I don't understand all the ruckus about a letter that was leaked from the office of the Most Rev. Michael Martin (OFM Conv.), Bishop of the Catholic diocese of Charlotte. The letter directs parish priests in the diocese to follow specific liturgical norms when celebrating the mass. No one seems the least bit miffed that the letter was leaked by someone in whom the bishop had placed his trust, which trust was violated upon the aforementioned leak. Instead, Bishop Martin has been branded an anti-traditionalist who hates the old Latin mass and will stop at nothing to forcibly impose the Novus Ordo mass on unsuspecting and unwilling parishioners.
Okay, so maybe I exaggerated that last part just a little.
When I read the letter which, to reiterate, was never published by the bishop, I was intrigued and hoped to find something incredibly exciting within—nothing like this ever happens in Charlotte!—and I tried really really hard, but failed. The norms decreed in this letter are uncontroversial. They are based on instructions clearly defined in the Catholic Church's liturgical books: the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, the Roman Missal itself, the Second Vatican Council's instruction on liturgical music Musicam Sacram, and the Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium. There are a couple of points at which I think the bishop stretched slightly the text of these documents, which points I will discuss in a subsequent post, but he didn't stretch them past the spirit of the documents and the post Vatican II liturgical reform.
Before I move on, though, I should provide for my two readers (who happen to be non-Catholics) some background on what exactly the mass is, how it developed over time, what the Second Vatican Council wanted to do with it in the 1960s, and what we ended up with in 1970 when Pope Paul VI promulgated the Novus Ordo Missae, or new order of mass.
Our current controversy has its origin back in first-century Palestine when a radical rabbi called Jesus, from Galilee, who hung out with fishermen and tax collectors, and who claimed to be the Son of God and Jewish Messiah, celebrated a Passover seder with his twelve friends. On that particular night, when he was about to be betrayed by one of his twelve friends, he took bread, broke it, gave it to his friends and said, "Take this all of you and eat of it, for this is my body which will be given up for you." No doubt baffled, the twelve did so. And when they had eaten, he gave them the cup, saying, "Take this all of you and drink from it. This is the cup of my blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me." This is the root of the mass.
But not yet the mass.
After Jesus ascended into heaven, his disciples were gathered together by the Holy Spirit into the Church, in Greek the ekklesia, literally the gathering. Details about what the early Church got up to are sparse, most of what we have comes from the Acts of the Apostles which tells us that "day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts." In this one sentence, but affirmed in contemporary extra-biblical sources, we see two things happening. First, being Jewish, the first Christians go to the Temple for scriptural readings and the prayers. Then, they meet in their homes for the "breaking of bread" which is what Jesus had instructed them to do at his last supper. These are the two major parts of the mass, Word and Eucharist. The language would have been Aramaic.
This form evolves and is somewhat formalized over the next 70 or 80 years, and by A.D. 150 or so, St. Justin the Martyr describes in chapters LXV-LXVII of his First Apology the basic outline of the modern mass which, again follows the movement of Word and Eucharist. St. Justin describes the prayers at second-century mass as what the president can offer "according to his ability." Was he just winging it? Who knows? But by the late third and fourth centuries we see specific formally composed prayers forming a ritual for the mass.
As Christianity spread, the mass was celebrated in Greek throughout the Mediterranean world, and in other languages in other parts of the world. St. Patrick would have celebrated mass in Gaelic. People in Britain would have celebrated in whatever version of proto-English that they would have spoken at the time.
By the time of Pope Gregory the Great, Latin had become established almost universally in the west, and especially at Rome. Gregory, apart from giving us a superb calendar, standardized and revised the mass. Among other things, he moved the Our Father around, added some stuff to the Therefore, O Lord part of the eucharistic prayer, and standardized the chant in which the mass was sung.
There were a few minor changes here and there until after the Council of Trent (A.D. 1560s). Apparently the Protestants had stirred up trouble about using the vernacular language in the mass instead of Latin. The Council insisted upon Latin except in a few cases. They won. Pope Pius V in A.D. 1570 promulgated the revised liturgical books which revision had been decreed by the Council.
More minor changes followed occasionally. Somewhere along the way, reading the first chapter of St. John's gospel after mass was added. In the 1860s, Pope Leo XIII added a prayer to St. Michael the Archangel to defend us against the forces of evil after a vision he had had about the upcoming 20th century. Popes in the early 20th century began various phases of reforms to the mass, raising questions on when the vernacular (in our case English) could be used. How could the people participate more fully? Etc. No doubt the changes in the mass from the first century to the early 20th century ruffled a few feathers, but we see very little written about it, if at all.
By the mid-20th century, the mass still followed the form it had in the first century: Word and Eucharist. However, there may have been a few flaws. It was still in Latin. The scripture readings, prayers, chants, all of it. And there was nothing for the people to do except kneel once or twice and go forward to receive communion. All the exciting stuff happened on the altar which was affixed to the back wall and was done by a couple of guys you couldn't hear and wouldn't have understood if you could hear them.
Then, there was this little get-together of bishops in the 1960s.They said we ought to change the mass (again!). And it is with this that I will bore my two readers in Part 2.
