‘Do this in memory of me’ is perhaps the most important instruction received from Jesus
Pope Francis reminds us that ‘Christian faith is either an encounter with Jesus or it does not exist’. And it is in the liturgy that this encounter takes place.
In the holiest of weeks, Christians celebrate the institution of the Eucharist during the Last Supper, on the night before he died. Henri de Lubac’s insights, “the Church makes the Eucharist” and “the Eucharist makes the Church”, shaped the theology of the Second Vatican Council. And the way forward for the Church, despite the many new and different challenges it faces, is still to be discovered not around a conference table or in meetings, but in the fruitful celebration of the Eucharist.
The command to “Do this in memory of me” is perhaps the most important instruction the Church received from Jesus. As the Anglican Benedictine monk, Dom Gregory Dix, wrote in his 1945 classic, The Shape of the Liturgy, the celebration of the Eucharist has always been at the heart of the Church, irrespective of the circumstances in which Christ’s disciples found themselves. “For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country, and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth.” The Church has found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America … “And best of all,” writes Dix, “week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this to make the plebs sancta Dei – the holy common people of God.”
This is not to absolve us of the supreme effort needed to face the many challenges in ensuring that our celebrations are as worthy as is humanly possible, or to paper over our internecine liturgical wars by declaring them to be unimportant. These struggles are vital; indeed, the future of the Church depends on how we celebrate the liturgy. But we will never fully get liturgy “right”. The Church always needs to be purified through penance and renewal, because it is made up of sinners. It should come as no surprise that differences surrounding the celebration of the Eucharist have always been part of the life of the Church.
The account of the Last Supper in the gospel of John tells of the Apostles squabbling over who should wash the feet – there was even arguing over who should sit where. The letters of St Paul and St James decry a lack of unity over the celebration. History is replete with real and alleged liturgical abuses and no age has been without scandal, unworthiness, and crimes associated with the celebration and the Christians who partake in it. The many lists of sins against the Eucharist codified in the Penitentials of the early Irish Church frequently mention the possibility of a monk or other Christian vomiting up the host, due either to sickness or drunkenness, and this being in turn eaten by a dog. There is no golden age of liturgical practice to which we can return.
The 20th century was a century of eucharistic revival; our best way forward is to build on these most recent foundations as we draw strength from the celebration itself. In the early 20th century Pope Pius X championed frequent Communion, thus ushering in a liturgical renewal almost unparalleled in the history of the Church. From the time of the Fathers, most Christians received Communion very infrequently. Such was the problem that the Fourth Lateran Council specified that Catholics could not normally be considered to be practicing if they did not receive Communion at least once a year. Before the twentieth century annual reception of Communion was the norm for most Catholics. Additionally, Pius X pioneered the need for “active participation” in the liturgy, a term that he coined to capture a concept that would have a huge significance in later decades.
The Liturgical Movement took the concept of active participation and ran with it. In the twentieth century, Christians faced the challenges of a rapidly evolving society. In Western Europe, the Church appeared discredited and the masses abandoned its practice. The theologian Romano Guardini could ask whether the person of his day was even capable of participating in the liturgical act at all. Both pastors and theologians discerned that these challenges were best addressed by promoting a liturgical life where the faithful did not simply “attend” or “listen to” Mass but participated in it with their full lives. When Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council, “active participation” was to take center stage.
The council considered participation in the sacraments, and in the Eucharist in particular, as the source of the universal call to holiness. The Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, would explain that “such participation by the Christian people as ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a redeemed people’ is their right and duty by reason of their baptism. In the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy, this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else; for it is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit.”
Without constant renewal, the Church withers and dies. We see this before our very eyes. We fool ourselves if we think “secularisation” is the key issue facing the Church. The key issue is the inner life of the Church: and without the ongoing renewal of the liturgy, the People of God cannot “draw water from the wells of salvation”, and certainly cannot draw that life-giving water “with joy” (Isaiah 12:3).
The Rhetoric of our culture of the individual veils the needs of the Body of Christ, and points us in a fruitless direction. It is the corporate body, the People of God as a whole, that needs renewal, and this renewal can only happen in shared communal experience. In the Catholic tradition, that shared communal experience always has been and will always be liturgical. The renewal of the liturgy and the renewal of the Church go hand in hand.
Some consider Vatican II to have been “done”. They are searching for the latest novelty. Pope Francis is closer to the truth when he says that an ecumenical council takes a hundred years to sink in and be fully implemented. Some aspects of Vatican II’s liturgical reform still need to be fully worked out. Most of the low hanging fruit of the liturgical reform has been picked. While they required a huge amount of specialist work, the production of new liturgical books and the reordering of churches were relatively simple to achieve. The renewal, however, still remains superficial: the renewal called for by the council requires the ongoing renewal of the lives of every member of the Church.
While evangelisation and mission is a vital part of the life of the Church, its pastoral priority must also be to live the mysteries of the faith with those who actually form part of its liturgical assemblies. They must be encouraged and formed to participate more actively in the Church’s liturgical life. The fact that the Church has retained millions of members, in spite of modern challenges, is in great part thanks to our partial implementation of the liturgical renewal of Vatican II.
An abstract concept of the Eucharist does not, by itself, constitute the “source and summit” of the life of the Church. The actual text of this much-cited quotation from Lumen Gentium makes clear that our participation is necessary: “When [the faithful] take part in the eucharistic sacrifice, the source and the culmination of all Christian life, they offer to God the divine victim and themselves along with him; and so both in this offering and in Holy Communion all fulfil their own part in the liturgical action.”
At Mass on Easter Day, as on every Sunday, Catholics are invited to a re-enchantment of their faith by a renewal of eucharistic wonder. Pope Francis has often invited the Church to embark on this voyage of rediscovery. He dedicated his 2022 Apostolic Letter Desiderio Desideravi to the need to promote the liturgical formation of the People of God. Not only does he affirm, referencing Traditionis Custodes, that “the liturgical books promulgated by St Paul VI and St John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of Vatican Council II, are the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite”. More importantly, he invites all Christians to have an experience of “astonishment at the paschal mystery”.
According to Francis, “Christian faith is either an encounter with [Jesus] alive, or it does not exist”. The liturgy guarantees the possibility of such an encounter. “A vague memory of the Last Supper would do no good,” Francis writes in Desiderio Desideravi. “We need to be present at that Supper, to be able to hear his voice, to eat his body and to drink his blood. We need him. In the Eucharist and in all the sacraments we are guaranteed the possibility of encountering the Lord Jesus and of having the power of his Paschal Mystery reach us. The salvific power of the sacrifice of Jesus, his every word, his every gesture, glance and feeling reaches us through the celebration of the sacraments. I am Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman at the well, the man possessed by demons at Capernaum, the paralytic in the house of Peter, the sinful woman pardoned, the woman afflicted by hemorrhages, the
daughter of Jairus, the blind man of Jericho, Zacchaeus, Lazarus, the thief and Peter both pardoned. The Lord Jesus who dies no more, who lives forever with the signs of his Passion continues to pardon us, to heal us, to save us with the power of the sacraments.”
At Mass we are all invited to meet Christ in the liturgy so that, in the words of the Collect on Holy Thursday, “we may draw from so great a mystery, the fullness of charity and of life.”
This article first appeared in The Tablet, The International Catholic News Weekly, and was reprinted with permission in Jersey Catholic. Father Neil Xavier O’Donoghue is director of liturgical programmes at St. Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, and a priest of the Archdiocese of Newark, NJ.
Featured image: The Church needs to be purified through penance and renewal. (Alamy. Adam Jan Figel)
