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Toward an Ars Celebrandi
Ars Celebrandi
In the spring of 2001, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments met in plenary session to consider the major questions before the church in this period of the post-conciliar liturgical renewal. It is significant that among the major issues up for discussion by the Bishop members was the idea of ars celebrandi, a subject addressed at some length by Cardinal George Pell.
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His Eminence stressed that for the Priest in particular, “ars celebrandi is not only a matter of preparation of mind, body, and heart, but also an appreciation of the gestures, the attitude of the body, and the dignity of a humble leadership that is evident to the people in a man who is loving and able to pray the liturgy, able not only to cover himself in sacred vestments, but above all, to be clothed with the Lord Jesus Christ.”
His Eminence's emphasis on the ars celebrandi was to be echoed in the second half of the paragraph in the General Instruction which I cited last night. The first half, you will recall, provided a job description of who the priest is at Mass.
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This last part of the paragraph provides a sort of performance review of the priest at Mass. In one of the most succinct and challenging statements, the paragraph goes on:
“When he celebrates the Eucharist, therefore, he must serve God and the people with dignity and humility, and by his bearing and by the way he says the divine words he must convey to the faithful the living presence of Christ.”
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You’ve heard the oft quoted maxim that the job of the priest at Mass is to “say the black and do the red,” that is to say the words of the Missal as handed down to us over the centuries and exactly perform the rubrics. But the Missal is asking something more of the priest here. It is not just the words he says, but the way in which he says them, from the heart. It is not just how high he raises the chalice, but how he raise it, with his whole being.
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As the great poet Paul Claudel once wrote:
Your prayers, and your faith, and your blood, with his in the chalice; These, like the water and wine, form the matter of his sacrifice.
This is what is truly meant by fostering an ars celebrandi, an art of celebrating the Mass and it is, I suggest, the key to an authentic spirituality of the Diocesan priest. For this ars celebrandi is not so much a matter of mastering skills, as conforming my heart to the Lord into whose Priesthood I have been ordained, and with whom I seek to join his holy people.
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Sacrosanctum Concilium
The Council Fathers first articulated this truth in the oft-quoted fourteenth paragraph of the Conciliar Constitution Sacrosanctum concilium. Have you ever listened to a talk on the Sacred Liturgy which has not recalled that the "full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else..."?
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However, seldom is the paragraph quoted in context. For this seminal challenge is immediately followed by the strikingly blunt assertion that it "would be futile to entertain any hopes of realizing this unless the pastors themselves, in the first place, become thoroughly imbued with the spirit and power of the liturgy.”
For priest are the primary agents of the liturgical reform. The success or failure of the conciliar vision is largely in their hands. But success must begin and end with the renewal of their priestly hearts.
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Internalization
Our beloved Pope emeritus, Benedict XVI, frequently returned to this theme, as he did in a conversation with diocesan priests from Albano on August 21, 2006. The ars celebrandi, he insisted, first demands that “the priest enter truly into [the dialog between God and man, which is at the heart of the sacred liturgy]. Announcing the Word, he must feel himself in colloquy with God.”
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Of course, we might be tempted to reply. Every priest knows that when he stands at the altar he is in dialog with God. But does he? Is our focus at Mass always on Christ or on the performative and relational dimensions of the ritual we have been taught to enact? Are the individual relational aspects of this work sometimes prior to and obstructive of the divine dialogue into which he is called to lead us?
"He is in a dialog with God," the Holy Father reminds us, precisely "because the texts of the Holy Mass are not theatrical lines or some such - they are prayers, thanks to which, together with the congregation, I as priest talk to God."
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Pope Benedict XVI then introduces us to the mystagogical dimension of the ars celebrandi, recalling how the Rule of Saint Benedict describes the monk's praying of the Psalms as Mens concordet voci. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council has this in mind, as well, when they insisted that in the celebration of the Sacred Liturgy we must attune our mind to our voices when praying. What we do and say must be an authentic expression of what we feel and thing, as what we feel and think is deepened by what we do and say.
This relationship between the internal disposition and its external expression is expressed in an entirely new paragraph of the new Roman Missal, which attempts to explain that a common posture observed by all at Mass, “both expresses and fosters the intention and spiritual attitude of the participants.”
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Back to the Pope emeritus. An authentic celebration of the Liturgy with heart, mind, body and voice (all working in harmony) means that our celebration of the Sacred Mysteries (here he quotes Pope Saint John Paul II) is nothing less than “a continuation of a permanent growth in adoration….[by which we] “join our minds and hearts to the voice of the Church."
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Here we find the true context of a liturgically rooted spirituality of the Diocesan priest, for it is rooted in the we of the liturgical assembly,…”praying with the Church, with the words of the Church, and being truly in colloquy with God.” Thus does the Holy Father insist on internalization as the first prerequisite for an authentic Priestly ars celebrandi.
A number of years ago, I was invited by the Cathedral Rectors' Association to address them on how to improve cathedral Liturgy. While they were probably expecting a dissertation on the fine points of the latest rubrical disputes, that's not what they got. For to make better Priest celebrants, I suggested to them, you need to encourage Priests to be holier: to seek after sanctity, to long for prayer, to rejoice in virtue, to be conformed more and more to Christ. That is the secret of the ars celebrandi: obedience, authenticity, humility, and love for the sacred rites and texts are by-products of a life lived in close communion with Christ. It's the same secret known by Chaucer in the Parson's tale: "Christe's lore and his apostle twelve he taught...but first he followed it himself."
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Internalization and John Paul II
Our consciousness of the heart of the priest as the proper forum for the renewal of the Sacred Liturgy was really born in the time of Pope Saint John Paul II, who encouraged us never to forget the "intimate bond between the Priest's spiritual life and the exercise of his ministry.” And the same Pontiff who issued perhaps the most challenging words of the first forty years of the liturgical reform, when her reminded the Bishops of the United States in the course of their ad limina visit that
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“prayer for the needs of the Church and the individual faithful is so important that serious thought should be given to reorganizing priestly and parish life to ensure that priests have time to devote to this essential task, individually and in common. Liturgical and personal prayer, not the tasks of management, must define the rhythms of a Priest's life, even in the busiest of parishes.”
Would that we would heed those prescient words!
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An American Disability
But why don't we spend more time praying than we do fighting about the arrangement of the sanctuary? Why is it that the liturgical reform of our day has been seen more as the source of contention than the source of a deepening of unity in prayer to Christ?
Is it because we share in an American obsession with doing over being, with relating over reflecting, with performance over substance, with pleasure over patience, with satisfaction over truth? Is it because we fear the silent, the reflective, the quiet presence of God in the heart of a listening child?
We live in a society which loves to "get things done." We are great "doers." Thus we are able to embrace with gusto the aspect of the liturgical reform which called us to "do more." But we're not so good at reflecting, at meditating on the mysteries we celebrate. Without such meditation, without a life of reflective prayer, we will never be able to celebrate the Mass fully, consciously or actually.
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The Presentation of the Instrumenta
How can a priest approach the sacred mysteries, speak the sacred texts, or give his body, mind, and voice over to the immemorial rights unless he is willing to seek the secret of this mystery in the silent beauty of the God who whispers to his heart? If the Priest is not passionately in love with Christ and the sacred rights which join us to his Sacred Heart, if he is unwilling or unable to empty his heart in the same way that Christ the lead for him from across, then how can he take up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the lord?
For the secret, you see, is in three little words spoken to the priest when the chalice filled with wine and that paten with bread are first placed into his hands: agnosce, imitare, conforma: know what you are doing, imitate what you touch, and conform your life to the cross. I suggest that these mandates describes a radically new and challenging way of relating to the liturgy and plot a certain course for growing in the ars celebrandi.
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Accept from the holy people of God
the gifts to be offered to him.
Know what you are doing,
and imitate the mystery you celebrate:
model your life on the mystery of the Lord's cross.
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Agnosce: Know What You Are Doing
So liturgical formation must clearly begin with us, and it must begin from the inside out, with prayer. But, as the second clause of that sentence from Sacrosanctum Concilium 14 which we quoted earlier insists, it must also involve a certain instruction. And in order to accomplish instruction we must first be instructed.
Over the course of my work at the BCL, as Seminary Rector and now, once again, as parish priest, I have been privileged to speak to the priests of almost every Diocese in this country on a variety of topics liturgical. But I will never forget the invitation I received around the turn of the millennium to a diocese on the 1989 revision of the Order of Christian Funerals. By that time, the 1989 edition had become the only approved way for Catholic priests to celebrate the rites of Christian death and burial. At the end of the first session I was perplexed by the questions they were asking and so at the beginning of the second session I asked “How many of you own a copy of the 1989 Order of Christian Funerals? After ten years, only 40% of the presbyterate had bought a copy of the book!
Such a situation is scandalous. But equally as scandalous is the fact that many priests, while possessing a copy of the liturgical books (it’s a good start!) had ever read the introductions, the rubrics or the full course of optional prayers contained therein. Do know what we are doing in the liturgy? Do we know the rites we celebrate? Do we read the introductions to the liturgical books? Do we pray the prayers and make them our own? The first step in opening ourselves up to the wonderfully transforming and sanctifying power of the liturgy is to know the rites we celebrate. Such a discovery comes by way of hard work and study, searching for Christ in liturgical prayer.
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The second demand of the presentation of the priestly instrumenta is Imitare: Imitate the Mystery You Celebrate.
We are called to be transformed by the sacred mysteries we celebrate, to imitate the very mysteries we touch. Such change, however, can only be the result of a profound appreciation of the Scriptures, a typological mystagogy which enters deeply into the language and the life of the Sacred Liturgy and its rites and texts.
When a Priest picks up the Chalice at Mass, how can this change him? If he sees this Sacred Vessel simply as a cup to be raised to prescribed heights and over which he must sing or say prescribed formulas, I suggest that not much will happen to him. However,
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- if in the quiet of his room late at night he meditates on the cup of suffering which the Lord prayed would pass him by (Mt.26.39); or of the "cup of blessing" of which St. Paul writes.
- If each day, in the name of Jesus, he offers to those in need that "cup of cold water" of which our Savior spoke (Mk.9.4)
- If before the Blessed Sacrament he recalls the life-giving "cup of the new and everlasting covenant" (Lk.22.20)
- If when he looks upon Christ on the cross he see a chalice, emptied that we might be filled, "obedient unto death, death on a cross" (Phil.2.7-8).
- If the Priest come to deeply understands the Chalice that he holds in his hands, then he too will become a chalice: ready to be emptied, ready like Christ, to learn through obedience to the will of the Father. (Heb.5.8 )
A true understanding of what it means to take that Sacred Chalice in my hands gives me the grace to accept the kind of suffering I would instinctively shun, even as Jesus did in the garden (Mk.14.36). For most assuredly, in our own Gethsemenes we will find this same chalice offered to us over and over, until we have drunk it fully and thereby been "conformed to the image" (Rom.8.29) of Christ. Each day, then, as we raise that Chalice at Mass, we can make our own the words of Psalm 116, so appropriately incorporated into the offertory of the old Dominican rite:
What return shall I make to the Lord for all the good things he has done for me The cup of salvation I will take up, and I will call upon the name of the Lord.
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Conforma: Conform Your Life to the Lord’s Cross
The third imperative is nothing more than a restating of the first two. For if we know what we are doing,
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if by prayer and study and sweat and agony we embrace the liturgical heritage which is ours in the sacred liturgy;
if we turn our lives into a cup of thanksgiving, poured out to the world,
if we conform ourselves to the body of the Lord who has been broken to make us whole;
if we proclaim the Word made flesh in season and out;
if our lives are conformed to the mysteries we celebrate,
then the liturgies which we celebrate will be grafted onto the one great heavenly liturgy, the Pasch of the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world. And that is what holiness is all about.
The idea here is that the priest, in order to preside in the person of Christ at the liturgy, must conform himself to the cross. At the heart of the mystery of the cross is the radical obedience of Christ, an “obedience unto death, death on a cross.”
The priest presider who thus conforms himself to the cross will be characterized by obedience. Obedience to the prayer of the Church, obedience to the word of God which calls him to die to himself in the model of Christ, and obedience to the euchology and rites he prays.
Such an obedience makes of the priest presiding at liturgy a humble servant. He is not a host, like Stephen Colbert, his success is not gauged by how “entertained” people feel. He is not a performer like Anthony Hopkins; His success is not gauged by how much he stirs human emotions. He is not a politician like Joe Biden; his success is not gauged by how popular he is. He is a servant-priest in the likeness of Christ Jesus, whose success is gauged by how transparently he shows forth Christ, how effectively he leads people to Christ and how obediently he dies to himself so that it is no longer he who lives but Christ Jesus who lives in him, no longer he who is seen, but Christ Jesus who is alive and acting and present to his Church through him.
All of which brings us full circle to what the Church asks of the priest when he celebrates the Sacred Liturgy. Like the words of the Council Fathers with which I began, the homily provided for the bishop in the rite for the ordination of priests begins with a description of the unique role the priest is given by God in the Church and in her liturgy.
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In sacred ordination, there is conferred on priests that sacrament through which “by the anointing of the Holy Spirit they are sealed with a special character and so configured to Christ as priest that they are strengthened to act in the person of Christ the Head.”
I suggest that a this sentence wonderfully uncovers a description of the distinctive character of priestly ministry and how it differs from every other ministry in the Church and in the liturgy. The Council of Trent made clear and the fathers of the Second Vatican Council reaffirmed that the one chosen to preside at Sacred Liturgy does so in the person of Christ and that such an order is transmitted from the Holy Spirit through the successors of the apostles, for it is not who choose God, but he who chose us. The use of the typically Thomistic vocabulary of conferral of the sacrament of orders on the priest so that he might be sealed with a sacred character and configures to Christ describes the way in which the priest is prepared for Sacred worship.
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This is the vocation to which we have been called, the order into which the Church has ordained us. It is a responsibility to be taken with all the seriousness of which we are a capable. For we have been called to nothing less than to be the door through which God enters the lives of his people and the portal through which their prayers come before him.
It is a great vocation of which none of us are worthy. But the fact remains that Christ has called us. May we strive each day to re-hear the words spoken at our ordination from the ordination homily I referenced above. May we hear the words spoken by the bishop and coming from Christ and his Church:
When joining men and women to the people of God through baptism, and remitting their sins in the name of Christ and the Church through the sacrament of Penance;
when supporting the sick with holy oil and celebrating sacred rites;
when you praise with thanksgiving and offer prayers throughout the hours of the day not only for the people of God but for the whole world as well,
be mindful that you are taken from among the people and set apart for the people in those things which pertain to God. Therefore, with true love and unfailing joy carry out the office of Christ the Priest, attending not to your own concerns but to those of Christ Jesus, our Lord.
