Sebastian Moore was one of our gurus back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His book “The Crucified Jesus is no Stranger” had a considerable impact. Now I find that his voice can be heard loud and clear on his website (http://sebastianmoore.blogspot.com) -- and he has wonderful things to say.
“The church is the home of eternal truth, crucified and risen. It is also the home of long-enduring errors. For most of its two millennia, it tolerated abstention from the bread of life for most people, and a liturgy that disguised rather than revealed. Karl Rahner, a theologian of undoubted orthodoxy, spoke of the dark intellectual history of the church, in which people have been crucified on absolutes that have turned out not to be absolutes. When Father Bernard Lonergan, my teacher whose orthodoxy was never in doubt, was sent to teach theology at the
“To be a Catholic is to find none of this surprising. It is to know that there is the Holy Spirit of Jesus, who creates saints and martyrs known and unknown, many of whom may have known only an impoverished liturgy and theology. It is to be in touch with what I am learning to call a live nerve of truth that always surprises, being the nerve that connects the agony of Gethsemani with the Sacrum Convivium celebrated by Thomas Aquinas. It is in short to know the signs of eternal life in this world of time and change, and to be undisturbed at the encroachments of man’s enormities. It is to be rooted in truth at a level that makes the mind astonishingly resilient and tolerant of idiocies and distortions, a serenity deeper than words. The barque of Peter is not promised average seas and good stabilizers. He said, ‘in the world you will have trouble. But take courage, I have overcome the world.’”
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On the liturgy, he has some penetrating criticisms of the eerie world into which the Motu Proprio beckons us, a world in which the Eucharist ceases to be a meal:
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“Trent tackled the sacrifice of the Mass and the real presence in the Eucharist in two separate sessions, some time apart. Why? Surely because they were thought of as two different topics. Understandably, because, in the long established usage of the church, the people didn’t go to communion at Mass; they didn’t normally go to communion at all; it had to be ‘at least once a year’. Thus the Sacrifice of the Mass stood alone as a mysterious event which somehow re-enacted the sacrifice of
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“Is it not now—at very long last!—clear that the whole problem arose from the practice of the church that separated the doing of the Mass from the distribution of the sacrament. And the doing was highly mysterious for this reason; because it wasn’t what Jesus did, saying ‘take, eat, my body for you.’ So you have two separate things, the doing (one session of the Council) and the distributing (another) How the Mass did
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“But how the Mass is
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“What makes this matter rather piquant is that the last pope wrote ‘the mass is essentially a meal’ with the italics his (Mane nobiscum), while his successor has said repeatedly that the notion of the mass as a meal is the fundamental mistake of the people behind the liturgical reforms, of which he openly disapproves.
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“The Mass is His ritual, into which he put all His meaning for us, which is God incarnate slain by us and for us and risen for us to be his Body. Let us stop dividing him up between blessed mutter and bad Aristotle, and come before him again, in sorrow for so much, and praying to be brought again to our senses, and into a true sensus fidelium.”
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And in another posting:
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“Bread broken and shared, wine blessed and shared, is a meal. Period. But we learn from Jungmann, who is the chief authority, that very soon the emphasis shifted from the rite as meal to the rite as defined by the solemn prayer of thanksgiving, and it is on this early shift that the pope’s strong disagreement with a meal-centred theology is based.
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“But surely it is clear that the finding in the Eucharistic Prayer, of what Ratzinger brilliantly calls a transformation of existence - even of death - into thanksgiving, is simply the discovery of what in this meal is wholly special and indeed unique. It is not a de-emphasizing of the fact that it is a meal. This de-emphasizing is a further stage, and it has been reached when the Eucharistic Prayer is being described as a quasi-holy-place and named as the Holy of Holies, to be entered by the priest alone, with the people as outsiders or spectators. This development does not follow from, is not pre-contained in, the experienced transformativeness of the Eucharistic Prayer. On the contrary, it would naturally resonate in the hearts of the people in whose name the priest is giving thanks. For its failure to do this, we have to look to another source, and the most likely one is the amazing phenomenon whereby the faith that created martyrs became the state religion. For with this, to be a Christian is no longer necessarily to be a disciple, but to be a decent citizen.
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“In an important article, Benedict XVI and the Eucharist (New Blackfriars, March 2007), Eamon Duffy writes. ‘It seemed therefore that the Eucharist’s basic structure was unequivocally that of a meal, and this was the position adopted by Guardini and most other theorists of liturgical reform from the 1930s onwards. Immediately however, the dogmatic theologians detected a problem. Was not this precisely the position Luther had adopted in renaming the Mass the Lord’s Supper, and hence, was not this the view condemned at
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“Ratzinger’s answer is unequivocally yes. He argues that ‘the Eucharistic thesis [that it is thanksgiving and not meal that defines the Mass] is able to put the dogmatic and liturgical levels in touch with each other. For the Eucharistic thanksgiving is the form (this, and not the meal, he means) in which Jesus at his Last Supper attached sacrificial meaning to his death, and identified the elements of bread and wine with his flesh and blood given for the forgiveness of sins…the Eucharistic words of Jesus are the transformation of existence - even of death - into thanksgiving.’(1) This is beautiful. Ratzinger is saying that that which identifies the bread and wine with Jesus’ body and blood - which of course is the crucial step - and makes a feeling-sense of this identification, makes doxological sense if you like, is the prayer that is celebrating the victory over death, a paean of life beyond life as we know it. This is Ratzinger, and I’m with it all the way. But why does this transformation of existence, even of death, into thanksgiving, into Eucharist, in a uniquely appropriate doxology, which gives us at last, yes, the sacrifice convincingly in bread and wine, have to reduce to secondary status the fact that what we have here is food and drink shared, the new convivium, indeed the Supper of the Lamb, the sacred meal that is the cult of Christians? It doesn’t follow, surely.
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“And so much is at stake here. The language in which, indeed, liturgy and doctrine are in touch with each other so that we have take-of, does take off - and leave the wondering people behind! It is indeed an endlessly fascinating problem - it has exercised me most of my thinking life - as to how we get, in a way of feeling, from the bread and wine to the awesome reality of Calvary made luminous by Easter, and the alchemy that Ratzinger finds in the thanksgiving prayer really pulls this off I think, it gets me thinking-together these chosen foodstuffs of his ritual and a new earth, but saying how this makes sense, how this conjoins bread-and-wine and a new world born on the cross, does not swallow up the bread and wine as food and drink, as meal, about which all these wonderful things are being said, the doxologically sacred meal.
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“Ratzinger has said that the notion of the Eucharist is a meal is the fundamental mistake of the new reformers such as Guardini (who did much to save the soul of German Catholic youth from the ravages of the Third Reich). Duffy describes his solution, which is to jettison the idea of the meal as what the Mass is, as draconian. Is not this draconian solution based on a confusion between the natural coming-to-the-fore of the rite in the solemn thanksgiving with the subsequent interpretation of this development as making of the great prayer a quasi-Holy-of-Holies to be entered by the priest alone, the people outside?
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“Once this confusion is overcome, it makes perfect sense to see the Mass as a ritual meal in which the participants, with understanding faith, hear the celebrant utter the great prayer that ‘transforms existence - even-death into thanksgiving.’ The fact that this is not often a description of what happens with the reformed rite leads me to a radical question: is Jesus too human for us? Choosing as the ritual of his passage our oldest and the only universal symbol, the meal shared, he exposes that most human thing to our banality.
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“And it is just here that there occurs to me what Alexander Schmemann, the great Orthodox theologian, names as the ‘Eucharistic Crisis, eastern and western’, ‘the loss of the Assembly.’ The Assembly is lost in the beautiful words that are lost on the Assembly.
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“Over a century ago, Gregory Dix, in The Shape of the Liturgy, pointed out that with the Christianising of the Empire, being a Christian changed from being a disciple, with one’s life at risk, to being a respectable citizen. One effect of this, he said, would surely have been that full participation in the rite fell to the celebrant, the professional as it were. As the bishops changed from martyrs to people with competence and power, so the people changed from communicants to ‘the people at Mass’, their Easter Duties’ being to communicate once a year. I remember as a pious child being surprised at this Commandment of the Church. Only once a year? Another surprise, that came much later as I was ‘doing my theology’, was that one of the demands voiced by the Pilgrimage of Grace under Henry VIII was a return to the old Mass at which only the priest communicated, this latter detail being specified.
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“Now let us take a big leap, to the innovative advocacy of frequent communion by Pius X, the full significance of which has only just dawned on me. It is not only saying ‘the more the better’, a good prescription for spiritual health. It also means the normality of the congregation communicating at the Mass, which makes the Mass more evidently a ritual meal, though one of unique moment.
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“And now another connection begins to appear, between ‘the Mass not evidently a ritual meal’ and ‘the Mass clericalised.’ If the old rite does mark the beginning of the clericalising of the liturgy, then to advocate its restoration is to advocate a re-clericalising; and after all, in the old rite the celebrant does play all the roles.
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“This leads me to invoke, in conclusion, a ground-breaking book on the Mass that appeared in 1993, On Breaking of Bread by P.F.Fitzpatrick (Cambridge University Press), a priest I came to know well. This was, far and away, the best book on the Mass that I had ever read - and I read the lot in those days! - and this goes for everyone to whom I have recommended it. The book is ground-breaking in that it discloses the role of ritual in our lives at a depth that we are not normally conscious of. The Mass is, most radically, a ritual. It is His ritual. A ritual what? A ritual meal. Let the author speak for himself.
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“‘Do this in memory of me’: Luke’s Gospel agrees with Paul’s account in First Corinthians in having Jesus give that command to those who were eating with him at the Last Supper. The early testimony of Justin Martyr (c. 180 AD), which also records it, shows that the story was taken then by Christians as including a command to carry out a ritual eating and drinking. What Aquinas has to say about Christ’s choice of the occasion is worth setting down at the start of this section [on the way of ritual]:
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The last things to be said, especially by friends who are about to leave us, are those that are best remembered. At such a time, our love for our friends is greatest; and what we love most is what sinks deepest into our hearts (Summa Theol. 3.73.5).
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“This leads me to my conclusion. I am with the Pope in seeing that the Great Prayer ‘transforms existence - even death into thanksgiving,’ and I find this extraordinarily beautiful. I am not with him in saying that this makes the Prayer, and not the sharing, say what the Mass is.”
Most catholics will, I hope, pass over yet another fruitless and convoluted discussion of what the mass is. We cannot expect the leaders of the church to ever get it right. With regard to the liturgy they lack competence. With the latest changes in the liturgy about to be foisted off on the laity we can see once again the sinister obession with ritual. Moore's comment about the 'long enduring errors' is telling. These errors are evidence of a deep and centuries long corruption in the church and especially in the hierarchy. The church is a secular religious institution whose bosses are more concerned with ritual than with freedom and peace. And so their endless flow of subtle utterances.
Posted by: Jeff | March 29, 2008 at 10:30 PM
Karl Rahner? "Of unquestioned orthodoxy"??????? Question!
Posted by: Jeremy | August 22, 2009 at 11:22 PM
Disagree with Jeff quite a bit as there have been those who labored to understand these things, even though they often were lost in the mimetic crowd. I disagree with Jeremy nearly entirely. Rahner is I believe trying to understand, and that is all too rare these days, but possibly getting better. Tradition can be criticized and pruned.
Posted by: Nicholas | August 24, 2010 at 04:02 PM