A
short while ago I wrote a piece about how we can use the situation in which we
Catholics find ourselves because of the Corona-19 Virus pandemic to deepen our
Catholic faith. In many parts of the
world we find ourselves in the unprecedented situation where the faithful
cannot attend Mass and therefore cannot receive Holy Communion. I tried, perhaps too subtly, in my previous
article, to suggest that this situation in which we find ourselves is an
opportunity to deepen our Catholic faith and our understanding of the Blessed
Sacrament. And I still believe this and
urge everyone to take advantage of this time of deprivation of the Mass and of
the reception of Holy Communion to deepen our Catholic faith. But to urge Catholics to do this and not
point out what is in the way of this deepening of our faith in these times of
pandemic and cancellation of all public Masses and, mirabile dictu,
cancellation of public celebrations of Holy Week and Easter, would be a
pastoral dereliction. As a priest, this
is not only an objective situation that causes me astonishment and personal
grief. It also forces me to dig deeper
into my faith, my Catholic faith, yes, to try to understand, albeit through a
glass darkly, yet trying to understand what this means for the Church and for
the faithful, what it means for our faith.
The
current situation has exposed a quasi-paradox.
The faithful for the most part accept the reasons for the suppression of
public Masses, namely that such proximity of people in a relatively small space
would contribute to the spread of the Corona Virus. What I would call the typical Novus Ordo
Catholics, whose experience of the Mass is only that which came about after the
imposition of the Novus Ordo Mass by Paul VI, is not fazed by the lifting of
the Precept of Obligation to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of
Obligation. What must be added here is that the number of Catholics attending
Sunday Mass has fallen dramatically since the Novus Ordo was introduced—this
data is accepted by all as objective--and the question can be asked whether if
the legal precept of the Church were nullified how many Catholics would indeed
come to Sunday Mass.
The
surprising and to me ironical opposition to the cancellation of public Masses
has come mainly from what we can call Traditional Catholics. That term must be parsed into its many
conjugations and tenses, but the outcry comes mainly from those who see this as
a denial of their right to receive Holy Communion at Mass. The deep and almost
comical irony of this situation must not be lost on God. God’s appreciation of irony with respect to
mankind is part of his infinite love for us.
One can much more easily explain the lack of opposition from the great
majority of Catholics who regularly attend the Novus Ordo Mass. If they feel discomfited by the present
situation it is not because they feel deprived of the opportunity to assist at
the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is for
the Catholic the sublime act of the worship of God. For most of them have no idea that the Mass
is a sacrifice and that their presence at the Mass is to assist in the deepest
sense the priest—not the minister but the priest who offers sacrifice—in the
offering of the Son to the Father, the offering of Good Friday but in an
unbloody way, for the living and the dead, for themselves and all they love,
living and the dead. Their experience of
Mass is for the most part a community gathering at which one hears readings and
a sermon—sorry, homily—where bread and wine are brought to the altar by
representatives of the community, which are offered to God as bread and wine
and then somehow become the true Body and Blood of Christ to be consumed by the
people.
The
fact is that according to many and constant surveys many Catholics do not
believe that what they receive in Holy Communion is the body, soul and divinity
of Jesus Christ. For many, if not most,
what they believe they are receiving is a symbol, an important symbol, which
somehow is the point of coming to Mass, their gift from God for making the
sacrifice of coming to church for this hour.
Now some may retort that this is cynical and not true at all, etc.
etc. But my experience as a priest of 36
years is the basis of my observation.
This does not deny that most people who come to Mass are not pious or
that their heart is not in the right place.
It is that they believe less in the Real Presence of our Lord in the
Eucharist than the Methodists among whom I grew up and who knelt at a Communion
rail to receive what they believed to be just blessed bread and wine.
And
for the great majority of Novus Ordo Catholics—again, I speak from years of
experience—receiving Holy Communion is the point of the Mass. They endure the
readings and the homily and the forced communitarianism—a perpetual replaying
of the 1970s-- so that they can come up to receive the Body of Christ in their
hands and then feed themselves (something that always shocks me—that they feed
themselves) and then turn and go back to their pews to wait—sometimes—for the
end of the Mass. If you told these good
people that the essence of the Mass is the Sacrifice of the Son to the Father
for the living and the dead, they would stare at you as if you were speaking
Martian. The deep protestantization of
the Mass, where the homily becomes deeply important to the experience of Mass,
and where the priest facing the congregation becomes the facilitator of the
Mass experience—the contrast between this and how the Mass was experienced for
almost 2000 years is deeply real.
Given
this degradation of the understanding of the Mass, it is no wonder that the
past fifty years have seen the proliferation of Adoration of the Blessed
Sacrament outside the Mass. Pious
Catholics are not unintelligent and not shy about getting what they want and
think they deserve spiritually quite apart from what the clergy give them. Hence, Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament
outside of Mass, sometimes perpetual, has grown in practice multifold in the
past fifty years. I would submit that
this practice, although with valid dogmatic bases, has furthered the
misunderstanding among the people of the meaning of the Mass itself.
And
so we come to the remarkable fact that with respect to the reception of Holy
Communion at Mass there is no difference in most cases between Novus Ordo
Catholics and Traditional Catholics. It
is true that there is no huge outcry from Novus Ordo Catholics about the
abrogation of the precept for Catholics to attend Sunday Mass, for in their
understanding they are merely being told that they cannot receive Holy
Communion in whatever fashion they understand this. But for many Traditional Catholics to take
this away is to deprive them of the most important thing in their spiritual
life. Irony of all ironies! It is the
Traditional Catholics who have forgotten that the essence of the Mass is the
worship of God, which act is the giving of oneself to the God who gave himself
to us in a total way in the Cross of Jesus Christ. For most of the Church’s history the
reception of Holy Communion at Mass was not common practice. We read in the lives of the saints how they
would prepare to receive Holy Communion by fasting and prayer and receive only
several times a year. The fact that the
Church “requires” the reception of Holy Communion only once a year must give us
pause about the current unthinking practice of receiving Holy Communion every
Mass every Sunday or even every day. Without being negative about St. Pius X’s
encouragement to receive Holy Communion more frequently, we must rethink within
the Tradition of the Church what reception of Holy Communion means in relation
to assisting at the Sacrifice of the Mass.
How
many Traditional Catholics know that no Missal before the Missal of St Paul VI
even had a mention or rite for the Communion of the people? All of this in no way is to say that frequent
Communion is not a good thing. It is to
say that in this time in which the Church cannot celebrate Holy Mass publicly,
in this time of enforced desert, we must think and rethink the place of Holy
Communion in the Mass and the spiritual meaning of Communion in the context of
the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
We
are called in this singular situation in which we find ourselves, where we are
called to give up not only our presence at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass but
just as important our presence to each other, which presence is the means of
love, we are called to dig deeper into the Cross of Jesus Christ, not in some
objective way, but rather what it means for me, how my faith in the Cross of
Jesus Christ forms my reality, that reality that always involves my brother and
sister in the deepest way, that reality that teaches me what love ultimately is
and what my obligation is to carry out that love in my life. This takes courage. It takes courage to refuse to glide on the
tracks of unthinking piety. It takes
courage to face what is at stake: life or death.
Father
Richard Gennaro Cipolla
