Seminarians are expected to attend Mass every day, even when home on vacation. All happily oblige. Daily Mass in my home parish, St. Charles, Woonsocket, was celebrated at 7 a.m. But Holy Family parish across town offered a 9 a.m. Mass which I often attended. Holy Family easily had about two hundred people present at daily morning Mass in those days, older French-Canadians adhering to the faith of their ancestors. Before Mass began, two priests would be in the handy confessionals and remain there all during Mass. Worshipers could get up from their pew any time during Mass and confess their sins.. And many did. The priest celebrating Mass meanwhile began his prayers quietly in Latin while the congregation read their prayer books or said the Rosary. There were no spoken readings or homily or dialogue Masses in those days.
About halfway through the Mass, a fourth priest would come out from the sacristy and go behind the altar where the tabernacle had a rear door. He secured a huge ciborium of consecrated hosts and proceeded to the far end of the altar rail. Immediately parishioners would approach the rail and pull up from behind the rail a cloth drapery which would cover their hands and clothing, catching any flake of a host that might drop from the priest’s hand or their lips. The celebrant of course proceeded with Mass unmindful of the traffic behind him. The priest distributing Communion and the celebrant of the Mass usually concluded their tasks at about the same time. The Leonine prayers concluded the celebration and all went off their business.
This parish celebration was clearly and predominantly an act of adoration of Christ and His Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament. Confession was handily available so every worshiper could readily approach the Eucharistic Christ in an undoubted state of grace. While the pre-mature distribution of Holy Communion gladdened the devout soul, the sacrificial activity of the Mass going on quietly at the far-removed main altar was almost entirely neglected. Interaction among the faithful was non-existent and in fact unthinkable. Treasured time in the personal company of Jesus was the pious soul’s quest and reward. The dozens of believers in the church’s pews each morning bore ample testimony to the Council of Trent’s insistence against Luther that Jesus Christ is Truly Present in the Eucharist: Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. And as Bishop McVinney observed when heading off for the Second Vatican Council in 1962, “Why break up a winning team?”
Well, some would argue, with a measure of merit, that the winning team was indeed broken up. The American Church just celebrated a national Eucharistic Congress to thwart decreasing belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Both the above named Woonsocket churches are shuttered except for funerals. Ordinations are down to meagre digits, at best. Rare is the parish that can boast a convent. But also recall that the Eucharistic devotion expressed at Holy Family parish on those various mornings was four hundred years in the making. Appreciation of the Council of Trent’s rightful insistence on the centrality of the Eucharistic Christ in the life of the faithful did not occur over night. Pope St. Pius X was still trying to urge frequent Communion only a hundred years ago. And Mass as celebrated in my youthful years, while devout and prayerful, did little to promote the Scriptural, homiletic, sacrificial and communitarian aspects of the liturgy. “Jesus and Me” spirituality was the order of the day. With great effectiveness, some might argue.
American Catholics can no longer rely on the strong Catholicism that our ancestors brought with them from the old country. The providential event of the Second Vatican Council rightly insisted that the role of the Sacred Scriptures, the task of the homily, the participation of the faithful, the communal nature of the celebration, the Eucharist as sacrifice as well as sacrament, and the mission of the faithful to bring the Mass to the world must be newly appreciated. The pull of the old Mass was definitely from the pews to the altar or, perhaps better, from the pews to the tabernacle. Mass was a foretaste of heaven. The flow of today’s Mass, as Notre Dame liturgy professor Fagerberg describes it, must be “from the altar to the nave to the narthex,” that is, from the sanctuary to the pews to the streets. The faithful must take the comprehensive aspects of the Mass – Scriptural and Sacramental, personal and communal – and share them with the wider world around them.
Like the Baptist, today’s Catholic has the awesome challenge of announcing the real Presence of Christ to the secular world: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths. Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” Indeed, quite a challenge!
