Traditional Catholic Teaching - Lesson 11

Lesson 11 - The Mass

What you see at Mass

Go to Mass some day in a Catholic church. It will probably look very strange to you. You will see the priest dressed in some unfamiliar garments. You will see him bowing from time to time, turning round to the people, turning back again to the altar, moving from one side to the other. You will see the people standing, at other times kneeling, sometimes sitting. You will hear a low murmur in an unfamiliar language — Latin.

The whole thing will be strange and unfamiliar to you. And yet for millions of Catholics it is a perfectly familiar thing. It was familiar to your ancestors in England for a thousand years.

King Alfred who burnt the cakes, William the Conqueror even Dick Whittington, half the names you read in your history books, went to Mass as a normal part of their lives. And indeed right back to the time of Christ Mass has been celebrated in the world without a break.

History in the Mass

When you see the priest go up the steps he bows down and kisses the altar. That is because there is a stone there in the altar in which are buried some part of the bones of martyrs — men and women who have died for the Faith. It is there because we have always said Mass on a stone like that ever since the earliest days of Christianity. In those days the only place where Mass could be said in safety for fear of the persecutors were the underground passages in Rome called Catacombs where a convenient place for saying Mass was the flat stone which covered the tomb of a martyr.

You will see the priest standing to pray with his hands extended. That was the most common attitude of prayer of the early Christians. The priest has stood like that for nearly two thousand years.

Even the garments (vestments) he is wearing are only the ordinary dress of the early Christians, modified slightly in cut and decorated rather more in the course of time, There is a lot of history in the Mass.

The Crucial Moment

All the early part of the Mass is composed of prayers, readings from the Scriptures and hymns (more often said now than sung except at a solemn celebration of Mass).

But the essential part of the Mass comes about half way. At that point you will notice the priest bow low over the altar, the whole congregation goes very silent, then the priest goes down on one knee, stands, raises the white consecrated Host¹ above his head and goes down on one knee again. He does the same with the chalice in which is the consecrated wine. And the server rings the bell at each of these movements, six times in all.

¹See Lesson 10

After that there are more prayers, the people come to receive Holy Communion and at the end the priest turns round and says the Latin words:

"Ite missa est" — Go it is the dismissal.

That word missa has become the name for the whole service — the Mass.

What Happens?

What happens at that central most solemn point? This happens. The priest recalls the night before Christ died on the cross. And he says:

"The night before He suffered He took bread into His holy and venerable hands and having raised His eyes to heaven unto Thee, O God, His Father Almighty, giving thanks to Thee, blessed, broke it and gave to His disciples, saying: Take ye all and eat of this for this is My Body. In like manner, when the supper was done, taking also this goodly chalice into His holy and venerable hands, again giving thanks to Thee, He blessed it and gave it to His disciples, saying: Take ye all and drink of this for this is the Chalice of My Blood of the new and eternal covenant, the mystery of faith, which shall be shed for you and for many unto the forgiveness of sins. As often as you shall do these things, ye shall do them for a commemoration of Me."

At that moment the bread and wine is changed into the Body and Blood of Christ and Christ offers Himself to God for the living and the dead. (Lesson 10.)

The Mass and the Cross

To understand the Mass it is necessary to read again what we said about Christ's death on the cross. As the head of the human race He offered Himself to God on the cross. And therefore the human race could at last say to God:

"We have made amends for the sin by which we cut ourselves off from you."

That was on the cross on Calvary. But the night before, at the Last Supper, Christ had made the same offering of Himself although no blood was shed. Body and blood, under the appearances of bread and wine, were separated. In fact, because He is the living Christ, with His Body there is His Blood, His Soul, His Humanity and His Godhead. But the separation at the Last Supper vividly represented the separation of body and blood which in fact occurred when He died next day. Then He said to His Apostles:

"Do this for a commemoration of Me,"

What He commanded His Apostles to do the priest does every day at Mass.

The Mass is a Sacrifice

THE Mass is called a sacrifice. A sacrifice is an offering. But it is a special sort of offering. It is an offering which is only given to God. And it is an offering made by a person specially appointed to make it — a priest.

Sacrifices are a commonplace of most of the religions of mankind. We find traces of them far back as history stretches. The idea behind them is this. Men realise that God is the Supreme Lord of all things. And so they take something belonging to themselves, maybe an animal, maybe the first fruits of their harvest, and they say:

"O God, we recognise that You are Lord of all things and as a sign of this recognition we take something which You have given to us and give it completely to You."

Secondly, men realise they have to thank God for all He has given them and as a sign of their gratitude they give something to God.

Thirdly, they recognise that they have sinned against God and to make reparation for their sins they give up something belonging to themselves and give it to God.

Lastly, they realise they should ask God for what they need in the future and it is a human instinct that when we ask a favour we should on our part give something².

Those were the ideas behind all the sacrifices that were ever offered. But obviously no gift can really be worthy of God. No gift can really he enough to make up for all the sins of men. No gift —except one... The only gift that could really be worthy of God would be a gift as great as God Himself. It is that gift that we have in the Mass. We give to God the life and death of His Son Jesus Christ Who was Himself both God and Man.

² Remember the word STAR: Sorrow, Thanksgiving, Adoration, Request.

We Offer the Mass with Christ

There are these differences between Christ's offering on the Cross and His offering in the Mass

1. On the Cross Christ shed His Blood and died: In the Mass He does not die; His death is represented and offered again.

2. On the Cross Christ offered alone. In the Mass Christ offers through the hands of the priest and all the people offer with Him each in his own way.

3. On the Cross the only offering was Christ Himself. In the Mass Christ is offered and with Him all the people are offered too.

In short, we bring to the Mass ourselves, our whole life, our family, our work, our recreations, our prayers, all that we have, all that we are. We put this with the offering of Christ and He makes it one with His own

And so God now does not see us as isolated individuals, He sees us as one great family, brothers of His Son, adopted children of His own.

He sees our offering not as a small insignificant thing but as part of the great and perfect offering made by His Son. In return He pours out upon us and upon the whole Church all the graces and blessings which His Son won for the human race when He died on the cross.

It may be asked if Christ made the offering once and for all on the cross how can the offering be needed again, how in fact can it ever be made again? The answer is that we simply renew the same offering that Christ made once and for all. We make it our own offering now. We present it again. (We re-present it.) And it is through the Mass that the grace, the pardon Christ won on the cross, is distributed among mankind.

How the Church Offers

Really to understand the Mass you have to know what St. Paul meant when he called the Church the Body of Christ.

We use the word "body" in different ways. Usually it means the flesh and blood body of each of us. It is one thing, every member of it living by the life which is in the whole. Then there is the other meaning when we speak of, say, a regiment of soldiers and we call them a fine "body" of men. Here again the body is one thing, all the members of the regiment are united for the same purpose. But a body of soldiers is not quite like the body of a man. The members are separate. They simply live and work together there is no physical connection between them as there is between the limbs of a man.

Now when we call the Church the Body of Christ our meaning is somewhere between these two uses of the word,

The members of the Church, like the members of the regimental body, are separate individuals. But, like the members of the flesh and blood body, they actually share the same life. The life they share is the supernatural life which comes to us from Christ.

There is something we cannot quite understand about this body, these separate individuals who are yet sharing the same life. It is of course a mystery. That is why it is often called the Mystical Body of Christ. As we said before, we expect to find mysteries, things we don't fully understand, when God acts directly in the world. What we have to grasp is that this Mystical Body is a reality. The supernatural life is every bit as real as the life we receive from our parents. It is as real as the life which keeps our flesh and blood body going. The Mystical Body of Christ is the Catholic Church. The head is Christ; the baptised Catholics are the members.

"Through Christ Our Lord ..."

Now at Mass the Mystical Body of Christ on earth offers the sacrifice which Christ offered personally and alone on the Cross. At Mass Christ our head and all the members of His Body the Church are united in the great act of worship of God. The priest who offers the Mass is the representative and instrument of Christ — he is also the representative of the Church on earth.

All the millions of members of His Church spread through the world are offering, even unconsciously, this sacrifice just as the whole body goes on living and functioning whether we are conscious of it or not. These are the members of the Church Militant.

But when you see Mass offered you have to see in your mind's eye not just the people in the benches there but the whole great Church of God. At the head of all is Christ; beside Him in Heaven are His Mother Mary and all the saints. They are called the Church Triumphant.

The dead who have not yet attained Heaven but are still in Purgatory (see lesson 19) share in the Mass too. They are the Church Suffering. Mass is offered for the living and the dead.

The fact is that through the Mass the worship of the whole world is offered to God. The Mass is the sacrifice of Christ continued — everything goes to God through Christ. He is the one and only mediator, the one go-between, the one representative of God to Men and Men to God. All the members of His body, priests or laymen act only by His power.

In the other direction — all the graces and favours of God are given to the world through the Mass, through Christ Whose sacrifice the Mass is. Even the Sacraments, the means of Grace made by Christ, draw their power from the Mass. The graces God gives to all men, Christian or Pagan come through the Mass.

There is a climax of the prayers of the Mass half-way through the second part. The priest has prayed for the living, he has made the consecration and the offering, he has prayed for the dead, he has prayed for the whole Church and all mankind, Then he says that we ask all these favours through Jesus Christ Our Lord:

Through Whom, O Lord, Thou dost ever create
sanctify, quicken, bless, and bestow upon us
all these good things
Through Him, and with Him, and in Him,
is to Thee God the Father Almighty
in the unity of the Holy Ghost
all honour and glory
for ever and ever. Amen.

Everything comes to us from God through Christ: everything goes from us to God through Him.

The completion of all is Holy Communion when we receive Christ Our Lord personally, and through Him our life in the Mystical Body is nourished. But of this we have already written. (Lesson 10.)

That is why good Catholics will risk their lives to get to Mass in times of persecution. That is why so many good Catholics go to Mass not only on Sundays when they are bound to — but every day hail, rain or snow.

That is why when a Catholic marries he wants his marriage set in the framework of the Nuptial Mass. When he dies he wants his body to lie before the altar whilst the Requiem Mass is celebrated.

It is the Mass that matters.

Why in Latin?

In most countries (not in all) the Mass is said in Latin because their first missionaries came from Rome. This causes no inconvenience because prayer books and missals in English or in any other language are readily available.

It has the great advantage that in nearly every country a Catholic finds himself perfectly at home with the service. Every Church is like his own parish church. Soldiers will recognise the truth of this better than anyone.

Moreover there is something very inspiring and moving in the thought that we are listening to the identical words heard by our ancestors right back to the first apostle of England — St. Augustine in 597 — and even further. The words spoken at their christening, marriage, death are spoken too at ours.

Finally Latin being no longer a spoken language in any country means that the meaning of the words does not change. This helps to keep the doctrines enshrined in the Mass from changing too.

If it ever seems an advantage to change to another language or languages, however, the Church will no doubt make the change. It is not a matter of doctrine.

End of Lesson 11

Supplement A

Appendix: "The Splendour of the Holy Mass"

Appendix: "Visiting Jesus In The Blessed Sacrament"

Supplement B: "This Bread Is My Flesh"

Appendix: "Jesus Institutes The Most Holy Sacrament"

Appendix: "The Paschal Lamb and Jesus"

Appendix: "Early Christian Teachers"

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