of man and the community to be rooted in the liturgy? Which forces and sensitivities need to be activated—even, yes, the core of every person—[that is, his or her being]? We are dealing with a very special skill, a becoming, and a growing; indeed, we are dealing with a kind of being. That means we are dealing with a problem of “formation” in the truest sense of the word.

The forces that presuppose such a skill, the sensitivities from which these forces arise, the whole being that carries these sensitivities—these all have withered since the beginning of modernity. Certainly, one will bring up the objection that this kind of approach ties liturgical action to a specific time and cultural-psychological predispositions. Such an approach is not permitted when dealing with Catholic religious practices—that is,

“This is the great difficulty in adapting chant into other languages: preserving the melodic-textual integrity of the Gregorian chant in the union of word and melody.”

“This new liturgical book, published by the U.S. bishops and confirmed by the Holy See, is a liturgical book entirely comprised of music. What an incredible gift to the Church!”

The Eucharistic Dynamic of Beauty

by Mary Catherine Levri

Beauty is an evasive idea—in the sense that it is difficult to arrive at its concrete definition. It is much easier to speak of its effects— beauty captivates us, beauty fills us with desire, beauty transforms us—than it is to speak of its specific nature. Nevertheless, certain attributes have emerged, beginning with a classical Greek understanding of beauty, and Christian thinkers throughout history have continued to use these attributes in their own understanding of the subject. The aspects of integrity (integritas), proportionality (harmonia), and radiance (claritas) accompany some of the earliest thought on beauty, and the notion of wholeness of form is at the heart of this basic understanding of what beauty is: that which is flawed, that which is imperfect, cannot be beautiful. Yet, it seems a Catholic understanding of beauty contains within it a certain space for the unconventional, the strange, and even the shocking. While the classical attributes of beauty could certainly be assigned to much of the glorious Catholic art that has been created across the ages, the scandal of the Incarnation at the heart of the Christian mystery begs a wider scope than the Greek classical view on beauty might be able to offer. But what is this strange innovation in the Catholic understanding of beauty?

Digest on Beauty

This past semester, in a course on the theology of aesthetics, I read with my seminarians an illuminating and fascinating book called Eating Beauty: the Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages by Ann W. Astell. In this book, Astell argues that each of the main spiritualities of the Middle Ages—the Cistercian, the Franciscan, and the Dominican, and the spirituality of the Jesuits— receive their charisms, in the mode of a particular key virtue, from Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. These spiritualities, or ways of holiness, serve to restore the God-given beauty of the fallen world. Astell writes: “Given the remedial and restorative quality of the Eucharist, Christ was received under the aspect of different root virtues depending on the interpretation of the first sin.... Thus the one Christ took form (the essential quality of the beautiful) through divine grace and human striving in four different ‘ways’ of holiness during the Middle Ages, each of them aimed at the artistic restoration of God’s likeness in humanity.”1

The original sin of Adam and Eve was eating the alluring fruit at which they only should have looked; by contrast, the eating of the Eucharist is “a sacramental foretaste of, and guarantee for, that heavenly looking and eating.” In heaven, looking at and eating beauty will be one and the same thing. The saints (such as St. Clare of Assisi, pictured above), nourished and transformed by the beauty of the Eucharist, restore the beauty of the world in and through the radiation of the beautiful virtues which they have received from the Lord.

does our Eucharistic Lord eat the one who eats him: “God’s eating of us and our eating of Him in the Eucharist are not destructive of beauty, [Weil] insists, but rather a way to participate in Beauty itself, the same Beauty that expresses itself in obedience to God’s law of charity.”5 The one who receives the Eucharist is unmade, remade, and integrated into the body of Jesus Christ, leaving the eater sanctified, hungrier for the Lord, and hungrier for souls. The one transformed by the Eucharist is zealous to allow the world to be transformed in Christ through his witness.

Perfect Flaws

In Astell’s argument for establishing each of these Medieval spiritualities as an artistic restoration of the imago Dei—as a way of beauty—she uses the aesthetic framework of Simone Weil, who argues for two kinds of “eating beauty”: “There are two ways to eat beauty, according to Weil. One way destroys the beauty of the world and the beloved; the other preserves and enhances it.”2 For Weil, the original sin of Adam and Eve was eating the alluring fruit at which they only should have looked; but, by contrast, the eating of the Eucharist is “a sacramental

foretaste of, and guarantee for, that heavenly looking and eating.”3 In heaven, says Weil, where our desire will not be distorted by sin, looking at and eating beauty will be one and the same thing.4

Drawing on these two ways of eating, Astell takes up the framework of “apple and Eucharist,” citing the virtue at the center of each Medieval spirituality as a Eucharistic remedy to a particular version of the original sin. (For instance, the virtue at the heart of the Franciscan spirituality is humility, which counteracts the sin of avarice.) Nourished and transformed by the beauty of the Eucharist, the saints restore the beauty of the world in and through the radiation of the beautiful virtues which they have received from the Lord.

The marvel of Astell’s argument here is that, first, it associates beauty primarily and primordially with sanctity: the sanctity of the Trinity, the sanctity of the Eucharistic Lord, the sanctity of the saints, and the sanctity of creation. Secondly, Astell identifies the transformative dynamic of beauty—a dynamic to which both Greek and Christian thinkers have attested—with the transformative and sanctifying dynamic of the Eucharist. We become what we receive. Beauty never simply “lets one be.” If the beholder truly allows himself to be taken by beauty, beauty leaves him lovelier and hungrier for truth, and awakened to the beauty present in the things of creation. So, too, Astell asserts, in referencing Weil,

Now, what is central to Astell’s notion of the beauty of the Eucharist is the Blessed Sacrament’s simultaneous containment of the Christus gloriosus (the glorified Christ in his resurrected body) and the Christus deformis (the suffering, deformed Christ). The Eucharist surely consists of the body, blood, soul, and divinity of the glorified Christ, and yet it also consists of the representation of his Passion and Death. This posits a problem for a classical understanding that considers beauty to be flawless, complete, and perfect. Astell addresses this problem by referencing the work of Carol Harrison on the thought of St. Augustine regarding beauty and revelation. Harrison points to St. Paul’s canticle of Philippians 2:6-8, which was frequently referenced by Augustine regarding the suffering Christ: “Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”6

These two forms of Christ—the form of God and the form of the slave—are held in tension in and through Christ’s pouring out of himself in his Passion and Death. Harrison asserts, “The absolute form and beauty of God therefore descends to absolute deformity—to death on a cross. His beauty and deformity are held together in forma servi and in forma Dei, so that Augustine often quotes Philippians 2:6-8 in this context....”7 St. Augustine expands the notion of beauty to include the suffering of Christ, allowing the words of both Psalm 44:3 (“You are the most handsome of men”) and Isaiah 53:2 (“He had no majestic bearing to catch our eye, no beauty to draw us to him”) to coexist in truth.8

This is the theological point at which a merely classical understanding of beauty ceases to suffice. When we eat the beauty of the Eucharist, we eat the deformity of Christ, and literally come to bear his suffering in our bodies (2 Corinthians 4:10). Indeed, Astell points to the stigmata of St. Francis as the “declaratory seal,” which “confirm[s] the life of St. Francis as a divine artwork, a masterpiece to which

“It seems a Catholic understanding of beauty contains within it a certain space for the unconventional, the strange, and even the shocking.”

“ When we eat the beauty of the Eucharist, we eat the deformity of Christ and come to bear his suffering in our bodies.”

“In heaven, looking at and eating beauty will be one and the same thing.”

AB/WELCOME COLLECTION. SAINT CLARE OF ASSISI, BY JEREMIASZ FALCK (C. 1610-1677)

Christ the Artist lays claim by affixing His wounds as a kind of signature.”9 The beautiful form of the life of a saint is incomplete if it does not include within it the deformity of Christ’s suffering. Just as Christ’s glorified body retains the wounds of his Passion, so must the life of a saint, the via pulchritudinis, contain within it an obedience that suffers unto death.

Deformed and Reformed

This remarkable understanding of personal holiness within the framework of Eucharistic beauty is both disruptive and dazzling. The idea that one’s life is a work of art fashioned by the hands of the Lord awakens a desire in oneself to be spiritually beautiful, and it sheds a refreshing, meaningful, and redemptive light on personal suffering. As a church musician and professor of music, though, I would like to consider this Eucharistic aesthetic framework on the level of artistic practice and vocation. What does this Eucharistic understanding of beauty mean for the arts? How does one approach musicmaking—in particular, liturgical music—within the framework of the scandalizing beauty of Jesus Christ?

For the dimension of practice, this framework of Eucharistic beauty might mean that liturgical music must continue to keep an openness to musical styles that contain a certain deformity within them. Here, I am speaking of a kind of music that reflects Christian suffering; not that which is stylistically lewd, maudlin, or deliberately offensive, but that which might contain harmonic discomfort, unusual compositional techniques, and a certain amount of unsettledness. It is possible for musical compositions to hold this artistic “deformity" within an artistic glory; from the perspective of visual art, many depictions of the Crucifixion in

the Catholic treasury of iconography, painting, and sculpture could be considered proof of this point.

As for the musical treasury of the Church, one could point to the strangely beautiful Tenebrae responsories of Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613) as an example of liturgical music which contains a palpable element of suffering within it. One can hear the bodily contortion, and almost feel the physical pain of the Lord, in these pieces. It takes great craftsmanship and wholeness of offering for the musician to accomplish a glorious presentation of deformity in his work, but the scandal of Catholic beauty requires an openness to it. Certainly, if the Church does not allow a space for authentic suffering in her art, then the world will take it up on its own terms. Absent Christ, a consideration of deformity and suffering becomes victimization, bitterness, cynicism, masochism, and a hatred of the human form. Without Christ, suffering becomes ugliness. The Church owes the world an un-sanitized Beauty, which is why she leaves room for an honest artistic presentation of suffering.

For the spiritual dimension—the vocational lives of liturgical musicians—the framework of Eucharistic beauty means that we must live our artistic vocations in humble service: we must always consider the beauty of our artistic offering to be subservient to the beauty of God present in the Eucharist. The beauty of liturgical art is only attendant to the beauty of the Lord, which means that it is also attendant to the beauty of the imago Dei—the beauty of human beings, the ones made in God’s image. As the saints radiate the beauty of the Eucharistic Lord to the people of the world in their charisms, missions, and works, so must our liturgical music compel the faithful to share the beauty they have received in the Mass with the whole human family. Claimed as we are by the love of the Christus deformis, the beauty of the Mass should send the faithful running towards the lonely, the poor, the sick, the abandoned, and the dying—the suffering ones who are most like Christ. Beauty runs its obvious course when it arrives at the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

The beautiful form of the life of a saint is incomplete if it does not include within it the deformity of Christ’s suffering. Just as Christ’s glorified body retains the wounds of his Passion, so must the life of a saint, the via pulchritudinis, contain within it an obedience that suffers unto death.

The Christian call to divinization means that we ourselves become gift—become beauty— and take a glorious part in the salvation and restoration of the world. The beauty of the world owes its existence, just as we do, to a Eucharistic reality. Let this be the reason for our art.

Wholly One

It would be tempting to consider the definition of beauty as a Eucharistic reality to be a wonderful but happenstance idea, as simply the identification of two categories with each other that have a lot in common but, at the end of the day, are two separate entities. There aren’t enough words left to me in this article (or in my mind!) to broach this consideration adequately, but I believe such a consideration would be a mistake. It would be far closer to the truth to consider that the beauty of the world, found in nature, art, human construction, and human beings, is a gift from the God who loves us, the one who poured himself out at the Last Supper and on Mount Calvary.

Mary Catherine Levri is the professor and director of music at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, where she teaches a developed music curriculum and directs the Sacred Music Institute. She currently serves as the President of the Society for Catholic Liturgy, and has given lectures on church music for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, the National Association of Pastoral Musicians, the American Guild of Organists, and the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy.

1. Ann W. Astell, Eating Beauty: the Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006): 16.

2. Astell, Eating Beauty, 5.

3. Astell, Eating Beauty, 6.

4. See Simone Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” in Waiting for God (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2009), 105.

5. Astell, Eating Beauty, 5.

6. See also Carol Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 236.

7. Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine 236.

8. Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine, 236.

9. Astell, Eating Beauty, 128.

“As the saints radiate the beauty of the Eucharistic Lord to the people of the world in their charisms, missions, and works, so must our liturgical music compel the faithful to share the beauty they have received in the Mass with the whole human family.”

“ The one who receives the Eucharist is unmade, remade, and integrated into the body of Jesus Christ.”

“Love Has Made in Us a Sort of Death”—

The Eucharistic Ecclesiology of Henri de Lubac

By Owen Vyner

Liturgical renewal leads to renewal in the life of the Church. To this end, in the late 19th century, theologians returned to biblical and patristic sources, read through authentic liturgical development, to study anew the mystery of the Eucharist and the Church. Essentially, the hope was to enable the faithful to engage the sacraments and liturgy more deeply so that they could undertake the mission of evangelization with greater effectiveness.

In particular, a revitalized understanding of the Church as communion or mystical body, if lived and interiorized by the faithful, could indeed resist the fragmenting effects of modernity and what we now call “post-modernity.”1 The Eucharistic theology of Henri de Lubac has proven prophetic in this regard. De Lubac was a peritus at the Second Vatican Council who stated, “The Church makes the Eucharist and the Eucharist makes the Church.” It is a maxim that has shaped the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent theology of the Church, having been quoted in both the Catechism of the Catholic Church and St. John Paul II’s last encyclical, his 2003 Ecclesia de Eucharistia. Indeed, such pithy yet profound sayings among the Church’s thinkers have a tendency to take on a life of their own. Consider St. Augustine’s often quoted exclamation from the opening lines of his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you,” or Pope St. Leo the Great’s brief on the sacraments: “What was visible in Christ has passed over into the sacraments.” In a similar way, de Lubac’s maxim offers a universe in a grain of sand, so to speak. This article will examine the meaning of de Lubac’s statement in light of his major works, especially his Corpus Mysticum (Mystical Body) published in 1944. When we turn to de Lubac’s writings we see that the fruit of the Eucharist is the unity of the Church. In the first part of this article, I will explore this connection between the Eucharist and the Church. Following this, I will discuss the work of the Holy Spirit in bringing about the Church’s unity.

One key aspect of de Lubac’s Eucharistic ecclesiology that must be attended to is the centrality of sacrifice to his thought. What is particularly interesting is the fact that despite de Lubac’s obvious influence on the Church in the post-Conciliar period, there has been reluctance by certain theologians to portray the Mass as a sacrifice, instead favoring an emphasis on the Mass as a shared community-building meal. However, there is a unity to de Lubac’s thought and to favor one element (the Eucharist’s building of the Church) over another (the re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross) does harm to this internal coherence in his work. Thus, it is precisely through an understanding of the sacrificial nature of the Mass that we can arrive at a correct Eucharistic ecclesiology that includes rather than opposes the two interpretative emphases of the Eucharist.

The Eucharist Makes the Church

Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) has been described as a modern Father of the Church.2 His contributions to the Second Vatican Council’s theology of the Church, the Eucharist, and the human person, have been welldocumented.3 One of the most significant questions he raises in the period leading up to the Council is the relationship between the Eucharist and the Church.

In his programmatic work, Catholicism, de Lubac addressed the corrupting influence of individualism on Christianity. In responding to this individualism, de Lubac refers to the social nature of the sacraments. He describes sacraments as instruments of unity because they are the means of salvation. Salvation, while pertaining to individuals, is always social (c.f. Romans 5:15; 2 Corinthians 5:14-15; 1 John 2:2). The restoration of the human person to communion with the blessed Trinity, although personal, cannot be seen as individualistic. Grace, which is the very life of God, is communitarian because God is a communion of persons.

As a primary means of salvation, sacraments strengthen the Christian’s union with Christ. In doing this, they draw the Christian more deeply into union with the Church, who is Christ’s body. In fact, the social-ecclesial effect of the sacraments is so foundational for de Lubac that one cannot be

Henri

Council and the subsequent theology of the Church.

united to Christ except through the Church. All sacraments are sacraments of the Church, and in the Church alone do they produce their full effect. Chief among these means of grace, the Eucharist is the sacrament of unity par excellence. Through participation in the one bread, those who are many are brought into unity (c.f. 1 Corinthians 10:17). De Lubac examines various texts from the Patristic period that refer to unity of the Church being effected by the Eucharist. One Church Father whom he cites is St. Cyril of Alexandria, who writes, “We are all of us, by nature, separately confined in our own individualities, but in another way, all of us are united together. Divided as it were into distinct personalities…we are, so to say, molded into one sole body in Christ, feeding on one flesh alone. One Spirit singles us out for unity, and as Christ is one and indivisible we are all no more but one in him. So did he say to his heavenly Father, ‘That they may be one, as we are one.’”4

symbolic and real became symbolic or real. For de Lubac, a new era in human thought that had given reason an eminent role had emerged: “Understanding was entering into a new era, and Berengar of Tours, however mediocre his genius might have been, was nevertheless one of its first examples and most vigorous architects.”9

The loss of the anagogical and its replacement with the dialectical is no less serious a danger for the Church today, despite the prescient warnings of de Lubac. In his introduction to de Lubac’s Catholicism, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote:

“If previously there was a narrowing of the Christian vision to an individualism, we are now in danger of a sociological leveling down. Sacraments are often seen merely as celebrations of the community.”10 This is because in an anagogical understanding of the Eucharist, communion with Christ’s Eucharistic body efficaciously signifies our communion in his ecclesial body, certainly with the local parish, and also the universal Church, and ultimately the Church purified and glorified. In essence, with the anagogical

De Lubac notes however that in the history of the Church a slow inversion took place between the meanings of the expressions the “mystical body” and “the true body.” In the early Church, the mystical body (corpus mysticum) referred to the Eucharistic body, whereas the true body (corpus verum) was understood as the ecclesial body. Nevertheless, in the 11th and 12th centuries the referents of these terms switched. In order to defend the real presence against views that denied Christ’s substantial presence in the Eucharist, theologians began to speak of the true body as the Eucharist. The shift in meaning of mystical and true, coupled with a new style of reasoning that emerged in the Middle Ages, would result in a weakening of the link between the Church and the Eucharist. Whereas previously, “mystical” had referred to the sacrament or mystery, now it becomes opposed to the visible or true.5

At the heart of this change, or “sacramental forgetfulness,” as de Lubac diagnosed it, was a change in the manner of reasoning. The patristic cosmology was profoundly anagogical. “Anagogy” derives from the Greek word for “ascent” or climb” and, as such, in an anagogical world-view, every sensible thing is a “sacrament” that ascends to Christ and through him to the invisible God. For the early Church, rationality and contemplation therefore went hand in hand. However, beginning with Berengar of Tours (999-1088) and then developing in the 12th century, contemplation was separated from rationality and replaced by demonstration.6 Berengar himself achieved notoriety in his favoring of a “spiritual” or figural consuming of Christ’s body and blood and, in effect, denying that we receive the reality of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist. Berengar’s views were condemned by Popes Nicholas II and Gregory VII. Happily, at the end of his life Berengar wrote his Memoir apologizing for his errors.7

Resurrecting Symbol

It is the contention of de Lubac that the rationalism and dialectic which Berengar introduced led to the death of a truly symbolic and sacramental understanding of the Eucharist.8 To oppose mystical and true, or symbolic and real, would have been utterly foreign to the patristic mind. The dialectical method therefore separated what tradition had always unified: true and mystical became true or mystical;

In responding to modernism’s rampant individualism, de Lubac refers to the social nature of the sacraments. He describes sacraments as instruments of unity because they are the means of salvation, and salvation, while pertaining to individuals, is always social. The restoration of the human person to communion with the blessed Trinity, although personal, cannot be seen as individualistic. Grace, which is the very life of God, is communitarian because God is a communion of persons.

we can attest to both the real presence and Christ’s presence in the local Church community. However, with a dialectical approach, the temptation is to emphasize Christ’s presence in the local Church and instrumentalize his substantial presence in the Eucharist.

It is precisely this “sociological order” or, to use Ratzinger’s phrase, “leveling down,” that de Lubac is trying to avoid. It is not the community that assembles to make the Church; it is the Eucharist that makes the ecclesial community. A community-centered model of the Eucharist was exactly what de Lubac was negating when he coined his famous saying: “Now, the Eucharist is the mystical principle, permanently at work at the heart of Christian society, which gives concrete form to this miracle [i.e., the Church]. It is the universal bond, it is the ever-springing source of life. Nourished by the body and blood of the Savior, his faithful people thus all ‘drink of the one Spirit,’ who truly makes them into one single body. Literally speaking, therefore, the Eucharist makes the Church.”11

The reduction of the Church to a specific community realized by the Eucharist was not what de Lubac intended—nor, more importantly, was it ever intended by the Magisterium. The Eucharist, according to de Lubac, is the effective sign of both Christ and his union with his members in the Church and therefore refers to the whole Christ or the totus Christus. The totus Christus is the fullness of Christ as head and bridegroom united to his body and spouse, the Church. It therefore also refers to the heavenly Church. This anagogical or sacramental

“ The fruit of the Eucharist is the unity of the Church.”

De Lubac, S.J. (18961991), was a participant at the Second Vatican Council who stated “The Church makes the Eucharist and the Eucharist makes the Church.” It is a maxim that has shaped the Second Vatican

AB/WIKIPEDIA

understanding could not be further from the theology contained in many post-conciliar hymns that focus exclusively on the local parish.

We can summarize this first section by stating that in de Lubac’s Eucharistic ecclesiology, there is a causal link between the Eucharist and the Church. The Eucharist makes the Church. This means that the definitive reality brought about by the Eucharist is the unity of the Church—the Eucharistic body is the source of the ecclesial body. Furthermore, through the Church’s union with Christ, which is signified in the celebration of the Eucharist, we have a foretaste of that union eschatologically fulfilled in the wedding feast of the Lamb.

The Holy Spirit and Sacrifice

There are two interrelated sources of this unity between Christ and his Church, according to de Lubac, that deserve special focus. The first is the role of the Holy Spirit in effecting the communion of the Church. The second is the part that sacrifice plays in bringing about union. For de Lubac, the Spirit’s role in the effecting of unity in the Eucharist is fundamental. The Holy Spirit is the bond of love between the Father and the Son. It is the Holy Spirit who is the fulfillment of the Son’s prayer that the Church may be one as he and the Father are one, in the communion of the Holy Spirit (c.f. John 17:21).

De Lubac turned to the anaphoras, or Eucharistic prayers, of the Eastern rites for the earliest witness to the role of the Holy Spirit in gathering the Church into unity. In examining the Eastern anaphoras, de Lubac noted that the epiclesis, the petitioning of the Father to send the Spirit, was a prayer for union. He quotes the liturgy of St. Basil in this regard: “May all of us who partake of this one bread and chalice be united to one another in the communion of the same Holy Spirit.”12

The Holy Spirit, who was at work in the Incarnation (c.f. Luke 1:35), is also at work in the Eucharist and in effecting the unity of the Church. De Lubac states: “This Holy Spirit…intervenes too in the confection of the Eucharist for the making of his Mystical Body.”13 As such, when he says that the Eucharist makes the Church, it is done so by Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. For the Christian, the Eucharist completes what has begun in baptism. Through the one Spirit, he has been baptized into one body, the Church. In partaking of the one bread and chalice, and by the action of the Holy Spirit, there is a perfecting of this unity.

Finally, in considering the role of the Holy Spirit in the making of the Church, we see that it is the Spirit who transforms the sacrifice of the community so that it may be “acceptable” to the Father. This too is a central theme that is taken up by de Lubac14 and will be developed further in our discussion below on the importance of sacrifice in understanding the Eucharist’s relation to the Church. John Paul II, who collaborated with de Lubac during the Second Vatican Council, was able to distil in a typical de Lubacian manner the mission of the Holy Spirit in the acceptance of the sacrifice of the faithful in his 1986 encyclical letter, Dominum et vivificantem (“On the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church”): “The Holy Spirit as Love and Gift comes down, in a certain sense, into the very heart of the sacrifice which is offered on the Cross…. He consumes this sacrifice with the fire of the love which unites the Son with the Father in the Trinitarian communion.”15

While de Lubac would certainly agree that there has been within Christianity the danger of individualism, he would be surprised that the mention of sacrifice has almost been eradicated from the language of contemporary Eucharistic theology. There are theologians today who, while aiming to emphasize the unity of the Church realized by the Eucharist, tend to focus on the meal aspect of the Eucharist and downplay the sacrificial nature of the Mass. And yet, as de Lubac makes clear in Catholicism, sacrifice is central to unity, referring to suffering as the “very crucible wherein unity is forged.”16 It is this latter dimension which has been ignored in much postconciliar Eucharistic theology.

In the Teeth of Sacrifice

For de Lubac, the outward sign of bread in the Eucharist signifies more than a simple meal shared by the community. Quoting the mid-12th-century de Sacramentis of Master Simon, de Lubac notes the sacrificial imagery employed. In the making of bread,

grain is wetted, milled, and baked in fire. Master Simon sees this process as symbolically representing the life of the Christian. The Christian is wetted in baptism, crushed between millstones of hope and fear, and baked in the fire of passion and sorrow. So too are the grapes crushed in the production of wine.17

St. Ignatius of Antioch was another witness to the link between the Eucharist and the suffering of the Christian. Ignatius wrote: “I am the wheat of Christ; let me be crushed by the teeth of the beasts to become the bread of Christ.”18 This is far from an over-active allegorizing; rather, it is the unity that the early Church saw between the Eucharist and the life of the Christian in the Church. The Eucharist is the memorial of the Lord’s death on the Cross and, through partaking in the Eucharist, Christians truly become “branches of the Cross.”19

oblation acceptable to the Father. This transforming love both kills and vivifies, which is why Henri de Lubac, quoting St. Augustine, states: “The fortitude of charity could not have been expressed more wondrously than when it was said: mighty love is like death.... And since charity itself kills what we were, so that we be what we were not, love has made in us a sort of death.”21

Conclusion

In Splendour of the Church, which represents de Lubac’s theological application of the historical study of Corpus Mysticum, de Lubac highlights the role of sacrifice in the making of the Church. As a sign, the Eucharist effects the spiritual sacrifice that the totus Christus offers to the Father in the Holy Spirit. This sacrifice is the sacrament of Christ’s passion and a memorial of his death. For de Lubac, the entire Eucharistic reality is linked to Calvary.

There is a twofold dynamism in the celebration of the Eucharist and therefore the making of the Church. De Lubac expresses this dynamism thus: “the mystery of communication is rounded out in a mystery of communion.”20 Therefore, the faithful are called to participate in and to enter into communion with this sacrifice. De Lubac clearly understands the priesthood of the baptized although he correctly distinguishes between the priesthood of the faithful who offer spiritual sacrifice and that of the clergy who offer the sacrifice of the Eucharist. These two participations in the one priesthood of Christ—that by the clergy and by the laity—truly constitute a priestly community, especially in relation to the world.

The role of the faithful is to receive the fruit of the sacrifice through the reception of communion and, through this communion, bring about their interior sacrifice. In scholastic terms we would describe this as the disposition necessary for the effects of the Eucharist to bear fruit (ex opere operantis). The term de Lubac uses is “assimilation.” The Christian is assimilated into Christ and in so doing becomes the body of Christ. Through sharing in Christ’s death on Calvary in the sacrifice of the Mass, the Christian is thus assimilated by the Holy Spirit through Eucharistic communion into communion with the Church and the Trinity.

The path to communion is therefore self-sacrifice in union with Christ. It is, in effect, the path of love and self-renunciation. The Holy Spirit, the “fire of love,” purifies our self-gift so that it might become an

It is thus sacrifice that leads to love and communion. As such, it is Calvary more than the table that brings about unity. As we have presented above, this is because, in the first place, the community—through the sacramental body—participates in the life of the heavenly Church and therefore the nuptial union with the Lamb. Secondly, the faithful are called to recognize the Lamb’s presence in the Eucharist and to be assimilated into his “Yes” of sacrifice on Calvary. It is still Christ, through his Holy Spirit, who gathers the Church. Thirdly, this union is not so much the fellowship of a simple meal shared with friends: it is the higher union involved in conversion and purification and as such takes the shape of the Cross. It is our participation in the Cross—the sign of the Son’s communion with his Father in the Holy Spirit—that becomes the source of our communion with Christ and with our fellow Christians in the ecclesial body.

Owen Vyner, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Theology and Chair of the Theology Department at Christendom College, Front Royal, VA.

1. For the fragmenting or pluralizing effects of modernity see Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religion and Affirmation (London: Collins, 1980).

2. Paul McPartlan, Sacrament of Salvation: an Introduction to Eucharistic Ecclesiology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), 45.

3. For de Lubac’s thought on the Eucharist see the aforementioned Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). His two principle treatments of ecclesiology can be found in Splendour of the Church (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956) and Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988). De Lubac’s writings on anthropology and the nature-grace debate are treated in The Mystery of the Supernatural (New York: Herder and Herder, 1998).

4. De Lubac, Catholicism, 91.

5. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 223.

6. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 235.

7. James T. O’Connor, The Hidden Manna: A Theology of the Eucharist (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 97-111.

8. O’Connor, The Hidden Manna, 225.

9. O’Connor, The Hidden Manna, 228.

10. De Lubac, Catholicism, 12.

11. De Lubac, Corpus, 88.

12. De Lubac, Catholicism, 106.

13. De Lubac, Catholicism, 110.

14. C.f. De Lubac, Splendour, 106-107.

15. John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem: On the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1986), no. 41. “The Old Testament on several occasions speaks of ‘fire from heaven’ which burnt the oblations presented by men. By analogy one can say that the Holy Spirit is the ‘fire from heaven’ which works in the depth of the mystery of the Cross.” De Lubac, Catholicism, 110: “[The Holy Spirit] fell upon the sacrifice of Elias as a devouring fire burns up the dross in humankind, the obstacle to the unifying power of the sacrament.”

16. De Lubac, Catholicism, 95.

17. De Lubac, Catholicism, 95.

18. De Lubac, Catholicism, 95.

19. St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Trallians, in Schoedel, 152.

20. De Lubac, Splendour, 108.

21. De Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 29, footnote 55, Quoting St. Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 122.

“

The Christian is wetted in baptism, crushed between millstones of hope and fear, and baked in the fire of passion and sorrow.”

Through sharing in Christ’s death on Calvary in the sacrifice of the Mass, the Christian is assimilated by the Holy Spirit through Eucharistic communion into communion with the Church and the Trinity.

Continued from QUIZ, page 3

Answers:

1. The sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, also called “extreme unction,” applies the graces of Jesus’ Paschal Mystery to those of the baptized who, having attained the use of reason, are “in danger of death from sickness or old age” (Code of Canon Law, Canon 1004§4; also Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), 1514). The sacrament bestows the grace upon those who receive it so that they may unite their sufferings to those of Christ for the good of the whole Church, as well as prepare themselves for their ultimate return to God (see CCC, 1520-23). For these reasons, those who are already deceased cannot be anointed. As the ritual Pastoral Care of the Sick: Rites of Anointing and Viaticum explains, “when a priest has been called to attend those who are already dead, he should not administer the sacrament of anointing. Instead, he should pray for them, asking that God forgive their sins and graciously receive them into the kingdom” (14). The ritual text includes a section of prayers and texts “For the Dead” (223-231). Still, “if the priest is doubtful whether the sick person is dead, he may give the sacrament conditionally” (14), introducing the formula with the words, “If life is in you,” and then continuing with the normative words, “Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit” (269).

2. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal specifies that during or after Mass only “the Priest, the Deacon, or an instituted acolyte” may purify the sacred vessels (279). Nevertheless, in the context of bringing Holy Communion to the sick, the extraordinary minister of Holy Communion does purify the vessels that have been used to carry Holy Communion to the sick person(s). This is clearly specified with regard to bringing the Precious Blood to the sick person where, after the Precious Blood is consumed, the “minister himself” purifies “the vessel as required [debitas ablutiones perficiendas curet]” (Holy Communion and Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass [HCWEOM] 55, 62, 77; see also Pastoral Care of the Sick 74, 88, 96; Norms for the Distribution and Reception of Holy Communion under Both Kinds in the Dioceses of the United States of America, 54). In this context the “minister” specified is the “acolyte or extraordinary minister, duly appointed” (HCWEOM, 54: “Chapter II: Administration of Communion and Viaticum to the Sick by an Extraordinary Minister”).

3. A sacrarium is a “special sink used for the reverent disposal of sacred substances. This sink has a cover, a basin, and a special pipe and drain that empty directly into the earth, rather than into the sewer system” (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Built of Living Stones, 236). The water used to wash sacred linens, holy water, baptismal water, and even holy oils may be returned to the earth via the sacrarium. The water used to wash cloths that have been used to clean spills of the Precious Blood may also be poured in the sacrarium. The Precious Blood itself, however, may never be so poured. After initial purifications of vessels or linens have been carried out, soap may be used for subsequent cleaning. But since these

Continued

practices true for all times and all levels of culture.

Now it is true that the liturgical life does in a certain way transcend these predispositions. Everyone can participate in the Eucharist and receive the sacraments, including he who is subjectivistic and individualistic. Moreover, recent centuries have brought to light forces which unfolded have promoted the wellbeing of the liturgical life, such as a greater sensibility of the soul, a stronger consciousness of personal subsistence, and the dignity and responsibility, etc., of each. We can find a deeper understanding of the essence, form, and spirit of the liturgy and no one will doubt that this rests on a “formation” which since the Middle Ages has slowly waned into disappearance. What remains in question is: Is this kind of formation tied to a specific time such that it will vanish once the frame of that time has vanished definitively? Or are we dealing with the universal human potentiality of the human essence and powers that always reawaken as soon as the conditions for their awakening are given anew? It is this latter conviction upon which this text rests.

Delving deeper it becomes even clearer: those things that make the future, what we sense in the coming of a future age, are to a certain degree forces of this kind. They seek life at the surface; they seek to regain long lost attitudes and to unfold withered sensitivities. A new striving for formation ferments interiorly in a renewed movement toward life and the revived will for

further washings have presumably been done after any sacred elements (holy water, oil, or elements of the Blessed Sacrament) have been removed, it would not be necessary to pour the soapy water into the sacrarium. On the other hand, there appears no prohibition against doing so.

4. Many people assume that Holy Communion is to be distributed under both kinds whenever Mass is celebrated. In the Roman Rite, Holy Communion may be distributed under both kinds in specific situations and to specified persons.

The ritual books specify, for example: 1) newly baptized adults in the Mass following their Baptism; 2) Godparents, parents, spouses, and lay catechists of a newly baptized adult, during the Mass of Initiation; 3) the bridegroom and bride at the Nuptial Mass; 4) parents, relatives, and special benefactors of a newly ordained priest celebrating his first Mass.

Additionally, Holy Communion under both kinds is permitted for: “1) Priests who are not able to celebrate or concelebrate Mass; 2) the Deacon and others who perform some duty at the Mass; 3) members of communities at the Conventual Mass or the ‘community’ Mass, along with seminarians, and all those engaged in a retreat or taking part in a spiritual or pastoral gathering” (see General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM), 283).

Beyond these specified contexts, most bishops in the U.S. have delegated to pastors the prudential judgment to decide when it is opportune to distribute Holy Communion under both kinds (see GIRM 283), even to all communicants at daily Masses on a ferial day. With such broad discretion, one might expect the distribution of Holy Communion under both kinds to be offered at every Mass. In our post-Covid circumstance with extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion in shorter supply, parishes are increasingly choosing to distribute Holy Communion under both species in more limited situations such as the celebration of major feasts and in those situations suggested by the ritual books (listed above). This decision to distribute Holy Communion under both species less frequently than was done before may have the effect of aligning U.S. practice more closely with that observed in the rest of the Latin Church; it also avoids “obscuring the role of the Priest and the Deacon as the ordinary ministers of Holy Communion” (Norms for the Distribution and Reception of Holy Communion under Both Kinds in the Dioceses of the United States of America, 24).

5. The Holy See published the “Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism” in 1993 during the papacy of John Paul II. The Directory’s aim is “to be an instrument at the service of the whole Church and especially of those who are directly engaged in ecumenical activity in the Catholic Church. The Directory intends to motivate, enlighten and guide this activity…. [T]he Directory gives orientations and norms of universal application to guide Catholic participation in ecumenical activity” (6). It addresses various kinds of collaboration with both Orthodox Churches and the non-Catholic ecclesial communions of the West.

Relative to “Sharing Other Resources for Spiritual

one’s own formation. Deficient in proper sensitivities, forces, and attitudes, our Catholic life languished, thin and rationalistic; yet now, these very elements are reawakening. We certainly do not want to return to the Middle Ages; we want our own present and future. Yet we yearn for those forces by which the Middle Ages were so mighty in imagery; we long for them to awaken again in our time and for the boon of our contemporaries. Despite the destruction of the past, we can trust that there is truly something coming to life anew.

Among those powers we have mentioned are those that need to be alive in order to render liturgical life real. By a movement of inner necessity, our time is ripe for the liturgy. Moreover, among the final challenges we face is to discern whether this new life that is surfacing can be elevated into liturgy and so participate in the formation of “all under one head, Christ” (Eph 4:15). Or will liturgical formation remain merely a formation of culture, a certain power of expression of man, man’s being in the world, and his natural feelings of devotion? Therefore, the liturgical problem, seen in the right context, will be one of the most pressing spiritual and cultural issues of the future.

Each chapter of this book contemplates the liturgical life under one specific aspect. Together they ask: What becomes of liturgical method? Is enough importance given to it in our time; and if not, then why not? Which forces lack in man to renew the liturgy, and will these forces reawaken?3 The concrete tasks of formation in the

Life and Activity,” the Directory states: “Catholic churches are consecrated or blessed buildings which have an important theological and liturgical significance for the Catholic community. They are therefore generally reserved for Catholic worship. However, if priests, ministers or communities not in full communion with the Catholic Church do not have a place or the liturgical objects necessary for celebrating worthily their religious ceremonies, the diocesan Bishop may allow them the use of a church or a Catholic building and also lend them what may be necessary for their services (137).... In hospitals, homes for the aged and similar institutions conducted by Catholics, the authorities should promptly advise priests and ministers of other Communities of the presence of their faithful and afford them every facility to visit these persons and give them spiritual and sacramental ministrations under dignified and reverent conditions, including the use of the chapel” (142).

6. There is no clear answer to this question, as none of the ritual books offer a particular time, whether that is 1) after receiving the host for the sick or homebound during the distribution of Holy Communion, or 2) waiting for some cue or sending near the end of Mass, or 3) waiting until Mass has concluded. In the absence of anything official at the level of universal legislation or at the level of an episcopal conference, a diocese may offer guidelines on the matter. If no official norms exist, the rubric at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday provides guidance that may reasonably be applied at other Masses. “At an appropriate moment during Communion,” it says, “the Priest entrusts the Eucharist from the table of the altar to Deacons or acolytes or other extraordinary ministers, so that afterwards it may be brought to the sick who are to receive Holy Communion at home” (rubric 33; emphasis added).

7. The Universal Prayer or Prayers of the Faithful or General Intercessions are only obligatory on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation.

Sacrosanctum Concillium (1963) called for the restoration of the Universal Prayer in the reform of the Mass: “Especially [praesertim] on Sundays and feasts of obligation there is to be restored, after the Gospel and the homily, ‘the common prayer’ or ‘the prayer of the faithful’” (53).

Shortly after this, in 1965, a question was put to the Congregation of Rites with regard to “Whether in Masses celebrated with the people, the prayer of the faithful is obligatory on ferial days?” The Congregation responded that the obligation to pray the Universal Prayer “does not oblige” at daily Masses.

The current General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM) stands in continuity with this response when it states that it “is desirable [expedit] that there usually be such a form of prayer in Masses celebrated with the people” (GIRM, 69). The Latin word employed here, expedit, does not constitute a strict obligation but rather a suggestion.

Still, while the Universal Prayer is not obligatory, it may be used at daily Masses to great benefit. This prayer provides the baptized the opportunity to exercise their share in Christ’s priesthood by interceding for the needs of the world.

liturgy will emerge in all clarity out of these explanations. Considering all of this, we need to focus on the essentials. We can only deal with what needs to be done in individual cases to the extent that we may emphasize certain basic and fundamental thoughts. How either the child or the mature person can be led to liturgical action, or even how this can be done with a community, is an inquiry that will need to be left for others to explain. The path only reveals itself once one endeavors to treat it. But to show that we are not just playing around with thoughts, our passages will be completed with some practical advice. This does not mean that there is a prefigured method, but these are supposed to help to initiate the process of resolution.

Romano Guardini (1885-1968) was ordained priest in 1910. He served in Mainz, Germany, and dedicated much of his life to working with the young. He received his doctorate in theology in 1915, writing on the theology of St. Bonaventure, and taught for most of his career at the University of Berlin as Professor of Catholic Philosophy. His noteworthy books include Sacred Signs (1917), The Spirit of the Liturgy (1918), Liturgical Formation (1923), The Lord (1937), and The End of the Modern World (1956).

1. There is no proper translation for “Liturgik” in English that is distinct enough to make this logical. In German it is Liturgie (that which is liturgically enacted) and Liturgik (that which deals with all things liturgical) (Translator’s note).

2 . See Romano Guardini, Meditations before Mass, part 1.

3 . It is natural that the youth movement together with its impulses, forces, and goals be mentioned frequently in these considerations. In a broad sense, it implies the emergence of a certain image of humanity, which embodies the turning point for a new future (Guardini’s note).

Q: What are Mass stipends? Are these the same as Mass offerings?

A: As the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia defines it, a Mass stipend is “a certain monetary offering which anyone makes to the priest with the accompanying obligation of celebrating a Mass in accordance with the intentions of the donor.” In common parlance, the terms “Mass stipend” and “Mass offering” are interchangeable. However, there is a difference between a true Mass stipend and a Mass “novena” or “prayer guild” or “Mass guild” (common among shrines and religious orders) which has one or more Masses said for all the intentions or guild members rather than a single Mass for each intention. In such cases, the offering is not a true Mass stipend or even a so-called “collective intention.”

Q: How do Mass stipends differ from “stole fees” or honoraria?

A: So-called “stole fees” are monetary offerings which someone makes to the parish on the occasion of the celebration of a sacrament or sacred rite—other than Mass. Such an offering does not come with an obligation as with a Mass stipend. According to canon law (canon 1264, 2º), the standard or suggested offerings for other sacraments and sacramentals are set by the bishops of an ecclesiastical province. For example, in the Milwaukee Province (which encompasses the five dioceses of Wisconsin), the suggested amounts are $10 at the time of baptism; $75 at the time of marriage; and $50 at the time of Christian burial. It is up to the diocesan bishop to determine where this donation goes: to the parish, to a fund for works of charity, to the priest or deacon, or to some other place. However, when an individual voluntarily offers more than the suggested offering, the priest or deacon must judge whether the intention of the donor is to give the amount beyond the suggested offering to the priest or deacon himself, or to the parish for the destination of the suggested offering.

An honorarium, in this context, is an offering given directly to the priest or deacon on the occasion of the celebration of a sacrament or sacred rite. It is distinct from the “stole fee” whose destination may differ. Unless specified differently by the donor, canon law requires donations given to the pastor or administrator of a parish to be given to the parish itself. The donor must be clear on the purpose of the donation: to the priest or deacon, or to the parish.

Q: What is the history of Mass stipends?

A: Like many matters in the Church, there are both practical and theological or spiritual elements to Mass stipends. Regarding the practical, the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia comments that the justification for Mass stipends lies incontestably in the axiom of St. Paul: “Those who minister at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings” (1 Corinthians 9:13). Originally, the Mass stipend provided to the priest the necessaries of life: food or otherwise. Later, it became a sum of money, the object being to contribute to the proper support of the clergy. The Catholic Encyclopedia comments: “The now customary money offering, which was introduced about the eighth century and was tacitly approved by the Church, is to be regarded merely as the substitute or commutation of the earlier presentation of the necessaries of life.”

Current canon law remarks that the Christian faithful who give an offering to apply the Mass for their intention contribute to the good of the Church and by that offering share its concern to support its ministers and works (canon 946). Priests are supported by the Mass offerings they receive. In the United States and in much of the Western world, this is no longer strictly the case as priests receive a salary from their parish or diocese, or are provided for by their religious community. Nonetheless, Mass offerings still contribute to the proper support of the clergy and provide a way for the faithful to make a sacrifice of their resources for the good of the Church.

RITE QUESTIONS

Regarding the theological or spiritual element, it is understood that the “fruits of the Mass” are temporal or spiritual benefits, pardon for sins, and pardon for the punishment due to sin. Dominican Father Francis McCadden remarks that “all the faithful, whether living or dead, participate in the fruits of all Masses in a general way. The person for whose intention the Mass is said receives these fruits in a more special manner than the faithful in common.” Therefore, when a priest accepts a Mass stipend, he enters into a quasicontractual agreement with the donor to celebrate a Mass in order to apply the fruit of the Mass to the intention. Therefore, even when a priest agrees to celebrate a Mass for no stipend or in Western countries where a stipend no longer completely supports a priest financially, the spiritual benefits of the Mass still exist.

Q: How much should one give for a typical Mass stipend?

A: According to canon law (canon 952), it is for the provincial council or a meeting of the bishops of the ecclesiastical province to define by decree for the entire province the amount of the offering. A priest is not permitted to seek a larger amount, although he may accept a voluntary offering which is larger or smaller than the one defined. If no decree has been issued, the custom of the diocese is to be followed. Religious institutes follow the same decree or custom in the territory where they are located. In the United States, the range of offerings is between $5 and $20 per Mass, with $10 probably being the most common.

If someone offers the priest or parish a sum of money without any indication of the number of Masses to be celebrated, the number is to be determined based on the standard offering in place where the donor resides, unless the intention of the donor must be presumed legitimately to have been different. Therefore, if the standard offering is $10 and a priest receives $50 with no indication of the number of Masses, he is to celebrate five Masses. However, if the donor asks him to celebrate “one Mass” and offerings him $50, one Mass is sufficient.

Q: What if I cannot afford the amount asked for a Mass stipend?

A: A priest may accept an offering lower than the defined or customary amount, including no offering. Canon law recommends earnestly to priests that they celebrate Mass for the intention of the Christian faithful, especially the needy, even if they have not received an offering. According to canon law, the needy should not be deprived of the assistance of the sacraments because of poverty. However, canon law does not require a priest to accept an offering smaller than the one defined or is customary—this is since some priests, especially missionary ones, may rely solely on Mass offerings for their livelihood and cannot justifiably accept a smaller amount.

Q: Can a priest receive more than one Mass stipend for a single Mass?

A: While a priest may legitimately celebrate more than one Mass per day when the law or the local ordinary allows it and have a separate intention for each Mass, he may only accept one offering or stipend each day (except on Christmas). The others are to be forwarded to the purposes prescribed the bishop. These purposes vary from diocese to diocese and include seminarian funds, clergy retirement funds, or missionary activity.

Q: Can my single Mass stipend include many intentions (“Bill, Mary, and Grandma”)?

A: Mass intentions may be for a living or deceased person (although not for the blessed in heaven or, generally speaking, the damned souls in hell), a group of people (such as one’s parents or “the deceased members of the Smith family”), or for a special intention.

Even if an intention has multiple people (e.g., “Bill, Mary, and Grandma”), it is considered a single intention when there is one donor. In fact, intentions such as “the living and deceased members of the Doe and Smith families” are considered a single intention, even though the number of persons is practically uncountable. At a concelebrated Mass, each priest may have a separate intention and may receive a stipend for the celebration, even though it is a concelebrated Mass (recalling, nevertheless, that a priest may retain only one stipend per day, except on Christmas).

Q: Can Mass intentions— and, therefore, Mass stipends—be combined?

A: The tradition and canonical norm is that each intention is to be fulfilled by the celebration of a Mass. However, due to various factors, the Apostolic See, since 1991, has permitted socalled “collective intentions” whereby various people combine their offerings in a single offering, satisfied in a single Mass. However, the norms regarding these collective intentions must be followed: the people making the offering must have been previously and explicitly informed and must have freely consented to combining their offerings; and it is necessary that the place and time for the celebration of this Mass, which is not to be said more than twice a week, be made public. The priest who says this Mass may only retain one stipend and the rest are forwarded to the purposes prescribed by the bishop. Collective intentions are an exception to the canonical norm. Nonetheless, in many places where, due to the lack of priests, Mass is not said daily, this can be a way for the faithful to have a Mass said for their loved ones.

Q: How far in advance should a parish accept Mass stipends?

A: No one is permitted to accept more offerings for Masses than can be satisfied within a year. If a priest or parish receives more offerings than can be satisfied, it is permitted for them to be celebrated elsewhere, unless the donors have forbidden this. Such Masses are frequently given to missionary priests, retired priests, and priests without a parochial assignment (such as chaplains, students, or curial officials).

—Answers by Father Alan Guanella Diocese of La Crosse, WI

MEMORIAL FOR

Mr. and Mrs. Randall W. Field for teaching our family the Catholic Faith from Kevin and Marie Field

Mrs. Dusca Pesco Nagy from Dr. Luana Pesco-Koplowitz

Rev. Franz Schorp, SM from Deacon Pat Cunningham Father Tim Church from Stanley Martin

TO HONOR

Brian Hicks and Sarah Jackson — Wedding from Thomas and Juliet Hicks

IN THANKSGIVING

Fr. James Altman from Philip and Judy Clingerman

64th Wedding Anniversary from Eugene and Yvonne Stivanelli

Readers in Australia and New Zealand can request additional copies of Adoremus Bulletin at no cost by contacting orders@parousiamedia.com.

New Biography on Lectionary Seeks to Read between the Times

Words without Alloy: A Biography of the Lectionary for Mass by Paul Turner Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic, 2022. 296 pp. 296,. ISBN: 978-0-81466763-7. $34.95 Paperback.

By John Grondelski

One of the Second Vatican Council’s generally accepted and less controversial liturgical reforms was that of the Lectionary, both for Sundays and weekdays. Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) prescribed (35.1) as “general norms” for overall liturgical reform, that “[i]n sacred celebrations there is to be more reading from holy Scripture, and it is to be more varied and suitable.” Concretely with reference to the Mass, the Council stipulated (SC, 51) that “[t]he treasures of the Bible are to be opened up more lavishly, so that richer fare may be provided for the faithful …. In this way, a more representative portion of the holy Scriptures will be read to the people in the course of a prescribed number of years.”

Some circles have attacked the reformed Lectionary, not primarily because it is broader but because it is missing negative hortatory moral texts (e.g., Romans 1:24-32 or I Peter 4:13-18), although a smaller traditionalist subset appears to object to the expansion in itself. To the latter group, the longer cycle of readings dilutes the moral focus they attribute to the former Lectionary, turning the Sunday readings into a Scripture course rather than nourishment for moral life.

Let’s remind ourselves of some of the key achievements of the reformed Lectionary. These attainments are important in themselves, even before we consider the practical changes in the new Lectionary’s structure and their comparative advantages.

As a general principle, the new Lectionary strengthened the importance of the Liturgy of the Word. It did this both by recognizing it as an essential part of the Eucharistic celebration and as a different form of God’s Presence (cf. Dei Verbum, 21) in the Mass. In highlighting the importance of the Liturgy of the Word, the new Lectionary created some balance between Word and Sacrament, important in itself but also as an ecumenical witness to Protestant brethren (who tended to skew in the opposite direction).

In practical terms, the new Lectionary enriched Catholics’ familiarity with scripture by enhancing the role of the Old Testament, which was largely invisible in the previous Lectionary. By adding a “First Reading” as a third reading on Sundays and solemnities, large sweeps of the liturgical year now include Old Testament readings. Likewise, the Old Testament goes from being practically absent to systematically read in the weekday Lectionary.

By adopting a three-year dominical cycle of readings, the Lectionary expanded the previous oneyear Sunday cycle and reduced the dominance of the Gospel of Matthew in it. Similar growth occurred in the two-year weekday cycle of readings, also tending to anchor readings to the liturgical year rather than particular saints or votive Masses.

One suspects, however, that asked how the new Lectionary met the Council’s call for “richer [Scriptural] fare,” even the average priest might cite— and end—on the three-year Sunday cycle. That cycle is among the Lectionary’s most important, but not its only achievement. The regular lectio continua of Paul— both on Sundays and on weekdays—is another, but less often commented upon, feature. So is the alternation on weekdays between the Old and New Testaments. Perhaps we have grown so familiar with the practice that one has to be at least in one’s 60s to remember two rather than three readings on Sundays or the novelty of regularly including the Old Testament.

But to stop at those changes—important as they are—shortchanges the breadth of the new Lectionary’s achievements. Paul Turner’s Words without Alloy: A Biography of the Lectionary for Mass looks at some of these other achievements. “Why do we have the readings we have on the days we have them?” is Turner’s opening question (ix). His book is the answer and the history behind it.

Behind the Text

Turner takes us through the twists and turns of Study Group 11, the working group after the Second Vatican

Council charged with producing the new Lectionary, based primarily on their documentation. One must remember that some of the Group’s challenges were outside its remit, e.g., they were not responsible for the Roman Calendar reform, to whose contours the Lectionary would be tailored.

Consider our three-year Sunday readings cycle. Should it have been three years? Or four? A three-year cycle privileges the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) at the expense of John. But how would one make a full year’s worth of Sunday readings from John, given the qualitative differences between his Gospel and the Synoptics? The Synoptics often report many events in the life and teaching of Christ briefly; John reports fewer incidents, but expands on them extensively to make his theological points. Would such readings then spread over multiple Sundays?

On the other hand, Mark’s Gospel is markedly shorter than Matthew or Luke. Can we make a full year’s worth of readings from it?

Some Gospels would be fixed to a day, perhaps out of tradition (e.g., the Shepherds Narrative and Johannine Prologue at Christmas Day Masses) or because it’s the only appropriate text for the day (e.g., the narrative relating the Magi, who alone appear in Matthew, on Epiphany). What about seasons like Lent and Advent? Should they have a fixed, annual cycle of Gospels? A preferred cycle with alternates (e.g., the Johannine Gospels for the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Sundays of Lent, with alternate texts in years B and C)? A fixed set of themes (e.g., John the Baptist and his ministry on the Second and Third Sundays of Advent, a prenatal text involving the Holy Family for the Fourth Sunday)?

Almost half the year is taken up by the postPentecost Sundays of Ordinary Time. Should such a chunk of time be divided up in terms of readings and themes and, if so, how? Should—and if so—how should the Sunday and weekday readings interact? Or the readings for Mass and for the Liturgy of the Hours? How should history be taken into account? Would history be seen as the contemporary Lectionary in force with which the Study Group was working, or would it be taken in a broader context? As an illustration of the former, should certain traditional Lenten weekday readings stay in place, even though they had more to do with the specific history of Roman stational churches than the theology of Lent? As an example of the latter, while three Sunday readings seemed a novelty in 1964, was that not the arrangement Ambrose knew in the Patristic era, as Turner asks (4)?

Turner shows how such questions were eventually worked out.

Pastoral Detour

Of particular interest to me was when the Study Group deviated from its theological principles in

order to take “pastoral considerations” into account. To this reviewer’s mind, whenever they did that, they confirmed the old adage, attributed to numerous writers: “Whoever marries the spirit of the present age will be a widower in the next.” One such consideration was whether readings were “too long,” “too complex,” or even whether the three-part set of Sunday readings should be optional. The length-and-complexity argument might have militated against swaths of John; though, on the opposite side, many readings from Mark (especially on post-Epiphany Sundays in year B) seem brief. Compared to the Synoptics, one could argue that a proportionately larger part of the Johannine corpus is unrepresented, at least in the Sunday Lectionary. Happily, “pastoral considerations” did not lead to the three-part Sunday reading structure becoming generally optional, though I suspect there are some national indults on this matter because, when I lived in Switzerland a decade ago, it was not uncommon at German Masses for one reading to be dropped in favor of “singen wir zusammen!” (Let’s all sing together!). I also expect that “pastoral” accommodation is why some of the more “judgmental” passages of Scripture got short shrift. Take I Corinthians 11:27-32, on unworthy reception of the Eucharist: neighboring verses (11-26, 33) are featured in Weekday Year II, Monday of the 24th Week of Ordinary Time, but verses 27-32 are dropped. Likewise, while the preceding verses (2326, Paul’s account of the institution of the Eucharist) appear annually in the Second Reading for Holy Thursday Evening and Year C for Corpus Christi, verses 27-32 never show up in a Sunday reading. Considering the pastoral situation not uncommon in American circles when the Study Group was working— people often would not receive Communion without prior Confession—one must imagine the swing of the pendulum to the other extreme by leaving those verses out of the Lectionary was not indeliberate. I’d maintain it was pastorally wrong.

A good part of Turner’s book is a detailed, Sundayby-Sunday, and then weekday survey of how the readings for that day came to be, including the logic that brings together the readings for a particular Sunday (both among themselves and within the broader vision of the Lectionary) as well as what the Study Group considered but did not adopt for that particular day. Reading these “biographies” of particular sets of Sunday readings may be particularly useful to priests preparing homilies to see more fully the rationale behind those selections (and perhaps even how the decision to use reading A rather than reading B developed a theme).

A Strict Read Turner generally sticks to the history of how we got the readings in the arrangements we got them, usually not asking whether the results turned out as well as perhaps was expected. He’s also good at pointing out where readings came from, especially on weekdays: where did a particular reading fit in the Lectionary, within broader liturgical history and/or in the version in force in the Study Group’s time?

The author turns to some of his own thinking in a brief “Concluding Observations.” There, he notes some of the ways he thinks the opportunities the new Lectionary affords continue to go unrealized. Among them are: a tendency to focus on the Gospel (which does, after all, enjoy pride of place) and sometimes the First Reading, because they are usually thematically linked, while leaving “unnoticed” the “hard work that placed key passages from New Testament epistles” (277) into the Sunday cycle; a focus on a particular Sunday without necessarily linking its readings to the wider cycle, even when that’s obvious (e.g., the Johannine Eucharistic discourse or Matthean parables that show up in summer); and ignoring linkages between the entrance/communion antiphons, responsorial psalms, and the readings.

Overall, Words without Alloy is a well-documented study of how the current Sunday and weekday Catholic Lectionary came to be, including its often detailed but underpinning infrastructure not usually visible to the eye. It deserves readership among clergy, liturgists, and liturgical planners.

John Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) was former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ.