We are his body

We break bread around our church parish altars to unite ourselves to Jesus and each other.  We become his body, his church.  Through our Eucharist we renew our hope and strengthen our faith.  The eucharistic community is our home.  

The two disciples on the road to Emmaus had had their faith smashed by the violence and apparent defeat of the crucified Jesus on Good Friday.  Two days later they found that faith again in the teaching of Jesus on the road and in the breaking of the bread at supper with him. Immediately, they ran back to the community of disciples in the upper room.  Their resurrection story was added to the experiences of St. Simon Peter, St. John and St. Mary Magdalen.  Then Jesus appeared again in their midst, “even though the doors were locked for fear of the Jews.”  Strengthened by each other’s experience of the risen Christ, they became one body, one church.  

The liturgy of our Catholic Church, our celebration of the Mass and of the other sacraments which all recall Jesus’ teachings and actions, is a fundamental source of our unity.  I forget which saint or theologian it was who said that in response to Jesus’ command at the Last Supper to celebrate the Eucharist, “We make the Eucharist and the Eucharist makes the church.”  

It is precisely because we have prayed together the Mass and the other sacraments so often during our lives that we have come to cherish the churches and the music and the precise ways in which our liturgies were conducted.  It is no wonder, then, that liturgy can also be a source of confusion and discomfort when what we are used to changes in any way.  Or we try to reverse our present liturgy in the hope of going back to times we can only imagine were calmer and more unified and more pious.

Maybe, some say, we should go back to Masses in Latin, put back altar rails in our churches, receive Communion on the tongue instead of in our hands, have women and girls cover their heads with hats or veils and, above all, never talk in church.  

I have been a priest 58 years.  I grew up in a very Catholic town, Plaquemine, with a beautiful church, called by one of its pastors, the “Basilica on the Bayou.” I learned enough Latin to serve as an altar boy.  Taught by a convent full of nuns and pastored until I entered the seminary by the same two priests, Msgr. Leonard Robin and Father George Barbier, who were both excellent musicians, I loved the pre-Vatican II liturgy. And then I got the most beautiful exposure to it possible by the monks of St. Joseph Abbey in Covington whose reason for being monks is liturgical prayer, work and community.  But, if you asked any of those wonderful and beautiful people (many are dead) would they want to go back to the pre-Vatican II liturgy, I think they would close their eyes for a moment, smile at fond memories past and then say, “No.”

Times then were good.  More people percentage-wise were practicing Catholics.  While they showed up more faithfully for Sunday Masses, that didn’t mean they were more engaged in the liturgical prayer of the Mass.  Some prayed the rosary, others just sat or knelt, sort of half asleep, and let the priest do the praying in Latin.  Very few brought English translations of the Mass to church. The choir was good, but the people often did not get too much chance to join in.  Ushers were always needed to sort of herd people to the Communion rail.  Msgr. Robin prided himself on how fast he could distribute Communion to open mouths, but the altar boys, with a patten which they placed under each chin, were needed. Sometimes hosts did not land on tongues.  Some people became so nervous at this synchronized oral reception, they snapped at the host and got the tips of the priest’s fingers.  They returned to their pews individually, certainly pious, but Communion was not really communal.  It was individual. And, of course, no one, except the priest, ever received the wine.

So, why was this good, but not perfect, liturgical format changed by the Second Vatican Council, that is, by the 2,500 bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, meeting together in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome each fall from 1962-1965?  From my viewpoint, as a graduate student in Rome preparing for priestly ordination during the first two years of the Council, and as an ordained priest who celebrated Mass in Latin for my first two years of ministry, I would offer these reasons:

1. to make the Mass and sacraments more intelligible to the ordinary Catholic

2. to emphasize the Scriptures as the written source of our faith, our worship and our evangelizing

3.  to engage the worshiping Catholic in the entire liturgical action—participation.

The document on the liturgy was the first of the four main documents, or Dogmatic Constitutions, to be considered by the bishops at Vatican II.  The four were:  The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium), Divine Revelation (Scripture—Dei Verbum), Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium) and The Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes).  

All the bishops of the council received preparatory documents, “schemas,” prepared by the Vatican.  They were to study these, debate them together in St. Peter’s Basilica, amend them where necessary and vote on the final documents, which by the end of the Council in 1965 numbered 16. The pope had to approve each final document.

Pope St. John XXIII, who died after the first session, had asked for a pastoral council, meaning a council concentrating on better ways to proclaim the Gospel, to make it more understandable and applicable to a modern, scientific world, a council that would show how the church is relevant to the needs of today.  The bishops began with the liturgy because it was something they understood best as priests. 

Furthermore, it had been already studied by a liturgical movement that had begun with a liturgical institute founded in France in 1943, and then the publication of an encyclical on the liturgy (“Divino Afflante Spiritu”) by the previous pope, Pius XII, in 1947; then yearly or bi-yearly international liturgical study meetings in Germany at Maria Laach 1951; Alsace Lorraine at Odilienberg 1952; Lugano, Italy 1953; Leuven, Belgium 1954; Assisi, Italy 1956; Monserrat, Spain 1958; and Munich, Germany 1960.  

A school of liturgical study had also begun in the 1950s at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana.  I attended Notre Dame in the summers of 1959 and 1960.

Change in something as important as religious culture and practice is very difficult for some people.  The biggest change for Catholics after the Dogmatic Constitution on the Liturgy was approved and promulgated for implementation by Pope St. Paul VI, was the Mass was translated from Latin into our own English language.  This was widely accepted with joy by almost all of the Catholics in our diocese.  A small group, reported to be about 30 persons, rented a building on North Sherwood Forest Boulevard and flew in a priest to celebrate a Latin Mass on Sundays.  Everyone else seemed very happy for about the first two generations after Vatican II.  Pope Benedict XVI, who, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was one of the great theologian experts at Vatican II, approved the use of Latin for the Mass as long as it was the Mass designed by Vatican II.  Pope Francis recently put a few restrictions on this to insure unity throughout the Catholic world.

With regard to Scripture in the Mass, I think the Vatican II Missal for Mass has been a great success.  No longer can Catholics who attend Sunday Masses say, “I don’t know much about the Bible.”  They hear it and have almost all of it preached in the homily through the three-year cycle of Scripture readings for Sunday Mass.  Also, Bible studies are held in many parishes.  Participation in the liturgy has also been achieved with men, women and youth serving as readers, Communion ministers and altar servers.  Music right after the council was not so great but, with time, some very good music has been composed for the Vatican II liturgy.  

As for altar rails and Communion on the tongue, well, if a Communion rail is truly beautiful, I would not be for removing it.  We can still have a good Communion procession and distribute the Eucharist in front of the altar rail.  Processions have long been an act of worship in Catholic liturgies, even though they sometimes used to include only the priest and altar boys.  

But altar rails were also once a barrier to keep women out of the sanctuary.  How could we for so long have ignored St. Paul’s teaching to the Galatians (3:28) that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free person, male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus?” The church in her wisdom has also permitted people to continue to receive Communion on the tongue even though reception in the hand seems to be the preferred way.  I guess that is because we can’t tell others how piety, which is a virtue, should feel to them.  The reason for receiving the host in the hand is simply Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, “Take and eat, this is my body” (Mt 26:26).

The Eucharist really does make us “one holy, Catholic, and apostolic church.”

Father Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at [email protected].