April 4, 2004

In the holiest week of the year, Lent ends with the Wednesday liturgies. The Triduum begins with Holy Thursday, commemorating the institution of the Sacred Priesthood and Eucharist. Christ provides this heavenly food for our brief earthly lifetime of service to Him. Holy Thursday renews the adoration of Christ’s Presence at the altar. Our world has forgotten the Mass to a shocking and, literally, deadly degree. The soul starves without the Mass.

Failure to adore Christ in the Mass comes from the curse of self-adoration. This is as old as the human race. In our day it has been furthered by wrong teaching about the Eucharist. Seven years ago the Church formed a Vox Clara (clear voice) commission to provide a more accurate translation of the sacred texts as well as encouraging use of the sonorous Latinity which is the universal heritage of the Western Rite. Many have been working on this and I was assigned a small part in it, from which experience I have learned how difficult it is to translate authentically. Much of the Novus Ordo (revised Mass) has not been satisfactory, and to this problem have been added many abuses which the Holy See is now also attempting to reform. In this holy season new instructions and admonitions will be published. Some liturgists who already protest that it will be hard to adjust to this, are the same people who promoted radical changes that have been so devastating to Eucharistic worship. Their so-called “renewal” has issued in a 50 percent decline in Mass attendance in the past generation and growing ignorance of the Real Presence.

We do not change the Mass. The Mass changes us. St. Gregory of Nyssa said that the Blessed Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood is not so much consumed by us as we are consumed by it. In recent years our society has suffered substance abuse, sexual abuse, financial abuse, marriage abuse, and countless offences against the natural order. The most devastating abuse is to abuse Christ. To abuse the Mass is to crucify Christ and to “eat and drink to our own condemnation.” The two go together, for as St. John Chrysostom says, in the Eucharist “we become a single body...members of His flesh and bone of His bone.... He blends Himself with us so that we might become one single entity.”

In second century Rome, St. Justin Martyr, who was beheaded under Marcus Aurelius, told the emperor: “We come together to celebrate the Eucharist. No one is allowed to partake except those who believe as true the things which we teach….We do not receive this food as ordinary bread and as ordinary drink. We are taught that the food over which the prayer of thanksgiving, the word received from Christ, has been said...is the flesh and blood of this Jesus who became flesh.”

Fr. George W. Rutler