Chairman's Blog

Holy Communion at a High Mass in the Domincan Rite at Oxford's Blackfriars

Sometimes people like to complain about problems but do not, really, want to solve them. If you offer a solution, they are uninterested, or even angry. The problem is important to them. It may even be a way for them to get something they want: perhaps to extract a concession from someone. So I ask: does anyone (anyone in authority) actually want to solve the problem of sacrilegious communions?

Pope John Paul II pointed out the problem way back in 1980 (Dominicae Cenae):

The situation is now vastly worse than in 1980. Many go without real reflection. Others, who might be thinking about how they ought to go to Confession first, find it embarrassing or even physically awkward to avoid going up too. It has become a common attitude that if you don't go to Communion, you've not been to Mass properly: you've not fulfilled your obligation. And all this is to say nothing of the problem of those who feel excluded, or the priests who feel they need to exclude them, because of notorious public sin, a problem which is the root of the greatest crisis in the Church, according to some, since Arianism, and which is threatening to cause a schism.

As a matter of fact there is a perfectly straightforward solution, which doesn't require any change to the Church's teaching about Marriage, or sacramental discipline about public sinners. Nor does it require priests to enforce brutal and (to many church-going Catholics) incomprehensible restrictions on the reception of Communion. It requires a liturgical practice which is not so problematic that it has not in the past been permitted over many years and over widely varying social conditions.

Here how it works. The problem of sacrilegious communion, and the related problem arising from the theoretical obligation to prevent at least one category of these at the Altar rail, arises largely because of the very public nature of the reception of Communion in our churches today. Although people generally no longer dress up for it, it is a parade. If we take that element away, we have greatly ameliorated the problem.

What I am referring to is the practices surrounding Holy Communion which were universal in the Church for a number of centuries up to the 20th century. Since they died out at the outer limit of today's living memory, between the two World Wars, people may be surprised to hear what they were.

1. Communion is not commonly distributed during Mass. It is distributed before, after, or between Masses, or on application to the parish priest.

2. Liturgical participation in Mass is focused not on the reception of Holy Communion but on witnessing the newly-consecrated Host and the Chalice, which are surrounded with as much solemnity as possible, enriched with indulgences, and so on.

If Holy Communion is not distributed at Mass after the priest's Communion then reception ceases to be a public act. The whole question of what people will think if you do or do not join the queue with everyone else disappears. People may still receive Holy Communion in groups at the Altar Rails, of course, but they do not do so in front of the entire congregation.

The older practice is not the most ancient practice. It was discouraged under the influence of the Liturgical Movement which sought to re-integrate Holy Communion into Mass where, it was felt, it belonged, from a ritual point of view, and also to make the Sacrament of Communion a more appropriately communal act. I don't have any particular disagreement with the arguments in favour of having the Communion of the Faithful in Mass, but they are clearly not arguments of infinite weight. Other things being equal it makes more sense, perhaps. But now we are facing a major crisis: the situation is one not remotely anticipated by the liturgists of the early 20th century. Reversing this particular well-meaning reform should be a no-brainer.

An incidentaly aspect of the re-insertion of the Communion of the Faithful into Mass was making impossible the singing of many of the settings of the Agnus Dei which were composed during the period when it wasn't there. These could be very long: they weren't interupted by the Communion of the Faithful, and sometimes included the Communion Antiphon at the end.

If, that is, we are in the business of finding solutions. Those who want to give the growing crisis the fuel it needs to create some kind of explosion in the Church, some kind or volcanic eruption where the theology of marriage and sacramental discipline, the reality of the Blessed Sacrament and even the authority of the Papacy are all imperilled: well then we should definitely keep things as they are.

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Cross-posted from Rorate Caeli.

I have pleasure in presenting the new edition of the quarterly magazine of the Foederatio Internationalis Una Voce (Una Voce International), Gregorius Magnus: the 4th edition.

It can be downloaded as a pdf here:

Gregorius Magnus 4

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St Paul

Peter Kwasniewski has an excellent discussion of the contrast between the Epistles (first readings) of the first three Sundays of Lent given us by the ancient Lectionary, and the Second Readings of Sunday Mass, usually Pauline Epistles, offered us by the 1969 Lectionary. Since there are three years of readings in the Ordinary Form there are nine passages to compare with the three of the EF. Not one of these nine passages so much as mentions the major theme of all three of the EF's selections: the importance of repentance from a sinful lifestyle, above all in relation to sexual sins.

So concerned were the compilers of the reformed Lectionary to avoid mentioning sin that they even cut out of the passages bits where the subject came up.

It is a nice illustration of a major strand of what happened in the Catholic Church when the reforms following Vatican II were implemented. Consider this, a passage commenting on yesterday's Epistle by Mgr Patrick Boylan (The Sunday Epistles and Gospels) which had its Imprimatur in 1941.

If there are among us Catholics, apparently convinced and genuine, who seek to minimise the sinfulness of unchastity, or the danger of its occasions, let us not be deceived by their words, nor follow their example. On all sides one hears voices raised against every attempt to check the growth of profligacy, every effort to restrict evil amusements and evil literature. We hear constantly of the 'sacred rights', of freedom--freedom, that is, to disregard the moral code, to follow the blind guidance of passion, to satisfy every form of curiosity, so see everything, to read everything. Popular literature is full of the 'empty words' [St Paul's phrase] with which all that is seductive to sense is represented as innocent because it is 'natural', or 'healthy', or because it 'develops the personality'!

Boylan, and no doubt the majority of his clerical and pious lay readers, was acutely aware of the ferocious assault which was being carried out against traditional sexual mores, a full twenty years before its hideous triumph in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. St Paul's exhortations were exactly what was needed at that time.

It was the moment when things were getting really, really bad--when a bad case of the common problem of all young people since time immemorial was turning into a social revolution which would permanently destroy the expectation of the permanency of marriage and of children being raised by their biological parents--that was the moment when the reformers chose to bury St Paul's message.

Everyone in the West in the middle decades of the 20th century was aware of the increasing gulf between the Catholic Church and the maxims of the world. Everyone was aware that Catholic communities, teachings, culture, and institutions were as a tightly-integrated group the last major refuge of a traditional Christian attitude.

It was for the Second Vatican Council to decide how to address this problem, and the path chosen, as far as anyone could tell through the confusion and chaos, was the path of appeasement.  The consequences tell their own tale.

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Today I publish the last of the FIUV Position Papers: The Sanctoral Cycle of the Extraordinary Form. Go over to Rorate Caeli to read it.

Researching the calendar, specifically the cycle of saints' days, has been very interesting. It has underlined how reletively empty of saints the 1969 calendar is (although the Novus Ordo it has picked up a few more over the decades since then). If you go to a weekday Mass in the Novus Ordo, the priest will more often than not be wearing green, during 'Ordinary' time, or violet in Advent or Lent, or white in Paschal time: the colour of a 'ferial' day, when no feast is being celebrated. I have heard of this being taken even further, and a preference for the ferial Mass taking over even on days when according to the rule there should be a saint. But in the Traditional Mass ferial Masses are downright rare. On the few days each week when there is no saint to celebrate, priests tend to say a Votive Mass.

It is important to understand the rationale behind this preference for ferias. In the EF a succession of ferial Masses would mean a succession of celebrations of the Mass of the previous Sunday (without the Gloria or Creed). Doing this sometimes can be nice, and occasionally the Mass of the previous Sunday may not have been celebrated on the Sunday (for example, the First Sunday after Pentecost is always replaced by Trinity Sunday). But doing this every day of the week would be a bit odd. For those who attend the Traditional Mass either every day or one or two days in a week, Masses are distinguished from each other by the saints and by the Votives chosen by the celebrant. On Fridays we tend to get the Mass of the Sacred Heart; on Wednesdays the Mass of St Joseph (a Mass formulary which isn't used elsewhere in the year, for historical reasons); Our Lady on Saturdays; and so on: these are devotions which will often be marked by statues or side-altars in traditonally-decorated churches. The saints and the Votives slot into our devotional lives: we can read up about the saints and prat to them, we can engage with the devotion celebrated in the Votive Mass. As you become used to the EF, it all slots together.

It is not so in the EF. Why? It was not an accident: Archbishop Bugnini said the fuss about the reform of the sanctoral cycle came from people who had a 'devotional attitude' to the liturgy. He thought that a devotional attitude to the liturgy was wrong. It wasn't, he thought, truly liturgical, and it wasn't truly scriptural. It had to be stripped away to reveal the bare reality of the Mass, like a modernist building with all the pipes showing. On the one hand the worshipper was not to be distracted, more than necessary, by devotions, from the action of the Mass itself. On the other hand, the liturgy would day by day introduce him to reams and reams of scripture, through the 'lectio continua' Lectionary: a Lectionary which, particularly in weekday Masses, plods through the books of both Testaments page by page (leaving out the odd embarassing bit, of course).

As someone who for periods of my life attended daily OF Masses I'd say that the reformed Lectionary does to an extent give one's liturgical experience a both continuity and difference: the readings of today's Mass will very probably continue the story or exhortation or whatever it is of yesterday's. Indeed, the more obscure readings are easier to understand if you've been keeping up. But the saints are rather left out of it. Even when they are celebrated, and the priest is wearing the red of a martyr or the white of confessor, the lectio continua will probably carry on, however innappropriate the reading may be to the saint whose day it is.

I leave it to others to defend the Novus Ordo in more detail. I hardly it necessary to defend the Traditional practice. It is just obvious to those who attend it that the traditional approach, which has been the Church's approach since the early centuries, feeds the spiritual lives of those open to it. The saints are not a distraction from Mass: they accompany us in it, and draw attention to its glories, since it was by it that they were themselves sanctified. The devotions of Massgoers and of the Votive Masses themselves point to Christ present in the liturgy as Our Lady points to the Christ-child in a thousand Rennaissance masterpieces. Why is St Joseph important? Why do we celebrate lots of Votive Mass of Our Lady? Because of their role in relation to Christ. And so it is with every authentic traditional devotion.

I hope this Position Paper, the last (at least
for now) in the series, will help those who are and also those who are not familiar with the Traditional Mass to understand it better, and appreciate it more.

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