A multitude of meanings

Year of the Eucharist ? 1

The Mass today is both fundamentally the same yet radically different from the celebrations of our forefathers. In the first of a new series, a distinguished historian examines changes to the liturgy and to ritual, and how these affect the beliefs at the core of Catholic faith

The declaration of a ?Year of the Eucharist? seems something of an oddity for Catholics, who hardly need reminding of the importance of the Mass. You could be forgiven for feeling that we currently have far too much of a good thing. Whatever the event ? the start of a school year, a wedding anniversary, a youth rally, a conference, a social-club outing, a study day ? someone will suggest it should be accompanied by a Mass in church, on the beach, round the dining- or the coffee-table. The once abundant repertoire of para-liturgical rituals, devotions and sacramentals, by which Catholics mark, bless or dedicate key events, has dwindled, and the Mass has become for most of us the one-fit focus of the sacred. The result at times can be a form of repetitive strain syndrome. You can sometimes hear the boredom in the voices even of conscientious priests, as they launch once again into the familiar opening formulae of the modern Mass.

The Pope himself evidently has some reservations about the modern Mass. His encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia, issued last Maundy Thursday, provides the keynote document for this Year of the Eucharist. It is laced with gloomy phrases about the ?dark clouds of unacceptable doctrine and practice? and the ritual and sacramental irregularities ?in the years following the post-conciliar liturgical reform, as a result of a misguided sense of creativity and adaptation?. Such abuses ? have been a source of suffering for many?. The document links these ?dark shadows?, ?abuses?, and ?confusion with regard to sound faith and catholic doctrine? to a somewhat ominous promise of corrective action by the Roman Curia.

As all that suggests, the encyclical is not exactly a ground-breaking document. Much of its formal teaching draws on Paul VI?s 1965 encyclical, Mysterium Fidei, or expands the relevant section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. But the Council of Trent is mentioned more often than the Second Vatican Council, and the Pope goes out of his way more than once to commend and insist on the permanent validity of Trent?s teaching on the Eucharist, with an emphasis on the Real Presence and the sacrificial character of the Eucharist.

But the encyclical is also characterised by a strongly personal, even autobiographical, note of celebration: the eucharistic ?amazement and gratitude? which have characterised the Pope?s own experience as a priest, a wonder and amazement he links to the experience of the disciples at Emmaus. He recalls particularly his own Jubilee celebration of Mass in the cenacle of Jerusalem, but also the myriad celebrations of his pontificate, back to his first celebration as a new priest in St Laurence?s chapel in the cathedral at Wawel.

The Pope?s thinking about the eucharist is, of course, coloured by the fact that, like any Catholic over 50, his own eucharistic piety was shaped by the so-called ?Tridentine? Missal, authorised by Pope St Pius V in 1570. Christian worship had for 1,500 years been characterised by immense regional variety, but the age of print ? and panic about the Reformation ? made such variety suspect. Pius V sought to impose a single form of the Mass on the whole of Latin Christendom, and decreed that it be frozen in that form for ever: ?nihil umquam addendum, detrahendum aut immutandum esse?. Nothing was to be added, or taken away, or changed.

From this side of the revolutionary religious changes of the 1960s and 1970s, that attempt to halt all change seems peculiarly Canute-like. But till the liturgical movement of the twentieth century, the myth of a timeless and immutable liturgy was widespread. Indeed, that very ?timelessness? was often felt to be one of the Mass?s main attractions. St Augustine, listening to St Ambrose singing Mass in the cathedral at Milan in the fourth century, would have heard a Eucharistic Prayer substantially the same as the Roman Canon in daily use into modern times. Yet under these very real continuities there were concealed seismic shifts in the actual eucharistic experience of Catholics. The Latin liturgy was for Augustine and Ambrose a worship celebrated in ordinary clothes in the common tongue of their times. By the early Middle Ages the priests ministering to the trouser-wearing peoples of barbarian Europe were using the same robes, now transformed into ritual vestments, and the same words, whose Latin was treasured as a sign of continuity with the greatness and prestige of the ancient Roman Empire. But the people no longer spoke or understood it: Latin had become a sacral language, with all that that implies about a growing sense of the mysterious, arcane and clerical character of the liturgy.

Eucharistic experience had changed in other ways too. The Canon of the Mass takes it for granted that the whole congregation is ?standing around? ? circumstantes ? the altar, in much the same prayer posture as the priest and, like him, facing East. Though the priest?s special and awesome responsibility in the liturgy was recognised, and prayed for, he was not yet perceived as engaged in a fundamentally different sort of activity from the laity, who also offered the Mass.

By the beginning of the second millennium, while the clergy still stood at the altar, the great prayer of thanks and consecration was not only in a sacral language, but was recited silently, and the laity themselves had fallen to their knees, a change which occurred first in the private Masses which had begun to multiply for small groups in side chapels, but which soon invaded even the solemn worship of the whole community on Sundays.

That shift, from standing and responding to kneeling in holy silence, was pregnant with significance. Awe and dread at the presence of the Holy became imaginatively stronger than confident participation in a shared act of communion. The laity ceased to respond to the priest?s prayers, their part being taken by acolytes, and they had by now also ceased to receive from the chalice, indeed, had become largely non-communicant, receiving once, twice or at most three times a year. As penance became more widely practised, it was believed that sacramental confession was essential before every act of communion. To compensate, the clergy began to hold the Eucharistic bread aloft after the words of consecration, for the adoring gaze of those who now did not dare or did not care to approach the Lord?s table. They were encouraged instead to say their own private prayers, while the priest got on with the sacrifice. All Catholics accepted in principle that the Eucharist was viaticum, food for the journey, but the resemblance of that spotless wafer, which might not be chewed, to real food became increasingly notional.

The ritual structure which resulted, and which was ?frozen? after Trent, is sometimes dismissed as ?non-participatory?, but it was in fact a powerful focus of the holy, the noble vehicle ? and school ? for generations of Christian prayer. Its very regimentation meant that what Seamus Heaney has called ?all the brisk proceedings of the Mass?, every minutely prescribed detail, became charged with meaning, for those willing to attend to them.

Without denying any of this, in the century or so leading up to the Second Vatican Council, the liturgical movement attempted to recover older emphases, to restore a richer and more concrete sense of communal participation to the Mass. Pius X encouraged more frequent communion. ?Dialogue masses? emerged, in which the congregation once again began to make the responses and even (like Protestants) to sing. Pius XII issued an important encyclical on the centrality of the liturgy to the understanding of the Church as the Body of Christ, relaxed the fasting regulations to make frequent communion easier (until 1953 even a sip of pure water after midnight prevented one taking communion that day), and simplified and restored the Easter Vigil as the climax of the Church?s year. Dual-language missals with learned notes proliferated, to enable lay people to follow the Latin liturgy with understanding and devotion.

Most of those involved in the liturgical movement saw themselves as unlocking the treasures of the liturgy, making its ancient storehouse of prayer and theological insight available again to all. But their expectations of change were modest, often antiquarian in method, using historical research to discover the ?original? forms of the liturgy, which they sought to revive. In the event, the reforms which flowed from the Council raced far ahead both of the pious antiquarianism and the theological nuance and poise of the liturgical movement. Few had expected or dared hope for the decision of the Council Fathers to translate the whole of the liturgy into the vernacular, surely the most momentous of all the Conciliar reforms. Forty years on that decision looks inevitable, necessary and right, yet there was a terrible price to be paid. Translation into the vernacular was often crassly done, sacrificing the theological compression and balance of the Latin without any comparable gain in subtlety or memorability in the often inept English. Overnight the entire repertoire of Latin sacred music, plainsong and polyphony, a millennium of glory, became redundant, and was replaced in most parishes by sub-Dylanesque guitar-tunes. Venerable church furnishings were stripped out and consigned to the skip. Hessian and pine reigned.

There was of course more at stake in all this than bad taste. Whatever the aesthetic rights and wrongs, it soon became clear that changed liturgical behaviour might involve changed beliefs. The old liturgy had been designed to evoke silent adoration: it was now re-engineered to encourage active and corporate participation: lots of readings, lots of responses, lots of singing. The old Mass had surrounded the elements with elaborate signals of transcendence and holiness. The sacred wafer was touched only by the priest, received kneeling, taken by the laity only on the tongue, swallowed without chewing: after the consecration, the priest held the fingers with which he had touched the host tightly together, lest any fragment should fall. All these actions and taboos threw a sacred cordon round the Eucharistic bread and wine, signals of its awesome character, signs of the presence of God. But now chunky fragments of bread were placed in the hand, distributed by lay people, eaten and chewed standing. If the signs had changed so much, could the reality be the same?

Any social anthropologist will tell you that in fact the reality can?t be the same: meaning is not some immutable substance floating above and beyond the forms in which it is expressed. Change the rituals, and you do change the beliefs, or at any rate, radically refocus them. And this refocusing, sometimes crude and inadequate, has alarmed the Vatican. Its instinct is to solve the problem with muscle. The Ecclesia de Eucharistia encyclical insists that the centrality of the Eucharist in the Church?s life ?as a reflection of and witness to the one universal Church?, requires the direct involvement of the Roman dicasteries in establishing norms and overseeing standards of eucharistic celebration in the local churches, a process involving new ?prescriptions of a juridical nature?.

If that ominous phrase evokes the shade of St Pius V, there is nevertheless a real value in stocktaking, to see where two generations of liturgical upheaval have left Catholic understanding of the eucharist. Vatican fears that significant numbers of Catholics have abandoned core beliefs like the sacrifice of the Mass are probably misplaced. But many Catholics, theologians among them, would now seek to make sense of that belief not in terms of the sacral detail of what the priest does at the altar, but in relation to the Church?s engagement with the world in which Christ is daily crucified, in the persons of the poor. The Mass is the heart of our faith: under its changing forms it contains and expresses a multitude of meanings: neither Trent, nor the Second Vatican Council, exhausts them.

Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity in the University of Cambridge. His most recent book, Faith of Our Fathers, is published by Continuum.