Image: Pope Benedict XVI offering Mass ad orientem in the Sistine Chapel (2008) 


COMING SOON - Saturday Morning Mass at St Patrick’s (Novus Ordo, ad orientem) 
 
Beginning on Saturday 3^rd February I will be introducing a Saturday morning Mass at St Patrick’s Lilydale. This is, firstly, because there are apparently very few local options for a Saturday morning Mass; secondly, because the Saturday morning Mass is generally dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and I would like to encourage in a particular way the ‘First Five Saturdays’ devotion given by Our Lady at Fatima. After careful reflection and consultation with the faithful I have decided that this Saturday Morning Mass will be offered ad orientem, which is to say with the priest facing the tabernacle, according to the ancient custom of the Church. To be clear, this is not the Latin Mass – it is the normal English Novus Ordo Mass, but said facing liturgical East. Given the widespread confusion regarding this I thought it might be helpful to briefly explain the historical and theological background to this liturgical orientation. The following is adapted from an address I gave at a retreat some years ago.  
 
“Turning towards the Lord” 
The theological and liturgical significance of Mass facing ‘towards the East’ 
On 5^th July 2016 Cardinal Sarah addressed a large gathering of priests at a liturgical conference in London. At the time Cardinal Sarah was the Prefect for the Congregation of Divine Worship. This congregation is responsible for overseeing the correct and worthy celebration of the sacred liturgy, and its Prefect is the highest liturgical authority in the Church, second only to the Pope. Therefore, Cardinal Sarah’s words carried significant weight. In this address he stated the following: 
 
“I believe that it is very important that we return as soon as possible to a common orientation, of priests and the faithful turned together in the same direction—Eastwards or at least towards the apse—to the Lord who comes, in those parts of the liturgical rites when we are addressing God. This practice is permitted by current liturgical legislation. It is perfectly legitimate in the modern rite. Indeed, I think it is a very important step in ensuring that in our celebrations the Lord is truly at the centre.” 
 
Cardinal Sarah was in many respects reiterating the concerns expressed by Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) who understood the crisis engendered by a dis-oriented, and anthropocentric liturgy, in which the personality of priest becomes the focus of the Mass. In The Spirit of the Liturgy Ratzinger observed the effect of the priest facing the people: “Now the priest – the ‘presider’, as they now prefer to call him – becomes the real point of reference for the whole liturgy. Everything depends on him. We have to see him, to respond to him, to be involved in what he is doing…The turning of the priest towards the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circled.” (p.80). A liturgy that is turned inward (to ourselves) instead of being directed to God is doomed to failure: it is like attempting to launch a rocket ship that’s pointing nose-down to the ground, instead of being directed to the heavens. The Christian liturgy must be fundamentally Christ-centred. Although most people are accustomed to seeing the face of the priest at Mass there is an advantage to the priest being less visible: the anonymity of the priest conveys more clearly that the priest is acting in the person of Christ. When he offers Mass ad orientem the particular identity of the priest (with all his personal faults and foibles) recedes into the background so that within the liturgical action he can ‘become Christ’ for his people. The people don’t need to see his face, because the priest is merely the instrument, and not the focus of the Mass. Jesus Christ present in the Eucharist becomes the true focus.  
 
Although little came of Cardinal Sarah’s invitation, there remains an enduring validity to his concern for a truly Christ-centred liturgy. When it comes to the orientation of the Mass many Catholics wrongly assume that the Second Vatican Council banned the Latin Mass and required the priest to face the people. These assumptions are historically false. As Pope Benedict XVI clarified in Summorum Pontificum (2007) the Traditional Latin Mass was never abrogated, and nor was the custom of offering Mass ad orientem. In January 1965 a Decree titled Nuper Edita formally permitted Mass to be said facing the people. Note here that the Decree merely permitted that Mass be said facing the People; it neither mandated it, nor did it forbid the Mass to be said ad orientem. Yet following this decree the practice of Mass versus populum (facing towards the people) became increasingly normative. The hope was this increased visibility of the priest would promote a stronger sense of engagement with the congregation according to the aim of ‘full and active participation’ spelt out in Sacrosanctum Concilium (the Council’s Sacred Constitution on the Divine Liturgy). What in many instances resulted was an increasingly desacralized, banal and irreverent style of liturgy, one in which the self-consciousness of the priest prompted him to become a live entertainer (improvising, telling jokes, inserting his own innovations) and where the congregation became an audience expecting to be entertained, rather than the Church being led in the celebration of Christ’s Paschal Mystery. As Ratzinger once wrote: “If the liturgy appears first of all as the workshop for our activity, then what is essential is being forgotten: God. For the liturgy is not about us, but about God. Forgetting about God is the most imminent danger of our age.”  
   
(to be continued next week)