{Book Club: The Spirit of the Liturgy}
- I hope you will read along in this book club (or just read my posts, that’s okay): Joseph Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy.
- (When you buy something via our Amazon affiliate link, a little cash rolls our way… just a little. Thanks!)
- I’ll post on Fridays, although for this longer book, perhaps not every Friday. I’ll give you your homework, I’ll talk about what we read, we’ll discuss in the comments. Even if you read later, the comments will still be open.
Previously:
Introduction to the reading: Joseph Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy: A Book Club for Easter and Beyond
Nature or history in worship? Or both?
The Relationship of the Liturgy to Time and Space: preliminary questions
Homework: Read Chapter Five of Part II.
Chapter Four, Part II: The Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament
Do you notice that as soon as I start posting about orientation, Cardinal Robert Sarah, the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, calls for the ad orientem posture at Mass? I don't like to brag, but yeah, I pretty much control the agenda over there. Dear Cardinal Sarah calls me up before breakfast just to know what's up for the day's activities and liturgical inquiries.
And I'm sure that like me, you have noticed how the discussion surrounding this and other liturgical issues lacks depth of study and serves mainly to increase the perception that matters of worship have to do with preference.
If only people (or at least those who profess to be the experts in these matters) would read the two books we've been studying, they'd be better off. They'd know the answers to their questions and the responses to their arguments.
But let's us study, anyway!
Recently the Chief and I were in Italy and France. We entered countless churches, both humble and grand. In each one, we felt the enveloping Presence, we knew we were in a sanctuary. Then we went to London. Our first visit was to Westminster Cathedral; again, the sense of home, of life. One day we had a tour of the Tower of London, which ended with a visit to the chapel. It's a lovely structure of course, a charming medieval stone building. But its only claim to sanctity is the fact of the souls (and at least one saint) buried there. As a place to worship, it is empty.
This week's chapter concerns just this, the Blessed Sacrament. To our friends here of no faith, or even to our Protestant friends, this is going to be something so foreign, it's hard to figure out what is being talked about. To our Catholic friends, it's likely to be a no-brainer — of course we adore! So I'm going to try to sort it out quickly and efficiently, as one does.
Every question comes back to this one: What is worship? Are things we do fitting? And fitting to what? Our likes and dislikes? Reality? Scripture? History? Are practices like adoration strange add-ons that ought to be cut away? Was there a period of time (obviously the Middle Ages) where practices sprang up due to the iron grip of a venal clergy on a superstitious and unsuspecting flock?
Ratzinger starts the chapter with the reality of the Real Presence:
It is plain for all to see that already for St. Paul bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ, that it is the risen Lord himself who is present and gives himself to us to eat. The vigor with which the Real Presence is emphasized in John chapter 6 could hardly be surpassed. For the Church Fathers, too, from the earliest witnesses onward — just think of St. Justin Martyr or St. Ignatius of Antioch — there is no doubt about the great mystery of the Presence bestowed upon us, about the change of the gifts [bread and wine] during the Eucharistic Prayer. Even a theologian of such a spiritualizing tendency as St. Augustine never had a doubt about it.” (P. 86)
The True Body of Christ is the means by which his people become the True Body of the Church, his body. “Only the true Body in the Sacrament can build up the true Body of the new City of God.” Thus, there was no “period of decadence” in which meaning got corrupted. It was always and continues to be the actual transubstantiated species — Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, True Christ — which brings our transformation about.
And this species, called the Host, the Blessed Sacrament, the Eucharist (a word that applies both to the event in which the substance is confected, and the substance itself) — “once changed, remains changed.”
Here is another “escape from preference”: because of our habit of thinking of religion in terms of our heart and how we feel about things, we can lapse into considering external realities as dependent on how we are thinking about them.
It's so good for us to be reminded that the whole universe is out there, going on its way regardless of the attention we pay to it. And Our Lord remains present in the Host, which has the appearances of bread, as long as it continues with those appearances (or “accidents” as the philosophers call them). If the bread decays, then the Presence is no longer there. When our bodies break the bread down and digest it, the Presence is not there, although God remains with us — just not bodily.
By the way, this fact is another example of Ratzinger's exitus and reditus — exiting and returning. He comes to us in the Host, we incorporate him, and he leaves — but he sends His Spirit. When we have communicated at Mass, we become the vehicle for this “leaving-returning” — the Spirit animates us. That is why Jesus told us to have no fear for what we will say. He sends his Spirit.
Anyway, the early Christians knew this. “That is why they reserved [the Host] for the sick.” And when they reserved the Sacrament, they knew it had to have a fitting place. This is how the tabernacle came to be. And yes, the Presence there in the Church changed things.
This realization came upon the Middle Ages with a wholly new intensity. It was caused in part by the deepening of theological reflection, but still more important was the new experience of the saints [that is, the ordinary faithful, not only professional thinkers], especially in the Franciscan movement and in the new evangelization undertaken by the Order of Preachers [Dominicans]… a new dimension… in complete continuity with what had always been believed hitherto…. This deepened awareness of faith is impelled by the knowledge that in the consecrated species he is there and remains there… when a man experiences this with every fiber of his heart and mind and sense, the consequence is inescapable: “We must make a proper place for this Presence.” (P. 89)
In Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, Ratzinger makes it clear that it is not the gathering of the community as such that makes the Church, or even “a loose federation” of such communities. “She does not become one through a centralist form of government; instead, one common center for us all is possible because she is always derived from the one Lord, who in the one bread makes her to be one body. That is why her unity goes deeper than any human union could ever go.” The Church is the union of persons in Christ's body… but stop thinking of this in a vague, metaphorical way! In. His. Body. That we eat.
Eating the Body and Blood of Jesus, as he commanded, is worshipping.
Eating it means letting it come into me, so that my “I” is transformed and opens up in to the great “we”, so that we become “one” in him (cf. Gal 3:16). (P. 90)
So the Sacrament is what it is, it doesn't change — it must be reserved. There must be a tabernacle.
What then is Adoration?
In a homily, Ratzinger says this:
… this idea of assembly had become flattened and separated from the idea of sacrifice, and thus the Eucharist had shrunk to a mere sign of brotherly fellowship. At the same time the concentration of the eucharistic celebration was causing faith and sacrament to lose something of their place among us. This has become quite visible in many churches — the place of adoration hides away somewhere on the edge of things, like a bit of the past. What was more far-reaching was the way the Eucharist itself was shrinking to the space of a brief half-hour, so that it could no longer breathe life into the building, no longer the be the pulse of time. Confined to the space of the sacred rite, it was becoming a tiny island of time on the edge of the day, which as a whole was given over to the profane and hectic business of our worldly activity. [Now] we realize that the adoration of the Sacrament was not in competition with the living celebration of the community, but its condition, its indispensable environment. Only within the breathing space of adoration can the eucharistic celebration indeed be alive; only if the church and thus the whole congregation is constantly imbued with the waiting presence of the Lord, and with our silent readiness to respond, can the invitation to come together bring us in to the hospitality of Jesus Christ and of the Church, which is the precondition of the invitation.
When we have a place for the Presence, when we set aside time for the Presence, then we have the preconditions for receiving (eating) the Presence. “A person cannot communicate with another person without knowing him.” (From God is Near Us.)
Ratzinger has a stark observation:
[With the Sacrament reserved in the Tabernacle], the church never becomes a lifeless space but is always filled with the presence of the Lord, which comes out of the celebration, leads us into it, and always makes us participants in the cosmic Eucharist. What man of faith has not experienced this? A church without the Eucharistic Presence is somehow dead…
Permit me to end with two stories which put this statement in a positive way — which show that a church with the Eucharistic Presence is somehow alive.
The first is the story of André Frossard, journalist, man of secular France in the 20th century. An atheist, whose only relationship with religion was one of ironic detachment, he was waiting for a friend outside a chapel where some nuns were adoring Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament (that is, the Host — the bread that has been transformed into the Body of Christ — is placed in a stand on the altar for people to pray before).
He got impatient for his friend and went inside. He writes of his conversion:
I still see him, the twenty years old boy I was then, I have not forgotten the wonder that seized him when, from the depths of the chapel, of no particular beauty, suddenly saw the rise of a world in front of him, another world of unbearable splendor, crazy density, whose light revealed and concealed at the same time the presence of God, the God who, a moment before, he would have sworn, had never existed except in the imagination of men; at the same time he was submerged by a wave, which was rampant with joy and sweetness, a flood whose power broke his heart and that he never forgot, even in the darkest moments of a life invested, more than once, by horror and by misfortune; he had no other task, since then, than to bear witness to this sweetness and this heartbreaking purity of God who, that day, showed him of what kind of mud he was made.
He had a sense of humor. “I was as surprised,” he wrote, “to find myself a Catholic when I left the chapel as I would have been to find myself a giraffe when I left the zoo.” He also said, “Sometimes to me it happens to get out of a station without becoming a train. As for my own free will, I can claim to have it only after my conversion, when I realized that only God could save us from all forms of enslavement in which, without him, we would surely be doomed to.”
The other story is of Sweden's Ulf Ekman, formerly Evangelical pastor of one of the world's largest congregations. His story is a fascinating one and has many elements, of course, but striking to me was this statement which I translate from a French interview:
I became Catholic first of all because of a spiritual experience. At the end of the 90s, when I was working in Hawaii, I went “by mistake” into a Catholic chapel that had Eucharistic Adoration. I sat down. I sensed that the Christ was really present. This impression never left me. Thereafter, I felt the need, as pastor, to restore the liturgy and the sacraments within my church.
Ultimately, he did enter the Catholic church.
We need the Presence in our churches.
Were there any other passages you’d like to talk about?
Questions? Comments? I’d love to hear from you!
(Emphases added in quotes are mine.)
Click here to see our previous discussion of Romano Guardini’s The Spirit of the Liturgy, which you can read free, online. You can also purchase it here, although be warned, this edition does not have the footnotes, which stinks.
Mari says
Just want you to know Leila how much I’m enjoying following along with you in your book club.I’m an Anglican so much of what you’ve discussed is a mutual experience.
I had an “aha”minute yesterday reading about the Reserved Sacrament and the presence of the Lord making a church “alive”.
I grew up in the Protestant evangelical tradition and by age 17 I classified myself as an atheist due to some unfortunate experiences in our church.It was hard to completely walk away from the way I had been raised and I still had some hope I could find some evidence of a God.
One day a few years later found me standing in an “empty”Anglican church.I was initially struck by its beauty but I found myself on my knees because I suddenly experienced an overwhelming sense that God was there and that God loved me even though I had turned my back to Him.
As you may know many Anglican churches have Reserved Sacrament (as this particular church did) and it was only yesterday that I realized the connection.
That day was the beginning of a journey that has resulted in a life of ministry in the Anglican Church.
Amanda says
I have an honest question as a protestant, so I trust you’ll forgive me if it’s unclear because of different underlying assumptions. I understand how adoration and all of that comes sensibly along if you believe the bread and the wine are the bodily presence of the Lord (the “risen Lord himself who is present”). What I don’t understand is the lack of that same…appreciation? reverence? for the Holy Spirit. Do Catholics not believe the Holy Spirit is specially present at mass? Do you adore that person of the trinity in a special way because of His presence at church, but in a manner that I’m unaware of? I mean, to an extent, this is quibbling, with the trinity being one, of course!. But there’s a lot of Catholic focus (it seems to me) on the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and I never hear anything about enthusiasm for the presence of the Holy Spirit. And related, it seems you’d say the risen Lord isn’t present at my church, because we don’t observe communion like that, but would you say the Holy Spirit isn’t present? Or that He is only present during a worship service or meeting for prayer? And how could you feel like a church was dead or sad or empty with the Holy Spirit of our Lord in it? What am I missing? I’m genuinely confused over here.
Leila says
Dear Amanda,
Great question!
I can’t say that I can address the whole subject of the Trinity! May be above my pay grade. We will discuss it more as the book goes on, so that will be interesting.
Here we are talking about the church building itself — apart from when there are people in it. To be sure, there is the sense one has about prayer: that in one place, there have been many prayers, and in another there have been none. My husband talks about praying in a hotel where he was sure he was the first one to do so… we have all had the experience of being somewhere — at our grandparents’ house or in a hospital room — where we can sense that the walls are imbued with prayer.
Jesus told us that he’d be present where two or more are gathered. The Holy Spirit breathes among us when we pray together. The Trinity dwells within our breasts at baptism. The Spirit intercedes for us when our prayers seem like groanings.
The assembly, the gathering, calls upon the Spirit and the Spirit comes among them. Sacred beauty in holiness and holiness in beauty radiate the Spirit — and fill us with what we will later read that Ratzinger calls “sober inebriation”!
And I think that our Protestant brethren are aware of this and have a lot to offer us in terms of remembering — and acting upon — this reality of the Holy Spirit. In this very chapter, Ratzinger deplores the constricting of religious life to the “half-hour” of the celebration. I think you are correct in saying that Catholics are less aware of this reality of the Spirit among us and acting through us.
What perhaps Protestants miss is the fact that the Spirit comes among us *because of* the Eucharist. Jesus Christ was Incarnate — wholly man, wholly God. This Presence — *bodily* Presence — he left us in the Eucharist, the Blessed Sacrament. He walked among us *in his body* when he lived on earth, then died on the cross. That is the first exitus-reditus. He goes but leaves His body and blood in the Blessed Sacrament. Then he goes to the Father in the Ascension but sends His Spirit — that is the second exitus/reditus.
The Holy Spirit being among us depends on the Eucharist. Without Jesus’ gift the Holy Spirit could not come to be among us (John 16: 7). Baptism depends on the Eucharist. Grace depends on the Eucharist. At the same time, it’s by the Holy Spirit that we can celebrate the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is Jesus Christ, BODY, BLOOD, SOUL, and divinity. Although Jesus is present in many ways, he is only present BODILY in the Eucharist.
Short answer, or rather, attempt on my part to clarify: when the people are present, they are making the building alive by calling the Holy Spirit to be among them through the Presence of Jesus Christ in the Mass, and, by the Spirit, taking their life in Christ with them as they leave to go out into the world.
But when everyone leaves, the *building* is empty without that Presence. Contrariwise, the church is alive with the Presence there.
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church [numbers within the text relate to footnotes to Scripture and other resources — you can find this all online] [emphasis added]:
1373 “Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us,” is present in many ways to his Church:197 in his word, in his Church’s prayer, “where two or three are gathered in my name,”199 in the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned,199 in the sacraments of which he is the author, in the sacrifice of the Mass, and in the person of the minister. But “he is present . . . MOST ESPECIALLY in the Eucharistic species.”200
1374 The mode of Christ’s presence under the Eucharistic species is UNIQUE. It raises the Eucharist above all the sacraments as “the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend.”201 In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist “the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the WHOLE Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained.”202 “This presence is called ‘real’ – by which is not intended to exclude the other types of presence as if they could not be ‘real’ too, but because it is presence in the FULLEST sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God and man, makes himself wholly and entirely present.”203
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p2s2c1a3.htm
Lisa G. says
I heard Fr. Barron say that the word Jesus used when he was talking about eating his flesh was a word which means “gnaw”, so there could be no mistake about what he meant. No wonder he lost a lot of followers – they couldn’t fathom it.
Mrs. B. says
Cardinal Sarah asked for our prayers: it reminded me of Pope Benedict’s same request at the beginning of his pontificate: there are wolves out there. It is scary to watch what is going on right now.
Anyway, your friend David Clayton is another with a conversion story hinged on the Eucharist, so to speak – though for him it was Mass, not Adoration. I am reading The Way of Beauty right now, and enjoying it immensely. I have discovered Stratford Caldecott as well, so this is what I’m immersing myself in this summer: how to find the way to put the liturgy right at the center of our family life, including the school part. I’ll be rereading The Little Oratory as well!
There are many churches in Italy which have been deconsecrated, and are used for concerts or exhibits. It is a very strange feeling to go to one: you know Someone was there, and you wonder if He can really leave His house, and it feels all wrong, like we’re all trespassing.
Finally, how can I not think of Brideshead Revisited, that great, wonderful masterpiece? Remember when Cordelia is all upset when her brother breaks the news that the local bishop might close their private chapel? Cordelia cries that they MUST have Him there at home! And also later, when she describes to Charles how the priest did take the Blessed Sacrament away, after her mother’s funeral, and the chapel felt empty, and she had the sense of having been left alone: she quotes a line from Jeremiah, prayed on Holy Wednesday: Quomodo sedet sola civitas…
I can’t get enough of that book! I have tried to read other books by Waugh, but to me nothing matches to the greatness of Brideshead.
Lisa G. says
I’ve wondered about those concerts, some of which end up on public tv. I have to say I’m glad they’re not using a “real” Catholic church for them, but I didn’t know that churches are getting deconsecrated.
Mrs. B. says
Sometimes, if the church is still used as a church, the Blessed Sacrament is moved out of the church, and then the concert happens. Afterwards, the Blessed Sacrament is replaced in the Tabernacle. There are rules about what can or cannot happen in a church, and how it should be done.
But sometimes, and this is what I was referring to, a church simply stops being used as a church, and the city government, or whatever entity is interested in it, can lease the church for whatever purpose. Sometimes the “former church” is sold to the city. Such a building is not really a church anymore, and yet, as I said, it’s a weird feeling. Very often the altar will still be there, though no altar stone and no relics are left, I’m sure. I don’t know the details of deconsecration. But at least for me, it’s a moment of cognitive dissonance, if you will: you’re in a place that is not what it should be, what it was born to be.
I think I would feel the same way if I could visit one of those abbeys or cathedrals in England that Henry VIII semi-destroyed: the walls are still there, no roofs, and grass everywhere. It is not a church anymore, and yet…
I think that once a building was born to house the Lord, even when that is not true anymore, something still stays, and it compels reverence and respect. I guess it’s for the same reason that blessed objects are treated with special care even after they cease to be useful, and they are buried or burned, not tossed.
All this is to say that the Real Presence impregnates the church building, and, at least in my opinion, changes it forever.
Lisa G. says
Yes, I’m sure you’re right.